Free Will Isn't Free

Once he had been interested in free will. Now it simply felt like too much work.

It was easier to move with the current.

Whatever free will was, it certainly wasn’t free — and at this stage of his life, it cost more than he was willing to pay.

Democracy is Like a Bicycle

“Democracy is like a bicycle. It must move forward in order not to fall over.”
- Edgar Faure, who served twice as Prime Minister of France during the Fourth Republic (1952 and 1955–56)

When societies don't make progress, or that progress isn't widely felt, democracies become vulnerable.

A Call for More Medals at the Olympics

Top 10 in the world but you don't medal. That seems a little stingy, what with all the metals in the world. In addition to gold, silver, and bronze, we could have medals made of lead, copper, and platinum. We have 8 billion people on this planet -- surely we could acknowledge more than the top 3. I would love to hear someone come back excitedly saying, "I tin-foiled at the Olympics!"

What Is Most Systemic is Most Intimate - says Peter Senge

"When we say 'the system,' what we are really talking about is a pattern of interdependency that we enact. There is no system. It's purely an abstraction. But there are patterns of interdependency. And they are created every day. Every hour. Every minute. Through our thinking. Through our actions. So as Carl Rogers said, what is most personal is most universal. What is most systemic is most intimate."
- Peter Senge

Perhaps another way to put this is that we talk about "the system" as if it is some entity "out there." The system has its power because it is actually what defines how we interact, and it is something we've internalized. The system is in us. We sustain it.

Rough and Tumble Fighting in the South

In the antebellum South, a brutal form of combat known as "rough and tumble" fighting, or "gouging," was prevalent. This fighting style aimed to maim opponents, with eye-gouging being a particularly notorious tactic. Combatants often sought to gouge out an opponent's eye, and some even sharpened their teeth to bite off ears, noses, or fingers. Such fights were common in rural Southern areas during the 18th and early 19th centuries.

This culture of violence extended beyond individual brawls. Homicide rates among White Southern males were significantly higher than those of their Northern counterparts, especially in rural regions. Notably, these elevated rates were primarily associated with argument-related homicides, reflecting a societal norm where personal disputes frequently escalated to lethal outcomes. In a region in which 40% of the population was enslaved and had no rights, this sort of dehumanization was hardly anomalous.

On a related note, in this last election Trump won in the former confederacy by 6.9 million votes and lost by 4.7 million votes in the rest of the country.

Prediction: In a Generation Wealth Will Be Another Right of Citizens

Per Google's Gemini Model:

As of early 2026, Norway's sovereign wealth fund—the Government Pension Fund Global—has surpassed a value of $2 trillion. With a population of roughly 5.4 million to 5.6 million people, this translates to approximately $340,000 to $360,000 per citizen. It is the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, investing oil and gas revenues into global stocks, bonds, and real estate.
Purpose: To manage oil revenues for long-term stability and to fund national budgets (healthcare, education, infrastructure).

My prediction? In a generation, wealth will be another right of citizens.

Checks and Balances are Not Working

 

During Biden's administration, Americans agreed 2 to 1 that checks and balances were working.
Now in Trump's administration, Americans agree 2 to 1 that checks and balances are not working. 

Checks and balances seem like a fairly clean definition of the difference between living in a democracy or autocracy. 

Lincoln: Right Makes Might

In a speech about slavery during his 1860 campaign, Lincoln said,"Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."

It is a dramatic reversal of the common phrase, "might makes right," and it suggests a principle that moral clarity creates political power, not the other way around.

Hitchhiking as Uber 1.0

 Hitchhiking was arguably Uber 1.0 - the beta release before getting strangers to pick you up became an app.

Proposal for a Dog Museum

No paintings on the walls. No hushed docents.

Instead, along the baseboards: scents.

Each accompanied by a tasteful placard:

• Dropped Sausage (One Bite Taken, Floor Contact: 3.2 Seconds)

• Coyote After-Thought

• Eau de French Poodle in Heat.
  (One of six rotational pheromonal exhibits. Please allow your dog to linger only briefly to prevent congestion.)

• Fresh Mud After Rain

• Frightened Human

• Suspicious Delivery Driver

• Pine Tree (Upper Bark, 3½ Feet High)

Interactive wing:
“Fire Hydrant, Urban” — a collaborative installation refreshed hourly.

Gift shop sells nothing visible.

William Deci on Autonomy Supportive Relationships

William Deci made a distinction that has greatly influenced me.

