Monday 14 July, 2025
Jeep lite
If you’re a recovering petrolhead (like me) one of the (many) pleasures of being in France is the number of beautifully-restored iconic vehicles one comes across. We found this one outside a petrol station in the Rhone alps on our way homewards from Provence.
It’s reminiscent of the 2CV generation of minimalist vehicles with no frills and easy repairability which were cheap to run and mostly designed for the warm and Sunny south.
Absolutely minimal interior. Such vehicles would, I guess, be illegal today; but they are a reminder of more innocent days.
Quote of the Day
”If, at the close of business each evening, I myself can understand what I’ve written, I feel the day hasn’t been totally wasted.”
- S.J. Perelman Me too.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Mozart| Trio in E-flat major for Clarinet, Viola, and Piano, K. 498, “Kegelstatt”, 1. Andante
Long Read of the Day
The law of unintended consequences strikes again
The economist Tim Harford is one of my favourite FT writers, and this week’s column (Gift article) by him about how hard it seems to be for governments to do joined-up thinking is a pleasurable must-read.
Here’s how it begins:
Economists love to tell each other stories about perverse incentives. The “cobra effect” is a favourite. It describes an attempt by the British Raj to rid Delhi of its cobras by paying a bounty for each cobra skin, thus encouraging a thriving cobra-farming industry. The cobra story is probably an urban myth — or a policy wonk’s version of one — but there is more evidence of a very similar scheme for Hanoi’s rats in the early 1900s. Rat tails brought a bounty from the colonial government, and soon enough the city was crawling with tailless rats who had had their valuable tails clipped before being released to breed.
It’s easy to dismiss such policy blunders as a thing of the past, but the Straits Times and Climate Home News recently reported on a striking scheme in Melaka, Malaysia, where locals were selling cooking oil that would eventually be used to supply European producers of aviation fuel. The underlying idea of turning a waste product, used cooking oil, into something that can be blended into aviation fuel seems as appealing as getting the cobras out of Delhi. Cooking oil starts tasting bad after being used for frying three to five times, but as an input to aviation fuel, used oil is perfectly good.
At this point two intriguing forces intersect: European governments are demanding that airlines use more biofuels from sustainable sources — used cooking oil being one — while the Malaysian government subsidises cooking oil…
You can perhaps guess what comes next. Read on to check!
Cloudflare to AI web crawlers: pay for content or be blocked
Yesterday’s Observer column:
The big news of the month is that a large tech company has declared war on the AI industry. On 1 July, Cloudflare, a leading cybersecurity and content delivery network (CDN) provider, through whose servers about a fifth of all internet traffic passes, declared “content independence day”. From that day onwards, AI web crawlers – the bots that tech companies use to scrape online content – will not be able to access sites running on Cloudflare’s servers without paying compensation to the owners of those sites.
Why is this a big deal? Several reasons…
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