Tag: Lies

Categories
Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 1589 and Disagreeable

I am in a lot of physical pain and I have been cranky about it all day. I just did not have the energy to self censor my discomfort either. I spent a lot of the day in bed popping off.

Because people are polite I only ever get rewarded for being spicy. I’m sure people harbor all kinds of uncharitable opinions about people who are mouthy, especially women. But I mostly find you can say quite a lot. Especially with your ingroup.

In fact being disagreeable is tolerated, and even celebrated, in almost all public forums. Hard truths, straight acts, unpleasant realities tend to be celebrated. Truth telling can become someone’s persona even when nothing is wrong.

But watch out for that dark path. If you care too much about broader opinions of yourself you can easily become what is called audience captured in which your persona gets adapted to what gets a response. Modeling your life as get it can go very wrong for people.

I felt for comedian John Mulaney who got typecast as the affable guy and absolutely hated being the bad guy for his various addictions and personal life complications.

In his special “Baby J,” Mulaney reflects on the burden of his public persona: “Likeability is jaaaaaaaail,” summary via Perplexity of a much better substack piece

In some ways, playing to type is just cognitively easier for everyone. A social contract if you will. Being able to show more than one side of yourself shouldn’t be shrugged off as people pleasing nor is being disagreeable always a sign of bad temperament. Humans contain multitudes even if everyone plays to type.

Categories
Politics Travel

Day 1574 and American HVAC

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?

Categories
Finance Politics

Day 1558 and Basis Point Bullying

I’ve tried not to pay too close attention to the panicked aftermath of the new tariff regime.

I don’t trade the public markets actively and we’d already made preparations in our personal financial lives for a deleveraged dollar. It seemed clear where things were headed and weakening the dollar solves a couple problems for America.

I am a free trader. I believe in open markets as the most effective means we currently have at our disposal for large scale coordination that works with human nature.

Nevertheless the allure of central planning and collectivism is hard to resist for those in power. The market will adapt and find other ways of allocating assets but the wasted energy of a crisis frustrates investors. Damming the waters only impeded flow.

Each basis point drop saves America 1 billion according to Secretary Bessent. So we’ve an incentive to nuke 30 basis points and keep yields low. And yet the 10 year is still stubbornly high.

The exorbitant privilege of Bretton Woods comes with the fears of a centralized currency managed by technocrats who must give guidance to markets without providing too many surprises.

I grew up with a significant amount of skepticism around the federal reserve and its places to hippie parents and the University of Chicago but even I never thought I’d live to see this kind of test. And I am a Bitcoiner! Maybe Silicon Valley will finally find out what bargain we have with Uncle Sam.

Categories
Politics

Day 1556 and Market Mania and Mold

I’ve had a week of poor sleep that feels like it’s catching up with me. My mood is sour and my mind is mush. This sort of state leaves me with anxiety.

The running joke in the family is that anytime the markets are about to go off I feel it in my body long before it hits the Bloomberg terminal.

I vividly remember the day Silicon Valley Bank collapsed as I had a terrible migraine. I had a sense in the days before I can only describe as snowblind. An informational blizzard of such density and intensity it turned every vantage into a blinding sameness.

It’s possible I’m a mess as the whole week was a mixture of market mania thanks to “Liberation Day” tariffs along with other personal life challenges like mold remediation.

I feel anxious about everything which is to say I am not anxious about anything. It’s simply pervasive. If past market issues caused snowblindness this feels more like swamp gas. It stinks, is favored by conspiratorial types and is a fantastic excuse for seeing things you shouldn’t.

Categories
Culture

Day 1551 and Jokes On Us

April Fool’s Day is just the worst. Practical jokes were much more enjoyable when telling the truth was still a widely accepted social norm. Our moment is one of a thousand falsehoods.

Our commitment to the truth and a shared sense of what separates truth from falsehoods has never felt shakier to me. It’s one strategic lie after another from all our institutions and leaders.

