ReasonTV
Published 22 Sep 2022Transit ridership, especially rail, has collapsed post-pandemic, but the Atlanta BeltLine Coalition says now is the time to take federal dollars and build a $2.5 billion streetcar.
Full text and links: https://reason.com/video/2022/09/22/i…
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Twenty-three years ago, Atlanta-native and architecture and urban planning student Ryan Gravel had an experience that opened his mind to what urban living could be.“My senior year I spent abroad in Paris and lived without a car for a year and traveled by train everywhere,” says Gravel. “And within a month of arriving, I had lost 15 pounds. I was in the best shape of my life because I was walking everywhere, and the role of the physical city was made clear to me in a way it really had never been before.”
For his Georgia Tech master’s thesis, Gravel sketched out a plan to make Atlanta more like Paris. He proposed redeveloping the land along the city’s historic rail lines to create a 22-mile loop called the Atlanta BeltLine. He proposed turning the city’s abandoned industrial areas and single-family home neighborhoods into business districts and walking trails. And he proposed connecting downtown to the rest of the city all with a new train running along the entire Atlanta BeltLine.
“I never imagined we would actually do it,” says Gravel.
But they did — for the most part. Cathy Woolard, who was president of the Atlanta City Council, read Gravel’s thesis and decided to use it as a blueprint to remake much of the city. Today, the Atlanta BeltLine is a walking and biking trail, parts of which are bordered by retail and condos.
But one piece of Gravel’s grand vision didn’t get built: The train.
Today, Gravel runs a co-working and event space along the BeltLine, which also serves as a gathering place for urbanists interested in making Atlanta less dependent on cars. He says that the train line is essential for improving city life.
“In those early days, when we built the movement behind the [BeltLine] project, it was around transit,” says Gravel.
The three COVID relief bills set aside $69 billion in federal funding for local transit agencies to operate and add to their transportation systems, meaning that Atlanta might finally get its train—with many American taxpayers who will never step foot on it picking up much of the tab.
Many American cities have used federal money in the past to build rail transit lines that suffer from dismal ridership, that are expensive to maintain, and that are a major drain on their budgets.
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September 23, 2022
Is This Atlanta Streetcar “The Worst Transit Project of All Time”?
August 19, 2022
The DeLorean Story
Big Car
Published 5 Jan 2020There’s much more to the DeLorean Motor Company than Doc’s 88mph time machine in Back to the Future. It’s a story of a playboy founder with a meteoric rise, a story of hope and regeneration in an area torn apart after a decade of fighting, and of a cocaine smuggling fall from grace. Yes, this story has it all!
(more…)
June 25, 2022
Kenneth Whyte announces the Sutherland House Prize
If the Canada Council for the Arts — the most important prize-awarding organization in Canadian literature — decides to ignore the majority of works of history in their award schemes, what can the Canadian literary community do about it? Sutherland House reacts by creating their own prize for those works deemed no longer prize-worthy by the Canada Council:
Almost from the start of this newsletter in May 2019, we’ve been concerned with the crisis in Canadian nonfiction publishing.
It began with our realization (SHuSH 10 and SHuSH 17) that the Canada Council had decided that books relying primarily on facts as opposed to the author’s voice are not art. Personal history, personal memoir, personal essay meet the Canada Council’s standard for art and are therefore eligible for grants and awards. Objective fact-based journalism, essays, histories, biographies, business and science writing, not so much.
We were bothered by the notion that the distance an author chooses to take from a subject (first person, say, versus third-person) is what makes or breaks a work of art. Same goes for an author’s fidelity, or lack thereof, to verifiable fact.
It also seemed bonkers that a government agency like the Canada Council would bail on researched nonfiction in favor of works in which the subjective experience of the writer is primary at a time when the rest of the government was so panicked over the lack of reliable fact-based information in the public sphere that it was pumping more than $500 million into our failing newspaper chains. If Ottawa was genuinely concerned about the quality of public discourse in Canada and the information available to the electorate, it would be directing the Canada Council to rescind its policy and support fact-based nonfiction to the same levels as fiction, poetry, and personal literature.
SHuSH pursued the issue. We explained why Canada Council funding matters: most publishers in Canada would be out of business or much reduced without their grants, so they naturally produce books that keep them in the money. Researched nonfiction is expensive and time-consuming to produce at the best of times; when it’s relatively disadvantaged by arts funders, it begins to disappear. It’s no accident that the shortlists of all the major nonfiction prizes in Canada have been dominated by memoir in recent years.
