Quotulatiousness

April 20, 2022

QotD: Innovation and risk-taking are anathema to Fortune 500 companies

Filed under: Business, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I learned the danger of excessive caution long ago, when I consulted to huge Fortune 500 companies. The single biggest problem I encountered — shared by virtually every large company I analyzed — was investing too much of their time and money into defending old ways of doing business, rather than building new ones. We even had a proprietary tool for quantifying this misallocation of resources — which spelled out the mistakes in precise dollars and cents.

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.

March 2, 2022

Duck Tape – WW2 Secret Weapon – WW2 Special

Filed under: Britain, Food, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 1 Mar 2022

This war has seen a huge amount of scientific and technological innovation. New ways of taking lives, and new ways of saving lives abound. But what about the more ordinary, everyday, products of the war? Would you be surprised to hear that people in the 21st century will still be using WWII inventions in daily life.
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February 24, 2022

Got Wood? – The de Havilland Mosquito

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

World War Two
Published 23 Feb 2022

What if there was a plane that the enemy could neither catch nor reach? One that fully relied on speed instead of defensive armaments? The de Havilland DH.98 Mosquito was the first multi-role aircraft developed during World War Two. Made mostly out of wood, the “Wooden Wonder” could be easily converted into different roles — a fighter, a fighter-bomber, a bomber, and a reconnaissance aircraft.
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February 15, 2022

QotD: Breaking the trench stalemate with tanks

Where the Germans tried tactics, the British tried tools. If the problems were trenches, what was needed was a trench removal machine: the tank.

In theory, a good tank ought to be effectively immune to machine-gun fire, able to cross trenches without slowing and physically protect the infantry (who could advance huddled behind the mass of it), all while bringing its own firepower to the battle. Tracked armored vehicles had been an idea considered casually by a number of the pre-war powers but not seriously attempted. The British put the first serious effort into tank development with the Landship Committee, formed in February of 1915; the first real tanks, 49 British Mark I tanks, made their first battlefield appearance during the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Reliability proved to be a problem: of the 49 tanks that stepped off on the attack on September 15th, only three were operational on the 16th, mostly due to mechanical failures and breakdowns.

Nevertheless there was promise in the idea that was clearly recognized and a major effort to show what tanks could do what attempted at Cambrai in November of 1917; this time hundreds of tanks were deployed and they had a real impact, breaking through the barbed wire and scattering the initial German defenses. But then came the inevitable German counter-attacks and most of the ground taken was lost. It was obvious that tanks had great potential; the French had by 1917 already developed their own, the light Renault FT tank, which would end up being the most successful tank of the war despite its small size (it is the first tank to have its main armament in a rotating turret and so in some sense the first “real” tank). This was hardly an under-invested-in technology. So did tanks break the trench stalemate?

No.

It’s understandable that many people have the impression that they did. Interwar armored doctrine, particularly German Maneuver Warfare (bewegungskrieg) and Soviet Deep Battle both aimed to use the mobility and striking power of tanks in concentrated actions to break the trench stalemate in future wars (the two doctrines are not identical, mind you, but in this they share an objective). But these were doctrines constructed around the performance capabilities of interwar tanks, particularly by two countries (Germany and the USSR) who were not saddled with large numbers of WWI era tanks (and so could premise their doctrine entirely on more advanced models). The Panzer II, with a 24.5mph top speed and an operational range of around 100 miles, depending on conditions, was actually in a position to race the train and win; the same of course true of the Soviet interwar T-26 light tank (19.3mph on roads, 81-150 mile operational range). Such tanks could have radios for coordination and communication on the move (something not done with WWI tanks or even French tanks in WWII).

By contrast, that Renault FT had a top speed of 4.3mph and an operational range of just 37 miles. The British Mark V tank, introduced in 1918, moved at only 5mph and had just 45 miles of range. Such tanks struggled to keep up with the infantry; they certainly were not going to win any race the infantry could not. It is little surprise that the French, posed with the doctrinal problem of having to make use of the many thousands of WWI tanks they had, settled on a doctrine whereby most tanks would simply be the armored gauntlet stretched over the infantry’s fist: it was all those tanks could do! The sort of tank that could do more than just dent the trench-lines (the same way a good infiltration assault with infantry could) were a decade or more away when the war ended.

