Author: Sam Allcock

A man named Robert is boarding a $20,000 cruise that he paid for in full with cash somewhere in suburban Florida. Technically, he is at work as well. Actually, there were two of them. Perhaps three. In between deck changes, he’s responding to emails, sneaking into Zoom calls from a corner of the ship’s business lounge, and turning off his camera just long enough to avoid any awkward questions. Last year, Robert made about $335,000. His employers (plural) don’t know one another. Most people are unaware of how big, quiet, and well-organized the world of overemployed people is. DetailInformationPhenomenon NameOveremployment…

Imagine a hiring manager looking at a screen on a Monday morning in a glass-walled office in Chicago, London, or Singapore. For a mid-level marketing position, she has 412 applications pending. The first one is opened by her. Next, the second. By the fifteenth, a strange, creeping sameness begins to set in, rather than fatigue per se. The language is refined. The formatting is neat. All of the phrases are expertly chosen. Nevertheless, none of these documents seem to have been written by a real person. SubjectApplicant Tracking Systems (ATS) & AI in HiringSectorHuman Resources, Recruitment Technology, Enterprise SoftwareKey statisticOver…

At the age of twelve, Chase Gallagher began mowing lawns in the same quiet, unremarkable manner that most children of that age take on after-school jobs—a little extra cash, something to do on the weekends. He had eighty-two clients by the time he was eighteen. By the time he was twenty-four, his landscaping business, CMG Landscaping, had reported yearly sales of over a million dollars, and he had made slightly less than half a million dollars. He never attended college. He claimed that after looking at the figures, he concluded that stopping his efforts to pay for a degree just…

For many years, the four-day workweek was mainly a thought experiment, something that wellness advocates and economists discussed at conferences and that employees discreetly brought up during performance reviews when they felt brave enough. The trials then began. The data then appeared to be surprisingly good. The UK conducted the biggest experiment in history, Japan’s government officially supported it, and Microsoft reported a 40% increase in productivity in its Tokyo offices following a single month of shorter weeks in 2019. The concept transitioned from aspiration to policy somewhere between the research papers and the Reddit threads. The four-day workweek is…

Imagine a mid-sized financial services company in early 2026 located in Midtown Manhattan. On Tuesdays, the elevator opens to the fourteenth floor at nine in the morning. There are people at half of the desks. The majority of those who aren’t belong to senior individuals, such as directors, vice presidents, and a few managing partners, who have discreetly set up their lives with the belief that no one significant enough to punish them will take notice. The junior analysts, who travel from New Jersey for an hour and fifteen minutes each way, arrive at their designated seats by 8:45 with…

It feels different to stroll through Stanford’s computer science building on a Tuesday afternoon. Compared to three years ago, the hallways are now quieter. There’s a different vibe to the lines outside advisors’ offices; there’s more anxiety, less excitement, and more people holding printouts of course catalogs from departments they never would have thought to look into. There is a change taking place on American college campuses, and it is happening more quickly than most institutions are ready to deal with. AI has already caused one in six college students to switch majors. Almost half have given it some serious…

During a downturn, a certain silence descends upon the cryptocurrency markets. The Telegram groups become fewer in number. The conference panels become increasingly circumspect. And the serious money, the money that doesn’t post about it online, begins to move somewhere between the excitement of an all-time high and the fear of a 50% drawdown. That’s about where Bitcoin is in early 2026, and if history is any indication, this is typically the most significant point. In October 2025, Bitcoin reached a peak close to $126,000. The unwind came next. A roughly 50% drop that is severe enough to undermine retail…

It’s simple to write off cryptocurrency as a world of abstractions: markets with no goods, tokens with no weight, and fortunes based solely on consensus. And that dismissal had some validity for a very long time. However, over the past few years, something new has emerged, complete with rooftop hardware, GPS dashcams, antennas, and GPU racks. If you haven’t been watching, the plot of DePIN has advanced more than you might anticipate. Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks are systems in which actual, physical devices contribute to a shared network and receive cryptocurrency token rewards in exchange. The acronym is a little…

A senior engineering project manager at Apple called in sick on a Friday morning last spring, drove downtown to Austin, and entered a coworking space on the second floor above one of the city’s noisiest areas. He wasn’t there to interview for a job. He wasn’t looking for a place to work. He was there because the Bitcoin Commons, which is tucked away above the intersection of Congress Avenue and Sixth Street, where the boulevard leading to the Texas State Capitol runs directly into Austin’s nightlife sprawl, felt more genuine than anything taking place within the refined campuses he had…

When an underdog begins to win, a certain kind of tension arises. Slowly, methodically, quarter by quarter, until one day the scoreboard looks different and no one can quite recall when it changed, rather than loudly, with press conferences or victory laps. That’s about where Circle and its USDC stablecoin are at the moment, getting closer to a position that Tether has held for almost ten years without much opposition. Tether’s USDT was the default for many years. USDT was used when transferring money between cryptocurrency exchanges, settling a trade at two in the morning in Jakarta or Lagos, or…