Quotulatiousness

October 30, 2023

The funny side of reviewing woodworking tools

Filed under: Media, Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Christopher Schwarz used to be the editor of one of the big US woodworking magazines and part of the job included being inundated with free tools from manufacturers eager to get a review in an upcoming issue of the magazine. Some — and not just the marginal producers — had the misfortune of shipping tools that failed to work properly (or at all) when tested:

“Woodworking Tools on the wooden table” by wuestenigel is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

… it should come as no surprise that toolmakers also make mistakes. Most readers probably think that the tools that came into our shop had been carefully tested and tuned by the manufacturers to make sure they were perfect. Based on how many goofed-up tools I saw, I doubt that’s the case.

And in fact, I took it as a mark of the toolmakers’ honesty when they sent us one right off the warehouse floor.

Here’s a small sample of some of the stuff I’ve seen:

DeWalt: The company makes good tools, but we had a jigsaw come into the shop where the blade clamping mechanism failed. It went click, click, then the blade dropped out like a rotten tooth. When DeWalt introduced its first hybrid table saw, the first rip fence we got was twisted. So was the second. The third replacement was fine.

Delta: When Delta introduced its C-arm drum sander, we were all excited in the shop. We set it up, plugged it in and cranked the puppy up. It spun up and then spun down forever. The motor burned out after three seconds.

Harbor Freight: It might sound too easy to pick on this discount seller. But they sell tools and people buy them. So here goes: When we tested the company’s plunge router, the collet failed. The bit slipped out and flew out. That was one of the days that I wished we had some Depends in the first-aid kit.

Black & Decker: Here’s every tool marketer’s worst nightmare. Black & Decker sent us its new cordless tape measure. Now let’s ignore for a moment the possibility that you do not need an electric tape measure. So Senior Editor David Thiel took it out of the box in front of the entire staff and demonstrated how it works. The tape extended about a foot and then died forever.

Metabo: Cordless drills aren’t supposed to shoot flames out the back are they?

Lobo: When we tested its edge sander the sheet metal base flexed like tin foil. You would turn the machine on, and the thing would do the twist like Chubby Checker.

Powermatic: Yes, even Powermatic. An early version of its benchtop mortiser had a flaw in the piece of metal that joined the motor to the arm mechanism. The gears on the interior stripped out. So when you pulled the arm, the motor never moved.

Tools for Working Wood: The Ray Iles mortising chisels are great, but one of my students at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking snapped the tip off one when working in poplar. I heard it from across the room. It turned out that a few of the tools had been made from A2 instead of D2. It did make for an amusing day as everyone crowded around the chisel like the victim of a car accident.

Lie-Nielsen Toolworks: I had a narrow iron shoulder plane that was an early production run. The bronze grip wouldn’t stay in place when you retracted the iron. When I turned the screw, the plane disassembled itself in my hands.

Veritas: An early version of the Veritas cabinet scraper (an adaptation of the No. 80) would clog after a few passes like Crystal Gayle’s shower’s drain. The company has since fixed that problem and the tool works great.

Stanley Tools: During a test of jack planes, we had a tool that simply would not function. It was like it was haunted. If you snugged up the frog screw to where you thought it should be, you couldn’t adjust the iron. If you loosened the frog screw so you could adjust the iron, the thing would chatter and shake like a Vega going 56 mph. We never figured that one out.

Wenzloff & Sons: While teaching a sawing class at Kelly Mehler’s School of Woodworking, one student’s carcase saw was misbehaving. It was tearing out the shoulders of his tenons something fierce. At first I thought it was user error. Turns out the saw was filed for rip when it was supposed to be crosscut.

Let me conclude by saying that mistakes slip out the door for every toolmaker (and magazine editor and book publisher). We’ve never heard of any toolmaker with zero returns. The real test of a toolmaker (and editor) is how you deal with the mistakes when they occur.

September 18, 2023

It turns out that buying up the rights to old rock songs wasn’t a good investment after all

Filed under: Business, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ted Gioia enjoys a little bit of schadenfreude here because he was highly skeptical of the investments in the first place, although the geriatric rockers who “sold out” seem to have generally made out like bandits this time around:

Back in 2021, investors spent more than $5 billion buying the rights to old songs. Never before in history had musicians over the age of 75 received such big paydays.

