Howard Schultz has a savior complex. For a quarter century, Schultz has either been running Starbucks or watching a hand-picked successor fail at it. He would set a strategy and, when the strategy failed, come riding to the rescue with a new strategy. You find this savior complex everywhere. You find it in sports, you […]

An e-bike is not a bicycle. This picture tells part of that story. I’m almost 70. I have difficulty bicycling 10 miles, partly due to posture but also due to Atlanta’s hills. Yet I was able to go 31 miles in a little over 2 hours yesterday, in 80 degree heat, riding my Edison, a […]

American urban design changed radically after World War II. Cars like wide roads. They’re noisy, they’re dirty. But we’re locked in our cars and don’t notice. We don’t notice, that is, until we get home. Then we want to be separated from those noises and that dirt. Quiet is a luxury good. Any residential property […]

Moore’s Law accelerates change in every direction. Huang’s Law puts it into overdrive. Artificial Intelligence (AI) software is one result. But the programs are just software. They’re no different than yesterday’s database computing. They’re based on it, true. They run thanks to Nvidia Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), products of Huang’s Law, that crunch numbers fast. […]

A hallmark of the “golden age of science fiction” is the idea of a strategic metal shortage. That’s why Allen Steele wrote the book Oceanspace, about mining the ocean floor. Asteroid mining is at the center of James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse.  The problem is such shortages don’t exist in the real world. It costs […]

After his 1984 convention, Walter Mondale polled better than Ronald Reagan. Then came the Reagan bandwagon. What I remember was not just “Democrats for Reagan,” but signs for other groups normally assumed to be with Democrats. It didn’t hurt that the economy was finally recovering, after the inflation horrors of the 1970s. We were still […]

This is a year where many of us in the Creative Class, who thought of ourselves as Talent, found they were just Labor. That’s what the sudden move to AI in tech has meant. Programmers without specific AI skills became fungible. Get your ass in the office. Get your ass out the door. While this […]

I had been a professional Internet reporter for a decade before the Web was spun. I was like a TV reviewer in 1947 who had covered Philo Farnsworth and owned a Philco. I’ve been there since before the beginning. By 1996 I had even seen what the Internet could do, in terms of driving the […]

The coming fall of Elon Musk isn’t showing up in the Forbes 400 yet. Democratic momentum isn’t showing up in the polls yet, either. But it’s coming. This dude is just too weird. Musk’s fortune is built on Tesla. The Cybertruck was Tesla’s Edsel. Sales of EVs are soaring, but those at Tesla are rolling […]

Sam Altman and OpenAI seemed to come out of nowhere, less than two years ago. ChatGPT, launched on November 30, 2022, has been defined as the Web browser of AI. Its release was a seminal moment when everyone in the industry “got it,” in terms of what Generative AI could do. But Altman is now in […]