Tag: Culture Wars

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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.

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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.

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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.

Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 346 and Pandemic Inequalities

The last two years have been pretty good for the wealthy and pretty shitty for everyone else. Mostly because when governments slash interest rates and pour in stimulus, it’s the wealthy who can flood into equities and secure loans that make money functionally free. Everyone else has to rely on salaries that are paid in a currency that is being inflated.

I don’t think we are coming back from this widening division. It started before this anyway. The Great Recession and the Global Financial Crisis decoupled a lot. And you can probably blame the rest on Reagan. Hell go back to Nixon and the gold standard. Doesn’t matter. Compound interest and power laws have pretty clear math. The rich get richer.

But I’m somewhat more offended by the cultural chasm that is emerging. The labor class that lives under restrictions and fear while the elite with good passports and wealth move into Dubai apparently.

In a very fine demonstration of the power of public relations, The UAE appears to have placed glowing article in the Wall Street Journal about how Dubai is the new Covid free home of the monied. It’s a fascinating piece of propaganda about freedom to live life and do business. As long as you can afford it. It’s expensive to move to Dubai but once you are there apparently life is back to normal.

Sky high vaccinations and low taxes make Dubai a pandemic boomtown. Open borders and low infections are drawing the wealthy, businesses and tourists.

If you aren’t wealthy enough to pick up and start life over, you are stuck with whatever restrictions your nation places on you. Or conversely, you accept the risks of local transmission, vaccine uptake & political disposition of wherever you live. If you want to travel good luck with things like visas and the expense of quarantines.

I don’t know why this offends me. It’s been clear from the start that some people have had very different pandemics. The middle class has had the benefits of work from home. It’s been the working class that has had to live with all the risk and restrictions. But I do find it a bit upsetting that we are accepting new tiers of global citizenship based simply on your ability to pay to be without Covid cases. Since we can’t end this together I guess we are doomed to escape it on our own with our own abilities.

Categories
Biohacking Medical

Day 341 and Drugs are Good M’Kay

I am a prolific consumer of supplements and vitamins. I maintain a spreadsheet to keep track of all my inputs. I take a bunch of exotic stuff so it’s easiest to check for interactions and assess impact if I maintain strict consistency.

I’ve seen remarkable benefits to the entire mess but it’s taken over a year of dedication to see the compounding effects. Taking vitamins isn’t quite like taking a pharmaceutical that way. But I suppose everything is dependent on dose. And yet I tend to apply a completely different moral valence to my supplements then my pharmaceuticals.

When I was a teenager it felt like the war on drugs had mostly devolved into scar tactics. After school specials, assemblies with terrifying speakers, and the general media landscape showing “this is your brain on drugs” probably gave me an unnecessarily limited view of how to approach drugs. Recreational drugs were bad but I also knew that pain medications were deadly. It didn’t help I had a family member who was an opioid addict.

The running gag on South Park with Mr. Mackey telling the kids that drugs are bad mmm kay logged into my subconscious. And not in a sun skeptical way. I appear to have taken it at face value.

South Park’s Mr Mackey says drugs are bad…mkay?

Except drugs are neither bad or good. I wouldn’t dream of considering my various supplements and vitamins as making me bad or weak. Those keep me healthy and function. I also take prescription medications. Those also keep me healthy and functional. It’s the same thing. I don’t take them for kicks or to get high.

But the idea I absorbed from childhood that I’m supposed to regard things like pain killers with intense skepticism continues to hinder my progress. I was warned by the orthopedist I may need to up the anti-inflammatories I take for my spine as my ligament injury heals. But I am still reluctant to take the prescribed dose. Despite being under the supervision of two doctors.

I’ve got to learn to let go of this attitude. Drugs are good mmmkay? Tinkering and tweaking and looking for improvements are great. No one deserves to be in pain. It’s not morally better no matter what religious nonsense we may have absorbed. Sure pain is a terrific teacher. But it’s perfectly alright to chose to forgo it. We can chose to grow without inflicting any more pain on ourselves than necessary.

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Aesthetics Preparedness

Day 339 and Doomer Optimism

I write a mini-festo for the Doomer Optimism community. I am sharing it here today as well as gosh darn it I wrote it so it counts.

I come from hippie utopian stock. My parents, both working class union types, moved us to the promised land of Silicon Valley right before I was born. The family lore concludes that my father had no job on the day I came into the world as he was pitching a startup. My parents believed in the promise of computing, and eventually, the internet, to connect free thinking humans in a culture of collaboration and self-sufficiency. The do-it-yourself ethos of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog combined with a heady blend of technical opportunity and growth that is well chronicled in What The Dormouse Said. This gives you a sense of cultural milieu in which I was raised. The sixties had long given way to the Reagan revolution and the rise of Clinton’s neoliberalism when I came on the scene, but I never forgot my roots. I invest in startups to continue that legacy of autonomy and freedom at my own fund chaotic.capital.

“Remember what the dormouse said: feed your head.”

