I hate to be feeling anything but patriotic as we get closer to America’s 250th birthday this July 4th. America has so much optimism in my corners of the world from nuclear energy to artificial intelligence and I want to celebrate this with my countrymen.
Alas there is always the nagging feeling that no matter one’s dedication to one’s nation, having a plan B in place has proven wise. Historically speaking in times of great change, technological shifts, and generational hand overs it has paid to plan ahead and be flexible.
Maybe I feel this more keenly with the rise of antisemitism from populist camps both left and right. I’m not Jewish, but my husband is culturally Jewish.
The fear that lurks in the back of the mind can’t be dismissed. They are history’s favored scapegoat. And I can’t help but feel technology is right behind as the next source of blame.
Add in the challenges of getting travel visas for unfavorable passports in my extended family, and I am always abroad. I never excited visa issues to prevent someone from being allowed to visit my own family America and we’ve never found a solution in a half a decade of work and advocacy.
So now we consider having a hide-y hole secondary residency sometimes. Never in my life did I expect to lose years of our lives to trying to manage visas that simply cannot be granted or to decide that perhaps it might be wise to have another residency just in case.
Many other nationalities are “Non Doms” in cities like London for similar reasons. You may want to get further from the front of a kinetic conflict or perhaps your government is looking messy or corrupt, perhaps your work has caught the attention of Leviathan in your home but other nations will welcome the work you do.
So I have been keeping on the on other jurisdictions I could see us living in if only for vacations for now. I see the value in owning a plot of land and having residency on another country should my passport become a “bad” passport in the future. Being prepared has new boundaries.
I write about packing so much on this daily blog that you’d think I’d have an equally large collection of posts on the art of unpacking. I enjoy unpacking emotions, family systems work, a complicated social graph so why not my travel bags?
The forethought and execution required for a well packed travel bag in summer high season is a tactical exercise I both love and loath. My husband and I compete on who can most effectively compress down different categories of items from first aid kits to travel cosmetics.
I am however in my mind not a particularly fastidious unpacker. Or maybe I am? I repack my bags on the return leg as closely as possible to resemble the outbound packing trip. There are labeled bags for under garments, separates, and dresses.
I’ll transition some garments into a bag that is designated laundry, but I’ll almost always take laundry detergent with me. So it’s not unusual for me to make a return trip with clean clothing. When one travels as much as I do it can help to treat as much of road life as you would your regular life.
I unpack immediately upon arrival at my destination whether that is home or away. I prefer to get things out and tucked into the proper drawers and line ups. This applies doubly when I return home. I once had a suitcase sit unpacked for two weeks after a particularly bad flare. It was a nightmare.
So today I had unpacking work that required a bit of disassembling of multiple types of trip packs from gala makeup and silk gown to Greek island hopping swimsuits and even Utah desert nuclear facility visiting garments. It’s been a pretty busy couple of weeks.
I feel almost like I’ve found the bits and bobs of items that were misplaced inside tiny pockets or stowed away in unseen baggies. I am still searching for a few things but unpacking why the unpacking took so long is for another day.
I just had a lovely transcontinental polar flight from San Francisco to Munich. I had access to the Polaris lounge for dinner beforehand where I got a hot meal and was able to livestream an event.
Afterwards I sat myself to watch the sunset and enjoy the parade of takeoffs. Every 2-5 minutes a jet would arc up across the lounge windows, and depending on its size and destinations would slowly bank to the right.
Airplane taking off from San Francisco International airport as seen from Polaris Lounge in the G Gates
It couldn’t have been a more enjoyable way to spend a layover. I must have recorded half a dozen airplanes soaring past to send to Alex as he and I both share a life of air traffic control logistics. The G terminal is undergoing a renovation as well so it has bonus heavy equipment to watch as well.
From the Polaris lounge the G terminal area renovations
I headed to my flight with time to spare so I could get in line first for my boarding class. Too much standing with a backpack hurts me spine. It turned out to be a mistake. The gate agent came over immediately and insisted she weigh my roller bag & my backpack as as it “looked too heavy” so she needed to check. Even though I had a business class ticket, she said would gate check my carry on roller unless I repacked or threw away unnecessary items.
