1. Gutenberg Press
The year 1438, Christmas day, a prosperous citizen of Strasburg died of the plague. A court case between his brother and his business partner proceeded, for his persue for secret art left him "up to his ears in debt"!!!
The senior partner named Gutenberg won and continued to persuit the advancement in secret art---His entire system was to allow durable metal type to be in mass produced, flexibly arranged, and used to print out hundreds of book in a matter of days!!!
The centre of his system is to mass produce the metal type.
Gutenberg himself was a goldsmith for carving coins. He and his men carved a punch, each punch for each letter out of hard matel; with the letter form sticking up in relieve, then the punch would stamp out a matrix with the letter depressed into it; then crammed it into a hand-held mold, with molten alloy pulled in, the metal type would emerge, cooling rapidly and was ready to use: brush on the oil-based ink; firmly presse slightly dampen paper onto the metal, and admire the result!!!
After his first test out of a 28-paged school book, his Bible in Latin in print won the praise from the then Pope in 1455:"Such a marvelous man. The type is so clear that it can be read without glasses!!!" All the copies then were sold.
Well, it's revolutionary is not in beauty and clarity, but in economics.
Centuries before him, the price of a book would cost six months of wage; after him, the price of books clasped and only cost six days' wage and only six hours' wage in 1600s.
Printing business was new then with more print in books went on.
In weaving industry, forganized by the "guilts" who controlled who and how to perform.
Printers were outside the system, it's hard not to find a printer without in debt. Those merchant bankers who would supply the considerable upfront investment, also organize the d8stribution of books. Because there was no bookshop then.
They found it's more profitable to print shorter, simpler product with lower price tag.
The printing went through Grammer books as its first test out and popular then; then pre-packaged papal indulgence; then the short religious polemics with which the speed of disseminating rebellious ideas was unusual(Martin Luther nailed his pamphlet to the door of All Saints Church in Germany in 1517. Churche doors were a traditional place for publicity.)
The Martin Luther pamphlet in Germen was praised as "the God's highest and extremist art of grace whereby the business of gossiple is driven forward!!!"
Well, the pamphlets rouse anything but gracefulness! It's used in vicious purpose and rose religious flame war:filled the pockets of printers and spark the refermation of the birth of Christian churches and ultimately lead to the catastrophic 30-year war.
Nowadays Internet trolls may argue that the conflicts may lead to tension and tension to influence.
In 1455, in another court case, Gutenberg, a man in millanian but still struggled to make money, lost his ownership of his own printing press!!!
It's around 1890s, it emerged as a kind of toy in Chicago, USA: 5 spinning drums; each with 10 playing cards; insert a coin; if 5 cards line up into a decent poker hand; then you can collect the price.
Charles Fey from Bavaria to Sanflancisco simplified it into three wheels. And the morden version has got it into a digital shift.
The trick is it can spid back some small wins some times. The more winning, the more credit one gets, and the more time on device (TOD)!!!
With fleshing lights, and celebratory gingles, it attracts people.
The ratio is for 100 spins, there will be 14 real wins (the machine paid back more pounds than you put in) and 18 false wins (players receive great fanfare than he or she had wagered) It's the false win with 18 ratio gets people more addictive!!!
The machines were ferociously competive--a 10,000 cost machine was supposed to pay itself in a month, or it would be replaced.
Those addicts get hooked and absorbed in the "Zone" much more quickly than other forms of gambling such as lottery, caseno games, or sports betting.
Well, such addiction now is moving to our phones!!! We are all in the "Zone" now with such intermittent reinforcement as what is described in the 2003 book《Something For Nothing》!
What worth mentioning here is the history. It's written in 1948 by Alan Turing, the great mathematician, who calculated one move every half an hour by just pencil and paper. The computer program looked up a few hundreds of options and made the move that produce the position with the highest value!!!
While the modern laptop takes faction of fraction of a second!!!
Algorithm is the step by step procedure; a set-up of well-defined that one follows to produce a result; a recipe written by an infinantly pedantic chef!!!
The word Algorithm was derived from a Perssian mathematician, called by his modern counterpart "Algorithmy", who was active about 12,000 years ago.
Predating him, there were Babylonians to calculate solution to algibrate problems 4000 years ago.
And about 2000 years ago, Greeks had the greatest common devicer of two numbers.
In 1850s, George Boole, a professor of mathematician in Queen's collage of Cork, Ireland, wrote a book 《Laws of Thought》in which he simplified logical propositions into mathematical operations--True or False, Or or Not!!!
80 years later, it was obeyed by electrical circuit--on and off!!!
So, in the digital age, the algorithm realized it's full potential.
Yet, the chess algorithm is far too complex.
Someone once put it in the first academic paper on chess in 1950:"the problem is not that of designing a machine to play perfect chess which is quite impractical, nor one which merely plays legal chess which is trivial. We' d like to play a skillful game, perhaps more comprable to that of a good human player."
Could the mere granding mindlessly through a pre-spesified procedure out-perform the human mind?
Both Turing and the author were intrigued by the ways of exploring how machines can think.
1997, the first chess play machine developed by IBM, Deep Blue can calculate 100 million movements per second and acquire huge library of human game openings.
"Problem-solving without human like thought was trickery!!!"
Delivering results is what computers do these days.
Lots of algorithm are applied in medicine field.
Alpha Zero--the game-learning algorithm developed by Google's sister company Deep-Mind.
2017, AlphaZero trained itself in few hours and programmed himself to beat human. Human wrote the learning algorithm, then the learning algorithm wrote a programme to play chess far better than human!!!
Auction was used as the tool to attack enemy's moral, but it's not the first recorded auction.
Auction can be seen common in markets all around. The theatrical effort turns into the term of "open outcry auction"!!! A room full of art and antique dealers, millionaires' backer submit offers by phone, the auctioneers tickling the whole price all along~~~
In the early 19th century, British traders used auction to offload large volumn of inexpensive British produce in America. The American consumers liked it, but the merchants were indignant.
1828, one economist complained:"Auctions are the grand machine by which British agents at once distorted all regularities in business and manufactory."
Some anti-auction committees were declaring that "All auctions are monoplay, and unjust by giving to a few debt which are to be distributed among the merchantile community generally!!!"
The grain of truth is large auction abuses market power.
There are the risks that large venues abuse market power.
Apart from the open outcry auction, there are other ways to design auction:
Dutch clock auction: the clock face shows not the time but the price. As the clock's ticking down and down until somebody stop the clock by pressing the button. The one who stops the clock buys the flower at the price specified.
Sealed-bid auction: people wrote down the bid, the bid was slipped in the envelope and sealed in tight, and the highest price got it.
One economist put it: Under ideal condition, all auctions can be expected to raise the same amount of revenue.
Auction comes to all that information and transformed it into price!!!
In our modern digital economy, every type search term into Google, ther ewill be an advertisement aside, and if you click that advertisement is a bid-per-click algorithm. The scale of the bid-per-click is unnerving. Google owns more than 2b per month in which most is from advertising and most advertising is sold by auction. In 2019, Google have taken more revenue from advertising than its two biggest rivals Facebook and Alibaba conbined.
Water was scarce and the rainfall was uneven there. And the dam allows the water stored till it's needed. A sudden storm would deliver a valuable resource free of charge literally falling from the sky.
Much of the world elsewhere, even in those developed countries, have problem of dealing with the uneven rainfall, wether the availablity of water is seasonal or unpredictable.
In Kenya, drought caused economic loss was 20% in 1990s, followed by larger economic loss by flooding.
In August, 1975, the crowned Iron Dam in HeNan China was broken by waves of seven metres high and 12000 metres wide!!! And no surprise that had been a state secret for many years!!! Still, it was replaced by a new one.
Broken dams can cause damages in wealthy countries, large one can cause earthquakes, small ones deadly landslides.
1959, a dam in France cracked, and claimed over 4023 death. 1963, a dam in Italy caused by an overwhelming inland tsunami caused 2000 plus people died.
Military attack on dams is, still, a war crime.
(Itaipu on the boarder of Brazil and Paraguay is at the upstream of the city Buenos Aires.)
It's not the risk of the catastrophe gives dam its uneasy reputation. It's the reshaping the eco-system, both upstream and down stream that makes the dam so disputable.
The High Aswan Dam in Egypt which held back the Nile caused such things: had impact on resources 500km long; explosion of water higher; outbreaks of somwwhere; polluted irrigation channels; build-up sandiment inland that would compensate for coast erosion from Egypt to Nebenon. Temples flooded, and people removed.
Despite all the cost, the project has been an overwhelming success: predictable irrigation; it paid itself in two years; shrouded Egypt from drout through 1980s.
All dams create winners and losers and the tensions need to be managed.
The only two women winners of the Nobel memorial economics are both about the dam.
One is in Napal for the disatblizing traditional bargains between up and down stream communities about sharing water and effort.
One is in India for some benefit from irrigation while others experiencing increasing poverty.
The losers in dams often lives in other countries, which causes the tension.
The dam intended to be completed in Ethiopia side of the Nile in 2022 makes Egypt not so happy.
Compansate the losers is not for politicians who are more interested in its symbolism. You can see why they want dams to stand the testament to their grand strategic vision.
Dams reshape economics in complex ways. Many maybe worth it overall. Only the benefits can be equitably shared with those lose-out. But it's easily to be overlooked when dam is regarded as the national virility.
In early 1637, tulip bulb reached truly extraordinary price. And such burst surddenly went over.
In February that year, the price of bulbs fell down nearly 10 fold in just a few days. That is called the Tulip mania or the financial bubble--the price goes up and up not because its intrinsic value but because people who buy it expect to sell it again at a profit!!! Also called the Great Fool theory.
In Charles' 1841 account, 《The Extraordinarily Popular Delusion of Madness of Worlds》 there are full of vivid stories of how the Dutch nation was involved. But those extravagant tales are properly false.
Tulip was a newly imported plant in Europe in 17th century.
Some bulbs, infected by virus, changed from simple bold petalled colour into exquisite various patterns.
Some newly richer Dutch merchants collected and displayed this rare tulips.
In early 1600s, the price of tulip went up and up.
One of those merchants had his garden full of artfully positioned mirrors, in the centre were few rare tulips, made by the mirroe, to look multiplied.
The price of one tulip bulb in winter 1637 was 5200 guilders!!! That's 3 times of Rembrandt's commission of the Night Watcher 5 years later. And 20 times of what a skilled worker earned annually.
The idea about a rare bulb was about the value of its right!!!
The bulbs worthed a million dollars produced not only tulips but also off-shoot bulbs called "off-sets". So, owning a rare bulb is like owning a champion race horse.
That's it's not only valuable in its own right, but also in its potential offsprings.
The financial bubble bursts when expectations reach a tipping point.
One theory was: once enough people expect the price go in down, the supply of great fools drys up.
Another theory: in warm Dutch land, February is the month for bulbs to burst through the soil. Having seen abundant shoots on their journeys, the bulb traders might have realized the crop would be bountiful, which meaned the rare might be less rare than they imagined.
If so, the fall in price may have reflected in surging supply, rather than the bursting of the bulbs.
Either way, soon after, the mania subsided.
The fallout was painful. Many traders did not do simple exchange of cash for bulbs. Some promised pay in future.
That's the struggle between buyers who don't have money and sellers who don't have bulbs--who owned what to whom!
Ironically, it's Charles who, being one of those bullish commentators, waved the wave of financial crisis ahead and encouraged investors to bid up stocks to absurd prices in the railway mania in 1840s!!!
7. Sanitary Towel
In 1920s, when manstrual was a discretion thing to talk, young men might be confused about what "Co-Tex" was!!!
It's the most popular manstrual pad brand. Another one -Fibs is still regarded as nasty, secretive, and unclean.
There were good reason for women to keep quiet about menstruation .
1868, a vice president of an company noticed that female staffs were not trusted in their periods.
A month later, girls were eliminated from school during their periods, which was criticized as a way to dismiss girls from school.
In late 19th century, when almost everything home-made was replaced by manufactory commodities in other parts of life. Why not in this case!
The challenge was how to advertise and sell such thing in that society where manstrual thing was unmentionable.
In 1890s, first case to sell disposable ones.
In WWI, sellu-cotton was made to replace make-up bandages.
At the end of war, it seemed there had some business opportunities, but still were risky.
The "cotton-texture", in short is called "co-tex", caught on fast, as, for decades, women found some independence in fields like job market. So women can think and manstrate at the same time.
Kimberly Clark had a hit.
Though it's no secret then, women wanted discretely packaged ones.
And there was nohing secretive about the way they were marketed: The booming demond encouraged manufactory to bombard customers with advertisement.
In 1930s, men were underseaged by such advertisement.
The previously unutterable technology had gone into the culture mainstream.
1933, the sellu-cotton pad was patented.
1937, manstrual cup was patented.
In WWI, it was marketed as a way to help women to participate in the war-effort.
Nowadays, women spend about 3b dollars a year on sanitary products. And the 21st century advertisements mock those old ones.
In India, some one invented pad machine is remembered.
Anyway, he made his back to Shanghai and from where he dispatched 8 glazed cases of living plants for England. In his 400 pages memorial, he was so proud that he saw his plants being full bloom in the garden of Royal Hoticulture Society of London, Chiswick !
Robert was the plant-hunter employed by Royal Horticulture Society (of London). Those glasses were called Wardian case developed in the previous decades--the 1830s.
Nathaniel Bagshow Word, a doctor in London east end, was a fern enthusiast. But the air then was too pollutant to let the fern grow.
His invention was simple: glass, timber, and a touch of paint. A sealed mini greenhouse that could let the light in, keep the sult and smoke out, and keep the moisture in so it's no need to water the plant. Not a feat of technology at all. And his fern survived.
He might also solved the problem troubling those plant hunters: how to keep their plant alive in a long sea jounery. Put them below the deck, the lack of support light; above the deck, the salty spray.
He took he experiment. He shipped 2 cases of plants to Australia and, several months later, the captain received a letter full of proud: most of the plants were alive and vigorous. Grass were attempting to push the top of the box off. And the ship returned with lots of healthy Australian plants.
Word then wrote a book:《The Growth of Plant in Closed Glazed Cases》
His case had far-reaching impacts: he might think human, like ferns, would out of polluted air; he might also invisioned that large green houses in which people could less missals or consumption.
Acctually, his case reshaped global agriculturals, politics, and trade!!!
The father of Plant hunting, Sir Joseph Banks, had envisioned the economic potential of moving corps from one colonial outpost to another.
In the last 1700s, he turned London Q garden into an imperial pure house of flora.
Before wardian case had its wind in its sail, there were 19/20 chances that plants would die at sea; after it, there were 19/20 chances plants could survive.
The case contributed the spread of Cavindish bananas around the world.
It made Brazil lost in the battle of colonial plantation of rubber. Rubber seeds were sneaked out and brought to east Asia, thus shattering Brazil's rubber industry.
It broke china' s grip of tea market. A book published in he year when Britain won the first Opium war. China stopped accepting Indian grown opium in exchange for their tea. And Britain sent gun boats to change their minds. Tax on tea accounted 1/10 of Britain' s income.
Suitably disguised, Robert brought 20,000 tea plants from China and let them grow on Indian land.
The point was it not only brought new plants in Europe from far-flung places, but also let people from Europe to go to other places.
The Quinine which is the cure for malaria made people less fear to go to Africa.
It started from the year 1954, location: a quiet town on the skirt of California desert 50 miles east from LA. Ray Kroc sold milkshake machines. McDonald brothers were among his best customers.
