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Doge loves snow. At Bethesda Fountain. Such a joy, the holidays. Long car rides, waiting around airports, packed flights, family squabbles. Cold, short, dark days with nothing to do. And yet, people still get excited about the holidays. This year I’ll be filling the void with long walks, Netflix binging, and gluttoney.

Starting any company is hard. Startups are even harder. If you want to start a company but don’t have a business idea, then the first step is figuring out what to build. Is this…a startup idea? The main difference between a small business and a startup is your level of ambition, and how much money you can raise.

The ISOC recently sold the .org TLD registry to a private equity firm for $1.1b. What this means, in the grand scheme of things, remains to be seen, but many people around the web have expressed disapproval. Doge contemplating the Internet, and squirrels DNS #DNS (which stands for domain name system) is the name service for the web.

It’s hard to maintain privacy these days, ever since we started carrying around the ultimate Internet connected surveillance device in our pockets. So what can you do about it? Here’s a brief guide. My pup cares about privacy. This photo has nothing to do with this post. Vote with your wallet #Thanks to capitalism, the best thing you can do in most cases is express your frustration about loss of privacy by boycotting companies that don’t respect your right to privacy.

Recycling has become a bit of a crutch these days. It’s a way for people to feel good about what they’re doing (“saving the planet”) without changing their behaviour. It gives people a free pass on generating waste; it allows them to save face. Mountain of trash generated by my apartment building.

I’ve never been great at talking to people, especially strangers, but I’m much better than I used to be. In this post I’ll share some of the things I’ve learned in my quest to be a better human. It’s good to have friends One of the easiest things you can do to improve your life is to get better at interacting with everyone you meet.

I’m publishing this post against my better judgement, and at the risk of starting a flamewar. However, I think it’s time for a reality check for those beating the drums of “diversity and inclusion”. First of all, let me make it perfectly clear that I’m very much in favour of diversity and including everyone regardless of their physical attributes.

I’ve long held the belief that it’s better to try and fail, than to never even attempt doing something. Along with a few successes in life, I have had a very long list of failures to my name. Here’s a story about one such failure. Christening Ursula, my canoe I was at a social gathering a few days ago and I had a conversation with someone about how I’d tried to paddle a canoe down the Mississippi in 2017.

Dopamine is a chemical in our brains associated with good feels. Rather than explaining it myself, I’ll share a quote from the book “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion”, (pp. 102-103): All animal brains are designed to create flashes of pleasure when the animal does something important for its survival, and small pulses of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the ventral striatum (and a few other places) are where these good feelings are manufactured.

I don’t like making predictions, but one prediction I do have is that many future big companies will be what I call “skin in the game startups” (you heard it here first). Having skin in the game simply refers to sharing risk and rewards with a counterparty. In startupland, angel investors have skin in the game: they give money to founders to help them start a business in exchange for equity with the hope that the business will become more valuable in the future.