Quotulatiousness

August 24, 2021

Bloody Victories – The Battles For Metz | GLORY & DEFEAT Week 6

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

realtimehistory
Published 19 Aug 2021

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The French Army of Marshal Bazaine was hoping to reach Verdun or even Paris after the first engagements around Metz. But the French troops were exhausted which allowed the Germans to catch up. With the Battle of Gravelotte and the Battle of Mars-la-Tour, the fate of the French Rhine Army is sealed; they are trapped in Metz.

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» LITERATURE
Arand, Tobias: 1870/71. Die Geschichte des Deutsch-Französischen Krieges erzählt in Einzelschicksalen. Hamburg 2018
Bourguinat, Nicolas/Vogt, Gilles: La Guerre franco-allemande de 1870. Une histoire globale. Paris 2020
Buk-Swienty, Tom: Feuer und Blut. Hauptmann Dinesen. Hamburg 2014
Roux, Georges: La Guerre de 1870. Paris 1966

» SOURCES
Braun, Lily (Hrsg.): Kriegsbriefe aus den Jahren 1870/1 von Hans von Kretschman. Berlin 1911
Engels, Friedrich: Der Deutsch-Französische Krieg. Sechzig Artikel aus der “Pall Mall Gazette”. Berlin (Ost) 1957
Fontane, Theodor: Der Krieg gegen Frankreich. Bd. 1. Berlin 1873
Geschichte des Krieges 1870–1871, Union Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart 1895
N. N. (Hrsg.): Bismarcks Briefe an seine Gattin aus dem Kriege 1870/71. Stuttgart, Berlin 1903
Seigneur, Daniel: Carnets d’un infirmier d’une guerre oublié. Bière 2014

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Tracking the bullshit in the ongoing “she-lection”

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Media, Politics — Tags: — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ever watchful of opportunities, the folks at The Line quickly realized that there was a critical tracking metric going un-reported in the 2021 federal election and They. Are. On. It.

“2019 Canadian federal election – VOTE” by Indrid__Cold is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

At The Line, we’ll be continuing to send out our weekly dispatches for the duration of the campaign. Columnist Jen Gerson will also be doing a weekly recap of major events. We’ll be running articles by other contributors as they come in — not all will be about the election, but many will. And we’re happy to do this. But we felt that something — something we couldn’t quite put our finger on — was missing from our plan. We felt there was more that we could do.

It was our friend over at The Hub, a new media startup, that set us on the right course. The Hub is going to be doing “Policy Pulse”, which they describe as “tracking all the policy announcements from the major parties, with instant analysis from our crew of experts.” Great idea! But the more we thought about it, the more we realized that, you know, that doesn’t quite catch it all. There’s something else that needs to be carefully tracked and analyzed. So we at The Line are proud to bring you our first Bullshit Bulletin, where we’ll note and mock all the incredibly dumb stuff that crops up along the way. This will be an evolving process, and we don’t pretend to see everything, so if you want to send us suggestions, tweet us at @the_lineca, and add #bullshitbulletin, or drop us a note at lineeditor@protonmail.com, with Bullshit Bulletin in the subject field.

And to be clear, all you smart asses out there, no, don’t just tag the entire campaign or every statement made by every member of a party you’re not voting for and write it off as bullshit. There’s degrees of wiggle room and salesmanship and base-mobilizing in every election. We’re not going to worry about that. We’re looking for the egregious examples, and the really weird stuff that comes tumbling out of the partisan mind.

On that note, let’s get started.

Note that although they’re careful to exclude bullshit reports on comments “made by every member of a party you’re not voting for” — which is fair and sensible — they are (one assumes) open to bullshit reports on comments made by members of the party you are planning to vote for … because if it’s enough to set off your partisan-biased bullshit meter when it comes from your “side”, then it’s got to be prime quality bullshit.

Aztec Chocolate – Blood & Spice

Filed under: Americas, Europe, Food, History — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 9 Mar 2021

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QotD: Happiness and aging

Filed under: Health, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… our immune system evolved to hum along at peak capacity when we’re happy but to slow down dramatically when we’re not. This is why long-term unhappiness can literally kill you through its immune-suppressing effects, and why loneliness in late adulthood is deadlier than smoking. Indeed, once you’re over sixty-five you’re better off smoking, drinking, or overating with your friends than you are sitting at home alone.

With this background in mind, Trivers hypothesized that older adults evolved a strategy of turning this relationship on its head, becoming more focused on the positive things in life in an effort to enhance their immune functioning. Such a strategy would be more sensible for older than younger adults for two reasons. First, older adults have a weaker immune system than younger adults, and face greater threats from tumors and pathogens. Second, older adults know much more about the world than younger adults do, so they don’t need to pay as much attention to what’s going on around them. For example, when older adults interact with a surly bank employee or a harried flight attendant, they have a library of related experiences to draw upon and can respond to the situation effectively without giving it much thought. As a result, they can afford to gloss over some of the unpleasant things in life.

William von Hippel, The Social Leap: The New Evolutionary Science of Who We Are, Where We Come From, and What Makes Us Happy, 2018.

August 23, 2021

Canada is extremely good at posturing on the international stage … not so good at performing

Filed under: Asia, Cancon, Government, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kevin Newman on the continuing failure of the Canadian government and Canadian Armed Forces to protect and retrieve the people in Afghanistan we’ve promised to help:

On the second day of the Taliban’s rule in Kabul, the front of Hamid Karzai International Airport was crowded with people trying to travel abroad, but were stopped by Taliban militants, 17 August, 2021.
Public domain image from VOA via Wikimedia Commons.

It is impossible to piece together, or understand, why no one from Canada would come out of the military protection of the airport to speak to them over the past two days. Because there must have been a whole lot of talking happening on the safe side of the razor wire barrier separating the Afghans from the terminal. Late Friday, a Canadian C-17 carrying more soldiers and a few diplomatic and immigration staff arrived at Kabul’s military air terminal. They had a plan to work with American forces to get some of the gas station people out of the country. There seemed to be renewed confidence expressed in media interviews by Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino that, finally, things would happen.

Instead the Americans started executing rapid-retrieval missions into Kabul to get their own people out, sealed the entrance where Canada’s gas station people were waiting, and co-operation with Canadian forces seemed to disintegrate.

In the meantime, there was a game of numbers to play. With so few Canadian cases on that C-17 ready to return to a third country, the big grey plane was loaded with Afghans that other countries had successfully brought to the airport. A picture and story was fed to political reporters on the campaign trails in Canada declaring broadly that “106 Afghans have been flown out on a Canadian C17” – but National Defence would not reveal if any of those passengers had been Canadian cases.

According to the Globe and Mail‘s Stephen Chase there had been none on the only other Canadian flight of 175 to leave the airport twenty-four hours earlier, even as the government boated of another “success”. For weeks, the Prime Minister and his besieged cabinet had also been talking about 20,000 refugees coming to Canada. That too was misleading in is vagueness, according to Global News’ Mercedes Stephenson, as all but a handful are coming from outside Afghanistan and even then, it’s over many years.

There is zero evidence from multiple Afghan sources around the airport that any of those the Prime Minister boasts they’re “rescuing”, (LGTBQ2, human rights advocates, women and journalists) have come from Kabul or any part of Afghanistan in the past month.

With all that, the government continues to claim a C-17 will come and go each day. But do the math. If even a hundred daily Canadian cases make those flights, (no where near that many have so far), there is no way the vast majority of applicants will make it here before the window closes for evacuations. Canada’s commitment of men and materials in no way matches the need. So, will Immigration officials those with no hope now of rescue and admit that they won’t get out in time? That number is likely in the thousands. They need to develop a more realistic way to survive the Taliban.

The mystery in this deadly absurdity is the government’s obsession with paperwork. Even today Canadian officials on the safe side of the airport controlling who might get through were reported by eyewitnesses to be taking an “extremely strict” approach to paperwork verification. Only those granted full Canadian citizenship under the government’s Special Immigration Measure are being told they qualify to leave. That requires a lot more work to process and is perhaps less than a tenth of all the Afghans who are known to have applied and are in various stages of completing multiple forms.

