Sunday, March 04, 2012
WORTHWHILE READING & VIEWING
How hyper-regulation has choked the Greek economy: the Athens bookstore and cafe that can't sell books or serve coffee
The plague of bureaucracy is not limited to Greece: read about trying to open an ice cream shop in San Francisco
Sibling of Daedalus has some photographs of the Dublin parks
A selection of landscapes
Revolutionaries and outlaws: one thing they tend to have in common
Hiring college graduates for low-level jobs and letting them sort themselves out based on skill and drive: the occupational centrifuge
Entrepreneur Phil Sugar has some thoughts about the management of growing companies
9:39 AM
Friday, March 02, 2012
"PATRIOTIC GERMANS ARE PROUD TO SHOW HOW THEY VOTE"
I've read that the above slogan was prominently displayed at polling places during the "elections" held during the early years of the Nazi regime. While the only definitive links on I can find on this poster are at the search summary screen here, it is clear that these elections (in 1933, 1936, and 1938) were marked by a climate of extreme intimidation, as well as the banning of opposition parties. This link suggests that to the extent people were still able to choose to vote by secret ballot, surreptitious means were used to identify those who had voted "incorrectly."
In Venezuela, in 2003, dictator-in-waiting Hugo Chavez asserted that "those who sign against Chavez are signing against their country and against the future", and added, "whoever signs against Chavez, there will remain his name recorded for history.
And in the United States in 2012, a tweet sent out under the name of and with the evident approval of Barack Obama said:
Add your name to demand that the Koch brothers make their donors public: http://OFA.BO/mfLtZX
(The reference is to the organization Americans for Prosperity, to which the Kochs have contributed but of which they are not officers or directors.)
Pressuring a political organization to make the names of its donors public is intimidation, pure and simple. Should Obama win a second term, you can expect the level of intimidation directed against American citizens not in his camp to rise to levels which are now almost unimaginable.
via Ricochet
Also see PowerLine: Why can't the Obama administration make its case without disseminating hate?
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
2:10 PM
Thursday, March 01, 2012
AUTHOR APPRECIATION--FANNY KEMBLE
 I knew that Fanny Kemble was a 19th-century British actress, but that's about all I knew about her prior to encountering her description of an 1830 train ride and thoughts about the contrasting attributes and social values of George Stephenson the engineer and Lord Alvanley the aristocrat. Fanny seemed like an astute observer and a good thinker, and one of the first things I did after getting my Kindle was to download her very extensive memoirs. She was born in 1809 to a noted theatrical family, achieved fame as an actress in both Britain and America, wrote two plays and a novel, married an American plantation owner and lived in coastal Georgia, and throughout her life recorded her thoughts and observations in her journal and in letters to friends. Publication of her impressions of America (in 1835) created quite a stir, as did the 1863 publication of her plantation journal, with its searing observations about the realities of slavery.
Fanny's writing is a valuable source for anyone interested in the social history of Britain and America during her era; she also has many thoughts about the theater and especially about the plays of Shakespeare; her writing is vivid, intelligent, and often quirky. She can quickly segue from an aesthetic observation of a railway journey to thoughts about governance and religion:
The road from Birmingham here is quite pretty; the country in a most exquisite state of leaf and blossom; the crops look extremely well along this route; and the little cottage gardens, which delight my heart with their tidy cheerfulness, are so many nosegays of laburnum, honeysuckle, and lilac.
The stokers on all the engines that I saw or met this morning had adorned their huge iron dragons with great bunches of hawthorn and laburnum, which hung their poor blossoms close to the hissing hot breath of the boilers, and looked wretched enough. But this dressing up the engines, as formerly the stage-coach horses used to be decked with bunches of flowers at their ears on Mayday, was touching.
I suppose the railroad men get fond of their particular engine, though they can't pat and stroke it, as sailors do of their ship. Speculate upon that form of human love. I take it there is nothing which, being the object of a man's occupation, may not be made also that of his affection, pride, and solicitude, too. Were we—people in general, I mean—Christians, forms of government would be matters of quite secondary importance; in fact, of mere expediency. A republic, such as the American, being the slightest possible form of government, seems to me the best adapted to an enlightened, civilized Christian community, a community who deserve that name; and, you know, the theory of making people what they should be is to treat them better than they deserve—an axiom that holds good in all moral questions, of which political government should be one.
