Another New York Central president who rode The Century in preference to the fine business car No. 1 which was at his disposal was F.E. Williamson. […] he took pleasure in the same amenities of luxury travel as he shared with other Century regulars: cocktails in the club car, a breath of fresh air on the open observation platform that survived into his regime, The Century Dinner and a long night’s sleep as the train rolled tranquilly under the stars.
Once encountered on the observation platform by the author as The Century rocketed through the Indiana countryside to overtake and pass a long merchandise train doing a mere sixty on the adjacent track […]
“Look at those high cars roll”, he exclaimed, as we passed the head end of the swiftly moving freight. “There’s nothing so beautiful in the world as a money making train going places fast on a spring evening!”
Lucius Beebe, 20th Century, 1962.
July 9, 2025
QotD: “Look at those high cars roll”
July 7, 2025
Consumers don’t want AI in everything, but you’ll be forced to take your AI, peasants!
Ted Gioia — like about 92% of consumers at last count — doesn’t want to have artificial intelligence “enhancing” the software he uses every day, but software companies don’t want him — or you — to have that choice:
A few months ago, I needed to send an email. But when I opened Microsoft Outlook, something had changed.
Microsoft asked me to use Copilot to write my email. Copilot is my AI companion. (That’s the cute word they use.)
Hey I don’t want a companion — especially not a fake AI buddy. I never asked for this.
And what about the people receiving my emails? They don’t want this either. They want to hear from me, not a bot.
How do I turn my companion off?
After some trial-and-error, I found a way to disable Copilot. Phew!
But a few days later, Microsoft surprised me again. It wouldn’t let me save an Excel file until I had agreed to new terms for my software account.
Guess what? AI is now bundled into all of my Microsoft software.
Even worse, Microsoft recently raised the price of its subscriptions by $3 per month to cover the additional AI benefits. I get to use my AI companion 60 times per month as part of the deal.
But I don’t want to use it. I want to kill it.
As you can see, I’ve never used this service. I still have all 60 credits unused. But I’m paying for it — because it’s now embedded into Microsoft Word, Excel, etc.
This is how AI gets introduced to the marketplace — by force-feeding the public. And they’re doing this for a very good reason.
Most people won’t pay for AI voluntarily — just 8% according to a recent survey. So they need to bundle it with some other essential product.
You never get to decide.
Before proceeding let me ask a simple question: Has there ever been a major innovation that helped society, but only 8% of the public would pay for it?
That’s never happened before in human history. Everybody wanted electricity in their homes. Everybody wanted a radio. Everybody wanted a phone. Everybody wanted a refrigerator. Everybody wanted a TV set. Everybody wanted the Internet.
They wanted it. They paid for it. They enjoyed it.
AI isn’t like that. People distrust it or even hate it — and more so with each passing month. So the purveyors must bundle it into current offerings, and force usage that way.
July 5, 2025
“This is what happens when a major label morphs into a copyright and IP management business”
Ted Gioia reads the tea leaves of the big music labels and says that the future does not look good. At all:
I follow music industry news the way other people read obituaries.
Those two kinds of articles have a lot in common — both death notices and music biz news deal mostly with the past. The only new thing in the story is that something was living, and now it ain’t.
Here’s an example from yesterday:
This sounds like a happy story, no? These smart people are investing in music.
But it isn’t a happy story. They are investing in the rights to old music. They won’t spend any of that money on new music.
If you have any doubts about Warner’s priorities, here’s another headline — also from yesterday.
If you’re looking for a clear signal from a major record label, it won’t get any clearer than this.
This is exactly what a record label does when it no longer views music as a vital creative force in the current day. This is what happens when a major label morphs into a copyright and IP management business — which can be run by a small team of lawyers and accountants.
Yes, you can make money living off the past — but not for long.
I keep waiting to read a news story about a major label investing a billion dollars in developing new artists. But I never see that story.
I’ve written in the past about fans who prefer old music. But big record labels are even more obsessed with vintage and retro songs.
And it’s not just Warner Music. Universal Music is doing the same thing. So is Sony and Concord and other big labels.
That’s disturbing.
These are the same companies who should be creating the future of music. They should be convincing the public to listen to new songs and new artists. After all, if record labels don’t invest in the future of music, who will?
Maybe nobody.
A few years ago, investment firms started viewing old songs as investments. That didn’t work out very well. The most prominent song investment fund crashed and burned — as I predicted long in advance.
At that point, the smart money headed for the exits.
In the aftermath, the only enthusiastic buyers of old songs were the big record labels. They are the buyers of last resort.
June 29, 2025
The oddity of Donald Trump’s personal “golden share” in US Steel
In the National Post, Colby Cosh points out the weirdest element of President Trump’s deal with Nippon Steel for the takeover of venerable US Steel:
A “golden share” is a special kind of equity that gives its holder veto power over specified corporate decisions. It is often used in privatizations to give governments some vestige of control over corporate entities originally created by the state (or, in Canada, the Crown) for public purposes. In this unusual case, the U.S. government is magically gaining a golden share in exchange for permitting the sale of one private company to another. The government will be given the right to choose some U.S. Steel board directors, to forbid any name change, and to veto factory closures, offshoring, acquisitions and other moves.
