June 07, 2007
Unemployment insurance is tricky: you want a safety net without making freeloading attractive. The Dutch employment office was great at one of its three jobs — paying people. Temp agencies, it turned out, were much better at the other two. So what if we let the market handle unemployment insurance entirely, without sacrificing solidarity? There's a scheme that might just work.
May 16, 2007
American bashing might be the least attractive European habit. People who'd never call Africans stupid happily call Americans stupid, then nod along sagely. Working for an American company probably biases me, but credit where it's due — count the Nobel prizes. That said, the things Americans say sometimes. Like the friend who didn't know Disney was based on folk tales.
April 26, 2007
Casual visitors to this site were recently greeted by cheery ads for real estate, dating, travel and used cars. The good things in life. My domain was registered with RegisterFly, who took my renewal money — twice — and did precisely nothing with it. I would call them mindless jerks who'll be first against the wall when the revolution comes, except I doubt they'll last that long.
April 09, 2007
Rumsfeld has probably gone down in history as the worst secretary of defense ever — the man who said we should storm Iraq without a plan to rebuild it. But hear me out: what if his doctrine deserves another look? Not the Iraq part, exactly, but the underlying logic. There's a case to be made for marching in and then leaving.
March 11, 2007
Taxes are annoying, but here's the thing: it's not really the paying that grates, it's the doing. The government forces you to do unpaid labor whose sole purpose is to send them money. Surely there's a fix. What if the government had to provide the accountants? Suddenly law makers might feel the true cost of their handiwork.
January 30, 2007
Taxis are a mixed blessing for the carless traveler: expensive, and often the driver knows things you don't, like where you are. The classic information asymmetry. But what if every cab carried a GPS box, a meter visible from the street, and a connection to a central computer that set prices by supply and demand? Uber, basically. In 2007.
January 28, 2007
The European Google Ski trip ended with Douwe staring at nine pairs of skis in the sun, with no memory of what his rentals looked like. An espresso, some patient elimination, and a binary search later he sped off. The Italian rental man's reaction the next day suggested the algorithm had bugs. Also: squat toilets and ski boots are a poor combination.
January 17, 2007
Back from Ecuador with a phone full of notes: a Conde Nast Traveler writer who thinks somewhere two hours from a European capital qualifies as the middle of nowhere, a clever bus scam that cost us a camera (and the third country to do so), and the price a husband pays for being married to someone genuinely nice on a flight over the Andes.
December 23, 2006
Seven rules distilled from being robbed in three countries, miming through Latin America on fifty words of Spanish, and once finding out that Sumatran third class on a 72 hour ferry is a fine thing to abandon for a flight, an ice cold beer, and a porch with orangutans. Lonely Planet crowd advice, with the receipts to back it up.
December 05, 2006
Frequent visitors might have noticed this blog vanished for a good two weeks. Sigh. Things are better now, though probably still not perfect. A full report to follow later, allegedly.
November 21, 2006
A Technorati claim link, preserved here for historical completeness. Remember Technorati? Exactly. Move along, nothing to see here. Or, if you must, click through for a single bit of 2006 link-rot in its natural habitat.
November 21, 2006
Technorati now ranks this the 27th most popular blog out of sixty million. Impressive, except they also reckon the last post was 475 days ago. Meanwhile a separate site puts the blog's value at $3,760,965.48, calculated to the cent. Any takers? A modest discount is available.
November 07, 2006
I scraped a language database to work out how many you'd need to learn to talk to most of humanity. The answer is at least two hundred, which is impractical. But why settle for one Romance language anyway? Learn the basics of five at once, then move on to Slavic, then Germanic. Speak five languages in three weeks. Badly.
October 11, 2006
Pets.com famously gave away pets to sell dog food, and famously went broke. The flaw: no switching cost. Any dog will eat any food. But what if genetic engineering fixed that? A patented enzyme, a cute puppy for the kids, and a week later, well, you'd better order more food. I'm joking. Kinda. Cars and printers are already most of the way there.
October 01, 2006
The Dutch love their tolerance — gay marriage, soft drugs, euthanasia. But mention the Second Amendment and the sympathy dries up. After watching Hotel Rwanda, though, an uncomfortable thought: what if the Tutsis had been armed? And what if the world kept a well-regulated militia on standby for the genocide we all know is coming next?
September 24, 2006
Has any economist seriously studied the price of public toilets? It is a strange little market, held in place by convention and the size of a single coin. Airports free, train stations not, planes free — for now. Somewhere at Ryanair, someone is surely doing the math on charging two euro a go. And the savings might be larger than you think.
September 06, 2006
Do painters live longer than composers? Hard to say without data — but Wikipedia comes with an XML dump and a curious Sunday afternoon. The resulting graph throws up two oddities: a startling cliff at the modern end (rock stars notoriously die young) and a mysterious dip around the first century AD. One has a boring explanation. The other might not.
August 28, 2006
A monkey hits a typewriter at random. Does abracadabra show up sooner, later, or just as often as abcdefghijk? Most people pick the wrong answer, and the second most popular answer is also wrong. The right answer is sneaky enough that it takes two separate explanations — plus a Python simulation — before it really sinks in.
August 24, 2006
Astronomers have spoken: Pluto is no longer a planet. Sad news for Pluto fans, and an awkward moment for astrologers. After all, their charts dutifully include Pluto's cosmic influence — so do they demote it too, or stand their ground? And if they stand their ground, what about Ceres, Charon, and UB313? Your love life this month may depend on it.
August 17, 2006
Americans visiting the Zurich office liked to compliment its hosts on having such a pretty city — in Sweden. Charming, until the bank started doing the same. The really strange part is that the post office happily delivers the mail anyway. Getting the bank to correct its mistake, however, turned out to require a particular form that could only be downloaded, signed and mailed.
I have seen the future and it is just like the present, only longer.