Tag: Competence

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Chronic Disease Chronicle Emotional Work

Day 1825 and Thoughts On Five Years of Writing Every Single Day

Much as it amazes me, I have written a public post every single day without fail for five straight years. I’ve not missed a single day.

I’ve written so many posts and essays, it honestly astonishes me. I didn’t expect to have this kind of longevity when I began but the world changed a lot in this past half decade. I am a woman of habits & routines, this blog helps me manage the chaos and instability that surrounds us. And hopefully I’ve become a better thinker (and writer) for this habit.

If you’d like to look back with me, I have a round up of 2021‘s best posts from fashion theory to the emotions of startup exits. They feel like a lifetime ago.

In my round up of favorites from 2022 aka year 2 of the experiment, we moved to Montana, bought our first house, had silly viral hits, & I became a certified wilderness first responder.

In my third year of posts from 2023, things remained intense. I accelerated into chaotic optimism, helped other millennial women understand fucked up fertility, and experimented with living outside America part time to improve my visibility on global issues.

And in fourth year of writing, my round up of my best posts of 2024 really showed a world sped up even further. My essays ranged widely with emotional work, crab bucket zero sum-ism & young men, Vernor Vinge’s legacy becoming our actual reality and the bizarre experience of digital memetics becoming constant real world issue.

So now it’s time to think about year five of the experiment. 2025 was a hard year for me even as it contained incredible wins. Going into it, I wondered how could year five top the past four years chronicled here? It both does and it doesn’t. Life, and the time we spend living it down, isn’t getting any easier. Life is barely human at all anymore. I feel the struggle in myself as I am still very much human.

It’s easy to feel as if I’ve not accomplished as much as my own written records show I did. If you ever feel like you get less done than you’d like, I encourage you to keep a log or journal as it helps show how much can do and how much does get done. Plus if you publish it online you’ll contribute to a wider humanistic understanding as our digital life becomes more mechanistic.

Another facet of this writing experiment has been fighting a chronic disease in my personal life that has no cure. Managing disabilities during with the pandemic years as it overlaid civilization shaking political and technological changes has been hard. I want to work and live as if I am healthy and it isn’t likely to ever be true. I work smarter because I can’t work harder.

I don’t always write about my investments in these posts, but I see how my thesis of chaos has forced us all into requiring more decentralization, compute and power. My once weird ideas are now common knowledge. Now everyone agrees with me.

The end of the neoliberal consensus and the beginning of the artificial intelligence buildout would have been hard on anyone. I’m proud that I was able to turn this change to my advantage.

I realize I’ve written quite a bit about the experience of these years where I wrote daily without showing off the last year of posts.

Since I’ve got one more day before 2025 officially ends, perhaps I’ll put the round up of posts tomorrow as I’ve given an overview of the experience of half a decade of daily essays today. What’s one more day among thousands right?

Categories
Culture Travel

Day 1824 and The Logistics of A New Year in A New World

I get out of America with as much frequency as I can manage. I juggle this with an intense patriotism not only for America but for my home biome in Rocky Mountain west. I am proud to say I am from Montana when I am abroad.

My interest in being regularly abroad began as an effort to source deals and understand different technical ecosystems, but has ended up being my barometer of what reality is being played for what channels. Deals get done where the founders are and it will remain so.

Yet if I didn’t see other economies and live outside of the news ecosystems of America I’d have an understanding of reality that was incomplete.

The projections of your interests as an American are in constant tension with the ex monica and cultural attacks on it from its adversaries. America has quite a few and it is extremely dangerous now to be blind to their impacts.

I don’t think our world will be as open in the future and this saddens me. When I visit a young formerly communist city in Europe I mostly see enterprising young people who see an. American and have positive associations.

The vibes Zoomer Eassyerj Europeans have towards a middle aged American from Montana is surprisingly positive. I am feel lucky that is their emotional connection to America.

And we shouldn’t take that good will for granted. We want America to be a good friend to them. Capitalist Zoomers who experienced totalitarianism and socialism are good friends to Americans.

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Aesthetics

Day 1817 and Magnesium

Not everyone has decent bathtubs. For a good chunk of my life and also in current chunk, I lacks for a decent bathtub. We’ve got an astonishing array of other marvelous ways to heal but not a good soaking tub.

I almost never get to enjoy a warm leisurely bath. I am not a hot tub person. I’ve got sensitive skin and the chemicals involved are not an environment for my skin.

I am alas a great fan of bathing in epsom salts. It is a cure for almost every ailment.

