Tag: Competence

Categories
Travel

Day 1870 and Cutting Down On Packing Time

I am a very thorough, well honed and time tested, and Karen hardened packing methodology.

I have a little bit of childhood anxiety around packing for having moved around a lot that has alas never left me. Many people having anxiety about flying so at least it is a bit relatable but I don’t know if packing anxiety is as common.

For me it’s not about being in the air but rather leaving behind an established base for parts unknown. Will I be able to find medicine for issue that arise or soap that won’t trigger eczema? What if I need to appear at an event requiring a dress & makeup? What if I need to walk for two miles with all those things?

Every time I pack I go through the same routine and I use the same bags with the same labeling system to manage all the permutations I might encounter. And it is a science.

I have a small pajama bag I carry in my backpack in case of an unexpected overnight or long delay. I carry small clear vanity case to clean & groom myself with full allergy protocols that passes even the crankiest Heathrow checkpoint. I am prepared.

I carry on my person a a small pill bag with every detail labeled that can handled medical incidents big and small along with my first responder certificate. If you have an issue on an airplane you want to be seated next to me.

From there in my carry on suitcase I label the packing cubes with every item I bring, from underwear to wrap dress and ballet flats. Everything that is packed in my larger Tumi that gets checked is also labeled and I place an itinerary on top as I find my bags opened more frequently than seems reasonable.

There are no questions from the TSA or the most belligerent customs agent that won’t be immediately cleared up with minor inspection. Now with artificial intelligence I can translate my labels on the fly into any language.

Despite this clarity and organization, I admit I’ve had a few amusing incidents. Once through Heathrow I unsettled a British Airways agent with my fiber and protein powder baggies. Because clearly middle aged woman would smuggle in a quart sized baggie of cocaine in her purse.

I really wish with all the travel I do and my very strict system that this would all somehow take a little bit less time than it does. I generally allow myself two days to pack as I like to check and double check as it’s an iron law that things will be forgotten. And Montana is remote enough that if I forget a fancy serum or a favored sweater I won’t get a replacement easily. We only just got a Sephora this year.

I am however headed for a large American city that has absolutely everything I could possibly want in short order. So as I leave behind a European home base where I do keep things on hand (I didn’t always but extended family has been kind to me) I feel much less pressure this time. And still somehow I will allow myself to let it take more time than I’d prefer.

Categories
Culture Travel

Day 1869 and Dumb Knuckleheads Driving Poorly

I’m surely not even the millionth person to make note of this phenomena, but drivers are getting worse and it’s very much the sorts of drivers you’d expect to be the culprits.

Let me tell you a humorous story about getting sideswiped not once but twice in less than week by ditzy women driving bottom of the barrel vehicles. Meanwhile I was in a decent sized higher end SUV which very much helped. Imagine the culprits driving a Golf or a Peugeot.

Now to preserve some privacy for all involved this did not happen in America but in Europe and the timing is being buffered. To protect the not at all innocent.

The first instance was (and I swear I’m not making this up) while I was helping a family member with the equivalent of a trip to the department of motor vehicles.

Turning into a parking space in their lot, a middle aged woman (who was not paying attention) backed out and scraped two feet down the right side of the vehicle. She stopped and gave the impression of us waiting to park. As soon as we settled she immediately scattered. So much for her stopping.

Fortunately a worker at the bureau saw it and knew that the driver was employed there which made sorting it feasible. She gave over her insurance and the paint easily buffed out the scratch. She didn’t act at all embarrassed for having clearly been caught.

Then forty eight hours later another near miss by a ditzy Zoomer got us. We were making a slow left turn to merge into a larger road. We’d already crossed the yellow line with just half the front of the car into the new lane. As one does when politely coming into a left turn.

Just as we began to accelerate into the lane having slowed traffic in then opposite lane, a cheap car continued barreling 20 over the speed limit without so much as an attempt to slow to let us finish the turn.

She clipped onto our bumper and tore into her own driver side door. It was not a pretty Boise. She attempted to keep going as every other witness on the city road tried to get her attention to stop her.

