Quotulatiousness

August 14, 2018

Ontario embraces online sales for marijuana, with retail stores to follow in 2019

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Selley on the Ontario government’s surprisingly sensible approach to phasing in retail sales of cannabis over the next eight months:

Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government called a brief truce in its multi-front war with the federal Liberals on Monday to give one of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s signature policies a major boost: as had been widely rumoured, the Tories will scrap the previous Liberal government’s tentative public marijuana retail scheme and instead hand out licenses to the private sector.

How many licenses and what kinds of stores are just two of many unresolved details. The government says it will consult widely to determine how best to proceed, with a target opening date for licensed brick-and-mortar stores of April 1, 2019 (with publicly run online sales to commence in October). But it seems safe to hope the cap, if any, will be significantly higher than the previous government’s laughably timid 150.

Thanks to Toronto’s reluctantly laissez-faire approach to illegal storefront (nudge-wink) “medical” marijuana “dispensaries,” we know 150 might not even satisfy a free market in the country’s largest city. Trudeau has always said the goal of legalization was to smash the illegal market and plunk down a legal one in its place. The Ontario Liberals’ plan seemed almost tailor-made to fail in that endeavour.

There remains ample room for the new government to screw this up. But if it gets pricing and regulation and enforcement halfway right, the country’s most populous province should now be well placed to give legalization a good shot at achieving what proponents have always said it should — which is, basically, to make it like booze. Of course kids still get their hands on booze, but at least it’s a bit of a chore. And at least when kids get drunk, they’re not drinking moonshine.

The need to claim the retail market from the existing extra-legal networks will hinge on quality, availability and (especially) the prices that the province sets. Price it too high (pun unintentional), and the legal market will not take over distribution and sales from the black market. Provide poor quality and get the same results. Restrict sales too stringently, and watch the profits go back to the current dealers … who are not noted for their sensibilities about selling drugs to the under-aged.

In the meantime, it’s interesting to ponder why they’re going in this direction. Fedeli and Attorney-General Caroline Mulroney were at great pains Monday to stress their primary concern was the children.

“First and foremost, we want to protect our kids,” said Mulroney. “There will be no compromise, no expense spared, to ensure that our kids will be protected following the legalization of the drug.”

“Under no circumstances — none — will we tolerate anybody sharing, selling or otherwise providing cannabis to anybody under the age of 19,” said Mulroney. Fedeli vowed that even a single sale to a minor would void a retailer’s license.

Yet, let’s be honest, kids well under the age of 19 can already get cannabis and other illicit drugs — more so in urban and suburban areas, but it’s hard to imagine that legalizing cannabis for 19-plus customers somehow magically renders the under-19s uninterested in getting access, too.

August 11, 2018

Second-hand bookshops

Filed under: Books, Britain, Business — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

An old Theodore Dalrymple article on the disappearing treasures (to some of us, anyway) of the second-hand book trade:

My love of money is so far unrequited, perhaps because I do not love it quite enough, which is to say to the exclusion of all other possible objects of adoration and devotion. Likewise I remain firm in my admiration of those who do not work exclusively or even principally for money; and among the latter must surely be English provincial sellers of second-hand books

Theirs is indeed a dying trade, and entering their shops – now, alas, fewer and fewer – one cannot help but wonder whether it ever truly lived. As long as I can remember, which is now quite a long time, they have been cold with a kind of irredeemable cold, an absence of warmth upon which no paraffin heater, no pre-war single bar electric heater (of the kind favoured by booksellers), no clement weather, can make the slightest impression. When you take a book from a shelf of one of these bookshops you get a puff of cold air in the face, as well as of dust, as if you had opened a mediaeval tomb complete with a curse against grave-robbers. One associates dust with dry heat, but this, at least where English provincial second-hand bookshops is concerned, is a mistake. They contrive to be cold, dusty and damp at the same time.

It is all the more remarkable, then, that in so materialistic an age as our own people can be found who not only spend, but want to spend, and cannot conceive of not spending, their working lives in such conditions, and all for little monetary reward. True, they are more or less protected by their avocation from the seamier and more violent side of modern society; burglars and armed robbers in even the worst areas for crime do not think to break into second-hand bookshops; and the comings and going of governments do not trouble them. Not for them, either, the shadow-boxing of modern party politics, in which one political mountebank sets himself up as the last bastion against the depredations of another, in truth not very dissimilar, mountebank. Rather they concern themselves with the eternal verities of light foxing, cocking, small tears to dust jackets, and the like. The worst that can happen to them is a gentle slide into insolvency as rents rise (all such shops are now found in the unlikeliest places because they can survive only where rents are low) and readers decline – both in number and in discrimination. For my money (of which, incidentally, they have taken a lot down the ages) they are the unsung heroes of our culture.

Their lives are precarious. For example, the other day I went into one such bookshop in the North of England, run by a husband and wife team, and bought for a sum that nowadays no one – no bourgeois that is – would hesitate to lay out for lunch, a slimmish volume published in 1857, that was in almost pristine condition. The lady was almost pathetically grateful: she said that by my single purchase I had paid half her rent for the day. I felt as if I had almost done a good deed.

Image via Google Maps street view

The majority of my own collection has been bought at used book shops, especially Gryphon Books in Port Hope and Willow Books and Books Galore in Port Perry. I haven’t been travelling much outside my immediate local area for the last several years, so Abebooks has been a very useful addition to my virtual book-buying range. I note, with mild sorrow, a few of my other favourite book shops have disappeared: especially the best military used book store in Ontario, Grenadier Books in Port Perry (moved to Montreal after the death of the founder), and the Book Vault in Stratford (the seasonal tourist traffic wasn’t enough to cope with rising rent).

August 10, 2018

QotD: Demands for “fair” trade

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

Whenever you hear someone demand that trade be made “fair” – whenever you hear someone plead for trade to be conducted on a “level playing field” – you can bet your pension that you are hearing a domestic producer, or its spokesperson, soliciting the state for protection from competition. You are hearing sweet words mask a sour plea for monopoly power. You are hearing a greedy corporation or other politically powerful producer group appeal to those who hold power that that power be wielded against fellow citizens who dare to spend their own money in ways that promote their and their families’ best interests rather than in ways that promote the interests of the greedy corporation or other politically powerful producer group.

You are hearing, in short, a seeker of unfair privilege – a demander that the playing field be tilted against consumers’ and society’s broad interests and toward its own narrow interests.

Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2016-11-01.

August 7, 2018

“[Trudeau’s] ideology is jeopardizing 20% of the Canadian economy”

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

Brandon Kirby on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s failing efforts to negotiate with the United States on trade:

Trade with Canada constitutes 2% of America’s GDP and trade with America constitutes a whopping 20% of Canada’s GDP. My home province of New Brunswick finds 50% of its private sector exporting to the U.S. – NAFTA is of vital importance to our economy.

The dwindling efforts of Trudeau’s cabinet to negotiate a deal with the Americans could become his government’s greatest failure. With tariffs already being imposed on steel and aluminum, NAFTA is potentially unraveling before our eyes and along with it, the Canadian economy.

Trudeau’s American counterpart isn’t known for his vocal support of trade and yet he handed Canada everything on a silver platter at the recent G7 summit. He offered to remove all tariffs and subsidies on imports and exports, provided Canada did the same. This is about as fair an offer as one could expect. Trudeau retaliated by insisting Canada had been insulted.

The trouble with Trudeau is precisely that. He was given a talking point. He developed rhetoric rather than substance. Akin to Marco Rubio’s disaster of a debate performance, who refused to go off script even when he was being called out for scripted answers, Trudeau had a talking point. It was a good one, Canadians and Americans died together in the mountains of Afghanistan to bring justice for Americans who died on September 11th. Trump alluded to our tariffs on their dairy farmers as a national security threat. But when Trump acquiesced, Trudeau kept to his talking points and refused to go off script, even when his talking points no longer made sense.

