First Post

Let's get this out of the way. I'm not starting a blog to blab about my life (who cares what I eat or how drunk I got on a Wednesday night? Damn you Twitter and Facebook). I am here to do commentary and analysis about society. Yes, there are plenty of other people doing the same thing. However, I feel that I've read widely enough that I might actually have something useful to say that hasn't been said elsewhere. I'll let you be the judge.

Maybe I should be more precise. I am not introducing new ideas. I believe that even the smartest people in the world only have one or two original ideas in their lives (Einstein only had about five and he is regarded as one of the greatest geniuses of all time) and that most people have zero original thoughts. That's okay though. We are meme machines. We copy and mutate ideas to evolve them. I am here to collect ideas that I feel are useful but have not been, but should be, widely discussed. Sometimes I will also repeat things that have been widely discussed to add something (or just tear them to pieces).

A bit about me... I am in my mid-20s and am a grad student. My background is in computer science and engineering, but I am a lifelong nerd that has read widely in all kinds of fields. Like most nerds, I am addicted to websites like Wikipedia, Ars Technica, and Reddit. I became politicized a few years ago after realizing that most of the world's problems are really political rather than technical. I have been heavily influenced by the crisis of my time: the oil price explosion and economic collapse of 2008. I am a weird mix of New Deal liberalism and libertarianism. I am also an atheist with a materialistic and empirical worldview (and a dash of existentialism, it's complicated). I am particularly interested in the topics in the blog's subtitle. Anyways, that's it for my background. If a future post requires that I spill more details, I will do so at the time.

Here is a list of things that I plan on discussing:

• Serial-hybrid electric cars
• Trickle-down economics and boats
• Spectrum whitespace
• The scary "unfunded liability" of Medicare
• My criticism of the Austrian School of economics and Anarcho-Capitalism
• "Mind reading" technology
• The downfall and last grasp for air of movement conservatism
• Artificial scarcity
• Funding of public goods
• The many-core problem

Basically, most of what I want to cover is about when technology and politics collide. Overall, I am trying to increase understanding on certain issues. I will always try to be objective about the facts, but I will be very biased towards what I think is right. I might also change my mind from time to time as I learn more. I strongly encourage commenting and discussion, but keep it civil. I want this to be as high-brow as possible. Disagree without being disagreeable. If you can't deal with that, there are plenty of other places on the Internet to go to.

Thanks for reading and I hope to get some real posts up soon.