Quotulatiousness

May 3, 2022

Is all of social media just a “giant domestic surveillance operation”?

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

Severian posted this last week, but I’m only just getting caught up now:

I was wrong about Musk buying Twitter. Lot of that going around — the Z Man got a whole podcast on “avoiding error” from his misread of the situation. It’s well worth a listen. I, too, had a “hot take” on Musk’s offer — not that it was particularly hot, as most folks on this side were saying it, but I too thought it was a stunt. After all, Musk, like Bezos and all the other “new commerce” billionaires, don’t exist without massive government support. I figured his “offer” was stoyak — he’s got something in the works in the Imperial Capital and needed to play hardball with somebody.

But I was also working off my longstanding assumption that Twitter, Faceborg, and all the rest are essentially CIA / NSA fronts. When I first heard about Facebook, my first thought was “Wait, don’t we already have Friendster? What does this bring to the table?” My second thought was the first one I’d had about Friendster: “That’s clever, I guess, but how on earth is this going to make money? Even if they saturate it with ads, to the point where it’s unusable — which will happen in about two weeks — they can’t monetize your personal data any farther. People are pretty set in their habits — once the algorithm figures out you’re the kind of guy who likes anime and New Wave music, any further data is useless.”

Being a much more naive, trusting sort back then, I figured it was just stupidity. You know, Pets.com level stupidity. The VC boys were trying to get another dotcom bubble inflated, because if the first one proved anything, it’s that people are dumb and will keep falling for the same obvious scam over and over. I could hear them in the board rooms: “This time, instead of sticking ‘cyber’ in front of everything, we’ll call it ‘Web 2.0.’ Cha-ching!”

Obviously that didn’t happen. So I went with the common explanation that was floating around in those days, that “social media” sites made their money by selling your data to advertisers. But that doesn’t pass the smell test either. For one thing, as I said above, your habits don’t change very much. For another, as anyone who has any experience with them knows, those algorithms really suck. The other day, for instance, I was listening to some old music one of the streaming music sites. And I mean really old. Nothing I’d played the whole morning had been composed after the 17th century, but the service’s algorithm was convinced that what I’d really like to listen to next was some rapper.

Indeed, the whole point of the ads on Pandora, Spotify, whatever seems to be: To annoy you to the point where you pay for their premium service. Pandora, for instance, either really really really believes I want a Surface Pro 8 and some Taco Bell, or they’re just playing those ads every two songs to annoy me into buying the premium service (which is every ad that isn’t Surface Pro or Taco Bell). Which is just bizarre, because I haven’t had Taco Bell since college — which was 30 years ago, and I paid cash — and this essay right here is the first time I have ever even typed the words “Surface Pro 8”, much less looked at the product.

I really wouldn’t be surprised that the “algorithm” is reading itself. Hey, this guy sure has seen a lot of ads for Taco Bell and Surface Pro! He must really want some!

But the algorithm for companies whose entire business model is e-commerce is no better. Amazon seems to have gone to a “push” model — they must be selling their suppliers on the idea that they can push you stuff, which is why they always pimp the same four or five items in the “Amazon’s Choice” recommendations, no matter what you’re searching for. And these again are laughably wrong — the only things I get off Amazon are used history and philosophy books, and stuff for my dog. Based on this, they have concluded that what I’m really looking for are chick lit and beach gear.

Given all that, I came to the conclusion that “social media” (and Amazon too, probably) really only have one customer, who really does have a use for your data, and that customer’s initials are CIA. It’s a giant domestic surveillance operation.

And why wouldn’t it be? The Regime has had a legitimacy problem for a long time, and a “feedback loop” problem for longer than that. Even if we assume no ulterior motives whatsoever — fat chance, but let’s stipulate — the fact remains that public opinion polling, however you want to define it, has a similar problem as psychological studies. Since the vast majority of study participants are college undergrads, what you get is WEIRD — that’s Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic, and also in a very narrow age range. Psych studies that purport to be universal are, at their very best, snapshots inside the head of the BCG.

If you haven’t encountered the Basic College Girl, he provided a thumbnail sketch here.

