2008

Cal Henderson's DjangoCon 2008 keynote, "Why I Hate Django", is a funny critique of Django from a Flickr architect. It touches on scaling topics such as database replication.

Dan Bornstein's Google I/O 2008 talk on the internals of Dalvik, the virtual machine that runs Android code. It covers the motivation for its design, the dex format and its register-based interpreter, plus tips for writing code that suits the platform.

Yanis Varoufakis talks at a festival in Zagreb about his book The Global Minotaur. He argues the postwar global economy and the 2008 crisis stem from deeper structural causes than greed or weak regulation.

Former bank regulator William Black explains how fraud, including liar's loans, was committed from inside banks and drove the 2008 financial crisis.

Peter Schiff's November 2006 speech to the Western Regional Mortgage Bankers Conference, in which he warned an audience of mortgage bankers that the housing bubble would collapse. The clip runs about 73 minutes.

Hans Rosling uses the Gapminder animated-data tool to debunk myths about world development, with sportscaster-like energy. It shows trends in health, income and child survival across countries.

Sociologist and comedian Harald Eia argues in a TEDxOslo talk that Nordic social democracies produce more rich people per capita than the US or UK. He credits high taxes, welfare and strong unions for creating a safety net that enables risk taking.

Jean-Marc Jancovici gives an MIT Media Lab talk on whether technology can save us from climate change. He argues from a physical view of energy that economic growth, energy use and climate impact are tightly linked.

Economist Martin Jacques offers three building blocks for understanding China's rise, including seeing China as a civilization-state rather than a nation-state. He also covers how Chinese people view the state.

A short video of Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 speech criticizing Gross Domestic Product as a measure of progress, saying it counts everything except what makes life worthwhile.

Scott Galloway's TED talk uses data to argue that young Americans are financially worse off than earlier generations, calling it a great intergenerational theft. He covers root causes and what could change it.

A 1997 Noam Chomsky talk at Northeastern University about the gap between free-market rhetoric and practice. He argues that business relies heavily on state intervention, and he discusses trade, NAFTA and labour versus capital mobility.

A two-minute excerpt of Robert Kennedy's 1968 University of Kansas speech criticizing GDP as a measure of national worth. He notes it counts harmful spending while ignoring what makes life worthwhile.

A 2012 debate between Peter Thiel and George Gilder on whether technological progress and economic growth are accelerating or decelerating, moderated by William Davidow.

Andreas Antonopoulos argues that money has a fourth function beyond store of value, medium of exchange and unit of account, which is as a system of control. He covers the history of money and why it does not flow freely.

Mark Blyth's Talks at Google presentation based on his book on austerity. He argues that government debt came largely from bailing out banks, and that budget cuts are a misguided response to the financial crisis.

Nick Hanauer's short TED University talk on economic inequality, which was famously not posted on TED's main site at first. He argues that rich people are not the job creators.

Billionaire Nick Hanauer warns fellow wealthy people in a TED talk that growing inequality could lead to social upheaval like pre-revolutionary France. He argues a higher minimum wage would grow the middle class and prosperity.

Policy advisor Simon Anholt presents the Good Country Index, a measure of how much each nation contributes to the world beyond its own borders. In a funny TED talk he argues governments should think globally, and reveals which countries rank surprisingly.

Barack Obama, then a presidential candidate, presents his innovation agenda at Google and takes questions from Eric Schmidt and employees in November 2007.

David Heinemeier Hansson's talk at Startup School 2008 on building a profitable startup. He argues for bootstrapping and small, well-run companies instead of chasing investment and exits.

A 2008 Google Tech Talk in which Slava Pestov introduces Factor, a concatenative language influenced by Forth, Lisp and Smalltalk. It covers the interactive environment, metaprogramming, and the language's modern high-level features and libraries.

A 2008 Google Tech Talk by the creator of Org-mode, introducing the Emacs subsystem for plain-text note-taking and project planning. It covers outlines, TODO states, tags, dates and priorities, and later shows using Org-mode as a spreadsheet.

Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore, the creators of ZFS, present 'ZFS: The Last Word in File Systems' at the 2008 SNIA Software Developers' Conference. They explain the design, including copy-on-write, checksumming and avoiding the write hole.

Paul Graham speaks at Startup School 2008 about how to create a successful startup. His talk emphasizes being good, not just avoiding being evil, as a strategic advantage.

Mike Arrington of TechCrunch speaks at Startup School 2008 about how to get press coverage for a startup and how to respond to it.

Peter Norvig, then Director of Research at Google, talks at Startup School 2008 about leveraging large amounts of data and about technical challenges in Google projects such as image search. A central idea is that data can beat hand-written programming.

A 2008 Google Tech Talk making the case for the liquid fluoride thorium reactor as an abundant, safe source of electrical power. It covers the technical motivations and design of thorium molten-salt reactors.

Larry Wall speaks at Google's Chicago office in 2008 about the Perl community, the language, and Perl 6. The talk touches on grammars, macros and error messages.

Neal Stephenson visits Google in 2008 to discuss his novel Anathem as part of the Authors@Google series. He talks about the book's world and takes audience questions.