The initial renegotiation began with Trudeau’s government attempting to include a chapter on gender. The Americans weren’t enthusiastic about devoting a significant portion of their time at the negotiations to discussing an unenforceable chapter of the deal, but Trudeau pressed on.

The liberal rationale in the briefing notes was leaked, “Think back 20 years and remember the early discussions of labour and environment in the context of trade agreements.”

Environmental and labour standards were included in the negotiations of decades past because a country that has humane labour standards is at a trade disadvantage to countries that neglect their workers and their environment. Gender doesn’t have any bearing on trade. His ideology is jeopardizing 20% of the Canadian economy.

July 28, 2018

QotD: “And are we doing okay?”

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

“And are we doing okay?”

Waiters have all started talking like preschool teachers in the past several years. It is perplexing. It makes me want to do something shocking and violent, but instead I usually just reply with something like:

“Well, we are, last we checked, not, in fact, plural. And we are therefore slightly confused by our insistence upon addressing us as though we had a mouse — or mice? — in our pocket.”

(I only do this if I am alone, inasmuch as it tends to make dinner conversation awkward when your date shrinks into her seat in mortification.)

Kevin D. Williamson, “You and Who Else?”, National Review, 2016-10-02.

July 25, 2018

QotD: How can you tell when a politician is lying?

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

This reality of outright lying during campaigns is so familiar that we excuse it. It’s just what politicians do.

But suppose that a business owner did the equivalent in the market. Such behavior wouldn’t be tolerated by customers or by law-enforcement officials. For example, suppose that the owner of Acme Furniture, in a scheme to get more sales, outright lies with a radio ad that promises that everyone who buys any piece of furniture from Acme will get half of the purchase price refunded in 12 months. “Wow! Darn good deal!” consumers think. They flock to Acme and buy furniture.

One year later, Acme customers submit their applications for the refunds of half of the purchase prices they each paid. But these customers, rather than getting what Acme promised, instead get a note from Acme explaining that the promise of a refund was made in jest; it was designed only to get more consumers to buy furniture from Acme. “But don’t worry!” the letter from Acme continues, “you’re still better off having bought furniture from Acme than from any of Acme’s competitors. Trust me on this! Yours Sincerely,….”

From time to time unscrupulous (and, typically, also really stupid or myopic) business people pull fraudulent stunts such as this one. Yet – rightly – no one excuses these stunts as being par for the course in business. One reason, of course, is that such stunts are not par for the course in private business; far from it. But such stunts are indeed par for the course in politics. And yet, despite this reality, we are constantly told that businesses operating in competitive markets cannot be trusted to behave honestly unless they are regulated by politicians and bureaucrats operating in political ‘markets.’

Politicians lie and such lying is excused because it’s normal. But it’s not normal; it’s not normal in the private sector; it’s normal only in the very abnormal world of politics.

Don Boudreaux, “Politicians Lie Openly and Such Behavior Is Excused Because It’s ‘Normal’”, Café Hayek, 2016-09-05.

July 24, 2018

The impact of licensing on previously unlicensed jobs

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

In the current Libertarian Enterprise, Sean Gabb looks at the recent outrage at Jeff Bezos and Amazon and recounts how at least one job he’d done in the past is now closed off to casual entrants due to the growth of licensing:

Let us imagine a natural order — that is, a world without states, or at least a world without the extended patterns of state-intervention that now exists. In such a world, wage labour would continue to exist. There are benefits in working for someone else. An employee commits to a contract of permanent service, in return for which he receives reasonable certainty of payment. Not everyone is or wants to be an entrepreneur. Not everyone finds it suitable to keep looking for unsatisfied wants and the most rewarding means of satisfying those wants. This being said, there would probably be much less wage labour than there is now.

If the present order of things does little to deter men like Mr Bezos, it does much to deter little people from starting little businesses — little business that sometimes replace, but more often supplement employed income. When I was much younger, the easiest way I found of making extra money was to drive a mini-cab. I went to the nearest cabbing office. I showed my clean driving licence. I showed a certificate of hire and reward insurance. I handed over £25 rent for the week, and was given a two-way radio and a cabbing number. That evening, I was taking prostitutes to their clients and pushing drunks up their garden paths. You cannot do this nowadays. Cabbing is licensed and regulated. It costs thousands to get a licence, and the regulations about age and type of vehicle add tens of thousands more to the costs of entry. You cannot get into cabbing unless you can pay these entry costs, and unless you are able to pay them back by working there full-time and long-term. A casual business has been made into a profession.

This is an example of which I have personal knowledge. But there is a vast range of little businesses that bring some money to little people. They have nearly all been placed out of reach. The effect is to increase the supply of unskilled labour seeking employment. Think of a supply and demand diagram. Shift the supply curve to the right. Make it more elastic. Money wages will be lower than they would otherwise be. Conditions of work — and these are part of the overall wage — will be worse. Make laws to prevent the market from clearing, and there will be more unemployment.

A further point I mention without choosing to develop is mass-immigration. This is not the kind of movement you would see in a natural order, where virtually the whole cost of entry and adjustment fell on the individual entrant. It is a movement encouraged and subsidised by the State — encouraged by institutional political correctness, and subsidised by laws that amount to forced association. The effect in economic terms is again on the supply curve for labour.

I have no reason to believe that Mr Bezos and Amazon have done anything to bring about this state of affairs. They simply operate in the labour market as they find it. No one is forced to work for Amazon. Amazon is not a legal monopoly, and has no power to force down wages. It pays at least the going rate. It is not a charity, and cannot be expected to behave as a charity. Blaming Amazon for how it pays and treats its workers makes no more sense than blaming a clock for telling the time.

He also touches on the state-created legal situation of limited liability:

I turn to the objection that Amazon is a limited liability company. This is an objection I accept. Limited liability companies exist because of a grant of privilege by the State. They are treated as persons, responsible for their own debts. Their owners have no liability beyond the value of the shares they own. This grant allows companies to gain more investment capital than they otherwise might. It allows them to grow larger and to exist for longer than they otherwise might. It allows even the most entrepreneurial company to turn gradually into a private bureaucracy, trading favours with the various state bureaucracies. Limited liability turns business into the economic arm of a malign ruling class.

So far as Amazon benefits from limited liability, it is an illegitimate enterprise. But this is not the end of the matter. Amazon almost certainly could exist without limited liability. It would instead have raised its investment capital by selling bonds. It would then only be in form what it plainly is in substance — that is, a projection of its owner’s ambition to achieve greatness. It would still have grown large, and it would have grown large by giving its customers what they want.

July 19, 2018

Crony capitalists of the military-industrial complex

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

Matthew D. Mitchell comments on some of the problems with government contractors and their all-too-cosy relationship with the government officials who hand out the public’s funds:

… as economist Luigi Zingales explains in his book, A Capitalism for the People, governments contracting with private interests has its own set of risks:

    The problem with many public-private partnerships is best captured by a comment that George Bernard Shaw once made to a beautiful ballerina. She had proposed that they have a child together so that the child could possess his brain and her beauty; Shaw replied that he feared the child would have her brain and his beauty. Similarly, public-private partnerships often wind up with the social goals of the private sector and the efficiency of the public one. In these partnerships, Republican and Democratic politicians and businesspeople frequently cooperate toward just one goal: their own profit.

When President Dwight Eisenhower warned against the “unwarranted influence” of the “military-industrial complex,” he was concerned that certain firms selling to the government might obtain untoward privilege, twisting public resources to serve private ends. It is telling that one of those contractors, Lockheed Aircraft, would become the first company to be bailed out by Congress in 1971.

