Foundations - User contributions [en]

World Bank

2026-10-26T18:00:42Z

Parijat: Created page with " link=Media:The_Bank_of_Good_Intentions.epub '''The Bank of Good Intentions''': A book by Claude on a brief history of the World Bank Download e-book === References and Related === '''Related''': World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund"

[[File:The_Bank_of_Good_Intentions.jpg|200px|link=Media:The_Bank_of_Good_Intentions.epub]]

'''The Bank of Good Intentions''': A book by Claude on a brief history of the World Bank

[[Media:The_Bank_of_Good_Intentions.epub|Download e-book]]

=== References and Related ===

'''Related''': [[World Trade Organization]], [[International Monetary Fund]]

File:The Bank of Good Intentions.jpg

2026-10-26T17:59:13Z

Parijat: Book cover

== Summary ==
Book cover

International Monetary Fund

2026-10-26T17:54:25Z

Parijat: Created page with " link=Media:Cap_in_Hand.epub '''Cap In Hand''': A book by Claude on a brief history of the IMF Download e-book === References and Related === '''Related''': World Bank, World Trade Organization"

[[File:Cap_in_Hand.jpg|200px|link=Media:Cap_in_Hand.epub]]

'''Cap In Hand''': A book by Claude on a brief history of the IMF

[[Media:Cap_in_Hand.epub|Download e-book]]

=== References and Related ===

'''Related''': [[World Bank]], [[World Trade Organization]]

File:Cap in Hand.jpg

2026-10-26T17:53:03Z

Parijat: Book cover

== Summary ==
Book cover

File:Cap in Hand.epub

2026-10-26T17:51:55Z

Parijat: /* Summary */

== Summary ==
Book about the history of the International Monetary Fund - written with Claude Opus 5.5

File:The Bank of Good Intentions.epub

2026-10-26T17:51:18Z

Parijat: Book about the history of the World Bank - written with Claude Opus 5.5

== Summary ==
Book about the history of the World Bank - written with Claude Opus 5.5

File:Cap in Hand.epub

2026-10-26T17:50:16Z

Parijat: Book about the history of the World Bank - written with Claude Opus 5.5

== Summary ==
Book about the history of the World Bank - written with Claude Opus 5.5

World Trade Organization

2026-10-26T17:49:33Z

Parijat:

[[File:A_Provisional_Truce.jpg|200px|link=Media:The_Provisional_Truce.epub]]

'''A Provisional Truce''': A book by Claude on a brief history of GATT and WTO

[[Media:The_Provisional_Truce.epub|Download e-book]]

=== References and Related ===

'''Related''': [[World Bank]], [[International Monetary Fund]]

World Trade Organization

2026-10-26T17:48:21Z

Parijat:

[[File:A_Provisional_Truce.jpg|200px|link=Media:The_Provisional_Truce.epub]]

A Provisional Truce: A book by Claude on a brief history of GATT and WTO

=== References and Related ===

'''Related''': [[World Bank]], [[International Monetary Fund]]

World Trade Organization

2026-10-26T17:45:44Z

Parijat:

[[File:A_Provisional_Truce.jpg|200px|A book by Claude on a brief history of GATT and WTO|link=Media:The_Provisional_Truce.epub]]

=== References and Related ===

'''Related''': [[World Bank]], [[International Monetary Fund]]

World Trade Organization

2026-10-26T17:45:28Z

Parijat:

File:A Provisional Truce.jpg

2026-10-26T17:38:39Z

Parijat:

World Trade Organization

2026-10-26T17:35:34Z

Parijat:

[[Media:The Provisional Truce.epub|thumb]]

'''Related''': [[World Bank]], [[International Monetary Fund]]

World Trade Organization

2026-10-26T17:30:14Z

Parijat:

[[Media:The Provisional Truce.epub|thumb]]

World Trade Organization

2026-10-26T17:29:59Z

Parijat: Created page with "thumb"

[[File:The Provisional Truce.epub|thumb]]

File:The Provisional Truce.epub

2026-10-26T17:29:53Z

Parijat:

A fast-paced history of the WTO, and its predecessor, the GATT. From inception to its current day state in 2026.

Politics and Economics

2026-10-26T17:20:53Z

Parijat:

== Politics ==

=== Historical Events ===
{{LinkEntry|Collapse of the French Ancien Regime}}
{{LinkEntry|Broad political history of Japan}}

== Global Bodies ==

=== Multilateral Institutions ===
{{LinkEntry|World Trade Organization}}
{{LinkEntry|International Monetary Fund}}
{{LinkEntry|World Bank}}

== Economics ==

{{LinkEntry|Game Theory}}
{{LinkEntry|Microfoundations of macroeconomics}}

Politics and Economics

2026-10-26T17:19:37Z

Parijat:

== Politics ==

=== Historical Events ===
{{LinkEntry|Collapse of the French Ancien Regime}}
{{LinkEntry|Broad political history of Japan}}

=== Multilateral Institutions ===
{{LinkEntry|World Trade Organization}}
{{LinkEntry|International Monetary Fund}}
{{LinkEntry|World Bank}}

Talk:Story of a boom

2026-10-08T17:14:02Z

Parijat: /* Peru */

== Peru ==
In the 1830s, Britain and most of Europe was experiencing population growth and the rise of intensive agriculture. Demand for food was rising and there was increasing understanding of the value of nitrogen/phosophorous etc to crop growth. At some point in the early 1840s, there was a realization that the guano (bird shit) on the Chincha islands in Peru was an incredibly concentrated and effective fertilizer. Demand for the stuff exploded. British imports apparently went from 2900 tonnes in 1841 to 280,000 tonnes in 1845. The Peruvian government laid claim to the islands as a national resource - thus preventing private interests from laying a claim. The exports produced massive profits for the government. Not only did it create the surplus that could be reinvested into the economy, it gave them access to global capital markets. Lenders abroad were willing to lend, knowing their guano deposits could generate the profits required to repay the loans.

In the 1850s and 60s, the government invests into infrastructure like railways, etc. Abolishes slavery in 1854 (ahead of the US btw). Peru gets rich.

By the 1870s, however, a new fertilizer is discovered. Sodium Nitrate. And this was in the Atacama desert, in southern Peru and Bolivia. This leads to a decline in the importance of Guano. By then, Peru has built up massive debt on the back of projected Guano revenues. It defaults in 1876. And a few years later, Chile, Peru, and Bolivia go to war over the Nitrate deposits (the nitrates have their own story of boom and bust). Chile wins. Peru does not quite recover until the early 1900s and gets a real boom during World War I - exporting copper, petroleum, and cotton.

== Argentina ==
"He's as rich as an Argentine", said a Frenchman in 1910. And it was not said sarcastically. Argentina had one of the highest per capita incomes in the world in 1910. Then it lost it all.

Argentina started out life as a peripheral economy emerging from the clutches of Spain - in 1816. All it had was agricultural and animals. Mexico and Peru were far more important places - because of their silver. By the second half of the 19th century, Europe is getting quite rich. And the wealth produces a surge in demand for food. Simultaneously technological developments make several things possible. Railways help move goods from inland to the ports. Steamships make long-distance ocean trade much more viable. And refrigeration makes it possible to ship fresh meat to Europe (instead of having to dry and pickle it first). All these factors combine to turn Argentina into a massive exporter, and Buenos Aires as the gateway. A large number of migrants arrive in Argentina. To trade. To farm. To work. This is followed by capital. Capital chasing returns helps build the railways, the factories, the ports. And banking. Utilities. The works. Argentina booms. And becomes the world's richest country per capita.

The country becomes rich, but depends on agricultural exports and foreign capital. This works well until 1914 and the first world war. Trade is disrupted. Capital markets are disrupted. And the European demand for imports declines. The Great Depression lands the final blow. Global commodity markets collapse. Argentina slips into a relative decline.

Once the governments of the day realised that railway development was critical, companies starting being formed to set up the lines themselves. Initially capital markets provided enthusiastic support and capital. However, the long gestation time of the projects and the heavy capital requirement meant that enthusiasm cooled. Governments had to step in to make sure the projects could continue. The federalist governments did not have as much capital as the Buenos Aires government. So they granted land on either side of the tracks as inducement. The Buenos Aires government guaranteed a 7% return on capital (but with a cap of 6400 pounds per mile of track - this sounds a lot like the transmission utility guarantees etc).

== Chile ==

== Brazil ==

== South Africa ==

== South Korea ==

== Australia ==

== Japan ==

== Ireland ==

Talk:The Railway Mania of the 1840s

2026-10-08T15:55:37Z

Parijat: Created page with "=== Some key events and participants === * Stockton and Darlington - the world's first railway company to use steam locomotives. The first name that comes up when discussing the railway boom in England. The first line was opened in 1825. Would eventually get absorbed by another company in 1863 - after over-extending itself in new, and less productive, lines. * Overend, Gurney and company - A large bill discounting bank. Effective a banker to the bankers. Got sucked into..."

=== Some key events and participants ===
* Stockton and Darlington - the world's first railway company to use steam locomotives. The first name that comes up when discussing the railway boom in England. The first line was opened in 1825. Would eventually get absorbed by another company in 1863 - after over-extending itself in new, and less productive, lines.
* Overend, Gurney and company - A large bill discounting bank. Effective a banker to the bankers. Got sucked into railway investments instead of sticking to short term assets - essential to maintaining liquidity for its business. By 1866, stocks and bonds collapsed (particularly the railway stocks) while credit tightened. The company was forced into bankruptcy, and triggered a banking panic. 200 companies are said to have collapsed in its wake.

The Railway Mania of the 1840s

2026-10-08T15:49:20Z

Parijat: Created page with "Britain’s railway boom of the 1840s was one of the first great infrastructure investment manias. Cheap money, rapidly falling construction costs, and the extraordinary success of the early railways triggered a frenzy of new companies and speculative investment. Thousands of miles of railway lines were proposed, often before there was any clear evidence that the traffic would justify them. The boom peaked around 1845, followed by a sharp collapse in railway share price..."

Britain’s railway boom of the 1840s was one of the first great infrastructure investment manias. Cheap money, rapidly falling construction costs, and the extraordinary success of the early railways triggered a frenzy of new companies and speculative investment. Thousands of miles of railway lines were proposed, often before there was any clear evidence that the traffic would justify them.

