This sentence, from the Wall Street Journal, strikes me as being profoundly wrong:
Today, another half-century later, a coast-to-coast flight still takes you as long as it took your father in the 1970s. And with the major exception of computers, nothing in your luggage is likely to be much more useful or valuable than dad’s equivalent.
It may well be the case that aeroplanes fly at the same speeds that they did in the 1970s. I don’t know for sure, but my understanding is that supersonic speeds were banned due to noise factors. No doubt someone in the thread will clear that up. Let’s also concede the point about “major exception of computers” – like wow, let’s ignore the single greatest area of human innovation in the past 20 years.
Okay – the material your luggage is made out of is very strong and very light weight compared to luggage in the 1970s. Your luggage will have wheels on it now. Luggage with wheels would have been a luxury item in the 1970s. The entertainment on the flight will be much better than what it was in the 1970s. Remember the single movie in the cabin? That was a feature of flying until the late 1990s. I reckon the food the would be better too, today. Hard to believe, but yes.
Then what about the computers? Paper tickets? Movies on demand on your own device? Books loaded on your own device?
So while it may be true that the experience of flying is very similar – hurry up and wait, fly through the air, and arrive at a destination faster than all alternatives. But many, many aspects of the experience are very different and much improved. Cheaper too.
When thinking of innovation, it’s not just gadgets and new-fangled things that we should think about – it’s improved business models and improvements in pre-existing gadgets that we should think about too.
Sinclair Davidson, “Has innovation stalled?”, Catallaxy Files, 2019-12-14.
January 15, 2025
QotD: Innovations hiding in plain sight
January 14, 2025
The deliberate enshittification business plan of every “tech” company
It may be hard to believe, but once upon a time we actually used to look forward to new technology releases and updated software. I know, I know, that’s asking you to believe fairy tales in our current “enshittification-as-a-service” technology dystopia. The Bone Writer — who worked in the same tech field that I once did — clearly understands why the promise of new technology has turned so negative:
Dead technology. Not because they’re broken, but because they’re no longer supported and THEREFORE no longer work.
I was straightening some stuff/junk up and came upon a pile of my e-Waste. It’s a damn shame that electronics devices are a planned obsolesce when they shouldn’t be. Especially the tablets and e-readers that would still work if the mothership, the corpo HQ, the evil Tech Bros, actually cared about their customers at all.
Do we need legislation that offers up some sort of tax write off incentive to get companies to support their shit for at least 10 years? I know what you’re saying … “That’s not a free market economy.” Yeah … well … The tech sector broke the free market economy a long time ago and now they actively hurt everyone with their greed and drive to force people into what comes next, every month to 3 months to 1 year.
That’s another reason prices never come down on tech stuff. They put out something new monthly to yearly, with just a small addition to the software or the design. Then they push it on people as if it is the BEST thing there ever was, creating FOMO. Then, some people will upgrade with every new device or software version sold.
[…]
Agile is the Devil’s Tool for Creating More Waste
Agile is the method that is used to push new software and updates out continuously. Get those updates out there and keep that device or software looking shiny but hold back the good stuff for the next big release. Even though the current iteration can likely support the next big release, we’re not going to do that. This way we can sell more shit to people and they will have FOMO so they will buy it up. Even though, the next big release isn’t all that great anyway… They consumer will eat it up.
Recycle It
The activist techies will just say, “Go ahead and recycle the old stuff.” As if it really gets recycled. More often than not (only 10% of recycled stuff actually gets recycled), it gets buried or sent to other countries to be disassembled and buried there, out of site. Both the tech sector and fashion industry are guilty of this. Meanwhile, YOU are told that if you recycle, you are doing your part to clean up the world, when you’re really just sending stuff elsewhere to pollute a third world country. Sleep easy though, it isn’t in YOUR backyard.
January 5, 2025
“Everything humans build starts with human and social capital. This includes everything economic.”
