When I was young, I worked in carpentry during the summers. Summer was busy. New buildings had to go up. Stables needed repairs. Barns needed extensions. Sheds had to be built out in the fields. Demand was high. Our bottleneck was capacity. We had one saw, and one person could run it at a time. Yes, we could extend the […]
A few years ago, my father decided to build a house in the village. On the surface, it was easy to like the idea. A quiet place. A porch. A garden. Somewhere to disappear for a while. Perhaps, a retirement home one day. My sisters and I got excited quickly. We talked about how the house should look, what each […]
Torres del Paine was easily one of the hardest and most rewarding hiking trips I have ever done. From the outside, it looks like one of those perfect dream adventures. Jagged towers, blue lakes, glaciers, open valleys, dramatic Patagonia weather. All of that is true. But what does not fully come across in the photos is how serious the commitment […]
I still think about one migration project where everything was green until the final month. We did not have the luxury of extending the deadline. This was tied to external regulation and compliance, so missing the date was not really an option. We had to make it. Up until that point, the project had been reported as green. Then, almost […]
In early modern France, the monarchy kept running into the same problem. Wars were expensive, revenue was not steady, and every obvious solution came with a political price. New taxes were politically explosive. Borrowing was finite. So the crown found an interesting idea to fund its endeavors. It sold offices, judicial positions, and administrative posts. People with money, mostly nobles, […]