Quotulatiousness

November 2, 2026

HR delenda est!

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’ve mentioned a few times before my utter contempt for the HR profession, due to my own experiences with job-seeking after a sudden health crisis kept me out of the working world for nearly a year. The last time I’d gone looking for work in 2009, the economy wasn’t doing great but I still got occasional interviews and eventually got hired after a few months. In late 2016, when I was able to return to work, I found that almost every company had gone to automated HR software systems and I got exactly two interviews over nearly ten years, despite 30 years of experience in the specific field in which I was applying for work. And one of those interviews was due to having met the hiring manager in a previous job. I eventually tired of the rigmarole of applying (upload resumé, then cut-and-paste the entire thing into their fill-in-the-field where it hadn’t managed to extract the data from my resumé, then off into the bit-bucket with the application, never having reached an actual human being … or even an HR harpy).

Alexander Troutner documented the HR industry’s secrets and got himself elected as the HR world’s Emmanuel Goldstein for his trouble:

“Help Wanted” by dreamsjung is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

On August 27th, I published a YouTube video titled, “Yes, You ARE Getting Auto-Rejected“.

In that video, I debunked a viral Enhancv survey arguing that 92% of American recruiters do not use ATS in order to auto-reject jobseekers’ resumes.

And I mean it when I say “viral:”

I found hundreds of examples of ATS companies, HR news outlets, and recruiter influencers across LinkedIn, Reddit, and YouTube all sharing this story — oftentimes using it as evidence to sell their own resume-writing products or AI-driven hiring software.

You can read my original article if you’re interested in the details, but LONG story short:

  • I argued that the Enhancv survey was too small and heavily biased.
  • I argued that their definition of “auto-rejection” was too narrow, as it did not include situations where “knockout” questions, fit scores, and other criteria forced ATS to auto-reject resumes.
  • I found evidence from government testimonies, university research, employment lawyers, and journalists proving that ATS do, in fact, auto-reject candidates for pointless, and often illegal, reasons.
  • And I argued that some companies and HR personnel might knowingly be using these broken hiring tools as a legal scapegoat to avoid getting sued for employment crimes.

The initial response to my video was modest and predictable.

“Yes, You ARE Getting Auto-Rejected” received over 100,000 views in its first day, and Enhancv actually updated their article with more nuance.

[…]

A week later, I started to receive dozens, and then eventually hundreds, of notifications from HR professionals, LinkedIn “Top Voices”, and recruiter influencers responding to my video/article about ATS auto-rejection.

However, virtually none of them were making substantive or evidence-based arguments against my video.

Instead, they were resorting to name-calling, personal attacks, and demonstrably untrue (and likely defamatory) accusations of me being a fraud or a scammer.

I had become the victim of a social media dogpile.

    (I won’t fill this article with screenshots, but if you’d like to see more examples of their comments, I’ve linked that portion of my response video here. They range from unprofessional to downright disgusting.)

Because of the scale of this dogpile, its public-facing nature, and the fact that these were influencers with millions of cumulative followers attacking me, I knew that I could not respond directly to the dozens of comments and reposts mocking me on LinkedIn.

So instead, on September 4th, I published a YouTube video titled, “I Turned the Entire HR Industry Against Me“.

And that video went algorithmically ballistic.

Within days, it hit over 1 million views, empowered thousands of jobseekers on YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn to express outrage over recruiter behavior, and led large creators like Damon Cassidy to respond to this situation.

There was also a fairly large institutional response where Directors of career centers, CEOs of companies, and Board Members of professional organizations expressed support for my work and apologized for the actions of these recruiters.

The internet was overwhelmingly on my side … But why?

In hindsight, I had accidentally done 3 very threatening things to the livelihood, authority, and egos of these HR personnel:

  1. I debunked a myth that they were using to make money.

    2. HR people, ATS companies, and LinkedIn influencers NEED you to believe that the job market isn’t broken, and that it’s YOUR fault if you’re unemployed.

    […]

  2. I entered their professional status bubble without needing their approval.

    3. (I know that sounds like something ChatGPT would say, but I swear I wrote this article myself.)

    HR is cliquey.

    […]

  3. I successfully reached their target audience — jobseekers.

    4. Attention is currency in the 21st century.

    So for recruiter influencers in particular, it can be deeply unsettling when someone doesn’t play by your rules, and yet still manages to garner more attention than you.