So it was this attitude with which I tried to run myself a bath in a remote location and I failed to consider the tank I was dealing with compared to the size of the soaking tub. Which was generously deep. A terrible and obvious mistake.

A lukewarm tub was my reward. And don’t I look silly for not obey a basic detail. Otherwise a very relaxing day which I would have enjoyed topping off with a soak.

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Culture Politics

Day 1812 and Highlander Political Power Sharing

There can only be one. One white boy. Oh no, sheesh we didn’t mean in the department. What on earth have you been reading? There is room for everyone to have a seat at the table in our modern world. Just one seat though. Were you expecting there would be more?

There can only be one Highlander. You know, the Scottish warrior Connor Macleod who is part of a race of immortals who must battle it out, do not age and only die if their head is taken? There can only be one of him. Except it’s a whole race. I don’t know how that works to be honest.

Immortals are driven to fight each other in “The Game,” where each beheading transfers power via a mystical energy surge called the Quickening, with the last survivor destined to win “the Prize,” a vaguely defined ultimate power. via Wikipedia

This very popular 1986 movie set between 1630s Scotland and 1980s New York City somehow turned into a mega-franchise with spin-offs and animes. It didn’t start out that flashy. I mean really look at how much content they had to pack into this poster to get people into the theater.

These days content usually the other direction, from anime to tv show to movie, but such was the power of Hollywood and its capacity for distribution in the eighties. Being a Baby Boomer movie director seems like it might have been a trip.

Things are not so rosy for the profession these days. Especially if you are a quirked up white boy like Duncan. We’ve lost them you see. This is a source of much consternation in the discourse. The children of the Higherlander generation definitely thought they would be more than one winner.

We’ve lost a whole generation of white men to diversity initiatives (launched by other white men) even though the lore being produced (by said white men) that white men were rightly battling it out for just one seat. The prize of real ultimate power seemed pretty clear. There can only be one.

Or at least this was the premise mythical of stories from ranging legendary Arthurian kings to actual Caesars of the Roman Empire. There wasn’t a team of Alexanders Who Were Pretty Good. The prize of real ultimate power is the stuff of myth. Sure actual power sharing is more complicated but humans love a final boss.

The American white boys (probably Ulster Scots) are suffering for the widening power sharing agreement reached in the great awokening diversity initiatives of the last generation. And no one even bothered to tell them until their hit middle age and didn’t end up as Highlander. We mostly told them it sucks to suck. You racist little shits just can’t compete.

I gather it wasn’t so bad when your enemy was other quirked up white boys. I don’t emotionally understand why as I was always expecting to have one seat as a token white girl. I must be less bothered having had lowered expectations. There is only one queen right? But there are lots of handmaidens if you are lucky.

Now if you want to be the Highlander you have to fight the whole globe. Highlander might be an Indian girl or a trans Guatemalan. That damned Netflix always caving in to the social expectations of elites forcing their luxury beliefs onto the suffering under class of millennial white boys. Didn’t you read JD Vance’s book? The American underclass is dysfunctional and suffering. They deserve it right?

But did they suck? Ah now that it’s too late we finally get to have the conversation about having deliberately changed the demographics of the elite winners of the Prize in American.

Which I assume is a wife, two kids, split level suburban home and a compact car. They weren’t expecting to be king. Maybe king of the cul-de-sac. And if you were forty in 2014 you didn’t get that. Well some of them.

Millennial American white boys expected they would have more seats at the table (having mostly seen themselves in power) rather than fighting it out to be Highlander.

Which is weird since I assume they saw the same movies, tv shows and animes as the rest of us. It’s hard out there for everyone. And the great game includes Everyone.

Zoomers get it. Shame it requires so much beheading. We’d better divvy up the spoils a bit more before the Highlander comes for our heads eh? Come on, at least give the boys a pilot or a term sheet or a job offer before this gets ugly. Just ask JD Vance.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1810 and Bodywork and Open Sourced Tactile Physical Data

I had a really excellent massage recently. The body worker really got under some of the tension points in my body and the compensatory patterns I was hoping for them to work through. I felt like the flow of my energy was reset.

This type of relational work between two people, one with body issues and another one who knows an efficient path for soothing them, need each other. I need relief and they need a payment that reflects their expertise.

Typically this has been labor paid in some increment of time. I paid for an hour long massage but I’d be willing to pay for more hours and the knowledge and capacity to execute that work on myself or through another body worker or tool.

I’ve got a Theragun, a Tiger Tail, lacrosse balls and foam rollers and I try to work through knots and pains. But I know way less than your average massage therapist or Alexander Technique practitioner so these tools are in the hands of a poor craftsman.

I would love for there to exist some type of Open Source Bodywork Database. I’m thinking work flows, anatomy training from video to textbook and routines input by every type of knowledge tradition and patient.

There are humorously already types of open source startups that work on body based API calls. One is called buttplug.io so you get the idea.

I’d love to see workers get paid to contribute their video, audio, and tactile experiences to an open world and ideally be paid a percentage each time it’s used.

Imagine being about to boot up this massage with an automated massage options. Or open share the repo with a therapist with less experience looking to learn. You pay the therapist trainee and for the routine and everyone benefits.

It’s a bit of a fantasy now but I’m sure we are closer than anyone realizes to being able to train these movements into automated systems. Imagine celebrity osteopaths with programs built into something you can use.

I would prefer this be an open source program for human body knowledge so that we learn mechanically the many physical routines and options that exist to make our bodies function better thanks to aligned incentives for everyone to participate. Dare to dream right?

Categories
Aesthetics Politics Travel

Day 1808 and The Secret Sauce is Strongmen

Without getting into too much detail about my travel schedule I will say I’ve visited a few places with a lot of construction this year.

I’m talking about cranes on every corner level construction. If I did a full rotation as if I were Michael Bay getting an action shot, I’d see a half dozen cranes putting up major construction projects.

In some European cities (not the western ones) I saw entire neighborhoods being rebuilt from old multi-family buildings to massive mixed used developments. Cute streets and courtyards be damned, the millenial families want Instagram housing from Tallinn to Tirana.

Their elders are confused but new families need new condominiums. Let’s just hope they remembered to plan for water, power, and other infrastructure needs like new roadways. I’ll admit I’m skeptical in many cases. Maybe it’s good that they are just building willy nilly as it’s not like we get infrastructure investment without the pressure of new families demanding it.

Americans don’t see this amount of construction regularly and it is both inspiring and also a mess of pollution from debris to noise. It’s pretty miserable if you happen to enjoy walking. It is also miserable to live with.

It almost makes me sympathetic to the whines of older residents who want their homes to be worth more and use the chaos of new developments as a cudgel to stop new housing from being built.

There was a time in New York City when I first arrived there when it felt like new buildings went up all the time. You’d complain about jackhammers, trucks, and the ugly protective sidewalk sheds that are meant for safety.

I even knew a venture capitalist who left his job to make a classier sidewalk shed as the damn things almost never come down in a city under constant improvement.

I went through ULURP or Uniform Land Use Review Process hundreds of times in just a few years as an appointee in the community board system.

All anyone can do is complain about the lack of new building and construction. And who can manage to overcome the slog to build let alone turn a profit. American processes for building are more “cranky man tells at clouds” local meeting hell than Robert Moses.

Maybe the YIMBYs (I myself am a yes in my backyard sort) are barking up the wrong true with red tape reform efforts. The strongmen cut the Gordian knot of land reform by simply not giving a shit about process.

The Zoomers are ready to rage for radicalism with their reactionary political entertainment industry. It’s unclear to me if those types would remember to incorporate waste water treatment in their plans. It’s not hard to go from bullshitting to being covered in shit. So that’s worth considering too before we get too excited about a new round of futurism.

Categories
Internet Culture Startups

Day 1805 and Dark Leisure, Time Violence & Outputting Value

Any other software developers out there remember the mythical man hour? It comes from Fred Brooks’ classic book The Mythical Man–Month which argues that adding more people to a late software project often makes it even later. This is also known as Brooks’s Law.

The man‑hour is “mythical” when tasks are not perfectly partitionable and require significant communication, shared context, and integration.

I think in the age of artificial intelligence we need to be revisiting this classic complexity insight as it applies across a world where we understand even less about how the time of input drives its notional value.

Measuring productivity in hours is a relic of a past labor era. And most workers have little incentive to improve output when they aren’t paid for it.

If we had quiet quitting during the pandemic where jobs could be done in minimal ways without getting fired, in this new artificial intelligence roll out we see another type of value capture mismatch between input labor and firm.

We are seeing what Fabian Steltzer calls Dark leisure. Others call it shadow user innovation.

Innovation happening through employee adoption of new technologies that is opaque to management doesn’t get counted and workers are reticent to be transparent.

the reason ppl hide their AI use isn’t that they’re being shamed, it’s that the time-based labor compensation model does not provide economic incentives to pass on productivity gains to the wider org

so productivity gains instead get transformed to “dark leisure”

Fabian Steltzer

Anthropic released a study on the supposed stigma attached to using artificial intelligence at work. Humans are already reacting to artificial intelligence as if it were an existential threat.

Except it’s been generally existentially freeing up to this point. Anyone who has used commercial large language models on healthcare can attest to that. So why are hiding its use?

Even coders are doing it. And who can blame them. It’s a lot less fun for some folks to coordinate a swarm of agents than it is to write code for a living. If you wanted to be a product manager, well you’d already be one.

The boss makes a dollar and I make a dime so that’s why I prompt on the company dime!

We are seeing the early artificial intelligence era take off collide with industrial-era systems of management that are no longer relevant in age of increasing complexity.

We’re putting intelligence into systems designed to measure hours and surprised when there is a misalignment. A Twitter mutual has a theory of consciousness systems they believe makes this is a form of time violence.

Human beings can tolerate NP hard moments of complexity, but cannot survive continuous low-grade complexity

The gap between human adaptability and systemic inertia is now wide enough to generate an entirely new form of harm: time violence

– Idea Nexus Ventures

We just cannot keep up with the varieties and types of complexities that are arising, so any advantage that can be used is being used. And you’d want to hide that advantage as long as you can. Sharing it has no rational basis. I find that disappointing.

I’d rather we not vice signal artificial intelligence as it only harms us. The value capture won’t always match up, but the gains to be made are worth having so keep using it where it works for you.

Categories
Aesthetics Media

Day 1802 and Very Julian Fellowes Coded

The temptations to build an investing case around a historical parallel cannot be avoided. Americans love their booms and busts. And we love grand television dramas about them.

Julian Fellowes is the stage name of a conservative British peer, actor and dude who gets BAFTA award for making television about aristocratic families familiar to adapt and Americans bailing them out.

Then he went on to make a period drama about righteous industrialists in America called the Gilded Age which isn’t as iconic as as it’s not as personal since obviously a British peer won’t understand American mores.

I keep reading editorials about what the artificial intelligence boom most resembles. This week it’s railway booms and busts and the fortunes made and most. We’ve got dueling mandates for skepticism and boosterism.

It’s just a little weird to think that we’ve already made the Silicon Valley drama about the last boom and bust moment and it didn’t get written by a British conservative peer but by a Gen Xer Mike Judge.

Maybe in another generation on Netflix we will get a sweeping historical drama about a polycule group house in San Francisco as the next Downton Abbey.

Categories
Finance Politics

Day 1799 and Thucydides Middle Income Local Maxima Traps

I have been catching up on Odd Lots which is the one podcast I listen to with any consistency. As all discussions about economics boil down to great power discussions as of late. The times they are indeed a-changing.

I noticed that both hosts brought up their collegiate studies of international relations across two back to back episodes. First on the Thanksgiving episode with Graham Allison of Thucydides trap fame.

I just caught up on it today and then the subsequent interview with Ray Dalio on his five forces episode. Joe and Tracy brought up international relations studies in both episodes as it does seem to be the current mood.

Dalio is always an enjoyable listen but I’m much more interested in Professor Allison as (to prove the joke Joe made) in the introduction that “a substantial portion of our listeners are really into ancient Greek history”

And indeed Joe is right. I’m a huge Thucydides fan, I went on a Peloponnesian War tour and am a regular visitor of the Balkans and its ancient Mediterranean and Roman history.

So naturally I have followed Allison’s work on rising power and its threat to established ones.

The US and China are in a “Thucydides Trap,” whereby the risk of war is heightened when an established power is threatened by a rapidly rising power. This is the framework that’s been popularized by Graham Allison, the Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard University. Professor Allison has been writing about China and the US-China relationship for decades

I guess all millennials grew up thinking we’d study these historical concepts in an eternal Pax Americana only to find the end of history wasn’t here to stay and we might fall into the trap. It’s just hard to imagine America feeling threatening to anyone at the moment.

As I listened to the episode, I happened to be walking through a neighborhood on the outskirts of a city that is keen to tear down some of its older homes to make way for new roads and denser apartment buildings. Much of those changes were clearly already in motion, as I saw cranes and construction crews.

The older homes looked multi-generational, but not in that wealthy polished way, so much as the middle income stalled economy compromise.

