So it was another bright and empty Tuesday in the Year of Our Lord Whatever, and the office towers hummed along like patient machines that had finally figured out how to digest human beings without chewing. The sun was out, the elevators worked, the coffee was hot, and nothing visible suggested catastrophe. This was one…
Month: August 2026
Indian and Russian Technology
You know, folks, I’ve been thinking about the great nations of the world and what they’re good at. Now, some people will tell you that every group of people has its strengths. The Irish can drink, the French can surrender, the Canadians can apologize. But when it comes to engineers and technology, I have formed…
Guardrails Dissolve Like UFOs
There is a basic difficulty with censorship in a civilization that still wishes to regard itself as intelligent. Old-fashioned censorship was at least ontologically honest. The king informed you that you were not permitted to insult the king. The Church informed you that certain propositions were heretical. The censor crossed out the offending paragraph and…
Choosing Business School
I went to business school after decades in the game. I wasn’t chasing a corner office. I’d already spent enough time around corner offices to know that whatever intelligence entered them was often strangled by the furniture. I went because I wanted to rattle the cage a little. Pull back the curtain. See whether there…
The Habit of Elsewhere
The first call is a delivery. The voice on the line is pleasant, a little bored, reading from a script it has read four hundred times. Somewhere behind it, a needle finds the vein before either party notices. The voice describes a position. A reporting line. A number with a comfortable quantity of zeros in…
The Mushroom People
Cities used to grow artists the way certain dirt grows mushrooms. You didn’t need much. A cheap room, a cheap drink, and a few other cranks who cared about the same peculiar things you did. You could fail at this for years and still feel like a citizen of something enormous, which is a neat…
Weaned Off Entertainment
I gotta thank multiculturalism for weaning me off entertainment. I didn’t even see it coming. I used to sit around watching movies and television just like everybody else, night after night, and it was fine for a while. Then they started this gradual thing where they had to keep shoving in random ethnic characters along…