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A stock retains value even without producing dividends. Allowing wealth tax payments in the form of stock, rather than cash, addresses the liquidity issue, especially for large family-owned companies. The challenge lies in accurately valuing the stock for private companies, but that's where finance experts come in ! Furthermore, an agreement between the taxpayer and the wealth fund could accompany the transaction, including terms like holding the stock for a specified number of years, buyback preferences, or limited voting rights. At a discount on the stock price.

Given the financial and legal complexities, as well as the challenges in standardizing the process, this would only apply to payments of a highly substantial amount. But one could argue that these individuals are no longer equal to others in terms of their tax obligations, as they have some ability to negotiate to a certain extent. That's probably the main problem.

Just thinking out loud !

The OS would notify the app that its IP address has changed. The app can then send this new IP to its notification server, for future notification to arrive at the correct IP. No need for an Apple notification server here.

This would still require some cooperation from Apple, for the OS to receive the notifications and dispatch them when the app is not running. A long time ago, when there was no outrageously dominant players, the Internet industry would have produced an open communication protocol for this use case. Using the same protocol and the same notification server for both Android and iOS would be nice. Sadly, this is unlikely in today's Internet.

This 1958 short film (in French) about Plastics is available on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lG1hZyQUF6Y

Was commissioned by an industrialist selling plastics, but is rather high-end for and ad ! Worth watching. I love HN for this kind of unexpected discoveries.

Plastics were regarded as a miraculous material in the 1950s.

Yes. There is a 2h15min high-speed train service between Paris and London via the channel tunnel (Eurostar), which is missing in the data. With connections, part of France is reachable from London, and vice versa. I guess the Deutsche Bahn data used to build this isochrone map is focused on continental Europe.

Graph theorists would call this a "critical bridge": if you remove this single Paris/London link, then a lot of indirect connections disappear without it. And the UK appears railway isolated from continental Europe, which it's not.

If you're interested in the history of Innovation, there is another great reference to add to your list:

Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages, by Carlota Perez

This is a bedside book for any Venture Capitalist interested in the various phases a major innovation goes through. Investment bubbles being one of these phases.

There is one very important book missing from this list: Diffusion of Innovation by Everett Rogers (1). Most of the innovation teaching in business schools today, is directly inspired from this book, first published in 1962. You’d be surprised that the fundamentals of Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory have not changed that much over the years but are still extremely useful today; only the communication channels have changed. The human psychology (early adopters/laggards) or the sociology remain the same. Most people adopt innovations only after they’ve seen the benefits in action in their close friends or relative circles. Hence the importance of social networks for the diffusion of innovations, not to be restricted to early 21st century Facebook style digital social networks.

This theory also explains why innovators should target niche markets, and then expand to larger markets, and not the other way around. It is much easier to overcome the inevitable resistance to change on a specialized niche market, and then the social network effect will help with adoption on larger and larger circles.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everett_Rogers

If you want to store solar heat, you cannot beat water @4000J/kg.K. Black barrels of water is probably the best solution, yet a very simple solution. I've checked the thermal capacity tables, only ammonia would do a slightly better job than water !

I also toy with the idea of building a greenhouse myself, that's why I have done some research. If you want to harness the thermal capacity of earth for a greenhouse, I know of two tricks:

- Excavate one or two meters of soil to build a “pit” greenhouse. You will get earth walls connected to an immense thermal storage capacity. This is the so called Walipini greenhouse concept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walipini

- The diurnal and seasonal temperature oscillations dampen quickly with depth in the ground. Below some meters of soil, the temperature will be stable at the average annual temperature at your location (Ta). If you can dig a trench to lay underground pipes to create a ground/air heat exchange connected to your greenhouse, you will get a free source of air heated at (Ta) in winter or cooled down to the same (Ta) in summer. Fans to force air circulation will help.

The thermal resistance of raw earth is not good, similar to that of concrete. Thermal conductivity is around 10 W/m.K. To be compared to 0.1 W/m.K for a typical building insulating material.

But raw earth is porous and will store moisture, hence behaves like a two-phase material. Water in the earth may vaporize or condensate in the pores, which helps in regulating indoor moisture levels, and explains the high thermal storage capacity of the material. Since earth is cheap, it's also possible to build thick walls and get a high thermal storage capacity in the building envelope. Sun heat will be re-radiated a few hours later at night during winter, and some the cool of the evening nights will be available indoor during summer days. Because of this high thermal capacity, raw earth buildings are good at this so-called thermal phase shift. But raw earth is still a poor insulating material.

