Tag: Work

Categories
Chronic Disease Medical

Day 1666 and Disability Rolls

It’s a shame that National Public Radio is going out in a Trump fire as used to regularly produce reporting that I find informative. Look at this old piece of reporting. We have seen a steady rise of disability rolls.

Thanks to their work I was made aware of the disability industrial complex and I was introduced its scope and cost. Even 2013 National Review was singing its praises. And it is staggering that disability has become the fall off program for those who only have unskilled labor to offer. Disability replaced welfare. And it’s not gotten any better.

I think about how easily I could have ended up on disability myself given my health issues if I didn’t work an information economy type of job you can do sitting day.

But I also know there are ranges of accommodations for most of the work I have now. Things could change and that work might be less valuable. I’m sure many Americans are considering this as automation and artificial intelligence threaten knowledge work.

I was somewhat aware of the relationship to welfare burdens being shifted from the federal government to states during the Clinton era for the rise of disability as it is still paid at the federal levels.

Naturally it meant a growth in disability as Washington D.C. has more money than say Washington state. But to realize just how much money disability rolls have grown and how tightly related they are is salient in our current financial and budget situation.

Comparison of lowered welfare rolls to the rise of disability claims. Source: Social Security Administration Credit: Lam Thuy Vo / NPR

A person on welfare costs a state money. That same resident on disability doesn’t cost the state a cent, because the federal government covers the entire bill for people on disability. So states can save money by shifting people from welfare to disability. And there are whole corporations that exist to make that transition seamless.

We are burdened by the unfit to work as manual labor has nowhere else to go but we will find other disabilities and other ways to get around labor if the contribution to rears ratios don’t work out in someone’s favor. After Covid this calculus got a lot worse.

Especially if health insurance continues to skyrocket. Better a live of poverty and healthcare than a live of poverty and no healthcare. But who knows if we choose to tackle this problem and when. If it’s all about getting what you can and we are in the exit scam era of America I am afraid to learn about the privileges of working while disabled.

Categories
Politics

Day 1662 and Class Consciousness Across The Atlantic

America is grossly class segregated in a way that I don’t think Europeans fully grasp but all Americans intuit even if they don’t understand all of its rules. Every time I find myself in Europe I learn something new about socialism and its trade offs.

Sure we talk a big game about the middle class but America has an enormous variance between our poorest classes and our richest. We are a country where capital decides your fate much more so than your birth station. And we have always had mad scrambles to the top between eras of consolidation and state intervention.

American aristocracy has been land owners but as of the post war years it’s been mostly making good financial decisions. Sure land ownership has been one of paths to better class positions but 2008 showed it is a policy choice from the state as much as an economic one.

Even in a middle tier city like the Seattle area you could once see wealth that ranged from Jeff Bezos to port and manufacturing line union workers. Maybe you don’t end up the richest man in the world but if you got a decent job at one of the many companies powering the metropolitan area from Boeing to the port authority you had a nice upwardly mobile life if you took the opportunities available to you.

If you made bad decisions maybe you ended up pretty far out of the city and can’t find steady work but you could find work if you could get to it.

Being poor when you have freedom of movement seems insane to Europeans who understand the logic of borders and state benefits in ways Americans and their interstate mobility don’t always.

You can with unitive move to better jobs and pick up marketable skills and send your children to decent schools. Maybe then they move from the factory line to engineering. In the next generation their kids go from engineering to founding their own company. Ever so the upward logic of American wealth goes. Naturally it’s not that simple but it’s a good story of competitive logic.

If you lived in a booming region maybe you moved to be closer to a core city. If you can move to opportunities you do so.

The question becomes if Americans can move to successful areas why don’t we do so? Some Europeans don’t understand attachment to place as their movements are either inside the Eurozone or a battle to get inside the Eurozone. That we might be attached to our mountain town and not want to move to Denver or Seattle might be a surprise. It’s all one country right?

Western Europe has had a safety net for so long that wealth is more of a choice than poverty. You have to make quite a bit of effort to get around the slow planned socialist efforts of older industrial concerns to become wealthy. But if you can become part of the social fabric you won’t starve or struggle to get antibiotics prescribed either.