I was confused as I’ve never has anyone weigh my bag at the gate. It has been weighed on my first leg and deemed fine. It fits all normal size constraints even for a regional yet. It should easily fit into the large containers of a transcontinental Airbus where the overhead only needs to accommodate two people’s luggage. None of this made a difference to her.
My suitcase was 2kg over the limit though my backpack was 2kg under the limit. I explained to her I generally pack my suitcase heavy and backpack lighter as I have ankylosing spondylitis so I keep my pack light. S
he scolded me saying if that was true I’d have registered my disability. I tried to explain that disability pre-boarding has become such a scammer’s paradise this method was easier on my spine. I was under the total weight and she could measure to confirm it worked.
Power makes people do odd things. She forced me to repack both bags so they each worked under the limit. But even then tagged my luggage as “heavy and oversized” saying she’d still need to gate check it. I excused myself to the bathroom and removed the tag as it fit the bin and had the correct weight. I wasn’t going to allow her to bully me out of the fair faire I’d purchased.
I got back in the business class line where more trouble awaited me. A very haughty man said I shouldn’t be in the line it was for first class. I explained that there was no first class on this flight, which is why boarding group 1 was combined with 2 but he said I was being silly as we all had to wait and he should be ahead of me and I shouldn’t be in line at all till they called business class.
I didn’t even attempt to explain the disability situation. He was certain he has better status than me so he should be upfront and I should sit down and wait my turn. He accused me of abusing my privilege. I tried a joke saying he’s well life is so hard “ha ha right” and that I just wanted to be prepared to go as I would board after the children.
Then another woman was pulled out of the business class line. The haughty gentleman admonished her as well to not be “like this woman” and listen to the gate check attendant. She looked confused and upset.
Having witnessed my issue, she complied and her bag was gate checked though. Even though she too was allowed two bags and a personal item in business class as well. She had a sling purse and her roller bag. They took her roller bag.
We began boarding and I rushed in to be sure I was in the line I’d tried to be first in, trying to avoid eye contact with the gate check woman. I hoped she forgotten about me. She hadn’t but she was too late. Just as I was being scanned by the biometrics device, she saw me and started towards me. Thankfully device pinged green, the check in woman sent me along and you better believe I ran down the jet bridge.
I reorganized my bags back to my preferred weight balance and stored them above my seat. I had plenty of room. I scanned for the gentleman and asked if I had been mistaken about first class. No, turns out business is the top class and they don’t offer first class. Furthermore, the gentleman turned out to be in coach.
I saw the girl board with only her purse and in some distress. She plopped down in her seat two rows behind me which had an empty flat law next to her. She had none of her essentials and seemed flustered. The sear next to me was also empty.
I kept waiting for the seats to fill to justify the gate check situation. It wasn’t until we pulled back from the jet bridge that I realized both of us were seated alone. Each of us had an entire row to ourselves. There had been no point in the gate nonsense at all.
The man wasn’t up front and our luggage overhead was more than half empty as mine could accommodate two people. The other woman’s overhead was entirely empty as her bag had been taken and her purse was in her lab.
I was so glad I had my things as she was completely lost. I offered up some of my cosmetics so she could clean up, as well an Advil for the headache. She needed tissues more. The poor girl has been bullied into letting go of her luggage by an asshole and a power drunk gate attendant for no point. There was plenty of space for luggage.
Why flying has turned into some kind of battle royal of poor manners and power games I’ll never understand. I wasn’t blocking the boarding inappropriately, I was just first in line for my section to avoid strain on my spine.
I had no reason to give my bags up and simply wouldn’t. Neither did the other woman, but she didn’t want to be bullied so gave in with both the gentleman and the gate attendant on her ass.
