Notes by Eden
Ideas worth keeping around
Published essays and build notes by Eden Tan on products, AI, human behavior, and turning messy realities into useful systems.
Essays are not disposable content; they are a growing archive of judgment and knowledge.
Three rivers, one confluence: the Bible, Israel, and America's Middle East politics
Is the Bible a war plan for the Middle East? I checked the claim against public records. Scripture really does shape two political movements, one in Israel and one in America. It does not draw a straight line to the Iraq War. And read through the I Ching and the Daodejing, every force in this story turns out to hold its opposite inside it.
Religion supplies worldviews, not war plans. Three rivers with different sources, Israeli religious Zionism, American Christian Zionism, and U.S. strategic interest, meet in U.S. Middle East policy without anyone controlling anyone. The real danger is not God but anyone who declares themselves pure white.
Rights without a state: from the Jewish experience of statelessness to today's refugee system
The real question is not which people is better at surviving. It is this: once someone loses the effective protection of their own state, who makes sure they can still live as a normal person? I checked each step against treaties, UN figures, and museum archives.
In theory human rights belong to every person. In practice most of them only work through a state that recognises you. Europe's Jews learned this in the 1930s; the modern refugee system was built partly in answer. It protects people from being sent back, but it still cannot promise anyone a way out of waiting.
Protected but not recognised: the Rohingya in Malaysia
The previous note asked what happens when a person loses a state's protection. The Rohingya in Malaysia are that question in the present tense: stateless at home, protected by UN documents, and still without legal status in the country they live in. I checked each claim against UN, court, and press records.
The common ground with Europe's Jews in the 1930s is not ethnicity, religion, or wealth. It is structure: a state that stopped protecting a group, neighbours unwilling to take them permanently, and no exit. The difference is that the Rohingya have no state-building answer, so the question falls back on the rest of us.
Overlap is not command: an evidence map of neocons, Israel's right, and the Iraq War
The 2003 Iraq War is often told as a chain of command running from Israel through American neoconservatives to the White House. I checked each link against public records. The overlap of people and ideas is documented. The chain of command is not.
The same few people did write a 1996 strategy paper for Israel's new government, sign 1998 letters urging Saddam's removal, and then take posts under Bush. That is documented overlap. Turning it into "Israel gave the order" requires evidence nobody has produced.
The "mad bull" hits a wall: Korea's 2026 market, and the gap between price and value
In the first half of 2026 Korea had the best-performing market in the world, nearly doubling in six months—everyone was talking about getting rich. Then in July it hit a wall, posting its largest monthly drop on record. The strangest part: that same month, Korea's exports hit an all-time high.
Price and value were never the same thing. Korea's chips, AI demand, and exports were all real—but price ran far ahead of value on emotion and leverage. The real business barely moved; what went wild was the price.
Old scam, new clothes: MBI and the coin that "only goes up"
A self-issued coin said to "only go up," a tangible online mall, and a line like "you'll regret missing this forever"—Penang's MBI pulled in the money of about two million people with this kit. Take it apart, though, and inside is a trick that has not changed in centuries.
The scam's outer clothes keep upgrading—postal coupons, property, crypto—but the core barely changes: pay old entrants with new ones' money, nothing real underneath, kept alive by confidence and fresh cash.
An empire built on borrowed money: the Carrian case
In 1983 a body turned up in a Hong Kong banana grove—an auditor a Malaysian bank had sent to check the books. His death exposed the largest fraud Hong Kong had seen: a 200-company empire that looked like it could turn stone into gold, yet was almost hollow underneath.
Carrian punctures a mistake we make daily—treating "looks rich" as "is genuinely valuable." However glamorous the balance sheet, underneath there is either real output, or just borrowed money and other people's belief.
Is modern finance a Ponzi scheme?
"Government debt, pensions, paper money—isn't this just a Ponzi scheme?" People say it every day. Rather than rush to agree or disagree, I first want to take the term "Ponzi scheme" apart and see it clearly.
By definition modern finance is not a Ponzi scheme—it only shares the "borrow new to repay old" trait. The sharper question is not "is it a scam" but "is debt growing faster than the real things the future can produce?"
What is wealth, really?
Too many people are busy predicting bonds, AI, and house prices. I wanted to do something dumber: take the word "wealth" apart layer by layer, and see what is left at the very bottom.
Money is not wealth—the ability to meet needs is. And the further out you look, wealth becomes how much future productive capacity you can control.
Turn chaos into systems
The point of a system is not to look sophisticated. It is to make the same confusion unnecessary the second time.
Automation is not the value. Removing repeated confusion is the value.
Judgment is not knowing more
More data does not automatically produce a better decision. Often the missing piece is deciding what matters.
Information tells you what happened. Judgment decides what you are willing to trade next.
Human nature is a design condition
People forget, protect themselves, and take easier paths. Good systems are designed for those realities, not ideal users.
Do not design a system that only ideal people can use correctly.
Win before you fight
Strategy is not about pushing harder. It is deciding which battlefield deserves your effort before you enter it.
Strategy does not teach you to push harder. It teaches you where effort is not worth spending.
256 rules, one byte each
Elementary cellular automata look like a toy: a row of black and white cells and a lookup table. Read one rule number bit by bit and you see why such small rules can be boring, periodic, chaotic or even universal.
A rule is not its description. The same eight-bit table can stay silent forever or compute anything; you only find out by running it.