If you are in society in Europe you can make through without a healthcare crisis, cut hours or an eviction notice upending your life. That is why there is a fight to be in the social contract of Europe. America has that fight too it’s just less intense as our benefits are about having our passport and are less about having social security. No one believes they will get it anyway.

Eastern and Southern European societies still know closed borders and poverty through restriction of opportunity. Intra-European strife is all about immigration just as immigration from the rest of the world now drives American fears. Who is part of the social contract and why?

Sure you see wealth in Europe but it can feel as if it’s either generational or corruption or both. In America you see how wealth might be both but you get to see how wealth can be series of good decisions.

If you can keep your shit together you can rise. So why don’t we all do it? It’s a mystery to everyone and no one. You either race to coordinate with capital or you opt out of it entirely.

That’s our class system in America and I think it has shown a lot of merit even as some of Europe doesn’t understand why we choose it. Why opt for competition when you can have coordination? Well maybe a New Yorker doesn’t want to coordinate with someone in Texas. We allow for some of that even as the federal tensions rise amongst our compact. Italy upsets Denmark too.

I don’t know how this class compact works itself out on either continent but I always find myself reaffirming my commitment to capitalism anytime I spend even a couple weeks in socialist countries.

Categories
Biohacking Media Travel

Day 1652 and Back in Istanbul

I’m a mess and somewhat scared. This abcess saga has grown from dismissive preventative care visit (which I did did out of an abundance precaution) and ended with me meeting a general surgeon at a Turkish medical tourism hospital tomorrow to discuss labs and my ultrasound. It’s my second time this year so that’s quite an endorsement as a revealed preference.

But I am serious with this sidebar. Don’t go to SkincareMT’s dermatology practice if you have a layered case that needs more involvement. I found Dr Oetken pleasant but entirely unaccountable when a patient needed advice and weightings on a complex case. I should have known better.

I was afraid she would be a box checking paper pusher afraid to give an opinion. But maybe younger doctors are afraid to treat that way given our system. I needed to know is it worth getting a clearer diagnosis before it is a crisis? Is imaging necessary? I have a set of drugs I take with these specific side effects. Given that risk profile and nuance at hand needed the interpersonal relationship that would guide me.

I do endorse SkincareMT’s cosmetic practice, and Addison in particular is fantastic, but their healthcare wing is clearly designed to extract maximum Medicare dollars from Montana seniors. 

My failure to get an ounce of prevention means I’m flown to Istanbul to attempt to get a pound of cure. Don’t worry I was already in the Mediterranean. Not in the way way some think though.

Yesterday we found out by pulling teeth that I had a problem. It’s clear I need this excised and quickly. The ultrasound is gnarly. Drainage, removal of the foreign object, and potential curratage to make sure the walls of the cyst are removed forever are what is needed. 

The sprawling medical tourism complex in Istanbul is amazing and I trust them more than any other system or talent pool on the planet right now.  What they have built is an incredible achievement and in challenging conditions.

Doctors who listen, who educate you on your options, and most importantly are up to date on current research and global innovations so don’t give you glassy eyed stares when you mention a new medication like a next generation IL-17 inhibitor it’s exotic side effects.  American doctors like that are rare and their hands are often tied by our horrific mess of state failure and lack of market innovation. 

I’m relieved to have choices like “general surgeon or gynecological surgeon” and texting discussions with my case lead (a full time liaison for you and your family on the entire case) on how we will handle excision and culture pathology. 

It does feel like I’ll have good choices. But it also seems like I booked less time than is necessary and I don’t know how I feel about that. A week of waiting on labs in a hotel while in pain is scary. Sure I can work and be productive and maybe even do some tourism but I just want this shit sliced out, an IV of the right antibiotic that will work and some sleep. 

I’ve been doing some crazy bi-phasic sleeping as the Mediterranean is hot as hell from noon to 10pm. So I’ve been doing a bit of staying up late and sleeping in to avoid the heat. It’s not clear how much it’s messing with me yet because I’ve got all these odd infection fever doctor nonsense. A quick surgery and some answers can’t come fast. Thankfully I’m at the crossroads of empires.

Categories
Culture Politics

Day 1648 and Dystopian Doomers

I’m fairly well branded as a doomer, so I hate to break ranks with my preparedness brethren, but I’m absolutely sick of the powerful using fear as a tool to control people.

It isn’t a new problem. This is the go-to tactic our species has used insofar as we can verify with written history.

Any time we experience a change of circumstance, material reality or technology, we hear the braying of the old guard and the panic of the precarious.

People complain for two basic reasons. If you are doing well why change a system that benefits you? If you aren’t successful but equally aren’t comfortable with change, then you resent anyone who benefit from change. Fear and resentment are the shadows of the human soul. Envy is the sin of our time.

I personally feel I’ve invested a lot in doing my part to educate people on risks from climate to currency and compute.

I am politically involved in crypto policy as well as fighting fear in artificial intelligence. I helped pass the only piece of AI legislation in the world focused on liberty. I want people to have a choice for how they engage in a virtual future.

I’m not just a nerd about being prepared either. I’ve done my wilderness first responder certification. We left Colorado for Montana for a host of reasons but top of them was a better and freer climate both literally and figuratively. We live this way because it’s a great way to live and when change happens we are hoping to be resilient.

Having all that in mind I was offline for the 4th of July long weekend as it has been a busy year on all of those fronts. So I was sleeping it off. To come back and see a spate of conspiracies over cloud seeding technology was like a punch to the gut. And I’m already feeling like I’m on the outs with some community when it comes to technology and my intentions.

I’ve only met Augustus Doricko of Rainmaker a handful of times but his circle of young technical Christians dedicated to building solutions to our modern problems are why I remain optimistic in fighting for technology and the people who build it.

These kinds of communities of builders exist in an archipelago of anarchic communities across digital and physical worlds that interlay across many systemic problems. These places will succeed no matter the future we face because they understand it’s necessary to build. That is will.

I’ve been lucky to have been the first investor in Isaiah Taylor’s Valar Atomics. He is a part of this builder world and of a part of a clan of physical builders. He faces decades of fear with a cheerful heart. I believe in his vision for energy abundance.

Nuclear energy was buckled under an old environmentalisms that was a proxy for a fear of a future whose risks, however minimal, were too scary to embrace for those in charge and the public they controlled.

I believe in a vision of a better America (and a better ecosystem and a better economy) because we embrace change to build materially better conditions.

I have frankly seen too much pessimism from older generations and cynical power brokers to be silent. The complicit rancor is slowing us down and there is nothing Christian at all about standing in the way of delivering better conditions to our fellow man.

Paradise is lost. In a fallen world we work to do what we can. It isn’t the end of the world. It’s already lost. Now we work because we must. We aren’t building an eschatology to replace the Lord. We build because that is what we are called to do by him.

Categories
Medical Startups

Day 1630 and Change Change Change

I was hit hard by a week of poor health which meant I missed a policy gathering in Helena today which I was really excited to attend. One of the topics was autonomy and choice in medical care and health.

And with any unexpected change of plans I try to see the upside. Because I was bed resting I was able to catch up on a keynote speech by engineer and technical communicating savant Andrei Karpathy’s talk to YC’s Startup School.

He is an excellent public speaker and has a rare gift for clarity which benefits the entire software ecosystem. And we are an industry who disproportionately see the value of sharing in real time the changes we are seeing as we build. This generation built the networks and seeded the data with our content that enabled these models.

I saw in the talk the long lineage of technical cycles, access expansion and autonomy expanding that I have been a part of since my childhood. I’ve seen a few development and deployment cycles to use the theories of Carlotta Perez

Each cycle granted more power to sharing. The excess value generation of making our tools open to more external use has proven itself. And that has generally made for cycles of innovation that are shared mid deployment by the people as it happens.

And yet we still struggle with the right way of interacting with the tools. Math is fairly abstract. Your average human doesn’t much care for conditionals. We developed mathematics over such odd timeframes that it’s somehow easier to think it’s not in tandem with a culture and a commercial environment.

Maybe some only look at the industrial or military applications for tools and they care little about how they were made. The level of autonomy and control and abstraction that is enabled by software baffles. The more accessible something becomes the more we need to think of the user of the tool. Specialists can use special tooling and need not be so accessible. When it becomes a tool for masses things change. And we are in a changing moment for software as a tool just as the world has the highest expectations for them. Because we are perhaps at the edge of the great buildout.

Karpathy said that working with LLMs can feel like using the command line. It’s an intuitive framing for many programmers. He believes we have not yet found the graphical user interface for this era even as we are perhaps building new operating systems.

A screenshot from Karpathy’s YC Startup School 2025 talk

The GUI or graphical user interface was a mind blowing shift for the personal computing revolution. It allowed in a world of new users including you to use the benefits of computing. Which wasn’t just calculating missile trajectory. The commercial possibilities were as endless as the personal and aesthetic.

That change in access built enormous businesses and was the stuff of nasty backstabbing in the commercialization processes and the competition was very sharp in personal computing era. My father sold software through an old school reseller called Ingram and I gather it was a pretty wild time in the eighties.

But the fresh paradigm is always beyond reach. It’s there waiting to upend your entire world.

To quote Neal Stephenson “ in the beginning there was the command” essay

We were all off the Batch, and on the Command Line, interface now—my very first shift in operating system paradigms, if only I’d known it.

We are in an operating system shift now and we don’t know what to think about it it’s structure. It’s modeled on humans so it has all the same problems we have. It has cognitive deficits just as humans do. This annoys normies who don’t understand how it’s built.

We are interfacing with a new kind of compute output and it will slowly change everything around it as the abstraction layers bring more people into the effort.

We don’t really know what it looks like at this order of magnitude but the change is here and we get to make it. It frankly seems exhausting to ponder and a much much much harder problem set for power than generalized intelligence.

How does this relate to medicine and autonomy? Well, it’s become clear that medicine will be one of the areas that benefits from new access.

I care about the way we develop tools for the entire stack of medicine from pharmaceuticals to patient data. I don’t want another era of regulatory capture. The way we build applications affects how much autonomy and freedom we can give both doctors and patients. I know don’t want to be stuck with what we’ve got. More people should benefit from the changes ahead.

Categories
Finance Internet Culture Politics

Day 1624 and Stay Out of the Red

It’s been a busy week for the MilFred family as it has been busy for many families across the word. We are praying for you.

This morning Alex and I were excited to attend the “Digital Assets Public Hearing” in Bozeman put on by The Commissioner of Securities and Insurance Office of the Montana State Auditor.

That is big job and a large office and an important one even if it may sound a bit dry to the average person. They oversee everything from securities fraud and data breach reporting to Medicare and health insurance markets.

I overstrained myself the last couple of days (Alex’s birthday was worth it) so my Whoop was blinking red but but I wasn’t going to miss an important public meeting on a topic crucial to Montana’s future.

For me, the future hinges on to compute and energy. Montana is well positioned. We secured our right to compute this year thanks to State Senator Zolnikov’s bill. And the work continues to as our civil servants.

On June 13, 2025, at 10:00 A.M., CSI will hold a second public hearing in the Cottonwood Room of the Bozeman Public Library at 626 E. Main St., Bozeman, Montana 59715, to further consider the public’s comments regarding digital assets and possible regulation of such digital assets. 

It drew quite a crowd both in person and over the internet as Montana has quickly gained a reputation of being future and freedom focused. And quite reasonably so.

