Quotulatiousness

June 13, 2025

The new marketing strategy is “Always Be Annoying”

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

Ted Gioia explains that the rules of marketing as explained in Glengarry Glen Ross no longer apply:

The rules of marketing never change. That’s what they told me in business school.

If you could peer inside the meetings at head office, you would see a never-ending loop of Glengarry Glen Ross.

Always be closing. Those are the A-B-Cs of business.

But that’s not true anymore.

In recent days, a new marketing strategy has emerged. I’ve never seen it before. And I wish it would go away. You probably do too.

It’s a new way of advertising. It’s a new way of marketing. It’s a new motivational tool.

It didn’t exist when I studied marketing back at Stanford GSB. I had the best marketing teachers in the world, but they never dreamed of doing this to customers.

Here’s the new marketing playbook of 2025:

  • Do NOT try to close.
  • Do NOT try to sell.
  • Do NOT try to persuade.
  • Don’t even listen.

The goal now is merely to ANNOY. The big companies do it on purpose.

Big streaming platforms are the experts at this new marketing tool. They want you to pay for a premium, ad-free subscription. The more annoying the commercials, the more likely you are to pay.

You will pay just to get rid of the ad.

In this topsy-turvy world, the more painful the ad, the better it works. The digital platforms have studied this — YouTube has tested using up to ten unskippable ads on users.

That’s not marketing — it’s water-boarding. But they need to test these techniques. Their business model is built on optimizing the level of annoyance.

And guess what? Even paying for premium doesn’t guarantee escape from ads. Welcome to the new digital platforms — which increasingly resemble prisons.

[…]

We once lived in an industrial economy — built on industry. Then we shifted to a consumer economy — built on consumption. And more recently we lived in a service economy — built on service.

But we now are entering the age of the Annoyance Economy. And it is the inevitable result of corporations battling for your attention.

They monetize your eyeballs — measured in clicks and microseconds — and they will do anything to hold on to them. This increasingly involves annoying, intrusive actions that no business would have dared to implement in a consumer-oriented economy.

QotD: The Subaru BRAT

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

Imagine, if you can, a truck with factory-mounted seats in the bed — and spotlights the size of a 747’s landing lights mounted on its T-topped roof.

If you know this truck, you also know why it’s no longer available.

Such fun things are no longer allowed.

They are not saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaafe! “Moms” are “concerned”!

But in 1977, the Safety Cult — which ended such fun things — was still a backwater aberration, like dancing with rattlesnakes — and most people still esteemed fun over fear. There were roofless Broncos and K5 Blazers — and cars with beds.

You could buy all kinds of different stuff back when America was still a fairly free country — and the Subaru BRAT was as different as it got.

BRAT — all caps — was short for Bi-Drive Recreational All-Terrain Transporter. It was superficially similar to other small import pickups of the ’70s, such as the Datsun 620 and similar models from Toyota (SR5), Mazda (B210), and Chevy (via Isuzu) Luv.

But unlike them, it was a four seater — with two of the four in the bed, facing the other way. The seats were made of all-weather plastic and far from the most comfortable — but the view was spectacular. Watching the world recede as you progressed is another one of many freedoms denied today in the name of “safety”.

Subaru wasn’t “unconcerned” about “safety”. Grab handles — to keep passengers from bouncing out of the bed — were included. Though holding onto them made it harder to reach for a cold one in the cooler. That was another fun thing people did in pickups back in the day — before the Safety Cult put the kibosh on that, too.

The seats were actually a dodge — of a federal fatwa known as the “chicken tax”, which was a retaliatory tariff of 25 percent applied to import-brand pickups manufactured outside the United States as tit-for-tat for tariffs applied by foreign countries to American chicken exported outside the United States.

The “chicken tax” hit trucks with just two seats — at the time almost exclusively the small import models, which didn’t offer the extended and crew cab configurations that are commonplace today.

By adding the extra seats in the bed, BRAT qualified as a passenger vehicle rather than a “light truck”, and thus Subaru evaded the chicken tax on a happy technicality — and was also able to sell the BRAT for less than two-seater rivals that had the cost of the tax folded into their MSRP.

Eric Peters, “Doomed: Subaru BRAT (1977-87)”, The American Spectator, 2020-04-26.

June 12, 2025

Why it’s economically impossible for Walmart to “eat the tariffs” as Trump demands

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

At FEE, Peter Jacobsen shows the clear financial reason why Walmart and other big US retailers are passing along the price increases due to Trump’s tariffs rather than “eating them”:

Recently, a post from President Trump on Truth Social went viral. An attempt to convince retail giant Walmart to keep prices down despite the tariffs, it read:

    Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain. Walmart made BILLIONS OF DOLLARS last year, far more than expected. Between Walmart and China they should, as is said, “EAT THE TARIFFS”, and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!

