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.

November 1, 2026

“Welcome to the wonderful world of carbon accounting”

Filed under: Business, Economics, Environment, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

One of the biggest blind spots for climate warriors is the proportion of hand-waving and wishful thinking required to make their grand unified visions of a Net Zero world, as revealed by John Robson as he conducts the search for the fabled “Scope 3”:

Net Zero image from Jo Nova

We recently got an email from Heatmap saying “Half of companies with net-zero commitments call scope 3 their biggest barrier.” And we thought duh what? And then “Probably the other half said ‘What’s scope 3?'” It turns out to be the carbon emissions you don’t emit but get blamed for anyway. More fun from the wacky world of climate economics. Which has this regrettable feature in common with interventionist economics generally: They don’t know enough to know what they don’t know. The email also said “Most are stuck on spend-based estimates too rough to prove whether their reduction programs are working”. As in the old Soviet Union the planners basically planned to spend because unless you let consumer preferences form prices in competitive markets, you can’t tell whether you’re making something useful or just sawdust sausages and ill-fitting size 12 shoes all for left feet.

In a striking departure from modern journalistic practice, we responded by Googling “Scope 3”. And it turns out to be something very revealing in its unrevealingness. For instance, from the “Carbon Trust“:

    The Greenhouse Gas Protocol – which provides the most widely recognised accounting standards for greenhouse gas emissions – categorises GHG emissions into three ‘scopes’. Scope 1 covers direct emissions from owned or controlled sources. Scope 2 covers indirect emissions from the purchase and use of electricity, steam, heating and cooling. By using the energy, an organisation is indirectly responsible for the release of these GHG emissions. Scope 3 includes all other indirect emissions that occur in the upstream and downstream activities of an organisation.

So here’s the problem. Scope 1 is reasonably easy to measure, at least in principle. It’s the GHGs you emit directly by doing whatever you’re doing, minus presumably staff breathing out CO2 while at work. Scope 2 isn’t too bad: it’s the same as Scope 1 except it’s from your power suppliers for whatever share of their output you acquire. But Scope 3 is a very different beast. It’s all the emissions from all the people you bought stuff from, plus all the emissions from all the people who bought your products. All of them. Every single one. Even your kid’s lemonade stand. And all based on pseudo-scientific “accounting and reporting standards” that sound good, make work, generate money and are no use in the real world.

Here we must again cite Leonard Read’s 1958 classic “I, Pencil“, a demonstration even from a simpler era when people used pencils not AI that tracing out all the steps involved in making things, was inherently a transcomputable and never-ending quest. Thus, the pencil tells the reader, “not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me”. Take any part of it: the wood, the paint, the eraser, the graphite, and you touch a global supply chain of near infinite complexity. Among a great many other things, that:

    My bit of metal – the ferrule – is brass. Think of all the persons who mine zinc and copper and those who have the skills to make shiny sheet brass from these products of nature. Those black rings on my ferrule are black nickel. What is black nickel and how is it applied? The complete story of why the center of my ferrule has no black nickel on it would take pages to explain.

And to explain who made the coffee and shoes and razor blades for the miners, and who produced the fuel for the ships that carried these goods about, and who made the machine tools to create sheet brass, and on and on, would defy any central planner even before they got to the problem that all these people in turn used pencils (we said it was 1958). Which is why after an initial burst of idealism Soviet Five-Year Plans were essentially reduced to replicating last year’s plan and adding a few percent.

Now imagine trying to track all the carbon emissions. Because it’s what Scope 3 aims to do as if it were a mere detail.

Incidentally Soviet planners from the 1960s on into the 1980s actually thought that more powerful computers would overcome this problem, being unclear on the concept of “transcomputable” particularly as it applied to systems with feedback loops. Then the USSR done died. But not this hope.

Thus Heatmap insists that it can be done with their handy guide, which “lays out a four-step playbook for closing the gap between scope 3 commitments and measurable supply chain progress, using domain-specialized sustainability AI” and from whose three “What you’ll learn” gems the first is:

    How to move from spend-based estimates to product-level emissions data in hours – with AI-powered material mapping and multi-agent validation

Oooh. AI-powered. Domain-specialized no less. And multi-agent validation. We suppose it beats getting it all from Agent 86. But not by much because the fantasy of measuring all the carbon outputs from all your inputs relies on the fantasy of measuring all your inputs and you can’t.

In a market economy, a real one, you don’t have to. As Read also said, as long as you know the price you must pay for the immediate inputs, how to assemble them into outputs, and the price you can get for those outputs, you can tell whether a purchase is rational. But if you have to know more than you can, you’re sunk. Especially if you don’t know you can’t.

Welcome to the wonderful world of carbon accounting. Do not mistake it for the real kind of accounting though.

Why Do Shortline Railroads Exist? | Railroad Economics 19

Filed under: Business, Economics, Railways, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

Railroad Economics
Published 14 Jul 2026

Every day, thousands of freight cars are delivered by railroads you’ve probably never heard of. These smaller companies, known as shortline railroads, play a critical role in the North American freight network by serving customers that the major Class I railroads often can’t do efficiently.

In this episode of Railroad Economics, we explore why shortline railroads exist, how they make money, what they haul, and why the largest railroads depend on them to complete the “last mile” of freight service. From industrial switching to local customer service, these small railroads are an essential part of the railroad business.

If you’ve ever wondered why there are so many different railroad names on freight trains, this video explains the economics behind it.

October 30, 2026

Neo-kremlinologists still find value in The E-Communist, er, I mean The Economist

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

In The Critic, Chris Bayliss explains how the once-great Economist can still have uses in its much decayed pro-managerialist guise:

Despite what people say, The Economist is still worth reading. This is true for two reasons — firstly whilst the depth of its analysis is not what it once was, it still covers the domestic affairs of a range of developing countries that would be too obscure for other news outlets. Secondly, it is because its editorial line can give fascinating hints about the tectonic movements of managerial elite opinion. Gauging a group of people whose view of the world is driven entirely by consensus is generally a very predictable game — until the moment it isn’t. And it is The Economist we can sometimes look to for the early signs of a change of course.

For us neo-kremlinologists, the magazine has been unduly generous in the last week, providing two interesting snapshots into the neuroses and instincts of the lumpenintelligentsia at the present moment. Before I go any further, it is important to add that these people are not uniformly specious or slow on the uptake — like the Soviet intelligentsia in the 1970s, it includes many highly intelligent and perceptive people, who may be thoughtful or even forthright about the crises that beset us, but only discreetly and on an individual basis. In the atmosphere of stultifying intellectual conformity that they inhabit, what matters is what they feel comfortable discussing and admitting to one another in public, because it is that which shapes the direction of policy. And it is on that that the Economist‘s cachet can be helpful, by virtue of the freedom it lends its unbylined writers to think aloud.

It was the more recent of the two articles that has garnered the most attention. An article titled “Do immigrants from some countries commit more sex crimes?” on 25th October admitted that, yes, they do. The piece was accompanied by a graphic showing — on a logarithmic scale — the rate at which immigrants in Britain were convicted of sexual crimes, by nationality, relative to that of British nationals. The graphic showed very clearly that nationals of countries in non-EU Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East were substantially more likely to be convicted of sexual crimes than British nationals, with people from Afghanistan way out ahead of any other group. EU nationals, meanwhile, were slightly less likely to be convicted of such offences, and East Asians and Australasians even more underrepresented in the statistics. People from the Americans and the Caribbean were, on average, roughly equal to British nationals in their prolificness.

On social media, it was the graphic which prompted the most voluble response; particularly the use of the log scale which, visually, seemed to minimise the scale of the sevenfold disparity between the Afghan rate of sex crime conviction, and the British average. This seemed to hark back to arguments that took place during the Covid pandemic in which the use of log scales for graphs showing the number of new infections or deaths flattened the lines on the graphs and, critics claimed, made the scale of the pandemic seem less severe than it was. But whereas the use of log scales for naturally exponential processes such as viral transmission is in line with standard scientific practice, it is usually considered less appropriate — or even misleading — when the point of narrative interest is the additive difference between two figures, rather than multiplicative growth. Nevertheless, it is perfectly possible that the decision to use a log scale was made in good faith, in the interests of conserving page space.

Arguments about the x-axis notwithstanding, it is still a big deal that The Economist would print this. The fact that certain groups of migrants — especially illegal arrivals and asylum seekers from highly unstable countries — are disproportionately likely to commit rape or sexual assault has been one of the most powerful anti-immigration arguments in recent years. It is a point that defenders of the status quo have often been highly sensitive about. In polite and liberal circles, the idea of even looking for a link between national and ethnic origins and sex crimes has hitherto been considered inherently racist and demagogic. In September 2025, an open letter titled “Women against the Far Right” — which was signed by a long list of prominent leftish politicians and celebrities — included the statement that “there is no evidence that people seeking refuge are more likely to commit acts of sexual violence”. This was an easily verifiable or falsifiable objective claim, which they clearly took no effort to verify or falsify, on the reasonable-enough grounds that such data ought to be extremely hard to come by in Britain.

Update, 31 October: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

October 27, 2026

Farewell, BioWare

Filed under: Business, Gaming, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I’m not really a gamer, although I have enjoyed playing several online games over the years, including Baldur’s Gate 3 which I’d assumed was a BioWare game (as the first two in the series had been) but was apparently developed by a different studio (Belgium’s Larian). So, perhaps I’m less disturbed by the demise of the Edmonton-based company than I thought:

Though it was just announced on Wednesday that the legendary Canadian game studio BioWare was shutting down, it did not come as a shock. Many of us already mourned it years ago when it was clear that the company had become a Ship-of-Theseus simulacrum of the original.

Back in its era of peak performance, BioWare delivered a steady stream of hits. The company’s 1998 Baldur’s Gate packed the rules and lore of Dungeons and Dragons into a game similar in calibre to Blizzard’s Diablo and Warcraft. The sequel, Baldur’s Gate 2, still tops best games of all time lists. Another notable early entry was 2003’s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and subsequent MMO in 2011.

Later, BioWare proved it could bring its formula for rich characters, story and combat to its own original worlds. In 2009, Dragon Age: Origins updated fantasy adventuring for modern tech and grew into a trilogy by 2014 Game of the Year winner Dragon Age: Inquisition. But it was the Mass Effect science fiction trilogy, with releases in 2007, 2010 and 2012, that catapulted the studio from maker of niche role-playing games into a AAA developer.

The studio was highly effective at multi-tasking.

The great pull of a flagship BioWare game in those days came down to the writing: the epic story arc at the centre of a given franchise would play out differently depending on the player’s choices in the game. Some choices could mean the death of an entire people; some could kill off a beloved character — and there were many of those, because they had their own flaws, motivations and unique relationships to the protagonist which would grow and change for better or worse as the story progressed. Player agency truly mattered.

For the Canadian fans, there was extra pride in BioWare’s success because the beating heart of the machine was in Edmonton. The studio’s three founders, Ray Muzyka, Greg Zeschuck and Augustine Yip, met at the University of Alberta while studying medicine and taking on related programming projects.

They drew much of their staff from local sources. The lead writer of the first two Mass Effect games, Drew Karpyshyn, grew up in an Edmonton suburb and was working on a Master’s degree in English at the University of Alberta when a writing position at BioWare was advertised in the faculty newsletter. He got the job, and minus a three-year break that he took to work on a book series, he remained with BioWare until 2018.

Preston Watamaniuk, lead designer of the entire Mass Effect trilogy, studied political science and history, and then worked a garbage route in Edmonton for several years before getting his start at BioWare. He was still with the company as of the shutdown announcement.

But the company changed significantly to attract [Critical Drinker voice] “modern audiences”. It lead to the recent announcement that the company was shutting down.

If only BioWare wasn’t so emblematic of Canada: once well-respected and economically strong for its small size, but now hollow from its unstomachable efforts to push a social mission to an unreceptive audience. Had it stuck to what made it exceptional in the first place, it might still be alive today. Instead, the very best parts of its legacy were exported and are now thriving somewhere else.

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.

October 20, 2026

Elon Musk’s evil plan to turn American youth into filthy capitalists

Filed under: Business, Economics, Space, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Did you hear the latest outrage? Arch-capitalist exploiter Elon Musk — reportedly the richest man in the world — intends to bribe American children by giving them each a share in one of his most important businesses. On X, Brivael Le Pogam has thoughts:

In 2021, the head of the UN World Food Programme said $6 billion from Elon Musk could solve world hunger.

Elon replied: publish the plan, right here, publicly, and I’ll sell Tesla stock on the spot.

