Quotulatiousness

August 31, 2023

Disaster response plans? I’m sure they’ve established terms of reference for the to-be-appointed blue-ribbon committees to look into that … eventually

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line Jen Gerson discovers once again that our federal government is much more interested in making dramatic announcements — usually repeated many, many times — than in actually doing anything. Their response to her inquiry about federal disaster response planning is anything but comforting to worriers among the citizenry:

Front page of the Calgary Sun after major flooding hit downtown Calgary in June, 2013.

The clever and devoted readers of The Line will have already surmised that I am a touch neurotic, prone to catastrophize, and gifted with one of those imaginations that is perfectly capable of picturing in vivid detail every worst-case scenario playing out simultaneously.

And so, dear devotee, you will have no trouble picturing my mental state in recent months, in what will come be known as the Summer of Fire. Until next summer, anyway. Until then, it’s always fun to watch two cities burn (or come close to burning) over the course of a single weekend, eh?

Watching the long lines of cars fleeing Yellowknife, or the beachcombers lining the shores of Lake Okanagan as swathes of West Kelowna disappeared, I have to admit that my mind wandered into its darker wings.

Yellowknife and Kelowna are cities, yes, but relatively small ones: Yellowknife is remote and served by only one road, making it a particular logistical challenge to evacuate. But it’s still only a town of 20,000 people. This ought to be well within the capacity of a wealthy, organized G7 country.

What if wildfires threatened, say, Edmonton? A city of a million. How would we get everyone out? Where would they go? What would they eat?

And this line of internal paranoia brought me to the media landing page of the minister of Public Safety Canada. I have questions — to my mind, basic questions — about this country’s capacity to handle major catastrophes. They were as follows:

  • What are the transportation resources typically available to facilitate an evacuation: in an emergency, how many people could we move by air or land, and how quickly?
  • Does the federal government maintain stores of food or other basic goods? How much? How many people could we feed?
  • Do we have the capacity to establish temporary housing for evacuees displaced by an emergency situation? If so, how many people could it hold, and for how long?

I also had a few more general queries. I am aware that they may not have been fully answerable by the federal government, but I was curious about what the response would be. Specifically:

  • Are we going to rebuild everything that burns down, or do we have to accept that climate change will make some previously inhabited sections of Canada unlivable?
  • What kind of resources will the federal government marshal toward hardening infrastructure to prepare for more serious floods and fires in the future? Is this a priority?

To be clear, none of these questions are “gotchas”. I was not out to catch the federal government by surprise, nor to embarrass it in any way. I don’t think any of these questions is unreasonable; in fact, I expected some fairly stock answers. That is, I expected that a federal government would keep at least a basic running inventory of things like temporary housing or food supplies. Further, I would have been perfectly content with very general answers. Perhaps some of my questions were misguided, and I would have been happy to understand that as well.

What I got was, well, I’m going to show you exactly what I got, offer a little of my own running commentary, and allow you to come to your own conclusions.

August 26, 2023

“Email jobs”, as defined by Freddie deBoer

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

Freddie deBoer offers some notes on what he calls “a book I’ll probably never write”:

When I talk to people about college-educated workers, even informed people, there’s a constant tendency to immediately think of doctors, lawyers, engineers, data scientists … Reflexively, people seem to think of educated labor in terms of college graduates who a) tend to go on to some sort of graduate study, b) work in fields that directly utilize domain-specific knowledge from their majors or graduate education, and c) are generally high-income relative to the economy writ large. These professions, combined, are a healthy slice of our labor force, and there’s nothing wrong with paying an appropriate amount of attention to them. But I think the amount of attention they’re given in the educational and economic discourse is in fact disproportionate. And I also think that there’s a kind of profession that is intuitively very understandable but which (despite considerable effort on my part) remains very difficult to classify and thus to quantify. Though it has many names, I think my preferred term is “email job”.

[…]

To me, prototypical email jobs

  • Depend, naturally, on email and other digital communicative tools like video conferencing, online calendars, and networked workspaces for the large majority of their actual productive capability
  • Are staffed almost entirely by people with college degrees, but while they do take advantage of time management and organizational skills that can be developed in college, almost never call on domain-specific knowledge related to a particular major
  • Dedicate a considerable amount of time not to the named productive goals of the job themselves but to meta-tasks that are meant to facilitate those goals (scheduling, coordinating, assigning responsibility, “touching base”, enhancing productivity, ensuring compliance with various HR-mediated job requirements and odd whims of the boss)
  • Have no immediate observable impact on the material world; an email job might involve coordinating or supporting or assessing a project that will eventually move some atoms around, but the email job itself results only in the manipulation of bits
  • Cannot be considered creative in any meaningful sense — they do not entail the production of new stories, scripts, code, images, video, blueprints, patents, research papers, etc — but may involve the creation of materials that are subsidiary to larger administrative goals, such as PowerPoint presentations, reports, postmortems, or white papers
  • May or may not be partially or fully remote but could likely be performed fully remotely/on a “work from home” basis without issue
  • Can involve supervising lower-level workers, even teams, but these positions are not themselves fundamentally supervisory and the holder of an email job is rarely the only “report” for anyone; these positions, in other words, are not executive or executive-track, though some may escape the email job track and gain entry to the executive track
  • Tend to top out at middle management, and often have a salary range (with a great deal of wiggle) between $50,000 and $200,000/year.

Doctors do not have email jobs because the human bodies they treat exist in the world of atoms, not the world of bits, and their work involves domain-specific knowledge. There are some lawyers who are effectively in email jobs, as their law credentials are used for hiring purposes but their actual task is handling particular kinds of paperwork that a non-lawyer could complete, but most lawyers are not in email jobs as their work involves various functions at courthouses and otherwise away from the computer, and anyway their work too involves domain-specific knowledge. Most accountants and actuaries are not in email jobs as their jobs require domain-specific knowledge that they acquired in formal education. Architects create new things that will someday exist in the world of atoms and utilize domain-specific knowledge they learned in college. Programmers take advantage of skills gained in college to create new things that exist for their own purpose, rather than to satisfy other administrative functions. Professors don’t have email jobs, even those who work at online colleges, as working with students takes place in the world of atoms and they are constantly accessing domain-specific knowledge they learned in formal education. Screenwriters create something new; engineers move atoms and usually get graduate degrees; CEOs don’t have email jobs because they’re on the executive track and enjoy the ability to delegate most of the email work to subordinates. I could go on.

So who does have an email job? Take someone who works in accreditation at a college in a large public university system. He or she didn’t get a major in accreditation (there is no such major) and is unlikely to have majored in education, and even if they did they would have learned about pedagogy and “theory” and assessment rather than anything having to do with their daily work lives. Essentially everything they do for work takes place within the confines of their laptop screen, and the exception is various in-person meetings that accomplish nothing beyond delegating various tasks, defining roles, critiquing past performance, and otherwise reflecting on how to do a better job of supporting the tasks that other people do. A person in this job might have a secretary or lower-level administrative functionary that reports to them, but they are not on a track that makes advancement likely — becoming a VP somewhere will likely require many years of service and going on the job market to get a job at another school. A person in this position will never interact with students in any real capacity, demonstrating the psychic distance between email jobs and the actual function of their institutions. Though they have a clear and defined set of responsibilities written into their job description, their overall impact on the day-to-day functioning of their college is nebulous, and far more time is spent on administrivia than their “real” duties. They live between the 50th and 75th percentile for individual income in their state.

August 24, 2023

QotD: Apparatchiks of the perma-bureaucracy

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

… in Tocqueville’s day the American government was almost inconceivably weak by our standards. For “magistrate”, then, read “bureaucrat”. Though of course American congress-critters do have “a vast deal of arbitrary power”, most of the real damage is done by unelected, unaccountable, indeed unknown bureaucrats. It’s the perma-bureaucracy, the Apparat, as the Soviets called it, who really run things. If you need examples, just google “Hawaiian judge meme”. That’s the Apparat, in all its glory, and exactly the kind of thing Tocqueville was discussing as the precursor of tyranny.

Being unelected, and therefore unaccountable, the Apparat works solely for the benefit of apparatchiks – and, obviously, vice versa. This is the mechanism by which Conquest’s famous “second law” operates: “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing”. This has nothing to do with “philosophical” orientation, since as we’ve discussed, the terms “left” and “right” are essentially meaningless when it comes to modern politics. Rather, Conquest’s law works because bureaucrats always prioritize the bureaucracy’s continued existence over its ostensible mission, whatever that happens to be. Pick any do-gooder organization: The “end hunger” bureaucrats of the Feed-the-World NGO would be out of a job if the world actually got fed; ergo, you’ll soon enough find the world-feeders disinterested in, and eventually openly sabotaging, the organization’s efforts to feed anyone.

Severian, “Anticipations and Objections (I)”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-16.

August 23, 2023

QotD: “Megacorporations” of the Roman era

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

The definition of a megacorp differs a bit, work to work. They are, of course, megacorporations in the literal sense; massive, vertically integrated companies that often have monopolistic control over multiple markets. But more fundamental to the definition of the megacorp is that they typically employ their own armed forces and either enforce their own law or are at least able to ignore the law more generally. It is not enough for a company to be big, it has to generate the sort of wealth to which M. Licinius Crassus famously quipped “no one was truly rich who could not support an army at his own expense” (Plut. Cras. 2.7).

Which is to say that what really defines a megacorporation is that it trespasses into domains usually occupied by the state: military, police and judicial functions – the use of force. A megacorporation is, simply put, a corporation so large and powerful that it begins to act as a state, be that in the form of the private armies of Cyberpunk 2077, the privatized police force of the Robocop franchise, or the straight-up corporate governments of Stellaris (which in turn channel things like the Spacer’s Guild or the Ferengi Alliance) And that is core to the generally dystopian leaning of megacorporations – they are meant to reflect capitalism and corporate empire building taken to an extreme, to the point where it has swallowed the entire rest of the society.

Taking that definition to history, we can actually see a fair number of megacorporations; they are by no means common, but they do exist. Going very far back, the Roman societates (lit: “fellowships”, but “business association” or “company” is an accurate enough rendering) of the publicani (businessmen who filled public contracts) exercised close to this sort of power in some of Rome’s early provinces. During the Middle and Late Roman Republic, the job of extracting tax revenue from the provinces was too administratively complex for the limited machinery of the Republic, so instead the senate directed the censors to auction the right to collect taxes. Groups of Roman businessmen (and often silent patrician partners) would group resources together to bid for the right to collect taxes from a province – any taxes they took in excess of that figure would be their profit.