Other countries have also been willing to grant refugee status to their interpreters and families, which doesn’t guarantee citizenship, but is it is a much faster way to process many more people, and it gives Afghans more choices should air rescue be impossible. In a news conference, Mendicino claimed his department’s agent in Kabul has authority to overlook the passport and biometric fingerprint requirements. But the evidence on the ground suggests he is being ignored.

Swastika Raised on Highest Point in Europe – WW2 – 156 – August 21, 1942

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, France, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 21 Aug 2021

The Axis advance in the Caucasus takes Mt. Elbrus, and the one on Stalingrad continues, and there are several raids of note this week- a Japanese one on Guadalcanal is destroyed, an Allied one on Dieppe is badly savaged, and an American one at Makin Atoll is successful in the short term, but with bad long term ramifications.
(more…)

The dying media’s strange obsession with the Green Party

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Green Party gets far more media attention in Canada than their vote totals or influence on goverment policy could possibly justify. Their ongoing attempts to commit media character assassination of their own leader might be the first time in living memory that the party’s antics might — might — justify it. The Line explains some of the dramedy in Greentopia:

“Annamie Paul with Green Party of Canada supporters” by Annamie Paul is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

One of us, just a couple of days ago, was standing around in our increasingly tattered casual wear and making a sandwich with the TV on in the background. A local news channel was showing Green party leader Annamie Paul speaking. So we changed the channel, because the Greens are irrelevant. But the next channel was also showing the same feed. We tried two others. It was all the same goddamned feed. And two of those networks were national. Viewers from coast to coast had a chance to hear, for an extended period, from a woman so thoroughly doomed that she’s not even pretending to run a national campaign. All she can muster is an attempt to win her seat in downtown Toronto.

Look, we don’t know who needs to hear this, but at the national level, the Greens are zeroes. Sorry, not sorry. Frankly, the Greens have long gotten too much attention in Canadian politics, which is a result of a few quirky things all aligning in their favour: Elizabeth May’s admittedly effective relentless self-promotion, the coffer-stuffing effect of the per-vote-wage subsidy, and, the politeness of Canadian media leaders who felt awkward saying no to Lizzie.

This is not to say that there are not serious Greens, nor that the Green party has not put forward some serious policy proposals. There are, and they have. The issue is that under our electoral system, the Greens don’t matter. And their strident complaining about their irrelevancy doesn’t actually make them relevant.

We glanced at recent vote tallies. The Greens generally get around five per cent or so, sometimes a point or two higher, sometimes a point or two lower. That ain’t nothing. But it is not enough to make them a meaningful electoral force in anything but a tiny handful of seats — or in really weird, bizarre vote-splitting scenarios, and those are very rare. We don’t believe there’s some magic level of popular support at which a party deserves serious consideration or not, it all depends on the context. The Bloc doesn’t get a ton of votes, either (though never less than the Greens), but since they only run candidates in Quebec, their efficient vote means they have a pretty consistently good chance of winning enough seats to matter in parliament. The Greens … don’t.

And that is in normal times. These aren’t normal times. Annamie Paul is a perfectly serious, credible person. The fact that her party is trying to back a cement truck over her in full view of 38 million witnesses simply confirms our instinct to ignore the party she leads. Most elections, you could argue that it’s a shame that the Greens don’t have an actual chance. This election, we’re thanking God for it.

Deciding how much attention to give a candidate or party is usually pretty easy. Outside Quebec, the big three — Tories, Liberals and NDP — get proper coverage, within the context of local circumstances and the dynamics of individual campaigns (ignoring a CPC also-ran in deepest Toronto isn’t going to break any hearts, nor the sacrificial Liberal in rural Alberta). The gamut of weirdo fringe parties are basically ignored. In Quebec, the Bloc warrants consideration alongside the big three.

What screws all this up, though, are the Greens and the People’s Party. They don’t warrant serious consideration, per se, but they will draw a fair number of voters. What to do with these?

Canadian Army Ranks 1939-1945

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

HandGrenadeDivision
Published 6 Sep 2019

A brief video describing the ranks used by the Canadian Army in the Second World War, with an equally brief introduction to the General Staff system.