QotD: Every social media platform

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

Mme D is trying to connect two social media accounts so she won’t have to upload the same photo twice. Frankly, she doesn’t even want to upload it once. She’d rather not have to deal with it at all.

Mme D does not do social media. Never has; never will.

This is a little tiresome because she needs to have an active social media presence to promote awareness of her brand new local business. Oh yes, social media is an absolute necessity. All the influencers say so, and we should always do what influencers tell us to otherwise they won’t be influencers any more. And, well, that would be a disaster, wouldn’t it?

I once tried to impress on her the importance of UGC. For weeks afterwards she looked at me in a funny way until we eventually cleared the air by establishing that UGC does not stand for Universal Genital Castration. Given that 25 per cent of user-generated content comprises dick pix, this was a misunderstanding too far.

“Social media is a time-wasting pit of crazies, pornographers, criminals, and perpetually angry nobodies flinging insults at each other,” she replied.

For someone who doesn’t do social media, she has a remarkably strong insight into it.

Alistair Dabbs, “How to get banned from social media without posting a thing”, The Register, 2022-01-28.

May 1, 2022

Despite the ever-present smartphone, people are still reading actual books in pretty good numbers

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

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte provides some mildly hopeful numbers for both readers and writers:

I was having coffee this week with a former star journalist who now (like so many) works in a journalist-adjacent industry. “Who reads books?” she wondered.

It’s a question I’m often asked by journalists who these days get a lot of their information from Twitter. The chore of keeping up with their feed leaves little time for anything else. My guest still read books and belongs to a book club, but she asked the question all the same.

According to the authorities at the PEW Institute, 77% of Americans read books in 2021 (or, to be more precise, read one or more books in one or more format—print, audiobook, ebook). That’s not bad considering only 86% of American adults can read.

Only 21% of women read no books, and 26% of men. Eighty per cent of white people read books (as compared to 62% of Hispanics).

Good news for the future of book reading: 81% of adults under the age of fifty read books compared to 72% of adults over the age of fifty.

More on the demographics: 69% of those earning less than $30,000 a year read books, while 85% of those earning over $75,000 read books; 61% of those with a high-school (or less) education read books; 89% of college graduates read books.

According to PEW, the average reader manages twelve a year.

There is some evidence that reading is a declining habit: according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average time spent reading for pleasure declined from twenty-three minutes a day to seventeen minutes a day from 2005 to 2017. But the least decline was among young adults, 18 to 34 (less than 1%).

In fact, there is good evidence that the much-maligned millennials read more than their parents, and they overwhelmingly prefer hard copies to digital books. Even better, the millennials pay for their books:

QotD: How Thomas Sowell abandoned Marxism

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

The brilliant Thomas Sowell, when in college, considered himself a Marxist. Asked what changed him, Sowell said, “Evidence.”

After completing undergrad at Harvard and obtaining a master’s in economics, Sowell landed a summer internship with the Department of Labor. While there, he researched the impact of minimum wage law on employment. Sowell learned two things, both of which he found startling. First, minimum wage laws create job loss by pricing the unskilled out of the labor force. Second, Sowell discovered that “the people in the labor department really were not interested in that, because the administration of the minimum wage was supplying one-third of the money that was keeping the labor department going. … I realized that institutions have their own agendas and their own incentives.” In short, Sowell found that the Department of Labor did not care about the real-world effects of the minimum wage law. He credits this experience, this search for evidence, with having the “biggest” impact on his thinking.

Larry Elder, “If $15 Minimum Wage Is Such a Good Idea, Why Did AOC’s Bar Close Down?”, TownHall.com, 2019-03-21.

April 30, 2022

“The NFL Draft is not socialism. It’s capitalism on steroids”

Filed under: Business, Football, History, Sports, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Peter Jacobsen refutes the claim that the NFL Draft is like socialism:

Once we recognize that teams aren’t really business competitors, and insofar as there is athletic competition it’s tempered to maximize profit, the claim that the draft is socialism rings pretty hollow.