These companies could be very large indeed. For instance, parts of the lex portorii Asiae (the customs laws for the Roman province of Asia) survive and include regulations for the relevant company including a slew of customs houses and guard posts (the law is incomplete, but mentions more than 30 collection points – all major ports – to which would also need to be added posts along the land routes into the province). From other evidence we know that the staff at customs posts included armed guards along with the expected tax collectors and bookkeepers. And we know that publicani were sometimes delegated local or Roman forces to do their work (e.g. Cic. Ad Att. 114, using Shackleton Bailey’s numbering). They also maintained the closest thing the Roman Republic had to a postal service (Cic. Ad Att. 108). It’s not clear exactly how many employees one of the larger tax collection companies might have had (and those for the province of Asia – equivalent to the west coast of Anatolia – would have been some of the largest), but it was clearly considerable, as were the sums of money involved.

To the cities and towns of a province, such Roman companies must have seemed like megacorporations, especially if they were in with the governor (which they generally were) and thus could call down the forces of Rome on recalcitrant taxpayers. And we certainly know that these publicani often collected substantially far more than was due to them under the law (the reason why “tax collector” and “sinner” seem to be nearly synonymous in the New Testament, a fact that gave Ernst Badian’s study of them, Publicans and Sinners, its title). At the same time, we see the clear limitations too: such companies were clearly subservient to the governor and to the Roman state. Administrative changes beginning under Julius Caesar and brought to completion under Augustus did away with some of the largest tax contracts and the influence of the societates publicanorum with them.

Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday: January 1, 2021”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-01-01.

August 13, 2023

“It makes [Canada] look like some cheap, politically petty little kleptocracy run by a collection of self-serving narcissists”

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

Canada became a parody of itself so slowly that the legacy media barely even noticed:

There was a time when politicians steered very carefully around saying anything that could be construed as an attempt to influence a decision by one of Canada’s independent agencies.

Honest, there was.

There was also a time when, should a politician so much as nod or wink publicly to indicate a preferred outcome by, say, the office of the Commissioner for Competition, the nation’s leading media organizations would see this as a big story. Sixteen dollar orange juice big. Heads would roll.

Seriously, there was.

The reasons people like Francois-Phillipe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development are supposed to keep their yaps shut are pretty straightforward. Businesses, citizens, consumers, and investors need to know the processes at law enforcement agencies and regulators — such as the Competition Bureau and the CRTC respectively — are independent of the sordid manipulations of partisanship. They need to be able to trust that the rules are clear, their application is consistent and that they can have faith that the institution involved views matters before it in an objective fashion.

It’s Rule of Law 101 stuff and messing with it makes Canada look like something less than a first world country. It makes us look like some cheap, politically petty little kleptocracy run by a collection of self-serving narcissists.

Shortly after the CBC, the Canadian Association of Broadcasters and News Media Canada filed a complaint with the Competition Bureau over Meta’s decision to no longer carry news in Canada, Champagne seized the opportunity to show Big Tech who their daddy is.

“I am determined to use every tool at our disposal to ensure that Canadians can have access to reliable news — across all platforms,” Champagne posted on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter). “I fully support the complaint made to the Competition Bureau by Cnd media groups against Meta in their effort to promote a free & independent press.”

I don’t expect that many readers have hung around with cabinet appointees. But I have, and I’ve been one. And I can tell you that most of them — particularly the ones whose conditions of appointment mean they serve “at pleasure” as Competition Commissioner Matthew Boswell does — pay attention when the minister through whom their agency reports to Parliament, says anything, let alone things like that.

August 12, 2023

QotD: Scientific management and the work-to-rule reaction

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

Scientific management, a.k.a. “Taylorism”, was all the rage around the turn of the 20th century. At its crudest (and I’m only exaggerating a little), you’ve got some dork with a stopwatch and a camera standing behind you while you do your job, and after some observations and a little math, the dork tells you you’re pulling the lever wrong. There’s a scientifically optimized way to pull that lever, one that shaves 0.6 seconds off each of your work “processes”, and henceforth you shall be required to do this exact sequence of steps, every time … and if you disagree, too bad, why do you hate science? Similar regulations follow, until the whole plant is “scientifically” optimized.

And since this is the great age of “Progress”, you’ve got umpteen government regulations to deal with now, too. And then as now, the august personages in Congress wouldn’t dream of soiling even their shoes, let alone their hands, by going anywhere near anyplace labor is actually performed, so all these regulations have been promulgated ex cathedra. Suddenly the straightforward, mindless job of lever-pulling — the one that was already so insulting to the human spirit, so “alienating”, as Marx put it, something to be endured because one has no choice — is bound up with reams of regulations, too. If you don’t like it, build your own factory.

