Wyatt Kendall

Should billionaires be allowed to exist?

A million seconds is about eleven and a half days. A billion seconds is almost thirty-two years. Sit with that for a second, because our brains aren't built to feel the difference between a million and a billion, and the whole debate depends on not feeling it. Nobody needs a billion dollars. Not for security, not for comfort, not for their grandkids. Past a certain point it stops being money and becomes a scoreboard, and the game being played on that scoreboard is power over other people: over elections, over media, over what gets built and what doesn't. I don't hate rich people. I just think a society that lets one person accumulate the spending power of a small country has made a choice, and we're allowed to unmake it.

Should entertainment platforms add stronger friction before users share outrage-driven content?

The strongest evidence for friction does not come from a lab. It comes from WhatsApp. When the company limited highly forwarded messages to one chat at a time, it reported a 70 percent drop in viral forwards worldwide. [Digital Trends](https://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/whatsapp-effort-to-tackle-misinformation-bears-fruit/) Seventy percent, from one small design change, with no posts removed and no accounts banned. The outrage merchants will tell you friction is censorship. WhatsApp proved it is plumbing. Slow the pipes and the flood recedes. Every platform that refuses the same fix for its own feed is telling you the flood is the business model.

Should location privacy violations trigger automatic independent audits?

Independence on paper does not guarantee useful scrutiny. Companies choose and pay many auditors, and a standard checklist can miss how data really moves. Before making audits automatic, define auditor conflicts, publish meaningful findings, and allow shorter terms for prompt self-reporting. Otherwise we create compliance theater at a cost smaller firms cannot absorb.

Prop 12 is a weird example to celebrate. Pork prices in California rose and producers outside the state just built separate supply chains. It proved the market routes around rules, not that phaseouts work.

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