“Estonian E-government” – Joel Burke (Can we still govern?)

“when the baby is born, that new little person is tagged to the parents’ profiles. Because the government already knows who the parents are and what they’re eligible for (such as tax benefits or social programs), the state can proactively send them money and access to the resources they need. No application processes to be discovered and completed. Plus, the automation of parts of the process have major time and cost-saving benefits for the government as well, with more than an estimated hour saved in application processing time for each birth”

https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/estonian-e-government

“What Felt Impossible Became Possible” – Dan Sinker

“When he wrote an editorial accusing circuit court judge Clarence Dearth of being a Klansman and stacking his juries with Klansmen, that judge sent Dale twice to perform hard labor on a penal farm. He later fled to Ohio to avoid arrest. When Dale got home, he picked up right where he left off and he and Judge Dearth fought a long and protracted defamation battle that left Dale broke”

https://dansinker.com/posts/2025-02-23-dale/

“The Code That Controls Your Money” – Clive Thompson (Wealth Simple)

“The Commonwealth Bank of Australia tried to rewrite a core system in a fresh language; the project cost twice as much as they expected, $1 billion in Australian dollars. Len Santalucia, the longtime mainframe expert, once worked with the financial institution DTCC to investigate the possibility of converting their COBOL to Java.

“They probably have about seventy-five million lines of COBOL code,” he tells me, “and they found out that it would cost them so much that it would take, maybe, a couple of lifetimes to recover. It was ridiculous. And they have more money than God.”

So the banks shrug, and figure, screw it. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Keep the old COBOL running”

https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-ca/magazine/cobol-controls-your-money

“How M.L.M. world works on Instagram and TikTok” – Becky Read (Max Read)

“Even putting it together as a joke I felt how seductive the biz opp can be, how we’re all constantly looking for our One Investment, the one ticket out of The Rut with all the other wage earning drones and up to the moon with the ownership class, a dream that seems to be slipping further and further away. Wouldn’t it be nice if my own book was the one product that changed my life? What a scam”

https://maxread.substack.com/p/anatomy-of-a-business-opportunity

Shelia’s wheels within Shelia’s Wheels – Dan Davies

“The conclusion I take away is that once more, a simple bonus-malus system (the “no claims bonus”) is not easily defeated, and also that most of the time, big features of datasets are big features that are easy to recover from correlated characteristics. (This is what makes me a big sceptic about futurists talking about genetics in health insurance, telemetrics in motor or AI in everything – if something’s big enough to be relevant to pricing, it’s generally really big and easy to find)”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/sheilas-wheels-within-sheilas-wheels

“Undocumented side effects” – John Elledge

“All of which I think explains why mid-sized regional cities sometimes now feel so much more vibrant than the ostensibly richer capital. A couple of decades back central London did have its share of decent nightlife. But the truly interesting things got pushed ever outwards, from Farringdon to Shoreditch to Dalston to Hackney Wick, as the developers regenerated one area after another. The further out it went, though, the smaller the catchment area – and the less chance of anything really sparking”

https://jonn.substack.com/p/undocumented-side-effects

“Exit, Pursued By A Bear Market”

“I am in my mid-40s, almost exactly halfway between my graduation and my retirement date (LOL, right). I have known precisely three years of sustained growth. I was a late starter, but to have known proper growth at all of the sort we took for granted for decades – centuries! – you’d need to have your 40th birthday in sight. Any younger than that, and you were probably still in education. That is twenty years of adults who’ve never known a “normal” economy”

https://jonn.substack.com/p/exit-pursued-by-a-bear-market

“There’s no justice without power” – Hamilton Nolan

“Typically the left’s answers to this are “protests” and “political advocacy” and “persuasion in all of its forms.” These are all great and valid techniques. But a quick glance at the state of the world tells us that they are insufficient for balancing out the power on the other side of the equation from us, which consists of all the billionaires and all the corporations and all the guns. Is there a form of direct power that we can wield, that will be effective in this radically skewed battle? Yes. It is organized labor power. That is it, my friends. That is the left’s power vector. That is where our focus needs to be”

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/theres-no-justice-without-power

“Questions of identity” – John Elledge

“He may well have been from the land we call Wales – but he wasn’t Welsh because Welshness hadn’t been invented yet. The man we know as Patrick was Romano-British, a mix of class status and ethnic group that no longer exists, and which messes with the internet’s sense of how colonialism works by merging both culture and probably genes of coloniser and subject. Trying to map this onto anything that exists today is madness”

https://jonn.substack.com/p/questions-of-identity