Quotulatiousness

September 9, 2025

Employers insist that there are lots of high-paying “entry level” jobs that Canadians won’t do

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

Canada’s insanely out-of-control temporary foreign worker program hinges on employers being honest about the jobs on offer being impossible to fill with Canadian citizens or legal immigrants. The huge numbers of these jobs — often listed at much higher than minimum wage in areas with very high unemployment — strongly implies that employers are systematically gaming the system:

A selection of jobs subject to active Labour Market Impact Assessments (LMIA), meaning that an employer has applied for a temporary foreign worker on the grounds that no Canadian is available to fill the position.
Photo by Government of Canada Job Bank.

If public sentiment is turning against the TFW system, it’s partially because of a greater awareness of the conditions under which employers are claiming they cannot find Canadians for their jobs.

Any hiring of a temporary foreign worker has to first be preceded by a “Labour Market Impact Assessment”. It’s effectively a job posting laying out the basic details of the position, and carrying the disclaimer “the employer could not find a Canadian worker for this job and applied for a Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) to hire a temporary foreign worker”.

What’s made many of these LMIAs so controversial is that they often describe quite desirable jobs with minimal qualifications. There are also noticeably high numbers of them being submitted in cities with high unemployment.

Last year, a viral Reddit post featured a heat map of all the Toronto-area employers who had been approved for temporary foreign workers after claiming to find no Canadian applicants. More recently, the website JobWatchCanada has launched a searchable database of active LMIAs, complete with interactive maps and guides to which employers are the heaviest users.

What really bothers a lot of Canadians about the program is the high number of jobs posted with few or no qualifications at well-above market rates at the same time that young Canadians are finding it impossible to get hired no matter how many positions they apply for:

In June, a Calgary auto shop submitted an LMIA for a “motor vehicle mechanic helper”. The job is to essentially act as a “gofer”. The starting wage for the helper job is $36.50 per hour, the employer promises to cover relocation costs, and the “experience” category contains only the words “will train”.

A Langley, B.C., drywall contractor said it can’t find any Canadian drywall installers at $36.75 per hour. A vape shop in Lloydminster, Sask., has filed an LMIA to fill a $36.05 per hour shift supervisor job in which the educational requirement is a high school diploma.

In Woodbridge, Ont., a homeowner filed an LMIA for a $38 per hour housekeeper in which the only qualification is that the applicant has to speak English. “No degree, certificate or diploma”, is listed in the space for educational requirements, and the requirement for work experience is just “will train”.

The useful site fakejobs.ca currently shows three LMIA positions in my small town each paying at least $35 per hour that supposedly can’t be filled by local applicants. The jobs — two food service supervisors and a marketing co-ordinator — can’t possibly have such exotic required qualifications that nobody in the area can match, which is why I strongly suspect they’re fakes.

September 6, 2025

The federal government’s foreign worker program is set up for abuse

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

Dan Knight discusses Canada’s deliberately two-track job system, which severely disadvantages unemployed Canadians and favours temporary foreign workers instead:

Canada now has a two-track employment system. On one track, you’ve got over 1.6 million Canadians unemployed the official rate just jumped to 7.1%, the worst since 2016 outside the COVID crash. Youth joblessness? 14.5%. Alberta, supposedly an economic engine, bleeding at 8.4% unemployment. And those folks are drawing EI, funded by your tax dollars.

On the other track? The Temporary Foreign Worker pipeline. In 2024 alone, Ottawa issued over 162,000 TFW permits by October. And they’ve already budgeted another 82,000 entries in 2025. Think about that: while Canadians are struggling to find work, Ottawa is busy handing out golden tickets to foreign workers.

And let’s be honest about how this program actually works. It’s sold as a way to “fill labor shortages”. In practice, it often looks like a backdoor family reunification scheme. Business owner Abdul suddenly needs a “specialized” worker conveniently, his cousin in India just happens to fit the bill. So instead of waiting in line under the normal visa system, he comes in the side door through the TFW program. Legal? Sure. Exploitative? Absolutely. It undercuts the immigration rules that everyone else has to follow, and it keeps wages low for Canadians who should be first in line.

Here’s the part that makes you wonder if Ottawa is even trying: we’ve got two federal departments, Employment and Social Development Canada (who runs EI) and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (who runs TFW permits). Wouldn’t a functioning government have these two agencies talk to each other? One department says, “Hey, we’ve got 1.6 million people sitting on EI“. The other says, “We’ve got 162,000 employers asking for TFWs“. The obvious solution? Connect the dots. Fill Canadian jobs with Canadian workers first.

But that would require coordination and “coordination” is a foreign concept in Ottawa. These are the same geniuses who can’t keep escalators running in Parliament Hill without a three-year feasibility study. You expect them to line up two departments, EI and Immigration … and have a five-minute conversation? Forget it. Imagine the radical idea: one arm of government saying, “Hey, we’ve got 1.6 million Canadians unemployed and drawing EI …” and the other saying, “Oh great, we’ve got 162,000 employers begging for workers. Maybe, just maybe, we could match those two groups up“. That’s not rocket science. That’s not even science. That’s called basic competence. And Ottawa can’t even spell it.

Using the fakejobs.ca website, I found three LMIA postings in my small town on the edge of the GTA … all paying well over median for pretty ordinary retail management jobs.

September 5, 2025

End the “temporary” foreign worker scam!

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

In the National Post, Chris Selley explains why Pierre Poilievre and the federal Conservatives should be hammering their demand to eliminate the much-abused temporary foreign worker program:

Youth unemployment stands at 14.6 per cent, according to Statistics Canada’s latest release. That’s the highest non-pandemic July figure since 2009 (15.9 per cent), at the nadir of the Great Recession. It makes nothing but good sense that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre would position himself, as he did on Wednesday, foursquare athwart bringing in any more temporary foreign workers to fill positions that certain employers swear blind they cannot fill with younger Canadians at any conceivable price.

“Why is (the government) shutting our own youth out of jobs and replacing them with low-wage temporary foreign workers from poor countries who are ultimately being exploited?” Poilievre asked, rhetorically, on Wednesday. By rights it ought to be a solid populist pitch to Canadians, and no-brainer policy besides.

Companies who use TFWs will insist it’s not about finding “cheaper” help, but about finding any help. Tim Hortons defended itself Wednesday noting that less than five per cent of its national workforce were TFWs — which seems like a very high number, right? It’s not just me? — and those hires tended to be clustered “in small towns and communities where local candidates are not available”.

But an odd sort of small town or community, surely, that can’t live without a Timmy’s, but that doesn’t have enough people to work at it. And it’s an odd sort of remedial program, surely, to bring in employees not from other parts of Canada but rather from halfway around the world. Especially since groups like the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) swear blind they’re not after an hourly wage discount, just anyone who’s willing and able to fill the position. It was certainly a very odd kind of fishing resort, it struck me, that claimed this summer it couldn’t find any Canadian employees and needed the TFW program instead.

Didn’t kids used to flock en masse cross-country to take outdoorsy jobs every summer? Have I not read 150 tiresome baby-boomer op-eds on the topic?

The special pleading sometimes beggars belief. And unemployed young Canadians aren’t free to you and me, after all — whoever’s fault it is, if anyone’s, they’re an anchor on the economy. A Deloitte study commissioned by the King’s Trust Canada, published in November, estimated “that under the right conditions, overall real GDP could increase by $18.5 billion by 2034 — more than Canada’s entire arts, entertainment and recreation sector — and (Canada could) add an additional 228,000 jobs in the process” if “youth engagement in the workforce” significantly increased.

September 4, 2025

Net Zero targets and Britain’s ever-declining car industry

Filed under: Britain, Business, China, Environment, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Jake Scott charts the decline of the British auto manufacturing centres and the government’s allegiance to its Net Zero programs:

Custom image by FEE

Britain was once a giant of car manufacturing. In the 1950s, we were the second-largest producer in the world and the biggest exporter. Coventry, Birmingham, and Oxford built not just cars, but the reputation of an industrial nation; to this day, it is a source of great pride that Jaguar–Land Rover, a global automotive icon, still stands between Coventry and Birmingham. By the 1970s, we were producing more than 1.6 million vehicles a year.

Today? We have fallen back to 1950s levels. Last year, Britain built fewer than half our peak output—800,000 cars, and the lowest outside the pandemic since 1954. Half a year later, by mid-2025, production has slumped a further 12%. The country that once led the automotive revolution is now struggling to stay afloat, and fighting to remain relevant.

This is why the news that BMW will end car production at Oxford’s Mini plant, shifting work to China, is so damning, bringing this decline into sharp focus. The Mini is not only a classic British car; Alec Issigonis’s original design made it an international icon. For decades, the Mini has been the bridge between British design flair and foreign investment. Its departure leaves 1,500 jobs at risk at a time when the government is desperate to fuel growth and convince a wavering consumer market that there is no tension between industrial production and Net Zero goals.

It’s a bitter reminder that we in Britain have been here before: letting an industrial crown jewel slip away.

The usual explanations will be offered: global competition, exchange rates, supply chains. All true, in the midst of a global trade war that is heating up and damaging major British exports. But such a diagnosis is incomplete. The truth is that Britain’s car industry is being squeezed by a mix of geopolitical realignment and government missteps.

The car industry has become the frontline of a new trade war. Washington has already moved aggressively to shield its own firms: the Inflation Reduction Act offers vast subsidies for US-made EVs and batteries, an unapologetic attempt to onshore production, and something that became a flashpoint of tension in Trump’s negotiation with the EU in the latest trade deal. On the production side, the Act has poured billions into US manufacturing: investment in EV and battery plants hit around $11 billion per quarter in 2024.

Ripples have been sent across the world in the US’s wake: Europe, faced with a flood of cheap Chinese EVs, has imposed tariffs of up to 35% after an anti-subsidy investigation. Talks have even turned to a system of minimum import prices instead of tariffs. Unsurprisingly, China has threatened retaliation against European luxury marques, while experts warn the tariffs may slow the EU’s green transition by raising prices.

This is no longer a free market: cars are treated as strategic assets, the 21st-century equivalent of shipbuilding or steel. Whoever controls the supply chains, particularly for EV batteries and the mining of lithium, controls not only the future of the industry but an important lever of national power.

The results are visible. In July 2025, Tesla’s UK sales collapsed nearly 60%, while Chinese giant BYD’s deliveries quadrupled. Europe responded by talking up new tariffs. Britain did nothing. In this asymmetric contest, our market risks becoming a showroom for foreign producers — subsidizing both sides of the trade war without defending our own.

September 1, 2025

“… these two [books] are ‘perfect bound’, which is a misleading name for a crappy technique”

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

Chris Schwarz on the frustrations of a (physical) book reader with far too many modern printed books:

Dammit, Norton!

I don’t read much for pleasure these days. I spend about three hours a day reading manuscripts, draft blog entries, old woodworking texts, academic papers and contracts. When the workday is done, the last thing I want is someone else’s voice chattering in my head.

But I love books and have always been a voracious reader. So I keep a stack of books that I probe and pick at, like a 5-year-old forking through chop suey, looking for something to consume.

This month has been great. I’m in the middle of “The Overstory” by Richard Powers and “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” by George Saunders. Both books were written with an exquisite pen, and I lose track of time when I’m reading them.

But both books also make me want to burn down the headquarters of Norton and Random House publishing. Because both books are made like dogshit.

Like most books these days, these two are “perfect bound”, which is a misleading name for a crappy technique. Like if we called a “butt joint” the “excellent end-grain joint,” or if we called miters the “super slanty joint”.

What’s perfect binding? Take a stack of individual sheets of paper, like the stack of pages you put in your printer. Slather some glue on one edge and press the goo into the pages. While the glue is still wet, slap the book’s cover to the glue on the spine. Trim the pages, sell the book and make an obscene amount of money.

I don’t know a binding technique that is crappier than perfect binding. Even loose-leaf pages in a Trapper Keeper are better because they can be repaired.

Perfect-bound books are – like a Ryobi drill – a product that has an expiration date. After two or three readings, the pages will start to fall out of the glue. You don’t even have to mistreat the binding for this to happen. The glue gets brittle, then you turn a page like a normal person and the leaves fall like it’s autumn.

Do not fool yourself and think that book publishers are suffering and need to cut corners in the manufacturing department. They aren’t. Book publishing is still one of the most profitable businesses, as far as margin is concerned. It’s not unusual for a publisher to have margins of 30 to 35 percent. (Note: Lost Art Press keeps a margin of about 15 percent – much lower because we pay more in royalties and pay a lot more for manufacturing.)

My paperback copy of “The Overstory” is the 23rd printing of the title since it was released in 2018. Norton is literally printing money at this point with the book. The book’s retail is $18.95. Manufacturing cost (at a plant in the United States): I’d guess is about $3.80.

Norton can do better. But it doesn’t have to. Customers are happy to pay $18.95 for an impermanent book.

August 31, 2025

Didn’t we once have “conflict of interest” rules for politicians?

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

It’s become a commonplace that politicians leave office vastly wealthier than they went in, far in excess of their official salaries. Once upon a time, even though it probably still happened, the fat cats managed to stay below the event horizon with their ill-gotten gains. Today, they no longer care if you find out that this or that senator has consistently beaten the market on their investments during their entire time in office. After all, what are you going to do about it, punks? Maybe something like this:

Paul and Nancy Pelosi, 16 February, 2022.
Detail of a photo by Amos Ben Gershom via Wikimedia Commons.

The original research was on how Senators seem to make 12% annually. That’s, erm, a lot.

Markets — something that always comes as a surprise to politicians — react:

    American lawmakers are so consistently successful that a flurry of new platforms and apps now compile filing data from US politicians as a key input in strategies for retail investors and even hedge funds.

    The number of people using these so-called “copy trading” strategies has exploded. Tens of thousands of Americans now follow and imitate trades made by members of Congress, and they are making millions of dollars in the process.

OK, what fun, eh?

Even more fun would be Megan McArdle’s suggestion, that the CongressThieves must announce that they intend to trade an hour before they do so that everyone else can front run them.

Because, you know, Ms. Pelosi:

    She beat every single hedge fund last year.

But there’s something even more fun:

    Dub launched in March 2024 as America’s first regulated brokerage to offer copy trading accounts to mimic politicians and star traders.

    “It’s been absolutely insane in terms of growth,” says Steven Wang, the founder and chief executive who dropped out of his freshman year at Harvard to build the platform. Today, it has 1.5 million users across America.

    Of the $100m or so invested across Dub, nearly $23m is in its Pelosi tracker account. Since its launch in early 2024, its paper gains are 172pc.

Stock prices do not move “because”. Interest rates change, profits go up, or down, or tariffs or … stock prices change because people buy and or sell more of them. That may be in reaction to those other things but the actual price movement is that buy and sell stuff.

Which means that if we copy Nancy’s trades — after she’s done them — then we’re making money for Nancy. Because we are piling in our weight of money into a position she already holds.

Which, when you think about it, is really pretty shitty. Sure, it’s nice to make money ourselves by trading upon that congressional information. But there is that very, very, heavy cost of making Ms. Pelosi even richer as a consequence.

QotD: The “working” world

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

In the dark days of the early 1970s, Britain was obliged by a coal-miners’ strike to go on to a three-day working week (our power stations were then mostly coal-fired, and hence there was a shortage of power). Strictly speaking, production should have declined by 40 per cent, but instead declined only by 20 per cent. This surely meant that, on average, people spent one day at work completely unproductively, which will come as a surprise only to those who have never worked in an enterprise or organisation of any kind.

In other words, at least a fifth of our working time is spent doing nothing, or rather nothing productive. Most people are incapable of doing nothing, in the strict sense that a meditator does nothing. Moreover, much of their activity may not merely be unproductive but positively counterproductive, in so far as most people at work feel obliged to do something, and by far the easiest thing for them to do with their superfluous time is to obstruct others, to have unnecessary meetings and so forth.

If taken seriously, not only offices, but millions of journeys to offices, would become unnecessary, pollution would decline and leisure time would increase. This latter would be a disaster, since most people do not know what to do with themselves as it is. It is for this reason that work is not arranged as efficiently as possible, but its productive aspect is diluted by myriad unnecessary tasks — unnecessary, that is, from the narrow point of view of production. Except in the factories of the East, where production is all, a great deal of work is designed to keep us occupied while we produce nothing. It ameliorates boredom and prevents the bad behaviour in which boredom results.

Anthony Daniels, “The Pleasant Embrace of Fear”, Quadrant, 2020-05-06.

August 30, 2025

QotD: SaaS – software as an “intolerable swarm of blood-sucking leeches”

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

Commercial desktop software is getting worse, not better. I’ve been generally aware of this for a while — the relentless pull away from “you pay for it once and own it” to monthly subscription models that extract money from you forever has been a leading indicator.

But my friend @DrInsensitive reports that the enshittification is accelerating. He says that in addition to a lot of tediously stupid UI changes, his most recent upgrade of CorelDraw now spams ads at him even when CorelDraw itself is not running! Furthermore the plague of microtransactions that has afflicted AA games for years is spreading — the set of free fill patterns for rectangles that his old version had is gone, instead when he tries to fill a rectangle he gets a pop-up invitation to buy an extra-cost feature pack of them.

When one asshole vendor thinks they’ve successfully numbed their user base into accepting this kind of crap, others immediately follow. We’ve seen this movie before, we know how it ends — with applications, like games, designed to be deliberately frustrating and low-level awful, intended to give you itches that you can only scratch by buying their endless parade of “enhancements”.

I’m sure a surcharge to suppress the spammy CorelDraw ads won’t be long in coming. And soon after that it will be everywhere.

If this goes on, open-source software will finally win the desktop not because it’s gotten enough better but because closed-source desktop applications have reached final form as an intolerable swarm of blood-sucking leeches.

This is not the way I was looking forward to winning.

ESR, Twitter, 2025-03-22.

August 28, 2025

No surprise at all – Liberals completely overshoot temporary foreign worker targets

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

In the National Post, Tristin Hopper confirms that the Mark Carney government, having promised to cap temporary foreign worker visas at 82,000 for the year, have already brought in over 100,000 TFWs in the first six months:

Despite promises from the Liberal government that they would be curbing the sky-high immigration rates of the Trudeau era, new data from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada shows that Canada is already on track to exceed its 2025 targets.

In the first seven months of 2025, Canada accepted 246,300 new permanent residents, according to data released last week by IRCC.

If this level of intake keeps up for the rest of the year, Canada is on track to bring in approximately 422,000 new permanent residents by year’s end.

[…]

And the missed targets are even more stark when it comes to categories of temporary migrants.

For the entirety of 2025, Canada was only supposed to approve 82,000 entries under the Temporary Foreign Worker Program.

Nevertheless, Government of Canada data shows that 105,195 Temporary Foreign Worker permits were awarded in just the first six months of 2025.

Temporary migration has been disproportionately responsible for the record-breaking population growth witnessed in Canada over the last four years. Since 2021, Canada’s population has grown from 38 million to 41.7 million. This represents an average annual increase of 900,000, which puts Canada well beyond the population growth rates of any other G7 country.

In late 2024, Statistics Canada estimated that the country was home to an unprecedented three million “non-permanent residents,” be they international students or temporary foreign workers.

Temporary migration is also the category on which Ottawa has promised to crack down hardest. Late in 2024, when then prime minister Justin Trudeau announced plans to “turn off the taps” on immigration, temporary migrants represented seven per cent of the overall Canadian population.

August 26, 2025

Table saws, technological patents, and rent-seeking

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

Tom Knighton, who I’ve “met” on my favourite woodworking forum, celebrates a small victory in the never-ending battle against the rent-seekers of the corporate world:

“SawStop” by Comfr is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

What does this have to do with rent-seeking?

Well, there’s a company called SawStop. They make really great table saws with a unique safety feature. They’re equipped with a brake and sensor that, when it detects moisture such as one might find in a human finger, it locks the saw and drops the blade down into the saw’s body.

It’s a really great bit of technology, and the saws happen to be really good saws, too, so the company has done well for itself.

However, it started out as a company seeking to license the technology, only no one wanted it at the time.

SawStop decided to try and press the United States government to mandate their technology on all new table saws, and the government was going to.

Was.

This video has a good rundown of the whole thing. (I’d embed it, but the channel doesn’t allow it for some reason.)

The short of it is that the rule that was being considered has now been tossed because it would specifically give SawStop a monopoly on table saw sales in the United States, legally. Yes, they were going to offer up a patent for the public domain, but it wouldn’t be enough to replicate the technology in and of itself.

Plus, at a time when woodworking isn’t the biggest hobby in the world, even if it had been enough, driving up the cost for a central piece of tooling that most consider essential for woodworkers ain’t the way to change that.

For example, Skil makes a jobsite saw that typically runs under $300. SawStop’s equivalent is around three times that much, and that’s a lot of money to spend on something you’re not sure you’ll even enjoy.

Especially since just being careful can prevent the need for the brake in the first place, to say nothing of the fact that if you cut wet wood, it’ll trigger the brake, which is a pain for a lot of people, especially building contractors whose lumber isn’t super dry to begin with.

Seeing the rug pulled out from under SawStop is great, but the real issue here is that it doesn’t happen often enough. Rent-seeking is all too common and all too often works.

QotD: Problem-solving in large organizations

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

… but it’s the nature of bureaucracy itself that’s most to blame. Everyone who has ever worked for even a midsize company has had this kind of experience: You’re in Customer Service, and some hotshot from Sales calls you up. He’s promised a big new potential client the earth and stars, and now he needs you to deliver. Alas, you tell him, you can’t do it. Not won’t, can’t — you’re not set up for that kind of thing. So you call your Department Supervisor over, and he comes up with what looks like a workaround …

… except no, now Accounting chimes in, that looks like it might be a violation of some codicil to some sub-paragraph of an addendum to a regulation, better check with Compliance. But before you can do that, the Division Managers get into it, because hotshot has called his Department Supervisor over and said look, Dave, I brought in seventy gorillion dollars last fiscal year, you owe me this one …

… and so forth. Everybody with me? No one is corrupt in this scenario. Nobody’s trying to pull a fast one on anybody else. Indeed, everybody’s on the same page, and everybody has every incentive to find a solution, because all our Christmas bonuses are going to look a little nicer if the firm lands this fat client. All we’re trying to do is add one task to the existing Customer Service workflow, but it’s going to take at least a Division Manager-level meeting, if not the direct input of the Big Boss himself, to get it hammered out. It’s an exponential increase in energy expenditure.

And of course it ramifies, and of course that’s true no matter what solution you come up with. Make an exception to the workflow for this one client, and pretty soon you’re going to be making exceptions for every client — every wannabe-hotshot up in Sales is going to demand the works for every little podunk potential client. Same deal if you designate one guy from Customer Service as the dedicated exception-handler. Same deal if you create a whole new sub-unit inside Customer Service (but a lot faster). And so forth.

I’m sure everyone has had that experience, too: Watching your company lose out on a potential big client because the various Departments couldn’t get on the same page for whatever reason.

And that’s just around the office! Meaning: yeah, it’d be nice if we could land that big client, maybe see an extra hundred bucks on our Christmas bonus, but nobody’s losing any sleep over it. Well, ok, Hotshot up in Sales probably is, but even the best salesman loses far more often than he wins. He’ll get over it in a day or two, or he won’t be a salesman much longer.

But the same thing happens when it comes to stuff that matters, which is why complex societies collapse.

Severian, “Collapse II”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-09.

August 23, 2025

Another Bud Light moment: Cracker Barrel gets rid of the cracker

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

I haven’t been to the United States for more than a decade — not for political reasons, just for financial ones … I haven’t had the money to travel since 2015 — so it’s at least that long since I visited a Cracker Barrel. On our usual driving holidays, we’d stop somewhere like a Cracker Barrel to get a big breakfast to tide us over to our next destination a few hundred miles further down the road. I’d heard that the food quality had dropped after Covid, but I can’t confirm that from personal experience. Here’s ESR’s take on the latest rebranding that has riled up the online commentariat and apparently tanked the company’s stock price:

Today I’m here to talk about why I dislike Cracker Barrel, but dislike the Cracker Barrel rebrand even more.

My first reaction to the outpouring of social-media sentimentality about the destruction of CB’s comfortable old-timey ambience was to stare and wonder if these boosters had gone entirely out of their minds.

Yes, CB was designed to evoke a sort of folk memory of what rural country stores used to be like. But it’s, at best, a gigantized, commoditized, kitschy simulacrum of what they were — Hee Haw as filtered through the mind of an urban-corporate bugman.

Exhibit A for this is the gauntlet you have to run through to get to the food — gift shops that are unrivaled for the utter tastelessness and worthlessness of the cheesy crap on their shelves.

Once you get to the food, well … they serve a decent breakfast. Everything else is bland, homogenized slop.

And yet, I find that I dislike the rebranded look and feel even more. Because at least CB as it was gestured feebly in the direction of something authentic and American. The new look strips out all those vestiges — it has all the character of a generic airport lounge.

