Quotulatiousness

August 7, 2022

Legendary British gunmaker Holland & Holland, now a Beretta subsidiary

Filed under: Britain, Business, History, Italy, Weapons — Tags: — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Critic, Patrick Galbraith talks to the current head of the Beretta company, which took over Britain’s Holland & Holland:

On the steps up to the blue door a man in a faded red tracksuit leans on one of the stone pillars in the Monday morning sun. All down Jermyn Street windows have been thrown open and flags above shop doors hang still in the heat.

I knock three times then push a bottle of Sudafed up my nose, squeeze twice, and lick at the bitter liquid as it runs over my lip. I was 20 before I ever experienced hay fever. I was fishing somewhere I shouldn’t have been when it first hit. I’ve not enjoyed June much since.

When I get up there, Franco Gussalli Beretta is sitting in the middle of the room in a puddle of sunlight: blue suit, thick grey hair, and a trio of arrows on his big silver belt buckle, the logo of a business established by his ancestor in Lombardy almost 500 years ago.

The earliest documented order was from the Venetian Republic for 185 barrels: “296 ducats made payable to Bartolomeo Beretta”. Fifteen generations later, Franco oversees the production of 1,500 guns a day, from grenade launchers to the ubiquitous “Silver Pigeon”, probably the most popular shotgun in the world.

The current generation are aggressively acquisitive. In recent years they’ve bought a German optics firm, a Finnish rifle manufacturer, and an American company that makes replicas of the sort of weapons that won the West — my own cowboy costume has been too small for some time.

Then, last February, Beretta made their boldest move yet by buying Holland & Holland, the finest gunmaker in London. Franco is a likeable man: he speaks at twice the volume he needs to and he laughs more loudly still. He loves cars and art and boats, and he admits that the day there’s a Beretta running the business who isn’t passionate about guns will be the day it all goes bang. What Holland & Holland needs, he reckons, is innovation.

British gunmakers have been stuck in the late nineteenth century for over a hundred years now and it might just be that Franco has the coglioni to make it new. We talk for half an hour and then as I’m standing to go, Carlo walks in — nonchalant at 25, a black t-shirt, dark sunglasses and jeans. Bartolomeo’s 16 times great-grandson. Franco gestures towards him and asks if I have any questions for the boy. Carlo talks to me briefly about NFTs but then tells me the real struggle is going to be a political one. He wants to make the world understand that hunting can be part of conservation. “And do you hunt?” I ask, thinking we might swap rabbit recipes. He shakes his head and tells me that as crazy as it sounds he doesn’t get out very much: “In Italy, young people don’t hunt so much anymore.”

July 31, 2022

American publishing has a race problem, but it has an even bigger gender problem

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

In the latest edition of the SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte considers a recent online brouhaha featuring novelist Joyce Carol Oates and notes that while she was being dragged by the usual online mob for her perceived defence of “white” authors, an even bigger problem for the ever-diminishing number of “big” publishing houses is their gender balance:

Publishing also has a gender problem. Only 34 per cent of the Penguin Random House workforce is male.

When you eliminate the warehouse staff, that figure drops to 26 per cent.

A Lee & Low survey from 2019 put the male component of the US publishing workforce at 24 per cent and a Canadian survey (referenced in SHuSH 90) found our publishing sector is 74 per cent women and 18 per cent men. Oates’ critics, many of them women, skated over this part of the equation.

That’s not unusual. Most people in publishing skate over this part of the equation. A few years back, when it was revealed that men are just 20 per cent of the fiction reading public, the question arose, might that have something to do with the lack of men acquiring and marketing books. Hardly anyone in publishing thought so. As I noted at the time, a Random House spokesperson said the gender composition of the firm was “not an issue of concern or even much contemplation for us”. And the head of Columbia U’s publishing program asserted that “great literature transcends gender in terms of editors”. A UK literary agent attributed the gender disparity in fiction to merit: some men, she said, “just aren’t very good”.

