Rene Dierkes

Pilot: Gliders, Airplanes, Helicopters; Skier; Scuba Diver...Life should be an adventure!

[Rene Dierkes @renedierkes]

9/11/2026 NYC 6:20am

[Matt Ridley @mattwridley]

Agatha Christie once remarked that she had never expected to grow rich enough to own a car or poor enough not to have servants.

The reason this strikes us as bizarre today boils down to two names that you hear invoked a lot in the tech industry: Jevons and Baumol. One is shorthand for the expansion of products or professions with rising efficiency, the other for the shrinkage of products or professions with stagnant efficiency.

There’s a pleasing chronological symmetry between these twin ideas: William Stanley Jevons coined the Jevons paradox in 1865; William Jack Baumol described Baumol’s cost disease exactly a century later in 1965.

...For every industry that experiences efficiency gains, there’s another that does not. And this latter industry inevitably becomes less affordable. Baumol’s first example was string quartets: violinists are no more productive but you have to pay them more to prevent them running off to become software engineers. The productive industries drive up the labour costs in the rest of the economy.

Marc Andreessen jokes that if a hole appears in the wall of your house in California these days it is probably cheaper to glue a flat-screen television over it than hire a builder to repair it: a Jevons-deflated cost beats a Baumol-inflated one.

The big question of our age is can AI drag Baumol-shaded industries back into the sunlight of Jevons? Can it make things like healthcare, education, or government switch from rising costs to falling costs?

I fear not in the case of government because of a bureaucratic version of the Jevons and Baumol effects. As Cyril Northcote Parkinson put it in an article in the Economist in 1955: “Politicians and taxpayers have assumed (with occasional phases of doubt) that a rising total in the number of civil servants must reflect a growing volume of work to be done. Cynics, in questioning this belief, have imagined that the multiplication of officials must have left some of them idle or all of them able to work for shorter hours. But this is a matter in which faith and doubt seem equally misplaced.”

Since 1997, the British public sector has seen zero increase in productivity. That is to say, the average civil servant generates about the same output today as he did three decades ago.

Think about this for a second. Thirty years ago fax machines were high-tech, the internet was in its infancy, emails were new, Wi-Fi was scarce, mobile phones were voice-only. How is it remotely possible to be no more productive today than then?

We know the answer. Each email is now copied to a dozen people, each report is pasted and copied till it is twice as long, each Zoom call has five times as many attendees, each mobile call is followed up by three times as many WhatsApp messages – and each day at the desk is interrupted by a training session on transgender anticolonial sustainability. That’s a sort of Jevons-Baumol effect: a Jevol?

[Rene Dierkes @renedierkes]

@FreightAlley I hope you have flown the Hudson Corridor crossed over Central Park and then the East River. It is do good that you think it ought to be illegal

[Rene Dierkes @renedierkes]

In a glider climbing 1000 feet with no motor, just using thermals like hawks and eagles do to get high in the sky

[Judge Stephen Dillard @JudgeDillard]

Every American should watch every second of this video.

Thank you, @BenSasse.

[Rene Dierkes @renedierkes]

@rsosa8 Absolutely Gladiator was a horrible movie!!!

[Alvin Foo @alvinfoo]

"Black hole" is a British film production and revolves around human greed. The film lasts less than 3 minutes and the audience is astonished by its ending. It won 4 international awards depicting the black hole in the human greed that never fills.

[Rene Dierkes @renedierkes]

On the Great Wall of China

[Rene Dierkes @renedierkes]

US Ambassador to China and former Senator David Perdue

[Rene Dierkes @renedierkes]

Formation flying in a glider

[JJ @JosephJacks_]

EVERYONE dumb (ok, naive) enough to think the west is ahead of China on AI and that we “must win” … has to watch this brilliant exchange between @altcap and @bgurley. SPOT FUCKING ON.

[molson 🧠⚙️ @Molson_Hart]

https://t.co/b9K9yNW5Dq

[Rene Dierkes @renedierkes]

Standing next to John Bramnick who would make an absolutely fantastic Governor for NJ. Vote for John Bramnick in the Republican primary on June 10th.

[Jon Bramnick @JonBramnick]

New Jersey might have to use our secret weapon to get the drones out of our State. The technique used for years to get people to leave New Jersey …… TAX THEM

[Compound248 💰 @compound248]

Jeff Bezos NEVER took a single share of stock-based compensation and was only paid $80k annually.

He ran $AMZN as an “owner-operator” rather than someone out to get his.

Questions for the masses:❓

Who else takes this type of approach?

Who is the opposite?

[Rene Dierkes @renedierkes]

Flew by the forest fire in NJ today

[Rene Dierkes @renedierkes]

The various forest fires and drought conditions that I saw in NJ, when I flew from Rutland, VT to Cape May, NJ

[Rene Dierkes @renedierkes]

Met with Patient Opportunity fund manager Samantha McLemore and assistant manager Christina Malbon

[Rene Dierkes @renedierkes]

Met with legendary fund manager Bill Miller and current Patient Opportunity fund manager Samantha McLemore

[Saint Adaugoijele ✝️ @JustAdaugoijele]

Catholics should pray these prayers every day..

Pray with me 🙏