I watched in amazement as artists who would never sell out actually sold out. And they made this the sale of a lifetime, like a WalMart in El Paso on Black Friday.

Bob Dylan sold out his entire song catalog ($400 million — ka-ching!). Paul Simon sold out ($250 million). Neil Young sold out ($150 million). Stevie Nicks sold out ($100 million). Dozens of others sold out.

As a result, rock songs have now entered their Madison Avenue stage of life.

Twisted Sister once sang “We’re Not Gonna Take It”. But even they took it — a very large payout, to be specific. A few months ago, the song showed up in a commercial for Discover Card.

Bob Dylan’s song “Shelter from the Storm” got turned into a theme for Airbnb. Neil Young’s “Old Man” was rejuvenated as a marketing jingle for the NFL (touting old man quarterback Tom Brady).

Fans mocked this move. Even Neil Young, now officially a grumpy old man himself, expressed irritation at the move. After all, the head of the Hipgnosis, the leading song investment fund, had promised that the rock star’s “Heart of Gold” would never get turned into “Burger of Gold”.

That hasn’t happened (yet). But where do you draw the line?

I was skeptical of these song buyouts from the start — but not just as a curmudgeonly purist. My view was much simpler. I didn’t think old songs were a good investment. […] But even I didn’t anticipate how badly these deals would turn out.

The more songs Hipgnosis bought, the more its share price dropped. The stock is currently down almost 40% from where it was at the start of 2021.

Things have gotten so bad, that the company is now selling songs.

On Thursday, Hipgnosis announced a plan to sell almost a half billion dollars of its song portfolio. They need to do this to pay down debt. That’s an ominous sign, because the songs Hipgnosis bought were supposed to generate lots of cash. Why can’t they handle their debt load with that cash flow?

But there was even worse news. Hipgnosis admitted that they sold these songs at 17.5% below their estimated “fair market value”. This added to the already widespread suspicion that current claims of song value are inflated.

September 12, 2023

Why Mark Steyn stopped marking the 9/11 anniversary

Filed under: History, Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

His reasoning makes a lot of sense:

For most of the last two decades we have observed the anniversary of 9/11 by re-posting my columns from the first few days of the new era. We ceased to do so after September 11th 2017 when “a president who, on the campaign trail, mocked his predecessor’s inability to use the words ‘radical Islam’ himself eschewed all mention of the I-word” — and a defense secretary laughably hyped as Mad Dog Mattis turned out to be just another dribbler from the Washington Generals and retreated to the madrassah wing of the Pentagon to explain that it was all just a theological misunderstanding.

We shall not resume our anniversary observances today. The war is lost, at home and abroad. On the domestic front, we doubled the rate of Muslim immigration to the west and began assimilating ourselves with Islam’s strictures on freedom of expression and the like. The decade-and-a-half since the Danish Mohammed cartoons has been one long remorseless surrender on core western liberties. When a school teacher gets beheaded in the street, there is no outrage at the act, just a mild regret that he should have been foolish enough to provoke his own fate. Even the milder jests from the immediate post-9/11 era — the cartoon of the woman trying on new burqas in the changing room and wondering, “Does my bomb look big in this?” — would not be published today.

In the broader society, our rulers quickly determined that it was easier to punish us than our enemies. The post-9/11 security state surely helped soften up western populations for the ChiCom-19 lockdowns, in which entire nations have been reduced to TSA-administered airports.

As for the war overseas, it ended with a military that can do everything except win handing the keys to Afghanistan back to the guys who pulled off 9/11 — and apologizing for the two-decade inconvenience by gifting the mullahs with some of the most expensive infrastructure on the planet plus an air force, approximately five assault rifles for every Taliban fighter, and express check-in for the forty-seven per cent of the Afghan population that apparently served as US translators.

The position of the United States is far weaker than it was twenty years ago. Around the planet, the assumption of friends and enemies alike is that the American moment is over and the future belongs elsewhere. They are making their dispositions accordingly. It is not a question of wishing “the post-American world”, but of accepting the known facts.

September 10, 2023

Indigo today … Indigone tomorrow?

Filed under: Books, Business, Cancon — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte discusses the financial woes of Canada’s quasi-monopoly book chain, Indigo after a series of misfortunes:

“Indigo Books and Music” by Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine is licensed under CC0 1.0

As we reported in SHuSH 197 and SHuSH 203, Indigo posted a ruinous 2023 (its fiscal year ends March 30), losing $50 million. That came on the heels of more than $270 million in losses the previous four years. The company’s share price, as high as $20 in 2018, has been floating around $1.30 this summer.