If you’re reading this and getting hot under the collar because I’ve impugned an experience that has sentimental value for you … look, I get it, okay? Old CB wasn’t designed for me, nor for anybody else who can unironically describe themselves as urbane, sophisticated cosmopolitans. But in its own pastiched way it had value, value which is now being destroyed.

Certainly the stock market thinks so. CB’s share price has been dropping like a rock — the rebrand is a failure even by corporate-bugman standards.

If the chain needed saving, the right thing to do would have been to double down on the attractive parts. Keep the local memorabilia on the walls, improve the menu, turn down the wince-inducing tackiness of the gift shop. Make it more like the mythical olden days, not less.

But no. Because the CEO is an idiot. I’ve been on a corporate board of directors and I’m here to confirm that if CB’s doesn’t convene an emergency meeting to fire her before the end of the week they are not doing their job.

August 18, 2025

Canadian grocers are “maple-washing” products to hide their actual origin

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

Sylvain Charlebois on the new phenomenon of grocery stores going to great lengths to pretend that items for sale are Canadian when they’re not — “maple-washing”:

Image by Troy Media via Todayville

Canadian grocery retailers are misleading shoppers about where their food really comes from. Behind the patriotic packaging lies a growing problem: “maple-washing” — using Canadian symbols to suggest products are homegrown when they’re not. It’s eroding consumer trust and must end.

That’s why more Canadians are paying closer attention to what labels actually mean. Awareness around origin labelling has grown as people learn the difference between “Product of Canada”, “Made in Canada”, and “Prepared in Canada”. The Food and Drugs Act requires labels to be truthful and not misleading. A “Product of Canada” must contain at least 98 per cent Canadian ingredients and processing. “Made in Canada” applies when the last substantial transformation happened here, while “Prepared in Canada” covers processing, packaging or handling in Canada regardless of ingredient source.

The differences may seem technical, but they matter. A frozen lasagna labelled “Prepared in Canada”, for example, could be made with imported pasta, sauce and meat — packaged here but not truly Canadian. These rules give consumers the clarity they need to make informed choices.

Armed with this clarity, many Canadians have become more selective about what they buy. That vigilance has emerged alongside a surge in consumer nationalism, spurred partly by geopolitical tensions and anti-American sentiment. Even with U.S. giants like Walmart, Costco and Amazon dominating Canadian retail, many shoppers are deliberately avoiding American food products. The impact has been significant: NielsenIQ reports an 8.5 per cent drop in sales of American food products in Canada over just a few months. In an industry where sales usually shift by fractions of a per cent, such a drop is extraordinary. It shows how quickly Canadians are voting with their wallets.

That kind of shift, rare outside of crises, caught many grocers off guard. The sudden change left supply chains long dependent on U.S. products under pressure, and store-level labelling grew inconsistent. Early missteps — like maple leaves displayed beside imported goods — were excused as logistical oversights. But six months later, those excuses no longer hold. Persisting with misleading displays and false origin claims has crossed the line into misrepresentation. Instances of oranges or almonds labelled as Canadian, with prices quietly adjusted after complaints, show the problem is systemic, not accidental.

August 16, 2025

This is just crazy enough to work …

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

Disclaimer: I’m not an American and I don’t know the details of the US immigration system, but from what I’ve read elsewhere, Copernican‘s suggestion has a lot of merit:

I can’t be the only one sick of H1Bs destroying the western labor market, particularly in tech, but across the board. Out-of-work tech workers further compress the labor market in other areas. This problem is not unique to the United States, but I understand the laws of the US better, so I’ll be arguing from that perspective.

I know it. Walt Bismarck has a whole organization dedicated to trying to find reasonable employment by job-stacking. A few new and interesting resources have appeared, dedicated to screwing with these companies that open the floodgates to a horde of foreign software engineers. Seven-eleven clerks, and SAAR YOU MUST REDEEMs, that can crash our software, our ships, and our interstate semi-trucks for us.

Fortunately, there’s something we can do to fight back.

[…]

Well, while the government doesn’t seem intent on doing anything about it, the Millennials and Zoomers that have been fucked-over appear to finally have enough cultural weight to start pushing back. Here’s the thing about hiring H1B workers: doing so requires that the company demonstrate that no American Citizens can fulfill the role. That demonstration usually takes the form of a listing in a newspaper with 500 readers, the back-end of a website with black text on a black background, or something similar. They don’t want Americans to apply for these jobs; they want to successfully demonstrate that no Americans even applied.

So they make the application process nearly impossible.

Usually, the way this is done is that when an H1B is hired, they are permitted to remain in the country for up to 6 years (2 renewals of 2 years). Once that’s completed, either the H1B worker is forced to return to where they came from, or the job must be re-posted for 2 weeks for a potential American worker. If no American worker applies (because they didn’t see it because it was posted in a hidden corern of the website or a newspaper with no readers), then the H1B may be sponsored for perminent US residency.

What was clearly once a method for gaining the Best and Brightest as potential employees in the United States has become a system of exploitation. H1Bs are underpaid, undervalued, and often booted from the country, so there’s no impetus for them to assimilate. It’s a mess all the way around, and the only ones who benefit are stockholders for billion-dollar tech companies.

For the most part, we all know the story.

But … what if during that 2-week posting, a qualified American candidate does apply for the job? Well, then everything goes to shit. The company is legally not allowed to deny an American Candidate that job without opening themselves up to a massive lawsuit and fines, and penalties. If only one American candidate has applied, then the company has to hire that individual … and if they don’t hire the American candidate and then apply for another H1B to fill that slot, the company is in deep shit in a legal sense.

August 14, 2025

The “Big Mac Index” is bogus and Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) is wrong

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

I started reading The Economist when I was in college in the early 1980s. I subscribed after I left college, no longer having access to the school library’s copies, and I continued my subscription for about 20 years. Eventually, I gave up on The Economist as their editorial stance shifted further and further leftward. One of the things they ran regularly was their “Big Mac Index” which compared prices of McDonalds’ Big Mac hamburgers across a range of countries to show the Purchasing Power Parity of the respective countries’ currency against the US dollar. I thought it was a neat way to use readily available data in a form that most consumers would be familiar with to illustrate a wider economic fact. But, as Tim Worstall points out here, the index isn’t actually measuring what it claims to be measuring at all:

    Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) constitutes a foundational concept within mainstream international economics, asserting that, over the long term, real exchange rates will naturally adjust to equalize the purchasing power of currencies across nations. This suggests that the cost of an identical basket of goods should, in principle, be uniform globally once currency exchange rates are applied. This notion is frequently popularized through informal measures such as the Big Mac Index. PPP is conceptualized as a specific application of the Law of One Price (LOOP), which posits that, when abstracting from transactional frictions like transportation costs, tariffs, and taxes, any particular commodity traded or purchased should sell for a similar price regardless of its geographical location.

Aaaand, no. The Law of One Price says that a *traded* commodity should be at the same price everywhere, absent transport costs, tariffs and all the rest. Anything that’s not traded this will not be true of. For example, to use an example provided to us:

    For instance, if a Starbucks coffee is considerably more affordable in Tokyo than in Manhattan, Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) would indicate an undervalued Yen.

No, Starbucks coffee is not a tradeable item. Coffee beans are globally traded, yes, and coffee beans are the same price the world over — given transport costs, tariffs and so on. But the coffee bean is pennies on the dollar of a Starbucks coffee.

The use of the Big Mac in The Economist‘s popular version of PPP actually runs entirely the other way around. The note is that a Big Mac is made the same way around the world. But it’s always made of *local* ingredients, not internationally traded ones. Therefore we are not measuring whether tradeable goods are the same price in different places at all — we’re measuring what local goods cost in different places.

    Comparative advantage, whereby nations specialize in their most efficient productions for reciprocal benefit, is a myth. Absolute advantage reigns supreme.

Then there’s that as well. Which is to misunderstand comparative advantage as well. The insight is not about whether Britain makes cloth better than Portugal and then the same again with wine in reverse. Which is indeed absolute advantage. It’s about whether Britain makes cloth better than Britain makes wine, whether Portugal makes wine better than it does cloth. Each should do what they are *least bad at* and then share the increased production making both richer.

It’s also, once we move away from Ricardo, nothing to do with countries either. It’s something that applies to each and every individual. We should all do what we’re least bad at then swap the production. This does produce an interesting result for given how good, *ahem*, my economic writing is take a guess at how skilled I am at other ways of making a living? Quite.

So, you know, not getting PPP, LOOP nor comparative advantage — but still ending up calling for world government and that proper democratic control of the economy. Ah well, at least it’s fashionable even if incorrect.

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