The boom peaked around 1845, followed by a sharp collapse in railway share prices and a brutal shakeout. Many proposed lines were abandoned, while the strongest companies survived and built much of the railway network that transformed Britain’s economy.

Check out the Discussion page for developing story, characters, and incidents...

Story of a boom

2026-10-08T15:41:13Z

Parijat: Created page with "Every boom has a story. A new resource, technology, market, or idea creates a wave of investment and optimism, often pulling an entire economy along with it. Story of a Boom traces these episodes across countries and centuries, from the guano boom in Peru to railways in Argentina, copper in Chile, and industrialisation in Japan. The stories follow the boom from its origins through investment, speculation, prosperity, and eventually the reckoning that follows. See the..."

Every boom has a story. A new resource, technology, market, or idea creates a wave of investment and optimism, often pulling an entire economy along with it.

Story of a Boom traces these episodes across countries and centuries, from the guano boom in Peru to railways in Argentina, copper in Chile, and industrialisation in Japan.

The stories follow the boom from its origins through investment, speculation, prosperity, and eventually the reckoning that follows.

See the Discussion page for developing content...

Talk:Story of a boom

2026-10-07T05:55:11Z

Parijat: /* Argentina */

== Peru ==

== Argentina ==
"He's as rich as an Argentine", said a Frenchman in 1910. And it was not said sarcastically. Argentina had one of the highest per capita incomes in the world in 1910. Then it lost it all.

Argentina started out life as a peripheral economy emerging from the clutches of Spain - in 1816. All it had was agricultural and animals. Mexico and Peru were far more important places - because of their silver. By the second half of the 19th century, Europe is getting quite rich. And the wealth produces a surge in demand for food. Simultaneously technological developments make several things possible. Railways help move goods from inland to the ports. Steamships make long-distance ocean trade much more viable. And refrigeration makes it possible to ship fresh meat to Europe (instead of having to dry and pickle it first). All these factors combine to turn Argentina into a massive exporter, and Buenos Aires as the gateway. A large number of migrants arrive in Argentina. To trade. To farm. To work. This is followed by capital. Capital chasing returns helps build the railways, the factories, the ports. And banking. Utilities. The works. Argentina booms. And becomes the world's richest country per capita.

The country becomes rich, but depends on agricultural exports and foreign capital. This works well until 1914 and the first world war. Trade is disrupted. Capital markets are disrupted. And the European demand for imports declines. The Great Depression lands the final blow. Global commodity markets collapse. Argentina slips into a relative decline.

Once the governments of the day realised that railway development was critical, companies starting being formed to set up the lines themselves. Initially capital markets provided enthusiastic support and capital. However, the long gestation time of the projects and the heavy capital requirement meant that enthusiasm cooled. Governments had to step in to make sure the projects could continue. The federalist governments did not have as much capital as the Buenos Aires government. So they granted land on either side of the tracks as inducement. The Buenos Aires government guaranteed a 7% return on capital (but with a cap of 6400 pounds per mile of track - this sounds a lot like the transmission utility guarantees etc).

== Chile ==

== Brazil ==

== South Africa ==

== South Korea ==

== Australia ==

== Japan ==

== Ireland ==

Talk:Story of a boom

2026-10-07T04:21:51Z

Parijat:

== Peru ==

== Argentina ==
"He's as rich as an Argentine", said a Frenchman in 1910. And it was not said sarcastically. Argentina had one of the highest per capita incomes in the world in 1910. Then it lost it all.

Argentina started out life as a peripheral economy emerging from the clutches of Spain - in 1816. All it had was agricultural and animals. Mexico and Peru were far more important places - because of their silver. By the second half of the 19th century, Europe is getting quite rich. And the wealth produces a surge in demand for food. Simultaneously technological developments make several things possible. Railways help move goods from inland to the ports. Steamships make long-distance ocean trade much more viable. And refrigeration makes it possible to ship fresh meat to Europe (instead of having to dry and pickle it first). All these factors combine to turn Argentina into a massive exporter, and Buenos Aires as the gateway. A large number of migrants arrive in Argentina. To trade. To farm. To work. This is followed by capital. Capital chasing returns helps build the railways, the factories, the ports. And banking. Utilities. The works. Argentina booms. And becomes the world's richest country per capita.

The country becomes rich, but depends on agricultural exports and foreign capital. This works well until 1914 and the first world war. Trade is disrupted. Capital markets are disrupted. And the European demand for imports declines. The Great Depression lands the final blow. Global commodity markets collapse. Argentina slips into a relative decline.

== Chile ==

== Brazil ==

== South Africa ==

== South Korea ==

== Australia ==

== Japan ==

== Ireland ==

Talk:Story of a boom

2026-10-07T04:13:19Z

Parijat: /* Argentina */

== Peru ==

== Argentina ==
Argentina was a minor Spanish colony. All it had was agricultural and animals. Mexico and Peru were far more important places - because of their silver. By the second half of the 19th century, Europe is getting quite rich. And the wealth produces a surge in demand for food. Simultaneously technological developments make several things possible. Railways help move goods from inland to the ports. Steamships make long-distance ocean trade much more viable. And refrigeration makes it possible to ship fresh meat to Europe (instead of having to dry and pickle it first). All these factors combine to turn Argentina into a massive exporter, and Buenos Aires as the gateway. A large number of migrants arrive in Argentina. To trade. To farm. To work. This is followed by capital. Capital chasing returns helps build the railways, the factories, the ports. And banking. Utilities. The works. Argentina booms. And becomes the world's richest country per capita.

The country becomes rich, but depends on agricultural exports and foreign capital. This works well until 1914 and the first world war. Trade is disrupted. Capital markets are disrupted. And the European demand for imports declines. The Great Depression lands the final blow. Global commodity markets collapse. Argentina slips into a relative decline.

== Chile ==

== Brazil ==

== South Africa ==

== South Korea ==

== Australia ==

== Japan ==

== Ireland ==

Talk:Story of a boom

2026-10-07T03:37:31Z

Parijat:

== Peru ==

== Argentina ==

== Chile ==

== Brazil ==

== South Africa ==

== South Korea ==

== Australia ==

== Japan ==

== Ireland ==

Talk:Story of a boom

2026-10-07T03:22:49Z

Parijat: Created page with " == Peru == == Argentina == == Chile == == South Africa =="

== Peru ==

== Argentina ==

== Chile ==

== South Africa ==

Broad political history of Japan

2026-09-27T16:56:02Z

Parijat: Created page with "=== The Broad Historical Arc === # '''1600–1868:''' Shogunate and relative isolation. # '''1868–1912:''' Centralization, modernization and emergence as an imperial power. # '''1912–1945:''' Parliamentary experimentation followed by military dominance and war. # '''1945–1952:''' Allied occupation and democratic reconstruction. # '''1952–1990:''' Stable LDP-led politics and rapid economic growth. # '''1990–present:''' Mature parliamentary democracy, economic st..."

=== The Broad Historical Arc ===
# '''1600–1868:''' Shogunate and relative isolation.
# '''1868–1912:''' Centralization, modernization and emergence as an imperial power.
# '''1912–1945:''' Parliamentary experimentation followed by military dominance and war.
# '''1945–1952:''' Allied occupation and democratic reconstruction.
# '''1952–1990:''' Stable LDP-led politics and rapid economic growth.
# '''1990–present:''' Mature parliamentary democracy, economic stagnation and demographic decline.

=== Tokugawa Shogunate (1600–1868) ===
* Tokugawa Ieyasu unifies Japan after a long period of civil war and establishes the '''Tokugawa shogunate''' in 1603.
* The emperor remains the formal source of legitimacy, while real political power rests with the shogun.
* Japan develops a highly centralized and hierarchical political order, with regional daimyo governed under the authority of the shogunate.
* Foreign contact and trade are tightly controlled, while Japan experiences more than two centuries of relative internal peace.

=== Opening of Japan and the Meiji Restoration (1853–1912) ===
* In 1853, Matthew C. Perry (Commodore Perry) arrives with American warships and pressures Japan to open to foreign trade.
* The resulting crisis undermines the Tokugawa shogunate, which is increasingly seen as unable to defend Japan against Western powers.
* In 1868, the shogunate collapses and political authority is formally restored to the emperor. (Meiji Restoration)
* The new Meiji government rapidly centralizes the state, abolishes the feudal system, creates a modern army and bureaucracy, and promotes industrialization and mass education.
* The Meiji Constitution of 1889 establishes a constitutional monarchy and a parliament, though political power remains concentrated among the emperor, bureaucracy, military and political elite.
* Japan becomes an imperial power, defeating Qing China in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) and Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905).

=== Taishō Democracy and the Rise of Militarism (1912–1945) ===
* During the Taishō period, political parties and the parliament gain greater influence, producing a period often called Taishō democracy.
* The military, however, retains substantial independence from civilian political authority.
* During the 1930s, economic crisis, political instability and military influence contribute to the collapse of parliamentary politics.
* Japan expands aggressively in China and elsewhere in Asia.
* In 1941, Japan attacks the United States at Pearl Harbor, entering the Pacific War.
* Japan is defeated in 1945, ending its empire and bringing the existing political order to an end.

=== Occupation and Postwar Constitution (1945–1952) ===
* Japan is occupied by the Allies of World War II, led by the United States.
* The occupation dismantles Japan's wartime military and introduces major political, economic and social reforms.
* The Constitution of Japan comes into force in 1947.
* Sovereignty is vested in the people, the emperor becomes a symbolic head of state, and the National Diet becomes the central institution of government.
* Article 9 of the Constitution of Japan renounces war as a sovereign right.
* Japan regains sovereignty in 1952.

=== LDP Dominance and the Postwar Settlement (1955–1990) ===
* The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) is formed in 1955 and becomes the dominant force in Japanese politics.
* Japan develops a stable parliamentary system while maintaining a close security alliance with the United States.
* Rapid industrialization and export-led growth transform Japan into one of the world's largest economies.
* The postwar political settlement combines competitive elections, LDP dominance, economic development and close alignment with the United States.

=== Political Change and the Contemporary Era (1990–present) ===
* The collapse of Japan's economic bubble around 1990 begins a prolonged period of slow economic growth and political instability.
* The LDP briefly loses power in 1993 and again in 2009, when the Democratic Party of Japan forms a government.
* The LDP returns to power in 2012 under Shinzo Abe, beginning another prolonged period of LDP-led government.
* Contemporary Japan remains a parliamentary constitutional democracy, with the emperor serving a symbolic role.
* Major political challenges include population aging, demographic decline, economic stagnation, and the country's changing security relationship with China and the United States.

