Quotulatiousness

July 20, 2018

No end in sight for our national fake poutine crisis

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Food, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 06:00

A few key posts from the Twitters to illustrate the problem:







“Trudeau becomes the first prime minister I’ve ever covered who has demoted himself”

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Maclean’s, Paul Wells analyzes Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent federal cabinet shuffle:

So much has changed, culminating — for now — with the burial of Ontario provincial Liberalism at the hands of Doug Ford. Alberta and Quebec could next fall to Jason Kenney and François Legault. Certainly that’s the way to bet it. Even normally sunshiny New Brunswick, Newfoundland and PEI are refusing to file carbon reduction plans in line with what Catherine McKenna expects.

So the cabinet Trudeau shuffled on Wednesday isn’t a pre-election cabinet, in the sense of one that’s sweet and shiny to attract distracted voters, so much as it’s a survive-until-the-election cabinet. If this cabinet were a movie, it’d be Walter Hill’s 1979 classic The Warriors. A bunch of street fighters, just trying to make it from the Bronx to Brooklyn in one piece. Doug Ford calling to them from an abandoned car, clinking empty bottles together. Or to use another, perhaps less obscure, movie analogy, it’s farewell to Hope and Hard Work, hello to Horse’s Head/ In Your Bed.

The stars of this partially-refurbished cabinet are two bad cops, in one case quite literally: Bill Blair and Dominic LeBlanc. Blair’s job on the border-crossing file isn’t only to get up Doug Ford’s nose, though that’s a handy bonus. It’s to do more or less what he did as the Liberals’ back-bench pilot of cannabis legalization: to steward a controversial file as humourlessly as humanly possible, to convey with every flinty word and steely grimace that the government is not even remotely interested in messing around.

It’s interesting that Ahmed Hussen, a personable and diligent minister who was also obviously appointed so he could incarnate Liberal branding of openness and diversity, keeps every part of the immigration file except those elements that scare some voters: the people walking across the border. Those parts have been assigned to Sgt. Rock over here.

LeBlanc, an irrepressible rogue whose dad was Pierre Trudeau’s fisheries minister and who has known Justin Trudeau all his life, is not by nature a political bone-crusher, although that’s certainly within his vocabulary. He doesn’t even like when people like me emphasize that part of his personality. He will prefer to get along. But he has the job Trudeau had because Trudeau noticed that, even though his intergovernmental minister was Justin Trudeau, the intergovernmental mood out there was getting noticeably chippy. So Trudeau stripped Trudeau of that portfolio and handed it to someone who could concentrate on it. It’s traditional to view a smaller ministerial portfolio as evidence of a demotion. Trudeau becomes the first prime minister I’ve ever covered who has demoted himself.

2nd Battle Of The Marne – Turning Point On The Western Front I THE GREAT WAR Week 208

Filed under: France, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 19 Jul 2018

The German Army launches an diversionary attack from the Rheims-Soisson salient and increases the pressure on Paris. But the Allies knew about the attack and for the first time, they effectively counter the German Stormtrooper tactics and even counter-attack along the line.

Fiat currency and the impact of cryptocurrencies

Filed under: Economics, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Catallaxy Files, Sinclair Davidson explains some of the advantages and disadvantages of both fiat (government-issued) and private currency:

As George Selgin, Larry White and others have shown, many historical societies had systems of private money — free banking — where the institution of money was provided by the market.

But for the most part, private monies have been displaced by fiat currencies, and live on as a historical curiosity.

We can explain this with an ‘institutional possibility frontier’; a framework developed first by Harvard economist Andrei Shleifer and his various co-authors. Shleifer and colleagues array social institutions according to how they trade-off the risks of disorder (that is, private fraud and theft) against the risk of dictatorship (that is, government expropriation, oppression, etc.) along the frontier.

As the graph shows, for money these risks are counterfeiting (disorder) and unexpected inflation (dictatorship). The free banking era taught us that private currencies are vulnerable to counterfeiting, but due to competitive market pressure, minimise the risk of inflation.

By contrast, fiat currencies are less susceptible to counterfeiting. Governments are a trusted third party that aggressively prosecutes currency fraud. The tradeoff though is that governments get the power of inflating the currency.

The fact that fiat currencies seem to be widely preferred in the world isn’t only because of fiat currency laws. It’s that citizens seem to be relatively happy with this tradeoff. They would prefer to take the risk of inflation over the risk of counterfeiting.

One reason why this might be the case is because they can both diversify and hedge against the likelihood of inflation by holding assets such as gold, or foreign currency.

The dictatorship costs of fiat currency are apparently not as high as ‘hard money’ theorists imagine.

Introducing cryptocurrencies

Cryptocurrencies significantly change this dynamic.

Cryptocurrencies are a form of private money that substantially, if not entirely, eliminate the risk of counterfeiting. Blockchains underpin cryptocurrency tokens as a secure, decentralised digital asset.

They’re not just an asset to diversify away from inflationary fiat currency, or a hedge to protect against unwanted dictatorship. Cryptocurrencies are a (near — and increasing) substitute for fiat currency.

This means that the disorder costs of private money drop dramatically.

In fact, the counterfeiting risk for mature cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin is currently less than fiat currency. Fiat currency can still be counterfeited. A stable and secure blockchain eliminates the risk of counterfeiting entirely.

Tank Chats #33 Panzer III | The Tank Museum

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Technology, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published on 11 Mar 2017

The thirty-third Tank Chat, this time presented by Curator David Willey. Including a fascinating insight into pre-Second World War German tank production and how the Panzer III worked alongside its fellow Panzers.

To find out more, buy the new Haynes Panzer III tank manual. https://www.myonlinebooking.co.uk/tan…

The Panzer III was conceived in 1934 as the principle combat tank of the Panzer divisions. The Museum’s Panzer III went into action in the North African theatre of war and is believed to have been captured at the Battle of Alam Halfa.

Support the work of The Tank Museum on Patreon: ► https://www.patreon.com/tankmuseum
Or donate http://tankmuseum.org/support-us/donate

QotD: The modern mission of the university

Filed under: Education, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

God makes a portion of each generation intelligent well above the average, and despite the best efforts of our state school systems, His handiwork is hard to suppress. The task of the modern progressive university is therefore to corrupt and unbalance the intelligent; to pit their minds against their common sense; to adapt their brains as a useful putty — a kind of “semtex” or plastic explosive to press into the folds and corners of the society the progressive must destroy to rule.

David Warren, “Halls of memory”, Essays in Idleness, 2016-10-01.

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