Tag: Materialism

Categories
Aesthetics Culture Travel

Day 2005 and The PMC Olympics Or Transcontinental Logistics: Couples Event

If professional class workers thin out as a function of artificial intelligence taking some of the work done by the professional management or PMC class, I suspect we will see nostalgia for the time they were seen as aspirational. I’d like to explore that near-future science fiction today with the PMC Olympics.

After the initial decade or two of upset (possibly even rage) at the power shifts & new status dynamics subside, we fondly remember business class types like lawyers & consultants with the same wistful fondness as we recall switchboard operators or the stenography pool.

I’d bet in the nostalgia wave, we see competitions, cosplaying and an equivalent of Renaissance Fairs or reenactments pop up where former PMCs and thr youth pretending to be them, compete in a cargo cult display of its cultural identity markers.

And when this does inevitably emerge as a cultural touchstone, I want to compete in the PMC Olympics with my husband in transcontinental logistics events. Think of it as figure skating but for married business partners.

I’m confident we would medal in the transcontinental travel logistics category. I’d get gold in the individual “cosmetic and liquids” category. Think of it as “uneven-bars” of the transcontinental logistics travel competition.

As part of this mirthful sci-fi exercise, I input a prompt to ChatGPT’s current image model and it gave me a very amusing montage of who might compete and win in just such an event.

Naturally the shining blonde California affluence worker (subcategory creative class) took the gold but let’s not forget the New York finance couple nor the European directorate class.

ChatGPT image prompted with:
Make me an image of three sets of couples who are professional management class knowledge workers. They are on an Olympics podium receiving gold, silver and bronze medals for medalling in the “Transcontinental Logistics: Couples” event. I’d like two American couples (one New Yorker finance style and one California Hollywood style) as well as a European couple (Swiss) in the style of a Brussels bureaucrat. There should be suitcases, travel bags for laptops, a 1L cosmetics bag, a medication cold tube, and other travel essentials in the image 

I know this sounds a little goofy, but the work that goes into managing what a couple need when constantly switching between personal life and work on the road involves a surprising amount of logistical support work. And that’s without children. I’d add a category with a toddler as the most extreme form of this event.

Just check this prompt I made for my own PDF for an event involving both industrial site visits and formal galas that I am attending after flying west from London. Some details are changed or redacted for modest privacy. Anyone can easily guess what I’m going to be doing.

Build a 8-10 day travel itinerary for a business trip departing from Heathrow London and arriving to Salt Lake City and a remote desert town in Utah, from June XX to July 2, 2026. Include a day-off rest plan for Salt Lake City, a Department of Redacted event logistics flow chart, transport coordination for a bus to small town and return back to the city on July X of event, and recommendations for high-quality food near event venues.

Include transitioning time and necessary grooming required for a facility floor tour with safety gear and a change for a formalwear gala with an hour buffer assuming an event mid afternoon, there hours transit and evening formal event at 7pm.

July 2-5th include a secondary itinerary for a follow on mountain social event at 8,000 feet Utah mountains with outdoorsman activities.

Format as a structured PDF briefing with time-stamped logistics, travel maps, and weather-appropriate clothing advice for the city to desert climate shift as well as mountain elevation needs. Include medications, standard pharmacy and first aid needs, cooled medications for peptide regimen, sun safety, facility floor safety gear, day event makeup, formalwear makeup, possible television ready makeup as well as hairstyle needs based on 3 day warning cycle.

Make sure personal preferences for all clothing, sleeping, cosmetic, medication and other gear is accommodated in a carry on suitcase, personal bag and one checked baggage.

Pretty fun right? And I might add that it’s relatively easy to spit these itineraries out once you’ve harnessed your preferences and all necessary items in one’s personal stock keeping. Always take inventory regularly when on the road and unpack and repack quickly for fast turn arounds. Oh and use the three pack cascade system. To my fellow flying logistic Olympians I wish you safe travels while we still enjoy global transportation for capitalism.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1998 and Daddy Issues Post Mortem on Father’s Day

It’s my first Father’s Day since my own father passed away last year. I never had an ideal relationship with my father in our daily lives and in death this did not change. I was blessed with a complex father and his gifts outweighed any failings in the final tally for me.

