My Ethics Statement

“There’s an evolutionary imperative why we give a crap about our family and friends. And there’s an evolutionary imperative why we don’t give a crap about anybody else. If we loved all people indiscriminately, we couldn’t function.” House, M.D. (2015)

There’s something uncomfortably honest in that quote. A blunt acknowledgment that empathy, like energy, has limits. But perhaps that’s where ethics begins: not in perfection, but in awareness. To ask what is good or bad is really to ask, what do we choose to value when no one forces us to? Because ethics, like freedom, collapses when it is imposed.

The Greeks were the first to formalize that tension between instinct and thought. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics teaches that virtue is cultivated through repetition not decreed, but chosen. He distinguished between extrinsic and intrinsic value: what is good for its function, and what is good in itself. Wealth, medicine, and law serve ends; love, beauty, and knowledge simply exist. Even then, virtue was never about obedience. It was about alignment, the harmony between reason and desire freely attained.

Two thousand three hundred years later, we still orbit the same questions. Kant attempted to standardize morality through the categorical imperative, a rule meant to guide all action. Yet for me, its weakness is precisely its certainty. Freedom cannot be formulaic. To act rightly only because one must is to remove the very choice that gives virtue meaning. A good action done without freedom is an empty gesture; it satisfies form, not conscience.

My father, a philosopher by both nature and discipline, says that the truest ethics are the ones that can survive in isolation when no one is watching, and there is no reward. I think of him when I read Plato and Socrates, those masters of the examined life. Their dialogues weren’t rules; they were rooms of thought. And maybe that’s what freedom really is the ability to stay in that room long enough to find your own answer, even if it contradicts the crowd.

Environmental ethics, too, needs this kind of freedom from the anthropocentric story that everything exists to serve us. We call it ecocentrism now, but it’s really a return to humility. What if the planet’s worth is not derived from its utility but from its being? What if “good” is not obedience to human need but alignment with balance itself?

As we step deeper into the Fourth Industrial Revolution, this age where algorithms predict even our impulses I can’t help but wonder whether we’ve traded moral choice for mechanical convenience. Economics, once the study of human behavior, risks becoming the study of its automation. Yet the most valuable things still resist quantification: air, time, trust. Freedom itself has no price, only cost.

That paradox is what draws me to the intersection of ethics and economics. Can the intrinsic worth of the planet be reconciled with the extrinsic systems that govern it? I look to three thinkers for conversation, not instruction.

• E.F. Schumacher, in Small Is Beautiful (2010), insists that sanity lies in scale, that the closer a system is to human size, the more moral it becomes.
  
  

• Thomas Piketty, in Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014), shows how inequality multiplies when returns on capital exceed the growth of labor is a kind of moral inflation that drains social balance.
  
  

• Noam Chomsky, both political and linguistic, reminds us that the words we choose to describe power shape the limits of our imagination.
  
  

Together, they form an uneasy trinity of caution that our systems are efficient, but not wise. We have learned to assign price to everything, and in doing so, we risk erasing the concept of worth. The ethical economy I imagine or perhaps dream of is one where value is not extracted but recognized. Where freedom is not a loophole but the very terrain on which ethics is built.

Freedom, like capital, compounds. Each honest choice enriches the next. But when we trade freedom for certainty, moral, economic, or political we bankrupt the very source of value itself. Ethics without freedom is compliance; freedom without ethics is chaos. The task is not to choose between them, but to make them inseparable.

Maybe that is the good Aristotle meant, not a law, not a command, but a life lived in deliberate awareness. One that allows for error, for paradox, for change. The kind of life that measures progress not by accumulation, but by coherence. Not perfection. Not control. Just the freedom to become good and to decide, freely, what that even means.

My First Environmental Research Paper

I wrote this a few years ago for my master's program, i believe it was the very FIRST research paper. Back when i was trying to impress academically because i thought it made me profound. Its so baby! me trying to save the Texas Hill Country with a research paper. Still, its cute and sound. Facts are still there. Reading it now is a little cringey but hey, i love that i cared. 

And then came nugz 🐾

I made this back in my early Photoshop days. Nuggy is perfection. Love my boy. 💚 

Invisible Capital

The concept: Invisible Capital is the unmeasured wealth that actually holds society together, trust, ecological stability, and generational knowledge. These forces are rarely valued by traditional economics, yet i believe they are the true sources of economic and societal strength. Money in this model, is not the source of value, it is the reflection of these deeper, often ignored forces. 

The question: What if our society has built itself around a false Sun, and the real source of value is invisible, unmeasured, and quietly collapsing? 

Thesis: Invisible Capital is the true gravitational force of all systems. While money is visible, it is merely a reflection of deeper, transactional forces, trust, ecology and knowledge. Our failure to recognize and protect this invisible wealth undermines the very systems we think we're sustaining. Real change can't be legislated or bought. It requires a collective re-centering of what we consider valuable. 

