“I handed my passport to the immigration officer, and he looked at it and looked at me and said, ‘What are you?’”
—Grace Hopper, American scientist, born December 9, 1906
Grace Hopper pioneered high level computer languages, leading to the development of COBOL in the early 1960s. She is the only computer programmer that I know of to have a navy destroyer named after her.
The payoff in the piece about corporate realism about the inevitability of carbon pricing: it leaves deniers of global climate change without any motivation other than sheer perversity to continue refusing to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence for it. Not that that’ll stop right wing jerks from wanting to piss off liberals. But if ExxonMobil joins the U.S. Navy and the reinsurance industry in taking climate change seriously, perhaps the U.S. Congress can get motivated to face the existential threat it poses to human life. Especially since their largest donors don’t need them to continue being stupid.
I decided this morning that the official policy of this blog is that we live in a post-scarcity world, and that all thinking and planning must proceed on that basis. Abundance is the new black; economics is no longer the dismal science. Software has eaten the world, information is free, and we are already, as Stewart Brand said, “as gods and we HAVE to get good at it.”
Today and Tomorrow in #westernma
| TUESDAY | DECEMBER | 10 |
| 8:00AM | Agawam | MarketRight |
| 12:00-2:00PM | Northampton | Don’t Eat Lunch Alone |
| 6:00PM | Northampton | Young Female Professionals in the Pioneer Valley |
| 6:30PM | Indian Orchard | The Geek Group of Western Mass |
| 8:00PM | Amherst | UMass Amherst Entrepreneurship Initiative Social |
Reading
The Last Word
“I left the room with silent dignity, but caught my foot in the mat.”
—George Grossmith, English actor, born December 9, 1847