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Hyperloop Freight is a Joke
As the ongoing attempt to build a Hyperloop tube in California is crashing due to entirely foreseen technical problems, the company trying to raise capital for the project, Hyperloop One, is lookin…
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When Accessibility Gets Labeled Wasteful
Note on Accessibility There has been some concerns about the contrast on this blog, unfortunately some find it hard to read light text on a dark background while others prefer it. I am looking into…
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Blitzted: The Third Reich as a Society on Drugs
So my copy of Norman Ohler’s splendidly-titled Blitzed showed up. This could have been a really disappointing book – in the acknowledgments, Ohler mentions a Berlin DJ friend who told him Nazis took masses of drugs, and I can well imagine going from that beginning to lurid Hitler Channel kitsch. But Ohler has achieved…
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The War on Cash
Corbett Reporteers will be no stranger to the war on cash. I’ve made videos discussing it, conducted interviews about it, written articles examining it and dissected it on the radio .
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The Brexit Possibility
Brexit’s downsides are clear; might tech help realize upsides in building something new based on a new world order?
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The meaning of trust in the age of Airbnb
I am on holiday in Bavaria, where, in between the beer and schnitzels, I have been contemplating the nature of trust. A rather old-fashioned guest house happily took our reservation and let us run …
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'Dirty Jobs' Mike Rowe Meets the Koch Brothers
If you haven't seen it, my name appeared a few weeks ago in a headline next to Koch Industries
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Developers don't build cheaper housing because we make it illegal (2014)
One of the protests against allowing more housing construction is that supply and demand has failed – that developers only want to build luxury units or that the global elite will invariably buy al…
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London vs San Francisco – back and forth
This site is mainly a storage cupboard for things I've tinkered with along the way, such as:
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Fewer Than 1000 Brits Googled “What Is the EU?” After Referendum
I’ve never seen such snobbery in my life. The post-Brexit condescension has been nauseating. The media, pundits, and academics have desperately tried to paint the Brexit voters as ignorant, backwoods troglodytes who only voted to leave the EU because they don’t like brown people.
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Is Craig Wright?
Today there has been an explosion of media interest in the claim by Craig Wright that he is the identity behind the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. However, his blog post is rath…
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$1M VotePlz Sweepstakes
The 2016 US Presidential election feels like the most important one so far in my lifetime. No one able to vote in the US should be sitting this one out—we have a major choice to make. With some...
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Facebook is ruining Instagram
I always loved Instagram. It's been my favorite social network since I had a smartphone. I was happy when it was purchased from Facebook…
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Tech worker resistance is crucial to preventing human rights abuses in the U.S
Hi, I am Valerie Aurora, systems archictecture consultant, writer, and cat appreciator. At Bow Shock Systems , I solve difficult systems problems in networking, file systems, and operating systems. In 2023 I moved permanently to Amsterdam after 20 years in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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Why the NSA Dump Isn't from an Insider
Between Lies and Bad Analysis
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A Simple Explanation of How Shares Move Around the Securities Settlement System
I explained here how money moves around the banking system and how the Bitcoin system causes us to revisit our assumptions about what a payment system must look like. In this post, I turn my attent…
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Anywhere but Medium
Last night I posted a tweet: "Next time you want to post an essay to Medium, do the open web a favor and post it elsewhere. Anywhere. Tumblr. WordPress.com." If I had more space I would have added Pastebin or Blogger. Really anywhere but Medium. I didn't have room to explain, but people asked, so here's…
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I tried to watch Game of Thrones legally in France, Here is what happened
As many of my friends in France started watching the last season of Game Of Thrones: I decided to start watching it too.
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Inequality and Skin in the Game
(Chapter from Skin in the Game)
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Somali Law
“ Few societies can so conspicuously lack those judicial, administrative, and political procedures which lie at the heart of the western conception of government. The traditional northern Somali political system has no chiefs to run it and no formal judiciary to control it. Men are divided amongst political units…
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On the Exponential View
The following is the text of a talk I gave in San Francisco on December 1st, 2016.
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