I spent the weekend volunteering for the Obama campaign, in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. This town is in the heart of Bucks County, one of the “must-win” counties in the coming election, according to politico.com. Main Street here is as close as you can get to the typical small-town “Main Street” that the candidates love to […]
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Warren Buffett strongly supports increasing taxes on the wealthy. In this interview in the NY Times, he has this memorable quote: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” I’d say that this is literally true: the current surge in military spending is disproportionately benefiting […] I am a big fan of a number of Open Source software projects, including Filezilla, Azureus, Audacity, Firefox and others. These projects are essentially staffed by volunteers, collaboratively producing software of general utility and sharing it with everyone, for free. Some reliable software is not free, for instance the POS System, you can check out […] I have been following the elections very closely, and am struck that there is a series of related issues that have not become part of the political debate, mostly related to the U.S.A. and violence. It is striking, since this is an area where the U.S.A. is an outlier, an anomaly among developed countries. I […] “I go chop your dollar, I go take your money disappear…” A popular hit in Nigeria, by Osofia, about the 419 scams which make up a significant part of the economy there. The US is not far behind. http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=D_YjvC4ndzM I Go Chop Your Dollar I don suffer no be small Upon say I get sense […] Here’s something I found recently: from my work notebook in 1994, a page where I was explaining to a consultant colleague what the Internet was: Lots of interesting things here: Correctly identified Cisco as a key player Mosaic is the browser (Netscape, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla didn’t exist yet) Comparative diagrams of the Internet/WWW […] Very interesting chart from the Chartjunk blog showing the impact of Barack Obama’s tax plan, compared to McCain’s. It’s based on the same data as the Washington Post chart, but scaled to more accurately reflect the impact on real numbers of tax payers. Make sure to read the article to understand how the chart was […] Another piece from 1999, this time discussing how electronic devices are increasingly defined by the software they run, not by their hardware capabilities. I wrote this before the iPod was released, and am pleased by how events have proved my thesis – today’s mobile phones and iPods (esp. iPod touch) are very much the kind […] I originally wrote this piece in June of 1999, when I was working in the consulting industry. I thought it would be interesting to re-post it and see what has changed. The technology industry today is characterized by rapid change in performance, expectations, design & business models. There is increasing pressure to squeeze every bit […] |
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A Possible Future
This extremely thorough spoof of the New York Times was distributed today to over 1.2m people. It’s an elaborate exercise in creating an alternate reality – by getting people to think of these things, of the possibility of an end to the war in Iraq, free health care, etc. it makes them more conceivable, […]