Finally some fifty feet later dhe slowed down once she realized she took damage and everyone was snapping pictures. We were able to call the police and exchange information.

In a final act of sneakiness, she tried to call a policeman that was in her family to plead her case. Him being nearby maybe she was thinking he’d help her out. Amusingly this backfired against her as it was pretty clear she was at fault and she accepted responsibility. She’d done more damage to her car than to ours.

It’s little wonder everyone is on edge about being on city roads as irresponsible drivers seem to be absolutely everywhere and rules of the road are mere suggestion. Don’t be a knucklehead is the moral of the story.

Categories
Internet Culture Preparedness

Day 1868 and Educating An An Entire Species or Start With Your Family

A viral essay was posted a few days ago by a Matt Schumer meant to help introduce the current state of artificial intelligence tools to people who do not work in technology.

It’s a very compelling piece of writing (or maybe it’s just reading), which I believe is well received by normal people especially older family members or technical skeptics. They are often the hardest to reach because of age and experience gaps and a smooth essay goes down well.

The author is the founder of HyperWrite. His company offers a suite of AI writing and research tools. So yes, his excellent writing and wide reach (over 40 million views so far) were achieved thanks his fluent use of AI for both writing and promotion.

The end result of using tools is an excellent essay distributed far and wide. Or if you prefer, the end product was a tool shaped object which gave people a sense of understanding. That’s valuable.

Don’t let his usage of AI in producing this writing and publishing stop you from taking his points seriously. In fact, it should encourage you to read it and consider if you want to share it.

You too will soon be competing in a world where regular people like Matt are capable of super human feats. Perhaps you’d like the same leverage for yourself and your family.

All of us can learn to work with the amplifying effects of networks and artificial intelligence algorithms with practice and usage. Allowing us global reach and potentially maximizing the potential of our insights and points of view. That should make us feel better about where we are headed and not worse.

I feel it is useful to share the essay with your skeptical family and friends who are either scared, confused, angry or indifferent about the rapid changes because it is the current reality we all live in.

I know it’s hard as a middle aged professional to learn new tricks. I’m in the middle of it too. But we have to educate all of us and it’s going to take some time. I’d rather we get started on it. And on that note my lunch break from Montana’s digital innovation committee is only an hour so I’ll get back to it.

Categories
Aesthetics Startups

Day 1866 and Never Escaping Veblen Goods

I love a good signaling and status competition. There are so many ways to to signal that at the far reaches of taste you will never fear to tread. Just don’t worry about how other people live.

I’ve worked in luxury fashion and venture capital and they run on the same rules. And it’s all snobbery up and down and it is a mixed bag when it comes to what works in reality.

I’ve known sneakerheads who seamlessly transitioned to private equity because they know in some fundamental way that rising price increases demand in strange markets. But the little signals can give away your whole game and you can’t always assume you are speaking their language.

Many an investor and fashionista has made good use of this basic understanding of a Veblen good. The more expensive it gets, the more it stokes demand. Everyone thinks they can become Hermes or Facebook but if you could well you would have.

This can fuck with actual performance as the thing being performed isn’t necessarily the thing that is getting done in reality. You can show your own displeasure with the pricing scheme by not participating. You can short a thing with a little creative and signaling of your own.

Many decided will continue to play along despite not needing to participate in status games. Outsourcing taste is actually something you can pay for and sometimes you should just get a realistic budget.

Often you really can’t afford to play the game and it’s better to cultivate your own taste and satisfactions in life so you are comfortable taking on the risk load of stepping out of unnecessary competition. You play your own game and win on your own terms.

Categories
Biohacking Medical Travel

Day 1846 and Doctor’s Orders

I have had a lot of experience with doctors over the last few years. A chronic autoimmune condition isn’t the sort of illness that gets “better” like a virus. It can only be managed.

I have come up with endless ways of collaborating with people who far too often believe they are more informed, powerful and intelligent than me.

