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.
It’s getting harder to ignore the crumbles. Everyone on the internet is furious about everything. And everyone offline is just trying to keep their heads down.
I should probably have the good sense to do so as well, but I’ve made my bones being accessible and not at all sure I know what happens in a post-human Internet. I want it to be a human directed future.
2025 as a year has been particularly challenging even though we’ve had some positive moments. More and more things are breaking and it’s just impossible to ignore no matter your insulation from reality.
And quite obviously, I have done more than average to move us as far from the center of Empire as is feasible. We moved to Montana.
Part of me thinks it’s well past time we really took a hard look at the hell in a hand basket direction we are headed in. Things are going haywire everywhere. The brief moment in which it felt like we might accelerate through the turn naturally goes splat if you don’t commit to the bit.
And part of me says fuck’em all. The shit that was done to me in the service of extracting my life force for what, pensions and healthcare costs for a generation who broke all social fabrics? It’s literally Saturn eating his son levels of disgusting.
It’s quite canny of Peter Thiel to be ahead of it and it’s a better look than insulting the spiritual leader of the Catholic Church. And I’m not a notably sympathetic person when it comes to institutions like the Church (being a Protestant and all). I’m more of a direct communion with the Lord type.
However when a man well versed in scapegoat theory puts out a sympathetic hand & his most significant rival makes the tactical error of insulting the Pope, you know the tilt-a-whirl is in full spin and there is little space for any of us to cling.
We are on the highway to hell, & I was promised a handbasket but there are none to be had as they’ve been hoarded. The fourth turning is about to show us that even the liberals get the boot. There is little doubt that I am mere scraps of elite overproduction that refused to fuse to my intended spot. I’ll find my own place to stand.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t know what it is about election day in America, but it has ceased to be a joyful, exciting day for me. I wonder about the lost version of me who ever felt positively about elections.
Now it’s a day of dread and worry. And not even having day 69 in the post’s title can make an old internet native like me chuckle. Nothing about democracy in America feels nice. I have no idea if it ever will again. And I swear I am not a cynical person, just a very tired one.
The civics education I got as a child taught me to see Election Day as a momentous moment in time where the will of the people is heard and considered and eventually enacted.
And in my heart of hearts, I can’t really let go of that, no matter how much reality shows me otherwise. I’m not sure if will is even the right word for a collection of such a diverse array of individuals that make up the American population. What could we possibly will as an entity?
And certainly I understand that America is not literally structured in ways meant to showcase the preferences of the plurality of the people. I understand this to be a good thing even. We balance a lot in a republic and never did it terribly well.
Somehow we always persevered. And so you presume that America will keep on persevering because what else is there to do?
And now, in this very plastic, protean in-between time, all feels far too malleable. Boundaries that I never thought could be crossed have been crossed repeatedly. The fourth turning is upon us and my generation is woefully behind. The changing of the guards isn’t going well and the choices only seem to get worse.
And so to sooth my own soul, day in and day out, have something to say about the times I live in. All seventeen hundred and sixty nine of them. Even as nothing really seems to get better, I try to get better. I do what I can because I can do more than most, and even that is just never, ever enough. I take on more responsibilities because who is there if not me? If not us?
And so, all day, I have been dreading the results of a mayoral election in a city I no longer live in, in a state that was never my home, safely in the comforts of a county that isn’t having an election outside of a city which is having an election which will affect me though I have no say in it. It’s a bizarre state of affairs.
I’ll be impacted by a mayoral election in a city that I deliberately chose to live outside of because we wanted to be beyond its reaches so we could live as we like. Which is a fantasy as the mayor of Bozeman obviously has a significant impact on the residents of Gallatin County.
And I’ll have to wait to see if a candidate for mayor, who has one of the worst possible plans for housing growth that I’ve ever seen, succeeds in taking the town further in a direction that sunk my own hometown two states down the mountain range.
And there is nothing I can do about it, because I chose to live outside of the city limits so that I wouldn’t be affected by those very politicians whose decisions will obviously have a knock on effect to everyone around them.
There is no winning in a networked world where our interconnection increasingly feels like a Chinese finger trap. The more you pull away the tighter its grip.
Because of course I will be affected. If Bozeman can’t build more housing because no one can afford to do so thanks to bizarre water allocation scheme the entire valley will suffer.
And all this because we wanted to live somewhere we could chose to build as we like on our own land and keep a few chickens. Another reminder that there is no other choice if America falls prey to the many maladies that collapse republics. Whatever comes next will be faced head on by all of us.
