Back when Abercrombie & Fitch was the NYC outfiter for affluent sportsmen, it carried high end guns and fishing tackle and outdoor equipment. Its Madison Avenue store had a shooting range and a casting pool on the roof. Griffin & Howe custom rifles, London best shotguns, and Payne fly rods were waiting there for sale. Alas! the real Abercrombie & Fitch died in the mid-1970s.
The name changed hands repeatedly and was revived in the late 1990s as a completely different kind of entity. The new revival markets sissy fashions to metrosexuals. It’s rather as if after Papa Hemingway shot himself, his name was sold repeatedly, and revived decades later as “Ernestine Hemingway”, an authoress of Gay Romance Novels.
David Zincavage, “From the Good Old Days: Abercrombie & Fitch, Change Sucks”, Never Yet Melted, 2021-08-24.
November 27, 2021
QotD: The zombie that used to be Abercrombie & Fitch
November 25, 2021
QotD: Corporate coercion can be just as dangerous as state coercion
And in an ideal world, yes, that makes sense. We do not live in anything resembling an ideal world.
In an era when three (two really) credit card companies and a handful of payment processors have an off-switch for pretty much any on-line business they take a dislike to (unless they are called Apple or Amazon), as more and more of the economy goes virtual, what we have is turn-key tyranny for sale to the highest bidder, and the highest bidder is always going to be a state. I am uncertain what the solution is, but as we do not live in a “free market”, not convinced “so go set up your own global credit card and payment processing network” adds anything meaningful to the discussion. It is a bit like saying when the local electric provider turns off the power in your office (or home) because they disapprove of what you are doing “so go set up your own electric supply company”, as if that would be allowed to happen.
Perry de Havilland, “This is what so many libertarians cannot understand …”, Samizdata, 2021-08-22.
November 21, 2021
QotD: Britain’s middle class after WW1
England is a country in which property and financial power are concentrated in very few hands. Few people in modern England own anything at all, except clothes, furniture and possibly a house. The peasantry have long since disappeared, the independent shopkeeper is being destroyed, the small business-man is diminishing in numbers. But at the same time modern industry is so complicated that it cannot get along without great numbers of managers, salesmen, engineers, chemists and technicians of all kinds, drawing fairly large salaries. And these in turn call into being a professional class of doctors, lawyers, teachers, artists, etc., etc. The tendency of advanced capitalism has therefore been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out as it once seemed likely to do.
But much more important than this is the spread of middle-class ideas and habits among the working class. The British working class are now better off in almost all ways than they were thirty years ago. This is partly due to the efforts of the Trade Unions, but partly to the mere advance of physical science. It is not always realized that within rather narrow limits the standard of life of a country can rise without a corresponding rise in real-wages. Up to a point, civilization can lift itself up by its boot-tags. However unjustly society is organized, certain technical advances are bound to benefit the whole community, because certain kinds of goods are necessarily held in common. A millionaire cannot, for example, light the streets for himself while darkening them for other people. Nearly all citizens of civilized countries now enjoy the use of good roads, germ-free water, police protection, free libraries and probably free education of a kind. Public education in England has been meanly starved of money, but it has nevertheless improved, largely owing to the devoted efforts of the teachers, and the habit of reading has become enormously more widespread. To an increasing extent the rich and the poor read the same books, and they also see the same films and listen to the same radio programmes. And the differences in their way of life have been diminished by the mass-production of cheap clothes and improvements in housing. So far as outward appearance goes, the clothes of rich and poor, especially in the case of women, differ far less than they did thirty or even fifteen years ago. As to housing, England still has slums which are a blot on civilization, but much building has been done during the past ten years, largely by the local authorities. The modern council house, with its bathroom and electric light, is smaller than the stockbroker’s villa, but it is recognizably the same kind of house, which the farm labourer’s cottage is not. A person who has grown up in a council housing estate is likely to be – indeed, visibly is – more middle class in outlook than a person who has grown up in a slum.
George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.
November 16, 2021
Mike Solana interviews Chris Best, the co-founder and CEO of Substack
Not long after I started hearing about Substack, some of my favourite writers and bloggers began to move their work to the new platform. I now subscribe to more than a dozen Substack authors, although being a penniless blogger, I’m restricted to the free offerings in each case. Thus far I’m definitely seeing Substack as a positive influence in the online world, so this Mike Solana post was of some interest to me:
MIKE SOLANA: In your and Hamish McKenzie’s recent essay, “The internet needs better rules, not stricter referees”, you say Substack is changing the publishing model. Before we get into all that, how would you characterize the publishing landscape before Substack?
CHRIS BEST: My general story on this is we’re coming out of an age of attention-monster social media. People used to get bored. People used to have this problem of like, I don’t know what to do with my time. Then the internet, and especially the mobile internet, took over ALL of our time and attention. It filled up every crevice in our life.
In the first phase of that — the attention suck — it was like this giant land grab. If you were making something that competed for attention space, you wanted to grab as much as possible, as quickly as possible, because there’s only so much. You were competing for people’s 10 minutes while they were waiting in line at the grocery store or whatever. So publishers made content free, and they made it as broadly-compelling as possible. The goal was to grab as much attention as possible in the lowest friction way possible, and to turn that attention into money through advertising.
And listen, none of that was nefarious. None of that was like, people with tented fingers going, “Aha! This will create something bad!” But when you create a system like this, you end up with a certain incentive structure. Then, if you build your algorithms to serve your business model, the incentive structure you create for people participating in your network drives a certain sort of behavior.
The platforms all optimized for things that brought cheap engagement at all costs, that interaction weighed to some of the worst aspects of human nature, and drove emergent behavior that gave us many of the things we see today. The legacy media just got totally steamrolled by all of this, and lives in the world created by these platforms.
SOLANA: Do you really feel that Substack is completely protected from this scaled advertising dynamic with its subscription model? There are a lot of legacy media institutions that have subscriptions, and have had subscriptions for the last 10 or 20 years, in addition to running ads. Personally, I’m also getting requests to run ads on Pirate Wires fairly often. I’m not biting, which maybe answers my question before I’ve asked it, but … do you really see this all changing?
