Tag: Constants and Variables
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Skill vs status
Carver in 1913: Start where you are. Work with what you have. Make something of it. Never give up. Here’s a fable showing what happens when you disobey Carver. Around 1915, Ford’s total mastery of high quantity at low price forced everyone else out of that position. Later, Cadillac’s total ownership of the luxury market […]
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Attics
Random stupid thought. Many of the podcasters I see on Youtube are in attic rooms. Slanted roof, low walls, visible dormers. This makes sense if you own a big house and want to set up a room solely for podcasting, outside of everyday traffic. But the typical McMansion also has unused basement rooms. Why don’t […]
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Tech gene question
Returning to the subject of tech genes. Here’s an odd question that doesn’t seem to have an easy explanation. Horse-powered vehicles had wheels with iron rims, and continued to have iron rims after automobiles were common.** Horseless carriages had pneumatic rubber tires from the start, even when they were made by the same company. Studebaker […]
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Why miss a chance to show your skill?
This is one of my perpetual puzzles. In the ’40s and early ’50s, the best Euro cars tried amazingly hard to omit taillights. Designers who lavished close attention to shapes and grilles and roofs and dashboards simply ignored taillights, tacking on microteensy standardized pinpricks way down behind the bumper. Taillights were apparently obscene. Two haute […]
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I don’t get it.
A failure of FAA’s air control system caused aircraft to be grounded for a few minutes or whatever. This is THE ONLY STORY right now, and Congress promises to “investigate” the glitch. The airlines (and buses and trains and taxis) STRANGLED AND GAGGED THEIR PASSENGERS for two fucking years, and media didn’t notice it. I […]
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Odd correlation
The US Commerce department wrote this book in 1929. It’s an impartial description of radio systems and radio advertising in every country of the world, for the guidance of American advertisers who want to reach foreign markets. There’s a STRONG and backward-seeming correlation between advertising and government style in Europe. The countries that we called […]
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Where’s the effect?
Stoller is extolling a new decision by the Federal Trade Commission to ban non-compete agreements. FTC claims this will raise wages by $2000 for an average worker. This doesn’t make sense. Non-compete agreements have been around for a long time. They were always used for executives and salesmen, and apparently they’re now used in other […]
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What’s worse than DDT?
Reading a Reddit thread about sounds we used to hear. Modems, rotary dials, antenna rotors, the 15750 horizontal flyback in TV (interestingly, the thread has 15,700 comments right now!), dial tones and busy signals. I’m mostly analog, never switched from landline to cellphone, so some of these are still common for me. One steady theme […]
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Same/opposite
Okay, here’s a suitable year-end shit, inspired by reading Huxley’s 1927 essays. Compare events that came out exactly as I thought, versus events that came out the opposite way. Check my own biases and assumptions. = = = = = Exactly as I thought: In Feb 2020, when China started doing the lockdown lunacy, my […]
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Good knockdown of a silly idea!
This article on the origin of language is sensible but sort of surprising. Apparently the idea that language started from gestures is becoming more common, and might even be the consensus assumption now. The first paragraph is eloquent: Some say language evolved by firelight, with our ancestors sharing stories deep into the night. Others suggest […]
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From an extremely same/different era
After finding the origin of ringers in this 1927 volume of Vanity Fair I started reading the rest of the magazine. 1927 was the peak of a Share Value boom, so it was like 2017 as measured by aristocrats. The two booms are drastically different as measured by peasants. 1927 was overgrown from a REAL […]
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Hypothesis
Wolf does his usual excellent graph and excellent explanation on the bankruptcy of a bitcoin “mining” company. The graphs for SPACs and IPOs are so consistent that they suggest a hypothesis. IPO = LBO. The usual myth tells us that an IPO is designed to provide capital for a company to grow. The graphs tell […]
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Seeing the whole graph
A brief feature on Yahoo Finance shows that the new “alarming” trend toward youngsters staying with parents is not alarming at all. A screencap of the relevant graph: This shows the percent of younger folks 18-29 who are living with parents. The underlying article at Business Insider links to Census data, but the Census website […]
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Data web returns to data web
The “rights” fans are getting all excited over the non-revealing “revelation” that FBI controls media. Time for a reprint from April of this year. = = = = = START REPRINT: Secrecy and censorship are the defaults. We don’t have the choice of escaping censorship. Given this CONSTANT, there are two interesting VARIABLES, a political […]
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Not dumb
For contrast, one of the anticoin redditors is brilliantly comparing the Madoff “fraud” with the Bankman-Fried fraud. He found an old government press release from the task force assigned to undo Madoff’s mess. The government managed to refund 88% of the losses. This means that Madoff and his partners OWNED most of the money needed […]
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