BAD BOY, WHAT YOU GONNA DO WHEN THEY COME FOR YOU? WELL, SETTLE OUT OF COURT, SURELY...

I don't have anything particularly insightful to add to the various articles that have discussed the giant tech wage fixing scandal.

For myself, I liked that piece by Pando and that one by Mother Jones.

But the reason I am writing is to notice the fact that, so far, almost no one on the right of the spectrum has had anything to say at all about this.

THE GREAT STAGNATION AND WHY IT'S WRONG

In the same vein as my previous blog-posts on Pr. Kimball's ideas (i.e. writing about authors I respect but disagree with), I would like to talk about Pr. Tyler Cowen's ideas, notably about his Great Stagnation thesis.

I will be concentrating on 'The Great Stagnation' rather than Pr. Cowen's more recent work 'Average is Over' for two reasons. First, because I actually read 'The Great Stagnation'. 

And, second, because I think 'Average is Over' is mostly right: If we do nothing, our future will probably look something like what Pr. Cowen is describing i.e. a world with a tiny wealthy elite and most of the rest scrambling for scraps. After all, this is already our world right now and it was our world for most of Humanity's history... My only criticism would be that this has nothing to do with technology per se and everything to do with how we organise ourselves...

But, if 'Average is Over' is simply projecting existing trends a bit further into the future, 'The Great Stagnation' is an attempt to explain how we got there in the first place and it is thus far more interesting.

It is also wrong.

UKRAINE, RUSSIA & THE NEW CRIMEAN WAR?

I know that this blog is starting to look like "All-Ukraine-All-The-Time" but this is obviously something close to my heart. And I believe it is also quite important for the future of the EU and US relationship with Russia. Finally, living in Kiyv, I can hopefully bring a mixture of Western and Ukrainian outlook to the discussion.

So, as you probably heard, Russia has been sending troops officially unofficially into Crimea and reserve itself the right to do so anywhere in Ukraine, should it deem it necessary to protect Russian-speaking minorities.

The pretext is not new. Plenty of people made comparisons with Hitler and Sudetenland but, frankly, it is hard to find a European power who hasn't used that argument repeatedly into all kind of conflicts, from ancient history to very recently (French intervention in Mali, for example). Indeed, the Crimean war between Imperial Russia and the British, French and Ottoman alliance was justified on the Russian side by Tsar Nicolas Ist supposedly wanting to protect the Orthodox Christian minorities oppressed by the Ottoman Empire.