An object lesson

After 1,428 years, the world's oldest continually operating business has failed.

Japanese temple builder Kongo Gumi, in operation under the founders' descendants since 578, succumbed to excess debt and an unfavorable business climate in 2006.

The object lesson comes in the details of what brought Kongo Gumi down.  It can be summarized in one word:  Greed.

Yup.  Greed.  Never mind the mumbling about "unfavorable business climate" ... read the article and you'll see that what happened was transparently simple:  The company borrowed heavily to fund real-estate speculation during the Japanese economic bubble in the '80s, then found that its new "assets" were nearly worthless after the bubble burst in 1992-1993.  Business dropped off, it's true — but the company would have been able to tighten its belt and survive through the lean times, if it hadn't had all that debt to service.  But it wasn't making enough to service the debt and still make ends meet, and the spiralling debt killed it.

Ah, the promise of an easy profit.  If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

(link from danjite)

Common cause

There is a lesson to be learned from Virginia Tech and, by comparison, from the Appalachian Law School.

There is a lesson to be learned from United Airlines Flight 93 on September 11, 2001.

I could find other examples.  The Warsaw ghetto, for example.  But the point would be the same.  They all teach the same lesson.

That lesson is quite simple, and can be stated in two words:

FIGHT BACK.

If you refuse to fight back, you are betting your future, your life, and everything else you have to lose, on the goodwill of your attacker.  Where is the possible logic in trusting to the goodwill of someone who has just viciously attacked you without provocation?

Datum: MOND vs. dark matter

In January of this year, Olivier Tiret and Françoise Combes of the Paris Observatory published a paper modelling the formation of barred spiral galaxies, in which they use computer simulations to compare the formation of barred spirals according to a model using Newtonian gravity plus dark matter to a model using MOND/TeVeS.  They found that the MOND/TeVeS model more closely matches the occurrence of barred spiral galaxies as seen today, and also found that bars form much earlier (as soon as a billion years) under the MOND/TeVeS model.