Author: Daniel Lieberman

“Why should the Devil have all the good tunes?”

—Sir Rowland Hill, English inventor, born December 3, 1795

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I couldn’t remember who Sir Rowland was, so I looked him up. He was an educational innovator early in his career, but his greatest work was done in postal reform. Hill transformed a hodge-podge of private services, expensive and poorly managed, into a cheap, fast, efficient communications medium for a society in rapid industrial and commercial development. He received a two-year contract to run the new British Post Office in 1839, and proceeded to lower the cost of a half-ounce of mail first to four pence (about $2.00 in today’s money), and the next year to one penny (about 50 cents). The new penny post was a tremendous success, and served as a model for the rest of the world. We’re at the far end of Hill’s revolution, and “snail mail” seems hopelessly out of date to us, but it was a crucial piece of the development of the modern world.

Continue reading “When Snail Mail Was State of the Art”

“Everyone carries around his own monsters.”

—Richard Pryor, American actor, born December 1, 1940

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Interesting piece about the often-repeated story of the automobile saving late nineteenth-early twentieth century cities from drowning in a sea of horse manure. The story is not quite as simple as it’s usually told: cars didn’t become very common until much later, streetcars were an important element, and long-established patterns of street use had to be changed by elaborate propaganda campaigns dedicate to reshaping them. For example, “jaywalking” was invented in the 1910s: only rubes from the country (“jay” is a synonym for “rube”) would do something so naïve as to use the street, now devoted to the automobile, incorrectly.

Continue reading “If Wishes Were Horses, Beggars Would Ride”

“This continent, an open palm spread frank before the sky.”

—James Agee, American novelist, born November 27, 1909

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Counting Our Blessings

1. Peace. After Veterans Day, I read Barbara Tuchman’s classic account of the origins and first month of World War I, The Guns of August. I’m very thankful for peace. I wish everyone in the world lived in peace.
2. Freedom. We have the right and the ability to say and do pretty much anything we damn well please. We may often wish some of our fellow citizens could be restrained from expressing the awful things they think, but that’s the price. Right now our liberties are under serious threat from governments and corporations taking advantage of technology to infringe on them. It’s an arms race, and we’d better hope that the Internet really does route around obstacles.
3. Diversity. We were in Springfield yesterday. We got to the excellent Panjabi Tadka Restaurant and found it closed. No problem: we just went on over to Pho Saigon Restaurant and had some wonderful Vietnamese food. We are rich because we have new friends and neighbors from all over the world who bring with them new foods, ideas, entrepreneurial energy, words, art, music…
4. Medicine. My partner, the Crazy Orchid Lady, is having some problems with cardiac arrhythmia, so I’ve been learning a bit about remarkable range of heart problems that can be fixed in in a few minutes with relatively safe, non-invasive procedures. By the way, the COL’s electro cardiologist attended medical school in Mumbai.
5. Electricity. Think of how you feel after a few hours without power as a thought experiment. Now try to imagine:
   1. Living in a less developed country where there isn’t reliable electric service. Now you have electricity, now you don’t.
   2. Living in the past before there was any electrical power available.
   3. Living through a major failure of the contemporary electrical grid.

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Today and Tomorrow in #westernma

Today you’d better be getting ready for Thanksgiving!

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Reading

Google “deep learning” Tech: There’s More than One Way to Scan a Cat

“…a front-page New York Times article revealed that after Google fed its ”DistBelief” technology with millions of YouTube videos, the software had learned to recognize the key features of cats….Google’s deep-learning tech works in a hierarchical way, so the bottom-most layer of the neural network can detect changes in color in an image’s pixels, and then the layer above may be able to use that to recognize certain types of edges. After adding successive analysis layers, different branches of the system can develop detection methods for faces, rocking chairs, computers, and so on.

“What stunned Quoc V. Le is that the software has learned to pick out features in things like paper shredders that people can’t easily spot – you’ve seen one shredder, you’ve seen them all, practically. But not so for Google’s monster.”

If this doesn’t terrify you… Google’s computers OUTWIT their humans

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The Last Word

“All the lessons of history in four sentences: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.”

—Charles A. Beard, American historian, born November 27, 1874

“Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.”