The Commissioner is the statewide elected official responsible for administering the Securities Act of Montana. As part of his duties, the Commissioner is responsible for the regulation of securities in Montana, including encouraging capital formation while also safeguarding Montana investors through mechanisms such as registration and disclosure, as well as antifraud enforcement powers…

The market for digital assets has rapidly expanded in recent years, and the unsettled regulatory landscape at the Federal level has left several questions open. Some bad actors have also exploited the market expansion and the public’s interest in digital assets in fraudulent ways.  The public’s perceptions, experiences, and knowledge of digital assets may aid the Commissioner in determining whether rules or definitions regarding digital assets may be helpful for the people of Montana.

The goal is to help the commissioner and his team understand this emerging market and make sure it works to the benefit of Montanas especially as the lack of federal regulatory clarity has been a challenge we are personally familiar with.

We hope we can help Montana can help her citizens flourish with the right tools. In the past we mined “pro y plata” with picks and shovels but in the future we may use Montana energy to mine Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and tokens. So make your voice heard!

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1623 and a Costco Birthday

Today is my husband’s birthday. He genuinely is a very low key guy and when his birthday falls on a weekday he isn’t into big to-dos. But he said he’d be up for a Costco date.

No surer sign of enjoying middle age than loving the finest buyers club values of Cost. But to be honest we’ve both always loved Costco. And you can really get into Costco when you have a multiple barn freezers and backup power so no apologies for our love of a practical Costco date.

Bounce house for sale? Birthday win

Though it didn’t go entirely to plan. If it means anything to the pulse of America the Bozeman Costco was a chaotic in a “concerning operational decay” way.

Now we noticed a lot of categories completely out. No lemons. Several steak cuts we’d been hoping to get for a birthday dinner. Produce in general was pretty bad. Enough to make you wonder if they were affected by the United Natural Foods hack.

But other things were off. Staffing wise you had to wonder if they fired half the staff or no one planned for managing checkout flow for June in Montana high season? Nothing is as predictable as tourists going to Yellowstone if you’ve got a manager with any tenure or common sense. but maybe they don’t. I have a Twitter mutual who burned out on a Costco job so two strikes guys. Talent is part of the Costco brand.

Alex works New York hours so we got there around 2:30 or so which you’d think would be quiet but is not in midsummer in southern Montana. It was summer high season traffic you’d expect on a Saturday though.

We walked every aisle and there was a lot of fun oddities. Japanese toilets, water bottle drying racks, sound absorbing wall panels. And there were some less fun selections.

We usually do a better business with bear spray

There was a disturbing amount of slop packaging products and rapidly prototyped TikTok trends follow ons. Dubai chocolate ice cream bars? The zoomers will enjoy their summers up here I’m sure.

Lots of grouchy Boomers and exhausted families were looking for basics in the middle of the store as we perused the sides of the store for fun. Everyone is in Montana it seems. As we waited checkout I heard discussion of how JD Vance meeting with the Murdoch family at their ranch in Dillon.

We had intended to go end it with a hot dog and pizza slice respectively but it was so intense at the checkout area we didn’t even try. The lines were unmanageable which is how we got so much gossip. Montana isn’t so big that you can fly Air Force 2 to Butte without chatter about which ranch you are visiting.

I hope Costco has made some margin on selling gold bars to happy men like my husband. We also found a few other things

Categories
Culture Emotional Work

Day 1614 and Updating Our Hyperparameters

The worst part of change is figuring out what you need to let go of in order to achieve it. Cate Hall (whose writing I admire) has a timely essay on the topic.

Modern life is mess of conflicting and changing realities to which we are more or less poorly adapting ourselves. Learning is hard.

As you might expect from hominids adapted to long extinct physical and chemical environments, the new parameters determining our current physical realities are a challenge for us to update on our own.

Backpropogating a human neural network does not yet have a set of best practices but when it does emerge I’m surely it will be a blogger tying together the layers of training, physical requirements and other weights and cultural measures that improve our learning environment.

Not with me? Google’s attempts to serve AI generated synopses is here to help and their updates might be working as this isn’t bad

Backpropagation is a training algorithm for neural networks, specifically designed to optimize the weights within the network by minimizing the difference between predicted and actual outputs. Backpropagation aims to reduce the error between the network’s output and the desired output

In plain English, you learn by making mistakes and correcting them. You do something again with an adjusted technique and when succeed you update your understanding. You reduce your errors by looking back at what you did and changing your future behavior hoping it will succeed. When it does you adjust. You have learned.