I spoke to several agents this week to see if the agent mentioned by Oates was an anomaly. What I heard suggests not. My agents were not surprised by the assessment of the anonymous agent. One just shrugged, as in, “what’s new?”

    Whether the comments following the Oates’ tweet are valid — “it’s about time”, or “welcome to the oppressed, now you know what it feels like” — I’m probably not qualified to say. The real issue, which seems to be missed in this conversation, is that work is very often not judged by its quality but by who the author is and what the author represents. (Not a wholly new phenomenon in the world.) It is heartbreaking to see work of real talent, maybe even genius, being rejected by publishers (and I do see this in action) in favour of an author who has the right name and biometrics.

Not all of my agents agreed with Oates’ anonymous agent. One said, “It’s equally hard to sell everybody in this market. I’ve got white authors, black authors, brown authors. It’s hard to get a good deal anywhere. The consolidation in the industry is real: there are fewer editors to pitch books to than there used to be.”

This agent admits that the trend is now toward loading up on BIPOC authors but believes that will blow itself out, as all trends do, and the publishing houses will all chase after the next shiney thing. As for the situation inside publishing houses, “it’s been tough for guys as long as I’ve been in the business. Talk to the white male editors who sit on editorial boards at publishing house and they’ll tell you, it’s tough, there’s a lot of pushback from the other voices around the table.”

This agent also noted that the agency world is starting to break down along gender lines. Not surprisingly, literary agents are overwhelmingly white women. Increasingly, they are representing only women.

July 29, 2022

“Shrinkflation” isn’t the only way companies try to sell you less for the same price

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

And, as Virginia Postrel points out, “shrinkflation” does get noticed for economic statistics, unlike some of the other changes many companies are making:

Original image from www.marpat.co.uk

My latest Bloomberg Opinion column is explained well in an excellent subhead (contrary to popular assumptions, writers don’t craft the headlines or subheads that appear on their work): “Packaging less stuff for the same price doesn’t fool consumers or economists. But diminishing quality imposes equally maddening extra costs that are almost impossible to measure.” Excerpt:

    If a 16-ounce box contracts to 14 ounces and the price stays the same, I asked Bureau of Labor Statistics economist Jonathan Church, how is that recorded? “Price increase”, he said quickly. You just divide the price by 14 instead of 16 and get the price per ounce. Correcting for shrinkflation is straightforward.

    New service charges for things that used to be included in the price, from rice at a Thai restaurant to delivery of topsoil, also rarely sneak past the inflation tallies any more than they fool consumers.

    But a stealthier shrinkflation is plaguing today’s economy: declines in quality rather than quantity. Often intangible, the lost value is difficult to capture in price indexes.

    Faced with labor shortages, for example, many hotels have eliminated daily housekeeping. For the same room price, guests get less service. It’s not conceptually different from shrinking a bag of potato chips. But would the consumer price index pick up the change?

    Probably not, Church said.

This phenomenon, which Doug Johnson aptly dubbed “disqualiflation” in a Facebook comment, is widespread. One example is the four-hour airport security line I chronicled in an earlier Substack post. Another is the barely trained newbie who screws up your sandwich order — a far more common experience today than four years ago. It’s the flip side of a phenomenon I wrote about in The Substance of Style and in economics columns in the early 2000s (see here and here).

    During the 2000s and 2010s, inflation was probably overstated because of unmeasured quality increases. Now there’s the opposite phenomenon. Quality reductions have become so pervasive that even today’s scary inflation numbers are almost certainly understated.

If you can read the column at Bloomberg, please do. But if you run into the paywall, which allows a few articles a month, you can use this link to the WaPo version, which doesn’t have links.

