Tag: Finance

Day 1244 and Twenty Four Hours To Go

Post author By Julie
Post date May 28, 2024

Discussing travel mishaps has become something of a national pastime for Americans.

Memorial Day Weekend is the official kick off to summer and I had the good fortune of doing a transcontinental flight. And by and large it went smoothly and enjoyably. It was a record breaking day for travel.

I was on a route I’d never done before flying Munich to Houston. I was on my way to my favorite crypto convention Consensus.

Despite the record breaking number of travelers, I had a pleasant United flight. The westward flights can be tricky for sleep as it’s not an overnight.

The logistics of this worked out as I slept 6 hours before a 4am wake up for the positioning flight and then on my flat lay got nearly a very decent four plus hours.

Munich to Houston is 10 hours & I slept well

My RHR was pretty high from the stress of flying but I was quite impressed that I got restorative sleep and REM. Those flat lays on Polaris really are worth it.

Once I landed in Houston I had a short layover where I was lucky enough to enjoy a sit down meal in the Polaris Lounge. I only wish I’d had more time to enjoy it but clearing customs, going back through security and rechecking luggage takes time.

After all this incredibly pleasant travel there has to be something right? I had a half mile walk to the E gates for my Austin flight. Americans don’t queue well so I arrived at the beginning of boarding. The entire plane boarded only for us to realize we had a serious mechanical issue.

We then deplaned and walked from the end of E gates to the very end of the C gates (about 22 minutes as the New Yorker walks and a mile and a half) to get to the new plane.

The crew was in danger of timing out while catering needed to do a supply for a down line flight. Someone’s executive decision worked in our favor as we got into the air without getting ice for whoever had the airplane next.

What is a two hour drive turned into a five hour ordeal but I made it in one piece and passed out much later than I intended after a full twenty four hours in transit.

Finally asleep at my hotel in Austin after a 4 hour mechanical failure & airplane change for a 30 minute fly time

If you are in Austin and interested in discussing the intersection of crypto and artificial intelligence I’d love to hear from you. I might need a bit more sleep first though.

A 10,000 step day is pretty good when most of it is sitting on airplanes.

Tags AI, Bitcoin, Chaotic, Competence, Crypto, Finance, Investing, Life, Prepared, Prepper, Startups, Stress, Systems Thinking, Time, Travel, Work

Culture

Day 1228 and Fabric of Our Lives

Post author By Julie
Post date May 12, 2024

I love cotton. In my Waldorf third grade, our year long class project was to plant, grow, harvest, gin, card, spin & dye cotton. Along with a similar wool project, this childhood experience instilled a love of fibers, fabrics & textiles in me.

Early in my career I crashed textile trade shows like Premiere Vision which is where I fell for the extra long stable fibers of American grown Pima cotton. Cotton remains a big business in America. We’ve got trademarked cotton like Supima is sold as a luxury fabric.

You’ve probably seen the work of organizations like Cotton Incorporated. Catchy campaigns like “the fabric of our lives” market cotton with the United States Department of Agriculture’s commodity check off program.

The Agriculture Marketing Service of the USDA oversees efforts to improve the position of various commodities produced in America. Other campaigns include Got Milk, Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner, and Pork: The Other White Meat

All commodity producers & farmers must pay into the check off program and it amounts to almost a billion dollars of mandatory spending. As you might imagine this system has had its share of controversy and corruption.

It’s not all sloganeering according to Cotton Incorporated.

We work to make cotton the best it can be through research, textile innovations (like water- and wind-resistant cotton apparel and moisture-wicking, wrinkle- and stain-resistant cotton), and sustainable advancements like finding new uses for cotton and cotton byproducts, reducing land and water usage, and modernizing agricultural processes.

We make sure you know about all of cotton’s amazing benefits through advertising, retail and influencer collaborations.

You might be annoyed to find that American cotton growers are obligated to pay into a government marketing program which underwrites social media influencers.

Cotton is the most popular natural fiber in the world with 25 million tons a year produced so it’s perhaps not unexpected American has an incentive to promote it as one of our commodities.

