Frequent thinker, occasional writer, constant smart-arse
Twenty years ago a friend of mine, Andrew, told me about a future where software wouldn’t just be tools we used. It would be intelligent personal agents who worked on our behalf. For most of that time, the idea felt distant. Then this year I built one. It runs on a small server in my [ ] The post From Apps to Chats first appeared on Blog of Elias Bizannes .
During my undergraduate days at the University of Sydney, I experimented with media. First with a newspaper, then with an e-zine, we found a niche covering student politics. One of my major sources at the time told me why it was valuable and that was because in politics, information is power. This is a phrase [ ] The post The magic of SF first appeared on Blog of Elias Bizannes .
If I were to ask you what metric governments run on, you d probably say GDP, inflation, or unemployment. I assume you know what those are and how they’re calculated, but I want to touch on the first two briefly—to show just how bizarre they are. Let’s start with GDP. It measures the health of the [ ] The post Two Metrics Governments should Focus On first appeared on Blog of Elias Bizannes .
When the first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, was released to the world, it had in its genesis block a cryptic message. The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks. The line references a January 3 2009 London Times article about banks being bailed out by the British government. This is the seed of the [ ] The post A Faustian bargain first appeared on Blog of Elias Bizannes .
Have you ever wondered who decided to add that question when filling out a form? If you have, like me, then maybe you ve also thought, what s the hidden force influencing what we think, say, and do? A thinker, Curtis Yarvin, has a hypothesis that has had me thinking for a while now. The default answer [ ] The post How we get told what to think first appeared on Blog of Elias Bizannes .
Last year for my birthday, my amazing wife treated me to a course I wanted to do. (It s still being offered, on business writing and story telling, and I highly recommend it .) I ve always been interested in good writing, and in my teenage years, I studied The Economist s style guide like a bible. So [ ] The post Greece and Turkey first appeared on Blog of Elias Bizannes .
Back in 2009, I attended the Identity Common s annual conference and met a gentlemen who pitched me his HTML5 social networking app. HTML5 was the flashy new technology of the time and social networking was all the rage due to Twitter and Facebook. Burbn is what it was called and even though I thought it [ ] The post The social media police state will be its undoing first appeared on Blog of Elias…
Income inequality is one of America s biggest problems. My issue is not with what the wealthy make even though they are richer than ever but those on the other side of the socio-economic spectrum. I see it on the streets in San Francisco, one of America s richest cities, with the chronic homeless problem [ ] The post The Income Ratio Problem first appeared on Blog of Elias Bizannes .
Should we abolish ownership rights over land? It s a crazy thought but it s actually very logical. Consider the factors of production. Classically defined, as land, labour, and capital. Along with entrepreneurship, which organises the factors, you have the building blocks of economic activity. Therefore, any controls on the factors leads to a limitation to the [ ] The post We shouldn’t own land…
The evidence behind the Big Bang can explain how our universe developed from 10-43 seconds. Anything before “the bang”, however, science has no evidence and its reserved for the philosophers. Following our own personal ‘bang’ into this world and as we grow as humans, we learn a fact that we spend the rest of our [ ] The post An evolving manifesto for earthlings first appeared on Blog of Elias…