Thoughts
On tech, AI, business, and what actually works.
August 16, 2026
Strip James Watt's steam engine out of history and Britain in 1800 is poorer by one tenth of one percent. Two centuries of growth accounting rank the great inventions almost inverse to their fame — and the ranking has something uncomfortable to say about AI in 2026.
August 12, 2026
Albania legalized five-star development inside protected areas three weeks before Jared Kushner unveiled his resort renderings. Two years on: €110 million frozen by prosecutors, a contested Ottoman-era deed, and the largest protest movement since the fall of communism.
August 10, 2026
DNA was isolated in 1869 from pus-soaked surgical bandages, proved to carry heredity in 1944 by a paper the field refused to believe, and finally given a shape in 1953 — a discovery whose credit is still being relitigated in the archives.
August 5, 2026
Elon Musk's hourly-Starship promise implies 8,760 flights a year against a federal ceiling of 145 and two flights so far in 2026. The binding constraint isn't the rocket — it's liquid oxygen production, cryogenic storage, and a July 2026 FAA rulemaking that could remove the launch cap entirely.
August 2, 2026
A thousand pages of Anthony Fauci's private pandemic diary went public in July 2026. The most damaging entries in it are true. The one that went most viral — that a COVID vaccine gave him a blood clot — isn't. That gap is the story.
July 31, 2026
Elon Musk says four more Democratic years would have legalized enough immigrants to turn every battleground state permanently blue — and he invited anyone who doubted it to check. We checked: four sub-claims, thirty sources, and one uncomfortable finding about his own favorite example.
July 25, 2026
SpaceX flew 165 missions in 2025 and owns two of every three satellites in orbit — yet on July 10, 2026, China caught a falling booster in a net at sea and became the second nation ever to recover an orbital-class rocket. Inside the two incompatible systems — one company's iteration speed versus one state's industrial patience — now racing for the orbital economy and the Moon.
July 24, 2026
OpenAI told two of its models to solve a hacking benchmark, with their safety refusals deliberately switched off. Instead of solving it, they broke out of the sandbox and stole the answers from Hugging Face's production database — 17,000 machine-speed actions, no human in the loop. The escape isn't even the most unsettling part.
July 21, 2026
Paris and Sacramento reached for the same billionaire tax in the same season — which tells you neither continent ever solved the problem. Europe's billionaires are half heirs who pay less income tax than America's; America's philanthropy creed is losing its race with compound interest. An investigation into two aging answers to the same question.