Cotton is crucial natural fiber which means it has its share of a controversies as commodity for things like its water & pesticide use and genetic engineering to withstand the herbicide glyphosate.

If you’d like to learn more about cotton and its history Empire of Cotton and Cotton: The Fabrice That Made the Modern World are both comprehensive. I personally recommend Virginia Postrel’s The Fabric of Civilization for a broader appreciation on how textiles drove crucial technological innovation of our species.

In The Fabric of Civilization, Virginia Postrel synthesizes groundbreaking research from archaeology, economics, and science to reveal a surprising history. The cloth business spread the alphabet and arithmetic, propelled chemical research, and taught people to think in binary code.

This thesis suggests to me that fashion bitches are one of the original tribes of technology brothers. To care this much about the feature sets of a base layer clearly marks us as nerds. So I’ll finish this up with a personal anecdote.

I am furious at a brand of upper market cotton basics called Splendid. I’ve been buying the same long sleeve classic tee-shirt from them for at least a decade. It claims to be a 50% blend of Pima cotton and Modal. Both are considered premium fabrics with long fibers. Modal is a semi-synthetic developed in Japan made from beech trees. There are many grades of both fibers Splendid could source and in the past I’ve found the tee to wear extremely well. I’ve got a half dozen that never pilled, held its color & shape, and gave me years of wear.

Last month I bought three new Splendid tees as I becoming fearful of the downward trend in quality of manufactured goods. I’ve been trying to stock up on basics I’ve relied on in the past. Alas it would seem my most reliable shirt in my favorite fabrics has come to an ignoble end.

Splendid no longer manufactures with premium extra long cotton fibers as a new shirt pilled & caught onto other fibers in my tee shirt drawer.

Tags Aesthetics, Books, Capitalism, Commodity, Cotton, Culture, Farming, Fashion, Finance, Geopolitics, Libertarian, Systems Thinking, Textiles

Finance Politics

Day 1223 and Human Wants Are Endless

Post author By Julie
Post date May 7, 2024

The curriculum of classical economics can be a bit of a blackpill if you are an optimist about the good in humanity.

Economists operate from a model that presumes human wants are infinite but our resources are not. Yes it is reductive, but if your goal is to model something on spreadsheet give got to start from where and somehow the economists picked non-satiation.

I’m using Perplexity more than Google Search these days so I’m delving (apologies to Paul Graham) into deep Reddit territory anytime I’ve got a random query.

Which incidentally is not paying off for Reddit just yet.

Reddit, which is trading about 40 per cent above its opening initial public offering price, is expected to report a net loss of about $610mn on $213mn in revenue.

Via Financial Times (which oddly I can’t share a link to for unclear reasons but here is a link to old reporting in Reuters and I’m writing this before earnings are released today.

Reddit’s artificial intelligence licensing deals have made them more useful to me than ever but it’s unclear how anyone gets paid for the mountain of work required to make it remain useful. Such is the tragedy of the internet commons. Anyways.

I’m feeling particularly sad about infinite wants as a framework for anything today. Ive been disappointed by just how much others view me as a source of want gratification even when I explicitly ask them to clarify their needs.

Much of the language of human wands must be couched in the language of need. Asking someone to be obligated to another person spirals quickly into a sticky web of moralists insisting on the value of their chosen wants. Id be more inclined to say yes to an ask if someone was clear about their needs upfront. Just in case you find yourself asking me for something.

Tags AI, Capitalism, Commitment, Culture, Culture Wars, Economics, Emotions, Finance, Need, Pain, Reddit, Religion, Startups, Want, Work

Culture

Day 1212 and Being One of Many

Post author By Julie
Post date April 26, 2024
1 Comment on Day 1212 and Being One of Many

Quick. Without overthinking it, pick one.

Words or Numbers.

I can’t predict your choice, but I’ll admit my “rational” conscience mind desperately wants me to pick numbers.

Alas my emotional subconscious intelligence quickly goes intuitive, lurching my feelings to a grabby place with “words.” That the right answer. I’d be hard pressed to correct my gut.

