Tag: Economics
Why The Economist hates wealth taxes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8mfqPNdENw "I want to speak to you now, somebody who is not incredibly rich, but has a bit of money, and is opposed to wealth taxation of the very rich. And I want to explain to you what is going to happen from here. Okay, we have increasingly, in this country, in America, in the...
Yes, Buy Them a Coffee: Support and Mutual Aid on the IndieWeb
Responding to criticism of 'buy me a coffee' links on blogs, I argue that asking for support isn't commodification—it's mutual aid! Exploring the economic pressures on creators, the history of mutual aid, and why the IndieWeb needs community support mechanisms to sustain independent art.
Another test the ATmosphere
"The implications of all this are profound. First, our understanding of political risk has to change. We are no longer dealing with actors who are constrained by norms, expectations, or even basic human decency. Second, the institutional safeguards that we assumed would provide protection look increasingly fragile. If those in power are willing to ignore...
BRIDGES ARE SOCIALISM
The great MetLife Stadium walking debate, why a bridge is not about crossing a road, but because bridges are socialism.
Clinging on to sanity
"The implications of all this are profound. First, our understanding of political risk has to change. We are no longer dealing with actors who are constrained by norms, expectations, or even basic human decency. Second, the institutional safeguards that we assumed would provide protection look increasingly fragile. If those in power are willing to ignore...
The Iran economic shock is coming. How to protect yourself
https://youtu.be/Oi265I48MdI?si=xFJEEFLBd3XMjGUg "Here's me in the UK, which is probably the least prepared country in the world for an energy price crisis, right? Massively dependent on imported energy, hasn't built up its own energy storage, doesn't have an enormous amount of reserves of energy like other countries like Japan or Korea have, which it probably should...
Social media’s dirty secret: they don’t use it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ebMm8stexM "But when you frame it that way, you understand that social media isn't the problem: the extractive profit motive is the problem. And then, banning under-16s is like putting a plaster on a bullet wound. Sure, maybe it helps a bit, but you're still bleeding out. The real question is, how do you stop...
AI and the corporate capture of knowledge
"A society cannot meaningfully debate policy, science or justice if information is locked away behind paywalls or controlled by proprietary algorithms. If we allow AI companies to profit from mass appropriation while claiming immunity, we are choosing a future in which access to knowledge is governed by corporate power rather than democratic values." Bruce Schneier...
The Jevons Trap
AI is creating more demand for knowledge work even as it makes workers obsolete. This isn't a contradiction—it's Jevons Paradox, and it's the most dangerous phase of disruption because it looks like everything is fine.
The White Collar Disruption
For two centuries, automation displaced blue collar workers while knowledge workers remained safe. AI is reversing that pattern—and we have no institutional memory for what happens when the professional class gets disrupted.
We're All Software Developers Now
After 30 years building software, I've never seen anything like the current pace of AI-driven change. What does it mean when 900 million people have access to tools that make them developers?
SaaS is Becoming Restaurants
On the commoditization of software and what persists when building gets cheap.
Chip War
An epic account of the decades-long battle to control what has emerged as the world's most critical resource—microchip technology—with the United States and China increasingly in conflict. You may be surprised to learn that microchips are the new oil—the scarce resource on which the modern world depends. Today, military, economic, and geopolitical power are built on a foundation of computer chips. Virtually everything — from missiles to microwaves, smartphones to the stock market — runs on chips. Until recently, America designed and built the fastest chips and maintained its lead as the #1 superpower. Now, America's edge is slipping, undermined by competitors in Taiwan, Korea, Europe, and, above all, China. Today, as Chip War reveals, China, which spends more money each year importing chips than it spends importing oil, is pouring billions into a chip-building initiative to catch up to the US. At stake is America's military superiority and economic prosperity. Economic historian Chris Miller explains how the semiconductor came to play a critical role in modern life and how the U.S. become dominant in chip design and manufacturing and applied this technology to military systems. America's victory in the Cold War and its global military dominance stems from its ability to harness computing power more effectively than any other power. But here, too, China is catching up, with its chip-building ambitions and military modernization going hand in hand. America has let key components of the chip-building process slip out of its grasp, contributing not only to a worldwide chip shortage but also a new Cold War with a superpower adversary that is desperate to bridge the gap. Illuminating, timely, and fascinating, Chip War shows that, to make sense of the current state of politics, economics, and technology, we must first understand the vital role played by chips.