Further reading and resources regarding the Canadian Army of the Second World War:

Service Publications

https://servicepub.com/

canadiansoldiers.com

http://www.canadiansoldiers.com

Department of National Defence Directorate of History and Heritage

http://www.cmp-cpm.forces.gc.ca/dhh-d…

QotD: Leaving money in the hands of individuals

Filed under: Economics, Government, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Here’s the thing: contrary to what the left thinks, when you leave wealth in the hands of the individuals, they don’t just flush it down the toilet or build gigantic bins that they fill with money, in which they go for a refreshing swim every day.

People do things with that money. And even if all they do is buy stuff (thereby allowing someone else to accumulate wealth) or invest it, that money gets aggregated and finds things to do, as it were. Wealth goes to work on things that seem interesting, might be interesting, or are otherwise likely to make money for the individuals who hold the wealth.

Individuals have money to start new businesses that would never have existed if they’d paid that money in taxes. Or they “invest” in free time and a really nice garden, which in turn lifts the spirits of people who invent something because they feel better than they would otherwise.

The left insists that if they leave money in individual hands, it will just be “wasted”. (Because, you know, no money spent on a vast apparatus, most of it a jobs program for useless paper pushers or power-hungry martinets is ever wasted.)

How do they know? Have they tried leaving enough money in the hands of those who earn it to make a difference?

Not in the twentieth century. Though we can infer from the fact that the most sclerotic, dying countries are the highest taxed ones, that perhaps what government considers “best” and what we consider “best” are not the same.

Not just taxes, but regulations too weigh heavily on possibilities. Sure, the left sees “lands saved” (or created. oop) when say, regulations curtail oil drilling. But what I see is energy taking up an excessive amount of every family’s money, wealth that would otherwise be freed for other investments, for starting businesses, even “just” for fun.

The problem we have is that leftists lack utterly in imagination. They see the “pristine” plots of land, or the things government does with our money and they find it good.

But they’re mind’s-eye blind. They can’t see the wealth that has been consumed for almost 100 years now say on the war on poverty to create chronic poverty having instead been used by individuals to create, to invest, to build, so that, in that parallel world in which money stayed in individual hands, we now have interplanetary travel, colonies all over the solar system, and squid farms on Mars that feed all of humanity.

Their lack of vision, their killing of possibilities without the slightest thought to them: That is a tragedy.

Sara Hoyt, “The Tragedy of the Squid Farms on Mars”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2018-12-05.

August 22, 2021

Mounties’ First Revolver: the NWMP Adams MkIII

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 3 May 2021

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The first handguns issued by the North West Mounted Police (which would later become the modern RCMP) were 330 Adams revolvers, requisitioned by the new police service in March 1874, and shipped over from England. Upon their receipt in July of that year, the Mounties were dismayed to find thoroughly worn out Adams Mk I 5-shot conversions from old percussion revolvers. These were found totally unfit for frontier service, and an appeal was sent back to England for something better.

A replacement shipment arrived in October 1875, and this time they received 326 much better Adams MkIII revolvers (330 were shipped, but 4 were stolen in transit). The MkIII pattern was a purpose-made .450 Adams cartridge revolver, holding six shots with a double action trigger and solid frame. These served very well, and the NWMP ordered more in 1880 — for which they instead received Enfield revolvers, which had replaced the Adams in British military service by that time.

The 326 Adams MkIII revolvers issued by the NWMP were marked by a local gunsmith upon their arrival. The right side of the frames are marked “C M.P.” (presumably Canada Mounted Police) and given a police inventory number just below the barrel (in addition to the serial number above the trigger). These issue numbers were defaced when the guns were sold out of service.

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QotD: Woodrow Wilson, wrong on many things, but quite right on this one thing

Filed under: History, Quotations, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Woodrow Wilson was wrong about many things, but he was a veritable hedgehog about One Big Thing: the principle of national self-determination. When it came to his dream of the League of Nations, Wilson was a utopian romantic; but on the question of how to draw national political boundaries, he was a Founding Father of what may be called National Realism.

National Realism comprehends and respects the perhaps tragic, but nevertheless undeniable, fact that most people are deeply attached to collective identities and aspirations. It accepts as both natural and important that psychological well-being would be rooted in a terroir, a set of traditions or other mythologies about who people are and where they come from, that can serve as a source of meaning and self-understanding, as well as social cohesion. It acknowledges that nationalism is a fixture of modern social and political reality.

