Matsimus
Published on 5 Feb 2018Captain Scott Franklin, with the office of the Director Land Requirements, pointed out in a Jan. 23 article on the Army’s website that with the delivery of the new Leopard 2 Tank Mobility Implements in the fall of 2017, the last of the Army’s Leopard 1 tanks have been parked for good.
So what happens with those tanks?
Department of National Defence spokesman Daniel Le Bouthillier explained to what might happen with the surplus Leopard 1s:
“The Department of National Defence has a formal process for disposing of surplus Canadian Armed Forces equipment. Once DND and the CAF has declared equipment surplus, a disposal plan is written that describes the preparatory steps that are to be performed, and describes the strategies for its removal from the DND system of record. The disposal plan assesses options, including retention, for alternate use within DND and the CAF (e.g. for training or display purposes), transfer to another Federal Government organization, sale, donation, or conversion to waste.
In the case of the Leopard 1 family of vehicles, there are 52 remaining Leopard 1C2 Main Battle Tanks, and 5 Leopard 1 Armoured Engineering Vehicles remaining. They will remain in place until a disposal mechanism is selected. They are currently distributed in Edmonton, Alberta; Montreal, Quebec; and Gagetown, New Brunswick. The first option would be to sell the tanks. Any revenue generating option for the government is encouraged. The tanks were listed for sale since 31 Aug 2015. While there is some interest currently, there are no firm buyers. The sale is open to approved foreign nations or approved Canadian industry. The second option is to use the tanks for alternative use (hard targets, monuments/artefacts). If tanks cannot be sold, alternative applications will be sought that may bring value to the government.
The last option would be to destroy the tanks. NO!
February 8, 2018
Canada wants to sell Leopard 1 Tanks!
A virtual tour of the Rensselaer Model Railroad Society’s NEB&W layout
John McCluskey shared this link on one of my mailing lists, and it’s well worth the visit: https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=e6d8iA5vGQ5. I visited the New England, Berkshire & Western layout at Rensselaer Polytechnic about twenty years ago, and the society has been busy working on it, so that while I recognize a lot of the scenes, they’ve clearly added to or upgraded them from my visit.
Stock Prep by Hand – Christopher Schwarz
Popular Woodworking
Published on 2 Feb 2017Learn how to process rough stock by hand and make it project ready – it’s not as difficult as you might think. (Excerpted from “Build a Hand-Crafted Bookcase,” by Christopher Schwarz – available at ShopWoodworking.com as a video download or DVD.)
QotD: Minimum prices for wine, a thought experiment
Consider this hypothetical (which, given the poor quality of today’s punditry and publicly discussed economics, is not as far-fetched as it might at first seem): Ostensibly to help raise the incomes of hard-working vintners of low-quality wines – vintners many of whom have children to feed and sick parents to care for, and many of whom also are stuck in their jobs as owners of low-quality vineyards – Congress passes minimum-wine-price legislation: no wine may sell for any price less than $1.00 per fluid ounce. Roughly, that means that the minimum price of a standard-sized – 750ml – bottle of wine becomes $25.00. Armed officers of the state will use deadly force against anyone and everyone who insists on disobeying this diktat.
If proponents of the minimum wage are correct in their economics, then the only effect of this minimum-wine-price diktat will be distributional. Consumers – including retailers and restaurants buying from wholesalers – will continue to buy as much wine, and the same qualities of wine, that they bought before the diktat took effect. The only difference is that, with the diktat in place, owners of low-quality vineyards earn higher incomes, all of which are paid for by consumers who dip further into their own incomes and wealth to fund this transfer. Easy-peasy! Problem solved!
But who in their right mind would suppose that a minimum-wine-price diktat would play out in the manner described above? Who would not see that a wine buyer, obliged to pay at least $25 for a standard-size bottle of wine, will buy only higher-quality wines – wines that before the diktat took effect were fetching at least $25 per bottle (or some price close to that)? Many wine buyers who before the diktat were confronted with the choice of paying either $8.99 for a bottle of indifferent but drinkable chardonnay and $25.00 for a bottle of much more elegant and enjoyable chardonnay opted for the less-pricey bottles. They did so not because they prefer to drink chardonnay that is indifferent to chardonnay that is elegant – they in fact do not have this preference. Rather, they did so because the greater elegance of the pricier chardonnay was not to them worth its higher price. So the low-quality chardonnay found many willing buyers.
Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2016-06-02.
February 7, 2018
The Martian Chronicles – Too Human – Extra Sci Fi – #12
Extra Credits
Published on 6 Feb 2018The second half of Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles can be described as “the human cycle” — a reflection on humanity’s seemingly insatiable need to conquer and consume every last bit of our own culture.
Better Safe than Sorry! l THE HISTORY OF CONTRACEPTION
IT’S HISTORY
Published on 26 Sep 2015The development of contraceptives has come a long way. It all started with questionable ointments and rituals to avoid pregnancy. The effectiveness of new inventions have since improved greatly. Especially the invention of rubber and latex for condoms or contraceptive ideas like the diaphragm or the pill. Learn about the development of contraceptives and their societal standing this episode on IT’S HISTORY.
QotD: You are not the customer … you’re the product
As we enter the third 24-hour period of relentless media coverage, the part where even the local TV stations have custom bumpers for the incident with distinctive theme music, let’s make sure we have some things clear.
TV news does not sell news to you.
TV news sells commercial time to corporations and your eyeballs are the poker chips in the card game.
