Tag: Finance

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Chronic Disease Internet Culture Media Politics

Day 803 and Killing Strangers

I’ve been one of those types that absolutely has no problem taking a shot at the Christo-fascists dorks at CPAC mincing words about eradicating trans people from public life. Fuck you, you fucking fucks, you absolutely would be fine if state sanctioned violence eliminated trans people. It’s not you being metaphorical or cute or whatever justification you used. It’s killing strangers.

I wasn’t any more amused when folks decided it was alright to discuss a cost benefit analysis of keeping the disabled alive within the context of state benefits. No thanks I am not interested in a mercy killing because I’m expensive. Oh it’s a mercy killing for children? Yeah no still good thanks. Fuck you Canada. Medicare for all sounds good up until you decide to put me on palliative care via the metaphorical ice flow of opioid addiction.

So you might imagine I am equally sensitive about someone making jokes about euthanizing people who pays their bills by investing in early stage startups. Oh it was just a joke about how Keynes didn’t like the rentier class? Hilarious.

I am just rolling on the ground laughing at your erudition. Yes, benefits of a classical education. Har har. It’s so much smarter than the CPAC guy who wants to kill trans women. Definitely smarter than those segueing to mercy kill sick Canadian children. Oh wait, no it’s fucking not you sick fucks. Stop killing strangers in your rhetoric for shock value and clicks.

Perhaps I could interest the Jacobin audience members in a trip back to the Opium Wars, funded by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s grandfather, just so we understand the gruesome reality that the New Dealers saw first hand in their own family trauma. Or if we are pluming the depths of the historical animosity towards finance and it’s intense hypocrisy, I’ll send you back with a copy of my favorite conspiracy text Creature from Jekyll Island. Then we can have a nice big chuckle about blood libel if you make it back.

I cannot believe that I am writing about any of this social media blood lust but perhaps we could all listen to Marilyn Manson’s Killing Strangers together and decide that there is no clever or enjoyable way to advocate for the killing of strangers. That it’s not cute to joke about killing people you don’t know just to further your political or economic aims. I’ll try to stop joking about how it’s ok to punch Nazis.

I am baffled that I keep ending up in groups that become the target of the genocide curious. I know being a hysterical disabled white bitch is a pretty commonplace “kill them all fetish” and smarter minds than me can untangle how all roads lead to disability. Witches and bitches.

But I’m getting unsettled seeing how it piles up and I keep getting lined up in other people’s sights. I’m married to a Jewish man. I’ve got queer family members. And yes I make a living investing capital (that I raised from weirdos) into other weirdos. Don’t worry my AUM is small enough I can’t live off management fees. Ironically because I’ve got medical bills because I’m disabled.

If you don’t know what that means and you still want to kill m perhaps it’s you that is the psychopath. Just a thought. Not that psychopaths are bad it’s just that I’m worried you will act on it. It’s not always clear if we are the baddies but advocating for blanket euthanasia is probably a helpful marker. Just like as a baseline for civilizational norms.

Either way, I’m not letting any of you kill my queer disabled Jewish rentier bourgeois family members. I don’t care if you a Jacobin or a CPAC member or a pissed off narco-trafficker running Fentyl out of Toronto. If you want to kill me because I’m a stranger and you don’t want to hurt the ones that you love. Ok. But I’ve got no intentions of making it easy for you.

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Politics

Day 801 and Not Today

It’s been a rocky few days watching the crisis unfolding around Silicon Valley Bank and what would happen to its depositors. We’ve received our answer.

After receiving a recommendation from the boards of the FDIC and the Federal Reserve, and consulting with the President, Secretary Yellen approved actions enabling the FDIC to complete its resolution of Silicon Valley Bank, Santa Clara, California, in a manner that fully protects all depositors. Depositors will have access to all of their money starting Monday, March 13. No losses associated with the resolution of Silicon Valley Bank will be borne by the taxpayer.

So that’s been a wild and scary ride and I guess we are kicking the can down the road. But I wasn’t emotionally prepared for a contagion on Monday.

