Airline Timetable Images

https://www.timetableimages.com/

Jab

 

Documentation and Argument in Early China

Architectura Sinica

 https://architecturasinica.org/index.html

Storm Cloud

 

Age of the Ring

 

Libyco-Berber script, from Marcy's "Introduction à un déchiffrement méthodique des inscriptions Tifinagh du Sahara central", Paris, 1937.

 

Harrowing

 

Fear and Loathing of the English Passive

Evolution of “hundred” in Indo-European languages

 https://jakubmarian.com/evolution-of-hundred-in-indo-european-languages/

Utah Teapot

The Utah teapot is a 3D computer model created in 1975 by Martin Newell, Phd student at the university of Utah, and which has become a standard reference object in the computer graphics community. It is a simple, round, partially concave mathematical model of an ordinary Melitta teapot.

Ends and Beginnings of World Literature

Key Concepts in Chinese Culture

William Gibson - My Obsession

https://www.wired.com/1999/01/ebay/




When I was a young man, traversing the '70s in whatever post-hippie, pre-slacker mode I could manage, I made a substantial part of my living, such as it was, in a myriad of minuscule supply-and-demand gaps that have now largely closed. I was what antique dealers call a "picker," a semi-savvy haunter of Salvation Army thrift shops, from which I would extract objects of obscure desire that I knew were up-marketable to specialist dealers, who sold in turn to collectors. To this day I am often unable to resist a professionally quick, carefully dispassionate scan over the contents of any thrift shop, though I almost never buy anything there. Mainly because the cut-rate treasures, the "scores" of legend, are long gone. The market has been rationalized. We have become a nation, a world, of pickers.

There are several reasons for this. One has to do with boomer demographics and the cult of nostalgia. There are now more fiftysomethings than there are primo childhood artifacts of a similar vintage. Most of our toys, unlike the wood and pot-metal of yore, were extrusion-molded ephemera, fragile styrene simulacra, highly unlikely to survive the random insults of time. A great deal of the boomer's remembered world has been melted down, or crushed into unreadable fragments in forgotten strata of landfill. What remains, particularly if it's "mint in box," becomes increasingly rarefied.

Another reason, and this one is more mysterious, has to do with an ongoing democratization of connoisseurship, in which curatorial privilege is available at every level of society. Whether one collects Warhol prints or Beanie Babies becomes, well, a matter of taste.

The idea of the Collectible is everywhere today, and sometimes strikes me as some desperate instinctive reconfiguring of the postindustrial flow, some basic mammalian response to the bewildering flood of sheer stuff we produce.

But the main driving force in the tidying of the world's attic, the drying up of random, "innocent" sources of rarities, is information technology. We are mapping literally everything, from the human genome to Jaeger two-register chronographs, and our search engines grind increasingly fine.


"Surely you haven't been bitten by the eBay bug," said my publishing friend Patrick. We were in the lobby of a particularly bland hotel somewhere within the confines of a New England technology park, and I was in fact feeling twinges of withdrawal.

eBay, which bills itself as Your Personal Trading CommunityTM, is a site that hosts well over 800,000 online auctions per day, in 1,086 categories. eBay gets around 140 million hits per week, and, for the previous few months, a certain number of those hits had been from me.

And, in the process of adding to eBay's gargantuan hit-pile, several days before, I had gotten myself in trouble. In Uruguay.

How this happened: I'm home in Vancouver, midway through that first cup of morning coffee, in front of the computer, ready to work straight from the dream-state.

I am deep into eBay, half-awake, staring at a scan of this huge-ass Zenith diver's watch. And I am, mind you, a practicing ectomorph. I have wrists like pipestems. I am not going to get too much wear out of a watch that's actually wider than my wrist.

But a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and I know, having already become of habitué of eBay's Clocks, Timepieces: Wrist Watches, that the movement in this particular Zenith is the very one Rolex installs in the big-ticket Daytona. Making this both a precision timepiece and possibly an undervalued one - the identical thing having sold on eBay, the week before, albeit in better cosmetic condition, for around two grand.

"I didn't even know you had Web access," Patrick said. "You mean you've overcome your infamous resistance to using the Net, but only in order to service an eBay addiction?"

Well, yes. Sort of. Not exactly.

eBay is simply the only thing I've found on the Web that keeps me coming back. It is, for me anyway, the first "real" virtual place.

In Patrick's hotel room, we used his laptop to get onto eBay, where I discovered that, yes, I was still high bidder for the damned Zenith: $500 American. This bid, you see, was the result of Fiddling Around. I'd sat there in my office, not quite awake yet, and had poked around with modest but increasingly higher bids, assuming that the seller's hidden "reserve," the lowest bid he'd accept, would be quite high. But no, at $500 I hit it, and suddenly I was listed there as high bidder. This had happened before, and I had always been outbid later. So I didn't worry.

But I didn't really want to have to buy this very large watch. Which was in Uruguay. And now I was still high bidder, and the auction would be run off before I got back to Vancouver. I thought about having to resell the Zenith.

When I did get back, though, I discovered, to mixed emotions, that I'd been "sniped." Someone, or rather their automated bidding software, had swooped in, in the last few seconds, and scooped the Zenith for only the least allowable increment over my bid.

How did I get into this, anyway?

I went happily along for years, smugly avoiding anything that involved a modem. Email address? Sorry. Don't have one.

And then I got a Web site. Had one foisted upon me, actually, and quite brilliantly, by Christopher Halcrow, who created William Gibson's Yardshow, an "official" homepage. So I kept having to go into my kids' bedrooms and beg for Web access to look at it, which bugged them.

Then Chris, who knows a bargain when he sees one, happened to buy this Performa 5200CD from someone who was leaving town. He passed the Performa on to me for what he'd paid for it, and suddenly I had this video-ready machine I could look at my site on, and the video-ready part brought cable into the office, so I got a cable modem, because it was faster, and I already had a hole drilled in the wall, and then I discovered that, damn, I had an email address. It was part of the deal. So email, over the course of about 15 minutes, replaced the faxes I'd been using to keep in touch with certain people.


In the way of things, very shortly, I no longer had a Web site, Chris having found it necessary to get a life. But there was the rest of the Web, waiting to be explored. And I did, and promptly got bored. It was fun, at first, but then gradually I found that there wasn't really anywhere in particular I wanted to go. I went a lot of places, but I seldom went back.

Then I found eBay. And I wanted to go back. Because eBay is, basically, just a whole bunch of stuff. Stuff you can look at and wonder if you want - or let yourself want and then bid on.




Mechanical watches are so brilliantly unnecessary.

Any Swatch or Casio keeps better time, and high-end contemporary Swiss watches are priced like small cars. But mechanical watches partake of what my friend John Clute calls the Tamagotchi Gesture. They're pointless in a peculiarly needful way; they're comforting precisely because they require tending.

And vintage mechanical watches are among the very finest fossils of the pre-digital age. Each one is a miniature world unto itself, a tiny functioning mechanism, a congeries of minute and mysterious moving parts. Moving parts! And consequently these watches are, in a sense, alive. They have heartbeats. They seem to respond, Tamagotchi-like, to "love," in the form, usually, of the expensive ministrations of specialist technicians. Like ancient steam-tractors or Vincent motorcycles, they can be painstakingly restored from virtually any stage of ruin.

And, as with the rest of the contents of the world's attic, most of the really good ones are already in someone's collection.

But the best of what's still available, below the spookily expensive level of a Sotheby's watch auction, can still be had for a few thousand dollars at most. At the time of this writing, the most desirable vintage Rolex on one New York dealer's Web site, a stainless steel "bubble back" automatic, is priced at $3,800, a fraction of the cost of many contemporary watches by the same maker. (And it's so much cooler, possesses so much more virtu, than one of those gold-and-diamond Pimpomatic numbers!)

My father bought a stainless steel Rolex Oyster with a stainless band at a duty-free in Bermuda in the early '50s.


After his death, not very long after, my mother put it away in a bank vault, from whence I wheedled it when I was 18 or so. I had a Rolex dealer in Tucson replace its white dial with a black one, so that it would be more like the one James Bond wore in Fleming's novels. I loved it, and, one very sad night a few years later, I sold it for very little to a classmate of mine, in order to pay for a hotel room in which to enjoy, if that's the word, a final bitter tryst with my high school sweetheart. It was one of those dumb-ass, basically self-destructive gestures, and I actually don't regret it. I needed that hotel room. But I've always missed that watch, that Rolex Oyster Precision, and have always had it in the back of my mind to replace it one day with another of similar vintage. I had never done anything about it, though, and made do quite happily with quartz. My last quartz watch was a French faux-military job I bought at the airport in Cannes, on my way home from the film festival. Cost about a hundred dollars. Perfectly adequate for everything - everything except the Tamagotchi Gesture.

Last year, for some reason, I was struck by an ad, one that ran repeatedly in the British men's fashion magazines, for the Oris "Big Crown Commander." It was just a very good-looking watch, I thought, and it was Swiss, and mechanical, and not terribly expensive as such things go. Driven in part by my then brand-new Web access, I used a search engine to determine that Oris had no Canadian distributor. This made the watch seem even cooler, so I went on, via the Web, to locate a Seattle retailer who carried what a sarcastic friend had taken to calling the Big Dick Commando. (The crown, the bit you twist to set it, see, is rather more than usually prominent, so that you can do it without removing your whacking great RAF pilot's gloves.)

And I was and am quite happy with it.

Except that, though I didn't know it at the time, my search for the Big Crown Commander had inadvertently exposed me to the eBay bug.

New Zelda!

 

Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum

端午Duanwu

 

The social ideology of the motorcar

by André Gorz (1973)

The worst thing about cars is that they are like castles or villas by the sea: luxury goods invented for the exclusive pleasure of a very rich minority, and which in conception and nature were never intended for the people. Unlike the vacuum cleaner, the radio, or the bicycle, which retain their use value when everyone has one, the car, like a villa by the sea, is only desirable and useful insofar as the masses don’t have one. That is how in both conception and original purpose the car is a luxury good. And the essence of luxury is that it cannot be democratized. If everyone can have luxury, no one gets any advantages from it. On the contrary, everyone diddles, cheats, and frustrates everyone else, and is diddled, cheated, and frustrated in return.

This is pretty much common knowledge in the case of the seaside villas. No politico has yet dared to claim that to democratize the right to vacation would mean a villa with private beach for every family. Everyone understands that if each of 13 or 14 million families were to use only 10 meters of the coast, it would take 140,000km of beach in order for all of them to have their share! To give everyone his or her share would be to cut up the beaches in such little strips—or to squeeze the villas so tightly together—that their use value would be nil and their advantage over a hotel complex would disappear. In short, democratization of access to the beaches point to only one solution—the collectivist one. And this solution is necessarily at war with the luxury of the private beach, which is a privilege that a small minority takes as their right at the expense of all.

