Tag: Montana

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Politics Travel

Day 1904 and Ms Fredrickson Goes to Washington

I will be in our nation’s capital next week for a gathering called the Hill and Valley Forum. It’s been ongoing for a few years but I am not someone with a lot of exposure to Washington and wasn’t sure I should pitch myself when the forum describes itself as such.

We host public discussions, panels, and published dialogues that highlight leading voices at the intersection of technology, security, and geopolitics.

Perhaps it’s silly not to think of myself as a leading voice in technology but I don’t know much about security (or its cousin defense) and my commentary on geopolitics is for fun on Twitter.

However, having seen others fail where I have succeeded, in passing successful bipartisan artificial intelligence policy I thought this year I should throw my cap in the thing. It’s not a nice feather having successfully brought the right to compute campaign from citizenry to policy to law in Montana.

It is now succeeding at the national level as states like New Hampshire have passed it in their house and well respected bipartisan policy organizations like ALEC have recommended it as policy.

My husband made a pilgrimage to our capital as the gentleman from Montana to testify before Congress last spring. I was very proud of him. I suspect he is easily as proud of my work on compute policy.

So if you’d like to meet some real Americans (8 wasn’t aware we had fake ones) and are in Washington D.C. drop us a line. I’m hoping to do a little meetup maybe on Monday but not all of my in groups will each other so maybe I’ll do more than one.

But wherever happens I’m excited to share time with other patriotic Americans who do the hard work of making sure we are governed well.

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Community Internet Culture Politics

Day 1903 and Ranting About Bentham

The tyranny of small differences can be the most vicious. I love vendettas in fashion and venture as they are connoisseurs of grievance.

Small communities with insular structures simmer embittered for years. You always know where someone, who is otherwise quite close to you, has committed a venal sin which cannot be forgiven.

But many times these small differences are actually the stuff of the breach. Once crossed you can never return. The opening cannot be closed without a great sacrifice. And these sacrifices are your character.

I am as well versed in the ridiculous schisms of my own affinity groups. As libertarians I’ll go on about the Cato libertarians, I’ll support my an-caps but I I’ll blood feud with the rest.

I feel this way about rationalists and the way they have introduced utilitarianism to Silicon Valley. And I want to be sympathetic here because there are aspects of effective altruism that are perfectly reasonable at first. I like prudent spending and reducing suffering with effective allocation.

But utilitarianism, taken to its end, has issues that anyone who has read Jeremy Bentham has to grapple with. The means do not justify the ends. We are all struggling with the horrors of the problems this creates in a modern society.

I saw the value of the manufactured meme campaign of effective acceleration as it oddly ended up dragging us to the middle. That was the intention and it achieved it. One can have many disagreements in the details.

However I do not think that political actors as far apart as Steve Bannon and MIRI agree on anything philosophically except “we want control over artificial intelligence so the people who are lesser than me can have no say.”

I cannot see how opposing forms of populist control can travel together without fear for character.

Everyone tries to be agreeable right up until coercive violence from Leviathan is required. And I guess some of you don’t think too hard about hard power huh?

I happen to find the request to have so much control over your fellow Americans to be an offensive view.

You think so little of the citizens of your own country when our core constitutional values require us to have so much more responsibility for ourselves?

I do think it is actually a moderate viewpoint that I believe in all of us. I believe in Americans no matter how stupid we can be. Remember that whole being a libertarian thing. I think personal responsibility requires more and Americans have delivered more despite our many failures.

I recognize that my personal stance here is not the final stance, especially as something of an outlier but because we have checks and balances, I know my involved citizenship demands that I declare where I stand.

Which is why the right to compute law that Montana adopted was a largely uncontroversial and popular when it was a bill. Before politics got involved, regular citizens, who were not whipped into a froth or frenzy, could understand that participating in the digital economy is crucial to living in the modern world.

It impacts our first, second, and fourth amendment rights directly because it demands we answer questions about property.

The wider existential issues on artificial intelligence do not get to be more important than our existing jurisprudence nor the opinions of our citizens.

The way we legislate and the value of our system of government, both state and federal, have a part to play. It’s funny the libertarian is making this argument I know, but it is a good revealed values exercise. Don’t get trapped by charlatans who have already declared that the ends justify the means. We both know they don’t.

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Aesthetics Politics Startups

Day 1898 and Please Copy Our Homework

Today has been a very gratifying day for a very strange intersecting set of reasons. You may know that I have spent several years working to pass a “right to compute” law in Montana. It was signed into law in August of 2025 by Governor Gianforte.

