Category: Investing
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— or, how a 4,000-year-old clay tablet explains why your gold dealer, magazine subscription, and Instagram feed are all part of the same story Let’s start with a man named Nanni. Around 1750 BCE, in the ancient city of Ur (modern-day Iraq), Nanni did what any aggrieved customer does today: he filed a complaint. His…
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An Opinion Piece I. The Governance Paradox at the Lunar Frontier The faint crackle of radio static emanating from the lunar surface may carry more significance for international relations than the text of any treaty currently under negotiation. This is not the hum of a radio telescope or the cosmic echo of primordial radiation. Rather,…
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You are fifty years old. You just earned a new degree. You are fit, sober, and cognitively sharper than most thirty-year-olds in the office. You walk into the lobby of a legacy corporation—one of those grand old institutions that has been running the same career machinery for half a century—to apply for an entry-level position.…
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There is a pattern that repeats across history. A power structure rises, peaks, plateaus, and then begins its long, predictable decline. The conservative mind, as Corey Robin observed, is not merely resistant to change—it is structurally incapable of recognising this curve until it is too late. The conservative defends the present, which is already waning.…
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A whimsical essay in comparative political sociology privileging synthesis over method-bound justification.. I. Introduction: A Transition in Class Formation One does not need to be a disciple of Karl Marx to recognise that class relations are undergoing a silent but decisive metamorphosis. The old binary of capital versus labour—the axis that defined industrial conflict for…
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A case study in channel bias, hassle aversion, and how publishers (and foreign retailers) profit from your distrust Part 1: The Magazine – Same Product, Same Publisher, Two Prices The phone rings. Telemarketer: “We’re offering you a subscription to Aku Ankka – 40€ per year, including gifts you can resell.” Grandma: “Ei kiinnosta. Sounds like…
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This post is whimsical. Not to be confused with telecom engineering standards, but the underlying logic is the same as in our social ecology article. Have fun reading it! Telecom spam filters were supposed to solve a simple problem: stop fraudsters from flooding our phones with garbage calls. Instead, they have produced a surreal outcome:…
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Most alcohol harm reduction strategies target individual behaviour: drink less, count your units, know your limits. These approaches place the entire burden of control on the drinker, while leaving the drinking environment unchanged. A growing body of evidence suggests that contextual boundary policies — which restructure where, when, and how alcohol can be consumed —…
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What a conflict‑windfall certification can achieve, how it differs from ESG, and why proliferation of such schemes is the only way to hold power accountable 0. The Certification Question The war‑windfall and harm‑windfall protocols described in the previous posts are governance tools. But tools left on a workbench change nothing. A fund may adopt a…
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A scalable, third‑party certification scheme for investors and portfolio companies that neutralise profit from intentional destruction – modelled on Fair Trade, B Corp, and organic certification 0. The Scaling Problem The war‑windfall and harm‑windfall protocols are governance tools for individual funds. But LPs cannot easily verify which funds have adopted them. GPs cannot easily signal…