—Ferdinand de Saussure, Swiss linguist, born November 26, 1857

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Saussure was a key figure in modern linguistics and semiotics (the science of signs, sign processes, and communication). This stuff gets very technical very quickly, but the notion that signs (words in the simplest case) have an arbitrary, socially-determined relation with what they signify (things in the simplest case) has been a fruitful one since Saussure proposed it. Semiotics and Deconstructionism were all the rage when I was a pretentious young francophile punk, so I was pleased to find Ferdinand de Saussure among my birthday quotes. Pretty pithy thought, too.

Continue reading “Dead Men Don’t Cash Royalty Checks”

“If the Lord Almighty had consulted me before embarking upon Creation, I should have recommended something simpler.”

—Alfonso X, Spanish royalty, born November 23, 1221

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How Hard Should We Try to Understand the Future?

I once asked a former Fortune 500 CEO why his peers were so indifferent to credible, dire warnings about the future. He reminded me that for most businesses anything beyond the next five years is the far future, which management can afford to ignore. Besides, they believe in their ability to deal with problems as they arise, push them off onto somebody else, or have moved on to other positions. Heigh-ho!

This isn’t stupid: it’s rational to pay attention only to problems you can do something about right now, or at the appropriate time. But it seems worth spending at least some time thinking about what’s coming. Dwight David Eisenhower said that “Plans are nothing; planning is everything,” worth thinking about as the future becomes the present, as it regularly does, and at an accelerating pace.

The realities of demographic change are not well understood. We’re used to thinking in terms of a population explosion, a concept approximately contemporary with double-knit leisure suits and disco. What’s coming is the opposite: declining population is a reality in a number of advanced economies (Japan, notably) already, and will be happening everywhere by the middle of the century on current trends. It will affect societies from top to bottom. No one knows how to think about how to have a growing economy in a world with declining populations. We’re about to find out. One possible hope is discussed in today’s Reading How to Keep the Economy Growing When Our Population Is Not. Research shows that richer social connections increase the ability of groups to find solutions to problems and exchange information. A more connected world, even with lower populations, could harness the creativity of its members better to continue to innovate and create.

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Tomorrow in #westernma

TUESDAY	NOVEMBER	26
12:00-2:00PM	Northampton	Don’t Eat Lunch Alone

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Reading  

More Problems with Fewer People

“Zero population growth is a period in future human history that is both hoped-for and feared. If we don’t get to that point, the world could literally become overrun with humans, straining already taxed resources like fresh water and farmland to the breaking point. But with zero population growth, the global economy—heavily reliant on a young and expanding workforce—could collapse. No matter what we hope, according to projections by the United Nations, it’s likely that within the next century, the global population will level off or even shrink….

“There’s another, more fundamental problem that zero or negative population growth poses, though—the transfer of knowledge. We know that when people come together, they tend to create new technologies, skills, and knowledge. Cities are hubs of innovation, universities are great factories of scholarship, and even smaller groups can inspire people to create wonderful things. Perhaps more importantly, the number and strength of our connections are vital for passing knowledge on to others, two recent studies suggest. Without those connections, our society could fall rapidly behind. Fortunately, the research also suggests a way to escape the declining population trap.”

How to Keep the Economy Growing When Our Population Is Not

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The Last Word

“We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.”

—Lewis Thomas, American scientist, born November 25, 1913

“Never play anything that don’t sound right. You might not make any money, but at least you won’t get hostile with yourself.”

—Hoagy Carmichael, American composer, born November 22, 1899

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Hoagy Carmichael’s advice holds true outside of the music business. One of the worst things about the glacially slow pace of our transition to post-scarcity economics is that our political economy needs to employ millions of people in jobs that are so truly useless, or even harmful by any humane standard of value, that people have no option except to “get hostile” with themselves. Thus the pandemic of unhappiness and depression so characteristic of late modernity. Today’s Reading, On The Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, explains the whole mess very well. (Oddly, Ian Fleming apparently felt that James Bond should look a little like Hoagy Carmichael.)

Continue reading “Stardust Memories”

“I decided that if the police couldn’t catch the gangsters, I’d create a fellow who could.”

