The brief mention that the fallout wasn't as disastrous as myth would have it greatly understates just how exaggerated the popular account of tulip mania is.
So many of these articles get it completely wrong. Economically. People weren't going crazy for tulips just because, the government had incentivized investment in tulips. The government at the time basically told people that they could not lose money on investing tulips. It should be a story about governments misallocating resources. That's it, but people quit. Keep twisting it into a story of psychology and mania which it was not.
>It should be a story about governments misallocating resources. That's it, but people quit. Keep twisting it into a story of psychology and mania which it was not.
The fact that it's marketed as a story about psychology and mania rather than government policy gone awry is arguably itself a story about psychology and mania.
People have a need to feel like the forces that control them know what they're doing.
The "government" didn't do much at all, there was no real oversight or guarantee like there is today. The whole concept was novel at the time so there was no law and there were no real procedures. The Dutch Republic may not have had an official king, it also sure wasn't a democracy with real, independent institutions or anything like that. The country was led by a democracy-lite system of nobility/rich people that feels a lot like how early American voting worked (but divided even less evenly).
The closest thing to an involved government wasn't really in favour of trading in immaterial goods at all. Something close to government intervention did happen in one of the two involved government systems after the bubble popped, but it was effectively unratified and useless (the local equivalent of a supreme court even ruled that the government couldn't interfere with the tulip trade).
The entire thing was just a club of a few hundred relatively rich people throwing themselves at a bubble. Most people didn't have the means or money to participate.
The "mania" name is an insult to those who partook as much as it described the trade bubble. It's not related to the modern psychological definition of "mania" that came much later.
In Dutch, where the term came from, manie has also been used to refer to obsessive behaviour for at least 700 years. In English, mania has also been used to refer to a frenzy for a long time. The term itself entered the Dutch language through French, not through Greek, where the non-literal use of the word had already got started.
The Greek word may have referred to a specific mental state, but the meaning has shifted over the thousands of years. The Greek word itself is derived from a Proto-Indo-European word for just thinking if Wiktionary is to be believed, cognate with an old-fashioned word for "remembering".
That's some similarities to the Salem Witch Trials. They were largely about going after whoever had a vendetta and pull with the courts and the bewitchery was the plausible mechanism under which that happens. The 'mania' was largely a veneer under which hid raw projection of judicial-political power to rid political and personal undesirables.
Does it make sense to talk about "the government" in this age? It probably misguides us more than informs us. I've always felt the perception of government at the time is closer to our perception of the captain of the local football team - at best distant and upholding the honor of the village, at worst a thief with a title - rather than how we view it today. Authority of information lay with the church. Maybe replace by "Persons of wealth in positions of power"?
I don't think a city of more than 100,000 would be possible without a substantial amount of civil management.
Deciding with bits are for streets and which bits are for buildings needs an arbiter of som sort for starters.
If a place had a sewer it probably had a government.
Sometimes I like to recall that somewhere in Tenochtitlan there must have been some Aztec administrator doing a job like making sure the road signs are repainted every few years.
Not sure you need any of that. My entire 'city' is private property including the streets. There is absolutely no one to manage them, no HOA, absolutely nothing. If you can't drive on them you literally have to bust out a tractor and fix it. There is no public water or sewer, no public utilities, so you build them yourself and the amortized cost is easily half of paying some asshole working for the state to administer it. No building inspection, no code inspections. No policeman and no fire; you defend your own life and property rather than some crazed man "protecting and serving" the fuck out of you. Taxes are ~$0. Absolutely glorious. I'd be happy if everywhere was like that.
I'm not claiming there is literally no government, I'm claiming they are not acting in planning or maintenance ('civil management') capacity. If you have an easement contract to travel on a 'street' and someone violates it by building a house on it you can still sue them but the government has nothing to do with planning that. The population is not quite 100k but also not an order of magnitude lower either.
Yeah this has happened, where someone went into the easement. Though with fences instead of houses. People just drive around. Realistically no one has decided to die over a fence or house being in the way and no one has decided to die over blocking a car from going around. It's one of those thought exercises that sounds interesting but isn't actually an issue.
Now I suppose at this point you'll move on to the next goal posts. We've been deregulated for 20+ years and we got this long list of gotchas by the statists when we did it but none of the hysterical hypothetical happened and largely because anyone capable of feeding themselves soon realizes acting in extreme bad faith in a place without police is worse for them than it is the people around them. You can add all the 'but but' whatubaut this and that but it simply isn't any more a problem than the fact we also haven't installed anti-aircraft lasers in case aliens arrive.