Fanny's father Charles, himself a noted Shakespearean actor, unfortunately took an investment and management interest in the Covent Garden Theater--which position carried personal liability for the theater's debts and kept the family in scary financial straits for many years. It was largely in the hope of creating a new star who would bring in ticket revenues and head off financial disaster that Fanny was first put on stage, in the role of Juliet, in 1829. She quickly achieved great popular acclaim, but the bottomless quicksand of Covent Garden's finances led Charles to organize a theatrical tour in the United States for himself and his daughter.
The decision to publish Fanny's journal describing her impressions of America was driven by the need to generate money for the care of a beloved aunt who had suffered a serious carriage accident. The publishing project was vehemently opposed by Fanny's new American husband, Pierce Butler, whom she married in 1834, and the conflict set the tone for what was to be a disastrous marriage.
The "Journal of a Residence in America" got a lot of attention, much of it negative. Edgar Allan Poe objected to Fanny's "dictatorial manner" and felt that the self-confident tone of the book was contrary to "American notions of the retiring delicacy of the female character"...yet he went on to speak of the "sound sense and unwelcome truth" of much of her comment and the book's "vivacity of style" and "beautiful descriptions." On the other side of the Atlantic, soon-to-be Queen Victoria told her diary that the book was "very pertly and oddly written...not well bred"..."full of trash and nonsense which could only do harm"....yet a few days later she was admitting that there were "some very fine feelings in it."
continued at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
4:07 AM
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
READ AND WEEP
Link
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
7:09 AM
Friday, February 24, 2012
EXTREMELY COOL
The scale of the universe
(Takes a while to load, but worth it)
via Cassandra
7:17 AM
VERY VERY SCARY
How Obama makes decisions.
Excerpt:
Ron Suskind's book Confidence Men portrays Barack Obama as being confounded by his duties as president. Some of the scenes depicted by Suskind would be comical if they were not so tragic for America.
For example, when Obama's experts assembled to discuss the scope and intricacies of the stimulus bill, Barack Obama was out of his depth. He was "surprisingly aloof in the conversation" and seemed "disconnected and less in control." His contributions were rare and consisted of blurting out such gems of wisdom as "There needs to be more inspiration here!" and "What about more smart grids" and -- one more that Newt Gingrich would appreciate -- "we need more moon shot" (pages 154-5).
Suskind writes:
Members of the team were perplexed...for the first time in the transition, people started to wonder just how prepared the man at the helm was. He repeated a similar sorry performance when he had a conference call with Speaker Pelosi and her staff to discuss the details of the planned stimulus bill. He shouted into the speakerphone that "this stimulus needs more inspiration! Pelosi and her staff visibly rolled their eyes."
Presidential exhortations more befitting a summer camp counselor will evoke such reactions.
Several months ago, I cited a study of Woodrow Wilson written by Sigmund Freud and William Bullitt:
Throughout his life he took intense interest only in subjects which could somehow be connected with speech...He took no interest in mathematics, science, art or music--except in singing himself, a form of speaking. His method of thinking about a subject seems to have been to imagine himself making a speech about it...He seems to have thought about political or economic problems only when he was preparing to make a speech about them either on paper or from the rostrum. His memory was undoubtedly of the vaso-motor type. The use of his vocal chords was to him inseparable from thinking.
To Obama, it's all about the speeches, all about the hype. Despite his faux reputation as an intellectual, the man has remarkably little interest in contemplation, analysis, or problem-solving.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
6:43 AM
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
JUST UNBELIEVABLE
Obama is planning draconian cuts in the Federal Flight Deck Officer program, also known as the armed pilots program.
via Five Feet of Fury
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
9:02 AM
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
HOFFER ON SCRIBES AND BUREAUCRATS
Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status...The explosive component in the contemporary scene is not the clamor of the masses but the self-righteous claims of a multitude of graduates from schools and universities. This army of scribes is clamoring for a society in which planning, regulation, and supervision are paramount and the prerogative of the educated. They hanker for the scribe's golden age, for a return to something like the scribe-dominated societies of ancient Egypt, China, and the Europe of the Middle Ages. There is little doubt that the present trend in the new and renovated countries toward social regimentation stems partly from the need to create adequate employment for a large number of scribes...Obviously, a high ratio between the supervisory and the productive force spells economic inefficiency. Yet where social stability is an overriding need the economic waste involved in providing suitable positions for the educated might be an element of social efficiency.
