Disaster Aid Over Prevention

Per-bushel subsidies reward overproduction of specific crops regardless of soil, market, or nutritional need.

Federal oversight intended to protect tribal assets creates friction that devalues the land.

Candidates dependent on large donors become structurally responsive to donor priorities over voter priorities.

High-velocity quotas for enumerators turn data collection into fiction-writing.

Forcing exhaustion of annual research budgets pushes agencies to fund speculative work for baseline protection.

Aggressive enforcement and complex eligibility turn a safety net into a liability trap.

Customers become trapped in a product due to switching costs or network effects.

Underestimating the probability of bad outcomes — especially to us.

A behavioral relaxation of Nash: players choose better strategies more often, but not always — errors are smooth, not binary.

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

Earned authority from publishing original frameworks that other operators adopt as their own.

Asymmetric information attracts the worst counterparties.

Relying on examples that come to mind easily, not on actual frequency.

The threat of retaliation suppresses legitimate speech or action.

Imagining what could have happened instead of what did.

Urgent vs. important; act, schedule, delegate, delete.

Specialized training on domain data.

Celebrating overwork normalizes burnout and crowds out rest, family, and craft.