Quotulatiousness

September 25, 2026

When did employee humiliation become part of the mission?

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

I’ve been out of the working world for some time now, but I still remember the stomach-clenching realization that my employer was going to be “doing some fun activities” at an upcoming company event/meeting/recognitions/celebrations It was always just like the meme about the extrovert “persuading” the introvert to come out:

I’m told it’s even worse in the non-productive sector of the economy, as Fortissax explains:

If you’ve only worked trades, or unskilled labour your whole life you’d be inclined to thinking that humiliation rituals and childish games are unique to retail jobs like Walmart, where in morning huddles they make their minimum wage employees dance in place to celebrate how well their team did in last week’s sales, or survey results. I want you to know that in Very Serious Jobs™️ like NGOs, government, finance, and banking, white collar salary workers who work for some of the biggest and oldest corporations in Canada have to play stupid little games, and all the men have to fake enthusiasm for getting to know employees they don’t give a shit about outside of work, mostly to appease women in their 30s and 40s. They all have annual or bi-annual celebrations they’ll call “balls” or “galas” where the corporation spends an exorbitant amount of money on a semi formal event and a three and a half star deal, usually at some mid-high tier hotel. They do this so they can justify low balling you and not raising your salary. The women in particular are completely mesmerized as they dress up to relive prom night one more time, every year, where they can win fake little awards for being good little cogs scoring their arbitrary KPIs and survey goals, getting to strut up onto a stage in a dress and claim up a plastic trophy or framed certificate to be mounted on a wall, a gold star for whose it and who cares metric that nobody knows or gives a fuck about. You can make six figures or just under it and you’re still subject to participatory humiliation rituals.

How True was Lord of War? Surplus from the Warsaw Pact (w/ Val Forgett)

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 May 2026

When the Soviet Union collapsed, there was a gold rush for the surplus guns held by all the various newly independent republics, as well as the Warsaw Pact nations. Lord of War is not far off … and Val Forgett was there, bringing guns into the US for Navy Arms.

September 24, 2026

Small rift in time brings 2021 dramarama to 2026

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

I still occasionally see people going about their business wearing WuFlu masks. I try not to overtly point and laugh, because I’m still pretending to be polite and civilized. Obviously, people should be free to wear or not wear whatever they like so long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. A bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts has apparently been requiring masks for all their patrons since the pandemic but recently decided to ease up the restriction for one night per week, making the masks optional for one day per week. As you might imagine, this move hasn’t gone down well with their customers:

Image via Not the Bee

Crybullying is a way of controlling other people. Predators and psychopaths pose: They deliberately put on sad face or hurt face when they want suckers to lower their guard so they can get what they want.

If you’ve been online today, you’ve probably seen discussion of the mindblowing Boston Globe story about the lesbian bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts that recently decided to start having weekly mask-optional nights, after many years of requiring KN-95 masks or better from patrons. If this is the first time you’re hearing about this, let me just say that no, you haven’t accidentally clicked on an article from 2021. This is happening now.

After the Last Ditch Bar posted their new mask rules on social media, they were immediately buried in rage-inflected comments from people who were in absolute agony over the way the place was just absolutely murdering them.

Sample comment: “You have shattered what I believed your values to be, and you should be ashamed to use the word radical to describe your venue in the same post where you’re announcing a decision to deliberately spread disabling diseases, that we know disproportionately impact marginalized populations, one night each week.”

Did you know that Covid-19 is medically much worse if you’re a politically radical lesbian? Second sample comment: “This is such a stab in the heart to those of us who have no choice but to protect our health. Esp when l0ng c0vid disproportionally affects queer folk.” That’s an interesting observation.

All of the bar’s efforts to calm the storm made it worse, and a community forum hosted by trained facilitators crashed and burned. I’m not going to describe that event or summarize it, because you should read every incredible detail yourself. Here’s the link again, in an archived form that gets you around the paywall and probably requires you to scroll down a bit to get through some blank space at the top. As a preview, though, one of the facilitators was white, which devastated the terrified attendees and made them feel that they were in extreme danger.