Trump’s demand here is, simply put, unreasonable, and it reflects a basic misunderstanding of how pricing decisions are made in a market economy. Let’s unpack why.

Walmart’s Thin Margins

The biggest problem with the President’s view is that it doesn’t pass a basic numbers test. To break it down, let’s look at Walmart’s financials.

It’s true that Walmart generates billions of dollars in revenue each year, but revenue alone doesn’t tell us how much Walmart makes.

To understand that, we need to consider profit, which accounts for the company’s costs. More specifically, we want to look at Walmart’s net profit margin, because that’s an extremely important indicator of whether Walmart could realistically “eat the tariffs”.

Depending on the source, Walmart’s net profit margin is somewhere between 2% and 3%. Let’s split the difference and say it’s 2.5%. What does that mean?

That means, if Walmart sells you $1 of goods, it only keeps 2.5 cents in profit. That’s right, 97.5 cents goes toward inventory, employee wages, store maintenance, and a variety of other operating costs.

Put another way, if you spend $100 at Walmart, they make $2.50 in profit.

Now let’s say you buy a $100 television that Walmart imports. A $20 tariff is imposed — an added cost Walmart has to pay to import the TV. Before the tariff, Walmart was making $2.50 in profits. After the tariff, it’s now taking a $17.50 loss.

The only way Walmart can still sell this TV is by raising the price.

At this point, a tariff supporter might respond: “The easy way to fix this is to buy US-made TVs instead!”

Sure — you can avoid tariffs by only buying domestic, but the problem is that domestic TVs tend to be more expensive. If they weren’t, Walmart wouldn’t be importing them in the first place. So even if Walmart pulls international TVs off the shelves and replaces them with US-made ones, the prices still increase.

Here’s the key point: “eating” the tariffs is not an option. Walmart operates on slim margins, barely making pennies on the dollar — there isn’t room to eat 20% cost increases!

There definitely used to be a gender pay gap

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

I’m sure activists will keep slinging around the “women are paid 82 cents for every dollar men are paid” factoid, because it’s politically useful (if statistically untrue in the way most people interpret it). But it used to be true that women were systematically paid less for doing the same work as men:

Dame Stephanie Shirley, entrepreneur, IT pioneer, philanthropist, at her 80th birthday party in September 2013.
Photo by Lynn Hart via Wikimedia Commons.

At which point enter Dame Stevie:

    Dame Stephanie Shirley, 91, is a tech pioneer and philanthropist who came to Britain on the Kindertransport in 1939. She built a £3 billion business, Freelance Programmers (later renamed F International), and 70 of her staff became millionaires due to its shared ownership structure. Since retiring in 1993 she has donated more than £70 million to charity. She was made a dame in 2000 and became one of the prestigious few members of the Order of Companions of Honour in 2017.

Back when she was building F1 the sexism in industry was such that she called herself Stevie, not Stephanie. You know, deniably pretending to be male sorta thing. Also, given that background, something of a tough nut and certainly nobody’s fool. F1, among other things, did the programming on the Black Box for Concorde. Proper, serious, company.

The sexism in industry was such that there really was a gender pay gap. A general assumption — to the point of rigid rule — was that wimmins didn’t work after marriage and certainly not when they had children. So, Stevie went out and hired all those birds who had been programmers before parturition, set ’em up with a home terminal and paid ’em peanuts. Then went around winning vast contracts with her price advantage.

This worked. To the extent that Stevie is on record as saying the Equal Pay Act was the worst thing ever for her business (note, not societally wrong, but bad for her business).

Which actually gives us a nice test of something that bastard neoliberals like me insist upon. Or as Gary Becker pointed out. If it is true that wimmins is underpaid in our capitalist bastardry patriarchal society then it must also be true that it’s possible to deliberately and specifically hire women and so gain a price advantage.

Dame Stevie did this and did so very successfully. Which is a nice proof that the first part of the contention works. If women are underpaid then hire them and make a fortune. Cool!

The apparent fact that nobody else has done this is a strong indicator that there isn’t a significant gender wage gap these days.

June 8, 2025

Managerialism – threat or menace?

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

In the New York Times (don’t worry … link is to an archived version), Nathan Levine explains to NYT readers why there is such a push back against the over-mighty technocratic organizations that have been running more and more of our fading civilization:

It is the culmination of a once marginalized, now transformative strand of political thought about who really holds power in the modern American system. Namely, that our democracy has been usurped by a permanent ruling class of wholly unaccountable managers and bureaucrats.

