By forming OpenAI as a nonprofit, the founders–which included Elon Musk and Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn–hoped to avoid what happens to nearly all venture-backed companies: the insatiable profit motive soon overwhelms any stated concerns for social good.
It’s easy to look out at the world and despair, to ask what point there is in donating to nonprofits, voting, protesting, calling your elected officials, writing Op-Eds. There is no shortage of anecdotes and pithy quotes to rebut that […]
Once, when I was getting my masters degree in environmental studies, I met with the then-director of the department to talk about potential career paths upon graduation. I told him that I was interested in figuring out how to enable […]
My freshman year of college at California State University, Northridge, I took a class called General Logic. I remember little of the class, in no small part because two weeks into the semester I fell off my bike at 40 MPH, sustaining […]
One could be forgiven for thinking that, with passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, America is all set to reduce emissions and create a bevy of green jobs. In many ways, of course, we are: Climate Power, for instance, has […]
When Capital Good Fund launched the DoubleGreen Solar loan, in Fall 2021, the Federal Funds Rate (FFR) was near-zero, and we priced the product accordingly: by charging borrowers an APR of 3.099% – 4.99%, we could provide a return of […]
“Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data.” – Shoshana Zuboff If no one but me profits from this walk in the woods, what does it say that I’m no good at making […]
Unfortunately, many of us, especially activists and other change agents, understand far too little about what works and doesn’t, why some protests fizzle out and others lead to transformational change.
It’s Fall on an even-numbered year
which means an election looms, again.
We wander pumpkin patches, corn mazes, haunted
houses, make holiday plans, think what gifts to give.
In two weeks, voters across the country will decide whether to keep control of the House and Senate in the hands of Democrats, or give one or both chambers of Congress back to the party of Trump, insurrection, election denialism, […]