Sometimes they are even right about that perception. It’s a frustrating fact of life that doctors value their status occasionally more than their patients.

Today I went to a tourist hospital renowned for its extensive offerings and professionalism. My usual interpreter (it’s in a foreign country as many nations from Mexico to Turkey to South Korea serve American patients) had a number of procedures and visits organized for me. I felt confident I’d learn a lot and maybe find new pathways to healthcare management.

I happened to have an aesthetic elective treatment first. A plastic surgeon met with me to refresh some Botox. That seemed excessive given a nurse does my light work back in Montana but why not get a professional opinion while you have the chance.

I’d intended to spend the afternoon at the hospital doing a number of more productive activities than smoothing my fine lines. I’d set up rheumatology and immunology lines of questioning and I was excited to get some holistic work done including ozone and an IV infusion of vitamins and minerals.

Alas I was stopped in my tracks by a physician who simply would not approve the IV I had set up, the ozone work, nor would she approve the alternatives I suggested (an intramuscular B vitamin shot). I made my case with the interpreter and my AI.

The doctor wouldn’t budge. She even obfuscated suggesting that glutathione was illegal though backed down when it turned out to be a malpractice issue related to compounding pharmacies.

I very much wanted to buff up my immune system, especially having chosen something elective to go first, and I could not make progress. It shut down my whole afternoon. All that was left was tests and waiting.

There was no order the doctor was willing to give for short term immune improvements unless I committed to five weeks of procedures which given it was a tourist hospital seemed a little ironic.

I am demoralized but doctors will be doctors. I never seem to manage to convince them when I really need it. Doctor’s orders are not always for the benefit of the patient. Maybe no one wanted a woman sitting around hooked up to a vitamin infusion. Who knows. I probably would have skipped the Botox though.

Categories
Emotional Work Preparedness

Day 1842 and What If It Is Very Different

I am trying to imagine my life being very different. If I step away from some of the areas where I have visibility what changes. I am imagining a phase change of assumptions about not only my own life but life as it goes forward.

It’s the topic we’ve all been dancing around for years and years, with crescendos coming all the more frequent. The science fiction I love so very much has different ways of portraying a jump in material conditions.

The Expanse called it The Churn. William Gibson called it The Jackpot. I wonder what we will call this period in a hundred years.

I have so much curiosity. Maybe too much. an almost childish sense of imagination has never left me even as I go about very adult life. The wonder and “what if” sensibility haven’t been crushed under cynicism even if it would be rational.

I don’t know if I feel equipped to manage what’s coming. How much of the difference will be the choices I make to life my life and how much will be forced on me. It’s a twitchy and terrifying prospect to consider just how much freedom we have against a backdrop of limited information. Only action will illuminate.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1834 and Oops All Reactionaries

A running joke personal joke I have when frustrated by humanity is that every movement compelling enough to reach any scale reveals itself eventually to be “oops all reactionaries” The bigger the thing or the deeper down you go and eventually with fractal consistency “oops, all reactionaries!”

Anytime I have really hard contact with reality this turns out to be true. Reality has been particularly harsh over the last couple decades insofar as materialism has gone for the species.

I have been shielded from reality by the gracious people of the United States of America. And even then if you look too closely “oops all reactionaries!”

I think “oops, all reactionaries” turns out to be a decent lens for assessing our past, present and probably future. If it’s any good it has a core that should concern if you take it too literally. You then have to decide how seriously to take their literalism. If you get it wrong you might wake up dead.

Which I don’t love. Most people just want to go along to get along. Which isn’t to say that getting along in America is easy. We are a surprisingly competitive place for the richest nation state to have ever existed among a bizarre republic of slowly expanded frontiers and boomtowns. So we’ve got plenty of pockets where reality has always been all reactionaries.

We’ve hit our limits a million times and still have shockingly low density. Being an industrious people who enjoy markets this has worked out relatively well for the “empire” and it’s people.

