I read Inside Steve’s Brain, by Leander Kahney, a compelling business biography of Steve Jobs and Apple. Jobs is a business genius by all accounts (and regularly a jerk on the job, by most accounts). Why has Jobs been so successful as an innovating entrepreneur? One factor is knowing clearly whether consumers or producers drive
Steve Jobs and innovation in business and art Read More »
An amusing quotation from William J. Bernstein’s Masters of the Word: How Media Shaped History. Gutenberg (1395–1468) had invented an efficient way to mass produce moveable type, leading to larger quantities and lower costs for printed materials. Before Gutenberg, the Benedictines made good money from hand-copying materials and were able to exert some control over
Benedictine monks versus Gutenberg’s printing press Read More »
Tim Black, a senior writer at spiked, has a good review discussion of “Why they’re really scared of Heidegger.” The “they’re” refers to many contemporary academics, and Black’s review is of Emmanuel Faye’s wave-making Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935 (Yale, 2009). Some key quotations from
Heidegger’s anti-humanism and the Left Read More »
Following up on how the shipping container reduced loading costs by 97%, which reminded me of this datum on how steam power dramatically lowered transportation costs: “In pre-steam days it had cost $5 to carry 100 pounds up to Louisville [from New Orleans]. It had dropped to $2 by 1830, and soon fell to 25
More innovation in transportation: steam and canals Read More »
One reason why goods are much less expensive now: “Freighters used to carry loose cargo in sacks and crates of various sizes, crammed into holds and piled on deck by stevedores. That began to change in 1956, when a Texas trucking magnate named Malcom McLean refitted an oil tanker with steel frames on its decks
Innovations in transportation: The Box Read More »
Under the northwest leg of the Eiffel Tower tower is a bust of engineer Gustave Eiffel. Portraits of outstanding individuals are usually not made until they are old or even from memory after they are dead. As a result, those of us in later generations have a harder time grasping how those individuals were in
Gustave Eiffel and portrayals of great humans Read More »
The techno-pessimists are wrong about our jobs and careers and the impact of robotics. The Robots Will Free Us is Episode 47 in my Open College with Dr. Stephen Hicks podcast series. “There’s a perennial divide between the technological optimists and the technological pessimists. We see that playing out right now among those assessing the
The Robots Will Free Us [Open College] Read More »
I was happy to be invited to participate in this panel organized by the Foundation for Economic Education. My remarks focused on how Covid-19 has made philosophers of us — as we were confronted with the immediacy of life and death, the importance of work and leisure, how much control we have control over our
Fear of Technology? FEE panel on Covid-19 and Technology Read More »