Despite our complicated relationship, I credit my father’s example for much of my professional interests and ultimately my success in my career. My love of technology came from his love of technology.

I loved him so much. I always feared I loved him more than he loved me. That fear led me to shape myself to appeal to his preferences so I could more easily fit into his life and how he spent his time.

I took up his work, his hobbies and his ambitions. I never felt I was enough to sustain his attention just because I was his daughter. So I made every effort to be the ideal Daddy’s Girl. I knew he was proud of me when I achieved something he valued.

I don’t think that his disinterest in spending time with his children was a reflection of his feelings for me or my brother, but rather his own preferences for living his life. His love was unspoken because that was his way of being.

He had an outward orientation to the wider world. He loved the comings and goings of world affairs and its impact on business. He loved to golf and travel. He was an avid reader of books, periodicals and newspapers. He took great joy in seeing more of the world than what his childhood has offered him.

He only turned to family at the very end of his life when he took stock of his decisions and their consequences and found he had some regrets. We did our best to reassure him of our love. I told him over and over, I forgave him for anything he felt he had done wrong.

I loved him for who he was no matter the imperfections or mistakes. His humanity was enough for me. Any anger, sadness or resentment I had as a child was let go through my adult life as I worked to become my own person who didn’t wish to carry certain things forward.

My life turned out so beautifully in no small measure because I strove to be part of his world. I may never have fully succeeded with him, but I succeeded in the wider world which is an amazing gift to pass on to your child. .

I prefer to think the best of my father, as I believe he did the best that he could. I’ll never know if my interpretation is correct. As in life so in death. He remain/ as distant and unavailable to me as always. At least now it’s permanent and not a function of my short game or my latest success.

My grief for his loss (which started long before he left this mortal realm) will always be a part of me. Just as the love for technology and the building new things will always motivate my life’s work. Our blessings are contoured to the shape of our lives. And I am happy this is the fit of mine.

Categories
Emotional Work

Day 1989 and Leaving Milestones Without Markers

My own family was never much for celebrating holidays or milestones. Birthdays, graduations, anniversaries (such that we had) tended to go unremarked upon as I got older.

We were never a gift family, so I think this distancing worked out for the best. The commercialization of life’s important moments, especially religious holidays like Christmas really bothered my mother in particular.

We have a rule that no one should buy a gift out of obligation but only if one spots an item and feels moved to buy it for someone. We treasure gifts with meaning much more than an item bought out of a sense of duty to a date or relationship expectation.

Today happens to be a birthday in my immediate family and a “big” one in the sense that it’s a year people often like to celebrate. They have asked that I not make much of the day as it is their preference to keep things low key. Anxiety can even creep in from putting expectations on the day and I’d never wish that on my most loved.

I have a truly blessed life with a wonderful close family in my immediate family. As the circle extends perhaps I can gripe (and who doesn’t) but my nearest and dearest are everything to me. The love they show me, the patience with which they grace me, and the love the accept from me are my reasons for being.

So if a milestone needs to be left without a marker to make them happiest I will do so. I do not wish to impose any of my feelings upon them. I want only to lift them up. My love for them is without expectation.

If being anxious and hidden is their choice I love them. If it is being peaceful and alone that brings them joy I love that for them as well. Whatever I can do I shall. My life matters in the tight weave of the tapestry we have made of our life together. No markers or milestones needed.

Categories
Finance Politics Startups

Day 1983 and Socialism is Bad

There is a lot of chatter as to the eventual ownership makeup of the frontier artificial intelligence labs and their economic surplus. One question that came up this weekend is whether equity in the companies should be owned in some portion at the nation state level. I am opposed to this for a host of reasons that I’ll try to get down in whatever garbled form.

