brewster’s billions (13. 869)

Neal Agarwal (previously) invites us to spend an outrageous fortune to better get our heads around the idea of how much a trillion of anything is—like the adage about the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars being about a billion dollars. Through big ticket item purchases, sports stadia, luxury yachts (1000x), fast food franchises and too many hamburgers—funnily enough the “Big Mac Index” is no longer a reliable economic indicator and following Jeff Bezos’ recent comments rejecting the idea that no one could become a billionaire without exploiting workers or resorting to monopsony or buying senators saying that many burger joints have expanded from a single restaurant to a worldwide enterprise by offering products and services genuinely valued by customers. We especially liked how we couldn’t donate to charitable causes or cleaning up the environment—we think Elon would have wanted it that way. This latest game was sponsored by Wired! Magazine which has a companion article with write up here.

synchronoptica

one year ago: peaceful protests against ICE agents in Portland (with synchronoptica)

two years ago: punting along the Wolblitz (with synchronopticæ) 

three years ago: assorted links to revisit, an archaeological discovery in Naples plus a station wagon camper

four years ago: more links to enjoy, World Postal Day plus to slander one’s good reputation

five years ago: even more links, happy birthday John Lennon, Karl-Marx-Stadt, drag queen tarot plus a visit to the Osterburg

six years ago: The Watcher in the Woods, more Phantom plus more links worth revisiting

seven years ago: major military exercise in Germany planned by US forces plus other European trade colonies in China

eight years ago: Trump’s legacy of failed businesses, more on the fight to save an ancient woodland plus moving Tokyo’s historic fish market

 

audentes fortuna iuvat (13. 868)

The popular slogan that privileges courage on the verge of foolhardiness, “Fortune favours the bold,” is a translation of the Latin proverb attributed by Pliny the Younger to his uncle, Pliny the Elder—see previously here and here and perhaps paraphrasing from a verse in Virgil’s Aeneid deifying Fortune as grace and luck and appreciating bravery—on the occasion of dispatching his fleet for a rescue and recovery mission to Mount Vesuvius (previously here, here, here and here) to search for friend, senator Pomponianus, who was in Stabiae just south of Pompeii, also to satisfy his own scientific curiosity. The rescue party crossed the Bay of Naples amidst the unfolding disaster, waiting overnight for the winds to change so they could depart. The prevailing winds never shifted to their favour, standing them and left to face either sheltering in the senator’s villa, knowing the roof would collapse eventually under the weight of the accumulated ash and pumice or try to escape overland and risk being poisoned by toxic gases from the eruption. Variations include Louis Pasteur’s reformulation Fortuna Eruditis Favet (Fortune favours the prepared mind) and Machiavelli’s dictum that it is better to be adventurous rather than cautious—extending the metaphor with, “because Fortune is a woman, it is necessary to beat her into submission and thus ill-used allows herself to be mastered by the daring.” It is the motto of several military units worldwide and a leitmotif in Star Trek canon.

pluto lamps (13. 867)

Via fellow internet caretaker, Messy Nessy’s Cabinet, we learn that for the 1897 Great Exhibition of London an inventor by the name of H M Robinson installed a number of gas street lights with a vending machine built into the base of them—dispensing everything from a hot cup of tea, beef broth, hot cocoa to cigarettes and postcards—the company variously known about town as the “Hot Water Supply Syndicate” or the “Refreshment Lamp Syndicate.” Some models further contained a telegraph relay connected to Scotland Yard for police use. Within the space of three years, however, locals got wise to the fact that a slug could be substituted for half-pennies and the innovative concessionaires were unceremoniously dismantled and nearly forgotten about with such conveniences uncommon for decades afterwards.

day two hundred fifteen (13. 866)

Israel forces the closure of the UK consulate in occupied East Jerusalem over sanction threats directed at illegal settlements in the West Bank. Hurricane Isaiah takes a quarter of oil refineries in the Gulf of Mexico off-line. Tankers, including those cleaving to the route off the coasts of Oman and Qatar, come under fire, slowing maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz to a trickle again. Fighting rages between Yemeni regulars and rebels as Houthis launch deadly strikes at Saudi airports. Newly obtained footage reveals the extent of damage sustained to US bases across the Middle East as troops posture towards abandonment and retreat. Despite issuing new demands, including the possibility of compromise of nuclear enrichment, the American president declares he has no interest in making a deal with Tehran and orders the military to prepare to resume hostilities imminently.

synchronoptica

one year ago: assorted links worth the revisit (with synchronoptica) plus cartoonist Rein Raamat

two years ago: boating on the Röblinsee 

three years ago: spiralling landscapes, vintage text book cover art plus LEGO art

four years ago: the cast of Star Trek in an energy company advert plus Saint Reparata

five years ago:  your daily demon: Raum, Baghdad’s House of Wisdom plus a bi-directional typeface

six years ago: more links to enjoy, Les Misérables (1985), poorly drawn animals plus Trump requires wildlife conservationist organisations to celebrate America’s hunting heritage

seven years ago: visualising Wikipedia updates in real time, Trump abruptly withdraws from the Syria-Turkish border, Call Me By Your Monet, The Million Eyes of Sumuru plus discouraging frivolous lawsuits in the Middle Ages

eight years ago: the degrading web plus calling attention to the problem of space junk

 

securities exchange company (13. 865)