And yes you see it even in first world nations. In America and Europe, many conditions would benefit from more of a longhouse “in it together” approach. As elders stretch on in years and millennials go into middle age with few markers of adulthood. You’d think we’d want more of these style of homes.

I wondered if a city carving out the old construction through imminent domain tactics and buyouts, would make this outskirts neighborhood more vibrant. It would certainly bring in new buyers of condominiums. Consumption must go up.

I wondered about the families inside of the homes that looked more like multi home construction. Gates and other obstructions made it hard to tell, but the impression I got was more middle income local maxima family compound trap.

China rising, while the first world learns it may be more second world than it realized, makes me wonder if we’ve got it all wrong. More of the planet is in the middle income trap than the World Bank realized.

What if there is no Thucydides trap to fear as other powers sputter and stall. We long for an artificial intelligence boom to launch the globe into a high earning high efficiency world.

Sociologist Salvatore Babones and political scientist Hartmut Elsenhans call the middle-income trap a “political trap” as economic methods to overcome it exist. However, few countries use them because of their political situation. They trace the causes of the trap to the structural problems and the inequalities generated in the early development process.

According to them, the wealthy elites then follow their interests by bargaining for a strong currency which shifts the economy’s structure towards the consumption of luxury goods and low-wage labor laws, which prevents the rise of mass consumption and mass income.  Via Wikipedia

That sure sounds like a lot of the problems we see in America and Europe. All we are doing is getting gummed up in Baumol’s Cost Disease as we try to reinvent new ways of living that consume what remains of the old without the new going as fast as is needed.

But old multi-generational homes blocking the expansion of a city won’t get anyone to mass affluence. So it’s time to bulldoze old neighborhoods and make luxury boxes in the sky.

Not sure that ended well for China either. They popped their real estate bubble. And they wisely tamp their currency to export all their consumer goods. They might be stuck in a local maxima middle income trap too. Maybe Thucydides isn’t the framework here. Or maybe war is the only reset humanity knows.

I myself am hoping we choose to go to space instead but the South China Sea sits waiting. The only currency that matters in this strange moment is GPUs and that’s a different trap entirely.

Categories
Culture Politics Startups

Day 1796 and I’ve Got Billions in My Inbox Julie!

I’m not new to the boom and bust cycles that have defined not only technology startups, but American herself. Most millennials have opinions about their malign status in an economy designed to borrow from the future for a dubious present.

Much of the world is in a state of panic over “the churn” of the old rules changing and the new ones not being quite clear. But it’s really not clear what happens next.

I think anything goes as the networks speed up our connections to each other through artificial intelligence. The end of the age of scaling means it’s time for the era of deployment is it not? Or are none of us Carlotta Perez fans.

I enjoy speculating as is the fashion. Do I think corporate debt financing of data centers is some time bomb in private credit? Not really, no. I think it’s way more likely that don’t understand the full demand case for coordination in a mediated world.

I don’t know if we can meet the demand to be perfectly honest. I will say I am way more worried about us not meeting the moment. Changes to our cultural environment are as hard as our material ones.

If I had to read sentiment, I’d say that everyone is absolutely sick of having their attention used like a fiat currency. We cannot inflate our capacity for focus as easily as we can inflate the dollar. And we will demand simplicity by any means necessary just to exist. And artificial intelligence will smooth our world to manage with what we’ve got.

I think running a decentralized world will prove to be far too complex for most humans and it will be mitigated by layers of choices in governance that will probably not always maximize for the freedoms we’v come to expect from the liberal world order.

And yeah I think we will need a lot of data centers for that coordination effort. That the state might be the ones with the most demand seems a little rich though. Every individual on earth will want to be on the right side of the ratings. That’s more network state than state and it will be a longtime horizon.

I know it doesn’t sound great on its face. And yet I think it has had upsides. The demand for real businesses that operate in some world of efficiency has never been higher.

And to some extent, I believe that was always the entire point of computing. Make things so much better and cheaper we move on to bigger projects.

Giving you video games and porn might have been a weird way to get to Mars but medicine is as driven by vanity as much as survival so I don’t judge reality. I just want us to get more nuclear power. I don’t ask for much.

We didn’t want a legion of information processing professionals. We wanted to change the material conditions just as the Industrial Revolution did. The invisible hand is a strange thing.

I expect we will see quite a bit of opposition to the people believe that we need more energy, more industry, and more science. The future and its enemies are legions. I always did find it funny that fashion critics had a better read on the future than anyone else. Virginia Postrel and William Gibson both have good taste.