That dismal performance spelled the end of founding CEO Heather Reisman’s leadership at the chain. In June, her husband, Onex billionaire Gerry Schwartz, who has been Indigo’s controlling shareholder and chief financial backstop since the company’s launch in 1997, took the reins and elbowed Heather into the ditch along with almost every member of the board of directors who wasn’t beholden to Gerry personally.

The only non-Gerry director to survive was CEO Peter Ruis.

As I said at the time, Peter Ruis, “a career fashion retailer who landed in this jackpot from England two years ago”, is either “polishing his resume as we speak or negotiating a massive retention bonus to stick around and wield an axe on Gerry’s behalf. My money is on polishing.”

[…]

Meanwhile, I’m hearing that everyone in the publishing industry is being slammed with returns. Publishers usually get a lot of books back from retailers in the first quarter of the year as stores send back unsold inventory from the holiday season. This year, the returns were slower to start, probably because of Indigo’s cyberattack last fall, but they have kept coming right through the second and third quarters. This is coupled with lighter than usual buying for the fall.

The firm’s releases continue to claim that Indigo will keep books at its core, even as it loads its shelves with brass cutlery, dildos, and pizza ovens. According to Google, the core of an apple represents 25 percent of its weight. Books are now less than 50% of Indigone, suggesting more returns and light orders to come.

One final note. I corresponded this morning with a giant of Canadian businessman who has no special insight into the Indigo situation although he’s kept up with the news and, like everyone in Toronto commercial circles, he’s familiar with the Schwartz-Reismans.

He wonders just how involved Gerry is with Indigo these days. Apparently his health is not good. And while he’s still the lead shareholder at Onex, he’s no longer CEO and may not have access to the hordes of ultra-bright hirelings and menials that have long surrounded him.

My friend writes: “My guess is that suppliers are going to start to halt shipping and that a financial crisis is imminent, despite [Gerry’s] line of credit. But I don’t know anything.”

September 7, 2023

QotD: Techno-pessimism

Filed under: Business, History, Quotations, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Unfortunately, by any objective measure, most new things are bad. People are positively brimming with awful ideas. Ninety percent of startups and 70 percent of small businesses fail. Just 56 percent of patent applications are granted, and over 90 percent of those patents never make any money. Each year, 30,000 new consumer products are brought to market, and 95 percent of them fail. Those innovations that do succeed tend to be the result of an iterative process of trial-and-error involving scores of bad ideas that lead to a single good one, which finally triumphs. Even evolution itself follows this pattern: the vast majority of genetic mutations confer no advantage or are actively harmful. Skepticism towards new ideas turns out to be remarkably well-warranted.

The need for skepticism towards change is just as great when the innovation is social or political. For generations, many progressives embraced Marxism and thought its triumph inevitable. Future generations would view us as foolish for resisting it — just like Thoreau and the telegraph. But it turned out that Marxism was a terrible idea, and resisting it an excellent one. It had that in common with virtually every other utopian ideal in the history of social thought. Humans struggle to identify where precisely the arc of history is pointing.

Nicholas Phillips, “The Fallacy of Techno-Optimism”, Quillette, 2019-06-06.

August 30, 2023

The endless search for the “Easy mode” in military conflict

Filed under: History, Military, Russia, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

CDR Salamander on the search for shortcuts to military excellence, despite literal millennia of evidence that there are no such shortcuts:

As the Russo-Ukrainian War reaches its 20th month, I hope everyone has been sufficiently sobered up to stand firmly against those promoting the “72-hour War” or spin an attractive story about some transformational secret sauce that provides an “easy button” for those tasked to do the very hard work of preparing a nation for war should, and if, it were to come.

See the Battle of Hostomel if you need a recent example of where buying this wishcasting can get you.

There is a reason we have continually railed against this Potomac Flotilla mindset for the better part of two decades here — it is the self-delusion of faculty lounge theories running up against the Gods of the Military Copybook Headings reality what we have thousands of years of experience to reference.

