You can contact me at the following address or read my thoughts on various subjects below.
Background
Work: In 2007 some blog reading investors left a comment and asked me what I was thinking about. I went up to Caltech and pitched my idea and HoundWire was born. Prior to that I worked on pretty much everything with blinking lights and wires though my passion has always been the human side technology.Not Work: Good books, good coffee, good beer. Thinking about weird nebulous, abstract technological and economic problems and writing about them here. I have north of 100,000 words since Unbeknownst's inception so that eats up a good deal of my spare time. I'm also working on an open source driving simulator (Motorsport) with some interesting people from around the world. I race my car occasionally but virtual accidents are far less expensive.
Economics
Political debate that ignores economics seems to me like professional wrestling with suits. I'm an Austrian Schooler. To paraphrase this discussion, the current crop of top economists (Bernanke, etc.) are writing the equivalent of book reports by using fancy math to count words in novels while claiming that their word counting techniques are irrefutably scientific. That may be true, the problem is that they're trying to predict the author's next book by using fancy statistics that have no real connection to the underlying ideas of the author. Austrians use something like Maslow's Heirarch of Needs to build from instead of things like the Phillip's Curve.I wrote the post "Maslow's Heirarchy of Capitalism" a few weeks ago prior to hearing about how Menger was using similar ideas when he was getting started. In other words my intuition aligns well with old books by people who write about these things.
I'm a former Democrat but not a Republican. I have a business degree but was hired out of college to write software. I also teach high school interns about technology, globalization, and software. I've been blogging since 2003 and have somewhere near 60k words since the beginning. I believe in limited government and think technology will break down the current ineqalities and inefficiencies in business and politics. I also believe that open source software, blogs, IP based communication, Wikipedia, and open standards are the five biggest factors effecting positive change in the world today.
Things I'm trying to find more time to learn about: Economics, linguistics, religion, math, history, and computer science. Take my outlandish theories with a grain of salt until I'm older, I still have a lot of reading to do.
The following is a summarization of my views on the world:
- Politics - I used to be a die hard Democrat but at
some point while reading essays about economics I realized I was not a
Democrat... or a Republican. Most of my political beliefs are now the
result of my understanding of economics and human nature. I think
government could be much smaller than it is now but there are some
areas that could use a spending increase. For example: Kids should have
free healthcare until they're 18 so crappy parents don't have to choose
between HBO or their kid's health. Unfortunately kids can't compete
with the voting power of the AARP.
- Media/Journalism - Good journalists, bloggers or otherwise, have the power to fix the world. They are ranked among politicians as the least trusted people in America but I'm convinced that will change when the masses have an easy way to find the best writers, be they bloggers or otherwise.
- Globalization - I look at this as the decline of the irrational practice of isolationism, not a growth of something new.
- Government - I read a lot of Hayek, Mises, and Rothbard and though I'm not totally convinced, their ideas make more sense to me than anything else I've read.