Is Trump the Ultimate Radical Community Organizer?

I hadn’t given much thought to the term: “Community Organizer” (CO) until Barack Obama. As the Right demonized him, the idea of a CO as something sinister and radical became common. This article on Obama’s Radical Past is a good example. In retrospect, this is especially hilarious since Obama was almost ineffectually centrist. So when I […]

Three March Things

Three things I’m bummed about: DONALD: Prior to his victory, I darkly speculated that the silver lining of a President Trump would be the “it’s always darkest before the dawn” idea. That no amount of abstract discussion of topics would bridge our divide, that it needed to take human form and we needed to see […]

links: thinking about AI and the future

Enjoyed this post on AI. There’s a lot of noise out there and it’s hard to take it all in, so I enjoyed this. “AI taking over the world” is something I’m less worried about than say…climate change, asymmetric warfare/polarization/inequality, USD collapse, etc. But, hey, that’s me.

Google Maps: the giant sleeps.

Update: 11/10 — Not surprisingly Facebook seems to have out-executed Google to market on big parts of this. Alphabet (née Alphabet) has some great $-churning businesses: Search/Adwords, Display/Adsense, and YouTube. Diane Green’s cloud efforts, Waymo, and DeepMind most often get labeled as the “next initiative likely to turn major.” But what about Google Maps? I’m long Google’s stock and […]

The Defiant Ones

Yes, this post is just 100% an excuse for me to use this photo of Snoop and me. But, also… I binged The Defiant Ones last night. So. damn. good. The four four hours flew by. The engine of the story is entrepreneurship. Both Dre and Jimmy are hustlers who scrapped their way up from the bottom. […]

the first driverless city

The World’s First Driverless City May Be In China Longer-term, says Jing, the hope is that a successful all-autonomous city will provide an example not just to the Chinese government, but to any city. If the experiment works, then other cities may be more likely to try it for themselves. Other cities are already experimenting […]

Byron Wien

The Life Report: Byron R. Wien What a fantastic read! He’s an incredible market commentator and is featured in Barron’s this week. Loved the writing and his insights. Selections/reactions: “Eventually I developed the necessary skills and became a partner of the firm. The lesson here is that you shouldn’t try to decide what you want […]

expectations

What’re your expectations? Steve Jobs was in this zone when he talked about dogma in his wondrous Stanford speech: “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. […]

little aliens

Growing up, I was always aware of how different my parents were from everyone else’s. It’s not just that we ate different food at home, that they dressed differently, or even just that they had accents. It was all of it; this feeling that they could never understand me. I now recognize this as the […]

journals

Have you ever kept a journal? I’ve got 15ish years with various incarnations. My first was a LiveJournal created in the dying light of the 90’s. It birthed a few friendships/pen-pals and lasted a few years before I nuked it. I don’t remember what I posted, but I’m confident it was properly self-absorbed, poorly written, and vapid. I concluded that the public nature […]