… I am going to borrow an idea from Stephen Biddle’s Military Power (2004). Biddle identifies what he calls the “Modern System” of combat (though I am going to treat it a bit more broadly than he does). In short, it’s a set of tactics and operational art that emerged out of the First World War and were refined in the European theaters (East and West) of the Second, to cope with the tremendous potency of industrialized firepower which had fundamentally reshaped war. Rather than relying on fixed positions for defense and dense shock-formations (“shock” here – think “bayonets, grenades and trench-knives”), the modern system relies on cover-and-concealment for survivability and maneuver in the offense (go around, not through your opponent’s overwhelming firepower). Adroit use of terrain on the tactical level is a key component of the system, which in turn requires both extensive training of junior officers and NCOs and devolving quite a bit of command agency down to them so that they can make local decisions (compare to, for instance, linear tactics which leave virtually no decision-making to the individual rifleman).
The modern system assumes that any real opponent can develop enough firepower to both obliterate any fixed defense (like a line of trenches) or to make direct approaches futile. So armies have to focus on concealment and cover to avoid overwhelming firepower (you can’t hit what you can’t see!); since concealment only works until you do something detectable (like firing), you need to be able [to] move to new concealed positions rapidly. If you want to attack, you need to use your own firepower to fix the enemy and then maneuver against them, rather than punching straight up the middle (punching straight up the middle, I should note, as a tactic, was actually quite successful pre-1850 or so) or trying to simply annihilate the enemy with massed firepower (like the great barrages of WWI), because your enemy will also be using cover and concealment to limit the effectiveness of your firepower (on this, note Biddle, “Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare” Foreign Affairs 82.2 (2003); Biddle notes that even quantities of firepower that approach nuclear yields delivered via massive quantities of conventional explosives were insufficient to blast entrenched infantry out of position in WWI.)
That means that modern system forces are focused on cover and concealment in defense, but on mobility – often very rapid mobility – in attack. The doctrines that developed to operationalize variations on the modern system (Bewegungskrieg, Deep Battle, AirLand Battle, and so on) all relied (intentionally or not) on pushing the tempo of an attack beyond the ability of a defender to coordinate a defense, on the theory that this would produce tactical and even operational collapse. That theory, it turns out, works very well, but it comes with some costs (I should note here I am stretching the definition of Biddle’s “modern system” a bit and also glossing over a lot of detail in maneuver warfare doctrines).
The thing is, embracing the Modern System is hard. Actually pulling this off requires a relatively high degree of training. It also requires delegating a lot of authority down to lower officers and NCOs. You need both because individual small units need to keep moving and maneuvering even when they may not have time to get direct orders from above, and they need the freedom to respond to local conditions and utilize local terrain, often down to the squad or fireteam level. In turn, that means it is really hard to do if your common soldiers are undertrained, simply illiterate, or if (as in an authoritarian regime) you can’t trust your officers with any kind of independence. Modern authoritarian “coup-proofing” makes it practically impossible to actually implement the modern system effectively (which is part of why most tin-pot dictators produce such poor military performance; though note that not all authoritarian regimes need to coup-proof in this way).
It’s also expensive. Getting the mobility to pull this off on the operational level means mechanizing almost everything in your army, so that the infantry and artillery can keep up with the advance units and so that the logistics can keep up with them. Doing that requires a lot of command sophistication, but it also just requires a ton of hardware. Everything needs to be motorized, mechanized and portable, and then all of that needs to be tied into radio communications, GPS, and so on. And because you’re delegating authority down to smaller and smaller units, those units need all of that expensive communications, and so on. All of that hardware costs a fortune.
But – and this is the core of Biddle’s argument – when modern system armies encounter armies that have not implemented the modern system in conventional pitched battle, the result is generally a crushingly one-sided affair. That’s going to matter a lot for the analysis going forward: so far, it doesn’t seem possible to hold territory (meaning not fighting as guerillas, but actually engaging in positional warfare in the Maoist sense) with a non-modern system army against a modern system army. Non-modern system armies that try get pretty badly wrecked. The 1991 Iraq war is the traditional case study in just how badly wrecked: the coalition (using the modern system) took 292 KIA; 776 WIA compared to the Iraqi Army (without the modern system) suffering 25,000+ KIA and 75,000+ WIA. That stunning lopsidedness is going to matter a lot for the argument going forward.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Why Don’t We Use Chemical Weapons Anymore?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-03-20.
