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 15, 2026
A twelve-word tweet in July 2026 set off a new discipline: designing networks of AI agents instead of prompting one. Inside the evidence — Anthropic's 45-agent swarm, OpenAI's zero-hand-written-code product, the MAST failure study — and why the human's job is becoming org design plus anchors.
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 6, 2026
Elon Musk says Starship will launch every hour — a goal so ambitious it sounds unattainable. That absurdity is the point: impossible goals redesign everything beneath them. Here is how to name your own hourly rocket, and the machinery that gets a small to medium business there.
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
Microsoft now describes its agent registry as 'Active Directory for AI agents' — and a $96 billion consolidation wave is building badge printers for AI employees. Why the chat box became the front door of work, why the permission layer is the real product, and why the biggest opportunity — encoding a company's roles and processes for AI — is still unowned.
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.
August 1, 2026
Three companies already command most AI-agent usage. What happens when their software stops showing choices and starts making them?