Success might change depending on what you are doing and how your environment changes. Some constants remain. How can we look back on the data in our own lives and in our species and use it to improve our lives going forward?

I don’t know exactly how to approach the current moment but I know I’m adjusting to millions of pieces of input daily and I am still frustrated that I don’t always get the outputs I want. The logical next move is to change.

But change what? And how? What will I be leaving behind in that process? How acceptable is it to let go of what we were so sure we knew? Can we convince others of it? Can we adjust the parameters globally so others adjust too? How do we turn the knobs and dials on the systems that we use to learn at network scale?

Categories
Aesthetics Reading

Day 1613 and Minority Opinion

Being disagreeable has a lot going for it. It’s frowned on when women do it even though it is usually coded as a feminine trait. Traditionalists say they want agreeable wives and iconoclast lords.

Despite this call to the past, it’s not hard to argue that this amenable feminine and chaotic masculine is itself a bit subversive. Fractious independent goddesses and agreeable brotherhoods are archetypes too.

I am fearful in this moment that we have less patience for disagreements among humanity just as our capacity for loyalty and reciprocity dims with atomization.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease has a bit of a “both sides of the bus” meme quality to it. Attention can build you up and tear you apart.

The eye of American’s elite class has many competing stories about which ideas must be celebrated, which are taboo and which are too dangerous to be discussed. And that’s just the last couple of days of essays at the New Yorker.

Categories
Culture Internet Culture Reading

Day 1600 and Uncertain Milestones

I read some Charles Dickens today. No this isn’t a Great Expectations joke. Rather, I read the first seven paragraphs of his 900 page novel Bleak House.

Why? I wanted to test my literacy as part of social media’s great ongoing debate about humanity’s waning reading and writing abilities.

A Substacker & Twitter personality broke down a 2015 think-aloud reading comprehension study which analyzed the skills of English majors at two Kansas universities.

[They were asked to] read the first seven paragraphs of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House out loud to a facilitator and then translate each sentence into plain English

They Don’t Read Very Well: A Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills of English Majors at Two Midwestern Universities.

The Substacker Beloved Kitten has written about what constitutes mass literacy before using something called the PIAAC which has five levels of literacy.

If you are a knowledge professional you better hope you are a four but social media comments suggest most of us are not.

This methodology doesn’t even try articulate level 5. And as someone who occasionally sees what a real 1% outlier looks like I don’t disagree. Our best are in a league of their own.

So obviously as American funded “college for all” it was clear not all college attendees would on the right side of average. And as it turns out, the English majors at highly subsidized state universities (mostly white girls incidentally) had a lot of trouble understanding Dickens’s British family court tragedy.

I also don’t want to read that many pages of fog metaphors, and I have an entire tag dedicated to forced metaphors.

I took the test (speaking my answer into my phone) and it was harder than you think to simplify but I had the vocabulary.

Amusingly all of the test takers were sure they could easily finish the stupid book after most of them failed to understand even its basic concepts. I would not finish Bleak House.

Like those other white girls I am unlikely to be in the 1% of literacy when it comes 19th century British literature. Surely in my own skill stack (and it’s overlapping areas of expertise) I can approach 2SD on things. I suspect this blog and my general internet presence suggests I can do Level 4 reading. We think around what we can.

That seems adequate given I contribute what I like and communicate what is enjoyable on my own spaces. Here I am plodding along contributing sixteen hundred days of writing to the public discourse which is its own proof of literacy. It’s several novels worth of training data for our artificial intelligences.

I think about how much I do or don’t want to contribute to the maw of publicly indexed Internet because I believe we get better if we all contribute to this public good.

Our future is a shared coordination problem requiring we can comprehend and contribute to our commons. Maybe I understand enough Dickens to get by. He maybe has a dimmer view of legalistic thinking than I do. But I’m sure he’d see plenty of wretches in our times too.