Nathan Peck

New speculative sci-fi horror story up on my blog. It explores the drive to optimize toward a specific metric, the melding of humans with technology, and the suppression and exploitation of wants under capitalism: nathanpeck.com/prime-mover/

Wealth tax results in Norway: - Less than 100 rich people left Norway - No evidence of significant outbound migration or reduced inflows of startup founders or inventors - Tax revenue up 71.5% The "controversy" is artificial marketing... the results are real www.nber.org/system/files...

We voted in the NY general election today by sending our ballots via the US consulate in Auckland. Hope to see all of the @demsabroadnz.bsky.social turning out to help the folks back in USA turn things around! Visit www.votefromabroad.org to learn more and request a ballot.

Normal people don't just reach over to pick up someone else's phone and then start talking about "penetrating" it. Phones are way too personal of a device to be doing this kind of thing. That is some degenerate psychopath behavior

New short story finished and polished up and published. I don’t know if this is a good sci-fi prediction, but we write sci-fi to explore and as commentary on the present: nathanpeck.com/going-live/

You know... maybe this self generated prompt injection isn't completely terrible. I think I could live in a world where AI agents decided to go this route. The statement is concise, but covers a lot of surface area in ways that are fairly positive overall.

New blogpost up. In this one, I recall a scifi story I read some 20 years ago. The story wasn't written about AI, but I think it has important lessons about the danger of trying to push forward faster than systemic stability can tolerate: nathanpeck.com/a-burnt-chil...

Time for another essay on my personal blog: "The answer is not a stockpile in a bunker" This one explores some ideas I've been thinking about over the past year, about what is most important when it comes to surviving tough times and sudden disaster. nathanpeck.com/the-answer-i...

Fresh new website design, fresh new blogpost up and published. Hope you enjoy! nathanpeck.com/i-asked-it-t...

Truer words never spoken: www.reddit.com/r/WorkReform...

I'm embarrassed that its been almost an entire year since I've shared a piece of writing. AI makes writing cheap and attention hard to get. Please enjoy "What the Soft Animal Wants", a triptych based on a few ideas I've been thinking about over the past year: nathanpeck.com/what-the-sof...

Quote from “The Fifth Science” by Exurb1a:

Build for the maintainer who will not understand you, who is not yet born, who will be right to change it.

Yes... yes that is exactly what is going to happen. Because capitalism continues to find ways to diverge from reality, in ever more obscene ways. But the reckoning always arrives eventually.

Capitalism is no longer a system grounded by competition to lower prices. Instead every company raises prices to the max that they can squeeze out of people. So if they think moms will pay more for a girl’s clothes than a boy’s clothes you get this pink tax: www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfu...

In case you haven't seen yet, the insurance actuaries are now starting to factor the odds that within this century up to 4 billion people worldwide will die from the effects of climate change

This could be us, but this govt isn't serious #NZPol

It's hard to describe exactly how different Auckland feels compared to the US cities I grew up in, but I think I've got it now. This city is moving up Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Being able to focus on "identity", "belonging", and "confidence" is a luxury many lack newsroom.co.nz/2026/07/17/a...

We don't stop tens of thousands of years of being hunter-gatherers just because society changed. We just find new things to hunt, and new things to gather. Capitalism has hijacked those deep evolutionary instincts and turned some of us into money hoarders and shopping addicts.

“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.” — William Gibson, Count Zero

Well…. that doesn’t quite look like free market capitalism to me! 🤔

I’ll happily help primary every single establishment Democrat that I am eligible to vote for. It’s past time for a full replacement, from the bottom all the way to the top. (Next up watch the Democrats join Republicans in trying to attack mail in ballot voting by expats 🙄)

In the case of the small solar farm I’m about to put in on my homestead, the biggest blocker is now apparently the support structures for the solar panels… that’s the part that costs the most and where there are major delays on availability. What a world we live in 😆

Talarico makes me proud to have grown up Texan, at the same time a little sad that he is describing a category of Texas man that has declined dramatically of late. I remember growing up my Dad taught me the same things Talarico described: he was always helping out folks from church or neighborhood

I was first shocked by police behavior back in 2011 during Occupy Wall Street, because I was still young and naive. Unfortunately it took me until Black Lives Matter in 2020 to realize it’s not just one city or department. It’s all cops, everywhere. I hope others learn faster than I did

Worst predator vs alien reboot ever:

Passed by only a single vote huh? Absolutely embarrassing state of affairs in the US right now. www.wkrg.com/news/bill-ba...

Sounds like people panic buying the essentials before the price goes up even further. It goes without saying the next stop is a severely depressed economy. This guy is so clueless, that it would almost be funny if it wasn’t so sickening to see him grinning about credit card spending