The idea that a self-described people should have the right to determine its own collective destiny was once considered progressive. Nineteenth-century liberal nationalists like Giuseppe Mazzini in Italy and Ernest Renan in France saw in the nation-state the fullest political expression of peoplehood, a true source of law and legitimacy, a celebration of diversity, and a font of culture, art, and human flourishing. The idea of national self-determination also resonated with the American Founding and with the Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed that governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed and found in Natural Law the right for one people to “dissolve the political bands which have connected it with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.” For good or ill, the French Revolution had awakened modern ethnic self-awareness among European peoples, and ever since, nationalism has been the most robust political force in international affairs. Nationalism is a property of modern nation states, the same way that gravity is a property of physical matter. It is unwise to underestimate its power.

Diversity is now, supposedly, the primus inter pares of our political values. But ethnic and racial diversity, in all its colorful pageantry, is traditionally associated with empires, not republics. Diversity brings to mind Barbara Tuchman’s description of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, with its splendid processions of Royal Nigerian Constabulary, Borneo Dyak Police, turbaned and bearded Lancers of Khapurthala and Badnagar, Zaptichs from Cyprus with their tasseled fezzes and black-maned ponies, Houssas from the Gold Coast, Chinese from Hong Kong, and Malays from Singapore, all paying homage to the great monarch. Imperial Rome was an equally spectacular kaleidoscope of nations and religions. By contrast, republican Rome was merely, austerely, Roman.

As a good Progressive, Wilson understood that modern democratic government is incompatible with multi-ethnic empire. But it took the cataclysmic breakdown of the Old World empires in the meat-grinder of World War I to bring the idea of national self-determination into political focus. It would be wise to remember that that civilization-shattering conflict was blamed in large part on the lack of congruence between state and ethnic boundaries. Most of Wilson’s famous Fourteen Points, outlined 101 years ago this month, were dedicated to correcting this discrepancy on the basis of national self-determination.

E.M. Oblomov, “The Case for National Realism: Diversity is the hallmark of empires, not democracies”, City Journal, 2019-01-02.

August 21, 2021

In this matter Canada apes the US rather than following the great example provided by France

Filed under: Asia, Cancon, France, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Kevin Newman highlights the stark difference between what France has been doing to rescue their own citizens and Afghani civilians with ties to France with the utterly feckless Canadian government’s “effort”:

On the second day of the Taliban’s rule in Kabul, the front of Hamid Karzai International Airport was crowded with people trying to travel abroad, but were stopped by Taliban militants, 17 August, 2021.
Public domain image from VOA via Wikimedia Commons.

Ten buses screamed out of France’s embassy in Kabul early this week, past every Taliban checkpoint along the way, and according to eyewitnesses, zipped confidently through a back-entrance gate and straight onto the chaotic tarmac at Hamid Karzai International Airport. Five hundred exhausted and terrified passengers were then loaded onto a French military aircraft which quickly took off.

And then it happened again on Thursday, four buses this time, under the guard of French special forces. As with the first convoy, Paris newspapers reported the buses carried French nationals stranded in Kabul, and hundreds of Afghans and their families the French embassy had given shelter to since before the Taliban roared into and re-occupied the city. Two ballsy airlifts took them to safety at a French military base in the United Arab Emirates, where hundreds of desperate people were given a hot meal, questioned about their identities and had their documents confirmed. Most were then sent on to Paris, where they received physical and mental-health support as well as cash, clothing, and places to stay as they begin their new lives.

On those same days in Kabul, another country tried to rescue its citizens and hundreds of Afghan interpreters and their families hiding throughout the city. I’ve pieced together what happened to them from texts and video Canadian veterans have been receiving every hour from people they know in Kabul, and I am sharing them with permission. I have verified each of these facts (from the peace of Canada) with multiple sources on the ground.