Politics and Economics

2026-09-27T16:51:14Z

Parijat:

== Politics ==

=== Historical Events ===
{{LinkEntry|Collapse of the French Ancien Regime}}
{{LinkEntry|Broad political history of Japan}}

The Disappearing Spoon (Book)

2026-09-17T08:50:00Z

Parijat:

{{StillToStart}}

[[File:The-disappearing-spoon-book-cover.webp|thumb|right|alt=The Disappearing Spoon (Book Cover) - Sam Kean|The Disappearing Spoon - Sam Kean]]

=== Snippets and Highlights ===
<blockquote>
That's why thallium, element eighty-one, is considered the deadliest element on the table. Animal cells have special ion channels to vacuum up potassium, and thallium rides into the body via those channels, often by skin osmosis. Once inside the body, thallium drops the pretense of being potassium and starts unstitching key amino acid bonds inside proteins and unraveling their elaborate folds, rendering them useless. And unlike cadmium, thallium doesn’t stick in the bones or kidneys, but roams like a molecular Mongol horde. Each atom can do an outsized amount of damage.
</blockquote>

[[Category:Books]]

The Disappearing Spoon (Book)

2026-09-17T08:49:51Z

Parijat:

{{StillToStart}}

[[File:The-disappearing-spoon-book-cover.jpg|thumb|right|alt=The Disappearing Spoon (Book Cover) - Sam Kean|The Disappearing Spoon - Sam Kean]]

=== Snippets and Highlights ===
<blockquote>
That's why thallium, element eighty-one, is considered the deadliest element on the table. Animal cells have special ion channels to vacuum up potassium, and thallium rides into the body via those channels, often by skin osmosis. Once inside the body, thallium drops the pretense of being potassium and starts unstitching key amino acid bonds inside proteins and unraveling their elaborate folds, rendering them useless. And unlike cadmium, thallium doesn’t stick in the bones or kidneys, but roams like a molecular Mongol horde. Each atom can do an outsized amount of damage.
</blockquote>

[[Category:Books]]

Category:Books

2026-09-17T08:46:30Z

Parijat: /* Science */

== Markets ==
<gallery mode="packed" heights="200">
File:Beating-the-street-peter-lynch-book-cover.jpg|link=Beating the Street (Book)|Beating the Street - Peter Lynch
</gallery>

== Marketing and Psychology ==
<gallery mode="packed" heights="200">
File:Alchemy-book-cover.jpg|link=Alchemy (Book)|Alchemy - Rory Sutherland
</gallery>

== Industry ==
<gallery mode="packed" heights="200">
File:Junkyard planet book cover.jpg|link=Junkyard Planet (Book)|Junkyard Planet - Adam Minter
File:Hard-landing-book-cover.webp|link=Hard Landing (Book)|Hard Landing - Thomas Petzinger
</gallery>

== Biographies / Business Histories ==
<gallery mode="packed" heights="200">
File:Kochland-book-cover.jpg|link=Kochland (Book)|Kochland - Christopher Leonard
</gallery>

== Science ==
<gallery mode="packed" heights="200">
File:The-disappearing-spoon-book-cover.webp|link=The Disappearing Spoon (Book)|The Disappearing Spoon - Sam Kean
</gallery>

Category:Books

2026-09-17T08:46:15Z

Parijat:

== Markets ==
<gallery mode="packed" heights="200">
File:Beating-the-street-peter-lynch-book-cover.jpg|link=Beating the Street (Book)|Beating the Street - Peter Lynch
</gallery>

== Marketing and Psychology ==
<gallery mode="packed" heights="200">
File:Alchemy-book-cover.jpg|link=Alchemy (Book)|Alchemy - Rory Sutherland
</gallery>

== Industry ==
<gallery mode="packed" heights="200">
File:Junkyard planet book cover.jpg|link=Junkyard Planet (Book)|Junkyard Planet - Adam Minter
File:Hard-landing-book-cover.webp|link=Hard Landing (Book)|Hard Landing - Thomas Petzinger
</gallery>

== Biographies / Business Histories ==
<gallery mode="packed" heights="200">
File:Kochland-book-cover.jpg|link=Kochland (Book)|Kochland - Christopher Leonard
</gallery>

== Science ==
<gallery mode="packed" heights="200">
File:The-disappearing-spoon-book-cover.jpg|link=The Disappearing Spoon (Book)|The Disappearing Spoon - Sam Kean
</gallery>

File:The-disappearing-spoon-book-cover.webp

2026-09-17T08:45:35Z

Parijat:

Kochland (Book)

2026-09-17T08:44:28Z

Parijat:

{{StillToStart}}
[[File:Kochland-book-cover.jpg|thumb|right|alt=Kochland (Book Cover) - Christopher Leonard|Kochland - Christopher Leonard]]

=== Snippets and Highlights ===
<blockquote>
The entire economy depends on refined oil, but no one has built a new oil refinery in the United States since 1977.
</blockquote>

[[Category:Books]]

Kochland (Book)

2026-09-17T08:42:42Z

Parijat:

{{StillToStart}}
[[File:Kochland-book-cover.jpg|thumb|right|alt=Kochland (Book Cover) - Christopher Leonard|Kochland - Christopher Leonard]]

[[Category:Books]]

Category:Books

2026-09-17T08:41:34Z

Parijat:

File:Kochland-book-cover.jpg

2026-09-17T08:40:28Z

Parijat:

Alchemy (Book)

2026-09-17T08:39:19Z

Parijat: /* Snippets and Highlights */

[[File:Alchemy-book-cover.jpg|thumb|right|alt=Alchemy (Book Cover) - Rory Sutherland|Alchemy - Rory Sutherland]]

=== Snippets and Highlights ===

<blockquote>
The late David Ogilvy, one of the greats of the American advertising industry and the founder of the company I work for, apparently once said, "'''The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.'''"
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
Imagine you have ten roles to fill, and you ask ten colleagues to each hire one person. Obviously each person will try to recruit the best person they can find – that’s the same as asking one person to choose the best ten hires he can find, right? Wrong. Anyone choosing a group of ten people will instinctively deploy a much wider variance than someone hiring one person. The reason for this is that with one person we look for conformity, but with ten people we look for complementarity.
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
Logic may be a good way to defend and explain a decision, but it is not always a good way to reach one.
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
The more data you have, the easier it is to find support for some spurious, self-serving narrative. The profusion of data in future will not settle arguments: it will make them worse.
</blockquote>

[[Category:Books]]

Category:Books

2026-09-17T08:38:43Z

Parijat: /* Markets */

Category:Books

2026-09-17T08:37:47Z

Parijat: /* Industry */

== Markets ==
<gallery mode="packed" heights="200">
File:Beating-the-street-peter-lynch-book-cover.jpg|link=Beating The Street (Book)|Beating the Street - Peter Lynch
</gallery>

== Marketing and Psychology ==
<gallery mode="packed" heights="200">
File:Alchemy-book-cover.jpg|link=Alchemy (Book)|Alchemy - Rory Sutherland
</gallery>

== Industry ==
<gallery mode="packed" heights="200">
File:Junkyard planet book cover.jpg|link=Junkyard Planet (Book)|Junkyard Planet - Adam Minter
File:Hard-landing-book-cover.webp|link=Hard Landing (Book)|Hard Landing - Thomas Petzinger
</gallery>

== Science ==

Category:Books

2026-09-17T08:36:49Z

Parijat:

Category:Books

2026-09-17T08:35:11Z

Parijat: Created page with "<gallery mode="packed" heights="200"> File:Alchemy-book-cover.jpg|link=Alchemy (Book)|Alchemy - Rory Sutherland File:Beating-the-street-peter-lynch-book-cover.jpg|link=Beating The Street (Book)|Beating the Street - Peter Lynch </gallery>"

<gallery mode="packed" heights="200">
File:Alchemy-book-cover.jpg|link=Alchemy (Book)|Alchemy - Rory Sutherland
File:Beating-the-street-peter-lynch-book-cover.jpg|link=Beating The Street (Book)|Beating the Street - Peter Lynch
</gallery>

Talk:The Downfall of Money (Book)

2026-09-17T08:31:46Z

Parijat: Created page with "== Snippets == * It might have been wars between the great powers that ruined the twentieth century, but in the first years of the twenty-first it was arguably the lack of them. (unclear how) * Exploiting the Germans’ declared intention in February 1915 to wage unrestricted submarine warfare against Entente shipping in the North Sea, the British initiated a total ban on imports and exports of all kinds, to and from the territories of the Central Powers, includin..."

== Snippets ==
* It might have been wars between the great powers that ruined the twentieth century, but in the first years of the twenty-first it was arguably the lack of them. (unclear how)

* Exploiting the Germans’ declared intention in February 1915 to wage unrestricted submarine warfare against Entente shipping in the North Sea, the British initiated a total ban on imports and exports of all kinds, to and from the territories of the Central Powers, including food and other goods entering via neutral territories such as Holland and the Scandinavian countries. (this wasn't already done at the start of the war)

* Excluded from power while the German Empire lasted, the Social Democratic Party and its members had come, over more than four decades, to form a parallel society within society. Inside this sheltered environment flourished paradisiacal, even fantastic imaginings of what life would be like when the day of proletarian power finally arrived. The party had never planned on carrying out the transition to this ideal state under the circumstances of a catastrophic lost war. Nor had it foreseen taking power in a nation exhausted by war, heavily loaded with debt, excluded from world markets and threatened with heavy reparations, and half-starved thanks to a ruthless blockade that continued even after the armistice. (obviously, when regime change occurs, it is rarely under happy circumstances)

* Everyone in Europe and America bought mark notes. They have been hawked by itinerant Jews in the streets of the capitals, and handled by barber’s assistants in the remotest townships of Spain and South America . . . the argument has been the same . . . Germany is a great and strong country; some day she will recover; when that happens the mark will recover also, which will bring a very large profit. So little do bankers and servant girls know of history and economics. (Timing is everything. And also, thinking out all the endgames.)

* Weimar had become famous 120 years or so previously as the home of the great writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany’s Shakespeare - and more.

* These are, by the look of them, enviable human beings living in an enviable city in an enviable country, at a time when Germany was continental Europe’s most powerful and efficient country, and Europe itself still ruled the world. That world was, as we now know, approaching its end. Soon it would be gone for ever. Astonishingly, considering how favourable the fundamentals of the country seemed at that juncture, this was the last time until well into the latter half of the twentieth century that Germany would be simultaneously fully solvent, fully employed and fully at peace.

* Germany was tied to the moribund Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose gilded façade concealed a snake-pit of warring nationalities, and whose frantic attempts to hold on to its recently acquired Balkan territories had caused the war in the first place.

* The planners’ way of thinking seemed justified by past events. During the hundred years since the twenty-year struggle against Napoleon had been decided at the Battle of Waterloo, Prussia and its German allies had needed to fight no war longer than a few months in duration.

* The first part of this financial plan of campaign involved abandoning the gold standard.

* Despite attempts by the government-guided press to convince them of the solidity of the everyday currency, many Germans suddenly didn’t trust paper any more. They wanted the security of the gold that the currency was alleged to represent. In the first weeks of July, around 163 million gold marks* were redeemed from German banks and stuffed under the nation’s collective mattress.

* Although all over the country patriots had obediently given up their gold and silver coins, many other Germans – especially in rural areas – proved immune to patriotic blandishments. They held on to the value they knew they could rely on, whatever the outcome of the developing European catastrophe.

* In the city of Düsseldorf, in the northern Rhineland – its adult population a mix of white-collar officials and industrial workers – staples such as potatoes were often unavailable for months at a time.

* Before August 1914, Germany had held overseas investments of between £980 million and £1,370 million in countries with which she later found herself at war. At least 60 per cent of these were subjected to outright confiscation.8

* Finally, there was the breathtaking hypocrisy of the so-called Sykes–Picot Agreement, which, even as the Entente encouraged Arabs to raise the standard of rebellion against their Turkish overlords, proposed to divide up the Arabic-speaking Middle East (Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq) between Britain and France.

* but, rather, to show that all the countries involved in the war knew that they couldn’t afford to pay for their folly. The losers would have to do that.

* a coup in Petrograd brought to power the far-left Bolshevik party. It was led by the brilliant Marxist theorist and agitator Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, whose passage from Swiss exile back to Russia during the summer had been arranged by the German authorities precisely in order to facilitate Russia’s exit from the war.

* With the Germans so uncomfortably close to Petrograd, a little more than a week after signing the treaty the Bolsheviks moved their capital back to the relative safety of Moscow, which had been the seat of the Tsars until the time of Peter the Great.

* Nightclubs and dance halls, which had been officially forbidden for most of the war, returned with a vengeance once the ban was relaxed from New Year’s Eve 1918. ‘The public launched itself like a pack of hungry wolves into the long-forbidden pleasure,’ wrote the liberal Berliner Tageblatt on 1 January 1919. ‘Never have Berliners danced so much, and so frantically.

* Compared with other countries, post-revolutionary Germany became a very highly taxed nation.

* Erzberger had another part-answer to this: high-value banknotes and securities would be called in by the banks and overstamped or replaced with new paper; the old or unstamped ones would become invalid.

* The problem was that, while conversion of marks by Germans into foreign currency was a bad thing, because it meant that German wealth was leaving the country, the proposed remedy would also affect the existence of large and small holdings of marks by foreigners in other countries, which were actually a good thing – these holdings by foreigners served to buttress the external value of the currency and thereby contributed to keeping domestic inflation at bay.

* even when a decent tax haul was achieved, the fact that it was inevitably collected in arrears undermined its usefulness. The capacity of shrewd operators to further delay payment until the real value of the assessment had diminished, often drastically, would prove an almost insuperable problem throughout this period.

* The ‘Weimar parties’, and the governments chosen from their members, whose composition would change with alarming frequency – seven governments came and went in the first five years of the Republic’s existence - became, to the nationalist right, the ‘Versailles traitors’. The country split down the middle, in other words, but not about the acceptability of the treaty. Almost everyone agreed that it was unjust and immoral.

* It would become even more so when the Republican candidate, Warren G. Harding, won the presidency in late 1920 on an ‘America First’ platform,

* In mid-1921, between a fifth and a quarter of the insured working population of Britain was out of work: 2.4 million people.17

* There was a coup in Portugal, during which the Prime Minister and several of his cabinet were murdered. The Prime Minister of Japan was assassinated, the Prime Minister of Spain likewise.

* It was in good part due to this fact that in 1913, 15 per cent of Germany’s wealth had its origins in investment income rather than wages and salaries.

* During the course of the inflation, this would be subject to a drastic reduction, falling to a mere 3 per cent.7

* The idea of the Werkstudent may seem normal to modern readers – and, indeed, ‘working your way through college’ was already an everyday phenomenon in America in the 1920s – but in the social and political context of Germany after the First World War it was perceived as shocking, a sign of class and therefore (from this hitherto privileged group’s point of view) national decline.

* The cheapness of living in France – and the franc continued to decline, steadily though at a more modest rate than the mark, throughout this period – was a great lure to the ‘lost generation’, as were Paris’s cultural riches, although escaping Prohibition was another one. Some other American expatriates went the whole hog and moved to Berlin, where in these years the economic power that their currency provided was, literally, fantastic

* The inflation wiped out the savings of the entire middle class, but those are just words. You have to realise what that meant. There was not a single girl in the entire German middle class who could get married without her father paying a dowry. Even the maids – they never spent a penny of their wages. They saved and saved so that they could get married. When the money became worthless, it destroyed the whole system for getting married, and so it destroyed the whole idea of remaining chaste until marriage. The rich had never lived up to their own standards, of course, and the poor had different standards anyway, but the middle class, by and large, obeyed the rules. Not every girl was a virgin when she was married, but it was generally accepted that one should be. But what happened from the inflation was that the girls learned that virginity didn’t matter any more. The women were liberated.

* Until 1 January 1876 – easily within living memory, therefore, in the Germany of Stresemann and Helfferich – individual German states had enjoyed the right to issue their own currencies. Thalers, Gulden, Kreuzers and so on, plus their smaller denomination coins, had circulated throughout pre-unification Germany

* One figure crucial to understanding the depth and social significance of the change in 1913 has already been mentioned. The proportion of Germany’s national income going to rentiers – people living from the proceeds of their investments – had been 15 per cent. By 1925-6, it had fallen drastically to around 3 per cent. These so-called ‘passive’ capitalists (who included wide swathes of the educated middle class) became a far less important factor in German society. The ‘active’ capitalists – industrialists, bankers and traders – and the producers – manual workers – now prospered.

* Investors in stocks and shares – unlike fixed investments, these increased in price along with inflation and over the years in many cases provided an excellent return.

* As already noted, other countries have suffered from inflation, some equal to Germany’s and some even worse, but it does not seem to have affected their national psyches to the same extent. It seems, in the case of Germany, that this is in good part because a relatively small but once extraordinarily privileged social group, the Bildungsbürgertum, lost more than anyone else, as a result both of inflation and the lost war.

* Many Germans saw membership of the euro (and the abandonment of their precious mark) as yet another sacrifice for the sake of a peaceful continent.

The Downfall of Money (Book)

2026-09-17T08:31:39Z

Parijat: Created page with "{{StillToStart}} Category:Books"

{{StillToStart}}

[[Category:Books]]

The Disappearing Spoon (Book)

2026-09-17T08:30:57Z

Parijat: Created page with "{{StillToStart}} Category:Books"

{{StillToStart}}

[[Category:Books]]

Talk:The Disappearing Spoon (Book)

2026-09-17T08:30:49Z

Parijat: Created page with "== Snippets == * That, too, proved unhappy, so he fled to the newly conquered Philippines to work for the U.S. government, taking with him only one book, Nernst’s Theoretical Chemistry, so he could spend years rooting out and obsessively publishing papers on every quibbling error. (recommended reading: cathedrals of science) * Tantalus, Niobe’s father, killed his own son and served him at a royal banquet. As punishment, Tantalus had to stand for all eternity up to h..."

== Snippets ==
* That, too, proved unhappy, so he fled to the newly conquered Philippines to work for the U.S. government, taking with him only one book, Nernst’s Theoretical Chemistry, so he could spend years rooting out and obsessively publishing papers on every quibbling error. (recommended reading: cathedrals of science)

* Tantalus, Niobe’s father, killed his own son and served him at a royal banquet. As punishment, Tantalus had to stand for all eternity up to his neck in a river, with a branch loaded with apples dangling above his nose. Whenever he tried to eat or drink, however, the fruit would be blown away beyond his grasp or the water would recede. (from whence the term tantalizing?)

* Lots of other elements emit gamma rays, but there’s something special about cobalt. Regular A-bombs can be waited out in underground shelters, since their fallout will vomit up gamma rays immediately and be rendered harmless. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were more or less habitable within days of the 1945 explosions. (were habitable within days??)

* The reactor’s initial source of power would be pellets of uranium-233, which readily fissions. (The 233 means the uranium has 141 neutrons plus 92 protons; notice the excess of neutrons.) But the uranium would be surrounded with a jacket of a slightly lighter element, thorium-232. After the fission events, the thorium would absorb a neutron and become thorium-233. Unstable thorium-233 undergoes beta decay by spitting out an electron, and because charges always balance in nature, when it loses a negative electron, thorium also converts a neutron to a positive proton. This addition of a proton shifts it to the next element on the table, protactinium-233. This is also unstable, so the protactinium spits out another electron and transforms into what you started with, uranium-233. (what? this is how a breeder reactor works)

* For instance, long after Isaac Newton had derived the laws of calculus and his monumental theory of gravity, he became master of the Royal Mint of England in the last few years of the 1600s. Newton, in his early fifties, just wanted a well-paying government post, but to his credit he didn’t approach it as a sinecure. Counterfeiting—especially “clipping” coins by shaving the edges and melting the scraps together to make new coins—was endemic in the seedier parts of London. (is that why coins now have ridged edges?)

* To test this idea, Rutherford had his physics department’s glassblowers blow two bulbs. One was soap-bubble thin, and he pumped radon into it. The other was thicker and wider, and it surrounded the first. The alpha particles had enough energy to tunnel through the first glass shell but not the second, so they became trapped in the vacuum cavity between them. (but lapha particles are basically helium. how do they travel through glass?)