Moreover, of course, the doctrine – briefly the systems of thinking and patterns of training, habit and action – to actually pull off what tanks would do in 1939 and 1940 were also years away. It seems absurd to fault World War I era commanders for not coming up with a novel tactical and operational system in 1918 for using vehicles that wouldn’t exist for another 15 years and yet more so assuming that they would get it right (since there were quite a number of different ideas post-war about how tanks ought to be used and while many of them seemed plausible, not all of them were practical or effective in the field). It is hard to see how any amount of support into R&D or doctrine was going to make tanks capable of breakthroughs even in the late 1920s or early 1930s (honestly, look at the “best” tanks of the early 1930s; they’re still not up to the task in most cases) much less by 1918.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: No Man’s Land, Part II: Breaking the Stalemate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-09-24.

February 4, 2022

The Origins of the SAS – WW2 Special Episode

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

World War Two
Published 3 Feb 2022

“Who dares, wins”. Nowadays the British SAS — Special Air Service — is considered one of the best special forces in the world. Yet its wartime origins are shrouded in mysteries and legends. From the first ideas of top-secret “special raiding squadrons”, to the first raids in North Africa accompanying the Long Range Desert Group, the SAS’s beginnings resemble one big experiment. An experiment from which a truly legendary special service would emerge.
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February 2, 2022

QotD: Breaking the trench stalemate with Stormtroopers (Stoßtruppen)

One way to respond to a novel tactical problem is with novel tactics. And the impetus for this kind of thinking is fairly clear: if your own artillery is the problem digging you into a hole, then find a way to use less of it.

The mature form of this tactical framework is often called “Hutier” tactics, after German general Oskar Emil von Hitier, though he was hardly the sole or even chief inventor of the method. In its mature form, the technique went thusly: instead of attacking with large waves of infantry which cleared each objective in sequential order, attacks ought to be proceeded by smaller units, carefully trained with the layout of the enemy positions. Those units, rather than having a very rigid plan of attack, would be given those general objectives and left to figure for themselves how to accomplish them (“mission tactics” or Auftragstaktik), giving them more freedom to make decisions based on local conditions and the ground.

These elite spearhead units, called Stoßtruppen or “Stormtroopers” were well equipped (in particular with a higher amount of automatic firearms and hand grenades, along with flamethrowers). Importantly, they were directed to bypass enemy strong-points and keep moving forward to meet their objectives. The idea here was that the follow-up waves of normal infantry could do the slow work of clearing out points where enemy resistance was strong, but the stormtroopers should aim to push as deeply as possible as rapidly as possible to disorient the defenders and rapidly envelop what defenses remained.

These sets of infantry tactics were in turn combined with the hurricane barrage, a style of artillery use which focused on much shorter but more intense artillery barrages, particularly associated with Colonel Georg “Breakthrough” Bruchmüller. Rather than attempting to pulverize defenses out of existence, the hurricane barrage was designed merely to force enemies into their dugouts and disorient the defenders; much of the fire was directed at longer ranges to disrupt roads and artillery in the enemy rear. The short barrage left the ground relatively more intact. Meanwhile, those elite infiltration units could be trained to follow the creeping barrage very closely (being instructed, for instance, to run into the shell explosions, since as the barrage advantages, no gun should ever strike the same spot twice; a fresh shell-hole was, in theory, safe). Attentive readers will recognize the basic foundations of the “move fast, disorient the enemy” methods of the “modern system” here.

So did infiltration tactics break the trench stalemate? No.

First, it is necessary to note that while infiltration tactics were perhaps most fully developed by the Germans, they were not unique to them. The French were experimenting with many of the same ideas at the same time. For instance, basic principles of infiltration were being published by the French General Headquarters as early as April, 1915. André Laffargue, a French infantry captain, actually published a pamphlet, which was fairly widely distributed in both the French and British armies by the end of 1915 and in the American army in 1916, on exactly this sort of method. In many cases, like at the Second Battle of Artois, these French tactics bore significant fruit with big advances, but ran into the problem that the gains were almost invariably lost in the face of German counter-attacks. The Russians, particularly under Aleksei Brusilov, also started using some of these techniques, although Brusilov was as much making a virtue of necessity as the Russians just didn’t have that much artillery or shells and had to make due with less and Russian commanders (including Brusilov!) seem to have only unevenly taken the lessons of his successes.

The problem here is speed: infiltration tactics could absolutely more efficiently overrun the front enemy lines and even potentially defeat multiple layers of a defense-in-depth. But after that was done and the shock of the initial push wore off, you were still facing the same calculus: the attacker’s reinforcements, shells, artillery and supplies had to cross broken ground to reach the new front lines, while the defender’s counter-attack could ride railways, move over undamaged roads and then through prepared communications trenches. In the race between leg infantry and trains, the trains always won. On the Eastern Front or against the Italians fighting under the Worst General In History at Caporetto (1917), the already badly weakened enemy might simply collapse, producing massive gains (but even at Caporetto, no breakthrough – shoving the enemy is not a breakthrough, to qualify as a breakthrough, you need to get to the “green fields beyond” that is open ground undefended by the enemy), but against a determined foe, as with the 1918 Spring Offensives, these tactics, absent any other factor, simply knocked big salients in the line. Salients which were, in the event, harder to defend and brought the Germans no closer to victory. Eventually – often quite rapidly – the front stabilized again and the deadlock reasserted itself. Restoring maneuver, the actual end-goal of these tactics, remained out of reach.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: No Man’s Land, Part II: Breaking the Stalemate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-09-24.

January 31, 2022

The Ram | Canada’s Most Successful Failure

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

Red Wrench Films
Published 4 Dec 2020

A Canadian Franken-tank that pre-dated the M4 Sherman, the Ram would be an icon of Canada’s industry in the early war years. Ultimately a failure as a battle tank, variants of the vehicle would see combat in Normandy and beyond, as the Kangaroo APC which revolutionised mechanised warfare in 1944 and 1945.

Any feedback is greatly appreciated, I’m always trying to improve.

Any suggestions for the next video? Leave it down in the comments or message me. 🙂

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Please note that the footage I can find on these vehicles is scarce and sometimes the video will not match properly or will perhaps be slightly inaccurate.

Sources:
https://tanks-encyclopedia.com/ww2/ca…
https://www.dday-overlord.com/en/mate…
https://www.friends-amis.org/index.ph…
http://panzerserra.blogspot.com/2015/…

Intuit256 by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/…
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Artist: http://incompetech.com/

QotD: Weird attempts to violate the Efficient Markets Hypothesis

Filed under: Books, Business, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There’s a lot more to this book, but it all seems to be pointing at the same central, hard-to-describe idea. Something like “All progress comes from violations of the efficient market hypothesis, so you had better believe these are possible, and you had better get good at finding them.”

The book begins and ends with a celebration of contrarianism. Contrarians are the only people who will ever be able to violate the EMH. Not every weird thing nobody else is doing will earn you a billion dollars, but every billion-dollar plan has to involve a weird thing nobody else is doing.

Unfortunately, “attempt to find violations of the EMH” is not a weird thing nobody else is doing. Half of Silicon Valley has read Zero To One by now. Weirdness is anti-inductive. If everyone else knows weirdness wins, good luck being weirder than everyone else.

Thiel describes how his venture capital firm would auto-reject anyone who came in wearing a suit. He explains this was a cultural indicator: MBAs wear suits, techies dress casually, and the best tech companies are built by techies coming out of tech culture. This all seems reasonable enough.

But I have heard other people take this strategy too far. They say suit-wearers are boring conformist people who think they have to look good; T-shirt-wearers are bold contrarians who expect to be judged by their ideas alone. Obviously this doesn’t work. Obviously as soon as this gets out – and it must have gotten out, I’ve never been within a mile of the tech industry and even I know it – every conformist putting image over substance starts wearing a t-shirt and jeans.

