I don’t think most Americans are quite ready to address the comical peril of some of our logistics issues. I myself am not and I’ve been screaming bloody murder about preparedness for years.
It’s hard to imagine that any of the music is stopping when you live in a very comfortable and functional place as we do in Montana.
But I’m seeing signs of stress in all corners of our world from grid load stress to importing manufacturing equipment to the ongoing crisis in air travel. Higher end industries like luxury education and venture are doing a swift two step to hide stress but it’s there as well.
I am feeling it. My body feels it as I go through a dip of adjusting to new pressures while still existing with the old ones like my autoimmune nonsense. But I think I am holding up as well as one can.
While I didn’t attend the University of Colorado at Boulder myself, as a townie kid it holds a special place as educational institution in my life.
Their libraries lent me books, I attended events like their famed Conference on World Affairs and I made use of campus facilities from sports fields to their planetarium.
CU Boulder helped make me who I am today. Which is apparently someone who is qualified to weigh in on challenging topics in technology and culture.
Tech” isn’t like other industries. In addition to money and products, it is now a source for politicians, policy, culture, and philosophies with unprecedented influence throughout the globe. Figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel hardly count as mere industrialists; they function as thought-leaders and government operatives.
This two-day conference gathers actors from today’s tech world–entrepreneurs, makers, thinkers, observers, and critics–to discuss the meaning of the tech counterculture, and what it might entail for the future of technology and American democracy.
The speaker line up is very impressive from politicians like our very own governor Jared Polis to journalists like James Pogue and entrepreneurs, operators and industrialists like myself.
My topic is first thing and the panelists are well worth being up early to learn from.
Technology can be a democratizing tool or a weapon of centralized authority. If those are perennial alternatives in technology’s history, which has predominated during recent years?
Panel: Michael Gibson, Jeff Schullenberger, Patrick Deneen, Julie Fredrickson Moderator: Paul Diduch
Americans are mere days away from the dreaded April 2nd tariff reveal and the mood could not be more sour.
If only America was a few good zoning reform bills further along. Then we could house 700 million more people and our Abundance bro moderate liberals would be in a better mood. Alas it’s easy dunking for most of us when Matty Yglesias weighs in late to the party
I’ve spent the last half decade preparing for a more chaotic world. How it would play out and what would be the driver was anyone’s guess.
I made plenty of bets that energy, compute, and decentralization would be the way in a multi-polar world, but I don’t want to count America out just yet. That’s why we made our last stand in Montana.
“God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” Otto von Bismarck
The amusing bit of Trump’s mercantilism is literally only he and a small band of trade administration aids actually think this is sensible economic policy. While I know a tariffs bro personally and I appreciate him as a friend they know I think this approach is dubious.
You know it’s bad when even the king of outlier events Nassim Nicholas Taleb is fretting for Treasury Secretary Bessent. Who is at least qualified to manage the a massive currency crisis.
“He probably gets that whether tarifs make or don’t make sense is irrelevant: any ABRUPT introduction of steep tariffs must lead to a CASCADING & GENERALIZED price action.”
We are damned if you do not because tariffs are the wrong tool for this moment (though most of them are) but because markets like predictable things and cascading price action everywhere makes us dizzy.
Rather like the drunks and the fools mentioned by Bismarck, we’d better hope providence provides in this topsy turvy moment.
I’ve been very wrapped up in my own problems of late. I have plenty of good reasons to be focused inward. When you feel as if you are fighting for survival, physical or otherwise, you can’t see anything else.
As I’ve looked up from my issues, I am seeing countless others caught in their own reactive spirals. Many of them are even directionally correct in their diagnosis of the problems facing them and the world as we know it.
The apocalyptic bent is especially strong in America at the moment. From politics to artificial intelligence to cultural wars, Americans are on the edge of change.
If your world is ending you probably can’t see beyond the horizon of the issues bringing about its end. Your view is myopic. Let’s call this phenomenon “apocalypse narcissism.”
It’s understandable to be wrapped up in fear when faced with all kinds of mortality. Your life, your nation, your culture, your planet and even your species all face world ending questions at some point. Sometimes change is so great we can’t see it as anything but death. Even if something better rises from the ashes.
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.
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)
Being from the American West, and in particular being a townie of one of the land grant university towns, I have found we have two orientations to federal power in “real America” that can be contradictory.
There is extreme skepticism of how Washington inserts itself into everything fron local land issues to education & regulatory policy. Taylor Sheridan has made a whole cinematic universe out of these issues. The West doesn’t want the long arm of the law reaching onto our land.
But the West also has its own power base. We are tied to the wider industrial and defense power run by the blob by supplying manpower and resources. Land grant universities like CU-Boulder have trained a cadre of science and engineering workers who run important programs like NIST and NOAA.
Federal scientists and their work runs everything from the atomic clock to tide reports. This doesn’t even account for the Air Force Academy and Cheyenne Mountain. The military industrial complex and its funding of the sciences is well integrated into the American west.
It makes for some interesting politics as the land grant towns. They owe some of their wealth and economic base to the training delivered by a university system that is local and regionally powerful.
And yet funding for its surrounding apparatus relies on a complex set of funding arrangements from the Blob from science grants to defense contacts.
If the money is under threat I’d expect regular people are going to have a bumpy ride. And systems will certainly break. Maybe all the burbling in the Blob as it recognizes this threat an opportunity for the western states to assert their own independence. That is a more optimistic outcome than many expect.
I’ve been well controlled though my disease is not “inactive” or in remission. I manage it as it’s worth it to me to have a quality of life that includes working in technology as I want to be a part of making the tools that enable material progress in health.
Seeing things go in the wrong direction when my life is going in the right direction had a clarifying effect on me.
Not that I’ve been unaware that I must work at my health but rather it’s hard to always be working at health as it’s a matter of survival. But when you see a change in the data you act. I got serious and immediately went into action.
I’m so lucky to have to have access to an incredible community of biohackers. That I can ask someone who is studiously pursuing health in public is the best of the internet. I get the benefit of Bryan Johnson’s open sourcing his work. I’m doing an experiment with HBOT or hyperbaric chamber oxygen therapy and I learned from him I need it to be 2 atmospheres to be effective. This helps me plan and find hard chambers.
I can use Perplexity and Claude and even make my own personal assistant trained on my condition and my data is the remarkable thing.
I’ve found a new IL-17 inhibitor that looks to have twice the efficacy of my current one at the same dose. It was only approved in Europe but finally came on the American market. I was able to discuss it with my doctor immediately after going down a short question sequence on perplexity. You have so much power to improve your life now.
Shopping
I’d like to improve my V02 max and cardiovascular health in a way that works around my psoriatic arthritis and ankylosis. I have significant fatigue from the pain and obviously high impact isn’t in the cards for me. But I can try something like a DeskCycke. It’s even possible for me to do HIIT training with one. So I bought one. My goal is to improve my V02 by 10% in 8-12 months which shouldn’t be hard as mine is absolutely awful
I feel like I’m in some sort of slapstick comedy with our city pratfalls. I’m in Los Angeles for the holidays which has been somewhat pleasant except for the modest signs of barely contained emergent chaos.
Which I frankly don’t expect to see we are staying in a very bougie neighborhood called Marina Del Rey. I figured the wealth that holds it together would make it more navigable. Lol.
There is something extremely funny about leaving your cozy Montana home with its backup solar power and multiple heating systems only to find yourself in an large apartment building on a rickety grid in an enormous city over which you have no control.
Last night around 11pm there was massive power outage affecting much of Marina Del Rey. Alex was already asleep having had a busy day so when the power dropped I didn’t want to wake him.
I went to fill up containers with water just in case we needed to flush the toilets as we are on an upper floor. I took a few pictures and went to bed with earplugs in and an eye mask figuring it would resolve itself.
The view from our Airbnb and the next set of low rises without power. What seemed to be edge of the outrage from the Airbnb two or three blocks out.
Alex woke up at 6am and the power was still out. He had been working so nothing was charged and we had no WiFi. It was dark out as he started his work day on east Coast hours
It turned out the outrages were larger than just the complex around us. Twitter had some estimates for who was without power but we weren’t the only family members without power or water in the neighborhood.
Mind you this is the beachfront south of Santa Monica so a pretty upscale area populated by Silicon Beach types. It is unincorporated community in Los Angeles county which complicates its infrastructure.
The outage stretched on into mid morning. The car we had rented was trapped in the garage with the power out. The elevators were obviously not working and we were quite a few floors up. We couldn’t shower or wash up. Thankfully I had water for the toilets to flush.
It all felt a little dramatic for what should be a pretty normal day. Imagine if there had been an actual storm or an earthquake. Complaining about it on Twitter was made humorous given our friends know we are the types to do preparedness planning. We are all at the mercy of a blown transformer. So make sure you keep extra water on hand.
Life has been on a wonderful trajectory for me over the last four years. The pandemic marked breaks in everyone’s lives and the chances we were afforded to shape our lives was a privilege in a disruptive and challenging time.
Others took similar leaps of faith into new ways of living. So as I celebrate my birthday today I feel such gratitude. I couldn’t ask for a better turn around the sun.
We had a life changing exit and a series of investments go our way, I made my way into inception & pre-seed investing with our pre-seed fund chaotic.capital, and we moved to Montana. It’s all amazing especially as it’s had its struggles with my health.
I am being offered a season of life where I feel like I can really contribute my skills in professional ways that could be impactful. Everything I’ve built towards and all of my interests and hobbies are tying together in amazing and exciting directions. A happy birthday to me for sure.
If you are in New York City I’ll be flying in this weekend for a week in the city. I’d love to meet founders, other investors, and startup folks in general. Also if any weird Dimes Square reactionaries want to meet up I offer parlay.
We are lucky to have the resources to be prepared but it’s easier than it looks. As the devastation of Helene has shown us everyone can find themselves at risk and it’s as a community that we can survive. I am praying for those in the path of Milton.