continued at Chicago Boyz
8:40 AM
Sunday, February 19, 2012
HOFFER ON HOPE & CHANGE
The millions of immigrants dumped on our shores after the Civil War underwent a tremendous change, and it was a highly irritating and painful experience. Not only were they transferred, almost overnight, to a wholly foreign world, but they were, for the most part, torn from the warm communal existence of a small town or village somewhere in Europe and exposed to the cold and dismal isolation of an individual existence. They were misfits in every sense of the world, and ideal material for a revolutionary explosion. But they had a vast continent at their disposal, and fabulous opportunities for self-advancement, and an environment which held self-reliance and individual enterprise in high esteem. And so these immigrants from stagnant small towns and villages in Europe plunged into a mad pursuit of action. They tamed and mastered a continent in an incredibly short time, and we are still in the backwash of that mad pursuit.
Things are different when people subjected to drastic change find only meager opportunities for action or when they cannot, or are not allowed to, attain self-confidence and self-esteem by individual pursuits. In this case, the hunger for confidence, for worth, and for balance directs itself toward the attainment of substitutes. The substitute for self-confidence is faith; the substitute for self-esteem is pride; and the substitute for individual balace is fusion with others into a compact group.
It needs no underlining that this reaching out for substitutes means trouble. In the chemistry of the soul, a substitute is almost always explosive if for no other reason than we can never have enough of it...We can be satisfied with moderate confidence in ourselves and with a moderately good opinion of ourselves, but the faith we have in a holy cause has to be extravagant and uncompromising, and the pride we derive from an identification with a nation, race, leader, or party is extreme and overbearing. The fact that a substitute can never become an organic part of ourselves makes our holding on to it passionate and intolerant.
To sum up: When a population undergoing drastic change is without abundant opportunities for individual action and self-advancement, it develops a hunger for faith, pride, and unity. It becomes receptive to all manner of proselytizing, and is eager to throw itself into collective undertakings which aim at "showing the world." In other words, drastic change, under certain conditions, creates a proclivity for fanatical attitudes, united action, and spectacular manifestations of flouting and defiance; it creates an atmosphere of revolution.
--Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change
(emphasis added)
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
7:07 AM
Friday, February 17, 2012
LABELS, STORIES, AND PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
Erin O'Connor links to George Eliot:
It is an interesting branch of psychological observation to note the images that are habitually associated with abstract or collective terms -- what may be called the picture-writing of the mind, which carries on concurrently with the more subtle symbolism of language. Perhaps the fixity or variety of these associated images would furnish a tolerably fair test of the amount of concrete knowledge and experience which a given word represents, in the minds of two persons who use it with equal familiarity. The word railways, for example, will probably call up, in the mind of a man who is not highly locomotive, the image either of a "Bradshaw," or of the station with which he is most familiar, or of an indefinite length of tram-road; he will alternate between these three images, which represent his stock of concrete acquaintance with railways. But suppose a man to had successively the experience of a "navvy," an engineer, a traveller, a railway director and a shareholder, and a landed proprietor in treaty with a railway company, and it is probable that the range of images which would by turns present themselves to his mind at the mention of the word "railways," would include all the essential facts in the existence and relations of the thing. Now it is possible for the first-mentioned personage to entertain very expanded views as to the multiplication of railways in the abstract, and their ultimate function in civilization. He may talk of a vast net-work of railways stretching over the globe, of future "lines" in Madagascar, and elegant refreshment-rooms in the Sandwich Islands, with none the less glibness because his distinct conceptions on the subject do not extend beyond his one station and his indefinite length of tram-road. But it is evident that if we want a railway to be made, or its affairs to be managed, this man of wide views and narrow observation will not serve our purpose.
Probably, if we could ascertain the images called up by the terms "the people," "the masses," "the proletariat," "the peasantry," by many who theorize on those bodies with eloquence, or who legislate for them without eloquence, we should find that they indicate almost as small an amount of concrete knowledge -- that they are as far from completely representing the complex facts summed up in the collective term, as the railway images of our non-locomotive gentleman. How little the real characteristics of the working-classes are known to those who are outside them, how little their natural history has been studied, is sufficiently disclosed by our Art as well as by our political and social theories.
Read the whole Eliot passage plus Erin's post.
See also Peter Robinson's post about Khrushchev and Soviet management practices, which I see as being pretty related.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
2:55 PM
MORE ON THE LUNCHBOX INSPECTORS
A thoughtful essay by Richard Fernandez about the costs of the effort to establish top-down control over all aspects of human life.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
6:00 AM
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
JUST UNBELIEVABLE
Government lunchbox inspectors in North Carolina
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
7:37 PM
Monday, February 13, 2012
NICELY PUT
Even in the freest society power is charged with the impulse to turn men into precise, predictable automata. When watching men of power in action it must be always kept in mind that, whether they know it or not, their main purpose is the elimination or neutralization of the independent individual – the independent voter, consumer, worker, owner, thinker – and that every device they employ aims at turning man into a manipulatable ‘animated instrument,’ which is Aristotle’s definition of a slave.
On the other hand, every device employed to bolster individual freedom must have as its chief purpose the impairment of the absoluteness of power. The indications are that such an impairment is brought about not by strengthening the individual and pitting him against the possessors of power, but by distributing and diversifying power and pitting one category or unit of power against the other. Where power is one, the defeated individual, however strong and resourceful, can have no refuge and no recourse.
There is no doubt that of all political systems the free society is the most "unnatural." Totalitarianism, even when it goes hand in hand with a modernization of technique, constitutes a throwback to the primitive and a return to nature. It is significant that the "back to nature" movements since the days of Rousseau, though generous and noble in origin, have inevitably tended to terminate in absolutism and the worship of brute force.
Eric Hoffer, The Ordeal of Change
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
7:29 AM
Saturday, February 11, 2012
AN INTERVIEW WITH PETER THIEL
...conducted by Francis Fukuyama, about America's current trajectory. Thiel co-founded PayPal and is a venture capitalist; he was an early investor in Facebook. In 2010 he created a fellowship with the mission of awarding $100,000 each to 20 people under 20 years old in order to spur them to quit college and create their own ventures. Fukuyama is a political scientist and writer best known for his book The End of History.
Link to the interview
I think this point made by Thiel is particularly worthy of note:
One regulatory perspective is that environmentalism has played a much greater role than people think. It induced a deep skepticism about anything involving the manipulation of nature or material objects in the real world. The response to environmentalism was to prohibit scientists from experimenting with stuff and only allow them to do so with bits. So computer science and finance were legal, and what they have in common is that they involve the manipulation of bits rather than stuff. They both did well in those forty years, but all the other engineering disciplines were stymied. Electric engineering, civil engineering, aeronautical, nuclear, petroleum—these were all held back, and attracted fewer talented students at university as the years went on. When people wonder why all the rocket scientists went to work on Wall Street, well, they were no longer able to build rockets. It’s some combination of an ossified, Weberian bureaucracy and the increasingly hostile regulation of technology. That’s very different from the 1950s and 1960s. There’s a powerful libertarian argument that government used to be far less intrusive, but found targeted ways to advance science and technology.
Read the whole thing.
Link via Isegoria
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
5:44 AM
Friday, February 10, 2012
THE PAST OF THE FUTURE
Predictions about the year 2000 made by Robert Heinlein in 1952.
via Newmark's Door
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
5:50 AM
Wednesday, February 08, 2012
COOL RETROTECH, BUT...
The first stored-program electronic computer capable of doing useful work was the EDSAC, built at Cambridge University and commissioned in 1949. It supported research in several scientific disciplines as well as the development of software techniques until being scrapped as obsolete in 1958. There is now a project to rebuild this pioneering computer: the reconstructed version will be made as close as possible to the original, with one exception...and the reasons for the exception, I think, are perhaps more related to social history than to the history of technology.
EDSAC used vacuum tubes (valves, in Britspeak) for its arithmetical and logical functions; for memory, it used something called a mercury delay line, an idea borrowed from WWII radar technology. (EDSAC=Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator.) information to be stored was introduced at one end of a tube of mercury, down which it traveled in the form of pulses of sound. About 1 millisecond later, at the other end of the tank, the pulses were picked up, amplified, and emitted again at the starting point, with the whole train of information bits in the line thereby being kept in continuous circulation as long as the power was on.