I'm glad you have the option to live somewhere like that. I'm also glad you can't forcibly impose it on everyone else. I'll take a moderate level of corruption over a completely unregulated anarchic hellhole, thank you very much.
~Most of rural AZ and probably rural AK is like this. There are some 'cities' that never incorporated and have street grids without any sort of government administering them nor any organized system of maintenance.
Socialism seems to be working fine in Canada, it's just selective. Health care, roads, police, fire fighters, sewage, energy & energy infrastructure are all socially owned.
Probably not in the Dutch republic (and even in general in Europe) governments did have significant control of the economy, through mercantilist regulation, monopolies and chartered companies (you required a government charter for a establish a joint stock company). The you had the Dutch Easy India company (and later the English East Company) which was more or less controlled by the state and had a monopoly on international trade.
Governments back then were remarkably interventionist and even kind of semi state capitalist even by modern standards.
Eh 1630s in not the bronze age. The Netherlands was a republic, with quite a complex state apparatus. Sure it wasn't a democracy but there still was a government.
From the article in the comment above, it seems like lack of government involvement is a factor. The article says the courts were unwilling to settle purchase contract disputes. Sounds like a government that is not performing what we today consider a core function, or even libertarians tend to agree civil court is an important function.
> or even libertarians tend to agree civil court is an important function.
Libertarians cannot agree on anything between themselves, they are programmed to hate the government, the hate for each other and humanity as a whole is just a natural consequence of that.
> From the article in the comment above, it seems like lack of government involvement is a factor.
We now have a government that is unwilling to control market excess because the government and big business have merged into one. Actually, the government has resigned from that "core function".
It is also worth pointing out how patchy the price data seems to be. Looking at Wikipedia [0] it seems like there isn't much actual evidence and the exciting part of the bubble was 6 months.
I expect the people involved cared a lot, but it looks like more of a cool curio than an event that could have had serious fallout. Paying $200k for a tulip looks quite tame compared to Blue Poles.
At this point it's extremely unlikely the needed funds will be secured for the foreseeable future. Even if the federal government were willing to contribute, spending $100+ billion of federal tax money on a regional rail project would be a hard sell to say the least.
Most likely the Bakersfield to Merced segment will be the only segment completed. It will end up as a white elephant racking up operational losses until Sacramento finally decides to pull the plug.
I wish that they had done just San Jose to Burbank with a couple stops on the west side of the central valley (starting building from both directions at the same time). I think that was the maximum achievable initial goal.
The Big Dig in Boston cost almost $30 billion in inflation-adjusted money and had nowhere near the impact on the region as a high speed rail system would have in California.
It basically had zero impact outside of the City of Boston.
(And it should have been spent on demolishing that highway, not burying it and not replacing it, then expanding regional rail and transit connectivity in the Boston metropolitan area.)
Silver Line was part of the Big Dig, but I agree the North/South Rail Link should have been part of it. Having no direct connection between North Station and South Station is stupid.
If you're just hosting videos on your website you are probably using High Profile which was standardized in March of 2005, i.e. more than 20 years ago. That doesn't stop VIA and MPEG-LA from claiming they still have relevant patents, but that claim is dubious and hasn't been tested in court.
Note that there's some patents that haven't yet expired, at least in the US. AFAIK this is because if there's delays in patent examination you get extra duration on your patent to compensate. Here's a list of the patents that were filed before High Profile was standardized and are still valid: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Have_the_patents_for_H.264_M...
Of course MPEG-LA deliberately makes figuring out which patents cover which parts of H.264 (which is really a set of multiple standards spanning a 10+ year period) ambiguous and hard to determine in order to sell more licenses.
MPEG plays a clever game with their standards. A standard like MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 Part 10 (aka H.264) doesn't just refer to one standard but rather a whole series of standards published over an extended period. Patents are pooled by standard with deliberate ambiguity over which parts of the standard each patent actually covers.
This lets patent holders spread FUD over whether earlier parts of the standard are actually patent free even after 20 years have passed since the original publishing.
In the face of patent holders threatening a costly legal battle, companies choose to continue paying licensing fees even on standards which plainly should be out of patent protection.
So far only the Nasdaq-100 has gone along with SpaceX's special weighting chicanery. The biggest fund which tracks the Nasdaq-100 is QQQ. Suffice to say, if you have money in QQQ you should be re-considering that position.