We are not smarter than previous generations. There is no secret weapon or war winning technology — or magic beans — that will allow us to skip past the hard work of a viable strategy backed up by a properly resourced industrial capacity to build, maintain, deploy, and sustain a fighting force on the other side of the Pacific for years if needed.

Not 24-hours. Not 72-hours. Think 72-weeks to 72-months and you have your mind right.

[…]

We do no one any good allowing free run towards the national security version of the prosperity gospel, a branch of the transformationalist cult, and their “name it and claim it” attitude towards solving hard problems.

From LCS to DDG-1000, to optimal manning, to six-sigma supply nightmares, to 100-hour workweeks, to 72-hour war CONOPS, to the “Deter by Punishment,” to “1,000 ship navy,” to the offset of this POM cycle, to counter-historical excuses for … again … not doing the hard work that takes so long to bear fruit that someone else will get credit for it.

Every time we have our top leaders — smart hard working professionals with the best intentions — step up to sound more like this guy — the worse we will all be.

Image result for Carpetbagger Josie Wales

It degrades them and endangers everyone.

We don’t need to sell the utility of small drones being used down to the lowest levels of responsibility — it is demonstrated every day.

What we do need sold is Congress’s need to fund a revitalization of our defense industrial capacity and a focus on the naval and aerospace forces that will do most of the fighting in any expected war west of the International Dateline.

Supported by swarms of drones of all shapes and sizes.

August 6, 2023

Chaffee Reece Model 1882: A Good Idea on Paper …

Filed under: History, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 29 Aug 2017

Patented in 1879 by Reuben Chaffee and General James Reece, the Chaffee-Reece rifle is an excellent example of how an idea that seems good on paper can easily become untenable in a fielded rifle. The main design premise of the rifle was to have a tubular magazine in the buttstock which held the cartridges out of contact with each other, as opposed to being pressed together by a magazine spring as in a conventional design. This would notionally prevent any possibility of recoil or other forces causing the bullet of our round to impact the primer of another and cause a detonation in the magazine.

In initial testing by the Army in 1882, the prototypes were appealing, and a field trial of 750 rifles was requested. Chaffee and Reece were unable to find a commercial manufacturer willing to take on the production (except Colt, which offered to make just 200, and at the cost of $150 etc), and they ultimately turned to the government-operated Springfield Arsenal to build the guns. A total of 753 rifles were made by Springfield in 1883 and 1884 (interestingly, not serial numbered) and delivered for testing.

That testing went quite badly. The magazine was a very complex system, using two sets of basically reciprocating racks to shuttle cartridges up the magazine as the bolt was cycled, without allowing them to contact each other. It proved very prone to jamming and breakage, and was both extremely difficult to keep clean and very susceptible to, as they would have called it at the time, “derangement”. It was handily beaten by the Winchester Hotchkiss 1885 pattern rifles (among others) in field trials, and that was the end of its potential for adoption. The rifles were eventually sold as surplus, and bought by the Bannerman company, where they remained in stock and available for purchase until at least 1907.
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July 27, 2023

Instead of a malignant conspiracy, consider the possibility it’s really a society-wide dearth of competence

Filed under: Education, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Sarah Hoyt on a topic I’ve been pushing for years in casual conversation:

Recently, in a conversation between friends, the hypothesis was floated: what if all the burning farms, derailed trains, crop failures, etc. etc. etc. etc. ad scary nauseam aren’t really enemy action, but more a competency crisis.

As in these things happen not because big-bad is plotting against us, but because no one knows how to do the things they purportedly do anymore. Some kind of know, but they are hampered, slow, and sometimes hemmed in by counterproductive regulation or the result of previous “strokes of genius” decisions that broke the system.

I’m not going to bore anyone with what I know to be a massive crisis of competency plus inherited factors breaking ability to function in the field. I already did that at Mad Genius Club this morning, and am not unpacking the whole thing again.

But here’s the thing: All of us can live without a functioning fiction writing/selling market. Maybe not as pleasantly/happily, at least for those of us addicted to reading, but we can survive. We have old books to re-read, and if we get really desperate we can write our own fanfic.

It’s another thing when you talk of transportation or medicine, or farming, or – Well, everything else.

I have friends and fans in a lot of places. And almost everyone’s story is of being caught in the middle of a system where nobody knows or can do much of anything. It’s all the way the cogs and bureaucracy move. And the way they move is completely divorced from what needs done, or what anyone knows how to do.

To give an example: Suppose you were hired to haul buckets from a well. But when you actually get the job, you find out, no. Because of inherited systems, and what your superiors expect, you’re supposed to climb down the wall, hand over hand, and bring up water by the cupfull. And there are regulations in the works to make that by the spoonfull. However, you’ll be fully held to account if you can’t provide the amount of water the company is contracted for. You. Personally.

So, you do what you can. You fudge the books. On paper, you’re getting all this water up. Where the water goes no one knows, every one down stream (pardon the pun) from you does the same.

If this sounds like the soviet system? It is. It’s just that the directives don’t come directly and traceably from the government. (Though under the infestation of Bidentia they increasingly do.) Instead, they come from “experts” “scientists” “Studies” “marketing gurus.” And sometimes they are curtailed or made worse by agencies and regulations.

Yes, the managerial or worse “expert” class is the same that furnishes government. These are not your friends, are not meant to be your friends, and are convinced they know much more than you do.

What they know in fact is “how to manage.” But it’s not how to manage anything. They know theory of management (or whatever) derived from no reality (mostly from the writings of Marx, if you dig a little) and pushed ALL THE WAY DOWN.

It’s like — exactly like — being run by “experts” who memorized the Little Red Book. It might please those in power, but it has nothing to do with accomplishing the actual job in front of you.

Part of this has to do with colleges. Remember all those student demonstrations of the 60s? If you’re like me, and didn’t hit college till the eighties or younger, you might think these are, as the movies show, all anti-war and for civil rights, and all that jazz.

Unspoken to any of us is the fact that half of these demonstrations were to DUMB DOWN THE CURRICULUM. To demand easier grading. And social factors taken into account. And to “update” to “relevant things.”

The idea being that we were in a sort of an year zero and anything else, in the long storied glories of Western civ no longer counted, except for us to declare ourselves superior to it.

July 14, 2023

Bread rationing in the United States during WW2

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Food, Government, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I haven’t studied the numbers, but I strongly suspect that most US government food rationing during the war was effectively theatre to encourage more support of the war effort: except in a very few areas, the US was more than self-sufficient in most foodstuffs. At the Foundation for Economic Education, Lawrence W. Reed recounts one of the least effective government moves in food rationing:

According to an old joke from the socialist and frequently underfed Soviet Union, Stalin goes to a local wheat farm to see how things are going. “We have so many bags of wheat that, if piled on top of each other, they could reach God himself!” the farmer told Comrade Stalin.

“But God does not exist,” the dictator angrily replied. “Exactly!” said the farmer. “And neither does the wheat.” Nobody knows what happened to the farmer, but at least Stalin died in 1953.

Soviet socialism, with its forced collectivism and ubiquitous bread lines, gave wheat a bad name. Indeed, it was lousy at agriculture in general. As journalist Hedrick Smith (author of The Russians) and many other authorities noted at the time, small privately owned plots comprised just three percent of the land but produced anywhere from a quarter to a half of all produce. Collectivized agriculture was a joke.

America is not joke-free when it comes to wheat. We are a country in which sliced bread was both invented and banned, and a country in which growing wheat for your own consumption was ruled to be an act of “interstate commerce” that distant bureaucrats could regulate. No kidding.

On this anniversary — July 7 — of both the birth in 1880 of sliced bread’s inventor and of the day in 1928 that the first sliced bread from his machine was sold, it’s fitting to recall these long-forgotten historical facts.

The Iowa-born jeweler and inventor Otto Rohwedder turned 48 on the very day the first consumer bought the product of his new slicing machine. The bread was advertised as “the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped” and it quickly gave rise to the popular phrase, “the greatest thing since sliced bread.” Before 1928, American housewives cut many a finger by having to slice off every piece of bread from the loaves they baked or bought. Sliced bread was an instant sensation.

Rohwedder earned seven patents for his invention. The original is proudly displayed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. He likely made a lot more money from the bread slicing machine than he ever did as a jeweler. He died in 1960 at the age of 80.

Enter Claude Wickard, Secretary of Agriculture under Franklin Roosevelt from 1940 to 1945. On January 18, 1943, he banned the sale of sliced bread. Exactly why seems to be in dispute but the most likely rationale was to save wax paper and other resources for war production. He rescinded the ban two months later, explaining then that “the savings are not as much as we expected.”

