Tag: Disaster

Categories
Preparedness

Day 1107 and -20 Below

The polar vortex that is hitting the northwest of America has come to Montana. It was an eerie scene as the light of the setting sun contrast off the dark of the inbound storm

The Bridger Range as the storm comes in

We woke up to -20F temperatures (which is -28C). That the sort of cold you can get frost bite from in less than 15 minutes of exposure.

Our weather station this morning.

Obviously this is a day for staying inside. There are however things you should do to make sure you are safely prepare for this kind of weather. Keeping closets and cabinets open and letting water drip helps with freezing pipes.

You should prepare extra layers and emergency food and water as you would for any other storm. If you have to travel make sure you’ve got a car emergency kit.

That should include, aside from a full tank of gas, “jumper cables, sand, a flashlight, warm clothes, blankets, bottled water and non-perishable snacks,” according to Ready.gov

Axios Prepare for Extreme Cold

We’ve got a roaring fire in our wood stove and have backups for both gas heat and electricity through our solar. So we should be snug as a bug. So stay warm outside everyone.

Alex still went in the hot tub at -20
Categories
Preparedness

Day 1104 and Storm Systems

It’s finally time for severe winter weather alerts. Much of America is under various forms of extreme weather watches.

We got half a foot of snow in southwest Montana in Gallatin county but it looks as if we’ve more on the way with plenty of gusting wind and temperatures dropping to -10 Fahrenheit.

We’ve got a number of habits around storm preparations in our family. I like to take a shower, run a few loads of laundry and run the dishwasher. Cleaning up yourself and your house before a storm is a good habit.

The idea is that if you lose power for an extended period you will appreciate having a clean home. In the cold and dark you don’t want to be surrounded dirty dishes. The extra time to feel you live in a clean house is well worth it.

Day 364 and Before The Storm

Losing grid power isn’t something we need to worry about as we’ve got a number of redundancies for both power and heat. We’ve got a solar array and wood burning stove for backups.

Alex stacking up wood

However the weather plays out, we should be I good shape.

Categories
Politics Reading

Day 1101 and Domestic Terrorism

I spent most of my day reading. I had a glorious backlog of essays, papers, and other sundry pdfs to enjoy on my Readwise Reader. They are my favorite new mobile app for keeping track of my library. And I enjoyed an afternoon dedicated to reading.

It is the anniversary of the January 6th capital insurrection. I remember being afraid to write about my feelings at the time and now I’m grateful I captured some of the intensity. It was early in my daily writing habit as day six.

Just by chance we had the same meal today as we did on January 6th. A wine braised short rib over risotto. An unplanned synchronicity.

I had another synchronicity. The essays I was reading was by FBI designated domestic terror group member. The human rights class I took in college was taught by the leader of the Weather Underground by the name of Bernadine Dohrn.

And now we’ve got these January 6th domestic terrorists whose goal was to stop the electoral count. The Weather Underground “group’s express political goal was to create a revolutionary party to overthrow the United States government.”

It was a day to be reminded that enemies of the state come and go.

It’s funny how the left wing domestic terrorists of the sixties went on to be tenured professors at top universities. I got introduced to Rawls and developed an interest in critical theory.

I can’t say what the January 6th insurrection folks will get up to in the future. Maybe one day someone’s daughter will hear Q Anon Shaman lecture about human rights at Harvard. I doubt it though. But you never know.

Categories
Aesthetics

Day 1077 and Disaster Porn

I loved the movie Independence Day when I was a kid. I still watch it every 4th of July Aliens invade and Americans unite a rag tag group of nerds for our species survival? I stand by my affection for it.

My mother had a very different take. She didn’t like that they showed the White House being blown up. She thought this was in fact a horrible image to have in one’s mind.

“Never imagine a future you wouldn’t want to happen“

My mom

As a kid I thought this was a little silly. Imagining things is good right? If we imagine bad things we can present them from happening right? I’ve given some thought to how we portray disaster aesthetically. The hope is always that by imagining bad future that we can take action to work for better ones but what if we don’t?

Hyperstition has been a hot topic as of late and it has me wondering if my mother may have had wisdom I didn’t fully appreciate at the time. The artistry of imaging dystopian outcomes vividly can turn a searing critique into a cult hit which eventually becomes genuine admiration. Think of how American Psycho’s perception changed over the years.

Let us hope we only hit rock bottom in our imagination and use it simply to fuel our ambitions for a better tomorrow.

Categories
Aesthetics Community Internet Culture Startups

Day 1066 and Behind The Scenes of Thousand Scenes Flourishing

We are living in an era of competing totalizing narratives. We assign Jungian archetypes and monomyths to complicated people and complex situations with many variables.

We ship relationships and stan fandoms even as the meme message is that we should be shipping code and forming bonds with other people with agency.

Remember that hyperstition is about bringing a reality into being. We have agency to impact the world we live in. We have more control than ever and anyone can get leverage.

I’m so inspired to see how many communities are facing an uncertain future head on. Sure we’ve had schisms and it’s easy to judge someone else’s sincere revivalism with crass cynicism.

I prefer an optimism about what we can all accomplish when we compete to serve a need better than anyone else. I like specialization as the more knowledgeable that is dispersed widely beyond a priest cast the better we seem to do as a species. A whole world of people is calling to you to own more of the future personally.

You may wonder what you can contribute. And sure some actors are massively more agentic. I never thought I’d be in that rare class and yet I can contribute meaningful to dozens of aligned projects. It’s important to avoid dickriding. Don’t make up stories about your betters. Or at least try not to believe them.

You can be personally better yourself. You can accelerate. Now is the time to arm yourself with leverage as the world shifts. Be wary of messiahs and mercenaries but also know action is expensive.

Strong organizations have healthy value memetics. “Just Do It” frames a broader truth that humans take in a context of millions of other agents. Action is disproportionally powerful when people just play their role.

I fight nihilism. I’m not eager for the end of humanity or our civilizations. I want our flourishing. But neither am I attached to a static vision of my humanity or yours. In the image of God gives quite a bit of latitude for our species’ evolution.

Categories
Startups

Day 1047 and Risking Resets

Apparently the last year has been an “annus horribilus” for startups. Kate Clarke writes in The Information.

If 2022 was a year of shock and denial for tech founders and investors as stocks collapsed, 2023 was a year of acceptance of their harsh new reality.

Kate Clarke “Startups’ Annus Horribilis—and What Comes Next”

Maybe I never got over my skis, but I don’t feel like I went through shock or denial as capital markets tightened. I remember a world before interest rates were low. I remember bad times. I have memories of bankruptcies and struggles to raise capital.

I was a teenager watching my father when tech crashed the first time. I was living in San Francisco working for a venture backed company that had acquired my startup when Sequoia said RIP good times and the global financial crisis unfolded.

Maybe the elder millennial timing of my life wasn’t as shitty as we thought. The constant crises were the norm. Unlike Gen Xers I never had a fear of selling out. I was much more interested in finding a way to survive. And I was disappointed to learn that the institutions didn’t really offer that anymore.

When I had good luck I didn’t think my accomplishments were my own. I mostly thought of them as accidents of survival. Praying for exits was less of a joke and more of a bitter reality. And when they did come it was a surprise.

I have made my peace with the risk of resetting the chess board. My optimism has always been tempered by expectations of crisis and chaos. I might even believe it’s for the best.

Categories
Culture

Day 1045 and History Repeating

I’ve been feeling grateful to be older. I’m also feeling grateful to have been educated in a family that valued learning history. The more I see how much we repeat the same stories, the more I realize we just don’t change very much. Maybe the characters and the contexts change, but we sure like to hum a familiar tune.

I’m glad as I acquire more context that I am even able to see another turn of the wheel. It makes me feel like I’ve got a chance to avoid being caught in the churn. If you are a fan of science fiction you might recognize the churn from the Expanse. I’ll let one of the heroes explain it.