I do not own a stake in any of the frontier labs other than owning ETFs that own Magnificent 7 exposure who own portions of the labs. I do invest in compute, nuclear energy and cryptography. I believe AI will change a lot about how we do business, my revealed preferences show I live remotely in Montana, I have a tendency toward emergency planning and Plan B scenarios. As a disclosure of my priors.

There are lots of competing interests in this and the self interests from the labs does no any favors. Especially after months, nay years, of overwhelmingly hyperbole about changing labor dynamics, the potential for mass layoffs due to automation as well as obfuscation and excuses about the reason for layoffs in existing companies. And that’s before we get the singularity which is a religious orientation toward making super intelligence that is Godlike in its framing.

I hate this entire conversation on nationalization and socialism. Part of it is that state actors desiring ownership of private companies reeks of the “you didn’t build that” malapropisms from Barack Obama’s presidency in which he attempted to articulate that America’s enormous wealth is built on generational compacts that no one individual could ever own outright. It triggers socialists and capitalists both.

We all contributed in our own ways to the shared infrastructure, institutions, education, cultural norms and the pluralism embedded in our governance systems that enabled the American Dream.

Unless you are a deep partisan, you understand Obama was trying to articulate that none of us made America alone. But the framing from liberals (and populists of all stripes) automatically make this conversation concerning.

Economics is complicated, central planning has a hell of a body count and your average American can only gesture towards the invisible hand and the benefits of self interested commerce. It’s easy to sell us bad policy from envy and fear.

So I must ask why are we acting like we have suddenly won a national level economic boom with clear winners whose spoils must be distributed by the nation state before we’ve even managed to understand how it will be used, at what level an AI model is a commodity and where the benefits will accrue?

Self interested pluralism with a system of checks and balances at the national federal level coupled with states exercising their own interests has been the bedrock of our national success. Changing this has not gone well for us as a nation nor do we have better examples in other nations.

Sure America has had a few twists and turns. The last time we made an attempt at a New Deal post Great Depression worked only thanks to a global world war industrial mobilization in which we won the war and all our other competitors were decimated on bombed our continents across massive geographical boundaries.

And that boom has been largely spent by the children of the generation that fought this war and their children are looking at a pretty significant bill. So why do labs suddenly want to “compensate” Americans and our collective contributions to the models?

And why are politicians taking this bait when we have so little insight into whether we should funnel cash into them in order to own them in trust for some nebulous future?

I have a few reasons in no particular order that I put on Twitter as to why I am opposed to this format of American state equity being the means through which we compensate the people who theoretically trained these models with our output on the wider open web and its content.

1) We don’t know who the winners will be or where the benefits will diffuse (as in post liquidity the current winners might not be the eventual winners) so compensation for model training when the eventual benefits disperse elsewhere isn’t ideal. Why aren’t taxes at state & federal level aren’t adequate enough here should be answered before we make moves

2) Existing IP law doesn’t account well for culture which is a shared co-creative process (i recommend Susan Scafidi of fashion law institute “who owns culture” ) so compensation is already not easy to track back

3) A state entity w the monopoly on violence can do a lot of damage on the margin by not fully understanding who created what and where it is applied especially in non deterministic systems

4) Much of what the models were trained on was open source licensing including the company where my own family made money Stack Overflow. We got paid sure, but none of this would exist without the effort of its users who contributed on those open license terms. But clearly the final value of the content created & company’s value itself were harvested much further down the line in enterprise contracts for coding models. It was not in the management of an open source license community product created by users or managed by engineers, so who should have been paid? The users who wanted their content to be open sourced? The volunteer moderators? The full time employees? The shareholders of the company, the buyer of the company or the users of that data set at Claude or Cursor or OpenAI? Or is it Americans that never even heard of SO? Where does value accrue over time versus point in time? It’s not an easy question to answer is it?

Categories
Aesthetics Politics

Day 1971 and An American Pope Meets Effective Altruism

To my Catholic friends, I sincerely hope today brought you closer to your faith. It is my hope that you received comfort from Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical, Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.

I myself look forward to reading all 42,000 words of it on an airplane tomorrow. My reader application’s AI says it should take me two hours and thirty minutes. Already the tools have opinions on my study.

I can’t say I fully understand the relationship between the knowledge and teachings put forth by the Pope and a Catholic’s personal faith.

I have very little exposure to Catholicism that isn’t entirely academic so please do not take anything I say seriously or personally, as I’m a mere Protestant.

The Vatican said that Leo had signed the new encyclical on May 15, 135 years to the day since the pope’s namesake, Pope Leo XIII, signed the landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”) on the rights of workers amid the Industrial Revolution. I understand is a crucial modern document in Catholic social doctrine

I read his namesake’s encyclical long ago when I studied economics in Chicago (not very far from where the Pope himself studied) so I am looking forward to comparing the documents once I have had a chance to read the new encyclical.

It’s very hard to have an opinion on a document written by a faith leader to whom I do not defer myself so please hold your judgement as I have held mine.

Without careful study I hesitate to say much beyond my initial impressions of the media circus surrounding the encyclical’s release and the social context of several attendees of the event around the signing.

The document is officially addressed not only to Catholics but to “all people of goodwill,” calling on us to seek the “protection of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence.”

I feel this is an invitation to us all to consider the document seriously. Silicon Valley has been anticipating its release for sometime, with both excitement and trepidation.

We have seen venture capitalists speak on fears of an emergent technological anti-Christ and the role artificial intelligence might play in eschatological matters.

There has also been a significant amount of discussion over the last several years as to the role a movement which calls itself effective altruism has played in the development of artificial intelligence.

In particular, there is concern as to whether the movement itself has become its own theology complete with a singularity eschatology.

I make no secret of my concerns around the EA community, its scandalous financial frauds and its intellectual roots in Benthamite utilitarianism.

They aim to be “less wrong” and take a rationalist approach to moral questions. At first glance this appears to be a kind of technocratic solutionism but has millenarian tendencies in singularity thought.

Several years ago an internecine split developed in Silicon Valley with a faction “meme schism” jokingly calling itself effective accelerationism. I myself professsed a preference for their approach as I am neither a utilitarian nor a rationalist.

E/acc encouraged an approach to technological development which focuses the benefits of material progress in reducing human harms while warning of the harms of the precautionary principle.

Neither are real philosophical traditions in any meaningful sense, but rather competing narrative memetics that came out of the diverse group of technologists making industrial progress from nuclear to computing chips and algorithms.

My concern today came from the highly visible corporate representation at the New Synod Hall in the Vatican during the press release. Past encyclical rollouts were normally handled only by curial officials. This was much flashier and included the Pope.

Further, the Vatican chose to highlight large language model developer Anthropic, and one of its many cofounders Christopher Olah. Both the man, and the corporate entity he represents, are part of an explicitly effective altruist world.

That only one frontier lab with a very particular viewpoint was put front and center as an emissary from the technical community may end up sending an unintended message. Or more worryingly, a very deliberately intended message. Only time will tell.

Categories
Aesthetics Media

Day 1957 and Closet Rummage

I am not up for the nostalgia festival around The Devil Wears Prada. It’s funny to have been in the fashion industry as the world of high gloss fashion magazines was rising in the public eye. It was ironically just as the business of publishing was about to be upended by technological change.

I never did take a job at Condé Nast, though I have some great stories. But I have enjoyed the largess of being inside a fashion brand with a closet. Nothing can fix a day like changing your look without spending a dime. Just “shop” the closet!

If a fashion closet doesn’t appeal to you, imagine a beauty closet. I was on the public relations gifting list for MAC during several of its glory years. I still treasure the packaging. Once I had my own beauty brand, I was swimming in samples that were far less polished but no less enjoyable.

So today that was the happy memory on my mind as I pulled together samples for a friend from my own beauty closet. who is about to go on tour for their work.

Finding just the right colors, chemicals and packaging for her needs was such a joy. I still love the hunt for just the right item that will work. From blazers to retinols, the closet contains fixes to almost all style problems. The bigger problems in life never have a quick fix so it’s worth treasuring the joy of the closet rummage.

Categories
Community Politics

Day 1949 and Swimming in the Contextless Sea Beyond The Dock At The End of History

There is a popular theory that Zoomers and Alphas are struggling with temporal context in culture because their consumption of culture is decoupled from the context in which it was made and consumed. It’s all one long scroll without the punctuations of reality.

The general theory goes that post internet generations see niche algorithm-driven content rather than say cultural or historical touchstones. Past touchstones might have unified past generational experiences.

I don’t know if unified experienced are all good. Sure all of the Boomers have heard the Beatles but all millennial woman recall tabloid headlines about Britney Spears getting fat. The water we swim in can be hard for us fish to spot.

If the younger generations have a problem, it’s being far too unified in their experience of their global position. The pandemic was a surprisingly effective reboot of expectations for all of us. But the older you were the easier it was to contextualize the impact of the pandemic across your entire life.

We all ran a dress rehearsal for collective responsibility at global scale And depending on your personality, you were funneled into perspectives you preferred.

So you saw us either shoulder or shirk responsibility. Not that other generations haven’t had to do some version of this, but being able to see it at networked global scale seems to have done something to the capacity to see the future.

You swim in a sea of history and at any point you can get out of the water. But you jumped off the dock is at the end of history so you can see how getting out might be a problem.

McWorld triumphed over Jihad right? But that is content for a paid Substack where Fukuyama and Zizek both still write. It must have been more convincing in hardcover.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture Startups

Day 1946 and Cultural Appropriation Wars

I wish I hadn’t signed online today. I participated in the basest form of attention grabbing virality as I needed a distraction from Bernie Sanders “America and China Need to Stop Artificial Intelligence” press push colluding with the “foot in mouth” disease of Silicon Valley.

So naturally I got caught up in bizarre intrasexual and intersexual competition schemes. Two absolutely bizarre stories dominated the feeds. The first is Asian women in California and the appeal of the ABG. The second is the alleged fantasies of an Indian banker who wanted us to “believe all men” but like Penthouse letters, it seems too good to be true. An Albanian baddie at JPM wouldn’t be that careless.

No clue what I mean? Let me urge you to stay that way. But I’ll put down some thoughts.

If you are a Subaru driver and Vin Diesel fan, you may dimly remember that they were once rice rockets and not lesbian all terrain vehicles. California has diverse homegrown culture of Asian American women who embrace bad boys, fast cars and their East Bay neighborhoods.

The controversy? The ABG culture is being appropriated by striving Product Mommies who believe their B2B SaaS baes will enable their inner Asian Baddie Gangsta ways. I am not from this culture so I can’t exactly say. I think it’s fine if you want to improve your looks in search of a specific aesthetic. There is even an event you can RSVP to attend.

Now the other horror show I mentioned is about intersexual competition schemes from a different Asian culture. Ink has been spilled on western portrayals of the sexuality of Southeast Asian men, specifically how Anglo culture emasculates them. Well, that’s how the story started out.

It began as a “believe all men” tale of Indian man who was a direct report to a blonde Albanian woman at an investment bank. He alleged being forced into sexual contact with his female superior and it is so salacious my best recommendation is to watch it via anthropomorphic fruit. Well, the internet moves fast.

And as the day went on it turned out that it might be some very lurid erotica written by a rake and the very attractive blonde Albanian banker has in fact had her good name besmirched.

Now why am I associating these two stories? I think that identity in Anglo-American dominant cultures has often flattened the experiences of assimilation into our melting pot. London, New York, the Bay Area all have unique flavors of this blending.

