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Gervais / MacLeod 22: Inferno
In Part 21, I wrote a summary of the modern Organizational Problem. For a recap of the highlights: As machines take over boring, commoditized work, the only stuff left for humans is convex work where...
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Blub vs. engineer empowerment
No, I’m not quitting the Gervais / MacLeod Series. Part 23, which will actually be the final one because I want to get back to technology in how I spend spare time, is half-done. However, I am going to...
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The Disentitled Generation
Anyone else up for some real rage? I can’t promise that there won’t be profanity in this post. In fact, I promise that there will be, and that it will be awesome. Let’s go. People don’t usually talk...
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Why we must shut down the Corporate System
I’ve come to the conclusion that the Corporate System deserves to be shut down. What is the Corporate System? No, it’s not the same thing as “corporations”. Corporations are just legal entities. In...
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Status checks and the stink-when-breaking problem
Most software engineers, being rational people and averse to legacy, hate management– a set of legacy processes that were necessary over the concave, commodity work that existed for 200 years, but...
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The shodan programmer
The belt-color meritocracy “Nothing under the sun is greater than education. By educating one person and sending him into the society of his generation, we make a contribution extending a hundred...
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Seeking co-founders. [April 23, 2013]
It has rained frogs before and, yes, it occasionally rains dragons. This is one of those times. I have a startup concept. I think it’s legit. Here are some of its features: validated business model....
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Update on what I’d like to build [April 28, 2013]
First of all, I owe an apology to many people. I said on April 23 that I’d be getting back to people quickly if they reached out, and I failed at that. My mailbox is full of messages to which I intend...
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Gervais / MacLeod 23: Managers, mentors, executives, cops, and thugs
This isn’t going to be the last Gervais / MacLeod post (first: here; most recent: here) and I don’t think there is a closed-form solution, so much as something I’m paddling toward. I’m still getting...
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Why You Suck
This is a post about Why You Suck. Since this is the rhetorical “you” that refers to a least-assumptions unknown person, it’s also about me and Why I Suck. Or, perhaps I should say that it’s about why...
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Constructing Computation 1: Symbols, nonsymbols, and equality.
I want to do something different than my normal writing. I want to construct programming. What do I mean? I want to start from some basic principles and build up to the familiar. I won’t be proving...
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Fixing employment with consulting call options.
Here’s a radical thought that I’ve had. There are a lot of individual cases of people auctioning off percentages of their income in exchange for immediate payments, which they use to invest in...
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Why an Atlas Shrugged smart people strike would never work.
I’m not a major fan of Ayn Rand, but one of the more attractive ideas coming out of her work is from Atlas Shrugged, written about a world in which the “people of the mind”– business leaders, artists,...
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Corporate “Work” is the most elaborate victim-shaming structure ever devised.
There are a lot of things to hate about the institutional pogrom that the middle and working classes must suffer in the name of Work. It’s not, of course, the actual work (i.e. productive activity)...
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One-month break from Hacker News.
I don’t have much use for TechCrunch– it’s symptomatic of the many things that are wrong with this weird advanced-marketing industry, hijacked by fired/disgraced finance guys who’ve reinvented...
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What Ayn Rand got right and wrong
Ayn Rand is a polarizing figure, and it should be pretty clear that I’m not her biggest fan. I find her views on gender repulsive and her metaphysics laughable. I tend to be on the economic left; she...
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A guess at why people hate paying for (certain) things… and a possible solution.
I’ve been thinking a lot about paywalls and why people are so averse to paying for things they use on the Internet. People don’t mind putting quarters into a vending machine to get a snack at 4:00, or...
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Much of “startup” is denial
I’m getting to the point where I think we should add startup to the list of banned words. “High-risk small company”? That’s fine. “Experimental niche endeavor”? Go for it. However, I think it’s time to...
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Wrong places, wrong times, decline, prestige, and what it all might mean.
Here’s a deceptively simple question: why would a person be at the wrong place in the wrong time? People who use this sort of description about places and times to describe “luck” in the business...
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Gervais / MacLeod 24: Fundamental Theorem of Employment
In analyzing the economics and sociology of office-style Work, an inefficient set of institutional patterns that affects hundreds of millions of people, I’ve often had to ask the question, “Why are so...
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