Brendan Byron

On Jan. 18, 1897, California farmer George Jones bought a quantity of livestock feed from Henry B. Stuart of San Jose. As security he signed a $100 promissory note that bore 10 percent interest per month, compounded monthly.

They had agreed that Jones would pay the debt in three months, but the note had run for almost 25 years when Stuart got tired of waiting and told his lawyer to sue. Judge J.R. Welch of the Superior Court of Santa Clara entered this judgment on March 6, 1922:

“Wherefore, by virtue of the law and the facts, it is Ordered, Adjudged and Decreed that said Plaintiff have and recover from said Defendant the sum of $304,840,332,912,685.16 with interest thereon at the rate of 7% per annum until paid, together with the further sum of $50.00 Plaintiff’s attorney’s fees herein with interest thereon at the rate of 7% per annum until paid.”

That’s $304 trillion, “more money than there is in the world, outside of Russia,” the New York Tribune reported drily. Jones paid $19.69 and filed for bankruptcy.

For starters, it hurts you. The iPhone retails for $500, and 64% of that is profit. It’s one of the most profitable items in history. But that’s not all.

It hurts Chinese workers.

The total component cost of an iPhone in 2009 was $172.46. Workers in China assemble the iPhone, but because their wages are low the assembly cost per phone is quite small, only $6.50 a phone. The total production cost per phone is $178.96.

But Chinese assembly means two things: it means that China is technically exporting iPhones to America (and so two billion dollars are leaving the American money supply every year) and that American jobs  (currently scarce) are becoming Chinese jobs (currently plentiful)

So what would happen if Apple assembled iPhones in America?

For the sake of discussion, let’s assume assembly line wages in the U.S. are ten times higher than China’s. Given that Chinese production workers earn roughly $1 an hour, that’s not an unreasonable assumption.  The higher wages would mean that the total assembly cost per phone would rise to $65, and the total manufacturing cost would approach $238.

 But unfortunately, if Apple continued to sell the iPhone for $500, the company would only earn a 50% profit margin.

EDIT: okay, on re-reading this looks pretty raging-lefty, and also somewhat down-with-the-corporations. So I’ll defend Apple and call it balanced: this is the marginal cost to produce one extra iPhone, and so it doesn’t consider retail (those big white stores that never sell anything,) marketing, development, capital costs, and a whole swag of other considerations. They add up, and although the amount of your $500 that ends up as executive pocket-liner is still probably obscene, we’re talking closer to Hays code than Miller test.

Ever since Catherine the Great in the late 17th century, Russia’s leaders have alternated between being bald and having a full head of hair. The full list goes:

Catherine I – Full-haired
Peter II – Bald (shaved for wig)
Anna I – Full-haired
Ivan IV – Bald (infant Emperor)
Elizabeth – Full-haired
Peter III – Bald (shaved for wig)
Catherine II – Full-haired
Paul I – Bald(ing)
Alexander I – Full-haired
Nicholas I – Bald
Alexander II – Full-haired
Alexander III – Bald
Nicholas II – Full-haired
Lenin – bald
Stalin – Full-haired
Khrushchev – Bald
Brezhnev – Full-haired
Andropov – Bald(ing)
Chernenko – Full-haired
Gorbachev – Bald
Yeltsin – Full-haired
Putin – Bald(ing)
Medvedev – Full-haired

Around the world, moths make kamikaze dives into open flames with such regularity that they have their own idiom. What is it about lights that make moths so crazy?

For a long time, scientists blamed the moon. Moths used the moon as a navigational beacon, it was argued, keeping it at a constant angle to their direction of travel in order to fly straight. Light sources used by humans threw a wrench in the works. The moon is far enough away that the angle between it and a traveling moth isn’t going to change much, even after the moth flies a great distance. With a closer light source, though, the angle changes quickly. A moth confusing a light bulb for the moon would notice this change and attempt to correct its path by turning toward the light. After just a few course corrections, the moth would set itself into a tightening death spiral towards the light and eventually crash into it.

On Second Thought…

Over the years, various holes were poked in this hypothesis. For one, moths might not even use the moon for navigation.  There isn’t much evidence for it, especially when it comes to the over 50 percent of moths that don’t migrate and wouldn’t have much use a celestial navigation aid in their short distance travels.

There’s also the fact that moths don’t always circle around lights in a closing spiral like the moon hypothesis assumes. Most of the time, they actually head straight for it. Henry Hsiao, a professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of North Carolina, has tracked moth flights as the bugs headed toward a light source and found that most of the time they fly in a straight line toward the light until they get very close, then veer off and circle at a steady distance.

Hsiao’s observations led him to develop a new hypothesis. He’s unsure what causes the moth to make a beeline to a light, but thinks that the circling behavior at close ranges is caused by a visual distortion common to all sighted creatures called a “Mach band.” The band is the region surrounding a bright light that is perceived as being darker than any other part of the sky. Hsiao thinks that moths hang out in the band because they want the cover of darkness for safety, and wind up circling the light until their flight path takes them away from the it (or causes them to crash into it).

Like this one

…which generated so much buzz that they tracked down the African correspondent and interviewed him about what was going on in it.

If you’re like me, you’ve been wondering with trepidation what will happen when the Gaypocalypse finally strikes. Are fudge-packers, nancy-boys, and pillow-biters all names for the same thing, or do they signify a hierarchy of types and sizes, like orcs? Which are most dangerous? Do bull dykes breed with bull queers? That seems anti-intuitive. And where do the Poohole Pirates come in? Are they like the Men of Harad? What about elephants? Will there be elephants? Will they be pink? Will we be forced to toil in underground sequin mines while Freddy Mercury lashes us with moustachioed falsetto arpeggios? And dear God, why didn’t we listen to Fred Nile?

Thank the Lord we’ve got an unlikely band of warrior heroes placing themselves between us and gaystruction. The Elven Queen Miranda Devine will brew arcane potions, able to fuse completely unrelated concepts with the power of saying she’s a Catholic. Barnaby Joyce will club any stray bits of logic that escape, while Action Bob Katter will ride in on the white bull Shadowhats, wielding the Black Rubber Fist-Pump of Infinite Justice.

And weren’t they active last week? Laying down the early markers in the fight to preserve our grandchildren’s grandchildren’s right to feel guilty and ashamed. Katter and Joyce got busy at an anti-gay-marriage rally in Canberra organised by that font of Messianic compassion, the Australian Christian Lobby. Devine got busy in the confines of her print column. We’ll put up with your weird ways, went the Trio’s message, as long as you remember that your relationships will never quite measure up to ours.

If the intro wasn’t incentive enough to read it, let me assure you: it gets better.