From Venetian merchants to modern S/4HANA.
In the 1490s, the "modo de Vinegia" let traders record: goods leave stock, a receivable appears, revenue is recognized. Pure double-entry.
The same logic runs today in SAP S/4HANA:
SD handles the sales order and billing. FI posts the accounting lines, debit receivable, credit revenue and tax. CO tracks the internal cost and profitability view.
All entries flow into the Universal Journal.
German Finanzbuchhaltung, Kostenrechnung, and Controlling still mirror this separation, now unified in real time.
530 years later, the principles remain. The platform has evolved.
What piece of centuries-old accounting still powers your enterprise systems?
Rêve de la nuit : replonger dans le son des 90s. 🎧 Faire de la musique à l'époque, c'était une autre philosophie. Ce mariage guitare/basse un peu "plastique", brut de décoffrage, qui donnait toute l'âme aux morceaux.
Ça vous manque aussi cette vibe ou vous préférez la précision moderne ?
Today, as European industry faces immense pressure, Sinn's 20-year-old warning looks less like an academic theory and more like a roadmap of the current crisis.
The lesson? High export numbers can mask a hollowed-out core until it's too late.
While Germany celebrated being the "Exportweltmeister" in the 2000s, one elite economist warned it was a structural illusion.
He predicted that a rising China would steadily hollow out Germany’s industrial core from the bottom up.
Meet the "Bazaar Economy" thesis. 🧵👇
True story: I was invited to speak to a group of Harvard Business School students doing a study trip in Europe. There was also a very prominent German economist. I said that China was destroying Germany’s industrial base. The German literally laughed in my face.
6] ...China didn't stay a low-cost supplier.
It climbed the value chain with ruthless efficiency. By the time Germany realized the "Bazaar" strategy had an expiration date, China had transitioned from a backend manufacturer into a direct, high-tech industrial competitor.
Quantum computing doubters are repeating the mistake of thinking we'd only ever need a few computers.
My ops research work proves the upside: I built a goods-to-pallets algorithm analysts called impossible. It ran great in Excel. Exact solutions for tough problems are coming.
QAOA will open major consulting opportunities. Computational chemistry and quantum simulations are nearing real impact for materials science.
Today: classical cloud sims top out around 44-50 qubits. Quantum cloud hardware delivers 100+.
Game-changing territory ahead. What problems will you tackle first? 🚀
@pegobry_en to be fair business schools are fairly lacking in academic credentials. for econ profs that warn about china look at sinn's bazaar economy. cheap economies will dismantle germany's production in depth (Fertigungstiefe).
copy paste that into your prompts please:
[STYLE CONSTRAINT]
Do not use "Not just X, but Y" or "Not only X, but also Y" sentence structures. Avoid the "Correctio" rhetorical pattern where you introduce a concept only to immediately replace or escalate it with a stronger word. State facts directly without using negative-positive contrasts or artificial escalations.
@peterrhague so true. i memorised for example the table of logical statements, the truth table, and draw from it daily, which is like second nature. i draw from memorised poems to articulate my thoughts.
Greece tops the world in ship ownership with around 20 percent of the global merchant fleet. Greek families drive massive fleets in bulk carriers and tankers through strong international networks.
That viral chart shows only container lines where Europeans shine. Real Greek shipping power runs deeper across vessel types and global trade.
Impressive legacy right? 🇬🇷⚓
Myth: Running a whole country on solar & wind takes up too much land.
Reality: To power ALL of Germany (100% electrified industry, cars, and heat) with a 50/50 mix, it would take just 2% to 6% of its territory. 🇩🇪
☀️ Solar: Most of it can go on existing roofs & facades. 🌬️ Wind: Turbines need spacing, but 98% of that land remains active farmland! 🚜
For nearly a century, physicists insisted that imaginary numbers were baked into the fundamental fabric of reality. 🌌
A 2021 Nature paper even mathematically "proved" that Quantum Mechanics collapses without complex numbers.
But a massive 2026 physics breakthrough just flipped the script.
