Mindblown: culture, urbanism, leadership, technology.
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Thoughts on “what programming language should I learn?”
“What programming language should I learn?” is a perfectly reasonable question. You might have asked it yourself. Almost every answer to that question you’ll get is bunk. The one that isn’t, sounds something like, “It depends on what you want to do.”. Which is, while not complete bunk, still very bunk-ish because it isn’t really…
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Is there a relationship between market stability and market fragility?
There this argument in economics that big, interconnected markets are more stable than markets without inter-dependencies because can make it through economic shocks better when they can dissipate the impact of those shocks more widely. This makes sense on a macroeconomic level where you don’t actually look at the individuals and where the low level…
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A working definition of…
Ta-Nehisi Coates has many accomplishments, so I occasionally feel bad that what I most often think of in his body of work is his 2013 article in the Atlantic, How the quiet car explains the world. I think of it often because it contains this: “I think what we have here is a working definition…
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Two kinds of software creation
There is a fundamental discord between software creators and the businesses that want them to create software on their behalf that really just boils down to something like the following: Programmers at all levels of experience want to believe they are artists, while businesses of all sizes want to believe that software can be manufactured.…
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What I’m reading (2023.04.22 edition)
Having suddenly found myself with more free time than expected I get to catch up on my reading. For me that means not only reading, but note-taking and capturing fragments of ideas to use later. This means I have stacks of books that I’ve read once but are filled with these little Post-it flags and…
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No Capital Opportunity in Social Problems
Because social problems cannot be solved by technological solutions, there are limited opportunities to invest capital into the solution itself. This is a problem for capitalists, since investing capital for gain is what they do. Once the opportunities to provide the tools that make implementing the solution to a social problem are exhausted or the…
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No Technical Solutions for Social Problems
You can’t solve social problems with technological solutions. This seems like it should be obvious, but in many circles it is far from obvious. That’s understandable, we want technology to save us from ourselves, but in the end technology is just tools and the knowledge to use them. We have to save us from ourselves,…
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There are two economies – the sharing economy and the capture economy
If you own something you have two choices – share it or don’t share it. That’s it. If you share it — and by share it I really mean, “let other people use it for free” — then it isn’t capital in any classical sense, though you may be mining social capital through the act…
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No redemption
John Lithgow is not the hero in Footloose because he “came around” and stopped being the ideological leader of Bomont’s manufactured moral outrage society. You don’t get a free pass because you “came around” to a not-evil way of thinking after being the mouthpiece of the evil-way of thinking.
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Late-stage Westphalianism
In 1648, the Peace of Westphalia brought an end to decades of widespread warfare between Catholics and Protestants in continental Europe. In a pair of treaties involving 109 parties, a system of International relations was born based on the idea that rulers were allowed to determine the religion of their own state, but that their…