BEST: I think the subscription model is necessary, but not sufficient, right? First of all, as a writer, that you can actually make real money doing this is by itself a big deal. I’ve convinced a lot of people to do subscription instead of ads, and usually they come back to me later like, “Thank you, you changed my life. I can’t believe I was ever thinking the other thing.”
People tend to think about this like, “I could make money with ads. I could make money with subscriptions. Two moneys is better than one money.” But when you’re making the best possible product to drive subscriptions, what you end up having to write is qualitatively different — and better — than the thing you’d have to do to drive the most ad revenue.
If you want to earn and keep the trust of a relatively small number of people who value your writing really deeply, deeply enough to pay for it, and you want that number to grow, the work you do in that world is different than the work you do if you’re like, “I need to get as many people to hear my Casper mattress ad read as possible.”
However, to your point, it’s not enough. One of the big problems with Substack now is people are like, “Great, we’ve got this place where the incentive structure works differently, and I want create this better product to earn and keep the trust of my subscribers … but the way that people find out about my stuff is still on Twitter.”
So we’re kind of downstream from this, you know, attention sewage factory of incentives. I think for Substack to live up to the idea of letting readers take back their mind, and their attention, and helping us all create this kind of alternate universe of content with different laws of physics … we need to do more on that front.
November 15, 2021
Sarah Hoyt on what happens when the wheels come off
In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt considers the supply chain chaos we’re seeing these days and reminisces about what happened in Portugal when the bakers went on strike, disrupting bread deliveries for most of the country:
Let me explain: to some extent this plan is always stupid because humans are resourceful. Even back in the seventies, in Portugal when the bakers kept going on strike (and to understand how much this touched the normal person, you have to understand that back then we were used to getting our bread delivered to the door before we woke up. Tie a bag to the back door, leave a note of what you wanted, wake up to crackling fresh rolls and baguettes. This is one the things I really missed when I moved here. Then I found bread machines, and made do.) The first couple of weeks were pandemonium and people were deeply unhappy because their routine — worse, their waking up routine — was disrupted.
And then things … changed. So, some people started making their own bread. Some people started making their own bread, other people heard and suddenly they were showing up at the back door and placing an order for the morning, then coming in the morning and knocking a certain way to receive your order. It was annoying, but life went on, and not everyone had to bake their own bread anyway.
Oh, and bonus, you didn’t have to pay taxes on the bread you sold. You were obliging your neighbors, and if they wanted to give you some money in return to help with expenses, it would be rude to refuse. (And since everyone was doing it, they couldn’t chase everyone, even in a tiny country.) Oh, and to understand this one, and the reason I use this expense, I don’t think people in Portugal had baked their own bread (Other than farmers making broa [Portuguese cornbread]) since before Roman times. Artisanal bread wasn’t a thing. But people found a way.
I do realize with so much of our manufacturing in China, and the supply problems, etc, it seems like the world is coming down on top of our heads.
But people find a way. Look, in Cuba, a tiny country, they’ve kept 1950s cars going all these decades. They might be repaired with washing machine parts, but they keep going.
The US is a huge country, with a ton more resources, and perhaps genetically (As we’re immigrants or descended thereof) more adaptable people.
We’re in the first shock, so not much being done to get around this cr*p inflicted on us from above. But in a month or two, probably before the anger reaches the level (alas) that #teamheadsonpikes comes out to play, we’ll adapt, improvise, overcome.
People are already buying direct from farmers. I have no idea how the Christmas gift shopping is going, because since the kids haven’t been little, we usually pick ONE interesting or meaningful thing for them, and anyway, Dan and I always want the same “A book and a music-vehicle (used to be a CD)”. This year, with worry over selling the house, etc. I haven’t even looked. I keep hearing it will be lean, but I suspect Americans will make more stuff/etsy will have a boom year. And life will move on. Heck, I know someone considering going into 3D printing to make those pieces that are stuck in containers or that China is not sending off, or whatever, to repair your car/washing machine/air conditioning. Yeah, copyright problems, but if you market it as a “Stop gap while you wait” and market to local repairmen? I bet it works.
The point is we’re not Portuguese or Cubans. Not a small country, easily stomped. Out in the heartland, people will go over, go under, get around almost by default.
November 14, 2021
The Media — declining to report the news and instead depleting the strategic reserve of Narrativium
This week’s excerpt from Andrew Sullivan’s Weekly Dish explores the many, many ways that the mainstream media have been actively abandoning any semblance of informing their audience and instead now concentrate almost exclusively on propagandizing them:
The news is a perilous business. It’s perilous because the first draft of history is almost always somewhat wrong, and needs a second draft, and a third, and so on, over time, until the historian can investigate with more perspective and calm. The job of journalists is to do as best they can, day by day, and respond swiftly when they screw up, correct the record, and move forward. I’ve learned this the hard way, not least in the combination of credulousness and trauma I harbored in the wake of 9/11.
But when the sources of news keep getting things wrong, and all the errors lie in the exact same direction, and they are reluctant to acknowledge error, we have a problem. If you look back at the last few years, the record of errors, small and large, about major stories, is hard to deny. It’s as if the more Donald Trump accused the MSM of being “fake news” the more assiduously they tried to prove him right.
You know the situation is bad when Andrew Sullivan references Donald Trump without a sneer!
We found out this week, for example, that a key figure in the emergence of the Steele Dossier, Igor Danchenko, has been indicted for lying to the FBI. He is also charged with asking a Clinton crony, Charles Dolan Jr: “Any thought, rumor, allegation. I am working on a related project against Trump.”
The evidence from another key source for the dossier, Sergei Millian — touted across all media, including the Washington Post — has also been exposed as potentially fake. What has the Post done? As their own indispensable Erik Wemple notes, instead of a clear retraction, the Post has just added editors’ notes to previous stories, removed sections and a video, and altered headlines retroactively. This is a bizarre way of correcting the record: “No such case comes immediately or specifically to mind, at least no historical case that stirred lasting controversy,” said W. Joseph Campbell, a professor and journalism historian at American University.