Sitting on the porch, watching the peaceful sunset, the brothers thought nothing more than their status quo. Opening more branches would be a headache: travelling around, finding locations, vetting managers, staying in motels~~~why bother?! They had already made more money than they could spend.
Though Kroc's approach was foreign to them, the brothers were convinced to let him to expend their business.
Three decades later, by the time Kroc' died, McDonald's had have thousands of branches all over America and owned billions of dollars.
Successful entrepreneurs are the same: they want different things, they have different talents.
The McDonald brothers, Dick and Mac, broke down process into simple, repetitive tasks so that people chun up food quickly, cheaply, and consistently. They speeded up streamline for packing burgers. Eg: condiment dispenser.
But when it came to the wilder world, they were clueless. When competitors started peering through the windows, taking out notepad, statching plans, they just laughed about it.
Later they sold franchise. But found other people use the same name, the same manu.
Kroc was in his 50s, with diabetes and arthritis, he was still keen on making money than the peaceful sunset. "Finding locations for McDonald's is the most creatively fulfilling thing I an imagin."
Mc brothers thought about their frenchfries, he rethought the Franchise!
Franchise is not a new thing:
In ages past, a monarch may grant you a franchise to organize a market, the exclusive right to do a certain thing in the defined area for a set time.
In 19th century, you have to buy the right to sell sawing machine.
Now, franchise can be seen everywhere. E.g. renting a car.
Though the business format was populized in 1980s, a Canadian Martha Matilda Harper built an international network of beauty salon. It was in 1950s' fast food brands gave the franchise the modern form. E.g. KFC, Burger King.
The conformity of it is not only you have the right to use the name, learn its methods, but also you are imposed an obligation to do things in a certain way!
Franchisees have to pay for the benefit of the brand.
McDonald's has 15% earnings of its over 36,000 outlets.
Why those outlets are willing to pay 45,000 fee and 4% growth sales?
The motivation: owner manager with own money at stake might put more efforts to put cost down than a manager on a cooperate salary.
As the economists pointed out: there has to be mutual trust between franchisee and franchisor--the double sided moral headed.
10. CCTV
The weapon V2 was supposed to win Hitler the war. It's the first rocket bomb that could travel faster than the speed of sound so you didn't know it was coming until it's exploded. And it couldn't be targeted preciously. It killed thousands of people, but not enough to tip the scales of the conflict.
Wernher von Braun, the engineer behind the weapon, surrendered to US when the Third Reich collapsed and helped them win the space race.
He didn' expect the closed circulated TV has the further prevalence.
The picture in that control room was the first example of video feed been used not for broadcasting, but for real time monitoring in private, over a closed circuit.
Walter Buch's brainchild has been used popularly around the world.
It's estimated that 245m CCTV cameras used around the world. That is 1 in 30 people ratio.
It's also estimated that the figure is doubled in China alone!!!
There is the "Hick version" partly owned by Chinese government!!!
It's, mainly, used to outing jaywalkers, to put them in public shaming. And to score people under the social credit scheme. As one poetically put it:"let allow the trustworthy roam everywhere under the heaven; while make it hard for the discredit to take a single step!"
This reminds us the novel written by George O'well in 1984, 7 years after Walter Buch pioneered the survalence camera. In the book, everything is monitored whether you are in public places or in home. But it's originally hinted that it's the people who choose to buy it.
There was a comic:"Can I put a device in your home that perpetually listens to everything you say and do, and stores that information, and profits from it, and you have no access to it, and you have to pay us for that?!"
Now, the voice control smart speaker such as Amozon Echo, Google Home.
Such advancement in AI also is the driven force behind the CCTV. Software can listen, watch and decipher meaning. How much survalence you can do is limited by computing power.
Shall we be queecy about it or enjoying the convience it brings is depended on how much we can trust the entities that survaling us.
So far, those AI technology has ensured us they are not snooping on us all. Just only by the signal "wake word", the audio information is sent to cloud for more powerful service to decipher what we want. And it's hard to hack.
The facial recognition algorithm is not reliable enough and people have to sift the footages.
The perception to the survalence is enough to deter.
"If you think you might be watched, you always act as you were!"
11. Retirement
The ritualistic action to old women in an indigenous tribe in eastern Paraguay was the axe to the head and being buried before their last breath; to men, it's the sending away until never return.
What obligation do we owe towards old people is a question as old as human kind.
In some ancient cultures, the young had the obligation to kill the old; in others, the young pre-chew food for aged and toothless parents. The gerontocracy.
What in common then is the expectation that until your body let you down completely, you'd keep working.
But it's no longer true now.
Many of us expect to reach a certain age, then receive certain amount of money from state or former employers not for the work today but in the recognition of the work past.
The stage of life is called retirement. And the payment is pension.
The word pension is from Latin for payment. The pension for soldier dates as far as ancient Rome. It's in the 19th century, it spreaded far beyond the military. The first universal state pension was in 1890 in Germany.
The right to support in old age is still far from global. 1/3 world old people have no pension; The rest doesn't get enough to live on.
In many countries, generations of grown-ups assuming they will be well looked after in old age.
But there is challenge to meet their expectation.
The slow-burn crisis in pension system, mainly the demographic one.
Half a century ago, in OECD countries, women over 65 had 15 more years to live; today it's 20 years.
Well, families have shrunk from2.7 children to 1.7. A pipeline of future workers is draining up.
Thus, facing the stark situation: brings the more retirees to support and less workers paying tax to support them.
In 1960s, there were 12 workers for every old person; Now it's 8 to 1; by the year 2050, it would be 4 to 1.
State and private pension system look expensive.
40 years ago, most people were on the defined-benefit plans which specified what you get when you retired. Now, it's less than 1 in 10.
The new norm is defined-contribution which specifies what employer would pay into your pension pot rather than income you'll be able to get out of it. Such pensions don't logically have to be more miserly than defined benefit scheme. But they usually are often vastly so. It's easy to understand why employers are ditching defined benefits. Pension promises can prove expensive to keep.
People find their pension is less than expected.
So, governments around the world persuad individuals saving money towards old age. But it's not easy to get people focus on the distant future(the threshold is the age of 50); it's no pressing need to provide the old person you will one day become.
Now, here come the methods suggested by behaviour psychologists:
Automatically enrolling people in work place the pension scheme;
Scheduling more saving from future pay rises.
These ways are working well. We tend to save through sheer inertia.
But they don't solve the foundimental demographic problem: no amount of saving changes the fact that current workers generate the wealth to pupport current pensioners through taxes, ranting properties owned by retirees, working for companies which pension funds are the major shareholders.
Here is the radical shift in our attitude to old age: the retirement has been retired! People work as long as they are able.
It's a hardnose trade-offs when the benefits they offer out-weight the cost of supporting them.
As we are richer and sedentary by comparison, we can afford rising pension. And the knowledge once can only get from previous generations are updated quickly everywhere.
12. Santa
In Japan, there is the curious ritual of KFC for Christmas on Christmas Eve. Such inspired marketing technique is because those expatriates in 1970s who were craving for Christmas turkey could only find fried chicken as substitute.
And the tradition goes down thanks to marketing. Christmas is not a religious holiday in Japan. This showed how easily commercial interests can highjack religious festivals.
As for why Santa wears red and white coat?
That's partly thanks to Cocoala advertising itself by making Santa dressing to match their brand in 1930s. And he red-nose reindeer is also the market gimic created in 1939.
For its origin, it's in the once Dutch city New York, Washington Ervings and Clement Clark Moore in the early 1800s turned Christmas Eve from rocous partying of street gang into a household family affair.
In 1823, Moore created the American idea of Santa. And the gift-giving tradition was populized in 1820s.
In 1840s, Santa had become the commercial icon of advertisement.
In 1867, there were 10,000 people paid for a reading from Charles Dickenson's Choras in Boston. That's a story light on biblical details yet heavy on the idea of generocity.
And the same year, down the east coast in New York, Macy Store decided to open to midnight to suit the last-minute customers.
The Christmas blow-out isn't new.
The sales records back to 1935 tracked by an economist showed the comparison between sales in December and in November and January--the figure surged three times in Christmas season. While, when compared with the Christams boom in other countries(like Portugal, Italy, UK), the U.S. figure was not the biggest one.
Financially speaking, it's a modesty affair, for only 3 out of 1000 dollars spent during the year were on Christmas gifts in U.S. And about 60~70 billion dollars spent on Christmas in U.S., comparing 200 billion worldwide. For certain retail sectors, however, notably jewelry, department stores, electronic devices and useless tet, it's a big deal indeed.
Is the sum well-spent? Both economists and religious moralizers in 1850 agreed the spending is wasteful. "No one cares about the God!!!"
According to 《The Dead Way Loss of Christmas》(simply try to measure the gap between how much various Christmas gifts had cost and how much the recipients valued them.), there were only 82 in 100 Christmas gifts valued by the recipients.
It's estimated by an Indian economist that about 35 billion dollars has been thrown away around the world in the form of polly-chosen Christmas gifts. That's the amount of money the world bank lent to developing countries each year.
To deal with this December rush, there are some alternatives to such clumsy gift-giving:
Vouchers, which can be unredeemed and resold online;
Wishlists, which can make people deceive themselves.
And giving money is the true spirit of Christmas.
13. Sewing Machine
Woke Capitalism, those cooperation promoting progressive social causes felt ostentatiously up-to-the-moment.
Back in 1850 when the social progress had further to go, American campioneer Elithebath Cady Stanton was calling for women to get the vote. A cause even her supporters were worrying the was too ambitious.
Mainwhile, in Boston, a failed actor was trying to make his fortune as an inventor. He was interested in carving wooden type which, unfortunately, had fallen out of fashion.
Then, he turned to sewing machine. It took nearly 14 hours for a single shirt then. And he found it's a fortune in speeding it up.
Some called sewing as "The never-ending, ever-beginning task" that made women's life nothing but dole around with ever-lasting toil." Some thought it "the only thing that keep women quiet."
Isaac Singer, the flamboyant, charismatic, capable of great generocity, but ruthless as well. A womanizer who fathered 22 children and had three families.
He was claimed to be as the certain backbone of solidity to the familist movement.
He contemplated the machine: move it to and flow in the straight line, in place of the needle bar pushing a curve needle, he had straight needle moving up and down.
His first prototype worked and made a shirt in just an hour. He patented his machine.
Unfortunately, it also relied on various other inventions which had been patented by other inventors.
The 1850s was the sewing machine war period. Rival manufactories showed more interest in suing patent infringement than selling machines. Then, the lawyer hedged in:"Why not licensing each other and work together to use everyone else?"
Free from the legal distractions, the market took-off. And Singer came to dominate it.
Though, he was late to the party of manufactory system others adopted by inter-changeable parts, with his business partner Clark, Singer was pioneered in another way--marketing.
The machine was expensive and cost several month's income for the average families. They launched a new idea--the hire purchase: the machine was rent to buyers for just several dollars per month, and when the rental payment totaled the purchase, buyers could own it.
Such marketing efforts still faced a problem--misogyny.
"Why should I buy one when I could marry one?!" "Such machine could get women more time to improve their intellects."
Such prejudice fueled the doubts if women could operate the machine. Singer showed women could by a demonstration event.
He inspired the notion that women could be the maker, and women should claim their financial independence.
In 1860, the New York Times gushing:"It's the great release for mothers and daughters." It's an amelioration and marketing the sewing the lighter toil.
"Needle woman has the time to rest at night and has the time at the day for family occupations and enjoyment. What a great gain of the world!"
Anyway, such invention showed "social progress can be advanced on the most self-interested motives!!!"
14. Hollerith Punch Card
Amozon, Alphabet, Alibaba, Facebook, Tencent, are five out of ten the most valuable companies in 2019, and all of them are under 25-year-old and got rich on data!!!
Data, the new oil clines on information.
In 2011, five of the top ten companies were oil, now it's only ExonMobile.
Anagolically, data can be used many times, while oil can only be used once. But they have common points: the crude, undefined stuff isn't used to anyone. You have to process it to get something valuable. Like the dessile put into an engine, and the the insides to inform decision. Take the search engine and advertisement as the example.
Just weight out the options, calculate the possibilities. But relying on human to process data will be impossibly inefficient. These business models need machines.
In the data economy, power doesn't come only from data, but from the interplay of algorithm and data.
In 1880s, a young German-American inventor tried to interest his family in a machine to process data more quickly than human could manage.
He designed it, now needed to test it--a up-right piano, instead of keys, it has slots for cards about the size of a dollar bill with holes to punch in them; facing you a 40 dials which may or may not tick upwards after you insert each new card.
His family laughed at him!
His machine responded to a specific problem--the censor. Every ten years US conducted censor such asking people questions of their jobs, illness, disabilities, languages, etc.
In the 1880 censor, the bureaucrats had swallowed more data than they could digest: in 1870, only 5 questions asked, while in 1880, there were 215 questions. The dealing with those ansowers would take years. They beardy had finish this censor when it world be the time to start the next one. A lucrative government contract surely awaited anyone who could speed the process up.
Then, Herman was working on a new break for train. The train or rail tickets were frequently been stolen. So he introduced a punch photograph which select physical feathers.
He noticed people's ansowers to censors question could also be represented as holes in cards.
So, all he had to do was to make up a tabulating machine--add up the censor punch card he invisaged, in that, the piano like contraption, a set of spring-loaded pins descended on the card, where they find the whole, the complete electrical circuit which move the appropriate dial up by one.
Happily, the bureaucrats liked his thing and it was used in 1890 censors which 20 more questions were added. And it's quicker and cheaper and easier to interogate the data.
The machine made its way far beyond the censors. Across the globe, bureaucrats were inspired to dream of omniscient:
1930, us had its first social security benefits dispersed through punchcards;
1940, it was used, notoriously, in Holocaust;
Other businesses were quick to see the potential:
The insurers use it for accurate calculation; The utilities for billing; railways for shipping; The manufacturing for keeping track on sales and cost.
Almost in all trades.
"Through merges, it eventually become!" IBM used to program computers.
Why data economy take a century to arrive?
Because something new in it when compared to oil in trading. Unlike the neatly structed as the pre-defined answers to censors question's position punched in the cards, the data is much harder.
Well, as the algorithm improved, more lifelived online, the bureaucratic dream soon become cooperate reality.
15. Stock Option
In 1991, Clinton put it in his campaign: everage CEO owns as 100 times of everage workers. And he vowed to tackle the excessive pay. Salary is treated as a cost reducing the profit on which a company pays tax. Clinton changed the law by making salaries over million dollars not tax deductable. But in 2000, the ratio between CEOs and workers was no more 100 to 1, it's 300 to 1!!!
What had gone wrong?!
Aristotal told the story: In ancient Greece, the philosopher Pheilis was been challenged to prove the value of philosophy--if it's so useful, why Pheilis is so poor.
Pheilis, heaving a sigh, took it. Philosophy back then included reading the future in the stars. Then, he foresaw a bumper harvest of olive, which led to a high demond to rent a ton olive presses. He visited each press owner with a proposition of negotiating the price to use the press in harvest time. The owner could hold a "deposit". If it's a poor harvest, then his option was worthless. If, by luck or astronomical judgement, he was right, then, he could collect a good deal of money.
That's the first recorded description of the option!
Option is a kind of conduct that buy and sell on the financial markets.
Eg: if Apple 's share price goes up, I could buy it; or, buy an option of Apple share to a specific price on the future date.
The option has problems:
One, the higher risk and higher reward. If share price was lower than what I bought, I would lose everything; if higher, I could excise the option, resell the share, and make a big profit from it.
Two, the principle to hire an agent problem. A person own something, he wants to employ an agent to manage it for him.
1990, Keven and Mickle published a paper, in which they explained the compensation of CEO is vertually indepent performance.