Now, why is it that what is perfectly obvious in the case of the beaches is not generally acknowledged to be the case for transportation? Like the beach house, doesn’t a car occupy scarce space? Doesn’t it deprive the others who use the roads (pedestrians, cyclists, streetcar and bus drivers)? Doesn’t it lose its use value when everyone uses his or her own? And yet there are plenty of politicians who insist that every family has the right to at least one car and that it’s up to the “government” to make it possible for everyone to park conveniently, drive easily in the city, and go on holiday at the same time as everyone else, going 70 mph on the roads to vacation spots. The monstrousness of this demagogic nonsense is immediately apparent, and yet even the left doesn’t disdain resorting to it. Why is the car treated like a sacred cow? Why, unlike other “privative” goods, isn’t it recognized as an antisocial luxury? The answer should be sought in the following two aspects of driving:

Mass motoring effects an absolute triumph of bourgeois ideology on the level of daily life. It gives and supports in everyone the illusion that each individual can seek his or her own benefit at the expense of everyone else. Take the cruel and aggressive selfishness of the driver who at any moment is figuratively killing the “others,” who appear merely as physical obstacles to his or her own speed. This aggressive and competitive selfishness marks the arrival of universally bourgeois behavior, and has come into being since driving has become commonplace. (“You’ll never have socialism with that kind of people,” an East German friend told me, upset by the spectacle of Paris traffic).

The automobile is the paradoxical example of a luxury object that has been devalued by its own spread. But this practical devaluation has not yet been followed by an ideological devaluation. The myth of the pleasure and benefit of the car persists, though if mass transportation were widespread its superiority would be striking. The persistence of this myth is easily explained. The spread of the private car has displaced mass transportation and altered city planning and housing in such a way that it transfers to the car functions which its own spread has made necessary. An ideological (“cultural”) revolution would be needed to break this circle. Obviously this is not to be expected from the ruling class (either right or left).

Let us look more closely now at these two points.

When the car was invented, it was to provide a few of the very rich with a completely unprecedented privilege: that of traveling much faster than everyone else. No one up to then had ever dreamt of it. The speed of all coaches was essentially the same, whether you were rich or poor. The carriages of the rich didn’t go any faster than the carts of the peasants, and trains carried everyone at the same speed (they didn’t begin to have different speeds until they began to compete with the automobile and the airplane). Thus, until the turn of the century, the elite did not travel at a different speed from the people. The motorcar was going to change all that. For the first time class differences were to be extended to speed and to the means of transportation.

This means of transportation at first seemed unattainable to the masses—it was so different from ordinary means. There was no comparison between the motorcar and the others: the cart, the train, the bicycle, or the horse-car. Exceptional beings went out in self-propelled vehicles that weighed at least a ton and whose extremely complicated mechanical organs were as mysterious as they were hidden from view. For one important aspect of the automobile myth is that for the first time people were riding in private vehicles whose operating mechanisms were completely unknown to them and whose maintenance and feeding they had to entrust to specialists. Here is the paradox of the automobile: it appears to confer on its owners limitless freedom, allowing them to travel when and where they choose at a speed equal to or greater than that of the train. But actually, this seeming independence has for its underside a radical dependency. Unlike the horse rider, the wagon driver, or the cyclist, the motorist was going to depend for the fuel supply, as well as for the smallest kind of repair, on dealers and specialists in engines, lubrication, and ignition, and on the interchangeability of parts. Unlike all previous owners of a means of locomotion, the motorist’s relationship to his or her vehicle was to be that of user and consumer-and not owner and master. This vehicle, in other words, would oblige the owner to consume and use a host of commercial services and industrial products that could only be provided by some third party. The apparent independence of the automobile owner was only concealing the actual radical dependency.




For the first time in history, people would become dependent for their locomotion on a commercial source of energy.



The oil magnates were the first to perceive the prize that could be extracted from the wide distribution of the motorcar. If people could be induced to travel in cars, they could be sold the fuel necessary to move them. For the first time in history, people would become dependent for their locomotion on a commercial source of energy. There would be as many customers for the oil industry as there were motorists—and since there would be as many motorists as there were families, the entire population would become the oil merchants’ customers. The dream of every capitalist was about to come true. Everyone was going to depend for their daily needs on a commodity that a single industry held as a monopoly.

All that was left was to get the population to drive cars. Little persuasion would be needed. It would be enough to get the price of a car down by using mass production and the assembly line. People would fall all over themselves to buy it. They fell over themselves all right, without noticing they were being led by the nose. What, in fact, did the automobile industry offer them? Just this: “From now on, like the nobility and the bourgeoisie, you too will have the privilege of driving faster than everybody else. In a motorcar society the privilege of the elite is made available to you.”

People rushed to buy cars until, as the working class began to buy them as well, defrauded motorists realized they had been had. They had been promised a bourgeois privilege, they had gone into debt to acquire it, and now they saw that everyone else could also get one. What good is a privilege if everyone can have it? It’s a fool’s game. Worse, it pits everyone against everyone else. General paralysis is brought on by a general clash. For when everyone claims the right to drive at the privileged speed of the bourgeoisie, everything comes to a halt, and the speed of city traffic plummets—in Boston as in Paris, Rome, or London—to below that of the horsecar; at rush hours the average speed on the open road falls below the speed of a bicyclist.




