Business
Notes and visualizations on markets and technology.
- Planned Obsolescence — a reader's summary
Bernard London's 1932 pamphlet that coined the term, the 1924 Phoebus lightbulb cartel, and General Motors' annual model changes — and why “they make it break on purpose” remains a reflex explanation for a worn-out phone.
- Parkinson's Law — a reader's summary
C. Northcote Parkinson's 1955 line that work expands to fill the time available, the Admiralty staffing data behind it, and how it became productivity culture's favorite excuse for a deadline.
- Infrastructure Booms, Financial Busts
Railroads, the electric grid and dot-com fiber all bankrupted their financiers while the network survived — and why highways and airports didn't, plus what it means for the AI data-centre race.
- The 1% Rule — a reader's summary
The 90-9-1 pattern of online participation — Jakob Nielsen's 2006 write-up, and why platform business models are now built around the imbalance rather than against it.
- Conway's Law — a reader's summary
Melvin Conway's 1968 paper, rejected by Harvard Business Review before running in Datamation, and the “Inverse Conway Maneuver” teams now engineer on purpose.
- Quiet Quitting — a reader's summary
The July 2022 TikTok that made the phrase a household term, and the retired money manager whose PR team apparently invented its 2009 origin story.
- Betteridge's Law of Headlines — a reader's summary
Ian Betteridge's 2009 line that any headline ending in a question mark can be answered “no,” and why it names a real incentive to hedge an unsupported claim rather than state it.
- The Peter Principle — a reader's summary
Laurence J. Peter's satirical 1969 “rise to your level of incompetence” line, and the 2018 study of sales-force promotions that gave the joke real data decades later.
- Founder Mode — a reader's summary
Paul Graham's September 2024 essay, built on a Brian Chesky talk about fixing Airbnb — why founders might need a different playbook than professional managers, and how fast it became a permission slip.
- How many factories are there in the world?
A data-driven sizing of the planet's ~10 million factories — their output, workers and value added, broken down by vertical, by country and by the era they were built. First of three companion sizing pieces, with a documented methodology.
- The factory capital stock
What the world's factories cost to build — the total capital invested, net of depreciation, set against output, and the manufacturing capex supercycle: China versus the rest of the world.
- Capex supercycles — AI vs. the great manufacturing booms
The AI buildout measured GDP-to-GDP against the Chinese manufacturing supercycle, the great Western industrialisation and the railway and canal manias before it — a railway mania, not yet a China supercycle.
- Bikeshedding — a reader's summary
C. Northcote Parkinson's 1957 Law of Triviality — a committee that waves through a nuclear reactor in minutes but argues for an hour over the bike shed — and the 1999 mailing-list post that turned it into software's favorite word.
- The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect — a reader's summary
Michael Crichton's 2002 speech naming a physicist's offhand observation: you spot every error in a news story about your own field, then turn the page and trust the next one anyway.
- Clickbait — a reader's summary
The 1994 psychology paper behind the curiosity-gap headline, the Upworthy-era formula that made it a genre, and the 2014 Facebook algorithm change built specifically to suppress it.
- Algospeak — a reader's summary
The coded creator vocabulary — “unalive,” “seggs,” “le dollar bean” — built to slip past automated moderation, and the April 2022 press coverage that carried it into mainstream use.
- Rage Bait — a reader's summary
Oxford's 2025 Word of the Year: content engineered to make you angry enough to engage, its unglamorous 2002 origin, and why Facebook's 2017 crackdown only ever caught the crudest version of the tactic.
- Greater-Paris waste producers
A map of the ~3000 actors most likely to produce collectable waste across Île-de-France — manufacturing, healthcare, public sector and food service — each with an estimated waste tonnage and annual waste-management budget, plus a documented methodology.
- US manufacturing plants
A map of the most notable factories in the contiguous US — their specialization, size, founding year, growth trajectory, dominant production process and pain points; recolor by sector, growth or process.
- European manufacturing plants
The same map for Europe — the EU, the UK and Türkiye's western edge — with each plant's specialization, size, growth trajectory, process and pain points.
- Chinese manufacturing plants
The same map for mainland China — from the Pearl River and Yangtze deltas to the northeast — sized, dated and tagged by process, growth and pain points.
- India & South-West Asia manufacturing plants
The same map for India and South-West Asia — the subcontinent, the Gulf, Iran and Türkiye — one dot per notable factory, tagged by sector, growth and process.
- Goodhart's Law — a reader's summary
Charles Goodhart's 1975 monetary-policy paper, Marilyn Strathern's one-line 1997 version everyone quotes, and why it now describes KPI dashboards and reward-hacking AI agents equally well.
- Shadowbanning — a reader's summary
Quietly limiting a user's reach without telling them — from early forum moderation to Reddit's admitted anti-spam use and the 2018 Twitter controversy.
- Metcalfe's Law — a reader's summary
Robert Metcalfe's Ethernet sales pitch, George Gilder's 1993 n² formalization, and the 2006 paper that argued the real exponent is smaller.
- The Ratio — a reader's summary
The Twitter-native folk metric for a bad post — replies swamping likes — how it became the insult “L + ratio,” and why platform changes since 2022 broke the signal it was named for.
- Company map
The companies that matter for technology and manufacturing — size × multiple, sized by growth, linked by business relationships.
- Companies & their business lines
Every company from the map, with its main business lines and assets — one card per line.
- The factory as institutional fact
Why operations software is constitutional law, and what AI agents change. Also in Philosophy.
- The token: an anatomy
What a token fundamentally is, who captures the margin, where the bottlenecks sit, and what is — and is not — compatible.
- The price of a token
Token prices, the market where unit price collapses while spend explodes, and where token share is going.
- Who serves the tokens?
The estimated share of LLM tokens served by each model family over time — the AI era's forms-of-rule chart.
- Distillation — how models copy models, and how you catch them
Capability at API prices instead of compute prices: what distillation is, the watermarks it leaves, and the GLM-5.2 versus Mythos affair. Also in Maths & Science.
- Aggregation Theory — a reader's summary
Ben Thompson's framework for who wins on the internet — zero marginal cost, commoditized supply, and the feedback loop behind Google, Amazon and Facebook.
- Enshittification — a reader's summary
Cory Doctorow's three-stage theory of platform decay, and the four disciplining forces that used to prevent it.
- The Attention Economy — a reader's summary
Herbert Simon's 1971 diagnosis that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and how platform design turned it into an engineering discipline.
- FOMO — a reader's summary
Dan Herman's 1996 research and Patrick McGinnis's 2004 acronym, the 2013 psychology paper that measured it, and how feed design turned a feeling into a business model.
- The Hook Model — a reader's summary
Nir Eyal's 2014 four-step framework for building habit-forming products, its roots in reinforcement psychology, and the ethics backlash it drew from its own author.