The mandatory mask-wearing somehow became a totem of belonging to the patrons of the bar and after so long, they are now reacting very strongly to any attempt to dilute their shared community with non-mask-wearing heathens.

September 21, 2026

Price controls work … but not the way they’re intended to

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, History, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Politicians love to intervene in markets, trying to impose their preferred solution to “problems” like high prices. But markets don’t work the way politicians think they do:

Price ceilings don’t manage markets, they destroy them. In 1946 the US meat market collapsed because of it.

The Office of Price Administration set beef ceiling prices during World War II. Ranchers and meatpackers adapted: some held cattle rather than sell at a loss, others shifted product to black markets, and slaughter volumes dropped. The OPA briefly lifted controls in mid-1946 under pressure. Beef flooded back into stores almost immediately.

Then Congress, drowning in constituent complaints about inflation, reimposed ceilings in August 1946. Slaughter collapsed within weeks. By October 1946, beef virtually disappeared from American grocery store shelves. You could walk into a butcher shop in Chicago or New York and find nothing. Scarcity was manufactured entirely by Washington bureaucrats setting prices below what producers needed to cover costs.

Mises explained the mechanism precisely: a price ceiling creates a shortage, which produces political pressure for rationing and further controls, spiraling into comprehensive economic disorganization. The OPA ran that experiment in real time on the American food supply.

President Truman ended meat controls on November 9, 1946. Beef returned within days. The supply existed the entire time. Ranchers and packers simply refused to sell at confiscatory prices, and they were correct to refuse. Coercive price suppression causes economic destruction, and 1946 proved it at the grocery counter.

September 20, 2026

“Honest” graft

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

Politicians and corruption go together like wine and cheese but not like crime and punishment for some reason. It’s almost as though the path to wealth and influence goes through political connections rather than economic efficiency and innovation. Chris Bray points out the difference between the “honest” graft of days gone by and the kind of all-consuming corruption we see far too often these days:

Tammany had honest graft: They said they would build a bridge or a park, and then they built it. The cost would be sort of not nakedly obscene, and no money would be missing if there was an audit. But by the most remarkable coincidence, the land where the park or the highway or the approaches to the bridge would go turned out to be owned by very close friends of the Tammany machine, who then got paid a nice little premium for the acquisition of land that was needed for a public purpose, and maybe the people who sold the concrete and the lumber and supplied the labor also turned out to be awfully close friends of the politicians who approved the project, but at the end, there’s the bridge. There’s the new highway, and it cost something within shouting distance of what you would expect the thing to cost. It added up, but they did some fairly polite stealing. There was respect in it. It wasn’t honest, but it wasn’t wide-open looting.

An extremely common form of graft in American politics is the “Three Bs” that Robert Caro famously described in Texas politics: beef, bourbon, and blondes. Cocktails, steak dinners, and maybe if you were a legislator who played ball a nice young lady came and visited your hotel room during the legislative session. But that graft was about topics like who got the state highway contract. Some money traded hands, there was dishonesty in the allocation of public resources, and the highway got re-paved.

The Quality Learing Center model, or the high-speed rail model, or the 800 hospices in Los Angeles with patients that never died, all represent a model of grift that comes from a culture of complete shamelessness. In California, nearly 700 non-profit corporations exist to provide shelter to the homeless, and over 500 non-profit corporations exist to prevent homelessness and provide social services to the homeless or to people who may become homeless. There’s quite a bit of overlap between those categories, so there aren’t 1200+ non-profits, but there are hundreds, and they have billions of dollars in income.

Some are entirely legitimate and do real work. There are people in California who will be fed and sheltered tonight by a non-profit corporation that will keep them from sleeping on the street. It’s not at all my argument that no one in any non-profit anywhere ever does anything real. But the overall picture is theft, and the premise that the flood of money is ending homelessness (or is meant to) is a lie, and a dark one. Gavin Newsom presented his ten-year plan to end chronic homelessness in 2008.

Update, 22 September: 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.

September 19, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    2. Conceptualizing the Collective Unconscious of a People

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

Internal migration patterns in the United States

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

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

Universities in the NCAA Southeastern Conference.
Map from Wikimedia Commons

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

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

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

But formidable is no longer synonymous with singular.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

The Wealth Tax Scheme Is Based on Unusual Accounting

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

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

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

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

September 14, 2026

Performative Canadian politics again

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Economics, Europe, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Prime Minister Mark Carney came to power promising that he was the best-qualified to deal with the US government on trade issues. Canadians assumed that this meant he’d be able to get as fair a trade deal with President Trump’s administration as possible. What he really meant was that he could do the most damage to cross-border trade relations in order to “pivot” to the EU and to China. He never intended to settle US-Canadian trade conditions, and his actions clearly show he was always putting the negotiations dead last in his priority list. And, thanks to the government’s generous subsidies to the relic media, instead of grilling him and his ministers for their blatant failures, they instead try to hold the opposition to account for things they have no control over.

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison points out that it makes no economic sense for Canada to become part of the European Union as Carney now says he’s working toward:

This strikes me as remarkably stupid economic strategy.

Diversifying Canadian trade makes sense. Pretending Europe can somehow replace the economic relationship we have with the United States does not.

The United States is next door. Our railways, pipelines, electricity grids, manufacturing supply chains and energy markets have been integrated for generations. Even after the trade fight intensified, 71.7% of Canadian merchandise exports still went to the United States in 2025.

And Canada already has CETA with the European Union. Roughly 98% of EU tariff lines on Canadian goods became duty-free when CETA took effect, eventually rising to about 99%. If Canadian companies see profitable opportunities in Europe, they already have extraordinarily good market access.

So what exactly do we gain from some invented “associate membership” beyond CETA?

Potentially European regulatory obligations, political entanglements, financial contributions and pressure to harmonize Canadian rules with decisions made in Brussels, all to sell more goods across an ocean to markets that cannot duplicate the geographic advantage of the United States.

Norway rejected EU membership twice. Iceland opened accession negotiations and eventually walked away without joining. Both understood that you can have close economic relations with Europe without surrendering unnecessary national autonomy.

Canada should trade aggressively with Europe, Asia and everyone else who wants our products. But our first priority should be fixing the relationship with our largest customer, removing our own interprovincial trade barriers, building pipelines and ports, and making Canada competitive again.

Picking a fight with the neighbour who buys most of your exports and then announcing that Brussels might become your new best friend isn’t economic sophistication.

It looks like desperation dressed up as grand strategy.

September 13, 2026

Stellantis signs an MOU with Roshel for their Brampton auto plant

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the surface, this seems like excellent news, both for Stellantis who get rid of an auto plant they can’t economically operate and for Roshel who now will get manufacturing capability for their expanding military vehicle lines. But, as Martyupnorth points out, it’s only an MOU and will require placating the auto union:

Image from @Martyupnorth on X

Let’s recap what happened at this old facility in the last 3 years.

The Brampton plant built Chargers & Challengers until December 2023. Then Stellantis (the parent company of Chrysler) shut it down to retool for Jeep Compass. Taxpayers handed over hundreds of millions of dollars to make that happen.

Workers were told it was temporary. They receive a combination of Employment Insurance (EI) and company-paid Supplemental Unemployment Benefits (SUB) that brought most of them up to about 70% of their regular weekly wage, plus continued health benefits. Their contract said they were good for 2 years of benefits.

In February 2025 the work stopped, because U.S. tariffs made building cars in Canada for the American market a losing proposition. October 2025 Stellantis moved the Compass to Illinois. The plant has sat empty ever since. Roughly 2,200 people have been collecting layoff cheques while the building rusts.

Now Stellantis has an MOU with Roshel, a local company that actually wants to use the place. The union’s response? Pause the contract talks. Declare an “impasse.” Demand the company keep pretending the old product plan is still viable.

Unifor spent years extracting benefits and job-security that assumed the world would stay the same. When the world changed, the union treated any other option, like a defence contractor, even just selling the asset so someone else who could hire people, as a betrayal.

The workers are the ones sitting at home. The union leadership is the one treating a mothballed factory like a sacred site that can only ever build Unifor-approved vehicles.

Markets don’t care about the last collective agreement. Tariffs don’t care. Customers don’t care. A plant that produces nothing is just expensive real estate with a Canadian flag out front.

The union’s job was supposed to be representing the people who used to work there. Instead it became another veto on anyone trying to turn the lights back on.

Unions are a scourge on Canada.

September 6, 2026

Henry Deringer’s Remarkable Percussion Pocket Pistols

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 15 Apr 2026

Henry Deringer Jr was born in Easton PA in 1786 to German parents. As a young man he apprenticed to a gunsmith, then spent 1808 working in the Virginia Manufactory making guns, and then opened his own business in 1809 at 612 North Front Street in Philadelphia. He remained there until his death in 1868, making a great many guns. Early on his work was largely in flintlock muskets, both for the Army and the commercial trade, but he became best known for his single-shot percussion pocket pistols. These guns became synonymous with his name, a feat not even accomplished by Samuel Colt.

Deringer’s pistols were available in a range of caliber from .31 to .50, but .41 was most common. Barrel length was also widely variable, from barely over an inch to 4 inches or more — but between 2 and 2.5 inches was typical. These were popular guns for self defense, easily carried in a coat pocket and generally sold in pairs. A flintlock of such a size was just unfeasible to conceal in a pocket, but the advent of the percussion system made these guns eminently practical. Obviously the most famous use of one was in Booth’s assassination of President Lincoln, but the guns were very popular before that.

In addition, Deringer became a part of trademark law when he filed suit against a sales agent, A.J. Platt, in San Francisco. Platt handled his inability to get enough pistols from Deringer to meet demand by setting up production of his own copy, complete with the marking “Deringer Philadel”. Deringer’s trademark infringement case was successful, and created a precedent for awarding a judgement based on the lost revenue suffered by the plaintiff — in Deringer’s case, $1,700 instead of his initial demand for $15,000.

Incidentally, Platt’s response after losing the case was to find a man in Philadelphia named “Derringer” and license his name, so that he could continue to make guns that his customers would not recognize as being counterfeits. This would be the basis for a further lawsuit today, but Deringer died in 1868 before pursuing the issue farther.
(more…)

September 2, 2026

Americans’ notorious disinterest in learning foreign languages

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

Malevitus points out some of the sensible reasons most Americans don’t learn how to speak other languages … and why it makes perfect sense for this situation:

There’s a common complaint about Americans online that goes something like this: “Americans are so dumb. They only know one language, most of the rest of the world is at least bilingual. Why can’t they learn to speak another language?”

To be fair, we Yankees are a pretty monolingual bunch. Only about 20% of Americans speak a language other than English, and for those that do, its mostly because they’re immigrants or children of immigrants. That doesn’t compare favorably to Western Europe, where the majority of adults can speak at least one foreign language (guess which one?)

This is often brought up in the long list of America Bad™ talking points. It’s yet another example of American idiocy. “Europeans can master four languages while Americans are too stupid to master one.” This is pretty much pure copium.

The American Empire

The world we live in is an American world. Since at least the 1990’s (and arguably since the 1940’s), the US has been the undisputed economic and cultural hegemon of the world. Americans don’t learn French or German for the same reason that a Roman in 100 AD would balk at learning Gaulish or Illyrian. Provincials learn the imperial tongue, not the other way around.

For your average non-Anglophone, learning English opens up opportunities in international business, makes it easier to keep up with news from the imperial core, and lets you talk to people around the world (who learned English for all the same reasons you did). For your average American, speaking not-English is a cool trick that takes 600+ hours to learn.

As with any respectable empire, the culture of the periphery is downstream of the core. The influence is largely unidirectional. A typical Frenchman has probably seen Avatar and Titanic. A typical American has definitely not seen Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis or La Grande Vadrouille. The world is buying our blue jeans and listening to our pop music.

[NR: Emphasis mine.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also 2019: Invite a film crew.

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

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

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

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

2023: Lose the appeal. Lose it again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

March 2026: Farm declared clear.

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

Eighteen years.

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

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

Worst tax dodger in British history.

Best thing to happen to British farming in fifty years.

August 30, 2026

The short-term impact of widespread LLM usage

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

I haven’t used any of the latest tranche of LLM agents, although I’m assured by those who do use them that they’re significant improvements over the previous iterations, so I don’t really have an opinion about the state of the “AI Revolution”, but Freddie deBoer has a rare non-catastrophist yet also non-utopian take:

My LLM skepticism is really pretty simple: immense practical consequences have been predicted for them, essentially none of those consequences have come true or can be proven to be imminent, and because reality has a powerful status quo bias it’s not sensible to simply assume that they’re coming. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and no one has produced such evidence. My position is not a complicated one to understand and shouldn’t be controversial. I’m acting with no more skepticism towards AI claims than I regularly demonstrate towards claims about religion or astrology or New Age woowoo.

And, crucially, I’m not the one who has set the comically over-the-top expectations here; the AI maximalists and their enablers in the media have. Sundar Pichai, who as the CEO of Google is one of the ten most consequential figures in the business world, said that LLMs were a bigger deal than the discovery of fire or electricity. AI maximalists frequently insist that the LLM era is equivalent to or more important than the Industrial Revolution. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropoic, went on a podcast from The New York Times (the stentorian, buttoned-down New York Times) and talked about a future where AI colonizes Mars of its own volition. Reports out of Silicon Valley hold that many tech workers sincerely believe that they’re a few years from owning their own asteroid mines and will be so wealthy they essentially step outside of the human experience when it comes to material desire. (If you look, you can find concerning stories on Reddit and similar places of techies spending down all of their saving and taking out large loans, on the theory that in the next few years they will become trillionaires thanks to LLMs.) Scott Alexander seems increasingly unwilling even to countenance the possibility that “AI” is not all its cracked up to be. None of this is serious, let alone convincing. I keep using the example of indoor plumbing to establish a baseline of what actual civilization-altering technological change looks like because that’s what civilization is built on. Videos where AI Chuck Norris beats up AI Vladimir Putin are not on that level.

None of this means that I believe what I am frequently accused of believing, that LLMs have literally no consequences. I don’t think that. I think that the winners of the current AI war will end up with important enterprise software that meaningfully changes how administrative and clerical tasks are completed in the average American workplace. The winners of all of this will make a lot of revenue off of this technology. Certain tasks are going to be presumed to be automated from now on. You’ll ask computers to do things in natural language that you used to do with clicks and commands. And, as we’re already seeing, human culture is going to become even lonelier, less authentic, more crass, less creative, more artificial, and less fulfilling than before. Those are consequences. They’re just, you know, consequences in a fundamentally mundane and boring world. But, yeah. Somebody’s going to make a lot of money on this stuff — conventionally a lot, I mean, not these absurd hundreds of trillionaire dreams, but a lot of money.

The trouble is that, clearly, none of this is enough, precisely because of those outsized expectations. The problems with “LLMs are going to prove to be highly consequential and remunerative enterprise software in a more-or-less unchanged economy and world” are multiple:

  • The amount of money and time and energy and attention and manpower that’s been invested in LLMs is so massive that nothing resembling an ordinary economic return can ever pay it off; with AI now essentially propping up the entire American economy, this is a dire circumstance even though specific firms will survive and eventually thrive.
  • You can’t cure cancer because cancer is not one disease and also it evolves under natural selection pressures and sometimes when we reduce rates of one cancer rates of other cancers rise etc etc etc; interstellar travel is a fantasy thanks to basic rules of physics and physiology, not because we’re not smart enough; asteroid mines make absolutely zero sense in basic economic terms; you can’t upload your consciousness because consciousness is not software but embedded into the very cells of our bodies that inevitably die; we already experienced radical life extension thanks to immense reductions in infant mortality and smoking cessation, the add-another-25-years-to-the-average-lifespan stuff is just a slow unglamorous chipping away; limitless cheap energy is being kept from us by thermodynamics, not how advanced our microprocessors are; on and on, the things we’re demanding failing to materialize because they’re not sensible things to demand.
  • It’s impossible that all of the major players in this field (OpenAI and Anthropic but also Meta and Google and Nvidia and Oracle and Caterpillar and Modine Manufacturing and Constellation Energy …) survive the next decade; some of them are going to fail, and they’re going to cause an immense amount of collateral damage on the way down.
  • Some very informed people will tell you that the future is not LLMs but SLMs, small language models you run locally on your own computer, which would have potentially devastating downstream effects for chip manufacturers, model developers, construction firms, energy companies, etc.
  • We have absolutely no idea about where the next big growth field might be if it isn’t this, and this period of permanently irrational stock market growth (which has underwritten all economic optimism) is dependent, more than anything, on that one organizing story.
  • The emotional investment in AI is even less likely to pay off than the financial investment; a huge number of people, including a lot of people who spend their lives being too cool for this sort of thing, have staked their emotional health on the idea that the mundane world is imminently going to end, but the mundane world never ends and we will all spend the rest of our days downloading apps to pay for parking a single time and emptying the diaper pail and trying to figure out how to avoid the third round of small talk with the same coworker in a day.

Honestly, I think Google’s recent shakeup tells us a lot about where LLMs are going. Google, for a thousand reasons, is the “frontier” company most likely to make a ton of money off of AI in the next decade — and also, they’ve slipped far down the rankings in terms of the best model and they don’t appear to care very much. Google’s Gemini was briefly seen as the class of the field, but in the past year or more they’ve consistently underperformed OpenAI and Anthropic’s best models. (To say nothing of the rapidly-ascending Chinese competitors, which is a whole other thing.) Google’s top AI guys, Demis Hassabis and Jeff Dean, have both moved on from active development of Gemini because they’re more interested in moonshot AI; the implicit concession is that Google doesn’t think that Gemini can ever be “AGI”, that utterly vague, non-falsifiable construct so many people are now chasing. Instead, Google seems to understand that its vast preexisting base of users allows the company to make a mint without any absurd sci-fi premises: when you ask an AI agent to do your grocery shopping, you’ll probably do it through Google in one way or another, and they can take a few cents off of each of those interactions to the tune of billions. It’s not glamorous and it doesn’t allow you to pretend that you’re going to live forever. But pragmatism of that kind is the soil in which modern day fortunes grow. Moonshot Google is long dead, and for a reason.

August 26, 2026

Regulating away small company benefits in the EU

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

Cláudia Ascensão Nunes discusses yet another example of regulatory capture, as new European Union regulations will choke off business opportunities for small companies to the benefit of big companies and multinationals who can absorb the costs of the new environmental regulations:

Today, the European Commission estimates that the Single Market has increased the European Union’s GDP by 3–4% and created 3.6 million jobs since its creation. A study by Bertelsmann Stiftung estimated that integration increases European citizens’ incomes by an average of about €840 ($974) per person per year.

Yet the benefits created by this integration, and the freedom that made these benefits possible, began to come under threat on August 12, 2026, quietly and through an apparently harmless packaging regulation.

The Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) will force sellers, both European and foreign, to comply with a complex set of rules that may be manageable for large brands but suffocating for small businesses.

The most problematic requirement is that sellers shipping packaged products to an EU country where they are not established must appoint a local authorized representative. That representative will act on behalf of the seller before that country’s recycling authorities. The representative must register the company in the national Extended Producer Responsibility, or EPR, system, file annual reports on the packaging the company places on that market, and charge a service fee of between €200 ($232) and €500 ($580).

The process of appointing a representative in one country is both bureaucratic and expensive. Doing so across several countries can become impractical for small sellers, who lack the scale to spread these fixed costs across a large volume of sales, especially since the PPWR does not provide a volume-based exemption.

