Tag: Status

Categories
Culture

Day 1918 and Other Lives You Could Have Lived

I was talking with my mother today as I was organizing some logistics for her birthday. Don’t tell her that though as it’s a surprise. Just kidding she knows I’m up to something.

As we talked shared pictures from a recent work trip where she was able to visit our extended family. Her brother lives in Texas after a long military career. It got me thinking about the very different lives it’s possible to live even within one family.

My mother has siblings that she is not related to by blood that are nevertheless our family. Her mother was unable to stay with her father. She married a man I consider my grandfather and gained a large family in the process.

One of my cousins (not by blood but through love) had her children when she was still a teenager. We are roughly same age. She has nearly fully grown children while I will likely never have children. We had very different life trajectories.

She didn’t have an easy time when she was a young mother, but seems to be in a good place now. She is married to a kind man (not to her children’s father though they were married for a time), enjoys watching her son play varsity baseball and football, and lives near her parents. She earned a beautiful life the hard way.

My aunt and uncle are hard working, deeply kind and patriotic people. They supported their daughter every step of the way. Which in the late nineties and early aughts was harder than it looked for a conservative military family in Texas.

I feel lucky my mother got to have such a wonderful brother (and other amazing siblings). My grandmother was an incredible woman. She got remarried at time when single mothers had it even tougher than my cousin did.

I think of the lineage of my mother’s family and wonder which of us made the right choices, which one of us thinks we made the right choices, and how we feel about those choices in the grand scheme of things. Lots of my family believe I made all the right choices. And maybe they are right.

Both my mother and grandmother heavily encouraged my interest in academics and the sciences in particular as they both wanted to pursue scientific careers and were unable to do so. I know I am their pride and joy.

But as I think of my mother’s upcoming birthday I know she won’t get to see her grandchildren playing varsity sports under Friday night lights in Texas with her mother sitting beside her. Her mother, my grandmother, has passed.

There won’t be three grown generations to coincide together because that’s just not how it works any more. And I don’t believe she is disappointed. And I know my grandmother wasn’t either. They wanted this life for me.

And it’s a good life. But I am also glad that my cousin was able to have a good life too. If only it were easier to balance some of the choices. If they were choices at all.

Categories
Preparedness Startups

Day 1917 and Bragging

My brain feels pretty scrambled at the moment. I wish I could say it was over easy but I’m clearly closer to fried than coddled at the moment. Yesterday had some big news. Valar is prepared for a long slog and that means on paper I’ve got a unicorn and a fund returner.

There’s nothing quite so satisfying as becoming big enough that instead of listing the founder and the team, they mention the celebrity investors.

It’s good that people know we have dry powder for an important mission, just as energy insecurity becomes a real concern, along with all of the cascading effects of side products and elements that are part of the hydrocarbon processing chain. Don’t worry. They’ve got a plan for nitrogen if it comes to it.

And obviously I want to brag, as do all of the other people who took a risk on this exceptional team, especially those who wrote multiple checks (we followed on three times) when it was unclear how far we could go and how fast it could be given regulatory hurdles and funding constraints. Those are now gone.

I do feel like I paid a number of social consequences for being a loud mouth and also generally being anti-consensus during the first few years. And I am glad to have paid that price. Real reward comes from real risk.

I felt we had not adequately addressed American energy independence, clean energy, renewable energy, or any of the many effects of our rampant demand for energy.

I do believe that carbon heats the planet and we have to address it in a way that meets our demands and gives us abundant supplies. I thought well how we could possibly serve it in a way that is sustainable and clean without nuclear?

And I’m as surprised as anyone that the Republicans are the ones championing this but we’re in a place where it’s very clear that we have industrial needs and a geopolitical context that require us to go much faster and invest much more deeply in the solutions that we’ve put off for so many years.

I didn’t get into technology to do some set of financial arbitrages or eke out an extra few dollars so I could have status in the world. I know it’s naive but I’m not very transactional and I do it because I think it’s the right thing to do.

We need to slowly push the markets towards funding the things that are necessary and not just the things that give extra capital to people fighting for status and power. I hope that I can look back on the work I’ve done and feel proud that I tried.

