Gyan

Time's running out for Trump. His support is faltering and elections are around the corner. He needs to burn some place to the ground to show how big a man he is. This time we may not even need the fig leaf of WMDs to start an invasion. Some ships somewhere has been damaged, it seems. That's all the US needs to start yet another gulf war. Every decade since WWII the US has done us all a solid by invading some place or the other and killing at least a million people. Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambo...

I am not letting any secrets slip in saying that the world has become much more authoritarian in the last decade. The largest countries in the world: China, India, the US, Russia, Brazil are all now ruled by authoritarians. The concentration of power in a few hands is not an isolated development; our networked, interconnected world is designed for concentration: of wealth, of fame, of power. The keyword I want to focus on here is design. I am not a conspiracy theorist - I don't think there's a...

The economist has a good article about poverty in California. Here's a disturbing statistic: "19% of Californians were poor in the three years 2015, 2016 and 2017, the highest rate in the country excluding the special case of Washington, DC. The national average was 14.1%." In one of the richest states in the union, whose "median household income in 2016 was $11,500 above the national average." There are several reasons for this crisis, including rental costs that are well beyond the means ...

There's been a lot of turmoil in the tech industry after the torture-murder of Jamal Khashoggi. We have known for a while that Saudi money (which is to say, the Saudi Royal family's money, or to be even more specific, the Saudi crown prince's money) is a major component of venture capital. Softbank's most recent $100 billion Vision Fund is 45% Saudi, who have major investments in Uber, WeWork etc. Suddenly, that money is looking suspect. A prominent VC, Fred Wilson, wrote a piece which questione...

Marx started writing his famous book in the early days of capitalism. According to that canonical source of truth, i.e., Wikipedia, James Watt's steam engine was invented between 1763 and 1775. Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848. In other words, somewhere between 85 and 73 years after the steam engine. Meanwhile, the first functioning electronic computer, i.e., ENIAC, was first completed in 1945, so we are 73 years past the deployment of that technology. Why am I saying this? ...