“A good song should make you wanna tap your feet and get with your girl. A great song should destroy cops and set fire to the suburbs. I’m only interested in writing great songs.”
So says Tom Morello, guitarist for the Los Angeles-based band Rage Against the Machine. He and his bandmates are not simply against cops and the suburbs, of course. They also stand for the Zapatistas and the Shining Path, for freeing Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier, for giving California back to Mexico, and for destroying stores where rich people like themselves shop.
That’s pretty strong stuff coming from work-for-hire employees of one of the great cogs in the global capitalist machine, the megaconglomerate Sony, which wholly owns and distributes Rage’s music and even is a co-owner of the group’s publishing. Since 1992, Rage has sold nearly 7 million records, and it’s safe to say that nobody has benefitted more from that commerce than the band’s unabashedly capitalist paymaster.
Brian Doherty, “Rage On: The strange politics of millionaire rock stars”, Reason, 2000-10.
August 27, 2021
QotD: Music corporations, musicians, and hypocrisy
August 21, 2021
Indigo in the red
In the latest edition of his SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte looks at the dire financial situation of Canada’s big box bookstore chain:
“Indigo Books and Music” by Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine is licensed under CC0 1.0
Indigo just released its first-quarter financial results, covering the period April-June 2021, which can be compared to its pre-pandemic results from the same quarter in 2019.
Back then, Indigo had revenues of $193 million and no profit. Seventy percent of its revenue, or $136 million, came from the firm’s eighty-nine Chapters and Indigo superstores. Only $25 million came from its 115 smaller stores (Coles and Indigo Spirit), and another $29 million from online sales at chapters.indigo.ca. Not only did the company book no profit, but all three of those revenue channels were down from the previous year, with online sales falling the most (15%).
This is to say that Indigo, in financial terms, was immunocompromised before COVID-19 hit.
The decline in digital sales was especially alarming. It seemed that CEO Heather Reisman was giving up on the web, an impression reinforced by her frequent renovations of in-store environments and her not terribly successful launch of a so-called cultural department store […] in New Jersey, Indigo’s first international gambit. She was all about bricks and mortar.
One also got the sense that Heather was giving up on books. She was building up the candles and blankets side of the business — it represented almost 40% of 2019’s total revenue. She also launched Thoughtfull.co, an effort to graze on Hallmark grass, and another step away from the book business.
I’d certainly despaired of finding much in the way of actual books at Chapters or Indigo stores … more and more of the floorspace that used to be devoted to books had been given over to housewares, candles, hostess gift items, decorative throw cushions and other such non-book items. Even before the Wuhan Coronavirus shut down the western world, it had been at least a year since the last time I’d found anything worth buying in one of their stores.
Two years and several pandemic waves later, Indigo is down to 88 superstores and 88 small-format stores, a net reduction of twenty-eight. I don’t know the significance of 88. Maybe the company’s new retail guru — Indigo always has a new retail guru — is a pianist, or Chinese, or a white supremacist.
The remaining stores are now open to foot traffic, and the company is wrangling with its various landlords over how much rent it should pay for the pandemic months when most of its outlets were closed. Indigo received almost $3 million in federal emergency rent subsidies, and almost $4 million in payroll subsidies, which seems like a lot but isn’t for a company as big as Indigo. As we noted in an earlier post, Heather also received a $25 million “liquidity enhancement”, or bailout, from billionaire husband Gerry Schwartz.
Which brings us to the present. Revenues for Indigo’s most recent quarter are $172 million (down $21 million from two years ago), and it lost $15 million (before depreciation, amortization, etc.).
Indigo doesn’t release enough detail on its operations to give us a clear idea of how the company lost only $15 million when its revenue fell $21 million, but costs were down across the board, probably reflecting the closed stores, reduced staffing levels, and fewer books on the shelves, among other savings.
QotD: Why do government workers need unions?
Sure, we can understand this if she’s working for the bastard capitalists. They merely want to maximise their profit and screw the workers while doing so – as we all know. But government is omniscient, omnipresent and omnibenevolent. It cannot be true that someone working for government is in need of protection from government. Because all those fine folks that make up government simply could not allow it to be that state workers don’t gain adequate wages.
Seriously, come on, this is the Progressive insistence. That getting government to do things saves us from the ravages we endure if the capitalists do them.