The plan came out. And when you read it, it wasn’t a plan to solve hunger. It was one year of food for 42 million people. A twelve-month subscription. And the year after? Start over.

A few months later, Elon summed up his view: if you care about the reality of goodness rather than the perception of it, philanthropy is extremely difficult.

“Reality of goodness over perception of goodness.”

That line stuck with me for weeks. Does philanthropy actually work?

Gates-style philanthropy is first and foremost institutional capture. Foundations funding NGOs, funding governments, funding programs, producing reports, producing photos. Everyone’s happy, and the aid machine keeps itself alive. Sixty years and hundreds of billions later, much of Africa is still dependent on aid. Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo laid it out in Dead Aid: aid breeds dependency, feeds corruption, and short-circuits the only mechanism that has ever lifted a country out of poverty.

So what actually works?

It’s been tested. In Kenya, Berkeley researchers working with GiveDirectly randomly selected villages and gave every poor household about $1,000 in cash. No program. No training. No conditions. Just cash.

The result: people bought metal roofs, livestock, started small businesses. Barely any inflation. And every dollar injected generated around $2.50 of economic activity locally, including for neighbors who received nothing.

Why? Because you didn’t give them charity. You gave them capital. You primed the pump.

And that’s where everything hinges: ownership. Hernando de Soto showed that the world’s poor hold trillions of dollars in assets, but without recognized property titles, it’s dead capital. You can’t borrow against it, pass it on, or grow it. Where property rights are respected, the system starts running. Where they aren’t, no amount of aid will ever be enough.

Now reread Elon’s post.

“Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America. This will be the first of many.”

That’s not a meal. That’s not a handout. That’s a property title. A piece of the company building the infrastructure of a multiplanetary civilization, owned directly by millions of kids.

A kid who gets a handout depends on the state. A kid who owns a share of SpaceX owns a piece of the future. He learns what an asset is, he has a stake in the economy working, and one day he’ll vote as an owner, not as a client of the state.

Gates buys perception. Musk distributes ownership.

The reality of goodness versus its perception. And it’s absolutely brilliant.

October 13, 2026

British beer vs. “modern audiences”

Filed under: Britain, Business, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Henry Jeffreys sings the praises for some of the greatest names in British brewing … while waving goodbye as they disappear one after another into international beverage behemoths who care nothing at all for history and tradition if it doesn’t add value to the stock price:

Beer Street, from Beer Street and Gin Lane by William Hogarth. The picture is a counterpoint to the more powerful Gin Lane — Hogarth intended Beer Street to be viewed first to make Gin Lane more shocking — but it is also a celebration of Englishness and depicts of the benefits of being nourished by the native beer.
Wikimedia Commons.

Burton-on-Trent was once the brewing capital of the world, home to such famous names as Bass, Allsopp’s and the famous “Burton snatch”. Stop giggling at the back, Jenkins! I’m talking, of course, about the refreshing sulphurous tang imparted by the high levels of calcium sulphate in the town’s water. By the 1890s, it boasted thirty-one breweries producing over three million barrels a year, providing a quarter of Britain’s beer. Sadly, it has fallen a long way from there.

While Burton’s most famous beer, Bass, is enjoying a modest revival at the moment with increased distribution and marketing, things aren’t looking so rosy for the brewery that makes it, Marston’s. For those not familiar with the Byzantine ways of big beer, a little explainer. Bass the brand is owned by AB InBev, the corporate behemoth behind Budweiser. But the beer is brewed at Marston’s Brewery, owned by Carlsberg Britvic, which has now announced plans to close the historic site, with around 310 jobs at risk.

Carlsberg has a woeful record as a custodian of English beer. In 2024 it removed the traditional wooden Burton Union system from Marston’s, switching to stainless steel for fermentation. In the past 15 years, it has closed Tetley’s in Leeds, ending nearly 200 years of history, Jennings in the Lake District, Ringwood in Hampshire, Wychwood in Oxfordshire, and Banks’s in the West Midlands. A roll call of shame. But Carlsberg is no outlier. The British beer industry has been cannibalising itself for years. Regional breweries were gobbled up by national companies, which in turn were swallowed whole by multinationals. Great names either disappeared or were kept as brands, like Bass, to be shunted around, unloved, on the spreadsheets of companies headquartered in America or Belgium. In 2023 Molson Coors “paused” production of another Burton classic, Worthington’s White Shield, perhaps the greatest of all bottled beers. This year it announced that it will close Sharps and move production of Doom Bar Cornish ale to Hartlepool.