America! It’s not bad and I recommend it even if we do functionally have feudal lords in the form of capital, labor and land managers at various levels of public and private parcels. But being civilized people trying to make a buck we really don’t like it when the shock troops are deployed at home.

We do seem to be ambivalent about it being deployed abroad. This has been my Ted Talk on homeland security. Really though beware the politics of wealthy heiresses.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture Reading

Day 1831 and A Stenographer For Everyone

I hate to use a dictation software to write a piece that I typically write with my own two hands and ten fingers but I’m not entirely sure that I see the difference between typing out a hundred words a minute on a mobile phone versus saying something a little more slowly to a stenographer application. I use Wispr Flow

I’m sure if you are a Paul Kingsnorth type, you would be happy to remind us that we’ve lost the “steno-pools” filled with women whose job was knowing just how to speed their notes to keep the dictation flowing. Those jobs are gone as the personal computer made its debut.

I don’t mind writing as I can write just a little bit faster than I can talk. And I often find that my dictation is less pulled together than my writing. But isn’t it funny that we should have reached this point so many centuries later? Yeah.

Categories
Chronicle Travel

Day 1827 and Year 6 of Daily Writing Begins

I didn’t feel like writing yesterday. That’s a weird way to start a commitment to a sixth year of writing every single day in public on this blog. I do intend to keep writing daily.

Maybe I should restart. My life was so full on the last day of the year, that the writing I had intended on doing on the last day of year five I simply couldn’t do. I fell asleep. It’s alright I had a beautiful synopsis of the emotions of the experience even if the links didn’t get passed may.

I felt the urge to sleep come on so strongly I wrapped up with a few “oh that happened too” sentences and I was out. Poof! Exhausted. Thankfully fireworks woke me up at midnight so I could ring in the new year.

I was midway into May doing a “best of” round up review by hand when that sudden “consciousness loss is imminent” feeling hit me. I’ve been driving the Dinaric Alps on an adventure that ended up in Sarajevo. I am sure I’ll write about the experience soon.

But now I have a meal and some unpacking to do. My 2026 is off to an interesting start. I’ve crossed three borders today. You can see how I might be tired.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture Medical Startups Travel

Day 1826 and Some Best of 2025 Selections

Yesterday I wrote about the experience of my daily writing experiment rounding out its fifth year. It’s been a fun and often emotional journey that I find hard to fully capture. But I’ll attempt to list a few of my favorite posts of 2025 on the last day of year.

Healthcare and Biohacking

Day 1490 and Healthcare’s Sin Eaters

Day 1468 Deciding to Go HBOT and Starting HBOT

1567 and Turkish Medical Tourism

1565 and Elephant’s Eye

1560 and Getting an HBOT

Day 1517 and Blink Blink (First Incision of 4 Scalpel Incidents in 2025

Day 1503 and Managing Healthcare Projects from Mold to Hyperbarics

Startups

Day 1486 and Is There A Tech Right

Day 1510 and Turning Valar On

Day 1542 and Future Blind

Day 1572 and Reskilling

Media

Day 1485 and A New Pogue at The New York Times

Day 1581 and Lecturing at UC Boulder on Renegade Futurism

Day 1569 and the sky above the port tuned to a dead channel

Day 1496 and Maneuver Warfare

Politics

Day 1484 and Montana’s Right to Compute Bill

Day 1549 and Productive Primates

Day 1578 and Dark Start or Energy Realism

Day 1576 and a NatCon Boomer Kicks a Townie Millennial Out of Their Hometown

Trends, Cultural and the Academy

Day 1484 and Zoomer Identity Violence Trend

Day 1479 and Liminal Industrial Transport in an Empty Frankfurt International Terminal Pod Hotel

Day 1580 and Learning By Doing or Embodied Learning for Humans

Day 1575 and Renegade Futurism

Day 1555 and Modern Machiavelli

And I got to about May and realized I didn’t feel like I needed to put more into the organization. I had 4 medical procedures involving surgery. My father died. My best startups all raised rounds to scale. You can find your own way from there. It’s been a hard year despite the wins.