Enlaces 26.01.2015

The Economist: The conquest of Mexico.On the trail of Hernán Cortés

Cortés was astonished by their city. He thought it “greater and stronger than Granada”; it teemed with fresh game to eat, in the market there were barbers’ shops, and it even had a functioning justice system (modern Mexico, take note). It also provided allies; its people were sworn enemies of the Aztecs and were delighted to join up with the Spaniards. The idea that the conquest is all Cortés’s dirty work is incorrect. “The conquest was a war of Indians against Indians. The Spaniards were far too small a force to do it by themselves,” says Andrea Martínez, a historian and expert on Tlaxcala.

Bret Swanson: How much would an iPhone have cost in 1991?

In 1991, a mobile phone used the AMPS analog wireless network to deliver kilobit voice connections. A 1.44 megabit T1 line from the telephone company cost around $1,000 per month. Today’s LTE mobile network is delivering speeds in the 15 Mbps range. Wi-Fi delivers speeds up to 100 Mbps (limited, of course, by its wired connection). Safe to say, the iPhone’s communication capacity is at least 10,000 times that of a 1991 mobile phone. Almost the entire cost of a phone back then was dedicated to merely communicating. Say the 1991 cost of mobile communication (only at the device/component level, not considering the network infrastructure or monthly service) was something like $100 per kilobit per second.

Podemos y Falange - Dos partidos, un mismo discurso

Pablo Iglésias: "Exprópiese es decir democracia".

Peter Thiel: Stop Wishing For Luck And Glorifying Failure

“I try to go against many of these bromides that people have in Silicon Valley and one of the ones that I really dislike is that somehow failure is this great learning experience or something like that,” he says. 

“Every time a company fails it is not a beautiful working out of the Darwinian free market and it is not a fantastic educational experience for all involved. Every death is a tragedy and that is even true of deaths of companies. 

“I don’t think that we should be setting people up for failure in all sorts of ways and that is something that should be avoid a lot.”

Zhang Jun: China’s Growth Secret

If a country fails to respond adequately to new challenges as they arise, economic growth and development stall. Many countries in Latin America and South Asia, for example, have become mired in the so-called “middle-income trap,” because they failed to adjust their growth models in a timely manner.