Author: admin

21 good things from 2021

Winter. The start to winter was fantastical; from climbing temps in December to full on blizzard conditions in a week. Excellent transition! Family. The blizzard meant my parents stayed a couple of extra days through the holidays, having them around for playing with grandkids and snow removal was quite fun. Books. It was a great […]

Not all lessons are hard

Nor do all hard lessons need to be difficult. Often, the signs are not subtle, and the lesson is easy – even fun. For some reason, believing this to be the case was not my default position, but I’m grateful to have learned this along the way.

New Defaults

Ben Thompson at Stratechery has a post that gives me hope. It is pretty easy to get spun out on negativity when thinking about the state of affairs in the world, but Ben’s suggested defaults offer an antidote: First, it should be the default that free speech is a good thing, that more information is […]

Ideas

Decentralized publishing. Printing press in every town; authors sell digital assets that people can then print locally, or read on a device. Instant nutritional value analyzer. Scan/sample/skewer a tomato from your garden and compare with storebought equivalent. Way to track ‘the great nutrient collapse‘ and compare benefits of gardening at home.

China

Branko Milanovic is arguing that the phenomena of China’s rise to economic superpower is largely ignored by mainstream economists, and I would tend to agree. In his podcast with Russ Roberts the discussion revolves around the western/free market economics perception that the only thing that prompted China’s meteoric rise was that they opened up to […]

Noise

Daniel Kahneman has a new book coming out, a copy of the prologue is currently available here. I’ve been throwing the term ‘noise’ around for the last, oh, 4 ish years in kind of a “Wag the Dog” sense, but the refinement that Kahneman provides gives an even greater sense of urgency to the act […]