If you are living in our era of lies, half truths, and various flavors of misinformation & disinformation the idea of dedicated a day to falsehoods seems perverse. I don’t want to be on the Internet or a part of discourse on a day when deliberately lying gives you social capital.

Alas this is an ancient human custom in many places. The Indian festival of Holi, medieval Feast of Fools, and the Roman Hilaria are all early spring celebrations of pranks, jokes and foolishness. The prevailing theory dates to France and the change to the Gregorian calendar.

April Fools’ Day back to 16th-century France. In 1564, King Charles IX adopted the Gregorian calendar, moving New Year’s Day from late March (around the vernal equinox) to January 1. Those who continued celebrating the old New Year date on April 1 were mocked as “April fools” and became targets of pranks, such as receiving fake gifts or being sent on “fool’s errands.”

– Via Perplexity

I rather imagine that the religious traditions mentioned above all valued truth as a foundational virtue. To know the truth of the world and the truth of your soul are the twin ambitions of human life.

Perhaps I’m being too sensitive. Or too rigid. Humans are evolved primates and we play status games that involve deception in the entire primate family. But I’d still prefer that we communicate true information to each other as both a norm and as an aspiration. That’s not a joke.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1538 and Reason About the World

There is a pet theory that I ascribe to that precious few changes their minds without experiencing a failure in social consensus. Being pushed outside of culture lets you map it more accurately on the way back in.

There is nothing more valuable than your ability to reason about the world. We sense-make with all kinds of inconsistencies and have so little incentive to step out of what we think is true about our world. Go along to get along is how humans stay alive.

I have had a wildly inaccurate model of the world in the past and I’m confident I’ll say that same soon in the future.

But I’m comfortable falling out of social consensus if it clashes with the model of the world that I work within. I’m not saying I’m smarter than anyone but I do know that I regularly weigh my faulty priors even if it’s embarrassing. I’ll keep searching for people who can reason about the world. We can see better together.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1530 and Pandemic Anniversary

March 11 2020 was the day the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 to be a pandemic. It’s been five years since we had our once in a century pandemic that changed everything. Honestly it feels like it just happened.

You can quibble a bit on the start (right there in the name alluding to its discovery in 2019) but this second of March the week where America finally started changing behaviors. Within two weeks we’d have the infamous “flatten the curve” discussion. What a shitshow those early days were.

The pandemic changed a lot of people’s lives. The New York Times has a feature with 30 charts about how the world is different that I found interesting.

My life changed in a lot of ways that are probably recognizable to other Americans. My already digital life became how business was done. I moved back home. I rethought my relationship with institutional trust.

We lived in New York when we were locked down. Alex and I didn’t leave our one bedroom apartment for three months except to go to the CVS.

Coincidentally we’d been in the middle of our landlord trying to evict us for filing a complaint with the department of buildings over broken elevators. That got stopped. As soon as it seemed safe to leave city we rented an Airbnb in the Hudson Valley. The next week protests broke out. We had lived above City Hall so we got very lucky.

Figuring out where to land and the shape of our lives was a process. The Airbnb phase felt stressful as the summer ended and the urge for permanency felt overwhelming. We signed a lease site unseen for a townhouse in my hometown of Boulder Colorado.

Much of the rest of these past five years have been subsequently documented here on this blog. We found our way to Montana. A lot happened in those intervening years. None of it felt like it happened very fast. And yet here we are.

Categories
Finance

Day 1529 and The Detoxing Economy

Do you recall the first time you heard the term detox? If you were a hippie kid I’d bet you grew up with it. If you were a striver maybe it arrived in your email inbox with Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop.

Or if you are a banker, maybe Scott Bessent introduced you to the term just this week. Which tbh I wouldn’t entirely believe as the entire dating pool for the professional upper middle class is obsessed with wellness.