But in this, the workers saw opportunity. You’re going to tell me how to do my job? Fine, but you’d better tell me how to do all of it. Is there anything the Policies and Procedures manual leaves unexplained? Where to place my feet as I stand in front of the lever, for example? I’d better not do anything until the manager tells me exactly what to do, in writing, in a fully-vetted update to the P&P, and have you run that by Compliance, sir? Perhaps the lawyers in the Environmental Division should take a gander, too, since who knows what might contribute to Global Warm … errrrr, whatever, you get the point. It turns out that even back then, when there was no such thing as OSHA or the EPA or the rest of the Federal alphabet soup, the “scientific managers”, let alone Congress, simply weren’t able to envision the nuances of everyone’s day-to-day job. Or, for that matter, the very basics of everyone’s job. Work ground to a halt because everyone was following the rules.

Severian, “A History Lesson”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-14.

July 29, 2023

If you like the CRTC regulating the internet, you’ll love having them regulating video games!

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Gaming, Government, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Not satisfied with strenuously trying to break the internet for ordinary Canadians, the Trudeau government is now being lobbied to introduce regulation of video games, too:

Bill C-11 may have receded into the background of CRTC consultations and government policy directions, but Canadians concerned with user content, video game and algorithmic regulation would do well to pay attention. Lobby groups that fought for the inclusion of user content regulation in the bill have now turned their attention to the regulatory process and are seeking to undo government assurances that each of those issues – user content, algorithms and even video games – would fall outside of the scope of the regulatory implementation of the bill. In fact, if the groups get their way, Canadians would face unprecedented regulations with the CRTC empowered to create a host of new obligations that could even include requirements for Youtubers and TikTokers to register with the Commission. With a new Heritage Minister in place, the submissions raise serious concerns about whether the government will maintain its commitments regarding scoping out users, video games, and algorithms.

The most troubling publicly available document comes from a coalition that calls itself ACCORD, representing songwriters, composers, and music publishers. The group has posted its submission to the government’s consultation on the draft policy direction to the CRTC on Bill C-11. All submissions are not yet posted, but I should note that I also submitted a brief document, calling on the government to fully honour its commitment to exclude user content and algorithms from regulation and to establish limits on discoverability regulation.

The government’s draft direction had called for “minimizing” algorithmic regulation and the exclusion of user content and video game regulation. The music lobby is now calling on the government to rollback virtually all of its commitments on these issues. The draft direction states:

    The Commission is directed not to impose regulatory requirements on

    (a) online undertakings in respect of the programs of social media creators, including podcasts; and

    (b) broadcasting undertakings in respect of the transmission of video games.

The lobby wants virtually all of this removed, deleting references to online undertakings and video games. Moreover, the directive speaks to Section 4.2, stating:

    In exercising its powers under section 4.2 of the Act, the Commission is directed to set out clear, objective and readily ascertainable criteria, including criteria that ensure that the Act only applies in respect of programs that have been broadcast, in whole or in significant part, by a broadcasting undertaking that is required to be carried on under a licence or that is required to be registered with the Commission but does not provide a social media service.

Here too the lobby group wants most of the paragraph deleted. And while the government directed the CRTC to minimize algorithmic regulation for discoverability purposes, the groups wants those limitations removed as well. In short, the lobby groups validate the concerns expressed by thousands of Canadians that Bill C-11 opened the door to the regulation of user content, video games, and algorithms.

July 22, 2023

QotD: “Managing” your way to victory

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

Some of the greatest victories of all time were managed by ad hoc organization that, like Topsy, just “growed“ from 1939 to 1945, as Churchill and Roosevelt searched for ways to operate a grand, strategic alliance fighting against formidable enemies, while the postwar fascination with process, led in large part by US Defence Secretary (1961-68) Robert S. McNamara, contributed, I believe, in a major way to the strategic and military debacle that was the Vietnam War (1955-75) when data began to replace tactics, and management theory, coupled with complex organization charts, replaced military acumen and strategic vision.

There is nothing wrong with good, sound management and management theory and management science (and, yes, I believe there actually is a such a thing) have much to teach us all, including governments and the military, about how to get the most from one’s always limited resources, especially time. But, too often, in my opinion, management becomes an end in itself and process replaces critical thinking and analysis. When this happens in both the political/bureaucratic and in the military realms, as I believe it has in Canada (which has tended, since about 1970, to follow the USA almost slavishly) then I believe that our national defence is in peril.

It is common, amongst military people, to accept that there is a “master principle of war”: Selection and Maintenance of the Aim. That means that one MUST understand what one is trying to do and then focus all one’s efforts on getting that done. The corollary is that if you don’t know what you need to be doing then getting the results you want (need) is unlikely. I believe that the Canadian Armed Forces lack good strategic direction because the Government of Canada, the Trudeau government, is unconcerned with anything past the next election. I also believe that the military leadership, lacking strategic direction, simply follows whatever new process seems to be popular in the Pentagon. Canadians, therefore, are not getting value for money from either the government they elected nor from the military forces for which they pay.

Ted Campbell, “Following the blind leader (3)”, Ted Campbell’s Point of View, 2019-05-21.

July 14, 2023

Bread rationing in the United States during WW2

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Food, Government, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I haven’t studied the numbers, but I strongly suspect that most US government food rationing during the war was effectively theatre to encourage more support of the war effort: except in a very few areas, the US was more than self-sufficient in most foodstuffs. At the Foundation for Economic Education, Lawrence W. Reed recounts one of the least effective government moves in food rationing:

According to an old joke from the socialist and frequently underfed Soviet Union, Stalin goes to a local wheat farm to see how things are going. “We have so many bags of wheat that, if piled on top of each other, they could reach God himself!” the farmer told Comrade Stalin.

“But God does not exist,” the dictator angrily replied. “Exactly!” said the farmer. “And neither does the wheat.” Nobody knows what happened to the farmer, but at least Stalin died in 1953.

Soviet socialism, with its forced collectivism and ubiquitous bread lines, gave wheat a bad name. Indeed, it was lousy at agriculture in general. As journalist Hedrick Smith (author of The Russians) and many other authorities noted at the time, small privately owned plots comprised just three percent of the land but produced anywhere from a quarter to a half of all produce. Collectivized agriculture was a joke.

America is not joke-free when it comes to wheat. We are a country in which sliced bread was both invented and banned, and a country in which growing wheat for your own consumption was ruled to be an act of “interstate commerce” that distant bureaucrats could regulate. No kidding.

On this anniversary — July 7 — of both the birth in 1880 of sliced bread’s inventor and of the day in 1928 that the first sliced bread from his machine was sold, it’s fitting to recall these long-forgotten historical facts.

The Iowa-born jeweler and inventor Otto Rohwedder turned 48 on the very day the first consumer bought the product of his new slicing machine. The bread was advertised as “the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped” and it quickly gave rise to the popular phrase, “the greatest thing since sliced bread.” Before 1928, American housewives cut many a finger by having to slice off every piece of bread from the loaves they baked or bought. Sliced bread was an instant sensation.

Rohwedder earned seven patents for his invention. The original is proudly displayed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. He likely made a lot more money from the bread slicing machine than he ever did as a jeweler. He died in 1960 at the age of 80.

Enter Claude Wickard, Secretary of Agriculture under Franklin Roosevelt from 1940 to 1945. On January 18, 1943, he banned the sale of sliced bread. Exactly why seems to be in dispute but the most likely rationale was to save wax paper and other resources for war production. He rescinded the ban two months later, explaining then that “the savings are not as much as we expected.”

I’m sure Hitler and Hirohito were relieved.

July 11, 2023

The obesity crisis … fuelled by iatrogenic public health warnings about certain food groups

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Food, Government, Health, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Here’s The Armchair General with another example of what he calls COGOs – Crisis of Government Origin:

So, after the decades-long crusade against saturated fats, we have a population that has been repeatedly told that fat will kill us. So, many people eschewed fats in favour of salt and sugar. Which, apparently, are also bad for us.

But without saturated fats, remember, people are not going to feel sated. So, what is likely to happen? Well, just what did happen — never feeling full, people feel hungry throughout the day so eat continually through the day: a behaviour known as “snacking” …

    Nutritionists believe many people are obese not because they binge on fatty main meals but because they indulge in constant grazing throughout the day without even realising it.

    This pattern, dubbed “auto-eating”, involves resorting to snacks and treats at the slightest indication of hunger.

Or, rather, people always feel hungry because they have been told to avoid saturated fats. And they snack on chocolate bars and biscuits and small things that provide a pleasant sugary boost.

Combine this with an increasingly sedentary population — both at home and at work — and other comforts (such as central heating which leads to fewer calories being expended on maintaining body temperature), and…

BOOM! You have an obesity problem.

And now — nearly seventy years after some arrogant doctors used some extremely dodgy studies to enhance their reputations, we now know that what we were told about the harms associated with saturated fats was all absolute bollocks.

And so, once again, we can demonstrate another Crisis of Government Origin (COGO), ably assisted by the arrogant fuckers of the medical profession.

Unfortunately, the government legislation is already in place, and it will take at least three years for the fuck-nuggets in politics to catch up — if they ever do. After all, they are going to have to undo decades of medical advice, government food advice, leaflets, bus adverts, nutritionist training, and social conditioning.

Just another reason why governments should stay the hell out of our private lives. Such up — and fuck off.

July 10, 2023

“De-banking” is the financial world’s version of cancelling someone

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Economics, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

At the Free Life blog, Alan Bickley considers the recently reported rash of prominent (and not-so-prominent) critics of the British government being refused service by their banks and further refused permission to open new accounts with any other chartered bank. Being “cancelled” by social media companies is bad, but being “de-banked” in a modern economy is worse than being declared a “non-person” by a totalitarian regime:

In the past month, we have heard that various rich and well-connected people have had their bank accounts closed, seemingly because of their dissident political opinions. The same has happened to other people who are much poorer and without connections. Twenty years ago, the same happened to the British National Party. There is a simple libertarian response to this.

No one has the right to coerced association with anyone else. If someone comes to me and asks me to provide him with services, I have an absolute right to say yes or no. If I am uncharitable enough to dislike the colour of his face or what he does in bed, so much the worse. I may lose valuable business. But it is my time, and it is my choice. If anyone starts a whine about the horrors of discrimination, he should be ignored. We have an absolute right to discriminate against others for any reason whatever.

This being said, the position becomes less clear when state power of some kind is involved. Banks in this country require a licence from the State to operate. This protects them from open competition. It also gives them access to services and information from the State that are not given to other persons or businesses. If a bank finds itself in serious financial difficulties, it has at least a greater chance than other large businesses of being saved by the State – by a coordination of support by others or by direct financial help. The State has also made it illegal for many transactions to be made in cash. If I try to buy a car with £20,000 in cash, the car dealership is obliged to refuse my business, or to make so many enquiries that accepting my business is too much trouble. In effect, anyone who wants to spend more than a few thousand pounds in cash is obliged by various actual and shadow laws to use a bank account.

So we have privileged corporations and an effective legal obligation for people to do business with them. This entirely changes the libertarian indifference to commercial discrimination. The banks are a privileged oligopoly. The banks compete for custom among a public that is free to choose one bank rather than another, but that is compelled to choose some bank. For this reason, since the relevant laws will not be repealed, it is legitimate to demand another law to offset some of the effects of the others. Banks should be legally obliged to accept the business of any person or group of persons without question. Limitations on what services are provided must be justified on the grounds of previous financial misconduct as reasonably defined. For example, it should be permitted for a bank to refuse an overdraft to someone who is or has recently been bankrupt, or whose spending habits are obviously reckless. Perhaps it should be permitted for a bank to refuse to lend money for purposes it regards as scandalous as well as commercially unviable. Therefore, a representative of the White Persons’ Supremacy Foundation, or the Vladimir Putin Appreciation Society, should be able to walk into any bank and open an account – with no questions asked. If an account is refused, there should be a legal obligation on the bank to provide a full explanation of the refusal. If the refusal is not made on valid commercial grounds, there should be a right of appeal before a tribunal which does not award costs, and this tribunal should have the power to grant punitive damages against any bank found to be discriminating on any grounds but the validly commercial.

The refusal of banking services is only the beginning of a new and sophisticated totalitarianism. What the banks can do can also be done by supermarkets, by Internet service providers, by hotel chains, by airlines and railway companies, and by utility providers. There is indeed a good case for insisting on a law forbidding any organisation that has the privilege of limited liability from any but obviously commercial discrimination.

“… the Western world is failing — culturally and economically — because the government now has a hand in so much of society”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The Armchair General would almost certainly agree with my frequent lament that the more the government tries to do, the less well it does everything:

There is a famous quote by American journalist and satirist H.L. Menken, which has been deployed by many political writers over the years:

    The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

It is an enduring quote because it has the ring of truth1, and it certainly fits with the Machiavellian aspect of politics. This attitude was, without doubt, deployed by governments across the world during Covid (and, to some extent, still is).

Your jaundiced2 General would like to propose a related, alternative and rather more plausible soundbite that, I believe, more adequately describes the Western world in the twenty-first century:

    The whole consequence of practical politics is the keep the ignorant populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be kept in comfort) by an endless series of colossal fuck-ups, labelled as crises, caused entirely by the government.3

Every time that you see the media whipping up a frenzy about a “crisis“, you can be 99% sure that the issue in question has been caused by the state — and that the real solution is to remove the government intervention. And that is never, ever the action actually proposed.

Crises of Government Origin
Your jaundiced General refers to these phenomena as “Crises of Government Origin” (COGO), and will form the back-bone of a series of posts titled with that acronym. Many of the issues are interlinked, and most are absolutely critical if we are ever to confront the economic and social issues facing us today.

These include (but are not limited to):

  • the energy crisis;
  • the Climate Warming / Change / Heating crisis;
  • the housing crisis;
  • the NHS staffing crisis;
  • the police shortage crisis;
  • the obesity crisis;
  • the education crisis;
  • the pandemic crisis;
  • the productivity crisis;
  • the activist “charity” crisis;
  • the drugs crisis (Scottish edition);
  • the rape gang crisis;
  • the intersectional and gender crisis;
  • just about any other “crisis” you can think of.

To be sure, the UK government is not the worst in some of these areas — but, since it is in UK that my comfy leather armchair is situated, it is the rampant stupidity of our own governments that I shall concentrate on. And no, not all of these posts will include reminding people that Grant Schapps is a prick.

I can promise that every one of them will include illustrations demonstrating the mind-gargling incompetence of our governments (of all persuasions) and “Rolls Royce” civil service4.

The law is a blunt instrument, and the government is really inefficient at doing anything at all.

Fundamentally, the Western world is failing — culturally and economically — because the government now has a hand in so much of society. And the UK is in the vanguard of this malaise as Sharon White, at the time Permanent Secretary to the Treasury (and currently fucking things up in typically Rolls Royce civil servant fashion at John Lewis), said (in a rare example of her being right) in 2015 at the Institute for Government:

    The UK is “almost the most centralised developed country in the world”.

Indeed it has been observed that, by some measures, the UK is more centralised than Soviet Russia. This is why we are failing.

The Crises Of Government Origin (COGO) series aims to examine some of these failures — large and small. For starters, let’s have a look at Hate Speech laws and why they are so dangerous.

    1. The same applies to Menken’s definition of Puritanism: “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy”.

    2. Caused less by poor mood than incipient liver failure. Now pass the port, would you, old chap. No, to the left, you fool!

    3. Yes, yes — I realise that it needs honing, but it will do for now. Feel free to submit more elegant versions in the comments.

    4. Snork.

July 8, 2023

During the pandemic, governments across the world chose the worst way to respond

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In City Journal, John Tierney explains why western governments’ almost universal grabbing of extraordinary powers was the worst possible way to handle the public health crisis of the Wuhan Coronavirus:

Long before Covid struck, economists detected a deadly pattern in the impact of natural disasters: if the executive branch of government used the emergency to claim sweeping new powers over the citizenry, more people died than would have if government powers had remained constrained. It’s now clear that the Covid pandemic is the deadliest confirmation yet of that pattern.

Governments around the world seized unprecedented powers during the pandemic. The result was an unprecedented disaster, as recently demonstrated by two exhaustive analyses of the lockdowns’ impact in the United States and Europe. Both reports conclude that the lockdowns made little or no difference in the Covid death toll. But the lockdowns did lead to deaths from other causes during the pandemic, particularly among young and middle-aged people, and those fatalities will continue to mount in the future.

“Most likely lockdowns represent the biggest policy mistake in modern times,” says Lars Jonung of Lund University in Sweden, a coauthor of one of the new reports. He and two fellow economists, Steve Hanke from Johns Hopkins University and Jonas Herby of the Center for Political Studies in Copenhagen, sifted through nearly 20,000 studies for their book, Did Lockdowns Work?, published in June by the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) in London. After combining results from the most rigorous studies analyzing fatality rates and the stringency of lockdowns in various states and nations, they estimate that the average lockdown in the United States and Europe during the spring of 2020 reduced Covid mortality by just 3.2 percent. That translates to some 4,000 avoided deaths in the United States — a negligible result compared with the toll from the ordinary flu, which annually kills nearly 40,000 Americans.

Even that small effect may be an overestimate, to judge from the other report, published in February by the Paragon Health Institute. The authors, all former economic advisers to the White House, are Joel Zinberg and Brian Blaise of the institute, Eric Sun of Stanford, and Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago. They analyzed the rates of Covid mortality and of overall excess mortality (the number of deaths above normal from all causes) in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. They adjusted for the relative vulnerability of each state’s population by factoring in the age distribution (older people were more vulnerable) and the prevalence of obesity and diabetes (which increased the risk from Covid). Then they compared the mortality rates over the first two years of the pandemic with the stringency of each state’s policies (as measured on a widely used Oxford University index that tracked business and school closures, stay-at-home requirements, mandates for masks and vaccines, and other restrictions).

The researchers found no statistically significant effect from the restrictions. The mortality rates in states with stringent policies were not significantly different from those in less restrictive states. Two of the largest states, California and Florida, fared the same — their mortality rates both stood at the national average — despite California’s lengthy lockdowns and Florida’s early reopening. New York, with a mortality rate worse than average despite ranking first in the nation in the stringency of its policies, fared the same as the least restrictive state, South Dakota.

July 7, 2023

QotD: Nazi Germany’s plans for Eastern Europe versus their actual implementation of those plans

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Germany, History, Military, Quotations, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… it’s easy to see what the evidence is (or would be): The well-documented awfulness of life under Stalin. There’s also plenty of evidence that the Wehrmacht certainly thought they’d be greeted as liberators, and while it’s hard to put too much weight on the anecdotes of individual soldiers and civilians (most recorded long after the fact), there seems to be a fair amount of evidence they actually were greeted as liberators …

… at least in some places, and at least initially. There’s a second inference here: “the exigencies of war led Germany to behave tactfully”. Here’s where our initial ground rules of evidence become extremely important. Those anecdotal reports of civilian / military interaction, above: What weight do we assign those? And why?

If I’m arguing for the “greeted as liberators” theory, I can use all those recollections of cordial civilian / military interaction. But I need to be consistent: If I say “You can trust those, even though they’re personal memories written down long after the fact, because XYZ”; then I can’t turn around and dismiss contrary evidence of the same type: “All those reports of brutality are just personal memories written down long after the fact.” That’s one of the ways you catch a propagandist: they constantly conflate the two.

Fortunately, in this case we’re dealing with two totally ideologized societies. Even better, one of those totally ideologized societies was German, with their well-documented love of paperwork. All armies generate scads of paperwork, and an ideologized army’s paperwork is full of ideology. So: How does the Army of Occupation’s paperwork tell the tale? That should give us some clues as to their future plans — obviously the occupiers would need to be part of it — and some insight as to the day-to-day.

As it turns out, the second part of your inference — “the exigencies of war led Germany to behave tactfully” — is false. We’ve got the paperwork on it, starting with the infamous “Commissar Order” and working down. Ideology trumps exigency. It seems clear from Wehrmacht paperwork that so long as military efficiency was maintained, you could do pretty much whatever you wanted out there.

[Interestingly, in a bit of meta-irony, the Wikipedia “thumbnail” — the little box you get on the side of the search results page — says of the Commissar Order: “Nazi conspiracy-enforcing unit of the Nazi military.” [Sic], of course — they really want you to know these guys were Nazis. Also, what’s a “conspiracy-enforcing unit”? One imagines a Q-tard goon squad, beating up people whose faith in the God-Emperor is wavering. Finally, it wasn’t a “conspiracy” — they were right out in the open with it. We’ve got lots of copies of the Commissar Order, because it was read out to the troops before the invasion. ALL the troops].1

That segues into the “Organizational Darwinism” thing. The paperwork shows us that “the Nazis” really did have grandiose plans for settling a whole bunch of Germans in the depopulated East. They even got a pilot program underway, as I recall — a whole bunch of ethnic Germans from Bohemia or someplace getting stuck in a transit camp in eastern Poland, or even Ukraine. But notice I put “the Nazis” in quotation marks. The guys with the grandiose plans were RuSHA, the Main Race and Settlement Office. And not even all of them: It was the fourth department, “Settlement”, inside RuSHA. And RuSHA was inside the SS, which was inside — but also outside, over, under, around, and through — the rest of the Nazis’ plate-of-spaghetti org chart.

