Posts on Rabid Curiosity

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Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:15:00 +0000

I have discovered, through rigorous Thursday-night research, that I only want to deal with Fortune 500 customer support when I am at least a little drunk.

Not wrecked. Not “send three paragraphs to the wrong group chat” drunk. Just tilted enough that the whole thing becomes funny before it becomes spiritually expensive.

This is not life advice. This is barely even a coping strategy. It is more like finding out that a terrible chair becomes usable if you sit in it sideways.

Monetary Discount Rates and Depression

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 06:30:00 -0500

The Performance of Planning

In my worst depressive episodes, making plans felt like church youth group theatre. I was performing.

The audience was a small cast: authority figures who needed to believe I had my life together, and myself — the harshest critic, who knew exactly how hollow the performance was. I would map out courses each semester with the same enthusiasm I might bring to a role I did not want. To my professors and advisors, I appeared organized. To my peers, I seemed to have it figured out. The secret was that planning itself had become a coping mechanism, a way to generate the appearance of forward motion while standing perfectly still.

When the Vault Has a Back Door: The Mythos Leak and the Inevitability of Information Freedom

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 06:30:00 -0500

Anthropic’s Claude Mythos leak is not a surprise. It was an inevitability. And it teaches us something important about how power actually works in the information age — and why the entire edifice of information security is built on sand.

The Paternalism Model

Anthropic designed Mythos as a cyber-capable AI so powerful it could find and exploit vulnerabilities in every major operating system and browser. Their solution? Keep it locked up. Only trusted partners — AWS, Apple, Google, Microsoft, the usual suspects — would get access through the Project Glasswing initiative.

Public Finance of the States: Florida

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 11:30:00 -0500

Florida’s Growth-Funded Model

Florida has no personal income tax and sustains itself on a combination of sales taxes, property taxes, documentary stamp taxes on real estate transactions, and the economic windfall of being one of the country’s premier destinations for both tourism and retiree migration. The model has worked during periods of growth, and it has created fiscal vulnerabilities that become visible when growth slows.

Revenue Structure

Sales tax is the primary state revenue source at 6%, with a broad base that includes many services. Florida’s sales tax revenues are strongly correlated with tourism and consumer spending, making them sensitive to national economic conditions and travel patterns.

Public Finance of the States: New York

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 11:25:00 -0500

New York’s Fiscal Complexity

New York is both a state and a city in a way that complicates most fiscal analysis. New York City’s budget is larger than most states. The fiscal fortunes of the state are deeply entangled with the fortunes of the financial industry concentrated in Manhattan. And the political economy of a state that must satisfy both the country’s densest urban core and large rural upstate regions produces a governing complexity with no real parallel.

Public Finance of the States: California

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 11:20:00 -0500

California’s Singular Scale

California’s economy is roughly the size of the United Kingdom’s. Its state government collects more revenue than most countries. Its fiscal decisions ripple through national markets for municipal bonds, healthcare, and education. Analyzing California’s public finance requires first setting aside the usual state-level frameworks—California operates at a scale where different dynamics apply.

Revenue Structure and Volatility

California’s defining fiscal characteristic is not its level of taxation but its structure of taxation—specifically, its extraordinary dependence on personal income taxes from high earners.

Public Finance of the States: Texas

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 11:15:00 -0500

Texas’s Fiscal Model

Texas is the most influential fiscal model in American state government—a large, fast-growing state that has maintained no personal income tax, attracted enormous business investment, and used its model as a competitive wedge against higher-tax states. Whether Texas’s approach represents a sustainable model of governance or a set of deferred costs and distributional choices that will eventually come due is one of the defining debates in state fiscal policy.

Public Finance of the States: Ohio

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 11:10:00 -0500

Ohio’s Fiscal Middle Ground

Ohio is the Midwest’s great median case—large enough to matter, diverse enough to reflect the full range of regional tensions, and fiscally positioned neither at the crisis end (Illinois) nor the model end (Indiana). Understanding Ohio means understanding a state managing genuine post-industrial transition while navigating intense interstate tax competition and the fiscal complications of being a genuine political swing state.

Revenue Structure

Ohio’s revenue mix has shifted significantly over the past two decades. A major tax reform in 2005 phased out the tangible personal property tax and the corporate franchise tax, replacing them partly with a Commercial Activity Tax (a gross receipts tax applied to business revenues) and partly with reductions not fully replaced—a net tax cut that reduced the state’s fiscal capacity.