October 22, 2026

The Cold War era research grant model has been a disaster for universities

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Government, Military, Science, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Before the Second World War, governments generally did not directly sponsor research in their universities. With the example of the Manhattan Project and other less-well-known directed research efforts, western governments all accepted the notion that it was part of their national defence mandate to push research efforts by way of indirect or direct funding. This spread from the STEM fields directly related to weapon development to pretty much every area of academia. Lorenzo Warby explains why this has been a major contributor to the decline of western universities and the quality of research they undertake:

By “crank the handle” notions, I mean analyses that focus so much on resources that they end up massively underestimating the importance of information — and information landscapes — in understanding human social dynamics, given that we are biological beings who use information and resources to maintain ourselves. So, a “just add capital” approach to foreign aid is a “crank the handle” approach. Attempted analysis of long-term economic growth based on some derivation of a Cobb-Douglas production function is a “crank the handle” approach. (The disastrous — and revealing — limitations of such production functions will be discussed further in the next post in the series.)

One of the many problems with the “crank the handle” approaches that the terms capitalism and capitalist so encourage — by implying use and control of capital is the crucial thing, regardless of information landscapes and reality-tests — is the innovation-is-good cargo cult that has generated disastrous incentives in and for academe. Like all cargo cults, the innovation-is-good cargo cult mimics some of the surface appearance of successful innovation without replicating (or understanding) any of the substance.

Yes, it is absolutely true that technological innovation generated mass prosperity. But there are several key features to note.

  1. Most new ideas are crap. (So are a lot of old ideas: especially those repackaged by folk who don’t have to make things work.)
  2. Technological innovation is not merely a process of invention, it also requires successful implementation.
  3. Commercial innovation has a strong reality-test: does it make a buck? The profit/loss continuum tests ideas (both old and new) and their implementation.
  4. The energy take-off that we call the Industrial Revolution arose from Britain being the first society to adopt learning-by-experiment at scale; so learning via inherent feedbacks from what did, or did not, work.
  5. That energy use take-off occurred because no elite coalition vetoed it.

The post-1945 adoption of the bureaucratically-delivered research grant system was a reaction in part to the Second World War — which was so much a technological war — and to the pressures of Cold War geopolitical competition with the Soviet Union. War generates serious reality-tests for weapons and other military technology. This reality-testing of weapons continued throughout the Cold War, as both Western and Soviet weapons were used in various conflicts.

The bureaucratised research grant model — whether government or non-profit — used to fund “innovation” within academe fails to grapple with what made either industrial innovation (with its commercial reality-tests) or military innovation (with rather brutal reality-tests) work. There also turn out to be major problems with trying to bureaucratise the Scientific Revolution.

Bureaucratised research grants treat innovation as presumptively good, when most new ideas are crap. It treats mere invention as some achievement, when inventing new ideas is hardly difficult or reliably useful. Such invention is even less difficult if there is no reality tests; if those propagating and judging those ideas do not have to make anything work in any practical, seriously-constrained-by-reality — not-just-performative — sense.

Outside the military realm and STEM (Science Technology Engineering Medicine), there are no reality-tests systematically built into the research grant process: only what plays to academic status games due to academic approval becoming the operative test. Academic approval is an amazingly weak filter. Consider Adam Smith’s famous remark about English universities:

    An English university is a sanctuary in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices find shelter and protection after they have been hunted out of every corner of the world.

Marxism and its derivatives (e.g. Critical Theory) come to mind. Any use of Marxism — or its derivatives — requires massive discounting and rationalising away of tens of millions of deaths and a couple of dozen tyrannies. (So, of course, does any use of Left as a positive moral category, given that being Left includes Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mengistu, Kim il-Sung …)

Moreover, across much of academe, we do not see the use of experimentation or observation to test claims, but rather “findings” baked into the “research”. “Findings” that are validated precisely because they garner academic approval.

October 21, 2026

Capital gains tax is legalized theft

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Handre explains the iniquity of most “capital gains” tax schemes in the west:

Capital gains tax is theft, committed twice against the same dollar.

You earn income. The government takes its cut immediately, in the US it’s between 22% and 37% depending on your bracket. What remains is yours, after-tax money, already processed through Washington’s collection machine. You choose not to spend it. You save it, invest it, buy assets with it. The discipline required to delay consumption is precisely the behavior that funds capital formation across the economy.

Then the asset grows. You sell it. The government appears again, demanding 20% (plus the 3.8% Net Investment Income Tax for higher earners) on the nominal gain, which often includes pure inflation adjustments that represent no real increase in purchasing power whatsoever.

The IRS treats your patience as a second taxable event. The original dollar was already taxed. The “gain” frequently reflects nothing more than the dollar losing value while you held the asset. Murray Rothbard identified this pattern: the state punishes capital accumulation.

Consider a simple case. You invest $50,000 of after-tax earnings in 2016 into an S&P 500 index fund. By 2026, it’s worth $115,000. Inflation consumed a meaningful slice of that $65,000 gain. You pay capital gains tax on the full nominal figure regardless.

Capital gains taxation suppresses investment, shrinks the capital pool available for productive enterprise, and forces entrepreneurs to seek financing from a shallower pond. Fewer productive investments get made. Workers carry that cost through lower wages and fewer opportunities. The state expands, while you suffer.

