good article outlining some of the issues with ramping up clean energy, which is dependent on dirty resource extraction.

"We need a rapid transition to renewables", "None of this is to say that we shouldn’t pursue a rapid transition to renewable energy. We absolutely must and urgently. But if we’re after a greener, more sustainable economy, we need to disabuse ourselves of the fantasy that we can carry on growing energy demand at existing rates."

good article outlining some of the issues with ramping up clean energy, which is dependent on dirty resource extraction.

"We need a rapid transition to renewables", "None of this is to say that we shouldn’t pursue a rapid transition to renewable energy. We absolutely must and urgently. But if we’re after a greener, more sustainable economy, we need to disabuse ourselves of the fantasy that we can carry on growing energy demand at existing rates."

"How might this be accomplished? Given that the majority of our energy is used to power the extraction and production of material goods, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that high-income nations reduce their material throughput—legislating longer product life spans and rights to repair, banning planned obsolescence and throwaway fashion, shifting from private cars to public transportation, while scaling down socially unnecessary industries and wasteful luxury consumption like the arms trade, SUVs, and McMansions."

good description of Federation and Decentralization

good description of Federation and Decentralization

"A decentralized service can reside on multiple machines, owned by different individuals, companies or organization. With federation protocols those instances can interact and form one network of many nodes (servers hosting similar services). One might be able to shut down one node but never the entire network. In such a setup censorship is practically impossible.

Think of how we use E-mail; you can choose any service provider or set up your own, and still exchange emails with people using another email provider. E-mail is built upon a decentralized and federated protocol."

technical debt in finance

analysing breakdown of the US democracy as an industry, which I think has been thoroughly shown requires regulation and oversight to ensure competitiveness

"We are not political scientists, political insiders, or political experts. Instead, we bring a new analytical lens to understanding the performance of our political system: the lens of industry competition. This type of analysis has been used for decades to understand competition in other industries, and sheds new light on the failure of politics because politics in America has become, over the last several decades, a major industry that works like other industries.
We use this lens to put forth an investment thesis for political reform and innovation. What would be required to actually change the political outcomes we are experiencing? What would it take to better align the political system with the public interest and make progress
on the nation’s problems? And, which of the many political reform and innovation ideas that have been proposed would actually alter the trajectory of the system?
Politics in America is not a hopeless problem, though it is easy to feel this way given what we experience and read about every day. There are promising reforms already gaining traction including important elements of the strategy we propose. It is up to us as citizens to recapture our democracy—it will not be self-correcting. We invite you to personally
engage by investing both your time and resources—and by mobilizing those around you—in what we believe is the greatest challenge facing America today.
It is often said that “We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.”1 Today the challenge for Americans is to participate not only as voters, but also to participate in the reform of the political system itself. This is our democracy, and the need is urgent.
This report is about politics, but it is not political. The problem is not Democrats or Republicans or the existence of parties per se. The problem is not individual politicians; most who seek and hold public office are genuinely seeking to make a positive contribution.
The real problem is the nature of competition in the politics industry."

raw data tables

28% of Americans read for pleasure in 2004, down to 15% in 2017.

"It's tempting to blame the decline on the recent proliferation of computers, cellphones, video games and the like. But the data don't really bear that out. For one, the NEA data show that reading has been on the wane since at least the 1980s, well before the advent of Facebook and Fortnite.

A long-term study of reading trends in the Netherlands points to a different culprit: television. From 1955 to 1995, TV time exploded while weekly reading time declined. “Competition from television turned out to be the most evident cause of the decline in reading,” the authors of that study concluded."

28% of Americans read for pleasure in 2004, down to 15% in 2017.

"It's tempting to blame the decline on the recent proliferation of computers, cellphones, video games and the like. But the data don't really bear that out. For one, the NEA data show that reading has been on the wane since at least the 1980s, well before the advent of Facebook and Fortnite.

A long-term study of reading trends in the Netherlands points to a different culprit: television. From 1955 to 1995, TV time exploded while weekly reading time declined. “Competition from television turned out to be the most evident cause of the decline in reading,” the authors of that study concluded."

love the pictorial explanation. everything is better explained with a picture!

"rationality is not knowing facts, but knowing which facts should be considered"

the second example blows my mind. never seen more clear proof that human minds {don't work with, aren't primed for, suck at} probability.