When everyone claims the right to drive at the privileged speed of the bourgeoisie, everything comes to a halt, and the speed of city traffic plummets



Nothing helps. All the solutions have been tried. They all end up making things worse. No matter if they increase the number of city expressways, beltways, elevated crossways, 16-lane highways, and toll roads, the result is always the same. The more roads there are in service, the more cars clog them, and city traffic becomes more paralyzingly congested. As long as there are cities, the problem will remain unsolved. No matter how wide and fast a superhighway is, the speed at which vehicles can come off it to enter the city cannot be greater than the average speed on the city streets. As long as the average speed in Paris is 10 to 20 kmh, depending on the time of day, no one will be able to get off the beltways and autoroutes around and into the capital at more than 10 to 20 kmh.

The same is true for all cities. It is impossible to drive at more than an average of 20 kmh in the tangled network of streets, avenues, and boulevards that characterise the traditional cities. The introduction of faster vehicles inevitably disrupts city traffic, causing bottlenecks-and finally complete paralysis.

If the car is to prevail, there’s still one solution: get rid of the cities. That is, string them out for hundreds of miles along enormous roads, making them into highway suburbs. That’s what’s been done in the United States. Ivan Illich sums up the effect in these startling figures: “The typical American devotes more than 1500 hours a year (which is 30 hours a week, or 4 hours a day, including Sundays) to his [or her] car. This includes the time spent behind the wheel, both in motion and stopped, the hours of work to pay for it and to pay for gas, tires, tolls, insurance, tickets, and taxes .Thus it takes this American 1500 hours to go 6000 miles (in the course of a year). Three and a half miles take him (or her) one hour. In countries that do not have a transportation industry, people travel at exactly this speed on foot, with the added advantage that they can go wherever they want and aren’t restricted to asphalt roads.”

It is true, Illich points out, that in non-industrialized countries travel uses only 3 to 8% of people’s free time (which comes to about two to six hours a week). Thus a person on foot covers as many miles in an hour devoted to travel as a person in a car, but devotes 5 to 10 times less time in travel. Moral: The more widespread fast vehicles are within a society, the more time—beyond a certain point—people will spend and lose on travel. It’s a mathematical fact.

The reason? We’ve just seen it: The cities and towns have been broken up into endless highway suburbs, for that was the only way to avoid traffic congestion in residential centers. But the underside of this solution is obvious: ultimately people can’t get around conveniently because they are far away from everything. To make room for the cars, distances have increased. People live far from their work, far from school, far from the supermarket—which then requires a second car so the shopping can be done and the children driven to school. Outings? Out of the question. Friends? There are the neighbors… and that’s it. In the final analysis, the car wastes more time than it saves and creates more distance than it overcomes. Of course, you can get yourself to work doing 60 mph, but that’s because you live 30 miles from your job and are willing to give half an hour to the last 6 miles. To sum it all up: “A good part of each day’s work goes to pay for the travel necessary to get to work.” (Ivan Illich).




In the final analysis, the car wastes more time than it saves and creates more distance than it overcomes.



Maybe you are saying, “But at least in this way you can escape the hell of the city once the workday is over.” There we are, now we know: “the city,” the great city which for generations was considered a marvel, the only place worth living, is now considered to be a “hell.” Everyone wants to escape from it, to live in the country. Why this reversal? For only one reason. The car has made the big city uninhabitable. It has made it stinking, noisy, suffocating, dusty, so congested that nobody wants to go out in the evening anymore. Thus, since cars have killed the city, we need faster cars to escape on superhighways to suburbs that are even farther away. What an impeccable circular argument: give us more cars so that we can escape the destruction caused by cars.


Since cars have killed the city, we need faster cars to escape on superhighways to suburbs that are even farther away. What an impeccable circular argument: give us more cars so that we can escape the destruction caused by cars.

From being a luxury item and a sign of privilege, the car has thus become a vital necessity. You have to have one so as to escape from the urban hell of the cars. Capitalist industry has thus won the game: the superfluous has become necessary. There’s no longer any need to persuade people that they want a car; its necessity is a fact of life. It is true that one may have one’s doubts when watching the motorized escape along the exodus roads. Between 8 and 9:30 a.m., between 5:30 and 7 p.m., and on weekends for five and six hours the escape routes stretch out into bumper-to-bumper processions going (at best) the speed of a bicyclist and in a dense cloud of gasoline fumes. What remains of the car’s advantages? What is left when, inevitably, the top speed on the roads is limited to exactly the speed of the slowest car?

Fair enough. After killing the city, the car is killing the car. Having promised everyone they would be able to go faster, the automobile industry ends up with the unrelentingly predictable result that everyone has to go as slowly as the very slowest, at a speed determined by the simple laws of fluid dynamics. Worse: having been invented to allow its owner to go where he or she wishes, at the time and speed he or she wishes, the car becomes, of all vehicles, the most slavish, risky, undependable and uncomfortable. Even if you leave yourself an extravagant amount of time, you never know when the bottlenecks will let you get there. You are bound to the road as inexorably as the train to its rails. No more than the railway traveller can you stop on impulse, and like the train you must go at a speed decided by someone else. Summing up, the car has none of the advantages of the train and all of its disadvantages, plus some of its own: vibration, cramped space, the danger of accidents, the effort necessary to drive it.

