More Regulation or Less?

Funny how many people simplify the economy to just two options: Regulations are "good" or "bad".

A more realistic list of our options would be:

1. Idiotic regulations.
2. Idiotic deregulations.
3. Clever well thought through regulations.
4. Clever well thought through deregulations.

A large number of people clearly choose 1 over 4. And a similarly large number of people choose 2 over 3.


Personally, I pick both 3 and 4 over both 1 and 2.

Amazon's Business Model - Eternal Debt

What is the realistic business model for the e-Book market? Let's say I pay $10 to Amazon for a book for my Kindle. For that price, I can read it on all my Kindle-devices: a Mac, a PC, an iPhone, an iPad, and so on. I can remove it from those devices and download it again a few months later. Or a few years later. Or a few decades later. Or a few centuries later. Or millennia.

Clearly there is no time when we customers expect to be cut off from books we paid for. That means that we expect Amazon to provide a server for all future, with all our books downloadable to all Kindle-enabled devices we or our descendants may have available. And that without having to pay another cent. Ever.

How does Amazon's balance sheet handle this eternal debt? Let's say that it costs them 0.001 cent to keep a book available on their servers for one hundred years. Then the cost to keep that book available for eternity is 0.001 time infinity, which is... Let's see... It is an infinity cents, which means roughly one infinity dollars, or if you are European, converted to Euro: one infinity Euro in debt for all eternity.

It does not seem like a great business to me.

Grandma Duck's Electric Car

Today I learnt that Granma Duck's car is electric. It turns out that it is based on a Detroit Electric, an electric car that was produced 1907-1939. This goes to prove that there is nothing new with electric cars.

The picture above is a 1915 model at Tekniska Museet in Stockholm.

I knew that Tintin's cars mostly were based on real cars, but it was news to me that members of the Donald Duck family had real cars as well.