Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. “The Business Error of the Century”

IEEE Spectrum has published a superb history of how IBM was late to the PC business, then dominated it, and then lost it. It’s a story filled with twists of fate, lucky breaks, and missed opportunities:

In July 1980, the IBMers met with Bill Gates but were not greatly impressed, so they turned instead to Gary Kildall, president of Digital Research, the most recognized microcomputer software company at the time. Kildall then made what may have been the business error of the century. He blew off the blue-suiters so that he could fly his airplane, leaving his wife—a lawyer—to deal with them. The meeting went nowhere, with too much haggling over nondisclosure agreements, and the IBMers left. Gates was now their only option, and he took the IBMers seriously.

Equally fascinating, IEEE’s history of Pixar.

2. Prime Grocery

Timothy E. Lee, writing in the excellent Full Stack Economics, tries to determine whether Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go pose an existential threat to grocery stores. In observing the Amazon stores around Washington, D.C., he finds they may not be what they appear:

Another remarkable thing about the Virginia store: it was swarming with Amazon employees. During my visit on a Monday afternoon, I saw more Amazon workers than I did regular customers. Most of them were carrying around hand-held scanners and filling shopping carts full of groceries—in other words, they appeared to be pickers for Amazon’s grocery delivery service…In short, the Franconia store is effectively a delivery warehouse that lets customers visit. Industry analysts who have visited stores in other parts of the country have observed the same thing. Deliveries account for a much larger share of Amazon Fresh store sales than the sales of most grocery stores.

3. Vaccines Mandates and Personal Freedom

In 1905, Massachusetts mandated vaccines for all residents in the wake of a smallpox epidemic. A pastor then sued, arguing that the law was “nothing short of an assault upon his person.” The state Supreme Court disagreed. Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen reviews this history and asks whether there are grounds to impose a national mandate for COVID-19 vaccination. She finds that the legal history is clear, even if the policy debate is murky:

Since the nineteen-eighties, all fifty states have required vaccinations for school attendance, subject to some exemptions, including on medical and religious grounds. Vaccination requirements have long been challenged by religious objectors, but the challenges are routinely rejected, as long as reasonable accommodations are offered. Just last year, the Fifth Circuit heard the case of a former firefighter who had religious objections to a vaccine for tetanus, diphtheria, and whooping cough that was required for his job, and who was fired when he rejected accommodations that the city offered: to transfer to a job that didn’t require the vaccine, or to wear a respirator mask at work. The court rebuffed the employee’s claims of religious discrimination and violation of First Amendment free-exercise rights. The pre-covid legal landscape, in other words, was quite clear: a state could require vaccinations to protect public health, even imposing criminal penalties for noncompliance.

4. Retracing the Segway Collapse

Segway once promised to “change the world.” Steve Jobs said Segway was “as significant as the personal computer.” Twenty years later, Dan Kois – who crafted an over-hyped book deal for Segway inventor Dean Kamen at the time of the product launch – writes a funny and revealing history of failure. As part of his research, Kois rents a Segway in 2021 and reaches one of his most important conclusions:

When I returned the Segway, I told the guy at the rental place how I’d learned about all the incredible inspiration and innovation and work and skill that had gone into the Segway, all to make something that cost 10 times as much as a scooter and required a lesson from an expert to ride. He said something I cannot stop thinking about. “Yeah,” he said, “a bunch of really smart people got together, but you needed one dumb person in the room to keep things on the level.”

5. Second Thoughts on Drug Legalization

Michael Shellenberg, an early advocate of needle exchange programs, has long fought to treat drug addiction as a public health issue instead of a criminal problem. He reviews the data from the last few decades and changes his mind: “it’s obvious now that we were wrong.” He continues:

Over the last 20 years the U.S. liberalized drug laws. During that time, deaths from illicit drugs rose from 17,000 to 93,000. Two and a half times more people die from illicit drug use than from car accidents; five times more die from drugs than homicide. Many of those people are homeless and die alone in the hotel rooms and apartment units given away as part of the harm reduction-based “Housing First” approach to homelessness. Others are children found dead by their parents on the floors of their rooms.

6. Tick Tock

In Lapham’s Quarterly, David Rooney offers not a history of time, but a history of timekeeping. He goes back to the days of the sundial and makes a case that clocks, while indispensable, impose their own form of tyranny:

It is tempting, in the twenty-first century, to feel that we are the first generation to resent being governed by the clock as we go about our daily lives; that we are no longer in control of what we do and when we do it because we must follow the clock’s orders. During our long warehouse shifts, sitting at our factory workstations, or enduring seemingly never-ending meetings at the office, we might grumble that the morning is dragging on, but we cannot eat because the clock has not yet got around to lunchtime. But these feelings are nothing new.

Websites Worth Reading

Quantum and Cryptography FAQs: By the NSA

War on the Rocks: Podcast on writing for policymakers

Remembering 9/11: The FBI’s account of how 9/11 changed the agency

Feeds We Follow

@VisualCap: Visuals of global economic data

@CocoGauff: US Open trendsetter

@DrTomFrieden: COVID updates from US public health veteran