July 28, 2022

The History of American Chip Flavors

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

J.J. McCullough
Published 2 Apr 2022

The story of chips is the story of America.
(more…)

July 26, 2022

Flying Failures – Christmas Bullet (The Worst Plane Ever Built)

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

Ruairidh MacVeigh
Published 25 Dec 2020

Merry Christmas everyone! 😀

To coincide with this most special of holidays, in this episode of Flying Failures we will be examining the dubious history of the Christmas Bullet, a divisive little plane that could either be seen as the brainchild of a man whose ambition outweighed his abilities, or perhaps one of the greatest cons in aviation history, a con that left two planes destroyed, two test pilots dead, and the US taxpayer several million dollars out of pocket.
(more…)

July 20, 2022

The Myth of Rosie the Riveter – On the Homefront 016

Filed under: Business, Government, History, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 19 Jul 2022

With American men going off to fight the war, there are concerns about a labor shortage. Enter Rosie the Riveter. The women who answered the “We Can Do It” call and entered the factories. But did she really exist?
(more…)

July 19, 2022

Drawing the proper lessons from the massive Rogers outage earlier this month

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney explains the really important lesson that seems to have escaped a lot of the critics who covered the Rogers internet/cell/TV outage that took a third of the country offline for 24 hours or more:

Most of the conclusions reached after the Rogers telecommunication outage two weeks ago are wrong. Millions of people lost home internet, television and cellphone service for the better part of a day (some for much longer). For those who had all their services bundled with Rogers, this meant being entirely cut off, including from access to emergency services. It was a big deal, both in terms of lost economic productivity and for those Canadians who needed help and could not access it.

The problem isn’t with Rogers, though. The problem is with everyone else.

I don’t want to be misunderstood. Rogers is bad. It did have a big problem. I am not a fan. Their customer service is generally awful. Their reliability and performance is decidedly meh and the meh costs a fortune. So don’t take this column as some sort of apologia for Rogers. I am one of their customers, but I’m only one of their customers because none of the other options are much better.

But still. The lesson of two Fridays ago shouldn’t be that Rogers is bad. It also shouldn’t be that the CRTC is bad or that our politicians are spineless and that our regulators are thoroughly captured. All of those things are true, but they’re not the lesson. That wasn’t the failure of two Fridays ago. The failure of two Fridays ago was that when one of our telecom companies went down, a pretty horrifying cross-section of Canadian society had no back-up plan.

Let’s imagine an alternate universe where things in Canada simply functioned better. Close your eyes and just dream it up. You’re in a different Canada now. The CRTC is awesome. Our politicians are terrific. Rogers is an incredibly good company that is masterful at delivering services that are overwhelmingly reliable and affordably priced. Even in this increasingly far-fetched parallel timeline, no telecom company is going to bat a thousand. You will never have 100 per cent service reliability. This alternate Canada still has outages — maybe they’re rare and brief, but they’re not unheard of or impossible.

And that’s why we can’t look at what happened two weeks ago as a failure at Rogers. Obviously Rogers failed. But the real failure was a failure of imagination and planning on the behalf of millions of individuals, and a worryingly diverse set of institutions, that did not have a back-up plan.

QotD: The soul-less, dehumanizing “cube farm” (aka, “veal pens”)

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

In 2010, the psychologists Alex Haslam and Craig Knight set up an experiment in which participants were asked to perform simple administrative tasks in a variety of office spaces. They tested four different office layouts. One was stripped down: bare desk, swivel chair, pencil, paper, nothing else. The second layout was softened with pot plants and almost abstract floral images. Workers enjoyed this layout more than the minimalist one and got more and better work done there.

The third and fourth layouts were superficially similar, yet produced dramatically different outcomes. In each, workers were invited to use the same plants and pictures to decorate the space before they started work, if they wished. But in one of them, the experimenter came in after the subject had finished decorating, and then rearranged it all. The physical difference was trivial, but the impact on productivity and job satisfaction was dramatic. When workers were empowered to shape their own space, they did more and better work and felt far more content. When workers were deliberately disempowered, their work suffered and, of course, they hated it. “I wanted to hit you,” one participant later admitted.

It wasn’t the environment itself that was stressful or distracting — it was the lack of control.

