Joe Costello has decades experience in politics, energy, environment, and communications. Traveled and worked across the planet. Long a student of democracy, its demise, possible revitalization.
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De heathen back dey pon de wall It’s essential to think about AI not as a new technology, but the latest generation of compute technology, more or less beginning with the invention of the transistor 75 years ago. We don’t well understand the impact this technology has had
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There’s an excellent piece in The New Yorker on Ukraine - https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/02/05/ukraines-democracy-in-darkness - remember Ukraine? It should be read by all the people who have supported the war, most especially the Boomers, who after a quarter century had that long ago
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Life in the 21st Century is a reader-supported publication. Please become a paid subscriber. There’s a lot of things that don’t make sense these days, especially any talk about how the economy works, better to start asking what is the economy. I suppose there’s someone, somewhere, who
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“In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become a part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed. This means that we are going to have to learn to think in radical terms. I use the term
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Life in the 21st Century is a reader-supported publication. Please become a paid subscriber. No fun, my babe, no fun to write about the American political class and the beltway heart of darkness. It's the equivalent of being tasked with cleaning the Augean stables but, knowing the nearby
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“Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.” ― John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money Subscribe now How is convention established? All convention is a social construct, politically defined. Historically, how convention arises and evolves is a somewhat
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Dem leave sorrow, tears, and blood Dem regular trademark Life in the 21st Century is a reader-supported publication. Please become a paid subscriber. The FT reports Shell is pulling out of Nigeria, or at least the Delta - Shell agrees to exit Nigerian business for $1.3bn after more than
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Before a person becomes a saint, is mythologized, canonized, and most egregiously commercialized as Dr. King, they are just a person. They interact with people as just another person. These interactions provide the greatest opportunity for learning, if the saint had anything to teach in the first place. Dr. Martin
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What's missing from politics today is any understanding of organization. Not simply organizing in bringing people together to push for a defined goal or even the initial step of bringing people together to define a goal, but the understanding organization, how power is structured, is the very foundation
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Life in the 21st Century is a reader-supported publication. Please become a paid subscriber. Geometry – concerned with the shape of individual objects, spatial relationships among various objects, and the properties of surrounding space. Power is like gravity, a curvature of space-time. The more concentrated, the more power warps and influences
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Subscribe now Phew, it’d be hard to figure if the SEC’s approval of bitcoin ETFs says more about the corrupt dysfunction of DC, Wall Street, or Tech. Good thing you don’t have to choose. It’s a shamefully pathetic indictment of all three. The FT writes, “While
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After publishing Cybernetics in 1948, Norbert Wiener wrote The Human Use of Human Beings (1950). In the introduction he explains, “Upon the publication of this book (Cybernetics) which possesses a rather forbidding mathematical core, some of my friends urged upon me that I should write a related book for the