But now survey the actual American workplace. Unions in the private sector pretty much don’t exist any more. It is the government workforces that are unionised, making up the vast majority of union members in the country. From that pattern of union existence we have to conclude that government screws the workers rather more than the capitalists do. Otherwise why would people desire let alone need the protection of unions when working for government?
Tim Worstall, “The Public Union Proof That The Progressive State Doesn’t Work”, Expunct, 2021-05-11.
August 10, 2021
QotD: Government workplace regulations still envision the unionized 1930s factory as “normal”
Warren Meyer, “When Regulation Hammers Those It is Supposed to Benefit — A Real Example in California”, Coyote Blog, 2021-05-06.
August 9, 2021
The modern-day threat of being made an “unperson” is real and very dangerous
Sean Gabb explains why even libertarians need to consider the non-state power in the hands of corporations that can — and does — force people out of their jobs, their homes, and even deprive them of the ability to communicate or to access financial services merely for expressing unpopular opinions. As I said in a different venue, it’s a short step from “no fly lists” to “no eat lists”, especially when the enforcing entity is a nominally private organization:
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
The old pressures to conform were wrong. So are the new. And they are wrong simply because they are pressures to conform. I find myself at last appreciating a part of Mill’s essay On Liberty for which I never used to have much time. Until recently, I would insist that the only real oppression was by the State: all else was the working of private choice. If the authorities fined a man £5 for having sex with another man, that was outrageous tyranny. If his tastes became public knowledge, and he was unable to find work, that was merely unfortunate. This is, I still believe, essentially true. Indeed, I could argue that, without a State having centralised and corporatised powers of discrimination that ought to be widely distributed, there would be no problem — or there would be a problem that was bearable. But these powers were centralised and corporatised a long time ago. They are now being used to achieve a uniformity of opinion outside the home in which the formal organs of compulsion have no obvious part. This is not the “tyranny of the majority” that worried Mill. I find it inconceivable that anything close to a majority could believe the insane drivel pouring from the regime media. Neither, though, is it the kind of oppression against which liberal bills of rights have traditionally been written. Because of this —
when society is itself the tyrant …, its means of tyrannising are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them …
(J.S. Mill On Liberty, 1859, “Introductory“)
We need protection indeed. But the protection we need is not yet another law telling the police to leave dissidents alone. We already have a stack of these, and they are protections against a threat that largely does not exist. The answer, I suggest, is an amendment to the anti-discrimination laws to outlaw discrimination on the grounds of what may be loosely called political opinion.
I say hardly anyone read my original essay. Sadly, most of those who did read it stand in the more wooden reaches of the libertarian movement, and these set up a cry that I had become a Communist. I was suggesting that private organisations should be coerced in their choices of whom and whom not to employ, and even in their choices of customer and supplier. I had abandoned the non-aggression principle. Here, briefly expressed, is my answer to these claims.
I run the Centre for Ancient Studies. This provides a range of tuition services in Greek and Latin. It is a sole tradership. As such, I reserve the unconditional right to decide what services I offer and to whom. If I dislike the colour of your face, or the status of your foreskin, or your tastes in love, or anything else that I may think relevant, it should be my right not to do business with you. It may be that only a fool turns away customers with money to spend, and I am not that sort of a fool. Even so, I do claim at least the theoretical right, and I ground it on my right to do as I please with my own. But I claim these rights as a human individual. A limited company is not a human individual. Whatever entrepreneurship may exist in them, these companies are artificial persons and creatures of the State. Their owners have the privilege of limited liability. That is, they have the right, in the event of insolvency, not to pay the debts of a company if these are greater than the assets of the company. If this were not a valuable right, there would not be so many limited companies. There are almost no large companies, and none lasting more than a single generation, that do not have limited liability.
This being so, limited companies benefit from a grant of privilege from the State, and are legitimate subjects of regulation by the State for as long as they are receipt of this privilege. No doubt, some forms of state regulation are bad in their objects, or bad as regards the means to their objects. But regulation is not in itself an aggression by the State. It follows that, whether or not we can get it, libertarians should not feel barred from demanding laws to prevent limited companies from discriminating against their employees on the grounds of political opinion, and to require them to do business with customers and suppliers regardless of political opinion.