And it’s actually way more complicated than that, because of course it is — these are the Nazis we’re talking about. I’m not going to dive into the details (not least because it all makes my head hurt), but if you were an ethnic German who wanted to get resettled in Ukraine for some reason — and this is all mostly theoretical, I hasten to add, very few actually moved so far as I know — you’d have to deal with a bewildering array of bizarrely-acronymed organizations. RuSHA, VOMI, the Generalgovernment (Occupied Poland), the SS (in general; over and above RuSHA), the army, the whole bewildering array of groups represented in Generalplan Ost, which was a “plan” in much the same way the “Holy Roman Empire” was holy, Roman, and an empire. Various Party goons would want to get their beaks wet, as would the Gestapo (hell yes they want to know if people are moving around the Reich, especially towards the front on military railroads), and so on.

As weird as this sounds, all this elaborate mishmash of ass-pulled “organization” was by largely by design. For one thing, it diffuses responsibility for really nasty shit — when it comes to certain events on the Eastern Front, even scrupulously neutral historians are often reduced to Ilhan Omar’s level: some people did some things. Who gave what order? Who was he reporting to? And in what capacity? Insufficient data.

Severian, “Organizational Darwinism”, Founding Questions, 2023-01-30.

    1. Side note: Ideology really increases military efficiency, up to a point. Recalling that I’m not even an armchair general, it seems like the American military is really missing a trick there. Imagine what the Americans could’ve done in Vietnam if their regular forces had been better indoctrinated, instead of punting military-civilian relations off to CORDS. Properly indoctrinated, I mean, with an ideology that kinda sorta makes sense and is internally consistent and at least somewhat intersects with the real world. “Spreading democracy” would work ok, if they actually ideologized the ranks (instead of having the PR guys just parrot it to the cameras). The AINO military is of course fully indoctrinated, but see above: we’re talking combat efficiency here, not butt stuff.

July 6, 2023

“Too many complaints? That’s racism. Too few complaints? Well, that’s racism, too.”

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

Amy Eileen Hamm reports on how the British Columbia College of Nurses and Midwives (BCCNM) acted on its concern that not enough complaints against their members were being lodged by First Nations people:

As regular readers of Quillette will know, many Canadian institutions have fervently adopted the cause of “decolonization” — a vaguely defined term that one university describes as the dismantling of “assumed Euro-western disciplinary constructs and traditions”. This can mean anything from abolishing musical scales (which “perpetuate and solidify the hegemony of [the] Euro-American repertoire”); to reimagining our scientific understanding of sunlight, so as to correct “the reproduction of colonialism” that has infected “physics and higher physics education”; to assailing the gender binary through a “decolonizing act of resistance”.

That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, institutional efforts at “decolonization” generally translate into affirmative-action hiring programs and policies to mandate symbolic (generally empty) gestures such as land acknowledgements. They’ve also created a cash cow for “specialist” administrators and third-party consultants in what is now known as the “equity, diversity, inclusion, and decolonization” sector. The premise is that decolonization is so difficult and complex that it can only be overseen by said (highly paid) professionals.

My own professional sector, nursing, provides a useful case study. In British Columbia, where I live and work, nurses are licenced by the British Columbia College of Nurses & Midwives (BCCNM), whose offices are located “on unceded Coast Salish territory, represented today by the Musquea?m, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.” In other words, Vancouver.

If a patient feels that he or she has experienced “incompetent, unethical, or impaired nursing or midwifery practice”, he or she can complain to the BCCNM through its complaints portal. It’s not a complicated process. You send an email describing what the nurse allegedly did, when the incident occurred, and whether there were any witnesses. If you’ve already complained to someone else, you’re supposed to note that as well, along with your suggestions for resolving the complaint. That’s it.

But apparently, this process is just too onerous — and even dangerous — for Indigenous people. And so the BCCNM has paid C$97,000 to a self-described “boutique business process management firm” called Novatone, which has duly produced a lengthy report on how to “make the BCCNM complaints process safer for Indigenous Peoples.” The same title — mantra might be a better word — appears at the top of all 50 pages: Looking Back to Look Forward: How Indigenous ways of being, knowing, and doing must inform the BCCNM feedback process and reflect the principles of cultural safety, cultural humility, and anti-racism.

(For the benefit of those outside Canada, the mystical-sounding phrase, “ways of knowing”, along with its “being” and “doing” variants, has now entered the official idiom as a means to signify the unfalsifiable shaman-like intuitions that supposedly guide the consciousness of Indigenous people throughout every facet of their existence — including, apparently, complaining about the care they receive from nurses.)

Juxtaposed images from the Novatone report, Looking Back to Look Forward, contrast the “colonial, western, linear” nature of existing BCCNM processes with a “wholistic, relational, culturally informed process” that would supposedly align with Indigenous values.

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