Anti-managerialism is back. Well positioned to answer decades of frustration with mainstream conservatives’ failure to deliver results, this old idea has become the central principle of the new right.

In fact, much of what is commonly called “populist” politics can be more accurately described as part of an anti-managerial revolution attempting to roll back the expansion of overbearing bureaucratic control into more and more areas of life.

Though it has so far met with limited success amid stiff resistance, grasping the nature of this anti-managerialism is essential to understanding the Trump administration’s effort to transform America’s institutional landscape, from government to universities and major corporations.

The idea’s intellectual history begins with the political philosopher James Burnham, who argued in his seminal 1941 book, The Managerial Revolution, that the aristocratic capitalist class was in the process of being overthrown by a revolution — just not, as the Marxists predicted, by the working class.

Instead, the exponential growth of mass and scale produced by the Industrial Revolution meant that in both corporation and state it was now those people cleverest at applying techniques of mass organization, procedure and propaganda — what he called the managerial class — who effectively controlled the means of production and would increasingly come to dominate society as a new technocratic oligarchy.

The book made an especially significant impression on George Orwell, who remarked that a managerial class consisting of “scientists, technicians, teachers, journalists, broadcasters, bureaucrats, professional politicians: in general, middling people”, hungry for “more power and more prestige”, would seek to entrench “a system which eliminates the upper class, keeps the working class in its place, and hands unlimited power to people very similar to themselves”.

Orwell was particularly struck by Burnham’s observation that the major political systems of the day — fascism, Communism and New Deal-era social democracy — were fundamentally similar in their turn toward the bureaucratic management of society. He observed that everywhere “laissez-faire capitalism gives way to planning and state interference” and “the mere owner loses power as against the technician and the bureaucrat”. Believing that accelerating managerial control risked dragging every society inexorably into totalitarianism, Orwell made Burnham’s ideas the basis of his novel 1984.

While the Cold War persisted, the view that America’s government might share some traits with the Soviet Union unsurprisingly proved unpopular, especially among Washington’s conservative establishment.

Nonetheless, the managerial class continued to grow, regardless of which political party controlled the government. Cold War defense budgets drove a relentless expansion of security state bureaucracy and the military-industrial complex. The advent of Great Society welfare programs and the Civil Rights Act demanded a re-engineering of social relations, prompting a dramatic proliferation of lawyers, regulatory bureaucrats and corporate compliance officers throughout much of public and private life. An ever-greater proportion of Americans began funneling through the credentialing machinery of higher education, inflating demand for yet more upper-middle-class managerial jobs.

QotD: The ratchet effect

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It’s well known that the people at the tippy top are raging SJWs, of course, but as anyone who has ever even tangentially worked for a GloboHomoCorp knows, the Big Bosses don’t know jack shit about even very high level stuff going on in their own companies. Big Boss, and several layers of management below Big Boss, are mainly concerned with greasing politicians and other CEOs. They have absolutely no idea what’s even going on with the North American Branch of the Customer Service Division, let alone what any individual person is up to … so those flunkies and fart catchers and butt boys way down the chain have to kiss ass on their own.

What ends up happening is a kind of “ratchet effect” on steroids. The “ratchet effect”, you’ll recall, was Margaret Thatcher’s explanation for how the Left kept winning on policy even though the Right kept winning at the polls (ah, God love ya, Maggie, and give you peace). When the Left is in power, they get whatever they want. When the Right is in power, they consolidate the Left’s gains, as this is now “the new normal”. Since The Right exists only to twiddle the knobs and levers of the Leviathan State in a more efficient, cost-effective, low-tax way, the “right-wing” “reformers” find jury-rigged quasi-solutions to the problems the Left’s insanity creates.

In a very real way, then, the “ratchet effect” means the so-called “Right” ends up doing the Left’s job for them, much better than they themselves could’ve.

Same deal inside the divisions of GloboHomoCorp. Same deal inside the Third Reich, which is why “working towards the Führer” turned so murderous, so fast. Since the only way to get noticed by the next higher-up level of “management” was to be more obnoxiously ruthless than everybody else at doing what the Führer seemed to be hinting that he wanted …

In the corporate world, then, I theorize, super-aggressive, ultra-obnoxious SJW-ism is a ground-up phenomenon. Does the Big Boss really want mandatory anti-Whiteness training across all divisions? Maybe … but maybe not. And though it’s tempting to say “He’s the Big Boss, he must know at least broadly what the big divisions are up to”, do I even have to ask if you’ve ever been in a situation where that’s true? Big Bosses the world over, in any field, be they CEOs or Generals or Chief Medical Officers or what have you, don’t have the slightest clue what’s happening structurally inside their commands.

All they know is what the next-lower level of management tells them is happening.

Severian, “On Selling Out”, Founding Questions, 2021-11-26.

June 2, 2025

The progressive case for unlimited immigration

Filed under: Business, China, Economics, Government, Health, India, Science, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Theophilus Chilton takes on the progressive arguments for bringing in as many “high quality” immigrants as humanly possible from his own professional background:

One of the constants that you can count on in any debate about the value of immigration (of every sort) is the inevitable assertion about the NECESSITY of immigration. Immigrants POWER AMERICA. Without them, NOTHING WOULD HAPPEN! They are ELITE HUMAN CAPITAL without which the White American chuds who did things like build the atom bomb and otherwise created modern technological civilisation would barely be able to keep the lights on in their single-wides. It’s not just that immigrants want a new life or might be useful — they are an absolutely necessity and the ones coming here are the cream of the world’s crop.

As a result, the recent move by Marco Rubio and the State Department to revoke visas from Chinese students in American universities (especially those associated with the CCP or who are in positions to commit especially damaging industrial espionage) will certainly not be well-received by this crowd. For example, witness Alex Nowrasteh, who’s whole schtick is to burble on about “meritocracy” and whine about “affirmative action for White Americans” while filling a useless sinecure at the Cato Institute that he got by being the token immigrant. He is appalled that we’d act in our own national interest rather than in the interests of a bunch of random foreigners.

Immigration man have big sad

Many people who know me on X already know this, but most readers here may not. Before I made a radical life-changing vocational choice a few years ago, I used to be a scientist in Big Pharma. For a little over two decades, I worked in the biotech/biopharma industry, covering a wide range of drug development stages and product types. I’ve developed vaccines (which is why I was skeptical about the Covid vaxx from the very beginning). I’ve developed small molecule drugs. I helped to bring to market several of the pharmaceuticals that millions take regularly and which you see advertised on television. I’ve done everything from bench scale analytical work to protein purification on 5000-liter batches used in support of human clinical trials. I’m proficient in literally dozens of different analytical techniques. Before that, in both undergraduate and graduate school, I specialised in synthetic organic small molecule development across a number of different subspecialties. And I’m good at all of this.

One other thing that I did throughout was work side-by-side with, and later manage, LOTS of visa holders and immigrants, especially from “tech heavy” countries like India and China, the stereotypical “H1-Bers”. As a result, I consider myself to be a pretty good judge of the value which visa holders bring to tech fields.

My judgment is, and has been for decades, that their value is minimal and it certainly does not live up to the hype. Indeed, one of the constants that I observed among most Indian, Chinese, and other visa holders was that they did not really, truly understand the science that was involved with the products being developed and the techniques being used to develop and test them. Most of these folks were the living embodiment of cramming to pass the test. When the test methods and the SOPs being employed were straightforward, these folks were great. They had a robot-like efficiency that comes with repetitively doing the same thing over and over and over again. Unfortunately, for anything requiring innovative or independent thinking, they’d be totally lost. If results from a test deviated from expectations and required some commonsense interpretation? That’s where the wheels came off. I mean, there was little to no capacity to deal with anything that wasn’t completely textbook.

Even basic scientific sense was often missing. At one job, there was an Indian guy who would takes dumps in the bathroom and then walk straight out back to his manufacturing suite in the cell line division without even washing his hands. I know this because I observed it for myself several times. I mean, even if you don’t care about getting fecal coliform bacteria all over door handles and whatnot, at least don’t carry them back into the suite where you’re helping to grow batches of genetically engineered E. coli. I assume he was properly gowned before going in, but still, there’s just that basic lack of sense there.

And then there are the ethics (or lack thereof) displayed by many visa holders (especially Chinese and Middle Eastern). Data manipulation, tweaked results, etc. etc. These tend to occur because both of those groups are under intense social pressure within their own cultures to “get the right results” rather than just dealing with the results you get. The “tiger mom” mentality carries over into the workplace. There is a reason for why these two groups are disproportionately overrepresented on the FDA’s debarment list. Indians can be subject to serious lapses in integrity as well, though theirs tend to revolve more around cutting corners and mistreating underlings, as I illustrated in a thread on X about three years ago where I recounted my time working for an Indian-owned company.

