If you look at how American communities work, there are basically two models, with a lot of mixing-and-matching between them. I have thought of them in my head as “The Samurai Village” model, and the “Logging Camp” model. If you watch the Tom Cruise movie “The Last Samurai,” there’s a…

I posted this as a comment in a thread, but I think it deserves its own thread. 25 years ago, at my first real tech job, I was approached by one of the administrative assistants for help getting some information for a spreadsheet she was working on. As it turned…

I do a lot of thinking about how to approach problems by analogy. I like to tell stories, and I like to read stories, so when I’m working through a problem, my basic tool for developing a framework is a storytelling framework: I tell myself a story about what needs…

If you didn’t see my couple of paragraphs on The Discourse, I saved it off to Medium here: https://medium.com/@turkshead/the-discourse-ab638be4ce3b In it, I basically posit that we humans create and maintain models in our head of the people and groups that we interact with regularly, and that there’s a style of…

Every group of humans has a shared state. You know where you stand with the members of your family, your work team, your diving club. …

When I hear someone complaining about the evils of socialism, and the dangers of a universal basic income, I think of Mark Rothko’s “№14.” I used to be one of those people who made snide jokes about post-modernism and modern art and whatnot. …

The gravel crunched as he turned the vehicle off the highway; there was no paving on the over-large parking lot. He pulled the utility vehicle up alongside the row of similar vehicles up against the side of the building; he recognized most of them. All of them, checking again, except…

The smell of roasted pork fills the studio as the sculptor carefully turns the pole in his hand, gently tilting a rough, blackened ceramic crucible. A stream of bright silver molten metal falls gracefully over the lip of the crucible and drops silently into the hole the sculptor has left…

The buzz of the rope running through the abseiling rig echoed. …