I was so grateful that a campaign I initiated became not only become a bipartisan policy but a law supported by many Montana citizens & legislators. Now to see it go national not only model policy for the American Legislative Exchange Council but now have a second state, New Hampshire, pass it in their house, gives me indescribable joy.

Just forty eight more states to go. Though I believe it’s going to be an uphill climb as the topic of artificial intelligence has well and truly become politicized which makes stating simple cases of shared values much harder.

Except this isn’t really about artificial intelligence. Compute is a much broader and bigger thing than AI. It’s the stuff of the modern world. But that doesn’t mean we can’t apply what we know to be core American values as the lens through which we see it. Indeed it’s crucial we do.

Last year people could easily see that this was a sensible law that reflected our American values. Because of this sensible approach “the right to compute” is a winning coalition. It was bipartisan. So naturally it became a culture war.

I urge you not to adopt that frame. The right to compute speaks to American’s most cherished beliefs. Recognizing that it is not a novel legal theory. It is the application of the Constitution’s oldest commitments—to expression, to property, to liberty against government coercion

Even if you do not understand how all of its parts work, most understand that the entire digital world, in its constituent parts, is mathematics executed on physical hardware.

When government restricts computation, it does not merely regulate an industry. It restricts the tools through which people think, express themselves, and make use of their own property. Through that lens it’s clear we as Americans decide ourselves how to use it.

I hope we can remember this as the world changes and political actors look to change your mind. I do expect this to become a very complicated and uncomfortable position to have staked out.

Yet I feel confident that we will be able to make the case that this is not only the most American way of handling our future challenges, but is also practically the best way to bring abundance in a chaotic world. America is a land of reinvention that changes material conditions. We need not seek doom.

I believe that I have articulated that vision over the last five years of writing and investing so you can see my revealed preferences. I called our fund chaotic.capital for a reason. It’s hard, weird, difficult and scary but it’s also possible to be a lot better in the digital world such that we can use those gains to make the material world better. We can be more than productive primates with jobs

From nuclear energy to compute, this is what I believe and where I have put my time and money. We are organizing our world of atoms through the power of compute. And that can bring about a materially better world for everyone. Which I want.

I have been thrilled to see so many different people come together around the basic premise that we are empowered to do things.

We can lean in to the accelerating changes, all while holding fast to the reins of the values that built America, so that we may steer ourselves to material success.

Travis Kalanick of Uber may be among the best founders to have ever played the venture startup game. Today he has espoused our thesis & reinforced the work of my friends & founders. To see a cultural program written by a big coalition be part of his return to startup life (though he was never gone) is validating. We’ve found a rallying call.

The way forward is through the application of math on real problems. We can dramatically reimagine outcomes and the pace at which we do it. It’s scary and will look different but our grandparents lived through a lot of change too. Their grandparents as well. It’s the human condition.

I believe all of this is grounded in a philosophical foundation that is a recommitment to America’s core constitutional values. We are free to make things. And sometimes, when we apply ourselves, the world really does change.

If you are a canny socialist thinking look at this useful idiot for capital, I am honestly surprised that dialectical materialism has become so disliked by its own movement. If states with conservative libertarians can see that culture only changes when material conditions improve why don’t you want to improve them? Please feel free to copy our work as we have studied yours. You can find model policy here.

Categories
Preparedness

Day 1897 and Howling Gusting Horrors

We have been in the middle of a massive windstorm since some time late last night in South west Montana.

We are lucky in Gallatin Valley too. Further northwest communities like Glacier and high country passes can expect white out blizzards.

Meanwhile, here outside Bozeman, we have the unnerving, unsettling, intermittent howl of unexpected and inconsistent gusts of wind. And they are strong.

Just about 50 miles east of us a sheriff pulled over to help a tipped over semi on I-90 only to have another truck tip onto his car. Thankfully everyone is OK.

The winds have been roaring across the valley in the bright blue high-altitude daylight. Blinding and deafening in equal measure. You almost pray for the clouds to come in. Which they do, quickly and with little warning before they are swept away.

All morning it has been bright and loud and my animal hindbrain hated it. It reminds me of the conditions before the prairie fire that burned 3000 homes to the ground in Boulder Colorado. The fear of fire in dry landscapes has become a permanent feature of the west.

Our snowpack is poor this year in the Rockies, so it’s a whistling screeching horror racing through patches of bare brown grasses. Only the mountains serve as wind breakers. It makes you feel exposed as barren aspens and cottonwoods trees do little to slow the wind down.

