Mindblown: culture, urbanism, leadership, technology.
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Some bad intentions…
Bad Intentions The green bus passes through melike vibrating waves varying shades of ink Color It’s a pleasant enough sensationBut since I am paralyzed If the green bus continuesTo pass through me I will be left here foreverAs if betrayedBy some bad intentions of space and time Jim Carroll
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Modern life is out of control
Modern life is out of control. This is well known, in fact, it is so well known that we have entire industries dedicated to the attempts to put it back “under control”. Yet we organize and structure and tidy and balance to no avail, because modern life is out of control. Too little and too…
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My American Trauma
This is about what happens when you are wrong about who you are, how you see yourself, and what you think that means when conceptualizing yourself, the world, and your place in that world.
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The Source of Truth
When we use truth and fact synonymously we lose the very precision that folks who care about things enough to want a “source of truth” are seeking in the first place.
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I hung up on my mother
I hung up on my mother today because she was trying to make an argument justifying why ~20 million Joe Biden voters didn’t show up for Kamala Harris because she wasn’t competent. There are many, many reasons why this happened, and none of them have to do with the competency of Kamala Harris compared to…
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Minority Rule
Today is Independence Day, 2024. As it may be the last such occurrence in more than name only, we should enumerate what stands to be lost to minority rule. The majority clearly shares common preferences for a value system where you are emancipated from those who would deny you the ability to actualize yourself because…
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Solving the problem
There are lots of voices bemoaning the use of copyrighted materials in the training of large language models, how much energy and water is consumed by their creation, and how they are enclosing a commons to create a new generation of robber barons. Congress could, if they were a functioning part of human civilization, enact…
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Middlemen
Thirty-four years ago today I got off a bus in the middle of the night and stood on yellow footprints at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot to begin boot camp. It was a different world. The Berlin Wall had come down, the Soviet Union had effectively surrendered (though it would take another year or so…
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1600 hours
We should be using 1600 hours as the annual amount of available labor per person when we calculate how long something will take, how much it will cost, or how much someone should earn. 1600 hours is 32 hours a week for 50 weeks. $15.00/hour for 1600 hours gets you enough to support a family…
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There are only eight crimes
Despite mountains of statutes enacted by governments making things illegal, there are really only eight crimes: The first five are straightforward uses of power to directly coerce someone to do something they don’t want to do. The next two subvert the will of another, often in a way that doesn’t require their presence. And then…