When he cut the tax break, Clinton exempted performance-related rewards. His adviser pointed out that he shifted the executive pay from salaries to stock options. The gap between boss and workers' pay bloomed. "The law deserves pride of places in the museum of unintended consequences."
It's a big IF that option could incentivise CEOs to do a better job.
One of the reason is it maximizes the share price on a given date.
If the stock option is not the best way to reward performance, shouldn't company's board directors being keen to find alternatives? In theory, yes. It's the board's job to negotiate with cooperative bosses on behalf of shareholders. In practice, it's another principle agent problem. As bosses have the say in deciding how much to pay, there is always potential of mutual backscraching.
As two economists put it in 《Pay Without Performance》, directors don't care about linking pay to performance. Stock Option is the way to achieve it.
Many hold shares through pension funds. These institution investors can persuade board to be tough negotiators. When a large shareholder can assert control, there will be more genuine link between executive pay and performance. This link seems all too rare.
It's always in the headlines that how well to evaluate the bosses' work! Anyway, good decisions in the helm of a large company is very important.
Maybe, they should learn from Pheilis who was clover enough to win a big deal of money, well, wise enough to wonder if he should!!!
16. Fundraising Appeal
"It's not from the benevolence of the butchers, brewers,or the bakers that we expect on dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity, but to their self love and never talk to them our own necessities but of their advantages", as Adam Smith put it in his 《The Wealth Of Nations》!!!
Nowadays, charity has become big business. It's not our advantages, but of other people's nesseties.
British people donate 54 pents in every 100 pounds(roughly the Sam on beer, no less on meat, three times on bread); which is three times German do; while the Americans give three times more again.
In economic significance, the charity is up there with butchers, brewers, and bakers.
Charity is as old as humanity!!!
In ancient religious custom of tithe, one tenth of income was allotted to worthy courses.
When taxes replaced tides, charity has to be professional about persuasion!
The father of the field is Charles Sumner Word.
In the late 19th century, he was working for YMCA(young men's Christian association). The New York Post described him as"medium sized man, so mild in manner, that people would not suspect him had the power to suspend to sway hither-to reluctant pocket box!"
In 1905, he was sent to Washington DC to raise money for a new building. His approach was far and wide: a target, a time limit, and a campaign clock showing the progress. What a publicity stuns planned with military processions!
1912, such conduct was novel in London. Times described him as:"a man has the knowledge of human nature and shrewd application of business principles in securing the advantages at the psychological moment!"
During WWI, there were more fund raising innovations such as lottery, etc.
1924, he got a fundraising firm advertising how much he has raised for everyone.
In Morden era, what counts is to build your brand, engage, and entertain!!!
According to some economists, there are two theories:
Signalling: we donate, in part, to impress other people, to display generocity.
Warmglow: we give in order to feel nice, or less quilty at least.
The experiment of knocking on doors: one approach is to ask for donation directly; another one is to sell lottery tickets.
The lottery tickets gathered more money of course. And attractive young women raise more.
Other economists: what happens to private donations when a charity starts getting government subcidies?
If people give purely from altruistic self desire to ensure the charity can function, then, the donation should move to another worthy course when the subsidy arrives. But that just didn't happen. So, it's not pure.
A movement calling for effective altruism.
Whether evidence of effectiveness would improve fundraising.
Experiment: sending mails to people, some with just appeal, some attached an explanation of test. The testing ones got less.
"Never talk to them of our effectiveness!!!"
17. SWIFT
City Bank London, in 1960s, payments were done on the first floor and sent upstairs by a vacuum tube; on the second floor, people confirmed the actions and sent their authorizations back down the pipe. One day, the vacuum tube was blocked. Later, the payment system was restored with assistance of chimney sweep.
Confirm large financial transactions was hard, it's even harder to do with across national or internatiomal boarder transactions.
Since the development of the telegram in the first half of the 19th century, sending instructions has been quickened up. But quick didn't mean foolproof.
1887, June, telegram was charged by words, so massage was encoded to save money. Instead of saying"I bought half millions of wool", Mr. P lost 20,000 dollars then by being misread his encoded one as:"please buy half millions of wool"!!! He could avoid it by paying cents-extra money.
There should be a way to send financial information more reliable than tube and more securiblly than the telegram which easily mistranscribed code.
For decades after the WWII, banks used tele-machines which made efficient use of Tele lines, allow users to type a massage somewhere and have it printed at the other side of the world.
The need to make massage more secure and accurate added enormous complicity.
Banks employed former signal men to check and re-check the information. It's really a laborious task.
The Tele-system was growing under the strain, especially in Europe. The need for a better solution, one could run smoothly, became acute. Committee was established, arguments were raged, progress was glacial.
1970s, by the globalizing action, SWIFT--The society for world wide inter-bank Tele communication system emerged. It's a private company setting its HQ in Brussels, and had 270 member banks over 15 countries, a global coopererative venture.
On 8th May, 1977, Belgian Prince sent the first massage through SWIFT. The same year, Marty was closed down.
SWIFT provides a massaging service using standardized forget that minimize errors and dramatically simplify proceedings.
It created the plug-in financial central hub for each nation.
More important than any other technologies is this is the cooperative structure of the institution, in which more than 2000 member banks agree standards and resolve disagreements. Though problems such as hacks still occur.
It largely solve one problem, but create one another.
It's so central to international banking for its attempting tool.
Track terrorist financial acting; distort the Iranion economy to deny access to banks; just ask the SWIFT!
The institution found itself unable to resist orders from US, even when the EU disagrees. It's not willing to be involved in geopolitics.
According to some economists, it's the "weaponized into dependence"! Big boys of the international economy are using their influence over supply chains, financial installment, communication networks to monitor and punish whereever they wish.
1907, after banking crisis have rocked the U.S. market, and left the UK system largely unattacked. UK was losing the ground as an manufactory economy but emerging as a financial hub. It remains supreme. The city of London set at the centre of financial webs of banks, telegraph lines and deep insurance lines in the world.
The think was that, in a war, Germany's banks could swiftly be crushed by financial shock. Spoil alert, the plan didn't work.
That historical parallel didn't frighten U.S. It will keep firm grip on the pressure points of the global economy, including the SWIFT massaging system.
For an organization that governized as the response to push America, it's quite a kink in the financial pipeline.
18. Wedgwood
To this manufacture, the Queen was pleased to give her name and patronage commanding it to be called "Queen's Ware" and honouring the inventor by appointing him "Her Majesty's Potter"!!!
Such recken(seen as more flattery than shrewd self interest) maight be Gesire Wedgwood's own suggestion. He was a shrewd individual. He was world's first management accountant, the pioneering early chemist who endlessly experimenting new ways to treat and fire clay, and noting his results in secret code unless his rivals steal his notebook.
His new breakthrough was the Cream Ware, or Cream coloured Ware from which he fashioned the tea service that impress the Queen Charlotte!
He was a lobbyist. In 1760s, pottery makers had to dispatch their wares on bone-shaking, pot-breaking roads to get to major cities. He suggested to create a cannel connecting the trants and merchants. Those trants were delighted until they realized Gesire snapped out land and built his own factories right on the banks.
His major achievement was solving a problem in monoplay theory two centuries before it even articulated.
1972, Ronald Coase, the Nobel memorial price for economics winner, put it into words:"Imagine if you are the monopolist, you alone produce a certain good that many people want to buy it, some pay a lot, others much less but still enough for you to turn a profit. Ideally, you'd like to charge a high price for the first group, a lower price to the second. But how can you get away of that?---launch a high price, then lower it to widen your market." Steve Jobs did that when setting his first iPhone price for 600 dollar st first and down to 400 dollar later. But the first set of buyers would see through the trick--they would find that they have only to wait to get it much cheaper."
That's the Coase' Conjecture in 1972.
Back in 1772, Wedgwood grasped the difference between the fixed costs such as research, decelopment; and the variable costs such as labour, row materials~
He initially incurred a great price to make the vase esteemed ornaments for palaces.
Once he perfected the process and trained the workers, he could churn out copies quickly.
The great people had their vases in their palaces long enough to be seen and admired by the middling class people. The middling people bought quantity of them, which reduced the price. This is later anticipated as the "Trickling Down Theory" of fashion--people tend to emulate those they considered to be above them on the social scale.
1760s, Gesire's Queen's Ware gambit worked spectacularly. They were sold twice the price as those ordinary ones.
He asked the question: how much of this general use and estimation is owing to the mode of introduction and how much to its real utility and beauty? The answer was to bestow as much pains and expense on gaining royal or noble approval.
What Gesire did next was to imitate the Atrascan style hot on the European continent then excavated by those noble ones. He had to do it to the perfection.
Traditionally, clay was fired and then to be painted. He tried to dye the clay with metal oxides before firing it, producing an oddly translucent effect. The "Jasper Ware" came into a distinctive light blue with white decorations in relief. It's still associated with Wedgwood brand.
It's a great success.
Those aristocrats figured out that they could wait till the lower price.
The Trickling Down theory affection made Queen's Ware turn into being rendered vague and common everywhere!
But those who were already the social supior still want it right now to show off wealth and good taste by buying something new!!!
19. Glasses
The previously painstaking two-day work of measuring 309 locations for certain fasteners on a particular panel for technician has now been reduced to two hours thanks to the new tech in glasses!!!
The Microsoft HoloLens, the bulky set of safety goggles, layers the digital information over the new world. It scans the curve panel, makes the calculations, shows the technician where each the fastener should go.
Such augmented vision devices providing smart specs save a vital few seconds in getting information from internet to brain.
1000 years ago, when information traveled more slowly.
In Cairo, 1010, the polymath Ibn al Haytham wrote his master piece--《The Book of Optics》!!! It took 200 years to be translated out of Aribic world.
Before him, it's generally thought that the act of seeing must involve some kind of rays emitted from the eye. By carefully experiment, Haytham proved them wrong. It's the light comes into the eyes!!!
Before him, optical devices have to be cumbersome. People used clear glass bowl of water to magnify things.
The gradual spread of knowledge inspired ideas.
In late 1200, the first pair of reading glasses appeared in North Italy.
1301, reading glasses were popular among Venecian Christal workers.
1306, a priest praised the then 20-year-old invention to be the most useful thing in the world.
Reading strings the eyes even at the best of the time. Medieval buildings were famed with big windows; artificial light was dim and expensive; as we age, it gets harder to focus on close-up objects.
It's useful only to those who can read, but when the print press came along, glasses has reached a bigger market.
1466, the first specialist spectical shop opened in Strasbourg, Netherland.
1600, it's invented that the concave lens which is to help people to see close-up, and the convex lens which is to help people to focus thing from far away. The two combined is the basic ingredients of micro or tele scope, thus opening a whole new world for scientific study.
A survey was conducted by a Len company in less developed countries.
By the year 2012, globally there were 2.5 billion people need glasses but don't have them. And many of them don't know glasses could help them.
An experiment in 2017 in a plantation in India: the yield of tea picking rose 20% after workers waring glasses. Workers are paid by how many they pick. So, the need for glasses went up as well.
Another survey on kids showed that giving kids glasses could be equivalent to giving extra half a year of schooling.
The short-sightedness among students might due to the less time they spent outdoors.
The average eye doctors per person varied from country to country: in Greece 5000/person, India 70,000/person, African 1,000,000/person.
In some circumstances, not the specialists are needed, other teachers or nurses who get proper training can do the job of spotting who need glasses.
Fria Giodano Bruno would make of the world in which we build space craft and augmented reality, but haven't help a couple of billion people to fix their fussy views of actual reality.
We should know where to focus!
20. Vickrey Turnstiles
In 1950s, the New York subway systems was facing a problem: during the peak time, the tubes are crowded, the other times, empty.
It had the flate price--10 cents all the way no matter where you board, how far you travel, and when you take it.
Econonmists suggested the abandonment of the flat-rate fare in favour of a structure which takes into account of the length and location of the ride at the hour of the day is obviously a sensible step.
The idea behind this is simple: charge more when it's peak time, and less at quiet time.
How to charge all those differences in price?
Vickrey's suggestion was a coin-operated turnstile that could charge different rates for journeys at different times.
It's not a simple thing in 1952. Take Cocoala for example, it wanted to raise the price from a nickle, but to restore 400,000 machines that only took nickle was a legistical nightmare.
It finally got its 7.5 cent coin machines.
Vickrey described the contraption to solve it: to have passengers put a quarter in entrance turnstile, get a matle check with notches indicating the zone of origin, to be inserted in an exitstile which would go through an electrical relay delivering an approperate numbers of nickle to the origin and the time of the day.
But such mechanism was never built!!! As Vickers said in his speech "My Inniciative Failours in Economics"
The idea itself is so important, even it's too complicated to realized!!!
His fellow economists said his ideas were too far ahead of his time. He recieced the Nobel Memorial Price just three days before his death.
The peak-low pricing by economists and the dynamic pricing by managment consultants are widely used in today's society.
Such as the early birds special price to have a meal in a restaurant.
The idea was appealled in far more complex settings.
As subways, airlines, concert halls, find it's costly to add extra capacity to meet short term peak demond; and useful to carry unused at other times. The varying prices make sense.
For Uber, it can effortlessly meet supply and demand with algorithm. Its surg promises the end of waiting. It always has a price to get you ride now!
But, according to some economic behaviourists, consumer acceptance maybe a problem, such price system make people feel exploited. The price could get doubled or half by couple of minutes.
And people felt the price-surge is infuriating!
The peak-low pricing plays an important role in the future. Imagine a smart electricity grid fared by intermittent power sources such as wind and solar power. When the cloud cover the sun, your laptop will stop charging, freezer to switch off for a minute, your electric car start pumping energy into the grid rather than sucking it out.
All that requires second by second price chargers.
The constraction price on roads to smooth the demond and ensure the limited capacity would be used well.
There always the free lane by paying more.
Good ideas just need to wait and the technology to catch up!
21. GPS
What would happen if GPS stoped working?
Just some idiosies only GPS could enable, say about problems of getting A to B?
Devices that use GPS usually stop getting us lost, if it failed, the roads would be crowded with drivers slowing to peer in signs or stopping to consult maps.
Commute by train? There would be no information boards to tell you when to expect the next arrival.
Phone for taxi would find harass operator trying yo keep track her fleet by calling her drivers.
With no GPS, emergency service start struggling to locate callers from phone signal or identify the nearest police car.
Continer crane needs GPS to unload ships.
Factories stand idle when their imports arrive on time.
Farming, constraction, fishing, survaying industries would pay about 1 billion per day as lost for the first five days of GPS shut-down, according to UK-based survey!
GPS is not only the location service, but also the time service.
GPS consists 24 satellites that all carry clocks synchronize to an extreme degree of position. Smart phone use GPS to locate on a map, it's picking up signals from some of those satellites, making calculations based o the time the signal was set and where the satellite was. If the clock stray by a million second, you would misslay yourself by 200 or 300 kill metres away.
In phone networks, your calls share space with others through so-called "multi-collecting"!
Data get time stamp scrambled up and unscrambled at the other end. A glitch of just 100 of second can cause problems.
Bank payments, stock markets, power grids, cloud computing, all depend on different locations agreeing on time.
Claimed as the invisible utility, GPS is compared to the oxygen to the respiratory system.
The first GPS use was in the US military for bombing people.
1978, first GPS satellite was launched.
It's in 1990 that it's first used in the Golf War--Operation Desert Storm went into a literal desert storm with swirling sand and reducing visibility to 5 metres. It helped soldiers to target mines, find water sources and avoid get in each other's way in sandy desert.
Soldiers got those 1000 dollar commercial devices home.