We aren’t quite in the main area of concern and yet our winds are gusting past 40mph

I have on noise canceling headphones to cut down on the howl to focus. Your mind can’t train itself to adapt to this type of wind as white noise. The gusts are too unpredictable.

We secured what we could, but items are flying around with ease. Our chickens haven’t left their hen house all day. It’s unsettling.

We’ve done our preparations. This afternoon we gassed up and got groceries. Dishes are washed and the laundry is done. I wish I was in a little less pain, as a shower is part of my usual storm routine but I’ve been in a migraine pattern. At least the clouds are coming in to cut down on the light.

Cars with extra gas cans and spare tires

We aren’t the only ones thinking ahead. When we got gas in town, the van next to us had multiple cans to fill. A wise precaution. If you are up north stay safe and be prepared. If you don’t need to travel consider staying put. There is no reason to put yourself in harm’s way. If it’s ripping the lights off barns, just think might else it might do.

Security cameras are on but a flood light got ripped clear off
Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1893 and Gusty Groaning Roaring Winds

Yesterday I went from the bright blustery Pacific surf beaches of San Diego to the fault block ridges of the Bridger Range in Montana’s Rocky Mountains. Going from one climate to another in the span of a few hours remains a wonder for me.

While I enjoyed the nervous system soothing peace that comes with watching the waves, I did feel a sense of relief coming over the snow capped peaks into the Gallatin Valley.

It’s been a dry winter with very little snow pack, ans the accumulation is much needed. It’s odd for Montana to have had so little snow this winter. I missed much of it but in truth I’ve seen more real winter in the mountains of Sarajevo and Greece than Montana.

I’ve been at sea level for long enough that I am nervous about my adjustment to altitude. After unpacking and restocking groceries, I went for a mile and a half loop that is my usual leg stretching route.

My V02 max remained identical to the scoring from the day before at sea level. My other biometrics are in a difficult place with my resting heart rate high and my heart volatility quite low

Twenty mile an hour gusts wiped across the valley which encouraged me to move a little faster than usual and breath deeply when I could. It was a stark contrast from the slow ambling cross sandy beaches that made up my recent exercise. The stress of altitude isn’t just the oxygen and exposure to the sun but the generally more challenging conditions.

While the mountains have enjoyed some fresh snow, the valley is brown and dry. It’s bizarrely warm at 58 degrees as we spring forward. The record high for March 8th is 62 in 2004 but we are meant to see an inch of snow and a drop back into the lower 30s.

We shall see how I adapt but I need some rest as the rate of change for everything is as jarring as waking up on the beach and falling asleep up in the mountains in the space of one day.

Categories
Politics Preparedness Startups

Day 1887 and Trust Me Bro

I don’t feel terrific so I’ll keep this as a ramble but with some links. I fear some sort of Rubicon has was crossed, which we will only recognize in hindsight, in the fight for property rights in America versus the tyranny of failing state capacity.

I am referring to the contract dispute between foundation model developer Anthropic and American Secretary of War Hegseth that boiled over on Friday night as some sort of Murderbot surveillance subplot parsed only by lawyers, policy wonks and anyone who remembers the patriotism of Chelsea Manning.

Right before America and Israel went all Epic Fury on Iran over the weekend, somehow it was felt a messy public fight between defense contractor and the civilian oversight of our military was ok? Good thing everyone is too distracted to care.

Funny how one can go from cheering on our military’s capacity for innovation one week and the next to be waving one’s arms screaming “no oh no no no” but that’s just politics as run by the instincts of reality television I suppose.

The best writing on this so far has been Dean Ball (who worked in this Trump administration on its AI position statement not so long ago) who feels that Hegseth took an approach on renegotiating a contract with a frontier AI model developer that has consequences.

Loosely and I am missing much Anthropic had its previous contract to parse classified documents in the Department of Defense (now the Department of War) negotiated by the prior administration. Some aspects of this contract wasn’t going to work for the Trump administration. Anthropic didn’t want to change it and Hegseth threatened to call Anthropic a supply chain risk unless it complied. They didn’t and Sam Altman signed a deal.

Wrapped up in this is that of course we all eventually comply with Leviathan who has the monopoly on violence. I don’t claim any expertise here but lots of people understand defense contractor law.

On its face Anthropic looks like the moral high ground and the position all capitalists and private property respected would prefer. However, it’s in Dean’s words, a bit weird for a company to tell the state that a private corporation has a say in policy as opposed to our democratic institutions.

