World War Two
Published 19 Jul 2022With 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?
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July 20, 2022
The Myth of Rosie the Riveter – On the Homefront 016
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July 19, 2022
Drawing the proper lessons from the massive Rogers outage earlier this month
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.
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QotD: The soul-less, dehumanizing “cube farm” (aka, “veal pens”)
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.
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July 11, 2022
Canadians deserve better than “core network maintenance problems” for critical cell phone and internet services
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?
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June 23, 2022
QotD: Mis-preparing our kids for the future
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.
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June 22, 2022
Riding the tiger almost always ends badly for the rider
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.
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June 19, 2022
The bookselling biz in Toronto
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.
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June 15, 2022
“Privacy” seems to be an archaic concept that doesn’t matter to the Canadian government
Michael Geist wonders why the Canadian government doesn’t seem to care at all about the privacy of Canadians:
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.
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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)
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.”
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May 29, 2022
Approaching the “Chekhov’s gun” denouement in the Random Penguin-Simon & Schuster play
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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May 28, 2022
“… the only thing that is history are any immediate hopes for a more competitive communications marketplace in Canada”
Michael Geist pans the latest official misinformation from the federal government on telecommunications legislation:
Innovation, Science and Industry François-Philippe Champagne unveiled the government’s proposed new telecom policy directive yesterday, hailing it as a “historic step”. However, a closer look at the policy suggests that the only thing that is history are any immediate hopes for a more competitive communications marketplace in Canada. Once again, the government has shown itself unwilling to take a strong stand in favour of consumers and competition, instead releasing a directive that largely retains the status quo and sends the message to CRTC Chair Ian Scott to stay the course. Indeed, the primary purpose behind the announcement would appear to be an attempt to shield the government from criticism over its decision to leave the controversial CRTC decision on wholesale Internet access intact, thereby denying consumers the prospect of lower costs for Internet services.
While the new proposed policy directive features much needed details and helpfully replaces the 2006 and 2019 directives that often conflicted and enabled the CRTC to pay little more than lip service to the issue, it sends a strong signal that it is happy with the Commission’s current approach. For example, the directive’s summary on measures to address wholesale Internet access are all about the status quo: “requiring large companies to continue to give access to competitors” or “directing the CRTC not to phase out the existing model for wholesale access.” These are not instructions to change.
The same is true for mobile wireless competition. Rather that using the opportunity to accelerate competition through mobile virtual network operators, the CRTC is instead to directed to improve its hybrid MVNO model “as necessary”. A full MVNO model? The government says it is prepared to support it “if needed”. Based on the current market, it apparently believes it isn’t needed.
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May 25, 2022
QotD: The “social responsibility” of business
Milton Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits”, New York Times, 1970-09-13.
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May 24, 2022
QotD: Portuguese art and creative genius
Then the economy recovered, they got jobs, a lot of them connected to or linked to government and all of that stopped. And of course with the EU there are no illegal stalls. I mean Papiere, bitte and all that.
And somehow, perhaps because the new generation knows they have all sorts of “benefits” and “support” coming to them and have never felt the bite of chaos, the crafts and arts in the stores are either startlingly mundane or bizarre. I’m still rather puzzled by entire “scenes from life” (including one that was an operating room) sculpted with penises instead of humans. I mean … who even buys that? Okay. We know who buys that. But do the German tourists and their nostalgie de la boue think they’re tapping into something uniquely “uninhibited and free”, some kind of wild Portuguese sexuality? Raises eyebrow. The Portuguese have been civilized land long before the Germans traded their furs for a place as Roman soldiers. And sure, the Romans could be startlingly and inappropriately sexual (I call to mind a mural, not out of place in a Roman middle class home that had monkeys copulating with children) but it didn’t mean that the culture was “free”, rather that they had different rules. Frankly, the sixties attempt to erase history has corrupted real art and … well, everything else.
Which is kind of the college student thing. Chaos and free time allows you to be very creative, but then you’re not organized enough to parlay that into a career. (I mean, if they’re destined to be the touristic “warm port” of Europe, perhaps they should consider letting real art flourish. Or even encouraging it. Grants for small businesses and young people. It beats the jobs that don’t exist. Just demand they be actually creative and accomplished, instead of giving grants for art that my kids could do at age two and about as interesting.
Sarah Hoyt, “The Ancient Enemy”, According to Hoyt, 2019-04-05.
