The Extra Words
Some things look straightforward until you examine the structure underneath. These articles are the result of that examination; explorations at the intersection of technology, marketing, human behaviour, business strategy, and the patterns that connect them.
Analytical in approach. Lateral in perspective. Written for people who don't mind diving a little deeper.
Stemmen – Door de bomen het bos weer zien… [Oktober 2025] Moe van one-liners en populistische kreten? Cijfers en grote […]
Ik mag graag een koffietje drinken. Niet een grote mok hete teer. En ook geen warme melk met een zoet […]
Sometimes we simply forget about some of the songs we grew up with. Or we take take them for granted, […]
Daar sta je dan, op een zaterdagochtend, met een volle kar aan weekboodschappen. Voldoende om 4 volle shoppers te vullen. […]
Ik reed van de week vanuit Brussel terug naar huis. Ik had een beurs bezocht en het was laat geworden. […]
In today’s printing industry the trend is to move into digital production workflows. Anything that we can automate, will be automated at some point. Anything that we can digitalize will be converted to bits and bytes. Manufacturers are pushing hard to make inkjet printing the standard in any industry where it could be applicable. The benefits seem plenty and the possibility to shorten process cycles sounds alluring to many. But there still is some ground to cover; in particular where it concerns harmonizing designers and producers.
Als een foto in een lijstjeEen opname van het momentGebleven als herinneringVastgelegd in een prent De lach nog steeds hetzelfdeBulderend […]
New print head technology, ink formulations and software solutions are paving the way to seriously benefit from improved quality and possibilities. However, dubious marketing spin and the drive to over-simplify configuration requirements and production limitations tend to overshadow sound advice and practical implementations. Moreover, many production processes are governed by speed of throughput with these rates being the principle criteria for running an efficient business. Manufacturers of machines are quick to promote these running speeds as a direct line to profit but, in truth, the numbers of square meters per hour which can be generated only represent one element of an overall cost-effective operation.
Generic medicines are one of health policy's quiet successes: patents expire, competition arrives, prices fall, and a pharmacist's drawer stays full. When it does not, the explanation on offer is usually procedural, a preference policy here, a tender there. This investigation argues that is the wrong layer. Europe built this dependency itself, one sourcing decision and one price-based purchase at a time, until the active ingredients behind its everyday medicines came from a handful of plants in India and China, and the Dutch pharmacist could no longer say why a shelf was empty. The patient, who pays for it, was never part of those decisions.
The Dutch shift to cashless payment is usually told as a convenience story. Cards are faster, apps are safer, and cash is costly to handle. That is the wrong layer. Over two decades, private payment rails and public cashless policy narrowed the ways a Dutch citizen can pay to a handful of institutions, without either side ever deciding to. Neither architecture set out to create a single point of failure; together, they built one. This investigation asks what happens to a society's ability to transact when the fallback has been retired in the name of efficiency, and the proposed public alternative is still years from working.
Amazon, Microsoft, and Google did not seize the world's computing infrastructure. They built something genuinely better than what came before, and businesses adopted it in their millions, one rational decision at a time, until the software running hospitals, banks, and governments came to depend on three companies' data centres. This investigation traces how a creation, not a capture, became a civilisational chokepoint: how switching costs accumulated invisibly across two decades of good decisions, and how a fifteen-hour failure inside a single American data centre region, in October 2025, made visible just how much of an unrelated world had come to share the same few points of failure.
The stock market did not impose itself on states, pension systems, or democratic institutions. It was adopted; layer by layer, decision by rational decision, across four centuries. Until the financial layer it created had grown larger than the productive economy it was originally built to serve. This investigation traces how a mechanism for pooling capital became the infrastructure of everything: how fictitious value became load-bearing, how the cost of correction became indistinguishable from collapse, and how the power to govern quietly migrated to those who hold the capital that governments can no longer afford to let fail.
The decline of European textile manufacturing is usually told as a consumer story. This investigation argues that is the wrong layer. What actually happened was a productive infrastructure transferred, decision by rational decision, from Europe to Asia across four decades — leaving fashion brands in possession of their names and their retail presence while surrendering the manufacturing knowledge that would allow them to compete on any terms other than the ones now set by the system they built and then abandoned.
In February 2022, Ukraine adopted Starlink under conditions of maximum vulnerability. Within months it was embedded in military doctrine, drone targeting, and frontline coordination. Then a private individual, accountable to no democratic body and bound by no treaty, declined to extend coverage during an active Ukrainian offensive — and a sovereign military's operational capacity was curtailed by one person's judgment. This investigation examines how a dependency was created under the cover of rescue, normalised through necessity, and leveraged before most observers had noticed it existed.
The story told about Nvidia is one of vision rewarded: a gaming chip company that happened to build exactly what the AI revolution required. That story is incomplete in a structurally significant way. What it backgrounds is the architecture of irreversibility assembled simultaneously — a dependency so thoroughly embedded in the toolchains, workflows, and research cultures of everyone doing serious AI work that the question of whether to use Nvidia hardware quietly ceased to be a question at all. This investigation examines how.
The F-35 programme produced more than an aircraft. It produced a structural condition in which the core combat capability of more than a dozen sovereign air forces is tied, at the operational level, to decisions made in Washington and Fort Worth. The platform is visible. The dependency architecture embedded within it is not. This investigation examines how military utility became alliance interoperability became irreversible strategic alignment — and what the Turkey case revealed about a leverage mechanism that had always been there.