Busi-ness Archives – Page 2 of 18

February 7, 2023February 9, 2023

Drought’s Over, Right?

One good January won’t reverse climate change. Photo from Reuters.

Californians always seem to have too much of something: too much sun, too much traffic, too much money, too much water in the wrong place at the wrong time, and not enough elsewhere. Our recent spate of rainy days caused massive flooding and damage, and we gritted our teeth, slowing down for all the construction equipment, muttering the magic words “snowpack” under our breath. Every day in late December and January, the local newscast would have a story that started with, “The rain this past week has everybody asking, ‘Is the Drought over?'” Researchers say…

No!

The creek near Niles Canyon. Spikes won’t last long enough. Photo from waterdata.usg.gov.

It Ain’t Enough

Our snowpack level is at 205%. Woohoo! Creeks have flooded, hills have slid, and all the measurements that can have spiked. But don’t be fooled by all the temporary flooding.

There is good news. The snowpack is at its deepest level in 30 years. News stories like this one are saying “the drought could be coming to an end.” Dams like Shasta and Oroville are back up to 65-70%. This is cool! How many times have we driven by Mt. Shasta when it didn’t have any snow in March? That was depressing. This is good. We want rain; we want snow. Sorry to all of you stuck in snow traffic on highway 50. Too many, California, too many skiers, too much traffic. Same as it ever was.

April 24, 2022April 25, 2022

U is for Usury

German woodcut of Italian bankers. Photo from medium.com

Usury was denounced by the Catholic church in the Middle Ages, a potential route to heresy and excommunication. But royalty, the church, and the merchants needed bankers. The bankers found ways around restrictions. The Medici thrived on banking, but it proved to be their downfall, or their rise depending on how you look at it. Lending to people in charge seems to have an inherent risk, usury or not.

Criminal Interest

Usury is defined as charging an “exorbitant” interest according to Webster’s. But there’s that third dictionary definition, listed as Obsolete. Usury was once defined as charging any interest at all. It varied with the century.

There were banks in Rome, which might charge from 5-12% interest. There were banks in the 6th century Byzantine Empire, because Emperor Justinian set loan rates, which varied by the venture: 4% for “exalted personages,” 7% for business loans, and 12% for maritime loans. The Council at Nicea centuries earlier had banned interest but for clergy, not everybody.

Yet a few centuries later, between the time of Charlemagne (750 CE) to the Black Death (1350), usury was more strictly banned. First, the Catholic church said that usury was banned to everybody, that you could not have a transaction where more was returned than was given. Even in a simple transaction, like selling a cow, the farmers had to find a just price, where they would only receive what it cost.

April 23, 2022April 23, 2022

S is for Summa di Arithmetica

Pacioli also created a font. This Majuscule seems especially appropriate.

Having just spent the past two months analyzing a 1494 accounting textbook, it seems natural to devote one my alphabetic letters to the greatest math teacher of the Renaissance age–Luca Pacioli. I stumbled upon him and his work last year for the letter “P,” so I’m not going to rehash his biography.

Luca Pacioli woodcut from *Summa*, his 1494 600-page math textbook.

Nor will I tell you the secrets of my 35-page treatise on how this chapter on double-entry bookkeeping for Florentine wool merchants reveals their pious contract with heaven and the Catholic church. Feather Beds and Jesus may just be my next book, who knows? What I will talk about is why this work was so revolutionary, despite accusations of plagiarism and critics calling it of “little or no value.” Boo on them!

Free the Numbers!

If numbers give you a headache, I apologize in advance. But we have to talk about numbers. Perhaps you aren’t crazy about multiplying large numbers, like 9876 * 6789. That’s what calculators are for. Now imagine that it’s the year 1490 CE, and you’re still using Roman numerals, and you don’t have a calculator. You have to multiply IXDCCCLXXVI * VMDCCLXXXIX. Can you imagine? There were, apparently, ways to multiple Roman numerals that involved writing them in columns, doubling and halving, then crossing out odds and evens. You would be desperate to find an easier way. Welcome to Hindu-Arabic numerals.