| IPencil
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I listen regularly to the Freakanomics Podcast (Radio). And they did a two part series on writing. Starting with, “do we really need cursive anymore”, some light discussion on cursive, it was an interesting podcast, but just for curiosity. Mostly it was a setup for the next week’s one which was far more interesting. The second podcast was on i pencil: an economics treatise by Lawrence W. Reed, founder of fee.org (circa 1958), explaining the complexity of making something as simple as a pencil in the modern world. I’d heard parts of this, in other contexts, and I was very familiar with fee.org, which I’d read a lot of their stuff. But it piqued my curiosity, and read I pencil in it’s entirety. It’s definitely worth a listen or read.
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| This American Life: Nummi and Brand Value
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A podcast about the Auto-Industry and NUMMI plant (now where they build the Teslas). The prelude is America (Demming) taught Japan about Kaizen, and this comes in later, with Toyota trying to teach the evolved lessons back to GM. It's not perfect: it gets some things wrong (based on the few dozen books and articles I've read), but it gets more right than wrong, and still is a good listen.
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| This American Life: The Super
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The Super, was enjoyable fluff. Act 1 was how badly some people under-estimated someone else, and how far removed are you from some very bad people. Act 2 was forgettable. Act 3 was about being a 100 unit landlord will harden and change you. Since we own real-estate, this hit home.
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