Miscellaneous Writings

Sometimes I write things that are too long-format and/or in-depth to stick on G+ or Twitter. So here is a dumping-ground for essays. It's not a blog, because (a) that's not a word, (b) there's no comment facility. A previous version (which I labelled a 'self-published opinion column', a far more descriptive name) sometimes had a comment facility and sometimes didn't, depending on my frequent experiments in writing new HTTP servers; it's currently offline owing to a change of httpd, but may return if I get around to converting it out of the custom preprocessor format I used.

Articles

• Tactical Doctrine for Near-Future Orbital Combat — an exercise in hard sci-fi prognostication.
• No, Robots Won't Steal Our Jobs — neo-Luddism is bad economics.
• If The Robots Stole All Our Jobs — because counterfactuals can illuminate contradictions.
• Contra Scott on Moloch — great insight, wrong conclusion.
• Positive and Normative Beliefs.
• Simply Leave — breaking up doesn't have to be hard to do.
• Lowest Common Denominator — the mechanics of removing non-tariff barriers to trade.
• The Structure of Moneys — why Bitcoin is not a replacement for gold.
• Money After Fiat — is bimetallic currency possible without running afoul of Gresham's law?

Fiction

I am writing (slowly) an alternate-history story called Deadman Switch. Progress has largely stalled since my beta reader dropped out in 2018 owing to other commitments; do get in touch if you're interested.

Elsewhere

A handful of my articles have been published on Comment Central.

• Leave MPs must hold their nerve — in which I predict the 2019 General Election nine months before the fact.
• Brexonomics: the power of unilateral free trade — how Britain can prosper outside the EU.
• How to negotiate with the EU — what May should have done in 2017-18, and what Britain still could do to start over.

While on a summer job at the NRICH project, I wrote an article about face-transitive solids.