Lorenzo Warby explains why he has always disagreed with the “standard model” of economic growth, as it fails to include the biggest cultural variables that matter enormously for economic development:
“Hyderabad bazaar” by ruffin_ready is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
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The seminal theory of economic growth is the Solow Growth Model (technically, the Solow-Swan model). The model can be easily expressed mathematically.
I have never liked the model, nor its later variations.1 The intuition behind my dislike was that societies — and indeed different ethnic groups within societies — obviously varied enormously in their capacity to use, to “put together”, the factors of production. They also vary enormously in their capacity to generate factors of production: specifically capital, the produced means of production. The model implies that there will be a general convergence between economies that has not happened.
Updating the model by including human capital was a gesture in that direction but did not fix the problem with the model, which is much more basic. The update attempted to grapple with the failure of investment to flow to poorer countries and, by implication, the long-term, systematic failures of foreign aid. The failures of foreign [aid] also supported my intuition.
The most recent (2024) Nobel memorial was for work that also directly supports my intuition — how much institutions matter for economic growth. The long-term economic growth literature — identifying culture as very much mattering for economic growth — also supports my intuition.
Skills and knowledge (human capital) are basic
To explain why the entire approach — basically, fiddling with some version of the Cobb-Douglas production function — is fundamentally mistaken, we need to go back to the origins of human economic growth. I mean, right back — all the way to foragers.
What are the original forms of capital? Well, there are tools, which are the original form of physical capital. But without the skills to make and use the tools, they either do not exist, or they are useless.
So, we start with skills and knowledge, with human capital. It takes almost 20 years to train a young human forager to be a subsistence adult — that is, to forage as much nutrition as they consume. The need to stuff the human brain with skills and knowledge — and the need to grow a brain that can be so stuffed — is why we have the most biologically expensive children in the biosphere. The need to impart skills to biologically expensive children is fundamental to the dynamics of all human societies.
Human capital — skills and knowledge — is not an “add on”. It is basic.
So are social connections (social capital)
Foragers do not live as atomistic individuals. They live in families and (fluid) foraging bands. Families and foraging bands are vehicles for our highly cooperative subsistence and reproduction strategies.
That we are the tool-making and tool-using species lacking tearing teeth and claws with the most biologically expensive offspring is why we have highly cooperative subsistence and reproduction strategies. It is also why we are so much the normative species — enabling robust cooperation based on convergent expectations — and why we have prestige and propriety as forms of status.
Both these forms of status represent currencies of cooperation. Prestige grants people status for doing things which are risky, clever, hard, entertaining. It is status by conspicuous competence. It provides a way to reward people for engaging in activities which generate wider social benefits — what economists call positive externalities. It also encourages people to want to associate with you.2
The other form of status — propriety — grants status to those who uphold the norms of the group. In particular, it wields stigma against those deemed to have violated those norms. It provides a way to punish people for engaging in activities which generate wider social costs — what economists call negative externalities. It helps solve the free-rider problem regarding the effort to enforce norms.
Reversing (i.e. perverting) status patterns so that people get prestige from victimhood — extending to various forms of failures of competence or even wildly anti-social behaviour — while stigmatising people who conspicuously successful (as oppressors or exploiters) is deeply destructive of human flourishing.3 We can see this pattern currently operating in “progressive” US states, and especially cities, but murderous versions of it operated in various Communist states. These things affect economic activity, but cannot be discerned by a Cobb-Douglas production function.
It is not true that scientists have never discovered Homo economicus. Unfortunately, Homo economicus is not a member of genus Homo. It is Pan troglodytes (chimpanzees) playing strategy games in a lab. It is precisely because we Homo sapiens are more normative, allowing us to encapsulate the social conquest of the Earth, that there are billions of us and only a few thousand of them.
We — as a highly social, indeed ultra-social, species — engage in both individual and social calculations. Different cultures notoriously generate different patterns for, and balances between, such calculations.
1. The model has some utility for short-term calculations of growth.
2. As with any social benefit, the knock-on dynamics of prestige can be complex, but status from conspicuous competence is at the heart of it.