Public Finance of the States: Illinois

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 11:05:00 -0500

Illinois’s Fiscal Crisis in Context

Illinois is the cautionary tale of American state finance—a large, productive economy with a world-class city at its center that has nonetheless accumulated one of the worst fiscal positions of any state in the country. Understanding Illinois requires separating the genuine structural problems from the political dysfunction that has prevented their resolution, and being honest about how much of the crisis was a choice rather than an accident.

Public Finance of the States: Indiana

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 11:00:00 -0500

Indiana’s Fiscal Identity

Indiana has cultivated a reputation for conservative, stable fiscal management that is largely deserved. Among the Great Lakes states, it stands out for maintaining a balanced budget through economic cycles, keeping debt levels low, and resisting the pension obligations that have crippled Illinois to its west. Understanding how Indiana got here—and what it costs—requires looking at the history, the revenue structure, and the political economy that has sustained this approach across decades and governors of both parties.

Public Finance of the States: The West

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:45:00 -0500

The Fiscal Character of the West

The West is America’s most fiscally diverse region—home to California’s singular economic scale, the extractive-industry booms and busts of the Mountain states, and the ideological experimentation of a region that has never had one dominant political tradition. The range runs from California’s large, activist state government to Wyoming’s minimalist reliance on mineral extraction revenues.

The region divides into the Mountain states and the Pacific Coast, with meaningfully different fiscal profiles.

Public Finance of the States: The South

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:40:00 -0500

The Fiscal Character of the South

The South is America’s fastest-growing region and, in many ways, the testing ground for the low-tax, low-service model of governance. The combination of population growth, relatively low public sector legacy costs, and aggressive interstate tax competition has produced a distinctive fiscal philosophy—and significant debate about whether it actually delivers better outcomes for residents.

The region spans three Census divisions: the South Atlantic, East South Central, and West South Central, covering sixteen states with considerable internal variation.

Public Finance of the States: The Midwest

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:35:00 -0500

The Fiscal Character of the Midwest

The Midwest is America’s fiscal middle ground—neither the high-tax, high-service model of the Northeast nor the low-tax competition model of the South. But within that broad characterization lies enormous variation, from Illinois’s catastrophic pension crisis to Indiana’s reputation for conservative fiscal management to Minnesota’s Scandinavian-inflected public sector tradition.

The Census Bureau divides the Midwest into the East North Central and West North Central divisions, though the more meaningful distinction for fiscal purposes is between the industrial Great Lakes states and the agricultural Plains states.

Public Finance of the States: The Northeast

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:30:00 -0500

The Fiscal Character of the Northeast

The Northeast—New England plus the Middle Atlantic states—is America’s oldest industrial and commercial core. Its fiscal profile reflects that history: high taxes, high services, dense and aging infrastructure, and long-standing commitments to public institutions that are expensive to maintain and politically difficult to reduce.

The region encompasses two distinct sub-regions with meaningfully different characters.

New England

Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont share geography but diverge sharply on fiscal philosophy.

Depression, Anxiety, and Organizational Dynamics: New Guy Syndrome

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:10:00 -0500

Introduction

Starting a new job is stressful for everyone. For people managing anxiety and depression, it can be genuinely destabilizing. The ambiguity of a new environment, the pressure to prove yourself quickly, the absence of established relationships and social capital—all of these hit harder when your baseline is already taxed. “New guy syndrome” is my term for the specific cluster of experiences that comes with being new somewhere when your mental health is already a factor. This post is about navigating it.

Building Fundamental Technical Knowledge

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:05:00 -0500

Introduction

There’s a pattern in technical work where people become highly skilled at the surface layer of a technology—the tools, the interfaces, the workflows—without developing any understanding of what’s underneath. This works fine until it doesn’t. When something breaks in an unexpected way, or when the tool changes, or when you need to make a non-obvious decision, the lack of fundamentals shows. This post is about why fundamentals matter and how to actually build them.

Personal Finance, Investing, and Building the Skill of Long-Term Thinking

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:00:00 -0500

Introduction

Most personal finance advice is technically correct and psychologically useless. Spend less than you earn. Invest early and consistently. Don’t time the market. These are right, but they don’t address the harder problem: humans are bad at long-term thinking by default, and investing is almost entirely a long-term game. The skill worth building isn’t picking stocks—it’s training your own cognition to make better decisions across long time horizons.

Key Points

Why standard personal finance advice fails to change behavior
The psychological obstacles to long-term thinking: hyperbolic discounting, loss aversion, availability bias
How to build the habit of thinking in decades rather than quarters
The investing principles that actually hold up once you account for human psychology
Connecting personal finance decisions to broader life goals rather than treating them in isolation

Conclusion

The goal of personal finance isn’t to optimize a spreadsheet—it’s to give your future self more options. Getting there requires building a cognitive skill: the ability to treat future outcomes as real and worth protecting. That skill, once built, turns out to be useful far beyond money.