[…]

While we shouldn’t let Carlsberg, Molson Coors and others off the hook for their cavalier attitude to Britain’s great brewing heritage, we are to blame as well. We’re letting a unique beer style die out. Maybe it’s already too late and real ale is already a specialist drink. But there are still great brewers who care, from newer names like Gadds in Ramsgate to historic independents like Harvey’s of Lewes or Timothy Taylor of Keighley. Go to the pub and drink their beers regularly, because if you don’t they will go the way of Worthington’s White Shield and countless others.

October 8, 2026

Central planning also centralizes the importance of “who you know”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Handre points out the other thing that socialized economies share with one another: the overwhelming importance of “friends”, “connections”, and “family” in generating unearned wealth and power.

AI-generated image from @Handre on X

Socialism concentrates power, and concentrated power concentrates wealth. Hugo Chavez spent two decades screaming about imperialist oligarchs while his own daughters accumulated the kind of fortune that would embarrass a Rockefeller.

Maria Gabriela Chavez holds assets estimated at $4.2 billion, making her Venezuela’s wealthiest individual by a comfortable margin. Her father nationalized over 1,200 private companies between 2002 and 2012.

The mechanism is straightforward: When the state controls production, distribution, currency, and courts, political proximity becomes the only productive investment. You don’t build a business; you cultivate a minister. Chavez’s inner circle stole through socialism, using currency controls, preferential exchange rates, and state contracts as the instruments.

Meanwhile, the Venezuelan poverty rate crossed 80 percent in 2024. Infant mortality climbed. The bolivar collapsed so completely that Venezuelans began pricing transactions in dollars just to preserve basic calculation.

Ludwig von Mises proved mathematically in 1920 that socialist planners cannot rationally allocate resources without prices generated by voluntary exchange. No prices, no signal. No signal, no coordination. Shortages follow as surely as math follows addition.

This while Venezuela sits atop the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Poverty there is entirely manufactured. Chavez’s family lives in Caracas and Miami on wealth extracted from people who cannot buy protein. The ideology that promised to eat the rich ended with the people eating the zoo animals.

October 4, 2026

Mark Carney’s … complicated … relationship with America

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

On her Substack, Melanie in Saskatchewan wonders what is going on in Mark Carney’s world whenever the United States comes up. At times, you would assume he hates the US, yet the vast majority of his personal wealth is invested there. His family members live there. It’s a paradox:

AI-generated image from Melanie in Saskatchewan

I’m starting to think Mark Carney has a passionate, personal hatred of America.

And I don’t mean Donald Trump. Plenty of people hate Donald Trump. I mean America itself, or at least the enormous role America has played in Canada’s economy for generations. Because the longer I listen to Carney talk about where he wants Canada to go, the more I wonder whether Trump caused this economic divorce at all … or whether he was simply the spectacular act of infidelity Carney needed to finally file the papers.

Maybe hate is too strong. Maybe geopolitical jealousy has stages too: irritation, resentment, righteous indignation and finally whatever stage comes after, “I’d love to go out sometime, but unfortunately I’ll be washing my hair indefinitely”. Whatever stage Carney has reached, I’m increasingly convinced this is about considerably more than Donald Trump.

Because we can document Carney publicly talking about a changing world order more than fifteen years ago. How long he had been developing those ideas before putting them into speeches, I have no idea. We don’t need to invent an origin story. The public record is interesting enough.

I can’t prove Carney hates America. Maybe he loves it. Maybe there’s a Louisville Slugger sticking out of a Davos swag bag somewhere between six conference lanyards, a King Charles commemorative tea towel and a couple of those luxury Normandy butter cups that apparently require their own travel arrangements. But if Mark Carney loves America, somebody should probably tell America the relationship is still on.

He certainly never seemed troubled by American money. His disclosed investments included hundreds of companies, many of them American. And I don’t begrudge him that. If American companies offered a good return, invest away. What makes it interesting is that while his money was quite comfortable in America, Carney had already spent years publicly describing a world becoming considerably less centred on American economic power. Donald Trump didn’t inspire that. He came crashing through the front door years later, apparently oblivious to the fact that Carney had already furnished the room.