(We’ve always been at pains to add that we have nothing against memoir — we publish our share — but it is no substitute for well-researched, fact-based nonfiction. We need investigative journalism, history, biography, politics, current affairs, science & health books if we’re going to understand ourselves and our times.)
June 18, 2022
“Fusion is 30 years away and always will be” … how much progress have we made toward practical fusion energy?
One of the readers of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten has contributed a review of The Future of Fusion Energy by Jason Parisi and Justin Ball. 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:
Fusion is the power which lights the stars. It is the source of all elements heavier than hydrogen in the universe. Wouldn’t it be great if we could use and control this power here on Earth?
I predict that we will get fusion before 2035 (80%) or 2040 (90%). I am a professional plasma physicist, a fusioneer if you will, so I probably know more about this subject than you, but am likely to overemphasize its importance.
The Future of Fusion Energy is the best introduction to fusion that I know. I can confirm that the information it contains is common knowledge among plasma physicists. My parents, who are not physicists, can confirm that it is accessible and interesting to read.
Things are changing fast in fusion right now, and The Future of Fusion Energy is already out of date in some important ways. I will summarize our quest for fusion as it is portrayed in the book, describe what has happened in the field since 2018, and make some predictions about where we go from here. The predictions are my own and do not reflect the opinions of Parisi or Ball.
Why Don’t We Have Fusion Already?
There is an old joke:
Fusion is 30 years away and always will be.
What happened? Why has fusion failed to deliver on its promise in the past?
By the 1970s, it was apparent that making fusion power work is possible, but very hard. Fusion would require Big Science with Significant Support. The total cost would be less than the Apollo Program, similar to the International Space Station, and more than the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The Department of Energy put together a request for funding. They proposed several different plans. Depending on how much funding was available, we could get fusion in 15-30 years.
How did that work out?
Along with the plans for fusion in 15-30 years, there was also a reference: “fusion never”. This plan would maintain America’s plasma physics facilities, but not try to build anything new.
Actual funding for fusion in the US has been less than the “fusion never” plan.
The reason we don’t have fusion already is because we, as a civilization, never decided that it was a priority. Fusion funding is literally peanuts: In 2016, the US spent twice as much on peanut subsidies as on fusion research.
June 4, 2022
Bill C-18 might as well be called the “Keep legacy media alive at all costs, even if nobody wants it anymore” act
The Line‘s Jen Gerson lays out the case against the federal government’s plans for permanent corporate welfare for the big Canadian legacy media organizations:
How Jen Gerson might visualize Torstar and Postmedia during the lobbying effort for Bill C-18.
“Zombie nuns” by Michael Cavén is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 
This week, The Line signed on to a campaign put together by a coalition of independent media publishers calling for amendments to the panda trash fodder piece of legislation known as C-18. To be fair, I mostly signed on; my co-founder Matt Gurney had some reservations, and I figured it would be best to hash them out in full here.
The bill is a hot mess created by a clearly well-intentioned government that appears to have been bamboozled by a group of media industry lobbyists helmed by organizations like Postmedia and Torstar — companies that despite extraordinary history and resources have largely failed to sustainably transition to a digital media environment. These large outlets are now using the last of their dying power and influence to champion legislation that will force big technology companies like Facebook and Google to compensate them for linking to their content.
This is a straightforward case of regulatory capture, the very thing we would condemn in any other industry; big media companies are using their credibility and political power to pressure the government into forcing “Big Tech” to sustain their dying business models — the very “Big Tech” that they’ve spent years deriding and defaming in their very own newspapers and outlets.
This whole process is corrupt. I don’t say that lightly. Perhaps inevitably, I’ve grown totally disillusioned with the industry to which I have devoted all of my adult life. We used to consider journalism a calling or a vocation — manipulative terms that justified the low pay, harassment, and sometimes abusive management. How can the church of journalism and its holy mandate to preserve democracy continue to take itself seriously when the very catechism of the craft are nowhere present in its own self-created lobbying arm, New Media Canada?
I think the leaders of this initiative have convinced themselves that the business model they enjoyed in the ’80s and ’90s is so totally central to the survival of democracy and liberal values that they’ve committed to keeping it afloat by any means necessary regardless of the ethical and philosophical cost. In doing so, I believe that they’re only ensuring their own failure.