Yet there is a long, dismal tradition of disempowering workers. In the 1960s, the designer Robert Propst worked with the Herman Miller company to produce “The Action Office”, a stylish system of open-plan office furniture that allowed workers to sit, stand, move around and configure the space as they wished.

Propst then watched in horror as his ideas were corrupted into cheap modular dividers, and then to cubicle farms or, as Propst described them, “barren, rathole places”. Managers had squeezed the style and the space out of the action office, but above all they had squeezed the ability of workers to make choices about the place where they spent much of their waking lives.

Tim Harford, “What Le Corbusier got right about office space”, Tim Harford, 2022-04-07.

July 11, 2022

Canadians deserve better than “core network maintenance problems” for critical cell phone and internet services

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

Our internet service provider, Rogers, suffered a major network failure early on Friday morning, taking down not just wired internet services, but also cable TV, and cell phone services and causing knock-on issues that utterly disrupted many emergency 911 services, government websites, banks (including ATM and point-of-sale terminals) and many more. I subscribe to both Rogers internet and Rogers cell phone services, but fortunately my wife has a different wireless phone provider so we weren’t completely offline all of Friday and most of Saturday. Michael Geist and his family weren’t as lucky:

Like many Canadians, I spent most of the massive Rogers outage completely offline. With the benefit of hindsight, my family made a big mistake by relying on a single provider for everything: broadband, home phone, cable, and wireless services on a family plan. When everything went down, everything really went down. No dial tone, no channels, no connectivity. Work was challenging and contact with the kids shut off. It was disorienting and a reminder of our reliance on communications networks for virtually every aspect of our daily lives.

So what comes next? We cannot let this become nothing more than a “what did you do” memory alongside some nominal credit from Rogers for the inconvenience. Canada obviously has a competition problem when it comes to communications services resulting in some of the highest wireless and broadband pricing in the developed world. Purchasing more of those services as a backup – whether an extra broadband or cellphone connection – will be unaffordable to most and only exacerbate the problem. Even distributing the services among providers likely means that consumers take a financial hit as they walk away from the benefits from a market that has incentivized bundling discounts. Consumers always pay the price in these circumstances, but there are policy solutions that could reduce the risk of catastrophic outages and our reliance on a single provider for so many essential services.

First, there is a need to better understand what happened and why. Rogers CEO says the problem lies with maintenance to the core network, which caused some routers to malfunction. But that’s just tech talk. Canadians deserve answers that explain not only how this happened, but how we find ourselves in a position where malfunctioning routers at one company cause a nationwide payment system to go down, government services to be taken offline, and emergency services to be rendered inaccessible. It is one thing for my household to make a mistake, but another for Interac to do so. That means conducting an open CRTC process into this outage alongside a Parliamentary hearing on the broader issues since this is a matter that requires both regulatory and political response. There is no need to wait: these hearings must happen this month with the goal of identifying the scope and source of the problem along with potential policies that might mitigate future harms.

Neither the CRTC nor the current government has shown much inclination to challenge the big telcos. CRTC Chair Ian Scott has reversed years of a consumer-focused Commission into one more comfortable supporting the big providers, while the government has been far more interested in sabre rattling or shaking down Internet companies than taking on big telecom. Yet as we were reminded on Friday, the linkage to the availability of essential services – payments, health care, government services – runs through the telcos, not the Internet companies.

This is the second object lesson in concentrated power in a small number of government-approved hands this year. Our first wake-up call was when the government prompted chartered Canadian banks to cut off some of their customers from all financial services even though no crimes had been committed and no charges were laid. It’s not clear how many people were affected, but arbitrarily denying people access to their bank accounts and credit cards should have rung alarm bells for many people. Now, we’ve been shown how dangerous it can be to allow a very small number of companies to divide the mobile phone and internet service market between them and use the power of government to keep out potential competitors. Will enough Canadians notice?

