Quotulatiousness

July 9, 2018

We used to joke about the “Pre-Fab Four”, but now every major artist is pre-fab

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

Not only pre-fabricated, but with a global audience that has been trained to like their music in advance. You could go so far as to say they’ve been brainwashed into liking it. ESR commented on this and shared the following video.

Not just a get-off-my-lawn rant, very exact information on how modern production techniques and producers’ economic incentives squeeze the life and variety out of popular music.

I actually didn’t know how bad it had gotten out there, I never hear any of this chart-topping crap because I select my music from niche genres without lyrics – instrumental prog metal, jazz fusion, space ambient. I thought that was just me, but maybe such strict selectivity is what one has to do to avoid being inundated in garbage these days.

July 7, 2018

The bad economics of rooftop solar installations

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

Norman Rogers points out where the numbers don’t add up for many jurisdictions’ domestic solar power schemes:

Photovoltaic panels on a roof, 28 April, 2015.
Photo by Antonio Chaves, via Wikimedia Commons.

A modest proposal:

We’ve all heard about “shop local” and “get your food from local farmers, not distant corporate farms.” Lots of people have apple trees in their backyards. Often they can’t begin to eat or give away all the apples. In the meantime, big supermarkets sell corporate apples for one dollar a pound and up. I propose that people with backyard apples be able to take them to the supermarket and sell them to the supermarket for the same price at which the supermarket is selling apples. Furthermore, they should be able to take them at any time and receive payment. If the store gets too many local apples, it can reduce its purchase of corporate apples.

My apple proposal may seem ill advised, but that is exactly how rooftop solar power works. The homeowner gets to displace power from the power company, and if the homeowner has more power than he needs, the power company is obligated to purchase it, often for the same retail price at which it sells electricity. That policy is called net metering. In order to accommodate the homeowner’s electric power, the utility has to throttle down some other power plant that produces power at a lower wholesale price.

The exact arrangements for accepting rooftop solar vary by jurisdiction. In some places, net metering is restricted in one way or another.

A large-scale natural gas-generating plant can supply electricity for around 6 cents per kilowatt-hour. Rooftop solar electricity costs, without subsidies, around 30 cents per kilowatt-hour, or five times as much. Average retail rates for electricity in most places are between 8 cents and 16 cents per kilowatt-hour. Yet, paradoxically, the homeowner can often reduce this electric bill by installing rooftop solar.

It is actually worse than forcing the power company to take 30-cent electricity that it could get from a natural gas plant for 6 cents. When the company throttles down a natural gas plant to make room for rooftop electricity, it is not saving six cents, because it already has paid for the gas plant. All it saves is the marginal fuel that is saved when the plant is throttled down to make room for the rooftop electricity. The saving in fuel is about 2 cents per kilowatt-hour. So 30-cent electricity displaces grid electricity and saves two cents.

July 6, 2018

“That’s what governments are for — get in a man’s way”

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

Veronique de Rugy says that the 4th of July is a good time to reflect on the American Founding Fathers fighting to gain independence from a distant tyrannical government … and the rest of the year is devoted to coping with a less-distant but no-less tyrannical government in Washington:

Consider the oil and gas industry. Over the years, the federal government has adopted many regulations meant to hinder the industry. As Nick Loris, an energy policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, reminds me, one such regulation is the Merchant Marine Act, also known as the Jones Act, which makes it more expensive to ship oil and natural gas from coast to coast. Then there are the past administrations’ outright moratoriums on drilling in certain areas of America’s coasts, which massively increases the cost of doing business. As Loris notes, there are many costly bureaucratic delays in issuing leases and processing applications for permits to drill (APDs), which stalls production on federal lands. On average, the federal processing of APDs in the last year of the Obama administration was 257 days, while state processing is typically 30 days or less.

Since Uncle Sam has a lot of regulations in place to make the operations of domestic oil and gas companies more costly, why is the biggest beneficiary of loans from the federal government export credit agency (the U.S. Export-Import Bank) the gigantic Mexico state-owned oil and gas company Pemex? Between 2007 and 2013 (the most complete data set we have), Pemex received over $7 billion in loans backed by American taxpayers to buy U.S. goods. Thanks to Uncle Sam, this discounted borrowing power gives Pemex a leg up on its competition with domestic oil and gas companies.

