Links are the lifeblood of the Web. Killing them means killing the Web. Cloud Czars are killing them anyway. One fourth of the links created during the last decade are now broken. This makes the Web useless as a source for research or in use as footnotes. Current Affairs magazine calls the result “gated knowledge.”  […]

“The Sun shines. The wind blows. The tides roll. And we live on a molten rock.” I started using this as the headline for this blog 15 years ago. At the time, solar and wind power cost much more money to produce than electricity from coal or natural gas. That has changed. But what has […]

Everyone is talking about Andy Jassy’s “Return to Office” demand in terms of employees and morale. The real story is more prosaic, a cash crunch hitting all the Cloud Czars. You know who they are. Amazon.com, Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, and Meta. They invested their cash flow to build today’s cloud infrastructure. As a result, they […]

Last week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gave us our first Clue that the current boom in Generative AI and data centers may have peaked. Nvidia’s data center sales have been doubling for years now. During the most recent quarter they came to $26.2 billion.  But that doesn’t mean they will be $60 billion in next […]

For 30 years, ever since the Web was spun, technology has been dominated by what Richard Florida called the Creative Class. Artists, writers, managers, and programmers, most highly educated, earn six figure salaries employers must pay. The biggest social struggle for the back half of this decade will be the slow fall of this Creative […]

While on vacation in Montreal’s Old City last week, I noticed an amazing thing. A young woman, probably around 30, dressed fashionably, held a selfie stick out from herself and checked her background. At the end of the stick was an iPhone, and on top of it a furry boom microphone. She said a few […]

Strange as it is to write, I was there at the start of the movement that created Donald Trump. It was 50 years ago. August 9, 1974. I was an intern at Human Events magazine, then as now one of the leading voices of the “New Right.” A few weeks before, I’d gone up the […]

Howard Schultz has a savior complex. For a quarter century, Schultz has either been running Starbucks or watching a hand-picked successor fail at it. He would set a strategy and, when the strategy failed, come riding to the rescue with a new strategy. You find this savior complex everywhere. You find it in sports, you […]

An e-bike is not a bicycle. This picture tells part of that story. I’m almost 70. I have difficulty bicycling 10 miles, partly due to posture but also due to Atlanta’s hills. Yet I was able to go 31 miles in a little over 2 hours yesterday, in 80 degree heat, riding my Edison, a […]

American urban design changed radically after World War II. Cars like wide roads. They’re noisy, they’re dirty. But we’re locked in our cars and don’t notice. We don’t notice, that is, until we get home. Then we want to be separated from those noises and that dirt. Quiet is a luxury good. Any residential property […]