Over the years, my observations have been substantiated and reiterated by any number of people in various tech-heavy industry to whom I’ve related them. Whether it’s pharma or IT or medicine or metallurgy or whatever else, the familiar story is told. It’s really, really difficult to reconcile this mass of lived experience with the theoretical assertions made by people like Nowrasteh that immigrants are this valuable resource that we absolutely need to be or remain competitive in world markets.

In effect, the goal with this type of white-collar mass immigration is to “roboticise” tech fields which can’t be given over to AI or actual robotics just yet. The formula is to import masses of workers who can simply follow a script and save companies money on labour costs. If you think about it, this is really a low IQ, high time preference approach by corporations whereby they sacrifice real innovativeness and future competitiveness for short-term savings. I’d argue that the entry of H1-B and other visa holders in large numbers into American tech industries which accelerated around the late 2000s-early 2010s has actually led to a slowdown in real innovation. We may have tons of new apps for our phones, but fewer truly groundbreaking advances in tech across the board.

QotD: How to use your billions to influence those in power, without risking prosecution

Filed under: Business, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Nobody really knows why your standard corporate merger happens, which is why they often seem so bewilderingly stupid to outsiders. Someone out there invents the next greatest web-based whatzit, which gets acquired by MySpace, which gets acquired by Yahoo, which gets bought out by Microsoft, all because the Accounting boys saw something on a spreadsheet cell … which 99% of the time, in tech anyway, turns out to be ass-pulled bullshit, and everyone loses bigly. Or never makes any money in the first place — e.g. Twitter and YouTube, neither of which have ever turned a profit so far as I know. Hell, I’m not sure Facebook (or “Meta” or whatever they’re calling it now) ever has; it has always floated along on its share price, which has always been buoyed up by … what, exactly? Even Amazon, which still depends to a large degree on the (eventual, shitty) delivery of an actual physical object (a cheap Chinese knockoff of what you actually ordered), took years to turn a profit.

In other words, there are no lessons there for us (except that people will tolerate shit like Fakebook and Amazon, which is indeed disturbing, but we already knew that). But blogs? Consider the Bulwark, or the Dispatch, or whatever it is (and if those are actually different things). Jonah Goldberg’s new outfit. I don’t follow this stuff, all I know is Ace of Spades calls it “The Cuckshed”, which is awesome, so let’s go with that. When Goldberg was pitching The Cuckshed to that Persian billionaire, he no doubt promised him all kinds of filthy, degrading acts of propaganda … in person.

I have to assume that the Cuckshed exists largely as his personal brand — he can go on whatever cable news shout show needs a “conservative” and the chryon says “Founder of leading conservative opinion site ‘The Cuckshed'” — and that’s what he pitched to the Persian, rather than reams of marketing data about the site’s literally hundreds of subscribers … but then again, maybe not, because I think we can all take it as read that 95% of the people who subscribe to The Cuckshed are fellow Swamp Things, no? Persians are a crafty lot, and this guy is no dummy, he understands the cardinal rule: Never write when you can speak, and never speak when you can nod.

To get his message into the [Washington, DC] intellectual ecosystem, then, the Persian Billionaire has two choices: He could either circulate a memo with “The Persian Billionaire’s Position on X”; or he could just have a flunky come into the room and start reading off a list of options, and he’ll nod when the flunky reaches the right one. Then the flunky slaps the list on the desk of a slightly lower-ranking flunky, pointedly tapping his finger at the chosen option. Then the lower-ranking flunky calls up one of his fart catchers, pulls out a highlighter, colors in the correct option, and hands it to him. Take that out through about six more levels of toadies, rump-swabs, and catamites, and it finally lands on Jonah Goldberg’s desk, at which point he starts punching up his “Word ’95” macros into a “column” telling the world what the Persian Billionaire wants them to hear.

Thus, if he’s ever called on the carpet by the Emperor’s Truthsayer, the Persian Billionaire can in all honesty say “I never told Goldberg to write that!” It just kinda worked out that way. As it always seems to. Every time.

Severian, “On Selling Out”, Founding Questions, 2021-11-26.

May 23, 2025

QotD: The decline of the photography business

Filed under: Business, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… photographers work in a hard-fought, competitive market. The ubiquity of camera phones means there are now few full-time newspaper photographers, for example. Television killed the photo magazines where the “greats” of photography mostly earned their crusts. The rise of Getty Images and the like has destroyed residual income from stock photography. More images are being generated than ever, but less money is being earned for making them. Their main problem is like that of actors, however. It’s a fun, creative job that many people want to do but there are too few customers to pay more than a minority of them. If they were not so disdainful about economics, both professions would find the outcome of that predictable. Mostly they just see it as “wrong” however.

