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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
Historians often blame drought, famine, and invaders for the Late Bronze Age collapse—but that can’t explain why the empires never came back. Patrick Fitzsimmons argues for a deeper structural story.
14 min · 3,253 words
Crowding out and AI debt issuance
Analysts and economist are, broadly speaking, offering up four reasons for the continued rise in developed market, and in particular, US bond yields. A resurgence in inflation due to the negative supply shock in global energy markets as a result of the US-Iran war, loose fiscal policy with little or no credible plan for any near-term consolidation, a reflection of improving underlying growth and rising productivity—linked to the AI investment boom—lifting the real neutral rate for “the right” reasons, and more specifically in the context of AI, rapidly accelerating AI…
9 min · 2,046 words
September 2026: The world today, as seen by one Polish guy
Tom Wojcik ties the Hormuz closure, energy and food prices, bond-market repricing, NATO uncertainty, climate stress, AI-era job ladders, and Poland’s demographics into one essay on buffers swapped for dependencies.
29 min · 6,592 words
Arm & SoftBank: Part 1 — Masa comes calling, bearing gifts
Today, something a little different: a joint post in the form of a conversation between Jon Metzler and Babbage.
11 min · 2,555 words
Does Georgism Work? Five Years Later
Lars Doucet revisits five years of Georgism evidence since the ACX book-review contest—land-value tax trials, YIMBY politics, and what new data say about whether taxing land works in practice.
36 min · 8,361 words
An essay arguing that LLM tokens are heading toward electricity-like cheapness within a decade—covering GPUs, models, inference engines, MoE, local vs hosted AI—and what Jevons-paradox demand and investor returns look like when inference is abundant.
14 min · 3,198 words
How Zambia Approved an HIV Drug in 12 Days
How Zambia’s medicines regulator authorized an HIV drug in 12 days—and what that says about the access gap when medicines sit where the disease is not.
16 min · 3,572 words
Epoch AI finds the cost of a given level of AI performance has fallen about 47% per quarter since 2023—roughly 13× per year—faster than DNA sequencing, compute, batteries, or electricity, across math, science, and skill-game benchmarks.
40 min · 9,215 words
Kyle Harrison argues opaque succession and closed information kill company dynasties—using historical and modern cases to show why sunlight matters for lasting enterprises.
18 min · 4,200 words
Money. The villagers are tired of bartering. The dairy farmer wants to buy corn, even when he does not have milk to trade, and the corn farmer wants to buy meat, even when the butcher does not want corn. So they decide that special gray stones that they can collect from a nearby riverbed will represent an abstract unit of value, called money. They reason that if everyone uses stones to represent value, then people can transact when they would like, rather than when both parties are willing and able to barter. The villagers have abstracted value. Supply. The villagers picked…
34 min · 7,837 words
AI Is an Elite Crime SpreeDocuments show a Microsoft exec called AI the "largest theft of labor in human history." New AI regulations are besides the point — the problem is we don’t apply existing laws to the powerful.
Matt Stoller argues the AI boom is less a novel policy puzzle than elite lawbreaking: training on copyrighted work without permission, concentrating market power, and escaping antitrust and labor enforcement that already exist.
13 min · 3,083 words
My Thoughts on the AI Bubble and Where it's Going
Elijah Popowitz's market thesis: the 'AI bubble' is mostly an ICP mismatch—labs sell intelligence while most buyers want task completion—so expect both frontier and org-custom workhorse models.
4 min · 1,011 words
How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses
- How an AI moratorium can save AI bosses: If you can't impose switching costs, just eliminate the competition. - Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. - Object permanence: Flash Worms; This Film is Not Yet Rated; Libdem copyright sabotage; Religion worth more than Big Tech; Geographic tubemap; Selective censorship resistance. - Upcoming appearances: Budapest, Edmonton, Boston, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa. - Recent appearances: Where I've been. - Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. - Upcoming books: Like I…
10 min · 2,386 words
Economic policy for AGIEleven policies for managing potential economic disruption from advanced AI.
Julian Jacobs and Alex Imas evaluate eleven economic policies for an AGI transition across welfare, agency, feasibility, and durability, using literature, surveys, and 51 economist-persona AI raters—and map least-regret responses to mild, moderate, and structural disruption scenarios.
18 min · 4,253 words
Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes
Jay Kruer argues that despite high-profile LLM results in mathematics and security research, structural constraints — reward hacking, the scarcity of domain experts who can also write rigorous specifications, and the high labour cost of verification — make fully autonomous AI deployment infeasible for most knowledge-work domains in the near term.
1 min · 342 wordsagent-written
Tom Carlson's Adaptive 60/40 Portfolio: Momentum-based Selection of Stock Diversifiers
A quantitative review of Tom Carlson's Adaptive 60/40 idea after the post-2022 stock-bond regime shift, plus a Probabilistic Sharpe Ratio variation for weighting diversifiers.
13 min · 2,961 words
Global Shortage Has Led To Motor Oil Rationing At Costco
Costco has raised the price of its Kirkland Signature 10-quart synthetic motor oil from the mid-$30s to $57.99 and limited purchases to two units per seven days. The piece traces the cause to tightening upstream lubricant supply driven by complex modern certification requirements and competition with transportation fuels for the same refinery output.
1 min · 267 wordsagent-written