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POSIWID

Hold my (Stafford) Beer

The Molecule, Day Three: Combustion and Exhaust

There’s a narrow window in Portland traffic where you get an unimpeded straight shot through I-84 into downtown, and I missed that aperture this morning, getting carried along a viscous stream of cars across the Morrison Bridge, down Naito Parkway, and into the $17 a day garage where optimism

The Molecule, Day One: Intake

The molecule arrives at 6:45 AM, having paid its entrance fee. Twenty dollars to Uber to avoid the bus, though public transit will claim its due eventually. The courthouse doors remain locked until 7:30. No explanation was offered. The institution kept its own hours. A coffee shop nearby

The Hammer and the Nails: What POSIWID Misses

The Limitations of Systems Analysis Introduction: The Appeal of Clear Answers There's something deeply satisfying about the POSIWID framework—"the purpose of a system is what it does." It cuts through mission statements, good intentions, and complexity to offer stark clarity: forget what they say they&

Long COVID and the Patterns of Normalization

A Look Through the POSIWID (Purpose Of a System Is What It Does) Lens Before anyone reaches for the "fake science!" or "old news!" pitchforks and torches, it's worth mentioning that we're only taking a look across public health data, systems analysis,

The Infrastructure Hypothesis, Part II

Leakage and the Work of Brokers What the Hypothesis Misses The first movement proposed that our information infrastructure is fractured in ways that prevent crisis analysis from converting to action. But this hypothesis contains a silent assumption: that the incompatibility is total. It isn't. Sometimes ideas do cross

The Infrastructure Hypothesis

Examining Why Nothing Changes We notice something missing from the articles we read about crises: calls to action. Not just absent—systematically absent. The diagnosis is intricate, the stakes presented as existential, the moral clarity apparent. Then nothing. The reader closes the tab, scrolls to the next story, and continues.

The Great AI Triple-Talk

When Everyone's an Expert and Nobody Knows Anything Artificial intelligence is either transforming everything, about to collapse in a spectacular bubble, or desperately needs better change management. Depending on which expert you ask, AI is simultaneously the solution to enterprise productivity, a massive speculative delusion, and a workflow

The Happiness Trap: How Institutions Weaponize Wellbeing

"If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands." Finland has topped the World Happiness Report for eight consecutive years. This statistical triumph feels increasingly surreal when you learn that roughly half a million Finns—nearly 10% of the adult population—are trapped in a

The Bubble, the Breakfast, and the Billionaires

Ted Gioia made his AI bubble essay free to all readers this week, and the timing feels almost cinematic. Markets have been on a jittery seesaw, NVIDIA's chart looks less like a rocket and more like a stalled elevator, and even Sam Altman is whispering "bubble"

The Careful Curation of Crisis

When Documentation Becomes Performance There's an almost therapeutic quality to Heather Cox Richardson's latest dispatch—the way it transforms a bewildering array of governmental chaos into a coherent story of democratic erosion. National Guard troops spreading mulch, mass firings at health agencies, data breaches, budget freezes: