Founder Archive

In 1760, two Philadelphia underwriters refused to pay an insurance claim. It took five years and an appeal to London to settle it. The claimant was John Brown of Providence, with his late uncle Obadiah. Their ship had sailed, they said, to exchange prisoners of war with the French, under an official flag of truce. A British privateer captured it and found molasses and sugar bought from the French at Saint Domingue. The underwriters, David and William McMurterie, had covered only a small part of the risk. £100, for a premium of £23. They argued the capture was "not a Loss within the Meaning of the Policy," because the voyage had been "illicit and contraband Trade." The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania held they had to pay. The McMurteries appealed all the way to the Privy Council in London. On July 16, 1765, it upheld the decision. Hannah Farber tells this story in her work on early American insurance, and her conclusion is pointed. Insurance gave merchants "a framework for sidestepping questions of legality altogether." The underwriters wrote the policy. The court held them to the words they wrote.

On November 3, three Texas school districts ask voters for over $3 billion. Most of it is for buildings they already have. Cypress-Fairbanks ISD is asking for $1.636 billion, and $1.299 billion of that is a single proposition for critical infrastructure and safety. Northside ISD in San Antonio is asking for $886.2 million, including $764.7 million for renovations, roofs, HVAC replacements, safety upgrades and buses. San Antonio ISD is asking for $600 million, with new chillers and capital system replacements on the list. Roofs, chillers and HVAC. These are the systems I see fail most often in school construction claims, and the ones most often installed wrong in the first place. A bond election decides whether the money gets spent. It does not decide whether the work gets done right. If these pass, the districts that protect the investment will be the ones that treat quality as a line item. Independent inspection during construction. A quality audit before the warranty periods run out. A record of who installed what. Taxpayers are being asked to pay once. The job is to make sure they do not have to pay twice.

Thousands of AI chips can change their power draw in the same instant. They do it hundreds to thousands of times a day. The electric grid was never designed for a customer like that. When a large AI model is being trained, the chips work in lockstep. They draw hard, pause while the results are exchanged, then draw hard again. In the words of one July announcement, "many thousands of GPUs ramp up and down in synchronized bursts." A neighborhood does not behave that way. Ten thousand air conditioners do not switch on in the same second and off again a moment later. That July announcement came from Crusoe and ON.energy. They plan to install 5 gigawatts of specialized battery-backed power equipment across several hyperscale campuses, with commissioning starting this year and running into 2027. Its job is to absorb the swings on site so the grid sees a steadier customer. In Texas, the system was validated against ERCOT's large-load interconnection requirements and its ride-through protocols, the rules for how a big load has to behave when the grid wobbles. Under Senate Bill 6, passed in 2025, large new loads in Texas must be equipped so ERCOT can curtail them in an emergency. Every structure I have litigated was designed around an assumption about the load it would carry. When the load changes character, the design has to change with it. AI changed the character of electrical load. The industry is now building the equipment to catch up.