Can you guess how the reconstructed EDSAC is going to differ from the original version?
continued at Chicago Boyz
7:19 AM
Monday, February 06, 2012
PENALIZING CHARTER-SCHOOL TEACHERS
The IRS has a proposed new regulation which would prohibit charter-school teachers from participating in state retirement plans. (At present, all of the states which authorize charter schools permit, and in some cases require, the charter-school teachers to participate in these plans.) Furthermore, the new regulation would apparently apply retroactively and would cause the teachers to lose the state contributions to their accounts which have been accrued, and on which they were no doubt relying, unless they give up their employment. More here.
Today, February 6, is the last day for public comments on this issue under IRS procedures.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
6:50 AM
Friday, February 03, 2012
AUTHOR APPRECIATION: Rose Wilder Lane
I got a Kindle a few months ago, and have been very pleased to discover lots of old and largely-forgotten but very worthwhile books available for download, often for free or for 99 cents. In this and future posts, I'll be giving some focus to these neglected but worthy books and their authors.
Rose Wilder Lane, born in 1886 in the Dakota Territory, was the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the "Little House on the Prairie" books. Lane is best known for her writings on political philosophy and has been referred to as a "Founding Mother" of libertarianism; she was also a novelist and the author of several biographies.
In her article Credo, published in 1936, she describes her political journey, beginning with the words:
In 1919 I was a communist.
continued at Chicago Boyz
3:35 PM
Thursday, February 02, 2012
WORTHWHILE READING & VIEWING
Novelist Ben Marcus talks about how a writer can create emotional involvement on the part of his readers
A Harvard Business Review writer on how your use of pronouns reflects your personality
Speaking of Harvard, Cold Spring Shops has an interesting piece on status differences among colleges
The American Spectator on Environmentalism and the Leisure Class
Daniel Drezner on American resilience
Chicago Boy Ralph Goergens calls attention to the Building Technology Heritage Library
The world's most luxurious trains
And speaking of trains, see this fine piece of writing by Celia Farber
4:31 PM
Monday, January 30, 2012
WORKING RIVER, OR REAL-ESTATE AMENITY?
Minneapolis is the head of commercial navigation on the Mississippi river. The city's barge facilities handle about 600,000 tons of traffic annually--not huge by water-transport standards, but not trivial either.
Concerns about a predatory fish called the Asian Carp have raised the idea of permanently closing the locks at St Anthony Falls and hence eliminating Minneapolis's industrial waterfront. Maybe this is necessary, or maybe there is an alternative way of dealing with the carp invasion--I don't know. But I do think that the reaction of the Mayor to the potential termination of barge operations in his city is a little--jarring:
Get over it. Minneapolis does not need a port
What Minneapolis apparently does need, in the opinion of many real-estate developers and politicians, is a new swath of riverfront parks, condos, and restaurants.
continued at Chicago Boyz
5:13 PM
Sunday, January 29, 2012
DECLASSIFIED, AFTER 66 YEARS
Mavis Batey, a WWII codebreaker, was presented by the British intelligence agency GCHQ with a document ("the history of Abwehr codebreaking") that she co-authored in 1945 and that has only now been declassified. One of the other authors was her late husband Keith, but the information was considered so secret, and was so compartmentalized, that she had not previously read or even been aware of his contributions to the document.
I've previously written about Mavis Batey (née Mavis Lever) in my post the bombe runs again. Her realization that a certain enciphered message did not contain a single occurrence of the letter "L" led to the breaking of the message, the setting of a trap for the Italian fleet at Cape Matapan, and the sinking of four enemy ships.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
9:36 AM
Friday, January 27, 2012
ONE OF MY LEAST-FAVORITE POLITICIANS
...out of a wide range of potential choices, is Rep Jan Schakowsky (D-IL). I first became aware of this reprehensible individual after seeing the incredibly arrogant letter that she wrote to Kathleen Fasanella (of the blog Fashion Incubator) in response to Kathleen's attempts to call attention to the harm being done to many small manufacturers by the ill-thought-out CPSIA legislation.
There are lots of reasons to dislike Schakowsky (see this, for example)---another such reason made its appearance Wednesday with her assertion, in an attempt to defend Obama's suppression of the Keystone Pipeline project, that "Twenty thousand jobs is really not that many jobs, and investing in green technologies will produce that and more."
