Blog

Long-form essays at the intersection of financial markets, systems thinking, and whatever else catches my eye. Updated occasionally (or barely).

• The Argument I Never Tested

  27 September 2026

  The Regime Radar page gave three reasons not to use a hidden Markov model, and nobody had checked them, including me. Tested on IHSG, the argument mostly fails for the simple two-state model and only comes back when you ask the model for three regimes.

• One Crisis Deep

  26 September 2026

  I pre-registered a test of the 200-day trend rule on IHSG and the S&P 500 before looking at the answer. The rule’s promised protection in bad months rests almost entirely on one episode, 2008, which is roughly what you should expect when you test a claim about rare events with twenty years of data. The volatility label, meanwhile, works everywhere.

• The Agency Problem

  30 April 2026

  An essay about the courage to feel discomfort: why weak men act as a pollutant on the systems around them, and why that is only partly their fault.

• Against 'All'

  17 April 2026

  The world has too many loser men and too many crazy women, but the louder lesson is that absolutist slogans erase the precision we need to actually fix anything. An essay about virtue signalling, motte-and-bailey, the kafka-trap version of gender discourse, and why the smallest, hardest place to start fixing things is your own group chat.

• Doing the Calculus on Peace

  4 April 2025

  An attempt to settle Israel-Palestine by elimination: treat the ethno-state and the two-state solution as systems, find where each one breaks, and see what survives. What survives is one democratic secular state.

• Like a Deep-Fried Stock

  23 December 2023

  The modern romance market is broken because perceived value on both sides has drifted away from intrinsic value, and the men who subsidize the market unconditionally have erased every feedback loop that could correct it. The Lindy fix is the old principle of kafa’ah: match on epistemology, values, trajectory, and emotional capacity, and stop chasing whoever sits highest.

• Smokers Are Cowards

  18 December 2023

  Smoking isn’t really a personal health choice. It pushes harm onto people who never agreed to it (kids included), drains the public health system, and reveals an unwillingness to do the structural work Indonesia actually needs.

• Noble Goals, Broken Vessels

  8 November 2023

  What I think about communism, the future of libertarianism, and what the world is about to look like.

• We Should Probably Stop Watching Porn. I Think.

  22 November 2022

  What porn costs you, the people who make it, and the culture, and why I don’t think the accounting adds up.

• Diego: Manusia Akhir Zaman dan Nubuat Masa Depan

  8 December 2021

  Pedagogi Tata Cara Hidup, bagaimana Diego memilih untuk tetap ’tinggal’ di ‘Society’ yang sudah ‘mati’.

• The Machine

  23 September 2020

  How I think the world works. It’s just math and biology.

• Titik Tepi: Keniscayaan Distopian

  3 August 2020

  Di Jakarta tahun 2031, seorang analis keuangan bernama Diego menyabotase pembaruan CBDC pemerintah yang dirancang memotong 40% UBI bagi warga tidak efisien dengan menyiarkan worm kriptografis dari menara transmisi tua, lari dan memanjat tebing mengejar drone pembunuh, namun kemenangannya terasa hampa, karena ia tahu ancaman yang jauh lebih besar dari oligarki sedang mendekat: AI takeoff, enam atau tujuh tahun lagi.

• The Shield That Became a Sword

  30 June 2019

  Religion may be the most elegant coordination technology humans ever built, and its most dangerous feature is also its most portable one: turning divisible goods into sacred values that nobody is allowed to trade. Secular ideologies do it too.