This doesn’t mean that Trump wasn’t eager for Russian help. But Trump was right, in the end, about the dodgy dossier; he was right about the duped FBI’s original overreach; and the mass media — Rachel Maddow chief among them — were wrong. And yet the dossier dominated the headlines for three years, and the “corrections” have a fraction of the audience of the errors. Maddow gets promoted. And the man who first published it, Ben Smith, was made the media columnist for the NYT.
Think of the other narratives the MSM pushed in recent years that have collapsed. They viciously defamed the Covington boys. They authoritatively told us that bounties had been placed on US soldiers in Afghanistan by Putin — and Trump’s denials only made them more certain. They told us that the lab-leak theory of Covid was a conspiracy theory with no evidence behind it at all. (The NYT actually had the story of the leak theory, by Donald McNeil, killed it, and then fired McNeil, their best Covid reporter, after some schoolgirls complained he wasn’t woke.) Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
The MSM took the ludicrous story of Jussie Smollett seriously because it fit their nutty “white supremacy” narrative. They told us that a woman was brutally gang-raped at UVA (invented), that the Pulse mass shooting was driven by homophobia (untrue) and that the Atlanta spa shooter was motivated by anti-Asian bias (no known evidence for that at all). For good measure, they followed up with story after story about white supremacists targeting Asian-Americans, in a new wave of “hate”, even as the assaults were disproportionately by African Americans and the mentally ill.
As Greenwald noted, the NYT “published an emotionally gut-wrenching but complete fiction that never had any evidence — that Officer Sicknick’s skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob until he died.” The media told us that an alleged transgender exposure in the Wi Spa in Los Angeles was an anti-trans hoax (also untrue). They told us that the emails recovered on Hunter Biden’s laptop were Russian disinformation. They did this just before an election and used that claim to stymie the story on social media. But they were not Russian disinformation. They were a valid if minor news story the media consciously kept from its audience for partisan purposes.
November 13, 2021
The unrealistic expectations society has of minimum-wage security guards
As a teenager, I worked several months as a security guard. In the 1970s in Ontario, to work as a security guard you basically needed to be physically fit (to a not-very-high standard), to pass a police background check and to be 18 or over. The jobs I worked were usually overnight shifts at upscale apartment buildings, industrial facilities and fill-in shifts at retail malls to cover for regular security staff vacations (plus one really interesting midnight shift on a ship docked in Toronto harbour). I think I was paid $3 per hour, and 99% of the time the work wasn’t worth any more than that. It’s that 1% of situations where the company hiring security guards might wish they’d invested in better-trained staff. According to Joshua Hind‘s article in The Line, the standards for security guards have been improved in the many years since my time, but that 1% is still a big issue:
While some of the best minds in the field of crowd management and event safety weigh in on the probable causes of the crowd surge, a new article in Rolling Stone has turned a spotlight on the security guards, and the culpability of private security in general, a high turnover, low-wage business focused on filling orders with warm bodies, seemingly regardless of their actual experience or competency. In Canada, security work is one of the easiest routes to employment for young people and particularly recent immigrants with little Canadian work experience, but, when it comes to live events, it’s also an often impossible mix of customer support, crowd management, law enforcement, and emergency medical services that requires years of training and on-the-ground experience to do well.
The apparent failures of this type of security, which is often referred to as “contract security” (not be confused with “private security”, which usually means expensive bodyguards), are not unique to Houston. I’ve been working in large public events for more than 20 years and contract security has always been one of the great planning dilemmas. If you want to get insured, you need lots of security, but every one of those guards must be treated as part asset and part liability.
Event sites, especially festivals with multiple stages, are expansive (the site in Houston was over 1,000,000 square feet in total space), and a well-designed event site, just like a well-designed building, needs plenty of entrances and exits, each of which must be adequately staffed. Guards are needed in front of the stage, in the crowd, at backstage access points, and around critical infrastructure. On top of all that you also need a team of roving guards to patrol the site looking for issues. Add it up and a large event site could have dozens or hundreds of security guards doing a variety of jobs, all of which fall under the catch-all description of “security”. On a big summer weekend at the height of event season, a large city like Toronto might have thousands of guards working dozens of sites. How do you find that many good people who can bear the responsibility of preserving public safety? Generally, you don’t.
It only requires a two-week commitment and a little patience to become a security guard in Ontario. So long as you have a clean criminal record, you can sign up for the required training: 40 hours on law and security, plus another 30-40 hours of first aid. This training is often performed by the very companies that do the hiring, which can greatly affect priorities in accurate skills testing. Hit all those marks and mere weeks after deciding to become a security guard you could be faced with a horde of concertgoers busting through the fence you’ve just been ordered to protect.
When I started in live events, it was all on the technical side, setting up lighting, sound and stages, and I didn’t pay much attention to what happened on the other side of the crowd barrier. About 15 years ago I started working on Nuit Blanche, Toronto’s overnight outdoor art event, and it was during those long nights watching hundreds of thousands and then millions of people that I developed a sense of how they act in large groups and how unpredictable they can be. This isn’t meant to sound like a superpower, it’s just a honed instinct. It took me well over a decade of steady work and constant observation to develop some ability to sense when a crowd might turn ugly. That experience can’t be replicated with two weeks of training, but that’s exactly what’s often expected of security guards.
November 9, 2021
QotD: Hollywood in the late Golden Age
The main difference between then and now is that in the old days, such films were mass-produced on the assembly lines of the major studios. Americans of all ages went to the movies at least once a week, and they expected to see something different every time they went. Hence the studio system, which ground out product fast enough to meet the omnivorous demand. Except for the occasional Gone With the Wind, the modern Spielberg-style “event” movies that now dominate Hollywood filmmaking didn’t exist. You went to the movies not to see Spider-Man or Lord of the Rings, but simply to see a show. If the show in question was a Western or a mystery, that was good; if it starred John Wayne or Robert Mitchum, that was better. But nobody went out of his way to see a Wayne Western directed by Howard Hawks, much less a Mitchum mystery directed by Jacques Tourneur. You took what you got, and if what you got happened to be a Red River or Out of the Past, then you got lucky.