There were no buses, soldiers or escorts for these terrified people. Thursday they received a short text from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC). They were instructed (in English only) to urgently head to the airport on their own, try to find a way through multiple Taliban checkpoints searching for them, and then if they survived that kilometres-long trip, figure out a way through thousands of desperate Afghans trying to flee. They were told by IRCC to carry documents to identify themselves to a gate agent, but because those same documents would be used to identify them by the Taliban, it was up to them to decide whether to carry them. With that, IRCC wiped its hands of responsibility. No direction on where to avoid Taliban checkpoints, no specific gates to head to (there are eight), and no Canadians on site to help. In fact there hadn’t been any Canadian officials in Kabul for a week, and when a few arrived hours after that text blast, reporters said they had travelled on an American military flight because their Canadian C-17 needed servicing somewhere else.

Needless to say, no one got through the airport, so they returned to their safe houses — wondering if their last flight to freedom had left without them.

It hadn’t. It never existed. Later that night another set of blasts went out again telling Afghans to move on their own to the airport. This time they were told to shout “Canada” and hope a soldier would hear them and help them through the airport gates. Taliban guards could hear them as well there, which would ensure that the target on their backs they had been trying to hide came completely into focus.

“Free” Navies of World War 2 – Small but Deadly (and a little crazy)

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Greece, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Drachinifel
Published 13 Aug 2019

Today we take a brief look at the various “Free” navies that operated with the Royal Navy and how that interaction played out across the years of conflict.

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Indigo in the red

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

In the latest edition of his SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte looks at the dire financial situation of Canada’s big box bookstore chain:

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

Indigo just released its first-quarter financial results, covering the period April-June 2021, which can be compared to its pre-pandemic results from the same quarter in 2019.

Back then, Indigo had revenues of $193 million and no profit. Seventy percent of its revenue, or $136 million, came from the firm’s eighty-nine Chapters and Indigo superstores. Only $25 million came from its 115 smaller stores (Coles and Indigo Spirit), and another $29 million from online sales at chapters.indigo.ca. Not only did the company book no profit, but all three of those revenue channels were down from the previous year, with online sales falling the most (15%).

This is to say that Indigo, in financial terms, was immunocompromised before COVID-19 hit.

The decline in digital sales was especially alarming. It seemed that CEO Heather Reisman was giving up on the web, an impression reinforced by her frequent renovations of in-store environments and her not terribly successful launch of a so-called cultural department store […] in New Jersey, Indigo’s first international gambit. She was all about bricks and mortar.

One also got the sense that Heather was giving up on books. She was building up the candles and blankets side of the business — it represented almost 40% of 2019’s total revenue. She also launched Thoughtfull.co, an effort to graze on Hallmark grass, and another step away from the book business.

I’d certainly despaired of finding much in the way of actual books at Chapters or Indigo stores … more and more of the floorspace that used to be devoted to books had been given over to housewares, candles, hostess gift items, decorative throw cushions and other such non-book items. Even before the Wuhan Coronavirus shut down the western world, it had been at least a year since the last time I’d found anything worth buying in one of their stores.

Two years and several pandemic waves later, Indigo is down to 88 superstores and 88 small-format stores, a net reduction of twenty-eight. I don’t know the significance of 88. Maybe the company’s new retail guru — Indigo always has a new retail guru — is a pianist, or Chinese, or a white supremacist.

The remaining stores are now open to foot traffic, and the company is wrangling with its various landlords over how much rent it should pay for the pandemic months when most of its outlets were closed. Indigo received almost $3 million in federal emergency rent subsidies, and almost $4 million in payroll subsidies, which seems like a lot but isn’t for a company as big as Indigo. As we noted in an earlier post, Heather also received a $25 million “liquidity enhancement”, or bailout, from billionaire husband Gerry Schwartz.

Which brings us to the present. Revenues for Indigo’s most recent quarter are $172 million (down $21 million from two years ago), and it lost $15 million (before depreciation, amortization, etc.).

Indigo doesn’t release enough detail on its operations to give us a clear idea of how the company lost only $15 million when its revenue fell $21 million, but costs were down across the board, probably reflecting the closed stores, reduced staffing levels, and fewer books on the shelves, among other savings.

Heat Treatment -The Science of Forging (feat. Alec Steele)

Filed under: Science, Technology, Tools, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Engineering
Published 29 Jan 2018

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