There are playful souls among them but they tend to be more than averagely earnest. There’s an historical reason for that. In the early days of photography it was derided by fine artists as mere mechanical trickery. Painters and sculptors thought of photographers as the Church had once thought of them — as low class artisans unworthy of respect and to be cheated of their pay wherever possible. In consequence photographic pioneers longed to be seen as artists too and paid a lot of attention to “serious” subjects and “social” issues.

[…]

In amateur photography, the comfortable pensions of teachers and university lecturers mean there are far too many of them in a leisure field that requires a certain amount of investment in kit — adding further layers of pseudo-intellectual pomposity, musty from a lifetime of never being challenged. I am a member of the Royal Photographic Society, but though I enjoy a few of its workshops from time to time, mostly find its members smug and insufferable. I hesitate every year before renewing. Its beautifully produced magazine, for example, unquestioningly peddles the conventional thinking of the BBC class. I have learned to appreciate the images while ignoring the priggish text around them.

Tom Paine, “Where we are and what we see”, The Last Ditch, 2020-05-20.

May 12, 2025

Is modern fiction in any way intended to be read by a male audience?

Filed under: Books, Business, Education, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I belong to several genre-specific groups on various social media platforms, most of which appear to be disproportionally female in membership, and I read very little new fiction of any sort these days, partly for diminished interest and largely from diminished disposable income. I’ve often seen the assertion that men no longer read much fiction, but is it actually true?

You can see here some of the challenges involved in measuring reading habits. Are we talking reading books or purchasing books? Does buying correlate to reading or are women better gift givers? What about those hugely popular 20-part, 60-page-per-instalment romance series that might ratchet up purchases by women — anything like that in the fiction market for men? Should we base assumptions about readership of literary fiction on data about readership of general fiction, as many of the articles I’ve read do?

All we can safely say is that it does seem men read somewhat less fiction than women; they also read fewer books of any kind. As a person in the book industry, I wish that weren’t so, but it may not be a cultural calamity.

The most interesting article I came across in last night’s binge was published in 2009 by the University of Saskatchewan’s Virginia Wilson in Evidence Based Library and Information Practice. She undertook a small study of boys aged four through twelve, interviewing them about their reading habits. Her theoretical perspective was that if anyone was ever going to understand the reading habits of boys, they needed to recognize that the experts were the boys themselves. She quizzed forty-three of them about their book collections, what they liked and didn’t like, and their motives for reading.

Each of the boys had a personal collection of books. These ranged from eight to 398 volumes, with a median of 98. All but one of the boys had fiction in his collection. The most prominent genres were fantasy, science fiction, sports stories, and humour. The boys had no time for love stories, books about groups of girls, and such classic children’s fiction as The Adventures of Robin Hood.

Asked about their favourite books, most of the boys pointed to a non-fiction title: joke books, magic books, sports books, survival guides, science books, references, atlases, dinosaur books.

The boys also read a good deal of non-book material: comics, manga, magazines, sticker books, puzzle books, and catalogues. A number mentioned reading video game manuals, both to learn more about the games, but also to heighten their enjoyment of the narratives within the games.

The manuals were part of a bent toward pragmatic reading, something they found useful as much as pleasurable. The boys often read to support another hobby — Pokémon, for instance. They also appreciated non-linear texts and plenty of illustrations.

Interestingly, many of the boys tended to discount their own reading. They often described the informational stuff they liked—those video game manuals or computer guides or research materials for science projects—as “not really being reading”. Serious reading, in their minds, involved novels and conventional non-fiction books.

Wilson’s conclusion was that at least part of the “boys and reading problem” might come down to what counts as reading. Informational nonfiction, comic books, computer magazines, graphic novels, and role-playing game manuals were “not necessarily privileged by libraries, schools, or even by the boys themselves”.

Of course, as Wilson notes, one shouldn’t generalize too much from a small qualitative study involving forty-three boys. There’s nothing definitive to be learned here about Trump or contemporary masculinity (although I’ve read several lengthy screeds based on less).

Wilson’s paper simply reminds us that reading is complicated, and most of the available research on reading habits isn’t. Survey respondents are typically asked if they read books for leisure, or if they’ve read a book in the last year. There are many reasons to read other than for leisure. There are many things to read other than books. And not all books are equal.

I haven’t seen a study that tracks if men spend more minutes per day reading sentences than women. Or one that drills down to find who reads the most newspapers, magazines, websites, newsletters, contracts, annual reports, research papers, instruction manuals, catalogues, and cereal boxes. Each of those formats is as potentially edifying (if not as much fun) as Morning Glory Milking Farm: A Monster Bait Romance, with its 47,570 enthusiastic ratings on Goodreads.