And yet, you may say, people don’t take the train. Of course! How could they? Have you ever tried to go from Boston to New York by train? Or from Ivry to Treport? Or from Garches to Fountainebleau? Or Colombes to l’Isle-Adam? Have you tried on a summer Saturday or Sunday? Well, then, try it and good luck to you! You’ll observe that automobile capitalism has thought of everything. Just when the car is killing the car, it arranges for the alternatives to disappear, thus making the car compulsory. So first the capitalist state allowed the rail connections between the cities and the surrounding countryside to fall to pieces, and then it did away with them. The only ones that have been spared are the high-speed intercity connections that compete with the airlines for a bourgeois clientele. There’s progress for you!

The truth is, no one really has any choice. You aren’t free to have a car or not because the suburban world is designed to be a function of the car and, more and more, so is the city world. That is why the ideal revolutionary solution, which is to do away with the car in favour of the bicycle, the streetcar, the bus, and the driverless taxi, is not even applicable any longer in the big commuter cities like Los Angeles, Detroit, Houston, Trappes, or even Brussels, which are built by and for the automobile. These splintered cities are strung out along empty streets lined with identical developments; and their urban landscape (a desert) says, “These streets are made for driving as quickly as possible from work to home and vice versa. You go through here, you don’t live here. At the end of the workday everyone ought to stay at home, and anyone found on the street after nightfall should be considered suspect of plotting evil.” In some American cities the act of strolling in the streets at night is grounds for suspicion of a crime.

So, the jig is up? No, but the alternative to the car will have to be comprehensive. For in order for people to be able to give up their cars, it won’t be enough to offer them more comfortable mass transportation. They will have to be able to do without transportation altogether because they’ll feel at home in their neighborhoods, their community, their human-sized cities, and they will take pleasure in walking from work to home-on foot, or if need be by bicycle. No means of fast transportation and escape will ever compensate for the vexation of living in an uninhabitable city in which no one feels at home or the irritation of only going into the city to work or, on the other hand, to be alone and sleep.

“People,” writes Illich, “will break the chains of overpowering transportation when they come once again to love as their own territory their own particular beat, and to dread getting too far away from it.” But in order to love “one’s territory” it must first of all be made livable, and not trafficable. The neighborhood or community must once again become a microcosm shaped by and for all human activities, where people can work, live, relax, learn, communicate, and knock about, and which they manage together as the place of their life in common. When someone asked him how people would spend their time after the revolution, when capitalist wastefulness had been done away with, Marcuse answered, “We will tear down the big cities and build new ones. That will keep us busy for a while.”

These new cities might be federations of communities (or neighborhoods) surrounded by green belts whose citizens-and especially the schoolchildren-will spend several hours a week growing the fresh produce they need. To get around everyday they would be able to use all kinds of transportation adapted to a medium-sized town: municipal bicycles, trolleys or trolley-buses, electric taxis without drivers. For longer trips into the country, as well as for guests, a pool of communal automobiles would be available in neighborhood garages. The car would no longer be a necessity. Everything will have changed: the world, life, people. And this will not have come about all by itself.


Above all, never make transportation an issue by itself. Always connect it to the problem of the city, of the social division of labour, and to the way this compartmentalizes the many dimensions of life.

Meanwhile, what is to be done to get there? Above all, never make transportation an issue by itself. Always connect it to the problem of the city, of the social division of labour, and to the way this compartmentalizes the many dimensions of life. One place for work, another for “living,” a third for shopping, a fourth for learning, a fifth for entertainment. The way our space is arranged carries on the disintegration of people that begins with the division of labour in the factory. It cuts a person into slices, it cuts our time, our life, into separate slices so that in each one you are a passive consumer at the mercy of the merchants, so that it never occurs to you that work, culture, communication, pleasure, satisfaction of needs, and personal life can and should be one and the same thing: a unified life, sustained by the social fabric of the community.

From Le Sauvage September-October 1973. Translator not known.

André Gorz was a philosopher, journalist, and writer. He was known as one of the first ecosocialists and political ecologists.

Aristotle's Problemata

The Book Collector

Grand Seiko "Omiwatari"

 

Operation Blowdown

What Living on Japan's Most Active Volcano is Like

Web Design: The First 100 Years

https://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm




Designers! I am a San Francisco computer programmer, but I come in peace!

I would like to start with a parable about airplanes.

In 1981, my mother and I flew from Warsaw to New York City in this airplane, an Ilyushin-62.

Mare of Easttown

 

The Dawn Chorus at Lingshan

Birding Beijing · The Dawn Chorus from Lingshan, Beijing, on 31 May 2021

Octavian AR denarius, 32-27 BC

Octavian AR denarius, 32-27 BC, 3.80gm, struck 29-27 BC in uncertain Italian mint (Brundisium? Rome?), 21.3mm. Obv: Bare head right. Rev: Ithyphallic boundary-stone of Jupiter Terminus, surmounted by laureate head of Octavian facing; winged thunderbolt below; IMP CAESAR across fields. RIC 269a; CRI 425; RSC 114. EF, pleasant toning that is nicer than photo shows.

Walking by Itself The Singular History of the Chinese Cat

The "Miracle of Wörgl,"

Background

The "Miracle of Wörgl," refers to the story of currency demurrage and the impact it had on the economy of Wörgl, a small town in Austria. For a bill of such currency to retain its face value, the currency holder must pay a regular, periodic payment (a tax) for a stamp or other marking. Wörgl is regularly touted by advocates of demurrage as a successful implementation of such a currency, one designed to encourage velocity due to the incentive to spend it in order to avoid the periodic tax.

The experiment at Wörgl was implemented by the town’s mayor, Michael Unterguggenberger in the midst of the Great Depression. Wörgl, like many towns throughout the world at the time, was suffering from high unemployment and low economic activity. The experiment began on the 31st of July 1932, with the issuing of "Certified Compensation Bills," a form of currency commonly known as Stamp Scrip, or Freigeld. It resulted in a boom in government projects, and a corresponding increase in employment and economic activity not just in the government sector, but throughout the town.

Despite its apparent success, and despite attracting the attention of luminaries such as French Premier Edouard Daladier and the economist Irving Fisher, the "experiment" was terminated by the Austrian National Bank on September 1, 1933.1
Theory

The theory behind the experiment of Wörgl comes from Silvio Gesell (1862–1930), specifically his idea of Freigeld (German for free money), representing one part of his overall idea of Freiwirtschaft (free economy). As you will see below, Gesell does not mean "free" as in the free market, so much as "free" as in the air.

From Wikipedia 

Freiwirtschaft (German for free economy) consists of three central aspects, usually summed up as The Three Fs:

Freigeld (free money)

All money is issued for a limited period by constant value (neither inflation, nor deflation).
Long-term saving requires investment in bonds or stocks.

Freiland (free land) All land is owned by public institutions and can only be rented, not purchased (see also Henry George).

Freihandel (free trade)

The (proposed) results and benefits include:


More private spending for consumption and investment


Consumers invest surplus money in expanding companies


Full employment: Work for everyone who can work


Rate of economic growth can be set by the society


Interest rates drop to almost zero percent in the long run


Freiland prevents high real estate prices


Tremendous social disparities will cease

Less working hours per week for everyone in the long run

So under Gesell’s theory, scarcity, if not eliminated, at least will no longer cause inconvenience to man. Suffice it to say, it is a theory that seems to fly in the face of the laws of nature, praxeology (the science of human action), and economic theory.

Bernard Lietaer is one of the leading proponents of these theories today, specifically regarding the issue of free moneyand demurrage (stamp scrip). Lietaer sees such a "stamp scrip" currency working in conjunction with a currency convertible to a basket of commodities. From his paper "A Strategy for a Convertible Currency":


Stamp scrip is a medium of exchange characterized by a small monthly "user fee," or "negative interest" charge. This user fee gives an incentive to the bearer not to hoard this currency. Its practical and demonstrated economic effects include a strong positive impact on employment creation and on inflation control. It also provides structural support for ecologically sound economic growth. While the concept of "negative interest rates" may appear unusual at first sight, it has solid theoretical backing behind it. Even more importantly, it has been tested and used with remarkable success in a variety of cultures and historical settings, including as recently as the 1930's in Western Europe.

The stamp scrip concept actively promotes internal economic stability and employment growth, while the basket of commodity concept ensures immediate convertibility to the national currency and the international stability of its purchasing value. These two concepts fit together by equating the negative interest rate of the Stamp Scrip with the costs of storing, insuring and delivering to their respective international markets the underlying commodities of the basket.
The Economic Environment of Wörgl

“The Story of Wörgl,” based on the book The Experiment in Wörgl, by Fritz Shwarz 4 describes the suffering economy of Wörgl during the depression of the early 1930s:

At the time Wörgl had a population of 4,216. Being a railway junction, the railway employed 310 people in 1930, but by 1933 the number had plummeted to 190…. Already in 1929 the service facility for steam locomotives had become obsolete following the transition to electric engines. The nearby cement plant in Kitzbühel employed 45 to 60 workers in 1930, but by 1933 that figure had shrunk to 2.

The Zipf brewery sacked between 10–14 workers from the previous 33–37. A cellulose factory, which in 1930 still employed 360 to 410 workers, in 1933 had only 4 men guarding idle machines. Farmers, who made up about a third of the working population, could barely sell their products at depressed prices and the remaining two thirds of the work force, consisting of blue-collar and white-collar employees, plus people running small businesses, suffered considerably from these bleak circumstances.

The ranks of the unemployed increased daily. Both the umeployed and those with expired insurance benefits turned to their mayor. In 1932 there were some 200 expired benefits cases destined for public charity schemes. In the spring of 1932 Wörgl township counted 350 unemployed. In its immediate surroundings there were 1,500.

The mayor of Wörgl, Michael Unterguggenberger, having previously read an article by Silvio Gesell in an obscure periodical named Der Physiokrat, came to embrace the idea of a currency subject to demurrage.5 The mayor concluded that such a currency would solve what he believed to be the two critical issues facing his township: falling prices and the slow circulation of money.4
The Mayor Applies the Theory

The mayor went from person to person in the township, explaining the concept of demurrage and its benefits if such a currency was implemented in Wörgl. Once he felt he had gained sufficient support, he held a session of the Wörgl Welfare Committee on July 5, 1932.

