Quotulatiousness

May 20, 2020

Roald Dahl – Pilot, Seducer and Author – WW2 Biography Special

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Greece, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 19 May 2020

Roald Dahl is not just a beloved author, he is also a wartime adventurer. He saw plenty of action in North Africa and Greece, where he got the inspiration for many of his work to come.

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Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Isabel Wilson
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Isabel Wilson
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

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Sources:
IWM K 8588, CH 2377, ZZZ 11729, CM 1725, CM 354, CM 358, CM 43, CH 13555, CM 131, CH 1500, CH 1431, CM 2527, CM 1353
Portrait of Roald Dahl, courtesy Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund
“Shot Down over Libya”, courtesy The Saturday Evening Post
Portrait of Walt Disney, courtesy of Disney Archive
Bundesarchiv
USHMM

Johannes Bornlof – “The Inspector 4”
Phoenix Tail – “At the Front”
Fabien Tell – “Last Point of Safe Return”
Johannes Bornlof – “Death And Glory 2”
Reynard Seidel – “Deflection”
Johannes Bornlof – “Deviation In Time”

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

Bidding farewell to “the dumbest management fad of all time”

Filed under: Business — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jessica Stillman hails one positive likely outcome of the Wuhan Coronavirus epidemic … the end of the “open office plan”:

Example of an open plan office
Photo by VeronicaTherese via Wikimedia Commons.

My Inc.com colleague Geoffrey James memorably called open-plan offices “the dumbest management fad of all time.” And with good reason. Not only do many workers loathe the interruption-prone, privacy-free spaces, but science shows they don’t even achieve their stated aim of fostering greater collaboration.

The current pandemic is a heart-breaking tragedy of epic proportions, but according to experts, it might at least have one small silver lining. Maybe, just maybe it will spell the end of the hated open-plan office.

[…]

All this means employers will need to find creative solutions to get work done even though far fewer people can safely fit in the same space. Continued work-from-home arrangements will certainly be part of the answer, but creative reconfiguring of your physical office is likely to be necessary too.

That’s a headache for facilities managers and bosses, but better news for open-plan office haters. In a post-coronavirus world, you will almost certainly have more privacy at work. In trade for that personal space, however, expect to submit to measures like temperature checks, half-empty break rooms, and a whole lot of hand sanitizer.

ZB26: The Best of the Light Machine Guns

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 26 Oct 2017

Sold for $34,500 (transferrable).

The ZB-26 stands as one of the best magazine-fed light machine guns developed during the 1920s and 30s – it was a very popular gun for small military forces and many countries which did not directly buy it were strongly influenced by it. The Japanese Nambu Type 96 and 99 were heavily based on the ZB, and the British Bren was a direct evolution licensed from Brno.

The design dates back to 1921, when the Czech government began searching for a modern light machine gun. They tested pretty much all the guns available on the market at the time, and also solicited guns from Czechoslovak designers. Brothers Vaclav and Emmanuel Holek submitted their I-23 light machine gun, which would become the ZB-26 (LK vizor 26 in Czech terminology) and become the official Czechoslovak light machine gun as well as a popular commercial export for the ZB factory. More than 120,000 were made in several different calibers and sold to 24 countries between 1926 and 1939.

When the Germans occupied Czechoslovakia, they seized a huge number of these guns both from the military and guns still in the factory. This particular one was part of a Spanish purchase contract, but was completed under the oversight of Heinrich Krieghoff and supplied to German forces.

Mechanically, the ZB-26 uses a tilting bolt and a long stroke gas piston, in a combination that would be copied in many later designs. It is robust, accurate, controllable, and handy – a truly excellent all-around light machine gun.

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QotD: Behavioural economics, aka the applied theory of bossing people around

Filed under: Economics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Once [Richard] Thaler has established that you are in myriad ways irrational it’s much easier to argue, as he has, vigorously — in his academic research, in popular books, and now in a column for The New York Times — that you are too stupid to be treated as a free adult. You need, in the coinage of Thaler’s book, co-authored with the law professor and Obama adviser Cass Sunstein, to be “nudged.” Thaler and Sunstein call it “paternalistic libertarianism.”

Adam Smith spoke of “the man of system” who “seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.” Thaler and his benevolent friends are men, and some few women, of system. They hate the Chicago School, have never heard of the Austrian School, dismiss spontaneous order, and favor bossing people around — for their own good, understand. Employing the third most unbelievable sentence in English (the other two are “The check is in the mail” and “Of course I’ll respect you in the morning”), they declare cheerily, “We’re from the government and we’re here to help.”

We humans face a choice of treating people as children or as adults. A liberal society, Smith’s “liberal plan of [social] equality, [economic] liberty, and [legal] justice,” treats adults as adults. The principle of an illiberal society, from Thaler’s to the much worse kind, is that you are to be corrected not through respectful dialog that treats you as an equal, but by compulsion or trickery, which treats you like a toddler about to walk into traffic.

Wikipedia lists fully 257 cognitive biases. In the category of decision-making biases alone there are anchoring, the availability heuristic, the bandwagon effect, the baseline fallacy, choice-supportive bias, confirmation bias, belief-revision conservatism, courtesy bias, and on and on. According to the psychologists, it’s a miracle you can get across the street.

For Thaler, every one of the biases is a reason not to trust people to make their own choices about money. It’s an old routine in economics. Since 1848, one expert after another has set up shop finding “imperfections” in the market economy that Smith and Mill and Bastiat had come to understand as a pretty good system for supporting human flourishing.

Dierdre McCloskey, “The Applied Theory of Bossing People Around”, Reason, 2018-02-11.

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