—Chester Gould, American cartoonist, born November 20, 1900

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Chester Gould’s “fellow who could” was Dick Tracy, the square-jawed tough-guy detective familiar to generations of funny paper readers. Tracy’s wrist-watch radio prefigured the miniaturized communications gear we all know, and the wearable tech that’s coming soon to a body near you. The other characters in the strip had cool names, too: Tess Trueheart, Tracy’s girlfriend; villains Flattop Jones, Mumbles, and Big Boy; and the Plenty family: B.O., “Gravel Gertie,” and the bee-you-teeful Sparkle.

Continue reading “There is No Money on Star Trek”

“I have seized the light. I have arrested its flight.”

—Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, French artist, born November 18, 1787

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Daguerre invented one of the earliest successful photographic processes, the Daguerreotype. The drawback of the process was that it produced a unique image, that was not reproducible, unlike the contemporary invention of Henry Fox Talbot in England. Nevertheless, millions of Daguerreotypes were made. Many Daguerrotypes still exist, mostly portraits, the medium’s most popular and common subject matter.

Our friend Fran Fahey of Fran’s Fine Editing, who runs the Tuesday morning G.R.I.S.T. group in Easthampton was kind enough to correct us: We had G.R.I.S.T. on wrong alternate Tuesdays. We apologize for any confusion.

Nice of the editors of Harrisburg Patriot-News to apologize for their predecessors’ famous dissing of the Gettysburg Address. I remember from school that in general, Edward Everett’s blockbuster address was considered the great speech of the day at the time. Everett himself was “deeply impressed” by Lincoln’s speech, and wrote appreciatively to him about it: “I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”

A more optimistic view of the renewed growth of jobs in personal service than I am able to take, my idea of “artisanal service” aside. Industrial jobs are obviously no bed of roses, but a widespread return to the tortuous dialectics of master and servant in an ostensibly democratic society seems pretty awful to me.

I love today’s Last Word: the founder of Honda Motors reminiscing about his first encounter with the astonishing automobile.

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Today and Tomorrow in #westernma

TUESDAY	NOVEMBER	19
8:30-10:00AM	Northampton	Art of Consulting Workshop
9:00-10:00AM	Easthampton	G.R.I.S.T. – Get Real Individual Support Today
11:45AM-1:30PM	Springfield	Affiliated Chambers of Springfield Pastries, Politics and Policy at Lunch
6:00-8:00PM	Springfield	Business Planning and Cash Flow
8:00PM	Amherst	UMass Amherst Entrepreneurship Initiative Social
WEDNESDAY	NOVEMBER	20
8:45-11:45AM	Holyoke	River Valley Investors
3:00-4:00PM	North Adams	How to Secure a Business Loan
5:00-7:00PM	North Amherst	Amherst Chamber After 5

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Reading

“We write today in reconsideration of ‘The Gettysburg Address,’ delivered by then-President Abraham Lincoln in the midst of the greatest conflict seen on American soil. Our predecessors, perhaps under the influence of partisanship, or of strong drink, as was common in the profession at the time, called President Lincoln’s words ‘silly remarks,’ deserving ‘a veil of oblivion,’ apparently believing it an indifferent and altogether ordinary message, unremarkable in eloquence and uninspiring in its brevity.”

Retraction For Our 1863 Editorial Calling Gettysburg Address ‘Silly Remarks’: Editorial

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“Working with and for people is not inherently degrading. Teachers and doctors work with people and are rightly respected for what they do. Hair stylists and chefs can be awesomely talented and some will end up extremely wealthy.

“Moreover, the new service economy is not going to be a revival of the old feudal system. There may well be nannies and butlers in the future, but they will be much better compensated and much more in demand than even the most loyal of the Downton Abbey crowd. A nanny who is learning to be a nutritionist and a gourmet cook has a much brighter future than Lady Mary’s lady’s maid.”

People Thought the Industrial Revolution Was Servile Too

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The Last Word

“I could not understand how it could move under its own power. And when it had driven past me, without even thinking why I found myself chasing it down the road, as hard as I could run.”

—Soichiro Honda, Japanese businessman, born November 17, 1906

TUESDAY	November 19
8:30–10:00AM	Northampton	Art of Consulting Workshop
9:00–10:00AM	Easthampton	G.R.I.S.T. – Get Real Individual Support Today

“People who don’t take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.”

—Peter Drucker, American businessman, born November 19, 1909

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Nice piece from BBC News: The circus animals that helped Britain in World War One.

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Continue reading “Economics 101 at Paragus IT”