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May 12, 2022
Too many cannabis retailers? “… a scrappy band of politicians is coming together to save main street from the excesses of the free market”
Steve Lafleur points out that the temporary surplus of cannabis stores will inevitably self-correct, as most retail situations tend to do on their own without needing the “helpful” hand of government to intervene:
Lately there has been a moral panic brewing in Toronto about the number of marijuana stores in Toronto. Take this New York Times article, for example, which captures the mood with the quotes from various Torontonians. Or this BlogTO piece. And here is a link to a story about two city councilors (including my own) pushing for a moratorium on new pot shops.
At least on its face, the panic hasn’t been about the availability of cannabis products or any kind of (unsupported) claims about pot shops attracting crime. Rather, the concern is that there is simply an unsustainable number of shops that may be cannibalizing other retail opportunities. So a scrappy band of politicians is coming together to save main street from the excesses of the free market.
What could possibly go wrong?
The boom in pot shops is real. Legal marijuana retailing is a new phenomenon, and there has been a gold rush in the sector. This was first evident in financial markets during the 2018-19 weed stock boom (which went bust) as investors sought to capitalize on the rollout of legal marijuana sales in Canada. There are now nearly 2,000 pot shops in Ontario, and it’s not hard to find two on the same block. People aren’t wrong to point out that there has been a rapid buildout of marijuana retailers. Hence the push by City Council and now the Ontario Liberal Party, to restrict clustering of pot shops.
To be sure, new trends can push out old trends. And this can be frustrating. For instance, one insidious trend recently replaced two of my two favourite hole-in-the-wall restaurants: poke bowls. The trendy Hawaiian rice bowls have taken cities by storm. Businesses, understandably, want to capitalize on the trend. If people want it, businesses will sell it.
Trends can create dislocations. No one knows in advance how many poke restaurants — or pot shops — the market will bear, where they should locate, or what their operating hours should be. But through a process of trial and error, retailers and consumers will figure this out. And if it is just a flash in the pan trend, many will fail.
But that’s okay. That’s just the creative destruction of the market at work. It’s not always pretty, but it’s how we get new products and services. It’s a process. Sometimes the market rewards annoying things. But trying any effort to plan these things in a way that avoids over-saturation of short-lived trendy businesses would be rife with unintended consequences.
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May 4, 2022
From “merely” censoring your words to seizing your funds
Matt Taibbi on PayPal’s recent moves to quash independent media reporting that disagrees with or contradicts the “official story”:
In the last week or so, the online payment platform PayPal without explanation suspended the accounts of a series of individual journalists and media outlets, including the well-known alt sites Consortium and MintPress. Each received a variation of the following message:
Unlike many on the list, Consortium editor Joe Lauria succeeded in reaching a human being at the company in search of details about the frozen or “held” funds referenced in the note. The PayPal rep told him that if the company decided “there was a violation” after a half-year review period, then “it is possible” PayPal would keep the $9,348.14 remaining in Consortium‘s account, as “damages”.
“A secretive process in which they could award themselves damages, not by a judge or a jury,” Lauria says. “Totally in secret.”
Consortium, founded by the late investigative reporter Robert Parry, has been critical of NATO and the Pentagon and a consistent source of skeptical reporting about Russiagate, as well as one of just a few outlets to regularly cover the Julian Assange case with any sympathy for the accused. Ironically, one of the site’s primary themes involves exploring disinformation emanating from the intelligence community. The site has had content disrupted by platforms like Facebook before, but now its pockets are being picked in addition.
This episode ups the ante again on the content moderation movement, toward the world hinted at in the response to the Canadian trucker protests, where having the wrong opinions can result in your money being frozen or seized. Going after cash is a big jump from simply deleting speech, with a much bigger chilling effect. This is especially true in the alternative media world, where money has long been notoriously tight, and the loss of a few thousand dollars here or there can have a major effect on a site, podcast, or paper.
As MintPress founder and executive director Mnar Adley points out, the current era of content moderation — characterized by private platforms either overtly or covertly working with government to identify accounts for censure — really began with PayPal’s historic decision in 2010 to halt donations to Wikileaks. In that case, PayPal acted after receiving a letter from the State Department claiming the site’s activities were illegal.
“PayPal banning donations from WikiLeaks really set up the blueprint for today’s censorship”, Adley says.
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