April 23, 2022
QotD: The “Modern System” of combat
April 22, 2022
QotD: George Carlin’s appropriate-for-Earth-Day monologue
We’re so self-important. So self-important. Everybody’s going to save something now. “Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.” And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. What? Are these fucking people kidding me? Save the planet, we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet. We haven’t learned how to care for one another, we’re gonna save the fucking planet?
I’m getting tired of that shit. Tired of that shit. I’m tired of fucking Earth Day, I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is there aren’t enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for their Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet. They don’t care about the planet. Not in the abstract they don’t. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that some day in the future, they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn’t impress me.
Besides, there is nothing wrong with the planet. Nothing wrong with the planet. The planet is fine. The PEOPLE are fucked. Difference. Difference. The planet is fine. Compared to the people, the planet is doing great. Been here four and a half billion years. Did you ever think about the arithmetic? The planet has been here four and a half billion years. We’ve been here, what, a hundred thousand? Maybe two hundred thousand? And we’ve only been engaged in heavy industry for a little over two hundred years. Two hundred years versus four and a half billion. And we have the CONCEIT to think that somehow we’re a threat? That somehow we’re gonna put in jeopardy this beautiful little blue-green ball that’s just a-floatin’ around the sun?
The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through all kinds of things worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worlwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags, and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet … the planet … the planet isn’t going anywhere. WE ARE!
We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Thank God for that. Maybe a little styrofoam. Maybe. A little styrofoam. The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.
You wanna know how the planet’s doing? Ask those people at Pompeii, who are frozen into position from volcanic ash, how the planet’s doing. You wanna know if the planet’s all right, ask those people in Mexico City or Armenia or a hundred other places buried under thousands of tons of earthquake rubble, if they feel like a threat to the planet this week. Or how about those people in Kilauea, Hawaii, who built their homes right next to an active volcano, and then wonder why they have lava in the living room.
The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed, and if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new pardigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?” Plastic … asshole.
So, the plastic is here, our job is done, we can be phased out now. And I think that’s begun. Don’t you think that’s already started? I think, to be fair, the planet sees us as a mild threat. Something to be dealt with. And the planet can defend itself in an organized, collective way, the way a beehive or an ant colony can. A collective defense mechanism. The planet will think of something. What would you do if you were the planet? How would you defend yourself against this troublesome, pesky species? Let’s see … Viruses. Viruses might be good. They seem vulnerable to viruses. And, uh … viruses are tricky, always mutating and forming new strains whenever a vaccine is developed. Perhaps, this first virus could be one that compromises the immune system of these creatures. Perhaps a human immunodeficiency virus, making them vulnerable to all sorts of other diseases and infections that might come along. And maybe it could be spread sexually, making them a little reluctant to engage in the act of reproduction.
Well, that’s a poetic note. And it’s a start. And I can dream, can’t I? See I don’t worry about the little things: bees, trees, whales, snails. I think we’re part of a greater wisdom than we will ever understand. A higher order. Call it what you want. Know what I call it? The Big Electron. The Big Electron … whoooa. Whoooa. Whoooa. It doesn’t punish, it doesn’t reward, it doesn’t judge at all. It just is. And so are we. For a little while.
George Carlin, “The arrogance of mankind”.
April 21, 2022
QotD: Self-promotion in the modern job market
A friend of mine, an Indian pediatrician, applied for temporary jobs in England and was considered for none of them. My friend was puzzled by this, for he had worked in England before and had good references. My wife, who knew the system from having worked in it at a senior level, asked to see his curriculum vitae that he sent to prospective employers, and soon spotted the problem: He boasted of nothing, and the culture had changed. What was necessary, my wife said, was to inflate his accomplishments as boastfully as possible. There was no risk that anyone would discover his exaggerations. He had once worked as a voluntary pediatric consultant to Mother Teresa’s charity in Calcutta; he had not even mentioned it in his CV, let alone made it sound as if he were all but the founder of her charity. If he once had helped an old lady across the road with her shopping, he should transmute this in his CV into a lifelong concern for the condition of the elderly; and so on and so forth.