I read so many concerns for and condemnations of contemporary males last night that it came as a surprise to learn that our most reliable measure of reading competence, the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, finds no real difference in literacy of men and women aged 16 to 64 in the US or Canada. We should all revisit that baseline before assigning responsibility for the state of civilization to whoever is or isn’t reading or buying contemporary fiction. (PIAAC did find that while Canadian literacy scores have been stable, US scores have slipped 5 percent since Trump was first elected. Make of that what you will.)

Does the men-and-fiction problem exist? I think yes, and my sense is that it’s one of both supply (what’s getting published) and demand (what men will read). I thought I’d have more than that to say. This is my kind of issue — the whole point of SHuSH is ill-considered opinion drawn from shaky evidence on a weekly timetable — but I can’t compete with what I’m reading, so I’m backing off for now.

I certainly find myself reading almost nothing that has been published recently with a few exceptions for well-researched and well-written histories and military histories. My preferred genre reading got taken over by the “jam the narrative into every story” crowd a few decades back, so I stopped buying SF and fantasy titles except those from authors I’d already read.

May 11, 2025

QotD: Corporate taxes

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

Many politicians, pundits and some economists would have us believe that corporations pay taxes, but do they? Economists distinguish between entities who ultimately bear the tax burden and those upon whom tax is initially levied. Just because a tax is levied on a corporation doesn’t mean that the corporation bears its burden. Faced with a tax, a corporation can shift the tax burden by raising its product prices, lowering dividends or laying off workers. The lesson here is that only people pay taxes, not legal fictions like corporations. Corporations are simply tax collectors for the government. Similarly, no one would fall for a politician telling a homeowner, “I’m not going to tax you; I’m going to tax your property”. I guarantee that it will be a person, not the property, writing out the check to the taxing authority. Again, only people pay taxes.

Walter E. Williams, “Economics Reality”, Townhall.com, 2020-02-04.

May 9, 2025

QotD: Becoming a parent

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

I know lots of female professionals — doctors, lawyers, professors, etc. — many of whom are quite good at their jobs. Let’s even, for the sake of argument, stipulate that they’re slightly better than their male colleagues. Leaving aside the thorny (and probably unanswerable) question of just how you’d rank, say, doctors — is strength of schedule a factor? do we trust the coaches’ poll? — the real question is, does society benefit more from a slightly-better, but childless, female MD, or from an excellent stay-at-home mom? Or a pretty-good nurse who works part time while the kids are in school?

Younger folks are no doubt shocked by that question, and if some BCG were ever to read this, she’d try to string me up, but it’s the only question that matters long term. The BCG would start sputtering some question about “what about her happiness?” — the only answer to which, if you want to maintain a stable society, must be: “Category error”. It’s like “staying together for the kids”, another phrase we oldsters recognize, but the younger generation can’t grok. But … but … but … whaddabout your feeeeeelings?

What about them?

Seriously: Who gives a shit? Viddy well, oh my brothers: When you decided to have kids, you didn’t hit the pause button on some video game RPG called “Your Career”; you ejected the disk, snapped that fucker in half, and smashed the Xbox Office Space-style for good measure. What’s good for you, personally, just got sent to the back of the line. Permanently. Yeah yeah, I know, you can’t fulfill your parental obligations if you’re completely miserable all the time, but you can find lots of joy and meaning and yes, even fulfillment (that most insidious of modern weasel words) doing stuff other than making partner down at the law firm.

Men used to understand this, because men were once trained to take the long view, to delay gratification, to suck it the fuck up for the greater good. It’s the same gene — and it IS genetic, 1,000,000+ years of evolution — that causes men to charge bullets or punch kangaroos or do whatever else needs to be done in the face of obvious threats, even at the risk, or even the near certainty, of his own injury or death.

Women don’t roll like that, because they can’t — “that 1,000,000+ years of evolved behavior” thing again. They’re evolved to put the kids first — their kids, not some abstract ideal. Women can be, and often are, suicidally brave — for their own offspring. But absent those — absent the possibility of those — all those maternal instincts go septic, which is how you get the BCG. She knows she’s not cut out for this, no matter how successful she is academically — indeed, in my experience it’s precisely the most academically successful ones who sense it the clearest.

Alas, they are trained that feminism is the answer to those inner alarm bells, so they carry on like caricature cavemen — being as crude and offensive and obnoxious as possible, trying to treat sex like an itch to be scratched while beefing with that basic bitch Becky on the next dorm block.

Severian, “Gettin’ Jiggy in College Town”, Founding Questions, 2021-10-08.

