Tag: Culture Wars

Categories
Politics

Day 379 and Red vs Blue Poverty

I’ve been scouting for homesteads so I have been making forays further from the city enclaves and blue liberal towns that are my normal haunts and out into rural America. Poverty in the context of blue cities has generally meant homelessness and panhandling. But poverty in rural america looks different.

NIMBY (not in our neighborhood) cities won’t let you just pull up a double wide on the outskirts of town. That brings down property values. I mean theoretically so does tent cities, but that’s an argument for another day. But I haven’t really seen a lot of RVs or mobile homes simply because I’ve lived in yuppie Boomer cities. NIMBY land has “standards” and if you can’t meet them we’d rather you be unhoused than accommodate uglier but more humane options.

As I’ve driven through industrial western cities I’ve seen a fuck ton more rural poverty than I expected. Which is naive and stupid of me. I’m aware of median American incomes. Not everyone can afford suburban townhouses and most developers aren’t interested in building that kind of housing outside of well gentrified places.

As I’ve gone further afield to towns that rely on commodity products like oil or minerals or cattle, I’ve noticed a reliance on temporary or low cost housing. You see a lot of decent well maintained working trucks. But a lot of the housing is as bare bones as you can imagine. And it’s ugly as sin to the NIMBY eye but at least it’s fucking housing. I’ve seen a lot of trailers in various states of decay but I’ve got to imagine it’s better than a tent.

I don’t have a real point here other than to say that America is hurting. No one can afford inflation and if we’ve got stagnating opportunities it’s going to blow up in our faces. Blue cities should be embarrassed as fuck by allowing massive unhoused populations when we’ve got prefabricated options. But the American crumbling is bad in any form.

Categories
Startups

Day 378 and Greenhorn

I’ve been running around the mountain west as I’m looking to buy a homestead. I’ve got kind of an elaborate master plan involving mountain houses & ranches and finding a set of living circumstances that works with climate change and social uncertainty. It’s a lot.

This means I’m doing a lot of social signaling to show people that I’ll be a good neighbor. Every place has its own social mores and expectations. I’m trying to show folks that I’m a good daughter of the inter-mountain west. But I’m also someone with the means to acquire property and invest in their community. But I’m also someone who appreciates the ins and outs of rural living. And well the list goes on depending on who I need to impress and about what. Every niche has its hierarchy.

It reminds me a lot about the process a first time founder goes through when fundraising. You are frantically signaling to different constituencies that you will fit into their expectations and worldview. But you do this dance while being completely new and naive to what matters. Being a greenhorn is bad for business. Doesn’t matter of that business is ranching or raising a seed round of venture capital. Alas everyone starts somewhere. So first time founders are often distinguished by how fast they can figure out all the shit they don’t know and fix it.

I’ve got a first time founder I’m excited to be investing in that I’m coaching through a fundraise. He knows his field and business, but he is a total greenhorn when it comes to raising a round. Just charmingly naive to the ways a round comes together. Alex and I are both frantically trying to school him on manners and customs before you can accidentally fuck up something that can’t be unfucked. It’s hard work getting someone schooled up on all the little signals that can doom a deal. But it’s also our specialty.

The particularly challenging aspect of a first round founder is just how much social signaling can be life or death for your company. Maybe if I’m up in Montana scouting property I need to show a certain set of mannerisms but the worst that can happen is someone won’t do business with me. If you fuck up a crucial deal point for ignorance or send a social signal you don’t mean, in venture it can sink your deal and your reputation without you even knowing it.

In venture, someone not doing business with you probably means your company dies. Early stage angel and pre-seed venture investors teach their asses off with new founders to avoid this fate. We can’t afford you being a greenhorn because we know it means death for the business. So if it’s your first time as a founder and fundraising, do yourself a favor. Recognize you are a greenhorn. Find an angel investor or advisor who you can trust that will teach you the manners and social signals you need. Good ones love this work. And you can reward them with advisor shares and pro-rata on your cap table down the line. If you are looking for someone like that drop me a DM.

Categories
Preparedness

Day 377 and Fucked

I was having a conversation with a colleague today. I didn’t know them well so I was amused and surprised when our conversation took a left turn into “everything is fucked!”

It’s not that I disagree. If anything I strongly agree shit is fucked. But I’m not used to a normie getting apocalyptic on me. I didn’t know them well enough that they would have had much insight into my politics or views on systemic collapse. Rather it was two work related people discussing just how uncomfortable daily living is right now. We laughed about how the massive wildfires that burned two Colorado suburbs was already last week’s crisis. And it’s not funny since it was my town’s crisis.

