It’s nice to be able to record some good news. Chris Mooney, in the Washington Post, reports that natural gas replaced coal as the largest source of electricity generation in the US for two months this year. 30% of the cost of generation involves coal transportation, whereas natural gas costs a fraction of that figure. …
Tesco is one of the biggest supermarket chains in the world. It has decided to scrap 30,000 of the 90,000 products from its shelves, partly in response to competition, partly because it is making huge losses. Tesco used to offer 28 tomato ketchups and 224 kinds of air freshener. They now understand that customers are …
You can do nothing on the web without filling in your email address and password. It gets time-consuming, especially if, like me, one has a number of passwords (for security reasons) and you can’t remember which one you should use. Why is it obligatory to do this? If it’s a bank or the Defense Department …
“If you want a demonstration of the accelerating infantilism of contemporary culture, look at Lego. Its origins lie deep in the history of European pedagogy, co-mingled with the Scandinavian design ethic. The bricks [were designed] to encourage intelligent decisions about structures, stimulating a child’s imagination. It was the ultimate open-ended system, with infinite potential for …
Epicurus was political insofar as he saw that it was in the best interest of society that people carry out agreements that promote fellowship and common sense cooperation. This implied a contractual form of government. But Epicurus and his followers disapproved of advocacy for social change. They saw political struggle as creating unnecessary stress, and …