It was all rather disgusting, but it worked like a charm: He immediately had offers of jobs aplenty, though of course his real worth as a doctor remained precisely the same. Reticence, which is to me a far more attractive quality than boastfulness, will get you nowhere, and nothing must be left to speak for itself. You must blow your own trumpet, if possible louder than anyone else’s.
Nowadays there are professional coaches in how to “big yourself up”, as the charming phrase has it, in applications for jobs or places in institutions. The son of a friend of mine used one to get into medical school. Lying will go undetected, but even if detected will do you no lasting harm. The most minor accomplishment can and should be made to sound like evidence of genius. It is almost a condition of employment that one should boast and write an advertisement for oneself.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Be Your Own Advert”, Taki’s Magazine, 2022-01-13.
April 20, 2022
QotD: Innovation and risk-taking are anathema to Fortune 500 companies
But senior management hated hearing this, and always insisted that defending the old business units was their safest bet. After I encountered this embedded mindset again and again and saw its consequences, I reached the painful conclusion that the safest path is often the most dangerous. If you pursue a strategy — whether in business or your personal life — that avoids all risk, you might flourish in the short run, but you flounder over the long term. Sad to say, that’s what now happening in the music business. Keep your head in the sand long enough, and you suffocate.
The leading companies in music had many chances to reinvent themselves over the last quarter century, taking bold action that might have transformed themselves and the entire culture. But they didn’t want to take any risks. They could have invested in new technologies — but didn’t, instead allowing Silicon Valley companies to swallow up most of the profits from music in the 21st century. They could have signed and nurtured new talent — but didn’t, preferring to invest in 50-year-old songs. They could have embraced exciting new sounds — but didn’t because the algorithms and dominant formulas reward rehashes of the old sounds.
Ted Gioia, “Is Old Music Killing New Music?”, The Honest Broker, 2022-01-19.
April 19, 2022
QotD: “Bog iron” in ancient and medieval society
One distinction here is between bog iron and iron in ore deposits. Bog iron is formed when ground-water picks up iron from iron-ore deposits, where that iron is then oxidized under acidic conditions to form chunks of iron minerals (goethite, magnetite, hematite, etc.), typically in smallish chunks. Bog iron is much easier to smelt because it contains fewer impurities than iron ore in rock deposits, but the quantity of iron available from bog iron is relatively low (although actually renewable, unlike mines; a bog can be harvested for iron again after a few decades as the processes which produce the bog iron continue). Because of its low output, bog iron tends to be an important part of the iron supply only when production is relatively low, such as during the Pre-Roman Iron Age in Europe, or the early medieval period.
But what I want to stress here at the outset is that while the local variety of iron may vary based on conditions, iron ores are sufficiently common that prior to the industrial revolution, it wasn’t generally necessary to trade or transport them over long distances because most areas have deposits. There are some exceptions (Japan is notoriously mineral poor – my limited geological understanding is that this is common in volcanic land formations – and while it does have some iron deposits, they are few and relatively small), but for the most part, getting iron ore was not hard. As we’ll see, timber availability was actually often a more pressing limitation on iron exploitation than the ore itself […]
Bret Devereaux, “Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-09-18.
April 18, 2022
QotD: Colonialism in the British Raj
There I met a man of very advanced age, whose name I cannot remember (to my shame) who had been a civil servant in India during the final days of the Raj. He told me something I have pondered ever since. “We were just a handful of people providing guidance and administration”, he said, “with overwhelming consent in a gigantic country. We even slept in the streets during summer on khatias and had no fear of being killed.”
Whatever politics was happening was between the British and Indian political elites, and plainly did not affect most normal Britishers or Indians.
Consider, that in 1901 Indians numbered nearly 300 million while the British-born population of India was around 150,000. Colonialism was indeed by the consent of the governed, and the independence fight was primarily an intra-elite affair, where the mostly western-educated native would-be boss class fought with the foreign overlords who taught them, for political control.
In the sub-continent, the civil service, lower (and some higher) judiciary, magistrates, police officers, intelligentsia, landed gentry and local businesses were primarily Indian, a lot of them pro-imperial to the end of their time. What happened to those voices? In current post-colonial discourse, one cannot read any pro-imperial literature, which is either lost or considered too reactionary to be taught at universities, an injustice to a clear understanding of history.
Sumantra Maitra, “Pro-imperial truths of the old world”, The Critic, 2021-11-09.
