popular logistics

The original Teddy bear can be found at the Smithsonian Institute National Museum of Natural History.

The Law of Diminishing Returns: Teddy Bear Corollary:

“A child will be love one stuffed animal. And will also love two. He or she will give them names. With 10 or 20, however, there will be the one or two named favorites on the bed, and the rest will gather dust in boxes, drawers, shelves, under the bed, etc.”

Once people have enough food to eat, and a warm clean bed in which to sleep, additional things don’t make people happy. Or, as Bill McKibben put it, in Deep Economy, “Up to a certain point, more really does equal better.”

Below $10,000 money buys happiness, and as Ed Diener and Martin Seligman quantified in “Beyond Money,” University of Illinois, etc, (click here) “Above U. S. $10,000 per capita income … there are virtually no increases … in well being. Moreover, health, quality of government, and human rights all correlate with national wealth, and when these variables are statistically controlled, the effect of income on national well-being becomes non-significant.”

McKibben tells the story of Du Pei-Teng, who by age 20 had managed to save $12,000 yuan over the course of two years in a shower curtain factory. This is about half of what Du would need to build a small house in his hometown. McKibben reported that Du was able to save this sum by giving up Coke-Cola, even tho it only costs about 8 or 9 yuan, because one can of Coke each day, over two years, would amount to about 6,000 yuan – half of what he had saved, and one fourth of what you need to build a hosue and start a family in China.

Eco-Tourism is becoming big in Mexico. Delfiniti, attracts hundreds of visitors each week to spend an hour swimming with, playing with, feeding, and getting to know dolphins. In Mexico and California, people have also realized that whales are worth more alive than dead. Whale watching tours make more money than whaling ships could - and the apparently sentient whales like to ‘hang out’ with the people in the whale watching ships. They know the people aren’t predators; they don’t try to capsize the ships.

More details to follow.

This is the story of how Dervis Korkut, a Moslem in Sarajevo, saved the Sarajevo Haggada, and then Mira Papo, a Jew, from the Nazis, and how Mira then saved Dervis’ daughter, Lamija from the Serbs. Click here for the details in The New Yorker.

In 1942, Naza Commander Yohan Fortner arrived at the Bosnian National Museum in Sarajevo demanding the museum’s greatest literary treasure, the Sarajevo Hagadda. Dervis Korkut, Muslim, librarian, intellectual anti-fascist, and eventual anti-communist, hid the Sarajevo Haggada. He told Fortner that the book had already been taken by the Nazis. He risked his life to save a book. Another way of looking at this is that he devoted his life to books, ideas, and culture.

In April, 1942, Dervis protected a young Jewish woman, Mira Papo, by bringing her home and passing her off as a Muslim servant to his young wife, Servet, to help care for their infant son, Munib. They risked their lives to save another person.

In 1994, in a letter to the Holocaust Memorial at Yad Vashem, Israel, Mira documented how Dervis and Servet saved her life.

Dervis passed away in 1969. Servet in 1998. In 1999 their daughter Lamija evacuated her children in advance of the collapse of Kosovo. Lamija and her husband were sent by the Serbs to a refugee camp. Lamija went to the Jewish community in Kosovo with a photocopy of Mira’s testimony. Four days later she and her husband were flown to Tel Aviv and reunited with their children, and Mira’s son, Davor Bakovic.

If this story is filmed, Harrison Ford should play Dervis, to Angleina Jolie’s Mira, and Uma Thuman’s Servet. Robert DiNiro should direct and play both Munib Korkut, and Davor Balkovic.