Passion, Skill, and Profit: A Callback to Scott Galloway

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:55:00 -0500

Introduction

Scott Galloway’s provocation—that “follow your passion” is terrible career advice, and you should instead follow the money—is a useful corrective to a lot of fuzzy thinking. But like most contrarian takes, it overcorrects. The real framework is more nuanced: passion, skill, and economic demand interact, and the sweet spot is somewhere in the middle. This post uses Galloway’s argument as a jumping-off point for thinking clearly about how to build a career worth having.

Sam Altman on Productivity, and How AI Creates Time

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:50:00 -0500

Introduction

Sam Altman has written and spoken about productivity in ways that are worth taking seriously—not because he’s a productivity guru, but because he’s someone who operates at very high leverage and thinks carefully about where his time goes. His framing around AI is particularly interesting: the claim isn’t just that AI makes you faster, it’s that it qualitatively changes the relationship between effort and output. This post reflects on those ideas and what they actually mean for how ordinary people should think about their time.

Customer Service and The Nordstrom Way

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:45:00 -0500

Introduction

Nordstrom built a reputation on a simple idea: give employees the authority to do whatever it takes to make the customer happy. The famous employee handbook was one rule: use good judgment. This is either a profound insight into organizational culture or a naive fantasy, depending on what you believe about how people behave at work. This post takes the Nordstrom model seriously as a lens for thinking about service, culture, and what organizations actually incentivize.

Personal Finance, FIRE, and Mental Health

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:40:00 -0500

Introduction

The FIRE movement—Financial Independence, Retire Early—is built on a compelling premise: aggressively save and invest, minimize expenses, and buy back your time. For people whose mental health makes traditional employment exhausting or unsustainable, the appeal is obvious. But the relationship between financial independence and mental health is more complicated than the FIRE community often acknowledges. This post explores both the promise and the limits.

Key Points

What the FIRE framework actually offers people dealing with mental illness
The ways financial stress compounds anxiety and depression
Where FIRE’s assumptions break down for people with health-related income instability
The psychological relationship with money, security, and future orientation
Building financial resilience without making it another source of anxiety

Conclusion

Financial independence is a legitimate goal and a genuine buffer against certain kinds of suffering. But it’s not a cure for mental illness, and the intense optimization mindset of FIRE can become its own trap. The aim is enough security to give yourself options—not a new obsession to replace the old ones.

Reflecting on My Past as a Student

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:35:00 -0500

Introduction

Looking back at yourself as a student is a strange exercise. You’re trying to understand someone who had less information, fewer skills, and a different set of pressures than you do now—but who was also making decisions that shaped everything that followed. This post is a reflection on what I got right, what I got wrong, and what I wish I had understood earlier about how to actually learn.

Reflections on Trusting Trust

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:30:00 -0500

Introduction

Ken Thompson’s 1984 Turing Award lecture, “Reflections on Trusting Trust,” makes a deceptively simple argument: you cannot fully trust code you did not write yourself, because the compiler that built it might have been compromised. The implications reach far beyond computer security. Trust in complex systems is always, at some level, an act of faith—and understanding that shapes how you should build, operate, and rely on things you can’t fully verify.

How to Change Your Mind Without Losing Yourself

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:25:00 -0500

Introduction

Changing your mind is supposed to be a virtue—a sign of intellectual honesty and willingness to update on evidence. But in practice it’s uncomfortable, because our beliefs are entangled with our identity. Admitting you were wrong about something important can feel like admitting you were a different, lesser person. This post is about how to actually do it: update your beliefs without losing your sense of self in the process.

On Reading Widely, Deeply, Exploring, Exploiting

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:20:00 -0500

Introduction

The explore/exploit tradeoff is a concept from computer science and decision theory: when do you keep searching for something better versus committing to what you’ve found? It maps surprisingly well onto how we read. Wide reading is exploration—building a broad map of ideas. Deep reading is exploitation—extracting full value from a rich vein. Both matter, and the tension between them shapes what kind of thinker you become.

Key Points

The explore/exploit framework and how it applies to reading and learning
What wide reading provides that deep reading can’t, and vice versa
How to recognize when you’re stuck in a rut versus appropriately going deep
The role of serendipity in intellectual development
Building a personal reading practice that balances both modes

Conclusion

The best readers do both. Exploration keeps you from becoming a narrow specialist who misses the bigger picture. Exploitation keeps you from becoming a dilettante who knows a little about everything and a lot about nothing. The skill is knowing when to switch.

Zoloft as My Soma

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:15:00 -0500

Introduction

In Brave New World, soma is the drug that keeps citizens content, compliant, and untroubled by the weight of real experience. When I started taking Zoloft, I worried about something similar—that I was trading authentic suffering for chemical comfort, blunting the edges that made me who I am. This is a post about why that framing was wrong, and what psychiatric medication actually does and doesn’t change.

Key Points

The soma anxiety: fears about medication changing identity or dulling experience
What SSRIs actually do at a functional level
The difference between treating illness and altering personality
Reflections on before and after: what changed and what stayed the same
The stigma around psychiatric medication and why it persists

Conclusion

Zoloft didn’t make me a different person. It made me more capable of being the person I already was. The soma comparison gets it backwards—it’s the illness, not the treatment, that narrows your world.

State Capacity and Philosophies of Governance

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:10:00 -0500

Introduction

The debate between big and small government often misses the more important question: capable versus incapable government. A state that lacks the capacity to implement its own policies—regardless of their ideological orientation—produces bad outcomes. State capacity is the unsexy prerequisite to everything else in governance.

Key Points

Defining state capacity: what it is and why it gets overlooked
The relationship between bureaucratic quality and policy outcomes
How different governance philosophies handle the capacity question
Historical examples of high and low capacity states
The American case: capacity gaps and their downstream effects

Conclusion

Before debating what government should do, it’s worth asking whether it can do it. Capacity is the foundation. Without it, governing philosophies are just theory.

Shackles of Anxiety and Depression

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:05:00 -0500

Introduction

Anxiety and depression are often described in clinical terms—symptoms, diagnoses, treatment protocols. That framing is useful but incomplete. What they actually feel like from the inside is more like wearing shackles: a persistent drag on everything you try to do, a narrowing of what feels possible. This post is about that experience, and what it means to start removing the shackles one at a time.

Key Points

The difference between describing mental illness and inhabiting it
How anxiety and depression interact and reinforce each other
The specific ways they constrain decision-making, ambition, and relationships
What “getting better” actually looks like from the inside
The residue that remains even after significant recovery

Conclusion

The shackles metaphor matters because it implies agency. Shackles can be removed. Understanding what they are and how they work is the first step toward taking them off.

Public Finance of the States: Series Overview

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0500

What This Series Is About

State governments occupy a fascinating and underappreciated position in American governance. Unlike the federal government, they cannot print money, must generally balance their budgets, compete with neighboring states for residents and businesses, and face hard tradeoffs with finite resources. That combination of constraints makes state finance one of the most instructive places to study how political priorities translate into actual policy.

This series examines each of the fifty states—organized by region—through the lens of public finance. The goal is not a dry recitation of budget numbers but an attempt to understand what each state’s fiscal choices reveal about its political economy, its history, and its relationship with the people it governs.

The psychology of habit formation

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 14:30:00 +0000

Introduction

This post will explore the psychology behind habit formation and how understanding these mechanisms can help us build better routines.

Key Points

Explain the habit loop: cue, routine, reward.
Discuss the role of dopamine in habit formation.
Offer practical strategies for building positive habits and breaking negative ones.

Conclusion

Summarize the key takeaways and encourage readers to apply these principles to their own lives.

Transaction costs of social anxiety

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 14:45:00 +0000

Introduction

This post will explore the concept of transaction costs in the context of social anxiety.

Key Points

Define transaction costs and their relevance to social interactions.
Discuss how social anxiety increases these costs.
Offer strategies for reducing transaction costs associated with social anxiety.

Conclusion

Wrap up the discussion and encourage readers to reflect on their own experiences with social anxiety.

Self-efficacy and self-esteem after becoming mentally healthy

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 14:40:00 +0000

Introduction

This post will examine the connection between self-efficacy, self-esteem, and mental health recovery.

Key Points

Define self-efficacy and self-esteem.
Discuss the impact of mental health on these concepts.
Provide strategies for enhancing self-efficacy and self-esteem post-recovery.

Conclusion

Summarize the insights and encourage readers to focus on their mental health journey.

Monetary discount rates and depression

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 14:35:00 +0000

Introduction

This post will delve into the relationship between monetary discount rates and depression.

Key Points

Explain monetary discount rates and their significance.
Discuss how depression can affect decision-making and discount rates.
Explore potential solutions or interventions.

Conclusion

Wrap up the discussion and highlight the importance of understanding this relationship.

Growth through constraints

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 14:30:00 +0000

Introduction

This post will explore how constraints can lead to personal growth and development.

Key Points

Define constraints and their impact on personal growth.
Discuss examples of growth through constraints in various contexts.
Offer practical tips for embracing constraints in life.

Conclusion

Summarize the key takeaways and encourage readers to reflect on their own experiences with constraints.