Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Venkatesh Rao, reading Joyce Appleby's history of capitalism, argues that today's AI panic mirrors early mercantilist zero-sum thinking: fears of surplus intelligence and useless minds resemble old fears about trade and idle labor, while a 'cognitive capitalist' view sees intelligence creating new demand and new freedom for minds.
15 min · 3,546 words
Local Democracy’s Business Model is Broken
Jeff Fong argues that US local governments, which control zoning, permitting, and building codes, are funded in ways that reward restricting growth, and that land value return would realign their incentives toward abundance.
14 min · 3,316 words
To Make, or to Buy: The Economics of Decision Models
Parth Parikh explores the economics of decision models like Jev, whose outputs are choices, scores or abstentions rather than free text, formalizes decision hierarchies using Chow's reject rule to decide when a cheap model should defer to a costlier one, and speculates on multimodal and on-device uses.
16 min · 3,592 words
Apocalypse Now and ThenArtificial intelligence is capitalism’s final destination
Arundhati Roy’s Equator essay argues that AI is not a neutral tool but capitalism’s accelerating endgame—and calls for political resistance rather than resigned inevitability.
22 min · 4,980 words
Cory Doctorow explains how Amazon's junk fees and most-favored-nation pricing rules raise prices for shoppers everywhere, not just on Amazon, and argues Expedia has done the same thing to hotel rooms, making travel more expensive for everyone through monopoly intermediaries.
6 min · 1,478 words
Steering AI Beyond AutomationA Research Agenda and Plan for Action
Stanford economist Gabriel Unger and Princeton's Arvind Narayanan argue AI need not be mainly about automating human labor. They set out four research problems for collaborative agents, explain why the automation agenda dominates computer science culture, survey the economics and policy debate, and propose a bottom-up, market-driven path plus targeted policies to steer AI toward augmenting workers.
25 min · 5,650 words
America Didn’t Lose Its Rare Earth Industry. It Sold It.
Kirsten Asdal, Tom Koch and Tao Tan argue in Lawfare that the U.S. rare earth chokepoint was created by market logic, since China prices for control rather than profit, and that rebuilding American supply needs asymmetric financing where government absorbs downside risk and shares in the upside.
11 min · 2,592 words
How Amazon pushes up prices all across the Internet
Amanda Shendruk investigates how Amazon’s marketplace and advertising tools push prices up across the web — not just on Amazon — via seller fees, Buy Box dynamics, and price-matching ripples.
5 min · 1,065 words
a16z's Seema Amble, Ivan Makarov and David Borecky argue AI is reshaping the CFO role from accountant to banker to builder: data stops being the bottleneck, finance engineers build their own tools, teams get smaller, planning becomes continuous, controls become product features, and finance's mandate grows.
9 min · 2,003 words
Why Texas Is Making Data Centers Wait
Ryan McEntush of a16z explains why Texas paused new data center interconnections and permits after ERCOT's large-load queue hit 474 GW, much of it speculative, walks through grid interconnection, bring-your-own-power and flexibility as paths to hundreds of gigawatts, and argues for better rules, incentives and community trust instead of a blanket pause.
25 min · 5,707 words
Alex Tabarrok examines a Harvard Environmental Health paper linking Costco density to cancer rates—and why the correlation likely reflects confounding rather than warehouse clubs causing disease.
1 min · 310 words
So You Think You Could Be An Electrician?
Contractor Jesse Smith pushes back on the viral “trades are an AI-proof six-figure escape hatch” narrative, weighing wages, injury risk, internal blue-collar status hierarchies, and how automation may still reshape construction work.
11 min · 2,474 words
[No] Use for Humans in the Age of AI
Alexander Schepanovski reads Anthropic’s 2030 AI-economy scenarios and asks what “use for humans” remains when knowledge work collapses—arguing power, scarcity, and who owns the robots matter more than productivity slogans.
8 min · 1,898 words
How Florida's HOAs and condo associations are making the housing crisis worse
HOA Spy indexes Florida association filings to show how liens, foreclosure suits, and association standing overlap with the housing crisis: higher carrying costs, thinner supply when units sit under association enforcement, and displacement risk for owners who fall behind.
10 min · 2,407 words
How Singapore's government-run dating service works, and why it won't solve the dating crisis
Kai walks through GovTech’s FirstDate pilot—questionnaire, Singpass verification, Gale-Shapley matching cycles—and argues why a government matchmaker is unlikely to fix Singapore’s deeper dating and fertility challenges.
18 min · 4,079 words
On the escalation of war in EthiopiaThe coming proxy wars will be devastating for civilians and do little to improve governance and human welfare in Ethiopia and the wider Horn
Ken Opalo analyses renewed large-scale fighting in northern Ethiopia between the federal government and TPLF and Fano forces, arguing these are wars of choice driven by historical grievance and elite hubris, with outside powers turning them into proxy conflicts.
11 min · 2,440 words
Has AI impacted the labor market yet?
Alex Imas and Jacob Schaal survey the empirical evidence on whether generative AI has already shifted employment, wages, and task composition—separating strong claims from what the data currently support.
23 min · 5,183 words
Software Goldilocks: the market for software is expanding but is the System of Record dead?
Sam Gerstenzang argues AI expands SaaS spend while splitting value into small opinionated point tools and large full-service “does the work” products—squeezing classic mid-market systems of record from both sides.
2 min · 520 words
Bryan Caplan vs Effective Altruism
Walter Veit challenges Bryan Caplan's recent criticism of effective altruism, arguing the debate should turn on arguments, reasons, and evidence rather than dismissive pseudo-philosophy.
6 min · 1,271 words
You Are No Longer Invited to DinnerThe death of the American host
Derek Thompson traces a half-century collapse in Americans hosting friends at home—from 42% monthly in 1975 to 12% in 2026—and weighs harried dual-earner households, screens, and other explanations for the great disinvitation.
10 min · 2,257 words