Thanks to this blog God knows I’ve got the receipts for it. We’re barely out of the first quarter. Not even confident we’re at halftime. There’s so much work to be done but I feel like I’m playing the right game.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics Startups Travel

Day 1909 and All The Twinks Standing In The Line For The Bathroom

I am not an early riser, especially not when I’m out late for happy hours and dinners and the like. So I wasn’t planning on being at the 8am opening for the conference I’m attending in D.C amongst all the side programming.

I had a ten thirty talk I was particular excited to listen to as it was most salient to my work in artificial intelligence policy. Well, that was a dumb decision on my part. Not to arrive earlier.

I’ll take full responsibility for being a moron on that front, but I stood amongst a gaggle of gorgeous well dressed, well groomed and bright eyed young men hungry to build the world of the future. What a crowd of young people.

Being a chatty Cathy I asked about vintage Barbour jackets, bulldog ties, pocket squares, the merits of gel versus more advanced soft hold hair products, the declining quality of Moscot eyewear and other important topics to ambitious young men who are looksmaxxing to win the great game.

I didn’t have much else to do as the line was not moving. No one was getting in. Until people left no one was getting off the line. And that included others who had already been in and had their passes. The hottest ticket in town was perhaps a bit over capacity.

Someone rolled out a portable Starlink and we all piled in to tweet, chat, roll calls and (in my case) send tweets, Signal messages, and Slack channel responses. I got told my tweet about the two hour wait wasn’t ideal so I deleted it as I appreciate any attention to me running my mouth as I assume no one ever listens to me. I barely do.

But maybe I’m wrong? Last night checking into Butterworth’s, the woman manning check-in in lit up when I gave my name “I love your Twitter!” So maybe people do notice what I say. I still find that an a funny notion.

That said, it did take the full two hours to get into the giant event hall which made all the rush and planning a laugh. More people left the line and went back to work than stayed at 10am but everyone determined to participate seemed to make the best of it.

I asked if this was normal for a DC event and no one seemed to be from DC. So I didn’t get any good answers. This was an unexpected wrinkle that the venue was full was full up as an enormous crowd circled the block twice.

Since we remainders had decided to make the best of it we got to know each rather. Every man was quite a gentleman as we chatted oblivious to status till we were let in and others let us all know the pecking order. One of the young men I spent my wait, who is I learned later was literally the heir to one of the most important fortunes on the planet. Another was launching containerized autonomous weapons.

But that time of work and waiting was rather like being on an elevator stuck together, we might as well get to know each other. We are all equal before a tough door.

Thankfully we did get into the room before Jamie Dimon spoke. And he was the big boss of the handsome executive crowd.

I titled this “all the twinks standing in line for the bathroom” as yes a lot of handsome queer men were in attendance. But twink is an all purpose gender fluid aesthetic and not reflective of anyone’s sexual preferences.

And the line for the men’s y was a lot longer than the women’s. Ten to one ratios make me think this would be quite the dating scene for the ambitious woman.

But yes there are a lot of very well groomed young men in Washington D.C and everyone wants to build solutions for America. And being beautiful doesn’t hurt. To my single lady have you consider meeting a man in DC? Good odds and I doubt even a fraction of the twinks are gay.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1907 and Blurred Velvet Glove in Their Iron Fist

I’m on what appears to be family spring break in Washington D.C. I have conferences and dinners and I think it’s lovely that everyone is doing their level best to get the county through the moment to a better end.

The cherry blossoms are in bloom, the weather is warm, and I am trying those trendy serum coral blush that are apparently in style. That’s code for every brand has a version and quality varies greatly. Also no one likes the millennial dewy white bitch. She is dead. So I must carry on with the a new look says Vogue.

The last 12 months have made clear that matte is definitely back, but it’s been rebranded a bit. Dry, cakey formulas have been swapped for ones that offer hydration while diffusing the look of pores and fine lines. The result is a velvet, satin, or cashmere effect that reads softly blurred.

Thanks Vogue! I am not entirely sure of what kind of events I’ll be attending this week but more than one is the sort of where you want to look up to the moment and polite.

So I’ve been playing with new foundations and lipsticks and putting on spring dresses. It’s a lovely way to spend time the first weekend of spring.

