joshuago’s Bookmarks

In his first interview since the world financial crisis, Gao Xiqing, the man who oversees $200 billion of China’s $2 trillion in dollar holdings, explains why he’s betting against the dollar, praises American pragmatism, and wonders about enormous Wall Street paychecks. And he has a friendly piece of advice.

The World Wide Web would serve well as a framework for structuring much of the academic Computer Science curriculum. A study of the theory and practice of the Web’s technologies would traverse many key areas of our discipline.

These tragedies [of violence] can be averted by a state with a monopoly on violence. States can inflict disinterested penalties that eliminate the incentives for aggression, thereby defusing anxieties about preemptive attack and obviating the need to maintain a hair-trigger propensity for retaliation.

Basic functionality, like calling people, email, and certainly document editing still feel inelegant and clunky due to the onscreen keyboard, and the lack of multitasking makes moving around through those typically important tasks difficult to say the least. At the end of the day, it's nice to stick the "we love business users" line into your PR, but it's quite another thing to make it real.

While providing a huge market for Europe's goods, we've also substantially relieved the European powers of the burden of defending themselves. By assuming Europe's defense the U.S. has, in effect, allowed it the luxury of extremely expensive and ultimately unsustainable social-welfarism. If the U.S. economy weakens because of increased regulation, heavy-handed unionization, and higher taxes and debt to support an expensive social agenda, it will hurt Europe.

Getting our heads around information abundance will mean becoming more discerning about what information is worth our time and what kinds of tasks require real focus.

And so the Republican Party should get serious, as serious as the age, because that is what a grown-up, responsible party—a party that deserves to lead—would do. We are going to need the best.

Since Bernie Madoff has put Ponzi schemes back onto the front pages, it's worth considering whether we are all complicit in the biggest Ponzi scheme of them all, the idea that the global economy can grow indefinitely. One hopeful view is that we will reach a steady state economy, which remains approximately the same size in terms of aggregate quantity, but enjoys a qualitative dynamism within the constraints of that size.

Work on something that matters to you more than money. Create more value than you capture. Take the long view.