* Chemical Warfare in World War I: The American Experience, 1917–1918, (book recommendation)

* The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. And actually, you should probably just read the whole thing, since it’s the best account of twentieth-century science history yet written. (strong recommendation to read)

* The repose of the noble gases is rare, however. One column to the west sits the most energetic and reactive gases on the periodic table, the halogens. And if you think of the table wrapping around like a Mercator map, so that east meets west and column eighteen meets column one, even more violent elements appear on the western edge, the alkali metals. The pacifist noble gases are a demilitarized zone surrounded by unstable neighbors.

* Overall, Mendeleev’s work is comparable to that of Darwin in evolution and Einstein in relativity. None of those men did all the work, but they did the most work, and they did it more elegantly than others. They saw how far the consequences extended, and they backed up their findings with reams of evidence. And like Darwin, Mendeleev made lasting enemies for his work.

* One popular trick, since gallium molds easily and looks like aluminium, is to fashion gallium spoons, serve them with tea, and watch as your guests recoil when their Earl Grey “eats” their utensils.

* Soon, wherever people found feldspar, they mined it, including in frosty Scandinavia, where porcelain stoves were prized because they reached higher temperatures and held heat longer than iron-belly stoves.

* More intriguingly for scientists, its rocks also produced exotic pigments and colored glazes when processed. Nowadays, we know that bright colors are dead giveaways of lanthanides

'' Only when the hydrogen burns up, B2FH suggests—and here is its real contribution—do things start shaking. Stars that sit bovinely for aeons, chewing hydrogen cud, are transformed more profoundly than any alchemist would have dared dream.

Desperate to maintain high temperatures, stars lacking hydrogen begin to burn and fuse helium in their cores. Sometimes helium atoms stick together completely and form even-numbered elements, and sometimes protons and neutrons spall off to make odd-numbered elements. Pretty soon appreciable amounts of lithium, boron, beryllium, and especially carbon accumulate inside stars (and only inside—the cool outer layer remains mostly hydrogen for a star’s lifetime). Unfortunately, burning helium releases less energy than burning hydrogen, so stars run through their helium in, at most, a few hundred million years. Some small stars even “die” at this point, creating molten masses of carbon known as white dwarfs. Heavier stars (eight times or so more massive than the sun) fight on, crushing carbon into six more elements, up to magnesium, which buys them a few hundred years. A few more stars perish then, but the biggest, hottest stars (whose interiors reach five billion degrees) burn those elements, too, over a few million years. B2FH traces these various fusion reactions and explains the recipe for producing everything up to iron: it’s nothing less than evolution for elements. As a result of B2FH, astronomers today can indiscriminately lump every element between lithium and iron together as stellar “metals,” and once they’ve found iron in a star, they don’t bother looking for anything smaller—once iron is spotted, it’s safe to assume the rest of the periodic table up to that point is represented.

Common sense suggests that iron atoms soon fuse in the biggest stars, and the resulting atoms fuse, forming every element down to the depths of the periodic table. But again, common sense fails. When you do the math and examine how much energy is produced per atomic union, you find that fusing anything to iron’s twenty-six protons costs energy. That means post-ferric fusion'' does an energy-hungry star no good. Iron is the final peal of a star’s natural life.

* For instance, the common elements lead and uranium fixed the birth date of the planet through a series of almost insanely meticulous experiments done by a graduate student in Chicago in the 1950s.

* Iridium is a siderophile, or iron-loving, element

* This cloud would have blotted out the sun and choked off plant life, which all in all seemed a tidy explanation for why not just dinosaurs but 75 percent of all species and 99 percent of all living beings died out around that time. It took a lot of work to convince some scientists, but the Alvarezes soon determined that the iridium layer extended around the world, and they ruled out the competing possibility that the dust deposits had come from a nearby supernova.

* When other geologists (working for an oil company) discovered a crater more than one hundred miles wide, twelve miles deep, and sixty-five million years old on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, the asteroid-iridium-extinction theory seemed proved.

* Many geologists today believe that massive volcanoes, in India, which were coincidentally erupting before and after the Yucatán impact, helped kill off the dinosaurs

* And in 1984, some paleontologists began arguing that the dinosaur die-off was part of a larger pattern: every twenty-six million years or so, the earth seems to have undergone mass extinctions.

* As philosopher-historian Eric Scerri writes, “All the elements other than hydrogen and helium make up just 0.04 percent of the universe. Seen from this perspective, the periodic system appears to be rather insignificant. But the fact remains that we live on the earth… where the relative abundance of elements is quite different.”

* But even though nitrogen makes up 80 percent of air—four of every five molecules we breathe—it’s surprisingly bad at topping off soil because it rarely reacts with anything and never becomes “fixed” in the soil. That combination of plentitude, ineptitude, and importance proved a natural target for ambitious chemists.

* It’s a sad truth that men like Haber pop up frequently throughout history—petty Fausts who twist scientific innovations into efficient killing devices. Haber’s story is darker because he was so skilled.

* Tungsten would go on to become the “it” metal of the Second World War, but in some ways molybdenum’s story is more interesting. Almost no one knows it, but the most remote battle of World War I took place not in Siberia or against Lawrence of Arabia on the Sahara sands, but at a molybdenum mine in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

* atoms in solids spontaneously and often disastrously rearrange themselves when temperatures change (more on this in chapter 16), which often results in brittle metals that crack and fail. Doping steel with molybdenum gums up the iron atoms, preventing them from sliding around. (The Germans were not the first ones to figure this out. A master sword maker in fourteenth-century Japan sprinkled molybdenum into his steel and produced the island’s most coveted samurai swords, whose blades never dulled or cracked.

* Few noticed the bulletin except for a behemoth international mining company based in Frankfurt, Germany, with a U.S. branch in New York. According to one contemporary account, Metallgesellschaft had smelters, mines, refineries, and other “tentacles” all over the world. As soon as the company directors, who had close ties to Fritz Haber, read about King’s molybdenum, they mobilized and ordered their top man in Colorado, Max Schott, to seize Bartlett Mountain.

* Until then, Salazar (if we lay aside morality for a moment) had played the Axis and Allies brilliantly with vague promises, secret pacts, and stalling tactics that kept the tungsten trains chugging. He had increased the price of his country’s one commodity from $1,100 per ton in 1940 to $20,000 in 1941, and he’d banked $170 million in three frenzied years of speculation.

* Beyond being amusing, Alvarez’s dash symbolizes the state of nuclear science at the time. Scientists had been making steady if slow progress in understanding how the cores of atoms work, little snippets of knowledge here and there—and then, with one discovery, they found themselves on a mad tear.

* The giant collective forehead slap—the “Of course!” moment—took place in 1932, when James Chadwick, yet another of Rutherford’s students, discovered the neutral neutron, which adds weight without charge. Coupled with Moseley’s insights about the atomic number, atoms (at least lone, isolated atoms) suddenly made sense. The neutron meant that lead-204 and lead-206 could still both be lead—could still have the same positive nuclear charge and sit in the same box on the periodic table—even if they had different atomic weights.

* Other writers have compared chemists who discovered new elements in the 1800s to big-game hunters, thrilling the chemistry-loving masses with every exotic species they bagged. If that flattering description is true, then the stoutest hunters with the biggest elephant guns, the Ernest Hemingway and Theodore Roosevelt of the periodic table, were Ghiorso and Seaborg—who discovered more elements than anyone in history and extended the periodic table by almost one-sixth.

* In 1942, Flyorov noticed that despite the great progress German and American scientists had made in uranium fission research in recent years, scientific journals had stopped publishing on the topic. Flyorov deduced that the fission work had become state secrets—which could mean only one thing. In a letter that mirrored Einstein’s famous letter to Franklin Roosevelt about starting the Manhattan Project, Flyorov alerted Stalin about his suspicions.

* Like most others, Pauling was not interested in DNA until 1952, even though Swiss biologist Friedrich Miescher had discovered DNA in 1869. Miescher did so by pouring alcohol and the stomach juice of pigs onto pus-soaked bandages (which local hospitals gladly gave to him) until only a sticky, goopy, grayish substance remained. Upon testing it, Miescher immediately and self-servingly declared that deoxyribonucleic acid would prove important in biology.

* Unfortunately, chemical analysis showed high levels of phosphorus in it. Back then, proteins were considered the only interesting part of biochemistry, and since proteins contain zero phosphorus, DNA was judged a vestige, a molecular appendix.

* Sadly, that conclusion was a reflex because of what happened a century ago near the Kamioka mines. As early as 1912, doctors there noticed local rice farmers being felled by awful new diseases. The farmers came in doubled over with joint and deep bone pain, especially the women, who accounted for forty-nine of every fifty cases. Their kidneys often failed, too, and their bones softened and snapped from the pressure of everyday tasks. One doctor broke a girl’s wrist while taking her pulse.

* Zinc is an essential mineral, and just as cadmium mixes with zinc in the ground, it interferes with zinc in the body by replacing it. Cadmium also sometimes evicts sulfur and calcium, which explains why it affected people’s bones. Unfortunately, cadmium is a clumsy element and can’t perform the same biological roles as the others. Even more unfortunately, once cadmium slips into the body, it cannot be flushed out.

* Still, itai-itai disease was not an isolated incident in Japan last century. Three other times in the 1900s (twice with mercury, once with sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide), Japanese villagers found themselves victims of mass industrial poisonings. These cases are known as the Big Four Pollution Diseases of Japan.

* Scarily, cadmium is not even the worst poison among the elements. It sits above mercury, a neurotoxin.

* That’s why thallium, element eighty-one, is considered the deadliest element on the table. Animal cells have special ion channels to vacuum up potassium, and thallium rides into the body via those channels, often by skin osmosis. Once inside the body, thallium drops the pretense of being potassium and starts unstitching key amino acid bonds inside proteins and unraveling their elaborate folds, rendering them useless. And unlike cadmium, thallium doesn’t stick in the bones or kidneys, but roams like a molecular Mongol horde. Each atom can do an outsized amount of damage.

* Indeed, radioactivity dominates the bottom of the periodic table. It plays the same role the octet rule does for elements near the top: almost everything useful about heavy elements derives from how, and how quickly, they go radioactive.

* But ordinary uranium is mostly uranium-238, which is a weak source of radioactivity. (Figuring out how to enrich ore by separating uranium-235 and uranium-238, which are chemically identical, was in fact a major achievement of the Manhattan Project.)

* With David’s record, this was a significant offense, since smoke detectors run on a radioactive element, americium. Americium is a reliable source of alpha particles, which can be channeled into an electric current inside detectors. Smoke absorbs the alpha particles, which disrupts the current and sets off the shrill alarm.

* If certain bacteria, fungi, or algae inch across something made of copper, they absorb copper atoms, which disrupt their metabolism (human cells are unaffected). The microbes choke and die after a few hours. This effect—the oligodynamic, or “self-sterilizing,” effect—makes metals more sterile than wood or plastic and explains why we have brass doorknobs and metal railings in public places.

* Copper tubing in air-conditioning ducts cleans out the nasty bugs that fester inside there, too.

* Gadolinium, which sits in the middle of the rare earth row, has the maximum number of electrons sitting by themselves. Having so many unpaired, noncanceling electrons allows gadolinium to be magnetized more strongly than any other element—a nice feature for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

* MRI machines work by slightly magnetizing body tissue with powerful magnets and then flipping the magnets off. When the field releases, the tissue relaxes, reorients itself randomly, and becomes invisible to a magnetic field. Highly magnetic bits like gadolinium take longer to relax, and the MRI machine picks up on that difference. So by affixing gadolinium to tumor-targeting agents—chemicals that seek out and bind only to tumors—doctors can pick tumors out on an MRI scan more easily. Gadolinium basically cranks up the contrast between tumors and normal flesh, and depending on the machine, the tumor will either stand out like a white island in a sea of grayish tissue or appear as an inky cloud in a bright white sky.

* Even better, gadolinium might do more than just diagnose tumors. It might also provide doctors with a way to kill those tumors with intense radiation. Gadolinium’s array of unpaired electrons allows it to absorb scads of neutrons, which normal body tissue cannot absorb well. Absorbing neutrons turns gadolinium radioactive, and when it goes nuclear, it shreds the tissue around it. Normally, triggering a nano-nuke inside the body is bad, but if doctors can induce tumors to absorb gadolinium, it’s sort of an enemy of an enemy thing.

* The other possible approach was to ignore Pasteur’s distinction and manufacture both right-handed and left-handed versions of biochemicals. This was actually fairly easy to do because, statistically, reactions that produce handed molecules are equally likely to form righties and lefties. The problem with this approach is that mirror-image molecules have different properties inside the body. The zesty odor of lemons and oranges derives from the same basic molecules, one right-handed and one left-handed. Wrong-handed molecules can even destroy left-handed biology

* That limited maneuverability during coitus, coupled with rhodium’s catalytic ability to fast-forward reactions, meant that Knowles could get away with doing only a bit of the hard work—making a chiral rhodium catalyst—and still reap bushels of correctly handed molecules.

The year was 1968, and modern drug synthesis began at that moment—a moment later honored with a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for Knowles in 2001.

* The scariest part is that no one struggles before dying. Panic never kicks in, despite the lack of oxygen. That might seem incredible if you’ve ever been trapped underwater. The instinct not to suffocate will buck you to the surface. But our hearts, lungs, and brains actually have no gauge for detecting oxygen. Those organs judge only two things: whether we’re inhaling some gas, any gas, and whether we’re exhaling carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide dissolves in blood to form carbonic acid, so as long as we purge CO2 with each breath and tamp down the acid, our brains will relax.

* The taste buds for bitter scour food, especially plants, for poisonous nitrogen chemicals, like the cyanide in apple seeds.

* The taste buds for savory, or umami, lock onto glutamate, the G in MSG. As an amino acid, glutamate helps build proteins, so these taste buds alert you to protein-rich foods.

'' The taste buds for salty also are affected by the flow of charges, but only the charges on certain elements. Sodium triggers the salty reflex on our tongues most strongly, but potassium, sodium’s chemical cousin, free rides on top and tastes salty, too. Both elements exist as charged ions in nature, and it’s mostly that charge, not the sodium or potassium per se, that the tongue detects. We evolved this taste because potassium and sodium ions help nerve cells send signals and muscles contract, so we’d literally be brain-dead and our hearts would stop without the charge they supply. Our tongues taste other physiologically important ions such as magnesium and calcium'' as vaguely salty, too.

* The primary component of taste, smell, is the only sense that bypasses our logical neural processing and connects directly to the brain’s emotional centers.

* Indeed, Curie was an early example of a species whose population exploded during the twentieth century—the refugee scientist.

* Moreover, polonium has been linked to lung cancer from cigarettes, since tobacco plants absorb polonium excessively well and concentrate it in their leaves. Once incinerated and inhaled, the smoke ravishes lung tissue with radioactivity

* Yet, as with most legends, what’s important isn’t the truth but the consequences—how people react to a story

* And whereas electrons absorb and emit light of the same color (yellow in, yellow out), fluorescent molecules absorb high-energy light (ultraviolet light) but emit that energy as lower-energy, visible light. Depending on the molecule it’s attached to, europium can emit red, green, or blue light.

* Pure samples were considered miracles. The French once displayed Fort Knox–like aluminium bars next to their crown jewels, and the minor emperor Napoleon III reserved a prized set of aluminium cutlery for special guests at banquets. (Less favored guests used gold knives and forks.)

* Aluminium’s sixty-year reign as the world’s most precious substance was glorious, but soon an American chemist ruined everything.

* The process was cheap and easy, and it would work just as well in huge vats as on the lab bench. This had been the most sought-after chemical prize since the philosopher’s stone, and Hall had found it. The “aluminium boy wonder” was just twenty-three.

Hall’s fortune, however, was not made instantly. Chemist Paul Héroult in France stumbled on more or less the same process at the same time. (Today Hall and Héroult share credit for the discovery that crashed the aluminium market.) An Austrian invented another separation method in 1887, and with the competition bearing down on Hall, he quickly founded what became the Aluminum Company of America, or Alcoa, in Pittsburgh. It turned into one of the most successful business ventures in history.

'' This spelling disagreement'' traces its roots back to the rapid rise of this metal. When chemists in the early 1800s speculated about the existence of element thirteen, they used both spellings but eventually settled on the extra i. That spelling paralleled the recently discovered barium, magnesium, sodium, and strontium. When Charles Hall applied for patents on his electric current process, he used the extra i, too. However, when advertising his shiny metal, Hall was looser with his language. There’s debate about whether cutting the i was intentional or a fortuitous mistake on advertising fliers, but when Hall saw “aluminum,” he thought it a brilliant coinage. He dropped the vowel permanently, and with it a syllable, which aligned his product with classy platinum.

* He had read Goethe in the original German and found him mediocre. I was still young enough to be impressed by any strong convictions, and the denunciation made me suspicious of Goethe as a great thinker.

* Luckily, the first real mood stabilizer, lithium, came to the United States in 1967.

* Lithium tweaks many mood-altering chemicals in the brain, and its effects are complicated. Most interesting, lithium seems to reset the body’s circadian rhythm, its inner clock. In normal people, ambient conditions, especially the sun, dictate their humors and determine when they are tuckered out for the day. They’re on a twenty-four-hour cycle. Bipolar people run on cycles independent of the sun. And run and run. When they’re feeling good, their brains flood them with sunshiny neurostimulants, and a lack of sunshine does not turn the spigot off. Some call it “pathological enthusiasm”: such people barely need sleep, and their self-confidence swells to the point that a Bostonian male in the twentieth century can believe that the Holy Spirit has chosen him as the vessel of Jesus Christ. Eventually, those surges deplete the brain, and people crash. Severe manic-depressives, when the “black dogs” have them, sometimes take to bed for weeks.

* Lithium regulates the proteins that control the body’s inner clock. This clock runs, oddly, on DNA, inside special neurons deep in the brain. Special proteins attach to people’s DNA each morning, and after a fixed time they degrade and fall off. Sunlight resets the proteins over and over, so they hold on much longer. In fact, the proteins fall off only after darkness falls—at which point the brain should “notice” the bare DNA and stop producing stimulants. This process goes awry in manic-depressives because the proteins, despite the lack of sunlight, remain bound fast to their DNA. Their brains don’t realize they should stop revving.

* selenium is toxic in large doses. Ranchers know this well. If not watched carefully, their cattle will root out a prairie plant of the pea family known as locoweed, some varieties of which sponge up selenium from the soil. Cattle that munch on locoweed begin to stagger and stumble and develop fevers, sores, and anorexia—a suite of symptoms known as the blind staggers. Yet they enjoy the high. In the surest sign that selenium actually makes them go mad, cattle grow addicted to locoweed despite its awful side effects and eat it to the exclusion of anything else. It’s animal meth.

* What made the experiment special was the combination of heavy hydrogen with palladium, a whitish metal with one flabbergasting property: it can swallow nine hundred times its own volume of hydrogen gas.

* The point is that many scientists who’d predicted the impossibility of such superconductors felt like asses. It was the physics equivalent of finding the coelacanth. And like megalodon romantics, cold-fusion lovers in 1989 could point to the recent superconductor craziness and force normally dismissive scientists to suspend judgment. Indeed, cold-fusion fanatics seemed giddy at the chance to overthrow old dogma, a delirium typical of pathological science.

* “Because the Cold-Fusioners see themselves as a community under siege, there is little internal criticism. Experiments and theories tend to be accepted at face value, for fear of providing even more fuel for external critics, if anyone outside the group was bothering to listen. In these circumstances, crackpots flourish, making matters worse for those who believe that there is serious science going on here.” It’s hard to imagine a better, more concise description of pathological science.

* One alien ice, Ice X, doesn’t melt until it reaches 3,700°F.

* Despite its austere beauty in a vacuum, light gets corrupted when it interacts with some elements. Sodium and praseodymium can slow light down to 6 miles per second, slower than sound. Those elements can even catch light, hold on to it for a few seconds like a baseball, then toss it in a different direction.

* The most powerful, most impressive lasers today—capable of producing beams that, for a fraction of a second, produce more power than the whole United States—use crystals of yttrium spiked with neodymium.

* When water leaks into calcium’s pores, the two react like a mini grade-school volcano to release small amounts of carbon dioxide, which softens up the rock. On a large and geological scale, reactions between rainwater and calcium form the huge cavities we know as caves.

* Shortly after moving from New Zealand to Cambridge University in 1895, Rutherford devoted himself to radioactivity, the genetics or nanotechnology of the day.

* Inside certain rocks, uranium atoms spit out alpha particles (which have two protons) and transmutate into element ninety, thorium. Thorium then begets radium by spitting out another alpha particle. Radium begets radon with yet another, and radon begets polonium, and polonium begets stable lead.

* Anytime you hear scientists announcing a record for the “world’s oldest rock”—probably in Australia or Greenland, where zircons have survived the longest—rest assured they used zircon-uranium bubbles to date it.

* For historical reasons (the French Enlightenment folk were fanatic measurers), the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM) just outside Paris acts as the standards bureau’s standards bureau, making sure all the “franchises” stay in line.

* So, like phobic mothers, they constantly monitor the Kilogram’s temperature and the pressure around it to prevent microscopic bloating and contracting, stress that could slough off atoms.

* You can’t e-mail the Kilogram, and no one has ever come up with a definition more reliable than that squat, shiny, pampered cylinder in Paris. (Or if they have, it’s either too impossibly involved to be practical—such as counting trillions of trillions of atoms—or requires measurements too precise for even the best instruments today.)

* If anything runs deeper than a mathematician’s love of variables, it’s a scientist’s love of constants.

* Einstein came to distrust quantum mechanics. Its statistical and deeply probabilistic nature sounded too much like gambling to him, and it prompted him to object that “God does not play dice with the universe.” He was wrong, and it’s too bad that most people have never heard the rejoinder by Niels Bohr: “Einstein! Stop telling God what to do.”

* First are superatoms. These clusters—between eight and one hundred atoms of one element—have the eerie ability to mimic single atoms of different elements. For instance, thirteen aluminium atoms grouped together in the right way do a killer bromine: the two entities are indistinguishable in chemical reactions. This happens despite the cluster being thirteen times larger than a single bromine atom and despite aluminium being nothing like the lacrimatory poison-gas staple.

* the most detailed account of Hahn’s story, see Ken Silverstein’s article in Harper’s magazine, “The Radioactive Boy Scout” (November 1998). Silverstein later expanded the article into a book of the same name.

Kochland (Book)

2026-09-17T08:29:12Z

Parijat: Created page with "{{StillToStart}} Category:Books"

{{StillToStart}}

[[Category:Books]]

Talk:Kochland (Book)

2026-09-17T08:28:45Z

Parijat: Created page with "=== Snippets === * In fact, while the world was looking elsewhere, Koch Industries built a financial trading desk that rivaled anything operated by Goldman Sachs or Lehman Brothers. Koch Industries, known for crude oil and natural gas, became a world leader in making and trading some of the most complex financial instruments in the world. ''(sounds a lot like enron around this time)'' * AFP chapters in New Jersey and elsewhere offered free chartered bus rides to protesto..."