Its never been about money, power, or religion. Civilizations rise and fall not by what they earn, conquer, or preach, but by the health of what remains invisible. The trust that binds people, the land that feeds them, and the knowledge that survives them.

This is an original framework by Rosaciela Coria (Rose Coria). If shared or cited, please credit the source.

Texas Elements: Limits of Economic Imagination

 

Introduction

I've always been fascinated by what we call resources. In fact, I earned a degree from the University of Denver with a 3.7 GPA, thank you very much, by studying how economies are built around what's visible, marketable, and already proven to turn a profit. But i started to wonder what’s left unseen, surely there’s gotta be more…maybe.

What we do know is where oil and water are. We can name the towns built on gas fields and aquifers. But we seldom ask what else is there? What else makes Texas, Texas?

We also know how industries move in and mine the fuck out of a town. Depleting its resources, jobs, people, and pride, until all you have is a ghost of a town. (and honestly, men and industries have that in common. The hit it and quit it pattern isn't just a dating issue).

As one study put it, resource-based cities play a crucial role in growth, but they also face “the boom and bust” cycles that leave them shrinking once the money moves on (He et al., 2017).

This project started as a curiosity to just map Texas, not by industry but by elements, the raw building blocks of matter. 

Method

I pulled data from the U.S. Geological Survey’s Mineral Resources Data Systems (MRDS), the Texas Bureau of Economic Geology, and the Texas State Historical Association, searching only for pure chemical elements, not compounds or hydrocarbons.

After mapping every documented element in Texas, I realized something wild: out of 254 counties, only 21 have any recorded presence of elemental resources. That leaves 233 counties as geologic blank canvases as underexplored, unclaimed, or potentially misunderstood. But they are not technically missing, just undocumented (don't call ICE). What I understand as an economist, or at least pretend to be, is that industry looks where it expects profit. BUT nature doesn't play by market rules (luckily). 

My Understanding

When we say “Texas is rich in natural resources,” we’re usually talking about what can be sold. But that's not the same as saying we understand what’s there. Exploration tends to happen where there’s a profit, not necessarily where there’s potential. Mapping only elements, without attaching dollar signs, exposes the limits of our economic imagination. It shows where we’ve been willing to look or rely on, because profit leaves little room for patience or curiosity to explore beyond it. 

Does Matter Matter? 

Studies have found that regions dependent on oil, gas, or other extractive industries often struggle to pivot toward innovation or sustainability. My idea builds on that by asking, what if cities started to transition by recognizing the elements? 

The shift from resource-based to knowledge-based economies is not new. Countries like Norway and Australia managed it by diversifying and investing in research, not just extraction (Ville & Wicken, 2013). The same mindset could apply locally at the city or regional level. The connection between elements and innovation isn't new either, Silicon Valley literally built its name on one. What’s new is realizing how rarely cities think this way. 

Case Study: San Antonio

Take San Antonio. It’s technically not a resource-based city, but its key industries still depend on the same logic. For example, most cities pitch the same industries: tourism, cybersecurity, bioscience, aerospace, energy, advanced manufacturing, blah, blah, blah. It’s what mayors, council members, or/and whoever the hell runs the city call a competitive advantage. 

But that advantage is mostly above ground. Building around the same industries that every federal playbook says are profitable. It's not that these industries are bad; they are just recycled, and it's about who pitches it better. 

What if, let's say, San Antonio, marketed something different? Not the same tech corridor or hospital expansion, but its geologic identity and used that as a foundation for innovation, education, or even art? 

It sounds small, but that’s the point. There’s nothing wrong with being basic. 

My two cents would be, maybe cities should stop chasing unicorns and start checking their own dirt. 

(Note: San Antonio’s listed industries are taken directly from public city and tourism sources. The "Elemental identity” idea is hypothetical, not an existing policy.)

Philosophical Frame

I wasn’t trying to map wealth or geological certainty (bc im not a geologist!); I was trying to map possibility, by highlighting the data gap and illustrating how difficult it can be to reach conclusions about a topic we were introduced to in the 5th grade.

Like an alchemist, I wanted to look at the smallest pieces of the world and ask what they could become if combined differently. Every investigation begins with an element, hydrogen, carbon, silicon, gold, and from there, we give it a new use and name.

Maybe the next frontier of innovation is just underexplored atoms in our backyard. That yes is expensive to explore. But i dont think it's the lack of means, maybe just the lack of curiosity. 

So Let Me Quit My Rambling

The element map isn't about scarcity or discovery. It's just about imagination. The courage to start from zero and look at Texas (or any place) not as a finished product, but as an unfinished experiment. 

Until curiosity is valued as highly as profit, 233 counties in Texas will stay blank.

The Poverty Penalty: How Texas Turned Late Fees into a Business Model

My father always said, "Poor people are poor because they make poor decisions."

That line stuck with me. Not because I believed it, but because it helped frame the question, what really keeps people in poverty?

Then I got court-ordered to have a breathalyzer in my home. The system demanded I pay $99 every month to a private vendor to comply or else literally straight to jail.

But when I was one day late-just one day-they charged me $134 instead. No warning. No grace period. Just a punishment on top of a punishment, and from a private company contracted to profit off court mandated compliance.

That $35 fee wasn’t a slap on the wrist. It was a shove further into financial instability. And that’s when I realized poverty doesn’t just happen because of bad decisions. Poverty gets manufactured and monetized.

In Texas, THE SYSTEM doesn’t just punish you for doing wrong. It punishes you for being poor AND it lets private companies profit off your inability to keep up.

Late Fees: A $100 Billion Industry, Built on the Backs of the Poor
Late fees are everywhere. In 2022, Americans paid over $14.5 billion in credit card late fees alone. Utility companies collected $561 million in late fees in a single year. Landlords routinely charge 10% to 12% of monthly rent as late penalties. If your water gets shut off for nonpayment, you're charged an additional reconnection fee just to access what should be a basic human need.

These fees aren’t scaled to income. They’re fixed. A $35 charge might be a mild inconvenience to someone earning six figures. To a family working hourly jobs or on disability, it means groceries, gas, or insulin. It means falling behind on the next bill to catch up on this one.

These fees do not improve outcomes. They extract wealth from those with the least to give.

And in Texas, the system that enables this goes beyond the private sector.

Where the State Looks Away
In April 2025, a Texas federal judge struck down a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) rule that would have capped credit card late fees at $8. The decision backed by major banking industry groups means credit card companies can continue charging $30 to $40 or more in late fees, regardless of a borrower's financial situation. This legal reversal keeps in place one of the largest and most regressive penalty systems in American finance, reinforcing how institutional decisions at the top continue to weigh most heavily on those at the bottom.

Municipalities and state agencies know these practices exist. Utility companies, many of which operate under public-private partnerships or regulated monopolies, regularly impose late and reconnection fees. And yet, while cities debate affordable housing or rental assistance, they remain silent about the millions quietly siphoned from residents through punitive penalties.

Housing authorities talk about eviction prevention, but permit 10% rent late fees to become standard. Courts mandate breathalyzers and probation conditions without checking whether the vendors charge fair fees or offer indigency plans. And while federal regulators debate limits on credit card late fees, Texans pay them anyway.

Credit card penalties are especially relentless. Missing a due date by even a few hours can mean a $30 to $40 fee, often followed by a penalty APR. For people revolving balances month to month, that single misstep can mean months of deeper debt. Nationwide, credit card late fees made up the largest share of penalty revenue, and many Texans, especially those without financial buffers, contribute disproportionately to that total.

This isn't oversight. It's selective blindness. The rules are enforced, but the methods of enforcement are ignored. And when the burden falls on the same low-income families, again and again, the silence becomes complicity.

The Economic Drain on Low-Income Texans
Texas has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, approximately 14.2% of Texans live below the federal poverty line. That’s over 4 million people. Meanwhile, Texas households spent hundreds of millions annually in late fees in rent, in utilities, in credit, and in court-mandated programs.

If even a fraction of those fees were eliminated, Texans living on the margin could reclaim hundreds of dollars per year. For a household at the poverty line, an extra $300 to $500 annually can be the difference between staying housed or becoming homeless. It could reduce food insecurity. It could allow debt repayment. It could cover a month of medication.

In short, eliminating unnecessary fees wouldn’t just relieve pressure. It could meaningfully improve Texas’s poverty rate.

The Psychological Cost of Financial Punishment
Behavioral economists call it "scarcity mindset." When you don’t have enough money, your brain shifts into survival mode. You tunnel in on the immediate crisis. Pay this bill, delay that one, juggle until something gives.

This mental strain reduces cognitive function, leading to more mistakes, missed deadlines, and short-term decisions that trigger even more fees. The system exploits this predictable human response.

Poor decisions don’t always cause poverty. But poverty-and the stress it brings-often causes poor decisions. And when every misstep is monetized, the result is a treadmill of financial punishment.

A Personal Example of a Structural Problem
HOA fees are another quiet offender in this pattern. They're not tied to essential services or utilities, yet they often mirror the same punitive practices. From community managers to corporate CEOs like Jamie Dimon, everyone seems to want the power to charge penalties, but no one wants the responsibility of understanding basic humanity or even the simplest economics. Penalties have become normalized, but their randomness across industries-from breathalyzers to HOA dues-highlights just how embedded this problem is.

I’m not writing this to avoid responsibility. I own my choices. But what I can’t accept is a system where a single late payment creates a chain reaction of penalties that keep people poor.

