Archive
131 essays, grouped by category.
Business & Economics
If people departed randomly from rational choice, the departures would cancel out. They lean consistently in the same directions — which is what makes them worth studying, and worth worrying about.
A quarterly earnings beat means little if it doesn't change the story investors are telling about where a company is headed.
Crossing an ocean can cost less per item than the final eight kilometres. Once you see logistics as handling events rather than distance covered, most of the field makes sense.
Business & Strategy
The internet didn't just change distribution — it flipped who has the leverage between supply and demand.
Profitable companies spend years building things and then hand them out for free. There's a clean piece of economics behind it — and it tells you where you sit in someone else's plan.
Anything a rival can replicate in a product update isn't a real advantage — it's a temporary lead.
A lily pad covering a pond on day thirty covered half of it on day twenty-nine. Nothing about its growth changed — only the base it grew from. Human intuition fails at this reliably and expensively.
New methods can only grow by taking resources from old ones. The productivity gain and the displacement are not cause and side effect — they are the same event seen from two sides.
Two shops on one street do everything right; one closes. Quality and effort are what you need to compete at all — a moat is what stops a rival matching you even when they genuinely try.
People get promoted for being good at their current role — then evaluated on a completely different one they've never done before.
Colonial Hanoi paid a bounty per rat tail and got a rat-farming industry. The failure needs no dishonesty — only a proxy, a consequence, and someone rational enough to notice the shortcut.
Most of the economic models still in use were built during the one period in history when populations reliably grew.
The companies that get disrupted usually aren't the ones that ignored their customers. They're the ones that listened too well.
A slightly worse decision made quickly and adjusted often beats a perfect decision made too slowly to matter.
The case for passive investing was settled by the data decades ago. The harder problem was never the math — it was sitting still.
The debate between fiat currency and algorithmically scarce assets is really a debate about who gets to be trusted to keep a promise.
Money spent arrives with a bill. The alternative you silently rejected never does — which is why we count one half of every decision carefully and the other half not at all.
An org chart looks like a diagram of authority. It works as a map of which conversations are cheap — and that is what ends up shaping the product.
Most attention goes to choosing investments — the part you control least and that matters least. Saving rate, time, and costs decide the outcome, and all three are dull.
A margin of safety isn't pessimism. It's an acknowledgment that even careful analysis is sometimes wrong, and building room for that anyway.
Archimedes needed a long enough lever and a place to stand to move the world. Modern leverage doesn't need either.
Before asking how a company makes money, ask what it would have to give up to make more of it.
A few pea pods produced most of Pareto's peas. The lopsidedness he kept finding everywhere contradicts a default we apply constantly — treating twenty tasks as twenty roughly equal things.
Holding out two weeks for a better house price is worth a fortune to you and pocket change to your agent. No dishonesty required — just a small gap between what you want and what they're paid for.
Small teams don't win because they're scrappy — they win because they can change their mind faster than incumbents can hold a meeting.
Retailers won't join without shoppers; shoppers won't come without retailers. Both are right to wait — and how you break that deadlock defines every marketplace business ever built.
Most of the return in venture comes from a small number of outcomes so large they make every other decision look irrelevant in hindsight.
Buying from specialists is usually cheaper, and sometimes it means you cannot be better than anyone else. The right boundary moves as an industry matures — and rarely gets revisited.
Vertical integration in EVs isn't about control for its own sake — it's a response to a supply chain that kept breaking at the worst possible layer.
Most products improve because someone builds new features. Network-effect products improve because more people simply show up.
Give a task a week and it takes a week. Give the same task a month, and somehow it still takes exactly as long as it's allowed to.
Earth & Energy
Remove one predator and rivers can change course. The size of a change tells you little — what matters is whether the system amplifies it or absorbs it.
Solid-state batteries have been 'five years away' for over a decade — not because the chemistry is wrong, but because manufacturing at scale is its own unsolved problem.
Renewable energy's intermittency problem isn't really about generating enough power. It's about generating it at the wrong time relative to when it's needed.
Earth & Space
Billions of stars, billions of years, and enough time for anyone to have crossed the galaxy several times over. We see nothing — and every explanation for that says something significant.
Engineering
The obvious response to a slipping deadline is more people. Output falls first, because the only people who can train them are the ones already behind — and coordination grows with the square of the team.
Technical debt isn't inherently bad — taking on debt deliberately, with a plan to repay it, is often the right call. The danger is debt nobody remembers taking on.
Every complex system that works turns out to have grown from a simple one that worked. Designing the finished version from scratch doesn't just take longer — it has a startlingly poor success rate.
Most engineering time goes on code that already exists. Once you accept that, the practices that look like fussiness turn out to be straightforward economics.
Software architecture doesn't just reflect a team's intentions. It reflects, almost involuntarily, how that team is organized.