By driving legislation in this way, they are not proving their worth to the broader public. Rather, they are conceding that what they produce has so little value that they need to evolve into parasites of the state. It demonstrates that commitment to democracy and accountability is secondary to their primary functions; running a business. They have stockholders to please and interest on loans to pay. Big loans.
Meanwhile, the legacy media they have managed is little more than a zombie in nun’s drag. It is in a state of terminal decline, and keeping it alive poisons the earth for the generations to come after.
May 18, 2022
For the Canadian government, announcing new programs is far more important than implementing them
It often appears that the Liberal government in Ottawa operates almost exclusively on an “appearance only” basis: whatever the situation, it’s the “optics” that matter the most and actual delivery on announcements barely counts at all. It doesn’t help at all that the media generally has the same set of priorities, because they need things to talk about on news shows and the headlines don’t write themselves in the newspapers — and legacy media’s social media concerns are even more about flash and clickbait than their primary product.
Canada has been quick to announce new initiatives to help Ukrainian refugees, but true to form, very slow to actually make any of these initiatives happen, as Joti Heir discusses in The Line:
Justin Trudeau has always had a strong affinity for the symbolic gesture, especially when the media are around to record it.
It’s almost as though the Canadian federal government is working buttocks-backward when it comes to the Ukrainian refugee file. After Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, helping Ukrainian refugees get to a safe place fast was the biggest concern. However, now, close to three months later, the bigger concern is how to help the refugees that are in Canada or making their way here.
“We are seeing an increasing amount of frustration within our community about the pace with which programs and announcements are being implemented,” says Orest Zakydalsky, senior policy analyst with the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC).
“For example, a month ago, the prime minister announced income support when he co-hosted the [StandWithUkraine] telethon with the European Council president, he announced there would be income support for people coming to Canada. A month later, they’re not available.”
The announcement on April 9 indicated that Ukrainian refugees would be able to access $500 per week for a period of up to six weeks. At the same time, it was also announced that housing support in the form of two-week hotel stays would be provided. Both programs do not appear to have been implemented.
“We appreciate this is a very difficult situation for governments, this is a crisis that emerged very suddenly,” says Zakydalsky.
“On the other side, the other problem is that the people that are in Europe, that have left Ukraine, that are looking to come to Canada, see these announcements and quite reasonably think that when a program is announced it is available.”
April 10, 2022
“Canadian media, ‘independent’ or otherwise, is about as sparkly as dry toast”
It’s impossible to disagree with the editors at The Line about the negative impact of government involvement, oversight and subsidization of the media, and the ensuing neutralization (or even Pablumization) of the news presented to Canadians:
“Newspaper Boxes” by Randy Landicho is licensed under CC BY 2.0
There is no way to create such a system without an inherently political process to answer philosophically fraught questions like “what is news?” and “what is a journalist?” And that takes us ever closer to the perilous path of state credentialization of a profession that only operates properly when it is free of both undue government interference and of government assistance. State meddling is bad for journalism whether the intent be good, bad or indifferent.
Every outlet is beholden to the people who cut the cheque, and if your business model relies on impressing government grant gifters or corporate social responsibility committees, then your content is going to reflect the milquetoast sensibilities of your true audience.
Which, bluntly, is why so much Canadian media, “independent” or otherwise, is about as sparkly as dry toast. Whole grain. To rely on government money is not only philosophically untenable, it is almost inherently corrupting. There are public journalism enterprises in Canada, including, for instance, the CBC and TVO, and your Line editors contribute to both. You can trust us when we tell you that the people in charge of those organizations work very, very hard to avoid the impossible conflicts public funding of journalism cannot help but produce. The readers can judge the results, but no one in either outlets pretends it’s easy. It’s not.
And in case it needs to be noted here again, The Line accepts no public cash. Not a dime. We rely entirely on paid subscriptions from our reader base, and we like it that way. Our relationship with you, the reader, is what allows us to be risky, innovative, and occasionally belligerent. You’re here because you like us — you really like us! — and as a result, we serve only you. That doesn’t mean that you’re always going to agree with us, of course, but rather that you can trust us to tell you what we really think.
We looked into the QCJO program and although we believe we would qualify for the program, we are simply too horrified by its mere existence to consider applying. This puts us at a severe competitive disadvantage, and one that can only be overcome by outperforming everyone else.
