Quotulatiousness

August 4, 2024

The rise and (rapid) fall of the Levittown model

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

Virginia Postrel linked to this interesting post at Construction Physics which traces the brief heyday of William Levitt’s “Levittown” model for mass-producing modern housing:

Prefabbed components and appliances for a Levittown home.
Image from Construction Physics.

For decades, people have tried to bring mass production methods to housing: to build houses the way we build cars. While no one has succeeded, arguably the man that came closest to becoming “the Henry Ford of homebuilding” was William Levitt, with his company Levitt and Sons. Levitt is most famous for building “Levittowns”, developments of thousands of homes built rapidly in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. By optimizing the construction process with improvements like standardized products and reverse assembly line techniques, Levitt and Sons was able to complete dozens of homes a day at what it claimed was a far lower cost than its competitors. William Levitt styled his company as the General Motors of housing, and both he and it became famous. Levitt graced the cover of Time magazine in 1950, and Levittowns became a household name.

For a time, it appeared that Levitt might actually sweep away the old way of building and become the Henry Ford of housing through modern mass production techniques. Levitt boasted that he could build more cheaply than anyone else, and for decades Levitt and Sons was the largest homebuilder in the U.S., and probably the world.1 But Levitt’s success unraveled. By the late 1970s, Levitt and Sons had barely escaped bankruptcy, and it emerged as a small, conventional homebuilder, which it would remain until it went out of business for good in 2018. Levitt himself would leave Levitt and Sons in the early 1970s, lose his fortune after a series of failed development projects in the U.S. and abroad, and die penniless in 1994.

Levitt’s model of large-scale, efficient homebuilding using mass production-style methods worked for a brief window in the 1950s, but by the end of the 1960s a changing housing market and increasingly strict land use controls meant that such methods were no longer feasible. And even at its peak, Levitt likely pushed large-scale building beyond what could be justified on pure economic terms. Levittown was ultimately a response to a temporary set of housing market conditions, not the herald of a new, better way of building.

[…]

First Levitt homes at Levittown.
Image from Construction Physics.

At Levittown, the construction process was broken down into 26 separate steps, each performed by a separate crew. Crews would go to a house, perform their required task (using material that had been pre-delivered), then move on to the next house. Within the crew, work was further specialized: on the washing machine installation crew, William Levitt noted that “one man did nothing but fix bolts into the floor, another followed to attach the machine”, and so on. By breaking down the process into repetitive, well-defined steps, workers didn’t have to spend time figuring out what they should do (what Levitt described as “fumbling and figuring”).

In addition to task and product standardization, Levitt and Sons took advantage of machines and mechanization wherever possible. It had its own cement trucks, and operated its own foundation-digging machinery and cinder block-making machinery. Levitt and Sons was an early user of power tools like paint sprayers, power saws, routers, and nailers. The company also made extensive use of what at the time were relatively novel factory-produced materials, like plywood and drywall.

Like any mass production process, the ultimate enemy of building Levittown was delay: keeping construction on track meant a steady, uninterrupted stream of material that arrived at the jobsite exactly when needed. On a typical construction site, as much as half the time was wasted while workers wandered around looking for needed material. In Levitt’s operation, wasted time was close to zero. To ensure timely material deliveries (and to cut out middlemen), Levitt and Sons had its own distribution company, the North Shore Supply Company, which stretched for half a mile along a railroad stop near the jobsite. To avoid delays, North Shore Supply kept a sufficient supply of material on-hand to build 75 houses, and pre-assembled items like plumbing trees, stairs, and cabinets. North Shore was also where lumber was pre-cut to the correct size. By using standardized designs, planned work sequences, and carefully controlled precutting, Levitt and Sons was able to almost entirely eliminate rework during the construction process.

But assuring an uninterrupted flow of material required far more than just owning a distribution company. William Levitt described some of the extreme measures the company went to avoid delays or slowdowns:

    We wouldn’t let ourselves be stopped by shortages. When cement was unavailable in this country we chartered a boat and brought it in from Europe. When lumber was in short supply, we bought a forest in California and built a mill. When nails were hard to come by, we set up a factory in our backyard and made them ourselves.

At its peak Levitt and Sons was completing 36 homes in Levittown a day. And the huge backlog of demand meant that housing was sold quickly. Months before the first Levittown homes were completed, families stood in line for the opportunity to rent one (roughly the first 2,000 Levittown homes were built as rentals). On a single day in 1949, Levitt and Sons sold 1400 homes, some to families who had been waiting in line for days. At $7,990 for a 800 square foot home, Levitt boasted that he could sell his houses for $1,500 less than the competition and still make $1,000 in profit.2

[…]

William Levitt tried harder than anyone else to make housing mass producing happen, and for a brief moment it looked like he might succeed. But Levitt’s dreams were predicated on a particular set of housing market conditions — a huge backlog of demand, relatively few competitors, compliant building jurisdictions and little public opposition — that quickly dissipated. In The Merchant Builders, Ned Eichler notes that as early as the mid-1950s, the Levitt model of a single, enormous project built rapidly with mass production-style methods no longer made sense. Says Eichler, “There simply was no market in which an appropriate site could be bought cheaply enough or in which demand was great enough to sustain such a pace”. Many of Levitt’s innovations — slabs instead of basements, power tools, drywall and plywood — did not require large volume production, and were adopted by other, smaller builders (and have since become standard). The enormous increase in land use controls starting in the late 1960s only further inhibited the sort of large-scale developments that Levitt favored.

