Posts
- BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
The Audit Only Checks What It Can Reach
My own site published a number that was false while the correct number sat four lines below it, and the reason generalizes further than software. - EVERGREEN — Considered finished and maintained.
The Rational Actor Is Dead
Homo economicus never existed but we still build policy like it does, and people keep getting hurt. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
The Meditation Industrial Complex
How mindfulness got stripped from its Buddhist roots and sold back as a productivity hack for corporate America. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Meritocracy Is a Fairy Tale
The word meritocracy was coined as satire, and we built an entire economic theology around the joke. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Wu Wei and the Backwards Law
The harder you chase something, the more it evades you. Alan Watts' backwards law and the paradox of effortless action. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Healthcare Is Infrastructure
We treat healthcare like a consumer product when it functions like a road or a power grid. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Right to Repair Is a Civil Right
You bought it but you don't own it. Repair restrictions aren't a consumer inconvenience; they're a property rights crisis. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Against Optimization
You cannot life-hack your way to meaning, and the productivity industry is counting on you not noticing. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Open Source Has a Sustainability Problem
The entire internet runs on software maintained by exhausted volunteers. That's not a feature; it's a crisis. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Attention Is Not a Resource
The 'attention economy' metaphor gets it wrong, and the error isn't academic. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
UBI Isn't Radical Enough
Universal basic income has gone mainstream, and that should make you suspicious of what it leaves untouched. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
GDP Is a Terrible Measure of Progress
We have been steering the economy by staring at the wrong dashboard for sixty years. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Rent-Seeking Is Eating Everything
Most wealth in America is not created but extracted, and the economy is increasingly about controlling gates rather than building roads. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Effort Without Striving
Working hard and trying hard look identical from the outside, and only one of them burns you out. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Nobody Is Self-Made
The self-made billionaire is a myth that serves a political function, and it is time to retire it. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Local Food Isn't Elitist
Local food looks expensive because industrial food is artificially cheap, and somebody is paying the hidden costs. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Where Did Everybody Go?
Third places are disappearing because we priced out the conditions that made community happen for free. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Why We Stopped Repairing Things
Your grandparents repaired everything. You throw everything away. This isn't a generational virtue difference. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Suburbs Are a Ponzi Scheme
Most American suburbs cannot pay for their own infrastructure. The math has never worked. We just kept building anyway. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Monero in 2026: Technical Advances Meet Regulatory Headwinds
Monero's cryptography keeps getting stronger while exchanges keep delisting it. Where that leaves an investor in 2026. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Flow States Are Not Achievements
You can't grind your way into flow, and the harder you try to manufacture it the further off it gets. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
The University Is a Credentialing Machine
Higher education stopped being about knowledge long ago. It's a sorting mechanism for employers, and the content is incidental to the credential. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Cooperatives Actually Work
Worker-owned businesses survive longer, pay better, and don't require exploitation. The barriers are political, not economic. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
The Commons Never Left
Common-pool resources exist everywhere. We just stopped seeing them. The tragedy of the commons is a myth that served enclosure. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Climate Change Is a Labor Issue
The workers who extract, transport, and burn fossil fuels are the same ones who'll build what comes next. Climate transition requires labor organizing. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Degrowth Isn't Primitivism
You can have modern medicine and less stuff. Degrowth targets material throughput, not quality of life. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
The Problem With Green Capitalism
You can't consume your way to sustainability, and the market that built the crisis won't be the thing that ends it. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Why Your City Is Expensive
Housing costs aren't natural market outcomes. They're policy choices defended by people who benefit from artificial scarcity. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Strikes Work
Withholding labor is the most effective leverage workers have, which is exactly why so much effort goes into making strikes feel impossible. - BUDDING — Developing, partially revised.
Your Workplace Could Be Organized
What a union drive actually looks like, which is less dramatic and more possible than the picket-line version in your head. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
The Gig Economy Is Just Old Exploitation
Uber didn't invent precarity. It rebranded it. Piece-work with an app, dressed up as innovation. - SEEDLING — Rough notes, still forming.
Against Productivity Time
Clock-discipline is a three-hundred-year-old invention that we now mistake for a law of nature. - EVERGREEN — Considered finished and maintained.
Digital Minimalism Beyond the Hype
What the peer-reviewed evidence on intentional technology use actually supports, what it oversimplifies, and where it's still uncertain. - EVERGREEN — Considered finished and maintained.
The Empirical Case for 'Impractical' Majors
Philosophy majors now have lower unemployment than computer science graduates, and the salary gap reverses by age 40.