Humans love a good story. Even a single word can contain centuries of meaning. Just ask someone to define “woman” if you don’t believe me.

In the battle between numeracy and literacy, the bell has long ago been rung on the fight. Cave paintings transitioned to runes. Runes became alphabets. Literacy won before numbers got beyond accounting for the treasures of a king.

Priesthoods may have hated man understanding “the Word” but human minds were already on board with incantations of auspicious words before we got formal symbolic systems.

Probably understandably attempts to introduce topics like algebra were was a bit of stretch. Even simple arithmetic proved to be a contentious abstraction for many humans.

Ideas like property are a not a long haul from understanding “mine” and “yours” but it’s quite a leap to understand “how much” and “in what ways across different time and organizational schemas” which gets humans upset over specific collection of things.

Look at your hands and you understand that base ten allows you to calculate simple transactions for resources within your life.

Beyond that good luck. Got an abacus? Understanding that zero and one can communicate a universe’s worth of information is an even further leap. Attention wanders quickly without a computer.

And yet, as I enjoy the aesthetics of my own numeric symmetry in my 1212 days of consecutive writing, I know it’s my private counting mechanism.

“The need for numeracy today is enormous. Business requires people who have grasped the principles of reducing chaos of information to some kind of order.”
The Economist 1966

The narrative overlay of what numbers mean matters more than the numbers. So I’ll ask again. Which would you pick? Words or numbers?

Tags Aesthetics, AI, Capitalism, Confidence, Culture, Culture Wars, Elite, Fear, Finance, Forced Metaphor, Geopolitics, Investing, Religion, Semiotics, Status, Systems Thinking, Trust, Work, Writing

Culture

Day 1195 and Responsibility

Post author By Julie
Post date April 9, 2024

No one seems to be responsible for anything anymore. To take on a duty seems almost quaint in a world where honor has become a historical oddity. To have responsibility means you have an obligation to do something. And sadly many seem to be saying who wants that?

And yet we can’t substitute liability for responsibility. At best a liability has a specific meaning in financial and legal realms.

To be liable for something means there are repercussions if something bad happens. We’ve got whole professions dedicated to avoiding liability.

Browsing for insight on the difference yields interesting Reddit threads. If you want to get into international law you can really get tied into intellectual and moral knots.

The interplay between the obligation to prevent harm and the prohibition to cause harm, the question of cessation and the procedural treatment at the International Court of Justice of the issues of injury, causality and reparation owed
International Responsibility of Public Institutions

This is on my mind because Norfolk Southern reached a 600 million dollar settlement for the train derailment in East Palestine Ohio.

What we owe each other seems to only ever resolve itself when money changes hands. And perhaps that’s simply not good enough. If we only look to reduce liabilities because duty is simply too much to ask (or too dangerous a commitment) then is it any wonder no one wants to be bond to one another?

Tags Commitment, Culture, Disaster, Fear, Finance, Stream of Consciousnesses, Trust

Finance

Day 1180 and Renting Picks and Shovels by The Hour

Post author By Julie
Post date March 25, 2024
1 Comment on Day 1180 and Renting Picks and Shovels by The Hour

The board needs to see that we are doing “something” and so management consultants have done a lot of paddling aggressively. Everyone is making money of artificial intelligence right? Well, wrong.

My belief is that this is a result of not having adequate developer tools at the enterprise level so no processes are repeatable or simple yet. Not for lack of trying in a frenzy of weird media panics around whether chat bots are gods or just malign spirits. Which like lol.

This isn’t something that gets solved overnight. Value accrues in strange ways to very particular forms of automation. Whether that gets bought up in bidding wars over core technologies over time or in simple breakout solutions isn’t actually as predictable as you’d imagine it. It’s very much about people who build things that other people want in reasonably reliable ways.

But right now a lot of software is being built in silly and not terribly repeatable ways. It reminds me a little bit of having been at a specialty retailer trying to figure out ecommerce and making a bunch of mistakes. Eventually the market solves it and then it demands a return on investment.