But, as if this weren’t enough, history also debunks the claim that the draft is a socialist institution.

In 1934, Minnesota Gophers’ senior running back, Stan Kostka, led his team to an undefeated season and made himself the top prospect for professional teams. As a result, teams engaged in a bidding war which ended in Stan going to the (no longer existing) Brooklyn Dodgers.

As a result of the bidding war, Kostka became the highest paid player in the NFL (with a $5,000 contract).

The owner of the Philadelphia Eagles was so mad about losing the bidding war that he proposed the idea of the draft to the NFL the following year.

So, in other words, the NFL draft started as a way for team owners to cooperate to keep player wages below where they would be if bidding wars were allowed.

To be fair, I haven’t read everything Marx wrote. But something tells me a system where capital owners cooperate to keep employer bidding wars from occurring isn’t praised in some obscure work he and Engels published. In fact, this is about as opposite to Marx as you can get.

In the modern day, players have formed unions to combat owner cooperation, but the point remains the same. The NFL is a highly sophisticated organizational structure that allows athletic competitors to cooperate in the goal of making money.

So, insofar as Americans enjoy the exciting games created by the draft system, they don’t have socialism to thank. Instead they should thank the cooperation facilitated by self-interest channeled through the free market.

The NFL Draft is not socialism. It’s capitalism on steroids.

April 27, 2022

QotD: Competition

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

In a normal industry (e.g., restaurant ownership) competition should drive profit margins close to zero. Want to open an Indian restaurant in Mountain View? There will be another on the same street, and two more just down the way. If you automate every process that can be automated, mercilessly pursue efficiency, and work yourself and your employees to the bone – then you can just barely compete on price. You can earn enough money to live, and to not immediately give up in disgust and go into another line of business (after all, if you didn’t earn that much, your competitors would already have given up in disgust and gone into another line of business, and your task would be easier). But the average Indian restaurant is in an economic state of nature, and its life will be nasty, brutish, and short.

This was the promise of the classical economists: capitalism will optimize for consumer convenience, while keeping businesses themselves lean and hungry. And it was Marx’s warning: businesses will compete so viciously that nobody will get any money, and eventually even the capitalists themselves will long for something better. Neither the promise nor the warning has been borne out: business owners are often comfortable and sometimes rich. Why? Thiel says it’s because they have escaped competition and become at least a little monopoly-like.

Thiel hates having to describe how businesses succeed, because he thinks it’s too anti-inductive to reduce to a formula:

    Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Zero to One”, Slate Star Codex, 2019-01-31.

April 21, 2022

QotD: Self-promotion in the modern job market

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

Self-promotion is not new, but never before has it been what theology was in the Middle Ages, the queen of the sciences.

A friend of mine, an Indian pediatrician, applied for temporary jobs in England and was considered for none of them. My friend was puzzled by this, for he had worked in England before and had good references. My wife, who knew the system from having worked in it at a senior level, asked to see his curriculum vitae that he sent to prospective employers, and soon spotted the problem: He boasted of nothing, and the culture had changed. What was necessary, my wife said, was to inflate his accomplishments as boastfully as possible. There was no risk that anyone would discover his exaggerations. He had once worked as a voluntary pediatric consultant to Mother Teresa’s charity in Calcutta; he had not even mentioned it in his CV, let alone made it sound as if he were all but the founder of her charity. If he once had helped an old lady across the road with her shopping, he should transmute this in his CV into a lifelong concern for the condition of the elderly; and so on and so forth.

It was all rather disgusting, but it worked like a charm: He immediately had offers of jobs aplenty, though of course his real worth as a doctor remained precisely the same. Reticence, which is to me a far more attractive quality than boastfulness, will get you nowhere, and nothing must be left to speak for itself. You must blow your own trumpet, if possible louder than anyone else’s.

Nowadays there are professional coaches in how to “big yourself up”, as the charming phrase has it, in applications for jobs or places in institutions. The son of a friend of mine used one to get into medical school. Lying will go undetected, but even if detected will do you no lasting harm. The most minor accomplishment can and should be made to sound like evidence of genius. It is almost a condition of employment that one should boast and write an advertisement for oneself.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Be Your Own Advert”, Taki’s Magazine, 2022-01-13.

