There is a kind of accelerator that funds sixteen startups, taxes the revenue of the ones that ship, hands it to the ones that don’t, forbids any of them from competing on price, and writes the arr...

Sometime in the last two years the price of intelligence fell by a factor of two hundred and eighty, and almost nobody noticed. In November 2022 it cost about twenty dollars to get a million token...

Here is a fact that should be stranger than it is. Put a healthy person in a bed and take care of their every need: food, warmth, no stress, no load. They get weaker. Not maintained at some baselin...

I first wrote this in school, when the assignment was to argue for compromise. I couldn’t, so I argued the opposite. This is my eighth attempt to get it right. There’s an old engineering joke t...

Every working German gets a letter once a year from the Deutsche Rentenversicherung. Mine arrived a few weeks ago. It told me, in three decimal places, what my pension will be at retirement. It als...

The conventional case for multi-party democracy is that it represents people better. Every shade of opinion gets a seat. No vote is wasted. The Germans I live among take this as so obviously good t...