Winterautos
Ich fahre ja einen Tesla, auch wenn ich eigentlich nie einen wollte, aber das ist eine andere Geschichte. Teslas gelten jedenfalls jetzt nicht unbedingt als Winterautos. Zumindest gibt es sehr viele Menschen, die behaupten, Tesla im Besonderen und Elektroautos im Allgemeinen seien im Winter nicht zu gebrauchen. Oftmals wird hier auf den im Winter erhöhten Energiebedarf verwiesen, was in der Realität bedeutet, dass die Batterie bei Minusgraden schneller leer ist als, wenn es warm ist. Die Erklärung hierfür ist relativ simpel: Elektroautos haben keinen Verbrennermotor (Surprise!), der in einem sehr ungünstigen Verhältnis aus Kraftstoff ein bisschen kinetische und ganz viel thermische Energie erzeugt. Wie ungünstig das Verhältnis genau ist, lässt sich am besten über den Wirkungsgrad vergleichen. Ein Benzinmotor hat einen Wirkungsgrad von 20%, das heißt, 80% des Sprits werden zum Heizen der Umwelt (und im Winter ein bisschen vom Auto) verwendet. Beim Elektromotor ist es genau umgedreht,…
The best job at Google
Recently, I came across two things I would call "Easter Eggs" in Google. The first happened while I was researching Cordyceps to add some facts to my review of Last of Us. I noticed that Google lets you "infect" the search results with the mushroom from the show. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SejPgNqyTI A few days later, I googled "six seven". I guess this is what parents do these days when they try to understand their kids slang. While keying it into the search field, I tried to remember the most strange jargon we used 30 years ago. I couldn't find much other than "cool", which has been in my bubble like forever, at least compared to how quickly these things seem to change nowadays. Then the Google results appeared and started to shake like this in front of my eyes. Again, I was surprised and smiled. Why do I love this? In the software industry, we call these things Easter Eggs), and I have always been attracted to them. In fact, 20 years ago, I created an Easter Egg myself, and…
Fight Oligarchy
Senator Bernie Sanders breaks down the unprecedented crises we face today in Trump’s America, as Trump undermines democracy at every turn—and how we can effectively fight back. From the moment that Sanders began his Fighting Oligarchy tour in the early days of the Trump administration, it was clear that his message resonated with Americans across the political spectrum. Record-breaking crowds numbering in the tens of thousands showed up across the country. Large numbers of Americans, in red states and blue states, were prepared to stand up and fight back. In this book, he shows how we can continue that fight.
The Last Class
A Great Teacher Inspires Hope American political economist, professor, author, and social media sensation Robert Reich teaches his final "Wealth and Poverty" class to 1,000 students at UC Berkeley, ending a 40-year career that reached 40,000 students. One thousand fill the biggest lecture hall on the UC Berkeley campus, the last class to receive Reich's wisdom and exhortations not to accept that the world has to stay the way it is. His belief in the next generation's ability to take on the fight is inspiring.
I enjoy Fitness+ more than Apple does
Even though the service doesn’t seem to deliver the results Apple is expecting, I enjoy using Apple Fitness+ nearly every day and really don’t want to miss it. Today, I had some fun (and sweat) with my kickboxing workout 🫠
Enshittification
Explaining the process of the “enshittification” of digital platforms over time and what to do about it. Cory Doctorow's Enshittification takes a witty yet incisive look at the tech landscape, where platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and Google start off great—before they inevitably turn terrible. In this contemporary moment of digital decline, Doctorow explores how tech giants lure users in with convenience and then degrade their services over time, squeezing profit at the cost of user experience. With a mix of sharp humor and deep insight, he unveils the slow creep of "enshittification," turning the online world into a worse place, one algorithm at a time.