US military was not happy let GPS accessible to everyone. They sent two waves of signals, the accurate one for them own, the degraded or fuzzier one for civilian. It's in 2000, then President Clinton bowed to the inevitable making high grade signals for everyone.
Is it wise to let GPS system suck billions dollars a year?
It's not the only global navigation system. There are versions by Russia, China, EU, Japan, and India.
There is the shadow that some might target military target in any future conflicts.
There are land-based alternatives to satellite one as well.
One is "E-loran": it's not covering the whole world.
Some countries are putting more efforts than others in their own national system.
One big appeal to e-loran is the signals are stronger.
By the time GPS gets its 20,000km journey to earth, it gets weak and easy to jam or spoof.
The apocalypse scenario: you wake up over night to find all your devices are offline.
Some economists are worrying about the terrorists who wreak the havoc by feeding inaccurate signals to GPS receivers in a certain area.
Spoofing can down drones, feasibly dry electricity grids, cripple mobile network, crash stock market. No one knows how much to be the danger.
"Knowing you are lost in one thing, being wrongly convinced you know where you are is another problem!!!"
22.Bonsack Machine
In a blind taste test in 1920s America, one described the cigarette he smoked dismissal and thouht it was Cammal, actually, it's LuckyStrike! And the easy and smoothly one as he described was actually the Cammal one.
Back then, branding was only just becoming to apparent.
Why did the cigarette lead the way?
1881, James Bonsack patented his new machine! Then, tobacco has been around for centuries. The market was dominated by pipes, cigars, chewing tobacco; Cigarette remained a niche market.
Bonsack adapted the Carding machine from his father's wool factory which turned fiber into yarn. The machine could get rolling the cigarette at 200 pieces per minute. The contraption he came up with weight a ton.
The significance is so obvious to entrepreneur James Duke!
The challenge he took then was how to sell it!--Advertising!
1889, he put 20 per cent of his revenues on promotion which was unheard of then.
In 1923, smoking cigarette was the most popular way to consume tobacco.
LuckyStrike advertised against the sweets industry. One sweets company fired back:"Do not let anyone tell you that cigarette can replace a piece of candy. Cigarette will inflame your torsos, poison with nicotine in every organ of your body and drive up your blood! Nails in your coffin!!!"
1940s, 20,000 plus physicians acclaimed that there was no big difference which tobacco brand you buy!
1950s, regulators agreed that it shouldn't allow advertisement to refer to doctors and any body parts.
This looks as the crisis to the advertisers, but it turned out to be liberating!
When products are essentially indistinguishable, companies could compete on price. But that would roll their profit margins. It's much better to compete on branding by making people think that products are different, so you can appeal more effectively to different buyers.
Economists raised the notion of "consumer surplus"! The surplus produced by a product: the enjoyment a product produces is less than money you have to give up to afford it.
Dose it matter if that enjoyment comes from your appreciation of a product's quality or your fond believes about the brand.
People worried about the boundary with branding on such product as deadly as cigarette. TV commercials and sports sponsorship have the compelling effect.
With the years gone by, some counties have witness the decline of the advertisement on cigarettes.
But in some poorer countries with loser regulations, it's a different story.
In China, in those years half a century after Mao took power, per capita cigarette sales reached 10 folds. China national tobacco cooperation, state owned, is the most profitable company which claimed almost 98 per cent of tobacco sales and contributed 10 per cent of national revenue.
So, it's no surprising China has been late in the game of restriction on advertisement.
In 2005, one advertisement assured: "Smoking removes your trouble and worries. Quitting smoking would make you misery and shorten your life!!!" That tobacco company is LongLife!!!
Then, China embarks on a new policy--premiumization! As China's people are getting richer, it's rational to get consumer pay more for their smokes. New premium brands advertise themselves as the less harmful, higher quality, more light, lower tar, and more prestige for gift-giving.
And it works!!! The sales ratio between normal ones and premium one are from 10 to 1 to nearly parity. And only 10% Chinese people know there is no difference in two kinds.
The power of the brand to create credulity is still as strong as ever!!!
23.Prohibition
Economists have the image problem: shamelessly massage statistics, over-confidently make terrible predictions, no fun in drinks parties!!!
The most famous economist in the world--Irving Fisher notoriously predicted in October 1929 that the stock market has reached a permanently high plateau!!! Just 9 days later came the Great Depression!!!
He was a fitness fanatics: always avoid meat, tea, coffee, and chocolate. And no alcohol of course. And he though nobody should drink alcohol either. He couldn't find a single economist to pro prohibition in a debate.
Prohibition is America's ill-fated attempt to outlaw the manufacture and sale of alcohol. It began in 1920. He predicted:"It will go down in history and ursher in a new era in the world in which accomplishment this nation will take pride forever!"
But historians saw it as a fass!!!
It has its roots in religion laced with class-based snobbery.
Economists had another concern: productivity would not sobber nations out-compete those of work force of drunkers.
Fisher was taken some liberty with figures.
He predicted that the Prohibition was roughly worthes 6b to U.S. economy. Well, his figures were not carefully studied. According to a report, people took stiff drink on an empty stomach made them 2% less efficient; and those down 5 stiff drinks habitually before work, and multiply the 2 by 5 and calculated alcohol locked 10% of production.
Economists might be less surprised if they would be able to fast forward half a century to Gary Becker who had the Nobel price winning insights on rational crime--making sth illegal will add cost that rational people will weigh up, alongside other costs and benefits, that cost is the penalty if you caught and modulated be the probability of being caught.
Rational criminals will supply Prohibition goods at the right price; whether consumer will pay that cost depends on "elasticity of demand"!!!
But with alchohol, even to hike price, some people will still pay.
Black markets change incentives in other ways.
Why don't use whatever means necessary to establish local monoplay.
Every shipment has its risks, you can save space by making your product more potent; in other industries, you can cut cost by lowering quality.
It was not only America has Prohibition laws then, other countries as Iceland, Finland has as well.
Nowadays, mainly in Islamic countries. And in Philippine, no alcohol on election days; in Thailand, no alcohol on Buddhist holidays.
America still has the "dry" counties, and local "blue laws" which ban alcohol on Sundays.
Such laws inspire economist to the "Public Choice Theory".
The boot-leggers and the Baptists. The idea was regulations are often supported by a surprisingly alliance of noble-minded moralists and profit-driven sinists.
In terms of drugs, weather to make laws to prohibit sale or to make it legal but put tax on it. In UK, tax on drugs(canabbis) is introduced. 30% tax would eradicate the market and save up to 700m pounds for the government for safer drugs.
24.Interface Massage Processor
Bob Tailor, worked at the heart of Pentagon. ARPA--the advanced research project agency, was supplanted by NASA in 1958, and dismissed by an aviation magazine:"a dead cat hanging in the fruit closet!!!"
Anyway, ARPA moded on. In 1966, Bob and ARPA planted a seed of something big.
In the terminal room, three remote access terminals with three key boards set side by side. Each allows Bob to issue commands to a faraway main frame computer: one in California University, one in MIT, and one was Air command Q32 in short.
They were massive computers each required different log-in processor and programming language.
They had no connect to each other; no sending massages nor could other ARPA computers across the US connect them. Sharing data, deviding ARPA complex calculation or even sending a massage between these computers were impossible.
Obviously, the next step for Bob was to find a way to connect these machines. And millions budget and more were sponsored to get it going.
One scientist from MIT, Laurance Roberts managed to get one of his computer share data with Q32 over the air command in centre, but it was slow, fragile, and fussy.
The aim was to make every conceivable item of computer, hardware or software, will be in a network--any computer can connect.
This was the opportunity as well as the challenge.
Then, the computers were rare, expensive, puni by morden standus, and were programmed by hand by researchers who used them.
There was a solution by Wesley Clark, a physicist, who proposed a mini computer, modest and inexpensive, at any site on this new network--the moving packets of data reliably around computers until all reach their destinations and run in a same way. If you wrote program on one of them, it will work on all of them.
Reckoned by Adam Smith's theory(specialization and division of labour), the mini ones will be optimized to handle the networking without breaking down.
The beauty of this idea: as far as particular computer was concerned, this was how the network would appear: each local main frame had to be programmed merely to talk to the little black box beside it--the mini computer. If you could do that, you would talk to the entire network stood behind it.
The little black boxes were actually large battleship gray--the Interface Massage Processor.
They were in the size of refrigerator, weighed more than 400kg, and worth of 80,000 dollar each.
They were expected to sit quietly with minimum supervision, and just keep on working, come heat or cold, vibration or power surge, mice or the most dangerous of all, the curious graduate students with screwdriver.
In early 1969, the IMP zero didn't work; in October that year, IMP I and II were in position, one in UCLA and one in Standford; on Oct. 29th, 1969, two main frame computers exchange first word through their companion IMPs. It was biblical enough, and low, and the network clasped after typing two letters into it.
The updating went ok in the following years. In late 1980, the Ruters emerged and IMPs had become the item in museum.
Nowadays, after all, the dream of "every conceivable item of computer will be in a network" has become reality.
25.Canned Food
In playing word association game, one's mind can not link Sillican Valley with canned food! Sillican Valley stand for cutting-edge technologies, bold ideas that change the world.
Canned food was as revolutionary as anything new being pitched by bay area starter-ups. Its story reveals how surprisingly little deep dilemmas around innovation have changed the world in the last 200 years or so.
How to incentive good idears?
The lure of patent or first mover advantage. Really want to encourage fresh thinking, you have to offer a price!!!
Take the self-driving cars for an example.
In 2004, Darpa invested 1 million dollars for a vehicle to across the desert. The result was pure wacky races.
Within a decade, self-driving cars were reliable enough to let lose on public roads.
1795, French government awarded 12,000 frenks for inventing a method of preserving food.
Through trial and error, Nicolas Appert found the way: put cooked food in a glass jar, plunge the jar in boiling water, then seal it with wax. And the food would not go off!!!
With the view of winning the war, Napoleon awarded it while in the invasion into Rassia.
Military needs spir innovations that transform the economy. Like GPS, and the APnet, later the internet. And the Sillican Valley was supported by the US military at first.
With the culture of entrepreneurship to explore what they can do, another Frenchman experiment it in tin, instead of glass, and wanted to commercialize his idea on the land across the English channel where too much French bureaucracy claims Norman Caw hah already in university in the UK!!!
"English financial system is entrepreneurial and those venture captalists are prepared to take risks!"
Bran, an English man brought the patent with a price of 1000 pounds.
The ingredients for innovation economic system:
Making business easy to start; encourage links with academic research.
But nobody has perfected the recipes. One ingredient that much debated is how best to regulate. But canfood was ready to demonstrate why rules and inspections do serve a purpose.
1845, Bran's patent went expired.
British navy wanted to save money by finding a cheap supplier. That's an unwise move that led to many decay food.
1851, with quality went up and price went down, canned food set up to mass market.
It took years to rebuild public confidence and made it self-evidently desirable.
With refrigeration yet to be invented, safe canned food would widen people's diets and improve nutrition.
How new technology will play out?
Regulations should try to speed up, or hold back, or nudge direction, or leave where alone.
"We are skating on really thin ice now!" As one former Facebook manager put it. Many, almost half Silicon tycoons have preparation for apocolips scenario--storage piled up, or helicopter constantly standby!!!
"Progress can be fragile!!!" The one who expanding the canning operation only to see it destroied by invading crushing Austrian army!!!
26.Interchangable Parts
On a sweatering afternoon , July, 1785, a chateau in east of Paris in France, a group of people, officials, dignitaries, few infuriated gun Smith, gathered to watch a demonstation done by Honore Blonc, a gun Smith from Avignon: in the cool cellar, he demonstrated 50 locks. There were locks of firing mechanism. He tossed the component parts into boxes, boxes for each part of the mechanism; as the master of the ceremony, he mixed their components together, pulled out parts at random, reassembled them into locks.
This was the demonstration of the interchangeable parts. The implications won't lost on.
One of this watchers was the Thomas Jefferson who wrote an letter back to the infledging country America:"An improvement made here in the construction of muskets, making every part of them so exactly alike that belonged to everyone, maybe used to everyone, the musket in magazine. The advantages of this when arms need repair are evident."
The battlefield repair, a task requiring complex equipment and hours of skilled labour.
On Moon's system, only a few minutes and some rudimentary skill would be required to unscrew the musket, replace the faulty part with an identical component and screw it all back together. Good as new!
When Jefferson was struggling to win support on the new land, Blon was struggling too. It's expensive to make the system work.
The solution is a revolution in the world economy!!
Ten years prior, a nicknamed John Ironman Wilkinson, who made iron desk, iron boat, iron coffin~~~, invented, in 1774, a method of creating hole into cannon snapped lump of iron, so that it was straight and true every single time. It's militarily value was invaluable.
Years later, the steaming engine.
Pisten cylinder formed of nand-beaten panels of metal didn't have a perfect circular cross section. So steam leaked out everywhere around the head. He created a pleasing round one to solve that problem. And his supplier James Walt never looked back.
Equipped with steamed engine and running by cylinder, the Industrial Evolution entered a higher gear!!!
The key to the interchangeable parts were:
A machine tool, a tool that alternates the manufactory process.
A very sharp drill, a water mill, a system, while clamping one thing, smoothly rotating another.
These machine tools had side-effects:
They put skilled craftsman out of work in large numbers.
Those machine tools are better than hand pmade tools, and also they didn't require hands to wield them. So, they loss not only lucrative repair work, but also manufacturing jobs too.
Another consequence: to use machine tools to perfectly precise interchangeable parts not only for simple battlefield repair, but also for the assembly simpler, and more predictable.
Adam Smith, nine years before the demonstration, had put a pin factory into the streamline mode. The production line with workers adding a step to what come before.
1820s, Virginia, the first truly mechanically produced objects mode were everywhere.
The production line was far quicker, more predictable, and more automated process.
It's the beginning of American System of Manufacturing. Such sewing machines, and other mechanical things were all produced in such way.
A century later, Henry Ford's model tea.
To Blonc, his cellar was sacked by mobs, his supporters were planet to the guillotine, he himself was in debts. He never saw his own idea realized!!!
27.Oil
Edwin Drake was hoping to find rock oil, a brownish crude stuff sometimes bubbled under the surface of western Pansovania.
He planned to refined it into caracine for lamps, a substitute for the increasingly expensive whale oil. There would be the less useful by-product such as gasoline, and he had to find buyer for that too.
1859, 27th. August, from 69 feet beneath the earth, the oil came out. The whale have been saved. The world was about to change.
1864, Pithole, Pansovania had less than 50 inhabitants around.
One year later there were 10,000 residents, 50 hotels, 2 telegram stations, one of the busiest post offices.
Another year later, all those things were gone!!!
Some did make fortune. But real economy is complex and self-sustaining.
Since then the thurst for oil just went up and up.
The modern economy is drenched in oil.
More than one third of the world energy is fueled by oil. Oil provides twice as much as the unclear, hydro-electric, and renewable energy resource combined.
Oil and gas together provides one fourth of the global electricity. And the raw material for most plastics.
In transport part, the internal combust engine drives from cars to trunks, cargo ships to jet planes.
Oil-fueled drive still moves us and stuff all around.
The price of oil is the most important single price in the world.
1973, some Arab states declared imbargo on several rich nations. The price surged from three dollars per barrel to 12 dollars in six months. A global recession was followed.
US oil price spiked in 1978, 1990, 2001. Oil price was blamed as one of the factor in 2008 economic recession which originally sarted in bank sector as well.
As oil goes, so goes the economy!
Why are we so excluciately dependent on oil?