I do see a way forward if we can focus on the ingenuity of American people. We are the end beneficiaries of a host of technological innovations that we paid to produce. I see new kinds of ways we could use that compute in clever and intermediate ways. Maybe I’m an old cyberpunk but banks are now with us.

So I try to remember the changing of trends are are also changing realities of how we must remember the coalition to take compute and speech from Americans is doing everything it can by making you afraid.

It comes from a patrician sense and you want to question if it passes your shit test. I don’t think anything good comes from believing scare tactics. We’ve had a good example of long forecast expert doom being completely wrong.

Which is probably why there are still magazines at all, if life were changing so sharply maybe we would still have a Vogue to tell tell us that it’s nice to have a smart sharp gloss that blurs to matte.

And it’s nice to have a Sunday with blousy colorful dress with the perfect handbag. It’s just a nice spring day in any city. This one is just right on time. Montana might take a little longer to get to spring dresses.

Categories
Travel

Day 1906 and Woo Spring Break

Starting a journey from a small regional airport subsided by billionaires is the way to go when airports are understaffed for lack of pay.

A partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security means the TSA isn’t getting paid because of a lack of agreement on annual appropriations from Congress.

You may dislike the TSA, but most Americans are sympathetic to the pain of missed paychecks. And if you are headed somewhere for spring break you will feel their pain as the lines through security are getting worse and worse at the major hubs.

Getting out of Bozeman was a breeze. Sure my first flight was 8am but that’s the second round of flights for the day. Chicago O’Hare on the other hand, was a bit more chaotic.

The Dinosaur is a hockey fan

Families with multiple children hoping for quality time together on their spring break looked exhausted coming through the security lines.

Little girls pulling sparkling backpacks behind them on the ground or riding dinosaur shaped luggage tugged by their exhausted parents clogged the tight “under construction” hallways.

My flight to Washington D.C. didn’t have as many kids as I would have expected. Maybe touring our national monuments isn’t as exciting as going to Disneyland.

Co-branding for citrus 🍊not history

The original gate was reallocated to an Orlando based flight and based on the number of families with three kids headed to Florida our natalism issue isn’t so bad among the six figure vacation set.

The workers that keep Disneyland the happiest place on work might be struggling with other issues based on the terrifying bathroom signage. I wonder if the men’s bathrooms have these signs

Servile marriages?

May you all enjoy spring break without weather delays, labor issues, geopolitical conflict, or basic operational problems like crew and aircraft shortages as reset flight legs and fuel costs begin to get in the way.

I’m looking forward to getting to the capital. Maybe I’ll see more spring breakers at the Smithsonian. Just deposit your cannabis if headed to a destination where it’s illegal.

Categories
Aesthetics Startups Travel

Day 1905 and Run of Show

I have very particular traveling habits. I like things to be packed in cubes, labeled with contents and in a cascade of backpack, carry on and checked bags should something go awry.

As I’m heading to our nation’s capital soon I am taking extra care with my “run of show“ as I’ll have more varieties of events to account for over my stay. I expect humidity and rain so that should be fun for hair and makeup. All men need to worry about is sunscreen and maybe a bit of hair gel.

Now my travel wardrobe must account for visits to historical sites, nice dinners, late night parties, internet friend meetups (see you at the Polymarket’s Monitoring the Situation bar?) and a conference that is somewhere between startup event and defense contractor conference.

If you are a woman, you are probably nodding your head and thinking well that’s at least 4 different pairs of shoes and two purses. Then there is evening wear, day blazers and skirt suits, sweaters and other mix and match separates, and heaven forbid I find time to exercise so sweats and all the undergarments.

All that packing must work with the additional run rate risks of TSA slow downs (can Congress pass a budget) while presumably needing additional care and attention to security. Given we are embroiled in a war with Israel in Iran it’s hard to count on smooth sailing. So I pack as if I will encounter unexpected difficulties. Hopefully none more irksome than long lines.

As a woman who mostly spends her time in Montana or otherwise in the middle of nowhere, you can imagine that my makeup these days has a bit more in common with tinted sunscreen than it does with a smoky eye with a cut crease let alone a full powdered contoured beat fit for television. However I’ve heard polished full makeup is the preferred look on the hill including eye makeup basics.

