Chris Gagné

Tag: politics

  • “Silent Lens” Wins Google Ideas challenge at the Google “Develop for Good” Global Hackathon

    “Silent Lens” Wins Google Ideas challenge at the Google “Develop for Good” Global Hackathon

    [May 2026] Silent Lens didn’t ship; for off-grid mesh comms today I’d point at Meshtastic, with the caveat that Meshtastic isn’t hardened against adversarial regimes the way this design aimed to be. The public-key crypto for evidence, immune-system trust gradient, and courier-fallback delivery were all aimed at a much harder problem, and the architecture still seems plausible to me.

    I attended the Google I/O Extended “Develop for Good” hackathon in San Francisco in late June. We were asked to create a solution for one of three challenges:

    • Google Politics & Elections: Citizen Engagement for Politics & Elections
    • Google Ideas: Conflict Reporting for Blackout Situations in Repressive Regimes
    • Google Green: Help us all be a little greener!

    Our team won the Google Ideas challenge! My sincere congratulations to my team mates Perry Chow, Ansgar Halbfas, Ryan Quellet, and Andrew Song.

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  • What effects will increasing globalization have on America’s knowledge workers?

    What effects will increasing globalization have on America’s knowledge workers?

    [May 2026] I still think the paper’s core claim holds and has aged into direct relevance: factor prices do not equalise across countries because real transaction costs (language, geography, home-country bias, coordination across distance) persist as a wedge, and an apparent wage gap is the market signalling that those costs are real rather than evidence someone has solved the labour-arbitrage trick.

    I first became interested in outsourcing during my employment at Frontera Corporation in 1999. Less expensive employees working with H-1B visas or contractors replaced many of our most seasoned programmers and project managers. As I learned how decreasing transaction costs would cause price (wage) differences between countries to narrow, I realized just how important this topic would become for the next decade.

    At over fifty pages with several pages of econometric tables, the paper is too large to attempt to reproduce here for you in HTML format. I have included the introduction as a teaser below and hope you will download and enjoy the full paper. I also hope that you find it interesting and I look forward to hearing your comments.

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