The increased activity came from Igalia who started working on Servo in 2023 with support from the Linux Foundation. Prior to that the project was effectively dead in the water with no sponsored development.
But the question still remains, why did Igalia pick up a dead project?
I doubt you'd invest that kind of money/time into a project without a good reason. I am not saying that ladybird or manifest v3 are the reason, I just notice a lot of new energy in the not-just-chrome category and wonder what the other reasons might be.
Andreas Kling is pretty open about his reasons to have started the ladybird project and I just know Servo from his monthly videos and a few other sidenotes, so I was surprised that it gained so much traction after being basically dead.
> But the question still remains, why did Igalia pick up a dead project?
Igalia is generally pro open-source, and Servo certainly aligns with their ethos, but a lot of the money came from Futurewei / Huawei who are interested in Servo because it's not US based, and therefore they are actually able to contribute to it (they are effectively banned from contributing to Chrome/Firefox/Safari due to US sanctions). There is now also funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund who are also interested in a "European browser" (and NLnet, but they fund all sorts of things)
As I understand it, funding was provided by NLnet[1], a longstanding Dutch non-profit that focuses on supporting open internet technologies. The funding was provided specifically for reviving Servo. By the looks of it, the money itself mostly comes from the EU, which has various grant programmes to fund open access technology, digital sovereignty, etc. Given several Servo contributors worked for Igalia, I expect they submitted a proposal to NLnet for them to fund Servo development, and it was successful.
It’s a physician who gets paid a subscription by a small panel of patients.
Pros: more time spent with patients, access to a physician basically 24/7, sometimes included are other amenities (labs, imaging, sometimes access to rx at doctors office for simple generics, gym discounts, eye doctor discounts, etc)
Cons: it’s an extra cost to get access to that physician yearly ranging from a few hundred US dollars per year to sometimes thousands $1.5k-3k (or tens of thousands or more), those who aren’t financially lucky to be that well off don’t get such access.
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That said, some of us do this on the side to augment our salary a bit as medicine has become too much of a business based on quantity and not quality. Sad that I hear from patients that said a simple small town family doc like myself can spent 20-30mins with a patient when other providers barely spend 3 mins. My regular patients get usually 20-30mins with me on a visit unless it’s a quick one for refills and I don’t leave until they are done and have no questions. My concierge patients get 1 hour minimum and longer if they like. I offer free in-depth medical record review where I get sometimes boxes of old records to review someone’s med history if they are a new concierge patient. Had a lady recently deal with neuropathy and paresthesias for years. Normal blood counts. Long story short. She had moderate iron deficiency and vitamin b 6 deficiency from history of taking isoniazid in a different country for TB and biopsy proven celiac disease. Neuropathy basically gone with iron and b6 supplements and a celiac diet after I recommended a GI eval for endoscopy. It takes time to dig into charts like this and CMS doesn’t pay the bills to keep the clinic lights open to see patients like that all the time and this is why we are in such a bad place healthcare wise in the USA were we have chosen quality than quantity and the powers that be are number crunchers and not actual health care providers. It serves us right for let’s admins take over and we are all paying the price.
So much more I want to say but I don’t think many will read this. But if you read this and don’t like your doctor, please look around. There are still some of us out there that care about quality medicine and do try our best to spend time with the patient. If you got one of those “3 minute doctors” look for one or consider establishing care with a resident clinic at an academic center were you can be seen by resident doctors and their attending physicians. It’s not the most efficient but can almost guarantee those resident physicians will spend a good chunk of time with you to help you as much as they can.
> It’s a physician who gets paid a subscription by a small panel of patients
That's how it works here too, in PCP-Centric plans. The PCP gets paid, regardless if the patient shows up or not. But is also responsible to be the primary contact point for the patient with the health system, and referrals to specialists.
"Public good" is a term of art in economics which means a good is both non-excludable (it is impractical to control who benefits from it) and non-rivalrous (one person benefiting does not prevent others from also benefiting).
Roads are clearly rivalrous and while it's often impractical to prevent non-payers from entering a toll road, one can certainly record them and met penalties after the fact to discourage it.
You’re both right. Roads can be an impure public good.
At low traffic loading, they are not rivalrous and can be modelled as a public good. At high traffic loading they become rivalrous and thus closer to a common-pool resource.
If roads are made excludable, they resemble a club or even private group.
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