The interesting question would be to know if the mix of raw earth + additives necessary for 3D printing, can be reused for a new construction after 20 years.

The raw earth used for traditional building techniques like rammed earth, can be re-used just by adding some water after razing the earth walls, as long as no cement/lime additive was initially used. This is also the Achilles heel of these traditional techniques: moisture will destroy the structure of a rammed earth wall when not appropriately protected with a large roof + above the ground foundation to avoid capillary rise.

Seek Thermal is an alternative provider for thermal cameras: https://www.thermal.com/

Let me expand on this thermodynamical metaphor. Open systems that may exchange matter and/or energy with their environment, can maintain or even decrease their own entropy. This is how living organisms exist, without violating the second law of thermodynamics.

If you see a software system as a living organism, then the natural entropy increase (new feature requests?) may be contained if enough energy (developer time?) is invested. Of course this kind of investment may contravene some other commercial software law, like being profitable.

In 2013, the President of Mali asked France for help in stopping an attack on the capital Bamako by Islamic groups from the North of the country, whose goal was to establish a second Islamic state in the Sahel region, modeled after the Islamic State of Iraq which was developing at that same time. Four fighter jets were sent from France to stop the attackers as they were driving down south in pickups and were just a few hours away from taking the capital Bamako.

7 years later, the French forces are still on the ground, trying to help in stabilizing not only Mali, but also the whole Sahel region. With little stabilization success so far, but a second Islamic state in this area was avoided thanks to this intervention.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barkhane

If you look at what a company really is from a different perspective, then it makes complete sense that an internal innovator cannot exist inside any established organization. Let’s examine how any company came to be: it first started with a few individuals with a shared project, who maybe managed to obtain resources beyond their own resources, for example by raising external capital. With these resources, they create a product or service, and more importantly look for customers. They may not find customers immediately, but through a long and painful trial and error process, they will try many different recipes before they actually discover the recipe to find customers. Companies who can’t find enough customers will die. Initial capital is just delaying this fatal outcome. During this first phase till initial success, the organization is very fluid. The company strategy can be completed changed, the product can be completely changed, the production process can be completely changed … basically anything can be completely changed. A newly established organization is fluid and can reconfigure itself quickly, because it is still small, and more importantly it has nothing to lose doing so.

After a recipe to some initial commercial success has been painfully discovered, then the only strategy that make sense is to replicate it to grow the company. The initial recipe will be scientifically and meticulously improved, optimized, refined and scaled in all its components. Possibly by deploying additional capital, because the investment is now much less risky. This is what professional managers do. They perfect the execution of a recipe and balance risks doing so. Because now, as an established company with many shareholders, thousands of employees, suppliers, customers … the company has so much to lose by doing anything risky. Any established company must be risk averse or it will quickly disappear.

Fast forward a decade or more of commercial success optimizing the same recipe with a risk-averse mindset, which still has room for some internal innovation but only of the incremental type, then any company is no longer fluid but solid. If it’s a public company obsessed with short terms returns, then it’s a very dense solid. It is also a large organization by now, with many gatekeepers to company resources. An internal innovator would have to convince all of these gatekeepers for any significant new endeavor. This is clearly impossible unless the internal innovator is the CEO of the company. That's why companies lose their best innovators. That’s why significant innovation cannot be produced inside large companies, but it can nevertheless be brought in via acquisitions ... sometimes from ex-employees who left to start their own company!

What you see as an established company today, you can also see as a “fossil of its past successes”. That’s why an established company cannot be an innovation machine in my opinion. This was not always the case in the past. It’s probably a consequence of contemporary professional management, with too much emphasis on short-term, low risk and immediate returns.

I think there is an interesting generalization to be made here: major innovations cannot be introduced to the market by raising billions to fund aggressive marketing push campaigns. Only minor innovations can follow this route to market, and it’s still risky.

If you define a major innovation as one that will have to challenge the established habits; then first and foremost, diffusion of a major innovation requires time, not money. To be understood, desired and finally accepted by the market/society. That’s why all major innovations I can think of started from very niche applications, and then patiently won neighboring niches, one after the other, slowly improving in the process, till they eventually became mainstream, sometime after several decades. This diffusion process generally spans over the lifetime of several companies. One example here: automobiles, around which our cities were ultimately redesigned.

It’s difficult to rewrite history, but had Segway started small as you suggested … it may have been more successful in the long run, as a concept and maybe as a company. To really change the world with some major innovation, starting small and targeting niche applications is the way to go.