    1. Levitt and Sons was at least the largest in the U.S. in 1950, and was in 1968 when it was acquired by ITT, and probably for some years after that.

    2. The first Levittown demonstration homes were sold for $6,990.

July 29, 2024

W.H. Smith attempts to rebrand their stores to “raise awareness” or something

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

British bookseller from time immemorial, W.H. Smith, apparently decided that the corporate branding they’d been using since the 18th century was just too boring for modern consumers, so they brainstormed a daring new design for the 21st century … that sucked.

When the British retailer, W.H. Smith, rebranded its logo last year, confusion and bafflement ensued.

The high street fixture, its Times New Roman logo mostly unchanged since 1792, earned its reputation by selling books, stationery, and for fleecing bleary-eyed travellers in airports. Through sheer zombie persistence, W.H. Smith remains a constant of British retail. Never mind the threadbare carpets, the general dilapidation, or the desperate staff forced to offer you a bottle of knock-off perfume with your twenty Lambert and Butler.

W.H. Smith endures because its business model concentrates on a captive audience. Go to an airport or a hospital — any place in which people cannot escape — and you’ll find a W.H. Smith reliably charging double for a Lucozade Sport. W.H. Smith will outlive Great Britain. The retailer’s existence — puzzling to the most scientific of minds — defies natural law.

Last year, creative designers attempted to play God. They sanded off the logo’s regnant edges and stripped “Smiths” altogether. The dynamic branding screamed minimalism: a plain, white “WHS” stamped on to a blue background.

I’d imagine the big revelation underwhelmed those paying for the work. “That’s interesting.” Or “It’s certainly different“.

Mockery ensued. “Baffling” said one. “It looks like the NHS logo,” observed another.

No doubt the designers plotted a revolution in design. Of course, these “creatives” — invariably young and invariably uncreative — fancied their vandalism as “forward thinking” and “dynamic”. I’ll wager at least one thought the new logo addressed the plight of some faraway progressive cause to which they subscribe. The public, unschooled in the most voguish developments in design, concluded: The new logo is shit.

W.H. Smith soon backtracked. Passive-aggressive defences of the staid new logo melted into sulky denial. It’s just a trial, they mewled.

A breathless spokesman revealed the truth. Or some addled version of the truth. The fresh signs, they revealed, were “designed to raise awareness of the products W.H. Smith sells”. What else, I wonder, is a shop sign meant to achieve?

The phrase “raising awareness” is one of a litany of linguistic evasions which say nothing. By shoehorning that ghastly phrase into a sentence, the speaker hopes to evade criticism. Reader, I’m not ploughing through a duty-free bottle of Chateau le Peuy Saincrit in the obscene Bulgarian sunshine. I’m raising awareness of the plight of southern French winemakers.

That passive-aggressive statement of the obvious — our shop sign raises awareness of our shop — you plebeian fools — crystallises the creative industry’s age problem.

Three-quarters of the creative industry is under 45. Perhaps this age gap (not the sexually consensual and fun kind) explains why so much of what we see and hear is cliché-riddled evasive hoo-hah.

When talking to anyone under 45, I mentally add a question mark to the end of their sentence. Millennials and Zoomers avoid declarative sentences. Listen. Almost every utterance sounds like a question. Further to this quirk, I note the adverbs and filler words. Young people stuff their speech with “basically”, “actually”, “literally”, and “like”. Zoomers are especially militant. They eschew capital letters. Capital letters are grammatical fascism. Full stops reveal a latent proclivity for Zyklon-B. Influencers add another tic to this repertoire of anxiety and unsurety. They crackle their voice as if a frog has lodged in their throat.

July 28, 2024

How America RUINED the world’s screws! (Robertson vs. Phillips)

Filed under: Business, Cancon, History, Humour, Tools, USA, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Stumpy Nubs
Published Apr 17, 2024

July 21, 2024

LCBO strike reportedly settled

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

A tentative deal was announced on Friday afternoon, then un-announced after the LCBO claimed the union had added financial demands to the return-to-work conditions after the contract itself had been agreed, and then on Saturday, re-announced. If the deal is ratified by the union, LCBO stores across Ontario should re-open on Tuesday.

It was the first LCBO strike in Ontario history, and it’s open to debate whether the union members will get all that much for their two-week unpaid break. The National Post‘s Chris Selley thinks not, calling it the “Stupidest. Strike. Ever.”

“LCBO at Parkway Mall” by Xander Wu is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

A week into the strike, a scant 15 per cent of Ontarians told Leger marketing that shuttered LCBO outlets had “affected (them) personally”. Only 29 per cent said they felt the government should legislate or arbitrate LCBO workers back into stores as soon as possible. Eleven per cent said they didn’t even know the strike was happening. And 32 per cent said they had explored “alternative locations” to buy booze, of which there are nowadays myriad.

Many more explored those opportunities in week two of the strike, I suspect, as fridges and wine racks were depleted. That’s potentially bad news for the LCBO’s future retail market share. But you didn’t even need an alternative to the LCBO: With a few days’ planning you could get all your regular brands delivered for free. Delivery and wholesale options were running as normal. Restaurants and supermarkets supplied by the LCBO were still supplied, and though there were reports of empty shelves at some supermarkets, that wasn’t truer than normal at the one I visit.

[…]

So this all looks like a terrible miscalculation by union leadership on behalf of its members — both a fundamental misreading of who had leverage, and a bizarre tactical choice to make the strike first and foremost about expanding the sale of ready-to-drink cocktails and seltzers (RTDs) to supermarkets and convenience stores.

Not wages; not benefits; not the number of full-time positions — things people can at least relate to — but where you can and cannot buy a White Claw or a Caesar in a can. Did they really think people would care?

Near as I can tell, it was an attempt to make this about the LCBO’s retail future: RTDs are a big and growing slice of the alcohol market in Ontario, only accessible (before the strike) at the LCBO. OPSEU wanted us to believe that by allowing supermarkets to sell them, Ontario would make no profit on them. And that’s their baked-in advantage: An incredible number of Ontarians, including far too many journalists, cannot wrap their minds around the notion of the government taking its cut at wholesale rather than retail.

Still, this gambit clearly fell flat.

Update: Fixed broken link to NP.

July 19, 2024

Airline Food During the Golden Age of Air Travel

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

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Apr 9, 2024

Back before airlines could compete with lower prices, they competed with the quality of atmosphere, service, and, of course, food.

I’d be happy to have this pot roast on the ground, let alone on an airplane. The meat is so tender that it falls apart, the vegetables and herbs give it wonderful flavor, and you get the added bonus of it making your house smell awesome as it simmers.
(more…)

July 16, 2024

Real world economic experiment to test Card & Krueger’s minimum wage theory

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tim Worstall points out that the California state government is — intentionally or not — running an interesting economic validation of the Card & Krueger study in New Jersey that seemed to show raising minimum wages didn’t have a negative impact on overall employment:

“Fast food” by Daniel Barcelona is licensed under CC BY 3.0 .

For think back to that New Jersey minimum wage study, Card and Krueger. That showed that acshully, employment in fast food joints rose when the minimum wage went up. Now, I’ve been saying for a long time now that I think there’s a fallacy of composition there.

“Fast food” isn’t “fast food”. There are — at least — two sectors here. There’re those big national chains, lots of advertising, franchisees, MaccyD’s and the like. Then there’s a vast hinterland of Mom and Pop places. The financial structures are entirely different. The chains are capital intensive. I think I’ve seen that buns for burgers come in pre-cut. Salad definitely arrives in bags, already shredded. There’s no prep – not even prep areas in those kitchens. Mom and Pop run differently. One reason I know is because I’ve owned and run one. There’s an awful lot of labour that goes into turning blocks of stuff into those sandwiches. Stuff is sliced, diced, soups are cooked on site, from identifiable ingredients, bread is sliced and on and on.

No, this isn’t to try and riff off The Bear. But there is a difference in economic structure between those who are large corporates vending fast food and not-large corporates vending fast food.

And I think — think, me, I do — that the problem with the Card and Krueger study was that it didn’t account for this. A change in the general labour rate might push people to the capital intensive end of this market. Certainly could do, it would be possible to model it that way. Which means that using only the data from the fast food chains, as C&K did, would pick up only part, perhaps half, of the reaction. The Mom and Pops shed labour, the capital intensive chains modestly pick it up, the net effect is — well, the net effect could be anywhere actually.

Which is what makes this CA minimum wage change so interesting. Because the $20 an hour applies only to those working for the big national chains — or their franchisees.

Mom and Pop have to pay the normal CA minimum wage, not the $20. So, the labour intensive part of the overall system has just been handed a competitive advantage against the capital intensive end of it. We would expect, could possibly measure, that the overall employment outcome is positive.

No, really. I’d be willing to defend the idea that it could be, certainly. Note that “could”. So, we’ve two sectors, capital intensive, labour intensive. We’ve just said that the capital using guys now have to pay more — much more — for their labour than the labour intensive guys. The capital intensive guys can only respond by higher prices or worse service (ie, fewer labour hours). The labour intensive sector might end up picking up so much of the traffic that they expand employment — expand employment so much as to actually increase overall fast food sector employment. By shifting from the capital to the labour intensive sectors.

This should be studied, right? Now, my actual economic skills — rather than ruminations — are zero so it’s not going to be me checking this out. But I recommend it as something for someone looking for a PhD subject to think about. Possibly even someone more senior than that looking for a point upon which to make their bones.

Does a higher minimum wage that only — only — applies to the capital intensive portion of an economic sector like fast food actually increase employment? By shifting the sector over to the more labour intensive sector not subject to that higher minimum wage?

Logically, it could, significant empirical work would be necessary to show it though.

QotD: Corruption and crony capitalism

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

When leftists look at the private sector, they see tips of icebergs – for every businessperson caught gouging the consumer, they insist there are a thousand under the surface waiting to trap the unwary. Whereas a libertarian like myself sees the mirror image – the odd bad civil servant caught is not a rotten apple as they claim, but the tip of another large iceberg.

Surely we have seen enough to know that large organisations like the government and their crony capitalists in the corporate sector are deeply resistant to independent investigations, whistleblowers and all other genuine threats to their status?

Whereas those that battle away in the competitive private sector don’t even get the chance to be that corrupt – they either treat their customers and employees well, or they crumble into dust like the costumed retards in the entertainment industry are doing so reliably these days, those beloved of progressive dunces the world over.

There are few cover-ups in the world of dogwalking and fishmongering – these people do a good job or they get told to piss off by their customers. But in the public sector and the corporate world that depend upon it …?

When we catch a corrupt civil servant or corporate lackey, we are seeing the Tip of An Iceberg. But when we catch a corrupt landscape gardener or carpenter, we are finding a Rotten Apple.

My claim is that terrible government officials and corrupt crony capitalists are the both the tips of icebergs, so the cries from Left and Right about rotten applies need to go away. Those that work in the public sector or depend upon their relationship with it, are routinely terrible and usually without consequence.

Alex Noble, “Corruption In The Coercive And Voluntary Sectors: Rotten Apples? Or The Tips of Icebergs?”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-12-02.

July 14, 2024

When the Ontario Progressive Conservatives backed away from LCBO privatization

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

In the National Post, Terence Corcoran posts an excerpt from last year’s The Harris Legacy: Reflections on a Transformational Premier edited by Alister Campbell:

“LCBO at Parkway Mall” by Xander Wu is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

Almost 30 years ago, in 1995, the Ontario Progressive Conservative government led by Mike Harris promised to privatize the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO). “We will sell off some assets, such as the LCBO,” said the party’s famed election document, the Common Sense Revolution (CSR). The LCBO could have been a true privatization — a full-fledged divestiture of a government monopoly into a new open and competitive market, but it never happened.

The failure to privatize the LCBO, lamentable from a consumer and economic perspective, remains a significant lost opportunity to demonstrate the benefits of privatization. If Harris had successfully de-monopolized the alcohol market, the whole concept of privatization would have been given a major boost. Instead, the government backed away from privatization of the alcohol market, preferring instead to allow the corporation to substitute modern marketing and retail razzle-dazzle to give the false impression it was offering the public the best of all worlds.

The LCBO failure is also a demonstration of the degree to which the Common Sense Revolution’s starting principles fell short in grasping the essential benefits of private versus public ownership and control. Neo-liberalism isn’t exactly a fine science. The Wikipedia entry on “Neo-liberalism” is a 30-page effort (including 400 footnote links to hundreds of warring academic papers), reflecting an economic and ideological scramble that dates back more than a century. But when the Harris government came to power, major elements of the free-market model were often overshadowed by fiscal policy objectives. With the LCBO, the Harris government veered off the neo-liberal course in pursuit of standard political objectives.

In 1995, the LCBO was a government owned and operated province-wide corporation that controlled liquor and wine wholesale and retail markets. Another private monopoly player, the Beer Store chain, while owned and operated by the brewing industry, was also essentially a government-sanctioned beer monopoly. The CSR neo-liberal objective should have been to privatize the alcohol market by selling the LCBO, deregulating the Beer Store monopoly and allowing beer sales through supermarkets and even corner stores. More importantly, dismantling the LCBO would allow other corporations to enter the alcohol retail business and provide consumers much more choice, which has been the Alberta experience. Notably, Alberta achieved a successful and deregulated approach without sacrificing provincial revenues.

The neo-liberal objective of privatization is to benefit consumers and enhance economic productivity through competition. Instead, the Harris government fell into the fiscal policy trap that routinely captures politicians, bureaucrats and corporate insiders. Instead of aiming to benefit consumers, the objective soon became how to maximize the fiscal return to government. Never mind the consumer and the market. The objective became preserving — and enhancing — government revenues.

At the time, anti-privatization advocates frantically pointed at the Alberta experience of privatization of their provincial liquor monopoly, which (briefly) generated a lot of retail horror stories that Ontario newspapers gleefully republished (and, likely, emphasized out of proportion to the actual Alberta market). You can still hear Ontarians casting aspersions on the Alberta market as if nothing at all had changed after the initial rough patch. From what I’ve heard from Albertans, they have far wider choices of alcoholic beverages in stores much more conveniently sited with better open hours than anyone in Ontario enjoys. The Alberta government still gets at least as much in tax revenues from alcohol sales without needing to be in the distribution or retail business. It doesn’t seem to be the utter disaster that Ontario media portrays it to be … rather the contrary.

July 7, 2024

Ontario’s LCBO strike may be both justified and counterproductive

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

Ontario’s main importer and distributor of wine, beer, and spirits is now facing its very first actual strike, as the negotiators couldn’t come to an agreement by the strike deadline on Friday morning. On the face of the dispute, the union certainly has some solid grounds for the strike, as pay hasn’t been keeping pace with (official) inflation and far too many of the LCBO’s workforce are on work schedules that keep them from earning full-time wages. On the other hand, over the last decade or so, both Liberal and Progressive Conservative provincial governments have been making piecemeal changes to the market so that the LCBO is far from the only place Ontario drinkers can purchase their preferred booze. Just off the top of my head, here are some of the alternative options now available to Ontario consumers:

“LCBO at Parkway Mall” by Xander Wu is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

  • The Beer Store, Ontario’s other (foreign-owned) booze oligopoly for beer and cider is still operating normally at all their retail locations and agency stores. They also have online ordering for delivery available to ordinary consumers.
  • The LCBO is still offering online sales — not same-day, but free delivery.
  • Ontario’s vast array of craft brewers are still able to sell individual cans or bottles of beer from their bottle shops or storefront locations (pre-packaged 6-, 12-, 24-container or other types are still limited to the Beer Store oligopoly, of course).
  • Ontario’s wineries are similarly still operating normally for retail sales at the winery or (for a few older wineries who still have grandfathered privileges from earlier licensing regimes) stand-alone retail stores.
  • Ontario’s much smaller — but growing — number of distilleries are also operating normally and are able to sell their locally produced whiskey, gin, vodka, etc. from their tasting rooms/bottle shops.
  • Many, many grocery stores in the province now sell wine, beer, or both, and are all operating normally. They may be slower to replenish the shelves as the LCBO’s limited number of non-union staff will be handling re-supply.

In addition, if the strike continues for more than two weeks, the LCBO will open a select number of their stores for limited hours across the province (again, limited by the number of non-unionized staff available to operate the stores). With all of this (and I’m sure I’m missing some options in my list), consumers may begin to draw the conclusion that the LCBO isn’t as essential as it once was:

On Thursday evening, Colleen MacLeod, chair of the team bargaining on behalf of government liquor-store employees, declared the summer of 2024 utterly ruined.

“Tonight, (Premier Doug) Ford’s dry summer begins,” said MacLeod, of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU), hours before the first ever strike in the Liquor Control Board of Ontario’s (LCBO) history became official.

Desperate? Delusional? That’s up for debate. OPSEU’s press release announcing the strike suggests “delusional.” At one point it claims the LCBO is “Ontario’s best-kept secret.”

What could that possibly mean?

The release then quotes OPSEU president J.P. Hornick as follows: “We told Ford not to ruin everybody’s summer, but now he’s closed the Science Centre and forced a dry summer for Ontarians by refusing to offer a deal that would be good for LCBO workers and Ontario.”

The Ontario Science Centre is a tired old children’s destination in North Toronto that has been neglected in every way by consecutive provincial governments. I’m quite sure few people in Ottawa, Windsor or Thunder Bay have ever even heard of it. Mashing it together with the LCBO, just because OPSEU represents employees at both, suggests the union really doesn’t understand the fight it’s getting into.

If the Ford government is willing to dig in its heels and fight — which isn’t something it’s particularly known for — this could be a great win for the Ontario consumer.

It’s not 1990. The LCBO shutting the doors to its retail stores is really only a minor pain in the rear end, thanks to years of piecemeal, needlessly complex and and too-slow but nevertheless significant liberalization that really kicked into gear under former Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne. (Ford is often mocked for being obsessed with alcohol, but Wynne was nearly beyond parody. If her government woke up in a crisis Monday morning, it was safe to say she’d find herself announcing more beer and wine in supermarkets by Thursday afternoon.)

Anecdotally, as I was in on Thursday picking up a small selection of wine and beer, I overheard a conversation with one of the staffers and another customer where the staffer didn’t believe there’d actually be a strike and that the only result of the brinksmanship at the bargaining table would be that they would have to do more re-stocking next week after the (understandably) higher sales during the past week.

July 4, 2024

“In other words, God is a deliverable for the R&D team”

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

Ted Gioia isn’t impressed with the changes we’ve seen over the years among the Silicon Valley leadership:

Yes, I should have been alarmed when this cult-ish ideology took off in Silicon Valley — where the goal had previously been incremental progress (Moore’s law and all that) and not being evil.

When I first came to Silicon Valley at age 17, the two leading technologists in the region were named William Hewlett and David Packard. They used their extra cash to fund schools, museums, and hospitals — both my children were born at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital — not immortality machines, or rockets to Mars, or a dystopian Internet of brains, or worshipping at the Church of the Singularity.

Tech leaders were built differently back then. When famous historian Arnold Toynbee visited Stanford in 1963, he had a chance encounter with William Hewlett. Afterwards Toynbee marveled over his new acquaintance, declaring: “What an amazing fellow. He has more knowledge of history than many historians.”

In other words, Bill Hewlett had more wisdom than ego. He invested in the community where he lived — not the Red Planet. Instead of promulgating social engineering schemes, Hewlett and Packard built a new engineering school at their alma mater, and named it after their favorite teacher.

They wouldn’t recognize Silicon Valley today. The FM-2030s are now in charge.

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard invested in engineering, not social engineering

Another warning sign came when Google hired cult-ish tech guru Ray Kurzweil — a man who had once created a reasonable music keyboard that even Stevie Wonder used.

But Kurzweil went on to write starry-eyed books of utopian tech worship which come straight out of the weird religion playbook (The Age of Spiritual Machines, The Singularity is Near, etc.)

What does tech look like when it gets turned into a religion? Kurzweil summed it up when asked if there is a God. His response: “Not yet.”

In other words, God is a deliverable for the R&D team.

I note that, when Forbes revisited Ray Kurzweil’s predictions, they found that almost every one went wrong.

So what does he do?

Kurzweil follows up his book The Singularity is Near with a new book entitled The Singularity is Nearer. Give the man credit for hubris. This is exactly what religious cults do when their predicted Rapture doesn’t occur.

They just change the date on the calendar — Utopia has been delayed for another 12 months.

But, of course, Utopia is always delayed another 12 months. Meanwhile the cult leaders can do a lot of damage while preparing for the Rapture.

And despite the techno-elite’s apparent endless quest for perfection in their own lives, the enshittification of the technology they deliver to us proles continues relentlessly:

Here’s a curious fact. The more they brag about their utopias, the worse their products and services get.

Even the word upgrade is now a joke — whenever a tech company promises it, you can bet it will be a downgrade in your experience. That’s not just my view, but overwhelmingly supported by survey respondents.

For the first time since the dawn of the Renaissance, innovation is now feared by the vast majority of people. And the tech leaders, once admired and emulated, now rank among the least trustworthy people in the world.

It was different when Linus Pauling was peddling his horse pills — he eventually set up shop in Big Sur, far south of the tech industry, in order to find a hospitable home for his wackiest ideas.

Nowadays, Big Sur thinking has come to the Valley.

And when you set up cults inside the largest corporations in the history of the world, we are all endangered.

Just imagine if Linus Pauling had enjoyed the power to force everybody to take his huge vitamin doses. Just imagine if Bill Shockley had possessed the authority to impose his racist eugenics theories on the populace.

It’s scary to think of. But they couldn’t do it, because they didn’t have billions of dollars, and run trillion-dollar companies with politicians at their beck and call.

But the current cultists include the wealthiest people in the world, and they are absolutely using their immense power to set rules for the rest of us. If you rely on Apple or Google or some other huge web behemoth — and who doesn’t? — you can’t avoid this constant, bullying manipulation.

The cult is in charge. And it’s like we’re all locked into an EST training sessions — nobody gets to leave even for bathroom breaks.

There’s now overwhelming evidence of how destructive the new tech can be. Just look at the metrics. The more people are plugged in, the higher are their rates of depression, suicidal tendencies, self-harm, mental illness, and other alarming indicators.

If this is what the tech cults have already delivered, do we really want to give them another 12 months? Do you really want to wait until they deliver the Rapture?

July 2, 2024

The Chevron decision

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

On his substack, Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds discusses the recent US Supreme Court decision on “Chevron deference” and how it is going to impact the administrative state (and their business victims) going forward:

Goodbye, Chevron deference. Larry Tribe is already mourning the Supreme Court’s overturning of NRDC v. Chevron, in the Loper Bright and Relentless cases, as a national catastrophe:

Oh, the humanity!

Well, speaking as a professor of Administrative Law, I think I’ll bear up just fine. I’ve spent the last several years telling my students that Chevron was likely to be reversed soon, and I’m capable of revising my syllabus without too much trauma. It’s on a word processor, you know. As for those academics who have built their careers around the intricacies of Chevron deference, well, now they’ll be able to write about what comes next. And if they’re not up to that task, then it was a bad idea to build a career around a single Supreme Court doctrine.

And that wasn’t the only important Supreme Court decision targeting the administrative state, a situation that has pundit Norm Ornstein, predictable voice of the ruling class’s least thoughtful and most reflexive cohort, making Larry Tribe sound calm.

Sure, Norm, whatever you say.

But how about let’s look at what the Court actually did in Chevron, and in the Loper Bright and Relentless cases that overturned it, and in SEC v Jarkesy, where the Court held that agencies can’t replace trial by jury with their own administrative procedures, and in Garland. v. Cargill, where the Court held that agencies can’t rewrite statutes via their own regulations. I don’t think you’ll find the sort of Russian style power grab that Ornstein describes, but rather a return to constitutional government of the sort that he ought to favor.

At root, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council is about deference. Deference is a partial abdication of decisionmaking in favor of someone else. So, for example, when we go out to dinner, I often order what my son-in-law orders, even if something else on the menu sounds appealing. I’ve learned that somehow he always seems to pick the best thing.

Deference doesn’t mean “I’ve heard your argument and I’m persuaded by it”, (though something like that is misleadingly called “Skidmore deference”, but isn’t actually deference at all). Deference means “even if I would have decided this question differently, I’m going to go with your judgment instead”.

Under Chevron deference, when an agency interprets a statute it administers (e.g., the EPA and the Clean Air Act), a court will uphold its interpretation so long as it is (generously assessed) a reasonable one, even if it is not the interpretation the court would have come up with on its own. As you might imagine, this, at least potentially, gives agencies a lot more leeway, particularly when, as is often the case, Congress has drafted the statute ambiguously.

With Chevron overturned, courts will now apply their own judgment instead of deferring to agencies. Of course, this isn’t as big a deal as Larry and Norm seem to think, because Chevron has been dying the death of a thousand cuts for a while. Under the “major questions doctrine”, courts already decline to defer to agency interpretations where the issue has major social or economic ramifications.

July 1, 2024

The Anglosphere “imported American racial progressivism, and then commenced to import American-style racial problems. Thanks, America.”

Filed under: Business, Education, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter discusses meritocratic racial quotas in employment and higher education as a “Universally Disagreeable Compromise”:

Graphic for Rhode Island College’s Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

The race question has been a fault line in American society from its inception. In the aftermath of the hypermigration of the early twenty-first century, it has only become more complicated and divisive, not only in America, but throughout the Anglospheric world. The rest of us imported American racial progressivism, and then commenced to import American-style racial problems. Thanks, America.

The question seems to ultimately revolve around who shall receive the economic spoils. The “equity” that is endlessly referenced by diversity commissars is literally the home equity held by the white middle class, which the diverse and their champions openly intend to expropriate and redistribute.

The most contentious battlegrounds are in academic admissions and corporate hiring, in which the imperative is to minimize the number of White men, and maximize everything that isn’t White men. How the everything else is maximized is of no particular account. A team composed entirely of black men is just as “diverse” as a team which also features Black lesbians, Arab homosexuals, and Thai ladyboys. It is the presence of White men that makes organizations less diverse: a team composed entirely of Black men, with the exception of a solitary White male token, is less diverse than the all-Black team.

For generations now we have suffered under the affirmative action regulations imposed under the banner of Civil Rights. For proponents, Civil Rights are a civic religion, and they guard the advantages won by adherence to their faith jealously. For the victims of affirmative action – which includes both those rejected from employment or university, as well as those subjected to the incompetency of affirmative action admits and hires – affirmative action is a hateful absurdity.

The underlying problem, which to this day only Internet edgelords will openly discuss, is human biodiversity. The various ancestral groups are, in fact, different, in ways that go beyond the merely cosmetic, to include general levels of cognitive aptitude, along with specific behavioural proclivities. To a certain degree this is due to upbringing, but only to a certain degree; upbringing can bring a child as close to his genetic potential as possible, but cannot push him beyond it. The best that nurture can do is to allow nature to flower; it cannot change nature. The natural outcome of this is that, under a purely race-blind, meritocratic dispensation, there will be noticeable and ineradicable differences in the representation of various races within any given profession.

Whether or not one supports a purely meritocratic approach to admissions and hiring then tends to depend a lot on whether one belongs to a group that is likely to do well, or poorly, under such a system. East Asians tend to support a more meritocratic approach, because their high test scores, good study habits, and strong work ethic mean that they will be extremely competitive. Blacks, on the other extreme, are far more skeptical of meritocracy, intuiting that a ruthlessly meritocratic approach would tend to see them pushed out of the professions at the expense [or rather, to the benefit] of Whites, Asians, and Indians.

The current system is practically the worst possible system. The official narrative is built upon the foundational lie that we are all the same under the skin, and that any difference in group-level socioeconomic outcome can only be the result of bigotry, racism, systemic racism, implicit bias, and the historical consequences of slavery or colonialism. This lie has driven our society quite insane, leading in particular to the demonization of Whites – a large fraction of whom buy into the narrative of ethnomasochistic guilt with religious zeal, and another large fraction of whom reject this framing of their racial character as sick and ugly. To a large degree the culture wars are driven by this very division. In the American context, this division maps quite closely to Constitutionalists vs Civil Rights adherents, i.e. it is a holy war between the two dominant civic religions. It is not accidental that this also maps to Republican (i.e. those who wish to preserve the Old Republic built by the Constitution) vs Democrat (i.e. those who wish to complete the transformation of the Republic into something [like] the Our Democracy they’ve been growing in the soil of Civil Rights).

As William M Briggs has pointed out ad nauseum, the prohibition of “disparate impact” and “discrimination” under the Civil Rights regime is an absolute nightmare for corporate America. On the one hand, to discriminate on the basis of race (or any other identity) is plainly illegal; on the other, to not discriminate is invariably to open oneself to charges of discrimination, as the various statistical differences between racial groups work themselves out in aptitude tests, SATs, grade point averages, or job performance. This places employers in the Kafkaesque position of being required to discriminate without being seen to discriminate. They must put their thumbs on the scale to ensure equal outcomes, without being caught doing so.

For Whites especially, this has been a very bad deal. Because no organization will ever be sued for taking on too many officially victimized minorities, there is no upper limit to the number of diversity hires; but if the student body or corporate org chart falls below a given group’s fraction of the population, lawsuits are almost guaranteed. This then produces an inevitable ratchet effect which systematically excludes White people from their own society, with corrosive effects on competence, morale, and confidence in institutions. It doesn’t help that, because we are still officially meritocratic, the leadership classes subject us all to constant gaslighting: we are discriminated against openly by people who brag about discriminating against us while insisting in the same breath that there is no discrimination. It is not surprising that many of us are ready to burn these people at the stake.

June 25, 2024

In all places and at all times, the true minimum wage is zero

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

Tim Worstall explains why fast food restaurants like McDonalds and Burger King are reported to be introducing new low-priced value meals to try and attract and keep more customers in the current economy:

“McDonald’s restaurant, Toledo OH, 1967” by DBduo Photography is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

It’s terribly unfashionable to say that minimum wage rises have any effects — other than that the minimum wage workers earn more, of course. It’s supposed to be one of those areas where only good things can come from poking a stick in the market. The justification is that the only jobs these folks can get are slinging fries (If that is the case then I’d probably start with education system reform so that grievance studies graduates are skilled enough to do something else but maybe that’s just me), therefore MaccyD’s and the like have a monopoly on employing them (a “monopsony”) and so omniscient and caring politicians and bureaucrats can correct this market error without there being any side effects.

Hmm. Seems unlikely but that is the story.

[…]

The standard economics of a minimum wage rise is — well, was before the progressive smokeblowing about monopsony — that the money’s got to come from somewhere. It could be that profits fall and therefore there’s less investment — even a move away from having invested in — that activity and so employment falls. Or, wages are higher for those fewer people employed and some lose their jobs — also known as rising productivity and also known as fewer jobs. Or, customers get to pay higher prices, fewer now buy the item and so employment falls as the sector shrinks.

Hmm, well, we can get all serious about monopsony but that one doesn’t work to my mind either as even if profits were excessive a fall in them will still lead to less investment in the sector and we’re back at option 1) above. But, many have convinced themselves.

But here we’ve got a general agreement that Americans are eating fast food less. They’re eating at home more. The only thing that’s changed in the varied cost structures is the price of fast food labour. Sorry, the only thing that’s changed in the *relative* cost structures is that labour as the minimum wage is pushed up. Whatever food inflation has been it’s been no better or worse for MaccyD’s than it has been in Albertsons or King Super. It’s also true that US real incomes have been rising so it’s not a general retreat on the part of consumers. The price of fast food relative to home prepared has risen, people are buying less fast food. The only cost pressure causing this is the pushing up of the minimum wage in recent years (for chains, in California, it’s now $20 an hour).

Myself I take that as being proof of the original and base minimum wage argument in standard economics. Trying to recoup that fall in sales is what is leading to these special offers — and don’t forget they’re special, not for all time and so should be considered advertising, not a long term change in price levels.

As a larger lesson I take it to mean that we should be very wary indeed of those claiming that there’s some special little economic trick that makes what they want to do anyway such a good idea. Why, yes, that does include any special little tricks I might want to claim. But many really did convince themselves that fast food wages were different, that pushing them up would have only good, not ill, effects.

Seems it ain’t so.

Over the weekend, there were a few stories about a small fancy coffee chain whose employees had successfully unionized to get better wages, only for the owners to shut down all three stores because even before the workers unionized, they were losing money on the business. Rather than the higher wages the employees were expecting (while keeping their unusually generous benefits for such entry-level jobs), all their jobs were lost and nobody won. Small businesses like restaurants operate on a far smaller profit margin than most people believe … according to Statistics Canada, the average restaurant of all types made a 4.3% profit in 2022.

June 24, 2024

Raise a glass of your favourite microbrew to … Jimmy Carter?

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

Glenn “The Instapundit” Reynolds visits a local brewing festival in Knoxville and remembers what it was like before — of all people — Jimmy Carter began the process of deregulating the beer industry by legalizing homebrewed beer in 1978:

The Instapundit models his Hamm’s Beer Hawaiian shirt at a recent Knoxville beer festival.

This weekend I want to the Knox Brewfest at the Knoxville World’s Fair Grounds. As the name suggests, it was a collection of most of the local micro-breweries, each with a booth offering samples. (There were also a few bigger operations, like Sierra Nevada, Abita, and Paulaner). I wore my Hamm’s Beer Hawaiian shirt, which was a surprisingly big hit.

And there were some lessons, about which more later.

Hamm’s doesn’t really exist anymore except as a sometimes-produced minor product of Coors, which bought the trademark after it passed through the hands of numerous other companies. But it’s not forgotten!

The beer was good and the crowd was cheerful.

Mostly me, and my friend Jim (who I’ve known since junior high) were reflecting on the vast improvement in the world of beer in America, and particularly in Knoxville. As late as, oh, 1990 or so, you could go into almost any bar in Knoxville and if you asked what kind of beer they had you’d get an answer like this: “We’ve got everything! Bud, Bud Light, Miller, Miller Light, Coors, Coors Light – anything you want!”

It’s easy to take the craft-brewing revolution for granted, but it brought about huge changes and for the better. Nowadays, the beer scene in America tends to be better than that in Europe. No, really. In fact, one of my former research assistants, who practices law in Belgium now, brought over a couple of Belgian friends who wanted to see Tennessee. I met them for lunch at Barley’s in the Old City, to hear a bluegrass show and eat pizza and drink beer. They were very impressed with the fifty or so taps that Barley’s offers.

Back home they said, the bars are usually owned by the breweries and only sell their own brews, so you might have only three or four varieties, all from the same label. Nothing like this.

[…]

This deregulatory story started (like airlines and trucking deregulation) with Jimmy Carter of all people. Despite his (often true) reputation as a bossy micro-manager, he was an engineer and a rationalist. That worked out poorly in foreign policy, but led him to undo a number of irrational regulatory structures, one of which was the limit on home beer production. Carter signed a bill legalizing homebrewing in 1978, and those homebrewers were the nucleus of the craft beer movement a decade or so later.

June 23, 2024

The Original Chef Boyardee Spaghetti Dinner

Filed under: Business, Food, History, Italy, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 13 Mar 2024

Absolutely fantastic tomato and meat sauce served over spaghetti tossed with butter and parmesan

City/Region: Cleveland, Ohio
Time Period: 1930s

Chef Boyardee was not born in Cleveland (sorry, 30 Rock), but in Borganovo, just outside of Piacenza in Italy. And his name was not Hector Boyardee, but Ettore Boiardi (boy-AR-dee). He opened an Italian restaurant in Cleveland in 1924, where the food was so popular that he frequently sent patrons home with bottles of his spaghetti sauce.

We can’t know exactly what that original sauce was, but this is from a family recipe and is probably pretty close. And it’s phenomenal. It’s fairly simple, but so good. You get a lot of the fresh basil, and the creaminess from mixing the butter and parmesan directly with the pasta is delicious. I don’t often make dishes from the show again, but I can see myself making this any day of the week.
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