There are still people out there who seem to believe that fighting the climate crisis is somehow in opposition to progress. That it will hold the economy back. The exact opposite is the case. Fighting the climate crisis is the most pro-progress program we can embark on. Driving an EV is a superior experience to driving a car with an internal combustion engine. I say this as someone who has driven a great many high end German cars. Using modern heat pumps combined with solar can save many hous...

There are still people out there who seem to believe that fighting the climate crisis is somehow in opposition to progress. That it will hold the economy back. The exact opposite is the case. Fighting the climate crisis is the most pro-progress program we can embark on. Driving an EV is a superior experience to driving a car with an internal combustion engine. I say this as someone who has driven a great many high end German cars. Using modern heat pumps combined with solar can save many hous...

We have reached the stage in the devolution of our democracy where people have become afraid. Not in the overt, trembling with fear way, but in the semi-conscious, easily suppressed, but no less potent one. If I say something now, what happens if Trump stays in power? Will my company (or portfolio companies) face repercussions, such as losing government contracts? Will the IRS turn over my finances? Will I be called out publicly and have an angry mob show up at my door? The more you have to l...

We have reached the stage in the devolution of our democracy where people have become afraid. Not in the overt, trembling with fear way, but in the semi-conscious, easily suppressed, but no less potent one. If I say something now, what happens if Trump stays in power? Will my company (or portfolio companies) face repercussions, such as losing government contracts? Will the IRS turn over my finances? Will I be called out publicly and have an angry mob show up at my door? The more you have to l...

I have been meaning to write a blog post about Marxism following an exchange in the comments to one of my posts about Trump’s dictatorial tendencies. Essentially the thrust of the comment was that Marxism is a bigger threat in the US today than fascism. I disagree with this assertion, but I do think that the extremes to which we have taken capitalism have opened the door for a resurgence of beliefs that it needs to be toppled entirely rather than shrunken dramatically, as I propose in The Wor...

I have been meaning to write a blog post about Marxism following an exchange in the comments to one of my posts about Trump’s dictatorial tendencies. Essentially the thrust of the comment was that Marxism is a bigger threat in the US today than fascism. I disagree with this assertion, but I do think that the extremes to which we have taken capitalism have opened the door for a resurgence of beliefs that it needs to be toppled entirely rather than shrunken dramatically, as I propose in The Wor...

I wrote a post last week that incensed some people who took issue both with my use of the term fascism and with the apparent focus on the deployment of DHS agents in Portland. Based on the comments here is a new post. I believe there is a clear and present danger of Trump attempting to become a dictator this fall. I am putting this at less than 10% probability but significantly above 0%. Enough so that I believe now is the time to push back hard against this possibility and not after it has h...

I wrote a post last week that incensed some people who took issue both with my use of the term fascism and with the apparent focus on the deployment of DHS agents in Portland. Based on the comments here is a new post. I believe there is a clear and present danger of Trump attempting to become a dictator this fall. I am putting this at less than 10% probability but significantly above 0%. Enough so that I believe now is the time to push back hard against this possibility and not after it has h...

By now, if you are in tech and haven’t been on an extended Techmeme and Twitter break you have heard about GPT-3 a new and massive language model developed by OpenAI. I have played around with it a bit myself and its capabilities are impressive. Here are some thoughts. The model perfectly illustrates the ever moving bar on what we consider artificial intelligence. Not that long ago facial recognition didn’t work at all, now computers routinely outperform humans. Putting together more than a c...

By now, if you are in tech and haven’t been on an extended Techmeme and Twitter break you have heard about GPT-3 a new and massive language model developed by OpenAI. I have played around with it a bit myself and its capabilities are impressive. Here are some thoughts. The model perfectly illustrates the ever moving bar on what we consider artificial intelligence. Not that long ago facial recognition didn’t work at all, now computers routinely outperform humans. Putting together more than a c...

Earlier this week I wrote a post about Trump’s fascist actions which need to be vigorously opposed. In the post I predicted that people would show up with excuses. The comment section delivered on this in spades. I will save anyone the pain of wading through the mess and provide a summary here. Excuse #1: The actions are legal This is presented along with some copy/pasted section of law or some assertion as to the powers of the President. While we absolutely have given the Feds too much power...

Earlier this week I wrote a post about Trump’s fascist actions which need to be vigorously opposed. In the post I predicted that people would show up with excuses. The comment section delivered on this in spades. I will save anyone the pain of wading through the mess and provide a summary here. Excuse #1: The actions are legal This is presented along with some copy/pasted section of law or some assertion as to the powers of the President. While we absolutely have given the Feds too much power...

I was born in Germany in 1967. Growing up my friends and I used to wonder why our grandparents hadn’t resisted Hitler’s rise to power. We were young and full of bravado and oh so sure about how outraged and courageous we would have been. But the sad truth of course is that we most likely wouldn’t have and that we were simply talking tough with the double benefits of hindsight and zero actual consequences for ourselves. Most people didn’t protest for one of many possible reasons, including ign...

I was born in Germany in 1967. Growing up my friends and I used to wonder why our grandparents hadn’t resisted Hitler’s rise to power. We were young and full of bravado and oh so sure about how outraged and courageous we would have been. But the sad truth of course is that we most likely wouldn’t have and that we were simply talking tough with the double benefits of hindsight and zero actual consequences for ourselves. Most people didn’t protest for one of many possible reasons, including ign...

My Twitter feed these days is full with back and forth on “cancel culture.” Much of it quickly reduces to bickering with each side assuming the worst possible interpretation of what the other meant or what their motives are. The latest exhibit here is the Harper’s Open Letter and the reactions to it. This is more than a bit annoying as there are some genuinely interesting issues here that are worthy of a more robust debate. Central to this discussion ought to be an analysis of the power of sp...

My Twitter feed these days is full with back and forth on “cancel culture.” Much of it quickly reduces to bickering with each side assuming the worst possible interpretation of what the other meant or what their motives are. The latest exhibit here is the Harper’s Open Letter and the reactions to it. This is more than a bit annoying as there are some genuinely interesting issues here that are worthy of a more robust debate. Central to this discussion ought to be an analysis of the power of sp...

ICE announced yesterday that foreign students at schools that only instruct online this fall (which includes my alma mater Harvard) must leave the US. I was a foreign student on an F1 visa and would have been distressed by this. More importantly there are quite a few foreign students for whom there is not enough time, or not enough money, or even worse a threat to their lives in their home countries. This is yet another one of those recent US policies where the only plausible assessment is th...

ICE announced yesterday that foreign students at schools that only instruct online this fall (which includes my alma mater Harvard) must leave the US. I was a foreign student on an F1 visa and would have been distressed by this. More importantly there are quite a few foreign students for whom there is not enough time, or not enough money, or even worse a threat to their lives in their home countries. This is yet another one of those recent US policies where the only plausible assessment is th...

In my book World After Capital, I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity. After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the natural environment, humanity invented agriculture. With that set of technologies (planting, irrigation, domestication of animals, etc.), invented roughly 10,000 years ago, the constraint shifted from food to land in what became the Agrarian Age. Then only a couple ...

In my book World After Capital, I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity. After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the natural environment, humanity invented agriculture. With that set of technologies (planting, irrigation, domestication of animals, etc.), invented roughly 10,000 years ago, the constraint shifted from food to land in what became the Agrarian Age. Then only a couple ...