Review of Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance
I recently finished reading Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance. First, it’s fascinating to see what history is known about how double entry accounting started and first developed. Also enlightening is a discussion of the problems it solved and continues to solve. For me, the book was worth buying just for that.
There is a second part of the book that discusses some limits of our current accounting and some suggested solutions. For example, GDP is a widely used measure of a country’s economy. GDP basically measures spending, and because not all spending results in our well-being, GDP isn’t giving us a perfect picture of the health of a country’s economy. However, because people pay so much attention to GDP, we need to change how we measure GDP so that we are capturing our well-being instead of merely how much we are spending. At least, that’s my reading of what the author is suggesting.
Emacs auto revert
Some weeks ago I mentioned that my Emacs auto revert stopped working. This meant that when I used “iadd” to make changes to a file, I had to manually revert the corresponding buffer, so that the buffer showed the new additions. And then after I manually reverted the buffer, I had to restart ledger mode again, because reverting the buffer knocked it out of ledger mode.
I am not sure what happened, but one day auto revert started working again. This happened before I upgraded to Emacs version 30.1, so it wasn’t the Emacs upgrade that fixed the problem. In any case, auto revert seems to be working again, and as a result my reconciling goes a faster now.
Warp now available for Windows
From time to time I mention Warp, which I use for basically all my command line work on my Mac. I recently saw an announcement saying that Warp is now available for Windows. So, if you are a Windows user and have been wishing that you could use Warp, now is your chance.