=== Snippets ===
* In fact, while the world was looking elsewhere, Koch Industries built a financial trading desk that rivaled anything operated by Goldman Sachs or Lehman Brothers. Koch Industries, known for crude oil and natural gas, became a world leader in making and trading some of the most complex financial instruments in the world. ''(sounds a lot like enron around this time)''
* AFP chapters in New Jersey and elsewhere offered free chartered bus rides to protestors to attend a rally in Washington, DC, that summer. Once in Washington, protestors were given free box lunches and glossy protest signs. The protestors were joined by Tim Phillips, AFP’s president, who gave rousing rally speeches. ''(not so different from India then)''
* The entire economy depends on refined oil, but no one has built a new oil refinery in the United States since 1977.
* By the time the whole mess had settled in 1974, oil prices had risen from $3 a barrel to $12 a barrel.
* To keep things moving up and to the right, Charles Koch had an unwavering philosophy about debt. He was rigid in his belief that debt should be kept as low as possible so that interest payments didn’t eat up Koch’s cash. The reasons for this were strategic. Every downturn brought opportunities for companies that were prepared. Downturns weakened competitors and made them ripe for takeover. Downturns made assets cheaper to buy. For this reason, Markel and his team were discouraged from borrowing large sums even if banks were more than willing to lend it.
* This expansion helped make Koch the single largest purchaser of crude oil in the United States by the 1980s.
* He realized that there were not two separate spheres of American life: the public sphere of government action and the private sphere of business enterprise. Instead, there was only one tangled web of a nation’s political economy, the deeply interlaced workings of government policy and corporate structures. One intimately affected the other. This reality was painfully apparent in the oil business. Government intervention affected every aspect of the industry. And the intervention reached its peak as Charles Koch was building his company.
* But the markets to buy PVC were just as confusing and opaque as its chemical formula. The deals were too specialized for open exchanges, and they were often done one-on-one, confidentially, over the phone.
* Roskind taught Bill Koch that trading was about one thing. “The idea of trading is to take what we have and get what we want,” he said.
* Chemical trading wasn’t a simple matter of buying low and selling high.
* Roskind and Bill Koch heard from clients that there was very strong demand in East Asia for a chemical called acetic acid, which was in tight supply. The companies that made acetic acid were aware of the supply crunch, and they were not about to let go of their product easily. This made it almost impossible to buy acetic acid at a price that would make it profitable to turn around and sell it in Asia. But a good trader knows what is happening simultaneously in different markets. Bill Koch knew that the companies that made acetic acid often used corn as a feedstock for the product. Bill Koch also knew how to get corn at a cheap price on the futures market in Chicago. So Koch Trading bought corn on the futures market and bartered it with acetic acid manufacturers for large quantities of their product. Then they sold the acetic acid at a much higher price in Asia.
* But going public would destroy the machine that Charles Koch had built. It would also mean that Charles Koch would lose control. Shareholders would have a vote. A new board of directors might have the power to fire him. Koch’s business strategy revolved around rapid decision-making: managers brought a plan to Charles Koch and Sterling Varner, and they had the authority to approve it on the spot. Publicly traded firms had to take their shareholders into account, leading to the proliferation of the kinds of committees and review groups that Charles despised.
* Antitrust laws were an economic foundation of the New Deal; a critical counterbalance to the power of monopolistic corporations like Standard Oil. Baxter issued a memo to his legal staff telling them not to worry so much about the concentration of corporate power but to focus instead on efficiency and prices. This subtle change ushered in a wave of consolidation that swept across virtually every sector in the economy.
* One of Clinton’s first acts was to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement, a pact that opened markets in Mexico and Canada. NAFTA dramatically weakened America’s labor unions. Companies once avoided unions by moving to southern, right-to-work states; in the 1990s, they began moving to Mexico. At the end of Clinton’s presidency, he signed a law bestowing permanent normal trade relations on China, opening the gates yet wider for companies to shift jobs overseas. Clinton also repealed key banking regulations from the New Deal, like the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which created a division between commercial banks that took deposits and investment banks that gambled through speculation.
* A libertarian group called the Competitive Enterprise Institute marked the increase by tallying the number of pages in the Federal Register, which records rules and regulations. In 1986, there were just more than forty-seven thousand pages. By 1995, there were more than sixty-seven thousand. The burden of these rules fell disproportionally on smaller companies, the CEI found.
* Neoliberal policies sought free-market reforms like NAFTA but retained federal entitlement programs and heavy defense spending. Its hallmarks were massively complex laws and programs that tried to thread the needle of unshackling markets while preserving a role for the state.
* After the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s, Congress enacted a strict and complicated set of rules around campaign donations. Individuals and companies were capped in how much they could give to any candidate in an election cycle. Donations had to be disclosed publicly, potentially embarrassing both the donor and the politician. Koch Industries circumvented this system in ways that would become widely imitated. In 1996, Koch Industries created a nonprofit group called the Economic Education Trust. The group did not need to disclose its donors because it was not ostensibly a lobbying or campaign finance organization. Koch funneled money through the Economic Education Trust to state and federal campaigns in Kansas and other states where it did business.
* Triad was a new kind of campaign finance machine. It acted as a third party that didn’t directly donate money to politicians. Triad hired consultants who created attack ads for Republicans in tight races. Triad was careful in its language. It never used words like “vote for,” “support,” or “defeat” that might have triggered oversight from campaign regulators like the Federal Election Commission.
* Employees didn’t have responsibilities, they had “decision rights.” They weren’t managers anymore, but “process owners.” The vocabulary was drilled into everybody.
* Rapid prototyping was the process of trying new ventures on a small scale to see how they worked. It was the method that Koch used to branch out into different industries. Failure would be part of the process, so Koch kept its initial ventures small. Divisions like the fertilizer business were all learning laboratories. Koch Industries learned a lot with its fertilizer business. Among other things, the company learned that American agriculture had slowly and quietly turned into a fossil fuel business. This strange fact would launch the largest expansion effort in Koch’s history. It was nothing less than a play to take over a vast portion of America’s food system.
* Koch’s fertilizer plant was basically an oil refinery, but instead of transforming crude oil into gasoline, it transformed natural gas into nitrogen-based fertilizer.
* The entire food system appeared to be one immense machine that laundered energy from fossil fuels into food calorie energy that humans could eat.
* Koch was able to offer a surprisingly giant sum of money for Purina. Dean Watson and others offered a price for Purina Mills that included the value Koch thought it would produce after its improvements had taken hold. Purina itself was worth about $109 million. Koch would pay $670 million to buy it.
* Farmers had production limits, but the limits were voluntary. The guidelines were encouraged by subsidies. Many farmers got checks in the mail to ensure they let part of their land lay fallow—they got money for nothing. In 1996, Congress passed a bill called “Freedom to Farm” that largely abolished the New Deal farm programs.
* Purina Mills had hatched a plan to boost hog feed sales by purchasing baby pigs and then providing them to farmers to raise. The farmers agreed to feed the pigs Purina products. The company had locked in guaranteed sales, and it was easy money for a while. So Purina expanded the program. It provided more pigs under contract to big companies like Tyson Foods, selling more feed and then buying even more pigs. By the end of 1997, Purina effectively owned six million pigs, making it one of the largest hog producers in the nation.
* Market-Based Management might have fostered business failures, but it had achieved one thing: It gave all of Koch’s employees a common language. It gave them a common mission, and this is more important than it might sound.
* When the development board saw a deal it liked, it moved with stunning speed. There were no layers of bureaucracy between the board and Charles Koch—there was only a short walk down the hallway. There were no public shareholders to consult, only Charles and David Koch. Again and again, Koch exploited these advantages. The development board recommended acquisitions, and Koch Industries acted before its competitors even seemed aware of what was happening.
* The Bush era would be regarded as a time of deregulation, when rules were stripped away from the private marketplace, and the reach of the federal government over corporations was curtailed. In reality, the Bush presidency only accelerated the trends begun under Reagan and continued under Clinton—and it pushed these trends to an obscene extreme by the end of the 2000s.
* The decade of the 2000s was defined by the financialization of everything. The financial deregulation acts passed by Bill Clinton launched an industry of trading and speculation activities that dwarfed anything even during the Reagan era
* In 1978, President Jimmy Carter stripped away the price controls to unleash market forces that might encourage new supplies. But Carter’s “deregulation” was hardly a libertarian dream. It created a wildly complex set of rules and price controls that sought to let the wholesale price rise and fall while protecting consumers from the highest price spikes. This was a Faustian bargain that would play out repeatedly in US policy making from the 1980s on. Lawmakers repeatedly passed deregulation measures that only went halfway, stripping away some controls while trying to shield average people from the true volatility of the market. The ensuing market structures were usually defined by complexity and dysfunction, and the natural gas industry was no different.
* Stephens, who traded at Koch Gateway’s connection to the “Henry Hub,” a Louisiana pipeline distribution complex that became a major market for gas sales. The Henry Hub was one of the industry’s price setting markets, and in the late 1990s Stephens seemed to be single-handedly brokering most deals on the hub. “He was the Henry Hub cash market,” O’Neill recalled.
* The new commodity in this market was called a megawatt-hour. This was a basic unit of power that could be bought and sold like an oil futures contract.I The size of this new market was breathtaking. The national electricity market was worth roughly $215 billion a year, making it more than twice the size of the airline or telephone industries.
* There were whole continents of public policy where even the most hardened lawmakers didn’t dare to tread, areas that were so tedious and so complicated and so lacking in public exposure that they promised to swallow public-service careers whole. Regulating public utilities was one of these areas. Just the phrase “regulating public utilities” was enough to make a citizen change the channel or skip to the next news article. It was one of those ironic facts of America life: very few issues affected people more deeply than providing them with electricity, but very few issues drew less public interest.
* ALEC’s mission, and its organization, was a novel innovation. State legislatures were often seen as policy backwaters. ALEC stepped into the breach by giving much-needed resources to overworked and underpaid state lawmakers. This innovation was born of necessity in 1973, when liberal politics dominated Washington. ALEC’s founder, a religious conservative activist named Paul Weyrich, felt it would be far more effective to push policy ideas on the state level. He was right.
* One division DuPont was keen to unload was one of its oldest and best known: the synthetic materials unit that made products like Lycra and Stainmaster carpet. The synthetic fibers helped make DuPont a household name, but global competition turned Lycra into a commodity, and, like most commodities, it was suffering from booms and busts in the market.
* Similarly, DuPont had expanded a boiler in Seaford, Delaware, without getting the proper permits and was running the boiler without the proper pollution control technology. In the past, Koch had tried to solve such problems on its own, before regulators discovered what was happening. This time Koch reported everything to the EPA, disclosing nearly seven hundred violations to the agency just months after Koch took ownership of the new factories. Koch entered into an agreement with the EPA that gave the agency power to audit Koch every quarter to ensure that it was complying with a schedule of improvements. Koch spent about $140 million to get everything up to code. Then it sued DuPont for $800 million in damages.
* After forty years of living and working in the volatile world of commodities markets, Charles Koch had finally built a machine that was poised to thrive, even profit, in the midst of violent market corrections. This capability derived, in part, from something that Charles Koch called “the trading mentality.” This mentality held that it didn’t matter so much if markets were going up or down; what mattered was that the traders could see ways to exploit large shifts in the markets. During volatile times, companies and governments and competing traders were thrown off balance. Prices diverged. Supplies were interrupted. Gaps emerged between market prices and underlying values. Koch became nimble, even expert, at exploiting those gaps for its gain.
* “When the market is constant, traders don’t make money,” explained Melissa Beckett, the star trader who’d once traded electricity futures. “Traders make money on change.”
* This economic stagnation wasn’t unique to the Georgia-Pacific warehouse workers. Between 1948 and 1973, American workers’ productivity rose steadily, and their wages rose with it. But in the early 1970s, as the age of volatility shook apart the New Deal policy infrastructure, the rise in productivity broke free from the wages that were paid for it. Productivity rose 74.4 percent from 1973 until 2013. Wages rose only 9.2 percent.
* Early data from the experiment suggested that it might be impossible to beat a holdout. Different strategies could undermine the holdout’s leverage, but the holdout couldn’t be eliminated. There was, however, one strategy that nearly decimated the holdout problem. The data was just astonishing on this point. The best way to destroy a holdout’s position was to make them expendable. Winn discovered this fact when his experiments divided the virtual landowners into groups and then made it clear that some of them might be cut loose if they bargained too hard. In this scenario, the pipeline company was looking to buy up land on which to build a route, but it could take alternative paths. It wasn’t necessary in this case to get all of the landowners to sell in order to build the pipeline. The company could assemble a path while excluding some landowners.
* The libertarian Cato Institute think tank, which Charles Koch cofounded and continued to support
* It’s common to think of the US House of Representatives as a single organization with 435 members who propose laws and then vote on them. In fact, the House is a collection of smaller governing bodies, each with its own authority, called committees. There’s a committee to write tax law and another to write environmental law, for example. Each committee has a chairperson, who acts as the committee’s CEO. Bills in the House are written by committees, then passed by a vote of the committee members. This structure gives tremendous power to committee chairs
* Cap-and-trade gained support after Bush imposed it on power plants that released sulfur dioxide, which created acid rain. By 2008, emissions were 60 percent lower than they had been in 1980. More importantly, the cuts were made at much lower costs than people had predicted. The cap and trade system on sulfur dioxide was imposed in 1990.
* They focused on three factors that could sway the legislator’s thinking. The factors were: 1. The Preferences of a Legislator’s Voters. This was the most important factor to a lawmaker. A legislator cares, more than anything, about winning the next election. They seek to stay safely within the zone of voter approval. 2. The Broader Political Impact of the Vote. Because every legislator belongs to a political party, they also obsess about their standing within the party and their political future. A good lobbyist points out how any given vote fits into the party’s goals. 3. The Personal Convictions and Idiosyncrasies of the Legislator. This was the most frustrating and most ambiguous factor. Legislators are only people, at the end of the day. Most of them ran for office for deeply personal, and sometimes irrational, reasons. It could not be overestimated how profoundly these personal motivations play into a legislator’s votes. Good lobbyists were intimately familiar with a lawmaker’s personal quirks and convictions.
* In March of 2010, Greenpeace released its forty-three-page report entitled Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine, which detailed Koch’s extensive giving to groups like the Mercatus Center, the Cato Institute, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
* The publicity culminated in August of 2010 when the New Yorker magazine published a detailed report of Koch’s political history, with contemporary accounts of Americans for Prosperity’s coordination with Tea Party activists. The article, “Covert Operations: The Billionaire Brothers Who Are Waging a War Against Obama,” was written by Jane Mayer, one of the most prominent investigative reporters in America.
* The previous two years had been wildly unstable. In 2007 and 2008, crude oil prices spiked to record highs. Natural gas followed crude oil upward, as it tends to do. Energy prices crashed during the recession due to weak demand, which was predictable. But then something strange happened: oil prices started to climb again, but natural gas prices didn’t follow them upward. Instead, gas prices started to slide. Then fall. Then collapse.
* During the 1980s, ownership of the nation’s refineries consolidated into fewer and fewer hands. After the Reagan administration loosened antitrust enforcement, a wave of mergers swept through the industry. The mergers accelerated during the Clinton administration. Between 1991 and 2000, there were 338 mergers among oil refiners. The consolidation continued through the Bush administration.
* By 2016, US refineries ran at an average of 90 percent of their total capacity, compared to the global average of 83 percent. Only India ran its oil refineries at a tighter capacity.
* In 2010, the average profit margin to refine a barrel of crude oil in the United States was roughly $6 a barrel, by far the highest in the world. The next-highest profit margin was in Europe, where it was about $4 a barrel. One year later, US refining profit margins had swelled to over $16 per barrel—nearly triple the next-highest rate of almost $6 a barrel in Europe.
* O’Neill found Chase Koch to be a surprisingly normal teenager. Chase wanted to make friends and spent a lot of time working on his car, installing a souped-up stereo and speaker system during his free time.
* Chase also worked in a group of tax and accounting analysts. This might sound arcane and boring. Nobody grows up dreaming that they’ll become a tax analyst. But Chase would have discovered that these skills were just as critical to Koch’s success as was the company’s expertise in managing complex pipeline and refinery systems. There was virtually no terrain in the American economy that was more complex, more prone to manipulation, and more financially valuable than the American tax code.

Hard Landing (Book)

2026-09-17T08:16:13Z

Parijat: /* Snippets and Highlights */

[[File:Hard-landing-book-cover.webp|thumb|right|alt=Hard Landing (Book Cover) - Thomas Petzinger|Hard Landing - Thomas Petzinger]]

=== Snippets and Highlights ===

<blockquote>
If a plane is going to take off anyway—once the fuel is purchased and the pilot paid and the interest rendered on the money borrowed to buy the plane in the first place—any paying passenger or payload recruited to the flight is almost pure profit...

The airline business was a matter of “putting bums on seats,” as Rickenbacker described it.
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
Braniff’s powerful hub vividly demonstrated another inviolate rule of the airline business: Whoever has the most flights from a city gets a disproportionate share of the passengers. Frequency enhanced convenience—the convenience of flying the day of your meeting, not the night before; the convenience of arriving just an hour before your business was scheduled to begin. Frequency also preserved valuable flexibility: a business traveler could catch a later flight if his meeting ran over, or surprise the family by grabbing an early flight home.
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
Landing assignments—slots, as they were called—had turned out to be a finite natural resource: Oregon had the redwood forests, Texas had oil, and New York had slots.
</blockquote>

<blockquote>
Though costly to the government, airmail soon became smashingly popular, fostered in part by the spread of telephones and other instant communication devices, which pressured businesses to speed up their paperwork. A 23¢ airmail stamp made it possible to post a document in Peoria on Thursday afternoon and have it on someone’s desk in New York Friday morning. As the economy of the late 1920s swelled on a tide of credit, banks realized that airmail paid for itself many times over when shipping money drafts and other interest-sensitive instruments. Manufacturers and distributors found that sending samples by airmail drew more attention to their products.
</blockquote>

[[Category:Books]]