Tag: Montana

Categories
Community

Day 1545 and Karens Calling Corporate

We’ve had a running joke amongst our friends in Bozeman that we have America’s worst Chipotle.

None of the food ever tastes quite right and MSU students who staff it always manage to have some random crisis playing out. Chipotle owns and operates all of its North American locations rather than franchising so it’s got no real excuses.

It’s bad enough that it was brought up to our friend’s sibling who works at Chipotle corporate. Is it complaining to management when it’s your family? A question for Karens of all ages.

Their Local Line program works to source food within a few hundred miles of its restaurants so you’d think at least the beef would be top notch.

Ahile in a hurry we ended up stopping by Chipotle as it was the quickest option on our way to a firm deadline. Now maybe we were really hungry but the food was terrific. Had our complaints reached someone?

After more than a year of avoiding the chain it had finally recovered. Probably a lesson in there about brand standards and the value of complaints.

The food has back at normal Chipotle “decency” and even the students were moderately more competent. Even the customers seemed in better spirits. We saw an actual teenage boy shoot his shot with a table of smiling girls.

Categories
Community Politics

Day 1540 and Zoning Out

Yesterday I was lucky enough to get a tour of a new mixed use housing development on the south side of Bozeman called Blackwood Groves.

I was introduced to one of the developers Dave through the serendipity of Twitter. He graciously walked Alex and I through the plans for community.

It’s thoughtful in including a range of housing types so younger families have a chance to grow. It has parks and public gathering spaces. It abuts public middle school. It will have retail amenities practical to the community. It feels like a little town in the town.

As a Montana resident who is Bozeman adjacent, I’m thrilled to see more housing being built. Especially for younger families. Having grown up in Boulder I feel a particular sense of obligation to make sure that Bozeman doesn’t end up like my hometown. Housing costs a fortune. Younger generations can’t afford to live and leave.

It’s hard to find housing. It’s hard to build housing. Housing is easily America’s most expensive problem. And seeing builders who want to make mountain towns actually feel like the towns we grew up in is encouraging.

Its hard to do well and there is a lot stacked against builders and buyers. We should want build up to a future that enables us to live and be industrious together across generations.

I support the Frontier Institute because it’s consistently putting force great policy on making sure we build the future in Montana. A little blurb from their work on property rights this sessions. Being able to build is going to take real reform.

Categories
Community

Day 1532 and Friendly Service

Much of our winter has revolved around various maladies that require the help of professional from doctors to industrial hygienists.

Alex and I (let’s be honest mostly Alex) have been scheduling a lot of consultations and procedures. While I’ll certainly caveat that selling a service does generally mean being friendly to the customer. But it really feels like like we’ve got friendlier people in Montana.

Even our government is friendly. We’ve has cause to call the county and it’s just so pleasant to engage with a kind, present and helpful fellow human.

We’ve really run the gamut. Our trash needed replacing after a hard winter and the company who does our pickup sent us a new one the next day. A recycling service for mattresses excitedly told us about community programs. The eye clinic got us in the day we called. And on the follow up let us add in an eye exam since we were already there.

We are all accustomed to the frustrations that come from indifferent corporations with private equity minders. Healthcare is by far the worst offender here.

So it’s nice to be reminded in a vulnerable world that American towns are filled with everyday people like you and me. And that genuinely makes me happier. We are all in this together and being friendly makes everything for everyone.

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
Media Politics

Day 1512 and Thumbs Down

It’s been a bad month for me. It seems like a bad month in general. But that’s February for you right? It’s a thumbs down kind of month. I’ve enjoyed the nonstop snow but we’ve finally gone above freezing.

Icicles

As the sun melts down our power into icicles I’ll try not to dwell on the negatives.

Reading

The Brussels Effect or Denialism in Europe

Are you a Frankfurt School student? I certainly am. If you are, you may find John Ganz’s review of Alex Karp’s new book The Technological Republic to be an amusing read. His Substack also has some gems including this imagine of Adorno which I intend to use everywhere.

Theodor W. Adorno giving a thumbs down

Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1502 and Always Something

When we first moved to Montana we did a pretty thorough home inspection. My husband flew in a friend who is residential contractor.

We didn’t need much remediation work. A bit of radon and we installed a state of the art water filtering system but otherwise everything from foundations to soil quality were looking good. But you can never be too sure things stay that way.

We’ve done some repairs and installations over the past two years and it would appear somewhere in there we must have had some water damage. We ran some mold tests and the reports are not good.

As we’d done so much testing before moving in we’d not done thorough assessment. It hadn’t seemed necessary. But as part of the new year’s rigorous “get a grip on autoimmune” push we did an ERMI test (done via dust collection) through an independent lab EnviroBiomics.

The Environmental Relative Moldiness Index (ERMI) test is a DNA-based method developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to assess indoor mold contamination by analyzing settled dust in homes.

It uses mold-specific quantitative polymerase chain reaction (MSqPCR) to identify and quantify 36 mold species, which are divided into two categories: Group 1 (associated with water-damaged homes) and Group 2 (common indoor molds not linked to water damage).

The ERMI score is calculated by subtracting the log-transformed sum of Group 2 molds from Group 1 molds, providing a single numerical value to indicate the relative moldiness of a house.

Welp. Seems like we may have some water damage somewhere. We’ve got some theories from the last two years.

ERMI Score 18.3:
Places this bedroom in the higher range of mold contamination. Typically, an ERMI above 5 is already considered higher than average. A score of 18.3 signals a strong likelihood of hidden moisture issues or longstanding mold growth.