It began with the dilemma faced Winston Churchill. Made the head of the Royal Navy in 1911, he had to decide whether the battle ship should be powered by safe, secure Walsh coal or by oil from faraway Pursia nowadays Iran.
Oil is the better fuel than coal with the faster acceleration, sustain higher speed, required fewer men to deal, more capacity for guns and ammunition.
1912, April, his fateful pledge reflected the same logic that governed our dependence on oil and shaped global politics ever since.
After his decision, the British state brought most stakes on Anglo-Pursia Oil company, the ancestor of the BP.
1951, Iran nationalised it.
Other oil-rich countries such as Sadieribia, whose oil company are richer than Apple or Google, are just Pithole on a grander scale.
Venisvala's oil minister on put it:"It's the devil's excrement. We are drowning in the devil's excrement!!!"
Why is the problem to have lots of oil?
If you export it, you push up the value of your currency, which makes everything else prohibitively expensive to purchase at home. That means it's hard to develop manufactory or complex service industries. Meanwhile, politicians will focus on monoplay. Dictatorship is not uncommon. Some can gain money on it. But such economy is thin and brittle.
How to change it?
Climate change is one argument. But oil is stuberned to give away to battery.
Machines that move us around need to carry power source with them. So the lighter the better. Oil is disappearing after use.
There was a time when oil seemed to running out. "Peak oil" just pushed price even higher.
Thanks to modern technology "Fracking", oil is discovered more quickly than consumption.
We are still dranning in the devil's excrement, and even deeper!!!
28.Chatbot
Robert A. P Stein was looking love online in 2006 and found he had conversations with a Chabot in Rusia!
That's one of the artificial conversations test. The annual test of artificial conversations I which computers try to fool human into thinking that they are human.
Those chatbots should pass the Turing test set by Turing in 1950s: Turing Image Game is between a human and a computer. The computer is aiming to imitate human conversation convincingly enough to persuade the judge. Alan Turing predicted that within 50 years, computers could fool 30% human judges after 5 mins of conversation. Actually, it had been done in 34 years.
Elisa, created in mid 1960s, functioned as the human non-directional therapist.
Psychotherapists were fascinated by this. They are far more efficient.
Now, computers are ubiquitous. They handle complains, inquiries, and medical issues.
Elisa and Siri can interpret our voices and speak back with the simple goal of sparing us from stabbing clumsily at tiny screens.
Those modern ones don't even try to pass that test.
In 2016 US election, bots were used to exchange insults.
Adam Smith, in the late 1970s, put it that computers can be used into small tasks.
Automation re-shape job rather than destroy them. Jobs are sliced into tasks, and computers take the routine tasks while human supply the creativity and the adaptivity.
Such as the digital spread sheet, cash machine, self-checkout keys.
The risk is as customers, producers, and ordinary citizens, we can teach us to fit the computers in the fields as self-checkout, status updates.
We can view this as the challenge to raise our game. Computers, rather than fooling humans, can save time and free us up to talk more meaningfully to each other.
29.Solar PV
Socretes once hoped that every house should be warm in winter and cool in summer. Such desire was easier to state than to achieved.
Many pre-modern civilizations designed buildings to capture sunlight from the low-hanging winter sun, while maximizing shade in the summer.
But millennium went by without much progress.
《A Golden Thread》,published in 1980, celebrated clever uses of solar architectures and technology across the centuries and urged modern economies racked by the oil shops in 1970s to learn from the wisdom of the ancients.
Eg: parabolic mirrors was used in China thousand years ago to focus the sun rays to grill hotdogs.
Solar-thermal system could use sun to warm water that could reduce heating belts.
But such energy just met 1% of global demand for heating, which was better than nothing but hardly a solar revolution.
The PVcells that use sunlight to generate electricity in 1980 was not new.
1839, Edmond Becquerel, the French scientist invented it.
1883, American engineer Charles Fritts built the first solid states PV itself.
Then the first roof-top solar array in New York city.
These stuffs were all made from costly element selenium which was expensive and inefficient. A change was required by scientists including Albert Einstein.
It's till 1954, by pure luck, the serendipitous breakthrough on discovering the silicon component exposed in the sunlight started to generating electricity current.
The silicon is much cheap and 15% more efficient.
Such element was great for satellites. The Vanguard I launched in orbit in 1958 had six solar panels.
PV had few application on earth, because it's far too costly. Half a walt cost thousand dollars.
In mid 1970s, it's 100 dollar per walt, and 10,000 dollars to power a lightbulb.
2016, it's 0.5 dollar per Walt.
The progress was in such a sudden.
In 1930s, US engineer T.P. Right observed the airplane factory and found that every time the accumulated production doubled, the unit costs would fall by 15%.
That was called "the learning curves". Such curves shallowed in some industries and steep in others.
By every doubling of the output, the cost would increase 20%.
The outcome was increasing so fast.
During 2010 to 2016, solar cells were increased by 100% more than it was before 2010. Such increase boosted battery usage as well.
The learning curves feed back loop that make it's harder to predict technological change.
The popular products go cheap; The cheap products go popular.
China produced large quantities to master the . Even the Obama government complained that the imported solar panels were unfairly cheap.
Solar panel is promising in poorer countries with underdeveloped and unreliable energy grids and plenty of sunshine during the day.
In 2014, Indian President Modi set large power grids in city and tiny ones in rural areas.
It's competitive even in rich areas.
2012, PV projects in US sunny states signing deals with less than the price of electricity generated by fossil fuels. Such deals posed serious threat to existing fossil fuel infrastructure. The point there was not because the solar one is green but because it's cheap.
As Socrate put it:"The wisest people understand they know nothing!"
Hope the solar energy will go cheaper and more popular.
30.Cassava
1981, in Nampula, Mozambic, a young Swedish doctor was puzzled by more and more people suffering leg paralysis. The outbreak of Polio? No such symptoms in the textbook; The chemical weapons during the civil war then? He went out to conduct his investigations.
The resolution of the mystery sheds lights not just on paralysis of the legs, but on one of the biggets economic question: why do human being have economy at all!
Back in 1860, Robert Burk and William Wills were embarked on their first exposition across the interior of Australia. On their journey return, they were stranded at Cupa's creek, and running out of food and water. They misunderstood the local people who brought them Nardu cake to help them, and drave them away by waving pistol!
They trusted their own survival skills and made fresh Nardu cakes. And within a week, they both died!
Safely preparing Nardu is complex. It contains high amount of an enzyme called theaminase which breaks the body's supply of vitamin B1 preventing them using the nutrients in food.
So, the two were full but starving!!!
Roast the spouts, grind the flour with water, expose the cake to ash~~~each step making the thiaminase less toxic. It's not a thing to learn to do at a glance.
Cassava roots, the similar stuff as the vital source of calorie in many cultures, especially for farmers in Africa, is toxic and requires tedious preparation to make it safe.
It releases hydrogen cyanide which leads to the sudden paralysis in the case of that Swedish doctor. People there were already starved and did incompletely processed steps.
How do people learn such skills?
It's the culture which evolved through a process of trail and error.
Like bio-evolution, culture evolution can, given enough time, produce sophisticated results.
In Amazon, people eat cassava for thousands years. To de-toxic it, they scrape, grate, wash, boil the liquid, leave the solid, strand for two days, and then bake.
Ask why they do these, they simply reply: this is our culture.
In Africa, the cassava was merely introduced in 17th century. The method didn't come with an instruction manu. Due to the culture learning was still incomplete, people there did some shortcuts.
Culture revolution is even smarter than we are.
People learn not by understanding first principles, but by imitating. Each person's method will be past to the next one who benefited from earlier experiment.
The verb ape is to copy. And the only Ape with instinct to imitate is us!!!
Compare the chimps and human babies at the age of 2.5, human babies are much more good at copying.
Human's ritulistically copy, in a way that chimps do not, is named "over-imitation" by psychologists.
Human civilization hardly based less on raw imitations, than on a highly developed ability to learn from each other.
Over the generations, our ancestors accumulated useful knowledge by trial and error, and the next generation simply copy them.
Scientists do not look down upon collective intelligence. That makes the civilization and economy possible!!!
31.Fire
1910, 20th August, the Big Blow-up in North Idaho. The person in charge found his mission was not to save the fire but those fire fighters. Having known the trail well, they got the chance to come out alive.
That fire killed 86 people, and claimed woods that could build 800,000 houses.
But in the following explanation, maybe it's unwise to quickly put the fire down!!!
Fire is terrifying but fundamental to the morden economy. And the story of fire goes back much further.
In the first 90% of earth's history, there was no fire at all. It's just volcanic eruptions. Those flaming rocks were not on fire.
Because fire is a chemical reaction, the process of combustion. It's life creates the oxygen and the fuel that fire needs to burn. Some fossil evidence suggests that flammable plant life existed hundreds years ago and periodically went up in smoke due partly to those vocanos but mostly to lightening.
According to recent report, there are around 8 million lightening strikes per day which are responsible for more wild fire than unadvisable BBQ or carelessly discarded cigarette buds.
Fire shaped the landscapes and with it the evolution.
It's able to spread grasslands somewhere around 30 million years ago. The grasslands helped to the emergence of the hominoids who evolved into us.
Imagine the economy before our ancestors tamed the fire: things like metal and glass made in furnace, plastics, plants plowed by artificial fertilizer, bricks and pottery fired in kiln, and those row food, all those materials made in fire were void.
We can hardly call it economy.
When and how our ancestors controlled fire are still debatable.
Other species are alert to the heating opportunities.
Birds prey by picking up burning sticks to start a new fire to punch on the creatures who then make a run from it.
People had harnessed wild fire for thousands years before they figures out how to make sparkles from flint. They might keep fire alive by adding slow burning animal dump.
One theory is the cooked food brought energy to evolve bigger brains.
The idea of big brain to nevigate growing social pressures led to another theory that the evenings around fire led to socializing, which is called the "social brain".
A historian called it the "Peric Transition".
In developing countries, millions death link to air pollution caused by cooking on indoor fires. This transition increased our fear of wild fires. With climate change, we can expect more of those fires.while satellite observation helping us to understand them, changing patterns of weather and vegetation are making them harder to predict.
It took half a century for people being confirmed to quickly extinguish wild fire isn't a such great idea.
The problem is eventually you will have a fire you can not control. That fire would be more devastating. Because it would burn through all the dead wood that would have been cleared by the small fire if you've not rush to put them out.
In the main time, complacency sets in. We are increasing building in or closer to wildness areas where fire will breakout sooner or later. The people who live nearby aren't going to be too keen. As in the book《Burning Planet》, our increasing scientific understanding on fire in recent years hasn't translated into greater public awareness.
Some economists think wild fire is just one wpexample of broader modern dynamic. Getting better handling small problems creates growing sense of safety which periodically creates much larger problems.
Politician who extiguishes minor problems, people would get confident, and take silly risks.
When the crisis came along that couldn't be stamp out, those bad debts fueled a global configration.
32.RFID
1945, 4th August, Europan chapter of WWII was over. USA and USSR pondered the future relationship. In the US embassy in Moscow, a group of boys from Soviet Union made a charming gesture of friendship between two super powers by presenting a large, handcrafted ceremonial seal of USA to the embaseder.
The Thing with no wire, no battery in evidence, was given its pride of place of hanging in the study for the next 7 years.
It was built by the true origins of 20th century.
Leo Theremin lived in US before went to Soviet Union in 1938. He was forced to design the Thing.
Eventurally, American radio operators stumbled upon U.S. embasseder' s conversations being broadcasted over the air waves. These broadcasts were unpredictable. Scan the embassy for radio emotions, no bug was evident. The listening device was inside the Thing.
Little more than an antenna attached to a cavity with a silver diaphomer over serving as the microphone, no battery or other source of power.
It activated by radio waves broadcast back using the energy of incoming signal. Switch off the signal, and the Thing will go silent.
The Thing might seem as the technology curiosity. The idea of the device that powered by incoming radio waves which sends back information in response is much more than that.
RFID (radio frequency identification) tech is ubiquitous in Morden economy: bank cards, library books, airport to track luggages, retailers for shoplifting.
Its cheap is the selling point.
It can be used to identify an object. Unlike bar codes, they can be scanned automatically without the need for the line of sight. Some tags can be read from several feet away; some can be scanned in batches; some can be re-written as well as read or remotely disabled.
They can store more data than barcode.
1970s, it used in rail way cabbages and dairy cattles.
In early 2000, it used in large organizations for tagging, and almost on everything. Some people even pin them into their body for paying the fee by just waving hands.
1999, Kevin Ashton coined a phrase "the lead to the internet of things"!
But the hype of it faded by the smart phone which emerged in 2007. All this devices are sophisticated, packed with processing power, but also costly and need power source.
We are in a world of over engineered foolishness I which toaster speaks to frig for no good reason.
It's no surprise that we are in the "survalence capitalism" where privacy violation is in a popular business model.
With all these hype and worry, the humble RFID continues to quietly go about its work. It's believed that its glory days are ahead.
Kevin's point of "the internet of things" is simple: computers depend on data, if they make sense to the physical world rather than just cyber space.
It can be used to track, to organize, to optimise. Objects need to be built that would automatically supply that information to the computer, thus making the physical world intelligible in digital terms.
Human carries smartphones, but physical objects do not. It remains the inexpensive way to track them. It's cheap and small enough to tag hundreds of thousands items without battery. We should remember Leo Theremin.
33.Postage Stamp
"It should be remembered that in few departments have important reforms been effected by those trained up in practical familiarity with their details. The man to detect blemishes and defacts are among those who have-nots by long familiarity been made in sensible to them."
That 's from Rowland Hills in 1837 who took upon himself the role to perform for UK postal service. He was a former school master. As a disgruntled user, he was for a complete re-vamping the postal service. He did the research in his spare time, wrote his analysis and sent to the British finance minister and the chancellor of the Exchequer. With the naive thought : The right understanding my plan must secure the adoption. He got the lesson in human nature: people whose career depends on the system, no matter how inefficient it might be, won't necessarily welcome a total outsider turning up with a meticulously argued diagnosis of its faults and proposal for improvement.
Brushed off by the chancellor, he printed and distributed his proposal to the public.
Everyone, expect those in the industry, agreed with him, and there were petitions, a campaign for it. Within three years, the government had to bow to public pressure.
Back then, people have to pay for receiving a letter, and the price was complex and expensive.
The free-franking privilege was wildly abused.
By 1830s, there were 7 million invalid letters per year. People used codes massages through minute change in the address to refuse to pay.
The solution was let the senders pay, and get the price cheap.
In Hills' words: It will stimulate the "productive power of the country." Because people would send more if it's cheap to send.
A few years ago, an India-born economist C.K argued: there will be a fortune to be made by catering to the bottom of the pyramid--the poor and lower middle classes in the developing world.
They might have little money individually, but they have a lot when you put them together.
Hills was one and a half century ahead of him:"small payment from large number of poor people had mounted up for the government."
"Duties on most and ardent spirits which beyond all doubt are principly consumed by poor classes brought in much more than those on wine--the beverage of the wealth."
"The wish to correspond with friends was not be so strange or so gentle as the desire for fermented liqueurs, but facts have to come my knowledge tending to show that but for the high rate of postage, many a letter will be written, many a heart gladdened too. Where the revenue and feeling of friends now suffer a like."
1840, 20th first year of penny post, the letters sent was doubled, and within the next ten years, the number was doubled again. Within three years, post stamps were to be introduced to Swizerland, Brizel, and later America. In 1860, 90 countries had such figure.
The fact had shown that the fortune of the bottom of the pyramid was there to be mined.
The problems is the junk mails, the scams, the growing demand for immedient responds.
