American Carnage
Watching what is happening in the United States, my adopted home country, is incredibly painful. I have seen the last few days coming for years based on the ever more untenable income and wealth distribution combined with militarization of the [...] Read more
The Social Media Triangle
“Two out of three ain’t bad” is the title of a Meat Loaf song but is also the idea behind triangles : situations in which you can achieve only two of three objectives. The classic example is the idea that in [...] Read more
#DIYInternship
I have been getting a large number of requests for help with internships. Many students either never got one for this summer or had theirs canceled. My advice to them is: create your own. Figure out what it is you [...] Read more
COVID19: Resetting Our Priorities
Towards the end of 2019, which feels a decade ago, I wrote a post on growth . It was an attempt to get away from the blanket term “growth” and its counterpart “degrowth,” which have become stand-ins for entire philosophies [...] Read more
COVID19 and the Decentralization of Money
One key lesson from COVID19 is that we need a lot more decentralization. This is especially true when the center is as inept at managing the crisis as the US federal government has proven to be. For example, the power [...] Read more
No End of Computer History (Yet)
At USV we have been discussing a cooling internet universe for several years now. We have largely stayed away from backing strictly sales driven companies as they are exposed to competitors who can spend more money on sales and marketing. [...] Read more
A Plan for Rapidly Ramping COVID19 Testing
Since I wrote my post on “The Road Back from COVID19 ″ we have made lots of progress on two out of the three pillars: masks and tracing. Masks went from a discussion of their merits to being mandatory to wear [...] Read more
Help Promote Earth Day Live
2020 marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day , an annual event supporting environmental protection and increasingly dedicated to fighting the climate crisis . Much had been planned, but due to COVID19 those plans had to be scrapped. Instead there [...] Read more
The Road Back from COVID19: Masks, Tests and Tracing For All
The lockdown measures put in place have started to flatten the curve, but they are hugely disruptive and even if we were better about freezing the economy than we are, we cannot possibly maintain them until we have a vaccine [...] Read more