Our common enemy, you and I, dear reader, is anyone that wants us to be enemies.

It’s a terrible thing to do to young people, to tell them that they are unavoidably surrounded by enemies on all sides who hate them because of who they are, what they are, what they look like, or what their skin color is. In addition to being almost certainly false, it is a sinister and harmful illness to install into the minds of the young.

The reality, according to an unreleased report by the US Department of Commerce, is summarized best on page 24…

What the hell happened at the US Capitol on January 6th? It had been happening already, actually. That riot is just the moment that most people finally noticed what was happening.

Some of the people at the Capitol in January, judging by their flags, were vile extremists. Some were loony conspiracy nuts. Many others, it seems, believed they were there for a peaceful protest. The police stationed there at the time made some pretty big mistakes. There was also a lot of misinformation about what happened, which federal prosecutors have since had to drop. …

In the United States there is currently buzz about raising the federally mandated hourly minimum wage. Everyone has an opinion and, as usual, everyone is letting themselves get overly emotional about it. Weirdly, multiple large corporations and corporate spokespeople have come out in support of a federal minimum wage increase. Isn’t that against their interests? Do they really think maintaining a socially conscious public image is worth the extra labor cost?

I’m a systems thinker. In pursuit of attaining understanding on this issue, what mental systems can we build? How can we adjust those systems to reach our goals? …

Bullying is a scarring experience. Society’s focus on the prevention of bullying is good and necessary if we are to be compassionate.

I’m concerned that there is a new form of bullying and it wears a compassionate mask. It can be difficult to parse this phenomenon as a form of abuse because it doesn’t look much like the arrogant, abusive style of bullying we are used to. In fact, it believes itself to be supremely empathetic and moral. I call it Nu-Bullying.

The Nu-Bully believes he is more virtuous because he bullies. To him, the only way to be truly…

I’ll never forget the first time I truly felt old. I was on a family vacation, and had obtained a physical newspaper to read. Something about the ritual of it, how long it takes, how out-of-date the information is, and the focus it demands from the reader, is all very relaxing to me. As I sat and read, a young relative of no more than ten years old asked with genuine bewilderment, “What kind of magazine is that?” She had never seen a newspaper in her life. It’s no mystery why this happened. …

Over the last several years, computer user interfaces, both touch and traditional, have slowly gone from reasonably easy to use and visually ugly, to more visually pleasing, but more difficult to use. This tradeoff can be painful for both developers and the average end-user. Is there a middle-ground?

Skeuomorphism is a design term referring to a derivative design that retains ornamental design cues that were present in the original object. For example, a piece of software designed to resemble its real-world physical counterparts, like a software drum machine, or the original iPhone’s calculator app. This has always present at least…

In my article, “User Engagement” is Code For “Addiction”, it was pointed out by a hacker news commenter that I left out what might be the most important part: the AI.

The infinite and addictive content feeds that we all like to busy ourselves with are curated by machine learning algorithms that psychologically profile each user individually and tailor your content feed to be as addictive as possible for you, personally. Your opinions and mine, what we decide we care the most about, have been assigned to us unknowingly by a machine learning algorithm. …