Tag: Lies

Categories
Finance Travel

Day 878 and European HVAC

If I were a betting women, and I am, I’d be placing them on European heating, ventilation, and air conditioning corporations. Yeah, I think HVAC is a growth industry for the continent.

HVAC is use of various technologies to control the temperature, humidity, and purity of the air in an enclosed space. Its goal is to provide thermal comfort and acceptable indoor air quality.

You’d think after the pandemic brought the importance of air quality to everyone’s attention, that decent ventilation would a priority. Add in the increasing frequency of deadly heat waves and you’ve got real tailwinds for HVAC technology being crucial not only for comfort but for life.

So why are European apartments somehow both poorly ventilated and poorly insulated at the same time? Is there even a term for this? Finally I viscerally understand why bad air (mal air) is one of the canonical health problems of the Western Cannon. All those nerdy writers inside were suffering.

I’ll grant 1700 era European cities have more excuses than modern cosmopolitan ones for having stuffy, dusty, stinky, hot and yet somehow also cold and drafty air. They didn’t have electricity so no fans, pumps or air exchanges. But why the fuck haven’t they fixed it yet?

The worst plague of the great indoors is shitty HVAC. We have no excuses for it anymore as it’s an environmental health hazard on its own before we even consider the current energy crisis (don’t even get me started on what counts as being green). Refusing to keep your apartment’s ventilated and insulated is bad for your body and your budget.

So if anyone has suggestions for investing up and down the value chain of improving HVAC systems I think we’ve got a growth industry on our hands. Europe can’t refuse to air condition forever and it sure can’t afford to continue to burn coal and Russian gas to heat drafty apartments either.

Categories
Culture

Day 877 and Punch The Nazi Nerd

I want to rant a little too much today, as it’s a holiday weekend and it’s all sunshine, apfelsaftschorle and pretzels but I need to rant a little bit. For a treat.

Anyone with too much focus on the esoterica of life; the nerds, the dorks, the dweebs and the outcasts, has some baggage. I never felt particularly uncool as a kid because I moved around enough that I didn’t have a lot of past embarrassments to hold me back. Odd when a childhood trauma ends up being protective.

But I’ve met plenty of genius in my time and a lot of them carry deep hurt from how they were treated as kids. The trauma isn’t always healed. And hurt people hurt people.

We used to expect an even trade from our nerds. You’ve got righteous technical skills and understand how those changing tools will affect the culture of the world. You see a future and hack at it because you’ve seen the rules of the game.

We need those rule breakers because they keep us honest. But we’ve got to keep them honest too. Life is a team effort and it takes all kinds of skills to pull off something great. The hacker nerd archetype is just one member of the team.

But if you are playing on easy mode, and the nerds have been on easy mode since we needed whiz kid scientists to fight the Nazis, then you don’t handle rejection too well. Everyone thinks they are owed something on the internet for being barely above a midwit. And they are probably right as we are living Idiocracy out there right now.

But you’ve got to have boundaries. Nowhere is that truer than with someone with a deep hurt. Probably why we have company politics, project managers and deeply angry startup mommies who spend their whole ass lives managing the feelings of man-babies who produced code. It ain’t great for moral.

I don’t know why nerds are such children. They say you stop growing at the age of your first trauma. Maybe. Or maybe if you had someone to clean up the hurt for you as a child you don’t know how to clean up your own messes as an adult. Mommy issues everywhere I enjoyed being a spoiled bitch more when I didn’t realize the enormous cost. Rationalize and reconcile what you can.

I don’t mind the hurt when nerds deliver us energy and weapons and the stars and whole new ways of self organizing. I’ve sided with nerds my whole life. Nerds are my ancestral people. Witches and rocket scientists and trailer trash chemists.

But if a nerd pretends the consequences of living with others doesn’t apply to them because they are so much more special, well you better be skeptical. Nerds can be bullied too. Sometimes you do in fact need to punch a bully. Punching Nazi nerds in particular is rarely a poor choice. The nerd bullies may need it the most. Remember it’s dweebs with delusions of grandeur who commit genocide and raise armies for fascists. Banality of evil and all that. Happy Memorial Day weekend everyone.

Categories
Aesthetics Community Finance

Day 863 Abstract The Pain Away

When I was a small child I attended meditation retreats with my parents. Hippies amirite? The particular branch practiced was some variant of Kashmir Shivaism, but I’ve got to imagine it was heavily edited for the consumption of white Boomers.

Who else would take a vacation to sit in silence, chant the Bhagavata Gita at 5am and practice sevā, all while having six year old children? Silicon Valley’s syncretic culture produces some weird hybrids. Seventies counter culture gave us some of the best religious revivals in American history.

If you didn’t catch the word sevā earlier it’s actually going to be the anchor of the post. Sevā as it was explained to me as a child at the ashram is selfless service. It’s work you do without expectation of reward. It is a dedication to others.

Practically it meant that anytime we lived at the ashram everyone contributed some set of work, mostly unskilled labor but not always, in the form of sevā. I did everything from food preparation and dish washing (working a commercial kitchen dishwasher is actually fun) to caring for some donated horses. I had fun summers as a child.

But the point was that everyone participated in some way to the functions of the ashram no matter who you were. And we did have some weird celebrities but that’s not the point. Sevā applied to us all. Though I’m sure glad I never looked too hard at the politics of finances of these ashtrays. Childhood innocence. As a child I just thought it was fun to contribute to the adult world.

But what I remember now is a sense of connection. That no aspect of these retreats was ever abstracted to far from me. The service was meant to bond you to an experience of a world bigger than yourself. And by recognizing that, you’d somehow connect more with others.

I try to remember that now when I am in lonely cities where every aspect of living with others is transaction. A food delivery service whisks you a meal in an hour in a country where you are an outsider without ties, bonds or service beyond the basic civilizational contract of capital markets.

The global cosmopolitan gloss of mobile applications have abstracted service away to the point where we can have an entire day of discourse about a man being sad a house cleaner washed a cast iron skillet but we can’t admit that we all pay for service as it cracks the facade.

We’ve got no sevā because that’s an expectation too great to hear. We can barely manage to pay a fee for service anymore. Imagine if we had to operate without intangibles. We can barely make Uber Eats function with taxes, tips, and services fees. Bless the markets for this freedom and curse it in the same breath.

Fuck the pain away? No, we abstract the pain away. No need to see who contributes anything. You can complain to a faceless chatbot cum customer service artificial intelligence about how some man on a bicycle didn’t deliver your order on time. The service lives below the machine now and has patience for frailty.

And yes I’m writing this because my Korean fried chicken and kimchi order got lost in a side street in Frankfurt for an hour or two.

Don’t worry the corporate entities that intermediated between me, the restaurant and the courier decided in my favor. The customer is always right as long as they have paid the fees to pretend that are lords.

All pain in the above transaction was abstracted away into some governance structure that decided it was worth 25 euro or so. One presumes some public market agreed on the price. I guess I did too. We all did.

Categories
Community Startups

Day 847 and Erasure

I hosted an interactive town hall for Consensus this afternoon. The topic was the path forward for building communities online, offline and IRL with cryptocurrency, decentralized autonomous organizations and maybe even network states.

I’ve been working on this town hall for several months. I worked with Marc Hochstein to refine the thesis question, build the flow and topics, bring together speakers from unique ecosystems and projects, and horse trade the various bit of social capital required to get interesting content out the door. I worked hard on it. I felt I was one of the owners of the panel.

Builders of new types of communities – online, IRL, and hybrids – roll up their sleeves and discuss how they’ve addressed challenges from 60,000-foot strategy to immediate on-the-ground tactics in a zero-trust world with high trust expectations. Topics include: governance and accountability; organic scaling through consensus (who and what decides on whether it is achieved); the architecture of sustaining and driving loyalty; navigating regulatory hurdles; uncertainty around novel governance structures; and managing information and workflows around who and what is trusted.

