It’s amazing for people to work together and help each other. But “collectivism” is something else, typically a sneaky euphemism for the personal interests of a powerful few. Usually, fuzzy phrases such as “bigger society”, “community”, “solidarity” and “public interest” are … Continued
Dear activist arseholes: stop making me oppose good things. Let me lead with a prominent example: A few years ago, people in western countries have collectively decided that riding bicycles is a good thing for a number of reasons – it improves … Continued
People in tech have been arguing whether programming is something that everyone should know at least a bit (pun not intended), or whether it should remain a highly specialized and exclusive (i.e. expensive) skill. There are two camps: 1) The reasonable people … Continued
Objective data show the world is in the best state in human history, yet people freak out and prophesize doom. Let’s see why. The blame typically falls on journalists, who are said to disproportionately report the bad stuff – that’s true, … Continued
I’m working on an article about fixing Europe, but that task is so daunting I will start with an easier one: Fixing the Middle East. First step: diagnosis. What’s even going on there? At the root of mutual misunderstandings (yes, that’s … Continued
Cover photo credit: James Cridland. On June 6th, the Swiss rejected Universal Basic Income (UBI) in a referendum by an overwhelming margin of 77 to 23 %, which I publicly predicted on reddit weeks ago based on intimate knowledge of the … Continued
By now, I could start most articles with “popular opinion has stuff the wrong way around“. For instance, you hear people saying they want to start a business, but worry that “the economy” might not be good enough right now. Let me … Continued
The British government, among others, is trying to figure out how to make people eat less sugar. I propose a better question: Have we all gone completely mad and legally incapable? What the fuck happened to sui iuris? Feel free to call me old-fashioned, … Continued
When people can’t find a good answer to an important question, it is usually the case that they’re not asking the right question. Obviously, that doesn’t apply to scientifically hard objective problems like nuclear fusion, room temperature superconductors and faster than … Continued
Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking are worried the human race might be replaced by robots. A couple of problems with that:
