Category: the market
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Democracy and capitalism
Democracy is about removing the friction of living well amongst people. Capitalism has realized there is money to be made by monetizing in perpetuity that friction that democracy is trying to remove.
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The problem with tech companies
Part of the problem with tech companies in general is that they don’t actually have to exist and I think everyone knows it, like in their soul. Tech, particularly Silicon Valley tech, is not actually valuable in any intrinsic way, and so if the Internet were to suddenly vanish, and everyone who knows how to…
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Intellectually dishonest apply within
The CEO of Comcast is making the rounds talking about how his cosmically disliked unregulated monopoly should be getting less heat about their deployment of data caps on residential broadband Internet connections because “the more bits you use, the more you pay“, comparing data use to electricity or gasoline use. Except it is nothing like…
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Mitigating gun violence versus controlling gun access
Gun control is decisive. Guns salve fear. Fear is increasingly pervasive, mostly because it is an effective tool for manipulating the market or the masses, occasionally because it is warranted. Fear-of-direct-bodily-harm-driven gun violence is most hazardous in places with higher population density. More people in smaller spaces increases the opportunity for both ad hoc violence,…
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I suffer from commercial-Internet-access-asymmetricitis
My upload speed is roughly 768 Kilobits per second. Assuming perfect conditions, at that rate a 40 megabyte file takes about seven minutes to upload. Light will travel over 70 million miles through a vacuum in the same time. I upload a lot. I live in the United States. It is 2015. I am sad.…
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Corruption versus Corrosion
There is, in the United States, a vocal angry outrage over what is being called corruption, particularly in the context of government. As a place where corruption hasn’t been a problem for many many years, this might seem odd. What are we really angry about?
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Internet mass surveillance shenanigans have one obvious outcome:
the widespread proliferation and use of IPSec AH headers and ESP in transport mode. First one with an easy-to-use solution for the masses wins the Kewpie doll.
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On digital piracy
I know it is pedantic, but “digital piracy” is a non-sensical phrase. Piracy means “crime on the high seas” and has been extended to mean crime in the air because of a long tradition of naval-aerial military jargon transfer. That crime is almost always theft or acts committed in the process of theft. The gist…
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Price premium for time sensitive video
Watching NFL games live on television incurs a 1912% price premium over the same game time-shifted from Sunday to Tuesday.
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Features are for artists, organizations just have Burdens
All Products have two kinds of properties: features and burdens. I don’t want anything that asserts “managed” as a feature. Me having to manage something is a burden. Me not having to manage it is a feature. BUT, if I don’t have to manage it, it better not do something that I wouldn’t have it…