A compact, interactive look at connections that are rarely set side by side: what a company decides from the inside, what acts on it from outside, the patterns we use to read time, money and each other, and what body and mind need. Thirteen chapters in four fields, independent of each other and readable in any order.
Recognising how things hang together is one of the more rewarding exercises of our time, and not only in economics. A rate decision in Washington, a blocked strait, a company's fixed-cost ratio, the return of a crisis generation, and the way two people move toward each other or step back, each follow rules of their own. All of them only become visible once they are drawn. This collection gathers such lines as tools rather than as texts, because interactions are easiest to grasp when you can pull, push and play them through.
The aim is orientation, not completeness. Every chapter is a deliberately compact section of a field where far more could be said. Where something is well documented the source sits underneath it; where an interpretation begins, that is stated, and the counter-argument is left standing. The difference between a measured figure, an estimate and a model is marked on every page.
What is decided inside.
Why a twenty percent drop in sales can eat the entire profit, and what decides that.
Price & balance→Who earns from a sold product, in what order, and how thin the layer at the bottom is.
Leadership→Why first-rate people hire first-rate people and second-rate people hire third-rate people: the saying, its arithmetic through a hierarchy, the measured mechanisms, ten signs and six rules.
What acts on it from outside.
What a Central European company hangs on without noticing: energy, interest rates, tariffs, currencies.
Work & taxes→What an hour of work really costs in Austria, how much of it arrives, and how that compares.
Interest rates→What interest costs and what prices, rents and loans say about the housing market: four calculators for saving, loans, buying and buying or renting, the rates and prices of recent years with sources, and a barometer that describes the situation without giving a recommendation.
Construction costs→What building has cost in Austria, Slovakia, Germany and the EU since 2018 and how wages and materials have become more expensive: indices, the price shock of 2021 and 2022, individual trades, a calculator that converts an amount from year to year, and a check of which statements of a construction-cost page hold up. Every figure with source, date and evidence level.
How we read time and ourselves, and how well that holds.
A theory says history runs in eighty-year circles. Here it is drawn, and then checked.
Birth chart→A natal chart, computed correctly, read in full, and then honestly checked.
Attachment→How people move toward each other and away again, in four patterns, one loop and a popular model that is marked as a model.
Knowing→Knowledge sets you free, but it takes away not knowing: the two sentences behind it, a sum that says when knowing pays, what people choose when they may choose not to know, what childlike curiosity can do, how the panopticon rules through not knowing, and what knowing costs.
Black swan→Events nobody expected and everybody explains afterwards: where the term comes from, which events in history deserve it and for whom, the case of 9/11 with the warnings, the polls and the documented staged events, the mathematics of fat tails, a test and what can be done.
What body and mind need, and what is only promised.