With the approval of the committee, the experiment began with the first printing of 1,000 schillings worth of notes on July 31, 1932. These were used by the town to pay government wages.4

In total, 32,000 schillings worth of notes were printed. 12,000 were released, but only 8,000 actually circulated. 4,000 shillings worth of notes were hoarded—despite the demurrage—as collectibles, etc.6 A more precise number of notes that ultimately made it into circulation is 7,443 schillings 4, although there are estimates in other sources in the range of 5,000–6,000.
Relevant Factors Regarding the Currency and Its Impact

(Adapted from The Wörgl Experiment With Depreciating Money 6 except as noted)

The demurrage was set at 1% per month, with a stamp affixed to the bill in order to demonstrate proof of payment.

Each of the issued Wörgl notes was backed by the equivalent amount of official central-bank issued notes. These notes were deposited at the local Raiffeisen Bank, earning 6% interest, to be paid to the parish (Wörgl) treasury.

Estimates differ as to the amount of national schillings held as backing (12,000 in one case, 40,000 7 in another).

The Wörgl notes could be converted to official currency at a charge of 2%. The notes entered circulation via payment to the parish employees, first at 50% of their wages, later 75%.

Apparently there was no noticeable price inflation. The notes were accepted by non-Wörgl businessmen, reluctantly at times due to the demurrage, because this was seen as a means of increasing trade.

Projects involving approximately 100,000 schillings of spending were implemented in Wörgl during the time of the experiment. Some of the major completed projects included: improvement of the drainage system in the main streets; streets were repaired and many were asphalted; the Railway Street was lighted in a modern fashion; a ski-jumping platform was constructed; and the parish mill received extensive modernization and improvements.

The experiment was brought to a forced end by the Austrian central bank and Austrian courts on 1 September 1933.8
The Results

The schillings paid to the workers were returned almost immediately as payment of overdue taxes.

The experiment seemingly produced miracles, receiving enthusiastic support of the townspeople. Interviews were conducted with the local businessmen and town leaders and almost unanimously they praised the new money.4

The “miracle” gained notoriety, and other towns wanted to copy the experiment hoping for similar success. Nearby villages even arranged to accept each other’s scrip. “In June 1933 Mayor Unterguggenberger held a briefing in Vienna for 170 Mayors—after reviewing accounts and reports from Wörgl. All the attendants were of the opinion that it was desirable to introduce that "magic money" also in their communities.”4
Financial Gains to the Parish

Besides the boom in projects, there were financial gains to the parish, though relatively minor6
From the 1% demurrage: 50 schillings per month (600 annualized)
From the 2% exchange fee: 690 schillings in 9 months (920 annualized)
6% interest earned on the 12,000 schillings deposited at the local Raiffeisen Bank (720 annualized)

Total: 2,240 schillings annualized

For comparison, the mayor’s salary was 1,800 schillings.

The indirect gains, however, were significant.

At the beginning of the experiment, according to two different sources, the township was owed taxes in arrears of either 118,000 schillings6 or 83,000 schillings8 Both sources, however, substantially agree on the amount subsequently collected by the township: approximately 78,000 schillings. This amount covered most of the delinquent taxes owed and was a finite and already virtually exhausted source of funding for the township.
"When, towards the end of the month, an inhabitant of Wörgl does not know what to do with his money which is about to lose 1% of its value, he bethinks himself of paying therewith his taxes. This alternative has not only led to the payment of the heavy tax arrears which had accumulated for years, but, what is unprecedented, to the payment of taxes in advance!"9

"The fact that the local populace were, as a whole, substantially in arrears on their tax dues to the parish would certainly assure a high level of acceptance (locally) and a continuing demand for the local currency, at least until such time as those tax arrears had been paid.”10

By the time the experiment was forcibly ended, after the first year, most of the taxes in arrears had indeed been paid. Many taxes were also paid in advance. Thus, demand for the scrip from this source would have no longer been significant.

The second indirect benefit was the increase in normal, current tax payments to the parish. During the time of the experiment, local tax payments increased by 37,500 schillings8(presumably due to the increased economic activity, driven by the velocity increase and the massive government spending on projects).

There were other factors at play having nothing to do with the new scrip.6 For one, a 12,000-schilling-relief credit was granted by the Tyrol government. Also, there was a partial default on parish debt owed to the Innsbruck Savings Bank. The Innsbruck Savings Bank reduced interest owed in arrears by 50,000 schillings. Various diverse claims were presented by the mayor to the bank, totaling 70,000 schillings (including interest). A parish deposit book, valued at 37,000 schillings, was presented to the Innsbruck bank. Presumably, the bank had frozen the asset for lack of payment of parish debts. The default, or forgiveness, totaled over 150,000 schillings; while certainly not all would have been payable immediately, no doubt of some benefit to the annual parish budget.
The Roots of the "Miracle"

It seems that the entire experiment was a Keynesian one, with incentives provided by Gresham's Law. The increased spending on public works were financed by:
A significant amount of taxes in arrears (approximately 78,000 schillings representing either 67% or 93% of the total past due, depending on which estimate is used) being collected due to the threat of demurrage.
Taxes paid in advance, of an indeterminate amount.
An increase in annual tax receipts (of 37,500 schillings) due to the artificially stimulated economy,
A credit by the provincial government of 12,000 schillings,
Defaulting on debt owed to the Innsbruck Bank of over 150,000 schillings, some portion of which would have been of benefit to the annual budget.
An annualized amount of 2,240 schillings due to parish earnings on demurrage, exchange, and interest.