Half a century from Hills, deliveries in London were as frequently as hourly. And the reply were expected "by return of post"!
Does this stimulate the productive power?
A test conducted in US: gather data on the spread of post-offices in the 19th century, the number of applicstion for patents from different parts of the country. The result was positive.
Now, it's called the snail mail. People have emails.
We no longer need the society to promote the defusions of useful knowledge, we need better ways to distill it.
A lesson to teach: government's policy and institutional design have the power to support technological progress.
34.Rubber
In a black and white photo, a man purged on the edge of wooden deck looking down at two objects; in the background, there is a palmtree, two other men, one with arms folded, the other with hands on hips staring grimly at their friend or the photographer.
That photographer was Alice Seeley Harris. The year 1904. The location a missionary outpost in nowadays the Congo free state.
The man was explaining to Alice that his wife and children had just been killed.
This photo caused an up-roar back in Europe. Printed in pamphlets, displayed at public meetings, it formed the first photographic human rights campaign and built the public pressure forcing the Belgain King Leopold to loosen his grip on the colony, which is depicted in the novel《Heart of Darkness》!
Rewind 70 years to get why rubber was in such demand.
1834, New York city, a young man was knocking on the door of Indian Rubber company. He believed he could invent his way out of financial trouble. His latest idea was an improved kind of air valve from inflatable rubber life preservers.
The rubber is stretchingly implible, air tighten, water proof. But now, it's all going horribly wrong.
The rubber has long been known in South Africa. The native made a kind of wax from trees that give milk when cut. That's the latex come from the inner and outer bark.
In 1490s, it's first reported in Europe. Bits of rubber made their way to Europe, but mostly a curiosity.
1700s, French explorers named it from its native language the "weeping wood"!
1820s, rubber was attracting serious interest. More and more was being shipped from Brizel. They were made into coats, hats, shoes, and inflatable life preservers.
Then, came a hot summer. A garst melted into foul smelling gue.
GoodYear saw its chance. A fortune awaited whoever could invented a way to make rubber that copes with heat and cold which made it brittle.
GY was the man to do it. Though he has no background in chemistry, nor has he the money.
After many trial and error, in the end, he found that heat the rubber with sulpha, a process we now call it the vulcanization. He borrowed more money for law suits to try to protect his patents. And finally died with debts of about 200,000 dollars. But his dogginess put rubber at the very heart of industrial economy. It was applied in belts, hoses, gas gigs, ceiling, insulating, absorbing shocks.
In late 1880, a Scotsman in Ireland supplied the killer app--the new metic tire, which made the demand for rubber boomed.
Then, European colonial powers set in Asia to plant. But the new rubber tree plantation would take time to grow.
How to get rubber as much and quicker as possible? The answer was disdressingly simple: to send military into villages to kill people.
Something has changed since Alice's photograph. Half of the rubber globally came not from weeping wood, by from gushing oil.
Synthetic rubber began as the natural stuff became popular and took off during WWII. With the supplyline within Asia disrupted, American government pudpshed industries to develop substitutes. The synthetic one is often cheaper and sometimes better. E.g, in bike tires.
1/3 of the global harvest is made into tyres for heavier vehicles. With the more and more cars, tucks, planes, we need more and more rubber.
That's not without the problem, the rubber trees are thirsty. Economists are worrying about water shortage and biodiversity as South Asia's tropical rain forest increasingly give up ways to plantations. Such situation happens in Africa too.
Those rubber processing companies owned by Chinese state claims they are doing the ethical sourcing by clearing thousands of acres for plantation!!! But the villages complain that they are not properly compensated for lose of their lands.
At least, it's cutting woods not hands now!!! It's a progress, of a sort!!!
35.CubeSat
There was a beloved story about the domination of the space shuttle: the boost shuttle has to fit into a railway tunnel with the width of two horse back sizes.
It's apocryphal! The true story is the BiniBaby!!!
In 1999, a Stanford teacher Bob Twigs teached students to design satellite.
Then, the Russian satellite launched in 2001 was so big--about 3 tons, 8 metres tall and each of its solar penals was as long as a bus. With no space and temptation to play with, there were more and more gears to add on, it gets more and more expensive. Not to mention an encouragement to lazy thinking. Bob placed a BiniBaby box on the desk, and asked his students to design one to fit into the box.
This educational challenge evolved into a practical standard for tiny satellite.
CubeSat is the one!
With the size of 10cm×10cm×11.35cm of each unit, and maybe several units combined, they are in kilos not in tons.
They are aimed to take photographs, other images of our planet from above. The basic ingredients are:a smartphone processor, solar penals, camera, battery.
They are cheap to make and cheap to launch.
And the cost has fallen from 500 million to just 100,000 dollars.
Compared with those big rockets which has 50m tall, CubeSat could ride on much smaller, private sector rockets.
It can slao pickbag on large ones. In 2017, 104 satellites launched in one launch. Hit the record high by a new Sillican Valley based company Planet--a company founded in 2010. That is the company having fleet of satellites. 140 of them are taking 800,000 photos per day, everywhere in the world every 24 hours which provides a better coverage.
CubeSat has three lessons to teach in morden economy:
I. The importance of cheap, standardized, modular components. While we reserve our tension, our pro for uniqueness and complex projects being cheap changes everything.
II. Pioneers have embraced the fail, fast model of silicon valley. NASA has low tolerance for risk. NASA focuses on those kits could work perfectly. The silicon valley said that failing with disposable satellites is cheaper than succeed with big ones.
III. Don't dismissed the public sector too casually. NASA quietly supports it by founding small CubeSats launching cuts; free ride to the international space station where they could be launched by a special airlog.
It can also teach entirely me about the way the economy works.
Alfred Marshall, the famous economist died in 1924, described the economy a sbeing the study of humanity in the ordinary business of life.
CubeSat allows us to observe the ordinary life as it unfolds all around the world day by day in some details.
Economic forecast hasn't been slow to notice it. The ups and downs of the oil price, the stock markets, and even the coffee bean output.
Beyond these narrow trading forecasts, satellites promise to illuminate hidden connections in the way world economy works. It measures pollution, traffic congestion, deforestation, attempted ethnic cleansing.
Algorithm has started to extract subtle information at scale. On the roof, on the roads, the conducts of aiding money.
So much going on under the surface of big economy. So much that doesn't show up in regular statistical releases.
Something that requires months, sometimes for years to show up. Now we can see it day by day!
36.Factory
In the rarly 18th century, John Lombe, a young English man, travelled to Piedmont, northwestern Italy where is famous for its fine wine with the purpose of industrial espionage. The town had a workshop for yarn from silk. Divulging such secret was illegal. So he was smuggling into a workshop after dark, and sketching the splitting machine by candlelight.
1717, he brought it back to Derby. But the Italian took terrible revenge on him. He suddenly died at the age of 29!!!
The way he and his brother Thomas used such machine was completely original.
They were the textile dealers. Knowing there was a shortage of silk yarn, They decided to go big. They built a structure that would be imitated around the world--a long, slim, five-story building with plane brick walls cut by a grid of Windows. It housed three dozen large machines powered by a 7 metres high water mill.
The age of large factory began with a thunderclap!
Interlecturers took notes:
Daniel Defoe came to gaze in wonder the silk mill;
Adam Smith set his 《The Wealth Nation》, published in 1776, beginning with the description of a pin factory;
Three decades later, William Blake penned his line about dark satanic mills.
Concerns about the condition in factory have persisted ever since.
The Round Mill, not far from Derby silk mill was modelled after Jarimmy Banson' s 《Pannotic Prison》as the place you never knew you were watched. The circular design didn't catch on, but the relentlent scrutiny workers did!
Critics claimed that factory's exploitation was somehow the same to slavery. A shocking claim then and now.
While Marx saw the "hope"!!! So many workers were concentrated together in one place. Hey could organize unions , political parties, and even revolutions!!! He might be right on the first two, but wrong on the third one. The revolution didn't come from industrial societies but from agrarian ones.
Russian revolution went slow to embrace factory.
In developed economies, dark mills were gradually gave way to cleaner, more advanced factories.
The condition open developing countries now attract attention. Economists attend to believe that badly paid sweaty jobs beat the urbanative of even more extreme poverty in rural areas. Those jobs draw people to fast growing cities.
Manufactory has long been viewed as the engine of rapid economic development.
What next of factory? There three lessons from history:
First of all, factory is getting bigger. 300 workers at the beginning, then more than 1000 in 19th century, then even more and more in Morden ones.
Volkswagen has 60,000 plus workers which is half the population of its town.
Fox.com city ShengZhen in China has 230,000 or 450,000 staggering numbers.
The increasing in scale is not the only way, ShengZhen continues the Arch of history.
There are fear of the walfare of the workers. The Chinese government cracks down on those young Marxists who tried to get workers unionized.
One thing has changed.
The factory used to centralize production process--row materials came in, finished products went out; components will be made on site or by suppliersclosed at hand; save the trouble of transporting heavy or fragile objects in the mupanufactory process.
Today's production process are themselves global. Production can be coordinated and monitored without the need for physical procceminity. Shipping containers, bar codes, streamlined the logistics.
Morden factories are just steps in the distributed production chain.
Huge factories have long been supplied the world, now, the world has been the factory itself!!!
37.Blockchain
2017, Longisalnd ice tea co. lost 4m dollars in the first three quarters that year an announced that it changed its name into Long Blockchain co.
The details were hazy. But investment got excited and the share price got quadrupled.
This was the the thing made the economy, not the thing will make the economy of the future.
Venture capitalists were pooling billions into start-ups with more plausible sounding plans. Billions more have been raised in the regulatory grey area of initial coin offerings.
Some predicted that Blockchain could be disruptive as the internet. It's also often been compared to the WWW in the 1990s.
Let's get our heads around the Blockchain.
Start with the deceptive simple question: what to stop one to spend the same money twice?
When money vs coins, we can't give the same coin to two people. It's easier to trust intermediaries to record of who's got what--you give me the goods, I trust the recordkeepers to shuffle their numbers accordingly.
How do you know I haven't given the same money to some one else? You trust the bank or master card or PayPal to generate that couldn't happen.
But there is the drawback: these intermediaries need to pay their services. Network effects offen give the market power. They know more about us than we do about each other.
That's another source of power. If they failed, the whole system collapsed.
What if we didn't need them? What if financial records that lubricate the economy could be communally owned and maintained?
In 2008, some one proposed the BitsCoin in pseudo-name.
Transactions will be verifed not by a trusted intermediary but by a network of computers solving cryptcraft puzzles.
If anyone control it, they could fake the record, defraud people by doubling spending biscoins. But that couldn't happen. As long as enough different people chipped in computer power to check the the solutions. People will be incentivise to contribute computing power by random occasional rewards in Bitscoins.
Some wider applications offer the completely new way to collaborate without intermediaries or centralized authorities.
That underlining technology is BlockChain--blocks of transactions of periodically approved by the network added to a chain of records. Or the distributed ledger.
One economist put it:"it's a general purpose technology that can lower the cost of verifying transactions and lower the barriers to create new marketing places."
In principle, it can be useful in any situation when we currently trust entities to manage our data in ways it helps us to interact.
Many other situations fit that description:
Maybe we could own our information and sell out our attention;
Track goods through supply chaind;
Contracts get quicker to heir bosses;
Voting system gets more secure.
One economist put it: Skepticism is more plausible than enthusiastism, at least for now.
One of the reason is Blockchain can be slow and power hungry. It consumes about much electricity of Ireland while dealing the transactions.
The technological challenge of scaling Blockchain seems real.
Blockchain reminds us the importance of intermediaries which can rectify the market and resolve disputes.
Anyway, the Blockchain has been just a decade old!!!
38.Pencil
The 19th century American essayist Henry David Thoreau made fortune by manufacturing high quality pencils.
Pencils seemed fated to be overlooked. We don't even give it the courtesy of a sensible name. It's derived from Latin word with means "tail"!
It does have some champains. Its very irrasability makes it indispensable to designers, engineers. "Ink is the cosmetic that idea will wear for going out to the public, while graphite is their dirty truth."
The Pencil Museum in Derwint in Lake District, England can have the answers to pencil questions.
How do they get the graphite inside the wood?
The trick is to take a slim slab of kilned dry cider wood an draw a raw of grooves into the top surface. Originally, the grooves are square and easier to cut by hand. Now they are poisoned a machine for a semi-circular cross section. Once the cylindrical logs laid into the grooves, glu another groove on top. This time for the groove at the bottom. Cut the whole graphite sandwich into a stick parallel to the graphite logs. These sticks are unformed pencils. Plain, varnish, and job is done.
1958, an American economist Reed published 《I, Pencil》, written in the voice of pencil itself, which is a proselytizing libertarian with a melon dramatic disposition.
"If you can be aware of the miraculousness of which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing!"
The pencil awaresit doesn't appear immedient impressive. It explained collecting cider wood requires saws, axes, ropes, railway cars. Its graphite was from nowadays Sri Lanka mixed with Mississippi clay, sulphur, animal fats and numorious other ingredients.
Milton Fredman adapted it in his 1980s TV series "Free To Choose".
Pencils is the testimony to 19th power of market forces to coordinate large numbers of people with no body in overall charge.
Jump back 500 years.
Graphite was first discovered in Lake District. Legend has it: a ferocious storm uprooted trees in the area. Underneath their roots was a strange shinny black substance. Also called "Black Lead" then, it was used as a marking stone.
It's soft, heat resistant. So, it can also be used for casting canon balls. And soon became a precious resource.
In late 1700s, French pencil manufacturers were happily buying to import high quality graphite.
Then the war broke out. English government sensibly decided to not make easy for French to cast canon balls.
French Nicholas Jacques Conte painstakingly invented a mix of clay with low grade powdered continental graphite, by which a patent was granted.
In practice then the pencil is the product of mass economic system in which the government plays a role and cooperated hierarchies insulate many workers from Fredman' s magic of the price system.
How profoundly complex are the process that produce the everyday objects whose value we often overlook.
39.Drawf Wheat
In the rarly 1900s, the Yarchi valley near Mexico was dry, dusty, and destitude, but still liveable. And there was the agriculture research centre--the Yaqui Valley Experiment Station.
But in 1945, it was deserted: it was fell in disuse; the fields were over grown, the fences fallen, the building window shattered, rooftiles missing, the place was infested with rats.
Then, Norman Borlaug, a young man from Rockefeller Fundation, was digging a hole trying to breed wheat that could resist diseases that ruined many a crop. Contrary to normal, he tried to sow in autumn and harvest in spring. By relocating for a few months, perhaps he could find variety of wheat that grow in diverse conditions.
23 years later, 1968, the main street of that town was named after this man.
The same year the biologist Paul Ehrlich published 《The Population Bomb》in which he said in poor countries, population grew more quickly than food supply; and predicted people would starved to death.
He was wrong, because of Norman.
Norman won the Nobel Prize for his effort in growing thousands upon thousands kinds of wheat and carefully noting their traits, e.g.. Some has good yields but bad for breadmaking.
The best he could do then was cross the variety that has some good traits and hoped that one of the crossbreed could happen to have all of the good traits and none of the bad.
The Dwarf Wheat--resisted fast, yielded well, crucially had short stems so that they wouldn't top over in the wind.
He did the further test on the maximum yield, how much fertilizer, how much to irrigate, etc.
In 1960s, he travelled around the world to spread the news. Some developing countries imported his seeds and wheat.
During 1960 to 2000, wheat yields had been tripled. And similar work on corn and rice.
The Green Revolution.
Since the global population has been doubled. The worry about over-population never go away.
In 1798, the first expert on economy Thomas Robert Malthus wrote an essay 《The Principle of Population》
He worried that the population will grow exponentially, but the food production can't keep that pace. Happily, while people getting richer, there are fewer children. So the population growth slowed
And there are someones like Norman.
Over the years, human ingenuity has met, food yields have kept pace, at least so far.
The food yields need to keep rising. With the 2.5% per year growth, the progress is so slow.
Problems AR emountaining up: climate change, water shortages, pollution for fertilizer and pesticides.
There are the problems that Green Revolution itself had made worse. Even perpetuate the poverty that keeps the population growing.
Sine genetic modification become possible, it's mostly been about resistant to deseases, insects and herbicides. It does help to increase the yields. But it hasn't been the direct aim.
That starts to change: the gene editing tool "Crisper" can propel the progress.
There are still questions remained: To let the imperfect way to grow food? Or let people starve? Just keep asking in the decades to come.
40.Like Button
Ela draws comics and share her opinions of emotional literacy and self love on social media like Facebook. Her friends and followers find her posts are healing and endearing.
Then Facebook changed algorithm of how it decides what to put in front of our eyeballs. So that your contents were shown to fewer people. To Ela, it's less Likes.
Social approval can be addictive. What's a Facebook Like if not social approval distill into its purest form. It triggers the same reward pathway of our brain.
To Ela, she paid Facebook so that more people will see her comics.
Before being a comics drawer, Ela was a developer at Facebook back in 2007. And in July that year, she and her team invented the Like buttom which is now ubiquitous across the web and similar features can be found on YouTube and Twitter.
For the platform, the benefit is obvious. The single click is the simplest possible way to get users to engage. Much easier than typing comments.
While it's not immediately appreciated by Mark Zarkburg who considered the culture shock problem.
Anyway, in February 2009, the Like buttom was launched. There were more engagement, more state subjects, more content. It all just worked.
Meanwhile at Cambridge University, someone was doing PHD in psychometrics--the study of measuring psychological profiles.
A student had written a Facebook app to test the big five basic personality traits: openness, concienciousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and nurotisism. The permission to access your Facebook profile with your age, gender, sexual orientation, etc. The test went viral. The data set swelled to millions of people and every people clicked Like.
The Cambridge man found himself sitting on a treasure trove of potential insides.
More likes meant more accurate guess he could make, say, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, political leaning, ect.
About 70 Like thing, he could know you better than your friends; 300 Like things, better than your partner.
What Facebook can do with its window into your soul?
There are two things:
One is it can tailor your needed so you can spend more time on the platform;
The second is it can help advertisers to target you. The better advertising, the more money it can make.
Targeted advertising is nohing new.
Long before the internet and social media, there were newspapers on local issues.
Facebook just improved that by gathering reletive advertising.
Not all advertisers are benile as local bycicle shop.
You can pay to spread political massages which could be hard to users to contextualize or verify.
It's said Cambridge Analytica claimed it swung the 2016 U.S. election for Trump. In part by harnessing the power the Like to targeted individual voters.
In reality, Facebook's potential for mind control still seems to be reassurely limited.
Experts worried how effective they really were, though the clicks on Facebook advertisements were only less than 1%.
Perhaps we should worry more about Facebook's undoubted proficiency at serving us more advertisements by sucking in our attention and hooking us to our screens.
How should we manage our compulsion in this brave new social media world? To cultivate emotional literacy about how these advertisement affect us.
If social approval feels as vital as oxygen, maybe more self love is the answer!
41.Pornography
On internet, what people really valuate is for more intimate massages. One in seven web searches is for porn. The Porn Harb company ranks the 28th globally.
When they are new, technologies are often to be expensive and unreliable. It needs to find a niche market for early adopters whose custom helped technology to develop.
Once it's cheaper and more reliable, it find bigger market and much broader range of usages.
Pornography plays this role in the development of the internet and the whole range of other technologies.
Since the very dawn of art, sex has been an subject.
Those paintings and drawings and carvings in prehistoric caves were to depict irrotica. But it doesn't mean irrotic was the driving force behind such technology.
The first communication technology to test the theory against is Guttenberg's Printing Press. The theory doesn't hold water. Because the main market for reading material was religious.
Next, a more plausible candidate leaping ahead to the 19th century's photography.
Pioneering studios in Paris did a roaring trace in art study.
Customers were willing to pay enough to fund the technology for a time. Because it cost more to buy an irrotic photograph than to hire a prostitute.
Next, the big technological breakthrough in artistic expression was the moving picture.
The word "pornography", in ancient Greek means "writing and prostitutes", has been taken on its modern meaning--now it means"I know it when I see it."
Porn didn't drive the moving industry for obvious reasons: movies were expensive, needing big audience to recoup your costs. That meant the public viewings.
There were audiences to watch dirty films in home and in public theatres.
In 1960s, the pit-show booth--an enclosed place; when you put a coin in the slot to keep a movie showing. A booth gained several thousands dollars per week.
Next, the video cassette recorder, or the VCR.
At first, it was a hard sell because it's pricy and not so many people wanted to pay for a device that soon would be obsolete.
In late 1970s, more than half of the video tape sales were porn. But within a few years, family movies made porn's share shrink.
Next, the cable TV and the internet.
In the past when getting online meant coaxing a dialogue modem into establishing a connection and fretting about long distance phone charges slowly chuck through a file.
Nowadays, download is easy as a snap of finger.
A 1990 study showed that 5 out of 6 images shared were porn.
The appetite for porn helped to drive demand for fast connections, better modems, and higher bandwidth.
It spurred innovations in other areas too.
Online porn providers were pioneers in web technology such as video file comparison and users' friendly payment system. And also in business models such as affiliate marketing programs.
To find wider users means more other stuffs.
It's hard to sell porn. What's bad for the content creators is good for the aggregate platforms which made money through advertising and premium subscriptions.
The big players in this ,moment is a company called "Mind Greek".
There is money in porn, but the best way to make it is to invest I the technology that enable it and that it enables.
Now, the algorithm that suggest content and keep eyeballs on the screens.
And next the robort of porn.
42.Recycling
The once world biggest paper mill in DongGuan china was about more than 300 football pitches, and was owned by "Nine Dragons", a recycling company whose female boss was ranked on Forbs as the self-made woman!!! The company imported large volume of American goods--wasted paper, with some less useful trashes mixed in.
Many chinese companies built business models around importing trashes from America and others; then put in their recycling receptacles and picking up stuff that shouldn't be there.
Such job is crucial. If the waste is too contaminated or non-recyclable. And it's hard to automate.
So rich countries started shipping waste to countries that poor enough to sort it for wages lower enough to turn a profit.
From 1980s to recently, such activity went smoothly. China exported cheap manufactory goods and to load their empty return ships with wastes.
But as China gets richer, it no longer tends to be the dumping ground.
In 2017, the nationawide "National Sword" campaign went through the whole country.
It only accepts well-sorted rubbish, which accounts no more than half of 1% stuff shouldn't be there. The amount of waste shipped to China plumped.
Governments and companies scrambled to adjust: find other countries, or to raise taxes to pay higher wages workers to sort it better.
The difference of recycling and reuse.
The reuse: the example of reuse go back before paper to papaya. Ancient Greeks gave the word "palumcest" which literally means scrape clean and used again.
The recycling: it dates back to Japan 1000 years ago when Japanese pulling paper to make more paper.
Anyway, those activities are all driven by saving or making money.
The raw material is too valuable to throw away. And the idea of we should recycle because it's the right thing to do is much more recent.
To see how attitude has changed:
August, 1955, "Throw Away Living" on the Time magazine. It was celebratory with the subtitle:"disposable items, cut down household chores"! There was an image of smiling family filling bins with stuff that required 49 hours to clean.
1971, the TV advertisement of "The Crying Indian". A native American man paddling conoe down a trash-polluted river, then stands by a highway, passing motorist tossing a bag of fast food trash to his feet. Then, a single tear rolling down his cheek!
Such advertisement was funded by an organization backed by leading companies of beverage in packaging industry.
The deposit schemes then were common: buy drink by a cash back when returning the bottle.
It assumed it's the manufactory's job to provide the incentives and logistics for returning waste.
The Crying Indian had the different massage: it's the people who should be responsible.
Historian argued: turning big systematic problems into questions of individual responsibility was a bad idea. It made recycling less about effective action, more about making ourselves feel good.
Chimed by behaviour psychologist: when people know recycling , they act more wastefully.
Economist had the similar arguement: you can not leave waste disposal to free market. If you charge people what it really cost, you tend them to dump them illegally instead. You have to subsidise it.
Article in Times also pointed that people chucked stuff away and society bears the costs.
How to get them to recycle?
One of the scheme is the guilt trip.
For each kind of waste, what we should do is cooly compared the costs and benefits of recycling against other options.
Well-designed landfills nowadays are pretty safe. We can harness the methone that produced for electricity.
Modern waste incinerators can be a cleanish source of power.
If we turn recycling into a moral good, then we back to the conundrum of china's national sword.
Pair back recycling program, collecting only what make sense to recycle seems like a backward step.
Systematic answer: regulators encourage new business models like those bottle-deposit scheme making manufactories think through the incentives and logistics for recycling their products.
Technology can come to the rescue: AI-enabled trash cans use laser, magnets, air jets to separate different recycleable streams.
43.Spreadsheet
1978, Harvard Busenness School student Dan Briklin sit in the classroom watching his accounting lecturer filling in rolls of columns on the blackboard and felt so boring, repetitive.
"Laziness is the mother of invention!"
Accounting clerks all over the world roll in the pages of their ledges. A two-page spread accross the open fold of the ledger was called a spreadsheet. The output of several paper spreadsheet where the input of some larger master spreadsheet; making an alteration may require hours of work with the pencil, eraser and desk calculator.
Before enrolled in Harvard, Dan was a programmer on computer in DEC. So he invented the electronic spreadsheet, a program for Apple tool personal computer.
17th, October, 1979, the "visiCalc" was on sell and became an overnight sensation. It's the first program with a modern spreadsheet interface and was widely thought to be the killer app.
Steve Jobs credited this app to his success.
Five years later, a historian on computer put it that there are two eras in computer world, the one before the "visiCalc" and the one after it.
It evolved from visiCalc to Lotus123 to Excel.
The real lesson of it is not about how monoplay rise and fall but about technological unemployment.
The cliche nowadays is Roberts are coming for our jobs.
The digital spreadsheet or a robort account, the Excel, these programs put hundreds of thousands of accounting clarks out of work. Accounting clark with men and women who were spending their days typing away at pocket calculators are raising and re-calculating numbers on paper ledgesheet. Of course, spreadsheet was revolutionary in that world. It works more efficient than a human.
Accoeding to an survey, about 400,000 fewer accounting clarks employed today than in 1980. While 600,000 more jobs for regular accountants. After all, crunching the number has been cheaper, more versatile, more powerful. So the demand is rising.
The point is automation reshaped the work place in much subtler ways than a Robort took my job.
In the age of spreadsheet, the repetitive, routine parts of accountancy disappeared. What remained indeed flourished required more judgement, more human skills.
There are countless jobs in high finance that for the purpose of trading or insuring depend on exploring different mirical scenarios.
The Jeniffer Unit strips a menial tasks of its last faintly interesting elements.
The spreadsheet does the reverse. It strips intellectually demanding of the most boring bits.
These two show that technology doesn't usually take jobs wholesale, it chisels away the easily automatic chunks, leaving humans to adept to the rest.
In accountancy, it makes the human job more creative.
What the spreadsheet did to accountancy and finance is a harbinger of what is coming to other white-collar jobs:
Journalists no longer churn out routine stories about cooperate earning results. Algorithms do that more quickly, cheaply.
Teachers get on-line tutoring.
Doctors can be replaced by combination of nurse or a diagnostic app.
Law firms use document assembly system that question clients and then draft legal contract.
Learn one final cautionary tale that spreadsheet to offer:
Sometimes we think we've delegated some routine jobs to a infaleble computer, while as we simply acquired a leaver with which to magnify human error to a dramatic scale.
44.Brick
"I found Rome a city of bricks, and left a city of marble!" Caesar Augustus apparently boasted about 2000 years ago. But ancient Rome is a city of bricks! No less glorious for that.
Augustus also joined in a long tradition of denigrating and over-looking one of the most ancient and versatile building materials.
One Greek architecture writer mentioned it just by passing; The 1751 Encyclopedia composer penned no brick-making at all.
Because a brick is such an intuitive thing, people have been teaching themselves to build simple structures out of bricks for many thousands of years and grand ones too:Barbelon, the Tower of Babel ~~~
The humble cube boy is everywhere: Great Wall, Temples, Castles, Bridges, Palaces, Churches, and skyscrapers.
One architect boasted that he can "make a brick worth its weight in gold."
Brick making started long time ago.
At the very dawn of our civilization, about 9600 to 10300 years ago, in nowadays Jordon their was the first brick archeologists found in 1951.
The making was: Loaves of mud, baked dry in the sun, stagged up and glued together with more mud.
About 7000 years ago, simple brick mold was originated in Mesopotamia. Such brick mold making was depicted on tomb painting in Egypt: a wooden rectangle with four sides but no top or bottom into which clay and strewn can be packed to make brick faster an more precisely. In the days pre metal, these were much cheaper and batter.
Even in a dry climate, sun-dried mud bricks do not usually last.
Fired brick, a much more durable, stronger, and water-proof one. By making them, you have to heat clay and sand at temperature of about 1000c. It has been possible for many thousands years, but at a price.
Accounts form 4000 years ago noted: 14,400 mud bricks equal to a piece of silver; 504 fired clay bricks for a piece of silver. The exchange rate was 29 mud ones for a clay one.
15,000 years later, by Balalonian time, one clay one was for 2 to 5 mud ones.
Fired ones can be effective way for many poor household to save .
The brick is one of those old technologies, like the wheels , the paper, seems to be basically un-improvable.
"The shapes and sizes of brick do not differ greatly where ever they are made."
The simple reason for the size is they have to be fit into human hands; for the shape, building is much more straight-forward if the width is half the length.
Bricks are much the same all over the world. It's precisely the uniformity of the brick that make it so versatile.
Many medieval buildings re-used Roman bricks. Because the brick production still used its traditions in many parts of the world.
But automation is gradually nosing its way in.
Hydronic shovels dig the clay; slow convey-belt carrying bricks through tunnels; full cliff chalk shift position that palates the bricks.
All those make bricks themselves cheaper.
On building sites, the weather and unique demand of each site require well-trained workers. The brick layer has long been celebrated as the symbol of honest dignity of skilled manued labour.
Brick laying tool has nearly changed since the 7th century.
There are signs that the robots are coming to brick laying.
Human can lay only 300 to 500 bricks a day; while semi-automative ones can do 3000 a day.
Machine can do quicker, cheaper. And bigger hands can lay bigger bricks.
45. Mail Order Catalogue
Montgomery Ward co. was the company being warned from the Chicargo Tribune on November 8th, 1873. Ward had to convince the Tribune and editorial staff that he was running a swindling firm, playing on golf on the countryside.
Ward's flyers were suspicious by utopian prices on a suspiciously wide range of goods over 200 items.
It not only display their wares in the shop, they employed no agents.
"In fact, the keep all together retired from public gaze and are only to be reached by correspondence sent to a certain box in the postal office."
Scam? No! It offers its utopian prices precisely because he kept no expensive premises and employed no middle men.
Mail and order existed but it wasn't common. Just few specialist firms with limited line of wares. The opening Ward store was ambitious but simple.
They use mail order to sell many things directly with low markups on wholesalers and buyers would pay on delivery. So if you don't like what is delivered, refuse to pay and send it back.