Canadians have since been handed a wonderfully tidy explanation for everything happening now. Trump returned. Trump threatened tariffs. Trump called Canada the 51st state. Trump made governor jokes. CBC, our publicly funded national broadcaster, and a Canadian media industry operating alongside various government support programs amplified every provocation until everybody knew exactly which Trumpism could send Canada through the ceiling.

He said “51st state”. Canada erupted, so he said it again. Trump noticed. The media noticed. And I have a very hard time believing Liberal strategists somehow failed to notice the political value of an issue resonating that powerfully with Canadians.

But heaven forbid an opposition MP or ordinary Canadian asks to see where our money went. Suddenly negotiations, contracts and records disappear behind confidentiality, redactions and “national security”. Apparently telling Canadians what our own government is doing requires security clearance, but advertising precisely which Trump taunts are working required something closer to a neon sign: YES, DONALD. RIGHT THERE. THAT BUTTON!

Why not circle the red button, write DO NOT PRESS across it and explain exactly what happens when he does? Because if humanity has established anything about a big red button labelled DO NOT PRESS, it’s that nobody has ever wanted to press that bastard more.

Jaguar – a case study in brand suicide

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

The Jaguar E-type was, in my opinion, the best-looking car of the 20th century. It was all downhill from that point, sadly:

Jaguar killed itself. No villain required, no recession to blame, no supply chain disruption to hide behind. Tata Motors bought a fading but salvageable brand in 2008 for $2.3 billion and spent the next fifteen years turning it into a case study in how to destroy capital.

The rebranding campaign of late 2024 was the public execution. Jaguar dropped its leaping cat logo, fired its entire existing customer demographic via press release, and replaced a century of racing heritage with a pastel-colored advertisement featuring zero cars. The marketing team apparently decided the path to profitability ran directly through alienating the people who actually bought Jaguars. Brilliant.

The rebrand was just the visible wound. The rot started earlier. Jaguar spent years producing vehicles with reliability ratings that made Land Rover look like a Swiss watch, while charging Mercedes money for the privilege. The F-Pace, the E-Pace, the I-Pace: each one a beautiful object that dealers apologized for in advance. You bought the badge and got a subscription to your mechanic’s vacation fund.

The pivot to an all-electric lineup, announced with great fanfare in 2021, then delayed, then sort-of-delayed-again, captured everything wrong with a company led by government subsidy chasers rather than engineers. Jaguar chased EV tax credits and green virtue points instead of fixing the fundamental problem. Nobody trusted the cars.

Markets are merciless precisely because they are honest. Customers stopped buying, and no amount of rebranding or regulatory coddling reversed that verdict. Capital allocated to a brand that cannot hold a customer is capital destroyed. Tata learned this lesson expensively. You, having never bought the car, learned it for free.

The ad campaign is just a sign on the door that reads, “This company is woke trash”. The real rot lies beneath the surface. Firing the marketing agency won’t change that.

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 27, 2026

The great mystery of the missing male book reader

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

I used to read a lot more than I do now — I have a personal library of a few thousand books — but less and less of what is being published has any interest for me at all. I still purchase a few new books every year, but rarely are they fiction titles. My primary interests are general history, military history, and a very limited number of SF authors’ work. The publishing industry isn’t interested in getting me back as a paying customer, at least based on the vast majority of what they’re pushing to the bookstores these days:

AI-generated image from Abstract Truth Substack

There seems to be genuine bewilderment in the publishing industry as to why male readers would rather read the instructions on an airplane barf bag than a novel from the “Manager’s Selection” at Barnes & Noble. It’s a genuine mystery why male readers weren’t anxiously digging into The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School over the summer. The story of a 16-year-old’s struggle with lesbianism, at a time when it seems that half of Gen Z has declared itself either gay, lesbian, bisexual, or of equivocal sexuality, is a story that just has to be told. I mean, who ever heard of a lesbian nun or a gay priest? It’s so utterly novel that you would find a homosexual in the Roman Catholic Church. I am certain that there were no worthier candidates than this for recognition as a finalist for the National Book Award.