April 20, 2022

QotD: Innovation and risk-taking are anathema to Fortune 500 companies

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

I learned the danger of excessive caution long ago, when I consulted to huge Fortune 500 companies. The single biggest problem I encountered — shared by virtually every large company I analyzed — was investing too much of their time and money into defending old ways of doing business, rather than building new ones. We even had a proprietary tool for quantifying this misallocation of resources — which spelled out the mistakes in precise dollars and cents.

But senior management hated hearing this, and always insisted that defending the old business units was their safest bet. After I encountered this embedded mindset again and again and saw its consequences, I reached the painful conclusion that the safest path is often the most dangerous. If you pursue a strategy — whether in business or your personal life — that avoids all risk, you might flourish in the short run, but you flounder over the long term. Sad to say, that’s what now happening in the music business. Keep your head in the sand long enough, and you suffocate.

The leading companies in music had many chances to reinvent themselves over the last quarter century, taking bold action that might have transformed themselves and the entire culture. But they didn’t want to take any risks. They could have invested in new technologies — but didn’t, instead allowing Silicon Valley companies to swallow up most of the profits from music in the 21st century. They could have signed and nurtured new talent — but didn’t, preferring to invest in 50-year-old songs. They could have embraced exciting new sounds — but didn’t because the algorithms and dominant formulas reward rehashes of the old sounds.

Ted Gioia, “Is Old Music Killing New Music?”, The Honest Broker, 2022-01-19.

April 17, 2022

The end of the (pandemic-induced) book boom

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

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte metaphorically collects his winnings from predicting nearly a year back that the boom in book sales during 2020/2021 would not last once the pandemic lockdowns began to ease off:

I noted last June in SHuSH 103, “Big Guys Lose Their Minds”, that book sales, especially for the leading firms — Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Simon & Schuster — were ramping up during the pandemic, reaching 10% to 20% above 2019 levels. I also noted that the numbers were making some of these publishers giddy.

HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray, for instance, gave an interview in which he proclaimed that humanity had entered a new era of permanently higher book sales and added that he was ratcheting up his spending to meet the increased demand.

“We are being aggressive in terms of buying books. We’ve seen the book pie grow, maybe 15 percent,” says Murray, “and so our response, which is part opportunistic and part defensive, is to be aggressive in buying right now. Because if that pie remains large, we want to make sure that we get a nice share of the larger pie … we want to make sure that we have a lot of new, exciting books in the future that will maintain our revenues at the current levels.” Yikes.

In that June newsletter, I anticipated the world returning to normal and book sales falling back to earth as vaccinations took hold and the coronavirus waned (we also promised to check back in a year — so here we are, a few months early).

It did not feel dangerous, that prediction. While it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish between a temporary spike (or drop) in sales due to extraordinary circumstances and the beginning of a long-term trend, it’s always safest to pick extraordinary-and-temporary amid an unprecedented pandemic with people locked up and not behaving normally. Also, my buddy Jack David at ECW Press agreed with me and he’s been doing this forever. And it wasn’t like Brian Murray had any evidence to back his claim that an era of permanently higher book sales had dawned.

[…]

The share prices of big publishing companies don’t tell the same sort of story because they tend not to be pure-play book publishers: Simon & Schuster, for instance, is owned by multimedia giant Viacom; HarperCollins by the omnipresent Rupert Murdoch; Penguin Random House is less than a quarter of Bertelsmann’s business. But first-quarter 2022 revenue figures for those firms are available and they show that the great give-back is underway in the book world, too.

The headline in Publisher’s Weekly reads “The Book Sales Boom is over”. Here’s the US data:

And that’s just the beginning. Sales will continue to slide throughout 2022 and into 2023 as the world normalizes, people concentrate on doing all the things they’ve not been able to do the past two years, run through the extra cash they accumulated in the pandemic, and resume their former library borrowing habits.

