In Iraq, I raided insurgents. In Virginia, the police raided me. →

The culture that encourages police officers to engage their weapons before gathering information promotes the mind-set that nothing, including citizen safety, is more important than officers' personal security. That approach has caused public trust in law enforcement to deteriorate.

Is Silicon Valley in Another Bubble . . . and What Could Burst It? →

So many good quotes in this article:

Vikram Mansharamani, a Yale lecturer and author of the book Boombustology, has argued that virtually every great bubble bursting has been preceded by an attempt to build the tallest buildings. Forty Wall Street, the Chrysler Building, and the Empire State Building were under construction during the onset of the Great Depression. The Petronas Towers, in Kuala Lumpur, were completed in time to inaugurate the Asian economic crisis. The Taipei 101 tower, once the tallest building in the world, laid its foundation right at the height of the dot-com boom.

As one technologist overheard and posted on Twitter, "SF tech culture is focused on solving one problem: What is my mother no longer doing for me?"

The problem with being a unicorn, indeed, is that there aren't many exit strategies. Either you can go public, which is inadvisable without a lot of revenue, or you can sell, which is difficult given the paucity of companies that can afford to make such an offer. So, for many, the choice becomes fairly simple. You continue to raise more and more money, or you die.

Now countless people from all over want this to be a bubble and they want it to burst. There are the taxi drivers who have lost their jobs to Uber; hotel owners who have seen their rooms sit vacant as people sleep in Airbnbs; newspapers that are at the mercy of Facebook's algorithms; booksellers and retailers who have been in an unrelenting war with Amazon; the elderly, who can't keep up; the music industry; television producers; and, perhaps most of all, San Franciscans, who would rejoice in the streets if their rents fell from totally insane to merely overpriced, or if they could get into a decent restaurant on a Monday night.

Why We Can't Get Over Ourselves →

As the context in which you're trying to understand another mind becomes more ambiguous, the influence of your own perspective increases. If you really want to understand your coworker or competitor or children, don't rely on modern mediums of communication that give you only a modern Rorschach test about the mind of another person. Twitter does not allow others to understand your deep thoughts and broad perspective. It only allows others to confirm how stupid they already think you are.

The Misleading War on GMOs: The Food Is Safe. The Rhetoric Is Dangerous. →

Activists who tell you to play it safe around GMOs take no such care in evaluating the alternatives. They denounce proteins in GE crops as toxic, even as they defend drugs, pesticides, and non-GMO crops that are loaded with the same proteins. They portray genetic engineering as chaotic and unpredictable, even when studies indicate that other crop improvement methods, including those favored by the same activists, are more disruptive to plant genomes.

I want to take you backstage, behind [...] blanket assurances about the safety of genetic engineering. I want to take you down into the details of four GMO fights, because that's where you'll find truth.

Detailed, well-researched, and informative.

Highway to Hack: The Beginning of the Auto-Hacking Era →

Good roundup of recent automobile computer security vulnerabilities and the impact to future connected car platforms.

Nearly every job in America, mapped in incredible detail →

Some cool visualizations on job types.

Go Ahead, Be Sarcastic →

"To create or decode sarcasm, both the expressers and recipients of sarcasm need to overcome the contradiction (i.e., psychological distance) between the literal and actual meanings of the sarcastic expressions. This is a process that activates and is facilitated by abstraction, which in turn promotes creative thinking."

People around me must be super-creative.