I’ll note we were both 30-40 something white women, so maybe we were just easy pickings. Middle aged Karens either go unnoticed or become targets who we tolerate bossing around a bit. No fighting back allowed lest you become one of those hysterics everyone hates.
It doesn’t matter if we followed the rules. Or that we paid to have the space. I clearly should have gone for the disability even if I loathe it as invisible disabilities always get questioned now that it’s everyone favorite scam. I may need to rethink that.
But I made it onto the airplane with my two bags (paid in full for the privilege) and an extra seat to keep them out with me if I so desired. Turns out one chair was broken so I couldn’t use it to sleep on the inside next to the bulkhead. But it stored all my luggage. And I had a lovely sleep on the aisle side. The weights and measures were pointless and I was victorious over petty power battles. Let’s hope I’m as lucky on the next leg. You just never know anymore.
A beautiful blur of lights and bridges and boats over the bay
Not so long ago (*gulp* five years or so) as I first began investing out of our chaotic.capital vehicle, I would discuss our thesis in terms like thriving in a world of increasingly accelerating complexity. That trajectory inevitably leads to chaos.
How does one make money and start fast growing businesses in a world where entropy must be fought at every turn and the rules are constantly changing?
There are a million metaphors and I’m sure all have been used by now. One must surf the chaos or risk being caught under wave after wave of punishing swells.
Next thing I know the world is talking about chaos constantly. And it’s always accelerating.
The implication? Chaos! China’s leader went so far as to invoke my beloved Thucydides, warning of the trap that arises between two powers. Yes, Xi mentioned the Thucydides Trap in the recent summit with Trump.
The term was popularized by Harvard political scientist Graham Allison in the early 2010s, drawing on the ancient Greek historian Thucydides. His argument: when a rising power challenges an established one, conflict inevitably follows.
Americans may not like the presumptive idea of a rising power challenging our existing power, but these days it’s hard not to be skeptical of American power and its limits.
After all, the acceleration of chaos globally is partially in response to our inability to manage the complexity of our systems. We seem unable to plan ahead. But if we’d like to find a win-win scenario that doesn’t end in a Peloponnesian War we might wish to find a way to learn to live with the chaos lest the trap close its mouth on all of us.
I joked to my husband that he better get back before nightfall. He had been in the capital Helena for our work on the digital innovation task force. Sunset was at 8:20 or so. The days are getting longer.
The day’s work went at a good clip as the weather coming in was on all minds. We were in for another large late spring snowstorm.
In our corner of the valley we got maybe a couple of wet inches but even up the canyons it was more than a foot.
It kept snowing all night through early morning. It was also quite cold. We went from lashing dry wind and the first fire of the season to snow in no time. Our AQI was poor from the fire south down range of the valley. Hopefully this helped.
It was snowing when I woke but by the time I showered and finished a cleaning round, it was already shockingly bright. Bright blue clear skies and full sun acted like a solar snowblower.
The clouds cleared so quickly and the reflection of the high altitude sun glinting off the white melting snow had me applying sunscreen twice.
We had warm days recently so the spring melt of April is already rising. Adding to snow today was looking at a picture of the challenges of our summer ahead.
Our snow pack is low, We had a rush of snow after warming which will push growth. But can it sustain itself the dryness? The fear is dried out forests and grasses like tinder by August. I hope by being away we can stay a step ahead. The patterns of the Rockies are becoming familiar to all of us.
We did not have much of a winter to speak of Montana. Sure, Farmer’s Almanac predicted a lot of snowfall but even such an august institution can’t always get it right.
We got almost no pre-season snow fall. Which one can shrug off. We dutifully schedule our snow tire switchover at the end of September anyway. Alex bought his lift tickets with high hopes for a good ski season. Then the openings of our local mountain and Big Sky looked dicey. And yet still we hung onto hope.
We had no white Christmas. The deep freezes of January usually come with snowfall. It was grey this year. February would surely come through right? Alas wrong again. March did not go out like a lion. There was little water to whip up in our non-existent bay. And so, in April we cried and our hopes stepped aside as we waited for pretty little May.
People began to take off their snowtires. This just wasn’t our year. Spring would arrive early right? Any hopes of good days of powder were thoroughly dashed. It was over till next year right? Wrong!
The weight of wet snow
It snowed a big wet mess of deep sloppy powder on Good Friday. Hooray! Indeed it was a good Friday. Except, oh no, our snow tires are off.
Then, last night, when no one honestly believed the forecast for 6-10 inches one bit, we went to bed expecting a normal day. The days had already begun to lengthen substantially. Birds were hatching and the green was growing.
A heavy wet mess dumped onto our patio overnight
Clearly we were wrong. I tossed and turned all night as my joints bubbled and ached. I thought I was using a flare. But when I woke up it was clear my body knew more than my brain and the weather forecast was correct. It has snowed almost a full foot.
The hot tub needed to be dug out
Now the particulars funny aspect of all this is that Alex took the snowblower off the tractor yesterday. He needed to cut the side pasture down before new growth hit so the snowblower attachment was replaced for the trimmer. We’d let long grass grow and then flatten which required more than a riding mower. It needed the Deere to cut through.
So the front walkway was hand dug out but the drive to our road is going to remain snowed in for a bit. The sun will come out tomorrow. I did however have to reschedule a haircut. But that’s the price you pay for trying to get ahead of the weather. We never should have taken off our snow tires early.
We keep chickens on our little homestead in Montana. Having playing hens is a relatively low maintenance though we do have predators we’ve generally been lucky. But it is all relative A lost hen to a fright is better than losing a hen to someone’s lost dog. Losing a hen from the flock is always sad.
We recently lost two laying hens to someone’s dog getting loose. We have video of the dog working the wiring on the coop for an hour till he loosens something just enough to wiggle in.
The lab mutt proceeded to play with the chickens for half an hour to an hour. A mother with two kids comes down the drive and gets the dog. Alas two chickens died while he was in the coop. No note was left and we don’t know if they knew we’d most hens to their dog but it was upsetting.
A bowl of eggs from our hens
Having eggs is a nice perk of living out in “zoned rural” county land as no one can yell at you for having animals. Farm fresh eggs are fantastic I’m sure though I don’t tolerate eggs well so we mostly use them for bartering or ingratiating ourselves with friends.
No one said no to a dozen eggs during the price hike. But it’s also pretty normal to keep chickens and have a garden so you barter for what you don’t have which is fun.
But after a few good years with our first flock it was time to add new hens. So we drove to the new Tractor Supply which I’ve been meaning to visit for ages but haven’t had the chance. Yes I like the Odd Lots episode about them.
It is exciting both because it’s a well merchandised retail experience whose excellent financial performance matches its in store experience but also because it is chick season. You can go to the store and in a box not all that different from a fast food bucket acquire your own flock.
It’s not a KFC family meal but it does contain chickens.
I’d seen some concerns about the price of chicks ranging from $5-$8 a chick on Twitter but we weren’t sure if we were going to buy this season. But we are also generally a bit later in the season for getting chicks here so we put it off.
Obviously we are on alert for long term consequences from our geopolitical situation but our hens are more for fun than calories. Did we want to get more when it’s like keeping pets?
Finally after a Good Friday snowstorm it felt like we might need to consider the consequences of spring even if others were well on their way with sprouting seeds and hatching chicks.
Tractor Supply had all kinds of breeds of chicken and some of the older ones who had been quite expensive a few weeks ago were now half off. Spring is late here but Tractor Supply gets them all at the same time at each store.
Once we were the cheep cheep cheep of the chicks it was all over. It was like picking donuts. I’ll take the Cinnamon thanks. We decided to go with five. Everything from chocolate to frosted right?
They all snuggled up together except for the runt who is a beautiful fluffy wonder.
They are now all safely in our barn with heating lamps, food and water as well as a camera live streaming them on our local network because who doesn’t want a baby chick camera? Hopefully we can raise them up without any incidents and introduce them into our existing chicken coop. We’ve got six weeks or so to find out so wish us luck.
A chunk of preppers and preparedness enthusiasts are just shopaholics. Shopping is common response to anxiety and depression. Doing something that you can control in a world you can’t control has logic to it.
So if you aren’t up for getting first responder certified or spending time in your local library I’ve got just the thing to sooth your anxieties about the current situation in the straight of Hormuz.
I vibe coded a dashboard of common household items with petroleum byproducts in them. It analyzes ingredients and wholesale pricing and assigns risk scores so you can make a shopping list of items most impacted by the ongoing supply chain crisis.
A screenshot of the dashboard I vibe coded today to soothe my anxiety about supply chain disruptions and get ahead of pricing hikes and potential shortages
From diapers to sunscreen, you’d be shocked at just how much our basic needs are downstream of petroleum byproducts. Now it’s just a silly little thing I used AI to put together, but petroleum dependency in consumer packaged is high.
From food products and personal care to drugs, you will find we that we rely on petrochemical feedstocks everywhere.
I’ll mess with it as I add in new data sources and get suggestions for categories I’ve missed. But I’d love for you to check it out even if I am not quite done improving upon the basic idea. You might learn something.
Even if the fighting ends today (as I write this a temporary two week cease fire has been agreed to), the damage to processing, production and manufacturing is already enormous.
Say you aren’t worried about price hikes but you are concerned with the environmental impact of your purchasing habits. I included alternatives in the dashboard if you’d like to make a switch.
Time to buy Aquaphor and Vaseline
The data is compiled from DOE, S&P Global, Investing.com, Packaging Insights, VCCI trade reports. A petroleum dependency score is assigned based on estimates of ingredient analysis.
The prices reflect wholesale market trends so you can be prepared to get ahead before retail prices go up. I’ve even included a bit of context on what aspects of the product are petroleum derived ingredients just for fun.
Below is a screenshot for food preservatives. A type of dependency many of us would like less of in our consumption. Maybe the dashboard helps you improve your diet with a little knowledge. Who knows! Isn’t vibe coding fun?
On another note, I remain amazed at what we can do with artificial intelligence and natural language input. This took me very little time thanks to Claude Code, Perplexity Pro and Cloudflare. If you haven’t explored the wide world of vibe coding now is definitely the time.
I am doing everything I can to biohack my way around a chronic autoimmune condition that interferes with my quality of life. My love for my life and work is strong.
I’ve not had good sleep this week between the excitement of huge wins and the terror of facing down another global crisis brought on my conflict.
You’d think I’d be used to it. Russian invaded Ukraine the week before I left to live in Frankfurt. I was living in Tallinn when 10/7 happened. I was also there when Estonian cables to Finland were cut. One of my best performing companies has had to work around three kinetic wars.
No wonder sleep can be elusive. Yesterday all dream roads carried me to horrors. I woke myself multiple times. You can literally see in my sleep tracking the spiking heart rate and my forced waking.
The positive side to this fitful pained sleep was being up early enough this morning to prepare for a Costco preparedness run and still arrived before their executive member hour was finished.
We rotated our basics like rice and beans. Tinned fish, chicken and other canned and stable shelf proteins are just part of preparing for a nightmare that we hope never comes. Preparedness is a civic obligation. Help yourself to take the strain off the system so we all make it.
It’s possible we are facing an industrial process cascade thanks to the war in Iran and I like us have supplies just in case. We can’t know what comes next but it’s good practice to check expiration dates and make sure you have everything from first aid kit supplies to soap. You’d be surprised at just how much processing fuel fuels the rest of the world’s production.
After all this, I was happy to get stumble into bed and take a long nap. I didn’t even wash the sunscreen off my face. I was running a deficit and wanted to have REM sleep where I wasn’t trapped in horror. Thankfully I got almost two hours of restorative sleep this afternoon and I am ready to go back to bed as soon as I can.
I have made a little bit of a side hustle out of being at Cassandra. There was a lovely chunk of time in between Hurricane Sandy and the pandemic when people felt as if the weirdness was contained. It was quirky.
It was novel to know people who had decided to make changes in their just-in-time lives because of a climate catastrophe They had experienced it personally because it happened in New York so the media paid slightly more attention.
It lets media, and the readers of said media, indulge in the fantasy that they might actually change their lives by hearing a rational argument from someone like me. Look at tbis nice young woman didn’t have power after a hurricane in the center of civilization in lower Manhattan while Goldman Sachs glowed in the background, continuing to serve capital in the dark.
In fact I did have friends that had to go by foot to their offices while they went for weeks without electricity in other boroughs of Manhattan it was just particularly surreal to live near City Hall, have absolutely no power but still see the glowing lights of techno-capital operating in the aftermath of the crisis. My husband literally got buckets to remove water from the server room of his startup but the banks were fine.
I had a speech on entropy and chaos that was fairly compelling and turned out to be a very correct investment thesis. We might have to get used to more chaos in our lives because of geopolitical, climate and other instabilities that we could not entirely predict.
That meant getting out ahead of the major controllable factors we had at our disposal as individuals and as a nation. I actually meant it as did my husband as if it could happen in Manhattan imagine what it would look like elsewhere.
Having been a prepper before the pandemic gave a little bit of structure to the first months of the pandemic unfurling in which I had the tools to do a dry run and the experience. I got a lot wrong.
And you must remember we really did not know exactly how bad things would be. The things that actually turned out to be quite detrimental to the economy did not turn out to be the ones we thought. Much of the pain of the experience was self-inflicted. Sound familiar?
But we thought we knew more than we did about the situation we were going into. In reality, we had very little predictive capacity on that front because the last time we had had a pandemic of any novelty, the world wasn’t nearly so well connected.
We overcompensated for a lot in our fears and reactions. I suspect that is going to continue being the way we handle networked global crises of any sort.
The thing is, it’s getting harder and harder to pretend that the things that affect our global lives are not actually happening because people look the other way when their economic situation works well for them. It’s a bargain that democracies and authoritarian governments make.
So right now if you work in technology or finance, you’re in a bunch of group chats in which everyone is freaking out. Even though you could make good arguments that we’re the only ones that have a clear view of some of the contours of what we’re about to face it’s quite clear that our visibility is limited.
I don’t know a goddamn thing about Iran or how it’s going to react, but I know more than I ever thought I’d need to about energy markets because nobody in my line of work had much choice over the last three years if they wanted to be ahead of the computing demands we already struggled to meet.
Now this demand may be coming from America companies, but feeding it is a global phenomenon of investment. One that lets all of the worlds capital pile on into a country that has a few domestic issues.
We all saw changed coming the second we had a mass market, large-scale compute-intensive process that enabled artificial intelligence interface that users felt they could meaningful talk to at scale. There’s something amusing to me about that because in Star Trek’s goofiest movie, The Voyage Home, the chief engineer Scotty picks up a mouse and uses it as a speaker phone. Hello he says, “Computer, are you there, computer?” He then proceeds to type in a number of commands when he says, “Ah a keyboard. How quaint.”
I imagined we’d get to this phase of computing ourselves a little faster than we did, but it turns out that we have finally reached the point of knowing how to type in a lot of solutions that could give us steps and instructions to use tools to make transparent aluminum. I mean this metaphorically, not literally, as we actually do know how to make transparent aluminum.
Transparent aluminum is a polycrystalline transparent ceramic made from aluminum, oxygen, and nitrogen. It was developed independently and is commercially produced by Surmet Corporation. It’s sapphire and funnily enough we use it in bullet proof glass. Which I’m sure is a great business to be in these days.
So be as freaked out as you want in group chats because all kinds of weird shit is coming down the pipeline. If you work in finance or technology, you probably know that you’ve got about two weeks before some irrevocable decisions start cascading.
None of us have any idea what it looks like but you’re probably not as prepared as Elon Musk or Sam Altman. Nevertheless we’ll have to get through it.
