Category: philosophy
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War Never Changes
“War Never Changes” the tag-line for the Fallout videogame franchise. Within that fictional world, it means that even when countries and governments blow each other off the map, a brute with a club is still more powerful than a mayor with a plan. The player is invited to bash skulls just as much (or more)…
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Pink Glue
In the spring of 1972, two revolutions met in the same sentence. One had marched and shouted and chanted. One had done none of these things. By a vote of 84-8, the U. S. Senate approved the Equal Rights Amendment. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United…
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Installation
In the summer of 1971, with the Southern air thick and humid in Richmond, Virginia, 344 days after Milton Friedman’s New York Times Magazine article, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits”, beneath the slow rotation of a ceiling fan a partner at the white-shoe law firm Hunton & Williams typed a…
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the illusion of stability
Why Everything You’ve Built Is on Shaky Ground You probably don’t think about the economy much. Not the big picture, anyway. You’ve got a job, a mortgage, maybe a 401(k). You pay your taxes, try to make smart decisions, and hope things work out. When something feels off—rising prices, a blown tire you can’t quite…
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the 20 worst ideas of the 20th Century
In no particular order: Dishonorable mentions that didn’t make the top 20, again in no particular order:
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The mobile internet that fits my notion of that the mobile internet is
The Mobile Internet is just The Internet. The Internet is just the Network of Networks. Networks are just “computers connected to one another so they can send messages to one another”. “Computers connected to one another …” is just Ethernet. The Mobile Internet I want is just Ethernet. Like WiFi. Like WiFi but with long-distance…
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The systemic state
Fixing a broken system is often hard because systems involve lots of parts and you might not be able to control all the parts involved in the fix. Knowing what to fix is usually pretty easy once you orient yourself to the system. Politics is this way. We know we need to fix elections by…
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chores
AI+robotics should make everyone’s life easier by doing the things in our lives that are necessary, time consuming, and annoying; basically, as the saying goes, they should be doing our chores so we can have more time to enjoy our hobbies. Chore is one of those odd words who’s meaning emerges from some kind of…
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when open doors let in all the wrong people
Bots use up more CPU cycles on the average Web site than humans, and bots are increasingly not there to help. Where in days gone by, a bot might be indexing for a search engine to help people you don’t know find your site, today the mostly exist to feed giant statistical machines that calculate…
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unintended consequences
Unintended consequences are the only consequences that really matter besides the consequences you feel because of the actions of someone else doing stuff outside of your control. When Putin invaded Ukraine it caused the EU to un-hook from Russian energy, which was, in retrospect, not nearly as difficult as they had been telling themselves because…