Researchers discovered that if you change the mathematical rules for how quantum systems entangle, you can run the entire universe on 100% REAL numbers. 🤯
The takeaway? Complex numbers aren't a mystical requirement of nature. They’re just an incredibly highly-optimized analytical shortcut we use to avoid doing monstrously ugly algebra.
Instrumentalists were right: Math is the ultimate modeling tool. It is the map, not the territory.
The year is 1772. A brutal recession hits Britain.
Josiah Wedgwood (yes, the pottery titan) looks at his warehouses. They are overflowing with inventory. Profits are cratering.
He has no idea why.
So, he invents modern cost accounting.
Instead of tracking what merchants owed him, he used double-entry bookkeeping to track internal factory steps. He isolated product lines, accounted for "spoilage" (broken pots in the kiln), and traced labor.
The data revealed a shocking truth: He was actually losing money on his famous, expensive ornamental vases because of hidden waste and specialized labor. He was being saved by his cheap, mass-produced tableware.
He pivoted, changed pricing, and survived.
Fast forward to 2026.
Every week, Solution Architects and Tech Leads present "Total Cost of Ownership" (TCO) models to executives.
And 90% of them are fundamentally broken. Why?
Because modern TCOs are static shopping lists. They look at the AWS bill and engineering salaries, but completely ignore internal systemic drag.
We need to treat software architecture like Wedgwood treated pottery. We need Architectural Double-Entry Accounting.
In software, complexity cannot appear out of nowhere. Every shortcut has a counter-entry.
Take a shortcut to hit a deadline?
Debit: Feature Delivery | Credit: Technical Debt Liability
Spin up 50 uncoordinated microservices?
Debit: Distributed Complexity | Credit: Engineering Capacity (Depleted)
You "funded" that quick release by issuing architectural junk bonds. Now you're paying high interest via engineering toil.
If your TCO doesn't treat Technical Debt, Operational Drag, and Engineering Velocity as balancing financial accounts, you aren't calculating TCO.
You're just guessing.
Stop building architectural "ornamental vases" that secretly bleed your engineering capacity dry. Track the flow of complexity, not just the cloud bill.
Forget Everest. Scaling the peaks of Mars would completely break human physics. 🧗♂️🚀
While Mars is famous for its massive shield volcanoes, tectonic ripping and cosmic impacts have left behind vertical cliffs that dwarf anything on Earth.
If you were to gear up for a Martian mountaineering expedition, this is the brutal reality you would face:
1. The 8-Kilometer Wall (Olympus Mons Basal Escarpment)
Olympus Mons is a broad, gentle dome at its peak, but its base is a deadly trap. The entire volcano is ringed by a near-vertical 90° cliff face stretching 8 kilometers (5 miles) straight up. For perspective, Earth’s tallest vertical drop (Mount Thor in Canada) is only 1.25 km. This is nearly seven times higher.
2. The 7-Kilometer Abyss (Valles Marineris Walls)
Standing on the rim of this canyon system means peering over a sheer plunge dropping 7 kilometers to the floor. The chasm is so vast that the opposite wall barely cuts through the pale orange atmospheric dust haze.
3. Alien Climbing Physics
Climbing on Mars completely rewrites the rules of mountaineering:
- 0.38g Gravity: You feel 62% lighter. Your gear feels like a feather, and you can make massive upward leaps—but managing rope slack and momentum becomes highly unpredictable.
- Void-Black Shadows: Because Mars lacks a thick, light-scattering atmosphere, shadows are brutally sharp. Stepping behind a boulder means transitioning instantly from blinding sunlight to total darkness. Your handholds disappear completely.
- Brittle Terrain: Much of the rock is loose volcanic basalt or fragile impact debris. One heavy boot-strike can shatter an entire ledge.
4. The Visual IllusionBecause Mars is smaller than Earth, its horizon curves away much faster. When you look down from a Martian ridge, the ground drops out of sight rapidly, making the heights feel twice as dizzying and terrifying as they would on Earth.
The Ultimate Question:
If you had a functional space suit and a lighter gravity advantage, which cosmic monument are you tackling first? The 7km depths of Valles Marineris or the 8km vertical walls of Olympus Mons?