Category: the market
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the eight factories every city needs to build before it’s too late
When we talk about climate, collapse, or resilience, we usually end up in the same cul-de-sac: we need better leaders, better policies, better apps. But we don’t. What we urgently need is physical infrastructure that lasts. Infrastructure we can control, repair, and replicate. Not another app. Not another subsidy. Not another committee hearing on “resilience.”…
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the illusion of stability
Why Everything You’ve Built Is on Shaky Ground You probably don’t think about the economy much. Not the big picture, anyway. You’ve got a job, a mortgage, maybe a 401(k). You pay your taxes, try to make smart decisions, and hope things work out. When something feels off—rising prices, a blown tire you can’t quite…
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a thought exercise
Imagine, if you will, that on the day you were born, you were handed a trust fund designed to run out the day you died — 100 years later. Every day of your life, you could spend some of that trust fund, and on the final day, you’d spend the final penny.1 How much would…
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minutes watched
Streaming sites evidently measure how much you like something by a metric called “minutes viewed” which really ought to be “cumulative minutes viewed” (if this was advanced stats for sports, it would be called CMV) because it is a measure of all the minutes that any client watched the show. Which is… weird, like, as…
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Tariffs only work if …
Tariffs only work if they raise prices of imported goods above the cost of domestic goods because the purpose of a tariff is to create space in the competitive landscape for domestic producers to grow and prosper by raising the cost of the imported good so that domestic goods can undercut them on price in…
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Rank, Role, Pay
Rank is where you sit in a hierarchy. You get positional authority from it. Role is what your responsibilities and operational authority are. Pay is how you are compensated. Some places try to keep these three tightly coupled — “Only people of this Rank can hold this Role, and Pay is bound to Rank.” Only…
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1600 hours
We should be using 1600 hours as the annual amount of available labor per person when we calculate how long something will take, how much it will cost, or how much someone should earn. 1600 hours is 32 hours a week for 50 weeks. $15.00/hour for 1600 hours gets you enough to support a family…
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The destruction of money
Money is a created thing. We create it by issuing loans or by authorizing government expenditures in fiat currencies. But what happens then? If we can only create money, how does money not become worthless over time? Obviously, we must also destroy money. The destruction of money happens in two ways. First, a lender can…
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Ahead of its time
Today I learned that in 1983 I could have downloaded games into my Atari 2600 using a modem, stored them in ROM and played them off-line. In 1983. And that the company that offered that service only offered it because their original idea to allow you to download music over a modem to listen to…
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Autocracy isn’t socialism
FWIW, all the people who say they are against socialism because they’ve lived under communism and their lives were hard or ruined, suffered because they lived under totalitarian autocracies. If they want to make a nuanced argument about how socialism _leads_ to totalitarian autocracies I’m receptive to unpacking that argument, just not while they are…