Author: Sam Allcock
When people first hear it, there’s a detail that usually stops them in the middle of a conversation. When traveling at 28,000 kilometers per hour, a piece of orbital debris the size of a marble—something you could lose in a couch cushion—carries about the kinetic energy of a hand grenade. There are currently a lot of those marbles in Low Earth Orbit. Actually, hundreds of thousands of them. And in the center of that field are the satellites that track climate patterns, route your phone calls, and guide your GPS. Although the issue of space debris has been growing for…
There is a time when strolling through Monterrey’s or Pesqueria’s industrial corridors begins to feel less like Mexico and more like a glimpse of something completely different. The skyline is dominated by cranes. A few years ago, the land was empty, but now steel frames are rising from it. Freshly poured concrete slabs are moved between by workers wearing hard hats. The Mexican peso has been steadily strengthening behind all of this physical momentum, subtly but clearly. This is not how it was supposed to go. The peso was the quintessential example of a high-risk, high-reward currency for the majority…
A certain type of wealth is created covertly through procurement contracts, defense appropriations bills, and Senate committee votes that most people never pay attention to, rather than through IPO hoopla or product launches. That is the type of wealth that is currently building up in the aerospace corridors of Los Angeles, Huntsville, and suburban Virginia, as well as in the corridors connecting Washington. It’s also accelerating more quickly than most observers have noticed. It’s difficult to ignore the background. What some defense economists refer to as a generational rearming is currently taking place in the United States. Major defense companies’…
If you look for a short-term rental in Manhattan today, the map on Airbnb’s website is almost embarrassingly sparse. There were thousands of pins in every neighborhood, from Tribeca to Harlem, a few years ago. The map now appears to be from a different city, one that is quieter, more regulated, and unquestionably less profitable. It’s not a coincidence. It is the outcome of one of the most successful regulatory campaigns against a tech platform that any city has ever carried out. Airbnb was not officially prohibited when New York’s Local Law 18 went into full effect in September 2023.…
When you watch footage from the Pacific Ocean’s bottom, an odd thing happens. Transparent worms, spectral corals, and sea cucumbers floating like abandoned artifacts are among the creatures that appear to be from a different planet. It is completely dark. It’s crushing pressure. Millions of potato-sized metal lumps that have been silently forming for tens of millions of years are dispersed throughout the seafloor in what resembles a pebble driveway. One of the more intricate resource disputes of our day revolves around those lumps. The Metals Company, a company that claims to be at the forefront of this industry, recently…
Within hours of the tickets going on sale, the arena in Allentown, Pennsylvania was completely sold out when Elton John took the stage in September 2018. It should have been clear from that detail alone what was about to happen. However, it’s unlikely that even the most optimistic forecasts at the time mentioned “nearly a billion dollars.” The Farewell Yellow Brick Road Tour attracted 6.1 million fans from North America, Europe, and Oceania and made $939.1 million from 330 shows by the time the curtain fell in Stockholm on July 8, 2023. It became the first tour in history to…
Watching one of Germany’s most renowned industries lose ground is somewhat unsettling; it wasn’t due to carelessness or ineptitude, but rather to a change that was so gradual that it seemed manageable until it wasn’t. Today, the rows of completed cars waiting in lots outside the Volkswagen headquarters in Wolfsburg feel more like inventory that no one is rushing to claim than a symbol of industrial might. Something has evolved. It is impossible to ignore the numbers. Volkswagen saw a 36.6% year-over-year decline in sales in China during the second quarter of 2026. During that time, Mercedes-Benz and BMW both…
Observing a nation devalue its currency four times in less than ten years and still not be out of the woods is unsettling. That’s precisely what Egypt has been doing. Before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Egyptian pound was trading at about fifteen to the dollar; since then, it has fallen to almost fifty-one. It’s not a correction. It’s unraveling slowly. The most recent part of this tale occurred in March 2024, when the Egyptian Central Bank promised to move toward a market-determined exchange rate while allowing the pound to drop precipitously, by almost 40% in a single day.…
A certain type of frustration develops gradually. It doesn’t reveal itself in a single negative instance. Stream by stream, policy update by policy update, it builds up until an independent musician in a home studio in Memphis, Manchester, or Manila discovers that the platform on which they built their fan base has subtly changed the ground beneath their feet. From the inside, that’s how the Spotify royalty model change feels. In an attempt to reroute funds from scammers and bot farms to “real” artists, Spotify announced a number of changes to its royalty payment distribution system in late 2023. The…
Approximately 72% of the world’s platinum is produced in South Africa. When planning an investment or purchasing a car, most people don’t consider that. However, that figure is crucial inside the nation’s mining belt, where electricity powers hoisting, ventilation, and pumping machinery in deep shafts hundreds of meters below the surface. Additionally, the electricity has been unreliable for years. The grid failure in South Africa is not a tale of abrupt collapse. The slow unraveling began long before most commodity analysts or investors became aware of it. Eskom’s own analysts predicted in 1998 that if nothing was done, the nation’s…