When everybody is already trying to be weird, who wins?

Part of the answer is must be that being weird is a skill like any other skill. Or rather, it’s very easy to go to an interview with Peter Thiel wearing a clown suit, and it will certainly make you stand out. But will it be “contrarian”? Or will it just be random? Anyone can conceive of the idea of wearing a clown suit; it doesn’t demonstrate anything out of the ordinary except perhaps unusual courage. The real difficulty is to be interestingly contrarian and, if possible, correct.

(I wrote that paragraph, and then I remembered that I know one person high up in Peter Thiel’s organization, and he dresses like a pirate during random non-pirate-related social situations. I always assumed he didn’t do this in front of Peter Thiel, but I just realized I have no evidence for that. If this advice lands you a job at Thiel Capital, please remember me after you’ve made your first million.)

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Zero to One”, Slate Star Codex, 2019-01-31.

January 27, 2022

What Would Ross Do? The .280 Military Match M10 Rifle

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 15 Sep 2021

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

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There were many different versions of the Ross straight-pull bolt action rifle made and adopted by the Canadian military. However, the version that Sir Charles Ross thought would be best was only ever made as a small run of prototypes. This rifle was called the Military Match M10, in .280 Ross caliber.

The .280 Ross was a powerful cartridge on par with 7mm Remington Magnum, firing a 140 grain bullet at 3000 fps. This made it very flat-shooting, which Ross saw as ideal for minimizing range estimation errors. Ross’ military experience had been in the Boer War, where long range individual marksmanship was perhaps as important as in any other modern military conflict. For his ideal rifle, he used his M1910 action with a Mauser-style 5-round double-column flush magazine, a finely adjustable rear sight with an aperture for precision shooting but also a notch sight for snap shots. He gave a it a 26 inch barrel — longer than many of the rifles being adopted in the early 1900s, but long enough to have good ballistics and a very long sight radius.

Ross presented his rifle to the Canadian and British militaries, but it was not accepted, because of the British retention of the .303 cartridge if for no other reason. Only about two dozen were made, with serial numbers in the 102XX range. Only perhaps half of those still exist today, and it’s a rare treat to be able to examine this one!

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January 9, 2022

QotD: Secrets in plain sight

Filed under: Business, Quotations, Science, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

One such trend – which Thiel approaches in a lot of different equivalent ways – is the loss of belief in secrets. People no longer believe that there are important things that they don’t know, but which they could discover if they tried a little harder.

Past scientific discoveries came from a belief in secrets. Isaac Newton wondered why apples fell, thought “Maybe if I work really hard on this problem, I can discover something nobody has ever learned before”, and then set out to do it. Modern people aren’t just less likely to think this way. They’re actively discouraged from it by a culture which mocks the story of Newton as “the myth of the lone genius”, and tells young people that even thinking about this risks promoting a regressive political agenda. Nowadays people get told that if they think they’ve figured out something about gravity, they’re probably a crackpot. Instead, they should wait for very large government-funded programs full of well-credentialled people to make incremental advances.

Good startups require a belief in secrets, where “secret” is equivalent to “violation of the efficient market hypothesis”. You believe you’ve discovered something that nobody else has: for example, that if you set up an online bookstore in such-and-such a way today, in thirty years you’ll be richer than God. This is an outrageously arrogant claim: that you have spotted a hundred-billion-dollar bill lying on the sidewalk that everyone else has missed. But only people who believe something like it can noncoincidentally found great companies. You must believe there are lucrative secrets hidden in plain sight.

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Zero to One”, Slate Star Codex, 2019-01-31.

January 7, 2022

The Most Important Invention of the 20th Century: Transistors

Filed under: History, Science, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 23 Dec 2019

On December 23, 1947, three researchers at Bell labs demonstrated a new device to colleagues. The device, a solid-state replacement for the audion tube, represented the pinnacle of the quest to provide amplification of electronic communication. The History Guy recalls the path that brought us what one engineer describes as “The world’s most important thing.”

This is original content based on research by The History Guy. Images in the Public Domain are carefully selected and provide illustration. As images of actual events are sometimes not available, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.