That’s why so many of the best films made in Hollywood in the Forties and Fifties were Westerns and mysteries. Precisely because they were commodities, their makers tended to be ignored by the front office. So long as your last picture turned a profit, however small, you got to make another one. If the movies in which you specialized were low-budget genre pictures for which demand was more or less constant, all that mattered was that you stay more or less within the accepted conventions of the genre, and the conventions of the Western and the mystery happened to be wonderfully well-suited to the artful telling of serious stories that were both entertaining and cheap to produce. The art, of course, was optional, and most such movies were as forgettable as a Law and Order rerun, but some of them were as good — and as serious — as a movie can be.
Terry Teachout, “What Randolph Scott Knew”, American Cowboy, 2005-12-23.
November 7, 2021
Apparently we need to block the “Random Penguin & Schuster” merger to protect the 0.001%
In the most recent SHuSH newsletter from Kenneth Whyte, the US Department of Justice case against allowing the proposed merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster is examined in some detail:
On Tuesday, the US Justice Department (DOJ) filed suit to block Penguin Random House from purchasing its rival, Simon & Schuster, for $2.18 billion. It promises to be a fascinating case, in part because there’s so much at stake for the two firms involved, and also because of the unusual angle from which the DOJ is attacking the file.
As one of two US agencies responsible for enforcing antitrust law (the other is the Federal Trade Commission), the DOJ believes the proposed deal, struck last year, would leave Penguin Random House, already the world’s largest publisher of consumer books, “towering over its rivals”. The combined entity would have revenues more than twice its next closest competitor, and “outsized influence over who and what is published, and how much authors are paid for their work”.
Bertelsmann, owner of Penguin Random House, and Viacom, owner of Simon & Schuster, promise to fight the DOJ in court. They acknowledge that the Big Five Publishers, a grouping that also includes Hachette, HarperCollins, and Macmillan, will be a Big Four after the merger, but maintain that these firms plus new publishing entrants, such as Amazon, and an abundance of small and midsize publishers will provide sufficient competition for authors and books. “The publishing industry is, and following this transaction will remain, a vibrant and highly competitive environment,” they said in a joint statement.
So far, so ordinary corporate behaviour. Who or what do we need to protect, beyond hoping to maintain something vaguely resembling a competitive marketplace for books? A tiny sub-set of authors:
With this suit, the DOJ is taking a narrower approach. One test of whether a merger results in illegal market dominance is spelled out in the Horizontal Merger Guidelines jointly issued by the DOJ and the FTC: it asks if the combined firm would be in a position to increase its profits by imposing a price cut — a small but significant and lasting price cut — on one of its suppliers. In other words, if the new and enlarged Penguin Random House is better able than the old Penguin Random House to squeeze one supplier on one product line, the merger is illegal.
To apply this test to the deal, the DOJ needs to identify which supplier and which product line is vulnerable if the firms are allowed to merge. It has a range of options. Book publishing is a complicated marketplace, with many suppliers and product lines. Publishers sell books to retailers, and market books to consumers; they buy distribution services, printing, advertising, editorial services, and so on. The DOJ might have argued that a merged Penguin Random House-Simon & Schuster would have the muscle to make its printers or copyeditors reduce their rates. Or that it could force retailers to accept smaller cuts of sales revenue.
Instead, the DOJ put its chips on the discreet line of business in which authors supply manuscripts to publishing houses. Its complaint says that the combined firm would have the power to improve its profits by significantly and permanently lowering the advances it pays to authors for the rights to publish their books.
Advances, notes the DOJ, provide the bulk of author income at the Big Five publishing houses (few authors earn out their advances and collect further royalties). Were Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster to combine, there would be nothing to deter it “from imposing a small, but significant, and non-transitory decrease in advances”. And if it did so, the complaint maintains, authors would have nowhere to turn. The DOJ ignores the existence of the other three members of the Big Five. It admits that the US has 3,000 small and mid-size houses but, these, according to the complaint, are economically irrelevant, mere “farm teams” for the big houses. Self-publishing, it adds, is not a serious alternative.
That may sound like the DOJ is suing to stop this merger on behalf of the writing community, a heartwarming notion, but it’s not. The lawsuit is primarily concerned with a small subset of writers: those who produce “anticipated top-selling books”. According to the complaint, there exists a small but definable market for “anticipated top-selling books”. It represents a distinct line of commerce, as required under the Clayton Act, and that is the real focus of the complaint.
The DOJ is going to war for sellers of “anticipated top-selling books”, the .001% of the publishing world.
Its lawyers foresee a time when Penguin Random House-Simon & Schuster will target John Grisham and his ilk with lower advances, and John Grisham will have no choice but to accept. So far as the DOJ is concerned, that is how this merger fails the Horizontal Merger Guidelines, and why it is illegal. The phrase “anticipated top-selling books” appears 29 times in a 26-page document.
November 5, 2021
The New York Times identifies the next big threat to humanity – “Muskism”
In Thursday’s NP Platformed newsletter, Colby Cosh outlines the “evidence” amassed in a recent New York Times essay blaming Elon Musk for, well, everything:
Elon Musk at the 2015 Tesla Motors annual meeting.
Photo by Steve Jurvetson via Wikimedia Commons.
Lepore commences by describing Bill Gates’s 66th birthday party, for which a bunch of rich people — including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos — were helicoptered to a private beach from a nearby yacht. Neither Elon Musk, thought to be the world’s richest person, or Mark Zuckerberg, founder of newly rebranded Facebook, were present at the party. Zuckerberg was busy illuminating plans for his “metaverse”, which Lepore describes as “a virtual reality,” wherein you wear “a headset and gear that closes out the actual world.”
Here’s where Lepore goes from this: “The metaverse is at once an illustration of and a distraction from a broader and more troubling turn in the history of capitalism. The world’s techno-billionaires are forging a new kind of capitalism: Muskism.”
In literally the next sentence, Lepore admits that the subject of her essay, Elon Musk, immediately and publicly made fun of the Facebook “metaverse” plans. We are on the third paragraph of the essay, and Lepore has already: a) blamed Elon Musk for an A-hole billionaire party he didn’t attend, because he was busy with his engineering and manufacturing projects; and b) applied the new coinage “Muskism” to a virtual reality project that actual Musk loudly criticized. Somehow this essay has severed its own hydrocephalic head twice over, within 500 words.
It gets worse from there as Lepore attempts to complete her mission of denouncing Muskism, which she describes as an “extreme extraterrestrial capitalism.” She quickly has to admit that Bill Gates, who is mostly spending a computing fortune on global philanthropy these days when he’s not lifting off from yachts in choppers, doesn’t have one single freaking thing to do with absolutely any of this. NP Platformed was an editor back in the day, so we notice that the intro of Lepore’s essay is at this point not only detached from its body, but has been left to rot several miles away. Gates-Musk-Bezos-Zuckerberg: they’re all tentacles of the same menacing Muskist octopus here, as in so much newspaper and magazine commentary, and abuse flung in their general direction will suffice to condemn all.
Lepore’s accusation against Musk turns out to be … that he likes some classic science fiction but doesn’t always concur with the politics of its authors. Musk has called himself a “utopian anarchist of the kind best described by Iain Banks,” but Banks was “an avowed socialist.” Gasp! Banks (1954-2013), the Scottish science fiction author best known for the Culture series, was a particular kind of U.K. “libertarian socialist” who believed strongly in spacefaring as a step toward post-scarcity life for sentient beings. His politics are easily misunderstood by Americans, who don’t have this particular kind of weirdo, and the interstellar “Culture” he envisioned was never intended to be admired unironically. In other words, that part of Lepore’s essay is as mangled and obtuse as the rest.
November 4, 2021
You think software is expensive now? You wouldn’t believe how expensive 1980s software was
A couple of years ago, Rob Griffiths looked at some computer hobbyist magazines from the 1980s and had both nostalgia for the period and sticker shock from the prices asked for computer games and business software:
A friend recently sent me a link to a large collection of 1980s computing magazines — there’s some great stuff there, well worth browsing. Perusing the list, I noticed Softline, which I remember reading in our home while growing up. (I was in high school in the early 1980s.)
We were fortunate enough to have an Apple ][ in our home, and I remember reading Softline for their game reviews and ads for currently-released games.
It was those ads that caught my eye as I browsed a few issues. Consider Missile Defense, a fun semi-clone of the arcade game Missile Command. To give you a sense of what games were like at the time, here are a few screenshots from the game (All game images in this article are courtesy of MobyGames, who graciously allow use of up to 20 images without prior permission.)
Stunning graphics, aren’t they?
Not quite state of the art, but impressive for a home computer of the day. My first computer was a PC clone, and the IBM PC software market was much more heavily oriented to business applications compared to the Apple, Atari, Commodore, or other “home computers” of the day. I think the first game I got was Broderbund’s The Ancient Art of War, which I remembered at the time as being very expensive. The Wikipedia entry says:
A screenshot from the DOS version of The Ancient Art of War.
Image via Moby Games.
In 1985 Computer Gaming World praised The Ancient Art of War as a great war game, especially the ability to create custom scenarios, stating that for pre-gunpowder warfare it “should allow you to recreate most engagements”. In 1990 the magazine gave the game three out of five stars, and in 1993 two stars. Jerry Pournelle of BYTE named The Ancient Art of War his game of the month for February 1986, reporting that his sons “say (and I confirm from my own experience) is about the best strategic computer war game they’ve encountered … Highly recommended.” PC Magazine in 1988 called the game “educational and entertaining”. […] The Ancient Art of War is generally recognized as one of the first real-time strategy or real-time tactics games, a genre which became hugely popular a decade later with Dune II and Warcraft. Those later games added an element of economic management, with mining or gathering, as well as construction and base management, to the purely military.
The Ancient Art of War is cited as a classic example of a video game that uses a rock-paper-scissors design with its three combat units, archer, knight, and barbarian, as a way to balance gameplay strategies.
Back to Rob Griffiths and the sticker shock moment:
What stood out to me as I re-read this first issue wasn’t the very basic nature of the ad layout (after all, Apple hadn’t yet revolutionized page layout with the Mac and LaserWriter). No, what really stood out was the price: $29.95. While that may not sound all that high, consider that’s the cost roughly 38 years ago.
Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ CPI Inflation Calculator, that $29.95 in September of 1981 is equivalent to $82.45 in today’s money (i.e. an inflation factor of 2.753). Even by today’s standards, where top-tier games will spend tens of millions on development and marketing, $82.45 would be considered a very high priced game — many top-tier Xbox, PlayStation, and Mac/PC games are priced in the $50 to $60 range.
Business software — what there was of it available to the home computer market — was also proportionally much more expensive, but I found the feature list for this word processor to be more amusing: “Gives true upper/lower case text on your screen with no additional hardware support whatsoever.” Gosh!
H/T to BoingBoing for the link.
Fallen Flag — the Milwaukee Road
This month’s Classic Trains fallen flag feature is the Milwaukee Road (MILW) by George Drury. As with most major US railways, the Milwaukee Road was a long-term collection of different railway lines, some merged for obvious economic benefit and others taken over to reduce competition, but the first of the components that eventually evolved into the Milwaukee Road system was the 1847 Milwaukee and Waukesha Railroad. This line was incorporated to connect the Wisconsin city of Milwaukee to the river traffic along the Mississippi River, and the corporate name was changed even before construction began to the Milwaukee and Mississippi Railroad to more adequately convey the purpose of the line. The first segment opened in November 1850 connecting Milwaukee and Wauwatosa, a distance of five miles, then to Waukesha a few months later, then to Madison, but not extending all the way to the river at Prairie du Chien until 1857.
In that year, another of the frequent financial crises of the era struck and the company struggled on for two years, but eventually went into receivership in 1859. New owner the Milwaukee and Prairie du Chien Railroad took possession in 1861. After the Civil War, the company was merged with the Milwaukee and St. Paul and in 1874 the combined railroad became known as the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul with the completion of a new line connecting with Chicago.