For me doomer optimism is the continued braiding of those cultural strands. Each one of us is capable of connecting to each other and enabling ourselves, individually and collectively, to lead the life of flourishing and growth we seek. We want tools and information that feed our head but also crucially our heart. The key insight that these very different culture strains, hippie and technology, have shown us, is that individual empowerment is what ultimately connects us to our tribes. 

How does it work? Well, natural law is pretty simple. The laws of thermodynamics are clear.  “If you do not fuck around, you never find out.” As we cede autonomy to others, we cede our capacity to fuck around. The inexorable logic of that, means we also cede our capacity to find out. Without the natural chaos of energetic entropy pushing man against nature, we get stuck. We stagnate in the local maxima. 

And we long to find out. We want to find our communities, our families, our capacities, and our passions. That is how we build. That is how we invent. That is how we solve our problems. Humans are capable of huge creative leaps. Massive shifts in capacity have risen in a blink of an eye. We can solve our problems, and indeed have been doing so, for millennia. But the only way we do is if we fuck around. Otherwise we will never find out what we are capable of overcoming. No matter how dire our problems we can rely on the deep laws of energy. So don’t be afraid, go and fuck around. We are counting on you to find out.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 338 and Effort

The real world rewards talent. It largely doesn’t give a fuck about effort. Sure, we like it when someone with talent works hard at honing their gifts. But if you just work hard it is largely ignored. The end result still matters most. Talent more easily gets the desired outcome.

This is a sort of hard truth that isn’t particularly hard to grasp. Every bit of evidence you have from a young age indicates that we reward outcome. Even if you are in a school system without grades, like I was, we still know what a quality outcome looks like. But we spend all this time and effort lying to kids with this separate system of effort that suggests that working hard and putting in a lot of effort are the thing “good” kids do.

I’m not wild about praising effort and hard work on its own. Sure it matters, hard work honing your skills, even when you suck, has its own value. But not when it comes to what the world expects of us. We inculcate habits and emotional expectations that are basically cargo cults. No wonder kids, after being praised and rewarded for effort for a decade or two, are confused when they get their first job. I’d be fucking pissed if I were that kid. I’d slowly shaped my behavior around one set of expectations only to find it had no bearing on reality.

Why do we spend so much time cultivating the myth that effort matters as much as talent? Why do we praise effort so consistently among our youth when we know that at a job being told “well you work hard but…” is probably a prelude to being let go. You have to work hard and achieve the desire outcome. It’s enough to drive people nuts. It is literally crazy making to contradict reality with all these lessons on effort. We are gaslighting our youth.

Categories
Media Politics

Day 331 and No Going Back

We were never getting rid of the downstream effects of the pandemic. All the joking about the “before times” was just our collective psyche exhibiting normalcy bias. There is no going back. Inequality is rising and people are struggling and attitudes have ossified. Not because of some bizarre conspiracy but because you can’t put toothpaste back in the tube.

Every restriction and panic is just another day where the world gets more unfair and the prepared and the wealthy have more moves than those at the bottom. And so more people suffer and the gyre widens.

The thing about being privileged is that it compounds over time. Every instance of success and every lucky break build on each other. The math is an inexorable process that leads to one conclusion. The rich get richer.

The reverse is true too. Every barrier, every bill, every setback, every issue compounds too. An object in motion stays in motion.

If this all seems very unfair, I regret to say there is absolutely nothing any individual can do about the physics of success. The best you can do is try to bring others up with you. Educate them on the logic of success and arm them so they can begin to compound their own.

You can’t do it at mass scale. Individual outliers will distort every set of rules and every game within a handful of moves and the accretion of influence begins anew. There is no such thing as revolution. There is only hoping you can enable enough people to change the direction for good. That enough people chose collectively to make better choices for each other.

Anyone who preaches anything other than individuals aiding each other in freedom will have to acknowledge that all systems are prone to corruption and self serving. There is no level playing field.

Some of us just have enough ego to think if it is our people and our tribe or our political party in charge we’d do it better. That’s a lovely lie and history is riddled with the graves of societies that fell to egos of Caesars and strong men. Humans wouldn’t be interesting without our sins. We have to chose to overcome them and accept responsibility for their consequences rather than put our problems at the feet of elites.

And this unfortunate logic can lead one of two ways for America. We can either accept the personal freedom and self responsibility of each other. Or we can get smaller as a nation. What’s more likely to happen is the inequality widens. The rich and productive will write their own destiny. They will take advantage of the sifting sands. New fortunes will be built on pandemic logic and technology.

And the insecurity of the chaos will erode the positions of most fragile members of society and they will fall further as we climb higher. We will force rules on them we don’t abide by. Masks, testing, vaccines, restrictions of movement become for thee but not for me. We will restrict their capacity because it doesn’t affect our lives. It’s corrosive and unequal and cruel. It’s entirely without empathy. And we are accepting that because our stars are rising. The money is being made off this societal transition. It’s already in motion.