What happens at the big publishing companies? If, as Murray’s comments would lead you to suspect, they’ve budgeted and spent for the good times to continue, unhappy times await.

QotD: How jobs differ from school

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

In industrialized countries, people belong to one institution or another at least until their twenties. After all those years you get used to the idea of belonging to a group of people who all get up in the morning, go to some set of buildings, and do things that they do not, ordinarily, enjoy doing. Belonging to such a group becomes part of your identity: name, age, role, institution. If you have to introduce yourself, or someone else describes you, it will be as something like, John Smith, age 10, a student at such and such elementary school, or John Smith, age 20, a student at such and such college.

When John Smith finishes school he is expected to get a job. And what getting a job seems to mean is joining another institution. Superficially it’s a lot like college. You pick the companies you want to work for and apply to join them. If one likes you, you become a member of this new group. You get up in the morning and go to a new set of buildings, and do things that you do not, ordinarily, enjoy doing. There are a few differences: life is not as much fun, and you get paid, instead of paying, as you did in college. But the similarities feel greater than the differences. John Smith is now John Smith, 22, a software developer at such and such corporation.

In fact John Smith’s life has changed more than he realizes. Socially, a company looks much like college, but the deeper you go into the underlying reality, the more different it gets.

What a company does, and has to do if it wants to continue to exist, is earn money. And the way most companies make money is by creating wealth. Companies can be so specialized that this similarity is concealed, but it is not only manufacturing companies that create wealth. A big component of wealth is location. […] If wealth means what people want, companies that move things also create wealth. Ditto for many other kinds of companies that don’t make anything physical. Nearly all companies exist to do something people want.

And that’s what you do, as well, when you go to work for a company. But here there is another layer that tends to obscure the underlying reality. In a company, the work you do is averaged together with a lot of other people’s. You may not even be aware you’re doing something people want. Your contribution may be indirect. But the company as a whole must be giving people something they want, or they won’t make any money. And if they are paying you x dollars a year, then on average you must be contributing at least x dollars a year worth of work, or the company will be spending more than it makes, and will go out of business.

Someone graduating from college thinks, and is told, that he needs to get a job, as if the important thing were becoming a member of an institution. A more direct way to put it would be: you need to start doing something people want. You don’t need to join a company to do that. All a company is is a group of people working together to do something people want. It’s doing something people want that matters, not joining the group.*

For most people the best plan probably is to go to work for some existing company. But it is a good idea to understand what’s happening when you do this. A job means doing something people want, averaged together with everyone else in that company.

    * Many people feel confused and depressed in their early twenties. Life seemed so much more fun in college. Well, of course it was. Don’t be fooled by the surface similarities. You’ve gone from guest to servant. It’s possible to have fun in this new world. Among other things, you now get to go behind the doors that say “authorized personnel only.” But the change is a shock at first, and all the worse if you’re not consciously aware of it.

Paul Graham, “How to Make Wealth”, Paul Graham, 2004-04.

April 11, 2022

QotD: Programmers as craftsmen

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

The people most likely to grasp that wealth can be created are the ones who are good at making things, the craftsmen. Their hand-made objects become store-bought ones. But with the rise of industrialization there are fewer and fewer craftsmen. One of the biggest remaining groups is computer programmers.

A programmer can sit down in front of a computer and create wealth. A good piece of software is, in itself, a valuable thing. There is no manufacturing to confuse the issue. Those characters you type are a complete, finished product. If someone sat down and wrote a web browser that didn’t suck (a fine idea, by the way), the world would be that much richer.*

Everyone in a company works together to create wealth, in the sense of making more things people want. Many of the employees (e.g. the people in the mailroom or the personnel department) work at one remove from the actual making of stuff. Not the programmers. They literally think the product, one line at a time. And so it’s clearer to programmers that wealth is something that’s made, rather than being distributed, like slices of a pie, by some imaginary Daddy.

It’s also obvious to programmers that there are huge variations in the rate at which wealth is created. At Viaweb we had one programmer who was a sort of monster of productivity. I remember watching what he did one long day and estimating that he had added several hundred thousand dollars to the market value of the company. A great programmer, on a roll, could create a million dollars worth of wealth in a couple weeks. A mediocre programmer over the same period will generate zero or even negative wealth (e.g. by introducing bugs).

This is why so many of the best programmers are libertarians. In our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses. When those far removed from the creation of wealth — undergraduates, reporters, politicians — hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to think injustice! An experienced programmer would be more likely to think is that all? The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software.

Wealth can be created without being sold. Scientists, till recently at least, effectively donated the wealth they created. We are all richer for knowing about penicillin, because we’re less likely to die from infections. Wealth is whatever people want, and not dying is certainly something we want. Hackers often donate their work by writing open source software that anyone can use for free. I am much the richer for the operating system FreeBSD, which I’m running on the computer I’m using now, and so is Yahoo, which runs it on all their servers.

    * This essay was written before Firefox.

Paul Graham, “How to Make Wealth”, Paul Graham, 2004-04.

April 10, 2022

“Canadian media, ‘independent’ or otherwise, is about as sparkly as dry toast”

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

It’s impossible to disagree with the editors at The Line about the negative impact of government involvement, oversight and subsidization of the media, and the ensuing neutralization (or even Pablumization) of the news presented to Canadians:

“Newspaper Boxes” by Randy Landicho is licensed under CC BY 2.0

There is no way to create such a system without an inherently political process to answer philosophically fraught questions like “what is news?” and “what is a journalist?” And that takes us ever closer to the perilous path of state credentialization of a profession that only operates properly when it is free of both undue government interference and of government assistance. State meddling is bad for journalism whether the intent be good, bad or indifferent.

Every outlet is beholden to the people who cut the cheque, and if your business model relies on impressing government grant gifters or corporate social responsibility committees, then your content is going to reflect the milquetoast sensibilities of your true audience.

Which, bluntly, is why so much Canadian media, “independent” or otherwise, is about as sparkly as dry toast. Whole grain. To rely on government money is not only philosophically untenable, it is almost inherently corrupting. There are public journalism enterprises in Canada, including, for instance, the CBC and TVO, and your Line editors contribute to both. You can trust us when we tell you that the people in charge of those organizations work very, very hard to avoid the impossible conflicts public funding of journalism cannot help but produce. The readers can judge the results, but no one in either outlets pretends it’s easy. It’s not.

And in case it needs to be noted here again, The Line accepts no public cash. Not a dime. We rely entirely on paid subscriptions from our reader base, and we like it that way. Our relationship with you, the reader, is what allows us to be risky, innovative, and occasionally belligerent. You’re here because you like us — you really like us! — and as a result, we serve only you. That doesn’t mean that you’re always going to agree with us, of course, but rather that you can trust us to tell you what we really think.

We looked into the QCJO program and although we believe we would qualify for the program, we are simply too horrified by its mere existence to consider applying. This puts us at a severe competitive disadvantage, and one that can only be overcome by outperforming everyone else.

April 9, 2022

“Woke Disney” is far from a new thing

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

Geoff Shullenberger points out that Disney’s reputation for family-friendly media rests rather uneasily on the corporation’s actual products:

“Disney is the worst enemy of family harmony.” You’d be forgiven for thinking those words were uttered yesterday, given the number of conservative politicians and pundits castigating Disney for “grooming children” following its criticism of the “Don’t say gay” bill.

In fact, the statement appeared just over 50 years ago, in a polemical analysis of Disney cartoons written by two Marxist militants, the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman and the Belgian sociologist Armand Mattelart. How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic was published in Chile during the brief rule of Salvador Allende as part of an attempt by Allende’s leftist allies to push back against American cultural influence. The book became a bestseller, but after Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup, it was banned and publicly burned.

The Right’s current lament for the betrayal of “traditional families who want to hold onto innocent entertainment for their kids” proceeds from the premise that this “woke Disney” is a deviation from the company’s benevolent past. But Dorfman and Mattelart, all the way back in 1971, contested this assumption of innocence. Although their methodology is Marxian and their aims overtly anti-capitalist, their allegations foreshadow the American Right’s current concerns in surprising ways.

