November 14, 2005
Europe is getting older and the Netherlands is now losing more people than it gains. Importing young foreigners has fallen out of fashion, so perhaps it's time to try the inverse: exporting the pensioners. Warm climates, cheap living, all those Third World doctors stuck without career prospects — the demographic math almost works itself out. I'm thinking somewhere in Goa.
November 09, 2005
You can't own the air or the water, so why the land? Common ownership wasn't a communist invention — it was just what made sense before industrial agriculture. Now that the Netherlands could feed itself off a postage stamp and people mostly want forests to walk in anyway, maybe it's time to admit the obvious. Nationalize the lot of it.
November 07, 2005
I used to believe university education should be free. Mine was — the Dutch government even paid me a small wage to study, essentially handing me money to boost my future earnings. Convenient position to abandon now that I have the degree, admittedly. But two things change the calculation, and neither of them is the one you'd expect.
October 27, 2005
Someone registered douwesinga.com — missing the second 'o' — and filled it with spammy ads. There's only one reasonable response to discovering that typo squatters consider your name worth squatting. Take the compliment.
October 25, 2005
The legend of the Google engineer: espresso, blue LCD glow, late-night heroics. The reality this particular week: a missed alarm, a sprint to the wrong platform, a German station bench at five in the morning, and the slow-dawning horror of hearing 'Zurich' announced just as the doors slid shut. Two European trips, two ways to almost not make it.
October 09, 2005
Old-school capitalism treats property as sacred and absolute. So whoever gets to call something 'property' has already won the argument. Notice how nicely 'Intellectual Property' rolls off the tongue, and how Free Market types nod along. Try the more honest phrase instead and watch the same crowd flinch. A small rebranding exercise, with consequences.
September 25, 2005
Pat Robertson floated the idea of just assassinating Hugo Chavez instead of invading. Awful man, but - hear me out - he had a point. Killing one leader is vastly cheaper than killing a hundred thousand people in a war. So why is targeted assassination the taboo, while full-scale invasion stays on the menu? The answer is uncomfortable and surprisingly strategic.
September 08, 2005
Index funds work because crowds, on average, beat individuals. But following the index condemns you to slightly underperform forever, buying high and selling low at every rebalance. What if you peeked at everyone's trades, kept the smart ones, ignored the foolish, and weighted accordingly? You'd need a lot of data - data that, conveniently, certain bankers already have.
August 31, 2005
Smart phones can do everything, which means most of us end up using them for SMS and calls. A trip to Handango fixed that: email that actually works, an ssh client, the entire Wikipedia in your pocket, Seinfeld episodes, an arcade emulator. And then, idly checking an old developer account from a Game of Life port written years ago, an unexpected balance staring back.
August 25, 2005
Part two of the how-to-end-terrorism plan, and this one isn't likely to win many supporters. The strategy, borrowed from Seinfeld, is: do nothing. Terrorism aims for terror, and the press supplies most of it. Stop paying attention and the whole enterprise loses its point. A monthly traffic-death count puts the casualty math in perspective. What if they threw a war and nobody came?
August 23, 2005
Two plans for ending terrorism, neither of them popular. This is the first, and the unsettling part is that it's roughly the one we're already implementing - just a bit at a time, with everyone's reluctant blessing. Abolish cash, GPS-tag everyone, log every transaction, build the warehouse. Terrorism would struggle. So would crime. So, of course, would something else.
August 19, 2005
The more we go wireless, the more wires we need to keep everything charged. Suppose you wanted to drape a mesh network over a forest - cheap and easy, except for the small detail of powering every node. Solar panels are ugly and big. Trees, however, are big, solar-powered, and aesthetically excellent. What if you could just tap one for USB?
August 10, 2005
It's easy to fret about the Netherlands lately: foreigner panic, the rejected EU constitution, a tone that doesn't sound quite right. Then a small news item from the homeland lands in the inbox and restores some faith. It involves nudist beaches, certain unauthorized activities taking place on them, and the gloriously practical solution proposed by the Dutch Nudist Federation.
August 04, 2005
Live from Wikimania. The plan was modest: ask to speak, get told it's too late, settle for a poster. Then arrive at the conference, glance at the badge, glance at the program, and discover that someone has quietly upgraded the situation. The new catch, of course, is the timeslot - 9:30 on a Saturday morning.
July 29, 2005
Parents swear they never pushed their kids toward traditional roles — and then a BBC documentary cross-dressed some toddlers to see what would happen. We say 'ladies and gentlemen,' coo over sweet girls and clever boys, and proudly announce 'It's a Boy!' on birth cards. Swap one word and the whole ritual gets uncomfortable fast.
July 27, 2005
Marx said history repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as farce. He didn't specify what the third time looks like — but it apparently involves a 130-euro taxi sprinting down the Autobahn at 170 km/h, a driver yelling at strangers for directions, and a train that calmly waits fifteen minutes after you've collapsed onto it. And then there's the fourth time.
July 19, 2005
The UN is debating who should run the internet, the Third World wants a seat at the table, and Bush has unilaterally declared America is keeping the keys. Easy call, right? Pile on the cowboys. Except when you look at who's lining up at the UN — China, Iran, African telecom monopolies — suddenly the obvious side isn't quite so obvious.
July 17, 2005
Yes, communism in practice was a disaster. But here's a graph that won't quite leave me alone: the top 0.1 percent's share of income starts plunging right around the October Revolution, stays low through the Cold War, and then climbs sharply again the moment the Berlin Wall falls. The rich, it seems, behave differently when someone's watching.
July 07, 2005
Nobody visits the museum in their own city, but everyone packs three into a weekend abroad. 'Last chance to see' wins every time. So why not stop pretending and lean all the way in: take the museums off their plinths, load them onto trains, and let your hour-long commute double as a tour of a foreign collection.
July 05, 2005
Try this one on for size: software patents exist because Open Source forced them into existence. The industry used to run on an implicit deal where everyone copied everyone else's innovations and the market leaders got paid anyway. Then Free Software showed up with a PR machine louder than Microsoft's, cheerfully cloned everything in sight, and broke the truce. Devil's advocate, fully committed.
Never tell a lie unless it is absolutely convenient.