sari

"We are optimists and believe there is hope on the other side of despair.... We need government, business and entrepreneurial intervention at scale (deployed logically and effectively) to get to the other side."

To summarize this view, the foundation of the human economy is built on bartering and swapping for mutual benefit: it makes us human, and let us specialize. Money and coinage evolved as an abstract representation of scarcity, in order to facilitate that bargaining. And then credit and banking evolved on top of that.

Google was the endpoint of this process: It may represent open systems and leveled architecture, but with superb irony and strategic brilliance it came to almost completely control that openness. It's difficult to imagine another industry so thoroughly subservient to one player. In the Google model, there is one distributor of movies, which also... See more

My fear is that the structure of the individual as profile based around quantified status games, has eroded our ability to recognize the intrinsic value of interaction — and in this loss we enable a path towards commodified consumption and transaction around what was previously everyday interaction.

More than 90% of the population lives within 5 miles of a pharmacy. There are about 327K pharmacists in the US and 486K total primary care providers (internal medicine, family medicine, pediatrics, etc.). Medicare beneficiaries, who are more likely to be on a recurring medication, see the pharmacist twice as often as their primary care physician.... See more