Life can seem very unfair


That photo first appeared in the 2007 post The Almost Submerged Cathedral and shows me riding my Moulton APB-14 bike round the Lac du Der Chantecoq in the Champagne region of France. I have been a Moulton owner for twenty years and some time ago had the privilege of visiting the bike's designer Alex Moulton at his Jacobean house in Wiltshire, where he had created workshops in the stable block. He read mechanical sciences at Cambridge and went on to pioneer the use of rubber in vehicle suspensions; his designs were used in the original Morris Mini as well as the unique small wheeled Moulton bikes. Now news has come of the death of Alex Moulton at the age of 92. The Telegraph obituary tells us “Toward the end of his life Moulton became increasingly exasperated with the decline of British engineering – something he ascribed variously to television, the financial services industry and the failings of the educational system”. In the last few weeks we have lost so many great minds. And what are we left with to console us? – Twitter. Life can seem very unfair.

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Comments

teledyn said…
alas, it is not twitter, it is not adhd or heavy metal, those are all just symptoms of the same thing; it is undoubtedly usary that plagues us, in every field you can name, what we do, what we make, what we eat and where we live and play, all of these things are in service of nothing but debt, ours or the vendors. what was a grindstone became the treadmill, but now there's a fence on it called interest payments so we can't get off, and the speed keeps creeping higher and higher, and everyone everywhere is doing everything they can to keep up.
Pliable said…
Interesting point about usury. E.F. Schumacher is worth reading on Buddhist economics - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_economics

And, of course, Alex Moulton's innovative approach to bike design, which was licensed to mass market brand Raleigh at one point, follows Schumacher's doctrine of self-sufficiency.

Also worth noting that at the time of his death Schumacher was planning a study of Islamic econonomics, a discipline that takes a radically different view of usury.

Far more interesting than Benjamin Grosvenor's latest CD, and a post that, contrary to my expectations, has attracted a lot of readers.

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