Embracing Chaos

Revolutionaries are idealists. They have to be. They risk their lives to fight for what they believe in. Lenin, Mao, Castro — they all truly and deeply believed that they were fighting for a better way of life for their people. And to a varying degrees, they accomplished that. In fact in all three of these cases — Russia, China and Cuba, the early years after the revolution were relatively good for the people. Wealth was redistributed and poverty decreased. The second world is generally better than the third world. When I was living in communist China, I found it…

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Many times I’ve been asked about the possibility of Apple offering a subscription music service for iPods and iTunes. Here I’ll lay out why I think this will happen, what the timeline is for it, how that relates to the future of DRM, and what impact it would have on the competitive landscape. First off, I am confident Apple will launch a subscription music service. As every Rhapsody fan and many industry analysts agree, subscription services are the best way to consume music. Just like Hotmail moved email into the sky, and Google Docs are doing the same for office…

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My 14-year old Subaru is on its way out, and since I’m commuting to Kirkland almost every day I really need a new car. Primary criteria for me are safety and fuel economy / ecological impact. Safety seems to correlate very strongly with model year so I’m looking at new cars. In theory running on bio-diesel gives your car essentially zero net carbon impact. Also, many new renewable organic fuel sources seem to be more like diesel than gasoline. So I looked at what diesel cars can be purchased new in the US these days. I was amazed at how…

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