All events are portrayed in historical context and for educational purposes. No images or content are primarily intended to shock and disgust. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Non censuram.

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The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered is the place to find short snippets of forgotten history from five to fifteen minutes long. If you like history too, this is the channel for you.

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Script by THG

#ushistory #thehistoryguy #invention

January 3, 2022

Testing Gyrojet ROCKET GUNS – Why were they a commercial failure?

Filed under: History, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

TAOFLEDERMAUS
Published 10 Jun 2018

We were able to make the impossible happen: test out two rare Gyrojet rocket guns. Remarkably, instead of just taking one or two shots, we were able to take 4 shots. We were able to learn a lot with these limited test still.

Check out Sean’s Youtube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/c/ReallyGreatGear

If you want to own an amazing book about the MBA Gyrojets:
http://www.gyrojet.net/

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Music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRli8…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKPUn…

December 15, 2021

Why Real Wasabi Is So Expensive | So Expensive

Filed under: Britain, Business, Environment, Food, Japan — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Business Insider
Published 19 Jan 2019

The green paste you’ve been eating with your sushi isn’t really wasabi. If you check the ingredients on the packet, you might see a mixture of sweetener, horseradish and perhaps a small percentage of the real thing. Real wasabi is hard to come across and it can cost $250 per kilo. So what actually is wasabi, and why is it so expensive?

For more from The Wasabi Company, go to: https://www.thewasabicompany.co.uk/

——————————————————

#Wasabi #Expensive #BusinessInsider

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December 14, 2021

Chatellerault M24/29: France’s New Wave of Post-WWI Small Arms

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 26 Aug 2017

France fought the Great War with an array of weapons which were all sub-par in one way or another — the Lebel rifle was obsolescent by 1914, the Berthier was a cavalry carbine forced into rifle service, the Chauchat was an emergency wartime design optimized for production volume instead of quality, and the handguns were a mixture of old revolvers and desperate imports from Spain. Once the war finally ended, the French military would move to replace the whole lot with new and modern arms.

This would begin by finally replacing the 8mm Lebel cartridge with a non-tapered, rimless cartridge — something that would be well suited to use in magazines and repeating arms. Simultaneously, a new light machine gun would be found, as this was deemed to most important improvement to be made. The cartridge was adopted in 1924 as the 7.5x58mm, but it would soon be realized that there was a critical problem with that round. The French military had a large supply of German arms taken as war reparations, and the new 7.5mm cartridge looked very similar to the 8x57mm Mauser cartridge. Worse, the Mauser round would chamber and fire in the new French chambers, causing serious damage to guns when the 8mm bullet was squeezed down to 7.5mm. To fix this issue, the French cut their cartridge down by 4mm, resulting in the 1929 adoption of the 7.5x54mm round — the chamber of which would no longer fit a German 8mm round.

As for the machine gun, the first choice was to simply adopt the Browning BAR — but France insisted on obtaining the technical data package and producing the guns in France, and they could not come to an agreement with Colt over the price of such a license. So, the French held trials of other guns, looking at virtually everything then available. In the aftermath of the trials, it was decided that the Chatellerault arsenal could design its own weapon using the best features of the other existing guns. The arsenal rather quickly produced prototypes, and they were adopted in 1924 (and then updated to use the shorter version of the 7.5mm cartridge in 1929).

The Chatellerault M24/29 is a quite good weapon, especially considering how early it was designed. It uses a tilting bolt and a top-mounted 25 round magazine. It has two triggers, the front one firing in semiautomatic and the rear one in fully automatic. The wooden front handguard allows for fire from the hip or shoulder if desired, and a set of thorough dust covers keep the gun free from ingress of mud or dirt. About 188,000 would be manufactured, and it would stay in service for many decades.

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December 4, 2021

How mail trains collected letters without stopping – Post Trains

Filed under: Britain, History, Railways, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Train of Thought
Published 3 Dec 2021

In this video, we take a look at how post trains would collect and deliver mail without the need to stop, mostly by yeeting the post out of the train

This video falls under the fair use act of 1976.

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