3. The November 2014 Shirtgate controversy — where a rocket scientist who had led the technically incredibly difficult task of landing a probe on a comet was publicly humiliated over the shirt he wore (a gift from a female friend it turned out) — represented conspicuous achievement (prestige) being trumped by feminist stigmatisation (propriety).
January 1, 2025
The EU emulates King Canute
The headline is a bit misleading, as Canute’s failed attempt to control the tides was intended to refute courtiers’ exaggerations about his royal powers. The EU, on the other hand, is determined to impose stasis on a very dynamic and changing field:
The European Union will have the continent-wide standard for the buggy whip real soon now. That’s the logical conclusion to draw from that recent announcement about USB-C.
For those who’ve not been following along at home the European Commission is very proud of itself. They’ve managed to pass a law mandating that USB-C (don’t worry, it’s a shape of cable) be the only flavour of connector now allowed within the EU. This has caused the less intellectual of our own rulers — St Stella for example — to just quiver, gasp, with excitement. This is proof of the ability of the collective bureaucracy to really stick one to The Man or something. A vast victory over Big Cable it seems.
Well, yes. Those with a little history to their name will know that the EU has been trying to do this for some time now. So much time that they’d originally intended to make Micro-USB the Europe-spanning insistence but it took them so long to make their rules that USB-C had already superseded it.
At which point we might draw a couple of conclusions. Even, suggest an insistence or two. That first insistence would be that a time of rapid technological change is really not quite le moment juste to be insisting upon only the one way of doing things. Because change, d’ye see? No, this is important for we know, absolutely, that there’re people out there just itching to insist upon the one connector for electric vehicles. Who would, in the name of a vapid uniformity, insist upon freezing technology at its current state rather than allow it to develop.
We could, should, also go on to insist that such a legal insistence on the only form allowed means that technological development cannot happen any more. For, in order to advance or even just change it will be necessary to change that law, that definition.
Legal changes in the European Union are not easy. Of course, the Parliament cannot do it — they are not allowed to even propose law changes, let alone enact them. It is necessary first to convince the European Commission of the need for a change. That means convincing the bureaucracy of course. Once that’s done it must pass the Council of Ministers, which is all the national governments. Parliament is then allowed to say yes. Then, and only then, would it be possible to put the new technology — say, a new cable — on the market.
But the only method we’ve got of testing whether a new cable is better is by putting it on the market. That is — no, really — the only process by which we find out whether consumers desire this new cable with all its delights, at the price that suppliers are willing to make it. But in the European system they cannot undertake the basic usefulness test until they’ve convinced a continent full of politicians that the new is in fact necessary and compulsory.
QotD: The OG internet moguls
The schlubby chic look was part of the con. Made him seem like someone who didn’t care about the money, which sends a subtle anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist, anti-finance bro NLP type message.
https://twitter.com/esaagar/status/1603015654206066688Posted by Noam Blum (neontaster) on Thursday, December 15th, 2022 1:25pm
Then it became sort of a cosplay thing for vaporware charlatans targeting FOMO investors.
“psst, Bob, should we really give $20 million to this guy? He’s picking his nose and wiping it on his cargo shorts rn”
“But remember that last nosepicker we passed on? He made $10 billion”
*fun fact: 8 years ago nosepicking guy was a Ralph Lauren-wearing chairman of the Delta Chi party committee, majoring in Entrepreneurship. And then he took the Silicon Valley Dress Down for Success seminar
There are other stylistic variations on pure slovenliness; the Black Turtleneck Next Steve Jobs gambit, and the coffee-clutching Patagonia Vest & Untuckits Next Steve Bezos thing
Oh, and the hoodies, so many hoodies.
For everybody thinking “tech people need to start wearing IBM suits again”: if you showed up to work or a VC meeting in one you would be thought deranged, building security, or a lunch caterer
For me the peak of Silicon Valley style will always be the pre-internet Assembly Language programmer polyester clip-on tie & short sleeve Sears Towncraft dress shirt look. The effortless nonchalance told you “I can trust this person not to run to the Carribean with my money”
David Burge (@Iowahawk), Twitter, 2022-12-15.
December 24, 2024
David Friedman on elegant solutions to problems
Sometimes the solution to a problem is obvious … at least once someone else has pointed it out:
Recently, when writing a check, it occurred to me that requiring the amount to be given separately in both words and number was a simple and ingenious solution to the problem of reducing error. It is possible, if your handwriting is as sloppy as mine, to write a letter or number that can be misread as a different letter or number. If redundancy consisted of writing the amount of the check twice as numbers or twice as words the same error could appear in both versions. It is a great deal less likely to make two errors, one in letters and one in numbers, that happen to produce the same mistaken result. It reduces the risk of fraud as well, for a similar reason.
That is one example of a simple and elegant solution to a problem, so simple that until today it had never occurred to me to wonder why checks were written that way. Another example of the same pattern is a nurse or pharmacist checking both your name and date of birth to confirm your identity.1
That started me thinking about other examples:
The design of rubber spatulas, one bottom corner a right angle, the other a quarter circle. One of the uses of the device is to scrape up the contents of containers, jars and bowls and such. Some containers have curved bottoms, some flat bottoms at a right angle to the wall. The standard design fits both.
Manhole covers are round because it is the one simple shape such that there is no way of turning it that lets it fall through the hole it fits over.
Consider an analog meter with a needle and a scale behind it. If you read it at a slight angle you get the reading a little high or low. Add a section of mirror behind the needle and line up the image behind the needle. Problem solved.
If you try to turn a small screw with a large screwdriver it doesn’t fit into the slot. Turning a large screw with a small screwdriver isn’t always impossible but if the screw is at all tight you are likely to damage the screwdriver doing it. The solution is the Phillips screwdriver. The tip of a large Phillips screwdriver is identical to a smaller one so can be used on a range of screw sizes.2
Ziplock bags have been around since the sixties. Inventing them was not simple but a new application is: packaging that consists of a sealed plastic bag with a Ziplock below the seal. After you cut open the bag you can use the ziplock to keep the contents from spilling or drying. I do not know how recent an innovation it is but I cannot recall an example from more than a decade ago.
1. This one and some of the others were suggested by posters on the web forum Data Secrets Lox.
2. I am told that the solution is not perfect, doesn’t work for very small screws, which require a smaller size of driver.
December 20, 2024
The legacy “mainstream” media is not going to be replaced with a new monolithic competitor
Ted Gioia says the transition is almost complete and what used to be the mainstream is rapidly becoming a fringe to the new, much more chaotic mainstream:
Last week, a cable news pundit struggled to understand the new media landscape. So he sought advice from his teenage son.
He asked the youngster to name the most influential people in the world today.
Can you guess the names he picked?
Here’s what happened:
I’m thinking to myself he’s going to say Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z.
He says Kai Cenat, Adin Ross, Jynxzi, and Sketch. I don’t know who he is talking about.
I said ‘What platforms are you on?’
He said ‘I’m on Twitch, Kick, and Rumble.’
I said ‘That sounds like you need to go to the hospital’.
What are these platforms? I’m telling you guys, the mainstream has become fringe, and the fringe has become mainstream …
There are people out there that are getting 14 million streams. And we are on cable news getting one or two million.
This is the new reality. The future of media has arrived — but people above a certain age won’t even recognize the names.
Check out the list below of the most watched streamers in the US and Canada.
Jynxzi? Zackrawrr? Summit1g?
A few days ago, I’d have told you these are passwords, not people.
Now I know better. I’ve watched videos from each of these individuals—and it’s shocking how different they are from mainstream media fare.
Media empires are getting defeated, but not by their corporate competitors. They’re finding themselves replaced by a ragtag assortment of podcasters, pranksters, pundits, gamers, gadflies, and influencers.
Who would have believed these headlines just a few months ago?