April 17, 2022
QotD: How jobs differ from school
When John Smith finishes school he is expected to get a job. And what getting a job seems to mean is joining another institution. Superficially it’s a lot like college. You pick the companies you want to work for and apply to join them. If one likes you, you become a member of this new group. You get up in the morning and go to a new set of buildings, and do things that you do not, ordinarily, enjoy doing. There are a few differences: life is not as much fun, and you get paid, instead of paying, as you did in college. But the similarities feel greater than the differences. John Smith is now John Smith, 22, a software developer at such and such corporation.
In fact John Smith’s life has changed more than he realizes. Socially, a company looks much like college, but the deeper you go into the underlying reality, the more different it gets.
What a company does, and has to do if it wants to continue to exist, is earn money. And the way most companies make money is by creating wealth. Companies can be so specialized that this similarity is concealed, but it is not only manufacturing companies that create wealth. A big component of wealth is location. […] If wealth means what people want, companies that move things also create wealth. Ditto for many other kinds of companies that don’t make anything physical. Nearly all companies exist to do something people want.
And that’s what you do, as well, when you go to work for a company. But here there is another layer that tends to obscure the underlying reality. In a company, the work you do is averaged together with a lot of other people’s. You may not even be aware you’re doing something people want. Your contribution may be indirect. But the company as a whole must be giving people something they want, or they won’t make any money. And if they are paying you x dollars a year, then on average you must be contributing at least x dollars a year worth of work, or the company will be spending more than it makes, and will go out of business.
Someone graduating from college thinks, and is told, that he needs to get a job, as if the important thing were becoming a member of an institution. A more direct way to put it would be: you need to start doing something people want. You don’t need to join a company to do that. All a company is is a group of people working together to do something people want. It’s doing something people want that matters, not joining the group.*
For most people the best plan probably is to go to work for some existing company. But it is a good idea to understand what’s happening when you do this. A job means doing something people want, averaged together with everyone else in that company.
* Many people feel confused and depressed in their early twenties. Life seemed so much more fun in college. Well, of course it was. Don’t be fooled by the surface similarities. You’ve gone from guest to servant. It’s possible to have fun in this new world. Among other things, you now get to go behind the doors that say “authorized personnel only.” But the change is a shock at first, and all the worse if you’re not consciously aware of it.
Paul Graham, “How to Make Wealth”, Paul Graham, 2004-04.
April 16, 2022
QotD: The Edict of Diocletian
Who is … so devoid of human feeling as not to see that immoderate prices are widespread in the markets of our cities, and that the passion for gain is lessened neither by plentiful supplies nor by fruitful years? — so that … evil men reckon it their loss if abundance comes. There are men whose aim it is to restrain general prosperity … to seek usurious and ruinous returns. … Avarice rages throughout the world. … Wherever our armies are compelled to go for the common safety, profiteers extort prices not merely four or eight times the normal, but beyond any words to describe. Sometimes the soldier must exhaust his salary and his bonus in one purchase, so that the contributions of the whole world to support the armies fall to the abominable profits of thieves.
The Edict was, until our time, the most famous example of an attempt to replace economic laws by governmental decrees. Its failure was rapid and complete. Tradesmen concealed their commodities, scarcities became more acute than before, Diocletian himself was accused of conniving at a rise in prices, riots occurred, and the Edict had to be relaxed to restore production and distribution. It was finally revoked by Constantine.
The weakness of this managed economy lay in its administrative cost. The required bureaucracy was so extensive that Lactantius, doubtless with political license, estimated it at half the population. The bureaucrats found their task too great for human integrity, their surveillance too sporadic for the evasive ingenuity of men. To support the bureaucracy, the court, the army, the building program, and the dole, taxation rose to unprecedented peaks of ubiquitous continuity.
As the state had not yet discovered the plan of public borrowing to conceal its wastefulness and postpone its reckoning, the cost of each year’s operations had to be met from each year’s revenue. To avoid returns in depreciating currencies, Diocletian directed that, where possible, taxes should be collected in kind: taxpayers were required to transport their tax quotas to governmental warehouses, and a laborious organization was built up to get the goods thence to their final destination. In each municipality, the decuriones, or municipal officials, were held financially responsible for any shortage in the payment of the taxes assessed upon their communities.
