This is another story from my recovery that might be TMI for some people. Read with caution, or skip. So while describing my initial hospitalization I mentioned an open question: What exactly my anus is supposed to be doing for those three months is a question I forget to ask. And now I know from the questions and comments I’ve received that many of you are curious too.

The last time we had a 70% top marginal tax rate in the U.S. it generated very little revenue. That doesn’t mean it failed, that means it was doing it’s job, as explained in The opportunity cost of firm payouts.

The fundamental problem with Silicon Valley’s favorite growth strategy is great article by Tim O’Reilly on the fundamental harm Silicon Valley’s single-minded pursuit of unicorns does to the whole economy.

It’s now been close to three weeks since my emergency surgery and I am recoving slowly. As I’ve gotten better I’ve progressed through the three stages of TV watching: Can’t watch TV, too much activity and sound. I could sit here and watch David Attenborough for days on end. If I watch any more TV my brain is going to melt and flow out through my ears. BTW, what happened to cooking shows on TV?

So here I am on a Tuesday morning, in the bathroom, getting ready for work while my wife still sleeps. The only context you need for what’s about to happen next is that my intestines had been a little sore the previous two days and that last year I found out that I had diverticulosis. The latter found because when you turn 50 you get a free colonoscopy. I really don’t think there is a more apt metaphor for turning 50 than a free colonoscopy.

Facebook must be restructured. The FTC should take these nine steps now This was published back in March of 2018, but it’s still a good list of things that should be done.

From June of 2017, this Tweet has aged like a fine wine: He eventually fires everyone. Just him, alone, on Twitter, in the WH. And the person that brings him his soda, that person never gets fired. https://t.co/eVISOqQw5i — Joe Gregorio (@bitworking) June 6, 2017

Via Alex Russell, I just found Guidelines for creating web platform compatible components, which further contains a link to The Gold Standard Checklist for Web Components, both of which look like excellent resources when creating custom elements. This is a good time to mention that work is progressing on elements-sk, a set of neat Vanilla JS custom elements.

Make Me Smart is a podcast with co-hosts Kai Ryssdal and Molly Wood. One of the features of the show is asking both guests and listeners the “Make Me Smart Question”, which is: What is something you thought you knew, but later found out you were wrong about. For the final episode of the year, my answer got selected! It starts at minute 33 of the podcast.

Meritocracy A system in which venture capitalists give large sums of money to 20-something male Stanford graduates in computer science.

Alerting in Prometheus is great, and easy, but one of the gotchas is that there’s no warnings or errors if you write an alert rule and there’s no data for that alert. Now Prometheus does have the absent() function, and you could tack OR absent(some_metric_name) == 1 to the end of every alert you write, but that’s tedious and error prone. So I wrote promk-absent a quick little tool on Go to create a set of absence alerts based on an existing set of alerts.

With Spectre and Meltdown we can see the inevitable results of trying to squeeze more and more performance out of a small number of cores. I believe the future is in processors with a high number of cores, such as RISC-V. With hundreds or thousands of cores on a single chip you can stop doing time-slicing and start doing core-slicing. That is, instead of doing preemtive multitasking, each process will be scheduled with a subset of the total number of core.

Here are a few articles that are good background on what I am about to talk about: The Planet Has Seen Sudden Warming Before. It Wiped Out Almost Everything. The Insect Apocalypse Is Here Here’s How Far the World Is From Meeting Its Climate Goals In my opinion, after watching climate change research for years and watching the effects of climate change arrive faster than predicted, and the continual shortening of timelines for climate change effects, and the fact that we are nowhere close to cutting emissions fast enough, I firmly believe that climate change is an existential threat to humans and that we need to start researching geoengineering strategies for cooling the planet today.

Don’t you just love it when oligopolies collude? {:title=“Alaska Airlines giving preferential treatment to Facebook and Apple."} Imagine you were a small startup with a new idea for a chat application. How could you ever compete with this? Is there any wonder there’s a startup slump?

The Monopolization of America: On Monday, the Open Markets Institute — an anti-monopoly think tank — is releasing the first part of a data set showing the market share that the largest companies have in each industry. Nothing surprising there, unless you didn’t realize you lived in a corporatocracy/oligarchy and not a functioning democracy.

This Yale Law Journal Note from Lina M. Khan on Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox is an amazing read on several levels. First, the case it makes against Amazon is impressive, shining a light on quite a few unsavory things Amazon has done over the years. Second, she then expands that case to the rest of the tech giants. Third, for a Note in the Yale Law Journal, the entire thing is very readable.

The Federalist Society The coonskip cap and musket branch of constitutional scholars.

You know what my favorite non-sound from the mid-term elections is? Paul Ryan slithering silently into political obscurity.

When I first started working I told everyone I could that I thought that the single most damaging entity to the American economy was the Harvard Business School. Little did I know that the University of Chicago Economics Department was like, “Hold my beer.”

Crowdsourcing, the idea of slapping together an algortihm that quietly works alone in the background on a large corpus of data to generate recommendations, most popular lists, etc. is slowly dying. I pointed this out in my 2018 Predictions post, but didn’t offer a concise explaination as to why that would occur, but as I’ve watched the year progress, and added more examples to that predicitions post, I’ve come up with a fairly simple model.