Quotulatiousness

September 19, 2026

International travel used to be a true luxury: it’s going back to being a luxury again

Filed under: Business, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I was never a serious globe-trotter and international flights were something I did on the company’s dime or rare trips back to England to visit family. But it was still theoretically possible for someone in my very middle-class cohort to travel extensively for fun. (No longer, of course, as my pension definitely wouldn’t stretch as far as airline tickets.) As Copernican points out, we’re looking at a future — indeed a very near future — where there will be a revived “Jet Set” where it is only the wealthy who can afford to travel:

With the creation of datacenters, artificial constructs, and global internet, being away no longer comes with the same psychological independence that it once did. Many are so hopelessly reliant on the noosphere that they can scarcely function without direct contact to it in one form or another. Particularly zoomers.1 Thus, the idea of “space” becomes as much cognitive as it is physical. Without the cognitive disconnection, the physical disconnection means nothing, and with Starlink now providing access literally anywhere, the wild is often perceived as just as observed and restricted as anywhere else.

The thesis of this argument is that luxury will no longer mean space away from other people (though there will always be a demand for that) but that the near-future will see a sort of throwback philosophy regarding luxury. The capacity to travel.

    This article was instigated by recent news updates regarding the airline industry. Namely, that many airline companies are ripping out economy class seating to make space for luxury seats and suites. Simply put, the poor can no longer afford to travel, and many among the former middle-classes cannot either.

Travel is increasingly becoming an economy restricted to the wealthy, international travel even more so. This is something that should be considered when one considers a backup country.2

We see the influencers who once peddled their lifestyles in Dubai and Mexico quietly rolling back home. Part of that is the cost of frivolous travel, and part of that is the result of global instability. I purchased international plane tickets immediately before and after the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, and the difference in price expressed more than a news article on the oil crisis ever could.

It is unlikely I’ll be traveling internationally again for the foreseeable future.

More, it’s unlikely many people will be traveling much for the foreseeable future at all. Business moguls, billionaires, and those who absolutely must show up in person, sure. But the average vacationer is not likely to lightly book a flight from Las Vegas to Tokyo. As the costs associated with travel increase, the heartland of the United States and the isolated villas to which the wealthy once flocked will see their own membership slowly contract.

    One of the reasons why the wealthy prefer owning vacation homes in those places is due to the fact that other wealthy people live there. As that network begins to slowly contract, so too will the value of possessing property in those locations.

The price spikes are likely to be sticky. Those with dreams of the cost of gasoline, diesel, or jet fuel coming back down are (I think) delusionally hopeful. If the inflation of the last few years since the pandemic has demonstrated anything, it’s that enshitification can affect all industries, and once it has, it doesn’t tend to go away. Regardless of how the conflict in Iran goes, the new higher prices are functionally baked into the global economy. That will be its own can of worms for governments to untangle.3

    At least there’ll be fewer girls traveling to Brazil to get their body-count reset via the best grift I’ve ever heard of. Soon the trip there will cost more than the $13,000 “treatment”. Seems like a lot of trouble when an AI-partner can just validate all your delusions for you at home.

  1. About half the population now suffers from a degree of Nomophobia. That is the fear of being without a mobile connectivity device. For those individuals, the concept of being “away from people” is meaningless. Constant connection to the feed has become a psychologically ingrained state. Effectively, such people require a constant connection to the collective human psyche to the point that their sense of self relies on it.

    2. Conceptualizing the Collective Unconscious of a People

  2. The Billionaire tendency to purchase bunkers in various parts of the world is truly impressive. We’re talking multi-billion dollar facilities built simply to afford these individuals not merely a sense of safety, but a place away from the rest of humanity. They’re buying themselves spiritual and physical space of their own.
  3. The United States has already floated the idea of a Diesel Export Ban. The US economy runs almost exclusively on Diesel fuel for big-box trucks shipping food and goods around the country. It’s among the least efficient systems globally, but permits people to live anywhere with a (relatively cheap) connection to the intercontinental road network. With the price of diesel now cresting $6 a gallon, it may well reach an unsustainable point for low-value goods. Thus, the consideration of an export ban. Banning diesel exports would preserve low(er) prices in the United States proper while forcing foreign nations to eat the cost on the international market.

CAMRA and the fight to save British beer in the 70s

Filed under: Britain, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On his Substack, Henry Jeffreys recommends a couple of YouTube videos that beer fans might find interesting:

Every so often I vow that I am going to stop wallowing in nostalgia and engage with some contemporary culture: watch some new films, read a new book, and maybe even listen to some new music. But then I discover a treasure trove of old Jonathan Meades documentaries on Youtube and I’m lost. There’s so much good stuff on there that I am very tempted to cancel my Netflix subscription and take out Youtube premium, which means I won’t have to watch the incredibly irritating adverts. That’s another thing that’s not as good as it used to be.