The breathalyzer in my home wasn’t optional. But the fees attached to it? Those were business decisions. Someone decided that $35 for being one day late was acceptable. And the state let them. No hardship waiver. No sliding scale. Just "Pay up, or else."

This is how poverty works in Texas. It’s not just what you make. It’s what they take when you fall behind.

What Texas Must Do
Ban late fees altogether or pilot a progressive, income-based penalty system. Even though compounding is an issue, the core problem is the initial flat fee that hits hardest when someone is already struggling. A one-size-fits-all model ignores economic reality. A progressive approach would scale penalties to what a person can actually afford, and could be tested locally before broader adoption. Cities and counties don’t need to wait on state leadership. Municipal action can make real change.

The Potential Impact of Banning Predatory Late Fees in Texas
If Texas banned predatory late fees today, the financial outcome for low income residents could be transformative. Even a modest estimate of $500 per year in avoided fees, across credit cards, utilities, housing, and court mandated programs, adds up to $5,000 over a decade.

For families hovering at or below the poverty line, that savings could mean staying housed, getting out of debt, or finally affording stability. This isn’t just relief, it’s wealth building.

A basic simulation comparing a household under the current system with one no longer paying late fees shows that the latter could steadily accumulate savings over time. In contrast, the current system traps families in a cycle of zero or negative net gains.

This isn’t theoretical. It’s math. And it should be policy.

Closing: Toward a Fairer Model
My dad’s line, that "poor people are poor because they make poor decisions," was never the full story. The truth is:
Poverty deepens when decisions are punished disproportionately.

Late fees aren’t teaching lessons. They’re turning temporary hardship into permanent setback. And the people writing these policies know it. They just aren’t feeling it.

If Texas wants to be bold, it doesn’t need more government programs. It needs to stop letting public systems quietly authorize the worst parts of private profiteering.

The cost of being poor in Texas isn’t just felt at the register. It’s in the fees added when you stumble-and the silence that follows.

Humans Love Stories

A tribute to Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky. MIT.

We connect with narratives more than numbers, react to emotions over logic, and make decisions based on perception rather than statistical reality. This isn’t just an individual quirk, it’s a fundamental part of how societies operate. The unpractical part of this is that the world we think we live in is often a carefully constructed illusion, shaped by media, misinformation, and our own cognitive biases. But wait theres more. Most people don’t even realize it.

Emotions are the filter through which we understand the world. When we hear about a tragic accident, a shocking crime, or an emotional personal story, it feels real. But the numbers that tell the bigger story? Those are harder to grasp, and often, they’re ignored.

We connect emotionally with individuals, not statistics.

We make decisions based on perception, not probability. A single shark attack makes people afraid of the ocean, yet few consider the far greater risk of driving to the beach in the first place.

The result? Our fears, anxieties, and even our policies reflect the stories we’re fed, not the world as it actually exists.

The phrase “If it bleeds, it leads” isn’t just a catchy saying-it’s a business model. Media doesn’t show us what’s most important; it shows us what’s most compelling. And compelling doesn’t always mean true.

Succession. HBO. 

Violent deaths dominate coverage but are rare. Violent or freak accidents account for more than two-thirds of coverage in major newspapers but less than 3% of total deaths in the U.S.

Public policy follows perception, not data. Governments allocate billions to counterterrorism, while preventable diseases kill far more people with little urgency.

Fear-based reporting keeps people tuned in. When the world feels scary, we watch more news. And when we watch more news, the cycle of fear continues.

The consequences are real: when society overreacts to rare events while ignoring daily systemic failures, we end up solving the wrong problems.

False information spreads 70% faster than the truth (Vosoughi, Roy, and Aral 2018. MIT), and it’s not because people are stupid, simply misinformation is designed to trigger emotion.

Monsters Inc. Pixar.

News thrives on outrage. False stories are more likely to evoke anger, shock, or disgust, making people share them before verifying their accuracy.

People believe what feels true. Once an emotionally charged falsehood takes root, facts alone rarely dislodge it, and you are more likely to see people dig their heels into it. 

If critical thinking is the answer, why don’t we all just… think critically? Because it’s not that simple. Unlike language, critical thinking isn’t universal. Being logical in one area doesn’t mean you apply the same skepticism everywhere. Even highly educated people fall for bias when it aligns with their emotions.

If we can’t change human nature, can we at least change how we interact with information?

• Pause before reacting. If something sparks immediate outrage or fear, ask: Who benefits from me feeling this way?
• Seek context. One shocking story isn’t the whole picture. Look for the bigger trends.
• Challenge easy narratives. If something sounds too simple, it probably is. Reality is messy!

A society that values reason over reaction, analysis over outrage, and truth over sensationalism is a healthier society. It’s not about suppressing emotions, it’s about making sure our emotions aren’t being manipulated.