He argues that parents, managers and teachers have three options: control, abandonment or autonomy supportive.

Control is when you dictate, monitor and manage goals and process for your student, child or employee. Abandonment is when you simply say, "Do what you'd like." You give them freedom but not support. Autonomy supportive suggests that you defer rather than dictate goals but then offer support - teaching, processes, resources - that enable them to achieve those goals.
My sense is that every decade there are more parents who are autonomy supportive. The parent who says, "He wants to be a skateboarder. We're doing what we can to get him to tournaments and fund lessons," is considered interesting today whereas in the 50s they'd be considered crazy. (But to be fair to folks in the 50s, skateboards were so bad back then that you'd be right to be outraged.)

Among the many things meant by the popularization of entrepreneurship is this notion of autonomy supportive. Rather than dictate processes, you support their goals. What might this look like?

Ricardo Semler - in Brazil - had a fascinating model in his factory. He would have half a dozen workers side by side, each with their own arrangement. One was getting paid by the hour, another by the month and another by piece. Yet another was working in the same area but paying for access to the machinery and then selling the product on her own. It was not haphazard. Each was working to a negotiated arrangement. The person who wanted less risk also had less opportunity for rewards. The person who could get what she could sell the product for had to - of course - find the market for what she was making. Given where they were in their life, their skills and goals, different arrangements might advantage them differently. As so often is the case, as the employees did better, so did the company. As is so rarely the case, employees had a variety of ways to do better.

If work is going to look more entrepreneurial, by definition it will be less defined by someone else and more defined by the worker. And yet the array of resources, skills, and knowledge needed to be successful in any endeavor suggests that there is a huge gap of possibility in the large gap between a traditional entrepreneur who creates a new business and the employee who simply takes a role in such a business. To allow individuals to slide the scale between conformity and autonomy rather than toggle from 1 to 10 suggests all sorts of intriguing possibilities in the relationship between employer and employee, a redefinition of work. Chief among the shifts is moving into a relationship that lets employees define the goals and then supporting them in that.

There was an old quip that customers of the Model T could have any color they wanted as long as it was black. Ford's dominance of the American auto industry was eclipsed by General Motors who offered a wide array of car models and prices. And colors. The notion that you would accommodate the various desires of various customers was revelatory and also resulted in a huge gain in value.

One of the more stunning stats of the modern world is that Amazon offers more than 300 million different products to America's 300 million people. The notion that those same customers as workers might similarly want variety in their work and how they create value is something we still haven't embraced quite yet. We're still in the "any process or objective you want as long as it is our processes and objectives" stage of employment. My prediction? The shift into autonomy supportive relationships with employees will create even more value than corporations shifting from dictating consumer choices to broadening them.

A Korean Project Managers' Perspective on American and Japanese Employees

The Korean PM I was working with in 2022 worked with Americans and Japanese. I asked him how he would describe the differences. He said (paraphrasing),

"Japanese are very methodical. Very process oriented. All the same.
Americans? You don't know what you are going to get. They are very different."

And that, I thought, is our strength and weakness.

What Mardi Gras Evolved Into

Terms evolve. 

Mardi Gras became Fat Tuesday, which somehow became Taco Tuesday.
From sacred ritual to cultural celebration to something you can sink your teeth into.

2026 - Not Just a Year

I hardly know whether to be comforted or insulted by the fact that the friendly hotel desk clerk clearly found me so old and befuddled that -- out of kindness -- he gave me a room number that just happens to be the year. Greatly lowering the odds that even I will forget it.

Separating Signal From Noise in Quarterly GDP Growth Reports

The rate of GDP growth from a year earlier fell from 2.3 to 2.2%. Which is to say, the rate of growth was essentially unchanged.

People who prefer the continuously compounded rate of quarterly change saw GDP growth fall from 4.3% to 1.4%. This measure assumes the change of the most recent quarter will continue for a full year. (Spoiler alert: it never does.) 

Headlines last quarter that told you the economy grew surprisingly fast and that this quarter tell you the economy has slowed down? Those folks might just be confusing noise for signal.

Why the Supreme Court Striking Down Trump's Tariffs Is Such a Great Thing

You would die within months if you were suddenly alone on a desert island with no one else to rely on. And that is why it is such a great thing that today the Supreme Court struck down Trump's tariffs.

Progress relies on one simple thing: widening the network of people with whom you can trade, invest, borrow, or coordinate in the production of new goods. If you have your family to help run your farm, you're so much better off than if you had to scratch out a living alone. If you can sell your product anywhere around the globe -- even to India where crop failures may have caused a surge in prices for legumes -- you might make more in one year's harvest than farmers a generation ago would have hoped to make in a decade.

Tariffs shrink that network. Widening it is the process that has defined progress for centuries.

Free Will Gives Way to Fee Will

Because of inflation, free will will now come with a small fee. Some have protested that in a market economy it was only a matter of time before free will gave way to fee will but that seems unfair given that free will has - in a sense - been upgraded, coming as it does with so many more options and consequences. Free will is - if you will - far more consequential and so of course cannot continue at its old, low price.

"A Civilization Persisted from Athens to Rome to America

 This is the sort of nonsense you get from people who don't understand progress, evolution or Western Civilization.

A Military Cost to our Failure to Help Ukraine in its Defense Against Russia

We spend on the order of $1 trillion a year on defense-related outlays, and the Department of Defense manages roughly $4 trillion in total assets -- not all weaponry, but a vast base of equipment, systems, facilities, and infrastructure. Much of America's defense posture -- its procurement habits, doctrine, and assumptions -- was shaped by Cold War deterrence, large-platform warfare (ships, aircraft, armor), and the lessons of Korea, Vietnam, and post-Cold War interventions.

Ukraine's rapid evolution of drone warfare suggests we may be living through a shift that could devalue much of that legacy investment. Cheap, fast-iterating drones -- paired with persistent surveillance, precision strike, and electronic warfare -- are rewriting what survives on a modern battlefield. This doesn't make tanks, ships, or aircraft obsolete overnight. But it raises a sobering possibility: some of what we're buying and maintaining may be optimized for a battlefield that is disappearing.

We're spending $1 trillion a year on defense. To save a tens - possibly hundreds - of billions, we're largely on the sideline in Ukraine's defense against the autocrat Putin. I would argue that helping to protect a democracy on the border of NATO from an autocracy is reason enough to get involved in Ukraine's defense, and for that reason alone we should have been more involved over the last 5 years. But even with that aside, we're missing out on a crucial period of battlefield evolution. The question isn't whether we can afford to help Ukraine. It's whether we can afford to sit out the war that's showing us what defense needs to become.

And here's the uncomfortable twist. Our reluctance to help Ukraine more -- sometimes defended on the grounds of cost -- may prove penny-wise and pound-foolish. Ukraine is pioneering the next frontier of battlefield adaptation in real time, under real fire, iterating faster than any peacetime R&D program could. Every lesson learned there is a lesson we don't have to learn the hard way. Underinvesting in that learning loop today could cost us far more later: in rushed procurement, doctrinal scramble, and painful write-downs of systems built for a previous era.

George Washington and the Bank of England

Even through the American Revolution, General Washington - fighting British troops - never sold the stock he held in the Bank of England.

 #PresidentsDay

A Theory About Why Bitcoin Is Falling in Price

Anyone who claims to explain why bitcoin rose so much -- or is falling so much (down 42% in six months) -- should earn your suspicion. That said, I have a theory.

Bitcoin was created in the wake of the Great Recession as a substitute for the dollar and a banking system that had clearly and recently hurt people. Don't trust fiat money? Invest in crypto instead. The price of crypto became, in a way, a proxy for distrust in institutions -- specifically the U.S. government and banking system, but the sentiment was broader than that.

Trump won votes from people who felt the same distrust. He was the one man who would make things happen without the constraints of faltering institutions. The less trust people have in institutions, the more ready they are to explore a relationship with a strongman -- or a cryptocurrency.

So what has happened in this first year of Trump's presidency? People are being reminded that institutional norms actually bring a lot of value and stability. They are starting to question the philosophy of "we don't need no institutions." They may even be coming around to the notion that flawed institutions -- which might be the only kind we ever get -- are better than no institutions.

People are turning back to institutions. And bitcoin, as a measure of distrust in them, is falling in price.

Economist: 61% of Americans Think Country is on the Wrong Track

From the Economist ... "A week into Donald Trump’s second term 37% of Americans thought the country was headed in the right direction, while 50% thought it was on the wrong track. Those numbers are now 31% and 61%, respectively."

Xenophobes Don't Like It When You Call Them ...

He took offense at being called xenophobic. “Don’t call me foreign names,” he said. “Speak American.”