March 20, 2022
Florida’s new passenger rail service
Thomas Walker-Werth contrasts the different experiences of California and Florida in trying to build new passenger railway services:
When the Federal Government ordered the construction of the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s and 1960s (at a cost to taxpayers of roughly $580 billion in 2022 dollars), it all but killed America’s privately operated passenger railroads. Since then, rail travel in America has mostly consisted of government-subsidized Amtrak services of deteriorating quality that amble across the country, catering to a niche market of leisure travelers and those with no other options. On the busy Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington D.C. there is still enough demand to operate a busy, profitable service, but elsewhere Amtrak’s services are too slow, inconvenient, and infrequent to effectively compete with highways and airlines.
But with gas prices rising and traffic congestion strangling many American cities, passengers, investors, and government planners are all reconsidering railroads. Several new projects have sprung up across the country, aiming to link major cities a few hundred miles apart, where a train might provide a more convenient journey than a plane, car, or bus. Some of these projects are led by state governments, others by private companies. The contrast between the two is dramatic. To illuminate that difference, compare the government-run California High Speed Rail project with Brightline, a new private rail system in Florida.
Approved in 2008, California High Speed Rail (CHSR) was expected to deliver a 520-mile two-track, electrified high-speed railway on an all-new route between Los Angeles and San Francisco by 2029. Fourteen years later, CHSR is now only expected to have a 171-mile single-track section between Madera and Bakersfield will be operational by 2030. Meanwhile the project’s cost has ballooned to $80 billion from an original budget of $33 billion, and costs are expected to rise further to $100 billion, or triple the original budget.
Meanwhile in Florida, a very different kind of passenger railroad is already up and running. Brightline was launched in 2012 by the Florida East Coast Railway, a private freight railroad. Unlike CHSR, Brightline mostly uses existing routes, removing the need to acquire (or appropriate) large amounts of land. Instead of building the whole line before beginning any passenger services (as CHSR is doing), Brightline began construction on a 70-mile section from Miami to West Palm Beach in 2014 and opened it to passengers in 2018. This meant that Brightline already had an operational, revenue-producing service before embarking on the 170-mile northward extension to Orlando Airport. That extension is expected to open in 2023, and the entire project will cost about $1.75 billion, raised through private financing.
This equates to about $7.3 million per mile for Brightline, compared to $153.8 million per mile for CHSR (using the current $80 billion budget). Why will CHSR cost at least twenty times more per mile than Brightline? How has Brightline managed to deliver a high-speed intercity passenger rail system within ten years whereas CHSR needs twenty-two years to deliver an incomplete, scaled-down version of its original plan? Much of the answer comes down to the fundamental nature of public works projects such as CHSR.
This isn’t quite a fair apples-to-apples comparison between Brightline and CHSR, as Brightline’s services will have to interact with freight trains on conventional rails while CHSR — if ever completed — will be a separate line hosting only CHSR’s own high-speed passenger trains. Brightline’s trains will probably not have the theoretical top speed that CHSR is intended to use, as the physical plant of rail lines intended for mixed-use traffic will limit the speeds due to signalling, traffic density and braking distances of the respective types of trains.
January 16, 2022
Library borrowing versus book store sales
I used to be a regular library user, but tapered off substantially after a few unhappy visits to the Toronto Reference Library on Yonge Street in the late ’80s (I’m now fully a believer in some of the wilder tales of disruptive and even criminal behaviour within libraries). I had my doubts about the direction most western library systems chose to concentrate on “popular” books and to get rid of “old” or infrequently borrowed books. It seemed to me that this was an attempt to set up libraries in direct competition with bookstores, and a deliberate act of neglect toward the function of libraries as repositories of valuable but less popular media. In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte details a fascinating natural experiment we’ve all be involved in over the last two years that seems to prove that library systems have been, in effect, taking money away from book sellers:
“Toronto Public Library” by Jim of JimOnLight is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Those of you who have been reading SHuSH for a while know that I suspect public libraries are doing harm to the publishing industry and author incomes.
Before the shooting starts, my standard qualifiers: I love libraries; they do a lot of fine work and are crucial civic institutions, running many outstanding programs and providing many necessary services, including the lending of books to children and people who genuinely can’t afford to buy them; I am always in libraries for research and to borrow and read hard-to-find books; I don’t want libraries to go away; I don’t want them harmed; I want their lending practices adjusted before they swallow what’s left of commercial publishing, book retailing, and, along with it, what’s left of author incomes.
