Proper Tools
Hard Problems Made Legible
Independent advisory practice on systemic infrastructure risk and long-horizon failure modes.

Proper Tools Field Notes

Essays on systemic risk, continuity, and long-horizon challenges.

New Field Notes arrive occasionally — typically every three to six weeks, never rushed. Subscribe by email below, or subscribe via RSS for a full-text feed in any reader.

A note on the infrastructure. This site is maintained as static HTML — no moving parts, no dependencies, no database to corrupt. The email subscription form is the exception: it connects to a self-hosted Listmonk instance running on herald.propertools.be, delivering via Postmark. We migrated to this setup from Buttondown after persistent delivery issues. It works well, but it has moving parts, and I maintain it without paid staff. If the form misbehaves, you have two fallbacks: the RSS feed above (which has no moving parts whatsoever), or you can email hello@propertools.be to report the breakage — I will subscribe you manually and go debug it.

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