QotD: Religious institutions in the late western Roman Empire

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

… the decline of political and civic institutions did not mean the decline and destruction of every sort of institution and this is particularly obvious with the survival of the institutional Church. It is important here to stress at the beginning how Roman an institution the Church was by the start of the fifth century. After Constantine (with a brief hiatus under the emperor Julian) the “catholic” church (that is, the institutional Church which conformed to the “right” sort of Christianity) had been the continued recipient of imperial benefaction: emperors built churches and funded Church activity. This was itself very Roman, reflecting a continuation of the role that pagan emperors had played in previous centuries, demonstrating their piety by building temples and reviving old religious practices. The emperors had not “gotten religion” but merely changed religion and so changed their religious benefaction accordingly.

The emperors and the Roman state had also taken an active role beginning in the fourth century in defining exactly what the “right” sort of Christianity was. In response to a dispute over the ordination of bishops in North Africa (the “Donatist” schism), Constantine called a council of bishops to convene in Arles in 314 to resolve the matter (it didn’t work and Constantine began persecuting the remaining Donatists). But that council would hardly be the last – Constantine convoked the first ecumenical council (one that in theory reflected the entire Christian Church) in Nicaea in 325 in order to create a single universal Christian doctrine and resolve a number of internal disputes (having grown as a religion in secret and facing persecution, as you might imagine Christianity had a lot of significant local variations). The emperor Theodosius I (r. 379-395) convened the next major council at Constantinople in 381; after that it was the emperor Theodosius II (r. 402-450) who convened the next at Ephesus in 431 and then the emperor Marcian (r. 450-457) who convened the next at Chalcedon in 451. All of these councils served to define what the “right” Christianity was (“Chalcedonian” Christianity, named after the council), putting some belief systems outside of the doctrine of the Roman Church.

But whereas other Roman institutions didn’t survive the collapse of Roman political authority, the Church as an institution very much did. It was perhaps not obvious that it would – many of the “barbarians” had embraced a non-Chalcedonian Christianity, Arianism, and so might have been hostile to the Church as it existed in Rome. But in practice the need to consolidate the loyalty of their Roman Chalcedonian Christian subjects (on this, note Brown, op. cit. 2nd ed., 105-6, 133-8) and the prestige that the institutional Church held led the rulers of Rome’s successor states to convert to Chalcedonian Christianity; the last of the major Arian Christian kings was Garibald, King of the Lombards in 671.

Indeed, the institutional Church was in some ways a lifeboat in which other elements of the Late Roman world were carried through the storm of the fifth century into the Middle Ages. We’ve already talked about the Church’s role in preserving a fair chunk of the Latin literary tradition. Much of this was done through the spread and then perseverance of monasticism. The first communities of monks emerged in the Eastern Roman Empire in the fourth century and spread through the failing Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries. The Western monastic tradition builds from this with the foundation of Monte Cassino in 529 by Benedict of Nursia and the promulgation of the Rule of Saint Benedict.

Meanwhile, the Church also emerged as one of the central institutions in the cities of the Roman world, with the bishop, the religious head of the Church in a given city, emerging as a key figure in civic governance. While the figure of the bishop rose to importance in both the east and the west, in the east, bishops largely did not move into becoming secular leaders alongside religious figures, in part presumably because the central Roman authority still existed to handle those functions. But in the west, the decline of both civic and centralized government left bishops in the breach. This in turn often preserved older Roman political geography as Liebeschuetz notes, with the civitas surviving as an administrative unit in the form of the diocese of a bishop, precisely because those bishoprics were originally established along Roman administrative lines and remained so even after Roman administration vanished. Bishops ended up taking up some of the tasks that in the past would have fallen to a Roman governor and since they had their seats in the embattled Roman cities, many of those cities survived the difficult fifth and sixth centuries precisely because they were the seat of a bishop.

And in order to run the institution of the Church, its bishoprics and their diocese, it needed both educated clergy who could read the Bible but also administrators who had learned the law – by which they meant Roman law. Secular learning had largely collapsed with the Roman Empire in the west – it had existed to provide training for wealthy men to become secular administrators for the central imperial government and so when the demand for that kind of training vanished, so too did the schools that trained the administrators and jurists. And so the Church had to train them itself, setting up episcopal and monastic schools which trained theology, but also law and administration (and of course provided the context for that survival of Latin literature as a teaching tool). As levels of education and literacy among the secular elite declined, it made sense for kings to employ bishops and other members of the clergy as members of their own administration, leading to this distinctly Roman religious institution having a key place within the secular “barbarian” kingdoms that followed.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part II: Institutions”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-01-28.

October 20, 2026

Britain’s regulatory “vetocracy”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I learned a new word today, although it describes a phenomenon as old as bureaucracy. “Vetocracy” in Britain is a combination of ordinary government bureausclerosis with wider regulatory powers that can (and are) used to “veto” otherwise legal and beneficial activities:

A public company in the UK was building a high-speed railway when it suddenly faced a regulation that few could have predicted: a £100 million ($132 million) bat tunnel. The railway passed through Sheephouse Wood, an area inhabited by rare Bechstein’s bats. To comply with environmental regulations that protect the bats from colliding with high-speed trains, the company had to build a roughly one-kilometer covered structure alongside the railway. This structure has since become widely known in the UK as the “bat tunnel.”

If you think this is just one case, let me tell you about the fish disco. EDF Energy was developing a new nuclear power station in Somerset, which draws cooling water from the Severn Estuary. The project faced regulatory requirements to reduce the number of fish being drawn into and killed by its cooling-water intake pipes. EDF agreed to three measures: specially designed low-velocity intake heads, a fish recovery-and-return system, and an acoustic fish deterrent—underwater speakers that make noise to steer fish away, nicknamed the “fish disco.” The acoustic deterrent alone reportedly costs about $66 million, while EDF says the full fish-protection package costs more than $926 million.

The problem with the UK is that it has become a vetocracy. Francis Fukuyama, the famous author of The End of History, explored this problem in his often-overlooked book Political Order and Political Decay. The concept helps explain part of the productivity puzzle in the Western world. Vetocracy means “rule by veto”: a political system with so many points at which organized minorities, courts, agencies, legislators, or interest groups can block action that the majority struggles to govern.

At first glance, this might seem necessary to protect democracy from majority rule and dictatorship. The separation of powers, independent courts, and an independent judiciary are essential safeguards. As Montesquieu famously wrote, “When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty.” But vetocracy is not simply about separating powers and protecting minority rights from the majority; it is about paralyzing democratic institutions and preventing the government from functioning.

Giving any bureaucracy the power to say “no” almost always means that organization will say “no” far more often than it says “yes”, because there’s no risk to the bureaucrat or their bosses for blocking something, but there’s a tangible risk if they approve something that later proves dangerous or even just controversial. Bureaucracies generally prefer to operate largely out of sight — and therefore out of public scrutiny — and danger to the public or controversy in the media brings public attention to the organization or, worse, to the individual bureaucrat who said “yes”.

… the more serious costs are the ones unseen: the products that fail to come to fruition as a result of regulation. As the Austrian school economist Per Bylund has argued in his book The Seen, the Unseen, and the Unrealized: How Regulations Affect Our Everyday Lives, the problem with regulation is that it limits the possibilities of what could happen. It is not just about the direct financial cost of compliance. It is about the choices that disappear, the investments that never happen, and the economic freedom that is gradually eroded. The real cost of regulation is not only what we can see, but also what we never get to see because it was never built in the first place.

Vetocracy is a product of an overextended state: one that wants to be the dominant actor in the economy and micromanage every aspect of economic life. Sooner or later, it discovers that governing is not as easy as it looks. The barriers originally created by the state in the name of better governance can make effective governance almost impossible. A vetocracy is a democracy that has accumulated so many opportunities to say no that it has lost the practical ability to say yes.

October 17, 2026

British disability programs may extend to 25% of the population under current criteria

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Health — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the above-the-paywall portion of his latest post, eugyppius makes the case that the British social state, along with most other western countries, has metastasized to the point that it is uncontrollable:

Production line for the VW Beetle – symbol of a happier age, when our politicians forged a new democratic social state in Germany that today can no longer be financed or reformed.
Photo from eugyppius: a plague chronicle

On Sunday the Wall Street Journal published a long article headlined “The Welfare State is Crushing Britain“. It focusses on but one aspect of the UK social system, namely disability and sickness benefits, and its details are equal measures depressing, familiar, predictable and alarming.

Like other European redistributionist schemes, British disability payouts have steadily ballooned in the postwar period – expanding from a niche benefit for those unable to work due to serious illness and on-the-job injuries to a morass of programmes that showers millions of people with billions in pointless, self-defeating subsidies.

A 2024 government survey found that fully 25% of the entire British population might be considered disabled under present inflationary criteria, which adds perspective to the eye-watering figure of 10% presently drawing benefits. The fastest growth in disability claims occurs among working-age demographics, where compensation, once granted, soon becomes a powerful disincentive to work. In this way the British disability system actively cannibalises its own tax base. The total bill for sickness and disability benefits this year will exceed £100 billion, which comes on top of the £280 billion the British taxpayer presently spends on healthcare and which substantially outstrips the £68 billion British defence budget. Disability spending has jumped 25% over the last four years, and without reforms it will rise another 30% over the next four. Fuzzy psychiatric disability claims, from depression to ADHD, drive much of the expansion, as a whole universe of charities and AI-powered chatbots advise ever more able-bodied people on how they might opt in to this wonderful system of free money. Among many crazy details, we learn that those on disability can trade some of their cash benefits for new car leases every three years. This programme now accounts for one in seven automobile sales in Britain and has elevated the company handling these deals (Motability) to the largest automobile leasing concern in the country. The debt required to fund this and the rest of the British social system has driven borrowing costs to rates not seen since the 2008 financial crisis, while high taxes continue to encourage the emigration of the wealthy and productive.