Twenty thousand jobs is really not that many jobs?
There is of course a huge difference between a project funded with private money that will act to reduce America's energy costs and increase its industrial competitiveness, and one funded with taxpayer money (much of it undoubtedly going to politically-well-connected corporations) which would quite likely act to increase America's energy costs and thereby reduce its industrial competitivness. Perusal of Schakowsky's bio reveals no experience at all working in the private sector, of course.
Whatever one thinks of the Pipeline and of various "alternative energy" options, surely it should be obvious to all that this CongressCreature's cavalier dismissal of twenty thousand jobs should be considered unacceptable arrogance on the part of any American officeholder. It is a level of arrogance that, unfortunately, has become far too common among the government classes.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
9:07 AM
PEOPLE WHO CAN'T TAKE CRITICISM
...should not be placed in leadership positions--...not as captains of ships, not as commanders of infantry platoons, not as managers of stores or factories, not as principals of schools.
Most especially, such people should never be chosen as national leaders.
More here.
5:34 AM
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
INTERESTING DATA
A Flesch-Kinkaid analysis of State of the Union addresses says that Obama's speech last night was at a grade level of 8.4. By comparison, JFK's inaugural was at a level of 12.0, Richard Nixon was 11.5, George H W Bush was 8.6, and George W Bush was 10.4.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
2:31 PM
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
A TALE OF TWO COMPANIES
Two old rivals. One is in Chapter 11, the other is thriving. Why?
Kodak and Fujifilm
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
8:47 AM
Sunday, January 22, 2012
EXCELLENT NEWS
The wit and wisdom of Cassandra has returned to the Internet.
Temporarily, at least...I see that she still has her notice that "you have reached a blog that has been disconnected or is no longer in service" up on the masthead. Maybe if we all clap our hands, she will stick around. It worked for Tinkerbell, after all.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
9:29 AM
NICELY PUT
The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.
--Joseph Schumpeter, 1942
Quoted here: the high price economy
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
8:45 AM
Thursday, January 19, 2012
4004 PLUS 40
Missed this by a couple of months....November 15, 2011, was the 40th anniversary of the Intel 4004, the world's first microprocessor. The history of this extremely influential device provides an interesting case study in innovation.
Early computers were constructed out of discrete components, first vacuum tubes and later transistors. Early work on transistors was done at Bell Labs...one of the inventors, William Shockley, became dissatisfied with Bell's management and left to start his own company, which he located in Palo Alto to be near his mother's house. (If Shockley's mom had lived in Roanoke, would the term "Silicon Valley" now refer to the Shenandoah valley!?
Eight of the new company's employees ("the traitorous eight") in turn became unhappy with the way Shockley was running things, and left in 1957 to form Fairchild Semiconductor as a division of Fairchild Camera and Instrument. The integrated circuit, which allowed several transistors to be placed on a single chip, was independently invented at Fairchild and at Texas Instruments. Large numbers of these chips still had to be interconnected to form the central processing unit of a computer.
continued at Chicago Boyz
7:21 AM
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
PROTEST THE INTERNET CENSORSHIP BILLS TODAY
Although public outrage has led to the "Stop Internet Piracy Act" in the House of Representatives being "suspended" until "consensus can be achieved," the Senate version, which is known as the "Protect IP Act," continues making its way through the legislative process. There is no doubt that numerous CongressCreatures, many of them in the service of the powerful media-industry lobby, will continue their efforts to enact something along the lines of this very dangerous legislation.
Several well-known web sites, including Wikipedia, have gone dark for the day in order to help inform the public about the SOPA and PIPA. Others, including Google, are remaining active but putting up an information banner about the threat represented by this legislation.
Links to information and analysis concerning these bills, including a summary of lobbying activities, in my post here.
This would be a good day to contact your CongressCreature and express your opinion about the threat to American free speech and to the American economy which is represented by this proposed legislation
5:06 AM
Saturday, January 14, 2012
"GREEN ENERGY," CRONY CAPITALISM, AND NICHOLAS NICKLEBY
...an interesting piece here.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
5:58 AM
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
THE IDEA THAT BIGNESS AUTOMATICALLY WINS IN BUSINESS
...still seems to have a remarkable number of adherents.
