I missed spring cleaning due to some unexpected travels. Part of that was by design, as a gnarly mold issue required mediation that we decided was best missed by my annoyingly fragile immune system.
You wouldn’t think galavanting across Alexander’s Empire by car would be a reasonable way to avoid mycotoxins and you’d be right but I also like to learn what’s happening in the markets in a visceral manner.
No finer way to come to grips with the breakdown of trade and empire than racing across a continent to understand a supply chain amirite?
In January we began the process of acquiring a hyperbaric chamber for personal use and a medical spa. We figured we were well ahead of the process and like many folks who buy products made in other countries we figured better to get it done before another trade was kicks off.
And then the tariffs came. Whenever you were ordering or transiting goods you were scrambling. I’m scrambling now at home to make sure the household is set up for whatever empty shelves and shortages are ahead but it’s hard to predict.
And so I spend my day planning and cleaning and running errands and generally cleaning up. I hope the mold issue managed as I’m certainly being exposed now. As you might imagine I’m trying to keep windows open and as dry as possible.
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 loadsof 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
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.
“We have never had a complete collapse of the system,” Sánchez said, before detailing that at 12:33 p.m. on Monday Spain’s power grid lost 15 gigawatts, the equivalent of 60% of its national demand, in a matter of five seconds. Via AP Newswire
As was lucky enough to finally meet Lynne Kiesling in person at Renegade Futurisms last week energy grid security and market coordination was top of my mind as I learned of the disaster in Spain
She points out that oscillations are an issue in all power systems which means it will take some analysis to tease apart the combination of atmospheric conditions, system inertia and other factors which caused so much demand to drop off at such speed.
If you are interested in a perspective of a white hat hacker of power grids on the problem of synchronization this thread is worth a read.
A drop caused automatic failsafes to kick in and disconnect things. It takes so long to restart after these failsafe crashes because we haven’t engineered it to be easy to restart the grid aka a “black start” as power plants require power from the grid to operate themselves.
But it’s alas not really much of a question that grids need reworking for managing our energy mix. I found this tweet to be both humorous and helpful in understanding why.
Me: What if the renewables underperform more than modeled, and spare capacity can’t keep up?
Cascading blackouts may be the better outcome. What Spain experienced today was what happens after the fail safe of cascading blackouts occur.
Javier Blas has an excellent opinion piece in Bloomberg about the need for electricity realism as our future demands we overcome the culture wars of the last decades of energy transition.
It’s clear electricity security issues are on the rise. On March 20th Heathrow Airport was shutdown after a single transformer at an old substation caught fire. That looks minor in comparison to an entire country going dark. Imagine what could happen as we head into summer and experience the grid pressure of a hot summer day.
I suppose this is silly of me but I didn’t think an academic conference would actually be all that academic. I am used to financial forums and media shined up environments where doing the reading is sadly not a prerequisite. Academics very much do the reading. Or we said at my alma mater “that’s all very well in practice but how about in theory?”
I felt a little silly as the lone person on my panel who actually worked in industry and felt a little more acutely how absolutely unprepared our technical industry is for the task of running our elite institutions. We have on the ground knowledge and they have a very firm grasp of Hegel and Gransci. It’s a tension that has come to a head before.
And yet here our technical elite are gaining power and and a seat at the table and congratulations we’ve finished the long march through the institution. And somehow you still lost. We aren’t any closer to socialism or social justice. You know what happens in the dialect resolution next? Fascism. It’s like why pay the six figures for the degree if you don’t even read. Champagne socialists the lot of them.
But I’m also struck at just how divorced our academics are from the reality on the ground. We had an industrial class that founded private institutions that clashed with our empire elites before. How do you think we ended up with Stanford and the University of Chicago? Why do we continue this dance of institutional ownership?
And yet the cycle continues and we come up with new readings and new interpretations of how things should be optimally done. We have moral traditions and religious traditions and I’m sure this is an exhausting time to consider a new Pope so I’ll go light on my Catholic friends. Protestants just don’t understand. The future has arrived. You just didn’t notice it.
Being back in America after any amount of time in Europe is always a weird transition for me. I am in Colorado for an academic conference so I’m staying in a chain hotel.
Being accustomed to European systems that simply don’t work beyond a set range I turn the air conditioning on maximum before bed assuming at best I’ll achieve 22C (71.5 degrees in freedom units) as I like to sleep in a cool room.
