The Thesis:

1. Venture Capital is Broken

2. True Innovation is is Undercapitalized

3. The Inflection Point has Arrived

4. It's Time for Change

The Canary Is Dead

"[We] need to get together and at least try and figure out what the rules of the game are."

"We might have less collateral damage if we can decide when cyberwarfare is allowed."

From the archive, a selection of worrywarts and their blithesome brethren:

According to one who was present, Churchill suddenly blurted out: "Are we animals? Are we taking this too far?"

John Arquilla worries about a “wildcard” threat: “individual hackers of very great skill.”

"You might call it, the art of fighting, without fighting."

Bush: first of all, we have said that whatever we do ... will be legal.

Finally:

The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.

The Dark Art of Cyberwar

You load sixteen tons, and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go;
I owe my soul to the company store...

Paul Graham:

Don't just not be evil. Be good.

It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.

On Richard Sennett:

The evidence suggests that from an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."

New York in the 1930's

Martin Varsavsky:

Five years into the 20th century, Einstein was living his Annus Miarbilis. Where is our patent office today? Who is our Einstein?

Unfortunately, when I look around me today, during the end of 2008, I see humanity leading an unsustainable life based on technology that should already be obsolete.

From the archive:

Someone from the future, I’m sure, will marvel at our blindness and at the hole we have driven ourselves into, for we are completely committed to an unsustainable technology.

Recall:

Albert Einstein achieved scientific fame by asking questions and solving problems that nobody else had realized were problems.

Also, Radebaugh: The Future We Were Promised (now, archived here by wayback, and here)

Radebaugh's space-age but practical inventions, from modular homes to be delivered by helicopter, to jet-propelled commuter trains, all have a wild utopian sensibility that is now both nostalgic and magical.

Where is the future that we were promised?

Bill St. Arnaud:

Changes being made under the rubric of fighting excessive use of bandwidth by that mythical 5 percent of broadband subscribers that use 90 percent of available bandwidth have nothing to do with freeing those ill-used bits for legitimate use.

From a March 6, 2001, transcript of an online chat between Bernd-Jürgen Brandes (cator99) and Armin Meiwes (antrophagus):

cator99: I’m in telecommunications

antrophagus: Oh, that sounds interesting

cator99: I believe you

Also:

The best network is the hardest one to make money running.

This is the Paradox of the Best Network.

More recently:

Comcast, the nation's largest cable company, has announced that it will impose a monthly cap of 250 GB on its customers' Internet usage.

Gobble, gobble.

The incredible shrinking Internet

America has two auto industries. The one represented by GM, Ford and Chrysler is Midwestern, unionized, burdened with massive obligations to retirees, and shackled to marketing and product strategies that have roots reaching back to the early 1900s.

The other American auto industry is largely Southern and non-union, owes relatively little to the few retirees it has, and enjoys a variety of advantages because its Japanese, European and Korean owners launched operations in this country relatively recently.

The question isn't whether Washington is willing to offer more public money to help auto companies survive.

There even appears to be a consensus on how much: Up to $50 billion.

The tougher question is: what's Washington's goal?

From the archive:

In July 1968, the Republicans knew they were in trouble, but they didn't know why. Ideas apparently mattered, and words were maybe more important than they had guessed; unfortunately, they didn't have any.

Having exchanged intellectual curiosity for ideological certainty, they had forfeited their powers of observation as well as their senses of humor.

"It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."

If today we are shocked by shenanigans like the Enron debacle, insider trading, mutual fund abuses and the prevalence of special interests in politics, we need to get some perspective on our history.

America's Two Auto Industries

Naomi Klein:

On the same day that he allocated the first $125 billion to the banks, Secretary Paulson announced the largest federal budget deficit in U.S. history. Buried in his statement was a preview of the next phase of the financial disaster. The deficit numbers, he declared, reinforce the need to "pursue policies that promote economic growth and fiscal responsibility, and address entitlement reform." He was referring to Americans who feel entitled to receive Social Security in their old age and Medicaid when they are sick. Those programs, Paulson implied, might not be able to survive the budget crisis he is currently creating for the next administration.

From Tom Friedman, in 2005:

Are Americans suffering from an undue sense of entitlement?

Somebody said to me the other day that the entitlement we need to get rid of is our sense of entitlement.

From last month:

"We need this to be clean and quick," Paulson told ABC.

The New Trough

Oh, to be young, and innocent

Michael Lewis:

The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over.

There’s a long list of people who now say they saw it coming all along but a far shorter one of people who actually did. Of those, even fewer had the nerve to bet on their vision. It’s not easy to stand apart from mass hysteria—to believe that most of what’s in the financial news is wrong or distorted, to believe that most important financial people are either lying or deluded—without actually being insane. A handful of people had been inside the black box, understood how it worked, and bet on it blowing up. At the top of a very short list was Steve Eisman.

The funny thing, looking back on it, is how long it took for even someone who predicted the disaster to grasp its root causes. They were learning about this on the fly, shorting the bonds and then trying to figure out what they had done. Eisman knew subprime lenders could be scumbags. What he underestimated was the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism.

From the archive:

We are willingly part of a world designed for the convenience of what Shakespeare called “the visible God”: money. When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out.

Also:

People say to me, "Whatever it takes." I tell them, It's going to take everything.

The End

Niall Ferguson:

This hunt for scapegoats is futile. To understand the downfall of Planet Finance, you need to take several steps back and locate this crisis in the long run of financial history. Only then will you see that we have all played a part.

This crisis is about much more than just the stock market. It needs to be understood as a fundamental breakdown of the entire financial system, extending from the monetary-and-banking system through the bond market, the stock market, the insurance market, and the real-estate market. It affects not only established financial institutions such as investment banks but also relatively novel ones such as hedge funds. It is global in scope and unfathomable in scale.

The key point is to appreciate why the quants were so wrong.

But what about the rest of us, the rank-and-file members of the deluded crowd? Well, we shall now have to question some of our most deeply rooted assumptions—not only about the benefits of paper money but also about the rationale of the property-owning democracy itself.

From one year ago, here is Nassim Nicholas Taleb:

Many hedge fund managers ... are just picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. And sometimes the steamroller accelerates.

Wall Street Lays Another Egg