Silicon Valley

In 2017, Google declared it had reached “100% renewable energy for our global operations.”  read more »

During the 20th century global prosperity was focused to where technological development was happening, and this has also been the pattern for the initial decades of the 21st century.  read more »

NYU professor Jonathan Haidt has a new book out called The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.  read more »

Artificial intelligence (AI) and its related technologies — machine learning and the metaverse — represent a watershed in the evolution of the global economy. Like other such shifts, its emergence is likely to favor certain interests, notably a handful of technology giants, the media and a small cadre of highly skilled programmers. Everyone else faces economic danger, certain to roil domestic and international politics in coming years.  read more »

The technological revolution once promised a new era of expanded democracy and enhanced opportunity. Instead, we face today a reality that blends the worst aspects of George Orwell’s Big Brother and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World controllers.  read more »

Sometimes a story takes a number of years to ripen. And sometimes two or three stories merge in unexpected ways. I just had a moment of convergence when new infill development, sub rosa adaptation, and wartime migration all collided.  read more »

The Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) and its predecessors serving San Jose and Silicon Valley have spent more than $7 billion (in today’s dollars) on rail transit.  read more »

Ernst Nolte’s Three Faces of Fascism examined the three devastating ideologies that led to the undermining of European democracy in the 1930s. Today, democratic life is also under threat – and there are also three basic forms that this authoritarian threat takes.  read more »

Back in the early days of California’s ascendancy, the state was described as “the Jews’ early paradise”, a place where the lack of social norms, and enormous opportunities, were ideal for enterprising people  read more »

Amid all the hysteria, technological wreckage and gallons of spilt ink, artificial intelligence’s most potent legacy is yet to be discerned.  read more »