I’m hoping I’ll be able to rely on my skills without additional practice, but I won’t lie I did a couple dry runs on new palettes I’d picked up and a few new colors. Very little new made the cut. When traveling, rely on what is reliable.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture

Day 1902 and Cynical Victories for Hollow Lies

I know it’s sweet bordering on stupid to engage in good faith when it comes to politics, but maybe I’ve grown soft in my old age. I really do believe that Americans are capable of building wide coalitions in a pluralistic society.

Call me naive but most Americans, even most humans, have more to bind us together than to break as apart. We are social animals even the most introverted of us.

So I hate seeing groups who share common values fall apart over schismatic propaganda pieced together explicitly to worsen your weaknesses and widen your vulnerabilities till you are both tied to horrors you’d never have condoned.

The trouble with Utilitarians is they say up front that the ends justify the means. Thats your starting baseline. Which is at least clean. Then the Machiavellian’s say it’s alright to obfuscate. The noble lie and all. And then suddenly the enemy is inside your gates and you are being gutted.

This is roughly what is occurring between Bannon-world who hates technology so much they have accidentally teamed up with a gaggle of one world government rationalists to…use zoning rules to save the world from…industrial parks with rack servers?

I know it doesn’t sound very sinister but everyone involved is sure the anti-Christ is going to be involved. Peter Thiel is in Rome giving lectures so the buggy man has involved.

Folks must enjoy being useful idiots as it’s strange to me to think you might align with people you loathe just to fuck up the other team. The goal is flourishing for all no? You came at me and my boys for whom all I wish is flourishing.

Which is funny as I was always under the impression that end times eschatology required the Antichrist to be quite well liked. Everyone involved in this is universally despised.

I guess if you are certain that you are in danger of being stomped out by an evil, and believe any of your actions are justified by this premise, you may as well embrace all kinds of evil.

But you do have the options of not using millenarian tactics to scare the shire. Hobbits are brave or so said the neomonarchist who can’t tweet. But I won’t forget people who threw me over for propaganda they were too dim to understand or cynical enough to believe no one else would.

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
Aesthetics Politics Travel

Day 1891 and So Much for Santorini or Status Hierarchies for Abundant Ages

If you watch me closely (which would be weird but I make it easy enough) you have surely noticed I spend much of my life traveling.

I’ve got no training in psychology but it sure seems like a certain personality type takes their childhood traumas and does exposure therapy till it becomes enjoyable.

I had intended for another trip to the general Mediterranean area in the spring to see family and work undisturbed by the American media timezone distractions. Now I am unsure if that will be feasible.

I am guessing that the sort of people who go to Sicily, Santorini and Cyprus to soak up the sun may find this Iranian conflict putting a wrench in their island hopping. Where will they go instead? Cartel wars bleed into the Caribbean and Bitcoin zillionaires setting up economic zones might make other things tricky. And oh the fuel costs will be ruinous.

War certainly makes me reconsider standard air bus style flying near any seas that connect to conflict areas but not too long ago I sat in a Turkish airport where “final boarding for Damascus” went over the loud speaker so maybe I’m making too much of it. Though I’m glad I enjoyed Istanbul over the winter as anything bordering Iran is now unnecessary risk.

For a world where speculative fiction bull case for artificial intelligence wiped off billions in market capitalization, we sure aren’t taking very seriously the kinetic effects of extreme uncertainty and change. Well, ironically maybe Pete Hegseth might be.

If we do make it through the Jackpot to the other side of the singularity, or just through this regional war situation, I would bet humans will find ourselves getting back to status hierarchies and power games.

If all our consumption needs are met, there will always be hierarchies. Wait your best friend summers in Block Island too? Or are those the Finnish slides from the Comme des Garçons show? Let me just call up “insert social scene’s patron billionaire” as everyone is headed to Big Sky for fresh powder this weekend.

It’s endlessly that sort of thing if you are inclined towards Bourdieu’s Distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste. If class predicts taste then we mimic the taste we think we ought to have to be a certain kind of person. I came across a sweet hand illustrated essay on the matter recently.

If we can have anything we like, then taste becomes finer and finer grained. The rich know this already and the rest of us just might find out if we survive to an abundance era. And as I’d like to do that maybe I be reconsidering heading out to sea. Caribbean, Ionian, Bosphorus or otherwise.

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.