These are the mere symptoms of a sickness that extends well beyond the United Kingdom. We are looking here at a fiscal and also a political crisis afflicting the entire postwar European model. Below the fold I want to explain the nature of this crisis and why our political systems seem powerless to address its fundamental causes – indeed, why many of our politicians seem determined to make it worse. With little chance of reform, we face a future of economic decay and declining living standards, culminating in sovereign debt crises and perhaps even political collapse. The postwar order is slowly dying, in its eighty-first year, of old age. There are no answers and nobody knows what will come next.

John Carter commented on Substack Notes:

The neglect of schools in order to pay for pensions is a particularly poignant phenomenon, a direct illustration of the old devouring the futures of the young. Eugyppius is correct that there’s no electoral solution to this mess. No one will vote to reduce their own benefits, and tax-eaters now comprise such a substantial electorate that any serious discussion of reform is political suicide.

State bankruptcy and economic collapse are real possibilities. Maybe “and then a dictator ends democracy” happens, but maybe not. For the young the all-devouring social state is increasingly unbearable. Polities that make themselves attractive to the young rather than the old could suck in such a large fraction of the youth that by the time collapse arrives, the social states are effectively retirement communities, and it just looks like a humanitarian crisis of starving geriatrics dying in their own unwashed bodily fluids.

October 6, 2026

The World Economic Forum

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Handre looks at the amazing — and sinister — success of the World Economic Forum:

The World Economic Forum.

Every January, roughly 2,800 executives, finance ministers, and central bankers fly private jets into Davos, Switzerland, to discuss how you should use less fossil fuel, practice sustainability, and pursue “equitable growth”.

Klaus Schwab founded the Forum in 1971, and for 55 years it has perfected a singular trick: dressing up cartelization as collaboration. When BlackRock’s Larry Fink sits across from Christine Lagarde and three heads of state, the outcome is never deregulation. It is always managed markets, stakeholder capitalism, and what the Forum itself calls “public-private partnership”, which is the polite term for incumbent firms writing the rules their competitors must follow.

The 2030 Agenda the Forum relentlessly pushes centralizes energy allocation, monetary policy, and food production under supranational bodies that nobody elected and nobody can remove. Prices no longer signal actual scarcity; they rather reflect political priorities. Farmers in the Netherlands lost land to nitrogen regulations lobbied into existence by parties with no skin in Dutch agriculture. You absorbed that cost through food prices, quietly, with no vote cast.

The Forum redistributes access to governments, and access to governments is worth more than genuine productivity when regulations make genuine productivity nearly illegal. Regulatory capture operating at a global scale.

Hayek identified the fatal conceit in 1988: the belief that a committee of sufficiently credentialed people can allocate resources better than dispersed price signals. Davos proves him right annually, producing white papers while the people funding those flights, through taxes and inflation, get poorer.

October 4, 2026

QotD: Auditors and the taxation system

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Is it plausible that a billionaire paid no taxes for a period of several years? Yep. Totally. See all that stuff I wrote above about the complicated tax code and how it is an accountant’s sacred duty to take advantage of all the stupid laws congress has passed to save their client’s money? Pretty much that. It has happened many times before, and it will happen many times again.

One thing that’s really unfair about our tax system is that it is rigged in favor of people who have more resources. Government meddling makes it more costly to conduct business. The more complicated the regulatory burden, the more smaller companies can’t compete. Make the laws complicated enough and the only companies that stay in business are the ones who can afford to pay for twenty guys like me. (my last regular accounting job paid extremely well, and nearly everything I did was jump through government mandated hoops, filling out government mandated paperwork which nobody in the government would probably ever read)

Trump has those resources. I bet he’s got a room full of accountants, and their leader is probably a grizzled old CPA with an eye patch and a raven who sits on his shoulder. The raven also has an eye patch and an accounting degree. This man has wrestled bears, and he’s going to take advantage of every tax break in the US Code for his client, and do so gleefully, knowing that many of those laws were signed by Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

On the other side, you know damned good and well that the IRS has sent their most fearsome auditor against him. This man sold his soul to the devil, and then fined the devil for failing to list that soul as a depreciable asset. When he shows up to audit your company, he appears a flash of fire and brimstone, as a Finnish death metal band plays his theme song. He is an auditor bereft of mercy, compassion, or pity, and beneath his leathery wings serve a legion of IRS goblins, who will crawl into every nook and cranny of the Trump Corporation’s P&L looking for errors, and if a mouse so much as shits a turd large enough to unbalance that ledger, there will be hell to pay.

