38 Comments
User's avatar
Kurt Schuler's avatar

For readers unfamiliar with the reference, the one-hoss shay (carriage pulled by a single horse) is from the poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., "The Deacon's Masterpiece or, the Wonderful One-Hoss Shay: A Logical Story," available here:

http://holyjoe.org/poetry/holmes1.htm

Expand full comment
Ken in MIA's avatar

Thanks for that: I assumed “one hoss Shay” was like “groat teary.”

Expand full comment
Thomas L. Hutcheson's avatar

Grade School staple!

Expand full comment
gas station sushi's avatar

Did you drop it off at the same shop as Hunter Biden?

Expand full comment
MikeDC's avatar

Came into the comments to make the same joke!

Expand full comment
Scott Gibb's avatar

I don’t recommend it, but many of my posts were written on my little phone, typed out one letter at a time with my pointer finger, often while sitting in my car, sometimes in a parking lot. Does it show?

Expand full comment
gas station sushi's avatar

You are good. Me on the other hand. I pound out my comments on a blackberry. It most definitely shows, thus my handle of expired, mediocre raw seafood.

Expand full comment
Invisible Sun's avatar

There's always the public library option

Expand full comment
David R Henderson's avatar

I noticed something missing in my life. It's your posts. I hope your computer gets well soon.

The one-hoss shay thing reminds me tangentially of one of my favorite terms from my UCLA transportation economics professors, George Hilton. He referred to horses that pulled wagons in NYC, at the end of their working lives, as being "fully depreciated." My late friend Harry Watson, a fellow Canadian who had come down with me for graduate school, and I laughed out loud every time George used the expression.

Expand full comment
T Benedict's avatar

Best explanation ever for "fully depreciated"! Thanks.

Expand full comment
David R Henderson's avatar

You're welcome.

Expand full comment
Hroswitha's avatar

Fervently hoping that the computer's fixed or replaced soon; I've missed reading Dr. Kling's daily post.

Though, looking at my own laptop, which is starting to show its age, it's clearly not designed along one-hoss-shay lines. The E and A keys are worn to a point that the letters are no longer visible; the left-hand CTRL key is starting to wear out, occasionally not registering, or requiring more pressure to make it work; and the backspace key is starting to give out, occasionally requring some extra pounding. If the computer'd been designed on OHS principles, the heavily used keys would be more robust, and the keys for the less-used letters would be more flimsy, so that the whole keyboard would wear at the same rate—and, per Holmes, would all give out at once, at the same moment that the power supply failed and the screen went dark...

Expand full comment
Axel Kassel's avatar

Dr. K's computerless spell (of short duration, one hopes) is a loss for his readers. The prospect of such an event is why I cling to a faithful 2012 MacBook that remains fully functional, for text at any rate, as a backstop against glitches in its more nifty successor.

Expand full comment
Beemac's avatar

And the obsolete OS is more vulnerable to those nefarious hackers.

Expand full comment
stu's avatar

Depends on what you use it for. And where.

Right?

Expand full comment
Tom Grey's avatar

I’d guess the actual data would show show far fewer numbers of obsolete Macs hacked than current Macs, and both far fewer than new or older Windows computers. In absolute numbers, not %.

Expand full comment
Michael Rappaport's avatar

Like others, I very much miss your daily posts. Let’s hope that computer gets fixed soon.

Expand full comment
Tom Grey's avatar

The barbell strategy for college ai use

https://inexactscience.substack.com/p/university-education-as-we-know-it

Fundamentals, thinking with no ai, plus projects with max ai.

Students want minimum work.

Expand full comment
Adam Cassandra's avatar

Attended an AIER Harwood Salon last night on the administrative state, which is big and growing with a political class like an ant pretending to steer an elephant. I could sense the frustration and despair of the well-informed audience that we are all just waiting for Leviathan to run out of money. Apparently, Stablecoin will delay the inevitable by tapping into the savings of Guatemalan dentists, so we'll be administering a "haircut" to them too.

As the Red-Blue duopoly gerrymanders itself into full abandonment of the center, what is to be done? A new fiscally conservative, socially agnostic party? A balanced budget amendment? True healthcare (and much easier social security) reform to cut the albatross from around our neck?

Expand full comment
Tom Grey's avatar

SS easy? Easier?! Hmm, increase the SS top level for tax, or no top, reduce the excess benefits. It becomes, remains a UBI-ish safety net for the old, for whom the disincentive to work doesn’t matter. The high earners pay far more into it than they receive. Blacks & men who die younger receive less.

Needed consumables, food & clothes, become cheaper as human based heath care gets more expensive. There’s too many possible ways to reduce health costs to list, both Dems & Reps should be proposing a main idea for reform, and a list of changes.

A big one is to increase the number of med schools & numbers of doctors graduating.

Expand full comment
Roger Sweeny's avatar

To repeat from Matt Gelfand's comment below:

Reminds me of Ernest Hemingway's dialogue about bankruptcy in The Sun Also Rises.

"How did you go bankrupt?"

"Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly."

Expand full comment
gas station sushi's avatar

We should start a gofundme for Arnold. He needs a burner laptop asap or at least some better contingency planning to stop outages. His 10k+ subscribers miss him.

Expand full comment
Tom Grey's avatar

My tablet’s only a little better than my phone for writing posts with links, but ok for comments.

Plus I have one (or 3?) old computers including for wife & kids.

I read posts on the iPad almost as well as on my computer, and in more comfort on the couch.

Thanks for letting us know. Maybe we can treat it a bit like an open thread.

Lorenzo just noted on the Great Feminization how it is destroying Hollywood & stories, by great-because-girl, and bad-because-boy, shallow, anti-culture stories.

Expand full comment
Hemant Kumar's avatar

Is there a possible connection between the Ship of Theseus and the One-Hoss Shay? Could someone explore the connection between the two?

Expand full comment
carl's avatar

Applicable to Banks. A friend was part owner in a small bank. Sold to Continental (Chicago) on a Friday (stock deal) , partied on Saturday. Continental went bankrupt on Monday. OOPS! My friend did NOT commit suicide. Analysists on the Thursday before said All was OK.

Leverage is great until is isn't.

Expand full comment
Dallas E Weaver's avatar

My old fingers don't work on iPhones. Battery science is good enough for car batteries with a 3-year design life to fail just before that 3 years, so you have an incentive to use the same brand. Lithium-ion batteries in laptops are more cycle-dependent than absolute time.

Expand full comment
T Benedict's avatar

A backup machine recommended to enable disaster recovery / business continuity. And, of course, external drives for backing up data every day no matter what. Looking forward to resumption soon!

Expand full comment
Chartertopia's avatar

I have gotten paranoid about backups. I have a fireproof safe with two sets of backup drives which I rotate through, and all my computers use Syncthing to back up everything to each other and to a home-grown cloud server. I have had to recover files a few times, always from user error.

The hardest backup lessons I learned were to always have multiple backups, and always check backups once in a while; pick some random file and try to recover it.

Expand full comment