Then there’s the Trump administration tariffs. These import taxes on foreign goods coming from Europe, China, and other countries have not only raised the cost of doing business but also triggered retaliatory measures from foreign governments. For instance, the farm industry is paying a steep price from the tariffs on steel because they increase the cost of farm machinery, lowering profit margins. Farmers are also hurt by the European, Mexican, Canadian, and Chinese governments that have imposed retaliatory export restrictions on U.S. farm products. Many small farms are calling for help to survive. It’s so bad that the entire Iowa congressional delegation sent a letter to President Trump on June 25 in which it called the tariffs “catastrophic for Iowa’s economy.”

Quote in the headline from Firefly episode “Serenity, Part 1”.

July 4, 2018

Open office plans do not increase personal interaction among workers

Filed under: Business, Health, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

From the abstract of a recent study:

Example of an open plan office
Photo by VeronicaTherese via Wikimedia Commons.

Organizations’ pursuit of increased workplace collaboration has led managers to transform traditional office spaces into ‘open’, transparency-enhancing architectures with fewer walls, doors and other spatial boundaries, yet there is scant direct empirical research on how human interaction patterns change as a result of these architectural changes. In two intervention-based field studies of corporate headquarters transitioning to more open office spaces, we empirically examined — using digital data from advanced wearable devices and from electronic communication servers — the effect of open office architectures on employees’ face-to-face, email and instant messaging (IM) interaction patterns. Contrary to common belief, the volume of face-to-face interaction decreased significantly (approx. 70%) in both cases, with an associated increase in electronic interaction. In short, rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM. This is the first study to empirically measure both face-to-face and electronic interaction before and after the adoption of open office architecture. The results inform our understanding of the impact on human behaviour of workspaces that trend towards fewer spatial boundaries.

This certainly matches my own experiences working at companies that changed their offices to more open or fully open spaces. The accountants may have loved the new spaces as being less expensive, but one of the key advantages claimed for open designs does not appear to be true.

H/T to Claire Lehmann for the link.

July 1, 2018

A point about historical advisors in films

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

Lindybeige
Published on 24 Mar 2011

In which I relate an anecdote which is fairly depressingly illuminating when it comes to how much Hollywood really cares about historical authenticitude.

www.LloydianAspects.co.uk

June 30, 2018

Enriching the public in ways that do not show up in the GDP calculations

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

Tim Worstall looks at the calls to regulate the big tech firms and points out that we already get a very good deal on “free stuff” that isn’t reflected in standard economic statistics:

It won’t have escaped your attention that rather large numbers of people are calling for the regulation of the tech companies. The Amazon, Google, Facebook (Apple and Microsoft often added, just because they’re large) nexus have lots of power over markets and thus therefore – well, therefore something. My own prejudice here is that certain people just cannot look at centres of power and or money without insisting that they, the complainers, should be the ones exercising that power and determining the disposition of that money. Thus much of the drive for “democratic” regulation of the economy more generally, the self proclaimed democrats being the ones who would end up with the power. The advantage of this analysis being that it does describe reality, the same people do end up making the same arguments about different companies over time. Mere prominence brings the demand for control.

The economist on this subject is Jean Tirole. His Nobel was for exploring this very subject, tech companies and the two sided market. Google, for example, sells the search engine to us and us to the advertisers. The tech here is different, obviously, but the underlying economics is the same as that of the free newspaper.

Tirole’s a new book out and there are a number of interesting points to be had from it:

    Yes, on the whole consumers tend to get a good deal, because we use wonderful services — like Google’s search engine, Gmail, YouTube, and Waze — for free. To be certain, we are not paid for the valuable data we provide to the platforms, as for example Eric Posner and Glen Weyl remind us in their recent book Radical Markets. But on the whole, our living standards have substantially improved thanks to the digital revolution.

From which we can extract a few points. We’re richer, we really are. Substantially richer and yet in a manner that normal economic statistics entirely fail to capture. As Hal Varian has pointed out, GDP doesn’t deal well with free. Near all of those benefits of the digital revolution are coming to us for free and so aren’t recorded in that GDP. So, we’re richer yet the numbers say we’re not. In that is much of the explanation of slow economic growth these days, even of slow real wage growth. We’re just not counting what is happening to our living standards.