Ward, whose talents extended writing, later gave the world the enduring phrase "Satisfaction guaranteed! Or your money back!"
Just two years after rousing the Tribune's suspicions, Ward's flyers has become 72-page catalogue listing 9 on 2000 items, basically just list of goods and prices.
Later, it's named as among the 100 most influential books in the American history, up there with Mobby Dick, Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Perhaps the greatest single influence increasing the standard of American middle class living.
It inspired competitors, notably Sear Roebuck which has smaller pages which were catering to tidy-minded housewives who would naturally stack the two with Sear's on top.
By the end of the 19th century, there was 13m dollars per year for mail orders. That's the billion dollar business today.
In the next 20 years, he figure grew 20 folds.
The popularity helped fuel demond in the postal offices in rural countryside. And thereby improved road networks too.
Rural free delivery was a huge success.
That was the golden age of mail order.
Catalogue bloomed to thousands of lavishly illustrated pages, new editions were eagerly awaited.
Many these mail order kit houses are still standing 100 years on. Some has changed hands for million dollars.
The catalogue itself has endured less well.
Ward and Sear started building department stores later. Ward was died in 1958, and years later followed by Sear.
Now the internet age.
The heyday of mail order has long passed, its dynamics has played out all over again.
The world rising economic power, the go element building roads and communication inferstructures in isolated rural areas. Customers fed up with existing retail options. Visionary entroprenours with new business models that let you browse and order from home.
It's China who has the e-commence giants: Alibaba, JD.com
Chian has thrown itself into online shopping. Its citizens spend time as much online as those of the US, UK, France, Germany, and Japan combined.
Drawing rural areas into the economy: it isn't just about expending consumer choices, middle class living standards. When you have good roads, access to information, you have more scope to make and sell stuff. And where the place flourished, the manufactory industry followed.
46.Bicycle
One Autumn day, 1865, Ansonia, Connecticut, USA, Pierre Lallement, a young mechanic who had been in America for a few months rided his vehicle into a flooded ditch and was viewed as a devil by locals.
The vehicle was a peddle cranked, two-wheel constrution he brought with him from France a machine of his own devicing.
He called it the "volocipede"; we call it the bicycle.
He patented it though which still lacked he gears and chain drive of the modern bicycle and the break.
The prototype was soon superceded by the "penny-farthing", which was not the gentle venicle--curtacy of the innormous front wheel, it was a racing machine with the doubled speed.
Next was the safety bicycle which had much broader appeal. It looks like more modern ones--chain drive, equally sized wheels, and diamond frame; speed came not from gigantic wheels but from gears.
It can even be ridden in dresses.
1893, the first woman got on a bike riding near New York city.
The bike was a liberating force for women. They would ride with more comfortable clothing.
Three years later, a women's right activist of 19th century declared that bike had done more to emancipate women than any one thing in the world.
It continues to empower young women today.
2006, a Indian state governor ordered bikes for school girls for their better accessibility to schooling.
In America, it's the inexpensive way to explore.
Bike has long been a liberating technique for the economy down-trodden.
In its early days, it's much cheaper than horse, yet offered the same range and freedom.
It also ushered in a manufactory revolution as well as the social one.
In the first half of the 19th century, percision, engineered, interchangeable parts were being used to military-grade fire arms in US army at condpsiderable expense.
The interchangibility was proved too costly at first for civilian factory to ammulate fully.
It was the bicycle that served as the bridge between high-end military manufactory and wide spread mass-production of complex products.
Bicycle manufactory developed simple, easily repeatable techniques such as stamping cold metal into new shapes to keep cost low without sacrificing quality. And other things like numatic tires.
Both manufactory techniques and innovative components were embraced in due course by auto-manufactory such as Henry Ford.
The first safety bicycle was made in 1885 in Rover factory in Coventry England. No doubt and obviously that the Rover has the progression from bike making to car making.
It provides stepping stone for Japanese manufactory too.
Bike was imported into Japan in 1890, then they did repair shops, then they made spares locally, then hey could make themselves in 1900, by the oitbreak of WWII, they produced 1 million a year.
It's tempting to view the bike as the technique of the past. The data showed otherwise: Half a century ago, the outputs of bikes and cars were the same--20 million per year. Now, the car has tripled, while the bike has been doubled to catch the speed again.
Among many grid-lot cities, bike is still the quickest way to get around. Of the next generation of automobile I pollution free and electric model driven by a conscious and considerable robot, it maybe that the bike's comeback just like its first dramatic appearance is about pick-up speed.
47. QWERTY
It isn't easy to type QWERTY on keyboard.
It matters where the keyset on your keyboard. There are good arrangement and bad ones.
Many people think QWERTY is the bad one for it's deliberately designed to be slow and awkward.
In he early 1980s when typewriter was in fashion, it's no stress for a typist to type 60 words per minute. It's about 5 or 6 letters striking the same spot each second.
The plot thickened.
The father of QWERTY, Christopher Latham Sholes was a printer in Wisconsin. In 1868, he sold his first typewriter to a Chicago telegraph colleague, which gave a clue as to what was going on--the QWERTY layout was designed for the convenience of telegraph operators trandgrading Morse code.
Why do we still use it? The simple answer is QWERTY won the battle of dominance in 1880s.
There are more logical layouts exist, notably the Dvorak which was patented in 1932. It favours the stronger hand. Left and right hand layouts are available. It puts the most used keys together.
US Navy once conducted a study that shown the Dvorak is much more superior and train in it would pay itself many times over.
So why not switch to Dvorak?
The problem laid in co-ordinating the switch.
QWERTY has been the universal layout since Dvorak was born. Most typists trained on it. Typewriter would choose the layout hat most typists could use.
And then the economic of scale kicks in. QWERTY typewriter was cheaper to produce and thus, cheaper to buy. Everyone use it and train on it. Dvorak never stood a chance.
A leading economy historian put it: QWERTY is the quintessential example of something economist call the "Lock In"!
It's not only about QWERTY, it also about Microsoft Offivpce and Windows; Amazon's control of the retail links between online sellers and buyers; Facebook's dominance of social media.
You can't personally makr the shift. The stakes here are high. "Lock in" is the friend of monoplists, the enemy of competition and may require a robust response from regulators.
There are two sides to the argument. It's dominant maybe because the alternatives are simply not just compelling as we imagine.
Two economists pointed the Navy's survey was badly fraud and raised the eyebrows at the man who supervised it--The Augustis Dvorak!!!
Though the fastest typist then did use Dvorak layout.
Nowadays, it's easy to use whatever keyboards you like on any digital devises.
"Lock in" seems to be entranching in the position some of the most powerful and vulnerable companies in the world today, such Apple, Facebook.
Maybe these locks are unbr3akable as the QWERTY standard once seemed.
One of the most important question in economy today is whether the Locks surrounding the technology standards are formidable or feeble.
48. Gyroscope
On October 3ed, 1744, a storm was brewing in the English channel, with sailors set for home after chasing a French fleet of the coast Portragual. A quadrum of ships was heading straight for trouble.
"We met with hard gale of wind which toiled our sails and wrigging. We were abligued to submit to he mercy of the waves."
"On the force, we have ten feet on our hold which made our condition very bad and the dread of death appeared in every face, for one minute, we only expect to be swallowed up."
The flag ship was swallowed up--HMS Victory commanded by Admond Balcon himself near Plummith, 1100 people. Rumor had it:"Quite Portregee's go bullying."
The wreckage laid until a decade later found by treasure hunters.
Instead of the gold, the one thing was the first unattempted to apply an ideal that is now used to guide everything from submarine to satellite, from rovers on Mars to the phone in your pocket.
The man behind the idea was John Serson. A year before that wrack, he was invited on a yart near London to explain his device to two high-ranking royal naval officers and an eminent mathematician.
Serson was a sea captain, bearly literate, but a ingenious mechanic.
His idea was inspired by a child's toy--the spinning top. The problem he wants to solve was this: sailors worked out ship's position by using a quandrum to taking an angle from the sun to horizon, for haze or mist, you can't always see the horizon. To create an artificial horizon, something that would stay level even as the ship lurged and sway around it.
Gentleman's magazine: "He got a kind of polished metal amd found as he'd expected that when this top has briskly set in motion, its plain surface would soon become horizontal; if the whirling plain was disturbed from its position, it was soon recovered again."
Those officers were impressed and expressed that this contrive was highly deserving their encouragement as likely to prove very useful in foggy weather.
To make further observation, Serson was on board HMS Victory and so perished poor Mr. Serson.
But his idea lived on. Other s made versions of his, and one was sold to the French Academy of Sciences.
Serson's whirling speculum proved to be limited practical use.
It was in France, a century later, gave us more successful take on the same principle--it was a spitting disc mounted in gimbos which were a set of pivotal supports that allow the disc to maintain its orientation regardless of how the base might be tilting around.
He physicist Leon Foucault called it the "Gyroscope" which was from the Greek for "turn and observe". Because he used it to study the earth's rotation.
Then electric motor came along meaning the disccould spin around indefinitely.
And practical applications came thick and fast:
Ships got workable artificial horizons; so did airplanes.
In the early 1900s, aline the spin with the Earth's northsorth axes giving us the gyrocampus.
Combine these instruments and others: ecceleromotors, magnetomotors, etc. Get a good idea which way up you are and in which direction you are heading.
Feed the outcomes into the system that could cause correct, you have airplane autopilot, a ship's gyro-stabilizer, inertial navigation system on spacecraft or missiles.
Add in GPS, you know where you are.
There's limits how small you can make spinning discs in gimbos, but other technologies have miniaturated the gyroscope.
Vibrating micro-electro mechanical gyroscope measures just few cubic minimetres.
Laser-based gyroscope is thinner than a human hair.
As these and other sensors have got smaller, cheaper, computers faster, batteries lighter, uses from smartphones to robots, virtual reality handset.
And the drones, which are commonplace from surveying to movie making, to urgent medical supplies to hard-to-reach places.
It's the routine everyday uses that promised to be truly transformative.
The weather is the key in the application of drones in online purchase. If it relay on air-born delivery, they will have to work in all conditions. Will drones even navigate storms that could sink battleships?
Till then, the promise of gyroscope will truly have been fulfilled.
49. Cellophane
Cellophane is the latest in clear plastic food packaging. It has a bad wrap.
Before anyone worried about plastic in landfills, or the sea, or the foodchain, it begins in an up-market in Voche, France, 1904.
When an elderly patron spilt red wine over a Christian table cloth, the nearby sitting Swiss chemist Jacque Brandenberger was wondering making a fabric that is simply wrap clean.
Instead of chemical material, he simply named the transparent sheets the "Cellophane" around the time of WWI!
In 1923, he sold the rights to an American company. The early uses there including: wrapping chocolates, perfume, flower~~~
Then, sales too off and the time was perfect.
In 1930s, supermarkets were changing. Customers pick products off the shelves themselves instead.
The "See-through" packaging was a hit. A less-than-progressively led article read:"She buys meat with her eyes."
The meat counter is the hardest to make self-service. Meat once cut would quickly discolored. But a survey suggested by letting shoppers skip the queue to instruct the butcher, such self-service could boost sells up 30%. With such incentives, solutions would be found: pink-tinted lighting, anti-oxigent additives, and an improved version of cellophane that let through just the right amount of oxygen.
But it was soon out of fashion and out-competed by other materials.
Like cellophane, Polyvinylidene was an accidental discovery that was first used in conflict. In this case, weather proofing fighter planes in WWII.
It, originally dark green and smelling disgusting, needs more research and improvement before it could used on food.
"Clean wrap" or "Clean film" is often made with low density polyurethane. The low density one is also used in supermarket bag now being banned around the world.
The high density one is the milk bottle.
The reason for his explained by plastic gurus: different materials have different properties.
So multiple layers can give you the performance from a thinner thus lighter piece of packaging.
But these compound packaging materials are hard to recycle.
The trade-off is hard to fathom. It depends on how much of the heavier recyclable packaging would be in practice been recycled. You might find the lighter, un-recyclable one generates less trash.
Such conter-intuitive conclusion comes up all the time.
Plastic packaging can let food stay fresh longer.
Food waste is not only about shelf life, but also occurs on routes to the shelf.
A UK government report: 3% food get wasted before it gets to stores; in developing countries, the figure is 50%.
It depends partly due on how the food is packaged.
And for city dwellers, this matters.
A plastic bag gets harmful after 52 times of usage.
A Danish government report which weight up he varied environmental impacts of producing and disposing of different kinds of bag.
The market can be a wonderful way of signaling popular desires.
Shoppers in 1940s America wanted convient, pre-cut meat and the invisible hand to lever the technology that made it possible.
Our desire for less waste may not yield to market forces. Because the issue is so complicated, and our choices of check out way accidentally do more harm than good.
We can only send our massage on the more securate route through government and pressure groups and hope they and well-meaning industries initiatives will figure out some sensible answers.
The answer won't be no package. It would be better package.
50. Langstroth Hive
It's a little known fact that economists love bees, or at least the idea of bees.
The tricky idea in economic theory--a positive externality--something good that free market won't produce enough of, meaning that the government might subsidise it.
The perfect example is the relation between apple trees and bees promoted by James Meed in 1952: Apple farmers plant more apple trees. Then the bee keepers would benefit. Because that would mean more honey. But that Apple farmer won't enjoy that benefit (the positive externality). So they won' t plant many trees. So the Apple farmer can't charge fees for feeding the bees.
But it's entirely mistaken. Because Apple blossom produce almost no honey.
A brief history of humans and honey bees.
The ancient Egyptian, Greeks, and Romans are all partial to domesticate honey.
By the middle ages, bee keepers were using skep hives. The trouble of skep hive is if you want to get the honey, you have to get rid of the bees. Bee keepers would generally poison them and worry about getting another bee colony in due course. People started to worry about this waste and distain for a creature that not only give us honey but also pollinate our plants.
It's in 1852 that Patent No. 9300A was granted to an American clergyman Lorenzo.L.Langstroth for a movable frame bee hive--the Langstroth Hive.
It's a wooden box with an opening at the top and frames that hang down carefully separated from each other by the magic gap of 8mm. Any smaller or larger, bees start adding their own inconvient structures.
It's easily pulled out and harvested by a spinning centralfuge that flings out, filtered, and collects the honey.
It's a marvel of design and efficiency allowed the industrialization of bees.
The honey bees are throughly domesticated animals. With Longstroth Hive, bees are portable. Nothing stop farmers coming to some financial arrangement with bee keepers to locate hives amid their crops.
A couple of decades after James Meed' s example, another economist conducted a survey.
It turned out that Apple farmers pay bee keepers for their service. For some other crops, the bee keepers indeed pay farmers to the right to harvest their nectar.
The market Meed said should exist but couldn't.
These days the centre of gravity is the almond industry in California.
Almond needs honey bees. About 5 colonies per hectare, 185 dollars per colony.
85% of 2 million commercial hives are moved. That's tens of billions of bees.
Bees have been almost fully industrialized. And pollination throughly commercialized.
It brings the conundrum:
Ecologists are worried about wide bee population which in sharp declining in many parts of the world.
Domesticated bees face the same pressures.
A reduction of supply of bees and increasing of the price of pollination services.
It appears that industrial bee keepers have managed to develop strategies to maintaining the populations on which they rely: breeding and trading queen bees; splitting colonies; buying booster packs of bees. That's why there is no shortages of honey.
Should we celebrate economic incentives for preserving at least some populations of bees? Maybe. Another perspective is that precisely 19th modern economy long-standing drive to control and monetize the natural world that cause the problem in the first place.
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