Since every taxpayer sought to evade taxes, the state organized a special force of revenue police to examine every man’s property and income; torture was used upon wives, children, and slaves to make them reveal the hidden wealth or earnings of the household; and severe penalties were enacted for evasion. Towards the end of the 3rd century, and still more in the 4th, flight from taxes became almost epidemic in the Empire. The well-to-do concealed their riches, local aristocrats had themselves reclassified as humiliores to escape election to municipal office, artisans deserted their trades, peasant proprietors left their overtaxed holdings to become hired men, many villages and some towns (e.g., Tiberias in Palestine) were abandoned because of high assessments; at last, in the 4th century, thousands of citizens fled over the border to seek refuge among the barbarians.
It was probably to check this costly mobility, to ensure a proper flow of food to armies and cities, and of taxes to the state, that Diocletian resorted to measures that, in effect, established serfdom in fields, factories, and guilds. Having made the landowner responsible through tax quotas in kind for the productivity of his tenants, the government ruled that a tenant must remain on his land till his arrears of debt or tithes should be paid.
We do not know the date of this historic decree; but in 332, a law of Constantine assumed and confirmed it, and made the tenant adscriptitius, “bound in writing”, to the soil he tilled; he could not leave it without the consent of the owner; and when it was sold, he and his household were sold with it. He made no protest that has come down to us; perhaps the law was presented to him as a guarantee of security, as in Germany today. In this and other ways, agriculture passed in the 3rd century from slavery through freedom to serfdom and entered the Middle Ages.
Similar means of compelling stability were used in industry. Labor was “frozen” to its job, forbidden to pass from one shop to another without governmental consent. Each collegium or guild was bound to its trade and its assigned task, and no man might leave the guild in which he had been enrolled. Membership in one guild or another was made compulsory on all persons engaged in commerce and industry, and the son was required to follow the trade of his father. When any man wished to leave his place or occupation for another, the state reminded him that Italy was in a state of siege by the barbarians and that every man must stay at his post.
Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Volume 3: Caesar and Christ, 1944.
April 15, 2022
QotD: Men without hobbies shouldn’t ever retire
This set off all sorts of alarm bells in my head, because I’d confronted the very same thoughts when I planned on retiring back in 2016 on reaching age 62 (which seems to be the “killer” age discovered by the researchers).
Worse than that, I either know men personally or have heard of many instances of men who have died soon — very soon — after retiring early. (When men retire at a later age, they paradoxically seem to live longer, as the study shows.) Sometimes, men die within six months of getting their gold watch, after many decades of working with little or even no time off for illness. Where I differ from the study is that I think I know the real reason why this happens.
We’re working dogs.
As long as men have work to do, we do fine. We have a purpose in life, we get up in the mornings with a day’s work ahead of ourselves, and this gives us a reason to live. It’s all tied up, I believe, in our inherent nature as providers and all that goes with it. When that activity stops earlier than expected — at 62, most of us have at least fifteen or even twenty more years to live — subconsciously we still feel that we are capable of working, providing and in short contributing to ourselves and others.
But when that ends, it’s as though a switch is turned off somewhere and our brains simply say, “Oh well, that’s it,” and we die. It may be that illness has been kept at bay through our industry and now given an empty playing field, so to speak, it takes over; or it may be that we do things that are more dangerous (the study mentions driving more as one activity), or perhaps we working dogs just feel useless and our existence, pointless.
Kim du Toit, “Working Dogs”, Splendid Isolation, 2018-02-15.
April 14, 2022
QotD: “… when life was simpler”
And then you get hold of primary sources on the thirties or fifties. Let’s say it’s particularly hilarious to read stuff from the right lauding that time of great freedom in either of those decades. Let’s just say that if some of the things happening back then were happening now we’d all be talking about how we were ready for revolution. (And the only reason they weren’t then is that the press was mass-media. You think it’s bad enough now, with a lying press? They had the same, but no way to check it. It was that concentration and lack of individual communication or access to the public by individuals unfiltered by the media/publishers that put us in the situation we’re in, with what is functionally the enemy of western civilization in control of the vital organs of culture. Before you get discouraged, it helps to remember, we’re only now fighting back. Continue fighting, but remember things take time. The larger a movement is, the longer it takes for it to become noticeable, much less prominent in the culture.)
