Mind Tavern Edition 17
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Turnaround story of a humble 140-year-old Book Company
We all enjoy the enticing aroma of a new book and the thrill of discovering personal little markings we made years ago on those fading white pages. We have all but forgotten the joy of picking out a book from the local bookstore. Barnes and Noble is probably the last one holding the fort against the onslaught of Amazon, and it was down in the dumps, going into a steady decline in the last decade or so. But one guy named James Dunt entered the field and turned it around to become a profitable business in just two years. Read here.
For a start, he refused to discount his books, despite intense price competition in the market. If you asked him why, he had a simple answer: “I don’t think books are overpriced.”After taking over Waterstones, he did something similar. He stopped all the “buy-two-books-and-get-one-free” promotions. He had a simple explanation for this too: When you give something away for free, it devalues it. But the most amazing thing Daunt did at Waterstones was this: He refused to take any promotional money from publishers.
Of course, there’s a lesson here. And it’s not just for books. You could also apply it to music, newspapers, films, and a host of other media. But I almost hate to say it, because the lesson is so simple. If you want to sell music, you must love those songs. If you want to succeed in journalism, you must love those newspapers. If you want to succeed in movies, you must love the cinema.
The uniqueness of the Faroese Taxation System
The Atlantic writes about what is supposedly the cleanest and most efficient taxation system in the world. Faroe Island, a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark, does tax selection centrally with no deductions and no need to file any returns. They monitor your financials and adjust your withholding as necessary if you lose a job or get a new one. This does risk privacy and requires immense trust in your government, but it seems like a nice idea to consider. Read here.
That brings me to ideology. Almost as remarkable as TAKS itself is the fact that the Faroese tax code has no income-tax deductions of any kind. This greatly enables the automation of the system, because all of the calculations are much simpler.
This is frankly impossible to imagine in the U.S., even if we were to replace the numerous tax-code handouts (165 of them at the Treasury Department’s last count, although that also includes business benefits) with direct payments. It would require a bone-deep acceptance of taxation that is directly at odds with centuries of American history. We are raised on “the idea that wealth is privately produced and then appropriated by a quasi-illegitimate state, through taxation,” as the economist Yanis Varoufakis writes. Tax deductions encourage the recipients of government largesse to believe that they are rugged individualists clawing more of their own money back.
Are the days of fine dining finally over?
You must have seen The Menu starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Ralph Fiennes, which beautifully satirises the pretentiousness of fine dining and how it sucks out the joy from eating and the chefs who are always under pressure to amaze and enthrall. This article comes in the aftermath of the closure announcement of Noma, the iconic restaurant categorized as one of those “internationally renowned, ardently coveted temples of gastronomy that are forever trying to dazzle self-regarding epicures with new stunts, novel sensations, modes of presentation that we hadn’t imagined, flora and fauna rarely pinned down on a plate.” Read here.
The price of a meal is 3,500 Danish kroner, or $500—without wine. A three-hour-long meal, comprised of 20 courses, could include a cod roe waffle; grilled koji cake wrapped in cucumber skin; and reindeer blood caramel. This was a restaurant in a class of its own—until it wasn’t. Since opening in 2003, Noma has led the way for a swath of extremely expensive, painstakingly detail-oriented restaurants to open around the world. The kinds of places where perfection came above all else—including, it turned out in many instances, the well-being of staff.
Evolution of music: A statistical analysis
In the last 50 years, music has gone through innumerable shifts, and this article tries to find a quantitative angle on them. In other words, the author brought Excel to a guitar fight. He goes through Billboard’s Hot 100 and Spotify’s song attributes as the base data. Some interesting trends emerged, like the democratization of music, a reduction in the length of songs and the number of words used in hit songs. Read here.
The Entitlement of Opinion on everything
A short piece by a philosophy lecturer argues that you’re not entitled to your opinion, you’re only entitled to what you can argue for. Read here.
The problem with ‘I’m entitled to my opinion’ is that, all too often, it’s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. It becomes shorthand for ‘I can say or think whatever I like’ – and by extension, continuing to argue is somehow disrespectful. And this attitude feeds, I suggest, into the false equivalence between experts and non-experts that is an increasingly pernicious feature of our public discourse.
More good reads for a lovely weekend.
Read this lovely short story titled The Case of the Four and Twenty Blackbirds by Neil Gaiman.
An NYT story about a ridiculous and nerdy dating system that actually works.
A nice The Cut essay on the impending vibe shift across the globe catalysed by the pandemic.
A brand story by The Hard Copy on the rise of Akshaykalpa.
Another good piece on the corporatisation of Drinking Water by capitalist America.
Something very cool: Classic art meets Modernism
Alexey Kondakov juxtaposes contemporary consumerism and pop culture with characters from classical art by incorporating them into modern contexts.
A book you should check out: The American Kingpin
I picked up this book randomly while exploring something on privacy and the ideas of libertarians. It was nonfiction but read like a fast-paced crime thriller, which I could not put down. It traces the story of Ross Ulbricht, founder of the erstwhile Silk Road, which was touted as the Amazon of everything illegal. The book traces the journey of Ross, from coding in the basement to create the website all by himself to ordering hits on people who threatened to expose him. The intriguing thing about Ross is that, at no point, he thought that he was doing anything wrong. He believed he was leading a revolution against the evil government and advocated for high individual freedom, regardless of the social cost.
Levels of morality
Yet to some of the buyers and sellers on there, this freedom was a problem. The mellow people who bought and sold weed on the site didn’t want to be associated with the speedy people who bought and sold cocaine. Some of the hard drug dealers didn’t want to be in the company of the right-wing crazies who hawked guns. And some of the gun guys didn’t want to be in the same shopping cart as the scummy heroin dealers. Round and round it went.
For inspiration, Arto suggested that Ross should read a relatively unknown novel titled A Lodging of Wayfaring Men. The novel tells a tale of a group of libertarian freedom seekers who create an alternate online society on the Internet that operates using its own digital currency, free from government control. In the book this online world grows so quickly that the U.S. government becomes petrified by its power. FBI agents are sent out to try to stop the Web site before it destroys the very fabric of society.
Thread(s) of the week
Hilarious thread by one of my favourite comic book writers, Matthew Inman. Check this out.
A nice thread on Salvador Dali’s eccentricity and the thought process behind his masterwork Persistence of Memory.
The Internet is beautiful.
Fun stuff for you to discover!
Character.ai: Two former Google researchers have created a chatbot that allows you to converse with AI approximations of famous figures.
Music Historian: Nifty little tool to discover new artists. It uses Last.fm’s directory of 30k+ artists to find a similar one to your choice of artist/genre.
If you were wondering how is the new fancy James Webb Telescope different from the Hubble telescope, here is an interactive tool for you.
Fold N Fly: Paper aeroplane database with instructions on how to fold them, if you need to keep the kids (or yourself) entertained for hours. The place is neatly organised with levels to get everyone from a child to a nuclear physicist engaged.
Guess The Year: A pretty cool guessing game where you guess when an event happened. Surprisingly fun