Business Insider has an interview with a 32-year-old Brit who is cofounder of Huddle, a startup aiming to compete with Microsoft's SharePoint. While I didn't read the comment thread, up toward the beginning there are at least 3 comments from people mocking the idea that a startup would be able to succeed against a product which (a)comes from a very large company and (b)is successful and growing.
Well, let's see. Up through the early 1980s, IBM's position in the computer industry looked unassailable...indeed, IBMs dominance was so complete that the computer industry had often been referred to as "IBM and the Seven Dwarfs." Who would have guessed that a couple of startups called Intel and Microsoft were about to start grabbing market share from IBM in a big way?
Up through at least the 1970s, Sears Roebuck & Co was a colossus of the American retail industry. Who would have guessed that Sears--along with many other large retailers--would have found itself losing out to a bunch of guys from Arkansas?
The steel industry was long dominated by the giant integrated steel companies, especially Bethlehem Steel and U.S. Steel. Both of these companies went bankrupt--but for smaller and more nimble firms such as Nucor, focused on mini-mills and continuous casting, the story was very different.
I haven't looked at Huddle in any depth, and don't have a considered opinion about their future. But I do know that many SharePoint users are less than happy with the product, and I do know that small and focused companies often have considerable advantages over larger and more complex companies. Sometimes these advantages, intelligently applied, will suffice to dramatically overcome the also-very-real advantages of the larger firm.
The belief that the-big-guy-always-wins seems surprisingly resistant to historical experience. J K Galbraith, in his book The New Industrial State, asserted to large firms would simply become larger and more vertically-integrated and would control demand through advertising, making themselves fairly unassailable. This was in 1967--in view of the history of the last 45 years, people today have much less excuse for such beliefs that Galbraith did
Why is the big-guy-wins theory still so widely held?
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
8:35 AM
Sunday, January 08, 2012
THE DANGERS OF DEMONOLOGY
A writer at The Economist notes that hatred of bankers is one of the world’s oldest and most dangerous prejudices:
Civilisations that have eased the ban on moneylending have grown rich. Those that have retained it have stagnated. Northern Italy boomed in the 15th century when the Medicis and other banking families found ways to bend the rules. Economic leadership passed to Protestant Europe when Luther and Calvin made moneylending acceptable. As Europe pulled ahead, the usury-banning Islamic world remained mired in poverty.
and
In medieval Europe Jews were persecuted not only because they were not Christians but also because killing them was a quick way to expunge debts. Karl Marx, who came from a Jewish family, regarded Jews as the embodiments of capitalism who could only be rescued from their ancestral curse through revolution. The forgers of the “Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” wanted people to believe that Jewish financiers were engaged in a fiendish global conspiracy. Louis McFadden, the chairman of the United States House Committee on Banking and Currency in the 1930s, claimed that “the Gentiles have the slips of paper while the Jews have the lawful money.” The same canards have been used against Chinese minorities across Asia.
It can be reasonably argued that the financial industry in the US, and probably also in Europe, is too large as a % of the overall economy and also far too influential in political affairs--see my post about sticky governors. But the unthinking demonization of finance as an activity, and of people involved in that activity, is counterproductive, and, as the Economist author argues, dangerous.
via Stuart Schneiderman
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
6:22 AM
Thursday, January 05, 2012
THE RAMPANT ARROGANCE OF THE GOVERNMENT CLASSES AND THE DECLINE OF AMERICAN LIBERTY
A 16-year-old girl in Florida parked in the wrong space, had her car keyed, suspected another girl, and posted on her own Facebook page the following:
oh so you keyed my car? well your karmas gonna be a wholeee lot worse that that
The next day, school officials suspended her for three days--and a criminal charge of "stalking" was brought against her by the Pinellas County Sheriff's Department
As Scott Greenfield says:
To call the arrest of Allie Scott crazy is to state the obvious. That both a school district and a sheriff's office would nonetheless indulge in such insanity is the piece that would make a good subject for Kafka.
Other incidents of Kafkaesque abuse of authority by public school officials and local police departments are easy to find.