December 17, 2024
The rejection-in-advance of Bovaer as a “climate-friendly” “solution” to the “problem” of climate change
At Watts Up With That?, Charles Rotter documents yet another imposed-from-above bright idea that consumers are already eager to reject:
When global elites and bureaucrats decide they must “fix” the world, the results often speak for themselves. Take the latest technocratic debacle: Bovaer, a feed additive designed to reduce methane emissions from cows, marketed as a “climate-friendly” solution. It’s now being shelved by Norwegian dairy producer Q-Meieriene after consumers flatly rejected its so-called “climate milk”.
This is more than a simple story of market rejection. It’s a cautionary tale of what happens when governments, corporations, and globalists push policies and products that tamper with the food supply to address a problem that may not even exist.
The Quest to Solve a “Crisis”
Bovaer, developed by DSM-Firmenich, has been touted as a game-changer in the fight against methane emissions — a major target of climate policies. The additive is said to suppress a key enzyme in the cow’s digestive process, reducing methane emissions by up to 30%. Regulatory bodies in over 68 countries, including the EU, Australia, and the U.S., have approved its use.
But let’s step back for a moment. Why are we targeting cow burps and farts in the first place? Methane is indeed a greenhouse gas, but it’s also a short-lived one that breaks down in the atmosphere within about a decade. Moreover, cows and bison have been emitting methane for millennia without triggering apocalyptic climate shifts. Yet suddenly, livestock emissions are treated as a planetary emergency demanding immediate action.
This myopic focus on cow methane is a prime example of how climate zealotry warps priorities. Rather than addressing real and immediate issues — like the energy crises their own policies create — governments and globalists have decided to micromanage how your milk is produced, all to reduce emissions by an imperceptible fraction of a percentage point.
Consumer Rebellion
The backlash against Bovaer has been swift and fierce. In Norway, Q-Meieriene began using the additive in 2023, branding the resulting product as “climate milk”. The response? Consumers overwhelmingly rejected it, leaving supermarket shelves stocked with unsold cartons while Bovaer-free milk flew off the shelves.
Facing dismal sales, Q-Meieriene recently announced it would discontinue the use of Bovaer, stating:
Demand for Q climate milk has not been high enough to continue production … we phased out the use of methane suppressants in cow feed and are putting this project on pause.
https://www.nettavisen.no/nyheter/ville-redde-klimaet-med-prompe-fri-kumelk-snur/s/5-95-2166980
This is not merely a marketing failure. It reflects a broader consumer revolt against the technocratic imposition of “solutions” no one asked for. People are increasingly skeptical of being told that their daily choices — what they eat, how they travel, how they heat their homes — must be sacrificed on the altar of climate orthodoxy.
December 16, 2024
The Price of Victory by N.A.M. Rodger
In The Critic, Phil Weir reviews the final volume in N.A.M. Rodger’s three-book study of the history of the Royal Navy:
This October a major scholarly achievement was realised with the publication of The Price of Victory, the third and final instalment of N.A.M. Rodger’s great trilogy on the naval history of Britain from 660 AD to 1945. It has been an odyssey, albeit one that to complete took more than three times longer than Homer’s hero took to journey home.
The first volume, Safeguard of the Sea, was published back in 1997, some six years after Rodger had left his job as Assistant Keeper of the Public Records at the then Public Records Office to join the National Maritime Museum. Having moved to Exeter University, he completed the second volume, Command of the Ocean, covering the period from 1649 to 1815, in 2004.
Mindful of the fates of others who have attempted grand, multi-volume naval histories of Britain, Nicholas Rodger, now aged 74, was known to quip that one of his key aims was to become the first historian to live to see it completed. What he describes as “an exciting episode of brain surgery” delayed the completion of the final volume for several years, and left achieving this a closer-run thing than was — one suspects — entirely comfortable.
To the immense relief of all, Rodger recovered to complete his great work, and it has, emphatically, been well worth the wait. The Price of Victory is, like its predecessors, a most substantial work in both physical and scholarly senses.
At the outset of his task, Rodger aimed to create “not a self-contained ‘company history’ of the Royal Navy, but a survey of the contribution which naval warfare with all its associated activities has made to national history”. In doing so, he sought to link naval warfare “to political, social, economic, diplomatic, administrative, agricultural, medical, religious and other histories which will never be complete until the naval component of them is understood”.
He has succeeded handsomely, firmly entwining naval and naval-related matters into the core fabric of the history of the British Isles. The Price of Victory is a worthy conclusion to an epic series that will both stand in its own right and, as he hopes, serve as a baseline for future scholarly endeavours.
The vast, polyglot erudition underpinning Rodger’s prose wears no disguise. Yet, for all its great length and the density of knowledge each page imparts, The Price of Victory is, like its two preceding volumes, a lively read, leavened with the author’s dry wit.
December 13, 2024
Modern (western) armies never seem to have enough infantry, no matter how high-tech the battlefield gets
Over the last century, one of the apparent constants in military doctrine has been that the latest and greatest technical innovation has somehow eclipsed the importance of boring old infantry units. Tanks were the future! No, tactical airpower was the future! No, nuclear weapons were the future! No, airmobile and helicopter units were the future! No, drones are the future! Yet every time the guns started firing, the limiting factor always seemed to be “not enough infantry” (at least among western militaries). You definitely needed more specialist and support units to handle the latest whizzy toys being deployed, yet it was still the infantry who mattered in the end. That’s just me noodling … it’s only loosely related to the rest of the post.
In my weekly recommendations list from Substack, they included this post from Bazaar of War which discusses the changes in organization of tactical and operation level units over time to best meet the needs of the modern battlefield:
Command post for a single battalion-sized element in a brigade combat team.
Photo by Sgt Anita Stratton, US Army.
Modern ground forces are torn between two competing demands, for infantry and for enablers. Urban operations and large-scale combat over the past decade demonstrate that infantry remains just as essential as ever. Yet that same infantry needs a lot of low-level support just to survive and remain effective: drone operators, EW, and engineers, not to mention armor and artillery. This poses an obvious dilemma for force management—not least when faced with competing demands for air, naval, and missile assets—but also raises questions about force structure.
Organizing the Force
One of the key decisions in how future wars will be fought is what will be the primary tactical unit. Inevitably, certain command levels are much more important than others: those which require greater freedom from higher headquarters than they allow their own subordinates. This partly comes down to a question of where the combined-arms fight is best coordinated, which in turn depends heavily on technology.
This has varied a lot over time. The main tactical formation of the Napoleonic army was the corps, which had organic artillery, cavalry, and engineers that allowed it to fight independent actions with a versatility not available to smaller units. The Western Front of World War II was a war of divisions at the tactical level and armies at the operational, a pattern which continued through the Cold War. The US Army shifted to a brigade model during the GWOT era, on the assumption that future deployments would be smaller scale and lower intensity; only recently has it made the decision to return to a divisional model. Russia also switched to a brigade model around this time, although more for cost and manpower reasons.
Tweaking the Hierarchy
At the same time, certain echelons have disappeared altogether. The subdivisions of Western armies reached their greatest extent in World War I, as new ones were added at the extremities of the model standardized during the French Revolution: fireteams/squads to execute trench raids, army groups to manage large sections of the front. At the same time, cuts were made around the middle. Machine guns were pushed from the regimental level down to battalions over the course of the war, reducing the number of these bulkier regiments in a division; this accordingly eliminated the need for brigades as a tactical unit.
This continued with the next major war. More organic supporting arms and increased mobility made combat more dispersed, creating the need for supply, communications, intelligence, and medical support at lower levels. As units at each echelon grew fatter, it became too cumbersome to have six separate headquarters from battalion to field army. Midway through World War II, the Soviets followed the Western example of eliminating brigades, and got rid of corps to boot (excepting ad-hoc and specialized formations). During the Cold War, the increasing use of combined arms at a lower level caused most NATO militaries to eliminate the regiment/brigade distinction altogether: the majority favored the larger brigade, which could receive supporting units to fight as a brigade combat team, although the US Marines retained regiments as brigades in all but name (the French, by contrast, got rid of most of their battalions, preferring regiments formed of many companies).
