Systems Thinking About Thinking Systems
Welcome to “COGSware”—software that looks like SaaS but behaves economically like manufacturing. AI has reintroduced the COGS reality that software escaped for twenty years. Every time your app calls an AI model, every automated task, every smart recommendation—it all costs money that scales with usage, just like manufacturing physical products.
This is a living document that will expand as new policy analyses are published
Economics claims to be a scientific discipline that discovers universal laws governing human behavior and market dynamics. This claim is demonstrably false.
This essay reveals how accounting rules systematically block wealth-building for middle-class families while concentrating profits in wealthy pockets. When businesses depreciate equipment, they get tax benefits, but when your smartphone or car loses value through planned obsolescence, you get no protection—forcing you to spend on replacements that generate corporate profits rather than help you build wealth. The essay exposes this $30 trillion asymmetry, then proposes solutions including a Working Family Depreciation Tax Credit and Right to Repair legislation. Rather than pursuing anti-capitalist ideology while authoritarians reshape America, these practical progressive reforms demonstrate how to build better capitalism that expands wealth-building opportunities across society.
This document is your decoder ring for mainstream economics. It reveals 31 hidden assumptions and claims that economists and politicians use to make helpful policies seem impossible. Once you understand how this coded language works, you’ll never be fooled by economic arguments designed to limit what seems possible.
The Analytical Blind Spot: Missing the Religious Framework Trump is a lifelong liar, manipulator and exploiter. This is well-documented by both his opposition and supporters—there’s no mystery here. Yet analysts, including Jay Kuo, keep writing narratives like: “Trump has repeatedly pitched himself as a peace candidate during his political career,” followed by surprise: “But if…
Originally posted to my LinkedIn newsletter Monday AI. A Shift in Medium, A Shift in Mind In the past, people wrote books. Now people post on social media. In the future, they’ll release agents. This fundamental transformation signals a paradigm shift in how human knowledge gets created, shared, and experienced. We’re moving from an era of static content consumption to one…
The retreat from federal power is exactly what corporate interests want—here’s how to fight back with systems that actually work Cross-posted to Substack What I Really Think About Community Wealth, Social Enterprise, and Wellbeing Economies I think community wealth building, social enterprise, and wellbeing economies represent some of the most important innovations happening in America…
Everything you think you know about the national debt is probably wrong. Here’s what’s really happening. Today is June 14, 2025, the day when No Kings protests are taking place across the U.S. I thought it would be nice to rework this old post from my blog chevan.info Calling out my own biases: Before I start, let me be…
How a 1990s text file reveals what we’re losing—and need to rebuild—in the age of AI agents In the mid-1990s, as the web rapidly expanded, website administrators faced a growing problem: bots. These were simple scripts written to crawl pages and index them for search engines. Harmless enough—until the traffic became overwhelming. Some bots would…