In the next few years the road built or bought lines from Racine, Wis., to Moline, Ill.; from Chicago to Savanna, Ill., and two lines west across southern Minnesota. The road reached Council Bluffs, Iowa, across the Missouri River from Omaha, in 1882, and reached Kansas City in 1887. In 1893 the CM&StP acquired the Milwaukee & Northern, which reached from Milwaukee into Michigan’s upper peninsula.
In 1900 the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul was considered one of the most prosperous, progressive, and enterprising railroads in the U.S. Its lines reached from Chicago to Minneapolis, Omaha, and Kansas City. Secondary lines and branches covered most of the area between the Omaha and Minneapolis lines in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota. Lines covered much of eastern South Dakota and reached the Missouri River at three places in that state: Running Water, Chamberlain, and Evarts. Except for the last few miles into Kansas City and operation over Union Pacific rails from Council Bluffs to Omaha, the Missouri River formed the western boundary of the CM&StP. (“Milwaukee Road” as a name or nickname did not come into use until the late 1920s; “St. Paul Road” was sometimes used as a nickname, but the railroad’s advertising used the full name).
The Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway in 1893.
Poor’s Manual of the Railroads of the United States via Wikimedia Commons.
The battle over control of the Northern Pacific and the Burlington in 1901 made the Milwaukee Road aware that without its own route to the Pacific it would be at its competitors’ mercy. At the same time the Milwaukee Road was experiencing a change in its traffic from dominance by wheat to a more balanced mix of agricultural and industrial products. Arguments against extension westward included the possibility of the construction of the Panama Canal and the presence of strong competing railroads: Union Pacific, Northern Pacific, and Great Northern. Arguments for the extension banked heavily on the growth of traffic to and from the Pacific Northwest.
In 1901 the president of the Milwaukee Road dispatched an engineer west to estimate the cost of duplicating Northern Pacific’s line. His figure was $45 million. Such an expenditure required considerable thought; not until November 1905 did Milwaukee’s board of directors authorize construction of a line west to Tacoma and Seattle.
In 1905 and ’06 the Milwaukee Road incorporated subsidiaries in South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, and Washington. The Washington company was renamed the Chicago, Milwaukee & Puget Sound Railway, and it took over the other three companies in 1908. It was absorbed by the CM&StP in 1912.
The extension began with a bridge across the Missouri River at Mobridge, 3 miles upstream from Evarts, S.D. Roadbed and rails pushed out from several points into unpopulated territory. The work went quickly, and the road was open to Butte, Mont., in August 1908.
Unfortunately for the Milwaukee, the Pacific extension was much more expensive to build than the initial estimates (it jumped from $45 million in the 1901 survey to $60 million in 1905), eventually weighing down the company books with $257 million in debt and worse, the traffic estimates for the new line turned out to be wildly optimistic. The difficulties of operating steam locomotives across the extension in winter pushed the railway toward electrification as an efficiency and cost-saving move. Beginning in 1914, sections of the line were converted to overhead catenary power until a total of 645 route-miles were being operated with electric locomotives, reportedly saving the company over a million dollars per year.
A Milwaukee “Little Joe” electric locomotive hauling a freight train along the Pacific extension in 1941. The “Little Joe” locomotives were originally built for the Soviet Union in the late 1940s but the US government cancelled the export license as relations with the Soviets deteriorated and the Cold War escalated. The Milwaukee Road bought 12 of the 20 from General Electric for $1 million during the Korean War.
Wikimedia Commons.
Despite the savings through electrification, the Pacific extension drove the company into bankruptcy in 1925, re-emerging as the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad, but the new company also had to declare bankruptcy during the Great Depression. Trustees ran the railroad for ten years until renewed civilian traffic after World War 2 allowed normal operations to resume. As with most North American railroads, the good times didn’t last and by the late 1950s, the Milwaukee’s management were looking for a merger partner to help cut costs and shed unprofitable branch lines. Unlike the rival merger of of Northern Pacific, Great Northern, Burlington Route, and the Spokane, Portland and Seattle Railway into Burlington Northern, the ICC blocked a merger between the Milwaukee Road and the Chicago and North Western. The ICC also blocked a later application for the Milwaukee to be included in the Union Pacific/Rock Island merger.
With declining business, deferred maintenance issues on most lines, and some self-induced financial issues caused by selling off rolling stock and leasing it back (which exacerbated car shortages leading to further reductions in business), the company had no funds to replace the failing “Little Joe” locomotives on the Pacific extension, so electrification was abandoned in 1974. George Drury sums up the mistakes that led to the end:
Over the decades, the road’s management had made too many wrong decisions: building the Pacific Extension, not electrifying between the two electrified portions, purchasing the line into Indiana, and in the 1960s choosing Flexivans (containers with separate wheels/bogies that required special flatcars) instead of conventional piggyback trailers.
After several money-losing years in the early 1970s, the Milwaukee voluntarily entered reorganization once again on December 19, 1977. The major result of the 1977 reorganization was the amputation of everything west of Miles City, Mont., to concentrate on what became known as the “Milwaukee II” system linking Chicago, Kansas City, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Duluth (on Burlington Northern rails from St. Paul), and Louisville (but no longer Omaha).
By 1983 the Milwaukee’s system consisted of the Chicago–Twin Cities main line; Chicago–Savanna–Kansas City; Chicago–Louisville (almost entirely on Conrail and Seaboard System rails), Milwaukee–Green Bay; New Lisbon–Tomahawk, Wis.; Savanna–La Crosse, along the west bank of the Mississippi; Marquette to Sheldon, Iowa, and Jackson, Minn.; Austin, Minn.–St. Paul; and St. Paul–Ortonville, Minn., plus a few branches.
Three roads vied for what remained of the Milwaukee: the Chicago & North Western, financially none too solid itself; Canadian National subsidiary Grand Trunk Western, with an eye toward creating a route between eastern and western Canada south of the Great Lakes; and Canadian Pacific subsidiary Soo Line.
October 31, 2021
Meta?
In The Line Matt Gurney wonders what Zuckerberg is up to with the corporate re-naming:
My favourite reaction to Facebook rebranding as “Meta”.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, chairman and CEO, has unveiled the newly rebranded company’s plans for the “Metaverse” — a combination of online environments that can be experienced in augmented and virtual reality. (The company’s new name, Meta Inc., reflects the new focus, but the major brands the company owns, including Facebook itself, will retain their current names under the now-renamed parent company.)
