Where does the margin actually go?
Sector by sector: who captures the surplus when AI lands — incumbents, entrants, or customers. Usually it's customers, and that's the whole story.
Independent · Reader-funded · No sponsored posts
Everyone agrees AI changes everything.
Almost nobody agrees on who gets paid.
Transformative technology and profitable investment are different questions. Railroads rewired a continent and bankrupted their shareholders. This is a publication about the gap between the two — industry by industry, filing by filing.
Three questions, asked repeatedly
Every piece here is a version of one of these. Narrow beats, covered properly, rather than a little of everything.
What is already in the price?
Infrastructure spend, energy constraints, index concentration, and the arithmetic of what today's multiples require tomorrow's earnings to be.
How should a normal person respond?
Plain-language treatment of allocation, taxes, and cash flow — written by someone who thinks the boring answer is usually right.
Recent essays
Sources are named. Numbers are traceable. Where the evidence is thin, it says so.
How financial planners actually get paid
The compensation model is the most important fact about any advice relationship, and the one you are least likely to be told.
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Five passive income businesses, honestly assessed
Almost everything sold as passive income is a business with a delayed payoff. Five real ones, measured against the only genuinely passive option there is.
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Amazon KDP, honestly assessed
Self-publishing is a discovery business, not a writing business. Why the winners run catalogs rather than books.
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Etsy print-on-demand, honestly assessed
The lowest barrier to entry in the series, and that is exactly the problem. Where the margin actually goes.
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Website rental, honestly assessed
A genuine chokepoint play with the best recurring revenue here — built entirely on a ranking you do not control.
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Wedding and event rental, honestly assessed
The outlier: physical, capital-intensive, bounded by geography. The only one whose downside leaves you holding something.
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Buying an existing online business
Instead of hoping for revenue, buy revenue that exists. How multiples encode risk, and what diligence really involves.
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Too Big to Fail, seventeen years on
Sorkin’s hour-by-hour account removes hindsight better than any other crisis book. What housing fixed since — and the risks that look nothing like 2008.
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Standard Oil and NVIDIA
Separated by a century and two legal regimes, both won the same way — by owning the dull layer underneath the glamour industry.
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1929, 2008, and where the next one comes from
Both crashes ran the same machinery. Running student debt through that checklist gives a more surprising answer than the headlines do.
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What the price already assumes
You don’t need an opinion about AI to be exposed to one. A multiple is a forecast — here’s how to decode the one your index fund is carrying.
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You can be right about the technology and still lose the money
Railways, airlines, fiber, dot-com. Four times the future arrived on schedule and the shareholders funding it paid for everyone else’s upgrade.
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Radiology, ten years after the first "radiologists are finished"
A useful control case for every confident claim about job displacement timelines.
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One essay a week. No stock picks.
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