There is an unsettling realization among regular people that life isn’t getting back to normal ever again. That some rubicon has been crossed and even the most normal among us senses that something is wrong.

Have we all become doomers this last year? Has every little crisis finally piled up high enough that it breaches the preoccupation with daily needs and obligations. I don’t like that it’s now common knowledge that shit is fucked. I’m unsettled we agree that life is on a hard left turn. I miss optimism being common knowledge.

Categories
Finance Internet Culture

Day 371 and Never Work A Day In Your Life

I had almost nothing on my calendar today I didn’t want to do. I had small administrative things that took up maybe two hours and that’s excessive by my standards. It’s rare I ever have more than half an hour of genuine obligations. Mostly I just go where I feel like on any given day. I lay in bed on my phone and I move the world with strangers on the internet.

I’m not sure how I optimized for this kind of idyllic work life. I certainly didn’t used to live this way. When I was a founder I was constantly at the mercy of meetings I didn’t want and obligations I wanted to shirk. I always felt put upon. I never felt more like hustle culture owned my life than during my founding years. I was constantly optimizing and I felt like I never had any relief.

Maybe it’s the pandemic. Once we stopped with offices and workdays and all their attendant events and activities, life got a lot better. Everyone kind of settled into routines that made space for what mattered most to them. We no longer had cocktail parties or conferences. Thought leadership stopped being keynote speeches and started being shitposts on Twitter.

I don’t know what the fuck I did it exactly to free myself from that over scheduled fate. I’m so much happier and more efficient. I get shit done and I am less stressed and working fewer unnecessary hours.

Maybe part of it is that I might be a better investor than I was a founder. I could spend the whole day skipping through direct messages and sharing insights in Telegram group chats or having product breaksdowns in Notion. I’m actually good at what I do now. I bring more value and I do it more quickly. Maybe this is what real optimized work is like. You are so good it’s easy.

I’m so fucking happy right now. Over the last hour I’ve done more to advance my deals, connect my community and dig into shit that I genuinely passionately love than I thought I could do in an week. It’s like winning the lottery. I cannot believe I make money doing this.

I basically gossip all day with super smart people and then trade a bunch of densely coded social signals. Those all translate into money. I plot elaborate stories with fellow degenerates with deep aesthetics and then we send it into media zeitgeist. It’s like I work in fashion but the pay is much much better. So I guess it is true what they say. Do what you love and you never work a day I’m your life.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 369 and Reeeee!!!

Maybe it’s human nature to be a bit catastrophic. We are so self centered we thought the sun revolved around us. Took centuries of science for someone to propose another framework. Completely revolutionized science by thinking hey what if what we think is true isn’t?

Narcissistic thinking is our vibe. But also Jesus fuck it feels like the world is going to hell. What if I am living in uniquely bad times? Maybe this is just old person thinking and I need to accept I can’t see reality with sparkling clarity. Or at least the most optimistic permutations of reality. Time isn’t linear and all.

I’m simultaneously planning for an incredibly positive future while I’m also freaking the fuck out. It’s straight up Dickensian. Best of times worse of times. On the one hand I have never been more excited about where technology is headed. Web 3 really might move forward a freer more open market capitalism for everyone. But also my county is on fire and a thousand homes were destroyed in a fire brought on by drought and heat and bad land use.

It’s just extremely jarring to be living a positive optimistic life where I’m excited to buy a home and invest in new founders while also incorporating risk from climate change and political instability. And I won’t even get into whether we need to give a fuck about the pandemic anymore

Pepe frog in a rage in red background

It’s enough to make you go REEEEEEE. Which is a meme that I think should freak me out a little as it bubbled up in kek rare pepe memes on 4chan. Which have filtered into some safe uses but are still tightly wound to meme magic alt-right. But that’s part of why everything is so scary today! Am I a Nazi fascist for using this meme? Who knows! Reeeeeee!! Cancel me daddy!

Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 367 and Flat Out Grossings

December was a pretty gnarly month for me. I tore a ligament. I got Covid. A fire burned down two entire towns. I’m emotionally burnt out right now and letting myself feel it because tomorrow I go back to work. So apologies if this is even more stream of consciousness than usual.

When I was a teenager I wanted to be a reporter. So I talked my way into an internship at our local television station Channel 8. I loved it. I got to be the assistant for such glamorous events as city council land use meetings. Which is how I happen to have the misfortune of knowing how Boulder became surrounded by suburban sprawl. I don’t have a grand unified theory. I just witness a lot of little decisions that compounded into unspeakable disaster no one could have predicted. Except we did.

