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the cake, the snake, and the cocktail party
Your emotions are real, but they are not reality. These days, reality seems to be a matter of opinion, or perhaps mere assertion. But this isn’t just a recent phenomenon; it’s a divergence of the...
View ArticleThe Morality of Ads and The End of Zuck
The “An Open Letter To …” format has always struck me as inescapably self-aggrandizing in a particularly duplicitous way. The explicit presumption is that the addressee will actually read the letter...
View Articlenext level
Humans have a tendency to believe that the most fundamental forces of nature can be mastered, and with some good reason: light, darkness, cold, heat, gravity – these forces have all been vanquished by...
View ArticleThanksgiving reverie: con job
Con Job I had to hire a bodyguard for a visit with my mother. The accumulation of events that led to these cold facts is something I can only regard with dull wonder, like waking up the morning after...
View Articlecelebrated people
p. 96: I keep it always full of interesting people, night and day. When you live alone in a feudal mansion, with gardens spuming the sparkling odor of jonquils and the frothy odor of hawthorn and plum...
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the story of the end
This week’s first-ever picture of a black hole was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope, which is named after the critical boundary around the black hole. Once an object crosses the event horizon...
View Articlewhy warren
I’m absurdly proud of having predicted Trump as President, more than two months before the Republican convention, and six months before the general election. I know of only two earlier public...
View Articlefrom Linden to Libra
Join me, friends, in the Wayback Machine … In 2007, Facebook sent a couple of strategists to Linden Lab to ask us about virtual currency. Of course they would ask us – at the time, we were the world’s...
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what we talk about when we talk about electability
What does it mean for one candidate to be more “electable” than another? Some people object to even posing this question, arguing that “electability” is just a cover for maintaining the status quo,...
View Articleover easy
Although being a visionary seems fruitful, you never want to be too far ahead of the times. When you can predict the future very far ahead about something that’s very important, the more fervently you...
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bottled up
When I first started getting glum about the future, I thought that maybe I was just getting old and grumpy. But now I’ve noticed that an increasing number of people are concerned about the direction...
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my way
I named this blog “ginsudo” in 2007, saying that it means “the way of ginsu.” That was a lazy evasion, as the natural follow-up question should be “Sure, but what exactly is your way?” And I had no...
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wishful thinking
I was wrong about why Warren would win the Presidency, bringing a merciful end to my brief non-career as a political prognosticator. (Though really, if a poor record ended dumb predictions, there...
View ArticleWhy The Next Financial Crash Will Be The Last
or, an Outline of Everything I’ve Read on Twitter in 2020 so far The most basic criticism of capitalism is that it is inexorably tied to growth. Capitalism is the most efficient way to allocate...
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present time
Many people have remarked that this month is the longest in memory, so much so that as you lie awake in bed at night, you can hardly believe that this morning was the same day. This has a very simple...
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the tragic triangle of the three cultures
In 1959, C.P. Snow delivered a lecture called The Two Cultures, about a vexing divide that he saw in the academic circles of Oxford and Cambridge in the middle of the 20th Century. Snow was a rare...
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the missing links
The first scientific mnemonic I can remember is King Philip Came Over For Good Spaghetti: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. That was a long time ago, and biological classification...
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police technology
In the future, the police as we know it today will not exist. This is not a political statement, it’s simply a technological fact. Now, it’s essential to remember that all technological facts are...
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the logic of “silence is compliance”
“Silence is compliance” is a phrase that many people toss off without thinking through how it works. People who use the phrase earnestly think that it’s obvious that silence in the face of injustice...
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Fighting Korea
I somehow just stumbled across a years-old interview with the actor John Cho, who, like me, is of Korean ethnic background. The Korean soccer team slogan, made famous in their run in the World Cup a...
View Articlenifty fifty
When I turned 40 years old, I wrote a short series of four posts to try to sum up the four most important lessons I’d learned to that point. For most of the past decade, I thought I’d do the same at...
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a lever and a place to stand
“Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I will move the world.” Archimedes (apocryphal) When I was a kid growing up in New Jersey, all I ever wanted was to get out, across the river to the bright...
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don’t be evil
B42 “Don’t Be Evil.” If you recognize this as Google’s former corporate motto, you probably regard it as a broken promise. But arriving too quickly at this judgment misses the lesson of the journey....
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truly universal advice
I enjoy mentoring as a stress-relieving hobby. I don’t mind stress, I consider it a byproduct of pursuing my goals, and I’m still willing to suffer if required to achieve my goals. I’ll probably need...
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bill & ted’s unconscious competence
There’s a difference between having a plan and changing it, and never having one at all. 6th Uncle I was twenty-one years old when my uncle said that to me in Minnesota, and I’m still thinking about...
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