Daily Archives: January 9, 2026

Power Without Alibis: What Remains After You Understand How Cruelty Works

This final essay completes a trilogy on power by asking what remains once its mechanics are fully understood. Building on Pfeffer’s organisational realism and Machiavelli’s historical clarity, it argues that unsanitised descriptions of power do not endorse cruelty but remove the moral alibis that allow harm to persist. By collapsing the distance between action and consequence, such writing makes innocence unavailable and neutrality impossible. The central risk, that truth can be weaponised, is acknowledged, but silence is shown to be more partisan, concentrating power through ignorance rather than constraining it.

Continue reading

From Partitioning to Liquid Clustering: Evolving SCD2 Bronze on Databricks at Scale

As SCD2 Bronze layers mature, even well-designed partitioning and ZORDER strategies can struggle under extreme scale, high-cardinality business keys, and evolving access patterns. This article examines why SCD2 Bronze datasets place unique pressure on static data layouts and introduces Databricks Liquid Clustering as a natural next step in their operational evolution. It explains when Liquid Clustering becomes appropriate, how it fits within regulated Financial Services environments, and how it preserves auditability while improving long-term performance and readiness for analytics and AI workloads.

Continue reading