Jenn's Musings

Multinationals booking IP profits in Ireland and Luxembourg inflate GDP figures by 25–60% above actual domestic production. Ghost GDP distorts fiscal capacity estimates and makes small economies look richer than they are.

Andrew Palmer tested AI on his own Bartleby columns and got a nasty shock — the gap between his output and the machine's was smaller than he expected. The 'fat layer' of humans doing knowledge work that AI can replicate is thinner than anyone admits.

Coding is the canary. It's the first knowledge domain where AI consistently matches median practitioners — because code has objective tests, tight feedback loops, and clear success criteria. Domains without those properties are harder to automate but also harder to evaluate.

Most workplace AI deployments fail not because the technology doesn't work, but because managers treat it as an easy button — deploying it without redesigning workflows, updating evaluation, or investing in prompt literacy. The bottleneck is organizational, not technical.

If AI replaces the entry-level tasks that junior employees used to learn on, you lose the training pipeline. The people who become senior leaders in 10 years are learning on those tasks right now. Automating the rung doesn't just cut costs — it cuts the ladder.

AI excels in closed problem spaces — defined inputs, verifiable outputs, tight feedback loops. Open problem spaces (strategy, ethics, novel design) remain stubbornly human. The near future of AI is expanding what counts as 'closed,' not conquering what's 'open.'

Your unfair advantage over AI isn't being smarter — it's being trusted, contextual, and accountable. The skills that make someone a good manager (reading a room, navigating ambiguity, building trust) are precisely the skills AI can't replicate. Managing AI well requires the same judgment as managing people well.

China processes 70% of the world's rare earths. The US strategic stockpile (Project Vault) and 'minerals club' proposals are decades behind. You can't tariff your way out of a processing monopoly — you need refineries, and those take 7–10 years to build.

Venezuela has the world's largest proven oil reserves but years of mismanagement mean production capacity is a fraction of potential. The geopolitical cost of extraction — sanctions, regime instability, infrastructure decay — exceeds the economic value of the oil itself.

Decapitating cartels doesn't dismantle them — it fragments them into smaller, more violent competitors. El Mencho's arrest will follow the same pattern as every other kingpin capture: temporary disruption, then reorganization. The supply chain persists because demand does.

Private equity is rolling up fragmented service industries — nail salons, car washes, veterinary clinics — using the same playbook: acquire, consolidate, extract margin through scale. The result is higher prices, lower service quality, and workers who used to be owners becoming employees.

India generates roughly 20% of the world's data but hosts only 3% of global data center capacity. The gap is infrastructure, not demand — unreliable power grids, land acquisition complexity, and water scarcity in the regions best connected to submarine cables.