By way of background, I’ve written at length in previous newsletters about how public libraries in the last decades of the last century abandoned their traditional role as gatekeepers of the culture, responsible for the moral, intellectual, and aesthetic growth of the public, choosing instead to pander to their patrons. They began pimping the likes of Mickey Spillane and Jacqueline Susann to goose the foot traffic and circulation stats they habitually use to demand of their political masters more funding and better buildings.
Over time, librarians have trained people who can afford to buy books for their own entertainment — the vast majority of library reading is for entertainment — to borrow them instead. Today, three out of four books read in the US and four out of five read in Canada are borrowed, not bought. That is bad for publishing, bookselling, and author incomes.
And then the Winged Hussars Wuhan Coronavirus arrived:
I believe it is self-evident that spending loads of taxpayer money to make the most popular books available at no charge at dozens of points around a city (as well as online) undermines retail sales of books, as it would if the same were done for coffee, running shoes, or Leafs’ tickets.
I have to admit, at the same time, that I’ve lacked hard evidence showing a portion of book borrowing represents lost sales. Nobody has thoroughly researched the question (it certainly isn’t in the interests of libraries to do so). The absence of a smoking gun has made it easy for library defenders to throw up their hands: maybe there’s a relationship, maybe not. People love free shit and will cheerfully strangle good faith to retain access to it.
I’ve tried to devise ways to prove conclusively that libraries are seriously undermining book sales. Maybe some huge experiment where we closed the public libraries in a large jurisdiction and studied what happened to retail book sales. But who was going to organize that? It seemed impossible until COVID-19 stepped up.
Libraries across North America and, indeed, around the world, have been closed, semi-closed, or otherwise limited in their borrowing activities throughout the two-year course of the pandemic. According to Library Journal, total circulation of library materials collapsed by 25.7% in 2020 (notwithstanding a huge spike in e-book borrowing). It looks like physical borrowing fell by roughly half. The 2021 numbers aren’t out yet but individual library reports suggest they will look a lot like 2020.
Meanwhile, over in publishing land, the champagne corks are flying. US book sales, which grew healthily in the first pandemic year 2020, grew again in 2021 and are now 19% ahead of the pre-pandemic year, 2019. All the major publishers have reported smashing sales (attributing the increase to their own genius). All categories are up, including adult fiction (31% over 2019) and adult non-fiction (10% over 2019).
Going by these numbers, it appears that a roughly 25% reduction in library borrowing leads over a two-year period to an increase of 19% in bookselling. I wouldn’t bank on those numbers, or even on the rough proportions, but I think the data demonstrates that when you make books more difficult to borrow for free, people turn more frequently to booksellers.
December 6, 2021
QotD: Modern “Canadian culture” is a vast vanity press operation funded with lots of government money
From a distance, it is beginning to look as if Canada does not have a specific culture. No one is buying books, no one is watching television, no one is watching or listening to the CBC. People trail through galleries sometimes, and at the top of the investment tree, people buy art. But not because they love it, they buy it because it lends them status.
CanCon is a heavy lift at the best of times, being close neighbors to that hulking great monster south of us which is the most creative culture on earth. That is why we spend billions every year to prop up our creators, our artists, who we love.
Except we don’t.
Film salaries are funded up to 50%, books, 30%, news media 60%, and yet … no one is watching, reading, or listening. It is like a giant vanity project which various foreign appointees can brandish in foreign capitals.
Last month I traced the sales of this year’s Canadian literary award winners and I suppose “best-sellers”. Their sales on Amazon, hardcover, soft cover and digital ranged from 4 books to 33 books per month, incomes hovering in the three figures. (Amazon accounts for roughly 70% of sales.) This during summer reading months where Canadians are at their lake shacks from coast to coast reading one would hope about themselves, the world they live in, and well … just curiosity.
Equally looking at the viewer and listener stats for the CBC, our national behemoth, which eats up $1.5 billion annually, and which amounts to 50% of the media dollars spent, is equally disheartening. The state spends another $600 million supporting once-successful media because “internet”.
CBC television is watched by 3.9% of Canadians and only .8% watch CBC News. Again, half of all media dollars, half. Half is spent engaging less than 4% of Canadians.
CBC radio is considered reasonably good, and is listened to despite the almost vindictive calling out of anyone who disagrees with their hard socialist stance. Despite every conceivable advantage, advertising on the CBC dropped 20% during the pandemic.
In fact, they are so disliked that CBC is hiring “close protection security” for the next two years. They are so disliked, they have turned off commenting on their various programs. They are so disliked that there is a brand of coffee called “Defund the CBC”. This isn’t passive ignoring, this is active dislike to the point of needing bodyguards.
Why?
Because our media show us Canadians as racist, stupid, sexist, stupid, stupid and more stupid. And while they are at it, shallow and violent.
That is the real reason, and the only reason CanCon is dying. They hate us.
Elizabeth Nickson, “Canadian Culture on the Ropes”, Elizabeth Nickson, 2021-09-01.
October 21, 2021
If Quebec is the model for universal childcare services, then voters will be waiting a long, long time for that promise to be fulfilled
In The Line, Andrea Mrozek talks about the promises (mostly still unfulfilled) of Quebec’s “universal” childcare service model:
Since last month’s election, many have been asking which promises the Liberals made will prove the most difficult to keep. Put child care at the top of the list: The federal government’s five-year, $30 billion Canada-wide child-care plan is rife with complicating factors. When government officials point to Quebec as the model for the rest of Canada, what that means is a system plagued by lack of access, inequality and poor quality.
When Quebec introduced its low-user fee “universal” system in 1997, the goal was to create a centre-based, publicly-funded system for all children. Fees started at $5 a day, briefly shifting to a fee structure based on income, before settling in at the current daily rate of $8.50.
The rapid reduction in fees in only one part of the child-care sector disrupted the care options parents were using in Quebec. Private providers, who were not to be included in Quebec’s system, “understandably crumbled” after the system began. Unfortunately, the public system never picked up the slack. So the Quebec government then coaxed them back into the business of child-care provision through a system of tax credits.
Consider this: We are told publicly funded child care offered at a fixed low price for parents is the way to go across Canada. Consider further that we are told Quebec is the model for said child-care system. Then consider that between 2003 and 2021, in Quebec, public (“Centres de la petite enfance” or CPE spaces) increased by about 55 per cent, or 35,000 spaces. In the same time period, private, unsubsidized spaces increased by about 4,200 per cent or 68,500 spaces. This growth in private provision is not at all what architects of public child-care provision desire. It has, however, proved unavoidable in Quebec, precisely because provision of public spaces has been so slow. Whether it’s lack of funds, political will or some other combination of factors, Quebec has been unable over two decades to build the system of CPE’s envisioned in the mid 1990s.
None of this is a secret: The Quebec auditor general reported last fall there are “not enough spaces available in subsidized child care to meet the needs of families in Quebec.” There are 98,014 spaces in CPEs but 46,000 on a waiting list for a CPE space, as per the auditor general. Does this sound like a policy success?
Further, the waitlists are now themselves a source of inequity. The same auditor-general report highlights that in Montreal in particular, “the children of low-income families are underrepresented in (CPEs).” Previous studies showed this to be a problem across Quebec. Sociologist Rod Beaujot wrote this in a 2013 paper: “In Quebec, day care is used less by children in vulnerable environments, and the services they use are of lower quality (Giguère and Desrosiers 2011). In contrast, the higher the mother’s education, and the higher the family income, the greater the usage of child-care in the Quebec program (Audet and Gingras 2011.) While the program has provisions for disadvantaged families, it would appear that other provinces are more successful in tailoring programs to families with lower incomes.”
So, it’s another “universal” program that disproportionally benefits the wealthy and well-connected (who tend to be Liberal Party supporters and voters)? Tabarnak! Who could ever have possibly seen this coming? Oh, and the Quebec model the rest of the country is supposedly eager to adopt has literally the worst ratios of adult caregivers to children, and 81% of Quebec parents say “Finding quality child care is a way bigger hassle than it should be for parents today”, which is a higher percentage than it is in any other province.
