Saturday links

Build Australia. “We need capital flowing into productive and creative industries - companies, factories, infrastructure, culture, and abundant energy - not just investment properties.” Also see Casey Handmer on Australian Defence. Much of these vibes and ideas can applied to the European context.

I loved this long read about how the Swiss watchmaking industry rose to the challenge of the cheap Japanese quartz watch. Includes lots of fun watch and timekeeping facts. with the unexpected industrial manufacturing twist of Swatch recapturing the market for mass production of watches. The key genius behind this turnaround is Nicolas Hayek. “Their prototypes took the Delirium’s approach even further, using ultrasonic welding to build the mechanism directly into the watch’s plastic case. The result was a radical simplification. Instead of the usual 91 parts found in quartz watches at the time, the new watch had just 51, each of which could be inserted from above by a machine, perfect for mass production. It was three times cheaper to produce than any other Swiss-made watch, and could be assembled in a matter of seconds. The team called it the Vulgaris. We know it as the Swatch.”

Related: building Europe’s first traditional architecture school. Building beautiful buildings is something that Europe excels at and is hard to copy.

Why clinical trials are broken and how to fix them. A reading list by Siebe.

Make animal cruelty unprofitable. This may be the best, most succinct description of why animals are treated so badly. At its core it is a collective action problem that can be solved. “The cruelty collective action problem is not some immovable feature of modern agriculture. It was created by technology, economics, and policy — and it can be unwound by them too. The tools are already in hand: regulations that extend to imports, targeted corporate campaigns, industry-wide agreements, humane technologies, and public subsidies.”

Creating new government institutions is often easier than reforming existing ones.

My new personal site: pepijn.xyz