Also, there are plenty of ministries that will give you a free bible. Gideon still puts millions of free bibles in hotel rooms. At my church, we have a giant bookshelf of old bibles free for the taking (mostly years worth of "lost and found" bibles that have become public due to statute of limitations). I grabbed a few old translations with good typography myself.

``Imagine a giant supermarket with only one cashier and checkout takes 15 seconds per cartload.''

Better yet, imagine a giant supermarket with RFIDS or smarphone-scannable barcodes so that I can just load my cart up and leave, and I don't HAVE to checkout at all.

Exactly. Kodak should have taught everyone that you cannot afford to NOT scavenge you own business...because if you don't, someone else will anyway.

"black market" is often another way to say "free market"

Cinematographer incompetence is the cause, with faster film stock a contributing factor.

Smaller formats are also being used more and more. The smaller frame size requires/allows faster relative aperture (f/stop) to be used for the same depth of field, which is only going to exaggerate the judder problem if the cinematography closes the shutter way down to compensate.

16mm and Super-16mm are really coming into their own nowadays with the digital intermediate workflow. It used to be, you could save money and use a smaller camera by shooting 16mm negative stock, but you can't contact print 16mm to 35mm in post, so you had to take a cost and quality hit by doing an optical enlargement to 35mm. So even though modern film stocks are so insanely awesome that 16mm gives great image quality, a lot of people stuck with 35mm because the savings wasn't that great. But with the Great Lowest Common Denominator of digital intermediate, post is the quality bottleneck either way.

I don't know how this translates to digital, since I don't think digital cameras use rotary shutters or mechanical shutters at all, and I don't know how the 'shutter angle' is adjusted. But digital sensors are just as fast or faster than film, and the smaller sensor sizes (though not smaller than 16mm) lead to even faster relative apertures at a given depth of field, so that's not going to help anything.

I'm sure it's due partly to the use of faster film stocks. All the cool kids are using Kodak Vision 500T, which is insanely fast in historical perspective. In black and white, Kodak no longer makes Plus-X (64 speedish) stock, and only offers Double-X (200ish). Slowing the shutter down with these fast films requires either a smaller aperture, possibly smaller than the cinematographer wants, or use of an ND filter.

At 24 FPS, a wide, judder-reducing shutter angle gets you a shutter speed of like 1/50th of a second. If you want anything less than deep-focus, you need to use an aperture of like f/5.6. In sunlight, this would require a film speed of iso 6. So yeah, I'm sure Vision 500T has a lot to do with it.

The king's hoarding of the gold is not that big of a deal without a "legal tender" mandate. In a free banking system, as you point out, the peasants can use other things as money, and the value of gold as a currency just changes in real time to compensate based on the King's shenanigans. "Imperial credits aren't worth much out here, I need something more real" etc.

When the King requires that gold be the only legal money--that's what really allows him to manipulate the economy. Legal Tender laws are the real problem. With legal tender laws, there is no competition to keep a currency in check, and the for the purposes of manipulation, the sky's the limit. Without legal tender laws, devaluing one currency just results in people switching to a superior currency. Governments like power, and they like to mandate that taxes be paid in a certain currency. The gold standard is an attempt to limit the ability of a government to manipulate a 'legal tender' currency, by tying that currency to something physical. But without legal tender laws, you don't need gold. You can use soybeans, bitcoins, kongbucks, averaged indices of all the above, or whatever you and your customers agree on.

Your last point hits home. I went to college for physics and grad school for materials engineering, and I work for a fortune 500 company. People I went to highschool with didn't even go to college and make nearly what I make (possibly more due to lower cost of living) working in coal mines making $25 per hour with benefits and overtime, and work less hours than I do.

The fundamental black-body efficiency limit (the Shockley–Queisser limit) for solar cells is 33%.

Actually, photovoltaic cells have a fundamental efficiency limit, and we are already close (well within an order of magnitude) of that already.

Also, it's more than that. Mostly, solar energy is not concentrated. People are just spoiled by semiconductor integrated circuits. Photovoltaics have been steadily improving, but the fact is solar power is not very dense...actual sunlight is not a concentrated source of energy. There's only so many watts per square meter that fall, and the sun doesn't always shine. The only way to get real gains is to set out more solar panels. So there is going to be no "breakthrough" like there sometimes is with other technologies that are enabled by integrated circuits; even if somebody invents the absolute perfect solar cell that sucks up every uJ of energy that hits it.

People set their expectations based on technologies that are enabled by integrated circuits, but fail to realize that more fundamental technologies can't be doubled in speed or cut to 1/4 the cost just be printing more of them on the same amount of silicon.