There used to be a crappy mall in Boulder. It had a Macy’s and a Foley’s but it couldn’t sustain its anchor tenant department stores even in the late 90s and early aughts. Now big developers and chain stores knew that Boulder was fast becoming a wealthy town and wanted in. Maybe we could upgrade from middle market to premium retail. But Boulder is run by a bunch of hippies and wanted no part of upgrading big box stores. City council meeting turned into an endless parade of “no” to various folks coming in attempting to take over the mall on 28th street. It languished for years.

Eventually the developers gave up. Decided to construct a mall outside of the open space belt outside of the city. You see Boulder is the prototype for NIMBYS. We literally bought up a bunch of land that the town owns and can never ever be developed so no one could sprawl the town. It’s gorgeous and amazing and expensive to maintain and makes Boulder a haven for its natives and an impossibly expensive place if you didn’t buy real estate in the 60s. But I digress. This is about the mall.

The developers called the new mall out on the prairie beyond the town’s open space Flatiron Crossing. It’s an homage to Boulder’s signature feature the flatiron mountains. And the views from up town highway 36 into town driving back from the mall are amazing.

And Boulder honestly felt like it won. The ugly box stores went up around it. Our town was saved from Costco and Chuckee Cheese and Ann Taylor. We all snobbishly called it Flat Out Grossings. We thought it was a nasty money grab. It was wise we let them develop outside the open space band and protected the town.

Except that mall and all the box stores turned into the anchor for all the surrounding towns. We called them the L towns. Well that and Superior. And that’s where the growth happened. That’s what enabled Colorado to thrive. And that’s exactly how an urban fire that was started on Boulder open space ended up destroying so many homes. We pushed out the development thinking we’d done a good thing.

I actually have to stop writing this as I can’t make the point I want to which is that Boulder brought much of this misery on itself. We wouldn’t let the land be developed in town. So someone else did outside of town. And now that land got wiped out from a fire in our open space. And everyone is going to be snide and awful but our policies have consequences and by pushing out our development to Flat Out Grossing the law of unintended consequences has taken over. And I’m sick to my stomach knowing the well intentioned hippies ended up doing so much more damage.

Categories
Medical

Day 361 and Once More For The Cheap Seats

I was starting to feel pretty good on Saturday and Sunday. I thought maybe I’d kicked the worst of my breakthrough Omicron Covid case. I went down a crypto rabbit hole with the SOS token airdrop and it’s implications. Then on Sunday I was getting excited to launch a fun new project my bff Phil and I have been working on called Vibrations on Solana.

But I had a difficult night. I got woken up multiple times with tachycardia. I tried meditating at 1am. An hour later I was back at 140bpm while asleep. The heart rate alert woke me up. I tried some Wim Hoff breathing. Still couldn’t get it down. I took an Ativan I was getting so concerned. That knocked me out but it didn’t do much for my heart rate. I woke up to these readings on my Whoop.

Whoop capturing 125bpm heart rate at rest. Elevated respiratory rate. Elevated RHR

It seemed clear that all the fun and games I had planned for the day were not going to manifest. I went to get additional readings. My pulse oximeter gave me a 94 reading which isn’t awful but it’s not great either. I then went to Welltory and did a long HRV reading. So I’ll be in bed if you need me.

Welltory reading of my HRV suggests my Covid case requires rest
Categories
Finance Internet Culture

Day 359 and SOS

A few days ago I wondered what project or cultural artifact was going to grab our mutual cultural attention during the Christmas vacation week? Something always does. One year it was fucking Quora if you can believe it. This year I’m ready to call it for $SOS at least if you are into Web3 and crypto economics.

On fucking Christmas Day these degenerates drop a contract to let anyone claim tokens who has ever purchased an NFT on the OpenSea marketplace. And people went ape shit. Suddenly someone had taken all the visible contributions from OpenSea and manifested them in a token and said this is ours. Fuck corporate dominance of profit your users hold the real value. I’ve never seen anything so ballsy. Last year when Wall Street Bets decided to taken on hedge funds I felt like we had entered a new era of community behavior.

An emergent community has swum up from the sea and eaten the lunch of a supposedly greedy centralized platform. Web3 just attacked what we didn’t even realize was Web2. A crypto darling turned parable for centralization in the space of a few years. $SOS seemed to say community owned this value all along. The airdrop showed us the balance of power in a web3 community if we all work together. I’m so impressed by the sheer cultural force of the statement. It could all go horribly awry but god damn if it isn’t utopian.