But we can and should go further than that. If the above is true then we’re very much less unequal than we’re recording. Stuff that’s free is, obviously enough, distributed rather more evenly among the population than extant monetary incomes. You, me and Bill Gates all have access to exactly the same amount of Facebook at the same price. We’re entirely equal in that sense. Bill’s actually poorer concerning search engines, stuck for emotional reasons with Bing as he is while we get to use Google or DuckDuckGo. Our standard measures of inequality are wrong both because of the undermeasurement of new wealth and also the extremely equitable pattern of the distribution of that new wealth.

QotD: In government regulations, complexity is a subsidy to existing companies

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

One of the major themes of the book I’m working on should be familiar to longtime readers of this “news”letter. It boils down to a simple insight: Complexity is a subsidy. The more complex you make the rules, the more you reward people with the cognitive, material, or social resources necessary to get around them. Big corporations tend not to object to more burdensome regulations because they can afford to comply with them. Dodd-Frank was great for the “too big to fail” crowd. But it has been murder on community banks that don’t have the resources to comply. As Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, put it:

    It’s very hard for outside entrants to come in and disrupt our business simply because we’re so regulated. We hear people in our industry talk about the regulation, and they talk about it with a sigh about the burdensome of regulation. But in fact in some cases the burdensome regulation acts as a bit of a moat around our business.

But you’ve been hearing this stuff from me for years. Let’s get back to the arrogance thing. It seems to me a big part of the problem with progressive elites these days is that they lack self-awareness. That elites arrange affairs for their own self-interest is an insight that was already ancient when Robert Michels penned his Iron Law of Oligarchy. But ever since the progressives concocted their theories of “disinterestedness,” they’ve convinced themselves that they are not in fact a self-serving elite. Give feudal aristocrats their due: They were a self-dealing crop of rent-seekers and exploiters, but at least they were open about the fact that they believed they had a divine right to sit atop the social pyramid. Today’s progressive aristocracy is largely blind to the fact that their cult of expertise isn’t really about expertise; it’s about organizing society in a way that reinforces their status and power.

Well, most of them are blind to it. Occasionally the mask slips. Jonathan Gruber, one of the chief architects and financial beneficiaries of the health-care “reform,” told audiences that Obamacare was designed “in a tortured way” to hide the fact that “healthy people pay in and sick people get money.” They had to do it this way to get around the inconvenient “stupidity of the American voter.” A feudal lord who talked this way about his serfs wouldn’t get any grief for it. But in America such honesty gets you rendered an un-person.

Jonah Goldberg, “The Consequences of Overpromising on Obamacare”, National Review, 2016-10-08.

June 29, 2018

Honduran refugees and the hellhole they’re fleeing

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

Justin Raimondo on the plight of Honduras, and how it got to be the hellhole it is:

Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador
Image via Google Maps.

As tens of thousands gather at our southern border, roiling US politics, the question arises: why are so many of the asylum-seekers and migrants crossing the border illegally from three Central American countries in particular: El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala?

To begin with, it’s no coincidence that these are the three “most invaded” countries south of the Rio Grande – that is, invaded by the United States and its proxies.

[…]

So what are these “refugees” fleeing? Is it so bad that parents are justified in paying smugglers to guide their underage children – traveling alone! – across the US-Mexican border?

Unlike the rest of the media, which has routinely ignored most of what goes on in Latin America since the end of the cold war, I’ve been covering the region regularly. […] As I wrote last year:

    “Honduras has always been an American plaything, to be toyed with for the benefit of United Fruit (rebranded Chiquita) and the native landowning aristocracy, and disciplined when necessary: Washington sent in the Marines a total of seven times between 1903 and 1925. The Honduran peasants didn’t like their lands being confiscated by the government and turned over to foreign-owned producers, who were granted monopolistic franchises by corrupt public officials. Periodic rural revolts started spreading to the cities, despite harsh repression, and the country – ruled directly by the military since 1955 – returned to a civilian regime in 1981.”

That column was about the Hillary Clinton-endorsed coup against the democratically elected President, Manuel Zelaya. The popular conservative-turned-reformer had pushed through a number of measures designed to alleviate the peasantry’s hopeless poverty and shift power from the military to the presidency, which angered the Honduran elite. They were triggered, however, when Zelaya joined the ALBA alliance of Latin American countries allied with Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela. While ALBA never really amounted to much, either economically or militarily, the symbolism of this move was too much for the Honduran military, which was trained in the US and generously subsidized by Washington. The generals soon had Zelaya on a plane out of the country – while still in his pajamas. Washington issued a perfunctory scolding, but Hillary’s State Department had approved the coup in advance. It’s always been done that way, and this time was no exception.

[…]

So is the Honduran hegira to the Rio Grande a direct result of US foreign policy: is it “blowback,” to utilize CIA parlance for the unpleasant consequences of US actions abroad? It would be easy to say this is yet another example of how our foreign policy of global intervention comes back to haunt us, because that is partially true. Yet the old familiar story of the Ugly Americans backing the even uglier Local Despot doesn’t quite fit the most current facts: there has been an amazing drop in US military aid to Honduras. In 2017 it was over $19 million. This year it’s a mere $750,000!

The history of Honduras before the rise of American hegemony has done more to shape the country than any other single factor: the vital question of land ownership is the central issue here and in the entire South. Feudalism was never really abolished, and the feudalist remnants that persist to this day in the region delayed economic and technological development and kept the vast majority in penury. US foreign policy helped to sustain the life of this systemic repression: it didn’t create it. Whatever the “root causes,” the blowback from all this history has created something very close to a failed state.

This is why tens of thousands are making the long trek to the US-Mexican border: the social and institutional basis of human civilization is breaking down, not only in Honduras but throughout Latin America. Yet this is neither new nor is it primarily attributable to the actions of the US. Yes, our “war on drugs” has created a criminal class that is rivaling the power of the local governments to keep order, but hard drugs are illegal everywhere, not just in North America.

June 27, 2018

Calico prohibition

Filed under: Business, France, History, India, Law — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 06:00

In the current issue of Reason, Virginia Postrel outlines an eighteenth-century French government attempt to prohibit calico cloth:

Calico printing, an image from Wellcome Images, via Wikimedia Commons

On a shopping trip to the butcher’s, young Miss la Genne wore her new, form-fitting jacket, a stylish cotton print with large brown flowers and red stripes on a white background. It got her arrested.

Another young woman stood in the door of her boss’ wine shop sporting a similar jacket with red flowers. She too was arrested. So were Madame de Ville, the lady Coulange, and Madame Boite. Through the windows of their homes, law enforcement authorities spotted these unlucky women in clothing with red flowers printed on white. They were busted for possession.

It was Paris in 1730, and the printed cotton fabrics known as toiles peintes or indiennes — in English, calicoes, chintzes, or muslins — had been illegal since 1686. It was an extreme version of trade protectionism, designed to shelter French textile producers from Indian cottons. Every few years the authorities would tweak the law, but the fashion refused to die.

Frustrated by rampant smuggling and ubiquitous scofflaws, in 1726 the government increased penalties for traffickers and anyone helping them. Offenders could be sentenced to years in galleys, with violent smugglers put to death. Local authorities were given the power to detain without trial anyone who merely wore the forbidden fabrics or upholstered furniture with them.

“The exasperation of the lawmakers, after forty years of successive edicts and ordinances which had been largely ignored, flouted or circumvented on a wholesale basis, can be sensed in this law,” writes the fashion historian Gillian Crosby in a 2015 dissertation on the ban. Her archival research shows a spike in arrests for simple possession. “Impotent at stopping the cross-border trade, printing or the peddling of goods,” she writes, “government officials concentrated on making an example of individual wearers, in an attempt to halt the fashion.”

They failed.

In the annals of prohibition, the French war on printed fabrics is one of the strangest, most futile, and most extreme chapters. It’s also one of the most intellectually consequential, producing many of the earliest arguments for economic liberalism. “Long before the more famous debates about the liberalisation of the grain trade, about taxation, or even about the monopoly of the French Indies Company, philosophes and Enlightenment political economists saw the calico debate as their first important battleground,” writes the historian Felicia Gottmann in Global Trade, Smuggling, and the Making of Economic Liberalism (Palgrave Macmillan).

June 25, 2018

What’s inside Ikea’s “wood” ?

Filed under: Business, Woodworking — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

Rag ‘n’ Bone Brown
Published on 12 May 2018

In this video I cut open one of Ikea’s Linnmon shelves to find out what’s inside.

June 24, 2018

Proper Model Making – a rant against the decline of good model shops

Filed under: Business, Gaming, Military, Railways — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Lindybeige
Published on 1 Jun 2018

A bit of a rant about how youngsters these days are making fewer models. The setting is Helsinki’s Mallikauppa.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Lindybeige

My source for the information about Charles Lutman were a newspaper article and word of mouth from his grandson.

Many thanks to the shop for letting me shoot this. Here is its website: https://www.mallikauppa.fi

Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.

June 23, 2018

QotD: The protectionist two-step, Alberta craft-beer variant

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

Economic protectionism has two classic rationales. Sometimes, as in the case of Alberta’s clumsy attempt at an interprovincial tariff on craft beer, it is undertaken in the name of defending small, emerging “infant industries” that a government wishes to give time to establish themselves in its territory. And sometimes, as in the case of Canadian dairy supply management, it is done to defend “strategic” industries that have existed forever and that allegedly create an irreplaceable quantity of employment and profits.

Give yourself a gold star if you spotted that these canonical pretexts for trade barriers are contradictory. The inherent promise of protection for “infant industries” is that they will grow up and leave the nest. But, oops: by the time they reach adulthood, they may have become too “strategic” to expose to market forces. Heads, the favoured firms win; tails, the consumer loses.

Of course, on the level of fine detail, the arguments for trade barriers are manifold and complicated. (If you get into a quarrel about dairy, and take the free-trade side, you will find them being changed by your interlocutor every 30 seconds.) Alberta’s program for supporting small brewers has an unclear, touchy-feely small-is-beautiful justification. By design, the tariff applies only to businesses that have no intention of attaining industrial scale. It’s right there in the term “craft brewing,” isn’t it? Whatever the esthetic merits of craft beer, this is surely the deliberate encouragement of what the urbane left likes to calls “precarious” jobs that could be flung into disarray by a bad season, a shift in fashions, or a supply problem.

And, also, it’s illegal.

Colby Cosh, “A court refuses to swallow Alberta’s thinly disguised craft-beer tariff”, National Post, 2018-06-22.

June 21, 2018

Buying quality used hand tools

Filed under: Business, Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I didn’t agree with everything Steve rants about here, but he does make some good points:

A small selection of bench planes: front to back, a jack plane, a junior Jack, a (garbage grade) #4 smoother, and a #3-equivalent smoother.

I’ve decided to punish humanity with a tool rant.

Back when I still had a real Internet connection, I put a video up on Youtube. In the video, I fixed up a $15 Harbor Freight wood plane, just to see if I could make it work. I got it to function, but I wouldn’t suggest anyone else try it.

A commenter said I should buy planes at garage sales. That set me off. The bag of pet peeves ruptured, and now I must rant.

Garage sales are only good for three types of people: mentally ill hoarders who buy crap, young people who live in poverty, and professional shoppers who snap up the best merchandise and put it on Ebay and Etsy.

That’s it. I will explain.

Say you’re 45 years old, and you decide you want a hand plane collection. To do woodworking well, you really need 4 or 5 planes, and you’re better off with a dozen. Different planes do different things well. Block planes are good for tight spaces and breaking corners. Jointing planes are good for jointing, obviously. Smoothing planes are good for, well, smoothing. Rabbet planes make rabbets. You can’t buy one plane and make it do everything. You’re going to need a bunch of planes.

You’ve already blown it by reaching 45 without collecting any planes. Now you have to catch up. Say you start going to garage sales.

Look at the paper or the web. There are no promising sales this week. Probably. Most of the time, the sales you read about look really bad. Action figures with missing arms and spit all over them, plus things like lamps with torn shades. IKEA furniture that ought to be burned. Maybe you’ll see a good sale in a couple of weeks. You may find 10 sales a year that are worth leaving the house for.

When you go to these sales, 9 of them will turn out to be losers. The other one will have one or two decent items.

To get those items, you will have to get up before the sun rises and do some driving. If you show up an hour after the sales start, the things you want will be gone. Tools go fast. Every city now has a fleet of professional shoppers who raid garage sales as early as possible and take all the good stuff. If you’re not there at the start, you’re dead. And what if you have two promising sales on the same day? You can get to one early enough to score, but you’ll be late for the other one

If you get the items you want, they probably won’t really be the items you want. By that I mean you won’t be able to choose brands and models. Want to collect a set of Stanley type 13 planes? Forget it. You’ll have to take a type 11, a 1990 plane from Home Depot, a Craftsman … whatever happens to be available. You will eventually get items that do what you want, but you’ll have to settle.

If you insist on good tools, you’ll have your woodworking shop equipped in about 20 years. During those years, you will have had to struggle without important tools. You will have had to forgo a lot of projects. You will become farsighted. You may get cataracts. You may get arthritis in your hands. You may need new hips. You’ll feel less like getting things done. The TV and the shuffleboard court will beckon.

You’ll miss out on the fun you would have had if you had bought your tools as early as possible.

You may drop dead, and then other people will buy your tools at your wife’s garage sale.

June 20, 2018

Do You Have a Right To Repair Your Phone? The Fight Between Big Tech and Consumers

Filed under: Business, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published on 18 Jun 2018

Eric Lundgren got 15 months in prison for selling pirated Microsoft software that the tech giant gives away for free. His case cuts to the heart of a major battle going on in the tech industry today: Companies are trying to preserve aspects of U.S. copyright law that give them enormous power over the products we own.

Reason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.

June 17, 2018

Conrad Black – Trump’s not bluffing

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

In the National Post (but linked from his personal website), Conrad Black warns of the danger of assuming that Trump is just blustering on his trade threats:

Justin Trudeau struck just the right Canadian note of our gentle nature but refusal “to be pushed around,” and he predictably will reap the short-term reward for standing up for the country opposite the ideal American bogeyman, the blustering billionaire president who has been a Garry Trudeau caricature of the Ugly American for 25 years. (It is a very incomplete picture, like most caricatures, but it works for Trump and he often cultivates it.) The boycotts of American goods and holidays will be a bonus to Canada economically and the anti-Trump American media will be along within two weeks to lionize doughty Canada like “Gallant little Belgium” in 1914 and “Plucky Israel” in 1947, and it will strengthen Canada’s always fragile self-regard opposite the United States.

On the other hand, Trump isn’t just a blowhard; all his career he has known how to go for the jugular and his reference to 270-per-cent Canadian tariffs on butter is a valid complaint that threatens to tear the scab off this egregious payoff to the comparatively small number of Quebec dairy farmers who mainly profit from it. The same issue was hammered hard by Martha Hall Findlay when she ran for the federal Liberal leadership in 2013 and by Maxime Bernier when he ran narrowly behind Andrew Scheer for the Conservative federal leadership last year. The issue died down after their unsuccessful campaigns, but if Donald Trump is incited to hammer that theme, he will roil the domestic Canadian political waters and English-French relations in the country generally.

Presumably our trade negotiators will not become so intoxicated by the prime minister’s peppy talk and spontaneous popular boycotts of the U.S. that they forget the correlation of forces. An aroused American administration could do serious damage to Canada’s standard of living, and it could be a tempting tactic to expedite more important negotiations with Mexico and the principal Asian and European powers. The United States is now enjoying three times as great a rate of economic growth as Canada (4.8 to 1.5 per cent), has lower tax rates, 11 times as great an economy, and more unfilled jobs than unemployed people.

Behind the peeling façades of Norman Rockwell and Walt Disney, the United States is a monster, and not always an amiable monster. If Canadians are blinded by their visceral dislike of Donald Trump, as the antithesis of Canadian criteria for likeable public figures, they will be exposed to the ruthless pursuit of the national interest that in his own career propelled him from technical insolvency to immense wealth and celebrity and then, against all odds, to control of a great political party and to the headship of the most powerful country in the world. If these talks blow up, the U.S. doesn’t have to settle for WTO rules; it can impose outright protectionist measures. Justin Trudeau has been agile, and the country has responded admirably. But Canadian policy-makers must understand that they are playing for almost mortal stakes with potentially dangerous protagonists who have no sense of fair play and no interest in what Canada thinks of them.

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