Given the ongoing decay of our institutions and their utter failure to address the climate crisis it is not far fetched to ask whether we are headed for some kind of societal collapse. A highly relevant book is Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies, published in 1988. I had two key takeaways from reading it. First, there are way more examples of complex societies collapsing than I was aware of. I was of course familiar with the collapse of the Roman Empire and was also aware of M...

Tonight I will be participating in a panel discussion about Universal Basic Income. One of the key arguments for UBI is that we need to decouple people’s ability to meet their basic needs from traditional work because of the rise of automation. This is the case I make in my TEDx talk. But there is another way of framing the problem that has been on my mind. It starts with my contention that the current transition is as profound as the ones from the forager age to the agrarian age and from the...

We live in the Chelsea part of Manhattan, which in turn is part of New York City, one of the iconic cities of the US and arguably the world. We have exactly one broadband provider available at our address. There is zero competition. Never mind an oligopoly or a duopoly. Broadband for us is a monopoly. And that’s exactly why net neutrality matters, as much of the US finds itself in a similar situation. A competition based solution to net neutrality is simply not possible given the current mark...

My partner Fred has come out in support of taxing carried interest as income instead of capital gains. I agree with Fred’s position because I do not believe that this change will result in less investment in startups. Taxes generally cause distortions and as a first approximation, taxing something at a higher rate tends to lead to less activity. Sometimes that is the desired outcome. For instance, if the US were to tax CO2 emissions we would expect to see companies attempt to reduce their emi...

The Deepwater Horizon accident is a terrible lesson in not testing backup plans. Yes, it is probably impossible to test the various way of trying to stop a well under exact conditions (i.e. with a gushing well), but the constant refrain of “this has not been tried at this depth” is deeply disheartening. That’s like hearing from your operations team that they have only ever practiced restoring a single development machine and never anything in the production environment. At this point I am wit...

Given the ongoing decay of our institutions and their utter failure to address the climate crisis it is not far fetched to ask whether we are headed for some kind of societal collapse. A highly relevant book is Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies, published in 1988. I had two key takeaways from reading it. First, there are way more examples of complex societies collapsing than I was aware of. I was of course familiar with the collapse of the Roman Empire and was also aware of M...

Tonight I will be participating in a panel discussion about Universal Basic Income. One of the key arguments for UBI is that we need to decouple people’s ability to meet their basic needs from traditional work because of the rise of automation. This is the case I make in my TEDx talk. But there is another way of framing the problem that has been on my mind. It starts with my contention that the current transition is as profound as the ones from the forager age to the agrarian age and from the...

We live in the Chelsea part of Manhattan, which in turn is part of New York City, one of the iconic cities of the US and arguably the world. We have exactly one broadband provider available at our address. There is zero competition. Never mind an oligopoly or a duopoly. Broadband for us is a monopoly. And that’s exactly why net neutrality matters, as much of the US finds itself in a similar situation. A competition based solution to net neutrality is simply not possible given the current mark...

My partner Fred has come out in support of taxing carried interest as income instead of capital gains. I agree with Fred’s position because I do not believe that this change will result in less investment in startups. Taxes generally cause distortions and as a first approximation, taxing something at a higher rate tends to lead to less activity. Sometimes that is the desired outcome. For instance, if the US were to tax CO2 emissions we would expect to see companies attempt to reduce their emi...

The Deepwater Horizon accident is a terrible lesson in not testing backup plans. Yes, it is probably impossible to test the various way of trying to stop a well under exact conditions (i.e. with a gushing well), but the constant refrain of “this has not been tried at this depth” is deeply disheartening. That’s like hearing from your operations team that they have only ever practiced restoring a single development machine and never anything in the production environment. At this point I am wit...

So yesterday the Feds busted the guy behind Silk Road, the marketplace for drugs and other illegal things paid in bitcoin. The indictment reads like a screenplay for a movie or Breaking Bad style television series (not that I watched Breaking Bad, just basing this on the inevitable flurry of tweets about it that I had in my stream). There should be one key takeaway here: law enforcement is easier online, not harder as government would generally have us believe. It is basically impossible to o...

So yesterday the Feds busted the guy behind Silk Road, the marketplace for drugs and other illegal things paid in bitcoin. The indictment reads like a screenplay for a movie or Breaking Bad style television series (not that I watched Breaking Bad, just basing this on the inevitable flurry of tweets about it that I had in my stream). There should be one key takeaway here: law enforcement is easier online, not harder as government would generally have us believe. It is basically impossible to o...

There is so much happening with privacy right now that it is enough to make my head spin. What is clear though is that individuals, companies and government all want it both ways. Some parts of government want private enterprise to do a better job of protecting individuals’ information from other individuals and companies. At the same time other parts of government are looking for wholesale access to individual data bypassing any and all privacy policies and constitutional rights. Sorry, you ...

There is so much happening with privacy right now that it is enough to make my head spin. What is clear though is that individuals, companies and government all want it both ways. Some parts of government want private enterprise to do a better job of protecting individuals’ information from other individuals and companies. At the same time other parts of government are looking for wholesale access to individual data bypassing any and all privacy policies and constitutional rights. Sorry, you ...