Michael Munger: “The potential for commoditizing as a form of sharing is just starting to be appreciated. In many cities (take New York….please!) there are three lanes of cars on lots of streets. But two of those lanes are filled with cars that are empty. We are storing empty cars, in some of the most valuable real estate on earth. If all the cars, and apartments, have people using them, and all the tools have people making things with them, we will need far fewer of those things. We have “enough” stuff, it’s just in the closet. It’s time to bring all the useful things we already own out of the closet, so others can use them.”
Mario Gabriele: “One of my favorite non-fiction books is Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse. I’m not sure if you’ve read it (I think you would like it a great deal if you haven’t), but Carse’s fundamental argument is that life is divided into two types of games. “Finite games” exist to be won; “infinite games” are designed simply to keep playing. I think lifelong praxes like writing, painting, and company-building fall into the latter category. You can practice them every day until your dying breath and still find more to learn.”
New Yorker: ““3 Body Problem” belongs to an all too rare breed: mainstream entertainment that leads its viewers down bracingly original speculative corridors. The scenario the show ultimately posits bears little resemblance to traditional sci-fi fare; the aliens are coming, but not for another four hundred years, putting humanity on notice for an encounter—and possibly a war—that’s many lifetimes away. This time span is as much a curse as a blessing. Forget the science for a second; what kind of political will—totalitarian or otherwise—is required to keep centuries of preparation on track? How do we get the über-rich to contribute to a new space race in a way that also flatters their egos? And what resources does it take to accelerate scientific discovery to a breakneck pace?”
Azeem Azhar: “What’s happening in energy is that the price of solar panels is coming down really, really dramatically. And, in fact, I had tracked a 15-19% compound decline since 1970…[I]n the last year, Chinese manufacturers halved the price of solar panels or one of the components within solar panels. And so, that’s continuing. And, I think it’s worth thinking about how dramatic and radical that is in an economic context for our economies. What you do when you are running off solar power rather than off fossil fuels is that you are away from the commodity volatility. Your price of energy is not dependent on what the regional autocrat feels like on a given day. You can make 20-year forecasts of what your price will be, and every subsequent installation will be, much, much cheaper. So, you trade off uncertainty and volatility, which has all of these frictional costs that we have to live with and contend with as the energy crisis of the last few years has shown.”
NYTimes: ““The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself” joins a recent spate of books seeking to help us to communicate, in the current phrase, “across the divide.” Reames, a specialist in rhetoric, sees us as unsuitably numb to the fact that our opinions are conditioned by what we already believe rather than springing from incontrovertible truth. She hopes that we can learn from the consciously honed rhetorical techniques of the ancient Greeks and Romans, among whom the art of argument was elevated in political discourse to an extent that seems almost unthinkable today. The Greeks and Romans expected political speeches to be lengthy, careful, thorough examinations of a case, crafted to persuade on the basis of logic rather than charisma. “If ancient rhetoricians listened to some of our public disputes these days, they would think we had lost our minds,” Reames writes, noting that “when we cling like hell to our hermeneutic circle” — our basic predispositions and predilections — “it forces us to hide from ourselves the places where our perceptions might just be wrong.””