Amos: This boss I used to work for in Baltimore, he called it the Churn. When the rules of the game change.
Kenzo: What game?
Amos: The only game. Survival. When the jungle tears itself down and builds itself into something new.

The Expanse

The rules change. But the game remains the same. Human nature doesn’t really change at all just our circumstances.

And as circumstances change so do the rules of how we navigate the world. But the real game has only one outcome. You win and the prize is surviving. The rest is just context.

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 1011 and The Same Timezone

My circadian rhythm has succumbed to the shock of the current crisis. I’m currently on the same time zone as Israel as I’m in Tallinn in Estonia. It’s been a windy weekend with a record breaking wind storm so folks have been advised to stay inside.

That means I’ve been online watching a war breakout with no news delay or influencer filters. There is no defining set of news narratives. Twitter is broken but it’s still largely moved by the enormous traffic of the American dominance on its algorithm. Stories build but American news can whipsaw a single image into our consciousness.

Except there is no one to trust on the platform. The old verification system of the blue check didn’t provide much except that if someone said they worked confidence that the source. It was not a great system. But now there is no system.

It doesn’t seem as if there is a functional trust and safety team at Twitter. So a lot of people have seen horrors that has previously been buffed away by content warnings and nerfings. It’s a good thing and a bad thing.

Keep in mind “trust and safety” is gone might be a fancy way of saying none of the intelligence services have any natural dominance, none of the legacy news institutions are caught up to internet OSINT and you will see things.

And I have. By the time something hits the American audience I’ve had almost an entire work day with the information you are just seeing. And it’s been horrifying. Because it is. And being on the same time zone really lays bare just how much narrative fog permeates war in a crumbling corporate internet.

Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 1010 and Exogenous Shocks

There are few shocks as jarring as waking up to a war starting. I was preparing to leave for Germany when the current Ukrainian conflict boiled over. I woke up in Estonia today to news of an escalation in Israel. No matter who you are or where you live, the existential dread of a hot conflict finds you.

Trying to orient your life around exogenous shocks of violence and conflict is part of the human condition. One that we seem as yet unable to evolve beyond no matter how much we elevate rationality. Every time a new rift emerges in the fragile status quo of the global consensus, I find myself wishing I were more surprised. But it’s pointless to be surprised by chaos.

I hesitate to weigh in on a conflict as it emerges as no matter how closely you watch the news it’s a mess of conflicting narratives. All I know is that more external risks like war will continue to drive volatility across all our human systems.

Our many complex human systems, from trade to politics, are already riddled with known endogenous internal risks. You start adding in more variables that can impact a given system and we don’t fully understand what is exogenous anymore. What’s outside the system if we’ve networked the whole planet?

I wish I believed a sunnier outlook was reasonable in the immediate term. Destiny remains in the hands of men. And we are a species prone to reactionary behavior. We are evolved to it. But we are tied together on this planet and every conflict, shock and unexpected event can ripple out to touch us all.

Categories
Emotional Work Politics

Day 984 and Distrust

I had a bad migraine over the weekend that simply took up all the space in my mind and body. I woke up with a break in the pain and a deep urge to throw myself into something that felt like momentum.

I found myself awash in sadness. I couldn’t stop myself from crying. It was as if my entire body felt despair. I’ve come to accept the value in embracing emotions as they come. “The only way out is through.”

I trust that my nervous system knows as much as my cognitive mind. I go so far as to say it knows more but that sounds a little woo to folks. And so I listened to my sadness. I cried. I rambled at the many problems large and small facing my corner of the universe.

The distrust I have for our elders who twenty two years ago used today as a catalyst for sending us down an inexorable path of death and fraud. I cried over petty inconveniences like the broken visa system keeping people I care about outside of America.

It’s hard to understand how we came to this point across a generation. But easy to see why millennials are unsure if any of our institutions can be trusted. And I wonder what it’s like to have no memory of a time before 9/11.