Though somewhat versed in the confidence trick and the underpinnings of grift and scam that cause them to work until they don’t like an audience primed and receptive to get rich quick peddlers, inscrutable investment instruments and FOMO, we realised that we knew very little about the individual behind the eponym, one Carlo Pietro Giovanni Guglielmo Tebaldo Ponzi from Emilia-Romagna, going by Charles after immigrating to Boston in 1903. After a string of odd jobs working up and down the Eastern Seaboard, Ponzi felt he had acquired a business acumen for import-export arrangements and tried to attract companies in Europe attempting to recover after WWI though found no takers. Registering his small office in the city as a corporation with the titular name in 1919—ironic and a full fifteen years before the establishment of the US SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) in response to the stock market crash and Great Depression charged with the enforcement of laws against markets manipulation—Ponzi was inspired to game the system after receiving a letter from a company in Spain inquiring about his proposed business listing service, which included an international reply coupon—sort of like a self-addressed stamped envelope that was honoured among member countries of the Universal Postal Union for return postage, facilitating writing back since the respondent would not be liable for the fee and one could not use foreign stamps domestically. Recognising the opportunity for arbitrage, inflation having depreciated the cost of postage in Europe and the coupons were not tethered to the exchange rate, Ponzi schemed that he could skim some money off the difference, trading the coupons for higher value American postage. 1. Step One 2. Step Two 3: ??????? 4. Profit Ponzi never quite figured out how it would work since neither the stamps nor the coupons were exactly fungible and could not be redeemed for cash on demand, but it did not matter as he had financial backers who believed in the return on investment. Infeasible as it would have taken, in theory, a cargo load of some forty million international reply coupons to cover the interest payments of just his initial investors, Ponzi realised he could pay out dividends to the older backers using the money coming in from newer ones as more learned of his scheme—even for those due outlays, most re-invested their profits. Much more from Planet Money at the link above—including a fraud that hits at the heart of the podcast.

day two hundred fourteen (13. 864)

The second largest oil refinery in Venezuela catches fire. Ukrainian drones disable a large petroleum processing facility in Sochi.  Amid intense fighting and both sides vie for control of the Yemeni highlands, Houthi rebels target several Saudi-Aramco oil fields. Whilst oil flows have nearly recovered to pre-war levels, exports falter as attacks on tankers in the Persian Gulf continue and the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed. Crude prices again climb over a hundred dollars per barrel. Despite the flagging bond market and the self-imposed energy shock, the US stock market, buoyed up only by a buying frenzy in AI-related technologies, reaches all time highs. The dismantled US Centres for Disease Control, under the leadership of RFK Jr, is monitoring the Russian plague risk as two hundred individuals in Siberia quarantine.

aăâ (13. 863)

Originally started as a Spiritualist club (with the above cipher, the first three letters of the alphabet) by a group of clerks working for the colonial government to hold ouija sessions and practise mediumship, within a year, whilst conducting a séance, members received a revelatory message heralding a future universal religion, leading to the formal founding of Caodaism (Đại Đạo Tam Kỳ Phổ Độ, The Great Faith for the Third Universal Religion) on this day in 1926—a syncretic movement that incorporates the ethical precepts of Confucianism, the belief of karma and transmigration of Buddhism, Taoist duality and the centralised hierarchy of Catholicism. The first disciple, named first pope Ngô Văn Chiêu for the Holy See in Tây Ninh, declined the role as spiritual leader, never intending for his interest and study in the occult to become a mass movement—retiring to the countryside for a life of seclusion and the first pontiff accepting the job only agreeing to do so provided he be referred to as the Acting Pope for the duration of his reign. The three saints and prophets of Đức Cao Đài are counted as Sun Yat-sen, physician and revolutionary who founded the Kuomintang and lead to the overthrow of the Qing dynasty, Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm, sixteenth century poet and government administrator, later revered as the oracle of the splinter faction known as the School of Teaching Goodness and author Victor Hugo, whose turn to spiritism and deism after retiring from writing and self-imposed exile on the Channel Islands informed much of doctrines of Caodaism. Banned during the French-Indochina war and during Communism as subversive to the state, the church was finally allowed to reconstitute itself in 1997 in Vietnam, practised by the diaspora and numbering around six-million adherents.

 

synchronoptica

one year ago: the dilemma of the video age (with synchronoptica) plus an iconic photo booth

 

two years ago: Suddenly plus more boating adventures 

 

three years ago: more hikes through the vineyards plus Hamas attacks Israel 

 

four years ago:  absinthe banned in Switzerland, the Feast of Sergius and Bacchus plus assorted links to revisit

five years ago: a cool ghoul and your ghost host, the Cyrus Charter, a bird wife plus a catalogue of invasive toys

 

six years ago: most senior US government officials in quarantine,  a typing tutor, a birdhouse apartment plus more historic maps

 

seven years ago: a minimum wage machine

 

eight years ago: more links to check out, East Germany’s Tag der Republik, a visit to an automotive and aviation museum plus himpathy and related neologisms

 

dark horse candidate (13. 862)

As our faithful chronicler informs, the Friz Freleng animated short, “Ballot Box Bunny,” made its debut on this day in 1951, the characters of Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam vying for the mayorship of a small town. Campaigning on empty pledges, such as “There’s enough fresh air and sunshine in this great country of ours for everybody—and I’ll see to it that you’ll get your share!” In his warren beneath the podium, Bugs listens to the speech and decides to run as a challenger when Yosemite Sam further promises to rid the county of every last rabbit. Engaging in the usual stereotypical politicking ploys of glad-handing and kissing babies, the rivals attempt to sabotage each other’s chances at the polls though Sam’s plots generally backfire including stealing the food from Bugs’ free picnic with a army of ants. The townspeople, however, elect the spoiler candidate, a chestnut horse proclaimed as “Our New Mare.”