I appreciate that I am asking for more than the regulation of limited companies. The anti-discrimination laws we have make no distinction between incorporated and unincorporated associations. Even so, the extension of these laws to cover political opinion would mainly affect only the larger limited companies. At the same time, there is an obvious and overriding public interest in the protection of political opinion. People are now scared to speak their minds. Whether intended or just revealed, this is part of the strategy. The reason why the collapse of both freedom and tradition is gathering pace is because no one dares stand up and protest. In the absence of protest, everything will carry on as it is. Given a restored right of protest, there is a chance of stopping the collapse. The only way to lift the blanket of fear that now lies over all but approved opinion is somehow or other to get a law making it clear that no one who speaks his mind can be loaded with shadow punishments.
“Somehow or other!” In a sense, I am making a fool of myself. I am asking the politicians to make a law against what they themselves may not be doing, but that has no effect on their main reason for being in politics, which is to fill their pockets. I am asking them to take on the entire mass of the non-elected Establishment. I am asking a lot of these people. On the other hand, the politicians still need to be elected, and that was the weak point in the Establishment’s plan to stay in the European Union. We had to spend four years voting and revoting, but we did eventually get what we wanted. It is conceivable that, if enough of us call loudly enough for protection, some kind of protection will be granted.
Short of that, we are lost.
August 6, 2021
Fallen Flag — the Western Pacific Railroad
The Western Pacific company magazine Mileposts included this historical snippet in their 50th anniversary issue (courtesy of the Western Pacific Railroad Museum):
Virgil Bogue had become George Gould’s consulting engineer and recalling his surveys for the Union Pacific in the ’80’s, recommended Beckwourth Pass and the Feather River route. Remembering also an unhappy experience he had once had in locating any other road, only to find the whole route plastered with mining claims of dubious mineral value but through which rights of way must be negotiated, he advised Gould to form a “mining company” first. Accordingly the North California Mining Company was organized and soon nearly 600 placer claims were staked out, blanketing the entire proposed route across the mountains.
Gould turned the job over to the Denver and Rio Grande and its president, E.T. Jeffery, sent a field party under H.H. Yard west to locate the line. It was all top secret. The transit men and stake artists were forbidden even to let their wives know where they were. Letters could only be exchanged through the Denver office of the railroad. Two California corporations, the Butte and Plumas Railway and the Indian Valley Railway, were set up to be the figureheads.
[…]
George Gould still remained completely out of the picture and denied all connection with the project. Although he financed the new surveying parties that were immediately sent out to make the final location, he was forced, in the interests of this secrecy, to keep the Rio Grande engineers in the field as well. The absurd result was two hostile groups struggling to outwit each other and often on the point of exchanging pot shots, though both were actually on the same payroll.
After much chicanery and effort, the railway’s right of way through the Feather River Canyon, the next historically significant fight was securing access to the waterfront along San Francisco Bay, where the legal department of the Southern Pacific believed they had an ironclad monopoly of all the potentially useful access routes to salt water:
… the S.P. was fully confident that it would have but little difficulty in isolating the Western Pacific from a practical outlet on the Bay. The Santa Fe, only a few years before, had built its ferry slip way up at Point Richmond rather than attempt to crack the S.P. stronghold. Bartnett, after a hard struggle against the older railroad’s influence, did secure a small site on the mudflats of the Oakland Estuary. It would have made a miserably cramped ferry terminal but, from all appearances, the WP promoters had concluded it was the best they could do. Harriman’s forces sneered and relaxed. Gould’s were just beginning. Every move was carefully rehearsed and logistics figured to the last detail.
As the Oakland tidelands had gradually been filled in, the Government had extended the banks of San Antonio Estuary with rock quays called “training walls” in order to prevent silt from washing into the Oakland inner harbor channel. A dredger was often necessary to prevent the formation of a bar at the entrance of the channel. This dredger became the Trojan horse of the Gould attack.
On the night of January 5, 1906, the Western Pacific forces under Bartnett struck.
With 200 workmen and 30 guards armed with carbines and sawed-off shotguns, he used the dredging company as a front, and seizing the north training wall, began feverishly to lay a rough track. Most of the guards took up positions at the shore end of the U. S. training wall and maintained them night and day. Laborers snatched their sleep in shelter tents on the wave-washed rocks and the WP commissary department fed them. Scows rushed more rails and ties across the Bay to the end of the wall. Soon there was a mile of track on top of the rock wall.
Of course the Southern Pacific did not quietly accept this outrageous trespassing on domains it had held undisputed for more than half a century. Its legal department, fairly in convulsions, was whipping out the necessary papers for immediate appeal to the law. This was exactly what Bartnett had told Gould would happen and exactly what they both desired. For the courts, as Bartnett had felt sure they would, held that the Southern Pacific title to the waterfronts had not progressed westward with the shoreline as the tidelands and marshes had been filled in, but was valid only to the low tide line of 1852. The S.P.’s “waterfront” therefore was by now well inland, and the new marginal land surrounding it was the property of the city.
The city government was duly grateful to the new railway for almost literally liberating the city’s shoreline from the grip of the Southern Pacific. With most of the legal complications (and paramilitary solutions) out of the way, construction of the full line began in earnest, as Arthur L. Lloyd picks up the story:
Construction started in Salt Lake City. The line would be all 90-lb. rail and have no curve exceeding 10 degrees. To keep to the 1-percent maximum grade, the full-circle Williams Loop was built between Massack and Spring Garden, Calif., and another partial one, Arnold Loop, west of Wendover, Nev.
Work also went from Oakland eastward, and the last spike marking completion was driven on the bridge over Spanish Creek at Keddie, Calif., on Nov. 1, 1909. There was no ceremony. Section foreman Leonardo de Tomasso, age 25, did the honors with a standard steel spike. Arthur Keddie was still around, though. He rode WP’s first passenger train, and he spoke from the Plumas County Courthouse steps in Quincy, Calif., on Nov. 21, 1910.
WP was dispatched completely by train orders and timetable; its only block signals were on the paired track between Weso (Winnemucca) and Alazon (Wells) in Nevada, where eastbound WP and Southern Pacific trains used WP, while both roads’ westbounds used SP.
Route map of the Western Pacific, published in The Architect & Engineer of California and the Pacific Coast, 1905.
WP’s map was simplicity itself, highlighted by a main line from San Francisco Bay to Salt Lake City and a connection with the Rio Grande. The branch to Bieber, Calif., completed in the 1930s, connected to a Great Northern line.
August 2, 2021
Who is Colt? A History of the Colt Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company
Forgotten Weapons
Published 23 Feb 2017Today we will take a look at the history of the Colt company, from Sam Colt’s first efforts in Paterson (and before) to the West Hartford remnants that survive today. If you enjoy this type of history, please let me know in the comments!
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July 31, 2021
QotD: The dangers of “hipster fuckery” in the craft beer business
Hipster fuckery is a great way to alienate potential craft beer fans.
So how about we all just agree to be innovative as hell, but stop well short of hipster fuckery? Excellent! But, umm, where is that line exactly?
Rebecca Whyman, “Beer gimmicks, pretentious nonsense and other hipster fuckery”, The Growler: Ontario Craft Beer Guide, Volume 1, Issue 3, 2018.
July 30, 2021
The British government reaches deep into the bag of “nudge” tricks yet again
Britain’s public health boffins have got the government agitated enough to try major incentives to encourage British shoppers to buy healthier, lower-calorie foods. Tim Worstall explains that, because those shoppers are human beings, this suite of incentives won’t do at all what Nanny expects them to do:
Now consider how it has to work. You go shopping, you present your DimbleCard and gain points for the healthiness of that shopping basket. Lettuce and carrots galore, super, free ticket to London on the choo choo.
So, where are the chocco biccies? If you buy them when presenting your card then no choo choo for you. What happens?
The lettuce and the carrots are bought on the card, the chocco biccies are not. Everyone simply does two transactions, with DimbleCard and sans. Lots of free choo choo and no change, whatsoever, in diet.
Yes, of course people will do this. For that’s what people do. Survey the landscape of incentives in front of them then maximise their utility, the outcome, in the face of them. It’s a restricted rationality, restricted by knowledge, but it is there. Everyone will fiddle the system because that’s what it is to be human. Collecting the fire from the lightning strike is fiddling the universe, that’s just what we do.
This being why so many clever schemes to encourage or deter this or that just don’t work. This being why those detailed plans for men, if not mice, gang aft into idiocy. Because we out here, hom sap, will play whatever system there is to our benefit.
No, this will not work out like supermarket loyalty cards. Yes, it’s true, most of us do use them. But the incentive is for us to do so. The more we do use them then the more discounts we gain, the better off we are, even at the cost of that data. How does this new government one work? The less we buy of certain things the better off we are. So, less of those things will be bought using the cards.
