But-cept II

A few days ago, I wrote a blog criticising, by the way, the so-called founding fathers.  When I shared that post elsewhere, a treasured colleague took exception to my generalization, and he informed me that I need to read more Thomas Jefferson.

Why Steve Jobs, not Bill Gates, Was the True Education Visionary

When it comes to education reform, there are generally two camps: those who want to improve the existing mass compulsory schooling system through tweaking and tuning and those who want to build something entirely new and different. Not surprisingly, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs was in the “think different” camp, advocating for school choice and vouchers, while Microsoft’s Bill Gates backed the Common Core State Standards and other incremental reforms within the conventional mass schooling model.

But-cept

It must be a fiction that the colonial man in the streets had any cohesive thought on the matter.  The American Revolutionary War was promulgated by the landed gentry to protect their already-claimed advantages.  They got the peasantry to fight and die, to freeze to death, to starve for the pretty abstraction of freedom.  This war, like all others, was fought for the status quo.  But-cept, how do I know?

On Co-Sleeping

We are co-sleepers and room-sharers in my family. We started our family bedroom in early 2013, before my youngest was born, and several years before we started renting our house out on Airbnb (2016) and doing some light traveling. This arrangement is how humans slept for the entire history of our species (and before, of course) up until 200 years ago.

Appeasing Robin Hanson’s Critics

Appeasement is greatly underrated.  As I’ve explained before: Didn’t the Munich Agreement prove for all time that appeasement doesn’t work?  Hardly.  Despite its well-hyped failures, appeasement is an incredibly effective social strategy for dealing with the unreasonable and the unjust… also known as 90% of mankind.  Whenever someone makes bizarre demands upon me, my default is not…

Entrepreneurial Innovation and Crony Corruption

It always starts with entrepreneurial innovators breaking new ground and establishing new avenues for the expression of individual liberty and private initiative. Then, as soon as some of the companies established by those innovators grow sufficiently large and influential, the biggest protection rackets operating in their respective territories stop fighting them and proceed to corrupting them with subsidies, “public contracts”, unofficial monopoly privileges, etc.