Anthropic is essentially using the contractual vehicle to impose what feel less like technical constraints and more like policy constraints on the military

This is all complicated by the model developer having wishes for frontier AI development to be nationalized and for their work in particular to be safeguarded by a different political administration. It has become a right versus left thing as it was bound to do.

Now Anthropic gets to enjoy the full throated defense of its industry peers and even conservative policy makers like Dean, because our current state capacity is not what I’d call excellent when it comes to our civilian government capacity. Honestly our military still seems to be crushing it.

Secretary Hegseth looked a bit like he was over reaching in his command that he get his demands met. Americans are very touchy about surveillance of if’s citizens and much less touchy about autonomous weapons so it’s natural to be a bit suspicious if you are a millennial who remembers the Global War on Terror. If you are Zoomer who doesn’t know who Chelsea Manning is please go ask Claude.

However it’s not at all clear that Hegseth’s original negotiations were out of hand as of course it’s the state who decides legal use not the private company and we are meant to have laws, judicial process and all the rest. It’s just that we don’t. So what on earth do we do about it? Trust me bro is not a policy.

Categories
Preparedness Travel

Day 1879 and Costco versus Cartels vs The State

I have more than one founder in my portfolio who has struggled with basing their businesses in America because U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is barely functional. My own family has been affected on the personal front.

I’m proud America is so desirable a destination. But we can’t be such a dysfunctional one. That makes me feel shamed. I want us to bring the best and brightest here to build.

I’ve never felt such patriotism as we begin to invest in industry and energy again. The America that makes it to its 250th birthday is at another turning point. When hasn’t she been?

My phone showed me memories of the last big birthday trip we took with my father for his 80th. He passed this year. Smiling photos of my brother and I and our spouses with my father a little bemused but happy to be in Puerto Vallarta.

It was cheap boomer luxury provided by a Costco vacation plan. Today the Costco in Puerto Vallarta is on fire. Cartel infighting they say. That detente is done

The last time I saw a Costco on fire my hometown lost a third of its housing stock in a freak prairie fire. In a sick twist of fate those homes housed scientists who did work on weather stations and forecasting work for NIST, NCAR and NOAA.

One of my friends owns an Airstream which they use to go from job to job. They park it in front of their home. A elderly neighbor called in a complaint.

Despite many destitute disorderly trailers and tents on sidewalks, now my friend is the one to get ticked and towed from his own parking spot. A simple ordinance broke and now it’s a fight with the city.

Rentals sit in an uneasy tension with elderly populations sitting housing wealth. They rent their second homes whose property taxes haven’t been reappraised for decades to those of us who might appreciate an opportunity to arbitrage one home’s desirable location for ski season for a break in the winter.

Freedom to transact with one’s own property in an era where property tilts to the elderly feels uncertain. The struggling homeless can’t be moved, but the legal tenant can’t park his van in front of his own home. In Airbnbs they don’t want you to stay more than 14 days. I guess that’s when you get squatters.

I want our institutions to function. I want a viable state capable of doing the business of its citizens. Instead it’s renter classes and public employee unions and right outside (and inside too) our borders we see corporations, crime syndicates and subsidies for the thee and not me for me. Normalcy bias until the Costco is on fire. And then we forget all over again.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture Medical Startups Travel

Day 1826 and Some Best of 2025 Selections

Yesterday I wrote about the experience of my daily writing experiment rounding out its fifth year. It’s been a fun and often emotional journey that I find hard to fully capture. But I’ll attempt to list a few of my favorite posts of 2025 on the last day of year.

Healthcare and Biohacking

Day 1490 and Healthcare’s Sin Eaters

Day 1468 Deciding to Go HBOT and Starting HBOT

1567 and Turkish Medical Tourism

1565 and Elephant’s Eye

1560 and Getting an HBOT

Day 1517 and Blink Blink (First Incision of 4 Scalpel Incidents in 2025

Day 1503 and Managing Healthcare Projects from Mold to Hyperbarics

Startups

Day 1486 and Is There A Tech Right

Day 1510 and Turning Valar On

Day 1542 and Future Blind

Day 1572 and Reskilling

Media

Day 1485 and A New Pogue at The New York Times

Day 1581 and Lecturing at UC Boulder on Renegade Futurism

Day 1569 and the sky above the port tuned to a dead channel

Day 1496 and Maneuver Warfare

Politics

Day 1484 and Montana’s Right to Compute Bill

Day 1549 and Productive Primates

Day 1578 and Dark Start or Energy Realism

Day 1576 and a NatCon Boomer Kicks a Townie Millennial Out of Their Hometown

Trends, Cultural and the Academy

Day 1484 and Zoomer Identity Violence Trend

Day 1479 and Liminal Industrial Transport in an Empty Frankfurt International Terminal Pod Hotel

Day 1580 and Learning By Doing or Embodied Learning for Humans

Day 1575 and Renegade Futurism

Day 1555 and Modern Machiavelli

And I got to about May and realized I didn’t feel like I needed to put more into the organization. I had 4 medical procedures involving surgery. My father died. My best startups all raised rounds to scale. You can find your own way from there. It’s been a hard year despite the wins.

