Why “Threshold Effects”
The name comes from econometrics — a relationship that changes character once a variable crosses a critical value. It is also a fair description of everything this blog will be about.
Gulf Coast: Who the Money Moves Through
BEAD is finally putting fiber in the ground around northwest Florida and south Alabama. Five years of process decided who gets to build — and it wasn't construction capability that decided.
A Fair Fight with SOX 404
Arguing against myself: SOX Section 404 is the strongest counterexample to this series' thesis. The argument survives — but comes out more precise than it went in.
Say Something vs. Build Something
There are rules that require organizations to say something and rules that require them to build something. Only the second kind has a track record of changing what organizations are.
The Dashboard Is Green
Goodhart's Law and Campbell's Law warned us fifty years ago: the metric changes what the organization reports, not what the organization is. We built the dashboards anyway.
What the Broadband Labels Revealed
The FCC's broadband nutrition labels were identical for all 35 ISPs a 2025 study scored. What the mandate produced depended entirely on what each organization already was.
Wanted: The Best Counterexample
The honest version of an argument has to survive its best counterexample. So: what's the strongest case of a rule that actually changed what organizations are?
Three Rules, Same Outcome
AI governance, compliance programs, mandatory disclosure: three domains, three rules, same outcome. The rule changes what organizations are required to do. It rarely changes what they are.
Shadow IT Was the Rehearsal
Shadow IT persisted because unsanctioned tools solved real problems faster than approved ones. AI governance is replaying the same dynamic — in months instead of years.
Paper Trails and Shadow AI
Only 37% of compliance leaders can measure whether their programs work — and half the U.S. workforce is using AI at work without knowing if it's allowed. Why did we think a document was going to govern a behavior?
Cover-Yourself 8-Ks
When the SEC required four-business-day incident disclosure, firms responded with “cover yourself 8-Ks.” Organizations don't respond to regulatory intent — they respond to regulatory incentives.
The Faster-Is-Better Assumption
The assumption behind mandatory breach disclosure timing is that faster equals better. Across 1,054 breach events and three empirical channels, that assumption doesn't hold up well.