July 20, 2021
An unlikely survivor in India, His Highness the Prince of Arcot
Ned Donovan explains why there is still a Prince of Arcot, despite the Indian government having abolished all the titles and privileges of the nearly 600 “Maharajas, Maharanas, Rajas, Nawabs, Khans and so on” of the Princely states that were incorporated into modern India after Partition in 1947:
A significant amount of effort was taken during the process of independence to integrate these princely states into the newly independent countries. Almost all of the rulers acceded quickly and peacefully in return for recognition of their symbolic status and titles by the new republics who also promised perpetual large annual payments to sweeten the deal. A handful of princely states were stubborn and were integrated by force, with issues as a result to this day, such as Jammu and Kashmir.
As a result, for the first few decades of independent India, there existed a class of royals recognised within the republic, with privileges and financial support not that different to what they received during the period of British rule. But in 1971 this came tumbling down.
The then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi amended the Indian Constitution to abolish all privileges and titles, along with any financial subsidies. She believed the whole system to be at odds with the secular socialist republic she was attempting to perfect. The move also had financial benefits: the large princely subsidies stopped being a drain on the Indian treasury while much of the royals’ gold and property were seized by the Government in the process. In 1972, Pakistan followed suit and similarly abolished its remaining princes’ titles.
But the title “Prince of Arcot” somehow escaped to carry on to the modern day … thanks to an unusual historical situation and the presentation of letters patent from Queen Victoria:
In 1855, the 13th Nawab of Arcot died without children. The British, influenced by the East India Company, declared the kingdom had lapsed as a result and annexed it entirely. As a token compensation, Queen Victoria in 1870 gave the last Nawab’s uncle a pension and the title of “His Highness the Prince of Arcot” for him and his descendants in perpetuity. This was granted in a type of royal charter, known as letters patent.
As there was no land still to rule, the Princes of Arcot existed in a strange realm of being kings without a kingdom but with significant influence and prestige. The title continued to pass down through the original holder’s family and they built a large palace, Amir Mahal, in Madras that became a centre of culture instead of one of government.
H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.
December 17, 2020
QotD: Light rail systems are almost always an upper middle class boondoggle
[…]
The problem with light rail (and the reason it is popular with government officials) is that it is an upper middle class boondoggle. There can be no higher use of transit than to provide mobility to poorer people who can’t afford reliable automobiles. Buses fulfill this goal better than any mode of transit. They are flexible and can reach into many corners of the city. The problem with buses, from the perspective of government officials, is that upper middle class people don’t like to ride on them. They like trains. So the government builds hugely expensive trains for these influential, wealthier voters. Since the trains are so expensive, the government can only build a few routes, so those routes end up being down upper middle class commuting corridors. As the costs mount for the trains, the bus routes that serve the poor and their dispersed commuting destinations are steadily cut.
Warren Meyer, “Phoenix Light Rail Fail, 2019 Update”, Coyote Blog, 2019-11-13.
December 12, 2020
Trains and Oil | California History [ep.8]
The Cynical Historian
Published 4 Jul 2019After a long hiatus, here is the return of the History of California series. For those who haven’t seen the previous episodes, here’s the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Today we’re going over the history of transcontinental railroads, monopolistic practices, and crude oil production in California.
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references:
eds. Richard Francaviglia and David Narrett, Essays on the Changing Images of the Southwest (Arlington: University of Texas at Arlington, 1994). https://amzn.to/2JwNiHkWilliam H. Goetzmann, Army Exploration in the American West, 1803-1863, new ed. (1959; Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1979). https://amzn.to/2K8tslY
Paul Sabin, Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). https://amzn.to/2W16gtt
Jules Tygiel, The Great Los Angeles Swindle: Oil, Stocks, and Scandal During the Roaring Twenties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). https://amzn.to/2ASH7Z0
Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011). https://amzn.to/2zkURO3
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Wiki: The history of the Southern Pacific stretches from 1865 to 1998. For the main page, see Southern Pacific Transportation Company; for the former holding company, see Southern Pacific Rail Corporation. The Southern Pacific was represented by three railroads. The original company was called Southern Pacific Railroad, the second was called Southern Pacific Company and the third was called Southern Pacific Transportation Company. The third Southern Pacific railroad, the Southern Pacific Transportation Company, is now operating as the current incarnation of the Union Pacific Railroad.The story of oil production in California began in the late 19th century. In 1903, California became the leading oil-producing state in the US, and traded the number one position back-and forth with Oklahoma through the year 1930. As of 2012, California was the nation’s third most prolific oil-producing state, behind only Texas and North Dakota. In the past century, California’s oil industry grew to become the state’s number one GDP export and one of the most profitable industries in the region. The history of oil in the state of California, however, dates back much earlier than the 19th century. For thousands of years prior to European settlement in America, Native Americans in the California territory excavated oil seeps. By the mid-19th century, American geologists discovered the vast oil reserves in California and began mass drilling in the Western Territory. While California’s production of excavated oil increased significantly during the early 20th century, the accelerated drilling resulted in an overproduction of the commodity, and the federal government unsuccessfully made several attempts to regulate the oil market.
