Ruminations on the Suffering of the Educated Class
Aweh, Dear Ruminants and Groupies, Please Respect My Suffering There are people suffering from war, hunger, homelessness, and diseases for which treatment is unavailable. Then there is me. I have a PhD and an internet connection. Every morning, these two unfortunate circumstances collide. I encounter something so confidently idiotic that I briefly lose the will…
Ruminations on my carbon footprint
Aweh, Dear Ruminants and Groupies, Forgive me, Ruminants, it has been four weeks since my last blog. The flesh has been weak, and I have been spending the time increasing my carbon footprint for 2026. Individual carbon footprint (noun): A number calculated to make you feel personally responsible, and perhaps slightly guilty, for climate change…
Ruminations on the Galápagos of the car industry
Aweh, Dear Ruminants and Groupies, It is September 2046 and I am going to America. I have been advised not to. Not because it is dangerous. America remains quite safe, provided one avoids schools, political rallies and discussing tariffs. The problem is getting in. My American visitor visa cost $10,000. There were three interviews. The…
Ruminations on the lanyard class
Aweh, Dear Ruminants and Groupies, How many lanyards have you received in the past year? Can you judge your importance by how many you have? Do you throw them away? South Africa has a genuinely consequential energy-investment ecosystem because the country is simultaneously trying to rebuild the grid, procure huge quantities of new generation, create…
Ruminations on Objective Reality and Elon Musk
Aweh, Dear Ruminants and Groupies, I watched all 85 minutes of the recent interview between Elon Musk and Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor-in-chief of The Economist.Not merely the flurry of soundbites it subsequently produced. I had two reactions. The first was: Bloody hell, this is fascinating. The second was: Bloody hell, this is disturbing. These reactions…
Ruminations on Meritocracy, Pink Cows and the Curious Resilience of Corporate Failure
Aweh Dear Ruminants and Groupies, The Two Capitalisms There are, it seems to me, two very different forms of capitalism. In the first, value creation is brutally tested every single day. If you are a dentist, patients return only if you are competent. If you are a surgeon, your reputation rests on outcomes. If you…
Ruminations on Who You Think You Are
Aweh Dear Ruminants and Groupies, A Bar, a Cow, a Vice President, and a Vorlon A pink cow, JD Vance, a Vorlon, and I walk into a bar… This is not the beginning of a joke, although it probably should be. It is also not, strictly speaking, a bar. It is more of a dining…
Ruminations on AI, thinking about thinking, and immigration
Aweh Dear Ruminants and Groupies, Last week I wrote about foreigners and immigration. This week is a continuation of that discussion, although it takes what appears to be a rather odd detour into artificial intelligence and how I think. Bear with me. There is a point to all of this. At least I hope there…
Ruminations on March and March and the seductive pleasure of not thinking
Aweh, Dear Ruminants and Groupies, The American columnist David Brooks has observed that many people seem remarkably uninterested in the hard work of thinking, finding it far easier to outsource that burden to whoever offers the simplest explanation. Thinking requires holding contradictory ideas simultaneously. It requires tolerating uncertainty. It requires sitting with the discomfort that…
Ruminations on being 65 and my last magnum
Aweh Dear Ruminants and Groupies, The bet On Sunday, I turned 65, and as Nerine does, there was a lavish feast with friends and family. It’s what Nerine does best, and I love her for it. We drank the last magnum of Kanonkop Paul Sauer 2012 that I owned. I won six of these magnums…
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