December 12, 2024
The Canada Post strike is achieving one thing … strangling the use of cheques
In The Line, Phil A. McBride outlines the one palpable achievement of the postal workers’ strike in the likely fatal blow to the use of paper cheques in Canada:
Bank of Montreal sample cheque
For more than a century, Canadian businesses have been using cheques and the post office to send and receive money across the country and the world. It’s easy: you write a cheque, you put it in the mail, the recipient deposits the cheque at their bank, you wait five business days for it to clear and voila — you’ve got the money.
Except, right now, of course, that’s not happening, due to the ongoing postal strike. In fact, a great number of cheques that are in the mail are stuck there, leaving businesses and Canadians with money stranded in transit. I am increasingly convinced that this strike will be remembered in the future as the death of cheques in Canada, at least as a major medium of business exchange.
The banks won’t miss cheques, if so. Cheques are expensive. In 2015, Scotiabank estimated that the writing and processing of a cheque cost anywhere between $9 and $25. In 2023, approximately 379 million cheques were issued for a combined value of $2.9 trillion dollars. That’s an average value of $7,650.00 per cheque, at an averaged cost of $6.44 billion dollars to the banks and their customers. Very little of that cost is incurred if a payment is made electronically.
But it’s not just the money. Cheques are prone to fraud. Cheques can be counterfeited, signatures can be forged and cheques can be written against accounts that can’t cover the amount they’re issued for. The customer is responsible for sending and receiving them, which means they are prone to loss or interception, which adds further time and cost to an already expensive process.
As a business owner, I happen to agree with the banks: I don’t like cheques. I’m made to wait five business days to access my money, and that’s after I’ve waited for the client to issue the cheque and for the postal service to (once upon a time) deliver it to my office.
Today, all of Canada’s charter banks, as well as most Credit Unions, offer many options for electronic payment. Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT), Interac Electronic Money Transfer (EMT), debit cards, credit cards, even SWIFT wire transfers for international payment. All of these institutions have the ability allow for multiple layers of approval that satisfy corporate accounting, security and reporting requirements. All of these forms of payment are faster, cheaper and more secure than cheques — in most cases, I get access to my money inside 24 hours, rather than waiting for a full week for a cheque to clear.
So why has the cheque endured as long as it has?
Some combination of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and “It’s always been done this way”.
CHEVROLET with Cartoonist Rube Goldberg: Something for Nothing (1940)
Charlie Dean Archives
Published Aug 27, 2013Cartoonist Rube Goldberg creates a little animation to explain how fuel is converted to power in the modern automobile engine.
CharlieDeanArchives – Archive footage from the 20th century making history come alive!
December 11, 2024
Norway finds the perfect tool to drive away those pesky entrepreneurs
Don’t you just hate having all these bothersome start-up companies in your country, creating new jobs and new investment opportunities? Norway sure does, but good news: they’ve found an almost perfect way to not only deter existing entrepreneurs but to punish those who try to leave after they’ve been successful:
Norway is a fantastically beautiful country, but lately they’ve decided they want as few new companies as possible.
“Norway” by Nouhailler is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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Norway’s entrepreneurs are disappearing. In the past two years alone, 100 of Norway’s top 400 taxpayers, representing about 50 percent of that group’s wealth, have fled the country to protect their businesses.
In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand paints a vivid picture of a dystopian society where government overreach and socialist policies kill innovation and demonize entrepreneurs. Present-day Norway mirrors this scenario in unsettling ways. The Nordic countries have long operated on an egalitarian ideal—citizens pay high tax rates for a generous safety net and effective public services. But Norway has taken the ideal to destructive and bizarre extremes.
Norway spends 45 percent more than Sweden on healthcare per capita with approximately the same health outcomes. Norway spends 50 percent more than Finland on primary and secondary school with worse results. And it splurges on green virtue-signaling with, for example, a $3.2 billion offshore wind project that industry experts believe is financially unworkable. That $3.2 billion, by the way, is roughly equivalent to the total revenue raised by the wealth tax.