And a cultural niches like East Bay Asian gangster baddies (Los Angeles also has its own variants) being consumed as an identity by other Asian cultures as a way to “be bad and sexy” seems harmless. But it’s also consuming a culture you didn’t create. I understand the annoyance.

The upsetting story coming from banking may be a very different way of embracing and reinforcing sexual narratives for southeast Asian men, but it is still fundamentally a story of belief about sexual identity and how it gets used in the workplace. H

ad it not been so incredibly salacious, we might have considered his side of the story a little bit longer, but it is now a piece of culture that reinforces some of the most negative perceptions of southeast Asian men.

Everyone is free to form their own identities and preferences, but it’s a fascinating day when the two major stories running rampant on social media are examples of constructing westernized, fetishized identities to get ahead.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1938 and ChatGPT 2.0 Image’s Mood Board Mania

Every time a new AI image generation model comes out, there is a wave of people creating new content riffs inspired by their friends testing out the newest capabilities.

Yesterday OpenAI released ChatGPT Images 2.0 which is tool powered by the gpt-image-2 model designed as a “visual thought partner.

It is pretty fun to play with if you have even the slightest design or visual vocabulary to work with. Or even just a couple cool selfies.

No need to focus on regulatory capture politicking, compute shortages, geopolitical drama or shipping choke points when you can create cute social media content right? Screw a grey zone informational wars (or even a hot kinetic one) girls just want to be remade as a fairy princess science or as Studio Ghibli character.

So what’s the next trend? My feed produced a wave of mood boards with color theory, swatching, fabric pins, makeup stories, hairstyles, other mood board elements that combines everything from descriptive prose to capsule wardrobes. And all this from a a couple of basic uploaded photos and some simple prompts.

I choose the below images and said “do a color analysis of the woman in this picture including best colors, makeup choices, hair choices, style options and create a mood board with outfit inspiration, prints that work, accessories and other details”

From there it spat out a long analysis which I will post below. I then asked that analysis to be mocked up in a mood board based on the look and feel of the images with the descriptions from the analysis. And I’m not going to lie it’s pretty good and clearly ChatGPT can smell the Ann Taylor on me. I mean, umm, it can tell I spent time working for some of best known American heritage retailers.

Now it gets weirder the more you try to edit it. The slow warping of my face from my own to I’m going to say Sheryl Sandberg is a little unsettling. But I do wear a lot of silks and prefer greens and browns though I am often a little black dress defaulter.

Now I just went through an enormous exercise in which I tried to find a television and camera ready foundation where other models were sure I was a soft autumn but a soft summer isn’t all that far off.

And I appreciate the buttering up OpenAI does with their quiet luxury spiel. I’m more of an Italic luxury buyer and a Quince if I’m feeling like a gamble. But somewhere back before all this inflation I for sure was the kind of girl who wore chunky antique vermeil accessories and never turned down a nice olive green.

This is a great set of photos for analysis—different lighting, styling, and contrast levels make it much easier to see your natural coloring clearly.

🎨 Overall Color Season: Soft Summer (leaning Neutral-Cool)

You sit in that refined, muted, slightly cool palette with:

  • Low-to-medium contrast (your features blend rather than sharply contrast)
  • Soft, diffused coloring (nothing overly bright or high-chroma)
  • Neutral-cool undertone (pink in the skin, but not icy)

You can borrow slightly from Soft Autumn (especially olive/green tones), but your best looks are cooler and more muted.

🌈 Best Colors for You

✅ Core Palette (your power zone)

  • Dusty rose, muted mauve
  • Soft plum, blackberry
  • Blue-gray, slate, steel blue
  • Sage, eucalyptus, muted olive
  • Taupe, mushroom, cool beige
  • Soft navy (not inky or harsh)

⚠️ Approach Carefully

  • True black (can feel a bit heavy—your blazer photo shows this slightly)
  • Bright white (too stark—soft ivory is better)
  • Bright jewel tones (too high contrast)

🚫 Avoid

  • Neon anything
  • Super warm oranges/yellows
  • High-contrast combos (black + white, etc.)