Is it unfair that rich guys can employ Gandalf level CPAs and take advantage of more complicated tax laws, while regular people use TurboTax? Yep. But in the meantime, as long as those tax laws are there, the rich guys would be utter fools not to take advantage of them.

Larry Correia, “No, You Idiots. That’s Not How Taxes Work – An Accountant’s Guide To Why You Are A Gullible Moron”, Monster Hunter Nation, 2020-09-28.

October 2, 2026

Generational incomprehension

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On Substack Notes, GenX Anecdotes expresses the frustration a lot of Gen X/Generation Jones folks have felt in their dealings with Millennial and Gen Z co-workers, supervisors, and managers:

Experience tells me that I need to add an eye-catching graphic to every non-video post, but finding appropriate images is sometimes difficult. I hope GenX Anecdotes won’t mind me using yet another meme instead of something more sober and appropriate to her point.

One of the things people tell you when you are young about getting old is how quickly it sneaks up on you.

What they don’t tell you, is that it’s not linear or obvious. It’s not like you have a specific moment where you think “OK. NOW I am middle aged”. It doesn’t work like that. You remain “you”.

You might change your outlook over time. You might get wiser (hopefully) and more content with who you are. You might have more serious responsibilities. More experiences and memories to draw upon. But you’re still YOU.

For me, I don’t really feel like I’m that much “older” going about my day-to-day business doing my thing. I actually still feel quite young in myself in many ways.

It’s how the world greets you that’s different. And that’s when little things will remind you. It gives you a kind of shocking “jolt”.

Being around younger people is what really brings it home. And I don’t mean kids or young teens. I mean young adults. Or even adults in their 30s who tell you they feel “old”.

I am in my mid 50s.

When someone in their late 20s or 30s tells me what year they were born it blows my mind.

When they were born in a year that I clearly remember, feels like last month to me, and when I was well into adulthood, that’s when it really hits home.

Also, it’s how younger people view you and act around you.

In my last job, most people were in their 20s and 30s.

I won’t lie. Some of them treated me like garbage. Like I didn’t exist.

I was a bit of a “cute” novelty to them. Like “aaawww bless her”.

I had the misfortune of being “trained” in one of my part-time jobs I had when my daughter was in junior school, by a 20 something. The job was a local convenient place holder during school hours.

What she was showing me was very “basic” and tedious. But if I questioned anything about it like “why can’t we just do this instead? Surely that would make more sense?”

She looked at me, not like someone who had 30 plus years experience working in different industries who might have a point. But someone “old” and passed it, who didn’t understand.

Like a silly backwards old woman who had no idea.

The amount of times I would say “Yeah. I DO get it. I am just wondering why it’s done this way? It seems a bit impractical?”

She looked at me blankly. Like I was asking her why water is wet …

I learned to just shut up and do the bloody tedious thing in the convoluted, dumb way. Because … because … that’s how it’s done.

Then I knew all those 20/30 year olds just saw me as an annoying old relic who “didn’t understand” how things worked.

I was there about a year before moving house.

I couldn’t wait to leave.

One of the HR women hauled me in at one point to give me an “appraisal”. There I was with a 20 something asking me if I was “happy at work” and going through other annoying questions on her ipad.

She obviously was irritated that I wasn’t taking the whole fake charade “seriously” enough. She wanted me to give her bullshit standard answers that she could tick a box to.

But I kept saying things that weren’t “tick box” worthy.

And that just signified further to her that “I didn’t understand” what was going on.

Oh I understood.

I just didn’t want to play along.

And just to emphasise how insane this whole scenario felt.

She still lived with her Mum and Dad and had soft toys on her desk.

That’s what getting “old” feels like.

September 23, 2026

Without massive contradictions, would Canada even have a federal government?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Media, Military, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As John Carter notes, the current federal government is committed whole-heartedly to a wide range of initiatives and programs, many of which are directly in contradiction of other initiatives and programs that the goverment is also whole-heartedly committed to:

Setting aside the absurd spectacle of this sheer economic illiteracy spilling forth from the mouth of a man who is supposedly some kind of economic prodigy (please do not look at the state of the British economy btw), pause to savour the conspicuous irony of a government trying to revitalize the Canadian economy while crippling its access to energy (in the middle of a war-driven oil shock no less) in the name of hallucinated climate nonsense no one even believes in anymore.

This is the same government that wants to turn Canada into a research superpower while miring the universities in DEI.

It’s the same government that’s trying to rebuild the military for “warfighting” (it has another purpose?) while going full speed ahead on vaginal maximalism in uniform.

It’s the same government announcing itself as an AI superpower, without a single frontier lab within its borders, while its brains drain south in search of the money, opportunity, and regulatory freedom the government itself ensures that Canada cannot provide.

