Tag: Control

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Travel

Day 1800 and On Steroids

I’ve been on the move, and in wet, rainy, and polluted weather (in other words coastal cities) where I tend to do the worst.

It is frustrating to see nearly five years of work in my journals and tracking amount to very little in the face of wet moldy environments.

It’s not a terribly pleasant topic for day 1800 and makes me feel as if I’ve made little to no progress on moderating my immune system.

I’m particularly upset as it’s bad enough I chose a steroid course. I am too afraid of getting an infection. I loathe prednisone. It works so well. It is like a hammer on inflammation.

Prednisone crushes every inflammatory condition instantly. Red itching oozing welts in a matter of hours. But I can speak from hard experience that even though it stops a cytokine storm in its tracks, it leaves you crazy and fat in quite short order.

I am simply terrified of picking up a skin infection as I’ve had a doozy of a year dealing with them in areas delicate and unusual. It’s been horrifying to have issues with eyes, an incision site and abscesses in even more personal areas.

It seems safer to use the hammer before an area of open skin can be found by an invasive species just looking for somewhere wet and broken. I pray it was the correct choice.

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
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1794 and What We Expect From The Wives

I’ve been intermittently online (as opposed to extremely online) this week what with the travel and the holidays. So I decided to use the Twitter algorithm to catch up on what the “Everything Platform” thinks I should see.

Which I realize is a bit like saying I’ll just have a little bump to see what is driving the rest of the club insane. I knew it was a bad decision and I fully endorse only using social media without algorithms. I generally use my following list in a chronological feed and stay away from image or video driven social networks.

But I am in many information flows that are built to grab attention and normalize information outside our Overton Window of current civil society consensus.

I was taught this was a good thing as a child. Reading and reconciling conflicting arguments was an important democratic norm required of all responsible citizens. I also understand as an adult that this exposes me to propaganda made by any number of sources.

Now you can judge my information sources but I value both of them and they had a common theme. Women, and in particular the wives of powerful men, are the keeper of m civilizational standards and used for this power. This message came from two very different places.

One is widely known indie founder who writes about doing business in Europe and the other is a publisher of books outside polite discourse messages as well as my neighbor in Montana.

Both accounts took me down different uses of the matter. Though both have share other accounts I’d consider right conservative populists. One was about an interview with Nicole Shanahan the ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, former running mate of RFK Jr.

She discusses how the wives of wealthy startup founders are finding causes that are not actually helpful to their intended purpose and are perhaps even actively harmful. It uses some language that is tied to a number of conspiracy adjacent words like the Great Reset and the World Economic Forum.

It is still fair game as a civic polity might ask about the responsibility of the wealthy pretty regularly. I do think Silicon Valley wives are a new vector to watch as a pressure point though. I better watch it as if the tech billionaires’s ex wives are under watch, I can’t wait to see how their less powerful (but much more numerous), Girlbosses will be scrutinized.

This video sent me right into an interview Jonathan Keeperman aka Lomez doing an interview with right populist pressure researcher Christopher Ruffo. He who made critical theory and Critical Marxism a household issue in Republican America.

Lomez has an essay about the feminization expressed in the longhouse. I won’t do it justify by doing a synopsis but Vikings had longhouses and so do plenty of other cultures. This is not all together a positive portrayal of women’s role in civilization but certainly as its driving force.

The video I was served after LevelsIO’s retweet of a video clip of Nicole Shanahan was certainly further down a worldview. But it was also a more positive view of the role of women could be if the Karen was not viewed as a villain but as a hero of social norms.

Algorithms refine down to clearer distillations. Smoothing functions are revealing of form after all. And I think it is interesting that Silicon Valley liberal ex-wives are being shown against the backdrop of norms enforcing regular mothers, wives and guardians of the good life the Karen.

The Karen was once a liberal nightmare and it is an interesting space to replace for the culturally conservative, especially as the Zoomer incel nihilist view is raging across the internet like a prairie fire. So that was an interesting gradient from a European founder to my neighbor.

I’d also say it’s exactly why I don’t read from the algorithm. I fundamentally agree with different positions expressed here but mane not in ways you’d expect. I’ve seen the pressure we place on women in certain social contexts and we make them feel crazy for being the balance of norms but also being hated for it if we don’t chose the ones our clique or social context prefers. My algorithm wants me to understand the narrow band I walk on. Fucking dicks.

Categories
Culture Travel

Day 1791 and Hack, Hack, Cough Cough

One of the oddest post pandemic norms we’ve come to accept are the hacking coughing fits we pretend are normal parts of public transit.

By public transit I don’t just mean just subways or busses. I’m sure they suffer from this issue as well.

But rather our most expensive version of public transportation, air travel, is riddled with passengers clearly infected with one variant or another of a respiratory illness.

Now I get it. It’s not cheap to fly. A cold coming on won’t stop you from going as you paid a lot to travel. Everyone is on the road trying to make their way to family, friends and community. It is hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to get from here to there.

So as you stand in long boarding lines where people queue seemingly at random in groups 1 through infinity, you see various flavors of sneaks, cheats and idiots bottlenecking the mess.

And then you hear the coughing, hacking, sniffing, sneezing and other variants of ignoring the body’s strain.

I am prone to skin infections rather than respiratory ones or this trend would worry me more. I generally don’t mask unless I’m stuck in tight quarters. Sometimes I wish I had. Dealing with Chicago and the sweating, panting, running, struggling human masses, I feel I should have.

You still see depending( on the city, its demographics and its politics, a range of mask wearing. The elderly are often masked. I see frequent flyers wrapped up tight in the good N95. There is quite a lot of masking and I think it’s a good thing.

Maybe these maskers know something. They must be used to persistent cold and flu season and understand some folks who don’t care about their impact on others. Masking must work well enough to be worth the hassle for some.

I hate to bring up the old awful politics of the COVID era, but we should have learned a thing or two from Asian nations who politely mask themselves when ill to benefit their fellow citizens.

Wouldn’t that be an impressive thing to see? Americans caring about each other’s welfare. If I have a cold, it will be because I was too stupid to mask up. But if I get a cold I promise I’ll mask up to avoid passing it on.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1779 and Panic at Disco, Panic In The Waymo

I don’t quite know what it is about San Francisco but it’s just not my town. I love so much about it San Francisco. And it has much to love. But I’ll never love it the way it deserves.

I love what once represented in culture, technology and history, I love its portrayal as the epicenter of a certain kind of future. Whatever universe got us to Star Fleet Academy seems even if 2025 was pretty bleak for them too. Most importantly I love my friends San Francisco. It’s impossible to base a career on startups without spending some amount of time here.

But I just do not love being here for any amount of extended time. I find myself in an absolute misery adjusting to it every time.

Even when I lived and worked in neighborhoods with microclimates more suited to my preferences, I struggled. Dry, sunny and friendly is surrounded by gray, damp and miserable. And you can’t easily get out of where you live. Everything is 30 minutes away by car and the only way around that is biking.

The rolling hills in the 7×7 block that make up the core metropolitan area are a fair representation of my moods and the city’s fate. You can enjoy spectacular highs but you see the lows spread outward before you and it makes you question why you should have this unfair vantage point. Right up until you are trapped by the mountains at the horizon. San Francisco makes it easy to forget the rest of the world.

Some people manage to find an entire world here. I envy that. All I ever feel is hemmed in. It deepens whatever mood I am in, and heaven forbid I experience a depressive fit as you can roll very dark and deep here.

The expense, the hassle, the status games, and somehow (still!) the lack of women are all points in its disfavor. You can tell it’s a boom town because it’s where men seek their fortune and women don’t seek the men with fortunes. San Francisco is probably the best advertising for women seeking men beyond their utility. And they have tried importing the art hoes it just work. I promise it’s been tried.

Categories
Community Culture Politics

Day 1776 and Remembering the Specifics

A little quirk of my personal record keeping that day seventeen sixty six of writing coincides with Armistice Day and in America now Veterans Day.

A lot to be said for how Americans always make it about themselves. World War I because an entirely new scale of war that did not exist when we fought the Red Coats for self governance.

And that has a lot of foreign interventionism in it. But we won that war so the assist from the French isn’t seen as pesky meddling. Imagine how the British press must have covered that at the time.

It’s still hard not to think about how different Americans post colonial future could have gone. We stabilized into a democracy and went in meddled in other people’s wars.

I don’t know why it never occurs to most Americans now people meddle in our problems with the intent of making us an easier target. One man’s nation is another nation’s propaganda target. Americans get targeted too.

The soft grey war is much harder to see when the wars we are taught to remember get lumped into one holiday honoring all veterans.

Wars aren’t specific anymore for us and this is a bad thing. My generation got the “global war on terror” and we learned our lessons in ways far too abstract for most and concrete in ways.

That disproportionately affected regular people rather than the wealthy inner core. Hard to consider how that plays into other nations calculations. Just seems like remembering the specifics of a conflict might be helpful to staying a thriving nation.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1773 and Post-Rats in An Irrational World

Shit just doesn’t feel right. That’s been true for a long time but the edginess of the moment seems nastier, grittier, closer and uncomfortably liminal. It feel like things are changing but into what I could not say.

Whatever we are phase shifting into as a species, or at least one with a shared reality, seems hopelessly fragile. We are coming apart and historical precedents don’t seem to be very helpful. Is this the furthest down the simulation we’ve come?

That is a pretty grandiose way of saying that America’s current troubles are accelerating and it’s hard to ignore how much stress this is causing.

Being on any portion of the internet is like being inside a tense family situation with billions of people who have poor impulse control. And no one is in charge.

Which to some extent means the planet wide project of nation states and the liberal capital system, is buckling under the weight of the network.

We can see too much of each other and the past rationalizations we’ve used to keep our world in check feels ridiculous.

Nothing feels rational to anyone, but only because the complexity of all our lives is now mapped across an enormous overlay of individual players which we can sense beyond our immediate daily lives. And it’s too much man. People are going offline and with it a contraction is happening.

I know more not only about my own country but can feasible access billions of other human players through the data that I have access to at any given moment. And it’s like watching every layer of Dante’s hell as your feed goes up and down the layers of a Hieronymus Bosch painting in an elevator. Except it’s not a metaphor.

Just the mechanics of global human scale seem insane. Player versus player at billions of players seems impossible. I didn’t sign up to be a character in Civilization. I don’t even think I’d like playing Civilization on God Mode.

I studied economics at University of Chicago in another lifetime. An institution started by an industrialist. That investment by one of the richest men to have ever lived did go on to educate minds. And while splitting the atomic changes the course of our societies, so did unleashing number of economists onto unsuspecting countries.

Eventually I realized that all our models are at best approximations, and every input is entirely reliant on mere maps of the actual terrain. Maps made by people just like me. I went to seek my fortune in the markets as a rational actor. Centralized systems did not seem to work.

I’ve got no idea where we are headed. I am intaking information as a totally irrational actor only aware of the hubris of any prior certainty. Is it irrational to behave rationally in an irrational system? Let us all smack into that paradox. Let us just consider that we are all trying to get through it changing as best we can.

Categories
Chronic Disease Internet Culture Reading

Day 1772 and No Signal

The volume of communication we receive digitally has risen to deafening levels. I’m shocked we aren’t all in a civilizational stupor muttering “mawp” like the cartoon secret agent Archer.

As we attempt to balance the barotrauma of the increasing volume of dings, pings, tings and Slack bings trying to reorient our attention towards them, the temptation is level the pressure explosively. Shut up!

The noise is bearing down on us relentlessly. Just when we think the pressure might equalized and we have adjusted to the din, a new chime will force a recalibration.

MAWP!

Our phones become dysbaric monsters. The ambient pressure disorder that is leveling your attention span to the cacophony of alerts and aggravated existential noise leaves us deaf, dumb and disoriented.

Different people cope with this in different ways. Many of my friends have committed email bankruptcy including me. Some people make big claims of having screen free homes. Others go to physical therapy or osteopathic craniosacral specialists for cervicalgia. Isn’t it nice to know your text neck is killing you even if the tinnitus and vertigo doesn’t get you first.

This is all to say that my Signal Mobile application inexplicably stopped working this morning and the silence is causing me some degree of anxiety. If I were a woman with fewer scruples I’d consider it disabling.

Alarmingly, because I’ve been forced to mute virtually every other channel of communication to avoid the noise, this means it’s been largely impossible to get work done.

Hopefully I find a solution soon. I rebooted my phone, cleared my cache and updated to the new iOS. Nothing works. I’m afraid that I’ll be losing the one channel that actually functions for me.

If not, you may very well not hear from me again. Twitter direct messages still work. If you are looking for me check the nearest ear, nose and throat specialist. If I can’t fix my ankylosis in my thoracic maybe I can improve my posture in the meantime. The worst case scenario will be installing WhatsApp but I’ve not given in to that nightmare scenario just yet. I’m running silent in my attention submarine but I’ll have to resurface at some point.

MAWP!

Categories
Emotional Work Politics

Day 1770 and Making Suffering Worthwhile

A long time ago, in a past life so foreign I can barely recall, I made some bad choices in the hopes that I was making good choices for the people I loved.

I froze eggs and embryos with my husband thinking that some day we’d have the money, health and stability to have children.

That day never came. And it’s unlikely to change. My health is what it is and I won’t ever be able to carry them. We’ve spent a small fortune trying to get me healthy enough just to go back to work and being healthy enough to carry just didn’t happen in time.

The high costs of surrogacy are daunting and the extra help I would require to raise them isn’t forthcoming. Being somewhat disabled means I’d need a lot of help and not the kind you can easily pay.

The extended family who does want to help and raise them (not blood family but nevertheless family) has never succeeded in getting a visa approved for so much as a vacation in America. So that route seems rather shut and has remained a small beacon of hope that seems ever less likely.

I could go abroad and raise children near them but that would be admitting defeat on a level on life in America that feels like dying.

My husband wouldn’t be able to come. We have a home and a life and careers in America. Funny how we don’t really have family in America that cares one way or another though all our existing blood relatives are American it’s the extended not quite family that seems to care most about family.

So a day after a socialist won the mayor’s race in New York City I have to ask myself how can we make the suffering of so many feel worthwhile? What did I achieve through my sacrifices? What did America achieve with our choices that can be seen as worthwhile? if those questions cannot be answered I don’t know where America goes from here.

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1768 and Maybe A Corner Is Being Turned or Maybe I Should Turn Back

I feel as if I lost almost all of October to combating a medical hard left turn from what was supposed to be a pretty simple procedure requiring no downtime and little healing.

I feel like I got quite a scare and yet you’d think I’d be used to it, as this is all downstream of the interleukin-17 inhibitor that I changed onto at the beginning of the year for my autoimmune condition.

Every single quarter, and in some cases every other month this year, I have had some bizarre skin infection resulting from otherwise pretty benign situations. An infected gland in my eye (twice!) an abscess that turned into a deep tissue infection, and a tiny incision that allowed in a subcutaneous infection all rocked my world.

As much as I am thrilled to see all of my inflammatory numbers rolling in to baseline normal, I just don’t know if I can sustain having a health crisis this frequently for a medication that is supposedly working. It’s working at an extremely high cost to my sanity and body.

And you might say, “Well, the numbers don’t lie.” And I’d agree. But there are many other factors I have to consider, not the least of which is that healthcare access in America is so bad that I have managed two of the four crisis points with medical tourism abroad.

I am going to give my IL-17 inhibitor a full year as dosing on and off biologics is no easy matter and the compounding effects are quite real. But I do very much wonder if in order to go forward I must turn back.