Today was a pretty big news day. It was a FOMC meeting with a cut, Jerome Powell gave some forward guidance that a cut in December is not guaranteed (cue market upset), and NVIDIA became worth $5 trillion.
This is apparently 16% of our GDP and without investment in artificial intelligence related build-out, our economy would have only grown by 0.6%.
Without Magnificent Seven spending, GDP would have grown at a mere 0.6% annualized rate instead of around 1.1%-1.2% – Fortune
So America would be looking about as gnarly as Europe without the Magnificent Seven and AI infrastructure build-out spending.
About 92% of GDP growth in the first half of 2025 was driven by investment in data centers, AI infrastructure, and information processing, with NVIDIA as a primary contributor Yahoo Finance
Which is a scary large amount for any corporation, but is somewhat rational in the logic of a civilizational technology changeover akin to the Industrial Revolution.
For some comparisons, Standard Oil at its height represented about 5-6% of the total U.S. stock market value at the time and 1.5% of America’s total GDP. AT&T’s Bell Systems were worth about 3-4% of America’s GDP at their asset peak in 1984 so not entirely an unprecedented situation though Nvidea’s percentage is a very networked era problem.
How afraid should we be about the potential for a market bubble in artificial intelligence? That is a questions for Carlotta Perez
Having lived through both the dot-com crash and the global financial crisis, I have some fears, but also this feels about as rational as any of the other ways we’ve handled valuations and value in past boom-and-bust cycles.
There is significant revenue from very real demand. It is just hard to see the demand as it’s industry demand not consumer. And the consumer demand we have is likely coming from professionals who are more enabled in ways we can’t count. I couldn’t have answered half the questions I had for this post before the LLM age.
And that demand for efficiency was coming and needed to be addressed over some time horizon, no matter what.
As different industries cope with their extreme lack of efficiency in the face of other industries who are efficient and in demand wages rise everywhere and basic needs like education & healthcare get more expensive despite not being delivered more efficiently.
So we still need those inefficient industries but what do we do? We have to find solutions.
Because we were going to need to build out the infrastructure for diversified energy transition. Much of this is being spent on build-outs for things that we genuinely need.
We need nuclear. We need power grids that aren’t from the dark ages. We need the efficiency for compute as government services have gone full runaway Baumol accelerationist. Unless we do the hard work that’s going to take 10 to 15 years, most liberal economies will collapse under the weight of the social safety net.
So we need to do a fairly thorough job of investing in the future, independent of whether it’s artificial intelligence driving our future or developing an industrial policy of, say, going to war with China. Necessity is the mother of invention and I’d rather the need be capital growth than war to drive industry.
I don’t know why this “facts of budgeting life” works people up so much. Booms and busts and bubbles build real things and we really need more efficient energy, healthcare, and education.
The economy is a nutrient gradient and money moves to where it gets fed. Right now the promised efficiency of a solution to unsustainable spending is paid for by gains in areas which did get more efficient. That is just the whole game. Grow faster and bring along anything that isn’t for the ride.
I was ordered into bed for a couple of days by not one but two doctors. As I mentioned yesterday, a small incision for testosterone pellets must have let in a small amount of bacteria.
Maybe we didn’t pick the correct antibiotics (or maybe it was an inadequate dose) so what looked like healthy healing turned into a subcutaneous infection just as it was all look well which needed managing and cause me a bit of trouble.
So I’ve been catching up on costume dramas like The Gilded Age about the 1880s boom times in America. I’m on the third season of it and while not quite done but I’m enjoying it.
No matter the era or the people involved, humans will always find new ways to organize themselves into hierarchies that reflect changes in technology and material conditions.
As eager as we may be to unravel past cultural ways of organizing our status and importance, we always find new ways to set new standards of who matters and why and the same human nature finds a way to creep back in.
Position, birthright, inheritances and other ways of marking nobility and aristocracy manage to find a way to accommodate wealth and power lest they lose all status.
And who has wealth and power in this century whipsaws so fast, it feels like change is as seasonal as the weather. Even if in reality, society changed little if at all. Money and birth still matter quite a bit no matter how many followers someone has on the latest attention gathering platform.
The Gilded Age attempts across the seasons to show that our society is always changing with subplots about rising in society through invention, intellect, political organization and sheer force of will.
Gilded Age’s director Julian Fellows also directed Downton Abbey which famously showed a British aristocratic family struggling with money, social change and war.
Both shows may show ways of changing one’s position in society but the skeptics exist at every turn. Even Fussell has Class X in his guide who exit rather than participate in what he calls the charade of meritocracy.
Fussell argues that it is essentially impossible to change one’s social class —up or down — but it is possible to extricate oneself from the class system by existing outside the system as a X person. Wikipedia
I find this particularly funny as we have entire institutions dedicated to deciding how we see and experience class and their luminaries hate how society organizes itself as much as anyone. The New York Times’s infamous columnist David Brooks finds Fussell’s book a “caustic and extravagantly snobby tour through the class markers of its time” which strikes me as especially funny as he once dedicated a column to worrying if he’d put his assistant into an awkward spot by presuming she wouldn’t know how to order in “gourmet” Italian deli.
Bourgeois bohemian that Brooks was, it never occurred to him that an Italian deli might actually be a lower class marker for plenty of people. American Society being filled with semiotic markers in America to ever really manage a static set of signifiers for all that long.
We may have some room for improvement technique with it so I am encouraged if the is as bad as it gets. I am not seeing any benefits from it yet and ugly bruising and a bit of an opening on an incision isn’t so bad.
A lot will depend on how well I recover and how much the hormone actually helps when I’m not healing. I’m also in the luteal horrors phase where my hormones are most ridiculous so I’m curious to see the curve.
The best part of this remains that I have a world class treatment for skin wounds on hand. Hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy’s best research has been in wound management from burns to slow healing diabetics. So if I have to nurse a wound doing it with oxygen at pressure is actually pretty baller.
And to make it even more on theme, I spent most of my time in there writing out a column on skincare and the Great Male Renunciation of Appearances as part of my beauty shopping column and excuse to write about the secret history of appearance and its power.
I am booting up the more practical aspects of writing to provide value, as opposed to the writing I do here, which is to provide a thinking space for myself, and if I’m lucky occasionally my notes will help someone else.
I am enjoying preparing posts with research, and the next post teaches a little about the Protestant Reformation and The Enlightenment’s role in the great “Male Renunciation” of appearance.
Afew short centuries upended thousands of years of cultural norms that showcased the importance of masculine beauty and taste and replaced it with a drab mind first Cartesian split.
If I’m going to put together historical context, I figure it has to help the reader feel freed enough to experiment with their own world and consider that they can regain lost or hidden knowledge that was once foundational. In this case how masculinity communicated power, status and taste through appearance.
If you are aspiring to better yourself, to pursue an aristocracy of the soul, we will start with mastering the basic ingredients you will encounter in a drugstore and how they might build into reclaiming your appearance. We will go from there to Pareto-optimal options for building a habit that helps age well and look its best.
So I am having a bit of fun thinking about appearances. Anything anyone of us can do to free up another human to choose a life that is better for them is worth the time.
I spent some time being really “in my special interest” today writing about why I think we should give more, and not less, time to beauty. I’ll post it to my new substack tomorrow as that will remain focused in subject matter.
Appearances clearly matter in every facet of life, but we don’t do much to help develop taste even as we face an onslaught of the hyper visual unrealistic world of short form video.
It’s all dopamine drips and quick hits that make it hard to develop taste of your own. At best you found algorithms that suited some things you could enjoy but sincerely held joy is rare. I’ve been able to experience many times and it’s now one keeps going in a cruel world.
I spent so much of my life beating the drumbeat of more access to the secret knowledge of the world only to discover again and again, that even if you offer up to the world pearls, not everyone will want them.
Or as my mother liked to say her Latin teacher said “I’m throwing pearl’s before swine!”
To appreciate the details is to recognize that layer upon layer of irritation worked to a finished pearlescent sheen which seems too delicate to truly show the process. That’s its beauty.
Each layer of culture is built by people who cares about details. And all kinds of details matter. Sometimes the details are financial. Sometimes aesthetic. Sometimes it’s noticing a very specific signal inside a very particular group and being able to admire the elegances.
I myself didn’t think I ever much went in for subtlety of any kind until I spent more of my time in mass markets. I’ve come to realize I was allowed to live without too much push on my own tastes for so much of my life.
And because I care about details, now I know I a stupid amount about the business of appearances because I worked at its heart.
I intend to do it as a fun addition to my life as I experience so much of life through professional and personal interest in technologies. I’ve got aspirations for a world where we choice to work to be better. That requires a world where beauty can be cultivated in improving ourselves. so you can be certain I appreciate the angles of how we use the existing culturally technologies at hand to create the new ones.
