It is good to know how stuff breaks. “increasing complexity yields diminishing marginal returns: each new layer of administration, infrastructure, or technology demands ever-greater energy and material inputs for proportionally smaller benefits. When the energy surplus required to sustain this… Read More »Collapse: A Framework for Understanding and Navigating the Decline of Industrial Civilisation
It is not great powers competing, it is Game of Thrones.
Shipping is the core. “it is surprisingly hard to motivate yourself to focus on the main thing. It’s much more natural to just jump into something that looks probably useful and start working immediately” https://www.seangoedecke.com/getting-the-main-thing-right/
Physics is cool.
Even fiction can be grounded in economy. “our protagonists aren’t typical Hobbits. Bilbo, Frodo, Merry, and Pippin are all very clearly members of the landed gentry, the landowning class that controls most means of economic production and maintains social dominance… Read More »The Moral Economy of the Shire
World is changing rapidly and what is true today won’t be so in a few decades. “It’s difficult to state just how stark and catastrophic of a collapse this is. The number of births in China fell by 17% in… Read More »Let’s save the human species!
Time isinear because we decided it is, not because it is. “Humans perceive three spatial dimensions: length, width, and depth. But mathematicians have long theorised there were more. In the 1880s, the mathematician Charles Hinton popularised these ideas, and went… Read More »When we turned time into a line, we reimagined past and future | Aeon Essays
Estimates help but are hard. “the majority of software work is not like this. We work on poorly-understood systems and cannot predict exactly what must be done in advance. Most programming in large systems is research: identifying prior art, mapping… Read More »How I estimate work as a staff software engineer
New Rome is in trouble. “Empires do not end because they want to. They end because the numbers leave no alternative.” https://nitishastra.substack.com/p/how-debt-bankrupted-the-british-empire
States are something different. “States tend to have a relatively rigidly defined territory, whereas non-state societies do not. States tend to have more complex social stratification with both a greater degree of labor specialization and a greater degree of social… Read More »Collections: How to Raise a Tribal Army in Pre-Roman Europe, Part II: Government Without States