"CLAW" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barry Dave)

When primitive humans first came along, they did not engage in business
as we now think of it. They engaged in squatting around in caves naked. This
went on for, I would say, roughly two or three million years, when all of a
sudden a primitive person, named Oog, came up with an idea. "Why not," he
said, "pile thousands of humongous stones on top of each other in the desert
to form great big geometric shapes?" Well, everybody thought this was an
absolutely terrific idea, and soon they were hard at work. It wasn't until
several thousand years later that they realized they had been suckered into a
classic "pyramid" scheme, and of course by that time, Oog was in the Bahamas.

BUSINESS DURING THE MIDDLE AGES

Business during the Middle Ages was slow. The main job opportunity
available was serf, which involved whacking at the soil with a stick. It was
not the kind of work where you had a lot of room for advancement. The best a
serf could hope for, if he was really good at it, was that he would be
rewarded by not having one of his arms sliced off by a passing knight.

If you wanted to be a knight you had to know somebody, and it really
wasn't that much better than being a serf. You were always being sent off to
try to get the Holy Land back from the Turks. This was no fun at all, because
of course the Holy Land is very sunny, meaning your armor would get hot enough
to fry an egg on. In fact the Turks, who dressed in light, casual, 100
percent cotton garments, would often do this. They'd sneak up behind a knight
and crack an egg on his armor, then race away, laughing in Turkish, before he
could turn around. So as you can imagine, knights would come back in a pretty
bad mood, and often would have to slice off several serf arms before they even
wanted to talk about it.

So the bottom line is that the Middle Ages were hardly the kind of ages
where anybody wanted to make any long-term business commitments. All the
really smart investors were waiting for the Renaissance.

THE BIRTH OF THE HELICOPTER
THE RENAISSANCE

The Renaissance was caused by Leonardo da Vinci, who drew the first
primitive sketches of what would eventually become the helicopter. Of course,
nobody really understood the significance of this at the time. But people did
realize that, whatever this new invention was, it was going to require a
tremendous amount of insurance. Thus a major business was born.

This was followed by trade with the Orient. The way this worked was,
Europeans would gather up some gold, and they would tromp across Asia to the
Orient, where they would trade their gold for spices. They didn't really want
spices, you understand, but the Orientals claimed that spice was all they had,
and the Europeans, having tromped all that way, wanted to take home something.

After some years of this, the Europeans were starting to run out of gold.
Also their food was so heavily spiced that it glowed in the dark. They