For many observers, the George W. Bush administration’s “no-bid” contracts to Halliburton and Blackwater appeared to exemplify the sort of deals that Eisenhower had warned of. It is true that federal regulations explicitly permit contracts without open bidding in certain circumstances, such as when only one firm is capable of providing a certain service or when there is an unusual or compelling emergency. In any case, a report issued by the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in 2011 estimated that contractor fraud and abuse during operations in Afghanistan and Iraq cost taxpayers an estimated $31 to $60 billion. This includes, but is not limited to:

    requirements that were excessive when established and/or not adjusted in a timely fashion; poor performance by contractors that required costly rework; ill-conceived projects that did not fit the cultural, political, and economic mores of the society they were meant to serve; security and other costs that were not anticipated due to lack of proper planning; questionable and unsupported payments to contractors that take years to reconcile; ineffective government oversight; and losses through lack of competition.

Governments may also award contracts to perform a service that has more to do with serving a parochial interest than with providing a benefit to the paying public. For example, Congress may order the Pentagon to procure more tanks even though the Pentagon itself says the tanks aren’t needed. Paying General Dynamics hundreds of millions of dollars to produce unneeded tanks in order to protect jobs in particular congressional districts may be an abuse even if the underlying process by which the contract was awarded is legitimate.

July 18, 2018

QotD: Understanding how company profits can be used

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

In its fight against company tax cuts, [the Australian] Labor [Party] peddles the myth that company tax cuts are a windfall for big businesses and their shareholders, this week even launching ads suggesting [Australian PM] Malcolm Turnbull supports company tax cuts because he’ll personally benefit as an investor.

It’s a myth easily debunked. Think about it. What exactly can a company do with the extra money retained from paying less tax? It can only spend profits in two ways: paying dividends to shareholders or spending more on its operations.

Dividends are subject to tax, including withholding tax for foreign shareholders. Suggesting Turnbull or any other investor will get a windfall is a blatant lie.

In fact, many shareholders will pay more tax to make up the greater difference between the company tax rate and their own tax rate. That’s how dividend imputation works, as Labor well knows.

Alternatively, the company can spend more on things like technology, plant and equipment, funding research and development, expanding its sales force or opening new shopfronts or branches. In other words, more money paid in wages to workers and buying goods and services from suppliers.

All of that spending is also taxed. Workers pay income tax. GST [Goods and Services Tax] is collected on goods and services. Suppliers pay company tax or income tax themselves.

Lower company tax simply allows a business to use more of its money on something productive before the money is collected by government.

Nyunggai Warren Mundine, “Bill Shorten’s Labor would kill the reforms of Hawke and Keating”, Financial Review, 2018-06-26.

July 14, 2018

Trump’s tariffs are working

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

Tim Worstall explains that the recent US price hikes in washing machines is exactly what the Trump administration wanted:

The part of import tariffs that all too many fail to understand is that it is consumers being “protected” by them who actually pay them. That is, import tariffs on foreign goods entering the United States are paid by those inside the United States. Or, as we can also put it, Trump’s tariffs are making Americans poorer. This isn’t a known to be desired effect of economic policy.

However, it’s important to note that the real burden doesn’t come from the rise in price of the imports. It’s what the domestic producers do to us all in the absence of that foreign competition which is important:

The clear and obvious effect of import tariffs – Credit, BLS, via Mark Perry and AEI, by permission

    If you’re unfortunate enough to be shopping for a new washing machine, you can thank the Trump tariffs on imported washing machines, washing machine parts, steel and aluminum for the largest three-month price increase — 16.4% from February to May this year — in the 40-year history of the BLS series for Major Appliances: Laundry Equipment that started in January 1978 (see chart above). In the May CPI report (see Table 2), the one-month increase in the CPI for Laundry Equipment of 7.4% in May followed a 9.6% increase in April, and in both months was the largest monthly price increase of any of the 300 individual CPI categories or sub-categories. For the month of May, the 7.4% increase in the washing machine series was twice the increase of the next highest increase of 3.7% for educational books and supplies (mostly college textbooks).

What’s worse than this price rise is that this is planned. This is the desired outcome from the people who imposed these taxes.

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

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