Tag: Finance

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Aesthetics Politics Startups Travel

Day 1909 and All The Twinks Standing In The Line For The Bathroom

I am not an early riser, especially not when I’m out late for happy hours and dinners and the like. So I wasn’t planning on being at the 8am opening for the conference I’m attending in D.C amongst all the side programming.

I had a ten thirty talk I was particular excited to listen to as it was most salient to my work in artificial intelligence policy. Well, that was a dumb decision on my part. Not to arrive earlier.

I’ll take full responsibility for being a moron on that front, but I stood amongst a gaggle of gorgeous well dressed, well groomed and bright eyed young men hungry to build the world of the future. What a crowd of young people.

Being a chatty Cathy I asked about vintage Barbour jackets, bulldog ties, pocket squares, the merits of gel versus more advanced soft hold hair products, the declining quality of Moscot eyewear and other important topics to ambitious young men who are looksmaxxing to win the great game.

I didn’t have much else to do as the line was not moving. No one was getting in. Until people left no one was getting off the line. And that included others who had already been in and had their passes. The hottest ticket in town was perhaps a bit over capacity.

Someone rolled out a portable Starlink and we all piled in to tweet, chat, roll calls and (in my case) send tweets, Signal messages, and Slack channel responses. I got told my tweet about the two hour wait wasn’t ideal so I deleted it as I appreciate any attention to me running my mouth as I assume no one ever listens to me. I barely do.

But maybe I’m wrong? Last night checking into Butterworth’s, the woman manning check-in in lit up when I gave my name “I love your Twitter!” So maybe people do notice what I say. I still find that an a funny notion.

That said, it did take the full two hours to get into the giant event hall which made all the rush and planning a laugh. More people left the line and went back to work than stayed at 10am but everyone determined to participate seemed to make the best of it.

I asked if this was normal for a DC event and no one seemed to be from DC. So I didn’t get any good answers. This was an unexpected wrinkle that the venue was full was full up as an enormous crowd circled the block twice.

Since we remainders had decided to make the best of it we got to know each rather. Every man was quite a gentleman as we chatted oblivious to status till we were let in and others let us all know the pecking order. One of the young men I spent my wait, who is I learned later was literally the heir to one of the most important fortunes on the planet. Another was launching containerized autonomous weapons.

But that time of work and waiting was rather like being on an elevator stuck together, we might as well get to know each other. We are all equal before a tough door.

Thankfully we did get into the room before Jamie Dimon spoke. And he was the big boss of the handsome executive crowd.

I titled this “all the twinks standing in line for the bathroom” as yes a lot of handsome queer men were in attendance. But twink is an all purpose gender fluid aesthetic and not reflective of anyone’s sexual preferences.

And the line for the men’s y was a lot longer than the women’s. Ten to one ratios make me think this would be quite the dating scene for the ambitious woman.

But yes there are a lot of very well groomed young men in Washington D.C and everyone wants to build solutions for America. And being beautiful doesn’t hurt. To my single lady have you consider meeting a man in DC? Good odds and I doubt even a fraction of the twinks are gay.

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Aesthetics Politics Travel

Day 1891 and So Much for Santorini or Status Hierarchies for Abundant Ages

If you watch me closely (which would be weird but I make it easy enough) you have surely noticed I spend much of my life traveling.

I’ve got no training in psychology but it sure seems like a certain personality type takes their childhood traumas and does exposure therapy till it becomes enjoyable.

I had intended for another trip to the general Mediterranean area in the spring to see family and work undisturbed by the American media timezone distractions. Now I am unsure if that will be feasible.

I am guessing that the sort of people who go to Sicily, Santorini and Cyprus to soak up the sun may find this Iranian conflict putting a wrench in their island hopping. Where will they go instead? Cartel wars bleed into the Caribbean and Bitcoin zillionaires setting up economic zones might make other things tricky. And oh the fuel costs will be ruinous.

War certainly makes me reconsider standard air bus style flying near any seas that connect to conflict areas but not too long ago I sat in a Turkish airport where “final boarding for Damascus” went over the loud speaker so maybe I’m making too much of it. Though I’m glad I enjoyed Istanbul over the winter as anything bordering Iran is now unnecessary risk.

For a world where speculative fiction bull case for artificial intelligence wiped off billions in market capitalization, we sure aren’t taking very seriously the kinetic effects of extreme uncertainty and change. Well, ironically maybe Pete Hegseth might be.

If we do make it through the Jackpot to the other side of the singularity, or just through this regional war situation, I would bet humans will find ourselves getting back to status hierarchies and power games.

If all our consumption needs are met, there will always be hierarchies. Wait your best friend summers in Block Island too? Or are those the Finnish slides from the Comme des Garçons show? Let me just call up “insert social scene’s patron billionaire” as everyone is headed to Big Sky for fresh powder this weekend.

It’s endlessly that sort of thing if you are inclined towards Bourdieu’s Distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste. If class predicts taste then we mimic the taste we think we ought to have to be a certain kind of person. I came across a sweet hand illustrated essay on the matter recently.

If we can have anything we like, then taste becomes finer and finer grained. The rich know this already and the rest of us just might find out if we survive to an abundance era. And as I’d like to do that maybe I be reconsidering heading out to sea. Caribbean, Ionian, Bosphorus or otherwise.

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Finance Startups

Day 1858 and Parked Outside the Flow

The crazier the informational world gets, the more inclined I am to tune it all out. The flows of information are fun sure but it’s only useful to financiers, degenerates and the global management class. I really only rate into very bottom of one. No, not the degenerate class.

As 2026 has become the year of repositioning for “whatever is coming,” I am unsure of much I wish to return from the hinterlands into the flow. Being inside the flow looks enticing but it’s Thor the only way to do business.

The thing is that I began my own career by participating (in a small way) in what Will Manidis calls The Flow. Being inside has its perks and I saw a lot which enabled me to make some very good investments.

What is the flow? It’s a metaphor for a 24/7 club of information, a formal and informal circuit of social and business obligations, and series of social & professional inputs that sometimes generate spectacular output.

It’s no wonder people think investing looks like gambling when you put it that way. It takes a lot of shrewd social manners and access to resources to be inside the flow and those are distinct barriers for anyone outside the global ten percent.

So where to go if you are an American? Well, stay put somewhere you can be stable and secure. Sure the middle powers will tell you that they can save the liberal order but in reality it’s all state capitalism by strong man and technocrats. And I’m not either and I’d wager most truly new things that will matter won’t be easily secured by old mechanism of power.

What Manidis rightly points out in his Flow essay, is that you can build businesses and make good money for investors and limited partners outside of the flow. You can focus on your unique insights and build something great.

I hope I offer some proof of that myself. I flash the codes for my odd little node and traffic occasionally routes through me. I found crypto winners and the future of atomics outside the flow. And I think I’d rather like to spend my Sundays seeing what’s happening outside the nightclub of financial flows.

If you want to be outside you can be. I just might be already. You can find me in the proverbial parking lot of the Flow (the open internet) yapping, chilling, lighting and fighting with the cool kids. You will always know where to find me. I’ll be one DM away.

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Finance Politics

Day 1857 and We’ve Got to Talk About Kevin

My husband was joking with me that he’d been arguing, in the way that men do, about what the state is or is not obliged (or allowed) to do about the movement of the capital class and where they keep their resources.

Capital flight and asset diversification are not just individual decisions but increasingly society ones as well. And it’s not just the wealthy who are worried.

This discourse emerged in the middle of the intense upswings in gold & silver prices subsequent profit taking and draw downs.

• Gold ran to roughly 5,600 USD/oz before sliding 7–10% in a day, still leaving it massively higher on the month.
• Silver briefly traded above 120 USD/oz, then fell 15–20% and is now back under the 100–110 area, which technically puts it in a short‑term bear move after a parabolic rise

These actions were stirred up by debate on Federal Reserve independence (ameliorated somewhat by the new chair Kevin Warsh over Kevin Hassett), China’s buying patterns (both official & wealthy retail) in precious metals and what these two interconnected news items might mean geopolitically for regular people. See this on buying in Australia and on China’s flows for more context.

From remittances to capital controls, the debate is particularly spicy as the dollar has been made to trade deliberately lower for the export agenda, rising remittance dollars (and debate on what’s missing in tracking them) has upset many Americans, and the money printing of the Biden years has raised awareness of inflation and national debt.