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Chronic Disease Chronicle Emotional Work

Day 1825 and Thoughts On Five Years of Writing Every Single Day

Much as it amazes me, I have written a public post every single day without fail for five straight years. I’ve not missed a single day.

I’ve written so many posts and essays, it honestly astonishes me. I didn’t expect to have this kind of longevity when I began but the world changed a lot in this past half decade. I am a woman of habits & routines, this blog helps me manage the chaos and instability that surrounds us. And hopefully I’ve become a better thinker (and writer) for this habit.

If you’d like to look back with me, I have a round up of 2021‘s best posts from fashion theory to the emotions of startup exits. They feel like a lifetime ago.

In my round up of favorites from 2022 aka year 2 of the experiment, we moved to Montana, bought our first house, had silly viral hits, & I became a certified wilderness first responder.

In my third year of posts from 2023, things remained intense. I accelerated into chaotic optimism, helped other millennial women understand fucked up fertility, and experimented with living outside America part time to improve my visibility on global issues.

And in fourth year of writing, my round up of my best posts of 2024 really showed a world sped up even further. My essays ranged widely with emotional work, crab bucket zero sum-ism & young men, Vernor Vinge’s legacy becoming our actual reality and the bizarre experience of digital memetics becoming constant real world issue.

So now it’s time to think about year five of the experiment. 2025 was a hard year for me even as it contained incredible wins. Going into it, I wondered how could year five top the past four years chronicled here? It both does and it doesn’t. Life, and the time we spend living it down, isn’t getting any easier. Life is barely human at all anymore. I feel the struggle in myself as I am still very much human.

It’s easy to feel as if I’ve not accomplished as much as my own written records show I did. If you ever feel like you get less done than you’d like, I encourage you to keep a log or journal as it helps show how much can do and how much does get done. Plus if you publish it online you’ll contribute to a wider humanistic understanding as our digital life becomes more mechanistic.

Another facet of this writing experiment has been fighting a chronic disease in my personal life that has no cure. Managing disabilities during with the pandemic years as it overlaid civilization shaking political and technological changes has been hard. I want to work and live as if I am healthy and it isn’t likely to ever be true. I work smarter because I can’t work harder.

I don’t always write about my investments in these posts, but I see how my thesis of chaos has forced us all into requiring more decentralization, compute and power. My once weird ideas are now common knowledge. Now everyone agrees with me.

The end of the neoliberal consensus and the beginning of the artificial intelligence buildout would have been hard on anyone. I’m proud that I was able to turn this change to my advantage.

I realize I’ve written quite a bit about the experience of these years where I wrote daily without showing off the last year of posts.

Since I’ve got one more day before 2025 officially ends, perhaps I’ll put the round up of posts tomorrow as I’ve given an overview of the experience of half a decade of daily essays today. What’s one more day among thousands right?

Categories
Culture Travel

Day 1824 and The Logistics of A New Year in A New World

I get out of America with as much frequency as I can manage. I juggle this with an intense patriotism not only for America but for my home biome in Rocky Mountain west. I am proud to say I am from Montana when I am abroad.

My interest in being regularly abroad began as an effort to source deals and understand different technical ecosystems, but has ended up being my barometer of what reality is being played for what channels. Deals get done where the founders are and it will remain so.

Yet if I didn’t see other economies and live outside of the news ecosystems of America I’d have an understanding of reality that was incomplete.

The projections of your interests as an American are in constant tension with the ex monica and cultural attacks on it from its adversaries. America has quite a few and it is extremely dangerous now to be blind to their impacts.

I don’t think our world will be as open in the future and this saddens me. When I visit a young formerly communist city in Europe I mostly see enterprising young people who see an. American and have positive associations.

The vibes Zoomer Eassyerj Europeans have towards a middle aged American from Montana is surprisingly positive. I am feel lucky that is their emotional connection to America.

And we shouldn’t take that good will for granted. We want America to be a good friend to them. Capitalist Zoomers who experienced totalitarianism and socialism are good friends to Americans.