Posts

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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.

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...