We also ran a HERTSMI-2 test on which we scored 20. That test is a bit more salient for my autoimmune conditions. And its results were not encouraging. Running that through ChatGPT’s new Deep Research.

This test is used to gauge risk for mold-sensitive or chronically ill individuals. A value over 15 strongly suggests that the environment may be unsafe for those with mold-related illnesses or sensitivities. Re-occupancy should be delayed until remediation and follow-up testing confirm substantially reduced mold levels.

We have to do remediation of some sort though we think it’s limited to the basement. But I’ll be staying upstairs for a while if this conclusion is sound. It’s always something.

Conclusion: The contamination is significant and poses a tangible health risk. Addressing it thoroughly is crucial, particularly given your household’s health concerns.

Categories
Homesteading Medical

Day 1497 and Doing Poorly

Maybe this is typical for mid-winter but it sure seems like everyone is doing poorly.

We’ve been pretty socked in weather wise in Montana for the last week so it was easy to get lost in the usual winter issues of snow accumulating and cold temperatures. It’s beautiful but isolating.

Adirondack chairs peeping out of the snow

But it’s not just Montana feeling the winter. We’ve got storm systems all across America. Seems like snowstorms and ice storms are hitting hard. Extreme weather patterns remain the norm for us all.

Influenza-A is having a second surge. When someone gets a cold or even the flu they usually describe symptoms. When it’s bad enough that you finally go to a doctor and get a test then you start to hear about the Influenza A diagnoses. And I’ve heard dozens of cases over the past two weeks.

I feel pretty poorly myself but it’s not influenza-A. I wish it were so simple. I’m not sure what’s going on but we’ve got doctors on the case.

At least our chickens are dug out of the snow. We’ve had so much accumulation over the last few days that our normal tractor plowing of the drive is inadequate. We need paths dug out to other areas too. Alex took out the small walkway snowblower and made a path around.

Our third and smallest snowblower barely up to the task of digging out the chickens

Categories
Homesteading Politics Preparedness

Day 1493 and Familiar With Our Game

I’d love to go on a long rant about the new tariffs America intends to impose, but a big winter storm is approaching and being prepared for that is likely the more important task.

Yes I am aware a much bigger looming economic storm on the horizon. I’ve been a “doomer” a while so I’ve come to gripes with that many years ago.

In joking about choosing what fine Canadian products like All Dressed Chips and Letterkenney we should be importing before the new Trump 2.0 tariffs kick in, I shared the preparations we’ve done to mitigate future dislocations. Someone said we should stock more electricity. Well, good news on that front.

That would be true except we have a giant solar array that provides enough electricity for heating, lighting, our bitcoin mining (whose heat exhaust exchange warms our barn where we keep the hydroponic greens)

For those not familiar with our game

The expectation we had when we settled in Montana was that those who prioritized resilience would be in better shape. Chaotic times means being able to handle whatever changes are thrown at you.

It’s been a great life choice. If we have oil shocks or supply chain implosions we are more prepared than average to muddle through it.

Categories
Chronic Disease Politics

Day 1486 and Odds and Ends and Migraines

It was a busy week. I felt physically well through most of it, but yesterday and today I am struggling. I’m in bed with a migraine that I think I accidentally kicked off by enjoying a quiet walk on sunny snowpack.

Amusing that people think we don’t get enough sun for solar power

While I prefer to have illness strike on a weekend, I feel irritated that I often get my personal time used up by health issues. I very much prioritize using my good hours for work.

Which on that note, I’d love for folks to check out a bill in Montana to secure a right to compute. What started as an idea has now officially been introduced into the legislative process. It’s a big victory to have this under consideration.

I was also in the New York Times this week in a column by James Pogue. It’s my second time being interviewed by him and I think quite highly of his reporting.

A few quotes in the New York Times on the tech right, the H1B debate, and a general sense of getting back to business

Categories
Internet Culture Politics

Day 1484 and Montana’s Right to Compute Bill

The one thing that really unites the American west, but in particular the Rocky Mountain West, is our independent streak. We take our rights seriously.

We don’t like being told what to do by the government. I hope to contribute to this tradition in my own efforts as a citizen. I’m pleased to support a bill that guarantees Montanan’s right to compute.

It shouldn’t be up to the government how you decide to access compute or what you do with it. Don’t be fooled by jargon or think tanks with fancy experts, computing is just math. We must secure our freedom to compute and Montana is leading the pack on this issue.

So what does this bill do? I’m cribbing a Tweet from Tanner Avery with a terrific synopsis but you can read the full bill here when you’ve got extra time.

Sen. Daniel Zolnikov has officially introduced SB 212, the Right To Compute Act, to the #mtleg.

This bill will ensure Montanans’ rights to free expression and property are protected in the 21st century, in addition to helping position Montana as a world-class destination for AI and Data Center investment.

Here’s what it does:

1: Establish the Right to Compute: The legislature makes it clear that privately owning or making use of computational technologies for lawful purposes is protected as an aspect of fundamental rights to free expression and use of property.

2: Create a New Policy Framework: Restrictions on the ability to privately own or use computational resources must be limited to those demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling state interest in public health or safety.

3: Balance Interests: Provides mechanisms for policymakers to address real harms to public health and safety posed by the application of new computational technologies, while also ensuring that regulations do not excessively burden the Right to Compute.

I feel like I’ve been discussing this issue forever but in reality we are in the first innings of how artificial intelligence will change our lives. And it has real possibilities for making many aspects of our very human lives better.

I don’t want this technology (which is again just math) being restricted by the federal government or dominated by a handful of corporate behemoths who can comply with endless regulations. Compute is for the people.

The last best place to compute