Not including the indeterminate amounts for taxes paid in advance, or the benefit due to the partial default, the documented gains to the parish come to almost 130,000 schillings and more than enough to pay for the projects.

Whether by accident or by design, the Mayor collected almost all taxes that were in arrears, in one year's time. If the experiment had not been terminated, all remaining outstanding taxes would have been paid in short order. The demurrage motivated taxpayers to pay the taxes before the end of the month, while they could still receive 100% value for the scrip.

Increasing normal tax receipts via an artificially stimulated economy is nothing new—this method has been deployed often and widely. Easy credit encourages this.

The mayor used these one-time windfalls, some of which are not at all attributable to the new scrip, to pay for 100,000 schillings worth of projects.
Could the Miracle Have Been Sustained?

The Austrian central bank and Austrian court brought an end to the experiment after just over one year. Supporters of demurrage point to this and suggest that (a) this represents the fear of the bankers of the people finding their own, decentralized, solutions, and (b) the miracle would have continued indefinitely or at least long enough to get the local economy back on its own legs.

I agree with the critique of the central banks; any threat to centralized control is a threat to the money power. But would the miracle have continued indefinitely, or at least long enough, to have primed the pump had the central government not intervened? This seems highly unlikely.

The activity would not have been sustainable. Once the taxes in arrears were completely paid and when people had paid enough taxes in advance to feel safe and comfortable (at some point they would stop paying forward), the scrip would lose a key part of its attractiveness.

One way a government can ensure the demand for its currency is to mandate that taxes be paid in the government-issued currency. The other way is through monopoly legal tender laws. Wörgl could not legislate or enforce monopoly legal tender, so the demand for the scrip is partially attributable to the need to pay taxes.

The demand for the scrip could not be attributed to the demurrage, because the national schilling was available, paying interest, and at a one-for-one exchange (setting aside the conversion fee). All things equal, a currency without demurrage and earning interest would be favorable to one with demurrage and not earning interest, especially when the exchange rate between the two is fixed artificially.

Once this need to pay taxes in arrears was satisfied, what would happen to the desirability of a depreciating-value scrip vs. currency that did not come with a 1% monthly penalty? The depreciating scrip would begin trading at a discount (but not exceeding the 2% conversion fee), and sooner or later would be returned to the bank for the national currency, even with the 2% loss. Two percent might be too big a loss when one owes taxes and can satisfy these taxes with the depreciating scrip at full face value. However, when there is no benefit to holding a depreciating currency to the national one, it is highly likely that many would prefer to suffer the one-time 2% charge to avoid paying the recurring monthly 1% charge.

Instead of the scrip circulating, it would be taken to the local bank for exchange. This would quickly have turned into a bank run. The town did not have an unlimited amount of national Schillings for the exchange, holding 40,000 (or 12,000 by another estimate6) national schillings as backing for the scrip.7

According to Anthony Migchels, another proponent of demurrage and the Wörgl experiment, 2.5 million Schillings of trade was financed during the one year.11 This amounts to approximately 7,000 Schillings of trade per day. Instead of being held, or circulating, the scrip would have been exchanged for national currency. In a matter of days the national scrip held as backing in the bank would have been exhausted.

In my opinion, this is exactly the situation that would have transpired in Wörgl had the national government not put an end to the experiment. Depending on which estimate of taxes in arrears is used (given the discrepancy as pointed out above), within one month, but not more than six, all taxes in arrears would have been paid. At that point, I suspect demand for the scrip would have fallen, resulting in exchange for national currency, and resulting in a bank run.

Now, what if the experiment was allowed to continue until the local economy got its own legs, the pump being primed, if you will? I will suggest the time was up. The primary source of the miracle—collection of taxes in arrears—was dried up. If the pump wasn’t primed by the time the experiment was forcibly brought to an end, then it wasn’t going to happen (even if one grants that “pump-priming” is a valid economic concept). There were virtually no more taxes in arrears to collect.
Conclusion

When it comes to the market, and certainly the market for money, credit, and currency, I favor free-market and competing solutions, and am favorably disposed to decentralized solutions of almost any type. Through decentralization and competition, the best solutions are developed and selected, and individuals retain more control over their economic lives. For this reason, I have no criticisms of the localized actions taken at Wörgl.

However, the experiment is deserving of scrutiny and study. Wörgl was not a miracle, but an example of Keynesian spending given incentive by Gresham’s Law. It is certain that the miracle could not have continued much longer even if the national government did not shut it down. Virtually all of the money used to fund the parish's projects came from one-time events, some not in any way attributable to the new scrip. Some factors at play were:
Taxes paid in arrears cannot be again paid in arrears. The outstanding balance owed to the parish was almost completely paid up in the first year.
Taxes paid in advance certainly have a natural life, but how many years will taxpayers continue to pay two years’ worth of future taxes? For how many years can they afford to do this?
The annual increase in normal tax receipts to an artificial boom cannot be sustained, witness the fiscal impacts of the dot-com bubble bursting or the subsequent real-estate bubble bursting.
The Tyrol government credit was a factor fully outside of any local “experiment.”
Defaulting on a portion of the loan certainly freed up resources, but is also not a sustainable method of financing.

The Gernsback Continuum - William Gibson