Long-form essays on inquiry, institutional design, industrial capability, and the seams where what an institution’s contract claims and what its implementation actually does have quietly diverged.
On how the legal collapse of the Trump II tariff regime preserved most of its practical effects through regulatory infrastructure built or accelerated alongside it — FDA ImportShield, CBP audit and valuation enforcement, the OBBBA de minimis phase-out, the Cantor Fitzgerald refund market, and Treasury’s refund slow-walk. Argues the durable variable in modern tariff policy is not the headline rate but the bureaucratic substrate.
On the 1993 consolidation directive, three decades of mergers from 51 prime contractors to five, and a financial structure that returned 98 percent of free cash flow to shareholders while production capacity atrophied. Operation Epic Fury exposed the arithmetic. Argues the publicly-traded defense firm is structurally incompatible with maintaining surge capacity, and points at the Government-Owned, Contractor-Operated model as the institutional alternative. Sourced edition with full bibliography.
On the migration of meaningful computation from user-owned devices to a small set of hyperscale data centers — the five civilizational risks the transition carries (economic concentration, surveillance infrastructure, supply-chain fragility centered on a contested island, cognitive atrophy, and the loss of off-grid-capable personal computing) and the structural interventions — a federal local-computation guarantee, a GOCO public compute option, mandatory open-weight access — that could rebalance the locus of compute.
On a stance toward inquiry that existing English vocabulary obscures and existing educational institutions are structurally unable to perceive. Coins and defends the term, distinguishes it from curiosity, philomathy, epistemophilia, and Bildung, and proposes a single pedagogical practice the doctrine actually licenses. The animating intuition: the love of being inside inquiry rather than of having concluded.