💄 Makeup Direction

You look significantly more harmonious in the softer, diffused look (photo 1 and 3 vs the sharper blazer look).

Skin

  • Light to medium coverage with a natural or satin finish
  • Avoid overly matte—your skin looks best with a bit of life

Blush

  • Rose
  • Soft berry
  • Muted pink (what you’re wearing in photo 1 = excellent)

Lips (this is your strongest feature zone)

  • Rose gloss (photo 1 = perfect)
  • Mauve nude
  • Sheer berry stains
  • Avoid: orange-red or overly brown lipsticks

Eyes

  • Taupe, mushroom, soft plum
  • Cool brown instead of warm bronze
  • Soft liner (charcoal > black)
  • Mascara: brown-black ideal

💇‍♀️ Hair Analysis

Your natural coloring works beautifully—this is key.

Best Hair Direction

  • Neutral to cool brown
  • Slight ash or soft cocoa tones
  • Subtle dimension (very blended, not high contrast)

Avoid

  • Golden highlights (too warm)
  • Very dark/black dye (overpowers you)
  • High-contrast balayage

Styling Note

You shine with:

  • Soft movement
  • Natural texture
  • Slightly undone polish

👓 Glasses (important win here)

The black frames:

  • Add structure (good)
  • But slightly overpower your softness

Try:

  • Soft charcoal
  • Translucent gray
  • Muted tortoiseshell (cool-toned)

👗 Style Essence + Mood

You read as:

Soft Minimalist + Intellectual Romantic

(very understated, very intentional, very modern)

Think:

  • Quiet luxury
  • Slightly academic
  • Soft structure, not rigid tailoring

🧥 Outfit Direction

Silhouettes

  • Fluid tailoring
  • Draped fabrics
  • Soft blazers (less sharp shoulders)
  • Relaxed but intentional lines

Fabrics

  • Silk
  • Fine knits
  • Matte satin
  • Soft wool
  • Avoid stiff, shiny synthetics

🧵 Best Neutrals (your wardrobe backbone)

  • Mushroom
  • Cool taupe
  • Soft navy
  • Dusty olive
  • Muted charcoal (instead of black)

🌿 Prints That Work

Because your coloring is soft, your prints should be too:

✅ Ideal

  • Blurred florals
  • Watercolor patterns
  • тонal (low contrast) stripes
  • Soft geometrics

🚫 Avoid

  • High-contrast graphic prints
  • Sharp black/white patterns
  • Loud, busy designs

📌 What Your Photos Show (Specific Feedback)

Photo 1 (window light, glasses)

Best overall look

  • Soft pink lip = perfect
  • Brown shirt = harmonious
  • Natural light = confirms your muted palette

Photo 2 (black blazer)

  • Black is wearing you slightly
  • More contrast than your features naturally support
  • Makeup slightly sharper → less aligned with your softness

Photo 3 (relaxed, green tone)

  • Muted green = excellent
  • Skin looks balanced and even
  • This palette direction is very “you”

🧭 Style Keywords (use these when shopping)

  • Muted
  • Soft
  • Washed
  • Dusty
  • Neutral-cool
  • Blended
  • Understated
Categories
Startups

Day 1936 and Life Inside The Jackpot or I Remain An Optimist

I did not expect to spend so much of my time on politics. Or maybe that’s the wrong word. I look being in voluntary service to American governance as my civic obligation. It can look like politics even when it’s mostly trying to be helpful to the running of our polity.

After 2016 I felt regular citizens like myself needed to recall Kennedy’s patriotic inaugural address from 1961. “Ask not what your country could do for you, but what you can do for your country.” America is a complicated place but we get a say in it. And I’d like to help people understand what I know so it might be useful in serving America in very strange times.