For most of history, in most places in the world, people have lived in fear of The Authorities. For a couple of centuries, that fear was largely lifted (with certain obvious exceptions) in the territory of The United States of America. Now, as a result of the endless expansion of governmental powers and the political and administrative arrogance which have inevitably followed, it is returning. The American populace is being collectively cowed.
See my related posts zero tolerance-zero judgment-zero compassion and Philip Queeg Public High School.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
6:01 AM
Wednesday, January 04, 2012
TAKE A STROLL THROUGH DUBLIN
...specifically, Harcourt Terrace, a favorite street of the Sibling of Daedalus.
Google Street View really is pretty cool.
1:59 PM
Saturday, December 31, 2011
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
Lots of people will be singing Auld Lang Syne tonight. A history of the song is here...note that the Burns version was apparently based in part on a much earlier ballad by James Watson. The lyrics of the Watson version (published in 1701) are here.
Thanks for reading Photon Courier...best wishes to all for 2012.
3:46 PM
Friday, December 30, 2011
VERY DANGEROUS LEGISLATION MOVING FORWARD
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, writes:
This week, a bill that would create America's first Internet censorship system is going to a full committee for a vote, and is likely to pass.
He is referring to the "Stop Online Piracy" act and the related "Protect IP" act. Links to information and analysis concerning these bills, for which heavy lobbying activities are underway, here.
This is dangerous stuff, and, as Tim notes, people need to be contacting their CongressCreatures now.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
5:58 AM
WELL, WHY NOT?
Admit Britain to NAFTA?
The acronym even still works..."NA" could stand for "North Atlantic" as well as "North American."
via Neptunus Lex
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
4:56 AM
Thursday, December 29, 2011
JUST BECAUSE I LIKE IT
Minutes to Memories, John Mellencamp
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
8:52 AM
Friday, December 23, 2011
CHRISTMAS 2011
A wonderful 3-D representation of the Iglesia San Luis De Los Franceses. Just click on the link--then you can look around inside the cathedral. Use arrow keys or mouse to move left/right, up/down, and shift to zoom in, ctrl to zoom out.
Vienna Boys Choir, from Maggie's Farm
Christmas photos from the 1920s
Lappland in pictures, from Neptunus Lex
Snowflakes and snow crystals, from Cal Tech. Lots of great photos
A Romanian Christmas carol, from The Assistant Village Idiot
In the bleak midwinter, from The Anchoress
French Christmas carols
Rick Darby has some thoughts on the season. More here.
A Christmas reading from Thomas Pynchon.
The first radio broadcast of voice and music took place on Christmas Eve, 1906. Or maybe not.
An air traffic control version of The Night Before Christmas.
Ice sculptures from the St Paul winter carnival
Silent Night in Gaelic
O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, sung by Enya
Gerard Manley Hopkins
7:13 PM
Thursday, December 22, 2011
BLACKBIRD AMONG THE STARS
Today marks the 47th anniversary of the first flight of the SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance plane. Which reminds me of this well-written article by an SR-71 pilot, especially the following passage.
One moonless night, while flying a routine training mission over the Pacific, I wondered what the sky would look like from 84,000 feet if the cockpit lighting were dark. While heading home on a straight course, I slowly turned down all of the lighting, reducing the glare and revealing the night sky. Within seconds, I turned the lights back up, fearful that the jet would know and somehow punish me. But my desire to see the sky overruled my caution, I dimmed the lighting again. To my amazement, I saw a bright light outside my window. As my eyes adjusted to the view, I realized that the brilliance was the broad expanse of the Milky Way, now a gleaming stripe across the sky. Where dark spaces in the sky had usually existed, there were now dense clusters of sparkling stars Shooting stars flashed across the canvas every few seconds. It was like a fireworks display with no sound. I knew I had to get my eyes back on the instruments, and reluctantly I brought my attention back inside. To my surprise, with the cockpit lighting still off, I could see every gauge, lit by starlight. In the plane's mirrors, I could see the eerie shine of my gold spacesuit incandescently illuminated in a celestial glow. I stole one last glance out the window. Despite our speed, we seemed still before the heavens, humbled in the radiance of a much greater power. For those few moments, I felt a part of something far more significant than anything we were doing in the plane. The sharp sound of Walt's voice on the radio brought me back to the tasks at hand as I prepared for our descent.
Read the whole thing.
cross-posted at Chicago Boyz, where comments are open
6:34 PM
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