Tag: Time

Categories
Finance Preparedness

Day 1923 and Petroleum Dependency Consumer Packaged Goods Risk Dashboard

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.

Now experts in disaster response will tell you that preparedness is as much about skills and community as it is about “stuff” but it’s a lot harder to learn a new skill and nurture community than it is to buy something.

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.

For instance, I didn’t know Kroger’s had a public pricing API till today so you live, you learn and then if you have a kid it’s time to buy Luvs. No really diapers are one of the most at risk products for shortages as the impacts of the war ripple out.

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.

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
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
Aesthetics

Day 1910 and Eyes at the Waldorf

I don’t wear makeup everyday. When the pandemic hit and life moved online, one could easily slap on a video filter and avoid the additional labor required to look professional as a woman.

I went from a life where wearing a full face of makeup was the professional default expectation to one where there was no expectations at all. People don’t like a world without rules.

That vacuum of expectations has been filled with even more intense appearance expectations. Now that “in real life” experiences have become luxuries, many social interactions have developed new norms in which cosmetics are part and parcel of expected manners and basic decorum.

Not all scenes have incorporated makeup. Technology is still relatively laid back about visible makeup but many have gone the opposite direction. Washington D.C. is a scene where professional expectations demand polish.

Maybe some of this is the Boomer expectations of television ready appearances or maybe it’s the constant Zoomer video recordings but this town likes a full face. A beat mug with a limp wrist as they say.

That means your face’s skin has multiple different layers from contour to powder, your eyes require eyeliner, eyeshadow and mascara and your lips are lined and colored.

I’ve enjoyed doing a “natural” look this week which despite its misleading name is still quite a few steps. The basics aren’t that hard though. Light brings a feature forward. Shadows move a feature back. Everything else is details.

I brought cosmetics for a few friends and one girlfriend who mentioned the cosmetic expectations asked me for some basic advice on eye makeup as she’s found it a nuisance and quite a bit of work.

I grabbed a few eyeshadow sticks and we popped into the bathroom of the Waldorf which was the home base hotel of the conference I’d been attending.

I will use brushes and powder eyeshadow palettes when I need a very specific look, but if I just need to be “done up” I like the ease of an eyeshadow stick. You smudge some depth into your crease and some light on the inner edge and you are good to go.

Two or three colors gets the job done. I use a gel twist up eyeliner just on upper line. I prefer lengthening mascara or tubing varieties as volume mascaras tend to drop fiber.

Demonstrating this process got us a small audience. The bathroom attendant was curious about the ease and speed at which this was possible. Nothing brings women together quite like the rituals and secrets of aesthetics. All eyes on my eyes and all hearts open to finding a new way to feel comfortable. That’s beauty to me.

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 Politics Travel

Day 1908 and Capital Perfection

I may have had one of the best days of my life yesterday. I want to get into a preposterous amount of detail as every single element of the day was peak Washington D.C.

I hung out with a long time friend with whom I have a shared passion (we are a special kind of economics nerd), we walked all over, toured several spaces your average citizen only sees on television. And if you are a nerd you really care where day Bretton Woods was signed.

The treaty room

It was my first time seeing some of those spaces and I felt very privileged. Nothing fires patriotism quite like seeing those who serve the nation.

I finished the day above the city watching the sunset on the Washington Monument while airplanes and helicopters ferried people of great importance than I in and out of the city.

It almost made me want to consider public service. But as my friend reminded me that it’s not all this glamorous. My Sunday was almost surely the very best the city has to offer.

Perfect weather, perfect company, perfectly cooked steak (from 6666 ranch so shoutout to my Taylor Sheridan homies), I even had on a perfect spring dress.

Thanks Jackie
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
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
Biohacking Chronic Disease

Day 1899 and Off To Sleep

I regret to say that after yesterday’s various excitements through my continued ill health; did not leave me with anything for today.

I crawled out of bed for a coffee far too late. Was greeted by marginally better biometrics such I think my Whoop took pity on me by giving me a green.

The trouble with context and personalization? It was only barely better than the reds of the worst that continued into a week of yellows where my resting heart rate and heart rate variability went in the wrong direction.

I largely spent today sleeping because I could t get enough last night. I hope you don’t mind if I go back to my nap as waking up was a challenge.

Categories
Chronic Disease Medical Politics

Day 1895 and If Not Us Then Who?

Despite persistent efforts to mitigate the downsides of my various medications, as well as maintaining dedicated wholistic lifestyle routines for my chronic diseases, I am not making adequate progress. I’d go so far as to say today it feels like I am sliding backwards.

But that is partially a function of luteal phase acute migraines and not the full picture on the ground. Yes, it’s true multiple metrics have gotten significantly worse over the 15-month span of my IL-17 inhibitor experiment with Bimselx and I am preparing to make the decision on what to do next. Many biometric markers are much better but the trade-offs are severe. It just feels like I can’t overcome them right now because I feel awful.

Nevertheless it’s important to remain grounded in the here and now. I think part of my trouble may be I am adjusting both to a new time zone and my normal altitude. Maybe I’m overly concerned by data points that will get smoothed out over time but it feels very spik.

Alas there is little room in life for downtime or bad days. Portfolio companies are fundraising, politics is getting uglier by the second, and one key blocker in my life has remained unsolved now for years.

I’ve never experienced a blocker quite so persistent as the American State Department’s handling of visa and immigration work. And yes that includes being disabled and chronically ill. That’s how bad state capacity is right now. My years-long attempt to get visas for family members to come help has not seen an iota of success.

But we keep going. There is much to be done, both practically and at higher levels of abstraction, and I am being whipsawed by hormone migraines over the last 48 hours. It is not an ideal time for weakness in one’s body.

Yesterday the best I could do in terms of writing was some rambling about my irritation with new retail sales cadences at Sephora feeling down market. Not that I necessarily need this space to be filled with decent content but I know that I am not running at even 10% capacity.

We all have to contribute our talents to this moment in time and there are projects that I wish to commit more time and energy to, even though it feels like it may be the death of me. But if not me then who? It’s a question we should all be asking ourselves and I hope more of us rise to the challenge.