To socialist politicians in Norway, entrepreneurs are mere piggy banks to be raided for ever more spending. When confronted with the reality that you can’t pay taxes with money you don’t have, the response is a vague moralism like “those with the broadest shoulders must bear the heaviest burdens.” Any dissent is waved away, deemed invalid because. . . free healthcare.
Earlier this year, instead of scaling back the tax blowout, the government doubled down, not only increasing the wealth tax but adding a vise grip on business owners in the form of an “exit tax” on unrealized gains as well. That means if you move from Norway, you’re immediately liable to pay 38 percent of the market value of your assets. It doesn’t matter if you have no cash on hand, if your assets are risky and could plummet in value, or even if your company fails after you leave—you still owe the tax. (Luckily for me, I left before this tax became law.)
The intent is to corral entrepreneurs inside Norway, impeding them from heading for the exits. The inevitable result: They’ll leave even before starting their businesses. After shooting itself in one foot, the government is now aiming a bazooka at the other one.
December 10, 2024
Microsoft has launched a publishing arm called “8080 Books” – AI-generated books anyone?
Ted Gioia notices that Microsoft and other tech companies are moving into book publishing, likely as a way to generate some additional revenue from their vast investments in artificial intelligence ventures over the last several years:
I never expected Microsoft to enter the book business.
But on November 18, this huge tech company quietly announced that it is now a publisher. But there was an interesting twist.
Microsoft is “not currently accepting unsolicited manuscripts”.
Let’s be totally fair. Nobody at Microsoft claims that it plans to replace human writers with AI slop. But this company has invested a staggering $13 billion in AI — it’s their top priority as a corporation.
So what you do think their goals are in the book business?
If you’re looking for a clue, I note that Microsoft’s publishing arm is called 8080 Books. Yes, they named it after the 8080 microprocessor.
How charming!
And just a few hours after Microsoft announced this move, TikTok did the exact same thing.
According to The Bookseller:
ByteDance, the company behind the video-sharing platform TikTok, has announced that it will start selling print books in bookshops from early next year, published under its imprint, 8th Note Press. 8th Note Press will work in partnership with Zando to publish print editions and sell copies in physical bookstores starting early 2025.
Here, too, nobody is claiming that they will replace humans with bots. But why would a company that has built its empire with online social media have any interest in the slow and stodgy business of selling printed books on paper?
Oh, by the way, TikTok’s parent is investing huge sums in AI. The company has even found a way around export controls on Nvidia chips. Just a few weeks before entering the book business, ByteDance’s sourcing of AI tech from Huawei was leaked to the press.
And as if these coincidences weren’t enough to alarm you, another AI publishing development happened at this same time — but (here too) with very little coverage in the media.
Tech startup Spines raised $16 million in seed financing for an AI publishing business that aims to release 8,000 books per year.
Here, too, the company says that it wants to support human writers. Maybe it will run a new kind of vanity publishing business. But is that a sufficient lure to attract $16 million in seed financing?
It’d be a rearguard action, but it’d be nice to have a requirement that publishers disclose when published works are partly or wholly AI-extruded, wouldn’t it? It would certainly help me to avoid buying books or magazines where AI hallucinations may occur in key sections …
December 3, 2024
Evolution of Airborne Armour
The Tank Museum
Published Jul 19, 2024Lightly armed airborne troops are at a huge disadvantage when faced with regular troops with heavy weapons and armour. In World War II this led to huge losses for paratroops on Crete and at Arnhem. Since then, many attempts have been made to level the playing field, to give airborne soldiers a fighting chance.
From the Hamilcar gliders of World War II to the C17 Globemaster, we look at how to make a tank fly.
00:00 | Intro
00:47 | The Origins of Airbourne Operations
02:34 | Gliders
07:20 | A Tank Light Enough to Fly?
09:02 | Success & Failure
14:24 | Post-War Solutions
17:41 | Better Aircraft – Better Tanks?
20:15 | Strategic Deployment
21:39 | ConclusionThis video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé. This video features imagery courtesy of http://www.hamilcar.co.uk/
#tankmuseum