Obviously it has been a combustible mix. And thus we see renewed interest in decentralized assets and hard commodities. And then, of course, there has been the trial balloon floating in California of a wealth tax. What should we do about our most moneyed citizens and what do they owe. We tax income not wealth and that change is likely to have huge repercussions.

It seems perfectly sensible that anyone who has dollar denominated assets might be concerned about where that currency is headed, who is benefiting from the changes, and what on earth the Chinese are up to both as a people but also as a nation with unclear monetary goals and tensions between its leader and its military.

Ultimately though this is an incident about the dollar, its long term value, who will oversee it (and which Kevin was meant to have the gig) and where wealth can and cannot go to deploy itself in an era where the rules based order and Bretton Woods are no longer a given.

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Politics

Day 1828 and Collective Warmth

I feel lucky to have acquired an education that taught enough of totalitarian history that I feel I can paraphrase Walter Benjamin.

I’d used to say well we all know “fascism is the aestheticization of politics” because academics helped me to be skeptical about theory and Marxism.

Benjamin saw the logical result of fascism is to introduce aesthetics into political life. A hundred years later we have cultural war politics to serve as spectacle instead of transforming material conditions.

So I’m exactly the sort of person who came to the end of Gramsci’s Long March and wanted to understand Frankfurt School academics viscerally. I like to be on the ground when I learn.

So I am horrified to have spent my New Year’s in Sarajevo only to see a socialist taking on the mayoralty of America’s most important financial center.

To go from seeing the history of a hundred years of European continental war to watching bratty millennial nepotism play act at collective action is frankly not a positive development.

Millions of Europeans did battle with communism and in America we are so coddled the swearing in ceremony of New York City’s democratic socialist mayor is celebrated.

“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. – Mayor Zohran Mamdani Inaugural Address

If misery loves company then we should all suffer equally is a less aesthetic way of saying we are all in it together. Or as Sebastian Junger said “It was better when it was bad”

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Chronic Disease Chronicle Emotional Work

Day 1825 and Thoughts On Five Years of Writing Every Single Day

Much as it amazes me, I have written a public post every single day without fail for five straight years. I’ve not missed a single day.

I’ve written so many posts and essays, it honestly astonishes me. I didn’t expect to have this kind of longevity when I began but the world changed a lot in this past half decade. I am a woman of habits & routines, this blog helps me manage the chaos and instability that surrounds us. And hopefully I’ve become a better thinker (and writer) for this habit.

If you’d like to look back with me, I have a round up of 2021‘s best posts from fashion theory to the emotions of startup exits. They feel like a lifetime ago.

In my round up of favorites from 2022 aka year 2 of the experiment, we moved to Montana, bought our first house, had silly viral hits, & I became a certified wilderness first responder.

In my third year of posts from 2023, things remained intense. I accelerated into chaotic optimism, helped other millennial women understand fucked up fertility, and experimented with living outside America part time to improve my visibility on global issues.

And in fourth year of writing, my round up of my best posts of 2024 really showed a world sped up even further. My essays ranged widely with emotional work, crab bucket zero sum-ism & young men, Vernor Vinge’s legacy becoming our actual reality and the bizarre experience of digital memetics becoming constant real world issue.

So now it’s time to think about year five of the experiment. 2025 was a hard year for me even as it contained incredible wins. Going into it, I wondered how could year five top the past four years chronicled here? It both does and it doesn’t. Life, and the time we spend living it down, isn’t getting any easier. Life is barely human at all anymore. I feel the struggle in myself as I am still very much human.

It’s easy to feel as if I’ve not accomplished as much as my own written records show I did. If you ever feel like you get less done than you’d like, I encourage you to keep a log or journal as it helps show how much can do and how much does get done. Plus if you publish it online you’ll contribute to a wider humanistic understanding as our digital life becomes more mechanistic.

Another facet of this writing experiment has been fighting a chronic disease in my personal life that has no cure. Managing disabilities during with the pandemic years as it overlaid civilization shaking political and technological changes has been hard. I want to work and live as if I am healthy and it isn’t likely to ever be true. I work smarter because I can’t work harder.

I don’t always write about my investments in these posts, but I see how my thesis of chaos has forced us all into requiring more decentralization, compute and power. My once weird ideas are now common knowledge. Now everyone agrees with me.

The end of the neoliberal consensus and the beginning of the artificial intelligence buildout would have been hard on anyone. I’m proud that I was able to turn this change to my advantage.

I realize I’ve written quite a bit about the experience of these years where I wrote daily without showing off the last year of posts.

Since I’ve got one more day before 2025 officially ends, perhaps I’ll put the round up of posts tomorrow as I’ve given an overview of the experience of half a decade of daily essays today. What’s one more day among thousands right?

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Aesthetics Politics Travel

Day 1808 and The Secret Sauce is Strongmen

Without getting into too much detail about my travel schedule I will say I’ve visited a few places with a lot of construction this year.

I’m talking about cranes on every corner level construction. If I did a full rotation as if I were Michael Bay getting an action shot, I’d see a half dozen cranes putting up major construction projects.

In some European cities (not the western ones) I saw entire neighborhoods being rebuilt from old multi-family buildings to massive mixed used developments. Cute streets and courtyards be damned, the millenial families want Instagram housing from Tallinn to Tirana.

Their elders are confused but new families need new condominiums. Let’s just hope they remembered to plan for water, power, and other infrastructure needs like new roadways. I’ll admit I’m skeptical in many cases. Maybe it’s good that they are just building willy nilly as it’s not like we get infrastructure investment without the pressure of new families demanding it.

Americans don’t see this amount of construction regularly and it is both inspiring and also a mess of pollution from debris to noise. It’s pretty miserable if you happen to enjoy walking. It is also miserable to live with.

It almost makes me sympathetic to the whines of older residents who want their homes to be worth more and use the chaos of new developments as a cudgel to stop new housing from being built.

There was a time in New York City when I first arrived there when it felt like new buildings went up all the time. You’d complain about jackhammers, trucks, and the ugly protective sidewalk sheds that are meant for safety.

I even knew a venture capitalist who left his job to make a classier sidewalk shed as the damn things almost never come down in a city under constant improvement.

I went through ULURP or Uniform Land Use Review Process hundreds of times in just a few years as an appointee in the community board system.

All anyone can do is complain about the lack of new building and construction. And who can manage to overcome the slog to build let alone turn a profit. American processes for building are more “cranky man tells at clouds” local meeting hell than Robert Moses.

Maybe the YIMBYs (I myself am a yes in my backyard sort) are barking up the wrong true with red tape reform efforts. The strongmen cut the Gordian knot of land reform by simply not giving a shit about process.

The Zoomers are ready to rage for radicalism with their reactionary political entertainment industry. It’s unclear to me if those types would remember to incorporate waste water treatment in their plans. It’s not hard to go from bullshitting to being covered in shit. So that’s worth considering too before we get too excited about a new round of futurism.

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Finance Internet Culture Politics

Day 1807 and Set Hyperparameters to Dumb

As much as I’m trying to salvage the end of my year by taking it slow, I’m still keeping myself plugged in. There is no unplugging in our hyperreality.

I’ve accepted this is a part of being human for the time being. I don’t struggle with internet addiction even if understand how it can be for others.

So here I am keeping an eye on various market movers like central bank rate cuts and earnings calls. It’s a shame I didn’t go into banking as it’s a lovely hobby I just happen to enjoy it watching the data go by.

The intake of long insight and slow instincts interplays with short data and animal spirits if you can stomach it. For me at least I don’t make moves based on any given day.

I find impossible to make much sense of the here and now, so the best I we can do (at least those suitably complex situations) is make very long plays or extremely short ones. I wouldn’t want to plan for a middle distance. Pity the politicians operating on two year schedules.

I’m glad I make long plays if it’s a choice between long and short. I wouldn’t want to edge out small gains in the algorithms like my quant friends do. Too much is out of distribution and nothing is ever really priced in. Cliff Asness is right. Markets have become less informationally efficient. Information becoming free made insights almost impossibly expensive.

For me it’s silly to make grand claims of sensemaking as we bumble from “so over” to “so back” by the hour. I’ll never compete with that.

What do we need over the next decade? How about two or three? That’s my plan. Anything else risks tip toeing between hyper tulip mania and the deepest depths of the Great Recession trough. I’m amazed we’ve shaved off volatility as long as we have. Apres Boomers, le deluge? Reality feels like hyperparameters are deliberately set to dumb.

And so Wendell Berry is now percolating up not just through the permaculture hippies, Monsanto fighting eco-terrorists and nouveau TradCaths but in the feeds of my design hipsters too.

Williamsburg taste by way of pastor parents has found its way back to the Kentucky poet. Back to the land didn’t take for the Boomers but maybe this time it’s different. (Only if you are landed gentry).

“The cure proves incurable.”

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Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1803 and Anemoia

You know I am old as I just don’t consume or create short form video content. Every new trend that filters to me on Twitter or on my reader feeds presents as sadness to me. I don’t fully understand them and probably never will.

The newest TikTok trend involves Zoomers pretending to be happy millennials in 2012 Williamsburg Brooklyn. They romanticize millennial optimism as unpolished and carefree for some sort of shared but unreal nostalgia for pre-gentrification Brooklyn.

I left Williamsburg in 2010 for Manhattan’s Chinatown as even the south side past the JMZ had become too expensive. The loft I shared above Future Perfect on North 8th and Berry was getting expensive on just the other side of the Great Recession. It was a loud place to live and a lot of fun but I needed a lease with my name on it and prime Williamsburg wasn’t it in 2012.

I wasn’t in a position by 2012 to buy an apartment but neither did I have any debt. So I’m sure that made me better off than the Zoomers coveting my life just before New York would go ZIRP. Not making a fortune wasn’t too bad when you could still enjoy a lot of hipster consumer choices.

You can’t blame the Zoomers for feeling like today’s economic volatility and social fragmentation makes our “before times” life look relatively utopian.

Michael Milaflora brought to my attention Gen Z’s “anemoia” which is a broader trend. A 2023 study in Emotion journal found 68% of young adults report nostalgia for past decades they didn’t live, linked to rising anxiety levels post-pandemic.

I’ve previously enjoyed when my own past lifestyles are the subject of nostalgia rehashes on social media. Now I think worried as no one should be too obsessed with the past. Especially not the young.

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Culture Politics Startups

Day 1796 and I’ve Got Billions in My Inbox Julie!

I’m not new to the boom and bust cycles that have defined not only technology startups, but American herself. Most millennials have opinions about their malign status in an economy designed to borrow from the future for a dubious present.

Much of the world is in a state of panic over “the churn” of the old rules changing and the new ones not being quite clear. But it’s really not clear what happens next.

I think anything goes as the networks speed up our connections to each other through artificial intelligence. The end of the age of scaling means it’s time for the era of deployment is it not? Or are none of us Carlotta Perez fans.

I enjoy speculating as is the fashion. Do I think corporate debt financing of data centers is some time bomb in private credit? Not really, no. I think it’s way more likely that don’t understand the full demand case for coordination in a mediated world.

I don’t know if we can meet the demand to be perfectly honest. I will say I am way more worried about us not meeting the moment. Changes to our cultural environment are as hard as our material ones.

If I had to read sentiment, I’d say that everyone is absolutely sick of having their attention used like a fiat currency. We cannot inflate our capacity for focus as easily as we can inflate the dollar. And we will demand simplicity by any means necessary just to exist. And artificial intelligence will smooth our world to manage with what we’ve got.

I think running a decentralized world will prove to be far too complex for most humans and it will be mitigated by layers of choices in governance that will probably not always maximize for the freedoms we’v come to expect from the liberal world order.

And yeah I think we will need a lot of data centers for that coordination effort. That the state might be the ones with the most demand seems a little rich though. Every individual on earth will want to be on the right side of the ratings. That’s more network state than state and it will be a longtime horizon.

I know it doesn’t sound great on its face. And yet I think it has had upsides. The demand for real businesses that operate in some world of efficiency has never been higher.

And to some extent, I believe that was always the entire point of computing. Make things so much better and cheaper we move on to bigger projects.

Giving you video games and porn might have been a weird way to get to Mars but medicine is as driven by vanity as much as survival so I don’t judge reality. I just want us to get more nuclear power. I don’t ask for much.

We didn’t want a legion of information processing professionals. We wanted to change the material conditions just as the Industrial Revolution did. The invisible hand is a strange thing.

I expect we will see quite a bit of opposition to the people believe that we need more energy, more industry, and more science. The future and its enemies are legions. I always did find it funny that fashion critics had a better read on the future than anyone else. Virginia Postrel and William Gibson both have good taste.