I’m sure Hitler and Hirohito were relieved.

July 12, 2023

DOES YOUR FLAG FAIL? Grey Grades The State Flags!

Filed under: History, Humour, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

CGP Grey
Published 2 Apr 2023
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July 3, 2023

Nuclear power

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Government, History, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

One of the readers of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten has contributed a review of Safe Enough? A History of Nuclear Power and Accident Risk, by Thomas Wellock. This is one of perhaps a dozen or so anonymous reviews that Scott publishes every year with the readers voting for the best review and the names of the contributors withheld until after the voting is finished:

Let me put Wellock and Rasmussen aside for a moment, and try out a metaphor. The process of Probabilistic Risk Assessment is akin to asking a retailer to answer the question “What would happen if we let a flaming cat loose into your furniture store?”

If the retailer took the notion seriously, she might systematically examine each piece of furniture and engineer placement to minimize possible damage. She might search everyone entering the building for cats, and train the staff in emergency cat herding protocols. Perhaps every once in a while she would hold a drill, where a non-flaming cat was covered with ink and let loose in the store, so the furniture store staff could see what path it took, and how many minutes were required to fish it out from under the beds.

“This seems silly — I mean, what are the odds that someone would ignite a cat?”, you ask. Well, here is the story of the Brown’s Ferry Nuclear Plant fire, in March 1975, which occurred slightly more than a year after the Rasmussen Report was released, as later conveyed by the anti-nuclear group Friends of the Earth.

    Just below the plant’s control room, two electricians were trying to seal air leaks in the cable spreading room, where the electrical cables that control the two reactors are separated and routed through different tunnels to the reactor buildings. They were using strips of spongy foam rubber to seal the leaks. They were also using candles to determine whether or not the leaks had been successfully plugged — by observing how the flame was affected by escaping air.

    The electrical engineer put the candle too close to the foam rubber, and it burst into flame.

The fire, of course, began to spread out of control. Among the problems encountered during the thirty minutes between ignition and plant shutdown:

  1. The engineers spent 15 minutes trying to put the fire out themselves, rather than sound the alarm per protocol;
  2. When the engineers decided to call in the alarm, no one could remember the correct telephone number;
  3. Electricians had covered the CO2 fire suppression triggers with metal plates, blocking access; and
  4. Despite the fact that “control board indicating lights were randomly glowing brightly, dimming, and going out; numerous alarms occurring; and smoke coming from beneath panel 9-3, which is the control panel for the emergency core cooling system (ECCS)”, operators tried the equivalent of unplugging the control panel and rebooting it to see if that fixed things. For ten minutes.

This was exactly the sort of Rube Goldberg cascade predicted by Rasmussen’s team. Applied to nuclear power plants, the mathematics of Probabilistic Risk Assessment ultimately showed that “nuclear events” were much more likely to occur than previously believed. But accidents also started small, and with proper planning there were ample opportunities to interrupt the cascade. The computer model of the MIT engineers seemed, in principle, to be an excellent fit to reality.

As a reminder, there are over 20,000 parts in a utility-scale plant. The path to nuclear safety was, to the early nuclear bureaucracy, quite simple: Analyze, inspect, and model the relationship of every single one of them.

June 29, 2023

The End of Nazi Intelligence in 1944 – WW2 Documentary Special

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 27 Jun 2023

After years of undermining the Nazi regime and aiding the resistance, Abwehr Chief Wilhelm Canaris finally loses his battle with Heinrich Himmler and the SS. The Abwehr Trojan Horse is no more, and German intelligence is at death’s door at the most crucial moment.
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When “flashy” became “constantly flashing”, the user experience got significantly worse

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Scott Alexander on the irritating advance of meaningless flashing elements on so many web pages where they serve no real purpose, but successfully generate anger in their users:

Everyone hates flashing banner ads, but maybe they’re a necessary evil. Creators want money, advertisers demand a certain level of visibility for their ad buys, maybe sites are willing to eat the cost in user goodwill. Fine. But what’s everyone else’s excuse?

A few days ago I needed to look up an obscure point of Jewish law, as you do, and found this Jewish law website:

The background toggles every few seconds between a picture of a rabbi and a picture of … a different rabbi? There’s no conceivable benefit to this and it makes it almost impossible to concentrate on the text.