I’ve got not fucking clue if this is a legitimate contract or not. I’m not going to FUD. But from a first principles, we are building a new internet where the incentives of the users align with the technology statement, then this is quite a shot across the bow. Also I’m pretty sure this makes it harder for OpenSea to IPO if their user base is in open rebellion against who gets rewarded.

The thing is I believe Devin to be a well meaning and genuinely forward thinking guy. He’s a terrific communicator that set out with the utopian intentions that we all do. But we are moving so fast with breaking cultural norms and acceptable societal level rewards for contributions to an economy that I think we might have just spiraled up to some kind of cultural singularity. Crypto might just be moving that fast. Whatever happens this is one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen from a startup. Score one for the anonymous degens.

Categories
Medical Preparedness

Day 354 and Covid

The worst has happened. After nearly two years of being ambiently aware of Covid as a risk in the world I have tested positive. I honestly didn’t think I had it. I feel a little bit sick. I briefly ran a fever. I mostly felt the malaise from the inflammation. Little did I know that the game had changed with Omicron. That was all Covid.

I think we are in the middle of public communication crisis. The new symptoms for Covid are not severe coughing but the sniffles. And the vaccine doesn’t give you neutralizing immunity. It sure does help reduce the severity of the infection if the mildness of my symptoms are any indication. I worked several days before I realized the extent of the illness. And in no way had we reduced our daily caution. The only time I spent indoors with other people was when I had to go to urgent care for a torn ligament in my ankle.

I’ve got to be honest. This is going to happen to you. It’s happening fast and you probably didn’t see it coming. From when Omicron first got identified to me getting ill was less than two weeks. We have a rapid test shortage which means only those with flexibility and money will know if they are sick.

It’s going to be a very ugly month. Not because anyone is going to get extremely sick. But rather a lot of us are going to be a little bit sick. Let’s be gentle with each other when it happens. We are all going to be really miserable together.

Categories
Preparedness

Day 351 and Preppers

The smartest people I know are preppers. Not the end times doomers and apocalyptic types; preppers I know are regular people who happen to have the means to get ahead of disasters. And they are quietly preparing for a much harder century ahead.

There is a significant amount of optimism in my world right now. Crypto and web3 has done well for startup people who saw the promise of blockchain early. But also more traditional startups like SaaS companies are having boom times as well. Every aspect of the pandemic has made life appreciably better for technology workers of all kinds.

Permanent work from home freed us from expensive cities like San Francisco. A stock market buoyed by stimulus made our equity heavy portfolios soar. We have been able to isolate if we want. We’ve had only the upside of the pandemic and born few of its burdens. We are the undisputed winners of the pandemic. And we see how that victory is fragile. An accident even. We did little to earn our comfort.

And so we are preparing for bad times. I’ve got multiple friends who have moved to rural communities from metropolitan cities where they have lived for decades. They are investing in farmland in some cases. In others, just little upgrades like gardens and chicken coops in small towns provide a bit of resilience. Gentleman farmers are making a comeback. Homesteading is to millennials what “back to the land” was for my boomer parents. Some of it is cozycore but a lot of it is genuine desire to get back to making things that keep us alive.

I’m seeing it increasingly from people who work in finance as well. There is a kind of quiet consensus that it’s wise to prepare for winter. Even in the midst of growth so impressive even the Fed is finally acting on inflation, the savvy finance folks know our world has risks. We talk about downside protection and portfolio diversification. But we also quietly talk about tail risks, complexity science and anti-fragility.

It’s not the we are Cassandras assuming that we live in a permanent bearish state. We aren’t convinced that if Rome falls so do we. If anything most of us are optimistic bulls who believe the best case scenario could show us into a new exponential age. But also many of us live in America. And who knows if America’s political situation will remain stable. Our liberal party can’t govern without panic and incompetence and our conservatives are openly adopting populism that flirts with fascism.

Add in that the regular climate driven catastrophes are now weekly. We are all aware it could be our homes in the eye of the next storm. And well it’s rational to be concerned that the world will be more chaotic. Some of us, including me, are convinced it will be an age for making fortunes.

But we aren’t idiots. We believe in scale, specializing and capitalism. We’d also like to know how to manage our own vegetables out back. It’s wise to know your local farmer and dairy. It just tasted better. We know it’s more resilient. Being decentralized may add in some additional friction. We think that’s a good thing in some cases. Why do you think we invested in Bitcoin?

Now I’m not saying we are right. I have no idea when or how some kind of disaster will befall us. But I am saying it couldn’t hurt to have some bottles of water and a couple weeks of food on hand. I’m saying you should prep. DM me if you need help.