It is not possible to insist that people must use the card to buy things. Well, not unless we’re about to descend into the dystopia desired by Caroline Lucas it’s not. There might be a card reader at the point of purchase but the supermarkets will not demand that a sale can only happen when a card is read.
Therefore there will be those sales which gain points which make prizes. There will also be those DimbleCardless sales which do not gain points, or even demerits, and are done without their being registered in the system.
July 26, 2021
When printers malfunction – Printer
Viva La Dirt League
Published 26 Apr 2021Adam experiences the utter frustration of when printers malfunction.
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July 25, 2021
The Line editors clearly loved crafting their “Dicks in space!” headline
As a fellow space nerd, I welcome the editors of The Line to our number:
You’ve probably noticed by now that your Line editors are space enthusiasts. It’s been an interesting few weeks on that front. Sir Richard Branson flew out of the atmosphere, into free-fall (not zero-G, you scientific illiterates!), on a Virgin Galactic space plane. That said, he didn’t get high enough to cross the Kármán line, which, in the absence of any real international agreement on where the Earth ends and space begins, is as close as we come to a functional definition of the edge of space. (It’s an altitude of 100 km, for those wondering.) Jeff Bezos, of Amazon wealth and fame, did cross that line this week, along with three passengers, including Wally Funk, which was cool, if you’re into that sort of thing. (We are.) Bezos was riding a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket; Blue Origin is a company he founded and funded with his own gigantic wealth.
Look, let’s face facts — your Line editors are into space. We just are. But yeah, we agree that space policy is important enough and complicated enough to warrant debate. Reasonable people can have different views on this stuff. And we also agree that there are important debates to have about the accumulated wealth of billionaires, and the distorting effects that wealth can have on politics and society.
But unlike a bunch of ya’ll, we don’t get confused about a debate over income inequality and a debate over space travel. You can despise Bezos, Amazon and everything he’s done there, and still recognize that what he is doing on the space front is important. Everyone rolling their eyes at Bezos matching space flight capabilities that the Soviets and Americans achieved literally 60 years ago is allowing their desire to rack up some sweet Twitter likes with a snarky dunk blind themselves to the fact that Bezos (and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is way ahead of Blue Origin) aren’t just recreating earlier capabilities, they are massively improving on them.
So yeah, Blue Origin can now do what the Soviets and U.S. could do 60 years ago, but they’re doing it more safely, more efficiently and much, much more sustainably than national space agencies did. Reusability isn’t a frill, it’s a massive game-changer. And as much fun as it is to snort when these private-sector companies recreate an existing capability, do you really think they’re going to stop there?
Branson’s company could be written off as a tourism play for the affluent. Fair enough. Except that making space flight economically viable is the first step to ensuring that capability is both sustainable and more broadly accessible in the long run. Further, Bezos and especially Musk are inventing new and transformative space-flight capabilities. They are materially pushing back against the final frontier in ways that we simply have not before. It won’t matter unless we choose to do anything with these new capabilities, and your guess is as good as ours as to whether or not we will. But we could. That’s huge.
As huge as the gigantic dick-shaped rocket Bezos rode up. Yeah, yeah. We snorted, too. But, like, seriously, folks — making penis jokes about the shape of an object dictated by aerodynamic considerations isn’t quite as witty as you think: the rockets are shaped like penises because they literally have to be in order to work. Having a giggle is fine, but if you actually think you’re making a real point about misogyny and fragile male egos when you get snippy (ahem) about a schlong-shaped rocket, well, we’d love to see what happens when your very emotionally vigorous and feminist vagina-shaped space vehicle hits max Q. So long as we aren’t aboard it or in the landing area for its hurtling debris.
Our main point still stands: don’t let your cynicism and even revulsion at these guys blind you to what they’re doing. Bezos isn’t gonna stop at Yuri Gagarin-vintage accomplishments. Musk sure hasn’t. This’ll matter. It’s time to get serious. They are.
July 24, 2021
QotD: Demolishing the Tim Hortons myth
Tim Hortons is not a defining national institution. Rather, it is a chain of thousands of doughnut shops, several of which have working toilets.
Tim Hortons is not an indispensable part of the Canadian experience. Rather, it is a place that sells a breakfast sandwich that tastes like a dishcloth soaked in egg yolk and left out overnight on top of a radiator.
Tim Hortons is not an anti-Starbucks choice that makes you a more relatable politician or a more authentic Canadian. Rather, it is a great place to buy a muffin if you’ve always wondered what it would be like to eat blueberry air.
There is no shame in having been caught up in the Hortons hype. It happens. Just last week, a columnist in the Toronto Star likened Tim Hortons to a precious vase that’s about to be juggled by its new owner, a monkey. (I was so irate at this irresponsible journalism that I wrote a letter demanding the Star issue a retraction. Everyone knows monkeys juggle only coconuts.)
Meanwhile, the NDP’s Peggy Nash — who, by all accounts, is an actual person and not a fictional construct of The Onion — gravely warned of the potential consequences of the Tim Hortons brand “falling into foreign hands.”
Yes, imagine the consequences. Maybe these madcap foreign owners will go so far as to alter the sandwiches so they taste like … something. Preferably like sandwich, but, at this point, most of us have stopped being picky.
Am I getting through to you, Canada? While we’re on the topic of hard truths, there is something else that needs to be said.
Canada, you sure do like your double-double — or, as it is by law referred to in news reports, the “beloved double-double.” But here’s a newsflash for you: If you drink your coffee with two creams and two sugars, the quality of the coffee itself is of little consequence. You might as well pour a mug of instant coffee or sip the urine of a house cat mixed with a clump of dirt from your golf spikes. It’s all basically the same thing once you bombard it with sweet and dairy. You’re really just wasting your …
I see from your reaction that I’ve crossed a line. I hereby withdraw my defamatory comments about the double-double and kindly ask that you return that handful of my chest hair.
Scott Feschuk, “Okay, Canada: It’s time for the hard truth about Tim Hortons”, Macleans, 2014-09-14.
July 22, 2021
Bourbon, almost an accidental hit
At TownHall, Salena Zito discusses the way Bourbon became a popular modern beverage from a none-too-promising eighteenth century beginning:
“Bourbon Bottles” by larryjh1234 is licensed under CC BY 2.0
About 250 years ago, farmers looking for a way to make their surplus corn crop profitable decided to distill it. Today, that leftover grain has become a billion-dollar industry and a symbol of the Bluegrass State’s identity, economy and culture.
“How bourbon came about is (what) … the American spirit looks like: business, independence, freedom, a little bit of luck and a lot of perseverance,” said Justin Thompson.
Thompson and his colleague Justin Sloan are the proprietors of The House of Bourbon, the world’s largest bourbon store, located on West Main Street in Lexington right across from Mary Todd Lincoln’s childhood home.
And right now, business is booming.
Thompson and Sloan started collecting rare and vintage bottles of bourbon 20 years ago, when the drink was out of favor. Then, four years ago, the state passed a law allowing the resale of distilled spirits and the duo opened their store, selling not just their stockpile but the history of the drink itself.
Bourbon is concocted from a strict formula. “By law it has to be made with a minimum of 51% corn, aged in charred new oak barrels and stored at no more than 125 proof and bottled at no less than 80 proof,” Thompson said.
But its sweet, rich flavor was actually born out of happenstance. In the early days, the best market for bourbon was on the East Coast, so farmers had to ship their barrels down the Mississippi to Louisiana then around Florida and up the coast. The trip took months but also allowed the whiskey to age beautifully.
“When merchants along the East Coast started marveling about this red whiskey with its unique flavor, that marked the beginning of the bourbon industry,” said Thompson.
In 1964, Congress deemed bourbon the nation’s native spirit, and there’s nothing more American than enjoying a sip of the brown stuff in a classic cocktail like a mint julep or an Old-Fashioned on the Fourth of July weekend.
July 19, 2021
Talk is cheap, as a pizza chain CEO demonstrates brilliantly
John Miltimore examines the claims of the CEO of the &pizza chain in the Washington DC area that his stores have no problem getting staff because he pays them a “living wage”:
As far as PR goes, Lastoria gets an A+. He was profiled by Business Insider, CBS News, and other media outlets. His economics grade, however, is another story.
First, the notion that &pizza’s wages are uniquely generous is wrong. The minimum wage in the nation’s capital, after all, is $15.20. Considering that Washington, DC has one of the highest costs of living in the US, it’s not unreasonable to assume that &pizza is paying workers what amounts to the market wage of their labor (i.e. the price they’d get in the absence of a wage floor). This is a stark contrast to other parts of the United States. Fifteen dollars in DC translates to roughly $24 in Florida, $25 in Alabama and Tennessee, $26 in New Mexico, and $27 in Louisiana.
Second, Lastoria decries the alleged “shortage of business owners willing to pay a living wage.” But it should be pointed out that &pizza is one of those businesses.
While there is no objective standard to determine what a living wage actually is, MIT has a Living Wage Calculator that allows readers to compute living wages based on the formula created by Dr. Amy K. Glasmeier.
To say that &pizza doesn’t pay its employees a “living wage” is an understatement. The living wage for a single mom with one child is $38.48 in Washington DC. For a single mother with two children, it’s $47.89. Indeed, even for a married couple with just one child, the living wage is $20.69 — nearly $5 an hour more than the average pay of Lastoria’s workers. (It’s unclear why Lastoria is having fewer problems hiring workers than other businesses, but it’s most likely attributable to local factors, such as the fact that he’s servicing nine of the twenty wealthiest counties in America.)
Finally, Lastoria’s claim that higher wages increase productivity enough to improve a company’s bottom line — the efficiency wage hypothesis — has problems logically and empirically. First, it implies that companies not currently paying an efficiency wage are willing to take less profit simply to make workers poorer. Moreover, efficiency wages have been shown to reduce employment, similar to minimum wage laws.
Lastoria might see the $16 an hour average wage as exceedingly generous — especially when he compares it to lower nominal wages paid in other parts of the country — but it’s a far cry from a “living wage”, according to the model used by living wage advocates.
I asked Lastoria how he’d respond to those who say restaurants like his should be required to pay each worker a living wage. He didn’t respond.
July 18, 2021
“Yes, we know Facebook is not the only harmful corporation on Earth, but sweet-jeepers-boy-howdy it is a blood-curdling fart in the elevator of existence”
At Damn Interesting, Alan Bellows bids an unfond farewell to Facebook:
For the past few years, we at Damn Interesting have been hearing from scores of long-time fans who were under the mistaken impression that we had ceased all operations years ago. These fans are typically delighted to hear that a) we are still writing and podcasting; and b) there is a wealth of new content since they last visited. When we ask them what caused the assumption of our demise, they invariably cite the fact that our posts disappeared from their Facebook news feeds.
I never had anything like the number of contacts on Facebook that Damn Interesting had, but I had the same experience with people contacting me to ask if I’d given up blogging because none of my posts were showing up in their timelines any more. As more information came out about just how creepy Facebook’s activities are, I stopped even trying to share to that site and eventually stopped linking to any content hosted there. For video credits where the only link for a creator is their FB page, I choose not to make it an active link (although I don’t remove the text). The only use I had after that was for keeping in touch with a few family members who only use that platform, and even that went away after I got locked out of my personal account anyway.
This trend roughly coincides with Facebook’s introduction of “boosting” for pages; in this new model, according to the stats we can see, Facebook stopped showing our posts to approximately 94% of our followers, demanding a fee to “boost” each post into an ad, which would make it visible to more of our audience. We lost contact with tens of thousands of fans practically overnight. We don’t mind paying for a service if it is valuable, but we absolutely don’t want to reach our audience by buying ad space on Facebook. Yuck. But no other option is given to reach the many people who previously followed our posts, and who presumably want to continue to do so.
[…] In a move that feels long overdue, we at Damn Interesting are abandoning all interactions and connections with Facebook.
We really should have done this back when it was revealed that Facebook used the ubiquitous embedded “Like on Facebook” buttons to follow people’s movements around the web without their knowledge or consent.
This bit of belated information prompted me to check the settings on the Share This plug-in I’ve been using for several years and yes, all this time I’ve been inadvertently enabling FB to track anyone on my blog who uses that button (and possibly any other sharing button — that isn’t quite clear). I’ve eliminated that plug-in just in case.
Our reasons for leaving are not entirely abstract. We’re sure many of you, like us, have experienced first-hand how Facebook gives people license to be their worst selves. It can elevate mere differences of political opinion into anger and hostility, pushing friends and family into extreme views, turning loved ones into ugly caricatures of their former selves. Perhaps you have even regretted some of your own posts there; the Facebook interface is designed to make it difficult to engage in good-faith disagreements. It gives undeserved forum to misinformation, disinformation, and hate. Using Facebook has been scientifically demonstrated to cause depression. Facebook subtracts from the quality of the world at a magnitude seldom seen in history, and we’ll all be better off when it goes away.
H/T to Robert Swanson (@WWI) on Gab for the link.
