If Intel’s failure taught tech anything, it should be that you don’t get big change from big companies. A proper industrial policy will focus on startups. You set a goal, and you expect a lot of failures. You pull the subsidies as the recipients grow. Instead, America focuses on big, slow moving companies, which is […]

American democracy operates by the Golden Rule. He who has the money makes the rules. Every so often my old Rice University history degree kicks in. It forces me to remind myself of that fact. I have written about history here, off and on, since 2006. Being a mere B.A., I’ve gotten things wrong. I […]

There are dark times ahead. The ignorance of the American people, our willingness to throw progress on the fire in the name of capitalistic excess and religious bigotry, will cost our nation dearly. Our grandchildren will be unable to tell the world that America is, as Lincoln said, the hope of the world. We will […]

Big Tech companies switched political sides in 2024 because they’re scared. They’re deeply involved in the Great Game of AI and don’t want anyone to tell them what they can or can’t do. (Illustration from Canva.) The Great Game has existed in tech since before I became a reporter. From operating systems to GUIs, from […]

My wife fell into programming. She was offered some training after applying for a job as an accountant. (Illustration from Canva.) This was in 1981. Over the years she learned Assembler, Cobol, some C++ and Java as well. She found her calling in organizing and writing as computing moved from mainframes to the cloud. She […]

The start of my 70s found me on a freeway, heading home from a somber week. A relative, close to my age, fell from a tree over a week ago. He lies in an ICU, his backbone fused, ribs broken, struggling to breath through his own vomit. We saw a lot of improvement during our […]

The idea of Returning to the Office (RTO) is highly controversial. In practice it amounts to a 25% pay cut. Getting dressed and eating lunch are both expensive. When my dear wife did it, BC (Before Covid), she would wake up at 4 AM, ride trains for 45 minutes, dodge cars on foot for 30 […]

The AI Revolution is fueled by equal amounts of hype and fear. (I asked Gemini to illustrate ChatGPT controlling your job and this is what it came up with.) They have the same root, the idea that computers will take away your job. The hypesters say this like it’s a good thing. The rest of […]

An American suburb is a one-story affair. It grows into a city that way. People will “drive until they qualify,” until they reach some unspecified limit of time and distance. At that point people, or more likely their kids, will seek jobs further from the center of town, or will move into town. (The picture […]

Despite its continuing failures, AI nonsense just keeps getting louder. The latest bit of nonsense is a bet between AI skeptic Gary Marcus and AI advocate Miles Brundage.. Brundage thinks AI will become creative by the end of 2027. He thinks AI will be able to write a coherent legal brief, a Pulitzer-quality book, an […]