Walking into a Barnes & Noble brings a familiar feeling of nausea to the male shopper. It is the same feeling I had when our 78-year-old public junior high school teacher taught The Red Badge of Courage in a style guaranteed not only to make us hate all literature, but to regret having become literate at all.

First, there is the Great Wall of Pastel: pink, turquoise, lavender, sea-foam green, with flowers climbing around titles written in cursive. Look over there and you’ll see the woman facing the ocean, next to a cottage or a vineyard — or some other place to which she has fled after discovering that her marriage was an oppressive patriarchal institution because her husband asked her what was for dinner on consecutive Tuesdays.

AI-generated image from Abstract Truth Substack

There are all sorts of creative variations on the story. She opens a bookshop, a dress shop, a bakery, or an inn on a Greek island or Nantucket. Maybe a distant aunt dies — Great-Aunt Millicent Pendergast — and leaves a fortune to the heroine because she once saw a spark in her as a little girl. The narrative is flowery and nauseating and full of feeling and description. Or perhaps she returns to the town she swore she would never return to and meets a rugged carpenter who is tortured but secretly wealthy and has chosen to work with his hands because money never brought him happiness.

By page 287, she discovers that she has been living for everyone but herself and has finally liberated herself from the horrible oppression of patriarchal submission.

It is truly baffling why men have gasped in horror at American fiction in much the same manner they would at the announcement of a Streisand-Cher double bill. I finally walked through the fiction section of Barnes & Noble some time ago and decided that I would rather be waterboarded than spend another minute there.

[…]

Men aren’t going to read trash that doesn’t appeal to them. But they will read history, biography, philosophy, and science fiction. They might read about a long-vanquished civilization or pick up a biography of Ty Cobb. They might spend 30 hours listening to a podcast about the Roman Empire. They may be reading about the Goths, Napoleon, or the fall of the Persian Empire. Men are not only capable of reading, they like to read. We just hate bad fiction.

It we find ourselves trapped inside Barnes & Noble, we are likely to cover their eyes as we pass the front displays and push our way toward the History or Philosophy section. American fiction has become a sea of political and therapeutic preoccupations produced by an industry that has pushed many male voices to the fringe of the business and then seems genuinely surprised that the male readers followed them out the door.

Meanwhile, somewhere at the London Book Fair, a panel discussion is convening under the title, “Where Have All the Male Readers Gone?” Thirteen of the fourteen panelists are women. The fourteenth is a transgender man who has complicated feelings about his father. The moderator has just finished explaining that men probably lack the emotional vocabulary required for contemporary fiction.

Nobody has thought to walk across the street to a pub and ask an actual male why they stopped reading fiction. But don’t worry. They’ll get to the bottom of it.

Gynogerontocracy in the Anglosphere

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Business, Cancon, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As the working world in the Anglosphere becomes ever more feminized and gynocentric, as companies disproportionally hire women over men, the working dynamics of most jobs has also shifted dramatically:

There’s many things to be exhausted about as a millennial or zoomer man, and I find that one of them really is gynogerontocracy. Everywhere you go, a profoundly alienating woman, often an older woman, is in charge, where she probably either shouldn’t be, or would be better executing tasks and responsibilities for a male executive.

In the private sphere, the corporate jobs go to girlbosses, whose neuroticism is channeled into unrealistic and dysfunctional adherence to rules, policies and procedures. There is no trust or discretion to do your own job, at the same time as management they don’t want you to ask them about anything. Every minor policy breach turns into an email, turns a passive aggressive “documented conversation” and “coaching”, as they talk down to you as a mother scolds their children.

When I think about my professional life, the only times I was ever promoted for my hard work and efforts, was under White or Asian male leadership, and that’s because they by and large are the only people who value demonstrable merit and ability. Women don’t. They value policies and procedures, they value inclusivity, and they become petty little tyrants when they’re in charge. The only female manager I’ve ever had who wasn’t like that was a 24 year old zoomer who played with a Needough in her office and posted weird alien cat gifs in the corporate chat app. She was fine, and understood my lack of enthusiasm. The rest of them act like they’re running the navy when the consensus is now that this is functionally adult female daycare.

As a generational experience and trait, I find that men and boys are collectively exhausted and resent women being in charge for what has been their entire living experience. I find myself asking how much longer this can go on.

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress