Quotulatiousness

April 30, 2021

Bill C-10, despite frequent government denials, would regulate user-generated content on the internet

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Michael Geist continues to sound the alarm about the federal government’s bill to vastly increase CRTC control over Canadians’ access to information and entertainment options online, including the Heritage minister’s mendacity when challenged about how the CRTC’s powers will increase to censor individual Canadians in what they post to online services like YouTube:

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault and the Liberal government’s response to mounting concern over its decision to remove a legal safeguard designed to ensure the CRTC would not regulate user generated content has been denial. The department’s own officials told MPs that all programming on sites like Youtube would be subject to regulation, yet Guilbeault insisted to the House of Commons that user generated content would be excluded from regulation as part of Bill C-10, his Broadcasting Act reform bill.

However, based on new documents I recently obtained, it has become clear that Guilbeault and the government have misled the Canadian public with their response. In fact, the government effectively acknowledges that it is regulating user generated content in a forthcoming, still-secret amendment to Bill C-10. Amendment G-13, submitted by Liberal MP Julie Dabrusin on April 7th and likely to come before the committee studying the bill over the next week, seeks to amend Section 10(1) of the Broadcasting Act which specifies the CRTC’s regulatory powers. It states:

    (4) Regulations made under paragraph (1)(c) do not apply with respect to programs that are uploaded to an online undertaking that provides a social media service by a user of the service – if that user is not the provider of the service or the provider’s affiliate, or the agent or mandatary of either of them – for transmission over the Internet and reception by other users of the service.

The amendment is a clear acknowledgement that user generated content are programs subject to CRTC’s regulation making power. Liberal MPs may claim the bill doesn’t do this, but their colleagues are busy submitting amendments to address the reality.

But it is not just that the government knew that its changes would result in regulating user generated content. The forthcoming secret amendment only covers one of many regulations that the CRTC may impose. The specific regulation – Section 10(1)(c) of the Broadcasting Act – gives the CRTC the power to establish regulations “respecting standards of programs and the allocation of broadcasting time for the purpose of giving effect to the broadcasting policy set out in subsection 3(1).”

April 15, 2021

QotD: The “evil” of profits

Filed under: Business, Economics, Germany, Government, Quotations, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The slogan into which the Nazis condensed their economic philosophy, viz., Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz (i.e., the commonweal ranks above private profit), is likewise the idea underlying the American New Deal and the Soviet management of economic affairs. It implies that profit-seeking business harms the vital interests of the immense majority, and that it is the sacred duty of popular government to prevent the emergence of profits by public control of production and distribution.

Ludwig von Mises, Planned Chaos, 1947.

April 8, 2021

Fallen Flag — the Duluth, Missabe & Iron Range Railway

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

This month’s Classic Trains fallen flag feature is the Duluth, Missabe & Iron Range Railway (DM&IR) by Steve Glischinski. The DM&IR was formed by the 1937 merger between the Duluth, Missabe and Northern Railway (DMN) and the Spirit Lake Transfer Railway and the 1938 further merger of the combined operation with the Duluth and Iron Range Road (D&IR) and the Interstate Transfer Railway. The D&IR had been founded in 1874 to transport iron ore from Tower, MN to Two Harbors, MN, eventually coming under the ownership of United States Steel Corporation in 1901.

The Merritt family of Minnesota (known as the “Seven Iron Brothers“) discovered a large iron ore deposit in the Mesabi Range and created the largest iron ore mine in the world (as of the 1890s) and tried to persuade the DMN to build a 70-mile rail connection to get their ore to harbour and out to the iron and steel foundries around the Great Lakes. The DMN was unwilling to commit, so the Merritt family borrowed money to build the line from, among other financiers, John D. Rockefeller. The line — called the Duluth, Missabe and Northern — got built and began operations in 1892, but the Merritts expanded too quickly at the wrong moment — the financial panic of 1893 — losing financial control and leaving ownership of both the mine and the railway in Rockefeller’s hands by 1894.

Charlemagne Tower sold the Duluth & Iron Range to Illinois Steel in 1887, which was succeeded by Federal Steel, then U.S. Steel. By 1901, both the D&IR and DM&N were under U.S. Steel control. USS upgraded both railroads with heavy rail and double track, ordered bigger locomotives and larger cars, and built sizeable shops and roundhouses at Proctor and Two Harbors.

In 1915 DM&N leased the Spirit Lake Transfer Railway, a link between DM&N at Adolph, near Proctor, and the Interstate Transfer Railway at Oliver, Wis., across from Steelton, Minn. The Interstate Transfer ran from Oliver to Itasca, in eastern Superior, giving the DM&N connections with large railroads including Northern Pacific, Chicago & North Western’s “Omaha Road”, and three members of the Canadian Pacific family: Minneapolis, St. Paul & Sault Ste. Marie (“Soo Line”); Wisconsin Central; and Duluth, South Shore & Atlantic.

DM&N and D&IR remained separate until January 1, 1930, when the DM&N leased the D&IR and consolidated operations. Then on July 1, 1937, the DM&N merged with the Spirit Lake Transfer to form the Duluth, Missabe & Iron Range Railway. DM&IR then acquired ownership of D&IR and Interstate Transfer, and they became part of the new corporation on March 22, 1938. Reminders of the two big predecessors remained in the DM&IR’s two operating divisions, named Iron Range and Missabe, made up primarily of the predecessors’ tracks.

The Great Depression drastically reduced ore traffic. In 1932, not a single all-ore train was run — the small amount of ore that had to be shipped was carried in mixed freights. World War II reversed the road’s fortunes, of course, and the postwar boom resulted in an even higher demand for ore, with an all-time tonnage record being set in 1953.

Missabe had minimal passenger service. Into the 1950s, handsome Pacifics pulled heavyweight steel RPOs and coaches, two with solarium observation sections. At the end of World War II, the Missabe still provided service between Duluth and Ely (Winton), and Duluth and Hibbing, with the Hibbing train connecting with one from Iron Junction to Virginia.

Duluth, Missabe & Iron Range M-3 locomotive no. 227.
Photo by “GavinTheGazelle” via Wikimedia Commons.

U.S. Steel spun off the DM&IR and its other ore railroads and shipping companies to subsidiary Transtar in 1988, selling majority control to the Blackstone Group. In 2001, DM&IR and other holdings were moved from Transtar to Great Lakes Transportation, fully owned by Blackstone, so for the first time in a century, DM&IR was no longer associated with U.S. Steel. On October 20, 2003, Canadian National announced it would buy Great Lakes Transportation, which also owned Bessemer & Lake Erie, Pittsburgh & Conneaut Dock Co. in Ohio, and Great Lakes Fleet, Inc. The purchase was finalized on May 10, 2004, and the independent Missabe Road vanished.

CN retired all but 10 of the SD40-3s, most of the SD38s, and all the rebuilt SD9s and 18s. Major locomotive work shifted from Proctor to other shops, and train dispatchers moved to Wisconsin, then Illinois. CN invested in new ore cars for the Missabe, gradually replacing those that dated to when steam still ruled the railroad. DM&IR existed on paper until December 31, 2011, when CN merged subsidiaries DM&IR and Duluth, Winnipeg & Pacific into Wisconsin Central.

April 3, 2021

QotD: When governments try to “help” small businesses

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

In 1961, economist Benjamin Chinitz argued that New York was more resilient than Pittsburgh because New York possessed a culture of entrepreneurship, originally inculcated by the garment industry, where anyone with a good idea and a couple of sewing machines could start a business. By contrast, gritty cities like Pittsburgh, dominated by large smokestack industries that tended to snuff out small-scale entrepreneurial activity, eventually faced a crisis when those industries grew less profitable, and the local economy struggled to adjust.

Love for small business is one of the few universals in American politics. In a 2018 Gallup poll, just 56 percent of Americans viewed capitalism positively; but 92 percent had a positive view of small business, and 86 percent viewed entrepreneurs positively. Government at all levels has policies intended to help small businesses, but there’s little evidence that these programs are effective — and even when bureaucrats try to help, they impede small-business creation by imposing new regulations. The New York City Business License and Permit index presents a daunting compendium of licenses and certifications that can be required to start a business in the city — such as the Esthetics License (needed if you want to “conduct beauty treatment”) and the Certificate of Fitness for Fire and Emergency Drill Instructor (necessary to “lead fire drills in buildings that do not require a Fire Safety Director”).

Such overregulation represents a second way that the deck gets stacked in the American economy against outsiders. The decline of American entrepreneurship is a discouraging trend of the last 30 years. In 2015, economist John Haltiwanger documented numerous signs of diminished business dynamism in the United States. In the early 1980s, he noted, America’s startup rate exceeded 13 percent, which meant that about one-eighth of all firms had just begun. The startup share fell to 10 percent near the end of the Clinton years and below 8 percent during the Great Recession. While no consensus exists about the causes of this dramatic drop, expanding business regulation is a plausible candidate.

Edward L. Glaeser, “How to Fix American Capitalism”, City Journal, 2020-12-13.

March 22, 2021

Apocrypha: Tour of the Kyrö Distillery

Filed under: Business, Europe — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 21 Mar 2021

While I was in Finland for Finnish Brutality 2021, I took a day to hitch a train ride up to Isokyrö, about 400km northwest of Helsinki. The Kyrö distillery was founded there in 2012, making single malt Finnish rye whiskey and several varieties of gin.

Their own video does a fine job describing the origins of the distillery:

https://youtu.be/6Q35akNanEs​

But I wanted to get a look at the production process — and it’s impressively well set up! The rye is made in a pair of imported Scottish pot stills, and the gin uses a combination of pot and column distillation. They were kind enough to give me a tour of the whole place, so let’s have a look around!

They are distributed throughout the EU, and to a limited extent in the US.

https://kyrodistillery.com​

(Apocrypha is a behind-the-scenes periodic series normally only available to Patreon supporters of Forgotten Weapons. Want to see more? Sign up to help support me directly at http://www.patreon.com/forgottenweapons​)

March 18, 2021

The Hornby Story

Filed under: Britain, Business, History, Railways — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Little Car
Published 27 Feb 2020

Hornby Railways is a British model railway brand. Its roots date back to 1901, when founder Frank Hornby received a patent for his Meccano construction toy. The first clockwork train was produced in 1920. In 1938, Hornby launched its first 00 gauge train. In 1964, Hornby and Meccano were bought by their competitor, Tri-ang, and sold on when Tri-ang went into receivership. Hornby Railways became independent again in the 1980s, and became listed on the London Stock Exchange, but due to recent financial troubles, reported in June 2017, is presently majority owned by turnaround specialist Phoenix Asset Management.

The script for this video comes from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornby_…
If you find issues with the content, I encourage you to update the Wikipedia article, so everyone can benefit from your knowledge.

To get early ad-free access to new videos, or your name at the end of my videos, please consider supporting me from just $1 or 80p a month at https://www.patreon.com/bigcar

#hornby #hornbyrailways

March 17, 2021

The long-gone economic framework of print newspapers

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

In The Line, Peter Menzies explains the economic underpinnings of the newspaper world back in the “good old days” before first radio, then TV, and finally the internet took all the profits out of their model:

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

We will hear a lot in the months ahead about who’s making money from news, so let’s get something straight: Even in the profit-soaked heyday of Canadian newspapers, no one made money from news.

That all ended about 100 years ago when radio — and then television — began delivering it for free.

Oh sure, the occasional ongoing news story would inspire people to buy more newspapers. But in my 30 years in that business the only event that did so in any significant way was the death and funeral of Princess Diana. Even then, after the extra cost of newsprint and distribution, the financial return was insignificant.

But mythologies die hard. People in newsrooms believed news made money — and apparently some still do — even when year after year, surveys of readers showed that there were lots of other things that sold and sustained newspapers.

Some people bought them because they were looking for a job. For others, it was a house, a plumber, a companion, a pet, a car or, really, almost anything else you can think of that might be needed. Classified pages were every town and city’s marketplace. That’s where you found stuff you had to get and bought an ad when you had something to sell or tell people about. It was where you announced the births of your babies, the graduations, engagements and weddings of your children and the deaths of your parents. The lives of communities were recorded in the classified pages of their newspapers.

After a glance at the headlines, many other readers’ first and sometimes only stops were the horoscope, comics, crossword (an error there generated far more calls than a rogue columnist ever could) and other pleasant distractions. For still more, it was the stocks listings, sports scores or recipes to which they were primarily drawn.

There were movie and entertainment listings — even a TV guide so you’d know where and when to find Seinfeld. On Thursdays, you might buy a paper just for the Canadian Tire flyer. On weekends, specialty sections discussed books and told tales of travel adventures well-supported by the latest deals advertised by travel agencies. Housing developers pitched their latest home designs in special real estate sections. And there were magazines. Honestly, there were.

It’s been literal decades since we last subscribed to a print newspaper, and nearly as long since I picked one up from a news stand. My mother is the last person I recall still depending on buying a physical newspaper — she only stopped buying a Saturday Toronto Star in the last year or so — but that was mainly for the TV listings. Back when I still occasionally travelled on business (also more than a decade ago, now), it was a nostalgic treat to find a copy of USA Today at the door of my hotel room in the morning.

March 15, 2021

Target is careful to only cite economic reasons for abandoning their downtown Minneapolis headquarters

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

Jon Miltimore explains why the Target corporate headquarters in Minneapolis will be given up — for reasons that go beyond the claimed success of the telecommuting encouraged by the 2020 pandemic lockdowns:

A building burning in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd.
Photo by Hungryogrephotos via Wikipedia.

Target Corporation, the eighth largest retailer in the United States, announced in an email to employees on Thursday that it will be leaving the City Center, its primary downtown Minneapolis location.

Company officials cited improved remote work opportunities and less need for space as the drivers for the decision.

“In just one year we’ve proven that we can drive incredible results, together, from our kitchens and basements and living rooms,” said Melissa Kremer, executive vice president and leader of Target’s human resources operations.

Target, the largest employer in Minneapolis with some 8,500 corporate workers, says the 3,500 employees who work at the City Center will still have a “home base,” but it will be at another Minneapolis location or in the nearby suburb of Brooklyn Park.

A Story of Capital Flight?

On one hand, there is little reason to doubt Target’s explanation for abandoning its headquarters. Many anticipated that the pandemic would lead to a normalization of remote work.

“The future of work will be distributed,” Erica Brescia, the chief operating officer of Github, told the BBC last fall. “We’re going to see a big shift from office by default to remote by default.”

Part of that shift, it’s reasonable to assume, would be corporations moving away from high-end corporate real estate. Yet it also shouldn’t be forgotten (or ignored) that Target’s decision comes less than a year after Minneapolis suffered some of the worst riots in US history, prompted by the May 25 death of George Floyd.

The riots — which broke out after a video went viral showing police pinning Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, to the ground for nearly nine minutes before he died — caused an estimated $2 billion in damage.

Though Target made no mention of the riots in its announcement, last summer I noted that an abundance of evidence suggested that the economic damage of the riots would persist long after the wreckage had cleared.

March 11, 2021

Substack is “‘incredibly dangerous and damaging’ to ‘one of the few failsafes against anti-democratic maneuvers'”

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

At The Line, Matt Gurney discusses Substack in the light of extreme criticism by, among others, UCLA professor of information studies Dr. Sarah T. Roberts:

It wasn’t long ago that Jen Gerson and I wrote damn similar columns within days of each other. She was writing here, at The Line, and I was writing at my personal blog, Code 47. We both discussed Substack, the digital publishing company you’re reading at this very moment — The Line is currently hosted on Substack.

Or, if you prefer, Substack is a “a dangerous direct threat to traditional news media” and “a threat to journalism.”

That is the view of Dr. Sarah T. Roberts, a professor of information studies at UCLA, who unloaded on Substack (and some of those who use it) in a recent Twitter thread. You can read it here, and should, but for our purposes, Roberts argues that Substack is bad because it lets journalists who have come up through the traditional newsroom system bail on it, stop bothering with the trouble of an editor, “cash out” on the reputation they earned in newsrooms, and transform themselves from a “journalist” to that vastly lower order of life, “an opinion writer, at best.” Ouch!

Roberts makes an explicit appeal to her Twitter followers: do not pay for Substack content. Do not write for Substack. (She does carve out exceptions for purely personal blogs on trivial topics.) But Substack as a journalism venture is, in her view, “incredibly dangerous and damaging” to “one of the few failsafes against anti-democratic maneuvers … We really can’t afford to lose [journalism] right now.”

This is my summary of what she said — perhaps she’d quibble with it, which is why I’m encouraging you, all of you, to go read her original thread. Get it in her own words and judge for yourself if I’ve been fair.

Assuming I’ve passed your muster, like, yikes. Where to start?

Roberts is, of course, as entitled to her views as any one, and if she hates Substack with a fiery passion, that’s totally fine. And I think there is some truth to her argument, as Jen and I both noted in our earlier pieces: there no doubt are some people with big profiles, who built those profiles working for traditional newsrooms, who will bail on that job to go make money — maybe lots of money! — on Substack. This is a threat to legacy media organizations, who are more reliant than ever on a few key contributors, who serve not only as click magnets, but also human avatars of an outlet’s brand. Roberts’ argument is on the money here.

But the sum of what she left out of her argument is so gigantic that it practically warrants a Substack of its own.

March 8, 2021

Despite the rhetoric, judging by their actions the Democrats really hate the “gig economy”

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

Along with all the giveaways to favoured groups in the US government’s huge “relief” bill, there was a late change that will take the gig economy into a back alley and rough it up to the tune of about $1 billion in new taxes:

UBER 4U by afagen is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

When the economy is struggling to recover from a pandemic and crushing government lockdowns, that’s probably the worst time to impose $1 billion in new annual taxes on the working class. But that’s exactly what a new provision quietly slipped into the Democrats’ sweeping $1.9 trillion COVID legislation would do.

“A last-minute insert by Democrats looking to offset the cost of their coronavirus aid package would send tax collectors into the gig economy, eventually costing Uber and DoorDash drivers, Airbnb hosts and others about $1 billion annually,” Roll Call reports.

Under current tax law, earnings data for gig economy workers only needs to be reported to the IRS once it reaches $20,000. This means that small earners pursuing gig work to supplement their income aren’t hit by crushing federal taxes. However, the Democrats’ provision would nearly eliminate this benchmark, and instead require all income above $600 to be reported to the IRS.

“The stiffer tax burden would be imposed while 10 million Americans are unemployed and more and more have turned to freelance and gig economy work to make ends meet,” Roll Call notes.

Indeed it would, and this would be disastrous for both workers and the economy.

This tax hike “adds a significant burden to gig economy and small business workers at the worst possible time,” according to TechNet spokesman Steve Kidera. One tax expert warned Roll Call that many struggling gig economy workers won’t be able to pay the higher taxes, and that IRS penalties “can destroy a person’s life.”

QotD: Wall Street

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

Wall Street is a street with a river at one end and a graveyard at the other. This is striking, but incomplete. It omits the kindergarten in the middle.

Fred Sched, Where Are the Customers’ Yachts?, 1940.

February 23, 2021

The Corgi Toys Story

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

Little Car
Published 4 Feb 2020

Corgi Toys is the name of a range of die-cast toy vehicles produced by Mettoy Playcraft Ltd. in the United Kingdom.

The script for this video comes from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corgi_Toys

If you find issues with the content, I encourage you to update the Wikipedia article, so everyone can benefit from your knowledge.

To get early ad-free access to new videos, or your name at the end of my videos, please consider supporting me from just $1 or 80p a month at https://www.patreon.com/bigcar

Link to my other channel – Big Car: https://www.youtube.com/bigcar2

February 19, 2021

QotD: The disillusionment of working in a bookshop

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

For the better part of 2006, while studying for a master’s degree, I worked part-time in a branch of Waterstone’s, in *REDACTED*, the county capital of *REDACTED*.

I got the interview by stating openly in my covering letter that I was 24, still living with my mum, and asking her for train-fare had become a bit undignified. This seemed encouraging. But then the panel (2 pax.) asked what I was reading currently, and I said Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, and there was awkward silence. This set the tone for almost every “literary” chat thereafter.

Call me an idiot, but I was genuinely stunned to find we weren’t allowed to read on the job. Instead, booksellers had to devote any time not spent actually dealing with customers (which on a rainy weekend, in the wrong bit of the shop, could be a lot) with often-fruitless searches for books which had been lost, mis-shelved, or maybe stolen, or because they had to be returned to publishers (another surprise), and at the publisher’s expense.

I also quickly realised that the layout of the shop was not an accident (even in the jury-rigged “commercial” buildings of many an English town centre), and that the unadvertised steering of a customer around a bookshop was near-identical to how the algorithms work in the online equivalents (or vice versa, probably). If you like Poetry, you’re more likely to also like Philosophy, (right here on the next set of shelves), or Music (by the window), or History books (just across the room there), than if you came in looking for the latest Jeffrey Archer novel (downstairs, on the pile-’em-high islands).

Most of the time, I was just moving “stock” about, taking maddening credit card orders over the phone, or walking people literally to alphabetised mass-market fiction. All of which required no interest in, let alone knowledge of, literature. To a middle-class nerd such as myself, discovering that working in a bookshop [cue poetic images of James Frain, or similar] was fundamentally no different from working in a Sports Direct or Tesco was about the most depressing thing imaginable. That, and waiting for the Sunday trains in winter.

A.S.H. Smyth, “Seven kinds of people you find in bookshops”, The Critic, 2020-11-14.

February 15, 2021

The current (and future) rash of newsroom purges

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

Some thoughts from The Line on why people like former New York Times science reporter Donald McNeil are being given the show trial treatment and why it’s not going to stop quickly:

The New York Times Building in New York City, 1 January, 2008.
Photo by Frieder Blickle via Wikimedia Commons.

The first issue, of course, is a steady weaponization of HR processes and unions. Vehicles intended to fix problems like unfair pay structures, workplace misconduct and lack of due process are being re-deployed as tools of ideological conformity — fuelled by healthy doses of personal dislike and professional resentment.

Make no mistake: there are bad people in journalism, as there are in any profession. Abusers should be rooted out, and there should always be clear processes in place to handle toxic personalities fairly, decisively and effectively. (“Fairly” isn’t a buzzword here — the accused must have rights, too.)

But there has also been a steady lowering of the bar as to what evils warrant an HR intervention. Every newsroom should be a safe place from abuse, harassment and violence — but not from ideas that are offensive. We recognize the entirely legitimate concerns of employees who are from marginalized groups about historic injustices, microaggressions and systemic power imbalances. But being in the world sometimes involves working with people who are simply insensitive assholes. Drawing the line between the merely difficult and the truly dysfunctional isn’t always easy.

Further, many of the complaints now being bandied about are strategic. They are being used to pummel terrified HR staffs and weak, ineffectual managers into compliance with ideological agendas. A staff at war with itself and ever-fearful of the axe is easier to silence and control. Owners have long understood this; it’s a grim irony that our peers have now decided to take up the hood and the blade.

These workplace revolts always boil down to an internal struggle for control. The very concept of where power rests is being challenged by those who think the traditional way of running newsrooms is as obsolete as a classifieds page. Uprisings are about who decides institutional values, and who gets to enforce those values. An entire class of leaders needs to wake up to the fact that they’re three campaigns deep into a battle for their own legitimacy. And they’re losing.

That brings us to the third issue: management. We’ve said this before, but managers need to show some spine. The most consistent theme in all these newsroom eruptions is management either lacking the confidence to assert its authority, or hesitating to do so just long enough to make things worse. Too many leaders have been selected for their affability rather than their toughness. We at The Line suspect this is no accident. Powerful editors, necessary for effective management of staff, are inconvenient for owners intent on slashing said newsrooms. The kind of people who’d be most effective at crushing the odd staff rebellion also annoy the suits. So instead, we get nice people — truly nice people — who know the right folks and subscribe to the right politics, and shy away from embarrassment, conflict, and loss of status. They’re marks.

February 11, 2021

Tom Brady’s Super Bowl success has outlasted many titans of corporate America

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

Despite the headline, this isn’t really about the NFL, Tom Brady or the S*per B*wl, it’s about a key factor in free market economies: creative destruction.

“Blockbuster store closing sale” by Consumerist Dot Com is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Consider some of the names that bought Super Bowl airtime during Brady’s first rodeo in January 2002: AOL, Blockbuster, Radio Shack, Circuit City, CompUSA, Sears, Yahoo, VoiceStream Wireless, and Gateway Computers.

The Titans of Yesterday

Notice a theme? That list features some companies we saw in Captain Marvel, the 2019 hit movie that nailed 90s nostalgia and reminded us how fast the world had changed. Like when Blockbuster Video stores were still a thing.

For those who may not recall, when Brady was winning his first Super Bowl, Blockbuster was approaching its peak. In 2004, it operated 9,094 stores and employed some 84,300 people. The company was pulling in $6 billion in revenue annually and looked invincible. Today, a single Blockbuster store remains open — in the world.

Remember RadioShack? Once upon a time, it seemed as if you could find one of their brick-and-mortar stores in every corner of the USA. Not anymore. In 2015, RadioShack filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, in large part because of those many store locations, which cannibalized revenues.

Sears, one of the historic giants of retail, managed to make it to 2018 before announcing its bankruptcy. Its stores continue to close so fast, it’s hard to tell how many remain in operation. (The best guess is about 60.)

It’s sometimes difficult to remember that the titans of industry aren’t always the same companies from year to year, and the sector-dominating company today might well be begging for a bailout (or demanding protection from uppity new competitors) only a few years down the way.

Some might see the collapse of Blockbuster, Sears and company as a sign of something terribly wrong with our economic system. After all, Blockbuster alone paid rent at tens of thousands of properties and employed tens of thousands of workers. Sears was the largest American retailer (by far) for decades.

Watching the companies we once shopped at flounder and fail can be surprising, jarring even. But a closer look shows this cycle is not unusual and is actually the sign of a healthy market economy, not a dysfunctional one. What may seem like pure destruction actually clears the way for economic innovation and renewal. “Creative destruction” is how the economist Joseph Schumpeter (1880-1950) characterized business failure in a free market.

As economist Mark Perry points out, companies on top have a very hard time staying on top. Perry, a scholar at the American Enterprise institute and a professor of economics at the University of Michigan’s Flint campus, compared the 1955 Fortune 500 companies to the 2019 Fortune 500. He found that just 52 were still on the list six decades later.

I spent most of my working career in the software business, and many of the companies I’ve worked for over the years aren’t in business any more (my first job out of school was with Northern Telecom … remember them?). Software is a particularly fast-cycling industry, but it’s true of the economy as a whole at a slightly more sedate pace.

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