Larsonist

I use Claude across three surfaces — the command line, the chat app, and an Excel add-in — and over time I'd accumulated a tangle of instruction files, each quietly drifting in its own direction. So I finally did the consolidation pass I'd been putting off: I pulled everything down to three master instruction documents, one per surface. Each keeps only the general operating principles — verify before claiming something's done, don't fabricate, don't quietly expand scope, correct me when I'm wrong — and leaves the project-specific stuff where it belongs. What surprised me was how much of the value was in subtraction . The lines that actually change Claude's behavior are short, concrete, and few; the rest is noise that makes the important rules easier to miss. Below are the three files, cleaned up and stripped of anything personal. Click any one to expand it, then copy the text straight into its home. Steal them, fork them, ignore the parts you disagree wi...

Political Economy Primer Note: The PDF document currently covers Parts I through IV of the primer, which span the schools of thought, historical genealogy, political spectrum placement, and cross-school comparisons. The remaining sections are still in progress and will be posted as they're completed. I've been working on this primer for the past several months. The goal from the start was to put together something I wished had existed when I first started studying economics: a single document that takes every major school of economic thought seriously on its own terms, rather than picking a winner upfront. Whether you're already familiar with some of these traditions or coming in fresh, I hope it gives you a useful framework for evaluating the economic arguments you encounter every day. The primer covers 11 schools of thought, from Classical to modern Mainstream and Heterodox schools. It traces how these traditions developed, where they agree, where they clash, and wh...

Congress Is Aging Too, But It's Not Frozen In my last post , I showed that the presidency has been locked on a single generation since 1993. The birth-year slope flatlined. Is Congress doing the same thing? Partially. Congress is aging, but 535 seats refresh faster than a single office. Members retire, lose primaries, die in office. The two chambers tell very different stories, though. The House has stabilized. The Senate hasn't. Median Age Over Time The House held remarkably steady from 1927 through the early 1980s, median age bobbing between 51 and 55 for over five decades. Then it dipped to a low of 49.7 in 1985 as a wave of younger members entered after the post-Watergate and Reagan-era elections. From that floor, it climbed steadily to about 59 by 2011, then plateaued. The ascent wasn't one dramatic election. It was a grinding ramp from roughly 1997 to 2007, gaining about a year of median age every two calendar years. The Senate has a wilder story. It...

The US Presidency Has Been Frozen on One Generation Since 1993 Plot every US president by birth year against the year they took office and you should get a staircase that keeps climbing. For two centuries it does. After 1993, it goes flat. 1856–61 born / 1901–21 in office 1882–87 / 1933–53 1908–13 / 1963–89 1942–47 / 1993–2029 Step chart of US presidential birth year vs calendar year, with cluster bands and a four-segment piecewise linear fit. The piecewise linear fit (with breakpoints chosen by minimizing residual error) carves the data into four eras: 1789–1901, slope 1.09. Brisk generational turnover. Each calendar year nudges the incumbent's birth year by slightly more than a year. 1901–1961, slope 0.69. Progressive era through Eisenhower. Real drag, partly from FDR's twelve years but broader than him alone. 1961–1993, slope 0.29. Post-Eisenhower stagnation. The 1908–1913 ...