My mother loved Kennedy’s profiles in courage. Boomers have beautiful mythos on facing the new world together. He was the first president born in the 20th century. The social compact of America changed quite a bit then. I wonder who the first president born in the 21st century will be. Maybe it will be another young Catholic man.

The optics of progress aside, it was clear as a new generation in Kennedy’s era took on a new obligation to come together when the American experiment felt at risk. So much about who benefit from the military industrial complex rested in the transition from Eisenhower to Kennedy.

I think the context is a little different when progress feels inevitable. Our moment is scary. Though the Cold War was not primarily optimism. They experienced as many breaks with institutional trust as we do in 2026.

Tines are different but I do not think the prescription is different. We owe it to each other to embrace change together. What can we do for America?

I am not the son of a mobster nor am I a nepo-baby of America’s great cultural surplus. I wish. I’m not presidential material or Tiktok star material.

I do have some singular cultural advantages. I am a regular person from slightly unusual circumstances that happened to enjoy some upwardly mobility which let me to participate as an equal in an important transition point. I am actually rather surprised to matter at all. But I do and I intend to advocate for America succeeding together in this change.

I do take technology as a force in society seriously. I believe surplus is an amazing thing. My life is completely different than my biological history. Given how my human DNA was programmed and what I can do daily beyond that you bet I take artificial intelligence seriously. Material progress is real.

I take the physics of demand seriously. It seems like not everyone is confident we can speak to the general public about what it means that the technology industry has found a way to automate itself. It is a scary thing to say. And we begin with ourselves. It is actually our jobs that go first. If we believe it can be better on the other side of the Jackpot live like it.

And I do. I live a little further from civilization for the peace and quiet and because I am a little uncertain. But artificial intelligence’s new incredibly malleable models have changed my capacity by an order of magnitude. How wish I could have had this when I was a software and cosmetics founder.

I am a heavy user of all the hosted commercial models because they are in fact very good. I can do so much more across all the areas of life where I have to figure things out on my own.

I have health problems that are expensive and challenging. I’m lucky to be able to explore extensively the web of issue that drive having a body which has decided it must overreact. And I am in the process of fixing it. In ways that I’d never have had access to before Claude or ChatGPT. I have comfortably setups in spreadsheets and web apps and we can map years of bloodwork and experiments.

I think America is having an autoimmune reaction to the idea of automation as the end product of artificial intelligence. We sense it as a threat and it’s both terrifying in its potential but also a bit of the optimism has waned as the culture of technology fails to engage the mainstream as normal or even beneficial.

It’s the same process of making life better we have run. We took all our brain power to make our physical jobs easier. This has largely been viewed as a benefit to everyone except by strict biological determinists. Bronze Age romanticism is just that.

Thanks to progress in mathematics, we can now make knowledge that was extremely expensive to find, query, and organize as as accessible as asking an expert a good question.

Which is actually still tricky. Most Arthurian legends seem to resolve on knowing what to ask in order to receive wisdom. Knowing what to ask is not easily solved by mathematics. It’s not actually a cheat sheet but rather a powerful way to enable yourself. If you wish to take on that responsibility.

I feel I am somewhere between Hill and Valley in that I work in this world and I chose to become civically engaged. And I am concerned about where we are at. I am genuinely an optimist though as I think humans are so very adaptable. So I try to translate between the tribes who run our system and the tribe of people who make the systems run by the first tribe.

Maybe it’s be being somewhat in between that lets me be a node between the hill and the valley in America. Or as others frame it as a tripartite of Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley. I think that’s a bit grandiose only because maybe empires run on roads and plumbing but let’s not get forget that power is diffused in a network era. Every node that can route information has power.

The criticisms technology rightly takes from our body politic is that we are going quite fast. I know. I am inside the Gibsonian Jackpot with you. And I know it’s hard to believe that living through the change can be good even if we have inklings of the way life is already better right now. So we have to work together to figure it out.