April 30, 2025

How Is Ammunition Made? A Tour of Sellier & Bellot’s Factory

Filed under: Business, Europe, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 30 Dec 2024

Today I am in Vlašim in the Czech Republic, where Sellier & Bellot has allowed me to film a tour of their ammunition plant. This is one of the largest ammo manufacturers in the world, and they start with basic raw material like lead, copper, and brass and ship out complete case ammunition. The machines involved in this process are really interesting — let’s have a look!
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April 28, 2025

Unintended consequences of vehicle mileage regulation

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

On the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, Sheel Mohnot explains the amazing unintended consequences of another “great idea with the best possible intentions”:

Ever wonder why sedans disappeared and every car is huge now?

“Thanks, Obama!”

His administration changed fuel economy standards in a way that had the perverse impact of making cars even bigger.

Here are all the vehicles for sale by the 3 largest US automakers. 62 vehicles, 4 sedans (6%). 20 years ago this chart would have been ~50% sedans!

What happened?

Obama administration changed auto fuel efficiency rules to tie fuel economy targets to vehicle size.

Under the new system:
-The bigger the car’s footprint, the easier the MPG target was.
-Light trucks (including SUVs and crossovers) had far lower requirements than passenger cars.
-Crossovers were quietly reclassified as “trucks,” giving them a huge regulatory advantage.

Instead of building lighter, more efficient cars, automakers simply made everything bigger, and made more trucks and SUVs.

Notice that cars that used to be sedans are now crossovers? They do this so it counts as a light truck – they raise ground clearance, square off the rear for cargo capacity, and meet off-road approach minimums so they get qualified as a light truck. Think Subaru Legacy > Subaru Outback.

As you can see in the chart, it’s a LOT easier to meet MPG requirements if your vehicle is classified that way.

So cars got LARGER to meet fuel efficiency goals. The new Honda Civic is 20 inches longer and 4 inches wider than it used to be, about the same size as an old Accord. By making the Civic larger, Honda slightly shifted it into a more favorable regulatory category.

… and smaller cars disappeared. The Honda Fit was a great little car, but would have had to hit 67 MPG in 2026, which would be nearly impossible … so instead, Honda stopped selling them.

So, the only way to make small vehicles now is to make them EV’s (Chevy Bolt).

The Slate truck that is all the rage now is only possible because it’s an EV … otherwise its footprint would have demanded an overly onerous MPG target.

So in short – Obama era CAFE standards had the opposite of the desired impact: sedans died, vehicles ballooned in size, and America’s streets turned into an SUV parking lot.

All thanks to a policy that accidentally incentivized bloat instead of efficiency.

Don’t get me started on “cash for clunkers!”

April 15, 2025

Daniel Defense H9: The Hudson Reborn and Completely Reengineered

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 16 Dec 2024

In 2017, Hudson released a new pistol that was the darling of the firearms industry. It purported to offer a radically low bore axis and 1911-style trigger in a striker-fired system that would be fast and simple to use.

In 2019, Hudson went bankrupt, out of money and having started to scavenge parts off returned pistols to fix other customers’ broken guns. It was an ignominious end to a product with such potential.

About that same time, Daniel Defense was looking for a way to expand their catalog into the pistol market. They saw Hudson, and it looked like the perfect opportunity to pick up a good design that seemed to have been the victim of management and cash flow problems. So DD bought up the patents and other aspects of the H9 pistol … but when they got a close look at the gun they realized, belatedly, that the whole thing needed to be redesigned.

In the years since, Daniel Defense has been fixing the H9. The fire control system remains fundamentally the same, but with no interchangeable parts — and now actually drop-safe. The exotic forward-mounted unlocking cams on the barrel are gone now, and the accessory rail is moved up enough to allow reasonable use of lights and lasers. The frame is aluminum and shortened for better concealment. The recoil spring system is much stronger, and the slide stop redesigned to prevent the breakages that plagued the original Hudson. Every part of the magazine has been changed, to fit the same 15 rounds into a shorter body and prevent over insertion. The slide is now cut for optics, with four different adapter plates to fit all the common footprints.

Shooting the new H9 side by side with the original Hudson, I think Daniel Defense has kept all the qualities of the design while fixing a lot of the problems it had. The gun does indeed have a lot less muzzle rise than more conventional designs, and the trigger feels quite nice. This is not a Grand Master’s IPSC gun and it is not a subcompact pocket gun. It is a jack of all trades piece that can be carried as well as any service pistol (better than most, thanks to its quite narrow construction) and can hold its own in a variety of competition venues as well.
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