The New York Times recently asked its readers – specifically the ones who live near or above the article circle – what it is like to live in darkness for part of the year. 

Almost 700 people responded with photos and stories, both of which can be found here. The photos are absolutely spectacular. Make sure you watch the video.

I love snow and I love being in the mountains, but I can only imagine what it must be like to live for months with no (or minimal) light. It must do a number on your mental state.

At the same time, there is something so sublime and beautiful about these places. I can’t say I’m ready to move, but I would like to experience it one day.

Steven Johnson has a terrific piece in New York Times Magazine called: Beyond the Bitcoin Bubble. Here is a snippet:

The only blockchain project that has crossed over into mainstream recognition so far is Bitcoin, which is in the middle of a speculative bubble that makes the 1990s internet I.P.O. frenzy look like a neighborhood garage sale. 

But the point of the article, as its title suggests, is to talk about what all of this craziness could mean for the future of the internet and how, in some ways, it could be a return to what the internet was always intended to be.

The real promise of these new technologies, many of their evangelists believe, lies not in displacing our currencies but in replacing much of what we now think of as the internet, while at the same time returning the online world to a more decentralized and egalitarian system. If you believe the evangelists, the blockchain is the future. But it is also a way of getting back to the internet’s roots.

Some are calling this new, decentralized internet version 3.0. We are currently living with internet 2.0. Practically speaking though, what could this shift really mean for us?

One example that is given in the article has to do with urban mobility – a topic that is particularly relevant to this audience. 

Internet 2.0 has created a winner-take-most economic model. And in the case of mobility – at least in the world of apps – that winner is Uber. But with internet 3.0 and the blockchain, this could be possible:

Just as GPS gave us a way of discovering and sharing our location, this new protocol would define a simple request: I am here and would like to go there. A distributed ledger might record all its users’ past trips, credit cards, favorite locations — all the metadata that services like Uber or Amazon use to encourage lock-in. Call it, for the sake of argument, the Transit protocol. The standards for sending a Transit request out onto the internet would be entirely open; anyone who wanted to build an app to respond to that request would be free to do so. Cities could build Transit apps that allowed taxi drivers to field requests. But so could bike-share collectives, or rickshaw drivers.

I don’t know about you, but I find this perspective a lot more interesting. I recommend you read Steven’s article. It will help you cut through a lot of the Bitcoin noise.

I was recently with some New Yorkers and we got on to the topic of their subway system. I made a comment about how extensive their network is and how their express trains work so well for traveling further distances. 

They responded by basically saying: “Yeah, it’s great, when it works.” They then went on to tell me that most of the time they just use Uber to get around the city because the subway has become so unreliable.

Admittedly, I don’t use the NYC subway system enough to comment on its declining performance. But this recent New York Times article describes it as an utterly failing system.

Here is a diagram from the article that shows performance on every line (2007 to 2017), measured as a percentage of trains that reach their destinations on time (i.e. less than 5 minutes late):

In 2007, more than 90% of trains reached their destinations on time. Today, the weekday average is around 65% and some of the lines are in the 30s. This is the worst it has been since the 1970s when NYC was almost bankrupt.

Apparently this also awards NYC’s subway the title of the worst on-time performance out of the world’s top 20 biggest systems.

I suppose one of the lessons here is that subway lines on a map will always be far sexier than the nuts and bolts of maintenance, performance, and ridership. But we can’t forget the nuts and bolts. Maybe those are the most important parts.