“The market and the economy have just become hooked. We’ve become addicted to this government spending, and there’s going to be a detox period,”

Scott Bessent at the New York Economic Club March 6th 2025

Hippies and anxious white women usually use detox as a kind of catch all for methods of various efficacy for flushing out unwelcome…toxins. Being specific can make you sound like a loony tune.

Turns the same logic can be applied to economic and fiscal policy. If you get too far into monetary policy and the Federal Reserve you too will sound like a loony tune.

But it’s hard not to be persuaded by those who rightly point out that America has been printing money and that has downstream effects.

Many an empire has fallen for debasing its currency. Something I am sure a man like Bessent understands. It’s not so much a pleasant white girl cleanse but managing through opioid addiction. Which isn’t an encouraging metaphor.

Categories
Internet Culture Media

Day 1514 and Informational Ravine

I hate to add fears that we will face a “dead internet” but increasingly we lack shared context in our online spaces. As context collapses so too does culture. Bad behavior proliferates.

Without shared values we cannot find purchase on the informational ravine of the open web. Competing narratives and interests buffet your mind as you try to sense-make your way into a firmer grip. It’s easy to slip and find yourself unsure of what is up or down.

The vibes are bad. People have entirely different interpretations when presented with something as innocuous as an email asking “what did you get done this week?” If you discuss a particularly contested space it quickly becomes a hostile information environment. Many retreat.

If you are tempted to argue with me about whether that action is in fact innocuous you have to wonder how far apart you and I are from each other as we try to climb through the great ravine to the other side.

Categories
Chronic Disease Politics

Day 1490 and Healthcare’s Sin Eaters

I went to see a rheumatologist today. I had the baffling experience of them wanting to actually get to know me. Which was surprisingly unhelpful in the moment but really nails vibe we’ve got with healthcare in America.

I kvetched on Twitter that I spent my week defending hot girls and open source software while I deride Big Pharma and public employee unions. That’s more of a humble brag about my priorities. But I felt bad that I picked on pharmaceuticals. I got replies. Why harsh on pharmaceuticals? And actually fair.

Drug companies are the least bad of some very bad actors. For all its faults, drug companies are not just existing to be parasitic like pharmacy benefit managers or generate wealth through regulatory capture like Epic.

If anything pharma is the sad scapegoat in healthcare. We pick one drug a decade to laud & then like clockwork do a hard reversal on it in a decade or two. Patients get hurt and doctors did their best. We saw with statins, SSRIs, opioids, adderall, and I’m sure soon GLP-1s will be next to have Netflix documentaries. Someone is always to blame and it’s usually the drug companies.

Some category is designated a sin eater for the system’s horrors. Which isn’t at all fair as all those drugs serve real needs. Sorry Oxycodone you remain a villain. But why is American in so much pain?

Which gets back to my surprise as having a doctor who wanted to get to know me. We came in with a typed up diagnostics sheet with a timeline of treatments, protocols and medications and the bastard has the audacity to ask me about the quality of my life.

I hesitate to say “well shit” because I am Protestant from Scandinavians stock because we pride ourselves on being “oh just fine”

And of course I’m the asshole who quotes Kierkegaard at my doctor. Sickness unto death right Doctor? Which I guess is a bit of a downer.

The man actually asked me if I’d consider managing my pain more aggressively. I am absolutely mogged by the audacity of the sentiment that I could suffer less.

Apparently no one scans you for drug seeking behavior when you chuckle and kneel before what God has decided for you. So that’s a good trick I guess for the less sincere.

You can really see how public perception of RFK Jr is so different from what elite narratives would like to see. People are with RFK’s righteous indignation. Why are so many suffering?

The cranks and the crazies are here because America is mostly gaslit by a nest of bad incentives. Doctors don’t want any of this. Neither do the drug companies. But someone has to be blamed and it’s usually the guys with the money. But they are trying as hard as anyone to actually come up with solutions.

Maybe no one deserves to have a righteous Kennedy come after them. But everyone feels a little bit crazy with how the system works now.