[…]

How to Read Donald Duck contains many of the expected Left-wing criticisms of patriarchy and gender roles, but it also includes observations that might be surprising to ideologues today. Notably, as one illustration of the propaganda functions taken on by Disney in the Global South, the authors remark that the US Agency for International Development has circulated films featuring Disney characters promoting contraception. They reinforce this association with the title of their chapter on Disney family dynamics: “Uncle, buy me a contraceptive …”

Like many radicals at the time, Dorfman and Mattelart saw the US state’s growing interest in controlling fertility in the developing world as consistent with a broader campaign to suppress the value placed on family in the subject nations of its economic empire; this was deemed to be in tension with values such as efficiency, productivity, individualism, and competition. Disney’s exclusion of references to reproductive sexuality, in this light, looks less like an attempt to protect childhood innocence, than part and parcel of the larger modern decoupling of sex from reproduction.

It all suggests that the supposed sexual innocence of Disney’s dreamscapes was never aligned with “family values” in the first place and the Right’s current war on Disney isn’t about family — it is simply the latest phase of its realisation that corporate America has now largely aligned itself with the values of the cultural Left.

For, in fact, Disney’s vast influence on the imaginations of children has been enabled by market society’s weakening of the authority of the family. With parents overburdened by the demands of work, important aspects of child-rearing are entrusted to the entertainment industry. Disney has capitalised on this exploding demand more than any other company. If we take “grooming” to simply mean instilling values alien to the family into children, Dorfman and Mattelart would suggest that Disney has never been innocent of this charge.

March 20, 2022

Florida’s new passenger rail service

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

Thomas Walker-Werth contrasts the different experiences of California and Florida in trying to build new passenger railway services:

“BrightLine – The Return of FEC passenger service” by BBT609 is licensed under CC BY 2.0

When the Federal Government ordered the construction of the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s and 1960s (at a cost to taxpayers of roughly $580 billion in 2022 dollars), it all but killed America’s privately operated passenger railroads. Since then, rail travel in America has mostly consisted of government-subsidized Amtrak services of deteriorating quality that amble across the country, catering to a niche market of leisure travelers and those with no other options. On the busy Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington D.C. there is still enough demand to operate a busy, profitable service, but elsewhere Amtrak’s services are too slow, inconvenient, and infrequent to effectively compete with highways and airlines.

But with gas prices rising and traffic congestion strangling many American cities, passengers, investors, and government planners are all reconsidering railroads. Several new projects have sprung up across the country, aiming to link major cities a few hundred miles apart, where a train might provide a more convenient journey than a plane, car, or bus. Some of these projects are led by state governments, others by private companies. The contrast between the two is dramatic. To illuminate that difference, compare the government-run California High Speed Rail project with Brightline, a new private rail system in Florida.

Approved in 2008, California High Speed Rail (CHSR) was expected to deliver a 520-mile two-track, electrified high-speed railway on an all-new route between Los Angeles and San Francisco by 2029. Fourteen years later, CHSR is now only expected to have a 171-mile single-track section between Madera and Bakersfield will be operational by 2030. Meanwhile the project’s cost has ballooned to $80 billion from an original budget of $33 billion, and costs are expected to rise further to $100 billion, or triple the original budget.

Meanwhile in Florida, a very different kind of passenger railroad is already up and running. Brightline was launched in 2012 by the Florida East Coast Railway, a private freight railroad. Unlike CHSR, Brightline mostly uses existing routes, removing the need to acquire (or appropriate) large amounts of land. Instead of building the whole line before beginning any passenger services (as CHSR is doing), Brightline began construction on a 70-mile section from Miami to West Palm Beach in 2014 and opened it to passengers in 2018. This meant that Brightline already had an operational, revenue-producing service before embarking on the 170-mile northward extension to Orlando Airport. That extension is expected to open in 2023, and the entire project will cost about $1.75 billion, raised through private financing.