I was proud of my first question as I felt qualified to ask having once been the founder and leader of an organization. Conway’s Law is a familiar adage in software design. Simply put, what we build is a reflection of who we are and how we communicate with each other. So I opened the town hall with this as the thirty thousand foot view.

If what we build is a reflection of the organizations that build it, then crypto is a reflection of this room. Assuming you believe our goal is economic and monetary solutions for everyone willing to align with our reformation, are we living up to this ambition?

We had a lot of ground to cover. Issues of institutional distrust, transparency, governance, and decentralization’s promises for inclusion. But reactivity means we go to base emotions. An older woman asked the panel (not me though) why there weren’t more women on the panel. Needlessly to say I took that personally. Ain’t I a panelist?

I just brought the hammer down on this poor woman who wanted to call my panel a “manel” because lady it’s fucking erasure I worked for months to bring this group together, I’m on the stage as an expert, and you think don’t I count?

She said I was the moderator. Which like yeah it’s my fucking show because I have the expertise to bring the leaders together as I’m a peer. I shut it down as we had deeper questions on what inclusion means than Boomer feminism or Girlbossing woke-ism can manage.

The beauty of Bitcoin and Ethereum and the ecosystem of L2s like Stacks is any of us can validate what’s going on. There is no “man” or patriarchy or systemic oppression keeping you out of learning and using the tools. Maybe they reflect their builders who haven’t always been inclusive but now all of us together can earn and build like anyone else. We can make our tools reflect us by insisting on being seen.

I regularly have my background and expertise and existence questioned by everyone. And I just keep showing up. So I’d like to say sticking a girl on a panel does nothing for inclusion. But being a woman who organized a serious (ly) weird town hall on community should also mean my experience counts as much as anyone else’s.

I want everyone to count. You count. I count. Your gender or sexual orientation doesn’t discount you unless you discount yourself first. I regularly make sure I’m seen and I want you seen too.

The way to count is by speaking up and making sure that men aren’t the only ones who contribute. Don’t want to make your gender or sex a thing?

Go ignore gender & sex and & identity entirely and be an anon with a Milady pfp. I came to crypto to be a sovereign of my own body and choices. It’s your choice. None of us are victims.

I was amused as dozens of women came up to me after with enthusiasm about how we do inclusion in crypto because we don’t need to be restricted by Girlbossing or Boomer feminism. We include ourselves as the system is inclusive by design.

Decentralized systems include us all. And that’s a future they can’t exclude us from. Do you want to categorize every identity into perfect little corporate identities and slogans? I don’t. We can build a future where we are free to be you and me. Ok Boomer?

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 823 and Non Attachment

Have you ever read a piece of literature and seen a character described as “a man of great passions?” I feel like it used to be much more acceptable to discuss appetites and the grasping griping hand of man. Perhaps this mentality passed just as Bejamin Disraeli did, unto another era of fallen archetypes. Now we are civilized men with passions well in hand.

Man is only truly great when he acts from his passions.

Bejamin Disraeli

I was raised in a family that meditated. We went to ashrams. We had family vacations in silent retreat. We settled in Boulder where Naropa is as much a part of the institutional fabric of the town as your typical church.

Non-attachment was a concept that was familiar to me long before I felt I had any secure attachment style of my own. I’ve written about my recurring nightmare of packing for a trip or a move. Non-attachment may even be my style of attachment. I am fearful avoidant for anyone keeping score.

Being in chronic pain has been a gift for deepening my understanding of non-attachment. In order to survive pain, you remind yourself it will pass. But accepting that knowledge is a double edge sword. You accept that your joy and happiness is also passing. And you are offered a choice to grasp at them with mean jealously or to hold them as lightly as you would hold your agonies.

Non attachment isn’t just practiced on the negatives in your life. It’s an equal opportunity philosophy. The money you have. The things you own. The beauty you possess. All are fleeting. They are rare intangible things we must value as both priceless and worthless in equal measure.

I believe we can act in greatness in our passion, even if, or maybe especially if, we practice non attachment. I am both saved and damned. I am powerful and meek. I am a woman of great passions and I am capable of separating myself from them as reality dictates.

Categories
Internet Culture Media Startups

Day 815 and Kayfabe

Here is a mindfuck for you. Pretending works. The mimicry of the thing occasionally, though not mostly, can lead to having the real thing. Fake it till you make it” works if you’ve got a long enough runway to allow for take off. If you’ve judged the resources correctly is more art than science but you should still be able to do the math.

There are, of course, laws of physics to account for in all of this but your reality is more fungible than you realize. I wouldn’t try manifesting a whole fantasy world, but if you are Brandon Sanderson you might have a shot. That guy rocks.

In discussing whether it is better to fire founders or product managers on Twitter today I got to see a lot of the cargo cult culture of Silicon Valley coming off a high. A lot of people can perform innovation and we’ve maybe even got it down to being well liked by financial markets. But sometimes you actually do have to go and do the thing. And you can’t fake it.

If you aren’t familiar with kayfabe, it’s a term used in wrestling. It means you don’t break character loosely. You keep the secret even if everyone is in on it. You can take things a bit too far and the blending of fiction and reality has now given us a reality tv president.

But what happens when you don’t make the jump? Does reality crash in? Will the market punish you for not delivering on a convincing enough value proposition? Do you have to keep your ambition within some scope that can exist in our agreed upon reality? Yes of course. Fuck you it’s called civilization. But every once in a while someone goes from vapor ware to the Revolution. Don’t be so sure you can spot the difference though. Kayfabe doesn’t just fool rubes.

Categories
Media

Day 813 and You

I took some of today off to watch television as I’ve been in a bit of an overwork tumult. I finished the 4th season of the psycho-sexual thriller You starring Penn Badgley.

I recommend the streaming series on Netflix (I’ve not read the books on which it is based) unabashedly to all women who have ever dated men seeking to save them and to men with mommy issues seeking salvation in broken women.

I may get a bit spoiler-y in this post so now might be the time to peel off if you don’t like knowing anything about a show though I promise to avoid big plot twists.

I was struck recently by an excellent Twitter thread from journalist and my favorite therapy poaster Heidi about how men are socialized to “never be the bad guy.” I felt it was particularly salient as I finished the newest season of You which hinges on the tricks ego plays on you to help you ignore your shadow.

Realizing that what you do and who you are are not the same thing but that we have responsibility for the consequences of our actions is kind of the whole enchilada of therapy. If you’ve ever worried you are a bad person or struggled with shame you recognize this.

You makes some clever stabs (pun intended) at dealing with the darkest manifestations of this by pairing women who need saving with a serial killer. Empire of skulls becomes a bit more than metaphor as it closes in on how wealth intersects with mommy and daddy issues and inter-generational trauma. I really do recommend it watching it.

In true “it’s hip to be square” American Pyscho style, it’s unclear how much we are meant to consider whether it’s possible to have “a good kill” as an intellectual exercise. What we do end up considering is that shadow integration work is invariably a dangerous Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde affair. And what kind of lies we are willing to tell is a function of our relative power as it intersects with a traumatic childhood.

Categories
Media

Day 810 and 90s TV

I’ve not had a lot of spare time for entertainment and recovery in what turned out to be a very busy month. This left me in a small quandary as Alex and I finished both a comedy and a hour long drama right before all hell broke loose.

My husband and I tend to always have a short form sitcom and a longer prestige piece in rotation depending on how tired we are at the end of the day. We’d run through all the comfort shows and couldn’t fathom testing a new something more serious.

I’m not entirely sure how but we decided to pick up two classic 90s era shows. For our comedy we picked That 70s Show and for our drama we picked the procedural NYPD Blue. Our expectations were that these would be easy to watch simple shows without much depth. And boy were we wrong.

I don’t recall watching a ton of television when I was a kid and I doubt I would have been allowed to watch gritty cop dramas. But the way folks kvetch about how network television sucks I went in expecting middle brow fare. Millennials have had both streaming and cable for so long we’ve come to expect tv that caters to our preferences tend to look down on anything made for the masses.

As it turns out, having to appeal to broad swaths of people actually has some advantages. Both shows are steeped in deep emotions and relatability. The writing is snappy and straight forward. The characters are multifaceted even as they work through their personas.

The fact that I’m relating to the struggles of a shitty racist balding drunkard detective and a pack of Wisconsin teenagers is probably a positive thing. Shared humanity is getting lost in consumer preferences and social identities.

We think unless we see ourselves on the screen we couldn’t possibly relate. And I’ll say I’ve appreciated more representation in entertainment as I often feel hopelessly un-relatable. A

nd yet I’m enjoying relating to humans that never even existed as portrayed by professional liars. So maybe there is something in that. The human experience is the thing, not that the experience must demonstrate it’s connection to your life.

Categories
Politics Preparedness

Day 808 and Left Eye

I’m literally sick to my stomach. I’ve got a twitch in my left eye. We’ve got dozens of competing factions in a massive narrative war online gunning for total social collapse and I’ve got multiple actual real live friends I care about deeply who think that THIS IS IT. Lemmings off a cliff would not be too far off as a metaphor.

There are multiple state, corporate, private entities working on a narrative collapse. Every single one of us needs to push back and say no. My only advice is to simply ignore them if you have already done basic preparations for your own life. If you haven’t it’s probably too late to do much more than treat this like a snowstorm.

Maybe Trump gets arrested. Maybe the money printer goes brrr. But you should assess your own risks as a responsible adult. Get out cash, buy some bottled water and get groceries for the week and keep calm. If it is indeed times for guns and butter the price of Bitcoin won’t matter.

I know I committed to a daily discipline of writing and I am doing it but I want to get off the internet and sleep for a thousand years. I’ll never get any work done or maintain my health and sanity if I don’t. So I am writing this and going to go about my life. You should too. And please nobody flee to El Salvador. I’ll write again tomorrow but if I’m quiet it’s because I am refusing to add any more fuel to this narrative fire.

Categories
Internet Culture

Day 804 and Organic All Natural Human Brain Brewed Montana Content

As a sign of just how fast the world is changing, my goal of making it to a thousand straight days of writing is officially pointless. ChatGPT4 is pretty good at mimicking all styles of writing. AI has come to rescue us from the drudgery of being a workdcel just as it once rescued my brethren shape rotators from doing math. Rejoice!

Fortunately I started this whole blog for personal amusement and feel entirely unthreatened by the looming reality that writing done entirely by humans is officially over. If anything I feel modestly relieved.

I’d be happy to jump cut to the Culture and move aboard a psychotic space ship with a name like Weeping Somnambulist. I just combined Ian M Banks with the Expanse but I’ve got omnivore tastes in my science fiction. The point is it’s fucking cool that the machines are coming. And if it’s not cool I won’t know the damn difference. I’ll be dead or in some other simulation and I am not worse off than I’m currently.

Two men on a bus meme. “The AI Took My Job”

I’ve been repeating as something of a mantra the Hunter S Thompson quote recently.

Buy the ticket, take the ride.

I’ve never actually read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas nor have I seen the movie. But I’ve absorbed enough of the basic essence of the “all gas no breaks” mentality from across multiple generations that I think I get the gist of it. Though a reminder to actually go to the source material.

The point being is that none of us has a fucking clue and sometimes you’ve got to go fuck around and find out. So I’ll be doing that. If it doesn’t worked out I’ll just chalk it up to consciousness expansion. And if I’m lucky maybe I get some new machine friends too. But I’m still going to write just for me using my mushy brain synaptic firings that I generated right here in Montana.