Atrocities (and let’s keep our terminology straight: hurricanes and earthquakes are tragedies, this was an atrocity) are like a Double Bonus Round in the Eyeball Delivery Sweepstakes for FOXNews and CNN and MSNBC.
And all this attention is just incentivizing the next Eyeball Deliverer out there, patiently loading magazines (or mixing fertilizer, or dumping powder into pressure cookers, or studying a flight manual, or filling jerry cans…)
And, yes, ironically this post is just more attention being paid, and by complaining about the problem I make myself a part of it. It’s a hell of a thing.
Tamara Keel, “Terminology, again”, View From The Porch, 2016-06-14.
February 6, 2018
Hit and Run – Motor Torpedo Boats in World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR Special
The Great War
Published on 5 Feb 2018The Naval arms race of the early 20th century certainly meant that battleships got ever bigger and more powerful. But there is a David to every Goliath and so Motor Torpedo Boats were developed and used for “hit and run” style operations by both the British and the Italian Navy. Especially, the Italians used their Motoscafo armato silurante (MAS) with great success against the Austro-Hungarian Navy.
Tank Chats #22 Mark V Two Star
The Tank Museum
Published on 10 Jun 2016Mark V** – A longer tank for wider trenches.
When the Germans realised what a threat tanks could be, they made their trenches wider to trap them; one answer to this was to build longer tanks and the Mark V was stretched by six feet to create the Mark V*. As an interim solution this was adequate but a further improved version, the Mark V** was designed for 1919.
Find out more about the First World War on the Tank Museum’s Centenary blog, Tank 100 http://www.tank100.com
QotD: The original goal of the minimum wage
For progressives, a legal minimum wage had the useful property of sorting the unfit, who would lose their jobs, from the deserving workers, who would retain their jobs. Royal Meeker, a Princeton economist who served as Woodrow Wilson’s U.S. Commissioner of Labor, opposed a proposal to subsidize the wages of poor workers for this reason. Meeker preferred a wage floor because it would disemploy unfit workers and thereby enable their culling from the work force.
Thomas Leonard, “Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era”, Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2005-09.
February 5, 2018
The Apple iPhone … productivity killer
Tim Harford explains why the first world’s productivity gains have stalled and even gone into reverse since the Apple iPhone was introduced:
A few weeks before Christmas, an impish chart appeared on the Bank of England’s unofficial blog. It compared plunging productivity with the soaring shipments of smartphones. Typical productivity growth in advanced economies had hovered steadily around 1 per cent a year for several decades, but has on average been negative since 2007. That was the year the iPhone started to ship.
Nobody really believes that the iPhone caused the productivity slowdown — a more obvious culprit would be the global financial crisis — but it is hard to find people who think that their phones are an unalloyed blessing. If in 1968 an economist or computer scientist had been told that 50 years later we would all be carrying wirelessly networked supercomputers in our pockets, he or she would have been staggered at the potential. I doubt they would have realised quite how much time we would spend liking Instagram posts, playing Pokémon Go and sending each other digital interruptions.
The costs of this distraction are starting to become apparent. I wrote recently about the research of Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine. Prof Mark argues that reorientating yourself after an interruption tends to take between 20 and 25 minutes. We all know how a moment’s inattention can turn into a clickhole of distractions. She also points out that once we get used to being interrupted by others, we start interrupting ourselves, twitchily checking email or social media in the hope something interesting might turn up.
A brief history of plural word…s – John McWhorter
TED-Ed
Published on 22 Jul 2013View full lesson here: https://ed.ted.com/lessons/a-brief-history-of-plural-word-s-john-mcwhorter
All it takes is a simple S to make most English words plural. But it hasn’t always worked that way (and there are, of course, exceptions). John McWhorter looks back to the good old days when English was newly split from German — and books, names and eggs were beek, namen and eggru!
Lesson by John McWhorter, animation by Lippy.
QotD: The Age of Hypocrisy
Hitler (one cannot mention him without the subliterates mouthing, “Reductio ad Hitlerum!” — not realizing that they are quoting Leo Strauss) was the great enabler. He gave cover to all lesser evils, including the greater of the lesser ones; and thereby retired all the prattling politicians from the Age of Hypocrisy, which he closed. Now all the baddies seemed good, by comparison, and everyone needed a baddie of his own, or they would get one assigned from Berlin.
The Age of Hypocrisy re-opened, of course, with Hitler’s death, when political discourse again softened. (Hypocrisy is the padding on the madhouse walls.) But for a twelve-year run in Germany, and shorter periods wherever their shadow fell, Hitler’s Nazis erased hypocrisy.
This is what Karl Kraus meant, when he said that the Nazis had left him speechless. For decades he had exposed the lies and deceitful posturing not only of politicians in the German-speaking world, but among their immense supporting cast of journalists and fashion-seeking intellectuals. He was the greater-than-Orwell who strode to the defence of the German language, when it was wickedly abused. He identified the new “smelly little orthodoxies” as they crawled from under the rocks of Western Civ — the squalid, unexamined premisses that led by increments to the slaughterhouse of Total War. He was not, even slightly, a revolutionist; he had no argument against anyone’s wealth or status, even his own. Rather, through savage satirical humour, with language untranslatably precise, impinging constantly upon the poetic, he undressed the false.
He had seen the First World War coming, in the malice spreading through the language; in the smugness that fogged perception; in the lies that people told each other, to preserve their amour-propre; in the jingo that lurked beneath the genteel. After, he saw worse.
David Warren, “The decline of requirements”, Essays in Idleness, 2016-06-07.