And as for the left thinking that everyone before the oughts were good white Christians or whatever … Oh, sweet summer children. Let’s say when they get their freak on, with witchcraft or being naked in public, or talking about their poly relationships, or whatever the actual hell they have in their heads that day, they rarely if ever (I’ve never seen it) would have managed to shock their ancestors or ancestresses 100 years ago. Those Edwardians … well … Let’s just say they had fewer hangups. Yes, I know what the public image is. But none of them would have worried about things that the left worries about now like “differential of power” or “implied patriarchy” which meant they were much freer to do whatever crossed their heads at the moment. Of course they also thought they would have shocked their ancestors. And I bet you they wouldn’t.
At some point, if you have a chance, read a book called Our Bones Are Scattered about the Indian revolt in Victorian times. I only read it once because it’s a deeply disturbing book, one of those clashes of civilization where you feel sorry for both sides. But it is very well written, and the beginning of the book is … revealing. The British commander was … well … sort of married to a woman who had been sort of married something like six times before and who went from man to man, collecting kids along the way. Notwithstanding which, they were Victorian nobility and had a bunch of kids of their own and …
Let’s just say Victorians aren’t the way we’ve learned to think of them either. In fact you can be sure pretty much no one ever was. People kept and keep the front they need to, but behind the scenes things were always messy and complicated.
Which often makes finding our own way in this messy and complicated way very difficult.
Sarah Hoyt, “Finding Your Way”, According to Hoyt, 2019-02-18.
April 13, 2022
QotD: Architectural arrogance
What is most telling, however, is the vitriolic response the op-ed triggered in Aaron Betsky. Called “one of the 21st century’s architectural power brokers,” Betsky is the former head of the Cincinnati Art Museum, and was director of the 2008 Venice International Architecture Biennale, the most important architecture show in the world. An architectural priest and patrician, he is to the profession what The New York Times is to the chattering classes: a voice of the high-status quo. Indeed, he writes for Architect, the official magazine of the AIA.
Betsky rained down on Bingler and Pedersen with ridicule and scorn: Their piece was “so pointless and riddled with clichés as to beggar comprehension.” He summarized their position: “we have three of the standard criticisms of buildings designed by architects: first, they are ugly according to what the piece’s authors perceive as some sort of widely-held community standard (or at least according to some 88-year old ladies); second, they are built without consultation; third they don’t work.”
Yet Betsky then admitted, “All those critiques might be true.” They are irrelevant, he claims, since architecture must be about experimentation and the shock of the new. (Why this should be the case he does not say.) And sometimes designers must stretch technology to the breaking (or leaking) point: “The fact that buildings look strange to some people, and that roofs sometimes leak, is part and parcel of the research and development aspect of the design discipline.” Ever brave, he is willing to let others suffer for his art.
At no point did Betsky consider the actual human beings, the unwilling guinea pigs who live in the houses. He implicitly says of the poor residents: Do their roofs leak? Let them buy buckets. And as for sickness-inducing mold, there’s Obamacare for that. Betsky also does not consider what a leaky roof means to people whose prior homes were destroyed by water. The architects, having completed their noble experiments, effectively say like the arrogant King Louis XV of France: “Après moi, le deluge” [After me, the flood]. No wonder architects have an image problem.
Justin Shubow, “Architecture Continues To Implode: More Insiders Admit The Profession Is Failing”, Forbes, 2015-01-06.
April 12, 2022
Calvin Coolidge: The Silent President
Biographics
Published 27 Sep 2021Simon’s Social Media:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SimonWhistler
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/simonwhistler/This video is #sponsored by Squarespace.
Source/Further reading:
Miller Center, in-depth overview: https://millercenter.org/president/co…
History Today, overview: https://www.historytoday.com/archive/…
New Yorker, “The case for Coolidge” (cached): https://webcache.googleusercontent.co…
NY Times, “Coolidge, the great refrainer”: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/bo…
NY Times, 1933 obituary for Coolidge: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytim…
Atlantic, “Coolidge and depression”: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/…
Politico, “How Coolidge survived the Harding-era scandals”: https://www.politico.com/magazine/sto…
History, “Boston Police Strike of 1919”: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-h…
Coolidge letter written after death of his son: https://www.shapell.org/manuscript/pr…
QotD: Writers are like otters
When I boot up a new book in my brain, I am not greatly interested in what has and hasn’t won awards. I want to write something else that’s even cooler.
Lois McMaster Bujold, interview at Blogcritics, 2005-05-24.
April 11, 2022
QotD: Programmers as craftsmen
A programmer can sit down in front of a computer and create wealth. A good piece of software is, in itself, a valuable thing. There is no manufacturing to confuse the issue. Those characters you type are a complete, finished product. If someone sat down and wrote a web browser that didn’t suck (a fine idea, by the way), the world would be that much richer.*
Everyone in a company works together to create wealth, in the sense of making more things people want. Many of the employees (e.g. the people in the mailroom or the personnel department) work at one remove from the actual making of stuff. Not the programmers. They literally think the product, one line at a time. And so it’s clearer to programmers that wealth is something that’s made, rather than being distributed, like slices of a pie, by some imaginary Daddy.
It’s also obvious to programmers that there are huge variations in the rate at which wealth is created. At Viaweb we had one programmer who was a sort of monster of productivity. I remember watching what he did one long day and estimating that he had added several hundred thousand dollars to the market value of the company. A great programmer, on a roll, could create a million dollars worth of wealth in a couple weeks. A mediocre programmer over the same period will generate zero or even negative wealth (e.g. by introducing bugs).
This is why so many of the best programmers are libertarians. In our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses. When those far removed from the creation of wealth — undergraduates, reporters, politicians — hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to think injustice! An experienced programmer would be more likely to think is that all? The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software.
Wealth can be created without being sold. Scientists, till recently at least, effectively donated the wealth they created. We are all richer for knowing about penicillin, because we’re less likely to die from infections. Wealth is whatever people want, and not dying is certainly something we want. Hackers often donate their work by writing open source software that anyone can use for free. I am much the richer for the operating system FreeBSD, which I’m running on the computer I’m using now, and so is Yahoo, which runs it on all their servers.
* This essay was written before Firefox.
Paul Graham, “How to Make Wealth”, Paul Graham, 2004-04.
April 10, 2022
QotD: Most MMORPG portrayal of iron-working is incredibly unrealistic
Iron production is a unique topic in one key way. If the problem with farmers is that the popular understanding of the past (either historical or fantastical) renders them effectively invisible – as indeed, it tends to render most ancient forms of production invisible – iron-working is tremendously visible, but in a series of motifs that are almost completely wrong. Iron is treated as rare when it is common, melted in societies that almost certainly lack the furnaces to do so; swords are cast when they should be forged, quenched in ways that would ruin them and the work of the iron-worker is represented as a solitary activity when every stage of iron-working, when done at any kind of scale, was a team job (many modern traditional blacksmiths work alone, often as a hobby; ancient smiths generally did not). The popular depiction is so consistently wrong that it doesn’t really even provide a firm basis for correction. We are going to have to start over, from the beginning.
[…]
In most video games, if you are looking to produce some iron things, the first problem you invariably have is finding some iron ores. Often iron is some sort of semi-rare strategic resource available in only certain parts of the map, something that factions might fight over. Actually finding some iron might be a serious problem.
Well, I have good news for historical you as compared to video game you: iron is the fourth most common element in earth’s crust, making up around 5% of the total mass of the part of the earth we can actually mine. Modern industry produces – and I mean this very literally – a billion tons (and change) of iron per year. Iron is about the exact opposite of rare; almost all of the major ores of iron are dirt common. And that’s the point.
One of the reasons that the change from using bronze (or copper) as tool metals to using iron was so important historically is that iron is just so damn abundant. Of course iron can be used to make better tools and weapons as well, but only with proper treatment: initially, the advantage in iron was that it was cheap. Now, as we’ll see, while the abundance of iron makes it cheap, the difficulty in working it poses technological problems; that’s why the far rarer and also generally inferior (to proper, work-hardened, heat-treated iron or steel; bronze will often exceed the performance of unalloyed iron) copper and bronze were used first: harder to find, easier to work. […]
Very small amounts of iron occur on earth as pure “native” metal; the term for this, “meteoric iron” is an accurate description of where it comes from (there is also one known deposit of native “telluric iron“); in practice, the sum total of these iron sources is effectively a rounding error on the amount of iron an iron-age society is going to need and so “pure” iron may be disregarded as a meaningful source of iron.
Bret Devereaux, “Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-09-18.
