Lists
Facts are great! Here are some fun ones.
Work in progress - let me know if you have ideas (about lists or, like, generally).
Idiosyncratic US States
Subdivisions
All US states are divided into counties - except for Louisiana, which has parishes, and Alaska, which has boroughs. Louisiana inherited a French legal system based on Catholicism and civil law, which also meant that slave transactions were notarised like real estate, which was the subject of my university thesis. Supposedly the Alaskans in 1955 wanted to create different types of borough - perhaps to avoid a situation analogous to Wyoming and California having the same number of senators…
Lloyd’s
US insurance is state-regulated, and brokers must conduct a ‘diligent search’ for a state-regulated (‘admitted’) insurer before approaching any out-of-state insurers to write what’s known as ‘surplus lines’ insurance. Hence, Lloyd’s of London insurance is only accessible to American companies on a surplus lines basis - except, until 2021, in Kentucky, Illinois, and the USVI, where Lloyd’s had a licence. I’ve not yet been able to find out why they (alone) had that licence, but it’s been true for a long time - the 1988 book A View of the Room presents it as a solid fact.
Zoning
Ok, it’s not a state - but Houston is the larget US city to not have real zoning laws. There were three referenda on zoning, in 1948, 1962, and 1993 - and all of them rejected it. But according to The Big Rich and this article, the 1948 referendum to get rid of zoning was a battle between Jesse Jones, a banker who served in the FDR administration, and his bitter rival Roy Cullen, the leading oilman of his day.
Cullen hated Jones, hated the ‘Jew Deal’, and particularly hated the zoning committee - once he found out that Jones controlled it. Cullen bankrolled the anti-zoning campaign to a 67-33 victory for Texan freedom over Northern collectivism - and got one over Jones in the process.
Marketing Ploys
De Beers didn’t just come up with “a diamond is forever”; they also invented the idea that you should spend two months salary on an engagement ring, ratcheting up the precise number of months over the course of the twentieth century.
Type A/B personality theory asserts that type A people are competitive and ambitious, whereas type B people are relaxed and receptive. Between the 1950s and 1990s, research into the theory was funded by tobacco companies as a way to misdirect attention from smoking as a risk factor in cardiovascular disease - he didn’t have a heart attack because he was a smoker, he was just very type A!
Ogilvy and Mather invented the concept of a personal ‘carbon footprint’ for BP, as a way to distract attention from corporate responsibility for climate change. BP published their first carbon footprint calculator in 2004.
Breakfast was invented by breakfast companies to sell more breakfast. In particular, the idea that it’s the most important meal of the day has been the subject of some pretty serious marketing dollars over the years. The jury’s still out on this one.
My mother thinks that both Halloween and Mother’s Day were invented by American corporations to sell more stuff. Jury’s out on this one too.
Old Software Essays
I wrote here and here about the value of reading old books; if we classify essays about startups and software engineering from before 2010 as “old”, then there are definitely some worth reading. Here’s a (very non-exhaustive) list:
Jun 2004 - Matthew Skala - What Colour are your bits?
Bits don't have Colour, but the law is not Colour-blind.Jun 2002 - Joel Spolsky - Strategy Letter V
This is the one about “commoditising your complement” - perhaps the best thing about this essay is that Joel chose to do it as an essay, rather than an entire book. There’s loads of other good stuff here - e.g. My First BillG Review.May 1993 - Mike Murray - Shrimp and Weenies.
“Microsoft, the biggest small company in the world.” Internal memo. Sounds really funny to a Brit.Apr 2010 - Rands in Repose - The Twinge
”As a manager, think of your day as one full of stories… As these stories arrive, there is one question you need to always be asking: do you believe this story?”Jun 2007 - Marc Andreessen - How to hire the best people you’ve ever worked with
“Some people have it and some people don’t.”Feb 1998 - Eric S. Raymond - The Cathedral and the Bazaar
The original open-source manifesto.Dec 2008 - High Scalability - Real-World Concurrency
I have no idea what’s going on here but it’s very cool. If you can figure out how I found this essay, email me.2005 - Nick Bostrom - The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant
Doesn’t fit, but does fit. Makes me cry.
Expensive Books
Nassim Taleb writes in The Black Swan about Umberto Eco’s antilibrary:
The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
I subscribe to the Umberto Eco view. Here are some books that I’d like to add to my antilibrary, but currently can’t - because they’re out of print and rather expensive: