🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 227
March 26th, 2026
Episode 227 — March 26th, 2026 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/227
Contributors to this issue: Justin Quimby, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Ben Mathes, Jon Lebensold, Ade Oshineye, Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, MK
Additional insights from: Dart Lindsley, Jasen Robillard, Lisie Lillianfeld, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Stefano Mazzocchi, Wesley Beary, and the rest of the FLUX Collective
We’re a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns we’ve noticed in recent weeks.
“There are two ways of constructing [any system]: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.”
📝 Editor’s note: When we started this newsletter (in another form) almost exactly six years ago, we were talking about supply chain breakages and the knock-on effects of an unexpected geopolitical event. Six years later, it’s much the same. Systems thinking stays useful!
📣 Triangular inkblots
We all want to find solutions, right? Not always. In reputation-heavy systems, our survival can depend on gaining broad support. Making the hard tradeoffs to actually solve problems can lose support. In these systems, sometimes the most (personally) effective path forward is to practice the art of saying nothing in a way that sounds good to many different constituents. We find this language in city halls and corporate suites, where the primary goal is to maximize “buy-in.” We call this triangulation slop.
The core tool of triangulation slop is the inkblot statement. The speaker starts with vague prose onto which the listener projects their own desires. A politician might promise “sustainable growth with historical preservation and affordable density.” Although these three goals do not always align, by dodging the hard tradeoff, the politician gets the support of the developers, the preservationists, and the activists all at once. Nothing gets built, but the poll numbers look great (for now).
Triangulation slop is debt. It promises to solve everyone’s problem without solving any of them. The issues are smeared across the future until they turn into a crisis later. “Consensus” becomes a cover for agreeing to a collective dodge so we can end the meeting and go to lunch.
The tell is in the language. When someone promises to “align interests” without naming what those interests are, or to “make things better for everyone” without specifying the cost, then triangulation slop is in the air. As a practical check: can everyone in the room name the same facts—the actual numbers, the real constraints, the concrete tradeoffs? When people cannot agree on the problem, you probably have an inkblot. (Contrast this with a different failure, scissor statements, which force a choice but flatten the possibility of compromise or third-way solutions.)
Not all vague language is cynical. A leader might be genuinely trying to build a broad church—a coalition around shared values that tolerates different views on specifics. When reached sincerely, consensus ensures that the broadest possible range of solutions is considered from multiple viewpoints. But if we go too far, to the point where we maximize buy-in over action, we allow for triangulation slop.
Problem-solving requires negotiation and finding solid common ground. It starts with the hard admission that we can’t have it all. It requires looking at the math and the physical constraints of the world. A real solution might mean the developers earn less profit, the neighbors lose some sunlight, but the city gets 500 new apartments. To get there, the leader then has to sell that specific, slightly painful reality to the crowd. But if they do this, they get buy-in for a real solution, not just conflicting imaginings.
A messy, specific solution that solves most of a problem is better than a “unified vision” that solves nothing but offends no one. One moves the needle. The other dodges responsibility while seeking short-term gain.
🛣️🚩 Signposts
Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.
🚏💊 The Strait of Hormuz closure may endanger American generic drug prescriptions
The US imports nearly half of its generic drugs from India, and experts warn that the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz could lead to shortages of these imports. It may seem surprising, since neither country borders the Persian Gulf, but petrochemicals are a major input to pharmaceutical manufacturing, and India gets 40% of its oil from the Gulf. What’s more, many medicine ingredients travel from China to logistics hubs in Dubai before heading to India. Because generic drugs are a very low-margin product, any increase in input prices could quickly spiral into drug shortages once distributors’ stockpiles run out.
🚏🎈 Helium shortages due to the Strait of Hormuz closure could threaten the AI boom
Semiconductor stocks have been pummeled in recent days, and a major reason is helium. The gas is an essential input for semiconductor manufacturing, and over a third of the world’s commercial helium supply comes from Qatar—leading to fears of supply chain disruptions and shortages if chipmakers run out of the notoriously difficult-to-store gas. Two other inputs, bromine and sulfur, also come from the Gulf and are thus at risk due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. And chipmaking hub Taiwan is at risk of energy shortages because it relies on imports for 97% of its electricity needs. All this is bad news for the AI boom, which requires vast quantities of chips to fill up datacenters (not to mention all the electricity needed to run and cool the computers).
🚏🇵🇰 Pakistan’s solar boom is protecting the country from oil & gas shortages
When prices of liquified natural gas (LNG) spiked at the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Pakistan experienced energy shortages, and millions of Pakistanis were left without power. Looking for an alternative, the country started investing heavily in solar power (which was rapidly becoming cheaper), and the share of the country’s electricity generated by solar power quintupled from 2021 to ‘25. That investment in resilience is paying off as the country experiences yet another petrochemical shortage, this time caused by the war in Iran. Experts say Pakistan’s power sector has been “insulated… from the worst of the energy market disruptions.” LNG now drives just a fifth of Pakistan’s power output, although it still tends to be necessary during evening peaks, meaning the country isn’t out of the woods just yet.
🚏🚢 The US is easing Russian sanctions because Asian countries need Russian oil
Perhaps the only winner of the war in Iran has been Russia: with oil and gas imports from the Persian Gulf effectively cut off, China and Southeast Asian countries are increasingly turning to Russia for their petroleum needs. Asia will import over 3 million tons of oil from Russia this month, more than double last month’s amount. What’s more, the US is temporarily easing sanctions on Russia in an apparent attempt to “stabilize global energy prices”: countries will get a 30-day license to buy Russian petroleum products currently floating at sea. America’s European allies have blasted the move as a “bailout for Russia”: one economist expects that Russia could enjoy $10 billion in additional monthly oil exports, with over half these receipts going straight to the treasury as tax revenue.
🚏🗞️ Polymarket gamblers threatened an Israeli journalist so he’d rewrite his story
A military correspondent for The Times of Israel wrote a piece about a missile strike outside Jerusalem, but started getting strange, threatening calls and emails from anonymous men who asked him to update his story to say that it was a fragment of an intercepted missile that fell to the ground, rather than a bona fide strike. Someone even faked a reply from him in which he ‘said’ he’d change the story, and it started circulating on X. It turns out that people had bet millions of dollars on a Polymarket bet on whether Iran would strike Israel; intercepted missiles wouldn’t count. Thus, his reporting as it stood would’ve made “yes” bettors lose money, but if he’d walked back the story, it would’ve flipped in the “yes” bettors’ favor. This explains some of the scarier threats, like “after you make us lose $900,000, we will invest no less than that to finish you.”
📖⏳ Worth your time
Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.
Rory Johnston on How Oil Could Surge to Over $200 a Barrel (Bloomberg Odd Lots Podcast) — An oil trader explains how nonlinearities and delays in feedback loops could make shuttered oil fields and refineries take a long time to come back online; how the Iran War (being a supply shock) could cause oil prices to skyrocket, in contrast to how they fell during COVID (a demand shock); how the elasticities of price and income explain why wealthy countries are seeing gas price rises while poor countries are seeing outright shortages; and more interesting economic topics.
Systems Thinking Is Brain Rot for Analysts (BlunderCheck) — Argues that systems thinking can give junior analysts (such as quants) unrealistic expectations about how much agency they have; it trains you to spot leverage points and makes you think you can use them, but “awareness does not imply ability to execute” and your nice clean model of the system may be too simplistic to begin with. As much as we like systems thinking around here at FLUX, the author points out some valid blind spots, such as how systems thinking over-emphasizes causal connections when complex adaptive systems are in reality dominated by emergent behaviors, and how practitioners can spend too much effort learning a “cool, cerebral methodology” rather than developing domain-specific knowledge.
The Waning Reign of the Wetland Architect We Barely Know (Hakai Magazine) — A peek into the wetland ecosystem of the humble muskrat which, like the beaver but on a micro scale, terraforms its surroundings; because they prefer to eat from their reed feeding platforms, their discarded mussel shells create “fountains of calcium on the landscape,” indirectly ensuring that their home hemi-marsh remains aquatic rather than drying up.
🔮📬 Postcard from the future
A ‘what if’ piece of speculative fiction about a possible future that could result from the systemic forces changing our world.
// How might college evolve in the era of agentic AI?
// October 2045
// American History lecture at the University of Greater New Hampshire
Thanks, everyone. I hope you’ve enjoyed this semester of American history.
The topic for the second major research paper is this: describe the history of the American middle class from the end of World War 2 to today, 2045.
Among the topics you could touch on are the evolving nature of jobs, the role of federal and state investment, and physical, social, and class mobility. Papers that do not cover the nature of American military conflicts, such as Vietnam, Iraq, Iran, Korea, Taiwan, and Brazil, should dig into other areas in depth.
As usual, I’ll provide agentic instructions along with the material covered so far in class. And to ensure that you have actually learned something about the topic, we’ll have half-hour individual interviews after the class has submitted its papers. You’ll be asked to summarize the key points of your paper, talk about the source material you referenced, and answer questions about your core thesis. We want you to be augmented people using AI to learn and expand your understanding of the world, not simply parroting what the machine spirit tells you.
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