I wake up with my Whoop warning me I have an “elevated body temp” and I think huh that’s weird it’s freezing in here. The room is 15C. That’s 59 degrees Fahrenheit for Americans.
Social media loves joking about PE HVAC takeover bros but a random conference hotel in Colorado has better air conditioning than the entirety of Western Europe.
You can stay in the best hotel in Frankfurt and it won’t get to a decent temperature. If you stay in an Airbnb and run an air conditioner you may even have troubles with the neighbors.
Isn’t it a bit odd you can be comfortable in a renovated 400 year old bank vault in Istanbul or a corporate chain hotel in American flyover states but Europe simply can’t manage climate control? Don’t worry though I’m sure NATO can re-industrialize no problem. Wink wink.
The way we virtue signal is so bizarre. Like let’s consider the 29 cent Dole branded banana I got at Trade Joe’s. It’s certified organic. The barcode tells me to look. Trader Joe’s is owned by a German conglomerate Aldi.
I’m Bob Dole.
The organic movement may be the original blueprint for ESG and DEI but it’s now so well accepted that hallelujah the mercenaries that guard the banana republic of Dole are verified socially responsible. It was only capitalism that ever forced their hands. Riddle me that my socialist friends.
And this brings me to my panel on Friday on whether technology can be a force used to counter culture. To which I respond with which culture are we countering and why?
Overweighting the American markets has been the default in finance for decades. The growth of the magnificent 7, the “exorbitant privilege” of the American dollar, and the security of the defense umbrella of our alliances bolstered treasuries.
American exceptionalism has been rocked with Liberation Day and the subsequent fallout for many. Nobody in business in or with America slept for two weeks straight.
But for me it’s always traveling abroad that changes how I feel about America’s place in the world. If you’ve been following along with my hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy saga you may know I was in Istanbul touring a factory.
Seeing is believing. I’d heard Turkey’s clinics were the best in the world but now I know it. I cannot wait to come back for a more thorough look at my medical situation.
Being born an American has been the privilege of a lifetime. My passport has shown me the world. And even as I do what I can to help to make Montana the friendliest place to do the business of the future I can’t help but fear America has lost more than a step.
Istanbul feels like a modern city in the vein of Shenzen. Growth and construction is everywhere even as you can visit mosques and hammam from when Constantinople was the crossroad of empires.
I had not planned it this way but I had a repeat of the meiborn gland issue that got me sent to hospital in February. I had, in just four short days, a chalazion turn into hordeolum aka an infected cyst.
It’s probably a side effect of the IL-17 biological I am using. I had a mold exposure over the winter in our bed room so who knows. Sucks to be me. This is why I’m excited about new technology for healing like HBOT.
It needed a doctor to perform an incision and curettage. I asked the concierge at my hotel for a clinic and I walked five minutes to an enormous glittering skyscraper of a hospital. Many of those hospitals are run twenty four hours a day.
I walk in with no appointment. They immediately find me a medical translator. I’m checked in within fifteen minutes. I get a full eye exam and a seen by a doctor who instantly diagnoses it.
Next thing I know I’m in the chair with a local anesthetic and she is slicing, draining and disinfecting. She gets me my post treatment protocol. A pharmacy delivers the prescriptions in 9 minutes. Now this is healthcare.
Within the space of an hour I’m fixed up and sent home to eat. I’m sitting down to grilled octopus and prawns by the Bosporus in no time. I needed a protein filled lunch to take my antibiotics.
The road to Constantinople is long. Whether a knight on horseback crusade bound or a bitch in an Audi, it’s a long haul to Istanbul.
That’s not me flexing honest just that the rental guy sold me on the quattro as a comfortable ride for long hauls so for you cavalry types it’s the destrier of our times.
My route is basically hugging the Aegean. I drove down the Adriatic, nodded at the Ionian and spent an evening on the Aegean before breaking at Thessaloniki. The reverse was no picnic for Odysseus and he started in Troy. Which is around the corner relatively thinking.
Unlike our friends in antiquity, I have further to go to make it to the capital of empires that is Istanbul.
I’m excited for both the work on the ground but also to see the sights. Making it across multiple border crossings is absolutely worth to see the intersection of so much history. Oh and also to tour a factory.
Concurrently we are moving through a massive global economic reorganization that impacts how one plans for even local businesses like a med spa.
So while we’ve purchased our first chamber before the tariffs have gone into effect, it seems reasonable to get ahead of the game and begin the sourcing process.
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.
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.