Tags AI, Capitalism, Community, Confidence, Energy, Entrepreneur, Fear, Finance, Silicon Valley, Social Capital, Trust, Venture Capital, Work

Finance Media

Day 1157 and Maybe Things Are Good

Post author By Julie
Post date March 2, 2024

I remember learning about economic malaise, inflation and oil wars in the seventies at school.

The grand narrative I was raised on was that deregulation led to the go-go eighties as Reagan leaned into free markets as the mood of America changed.

I’ve read a lot of takes in the financial news and on Twitter that suggest we are in a similar period. I tend to land more towards Kyla Scanlan’s position that the Vibecession may be over. And yet we cannot agree on if things are getting any better. We are confused.

So we have this number that no one knows where it’s coming from, yet we are using it to make informed decisions on headline text which informs what is happening in the economy – but also informs how people should feel about what is happening in the economy. No wonder the sentiment is off! No wonder people are confused! It’s hard to understand what’s happening, and that makes all of this so much harder
Kyla Scanlon “Why We Don’t Trust Each Other Anymore” on Epsilon Theory.

I’ve got lots of reason to be optimistic. I see the shock and confusion and culture wars and I still see people who are optimistic.

I’ve taken to joking around about decisions by saying “fuck it, e/acc!” I am extremely online and it’s a contagious cultural meme to root for the future. And so maybe things are getting better.

There is a same shit different day quality to the long now. But I see more and more people committing to build things. Gold rushes are a patten humanity seems to follow at every changing of the generations. Maybe we’ve got reason to think we can come out of this moment better. Or at least work to make it so.

Tags Capitalism, Chaotic, Confidence, Culture, Culture Wars, Emotions, Entrepreneur, Fear, Finance, Forced Metaphor, Media, Press, Social Media, Stream of Consciousnesses, Stress

Finance Startups

Day 1147 and Balkan Crypto

Post author By Julie
Post date February 21, 2024

I’m in the Balkans for a few weeks doing some scouting and visiting with friends and colleagues. The western Balkans including Albania, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro are known for their occasionally colorful participation in cryptocurrencies.

The region has experienced currency volatility, struggles with central banking and even in Albania a civil war stemming from a financial crisis over government Ponzi schemes.

These negative experience with currency instability, government corruption and sociopolitical unrest has led to a desire to experiment with transparency and decentralization amongst the region’s youth.

The ecosystem is host to serious projects has a talented base of engineers. Ripple is experimenting with a national stable coin in Montenegro. Zuzalu, the two-month invite-only gathering that Ethereum blockchain co-founder Vitalik Buterin led in Montenegro has been a regional hub. And it has inspired a new grants program Zu- villages that strikes me as a cross between network state and a DAO with Gitcoin.

In an editorial in Bitcoin Magazine the founder of the Belgrade Bitcoin Hub summed up the “why”

As a result of years of unfulfilled promises from regional politicians, people of the Balkans are hard to convince about the long-term benefits that can be realized by adopting Bitcoin in one’s life. A low time preference way of life to most people in this region is associated with disappointment and the lowered standards of living that have happened many times before.
Plumski founder of the Belgrade Bitcoin Hub.

Tags Anger, Bitcoin, Capitalism, Crypto, DAO, Decentralized Finance, Entrepreneur, Finance, Geopolitics, Investing, Startups, Travel, Work

Aesthetics Internet Culture Politics

Day 1142 and Come See The Violence Inherent in the System

Post author By Julie
Post date February 16, 2024

While parked in gridlock caused by the American state department delegation snarling traffic in Tirana, I shared a classic British comedic sketch from Monty Python’s The Holy Grail with a friend who resides part time in the Balkans.

King Arthur is riding through his lands and is asked to contemplate anarcho-syndicalism and the constitutional arrangement most equitable to an offended peasant named Dennis.

Help! Help! I’m being repressed
Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Feeling moderately repressed ourselves by the various bureaucrats, politicians, and general institutional disarrays that was in our way, the joke hit home. No matter your station in life, we are all a repressed in someone else’s system.

We can make jokes about staying above the API layer all we like, but the nudging organizational state is finding ways to reduce us to variables. Many of us have become spreadsheet brained. Will it be a gradient descent into the madness of a jackbooted local minima?

Perhaps it better to become the disassociating trader acted by Paul Bettany in Margin Call who simply can’t stomach that level of hypocrisy. He knows we want to play innocent about the violence hidden underneath the abstractions.

“Listen, if you really wanna do this with your life you have to believe you’re necessary and you are. People wanna live like this in their cars and big fuckin’ houses they can’t even pay for, then you’re necessary. The only reason that they all get to continue living like kings is cause we got our fingers on the scales in their favor. I take my hand off and then the whole world gets really fuckin’ fair really fuckin’ quickly and nobody actually wants that. They say they do but they don’t. They want what we have to give them but they also wanna, you know, play innocent and pretend they have no idea where it came from. Well, thats more hypocrisy than I’m willing to swallow, so fuck em. Fuck normal peopl
Will Emerson (Paul Bettany) Margin Call

We are all experiencing some level of abstraction from the base layers of reality. Some of us are more academic about it. Some of us are simply more or less unwilling to accept the hypocrisy of it. None of us can opt out completely. Plenty of professions let you get closer to the visceral base reality and then you too can see the violent inherent in the system.

And so we argued over resources and raw power. How abstract can we get? The paleoconomists say “go back to the gold standard” but we can’t. Can we go forward though?

Most of us see that entirely detaching the exchange value of goods from material items and their underlying value is a huge struggle for most people. We wouldn’t have endless discussions about the cost of groceries if it was clear to folks how the market priced physical goods.

Financial markets are fictions where we negotiate material needs like food, shelter, clean water, bodily integrity, and property ownership claims. All need to be priced in. It isn’t fun when the exchange value mechanism completely detaches from that reality. It makes us uneasy. Shrinkflation makes humans feel gaslit.

Humans are physical beings who abstracted our physical needs into an elaborate market system of exchange values. And like that Monty Python sketch, sure it’s a fun joke, a meme if you prefer, but that meme is a reminder to see the violence inherent in the system.

Anyways, I hope Antony Blinken enjoyed his time in Albania and that everyone has a productive weekend in Munich for the neutral ground security conference. Our diplomats have never needed a neutral ground weekend more amirite? The financial engineers will concede that reality. Maybe.

Tags Aesthetics, Art, Capitalism, Class, Control, Culture, Democracy, Elite, Extremely Online, Fear, Finance, Geopolitics, Lies, Memes, Shit Posting, Stream of Consciousnesses, Stress, Systems Thinking, Trauma

Chronicle

Day 1095 and 2023 Round Up

I’ve been sick for the last week and a half or so, so this round-up is coming on the last day of 2023.

As you may have gathered from my title schema, I have been writing every single day for 1095 straight days.

That means I’ve been doing this for three years which is a satisfying achievement. If you’d like see my favorite posts of 2021 here is a link to my first year round up. My round up for the second year of writing in 2022 was quite comprehensive as well.

Below is a list of categories that held my attention in 2023 and the posts I wrote as I tried to make sense of my rapidly changing world.

It probably tells you a lot that the largest sections are artificial intelligence, startups and community. I think this includes almost 50 posts so it’s a testament to how busy the year was that I couldn’t narrow it further. I spent time in Prague, Puerto Vallarta, New York City, Austin, Seattle, Frankfurt, Tallinn, Helsinki, and Amsterdam which is way more travel than I expected. Much of my focus was on investing work for chaotic.capital and is reflected across almost all categories.

Artificial Intelligence

Day 1078 Why We Keep Centering Ourselves

Day 1072 and Math is Leverage.

1055 and Freedom to Compute

Day 989 and Autopoeitic Ergodicity

Day 980 and Beff Jezos

Day 897 and Cruft and Email Bankruptcy

Day 826 and Alignment

Day 780 and Copernican Crisis of Meaning

Community

Day 1070 and Allocating Social Capital

Day 1055 and Shipping, Smoothing Narratives and Making Reality or Effective Acceleration Is About Choice