Creating responsibility in fact (and not in theory, law, or policy) requires tethering the objects of responsibility to substantial risk. The only risk category that transforms responsibility into innovative success is existential; anything substantially smaller amounts to nothing more than parking tickets, a minor nuisance for minimizing risk in any…

In the early months of 1768, royal Massachusetts governor Bernard fired off a series of letters to the Ministry in London. The Stamp Act had been rejected by the people in November 1765, and the following month James Otis informed Bernard that a government that does not function has abdicated…

Property Rights & Revolution The date was December 20, 1765. The location was Castle William, a royal castle just outside of Boston that protected the harbor. James Otis and John Adams were meeting with Royal Governor Bernard. Legally, the Stamp Act had gone into effect the month before, but the…

Rittenhouse and Right to Rebel A curious though mostly legally irrelevant observation in the Rittenhouse matter is that he shouldn’t have been there; a more legally relevant argument is that his presence — with a weapon — and his specific actions provoked the rioters. There does seem to be a…

Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: “Σίβυλλα τί ϴέλεις”; respondebat illa: “άποϴανεΐν ϴέλω.” For Mac Miller. il miglior fabbro[1] I. It’s axiomatic in the dead land of college failures to study Bennington. In the 1970s and 1980s, Bennington was…

The CCP and its fiefdoms are funded by a real estate sector under threat. Update Nov 2021. Heavily indebted Chinese developer Kaisa Group had a $27B USD market cap six months ago. Today, it’s at about $7B and trading has halted after it was revealed that 18 of its Shenzhen…

Was Theranos a CIA front? Theranos was a med-tech start-up that raised more than $700M at a peak $10B valuation (2014). It supposedly developed a technology that could run multiple blood tests rapidly using a very small amount of blood. Theranos had labs, hired expensive scientists, and burned through hundreds…

One can create a machine that requires inputs that don’t exist…. The performance bounds of any given algorithm can be generally determined by the upper and lower bounds of the inputs (data, bounded by quality and quantity) so that the potential performance of the machine can be described as a…

Political genius lies in extracting success even from the people’s ruin. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn It’s axiomatic that ponzi and multi-level marketing schemes continually require new money, and usually this new money comes from new investors/consumers. The lever such schemes pull is information asymmetry. Those on the inside have information that…