I used to think I must be the only person who worried about this; maybe it was a weird OCD thing. But I asked about it on the ACX survey …

… and 88% of people find them at least a little annoying! 16% of people go all the way, and say they wouldn’t use a website that has them!

Yet websites have been adding them to more and more parts of the user experience. Most aren’t as blatant as the Jewish law site, but they’re still there.

June 25, 2023

Canada’s DeLorean – Bricklin SV-1

Filed under: Business, Cancon — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Ruairidh MacVeigh
Published 5 Sept 2020

This week, it’s back to cars, and today we look at the history of a motoring scandal that took place 10 years before DeLorean and his DMC-12, but followed nearly the same notes; a rushed design, shady business practices, an inexperienced workforce in an impoverished part of the world, etc.

The Bricklin SV-1 may have looked good on paper, but in reality it was a severely flawed design that was ahead of its time in many aspects, but highly primitive in others.
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June 14, 2023

QotD: In hindsight, calling it “Operation HONOUR” was quite ironic

Filed under: Cancon, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I spent my subaltern years in the light of Operation HONOUR, the signature project of then-Chief of Defence Staff General Jonathan Vance. Operation HONOUR was a massive culture change effort intended to address the findings of the Deschamps Report, which had exposed the “underlying sexualized culture in the CAF that is hostile to women and LGTBQ members, and conducive to more serious incidents of sexual harassment and assault”. General Vance went to great lengths to emphasize that Operation HONOUR was, in fact, a military operation and not a mere policy. Slicing out the tumour of sexualized culture was our mission and the General’s words were our orders. During my first ever round of quarterly performance evaluations, I reported to the company commander that one of my NCOs was non-compliant with the principles of Operation HONOUR.

Loyalty up, remember?

As a young soldier, I had actually worked for this particular NCO. He was an artifact of the Old Army and had a reputation as a hardman. He liked to brag about picking Friday night fights in Native bars out on the Prairies (he wore weighted gloves for extra knock-out power). He described to us in detail what he would do to his wife after a training weekend. He told us she would never say no, followed up with a chuckle and “like she has a choice”. If you were weak in his eyes, he’d belittle you publicly as a “queer” or a “faggot”. The funny thing was that this guy was overweight and never showed up for ruck marches or PT tests. His annual conduct-after-capture briefing was basically forty minutes of “you’re gonna get raped but that doesn’t make you gay”. One of his favourite war stories was about stray dog duty in Bosnia. He’d lure in the strays with peanut butter on the end of shotgun then blow their brains out. Riveting stuff.

Overnight I had gone from from being this man’s subordinate to being his superior, so when the General said we had a duty to report, I did my duty. The next week I was in front of the Regimental Sergeant-Major being asked why I was interfering with a strong NCO’s career prospects. That’s when I learned that loyalty up meant loyalty to the Regiment, and that sensitive matters such as this were handled internally and off the record. That one-way conversation was a major push towards putting in my application for the Regular Force. I didn’t want to be around that type of nonsense (“oh my sweet summer child” says the peanut gallery). Not long after I left, my former supervisor sexually assaulted the mess steward.

[…]

In February 2021, an investigation was opened into General Jonathan Vance, who had just finished his tenure as Chief of Defence Staff. Major Kellie Brennan, a subordinate of Vance at various times, accused him of a preventing her from disclosing their long-running affair. Since their relationship began in 2001, Vance had been married twice. DNA testing confirmed that Vance was the father of one of Brennan’s children, but he had never acknowledged or taken responsibility for the child. Vance plead guilty to obstruction of justice in March 2022 and received a conditional discharge with twelve months of probation.

The heat and light generated by an investigation of the outgoing Chief of Defence Staff led to an unprecedente level of scrutiny on the CAF’s senior leadership. In 2021 alone, the Governor General of Canada, the Minister of National Defence, the incoming Chief of Defence Staff, the Vice Chief of Defence Staff, Commander Canadian Special Operations Command, and Commander Military Personnel Command, amongst others, would resign, retire, or be re-assigned amidst allegations of impropriety. Since 2021, recruiting and retention levels have continued to free fall and the federal government has set aside $900 million in class-action lawsuit compensation for current and former CAF members who experienced sexual harassment, assualt, or discrimination. The social trap has been sprung.

“Shady Maples”, “A Question of Loyalty”, The Powder Horn, 2023-03-12.

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