Here’s a few booze-linked things that I’ve been watching recently.

[…]

The battle for Britain’s pint

I’ve long been a real ale enthusiast, in fact I wrote something for the Daily Telegraph on the subject earlier this month. My father was an early member of CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale. Meades refers to the organisation, not altogether negatively, I think, as “anti-metropolitanism, anti-modernism”. There’s something distinctly Hobbity about tilting at progress and, to some extent, winning. Live, unpasteurised beer was becoming a rarity by the 1970s, and now it’s easy to find in almost every town and village that still has a pub. It was described as “the most effective consumer pressure group in Europe”.

This documentary from 1977 looks at the battle to save Britain’s traditional beer. It’s particularly worth watching for the young bearded earnest CAMRA members at their conference. There were also a surprising number of women. It makes you realise that while real ale has a stuffy image today, at the time it was fashionable. It was a youth movement, not a bunch of reactionary old men, but young people seeing a problem and doing something about it. It is inspiring. If it wasn’t for these earnest, bearded young men and women (mainly without beards), then much of what we take for granted about British beer would no longer exist. The movement also inspired American craft beer, which in turn inspired British craft beer. It is hard to overstate how important CAMRA was for beer around the world.

Whicker’s World — Englishmen in New York

If you want to see what the state of American beer was like in the early 1980s, watch Alan Whicker’s documentary about Englishmen living in New York. The star is entrepreneur Mancunian Richard Wrigley, who is behind the Manhattan Brewery Co. He says at one point: “I like good beer and there wasn’t any in the States”, and compares the local brew to Perrier. He has taken over a gigantic derelict industrial building and is trying to turn it into a brewpub with brewing equipment from Germany. He’s even shipped over two dray horses at vast expense. Wrigley is completely unflappable, confident that they will open in two weeks even though the work is nowhere near finished. Whicker is such a great interviewer, warm and avuncular, but he keeps pressing Wrigley about the expense and where the money is coming from.

Amazingly the brewery, which cost over a million dollars, did actually open, but it struggled to make money and eventually closed in 1995. Richard Wrigley, who died in 2022, is a fascinating character. He’d make a great subject for a feature film. There’s something of a chancer about him, slightly slippery but very charming. At one point Wrigley says that he has been described as a “conman”, but the Americans mean it as a compliment. It’s well worth reading up on the story of the Manhattan Brewery Co. While it failed, the head brewer Garrett Oliver would go on to make beer at the Brooklyn Brewery in 1994 — a company that would transform beer in New York. By the time I visited the city for the first time in 2003, good beer was everywhere.

Internal migration patterns in the United States

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Economics, Education, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s become a commonplace to see yet another tech company pulling up stakes and leaving California … and the state government seems determined to get rid of many of their biggest economic contributors with new legislation to make life harder for companies and wealthy individuals (see the second item, for instance). But it’s not just California losing population to other states:

Universities in the NCAA Southeastern Conference.
Map from Wikimedia Commons

Americans have long expressed their political preferences at the ballot box and their economic preferences with moving vans. Increasingly, they are expressing a third preference — where their children attend college — and the destination looks remarkably like the other two.

In 2025, North Carolina gained more than 84,000 residents from other states, more than any state in the union. Texas added over 67,000. California lost more than 229,000, and New York lost nearly 138,000, continuing a migration that has by now acquired the character of a rout rather than a trend. Yet few have noticed that the same states drawing families and factories are drawing something else: students, and with them, the institutions built to educate them.

For most of the 20th century, the hierarchy of American public higher education was as fixed as the Electoral College map of a one-party era. Berkeley, Michigan, Wisconsin — these were the names invoked when a public university wished to be mentioned in the same breath as Harvard. They remain formidable.

But formidable is no longer synonymous with singular.

Consider what the Southeastern Conference, or SEC — an organization whose reputation was built on forward passes rather than research grants — has quietly assembled. Texas A&M enrolls more than 79,000 students, a figure that would have seemed a typographical error a generation ago (see here and here). The University of Florida enrolls roughly 56,000 (see here, here, and here). Collectively, SEC institutions now educate more than half a million students, with total enrollment around 620,000 (see here and here), a statistic that ought to interest university presidents in blue states rather more than it apparently does.

This is not the result of some coordinated Southern strategy hatched in a statehouse. Universities are lagging indicators of demography, not leading ones. States that attract families acquire, in due course, college students. States that generate jobs retain their graduates rather than exporting them, as Rust Belt states have exported so much else.

States that welcome capital acquire, eventually, the tax base with which to build ambitious public institutions. Ambition, it turns out, is portable. The family that leaves Illinois for Tennessee brings its expectations for its children along with the furniture, and both eventually find a permanent address in Knoxville or some other city in the Volunteer State.

Affordability, too, plays its part, and Americans have noticed that a nationally respectable degree from a Southern flagship costs a fraction of what state flagships elsewhere demand for a comparable credential, at a moment when the public’s confidence in the value of a degree generally has become, to put it charitably, provisional.

One of California’s most impactful proposed pieces of legislation has been their “Billionaire tax”:

California’s proposed “billionaire’s tax” on the assets of wealthy state residents enjoys a slim lead in the polls leading up to the midterm elections, though so do two measures that, if they draw more votes, could render the scheme unenforceable. That makes for a high-stakes battle as many prosperous Californians are already fleeing to escape a tax that could force them to surrender ownership stakes in companies they’ve founded. Even if it doesn’t pass, a new report warns that the proposal is based on faulty research and could do vast economic damage.

[…]

The Wealth Tax Scheme Is Based on Unusual Accounting

Now, a new report finds the proposed wealth tax is not only dangerous for California’s economic prospects; it’s also based on bad research. According to the report’s author, Independent Institute research fellow Kristian Fors, “this proposal has been heavily influenced by the work of UC Berkeley professors Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman to justify the concept of wealth taxation”. Saez and Zucman have generated news headlines with their claims that the wealthy are undertaxed in comparison to lower-income Americans. But as Fors points out, the estimate that drew so much news coverage claimed that “the overall tax rate for the top 400 richest households in the nation was 23 percent”, while just a year earlier, Saez and Zucman “estimated that the top 1 percent paid an overall tax rate of approximately 36 percent; the authors found a share of 41 percent for the top 0.001 percent of earners in the most recent year of their survey, a category encompassing billionaires and high multimillionaires”.

The discrepancy, according to Fors, comes from how the economists treat corporate income taxes. Conventional analysis assumes that corporate taxes burden shareholders, workers, and consumers as the tax gets passed on. That results in the earlier estimate of a 41 percent tax rate for the wealthiest. To reach their much lower 23 percent estimated rate, Saez and Zucman used a non-standard analysis — and while the results of that approach won news coverage, they weren’t subject to peer review.

“Saez and Zucman’s empirical work on the California billionaire tax proposal retains these same unconventional accounting practices from 2019 without addressing their conflict with the mainstream corporate tax incidence literature,” cautions Fors.

The Independent Institute report observes that privacy laws prevented Saez and Zucman from drawing on personal income tax and other financial records. They relied on the Forbes 400 list, and “a 2010 study by a group of IRS statisticians found that the Forbes 400 dramatically overestimates the net worth of individuals in their lifetimes when compared to probate records of their estates after death”. Adjusting for that discrepancy produces estimates of “an average effective tax rate of 38 percent between 2018 and 2020, as compared to the 24 percent claimed by Saez and Zucman for this period”.

How Britain’s oldest Proof House still tests modern military weapons

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

BFBS Forces News
Published 12 May 2026

For nearly 400 years a succession of Proof Masters have been making sure firearms in the UK are safe, stopping dangerous guns from being used.

Every firearm, whether it’s for military use or not, has to go through something called a proofing process.

This is a series of tests to make sure the weapon is not only made properly, but it can withstand the pressure generated by modern-day ammunition.

QotD: Islam and the rise of Western hegemony

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

Governments across the Islamic world began to adopt constitutions that directly contradicted what Muslims had always believed was the perfect and eternal law given to them by God. Simultaneously, they began to sign up to international bodies that, despite their claims to neutrality, were shot through with the ideological assumptions of the West. The most significant of these was the United Nations, which in December 1948 issued a definitive statement of its guiding principles: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

This, which claimed in its preamble that acknowledgement of “the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”, was in reality not at all as “universal” as it affected to be. Standing recognisably in a line of descent from the proclamations of the French Revolution, it served as well as a repudiation of some of the more foundational assumptions of Islamic theodicy.

The concept of human rights was an alien one to Islam. Muslims, traditionally, had not believed in natural law. There were only laws authored by God. The insistence of United Nations agencies on “the antiquity and broad acceptance of the rights of man” derived, not from the great inheritance of the Sunnah, but from the philosophes of the 18th century. Tellingly, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights had been signed — where else? — in Paris.

Western hegemony over the Islamic world, then, did not end with the collapse of direct rule over it by the European powers. Western values, Western assumptions, Western concepts of law, all of them packaged and marketed as “universal”, continued to exercise an overweening dominance in global affairs. If this was true for Muslims in lands that had sought to reconstitute themselves as nation states, then how much more so was it for Muslims who, in the decades that followed the Second World War, travelled to Europe, and settled there in growing numbers.

Tom Holland, “The age-old tension between Islam and France”, UnHerd, 2020-11-02.

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