We can’t ignore the fact that Facebook is rolling out its bold plan at a moment when the company is on the receiving end of much negative attention over its business practices and corporate values, if any. Facebook is as much a global supervillain as a company, or at least the overall coverage would suggest as much. No, we definitely can’t ignore that, and we won’t — look for a specific analysis of that part of the whole puzzle in this week’s full version of the The Line‘s dispatch feature later today.
But for this column, just for now, let’s briefly set aside Facebook’s major political and cultural problems, and actually try to assess Metaverse on its own merits. What the hell is the company trying to do here, and will anyone go for it?
The what of Metaverse is intriguing. Zuckerberg announced the concept in a promotional video, but that’s mostly marketing. The Guardian tried to concisely sum up what is being proposed, and I probably won’t do better, so let’s just crib their summary:
The metaverse is where the physical and digital worlds come together. It is a space where digital representations of people – avatars – interact at work and play, meeting in their office, going to concerts and even trying on clothes.
At the centre of this universe will be virtual reality, a digital world that you can already enter via Facebook’s Oculus VR headsets. It will also include augmented reality, a sort of step back from VR where elements of the digital world are layered on top of reality – think Pokémon Go or Facebook’s recent smart glasses tie-up with Ray-Ban.
Virtual reality isn’t a new technology — I first tinkered around with a VR headset as a child probably 25 or 30 years ago at a downtown Toronto convention centre. It was incredibly rudimentary, but the core concept has basically stayed the same: a user puts on a virtual reality headset that puts a screen (or two separate ones) before their eyes, and those screens provide visual stimuli that, when combined with audio through a headset or earbuds, can create a very convincing simulation of … basically anything. There are a series of virtual reality video gaming systems on the market today; I own one of the lower-capability versions, a PlayStation VR, running off a Playstation 4 console. Though one of the less powerful modern VR systems, it’s still surprisingly capable of completely tricking your brain. My wife and I once spent an amusing evening doing a virtual rollercoaster ride, and even sitting in a chair in my basement, you’d swear you could feel the motion of the car going up and down the tracks.
All the bafflegab about a “metaverse”? Wes Fenlon believes it’s all bullshit:
We have Neal Stephenson’s 1992 novel Snow Crash to thank for popularizing avatars as our digital personas, from early internet message boards to full-body VRChat. We also have Snow Crash to blame for the absolute hell we find ourselves in today, as every tech billionaire on the planet slobber all over themselves as they declare the metaverse — the next phase of human culture!! — is within reach. Games, NFTs, crypto, VR, AR, the blockchain, they’re all wrapped up in this idea of a virtually-integrated society in which our Fortnite costumes will carry over to our Onlyfans accounts and we will never, ever have to log off.
The absurdity of it makes me want to scream, or maybe die, or maybe just spoon out the part of my brain that knows what an NFT is. But there’s one thing that keeps me going:
The absolute gleeful, cackling, deep-in-my-bones certainty that it’s all complete bullshit.
If you also know deep in your heart that the metaverse is a big fat steaming load of billionaire nerd pabulum, I hope reading these words provides you with a wave of vindicating comfort. You’re not crazy. I know it can feel like that when the people peddling these things seem so convinced that they’re the future, like they know something you don’t. Don’t fall for it. Watching people spend $69 million in fake money to buy a JPEG should make you feel like you’re living in an age of unparalleled nonsense.
That feeling isn’t going to go away. For the next decade we’ll all be asking ourselves if the whole world’s gone mad at least once a week. But the good news is that the metaverse and the tech industry’s very expensive obsession with trying to make it a reality will be a schadenfreude generator the likes of which we’ve never seen before.
We will all become the living embodiments of the one true expression of being online in the 21st century:
The metaverse is bullshit because it already exists, and it’s called the internet
When Epic’s Tim Sweeney and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg talk about the metaverse, they’re primarily drawing from the foundational visions of cyberspace created by science fiction authors like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. Their books in the ’80s and early ’90s looked at what computers were capable of at the time and imagined them decades in the future, just abstract enough to let our imaginations run.
Here’s Gibson’s description of cyberspace in Neuromancer (1984):
A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.
And here’s a snippet of Stephenson’s description of the metaverse in Snow Crash (1992):
Your avatar can look any way you want it to, up to the limitations of your equipment. If you’re ugly, you can make your avatar beautiful. If you’ve just gotten out of bed, your avatar can still be wearing beautiful clothes and professionally applied makeup. You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking down the Street and you will see all of these.
Both novels were prescient and profoundly influential. Alongside movies like Tron, they shaped ’80s and ’90s depictions of what it would look like to be inside a computer, from rudimentary early VR to movies like The Matrix. In 2012, Michael Abrash — who has worked at Microsoft, id Software, Valve, and Oculus — wrote that his game development career “all started with Snow Crash.”
October 21, 2021
If Quebec is the model for universal childcare services, then voters will be waiting a long, long time for that promise to be fulfilled
In The Line, Andrea Mrozek talks about the promises (mostly still unfulfilled) of Quebec’s “universal” childcare service model:
Since last month’s election, many have been asking which promises the Liberals made will prove the most difficult to keep. Put child care at the top of the list: The federal government’s five-year, $30 billion Canada-wide child-care plan is rife with complicating factors. When government officials point to Quebec as the model for the rest of Canada, what that means is a system plagued by lack of access, inequality and poor quality.
When Quebec introduced its low-user fee “universal” system in 1997, the goal was to create a centre-based, publicly-funded system for all children. Fees started at $5 a day, briefly shifting to a fee structure based on income, before settling in at the current daily rate of $8.50.
The rapid reduction in fees in only one part of the child-care sector disrupted the care options parents were using in Quebec. Private providers, who were not to be included in Quebec’s system, “understandably crumbled” after the system began. Unfortunately, the public system never picked up the slack. So the Quebec government then coaxed them back into the business of child-care provision through a system of tax credits.
Consider this: We are told publicly funded child care offered at a fixed low price for parents is the way to go across Canada. Consider further that we are told Quebec is the model for said child-care system. Then consider that between 2003 and 2021, in Quebec, public (“Centres de la petite enfance” or CPE spaces) increased by about 55 per cent, or 35,000 spaces. In the same time period, private, unsubsidized spaces increased by about 4,200 per cent or 68,500 spaces. This growth in private provision is not at all what architects of public child-care provision desire. It has, however, proved unavoidable in Quebec, precisely because provision of public spaces has been so slow. Whether it’s lack of funds, political will or some other combination of factors, Quebec has been unable over two decades to build the system of CPE’s envisioned in the mid 1990s.
None of this is a secret: The Quebec auditor general reported last fall there are “not enough spaces available in subsidized child care to meet the needs of families in Quebec.” There are 98,014 spaces in CPEs but 46,000 on a waiting list for a CPE space, as per the auditor general. Does this sound like a policy success?
Further, the waitlists are now themselves a source of inequity. The same auditor-general report highlights that in Montreal in particular, “the children of low-income families are underrepresented in (CPEs).” Previous studies showed this to be a problem across Quebec. Sociologist Rod Beaujot wrote this in a 2013 paper: “In Quebec, day care is used less by children in vulnerable environments, and the services they use are of lower quality (Giguère and Desrosiers 2011). In contrast, the higher the mother’s education, and the higher the family income, the greater the usage of child-care in the Quebec program (Audet and Gingras 2011.) While the program has provisions for disadvantaged families, it would appear that other provinces are more successful in tailoring programs to families with lower incomes.”
So, it’s another “universal” program that disproportionally benefits the wealthy and well-connected (who tend to be Liberal Party supporters and voters)? Tabarnak! Who could ever have possibly seen this coming? Oh, and the Quebec model the rest of the country is supposedly eager to adopt has literally the worst ratios of adult caregivers to children, and 81% of Quebec parents say “Finding quality child care is a way bigger hassle than it should be for parents today”, which is a higher percentage than it is in any other province.
October 14, 2021
The quasi-monopolies of the “web giants”
Arthur Chrenkoff runs afoul of automated “community standards” enforcement on social media, getting locked out of his Twitter account for something that any actual human being would be able to instantly decide was not at all any kind of violation of normal human interactions online or in-person. Of course, if you’ve been in this position yourself, you won’t be surprised to find that launching an appeal of the bot’s action does not get immediate response … and sometimes never gets any attention from a human. He’s aware of this, and he’s still of the belief that this does not call out for any kind of government intervention:
“Automotive Social Media Marketing” by socialautomotive is licensed under CC BY 2.0
I remain broadly sympathetic to the free market argument that competition will, in time, cure any problems that business activity throws up from time to time, such as market domination or underhand practices. The mighty will be brought down low, new players will offer new products, consumer preferences will change, creative (or destructive) equilibrium will be restored. We can all argue, of course, to what extent free market and free competition exist in any particular setting at any particular time. If “real socialism” has never been tried, “real free market” (as opposed to capitalism, which is not necessarily the same thing) might be equally rare in practice. It is certainly true that comparing the lists of top 50 biggest companies one hundred, 50, 20 years ago and today will indicate a lot of economic change, but might not tell us very much about the reasons for that change, which can be quite complex.
The tech giants might not be historically unique as far as their size and power are concerned, but they’re not the norm either. They are not exactly monopolists, but their domination of their particular sections of the market elevates them from the domain of mere companies to something akin to public utilities. Google, Facebook and YouTube, for example, account for 80 per cent of digital advertising in Australia. There are alternatives to all these providers but they are so tiny by comparison as to defeat their main purpose for many users, which is to provide the biggest possible reach and exposure to the world. If you get demonetised or banned by YouTube, other video-sharing platforms can give you only a fraction of the traffic and the eyeballs, which impoverishes you literally and the internet users metaphorically, since they are now less likely to be exposed to the broad range of content. There are other social networks, but only Facebook has “everyone” on it, including your grandma, school friend from primary, and that couple you’ve met on the trip to Spain. Sure, if you get banned from Facebook, you can still try to keep in touch with all these people via many separate channels but it’s so much more difficult, disjointed and time consuming. For that same reason, Facebook’s Marketplace has a much better reach than other platforms that are focused exclusively on online ads. If Marketplace continues to shadow ban me, I can try Craigslist or Gumtree or Locanto, but – certainly in the categories I’m interested in – they all have significantly smaller audiences.
The traditional response to bad customer experience has been “try somebody/something else”. You don’t like Facebook – or Facebook doesn’t like you? Try another similar service. But I’m not sure if most of my friends would be able to name even one alternative to FB, and the chances they are on it are even slimmer. So telling people to stop whining and use an alternative to the tech giants is akin to telling someone “Oh, you can’t have a mobile (cell) phone? So what, no one is stopping you from writing a letter!” It’s the same but different. This is the consequence of the domination of the internet by the Googles and the Facebooks. And the internet now does play an essential role – for better or worse – in our lives and work. Hence the comparison to public utilities. Facebook might not be quite like electricity or running water, but it’s very close to, say, phone service. Yes, you can opt for another social network, but compared to Facebook this would be like a phone company that only makes it possible for you to contact one in twenty people instead of just about everyone, and even then maybe only once a week, at a time predetermined by the provider. It’s a service of sorts, but so inferior in every way to the main game in town as to be incomparable.
I’m not offering any solution to this problem. Many, both on the left and the right, are increasingly of a mind that, like Standard Oil of more than a century ago, the tech behemoths of today need to be broken down into smaller and less powerful units. That could solve some problems but won’t solve many others. Like mine, for example; a somehow “smaller” Twitter and Facebook can still be unresponsive and unaccountable. And as we know from other areas of economy, greater involvement and control by the supposedly impartial government does not guarantee better outcomes either. Big government, like big business, is run by human beings who, quite apart from their own characteristics as individuals, work within a particular culture, which has its own values, agendas and preferences. Government is a monopolist too in many ways, and for all the politics, is not necessarily responsive and accountable either.
