Reality-BasedTM Political Numbers from Nicholas Beaudrot
Electoral Math
Reality-BasedTM Political Numbers from Nicholas Beaudrot
Harry Potter and the Operational Nightmare | Home | Public Opinion on Reproductive Rights
Angelica Oung discovers the connector conspiracy's vicious plot to make it nigh impossible to get herself to England, along with her little dog, too.
The connector conspiracy was popularized by the hardware accessory companies during the 1980s, but has its roots in a much, much older conspiracy: the railroads. At one point in time, each town had its own quirky local railroad, which was able to handle a different weight of car from the next town over, had different width rails, had different space between each "slat" (or whatever those things were called), could tolerate a different top speed, and so on. Of course, the company that maintained the local railroad was locally owned, so whenever Vanderbilt and his band of merry capitalists came a'calling for standardized rail gauges, the local company would lobby furiously against the outside agitators. This reduced competition and put upward prices on railroads, in addition to making it a pain in the butt to get to the next town over. On the other hand, it kept a few mom-and-pop businesses alive. Analogies between Vanderbilt and the Waltons are likely quite appropriate; though, the railroads would often jack up the price of shipping soon after acquiring a local monopoly.
In the case of the railroads, standardization was an inevitable consequence of the push for trans continental railroads, though it was probably hastened by the tight relationships between Congress and the large trusts of the Gilded Age. In the computer software business, the need for Windows to compete with linux in the Enterprise Server space has force Microsoft to embrace open standards rather than push more proprietary ones. As for animal tracking microchips, Angelica's best bet is to hope that a major chip maker -- such as IBM. Texas Instruments, or Analog Devices -- decides to break into the animal tracking market directly. The big players will inevitably adopt as many existing standards as they can, because their goal is to capture as much of the market as possible, not to preserve their existing share. In theory, this will force the bit players to get on board, or more likely, start buying their chips from the big chipmakers and making their money on services (support for tracking devices, tracking software, etc.).
But I Am Not a Libertarian, so there are no guarantees that the market will do what you want in this case.
| | technorati
Last
updated by Nicholas Beaudrot on 06:25 15 July 2005