Apple in China
For readers of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs and Chris Miller’s Chip War, a riveting look at how Apple helped build China’s dominance in electronics assembly and manufacturing only to find itself trapped in a relationship with an authoritarian state making ever-increasing demands. Apple isn’t just a brand; it’s the world’s most valuable company and creator of the 21st century’s defining product. The iPhone has revolutionized the way we live, work, and connect. But Apple is now a victim of its own success, caught in the middle of a new Cold War between two superpowers. On the brink of bankruptcy in 1996, Apple made a strategic move to offshore its operations. By 2003 it was being lured to China by the promise of affordable labor that allowed the company to churn out premium products at an unprecedented scale. For years, the Silicon Valley giant sent thousands of America’s top engineers to China and spent tens of billions of dollars on equipment, spurring the transformation of a cheap labor country into the world’s most sophisticated electronics manufacturing powerhouse. Fast forward to 90% of iPhone assembly happens in China. Despite capturing less than 20% of the global smartphone market, Apple’s operations allow it to rake in 80% of the sector’s profits. Yet Beijing has tightened its grip, incentivizing Apple to work with more Chinese companies in its production, exerting control over what Chinese users can do on the iPhone, and requiring customer data for its citizens to be stored in state-backed data centers. The visionary company that Steve Jobs dreamed of finds itself in a tight spot. No other nation can match China’s quality, volumes, and flexibility as a producer of nearly half a billion iGadgets yearly, and Apple isn’t keen to abandon a market where it generates more profit than even China’s own tech giants. Investigative journalist Patrick McGee draws on 200 interviews with former Apple executives and engineers to reveal how Cupertino’s choice to anchor its supply chain in China has increasingly made it vulnerable to the regime’s whims. Both an insider’s historical account and a cautionary tale, Apple in China is the first history of Apple to go beyond the biographies of its top executives and set the iPhone’s global domination within an increasingly fraught geopolitical context.
I BUY, THEREFORE I AM
Neoliberalism Sale: Buy Now! - Why not borrow against a future you’ll never own?
Chokepoints
The epic story of how America turned the world economy into a weapon, upending decades of globalization to take on a new authoritarian axis — Russia, China, and Iran. It used to be that ravaging another country’s economy required blockading its ports and laying siege to its cities. Now all it takes is a statement posted online by the U.S. government. In Chokepoints , Edward Fishman, a former top State Department sanctions official, takes us deep into the back rooms of power to reveal the untold history of the last two decades of U.S. foreign policy, in which America renounced the gospel of globalization and waged a new kind of economic war. As Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Ayatollah Khamenei wreaked havoc on the world stage, mavericks within the U.S. government built a fearsome new arsenal of economic weapons, exploiting America’s dominance in global finance and technology. Successive U.S. presidents have relied on these unconventional weapons to address the most pressing national-security threats, for good and for ill. Chokepoints provides a thrilling account of one of the most critical geopolitical developments of our time, demystifying the complex strategies the U.S. government uses to harness the power of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Big Oil against America’s enemies. At the center of the narrative is an eclectic group of policy innovators: the diplomats, lawyers, and financial whizzes who’ve masterminded America’s escalating economic wars against Russia, China, and Iran. Control over economic chokepoints — such as the U.S. dollar, advanced microchip technology, and critical energy supply chains — has become the key to geopolitical power in the twenty-first century. The result is a new world order: an economic arms race among great powers and a fracturing global economy. Chokepoints is the definitive account of how America pioneered a new, hard-hitting style of economic warfare — and how it’s changing the world.
Everything flows from economics. It shouldn't.
In the US, at the very least, everything flows from economics with market and financial concerns placed first. It's always been that way. It shouldn't. It's led to a societal death spiral. Selfishness is treated as though it's a virtue. Perhaps not explicitly, but certainly implicitly.
POLITICAL ENSHITTIFICATION
Political Enshittification as Oligarchy, - lobbying replaces competition in capitalism, but for technology, removing innovation also removes relevance.
The Cambridge "Green Blue" competition to reduce emissions
Thinking about a Cambridge "Green Blue" competition to reduce emissions among Colleges, promoting cooperation through a semi-competitive league
Letter from Birmingham jail
"Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."