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Hashtags: #history #California #trains #oil
November 18, 2020
Trudeau’s internet policy — cash grab or power grab? Embrace the healing power of “and” (TM Instapundit)
The Canadian government is taking advantage of the ongoing economic and social disruption of the Wuhan Coronavirus to widen their existing regulation of both broadcasting and internet entertainment. It’s not just a bit of maple-flavoured cultural imperialism, but it’s also a blatant cash grab:
Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020.
Screencapture from CPAC video.
I see, in the Globe and Mail, that Justin Trudeau and Steven Guilbeault want to further regulate the broadcasting services in Canada. Their goals seem to be, in part, a cash grab ~ online streaming services, like Netflix, are offering Canadians, for a price, what they want, while the CBC offers Canadians, thanks to a $1+ Billion annual subsidy from taxpayers like you and me, what we, pretty clearly, do not want to watch and the Liberals want a share of that money ~ and also an appeal to those who play identity politics.
I think we need to look at the “products” of broadcasting ~ information (news and “public affairs” and documentary programmes) and entertainment, including sports, as “consumable products,” rather like food and, say, soft drinks.
We do allow, even demand that governments exercise some important regulatory functions in regard to food and soft drinks: we want to make sure that they are safe to consume and Canadians want to know what is in the food we consume.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) was, originally, conceived to solve a fairly simple problem: allocating broadcast licences. Government engineers calculated how many radio channels could be used in any given place but they didn’t want to have to decide who should get to use them. Politicians didn’t want to do it, either, because while the successful applicant was (usually) happy the more numerous unsuccessful ones were disappointed and politicians hate to disappoint people. Thus they created an arms length agency to make the tough decisions for them. Licence allocation is still an important job for the CRTC. But the CRTC’s mandate was expanded with the birth of cable TV. Companies, like Rogers, built cable systems ~ and they received both direct and indirect government support to reach more and more Canadians ~ and then “sold” access to consumers. In the normal course of events one might have thought that the government would attach some business conditions to its loans, grants and tax deductions, but there was an ever-growing demand, from the Canadian cultural community ~ based almost entirely in Montreal and Toronto ~ to regulate the fledgling cable and “pay TV” market to ensure that Canadian programmes were not shut out but, in fact, could have privileged positions in the cable lineup, which led to the government, in the 1960s, telling the CRTC to regulate how companies like Famous Players, Maclean Hunter and Rogers configured the private product they sold to individual consumers.
The initial government argument was “we regulate all kinds of things for the common good: that’s why we all drive on the right, for example, and the delivery of broadcasting by cable is like that.” “No it’s not,” the cable operators replied, “you build and maintain the roads, using taxpayers’ dollars, so you’re allowed to regulate how they’re used, plus it’s a safety issue. Cable service and ‘pay TV’ are private, commercial transactions between us, the companies who built and operate the systems, and the individual consumer who wants to subscribe to what we offer. You don’t presume to regulate, beyond the laws against libel and pornography, what people can read in MacLean’s magazine or the Globe and Mail, why is ‘pay TV’ and cable different?” It’s still a good question. But the cable operators surrendered gracefully and the CRTC has been, broadly, for the last half-century, protective of the rights of incumbents in the infotainment markets. In return the cable and internet operators have agreed to “tiers” of programming which means that if you want to watch, say, BBC World Service or Deutsche Welle or Fox News, you must also pay for CBC News Network and CTV News Channel and, no matter who you are and what your individual preferences might be, when you subscribe to a cable/internet service you must also support a number of French stations/channels; it’s the law. And now Minister Guilbault wants to ensure that you pay for the output of indigenous producers, writers, actors and so on, on both indigenous networks ~ to which you must already subscribe if you have a “basic” Canadian cable or satellite TV package ~ and, it appears to me, in programmes produced by Canadians and even by Netflix.
