Midweek. The coffee is hot, the markets are restless, and today’s observances invite a moment of reflection before the velocity resumes. This is not a post about urgency. It is about noticing — the sort of quiet observation that belongs with a second cup of coffee (some might say, "WISDOM").
🗂️ National Organize Your Home Day
There is something deeply satisfying about restoring clarity after a season of excess. Drawers, inboxes, and data pipelines all benefit from the same principle: entropy is undefeated unless we intervene. In fintech, as in housekeeping, the smallest neglected corner becomes the largest future problem. A mislabeled folder today becomes a regulatory headache tomorrow. A forgotten configuration becomes a risk surface. Order is not decorative. It is operational.
This is also a good day to review your personal ontology — the mental glossary of terms, acronyms, and half—remembered concepts that accumulate over time. What did that "funny, fuzzy" term mean again? Why did you bookmark that paper? Which definition did you silently assume last quarter that no longer holds? Ontologies drift unless tended. The Tau System helps, but even the best tooling cannot substitute for the discipline of periodic review.
🪁 International Kite Day
Kites remind us that lift requires both tension and freedom. A system too rigid never leaves the ground; a system too loose never returns. The same applies to agentic AI. We want altitude — insight, acceleration, autonomy — but only with a line strong enough to prevent the machine from drifting into the wrong airspace. Governance is the string. Innovation is the sail. Both matter.
🐴 Feast of the Ass (Historical / Medieval)
A medieval celebration honoring the humble donkey may seem an odd addition to the modern calendar, but there is a lesson here as well. The Feast of the Ass recognized the value of the overlooked worker — the creature that carried the load while others took the credit.
Every system, whether a medieval donkey or a 400-ton locomotive, depends on the quiet components no one sees. Like the great steam engines of the early railroads, humble strength is what moves the world — not the glamour, but the grit. In our world, the equivalent is the unglamorous infrastructure: the ontology tables, the schema registries, the validation scripts, and the documentation no one reads until something breaks. BRC has always admired the engineering ethos of the steam era: precision, documentation, and the dignity of work done well.
Things to Contemplate Over Coffee
The metals markets were volatile again overnight. Silver, gold, platinum — all moving with a restless energy that suggests deeper structural tension. When markets behave like this, one wonders which institution will be the first to mis-mark, mis-hedge, or mis-estimate its exposure. When will the first of the big G-SIB banks fail? Not in a sensationalist way, but in the quiet, systemic sense: a liquidity mismatch here, a collateral call there, or a model that assumed yesterday’s volatility regime would persist. These are not predictions. They are contemplations — the sort of questions that belong in a morning coffee post, where the goal is not to alarm but to observe the world as it is, and to notice the patterns forming at the edges.
A Note for This Afternoon
At 3 PM Eastern today, we convene for Agentic AI Liability Triage — a peer review of provenance, mechanism design, and epistemic risk. The London battleground over stablecoins, tokenization, and Near-Real Time Enterprise Risk Management ("NRTERM") is heating up. If you have not validated your TTL metadata, now is the moment.
May your home be orderly, your kite fly high, and your infrastructure remain steadfast.
— Lars
Read Online: www.brcfintech.com/daily/coffee/2026-01-14-coffee-start