Hopefully Interesting

An interregnum is a gap in governance, most commonly when a monarch dies without a child old enough to take over.  For decades the world has grown used to the idea that computers would get better and better year by year as engineers were able to fit more and more transistors onto a piece of silicon economically in a process described by Moore's Law.  Sadly, that law looks to be running out of steam.  So we're going to have to go through an interregnum while people discover some other substrate for computation that can be pushed further than silicon transistors could. Transistors have come a long way since they were invented in 1926.  They couldn't be built by the people who conceived them but in 1947 Shockley et al figured out how to make a practical transistor for use various electronics such as radios and then in 1954 the first transistorized computer was developed: TRADIC.  It was an amazing device at the time because computers were usually room sized whereas TRADIC wa

There's a very real sense in which any sort of free market you could have can only exist when it is created by a government.  Without government there might be no third party to prevent me from selling my goods to the person over the hill but at the same time there's nothing preventing that person from just taking my goods and not paying me if he feels that he has a greater capacity for violence.  A world without government doesn't look like the "war of all against all" that Hobbes described in Leviathan  since people still have their senses of friendship and kinship but those only extend so far.  Trading without the arm of the state to preclude violence takes trust that has to be built up over long periods of time and tends to occur in very stereotyped forms.  You can't run a modern supply multi-stage supply chain or anything like it without the umbrella of a state unless, against all odds, Nozick's ideas about  capitalist anarchy  actually work out in pr