Quotulatiousness

August 2, 2019

Doug Ford’s sudden onset “Winegate” scandal

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

Ontario premier Doug Ford is now taking flak for promoting an Ontario winery after his party accepted what some Toronto media reports characterized as a “generous” donation from the winery’s owner. How generous? Are we talking millions? Tens of millions? A thousand dollars. Toronto media considers $1,000 to be enough money to sway the provincial government and at least one local media outlet encouraged its readers to boycott the winery. But that turned out to be only the tip of the iceberg from a media investigation point of view: Ford’s ultra-cheesy “Ontario News Now” party propaganda channel had given Ford’s endorsement to at least four other mega-corporations whose political contributions may have gone as eye-wateringly high as $2,000! Torontonians may never have heard of these corporate puppet-masters who clearly now control Premier Ford’s every waking moment, but as Canadians have never seen corruption on this scale before — nearly ten thousand dollars in political contributions!! — they’re demanding all the usual things that media-ginned-up protests tend to demand.

At the National Post, Chris Selley wonders why the Ontario Progressive Conservatives are acting just as badly as the Liberals they replaced:

When it comes to Canadian politicians and money, it might be difficult to explain to a foreign visitor exactly what’s kosher and what’s not. Ontario Premier Doug Ford got some bad press this week for having promoted the Pelee Island Winery in one of his impossibly cheesy “Ontario News Now” propaganda videos, just weeks after the winery’s owner, Walter Schmoranz, donated $1,000 to Ford’s Progressive Conservatives. In isolation, it didn’t look great. If it’s a coincidence, as the premier claims, then it’s the sort of coincidence a government wishing to claim moral rectitude should endeavour to avoid.

Viewed in the broad landscape of Canadian politics, however, it all seems rather overblown. Politicians regularly stump for certain products and businesses, after all, implicitly at the expense of others. More to the point they routinely give businesses free money without asking us, and not out of the goodness of their hearts.

According to David Akin’s indispensable @ottawaspends Twitter feed, the federal government doled out $723,000 to wineries and winery associations this year and last. The Nova Scotia Winery Association hoovered up $522,000 of the total, plus another $175,000 back in 2012. Perhaps it would be cynical to observe that the riding of West Nova, home to the Annapolis Valley wineries, is notorious for changing hands between the Liberals and Conservatives. Whoops — too late.

Here in Ontario, meanwhile, between 2013 and 2018, the province and feds collectively gave away at least $1.1 million to wineries and $1.5 million to breweries, plus $140-odd million more to an endless queue of cap-in-hand distillers, mushroom farmers, meat processers, goat dairies, sugarmakers and bakeries. Pelee Island Winery isn’t on that list, incidentally, which might put the premier’s non-financial contribution — quid pro quo or not — in perspective.

All that taxpayer dough got handed out under a program called Growing Forward 2, which was an “initiative that encouraged innovation, competitiveness and market development, adaptability and industry sustainability in Canada’s agri-food and agri products sector.” That’s a fancy way of saying “corporate welfare,” which can be unpopular in Canada when it comes to bailing Bombardier out of its latest fiasco or buying the Weston clan new freezers, but which is entirely uncontroversial when it comes to smaller, less obviously villainous businesses — especially if they happen to be farms.

July 31, 2019

The quickest way to raise the real income of minimum wage earners

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

Tim Worstall explains how to quickly raise the living standards of everyone in Britain earning the minimum wage, without costing employers any more:

I – Tim Worstall that is – then started pointing out that the difference between this living wage and the minimum wage was the amount of tax that we – shamefully – charge to the low paid. Tax being both income tax and national insurance contributions. In fact, I rather shouted about it around the place, at the ASI, and here in The Times in 2012.

    The gross annual salary of a full-time worker on the minimum wage is £12,070.50. We could come close to lifting every low-paid worker out of poverty if we simply increased the personal tax allowance from £8,105 to that sum. Not a penny of income tax or NICs should leave their pay packet. A full-time worker, however, on the living wage would be taking home £12,410.74, after the taxman has taken a cut — that’s only £340 more. And before the Foundation uprated the living wage yesterday, the annual difference was just £8.74.

    There are problems. Raising the personal allowance gives everyone a tax cut — which I’ll admit doesn’t break my heart. But we could lower the amount at which the higher rates of tax kick in to make up for that lost revenue. And won’t these workers lose their right to unemployment benefit and a pension, if they don’t pay NICs? No, they qualify already, as the system treats the very low paid as if they had made NI contributions. We should go farther. The link between the full-year minimum wage and the personal allowance for tax and NI should be made explicit. Change one and the government of the day must change the other. If the minimum wage is the minimum moral amount that someone’s labour is worth, then that is what they should get, not the amount after Denis MacShane’s European wanderings have been paid for.

    Which leaves us with two competing visions of how everyone can be free of poverty pay. The Living Wage Campaign’s vision is to shout at every employer in the country until they give in. The Worstall Way is to increase the incomes of the working poor by stopping taxing them.

The Jaguar E-Type / XK-E Story

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

Big Car
Published on 10 May 2019

To help me continue producing great content, please consider supporting me: https://www.patreon.com/bigcar

The Jaguar XK-E or E-Type may be the most beautiful car in history. It’s certainly one of the most sought after, with cars fetching crazy prices at auction. It’s a car born out of a Le Mans-winning heritage, delivering looks with speed and handling to match, all at an affordable price. Yet somehow it had a top speed over 150mph, while also not having a top speed over 150mph!

#JaguarEType #JaguarXKE #EType

July 30, 2019

QotD: Business versus economics

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

There often occurred to me the difference between the Professor of Economics and the business man, as judged by their financial success. The business man may not perhaps be on the same intellectual plane as the professor, but he bases his ideas on real facts and puts the whole power of his will behind their realisation. The professor, on the other hand, often has a false conception of reality and although perhaps having more ideas, is neither able nor anxious to carry them out; the fact that he has them is satisfaction enough. And so the business man has the greater financial success.

Erwin Rommel, edited by B.H. Liddell Hart in The Rommel Papers, 1953.

July 25, 2019

YouTube’s secret fight against history documentaries

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

The good folks at TimeGhost have been struggling with YouTube’s monetization and recommendation mechanisms for some time. A number of TimeGhost’s WW2 documentary videos have been demonetized over the last year, and the team noticed that every demonetized video had significantly fewer viewers than those that were not demonetized. They did some analysis and submitted the results to YouTube, showing that the demonetized videos were also being restricted from showing up on the automated recommendation lists that users see, which largely accounted for the lower viewership for their demonetized videos, but YouTube denied that there was any connection between these things … that demonetized videos are just as likely to be recommended as the ones that are not demonetized, and that TimeGhost’s analysis was just wrong. YouTube sent the TimeGhost team a set of guidelines for how to ensure that the videos they post were considered acceptable to advertisers and would not be subject to demonetization (and the stealth omission from recommendation lists). Here’s the first video from TimeGhost, implementing those guidelines:

This is how they explained the situation in the comments:

World War Two
3 hours ago (edited)
Now, to begin with – this is not about that we need YouTube’s ad money, at our viewership levels that money is not near enough to finance our content anyway. We have a fantastic community in the TimeGhost Army that support us financially, and make our shows possible, for which we are eternally grateful. This is also not about politics – nothing in our data indicates that YouTube is choosing what to monetize based on political considerations. However, indirectly this is about money, but even more importantly about our self-appointed mandate to share education about our common past. You see, when YouTube labels content as “not suitable for some, or most advertisers” they also recommend it less – in fact almost only under our own videos. This means that we don’t reach new viewers with those videos, this in turn means that our community grows less, or not at all.

When we sent the data proving that (data from YouTube no less), they at first denied that there was a connection between monetization and recommendation. We sent them more data showing conclusively that this is a false statement. Their response then was to say that maybe there is a connection between things that impact monetization and things that impact recommendation. They also sent us a list of things we should do to become “more advertiser friendly” – the list states among other things that content dealing with war, political controversies, terrorism, or death is not suitable for advertisers. That in effect means more or less the better part of human history and all of WW2.

We emphatically object to this interpretation of what is acceptable for advertisers – our kind of content has been attached to advertising for decades in main stream media, historical magazines and websites dealing with exactly the same things we do, receives advertising from major brands. Furthermore less recommendation means less viewers, which means that our content gets less support and thus risks becoming financially impossible – that is censorship by drip. Therefore we also vehemently protest this policy that in effect restricts the access to educational content, with high academic standards covering topics that are essential parts of human history. Events and phenomena that need to be widely understood in order for the world to learn from our past mistakes.

Last but not least we want to point out one more time – we do not have any indication whatsoever that we are being targeted for political reasons. We cover topics covering both right wing and left wing politics, we do not make judgement ourselves, instead we leave it up to you to decide positively or negatively depending on your opinion. We cover these topics factually, with completeness, and unbiased. The portion of our videos that have been deemed unsuitable to advertisers include political themes that cover the entire spectrum from Naziism to Marxism. Notably, and from the educational perspective troubling is that videos covering crimes against humanity such as the Holocaust or war crimes by the Soviet Union are almost always demonetized.

Please share this video to raise the awareness of what we find to be irresponsible behavior by a corporation that holds a virtual monopoly on free to access ad financed online video. Thank you.

July 15, 2019

QotD: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

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

The public broadcaster is a sticky wicket, admittedly. If every privately held media outlet in the land wound up business there would still be CBC News, providing some very serviceable-to-excellent coverage of cities, provinces, territories and their governments across this land. It reduces the private organs’ leverage. But Britain’s private media competes just fine against the BBC, and ours compete just fine against CBC today in the world of television and online news — and well they might.

CBC’s television and online news departments are a haunted museum of bloat, larding tons of valuable content with tiresome victim-mongering; endless why-didn’t-the-government-prevent-this stories; Trudeau propaganda snaps beamed straight in from the Prime Minister’s Office; a dumb, tawdry nightly newscast; an opinion section that pays writers way over market (though, ahem, nothing more than what’s fair!); Canadian Press wire copy of which a lavishly resourced public broadcaster has no earthly need; and an entire clickbait department that’s stealing digital advertising revenue from private-sector outlets. It has no clear mandate to do much of this in the first place — indeed, the Heritage Committee recommended getting CBC out of digital revenue altogether — and unlike CBC Radio and SRC, I’m not aware of a single human being who supports the TV/online status quo.

Chris Selley, “Federal government should stop trying to help private media and fix the CBC”, National Post, 2017-06-20.

July 9, 2019

QotD: Tariffs

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

The entire aim of having trade is so that we can go buy those lovely things made by foreigners. We only export so as to be able to swap something for those foreign made goods. Thus tariffs are a bad idea to begin with — why should we tax ourselves for gaining access to the very point of our having trade in the first place? Sadly all too many don’t grasp this point. Too many of them being in the current Trump Administration.

Over and above the general point that we don’t want to limit trade nor imports there’s another worry with tariffs and trade wars. Which is what the International Monetary Fund is complaining about. The imposition of more tariffs is a disruption to that global economy. One that is going to reduce growth, the very thing we all desire.

Tim Worstall, “IMF Says The U.S. And China Trade Tariffs Are A Major Risk To World Growth”, Seeking Alpha, 2019-06-07.

July 7, 2019

Does this sound like your gym?

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

Instapundit linked to this older Sean Kelly article about the “Planet Fitness” chain of health clubs. According to him, it’s even less pretty than you might have thought:

Here’s what you need to know…

  1. Planet Fitness: The gym for people who don’t really want to get in shape, owned by people who really can’t afford for the members to be there.
  2. A survey of over 20 different Planet Fitness locations in 12 different states revealed that they provide no nutritional guidance. They do however supply candy and pizza.
  3. Planet Fitness seems to promise that health and fitness will ultimately be comfortable and not involve any real effort.
  4. Planet Fitness is a big, purple-colored adult daycare marketed to people afraid to go to an actual gym.
  5. Many Planet Fitness members do want to make progress of course, but the gym’s own rules and operating guidelines seem to dissuade this.

July 6, 2019

Putting global worker pay into perspective

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

Tim Worstall explains why the headline-friendly numbers in a recent ILO report are nothing to be surprised at:

“Nearly half of all global pay is scooped up by only 10% of workers, according to the International Labour Organization, while the lowest-paid 50% receive only 6.4%.

“The lowest-paid 20% – about 650 million workers – get less than 1% of total pay, a figure that has barely moved in 13 years, ILO analysis found. It used labour income figures from 189 countries between 2004 and 2017, the latest available data.

“A worker in the top 10% receives $7,445 a month (£5,866), while a worker in the bottom 10% gets only $22. The average pay of the bottom half of the world’s workers is $198 a month.”

[…]

The explanation? To be in the top 10% of the global pay distribution you need to be making around and about minimum wage in one of the rich countries. Via another calculation route, perhaps median income in those rich countries. No, that £5,800 is the average of all the top 10%.

Note that this is in USD. About £2,000 a month puts you in the second decile, that’s about UK median income of 24,000 a year.

And as it happens about 20% of the people around the world are in one of the already rich countries. So, above median in a rich country and we’re there. Our definition of rich here not quite extending as far as all of the OECD countries even. Western Europe – plus offshoots like Oz and NZ, North America, Japan, S. Korea and, well, there’s not much else. Sure, it’s not exactly 10% of the people there but it’s not hugely off either.

So, what is it that these places have in common? They’ve been largely free market, largely capitalist, economies for more than a few decades. The most recent arrival, S. Korea, only just managing that few decades. It is also true that nowhere that hasn’t been such is in that listing. It’s even true that nowhere that is such hasn’t made it – not that we’d go to the wall for that last insistence although it’s difficult to think of places that breach that condition.

July 4, 2019

Assorted green scams

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Environment, Food, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

David Warren briefly returns to the current day (away from his normal 13th-century preferences) to look at a few of the many green scams being run by various government and industry scam artists:

Speaking with a gentleman who vends in a neighbourhood farmers’ market, I learnt something interesting, and probably true. Surviving family farms usually lack “organic” credentials. This is because getting them, from the bureaucracies that dispense them, is an immensely time-consuming process, and involves costs that would erase most of the little farmer’s profits. You have to be a big, faceless, industrial operation to afford the official “organic” labels that sucker big city consumers into paying double for essentially the same goods. That the whole system is massively corrupt, can almost go without saying. It was designed to be.

Organic scams are far from new, but perhaps more insidious because corporations love to add that “organic” label on stuff to jack up the prices on all sorts of things, like spices, wine, and many, many other items. Restaurants do the same trick on their menus, frequently assuming nobody will ever check up on them. That said, it’s mostly the well-off who get fooled because, well, they’re eager to be fooled on that score. The US government even admitted that organic certification is not about food safety or nutrition: it’s all marketing.

By coincidence, the same day my eye caught, by accident on the Internet, the announcement of a Green Award to a big car assembly “park.” They had changed all the light bulbs in their factory buildings, thus saving themselves a few thousand dollars on their multi-million electric bill, and seem to have installed new toilets, too. This sprawling high-tech carriage works remains three hundred acres of unspeakable aesthetic horror, in which human beings are enslaved to machines. But now it is “Green.”

The greenwashing of modern industrial and commercial buildings is a long-running scam, with the much-desired “LEED Platinum” certification usually, if not always, awarded to those who game the system most successfully. “What LEED designers deliver is what most LEED building owners want – namely, green publicity, not energy savings“

The environmental business — currently buoyed by unprovable, often fatuous claims of anthropogenic global warming — is perhaps the most cynical. It has spawned vested interests on a global scale, that will not be overturned by occasional exposure. At its heart is the manipulation of statistics, and scare-mongering through compliant mass media. The general public are hypnotized by repetition. I have noticed in desultory dips into the news that e.g. anomalous weather will invariably be attributed to “climate change,” when more plausible explanations are easily at hand.

This zombification extends to most other areas of reportage: invisible bogeys blamed for imaginary trends. Solutions to “environmental problems” are proposed that will not make the slightest dent in them.

Of course, the constant demands for “clean energy” almost always explicitly reject the use of nuclear power because reasons.

Darlington Nuclear Generating Station in Clarington, Ontario.
Photo by Óðinn via Wikimedia Commons.

But nuclear power, most easily in the form of molten salt reactors (on which research was killed fifty years ago), could replace most uses of coal, oil, and gas within a decade, through much smaller facilities eliminating huge transmission costs. It would be the cheaper because the fuels are readily available to start in the form of recycled nuclear waste, and the raw materials would be abundantly available thereafter.

On the question of safety, the death toll from mining, drilling, hydro dams, &c, is quite considerable — in the tens of thousands at least, post-War. Except for Chernobyl (one of many Soviet-era environmental disasters), the death toll from nuclear accidents remains about nil. No one died at Three Mile Island. Not one death was caused by the flooded Fukushima reactors (though well over twenty thousand were killed by the tsunami that caused the difficulty there).

In short, “clean energy” is not a problem. It had to be made into one by the fright campaigns of the environmentalcases, whose own power and income depends on sustaining the problem, and preventing the most obvious solutions.

July 3, 2019

QotD: Elon Musk as a modern-day Ferdinand DeLesseps

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

I used to love Elon like everyone else. I still think that having four or five billionaires in a space race against each other is finally the world I thought I was going to get growing up reading Heinlein. The Tesla Model S was probably one of the most revolutionary cars of the last 50 years. But he lost me when he committed outright fraud in the Solar City – Tesla deal and since then have only become more skeptical about he and Tesla.

Elon Musk at the 2015 Tesla Motors annual meeting.
Photo by Steve Jurvetson via Wikimedia Commons.

I sort of laugh when folks tell me that really smart successful rich people believe in Tesla. You mean like James Murdoch, on the board of Tesla and who also was lost his entire investment in Theranos? Or like Larry Ellison, an adviser and fan of Elizabeth Holmes who invested $1 billion in Tesla just 6 months ago and has already lost 40% of it? The window on this is probably closing, but over the last 10 years if you wanted to get Silicon Valley investors to throw a lot of money at you, find a traditional bricks and mortar business and devise a story in which you take that industry and convert its economics to that of the networked software world (see: Uber, WeWork, Tesla, and even Theranos in some of its strategic pivots).

Or how about true millennials and Elon Musk? Name a wealthy millennial supporter of Elon Musk and Tesla and I can bet you any amount of money they have not looked at Tesla’s balance sheet or cash flow or the details of its global demand trends. They have not thought about its dealership strategy or manufacturing strategy and the cash flow implications of these. They just like what Elon says. It sounds big and visionary. They buy into Elon’s formulation that he is saving the environment and everyone opposed to him is in a cabal with big oil (ignoring the fact that Elon routinely uses his Gulfstream VI to commute distances less than 60 miles). So saying that rich millenials adore Elon is effectively saying that they want to be associated with the same things Elon says he is for — the environment and space travel et al.

Elon Musk is Ferdinand DeLesseps. He is PT Barnum. He is Elizabeth Holmes. He is the pied piper. He is fabulous at spinning visions and making them sound science-y. But he is not Tony Stark. There is a phenomenon with Elon Musk that everyone thinks he is brilliant until they hear him speak about something about which they have domain knowledge, and then they realize he is full of sh*t. For example, no one who knows anything about transportation or physics or basic engineering has thought his Boring Company and Hyperloop make any sense at all. His ideas would have been great cover stories for Popular Mechanics in the 1970’s, wowing 13-year-old boys like me with pictures of mile-long cargo blimps and flying RV’s. He is like a Marvel movie that spouts science that is just believable-enough sounding that it moves the plot along but does not stand up to any scrutiny.

All of this would be harmless if he was not running a public company. I don’t really care about the rich folks who were duped by Elizabeth Holmes, but hundreds of thousands of small millenial investors who have totally bought into the Elon hype are literally putting their last dollar into Tesla, and sometimes borrowing more. Tesla shorts often laugh at these folks on Twitter, calling them “bagholders,” but it is a tragedy. Unless Tesla finds a sugar daddy sucker, and the odds of that are getting longer, I think it is going to end badly for many of these investors.

As a disclosure, I have been short Tesla via puts for a while now. It you really want to understand Elon, the best book I can recommend is The Path Between The Seas about the building of the Panama Canal. First, it is a great book you should read no matter what. And second, Ferdinand DeLesseps is the best analog I can find for Musk.

Warren Meyer, “People Who Express Opinions Outside of their Domain Seldom Have Really Looked into it Much”, Coyote Blog, 2019-05-28.

June 29, 2019

Canada’s inability to deal with Chinese hard ball tactics

Filed under: Business, Cancon, China, Law, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The Canadian government complied with a request from the United States government to detain a Chinese national for possible extradition to the US. But this was no ordinary Chinese citizen: it was Meng Wanzhou, the Chief Financial Officer for Huawei, a very big and very well-connected Chinese conglomerate. Ms. Wanzhou is not just a high-ranking executive, but also the daughter of the founder of the company. The Chinese government is more than miffed at Canada’s legal presumption and has been piling on the means of persuasion to get Canada’s notoriously pliable government to just pretend this never happened and to let Ms. Wanzhou proceed on her way. Under normal circumstances, this might well happen, but the US government is now under the control of a man who reputedly makes our Prime Minister lose control of his bladder, so we can’t just be seen to knuckle under to the bullying of the Bad Orange Man, nor can we be seen to knuckle under to the bullying of the PRC, leaving poor Justin Trudeau looking weak and powerless (and, to be fair, he is weak and powerless).

Andrew Coyne suggests that the best way to help a couple of poor Canadians who have been caught up in the inter-governmental shenanigans is to stop talking about some sort of “deal”:

U.S. Department of Justice among others announced 23 criminal charges (Financial Fraud, Money Laundering, Conspiracy to Defraud the United States, Theft of Trade Secret Technology and Sanctions Violations, etc.) against Huawei & its CFO Wanzhou Meng
Image via Wikimedia Commons.

I don’t doubt that behind the scenes government officials are doing everything they can, or think they are. But the pressure to bring the Canadians home is surely less for the conspicuous failure of other Canadians to give a damn.

Indeed, what is striking throughout this standoff is that most of the pressure has come from the other side. It is China, not Canada, that has used trade as a weapon, blocking imports of Canadian meat and canola. It was the Chinese air force that buzzed a Canadian warship in the East China Sea.

It is the departing Chinese ambassador to Canada who has launched one incendiary attack after another on this country, while Canada’s now-former ambassador to China was floating trial balloons about getting the Americans to drop the charges against Meng. It is China’s leaders who refuse to meet ours.

And yet for all of China’s lawlessness, for all its bestial mistreatment of our citizens and baseless attacks on our interests, the most common response in this country is not to demand that China repair its relationship with Canada, but to ask how Canada can mollify China.

June 26, 2019

Social media giants can be publisher or platform, but not both

Filed under: Business, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

At Ace of Spades H.Q., Ace explains why Facebook, Google, and the other social media companies have been playing fast and loose with the rules, sometimes using the rules that apply to publishers and sometimes the ones that apply to platforms, depending on their whim:

Only a speaker or publisher of claimed defamatory content can be sued.

Not being a speaker or publisher of a defamatory statement gives you total immunity from suit. You’re just a guy, you had nothing to do with the tort alleged.

Section 230 [of the Community Decency Act] specifically says that “neutral content platforms” shall not be deemed to be the “speaker or publisher” of a claimed defamatory statement made by a third party using their service — hence, the complete immunity from suit. You can’t be sued for something someone else said, obviously.

Now newspapers can be sued for the defamatory remarks of, say, an interview subject. They are publishers of that defamatory statement — they chose to publish it. The interview subject made the statement, but then they chose to publish it themselves, becoming another “speaker” of the defamation.

Now, “neutral content platforms” are never considered “speakers” of third-party defamations (or any third-party crime involving speech, such as offering to sell contraband or conspiring to commit a crime). But a newspaper or media company — or this blog — could be.

The corporate cucks claim that you cannot put restrictions on Google, Facebook, or Twitter as regards their right to censor opinions they disagree with because that constitutes “compelled speech.” You’re compelling them to speak things they do not believe, the cucks’ argument goes.

But… section 230 states that, as a legal matter, they are not considered the “speakers” of any statement made on their “neutral content platforms.”

So which is it? Are they the speakers of these words — in which case, like a newspaper or tv station, they’d have every right to exercise editorial judgment and decide what they wish their company to say — or are they not the speakers of these words, which is their claim whenever someone tries to sue them?

As it stands, they are speakers when it comes to their power to block people from speaking on their platforms — and thus can indulge in the vice of censorship — but not speakers when it comes to people suing them for what other people said on their platforms.

Choose one or the other: Either you are a speaker of other people’s words or you’re not. You can’t forever choose one and then the other when it’s in your interest to have the Clown Nose On or the Clown Nose Off.

June 23, 2019

They managed to get 7% approval? That’s surprising

Filed under: Business, Law, Liberty, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Michael van der Galien reports on a recent poll of registered voters in the United States that will not be happy reading for many social media companies:

Only seven percent are happy with social media companies being able to harvest and sell data without permission or compensation.
Chart from Hill.TV – https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/449576-poll-voters-overwhelmingly-want-more-regulations-on-personal

Thirty-six percent of those polled say there is no scenario imaginable to them in which it’s OK for companies to collect and sell such information. Read that again: one-third of those asked always oppose companies like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Google collecting and selling such data. Another 36% said they can support the collection and selling of personal data if the individuals involved are compensated for it.

Only 21% say they believe companies should be able to collect and sell personal information of users if they’ve expressly asked for permission. As for selling and collecting it without permission:

    Eight percent of Republicans and also Democratic respondents said that firms should be allowed to sell information without permission. Seven percent of independents agreed.

In other words, this is a bipartisan issue, which makes perfect sense. After all, this issue affects all of us, whether we are conservative or liberal.

Matthew Sheffield has more for Hill.TV:

On Monday, the Washington Post reported that the Federal Trade Commission has been investigating Google’s YouTube division for tracking child users, a practice allegedly in violation of a 1998 law which forbids tracking and targeting children under 13 years of age.

The poll found broad bipartisan agreement on what companies should be allowed to do with consumer data. Eight percent of Republicans and also Democratic respondents said that firms should be allowed to sell information without permission. Seven percent of independents agreed.

About the same number of Democrats and Republicans said that companies should not be able to sell data under any circumstance. Thirty-three percent of GOP respondents took this position, as did 35 percent of Democrats. Forty percent of independents agreed.

Younger voters were more willing to allow companies to sell consumer data than older ones although it was still a minority position. Fourteen percent of respondents who were between 18 and 34 said they supported letting companies compile and sell personal data without permission while only 2 percent of those 65 and above agreed.

June 22, 2019

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA)

Filed under: Africa, Business, Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Alexander Hammond explains why a free trade deal among many African nations is good news for the United States and other non-African nations:

2018 map showing the African countries involved in the African Continental Free Trade Agreement.
Dark green indicates ratification, medium green are countries that signed in March 2018, and light green are countries that signed in July 2018 but did not ratify the agreement immediately.
Map by Themightyquill at Wikimedia Commons.

The poorest continent in the world is about to lend a hand to the United States. Last week, Africa implemented the world’s largest free-trade area, and that’s great news for American foreign policy. Back in December, U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton unveiled a plan for the Trump administration’s titled the “Africa Strategy.”

The plan is simple — the United States will give less aid to Africa, instead prioritizing enhancing America’s “economic ties with the region.” Now that many African nations have unified under a single market, trading with the continent will become far easier — and a trade deal between the United States and Africa would help out everyone involved.

Streamlining Trade

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) trade deal officially came into force on May 30, a month after it reached the twenty-two-nation threshold needed to do so. Now, tariffs on 90 percent of the goods traded among AfCFTA member states will be removed — a move that, according to the UN, will boost intra-African trade by 52 percent in only a few years.

Given the United States’ new plans for the continent, the AfCFTA’s member states aren’t the only economies that will reap the benefits of an African single market.

A key component of the Trump administration’s Africa Strategy is to advance “U.S. trade and commercial ties” with Africa by creating “modern comprehensive trade agreements.” A single African market will be a far simpler trade partner for America. Now, only one set of trade deals will need to be negotiated with the AfCFTA — as opposed to fifty-five intricately-crafted trade deals with each small African economy. The U.S. Trade Representative has even released a report noting how time-consuming and costly it is to negotiate trade deals with each African nation. Because trade deals are long and expensive processes, creating a solitary trade deal with the AfCFTA will keep more money in the U.S. government’s purse.

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