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Finance Politics Preparedness

Day 800 and Small Potatoes

It’s nice when a round number crops up in my daily journey of writing every single day. It’s even better when it’s colliding with the wider narratives of humans. If you aren’t paying attention to the news, Silicon Valley bank had a run on Thursday and was taken over by FDIC on Friday. Now the powers that be decide our fates. On day 800 we wait to see if anything has changed about capitalism.

I’m small potatoes so I’m scrambling for survival as much as anyone. But I’ve got a reasonably good head on me and I’ve seen this movie before. Literally. I watched Margin Call a dozen times this year. My family also went bankrupt in the 2001 crash and I was working in startup land during the 2008 crash. So this isn’t exactly my first ride on the roller coaster. I still get sick to my stomach though.

I think we are all about to have a significant conversation in America about trust and who is looking out for whom. I have my theories on how it plays out and over what time horizon. Very few of those scenarios and involves actually letting the american economy implode. But some heads will need to roll it’s just going to depend on the fates.

I really don’t feel like writing through some of this as it’s both personally traumatic because I’m a human being but also because I don’t know where this lands any more than you do. A lot depends on who blinks and who we want to scapegoat and how much we want to tolerate the unpleasant realities of who matters most. Not to be dramatic but every empire rests on a pile of skulls. It’s the degree to which this is literally true that changes over the years.

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Homesteading Politics

Day 784 and Endocrine

In case you haven’t heard, everyone is bracing for apocalypse. Well, that’s just the headline to get your attention. Everyone is watching the decline in American state capacity as we struggle with distrust across all forms of institutional power.

It’s really challenging to discuss this subject as it is unpleasant to look bad things happening straight in the eye. But if you have read some history, maybe own a copy of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, you’ve probably got theories. But I understand that it’s hard to look at worst case scenarios. Your life may still look normal. But know that for millions of people the consensus is that shit sucks.

I’m not placing any moral or ethical judgements on the wide variety of kooks & characters that have traditionally espoused the various flavors of doom. I don’t particularly care for my compatriots in doom included in the Vanity Fair piece. They don’t like me either. I will self identify as degenerate libertarian who is skeptical of governmental and corporate power.

I’ve been called a Bolshevik by the Christian right and a crypto fascist by the DSA so I’ll assume your average rational mind will recognize that perhaps that the common cause of an America in decline is a bigger fight than tribal affiliations. If you cannot retain a calm mind in your analysis I hope I can convince you that this is a problem.

She thought something had gone wrong with us physically too. “Endocrine systems get fried. There’s too much cortisol, you’ve been running on adrenaline, eventually you tap out. Everyone feels nuts right now,” she said, “because what on earth are we supposed to do with the fact that we’ve had this incredible rate of change for so long. We think we’re keeping up with it, but our bodies are like, ‘Oh, actually no. We have no idea what’s going on.’ ”

Dissident Fringe

We are all overreacting to everything because we’ve come out of the stress of three years of a pandemic that has overlapped with such an incredible array of natural, industrial and political disasters anyone would be edgy. Oh and remember how we had 4 years of Trump? We are acting nuts because stress made us more reactive.

Some argue the great weirding goes back much further but the point is that we are all victims of a long now of persistent anxiety, exhaustion and adrenaline. I don’t know if we can even hear each other trying to grapple with problems in good faith because we are just so tired from being driven nuts by all this.

Imagine a future where this kind of endocrine draining stress simply never relents. And that’s the future I’m earning you about. Everything gets a little harder and less reliable. You trust everyone a little less. It’s harder to eat healthy and maintain healthy habits. It’s harder to trust mainstay civic services like schools, police, and the postal service. The roads are worse and infrastructure is crumbling and do I really need to tell you? Use your imagination

Decline is hard on the body and you need to be planning on how to manage disruptions if only so you can keep at the business of raising your family, going to work and trying to have a life.

If your ambitions outstrips these goals and you’d like to make money on the realignment of the world you will need to do more, build more, investment more. So I’d probably do some basic resilience work so you can maintain focus. If you want to make money trying to solve for the many customers all looking for solutions to all the shit that is going wrong you might want to stabilize your life with basic preparedness.

I don’t know what systems will evolve. But if we don’t start investing in them now we are in serious trouble. I’ve been investing in solutions that are venture scale for sometime. If you want to join me on this journey, DM me on Twitter or join as an LP

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Internet Culture Politics

Day 764 and Natalism

There are a number of cultural streams in American life that have all aligned around being natalist. You want your country to have babies because it’s good for the economy. And presumably also good for national security.

This fairly basic insight means everyone from techno-libertarians to Catholic homesteaders believes that Americans should be having more babies. It is not just the Quiver-full types having six babies anymore, so are our wealthiest aristocratic titans of industry.

But this alliance is missing some crucial basics. Like for instance the fundamental civilization level things we need to do to make it desirable and affordable to have children. It’s expensive to be pregnant, it’s expensive to raise children, it’s expensive all around to be parents. I spent $40,000 on IVF and it ruined my health. If I counted lost wages and being forced to sell my startup I’m the total costs is seven figures.

I don’t know if you’ve looked at just the costs around having a baby but it will shock you every time you turn a new corner in the fertility space. I learned today you will spend between $100,000 to $200,000 to hire a surrogate. It’s a person’s salary and a lot of medical care so sure that seems right but damn.

I guess I am interested in the math of Natalism to see if I could afford it. I am one of those “tech elites” that thinks we have to have children to drive the innovation of tomorrow. Our future is based on an optimistic hope that maybe we can push for a better future. Humanity won’t continue without children.

But I don’t have a body that is all that healthy without medical intervention. I live a normal life now and can work full time again because I take some exceptional medicine.

But it’s not medicinal regime that can be combined with pregnancy. So if I want to carry a child I have to go off what amounts to life saving medicine. Without it I’d be on bed rest. You can imagine the math I’m doing in my head? Do I want to pour another million into having a family?

So what’s a girl like me to do? Surrogacy right? But I’ve got 10 eggs and 2 embryos so assuming a third of them make it, that’s nearly half a million dollars in surrogacy fees. To get three kids. That’s a heavy price tag on the future. If more of them take it gets even wilder.

Now ok sure I’d rather we encourage a world where younger healthy folks do things naturally but don’t we want everyone going at maximum effort for a better tomorrow? Shouldn’t we want technology to solve this? Where are my artificial wombs at?

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 718 and Change

As I supposed is natural towards the end of a calendar year, I am thinking of the ways this year has changed me. I will surely look back on 2022 and think that was a year where a lot happened.

I expect a lot to keep happening in the future. If anything 2022 will feel slow by comparison. You can already feel the present speeding up can’t you? That sense of anxiety you feel all around you is a collective state of future shock. Our endocrine system has been pumping cortisol on overdrive as we desperately try to sensemake the chaos. And it’s only getting worse.

Yes I’ll remember that this is the year I moved to Montana. I’ll remember it as the year I really began to formalize my investing. I’ll remember it as the year I laid the groundwork for huge personal life changes. I’ll remember it as the beginning of a new chapter.

But I’ve really got no idea how fast this thing is going to go. We’ve got a recession and geopolitical power struggles and commodities concerns and climate chaos and who knows what’s next. But I think if you are nimble and can adjust fast you might just surf this wave. I’d be prepared to wipe out. But I think it’s going to be a good ride.

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Aesthetics

Day 694 and Buy Everything Day

When I was a hippie kid growing up in Colorado I was a fervent believer in a “holiday” called Buy Nothing Day. It was a campaign heavily promoted by a magazine called Adbusters which saw itself a culture jamming organization.

It felt cool and hip and maybe even a bit new to protest excess consumption in the era when globalization hadn’t yet experienced the bitch slap that are the last twenty years of history not actually ending. Teenagers are obviously a bit prone to over simplifying the world and I was no exception.

Now as a jaded veteran of the retail and luxury wars, I think it was the height of white girl naïveté that not shopping one day of the year meant shit. Now I pile all of my shopping into Black Friday. Instead of it being “Buy Nothing Day” it has become “Buy Everything Day” for me. I know how much brands are riding on my choosing to spend and I hold out the bulk of my shopping to extract maximum value.

I bought 2 tee shirts, one cardigan, 3 cashmere sweaters, one pair of silk pants, one cotton robe, 2 slips, 2 bras, and 3 pairs of tights. I bought a jumbo size shampoo and conditioner as well as travel sets. I also bought a luxury face cream, highlighter and other sundry cosmetics even though most of the cosmetics I prefer aren’t even on sale today. We also bought 4 scented candles for the house. Alex bought a pair of Chelsea boots, a new gun safe and a hunting jacket. In other words, we shopped till we dropped. We went full American on the day.

We’d hoped to buy new dishes and a few pieces of furniture as this has also been the year of outfitting the house but alas we just couldn’t figure out enough deals ahead of time. Black Friday is often a mess of confusing offers and marketing bullshit. It’s been made dramatically worse by the wave of direct to consumer brands who claim to give you better deals but often do little more than obfuscate where you are getting ripped off. It’s lowering trust by insisting that you are getting something better when you know you are not.

It’s with that knowledge in mind that I’ve come to terms with the reality of American consumption. I’ve come full circle on Buy Nothing Day. I recognize that shopping is the full contact sport that drives everything else around us. And so long as I’m embedded in that system it serves little purpose to be obstinate or contrary. But equally it serves no purpose to be taken advantage of by these brands either. Getting a deal is a very American kind of battle I’d rather win. As of yet there is no option to remain off the battlefield. But one day it may be gone for good. Until then I’ll buy my cashmere in discount.

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Culture

Day 690 and Status Games

Noblesse oblige. Literally translated from the French as nobility obligates. It’s commonly understood to mean that aristocracy has a responsibility to act graciously towards the civilization which has granted them status.

It’s a turn of phrase I’ve written about before, specifically how in our post modern times, we are challenged to understand who is pursuing a life of virtue and what their obligations may be to the rest of us.

No one is sure if they are nobility or peasantry. No one is noble or good. Which means nobody deserves anything they get. Which is about as close to the war of all against all as I can imagine. Hobbes would be pleased.

JFredrickson.com Day 45

Humanity has always been rather clever at inventing new classes. We need fresh blood from the bottom to keep revolutionary sentiment in church. Every century we are finding new ways to fight it out for new types of status and virtue.

Business values money. Old money values class. The intelligentsia values intellect. Hipsters value taste. The religious value faith. And around we go with status games as we trade social capital for actual capital just so we can get something to eat.

There is always an emerging new game that upsets the underlying order. The printing press destabilized the church and its priestly cast. The internet destabilized the media and it’s editor cast. You know the drill.

Right now there is a massive internecine fight over which order rules over Twitter. And depending on whose camp you fall into you are probably signaling different things. And that lack of shared cultural values is leading to some pretty silly reactions. A lot of dickriding is happening across every major faction.

Which if you take away the reactionary specifics, is totally understandable. If one class of person values money but the competing group values taste than you aren’t really fighting for the same things. Different values are different.

But you’ve got to be careful with your own reactions. Ask yourself if you are responding out of some shared cultural loyalty that is overshadowing your own common sense. Your attention is valuable and powerful people recognize your attention for the commodity that it has become.

Don’t buy into bullshit just because it’s your team. The chance that someone is making a buck off of your attention sure ain’t zero. And America being a free country and all means you shouldn’t be living enthralled to someone else’s priorities.

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Finance Startups

Day 687 and Winter

It’s cold out there. And I don’t just mean metaphorically. Winter came early and hard to Montana just as the Farmer’s Almanac predicted it would. Driving back in from town last night after grocery shopping it was -3 degrees on the car’s temperature gauge just after sunset at 6pm.

It’s cold out there in the capital markets too. The federal reserve is raising rates to tamp down on inflation and the cost of capital is hitting the technology industry. Frankly I think we’ve all been waiting for an excuse to cut the fat and now we’ve got it.

But it’s going to have consequences for startups. Founders who have never had to live with the harsh realities of a down market are in for a surprise. Those juicy valuations in the private markets don’t work so well when the public markets can find safer returns in a Treasury finally paying out on a t-bill.

Let me play with a tortured metaphor to help you understand the situation. You think you understand how cold winter will be until you realize you haven’t had to work through a chill for over a decade. Sure maybe in your closet you’ve got a nice coat but when was the last time you wore it? If it was for a ski retreat with one of your venture partners then this metaphor is absolutely about to do double duty.

Surviving a bitter cold isn’t just about having a bulky down coat. Think of that as your cash runway. Without adequately rated cold weather gear to keep you alive you may find yourself tapping out. But it’s not just about the coat.

Keeping warm and staying productive requires some technique. Do you understand how to layer correctly? Do you have hats, gloves and scarves? I bet you walk around with ankle socks and Allbirds. That’s not going to go well in a foot of snow. Do you know how to eat for the cold? How about hydration?

Your team will need more than runway. They are going to need motivation to work with less fuel. You have to show them that the climb up the snowy mountain is worth it.

A winter startup team will need the skills and flexibility to work around problems that can’t be solved with money. Shit can and will go wrong on a long cold climb out of an economic winter. Creativity and belief must overlap with intuition if you want to make it.

And it’s important to remember lot of your team won’t have those intuitions. We’ve all been living in Miami and suddenly it’s -3 in Montana. And guess who gets to teach them how to adapt? You. You need to teach your team gently and with empathy what it will take. And they will makeup mistakes. Have you ever watched someone try to lace up boots for the first time? You might need to help them cinch.

I promise it is worth it though. If you are climbing the right mountain, and prepare adequately for your journey, the rarified air of a successful startup is invigorating. And the view from the top isn’t bad. If you need some help thinking all this through as a founder drop me a line Julie (at) chaotic dot capital and I’m happy offer some Sherpa advice. I lived though 2001 and 2007 (I even got laid off during RIP Good Times) so you can rely on me for some elder millennial wisdom. Stay warm!

Categories
Finance

Day 684 and Newcomb’s Paradox

I like mathematics. I’ve got very little talent for arithmetic but formal proofs were something I could feel my way through. I only learned this by failing regular calculus so badly and getting rescued by my roommate who is the scion of a very important family in algebraic topology. Bet you didn’t know that was a thing did you? He showed me that mathematics isn’t about numbers at all but about the logic of the universe. Also he kept me from flunking out. Thanks Tom!

I know the above sounds silly, but in academic circles math is one of those “purest” of institutions where cognitive processing power matters a lot and absolutely nothing else. They are some of the most deeply impractical and removed from reality types of humans you will ever meet.

I’m autistic enough that I found the company of this type of human deeply comforting as they comforted me though my shame based need desire to be normal. Literally no one will make you feel more normal than someone that works in formal logic and it’s adjacent philosophy of decision theory. I bet a lot lot of pretty girls with daddy issues have found this to be true if the LessWrong community is to be believed.

Because of how close I was to my roommate (and still an even though we don’t see each other enough) I got to spend time with a lot of utterly bizarre math people. And it really runs the gamut from those who are functionally pirates who can barely feed themselves to the founders of Renaissance Capital. They are a good time generally speaking. Extremely chaotic people who drink thousand dollar bottles of champagne from solo cups while discussing science fiction are my definition of a good hang.

But they are not what you’d call standard issue humans. If you’d like to know exactly how, ask them to explain how being three standard deviations from the mean has affected them and don’t interrupt them for thirty minutes. I am an outlier in many ways. But I don’t hold a candle to some of the folks I got to meet.

The reason I titled this post Newcomb’s Paradox is because it is thanks to early exposure to mathematics that I got to explore the complete irrationality of rationalism. Newcomb’s Paradox in its simplest format tells us that in an irrational system it is not rational to behave rationally. It is a paradox because this is both true and not true.

If you have some common sense you are not immediately knocked on your ass by this revelation but it turns out to be so unnerving. Unfortunately for some folks at the edge, which is most folks who are mathematicians, it might also break their brain. Effective altruism is now being blamed for its adjacency to the entire Sam Bankman Fried committed fraud at FTX scandal because they took the paradox entirely too literally and not at all seriously.

And given the dangers that can come from extremes perhaps more of us should be spending time with mathematicians. Math pirates when combined with high finance and potent philosophies might need tempering by those of us only two standard deviations out.