> Per the statement, the large vessels were made to sail north from the Netherlands, around Denmark and toward the Baltic Sea. [...] Uldum adds that shipbuilders made the cogs as large as possible to transport bulky cargo, like timber
Once you've built one cog, you've got the ideal tool to fetch Polish timber to build more!
Yea, this is like the early railroads making steel cheaper via cheaper transport of bulk ore/coal, that made cheaper railroads, that then ship more products made of steel to larger markets opened by the extended rail networks, etc.
This happened with tin all the way back in the Bronze Age, where a lot of it was shipped as ingots from industrial-scale mines / smelters in Cornwall all the way to the Mediterranean empires to mix with copper to make Bronze.
A cog-based auto-catalytic wood industry is super interesting.
Also this stuff never happens by design. Some entrepreneur notices things and the costs, make a decision, suddenly more products exist, organic trading routes appear. There is no need for computers or grand design or hyper-managerial government. The market solves the problem
In the US context that's largely true, with the government providing useful regulations after the fact (allowing national corporations, railroad right-of-way law, etc.).
The exception being guys like JP Morgan who organized industry cartels that acted as private "central planners", part of which turned into the current Federal Reserve Bank.
But for countries like China and many others in Asia with strong state capacity, industrial policy was planned top-down for the "commanding heights" of industry like: roads, rail, shipping, airlines, telecom, steel, energy, etc., and that actually worked very well, faster than private markets alone, with the benefit of existing tech and models to follow.
We are talking about a sophisticated international trading system that happened 600 years ago. Clearly you don’t need anything like that to make it happen. Let alone Ancient Rome, Greece, Assyria, Sumer…
> There is no need for computers or grand design or hyper-managerial government.
The response above is just pointing out that although you don't need a grand design or hyper-managerial government, it can be done using that approach too.
If this stuff worked, then given that Microsoft has a huge share of it, shouldn't Microsoft's products be good? Or at least getting better. I use Bing most days [1], and it's consistently an absolute joke.
[1] to farm reward points to get cosmetic items in video games
Near me, the (nice but always too busy) Old Dairy is getting a cut, and the (mediocre Arsenal fan packed) Bank of Friendship and Arsenal Tavern are getting obliterated. God exists, and he supports Spurs!
A lot of the Leica-branded lenses have an aperture ring that doesn't work on Olympus bodies. Besides that, both brands have proprietary lens + body stabilization that only work if the lenses and bodies match.
Part of what's going on is that all of this stuff is developed by volunteers. If only one person, or three people or whatever, are actually willing to give up hundreds of thousands of hours of their own time to work on something, then those people get to make the decisions about what gets done. There's very little supervision from any kind of "upper management" to catch bad decisions.
On top of that, there's adverse selection here. Who gives up thousands of hours to work on some obscure corner of the Linux desktop? People with quite unusual thought processes.
And aren't diatoms largely responsible for silica deposition in deep ocean sediments, not radiolarians? The latter are zooplankton, and being higher on the food web will not appear in as large numbers.
> Per the statement, the large vessels were made to sail north from the Netherlands, around Denmark and toward the Baltic Sea. [...] Uldum adds that shipbuilders made the cogs as large as possible to transport bulky cargo, like timber
Once you've built one cog, you've got the ideal tool to fetch Polish timber to build more!
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