June 23, 2022

QotD: Mis-preparing our kids for the future

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

I think that’s part of the issue, with our civilization at large. You see, the world is very complicated, and people are given the impression that it’s never been this complicated — which is a lie — and know for a fact that things are changing very fast. They no more find a path, than it dissolves and crumbles under them.

We’re preparing the new generation rottenly for this, too. Look, every generation is educated according to what their grandparents thought was desirable. Which is why I had the education that would have helped an upper class Portuguese Lady in the mid 19th century to make a good marriage and shine in society. For practical purposes, other than diplomacy […] the only use for my degree was academia by the time I took it. Though business desperately needed translators, we weren’t being taught office skills, or the terminology we needed to translate science or industrial stuff. (I learned those on my own, through running into them head first, as I learn practically anything.)

Kids now are being educated to the dreams of the early twentieth elites: for a communitarian world with a strong central government. They’re being told this is the future and what to expect, because when that idea made it into academia, and slowly worked itself through to curriculum and expectations, that was the future everyone EXPECTED. Even conservatives thought that the future would involve central planning. They just wanted to keep a little more individual freedom with it.

I remember blowing the world of Robert’s third grade teacher apart when we informed her that no, in the future there wouldn’t be a need for MORE group work, and that all creativity wouldn’t be communal (which frankly is funny. Creativity doesn’t work that way) but that it would be more individual, probably with people working on their piece of the project miles and miles away from the rest of the “team” and having to pull their weight alone. Dan and I explained why based on tech and trends, and all the poor woman kept saying is “that’s not what we were taught.”

Our kids were prepared not only for a world that doesn’t exist, but the world that idiot intellectuals (all intellectuals are idiots. They mostly don’t know a thing of the real world or real people) thought would come about, somehow, automagically. Think of Brave New World, but everyone is happy and doesn’t need the soma. (rolls eyes.)

And then we sneer at millenials for not finding their way, when people my age, who are self-directed and battlers, and have vocations, find ourselves caught in the grinding gears of change and get our goals and work broken over and over again, and yeah, also don’t find it easier to find our way.

Talk to the kids. Help them find something they’re “meant” to do (that’s not how it works, so make sure they know there isn’t only one goal and only one vocation, but there’s almost always something that their skills and ability are useful for RIGHT NOW. And the ability to learn more to change.) If needed, hook them on multiple streams of income. Help them see it’s possible. Dispel their illusions that life was ever easy.

Sure, in the past there were people who got “the one job” and stuck to it through thick and thin to the golden watch at the end. But I don’t think they were ever the majority. And by the time I came along, you couldn’t have any loyalty to your company, because it would have none to you.

Sarah Hoyt, “Finding Your Way”, According to Hoyt, 2019-02-18.

June 22, 2022

Riding the tiger almost always ends badly for the rider

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

Christian Watson considers the plight of so many consciously progressive organizations as they discover that there are no limits to wokeness:

Leftists created wokeism. They claimed it was about justice, inclusion for all, diversity, equity and more, much much more. However, this ill-defined “theology” has become a self-destructive nihilism.

Now, leftist organizations are being eaten from within over the no-bounds, no-rules wokeism.

Wokeism essentially empowers any person – except straight white males – to claim grievances. There are no limits as to what can be called a “microaggression” or upon which one can claim to be harmed. With wokeism, “my truth” matters — even if it is not at all based in reality.

A recent report from The Intercept outlined the many ways leftist organizations are imploding due to this open-ended invitation for people to claim grievances. Leftist organizations found themselves mired in “Slack wars, and healing sessions, grappling with tensions over hierarchy, patriarchy, race, gender, and power.”

Some executives claim they spend “90 to 95 percent” of their time addressing office drama. They’re being forced to address issues that have nothing to do with the organization’s mission or the donors’ wishes.

Executives at the Guttmacher Institute, the American Civil Liberties Union, Sierra Club, and elsewhere are now the targets of their own employees for failing to meet their woke expectations.

Many executives have quit, leaving behind prominent positions because they simply cannot stand their employees. As one executive put it, “This is out of control. No one can be a leader in this culture. It’s not sustainable. We’re constantly being called out from the bottom.”

“I also see a pattern of … people who are not competent in their orgs getting ahead of the game by declaring that others have engaged in some kind of -ism, thereby triggering a process that protects them in that job while there’s an investigation or turmoil over it,” a separate executive stated.

That process leads to internal divisions as employees take sides. And when the woke rules are violated, no apology is ever good enough.

June 19, 2022

The bookselling biz in Toronto

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

In the latest edition of the SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte looks back to those dimly remembered days early in the never-ending pandemic lockdown theatre we’ve all been trapped in since, like, forever:

I was in downtown Toronto one morning this week for the first time in a long time and while there was still lighter traffic and fewer people than in pre-pandemic days, things were bustling. That’s good news for thousands of retail businesses in Toronto’s core, not least Ben McNally’s bookstore.

Grumpy Ben is a favorite of this newsletter, always good for a quote. Way back in SHuSH 10, a reader asked us: “Why do books have prices printed on them? Very few items I purchase have ‘suggested retail prices’ but books and magazines do.” We went to Ben for an answer and, as reported at the time, almost lost our hearing:

    Why do they have prices printed on them? Great question! It makes me fucking nuts. Why shouldn’t I be able to set my own price? I mean, the publisher can have a suggested retail price, fine, but I shouldn’t have to honor it. As a bookseller, I should be able to sell it for what I can get. Some of those books from places like Harvard University Press, I could price the shit out of them. Who else is gonna carry the goddamn things?

I caught up with Ben again at his former Richmond and Bay store […] for SHuSH 53, a few months into lockdown. He was closed to foot traffic but delivering by courier and fulfilling curbside pickup orders. His lease was almost up and he had no option to renew. His landlord was turning his space into a breezeway. He felt fortunate not to have signed on for another ten years given that the retail world was falling down around his ears and I was happy for him from a financial perspective, but that location was easily the most beautiful bookstore in Toronto, and maybe in Canada. It was a real loss when it closed in August of that year. Ben put its gorgeous hardwood fixtures into storage and moved to a temporary location with plans to perhaps open again at a new spot if life ever returned to normal.

It was interesting for me to re-read that conversation. So much was unknowable at the time. Would the virus pass as quickly as SARS, or would it haunt us for years? Would there be a vaccine? Would people return downtown or work from home in perpetuity? Would they ever feel comfortable returning to a bookstore, buying a book off a shelf that some other customer may have handled a few minutes before? Was the future of book retailing home delivery and, if so, would Ben ever need another store? Were book launches and book events, an important part of his business, ever coming back? On a brighter note, would there be great opportunities to snap up prime commercial space on better terms after landlords had suffered for a year or two?

He also revisited the situation of Canada’s only big box book retailer (who long ago gave up on selling many books and now seem to give much more floor space and marketing attention to candles, housewares, decorative cushions and goodness knows what else):

“Indigo Books and Music” by Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine is licensed under CC0 1.0

In our review of Indigo’s travails in SHuSH 152, I complained, almost as an aside, about the chain’s commitment to selling crap general merchandise. It strikes me that putting blankets and candles on an equal footing with literature leaves the customer with the impression that the retailer believes books are nothing more than housewares or decorative objects. It trivializes them. Most of the feedback I received focused on this point. I’ll let author Judy Stoffman speak for the majority:

    Ken is absolutely right about Indigo having to learn or relearn to be a decent bookseller first instead of selling cushions and cheese boards. Here in Vancouver the store stocks few quality children’s books and no children’s music — staff has never heard of Dennis Lee. They never host a reading or book launch or an interesting talk about books. It’s a continuing source of frustration to readers like myself.

While we had his attention, we asked Ben McNally what he thought of Indigo’s merch strategy. He understood the attraction: “The margins are ok on that stuff. Books, you’re pretty much locked into a 40 per cent margin. You sell sweatshirts or something and you price them at whatever you want. So the margins are there, but long-term, I don’t know. I haven’t been into [an Indigo superstore] in a long time but I’m hearing that their stores are pretty spotty. Not looking healthy.”

Ben sells some gift cards, because people are often buying his books as gifts, but he’s otherwise light on general merchandise: “We’ve always shied away from that stuff because we want people to think that we’re serious about selling books.”

Serious about selling books. Imagine that.

I can see the sense in selling book-adjacent items, but Chapters/Indigo seemed to decide well before the pandemic that they needed to attract a non-reading audience who otherwise would never set foot in their retail stores. In the process, of course, they de-emphasized the advantage that big box stores have over smaller retailers: the width of stock they can offer. If you go into one of the cavernous Chapters or Indigo stores these days — and it’s been over two years since the last time I did — you rarely find much in the book sections beyond the “bestsellers” (taking up vast swathes of shelf space) and suggestions to go to their website if you are looking for something they don’t have on hand. If I have made the effort to go to your store, telling me I’d have been better off firing up a web browser isn’t the best method of luring me back again.

June 15, 2022

“Privacy” seems to be an archaic concept that doesn’t matter to the Canadian government

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist wonders why the Canadian government doesn’t seem to care at all about the privacy of Canadians:

“Privacy” by g4ll4is is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Over the past several weeks, there have been several important privacy developments in Canada including troubling privacy practices at well-known organizations such as the CBC and Tim Hortons, a call from business organizations for privacy reform, the nomination of a new privacy commissioner with little privacy experience, and a decision by a Senate committee to effectively overrule the government on border privacy rules. These developments raise the puzzling question of why the federal government – led by Innovation, Science and Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino, and Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez – are so indifferent to privacy, at best treating it as a low priority issue and at worst proposing dangerous measures or seemingly hoping to cash in on weak privacy laws in order to fund other policy priorities.

The privacy alarm bells have been ringing for weeks. For example, the Globe and Mail recently featured an important story on children’s privacy, working with Human Rights Watch and other media organizations to examine the privacy practices of dozens of online education platforms. The preliminary data suggests some major concerns in Canada, most notably with the CBC, whose CBC Kids platform is said to be “one of the most egregious cases in Canada and really all around the world”. The CBC responded that it “complies with relevant Canadian laws and regulations with regard to online privacy, and follows industry practices in audience analytics and privacy protection”. Yet that is the problem: Canada’s privacy laws are universally regarded as outdated and weak, thereby enabling privacy invasive practices with no consequences. Soon after, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada released findings in an investigation involving the Tim Hortons app tracking location data. First identified by then-National Post reporter James McLeod, the commissioner found privacy violations, yet Canadian privacy law does not include penalties for these violations.

Despite the obvious need for privacy reform – outgoing Privacy Commissioner of Canada Daniel Therrien reiterated the necessity for reform in his final speech as commissioner and business groups have made a similar call for privacy reform – the government seems indifferent to the issue. The nomination of Philippe Dufresne as the new privacy commissioner is a case in point. I don’t know Mr. Dufresne and I’m hoping that he proves to be a great commissioner. He certainly said many of the right things in his appearance before committee yesterday. However, the government’s choice is instructive. In choosing someone with no obvious privacy experience, the government sided instead with government managerial experience. Good managerial experience is valuable, but a career spent within government is not a training ground for pushing the policy envelope, pressuring governments to reform the law, and demanding that the private sector comply with it. The Dufresne choice signals that the government may be more comfortable with a well-managed agent of Parliament than with an agent of change.

