Tag: Extremely Online

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Finance Politics Preparedness

Day 1583 and The Last Tariff Free Shopping Spree

I remember the weeks before Covid-19 lockdowns hit vividly. My father went on international cruise, my husband was traveling domestically right up to the last week, and I got yelled at on the internet for discussing buying masks, toilet paper, and disinfectant.

My father got stuck in a Latin American port as borders closed, Alex made it back with mere days to spare before New York locked down and I had a well stocked pantry & dry goods cabinet. I was a prepper long before it became the default of normie Americans after Hurricane Sandy.

So naturally I’m trying to get ahead of the impacts of the tariff war as the last container loads of goods ordered before “Liberation Day” are sold through by American retailers.

Items Most Likely to Experience Shortages if the Drop in Container Cargo from China Persists
If the current sharp decline in container cargo from China to the United States continues, Americans are likely to see shortages-and significant price increases-across several key product categories. This is due to a combination of record-high tariffs (up to 145%) and a dramatic reduction in shipping volumes, with estimates suggesting a 60% to 80% drop in imports from China

Via Perplexity

Clothing basics, footwear, and cosmetics are at at the top of the list of potential shortage areas so I stocked up on underwear, socks, Aquaphor and hit “order” on the two pairs of athletic shoes I’ve had languishing my cart for months.

Amazon must be having a great couple of weeks.

I also decided to treat myself to a few Landmark classics including Julius Caesar and Alexander’s Campaigns. If the empire is falling I may as well revisit some of my schooling.

Plus I just returned from a run through Alexander’s empire so perhaps this is a moment to ground myself on the rise and fall of empires. I never did much care for Rome though but I didn’t expect to be born in a late republic.

I don’t know how this particular supply shock will play out and I feel lucky to be able to spend on thing’s frivolous and essential. Dry feet and military history are as good as any a thing to have on hand. I imagine we will have more serious inventory to do but it’s better to take the first steps.

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Aesthetics Media

Day 1581 and Demand for 15 Friends

We live in an endless scroll world of relational voids. The ways we consume content has now surpassed even the worst fears of media theory greats like Marshall MacLuhan and Neil Postman.

Amusing ourselves to death is no longer a fear but a practical reality. So we spot auto playing clips divorced from context of tech CEOs revealing ever more horrifying statistics about how degraded our conditions have become.

I have no idea if this interview pull quote is from the frat bro former addict Theo Von who so likable interviewed Trump or from Dwarkesh the 24 year old artificial intelligence wunderkind. Context collapse indeed.

Zuckerberg explaining how Meta is creating personalized AI friends to supplement your real ones: “The average American has 3 friends, but has demand for 15.”

I think this tidbit on its own is open to a number of interpretations as our Bowling Alone era has been with us before Facebook.

We forget how inelastic social capital can be. We’ve got a statistic (not even a nod to Dunbar’s number) about friend demand without addressing the issue of friend supply. Of course, it’s not an economics problem as humans are not fungible.

We have a cultural and psychological problem on our hands when it comes to our new relational world as it’s mediated through digital intermediaries. Maybe you can make a case that there is a demand for 15 more people to improve your social standing.

You’d think the man at the head of the corporation who owns Instagram would understand status signaling. For plenty of people having friends is about your social position.

Fortunately for most of us friendship is still about feeling understood and caring enough to understand another person. Which an artificial intelligence is probably capable of doing. But that’s a different story.

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Community Politics Startups

Day 1571 and Townie Done Good

I am excited to be a panelist at an academic conference at my hometown’s university later this week.

While I didn’t attend the University of Colorado at Boulder myself, as a townie kid it holds a special place as educational institution in my life.

Their libraries lent me books, I attended events like their famed Conference on World Affairs and I made use of campus facilities from sports fields to their planetarium.

CU Boulder helped make me who I am today. Which is apparently someone who is qualified to weigh in on challenging topics in technology and culture.

The conference is called Renegade Futurism: Tech and the New Political Counterculture

Tech” isn’t like other industries. In addition to money and products, it is now a source for politicians, policy, culture, and philosophies with unprecedented influence throughout the globe. Figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel hardly count as mere industrialists; they function as thought-leaders and government operatives.  
 

This two-day conference gathers actors from today’s tech world–entrepreneurs, makers, thinkers, observers, and critics–to discuss the meaning of the tech counterculture, and what it might entail for the future of technology and American democracy.     

Hosted by the Bruce D. Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization on Friday April 25th and Saturday April 26th and it is open to the community so if you are nearby please consider registering and attending.

The speaker line up is very impressive from politicians like our very own governor Jared Polis to journalists like James Pogue and entrepreneurs, operators and industrialists like myself.

My topic is first thing and the panelists are well worth being up early to learn from.

April 25th Atlas Building ATLS 100 – Cofrin Auditorium

9:00AM-10:15AM “How dissident is today’s tech?”

Technology can be a democratizing tool or a weapon of centralized authority. If those are perennial alternatives in technology’s history, which has predominated during recent years?

Panel: Michael Gibson, Jeff Schullenberger, Patrick Deneen, Julie Fredrickson
Moderator: Paul Diduch

Categories
Finance Medical Travel

Day 1562 and Istanbul

In a twist that one of my friends described as “an extremely Julie situation” I’m heading to Istanbul tomorrow. I’m in Europe so I’m actually going to drive. Any recommendations for hotels, great meals and must see sights are most welcome.

How I ended up on this last minute surprise journey is a long involved story that includes spotting a maintenance issue on a hyperbaric chamber, having a friendly mutual who swears by HBOT email the CEO to troubleshoot, and a long Twitter conversation to do said troubleshooting.

This then turned into an offer of a tour of the factory by their team (since we are in the market as we plan out our Montana medical spa) that was topped off by an offer to discuss the experience on my favorite podcast.

Apparently manufacturing complex medical equipment in this new era of tariffs and bilateral trade agreements is a topic of interest to many people as Turkey may end up a better trading partner than China for many categories of sophisticated equipment.

The Trump administration is making attempts to reorient more of the world under our trade & defense umbrella rather than China is obviously on everyone’s mind. Turkey is an advanced manufacturing industry from which I have imported in the distant past for textiles so I’m sure I’ll learn a lot from this trip.

One of the machines I’ll be checking out
Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 1550 and Fools, Drunks & The United States of America

Americans are mere days away from the dreaded April 2nd tariff reveal and the mood could not be more sour.

If only America was a few good zoning reform bills further along. Then we could house 700 million more people and our Abundance bro moderate liberals would be in a better mood. Alas it’s easy dunking for most of us when Matty Yglesias weighs in late to the party

I’ve spent the last half decade preparing for a more chaotic world. How it would play out and what would be the driver was anyone’s guess.

I made plenty of bets that energy, compute, and decentralization would be the way in a multi-polar world, but I don’t want to count America out just yet. That’s why we made our last stand in Montana.

“God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” Otto von Bismarck

The amusing bit of Trump’s mercantilism is literally only he and a small band of trade administration aids actually think this is sensible economic policy. While I know a tariffs bro personally and I appreciate him as a friend they know I think this approach is dubious.

You know it’s bad when even the king of outlier events Nassim Nicholas Taleb is fretting for Treasury Secretary Bessent. Who is at least qualified to manage the a massive currency crisis.

“He probably gets that whether tarifs make or don’t make sense is irrelevant: any ABRUPT introduction of steep tariffs must lead to a CASCADING & GENERALIZED price action.”

We are damned if you do not because tariffs are the wrong tool for this moment (though most of them are) but because markets like predictable things and cascading price action everywhere makes us dizzy.

Rather like the drunks and the fools mentioned by Bismarck, we’d better hope providence provides in this topsy turvy moment.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics

Day 1549 and Productive Primates

We are in a moment of narrative collapse. The elites who we’ve typically take our “consensus reality” cues from don’t know where to land in order to manage the revolt of the public and you can see the recycling of big ideas happening at a rapid pace.

If you’ve been on the internet at all recently, you were probably exposed to both Ezra Klein’s Abundance book tour and the Studio Ghibli mania using AI to turn iconic images into Miyazaki animations.

I think these two events are more related than you might think. Labor is becoming simultaneously more and less productive in the face of artificial intelligence. This naturally has consequences for power.

This progress is either “an insult to life itself” if you are Miyazaki or offers the potential to improve human productivity in ways we’ve not seen since the Industrial Revolution.

Which brings us back to the moderate state capacity liberals and Ezra Klein’s book tour. They are out in the cold politically and yet rather than produce a new narrative they’re re-heating the work of the meme movement effective accelerationism.

I’m pleased to see total narrative victory for e/acc over the effective altruists. Sustainability (or worse degrowth) has simply failed to resonate with our primate hierarchies that demand more. We want more of whatever other monkey’s have be it bananas or status.

Socialist zero sum politics encouraging sharing & collectively managing resources having been roundly beaten in the zeitgeist, the moderate left are insisting that actually public state mechanism are the best means to achieve abundance. Government is good actually.

Making the case for the state’s role in creating abundance is about all they have left while they wait for the pain of Trump’s tariff policies to kick in. The private markets not having the necessary time frames for long term planning is a perennial issue.

Even our most productive technology companies are feeling the pinch to perform immediately in the short term. Alex Danco dropped on essay on where we might be in the S-curve of artificial intelligence.

He argues that perhaps in the scaling of this infrastructure we may change our thinking around code as “the primary asset” of software companies and reorient it back to the shared labor, management and final product of the traditional corporation. Software companies were valued for capital efficiency by the markets but perhaps that constant no longer applies.

All this worry about creating abundance is a battle of who decides how we allocate future resources (which we don’t yet have) and who will receive the biggest share of power and plaudits in the process.

The fact that we can replicate aesthetics in an instant or do the document work of a dozen legal associates with a program isn’t really the issue at hand. We are worried that how we divvy up the sum of all our hierarchies is changing. Of course that worries every primate. It’s bloody stuff.

Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 1546 and Present Ephemera

I am backing off some of my “current thing” hyper vigilance for a moment. I need to shake off the noise and find my signal.

The band of possibilities is simply so wide that it feels pointless to react. Who you are will determine everything from here. You must go into the future based on your values. I must strip back to see myself clearly.

The complaints about our geopolitical moment (true and righteous as they may be) are set against a great power conflict that will play out over multiple decades of technological change.

It’s yet unwritten though I have some ambition that we can all play a part in the restructuring of a knowledge abundant world.

The trouble with accelerating into the turn is the sheer stress. We know we need change but how we achieve it is messy.

It seems in some areas we will take the low road. It is a reasonable worry that we are seeing all of the downsides of American choices while the upsides are harder to see. I feel as I’ve only seen the fears I’d had and the changes are made at great cost.

We fucked around and it is finding out season. The present is all ephemera. I need to hold it lightly. The stress it induces serves no purpose. It will pass. I will adapt.

Categories
Internet Culture Media

Day 1543 and Buffering in the Network

Being that so much of modern work is done online it is a challenge to ever really unplug. I feel as if startups, finance and media have it particularly bad.

I try not to let myself burn out on the dopaminergic waves of the network. But I am a citizens of the internet and just like Molly Millions I’m suffering from the central nervous system stress the Cyperpunk future promised us.

I am however going to attempt a pull back to refocus myself so that I don’t get pulled by the strong currents of the network. A lot of low roads will be traversed between here and wherever we land.

Categories
Finance Media Politics

Day 1539 and Institutional Trust

Continuing their exceptional data visualization work, the Financial Times shows how young Americans are losing trust in our institutions through a series of grim charts powered by Gallop polling. 

Gallop polling in the FT on young American’s trust

What a fun set of polling data on the day we have Tim Walz stomping around saying industry sucks. We have no future and the people who build just absolutely suck isn’t the best vibe from a vice presidential candidate. But it certainly seems to be a mood.

Why would anyone trust a system that proudly rolls out installment loans for food delivery aligned with payday schedules? The internet is making hay with the Klarna DoorDash partnership.

Decent people suggest we must protect the class of people so bad at math they would use this financial product. Well, actually…go a million nuanced credit understanders. Honestly I’ve never carried a credit card balance because I’m too afraid to do so. But some people yolo their consumption.

Abundance means we need to produce things. Which costs money. It’s hard to take say Ezra Klein’s Abundance tour too seriously when we make it impossible to finance housing but we can finance your burrito taxi. That’s not what anyone was hoping for when they gave all this power to our government. No wonder institutional trust is down.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture Politics

Day 1537 and Copy Cats

A friend of mine has managed a career as a tastemaker of the sort that hardly exists any longer. It’s hard to find a term that’s even appropriate without both identifying them and understating the power of their influence.

Influencing the direction of culture isn’t so much a job as a point of view with a paycheck. It used to be a bit simpler. We had a hierarchy of influence caped by physical realities.

Maybe your pastor or your employer influenced your daily culture. Even when I was younger it wasn’t much broader than your local news and what you could get at the library. Now we live in a mass market of influence.

Influencer, creator, journalist, editor, blogger, hell we even have Twitter accounts that move culture now. So it’s not surprising that it can be hard to keep track of who is truly influential and who is just popular.

Being heard out and being really listened to and considered are very different things. It’s a weird moment for taste. Especially culturally. We keep having vibe shifts. The people who are paid to make sense of it all are as clueless as the rest of us.

The only thing anyone can seem to agree on is that it’s all very chaotic. Which is a point of view with which I’m quite familiar. And naturally that unsettles me. Once everyone agrees on a cultural moment is exactly when the tastemakers look for something new and when the masses really come with the big bucks.