Trolls convinced journalists they were “abortion bounty hunters”
And other misadventures
Superhighway84 – a Usenet-inspired decentralized internet discussion system
Superhighway84 is a USENET-inspired decentralized internet discussion system, featuring a retro text user interface and powered by IPFS and OrbitDB.
Do Adults Really Not Remember School Sucked?
One of the constant refrains which has bemused me during the pandemic is all the people saying how much kids want to go back to school.
What's going on here, with this human?
The philosopher Kwame Appiah writes that “in life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you’re playing.” When I try to figure out what game I’m playing, I see that for the last 25 years I have been playing […]
Is Norway the New East India Company?
Gas and oil, and opium
Why inflation is not a threat
I have just posted this thread on inflation on Twitter. It will feature in 'Money for nothing and my Tweets for free' in due course: Current debate about inflation isn’t really about whether it’s likely: it isn’t. Instead it’s about whose vision of the future is going to win. Is it...
Stonks Are What You Can Get Away With: NFTs and Financial Nihilism
Eric Jang, "Ten Apes", Jun 19 2021. NFT "drop" coming soon. Andy Warhol once said, “Art is what you can get away with.” I interpret the qu...
Teaching open-source software in North Korea
In 2016, I went to North Korea to teach a class of masters students how to contribute to open source software . Here’s an image from one of my lectures:
Repealing Section 230 won’t do what anyone wants
Abolishing platform immunity won’t do what anyone wants
The good things in the current age in tech
In the industry, we often talk about the more negative aspects that cause us strife - frameworks that are out of date, hard problems that no one really has concerete solutions and so on. But every now and then, it can be helpful to introspect and consider things at a larger scale, for example, what good things are…
McKinsey taught Big Pharma how to price-gouge
Leaked slides document the lies, sleaze and profiteering.
The Amazon Empire Strikes Back
Amazon’s logistics investment makes the company increasingly attractive to 3rd party merchants.
I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months
I believe there is a non-trivial chance that the United States will experience a rolling series of “Ireland events” over the next 30-45 days, where the Covid effective reproductive number (Re not R0) reaches a value between 2.4 and 3.0 in states and regions where a) the more infectious UK-variant (or similar) Covid…
California Megafires Are Solvable
The basics on how we got to now, why it matters for all Americans, and how we can fix it together.
Power imbalances and sex
I saw a gif of a woman talking about how women make less than men in the film industry, ending with ‘the only industry where women make more than men is porn!’ Her point was about the o…
Facts don’t change our minds (2018)
Why don't facts change our minds? This article explains the logic of false beliefs and proposes a better system for constructive conversation.
Tyler Cowen is a curator of talent
Tyler Cowen is an economist that has spotted top talent in fields ranging from biotech to literature, often years before insiders. How does he do it?
WhatsApp and the Domestication of Users
WhatsApp's rise and recent PR efforts highlight a class of business models that I call "user domestication".