Catching up

A few snippets from links I've saved over the past 2 weeks:

Modern humans aren't very robust, due to diet and lifestyle changes:

"Twenty thousand years ago six male Australian Aborigines chasing prey left footprints in a muddy lake shore that became fossilized. Analysis of the footprints shows one of them was running at 37 kph (23 mph), only 5 kph slower than Usain Bolt was traveling at when he ran the 100 meters in world record time of 9.69 seconds in Beijing last year. But Bolt had been the recipient of modern training, and had the benefits of spiked running shoes and a rubberized track, whereas the Aboriginal man was running barefoot in soft mud. Given the modern conditions, the man, dubbed T8, could have reached speeds of 45 kph."

A really interesting look at trends in micromanufacturing, in the context of a book review:

"The implosion of capital outlay requirements, overhead, and production costs, and the unenforceability of the “intellectual property” laws from which artificial scarcity rents are derived, mean that all the traditional sources of monetized value are collapsing. Today, in 2009, we see an economy awash in surplus capacity and surplus investment capital, with no plausible scenario by which that capacity can be utilized or productive outlets for that capital can be found; the idea that some combination of debt-fueled consumption and planned obsolescence can get the factories back to churning out eighteen million cars a year is a joke. What we’re left with is the near certainty of long-term unemployment gradually creeping into the teens, and idle plant and equipment turning to dust, as an underemployed workforce produces growing shares of the value it consumes in the informal economy, and a growing share of physical production takes place in small shops and garages."

and ...

"The individual startups, given sufficient agility to switch rapidly to new products as returns collapsed on the old ones, could produce enormous ROI compared to traditional industrial investment. The problem is that, despite the astronomical rate of return, the absolute quantities of capital required for such startups was so small; even a million garage shops, if they require only a few grand to get started, will use only a fraction of the capital that used to be invested in conventional industry. So the overwhelming majority of available capital still sat idle without any productive outlet. What’s more, those enormous ROIs were as unstable as a uranium atom; the problem was that with the initial capital outlays required so small, and entry barriers so low, the period of entrepreneurial rents from being first to market kept getting shorter and shorter, until the investors were barely staying ahead of the shock wave of competitive price implosion."

A fascinating study of economic behavior in primates:

"Dr. Noe says that monkeys arrive at these economic outcomes not through sitting down and negotiation, but through feeling and emotion. Monkeys develop positive associations toward a container-opening member of the society, and they just want to groom her. But once another monkey can open the container, the skill isn't as unique, the positive feelings diminish, and grooming goes down. It's the law of supply and demand played out along the neurohormonal pathways that deal with emotion in the monkey brain."