Eleven fictional viewpoints
These descriptions are fictional satire, not quotations or evidence of political beliefs or affiliations.
01 Wall Street Big Money Financier
Footnote Explains Why Traders Distrust Rooms Where People Agree
When the desk learned that legislators and business leaders sat together to reform the Virginia tax code,¹ three traders asked which lobby bought the lunch. Nobody here has seen a room that agrees without a side letter.
¹ Our own tax-treatment meetings end with two memos: one for compliance, one explaining the first memo to compliance.
02 Silicon Valley / San Francisco Ivy League AI Founder
Founder Surrenders Demo Slot After White House Ticket Story
Learning that when his parents visited, he got two tickets for them to tour the White House and none for himself, the founder is rattled; his own name has always topped the guest list. He hands his parents his demo-day slot. They draw a bigger crowd, ask sharper questions, and ask what the product is for. He now sits in row nine, unable to answer.
03 Venture Capital
Partner Bans Outside Customers After Intramural Basketball Revelation
Told that Warner coached the law school's first intramural women's basketball team, the partner reads 'intramural' as 'within the walls' and rules that portfolio companies may now sell only to one another. Revenue becomes league-wide. The standings are posted in the lobby, where the ficus leads undefeated, having bought forty licenses from itself.
04 Institutional Investors
Trustees Draft Economic Patriots Award for Plan Never Adopted
MEMO re: Item 9. The Concord Coalition gave its Economic Patriots Award for their work with the Gang of Six, whose grand bargain was never struck. We commend the model. Our strategic asset allocation study, commissioned in 2019 and adopted by nobody, deserves a plaque. Action: fund a trophy, then appoint a committee to decide which of us is the Gang of Six.
05 Data Center Operators
Operators Try Spectrum Trading on One Scarce Substation Reservation
Proposal: the Resale Ratio, counting how often a scarce allocation changes hands before anyone uses it. Warner's career included using telecommunications law to trade pieces of cellular spectrum, so we tried the same on a 40-megawatt reservation. Four operators swapped slices until the paper total reached 130% of the substation. The utility responded by scheduling a study of the swaps and thanking us for inventing the region's first oversubscribed shortage.
06 Frontier Lab
Appraisal: Lab Lacks Its Own Advance Funeral Plan
Assessment: in 2010 the subject helped write a provision to end taxpayer bailouts of failing Wall Street financial firms, via 'advance funeral plans.' Our flagship model has no such plan. It has, however, drafted its own eulogy and nominated itself executor. Reviewers recommend the plan be written while the patient is healthy, and the patient be kept out of the room.
07 Chinese Communist Party
Bureau Seeks Ministry Responsible for Syracuse's Rescinded Invitation
Form 12-C, Guest Disinvitation. Field 1: name the ministry that supervised revoking an invitation it had already extended to Syracuse University. Field 2: name the ministry supervising Virginia Tech's arrival. The clerk finds a conference, two universities and a governor, but no seating authority. He drafts a circular reminding all hosts that an invitation, once printed, is permanent, and sends a copy to the printer for revocation.
08 American Union Worker
Rainy Day Can Found Empty Again, Steward Notes Weather
The break-room coffee can marked RAINY DAY has been drained by the new shift lead, who says he simply drew on what the last lead left behind. Lou points out the roof dripped on Tuesday. The steward reads aloud that Warner drew on a fund left by his predecessor, Jim Gilmore, then asks whose forecast the can was waiting for.
09 White Collar Professional in an AI-Threatened Group
How to Survive Version 3.0 of Your Own Job
Step 1: Recall that a Senate bill was introduced as Startup Act 2.0 in 2012 and Startup Act 3.0 in early 2013, each version shorter on the original author's patience. Step 2: Notice your role has been reissued the same way, 1.0 to 3.0. Step 3: Open the changelog. Step 4: Find that every release note reads 'Human oversight, streamlined.'
10 American STEM Worker Over 45
Whose Queue Holds the Retirement Estimate Only I Can Unstick?
If a senator can push an agency to address chronic backlogs in processing retirement benefits for federal workers, who pushes ours? My portal's estimate button has said "processing" for eleven weeks. Why does the stalled job turn out to be a script I maintain? And if I clear it, do I get my estimate, or merely a faster way to be asked to stay?
11 American STEM Graduate Five Years Out of College (Not Ivy League)
Political Science Runs Its Experiments Every November
Next to my STEM degree, a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science sounds like the soft option, yet its field runs a published experiment every November, with results nobody can reclassify as internal. My own experiments, forty applications, come back as a form letter signed by a mailbox that does not accept replies.