This equates to about $7.3 million per mile for Brightline, compared to $153.8 million per mile for CHSR (using the current $80 billion budget). Why will CHSR cost at least twenty times more per mile than Brightline? How has Brightline managed to deliver a high-speed intercity passenger rail system within ten years whereas CHSR needs twenty-two years to deliver an incomplete, scaled-down version of its original plan? Much of the answer comes down to the fundamental nature of public works projects such as CHSR.

This isn’t quite a fair apples-to-apples comparison between Brightline and CHSR, as Brightline’s services will have to interact with freight trains on conventional rails while CHSR — if ever completed — will be a separate line hosting only CHSR’s own high-speed passenger trains. Brightline’s trains will probably not have the theoretical top speed that CHSR is intended to use, as the physical plant of rail lines intended for mixed-use traffic will limit the speeds due to signalling, traffic density and braking distances of the respective types of trains.

March 18, 2022

The “DeSantis Doctrine”

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

Kurt Schlichter confesses a man-crush on Florida governor Ron DeSantis:

Governor Ron DeSantis speaking at the 2021 Student Action Summit hosted by Turning Point USA at the Tampa Convention Center in Tampa, Florida on 18 July, 2021.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.

You gotta hand it to a guy who convinces Democrats to die on the hill of defending perverted groomers talking about sex with little school kids. It’s on-brand for their fellow travelers at The Lincoln Project, but you would think that Democrats actually want to win elections. But no – they want to make the schools safe for pedos, and they don’t care who knows it. But they’ll care plenty in November when parents around the country come out and vote for The Party of Not Hitting on Der Kinder.
Donald Trump has his record of achievement – economic success and peace abroad. But Ron DeSantis has the DeSantis Doctrine, sort of like the Monroe Doctrine, except instead of keeping shady foreigners out of our hemisphere, the DeSantis Doctrine keeps woke fascists out of our lives.

It was DeSantis who started the fire that burned the pyre of Democrat hopes and dreams they jumped onto in their campaign against the Florida anti-grooming statute. But that’s only his latest fight with the elite. DeSantis has been laying down the law in Florida, literally, and in a way even Donald Trump never did. At some level, Donald Trump still has some residual respect for the trappings of the elite. He’s impressed by name universities and huge corporations, and for all his much-justified complaining, he still cavorts with institutions that hate him, like the NYT. He’s not yet completely done with the institutions, but DeSantis is. DeSantis is all honey badger, laying waste and making the rubble bounce.

It’s the DeSantis Doctrine, and it’s summed up this way: Your garbage institutions don’t mean Schiff to me. I am going to ruthlessly wield my power to protect normal people from your depredations. And I’m going to smile doing it.

Did the head of China-hugging Disney really think he was going to push Big Ron around? The nattering twenty-somethings and woke pronoun people in his company and on social media thought they could leverage their power to make this huge Florida employer bring DeSantis to heel over the threat that creepy weirdos could no longer chat up kindergartners about sex in schools. So this dude – who shrimps Chi Com toes even as his commie masters torment, torture, and terminate Uighurs and prop up Putin – comes out and really expects that DeSantis will fold. And then DeSantis, delighted at the chance to figuratively post a rodent skull on a pike, told the Mouse to pound some Sunshine State sand.

But I was informed by all the smart people with blue checks trapped in a vortex, which keeps them forever in the year 2005, that conservatives were supposed to hate regulation and love big corporations.

Well, things change – among them, the left, which decided that it was going to weaponize every institution against us, including corporations. A key element of that campaign is neutralizing normal people’s retaliation by barring us – through the application of principles that exist only in a paradigm that no longer does – from exercising our own power. “It’s so unseemly for a governor to attack a corporation!” Perhaps, in a world where corporations tend to literally mind their own business and not use their economic power to affect policy. But it’s ridiculous to expect that, in a world where corporations regularly use their power to affect politics, we normal people are somehow barred from using our own power – political power, including the power to regulate – to protect ourselves. You don’t get to change the rules, then expect us to remain bound by the old ones.

Well, you can expect that – many do, in fact – but Ron DeSantis scoffs at such unilateral disarmament. He’s all about the massive retaliation.

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