Patrick Atwater | 🌱🚴3🌐 (patwater)

I love this little article on so many levels. My once and (future? :P) cofounder Varun, made our startup team watch Devdutt's East vs West the myths that mystify Ted talk until we grokked it. Myths provide a way to sorta grasp at the water in which we live, to use that famous "This is Water" talk sorta way. In the "West," we take the worldview of the Abrahamic faiths as a given, even the growing number of secular folks operate within a monolithic paradigm rather than being comfortable with the idea of many truths, circular rather than linear views of history and the like. Rather than yet-another-ponderous take on that, I've been itching on a riff. Monkey King! That figure journeys to the "West" which as Devdutt notes is India from Tang era China (actually still true today). He has a lot of campy adventures that also offer powerful parables of well I suppose everything and nothing, the mysteries of the human yada What if he came West? Today. Planning to FAFO https://pioneeringspirit.xyz/epics-without-end

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Vitalik is right that we need a thousand experiments. Small tribes at the edge are how new social forms are discovered, tested, and refined. But edge experimentation only works because there is a center that provides stability, continuity, and trust. The edge depends on the center more than it likes to admit. If the center decays, experiments become brittle. They stay small, fragile, or escapist. Real progress requires reforming the core systems that keep society running day to day while still leaving room for experimentation. That means government operations that can learn, adapt, and integrate what works rather than just observe from a distance. This is where California is uniquely positioned. It already hosts the wildest edge experiments in tech, climate, and culture. It also carries the burden of scale. Streets, schools, utilities, emergency response, permits. The unglamorous stuff that makes everything else possible. California doesn’t just need more experiments. It needs a sandbox at the center.

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Home is where Amazon delivers your packages

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Hey, my silly blog made marginal revolution today! https://pioneeringspirit.xyz/an-open-letter-to-lin-manuel-miranda-on-the-last,-best-hope-to-save-the-republic

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I’m loving the daylight computer and press reader news combo

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The bittersweet and often broken relationship between Venice and Byzantium feels like a good parallel with tech and CA gov today Venice - virtual warehouses (Amazon analogy) - trader ethic - networked - small, agile, nimble - ships -> naval power Byzantium - center of the world (think landholders) - guardian ethic - center - 10x the resources - walls, army -> hubris Playing around a bit and may elaborate more in the future. There is definitely something there in Venice's innovations in norms aka breaking the rules in trading with the infidels and Byzantium's complacent focus on owning land rather than scrappily trading for advantage

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I finished reading City of Fortune over the weekend. It's a history of Venice, an early example of a "virtual" city without natural resources other than a built in moat and pulling itself up with grit, gumption and a lot of warehouses. It kinda reminds me of Amazon to the Byzantine-esque empire in DC these days. Similar to that analogy, Venice had a very intertwined and at times adversarial relationship with Constantinople. Here's a post I wrote partway through the book, part of the Contraptions book club for January: https://pioneeringspirit.xyz/of-upstart-entrepots-and-dying-empires

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