Several businesses are already announcing the suspension of shipments to other EU countries or disabling shipping options to the EU altogether. The German company Copiaro, for example, suspended shipments to other EU member states while continuing to ship to European markets such as Switzerland, Norway, and the United Kingdom, which are outside the EU’s regulatory framework.

We are therefore returning to something resembling the old national markets, with barriers to entry.

The entire model of cross-border trade for small businesses risks being undermined in the name of environmental protection. Yet if larger companies, which produce far more packaging waste, are the ones best able to absorb these costs, we are facing a contradiction. Packaging regulations can shield large sellers from competition by smaller businesses, creating a more closed and concentrated market.

Europe may become greener by becoming poorer. European entrepreneurship is being strangled, and small business owners are paying the price.

August 25, 2026

The new missile gap – between manufacture and deployment

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

Edward Luttwak offers some suggestions to help explain why the vast and lavishly funded US Military-Industrial Complex seems incapable of manufacturing enough weapons to allow the US military to fight more than a brief demonstration war before running short of the things that go boom:

Royal Navy Tomahawk Land Attack Missile (TLAM) in flight.
MOD photo via Wikimedia Commons.

It is a strange thing indeed that among the countless stories about America’s shortage of long-range weapons — a truly crippling scarcity that now both limits President Trump’s strike options against the Islamic Republic, and might weaken responses to other looming threats — I have not found one that raises the most elementary question of all: why?

Why was Iran attacked with scarce and expensive BGM-109 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles — costing around $3 million each — rather than ordinary gravity bombs dropped by fighter-bombers? Accuracy cannot be the answer: with so-called “JDAM” guidance kits, regular bombs become very accurate indeed, and they are still simple enough to be mass-produced cheaply.

Nevertheless, US forces had launched 850 Tomahawk missiles against Iran by 27 March this year, amounting to almost half the country’s global stockpile, though the Pentagon has since announced a huge $22.9 billion contract for more Tomahawks. Air-launched AGM-158 missiles, some of whose models can fly up to 1,000 miles, and which cost as much as $1.6 million apiece, were also used, along with Army’s Precision Strike Missiles are yet more expensive.

What makes these missiles so costly is their great virtue: they are all so-called “stand-off” weapons, which can safely be launched hundreds of miles from their targets. This means an attacker’s aircraft can remain outside enemy air space, where they could be exposed to detection by radars, and then to interception by air-defence fighters and surface-to-air missiles. There is simply no way of producing such missiles cheaply. They need powerful rocket propulsion and complicated electronic guidance to fly such vast distances and hit their targets successfully.

[…]

Nor, of course, are the implications here limited to Iran and the Gulf. Having needlessly used so many stand-off missiles to target Iran, US inventories are worryingly low in the event of the “Chinese contingency”: the invasion of Taiwan that Xi Jinping, unlike his predecessors, refuses to rule out. Any Chinese assault might start with subversion, with the activation of Chinese agents in Taiwan’s armed forces, but amphibious landings would have to follow — against which Tomahawk missiles would be the prime US weapon, alongside local anti-ship missiles.

But having examined all these technical details, we nonetheless arrive at something else entirely, a much more intractable problem than any munitions shortage could ever be: a fundamental change in the entire American attitude to war, which I described as “post-heroic” as far back as the Nineties when its first signs emerged.

This amounts to a truly drastic shift. What started with a proper striving to limit the casualties of war by every means possible — starting with prudent statecraft to avoid war in the first place, and extending to prudent tactics — has now devolved into the current predicament: whereby the US must spend billions on extremely elaborate stand-off missiles so as to further reduce risks to its pilots, which were already very low to begin with, against the vainglorious and incompetent Iranian enemy.

Of course, it’s always a possible explanation that the big defence contractors felt the need for another boost in their income, so it wouldn’t take much to persuade friends in the War Department or in the US Navy to toss a few more TLAMs at Iranian positions …

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress