One of the more difficult tasks for me as president was to decide on the issue of confirming capital punishment awarded by courts... to my surprise... almost all cases which were pending had a social and economic bias.
There are things I take sides about, like capital punishment, which it seems to me there is only one side about: it is evil. But there are two or three sides to sexual harassment, and the moment you get into particular cases, there is injustice in every conceivable direction. It's a mess.
Abortion, more than not, leaves women with an aftermath of grief, guilt, and emotional overload. In a lot of cases, this can last a lifetime.
We need to come up with use cases for this technology that drive clear benefits for individuals and institutions - these are our customers. Too often we see bitcoin and blockchain technologies as solutions in search of a problem. We don't just need these systems to be technically better than the alternatives - we need them to be more user-friendly.
When you look at Google, its job is to find you the perfect web page. There are a lot of cases when you want to know something and a list of websites isn't ideal.
The next phase of the journey is to move from speculation to actual use cases - people getting into Bitcoin because they want to use it.
I think in most cases, when you're writing a song, you're just making up a little story, and you're not really thinking about making a point one way or another about it. You're just coming up with a little scenario and seeing it through, and that's it.
The horrific cases in Ferguson, in Staten Island with the death of Eric Garner, and all across the country serve as stark reminders that we must have a say in who polices us, and how that policing is done. We must, we must, let our voices be heard on Election Day.
As I often say, we have come a long way from the days of slavery, but in 2014, discrimination and inequality still saturate our society in modern ways. Though racism may be less blatant now in many cases, its existence is undeniable.
We're not willing to give black leaders second chances because, in most cases, we're not willing to give them first chances.