June 10, 2022

Don’t think of it as “Shrinkflation” … think of it as corporations helpfully trying to help you lose weight (at the same or higher prices)

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

Companies have several different ways to cope with rising input prices, including just swallowing the increases without passing them on to consumers … stop laughing, I mean it’s at least theoretically possible, right? They can also just hike retail prices, which we’ve seen a fair bit of already, but that sometimes agitates consumers enough to materially depress sales. A sneakier way, which we’re also seeing a lot of, is to shrink the product but sell it for the same price. Sometimes, it will take a while for people to notice they’re getting less than they used to:

Original image from www.marpat.co.uk

The rise in consumer prices has rightly received a great deal of attention, as inflation hovers around 40-year highs. Everyone can see that virtually everything is getting more expensive, but fewer have noticed that many items are also getting smaller.

On Wednesday the Associated Press ran an article under the headline “No, you’re not imagining it — package sizes are shrinking.”

The AP spoke to one shopper, Alex Aspacher, who does a lot of shopping for his family of four in Ohio. He noticed he was still paying $9.99 for Swiss cheese even though the package had shrunk from a pound to 12 ounces.

“I was prepared for it to a degree, but there hasn’t been a limit to it so far,” Aspacher told the AP. “I hope we find that ceiling pretty soon.”

This phenomenon — known as “shrinkflation” — is nothing new, of course. It’s just more pronounced now than in any time in recent memory because inflation is much higher.

But what exactly is shrinkflation? As economist Peter Jacobsen explained last year, it’s simply a different kind of inflation.

“Shrinkflation is a form of inflation because you’d have to spend more money to get the same quantity or quality as you did in a previous year,” he explained. “The prices have remained the same, but the products are worse.”

The only difference is, instead of raising the price of an item or service, businesses are reducing the quantity or quality of it while keeping the price the same.

Edgar Dworsky, a consumer advocate who has tracked shrinkflation for decades, told the AP shrinkflation is rampant at the moment because of the underlying economic conditions.

“It comes in waves,” said Dworsky. “We happen to be in a tidal wave at the moment because of inflation.”

May 29, 2022

Approaching the “Chekhov’s gun” denouement in the Random Penguin-Simon & Schuster play

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

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte updates us on the state of play in the long-running drama in the publishing world:

SHuSH readers know that back in November 2020, the fattest of the world’s five big publishing companies, Penguin Random House, outbid the second fattest, Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins, to acquire a listless third member of that group, Simon & Schuster.

Regulators in the UK, Canada, and the USA immediately began studying the $2.1-billion cash deal to determine if it would result in too much concentration of ownership and not enough competitiveness in the big leagues of book publishing. Last November, the US department of justice decided it would and sued to block it. A trial is expected this summer. Penguin Random House has until November to close the deal or it expires (with PRH owing S&S a dead-deal fee of $200-million).

For those of you who think in literary terms, the deal is Chekhov’s gun, and we’re coming in hard on the third act. Either S&S gets shot (acquired) or the play ends in an anticlimax (although whoever has been stewarding the deal at PRH may get shot by its parent company, Bertelsmann.)

If the deal fails, we’re in for a sequel because the current owner of S&S, Paramount (formerly ViacomCBS) won’t want it back. It is a motion picture/television company in the process of selling everything it owns not directly related to screen entertainment. It hopes to cement its status as a fourth-rate streaming service. S&S no longer fits, if it ever did.

Our view of the PRH-S&S deal is that the department of justice suit will fail to block the merger and S&S will be swallowed whole. It will be difficult to present the merger as the end of competition in the book industry when there are still four large publishers operating in the US, and a shitload of mid-size and smaller publishers. Combined, PRH&S&S may amount to less than a third of the American trade book market, and as little as 20 per cent, depending on how you do the math. That’s a long way from monopoly.

The DOJ, moreover, has chosen to fight its battle on low ground. It’s saying that the deal is bad for competition in books generally, but it is particularly concerned that the merger will result in less competition for the services of writers of anticipated top-selling books, loosely defined as authors commanding huge advances. You read that right: the DOJ is seeking justice for the .001% of the literary world. We argued all this at length, and destroyed the government’s case back in SHuSH 123.

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