Tag: Safety

Categories
Media Politics Preparedness

Day 1916 and Freaked Out Group Chats

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.

Categories
Biohacking Medical

Day 1915 and Physiological Stressers

Last October I did an experiment to balance out my core hormones by inserting pellets of testosterone and estradiol into my left buttcheck.

We’re started me with 10mg of estradiol (range 6-25mg with 8-10mg being most common), and 75mg of testosterone (range 50-150mg with the most common being 75-100mg. Day 1748

If you are interested in learning why women are optimizing their hormones, Cate Hall wrote an amazing piece on how it affected her life. A week or two after I did my own experiment the New York Times did a long lifestyle piece on the treatment’s growing popularity.

I had been working to raise my testosterone level to a baseline minimum with diet and supplements like DHEA with mixed success which is how we ended up trialing this new pellet method. And it worked very well very fast you can see from several rounds of bloodwork.

We did not do the full 75mg but landed around 62mg in the pellet which raised my testosterone right off the bat. It then quickly dropped off from very high to comfortably high. This go around we will do a lower testosterone dose to start and a lower estradiol one as well and test within the month to see if we can moderate them better over time.

Alas I did have some complications on my first attempt as my insertion sight got infected rather badly and took over a month to resolve.

If thr last fifteen months on my immunotherapy Bimzelx has had a theme it would be soft tissue infections. I am however as far out from a shot as I can be and am planning to stop it entirely as a girl can’t spend her whole life on antibiotics.

Though I am on quite a dose at the moment as we won’t make the same mistake twice. We stitched me up and prophylactically began a dose of a very intense antibiotic with the hope that I won’t lose a whole month of the four that these pellets dissolve through fighting cellulitis.

My goal is a balanced blend of estradiol, testosterone and progesterone so I have energy and focus and maybe fewer migraines during my luteal phase. You may wonder why I share all of this personal information and I wonder why more women don’t share it. We are in a brave new world of challenges in our healthcare and environment and the more we can share with each other the better our chances at finding solutions for all of us.

Categories
Biohacking

Day 1912 and Informing Ourselves

Some 20 years ago, before I knew I’d have medical troubles of any length, my college job was working for a medical ethicist who was a physician with a grant to study informed consent.

Now, years later, as I have worked my way through institutional resistance to how I may come to be disabled and generally dismissed as a patient, I come to find that much of the skepticism my mother had as a crunchy hippie is now functionally being proved a quarter century on. These uncomfortable trends drives skepticism in even the most informed minds. And most patients can only ever be expert on their symptoms.

This comes at the end of a crisis of communication about the value of public health and personal responsibility in a community. Many people did not feel that they were given adequate consent and no longer trust anything said by doctors. Would most medical professionals agree they had informed consent? I think most argue they were. I agree.

Now of course we’re all desperately trying to prevent harms here and patients more than ever feel that, as they don’t trust what’s coming to them because we’ve not effectively decoupled population-level information from the individual human behind a given case. Is that informed consent? Yeah as best we can do it.

Now how does research play into all this? I also happen to have the misfortune of having working on the early years of on one of the worst medical misinformation spreaders in all of healthcare. I say this lovingly: it is Gwyneth Paltrow.

Now if you root around Twitter, you will find commentary about how the supplements hawked on Goop and the supplements hawked on various right-wing sites are functionally identical. But she got a lot right because she is a rich well connected white woman with money. So again who is informed and to what degree?

Unfortunately some of the things that are sold as treatments or supplements they sell are real and have proven out. We’re working our way through the science on our gut biome, infection and its links to preventable autoimmune diseases, and any number of other previously heretical paths.

But we’ve really not transformed the way we process our information on what we know and what is actually considered best practices. The gap is very wide. Like a chasm. I am way outside the norms because I fucked myself up believing I wouldn’t be a statistic as it mostly worked for most women.

So I live with issues. But do I think that people have a right to experiment with what we think might be snake oil? Absolutely. Everyone calculates their own risk. Heck Sarno is just one giant placebo doctor on letting go.

We know that some of the avenues of exploration will prove to be placebo effect if they work. And we still somewhat trust things that are actually going to cause harm aren’t really making it into the popular press and mass consumption unless there’s some evidence. I sort of believe that to be true.

More people should feel that they have the right, if they have informed themselves over a period of time as patients, to work around the system if they make no progress despite best efforts and years of work.

There’s just a lot to balance on being informed about your conditions and your capacity to manage your own health that is up to you. I think that generally speaking the paternalistic attitude has not produced superior outcomes.

And the quality of care I get as someone who can pay for health care anywhere in the world, it is galling to me that the gap between what we know and how far we can go in practice is so wide.

So let the guy advertise the doggy cancer vaccine because at least it’s teaching people that we have solutions to more than they know. They can judge risk reward and be a little bit strange. Humans are humans.

You get to decide it based on your own understanding of your own life and you get what you get. I was disabled by my own misjudgment of informed consent on treatments recommended by a COO of a major company who paid to have as a perk to her workforce. Egg freezing was an approved elective procedure that everyone was on board with ten years ago.

I was informed. I consented. I got it wrong. Now let me see if I can fix it in my own manner of choosing. And I won’t trust mere authority next time. Neither celebrity nor pharmaceutical company is to be trusted.

Categories
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.

Categories
Chronic Disease Culture Politics Preparedness

Day 1901 and Burying Ehrlich

For as much time as I spend kvetching about my own petty problems (and I know that it is a not insubstantial amount of time), I am what my husband calls a macro optimist.

This is somewhat in contrast to him, who is on a day-to-day basis, a micro optimist but doesn’t quite see the long-term horizon as positively as I do.

Different temperaments are a good thing when it comes to balancing outlooks and outcomes. This is arguably why we are a good team and have managed to stay married for a decade.

I look out for the macro level future and optimize for it being successful and he optimizes the day-to-day, making sure that the micro level is successful.

I titled this post “Burying Ehrlich” because Paul Ehrlich passed away at the age of 93 last Friday. You might know him as the co-author of the 1968 best seller Population Bomb.

An entomologist by training, his book jumped to much bigger claims saying Earth faced imminent mass starvation urging governments to reduce population. That has not so far proven to be true. Even now the New York Times obituary said his claims were premature. We just love an impending disaster.

It’s a cruel historical irony that a man who wrote his thesis on butterflies would end up having such an enormous butterfly effect on the number of human beings being born. His neo-Malthusian insights were a huge hit.

And unfortunately we will experience the consequences of his public intellectual adventurism. We will have fewer humans and the famine he predicted never materialized. And now if we have more troubles facing us, we have far fewer humans able to take up the task of finding the solutions we will need.

Maybe if he had been a little bit more of a macro-level optimist, he would have been able to see what I see everyday. Despite daily travails due to my chronic disease, I see the micro-optimism of humans like my husband every single day. While I can’t always be positive every day, I remain positive that together we can find a way to improve on yesterday.

Humans are incredible at finding a way around life’s intractable problems. We produce little innovations, little inventions, little tweaks and little solutions. And they add up.

We are social animals whose evolutionary pressures seem to have yielded a culture of engineering. These little fixes we constantly produce when added up together have made for major improvements.

We even occasionally see extraordinary catalysts that allow us to go much faster with our improvements. We’ve had a number of revolutions, industrial and otherwise. Indeed the last 50 years or so have shown the Malthusian fears of food production to be histrionic in comparison to the progress we’ve made.

We have fed the planet but we will never get back the babies who were not born either because of China’s one-child policy or simple cultural attitude acceptance that one or two children should be enough. In my generation it may end up being more common to not have children at all.

Now it may seem rich that someone who goes in for quite a bit of preparedness should speak against a man who saw the value of taking action in the face of what he saw as long odds.

But next time someone tells you that the end is near and all is lost, remember that Paul didn’t end up being correct in any of his assumptions.

Not because at the time it was so crazy to think we weren’t producing enough food, but because he couldn’t conceive of a world in which we were able to solve our problem.

So I pray as his family buries him that we as a species can remember to bury some of our own alarmism. Our job is to keep on going in the face of long odds, just as every one of our ancestors has done before us.

Categories
Emotional Work Internet Culture Preparedness

Day 1900 and I Have Another 100 Days of Writing In Me But Should I Have More?

Just a hundred more days of writing and I’ll have two thousand days of consecutive writing published on this humble website.

Nineteen hundred days is a little over five years. It is a lot of writing and a testament to my own capacity to keep going. Every threshold I cross requires asking if I should keep going.

Day 2000 will towards the end of June. And what then? On July 4th hopefully I’ll be celebrating America’s 250th birthday with a crew who built a working nuclear reactor that I funded. The near term has goals and milestones. The long term is much fuzzier. Scarier. Murkier. Beyond my sight.

I’ve covered a lot of life in half a decade. There was lot of work and lot of investments and a lot of change. I’m glad I have such thorough records of my thinking. As more rupture, dislocation and chaos emerge from the acceleration how do I best hang on? Can I steer?

I can use this material to provide context on my mental model and worldview. This was intended both for myself but also the many other models built on content from humans on the open internet. I contributed a lot to training artificial intelligence models just by showing up.

Now that the models have shown up how safe is it for individual humans to show up? Remaining visible and human seems quite risky. When you strip the niceties of civilization and my place in it realism rears its ugly head. I am little more than frail woman in a dangerous world.

Maybe the sooner I stop showing up publicly the safer I’ll be. I am almost certain that is that will be true. I doubt it is the good, the beautiful or the righteous thing to do.

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
Biohacking Internet Culture Politics

Day 1886 and Whoop There It Is

Quite a weekend for Americans and the wider Persian Gulf. Let us hope it is resolved swiftly and with the least loss of life possible.

It happened quickly. On Friday night policy types were arguing about artificial intelligence with our department of war about use cases and contacts. And then on Saturday we bombed Iran and they bombed pretty much every neighbor they have. No wonder they had a midnight deadline eh?

I’ll stick to human interest here but Chief of Staff Susie Wiles appeared to be wearing a Whoop tracker in a secure room which was confirmed by the company’s CEO by tweet.

The original concern being that some fitness trackers break NSA protocols as they have audio recording and other data recording which wouldn’t be appropriate in a dark room type the situation room.

Interestingly Whoop is approved by the NSA for use in these situations. Per the CEO the Whoop does not include a microphone, GPS, or cellular capability of any kind and has long been on the NSA approved PED list.

I myself wear both an Apple Watch and a Whoop everywhere but I rarely need to be out of the prying ears of recoding devices but it’s good to know.

Whoop’s CEO joked that given the success of the mission Susie Wiles must have had a green recovery score (quality sleep, low resting heart rate and high HRV) though I imagine she must be feeling the stress now that it’s over.

I wonder if her score worse than mine. I needed steroids and antibiotics to manage the flare post dental work and my body is under more strain than you’d imagine.

It’s somehow nice to know that the most powerful people on the planet use the same tools as I do to track their biometrics. From billionaire founders like Bryan Johnson to the Chief of Staff of the President to little old me. We all wear the same track. If you want a referral code here you go.

Categories
Aesthetics Medical

Day 1882 and Crowning Glory

I have always been fastidious when it comes to dental hygiene. I floss twice a day, I brush morning and night. I always carry dental picks for good measure.

I didn’t earn enough for steady dental care in my younger years so I knew my habits would have to carry me. But I did have a few tricks that helped me manage in my twenties. I would volunteer my time as a patient at the NYU Dental Clinic.

Not only were you not charged for procedures but you’d learn a lot as students went through clinical hours and professors lectured using your mouth as the live lessons.

I thought this was a pretty good trade for low stakes maintenance work like cleaning but I let them do more involved work including a filling on one of my molars which I’d cracked.

Fifteen years later that the crack which has been filled needed a little maintenance. A another crack had formed and it was looking a little unaesthetic. I was experiencing some dull pain so I decided to get it looked at. And it’s a good thing I did.

For a brief moment there was concern that the nerve in the tooth had died. I should have felt more pain than I did. But the cold test cleared it up. I don’t think I’m healthy enough to manage a tooth being pulled and replaced with my immune suppression medicine.

As I explained the filling’s provenience and just how old it was, it became clear that it needs to be redone. A bit of it had edge over to the back molar I’ll get two teeth filled.

A filling is a treatment where a dentist removes decayed or damaged tooth structure (sometimes it’s a cavity others a crack ) and replaces it with a material (like composite “white” resin, metal amalgam, or other restorations) to restore shape, strength, and function while preventing further decay.

It’s not a crown so the title is a misnomer but it is a bit glorious that one can get care from students and have it hold up for so many years. It’s always something in the maintenance and care of one’s body and I tend to prepare for the worst.

Categories
Internet Culture Travel

Day 1860 and Some Technical Difficulties On The ISP Side Perhaps

I’m not anywhere particularly unusual (a European capital) but all of my end to end encryption applications, most crucially Signal and Twitter are not working.

Nothing will send and I’m not receiving messages now either. Why? Well, I’ve got conspiracy theories but I doubt it’s sinister and I’ll boot up a VPN in the meantime if it persists.

I am nearby several embassies (of the regions you might expect to be dicey including my own) and just uphill of city’s international school so maybe one of them is being a dick.

Or perhaps the Airbnb I am using has an ISP provider that is throttling end to end encryption for some reason. For what reason I couldn’t fathom but I am annoyed. YouTube is streaming in full glory on an enormous television but I can’t text in peace to my loved ones.

So this blog post will have to serve a test post to let folks know that I am fine and anyone who needs to know where I am does which is to be fair a pretty darn small list. I’ll move if the issue persists. I’m a mere 7 kilometers away from the center of the city where the internet was working fine earlier today so I’ve got no idea why I’m having issues now. If I’d known I’d have done my writing earlier. A part of me wonders and worries about what might eventually stop my writing experiment being a communication blackout. Though I never thought I’d have a problem in Europe. That is the stuff of authoritarians right?

I have got unpleasant notions about why a European city and its nearby embassies wouldn’t wish to let people communicate freely and privately on websites with end to end encryption. It’s just amusing they are happy to let me watch Netflix and Youtube. The New York Times has no problem getting through nor my other media applications on my phone.

Having been behind America’s first freedom to compute act, I suppose I’ll let my emotions run a bit wild here as a treat. It seems especially concerning that this sort of informational throttle by big European ISPs seems possible and even likely. That embassies might want to extend a little protection beyond their very high walls seems even more probable. Which is not very nice of them.

It makes my mind go straight to propaganda campaigns and not technical difficulties. In this day and age, we should never take for granted our right to express ourselves via compute freely and privately. Stay frosty and I hope this post makes it to you.