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Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 490 posts.
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Beginner's Guide to Arguing Constructively
How to turn arguments from vicious battles into productive dialogues.
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Banks, QE, and Money-Printing
Published November 2020 Lately, it has become fashionable to debate what is, or is not, “money-printing” by central banks. This debate is natural, due to the extreme policy nature of 2020, with massive fiscal expenditures, huge increases in central bank balance sheets, and changes in central bank inflation targets…
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The biggest competitor to your digital service? The Mars Bar
This post has been languishing in my drafts folder for about a decade. It has recently become relevant again. When I was at Vodafone, selling ringtones was our top priority. They cost almost nothing to produce, supply, and market. Yet people would pay through the nose for them. I say people. I mean kids. We saw a huge…
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The coming IP war over facts derived from books
Facts are friends not food
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That’s not why I did it
It has been a very long time since I’ve dealt with a major loom screw up. A really long time. Like I don’t remember the last time? And it isn’t because I’m so very good at this whole weaving thing, but it sort of is. I’ve been weaving since the mid 70’s. If there is a mistake, or screw up, I can assure you I made it…
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Leave Facebook
One vote doesn’t seem like much. On its own, it hardly matters at all. But if you think of yourself as part of something bigger — America, let’s say — then that one vote can make a difference. Many…
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Assange Hearing Day 15
When Daniel Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers, the US Government burgled the office of his psychiatrist to look for medical evidence to discredit him. Julian Assange has been obliged to submit himself, while in a mentally and physically weakened state and in conditions of the harshest incarceration, to examination…
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Looking for Voter Fraud (In Old Elections) with Data Visualization
The 2020 US election is finally over, and all the election excitement of the last week reminded me of something I had been meaning to look into: Sergey Shpilkin’s data visualizations that cle…
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Assange Hearing Day 14
Monday was a frustrating day as the Assange Hearing drifted deep into a fantasy land where nobody knows or is allowed to say that people were tortured in Guantanamo Bay and under extraordinary rendition. The willingness of Judge Baraitser to accept American red lines on what witnesses can and cannot say has combined…
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How does Brown University know where you are?
In September 2020, Brown University accused students of lying about their location; e.g.:
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The Slack Social Network
Slack lost to Microsoft head-to-head, but has smartly shifted to a horizontal strategy that the vertically-oriented Microsoft can’t match.
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Old bills in Yemen are worth 10% more than new ones
I often write about odd monetary phenomena on this blog. Here's a new contender, Yemen's dual banknote system. Yemen uses the Yemeni ri...
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On the Closing of Living Computers: Museum+Labs
As you might have heard, Living Computers: Museum+Labs has shut down; its doors will remain closed for at least the next twelve to eighteen ...
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Signaling as a Service
01 Intro One of the best books I have read in the last few years is The Elephant in the Brain by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler. The book makes two main arguments: a) Most of our everyday actions can be traced back to some form of signaling or status seeking b) Our brains deliberately hi
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Google: “Any harm Epic has suffered is not irreparable and is of its own making”
Domain registriert bei united-domains.de
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Nuclear power is the only green solution (2004)
We have no time to experiment with visionary energy sources, writes James Lovelock – civilisation is in imminent danger. Published in The Independent , 24 May 2004.
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How I got my Japanese permanent residency
In 2018 I applied for and received Permanent Residency in Japan. The process I used is relatively new and unknown so I wanted to document it in case it might come in handy for someone else.
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How Bees Argue
The book Honeybee Democracy, published in 2010, has been sitting on my shelf for many years.
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Save the USPS
There are three types of infrastructure. One is visible: roads, dams and bridges. The second is invisible: broadband internet provisions and the entirety of our cellular infrastructure. Both are st…