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.
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.
July 17, 2026
AI made execution nearly free, and the slop flood is what losing the price filter looks like. For seventy years, cost silently decided what got built, what came first, and when building stopped — now every builder has to make those three declarations on purpose, or not at all.
July 17, 2026
Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab shipped its first model, Inkling, and admitted in writing that it isn't the best one available. That confession is the first coherent AI business strategy built on the premise that the frontier is a loss-leader — and that the real economics live in making a good-enough model yours.
July 15, 2026
In June 2024 Google forced its biggest advertisers off credit cards with a no-exceptions ultimatum, calling it a better billing experience. The payments math tells the real story: roughly $300 per $10,000 in card fees versus a dime by bank transfer — plus tighter control, verified identities, and a bet that advertisers had nowhere else to go.
June 24, 2026
The only force that ever durably crushed the world's largest heroin supply is the same movement that grew rich taxing it — and the Taliban have now done it twice. A four-decade history of Afghan opium, from the Soviet-era jihad to the 2022 ban and its fragile aftermath.
June 19, 2026
The $1.7 billion the Obama administration sent Iran in 2016 was a debt thirty-seven years in the making — money Iran paid the United States before the 1979 revolution. How it was paid, in untraceable cash and only after four Americans were freed, turned a defensible legal settlement into a decade-long argument over whether it was a ransom.
June 16, 2026
A trillion-dollar pay package revived the internet's oldest fantasy — that one rich man could end world hunger with a single signature. It's wrong about wealth, wrong about hunger, and wrong about history: a defense of the much-maligned billionaire.