None of this is real. It’s all press releases and press conferences meant to create the illusion of forward motion towards the achievement of contradictory aims, when no such reconciliation is possible, and no actual movement is taking place.

QotD: The EU as a modern Habsburg Empire

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

Those in Britain who supported Brexit are often accused of nostalgia for a past in which the country was powerful, but I do not think this nostalgia, if it ever existed at all, was very widespread. One might well say that nostalgia, on the part of France, was and is a driving force in the European Union, since it is only by union with Germany than France can aspire to a semi-Napoleonic role in Europe.

The irony is, of course, that Germany is once again by far the strongest power on the continent. Its interests are complex and no doubt contradictory: it wants the rest of Europe to continue to import its goods, but it does not want to fund, or mutualise, the debts that allow it to do so. The southern countries would like to either to mutualise the debts, or inflate them away by debasing the currency, but Germany will allow neither of these solutions to the imbalances within Europe. There would be no better way to re-awake German nationalism than follow the prescriptions of the southern nations; on the other hand, resentment of Germany will grow if they are not followed.

The author acknowledges the problems within Europe in his last chapter, up till which he has treated Europe as if it were one big happy family with a population gaily marching in unison behind its leadership. The truth is quite otherwise, which is why an example must be made of Britain. But the likelihood is that the more integration there is, the greater will be the tensions, both between and within countries. There is a class within countries that benefits mightily from the present arrangements, which in my opinion explains the paradox of Catalan, Flemish, and Scottish nationalism: for all these nationalisms are firm adherents to the ideal of European Union, namely a dilution of national sovereignty even greater than that which their nations already possess. Again to put it crudely, the leadership of these movements want their place not in the sun, but at the trough. They are pied pipers to their populations.

The book ends by quoting that old Mephistophelian, François Mitterand, to the effect that “Nationalism means war”. And of course this is true if by nationalism is meant an exaggerated and militant love of one’s own country and a hatred of, or disdain for, all other countries, particularly neighbouring ones. Yet at the same time, nation states — at least some of them — have been the only large-scale states able durably to protect the freedom of their populations. Moreover, if nationalism means war, it does not follow that supranationalism means peace. The European Union may be a Yugoslavia in the making, without a Tito to hold it together. As José Manuel Barroso, once President of the European Commission, former Maoist student leader and then Goldman Sachs executive (the thirst for power being the golden thread that runs through this diverse career) put it, Europe — using the word to mean the European Union, which is now more or less standard — is an empire, though of a new kind.

Perhaps not so new, in fact: a kind of Habsburg Empire without the charm and aesthetic sensibility. From the right it is attacked as a socialist enterprise, from the left as a neo-liberal one: corporatist is the word for it, that happy union between regulatory bureaucracy and large corporations.

Theodore Dalrymple, “European Empire, Fractured”, Law & Liberty, 2020-11-10.

September 19, 2026

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”.

September 18, 2026

QotD: Higher education as a vast money laundering racket

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

Have I mentioned my theory (which I regard as a certainty) that Higher Education is best understood as a massive money laundering operation? We all had a good chuckle, I’m sure, at that title [“fellowship at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College in London”], just as we’ve had good chuckles at the ridiculous titles of all the Angry Studies programs infesting colleges nationwide. We’ve probably concluded — correctly — that these are just make-work for otherwise unemployable PhDs who check a few of the Diversity quota boxes.

But when you consider just how much money is involved, it’s a lot harder to laugh. Your average tenured prof makes north of $100 K, and for every one of them, there are at least two administrators, four outreach coordinators, and uncountable Special Assistants to the Assistant Provost’s Special Assistant for Diversity and Inclusion. Not to mention all the classroom space, office space, etc. that this requires (including paying the very real people who have to coordinate that stuff — no easy task — the custodial staff and so on). I’d bet that just one of these programs, all in, runs at least a million dollars per year when you throw in bennies and whatnot.

That’s a LOT of scratch, for one or two classes a semester that barely even make their enrollment numbers.

I dunno what nefarious purpose the Angry Studies programs serve (aside from the obvious, perpetual one of “burning down ambient civilization, just because”), but the “national security” ones I’m sure are basically just “diplomatic” cover for cloak and dagger shit. They used to use academic conferences like that back during the Cold War — who else but an officially credentialed diplomatic representative gets to travel around his enemies’ territory? In this case, of course, none of these people are actually going anywhere near war zones (with the exception of Mx. Kagan, of course, who decided to take command of American forces in the field). But academic “conferences” are good ways to make contacts and pass suitcases full of cash and other goodies around …

… I suspect.

Severian, “Klown Kollege”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-28.

