A Phoenician bireme on a relief from the South-West Palace at Nineveh, now in the British Museum. Wikimedia Commons, licensed CC-SA-3.0
Recently I have been reading two online debates about the role of naval force in the 21st century. Over on his blog, Australian economist John Quiggin has been chatting about the Australian navy with commentators like MarkL since 2008. That debate brought up a helpful reading list on strategic theory. Over on his blog, Bret Devereaux has been talking naval power and global trade with people such as Yard. He also got a lively response. I have decided to expand one of my comments to his blog with yet more amateur thoughts.
The 2026 Fibrations Festival in Fernwood, Victoria BC. Being tempted to buy more yarn is never dangerous!
It’s hard for people to know this until they get there, but money has such diminishing returns. Once you can buy dinner and not worry about it, everything beyond that is just marginal square footage in a second home or an extra-comfy seat on an airplane. However, wealth can be useful if you see money as a system. I have more “system points” than others, so if I want, I can donate money to my kids’ school or fund businesses that I think are interesting. Accumulating wealth for its own sake is creatively bankrupt. But deploying it to move needles you care about moving is a super-good use of time and energy.
Startup CEO Daniel Eberhard, interview with Macleans, 10 August 2026
Eberhard is newly rich and elsewhere in his interview sounds like he has been hanging out with bad company who tell him he is more productive than a homemaker who raises children and organizes or a bus driver who keeps the local makerspace going. I think he is smart enough to understand why the rest of us don’t like a few people who were lucky in their parents or lucky in business moving so many needles. But I don’t know he has seen where this kind of thinking leads as well as Agatha Christie saw in 1952.
I wish more people understood that the future of human things is not already determined and just waiting for a wise oracle to reveal it. It is a dynamic system created by the actions of billions of human beings, natural forces, and the world of plants and animals. Nobody from a president to a panhandler can control the future, but they all have a chance to shape it. Anyone who says that a technology or institution is inevitable is selling something, and anyone who thinks that a wise council or sinister cabal control the world is mistaken.
There is an urban legend that a brokerage once found that its best-performing accounts belonged to clients who were dead so could not meddle.1 Financial planners often rely on the theoretical performance of different strategies because actual investors keep putting in money, changing strategies, and taking out money. Skeptics often warn that in practice there are various costs and delays which make the same strategy work differently in real life. Sometimes you take out money to fix your roof just before the market crashes, or put in your whole tax refund just before it booms, or the country with the big investment returns also has big taxes on foreign investors. It occurs to me that I have an account which has followed the same strategy with no new money or withdrawals since 2014.
(This is another post outside the main topic of this blog! If you just want to read about books and swords, my article on ancient spears just appeared with Marine Corps University Press and is open-access!)
A James Bay cat! Cats may be the one good thing about the Internet and I saw this one with my own eyes.
Another year is passing, the tenth which I have ended with a blog post. This was a year of transition and activities outside of the history and archaeology I talk about on this blog. So sit down with a mug of something warm (or a glass of something cool for readers in the Antipodes) while I talk about this past year.
This small business in downtown Victoria has diversified to selling pizza and wine. But that would not protect it if a tsunami washes away the city or the next government decides that anyone who owns an ethnic restaurant is un-Canadian and should have their business confiscated and sold at auction
(The following is outside my usual topics but its an area of my expertise that I have not found anyone else talking about).
Wise investors use diversification to reduce risk. Any one investment might fail for many different reasons, but many different investments are unlikely to fail together. Additionally, what causes one investment to do poorly often causes others to do well. Rising energy prices hurt manufacturing (which buys energy) but not energy companies (which sell it). Rising wages hurt employers with many low-wage employers, but benefit businesses who sell to consumers. Classically, bonds and stocks tend to move in opposite directions under a given type of pressure, so almost all long-term investors will benefit from holding some of both. For most of history opportunities for diversification were limited, and a prudent investor might buy several plots of land, invest in a ship’s cargo, and make some loans to neighbours. In the 20th century, mutual funds allowed small investors to own dozens of different assets for low but significant costs. Today anyone with a bank account in Canada can buy an index fund that holds thousands of different assets around the world for around 0.25% of their investments per year. However, most of these funds lack one important type of diversification.
A very foolish and ignorant man has made a decision. Unlike some people with a PhD, I won’t claim I can predict the future. If you want that, I recommend you find a haruspex and slaughter an ox. What he sees when the steaming liver gleams like a mirror may be true or plausible lies, but at least you will get a summer barbecue for your trouble. But I can describe the structure of the situation as I see it, just like I did in The Iron Horse in Ukraine.
If you are aware of all Internet traditions, you remember that the end of the year is the time when Bookandsword Blog posts about the state of the author and the state of the blog. There is a lot to talk about!
BC had a slightly more exciting than ordinary election, in which the party which had the second most seats and formed government from 2002 to 2017 changed its name and dissolved itself, a party which got less than 2% of the vote and no Members of the Legislative Assembly in the last election came three seats short of a majority, the former head of the Green Party said he would vote for someone whose party is not sure that climate change is real and worth taking action to reduce, and there were bomb threats and hangings in effigy. Amidst that, party politician Kareem Allam is talking about why he changed parties, and he says:
we had MLAs that had been there for 15, 20 years, and we had staff that were 20 years old. All they had ever known were these MLAs, and things changed a lot, and things in society change very quickly nowadays. So it wasn’t reflective and there weren’t really debates of new ideas and new approaches, and there was a sense of stagnation that was occurring around that.
Now, its hard to be eloquent in an interview, especially when you are trying carefully not to offend former or current allies. But that makes me think about the history of the Salish Sea about 150 years ago.
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