September 14, 2026

QotD: “We have Homo Sovieticus in America”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Humour, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Institutions tend to only find data they want to find, so the City of Los Angeles last counted street deaths among the homeless — in their description, “Deaths of Unhoused People” — from 2023. There were 900. Sample detail: “Black people were 31% of deaths. Black people are only 8% of the City’s general population, but are 33% of the City’s unhoused population.”

The last numbers from Los Angeles County as a whole were for 2024, when 2,208 homeless people died on the streets. County officials celebrated, because that number was a sharp reduction, and a reflection of the success of programs like overdose intervention teams stationed around public parks.

Remember those numbers, and let’s talk about something else for a moment before we come back to them.

The Soviet writer Aleksandr Zinoviev told a joke that speaks fluent Californian: “In some institution a routine meeting was in progress. There were two points on the agenda: 1) the construction of a barn; 2) the creation of an abundance of consumer goods under communism. As they didn’t have enough planks to build the barn, they moved on at once to the second question.”

Maybe that joke doesn’t land if you don’t live in Los Angeles or Seattle, but from here it’s flawless. Take a quick look at the campaign page for María Elena Durazo, a state senator who just won a seat on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Infrastructure and fire departments are in bad shape in the place where elected officials think that government exists to provide “economic justice” that restructures communities. When government exists to pay your rent, 911 response times soar.

They can’t fix a street, so they move on at once to managing all of society.

Here’s what Senator Durazo boasts about on her “Meet Maria” page: “Arrested over 13 times for leading non-violent Civil Rights and Worker Rights protests”. It’s the line that appears below “State Senator” on her list of accomplishments. Gentry socialists have high-status-marker arrest credentials, without the burden of low-status prosecution and jail terms.

Zinoviev gave us the term “Homo Sovieticus”, describing the human creature that shaped itself around the postures and predilections of Soviet culture. Humorless, a sanctimonious scold, a deeply selfish schemer while professing adoration for collectivism, comfortable reciting official slogans without feeling the need to believe them or examine them, reflexively conformist, not worried about truth. (X) has been advanced as party doctrine, so (X) is correct, and anyone suggesting (Not-X) is highly suspect. The official account is always correct.

We live among these people. We have Homo Sovieticus in America.

Chris Bray, “Homo Cosmopolitus Won’t Count the Costs”, Tell Me How This Ends, 2026-06-10.

September 2, 2026

Jeremy Clarkson is “the worst tax dodger in British history”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Food, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As I mentioned recently, I’ve been watching episodes of Clarkson’s Farm and thoroughly enjoying them. I’m doing the opposite of binge-ing them, limiting myself to one episode at a time, and not every night. I’m part-way through Season 3 at the moment. The unrelenting hostility of the local government is a thing to behold … it really does seem as if they think that their role is to prevent any sort of economic activity from taking place in their jurisdiction.

Sama Hoole outlines the steps Jeremy Clarkson has taken over the time since he purchased one thousand acres of farmland:

A timeline of one man’s cunning inheritance tax scheme.

2008: Buy a thousand acres in Oxfordshire. Tell The Times that dodging inheritance tax is the critical thing. Scheme live.

2009 to 2018: Do absolutely nothing. A villager farms it on contract. Flawless.

2019: The villager retires. Rather than hire another one, decide to farm a thousand acres yourself, having never grown anything.

Also 2019: Invite a film crew.

2020: Rain for nine weeks. Profit on a thousand acres: £144.

2021: Broadcast the £144 to the largest streaming platform on earth, thereby informing the entire planet that farmland makes nothing.

2021: Open a farm shop. Acquire a queue down a lane and the undivided attention of West Oxfordshire District Council.

2022: Restaurant refused. Enforcement notice. Six weeks to take a barn apart.

2023: Lose the appeal. Lose it again.

May 2024: Accidentally get English planning law rewritten. Lawyers name it Clarkson’s Clause.

August 2024: Open a pub selling only British food. Sell your own sausage at 74p against 18p imported, and eat the difference on every plate.

October 2024: The Chancellor caps agricultural property relief at a million. Scheme dead.

November 2024: Stand on a platform in Westminster in front of thirteen thousand farmers, drawing maximum national attention to the exact tax break you were supposedly hiding behind.

July 2025: Go down with TB. First calf ever born on the farm destroyed, pregnant with twins. Gate padlocked.

23 December 2025: Government retreats. The threshold goes from one million to two and a half. Five million for a couple.

March 2026: Farm declared clear.

July 2026: Drive four hundred miles to Scotland and buy more cows.

Eighteen years.

Planning law changed. Agricultural degree applications climbing. Cited in the Commons more times than most ministers manage. Half the estates that were going to be caught by the tax are no longer caught by it.

He was accused of buying a farm to dodge inheritance tax, and then spent eighteen months getting the relief raised for everybody else’s.

Worst tax dodger in British history.

Best thing to happen to British farming in fifty years.

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