As the Cato Institute immediately pointed out, this is a de facto nationalization of U.S. Steel — the sort of thing that would have had Cold War conservatives climbing the walls and hooting about socialism. But at least socialism professes to be social! Yesterday a lefty energy reporter named Robinson Meyer was nosing around in the revised corporate charter for the newly-acquired U.S. Steel, and he discovered a remarkable detail that the Cato folks had missed: the decision powers of the golden share have been legally assigned to Donald Trump in person and by name for the duration of his presidency. Only after Trump has left the White House do those golden-share powers revert to actual U.S. government departments (Treasury and Commerce).
The stench of banana-republicanism here is truly overwhelming. Again, any species of government foreign-investment review is bound to have a personal character, but such decisions are not supposed to involve the legally explicit assignment of a valuable corporate asset to the decision-maker in his own person. Can this be described as anything but legalized, open bribery — assuming that U.S. courts will find it legal if the terms of sale are challenged? Where in the U.S. Constitution, or in the history of the United States, can any warrant for this extraordinary behaviour conceivably be found? And will unholy bargains of this nature soon become routine?
June 23, 2025
80% of top-grossing movies are prequels, sequels, spin-offs, remakes or reboots
Ted Gioia on the death of creativity in the movie business, which also seems to be tracking almost exactly with the trend in music business profits:
I’m not shocked when I look in the mirror. Yeah, the Honest Broker isn’t getting any younger. But that’s the human condition.
Maybe I should start using a moisturizer. What do y’all think?
Nah. I’ll just let this aging thing play out.
On the other hand, I’m dumbfounded at everything in public life getting older — even older than me! Consider the current political landscape.
With each passing year, the US Congress looks more like the College of Cardinals (average age =78) or the Rolling Stones (average age = also 78).
We’re gonna need a lot of moisturizer.
But Congress is young and spry compared to Hollywood.
Back in 2000, 80% of movie revenues came from original ideas. But this has now totally flip-flopped.
Today 80% of the movie business is built on old ideas — remakes, and spin-offs, and various other brand extensions. And we went from 80% new to 80% old in just a few years.
Source: Experimental History
[…]
Look at music — and you see the same thing.
The share of old songs on streaming will soon reach 80%. It’s not quite there yet — the latest figures are 73%. But it was at 63% back in 2019. So it’s just a matter of time.
In 2000, streaming didn’t exist, so we looked to the Billboard chart to gauge a song’s success. And new music made up more than 80% of charted songs. So here — just like the movies — we’re flip-flopping from 80% new to 80% old over the course of a few years.
I don’t have good figures on publishing. But I’m pretty sure that AI-generated books and articles will soon represent 80% of the marketplace. Maybe we’ve already reached that threshold.
AI is deliberately designed to cut-and-paste, rehashing past work as its modus operandi. And it will do this to every field — replacing originality with repetition and regurgitation.
This is the new 80% rule.
Just imagine if traditional businesses operated this way.
- “Welcome to our restaurant, 80% of the food is leftovers.”
- “Welcome to our boutique, 80% of clothing is secondhand.”
- “Welcome to our dating service, 80% of the choices are your ex-girlfriends (or ex-boyfriends).”
None of that sounds very appetizing.
June 22, 2025
Delaying Mark Carney’s next book
In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte outlines the various oddities of Mark Carney’s next book to market:
Three years ago, long before he declared himself a politician, Mark Carney published Value(s), his attempt at solving some of the world’s biggest problems: income inequality, climate change, systemic racism, etc. The book was reasonably well received. It sold well. A sequel was in order.
Announced last year, The Hinge: Time to Build an Even Better Canada was ostensibly Carney’s attempt to address Canada’s biggest issues, and perhaps to position himself as our future leader. The book was set for release in May 2025. Events interceded and Carney was elected prime minister on a far tighter timeline than anyone, including his publisher, could have imagined. Publication of The Hinge was delayed. An anonymous source told the Toronto Star Carney was too busy politicking to finish the final edits on the book. I heard the delay had more to do with campaign finance rules that would consider a book publicized or released in election season as political advertising. Anyway, a new release date was set for July 1. Amazon now has The Hinge coming next January.
Carney’s political opponents have been enjoying the delay. Critics both left and right have attributed it to the difficulty of squaring positions taken by Carney a year or two ago with positions he espoused during the campaign and, more recently, as prime minister.
I don’t doubt that Carney’s politics have moved over the last six months. And I wouldn’t be surprised if his second book is being rewritten in whole or in part. I don’t have a problem with that. Much has happened, both in Canada and south of the border. We’ve all been reconsidering our positions.
My problem with Carney’s conduct is not that he’s revising his manuscript, if he is, but that he’s not revising his publishing contract.
The Hinge is set to be published by Signal. Signal is a division of McClelland & Stewart. M&S is a division of Penguin Random House Canada. PRHC is a division of Penguin Random House LLC, corporate headquarters at 1745 Broadway, 3rd Floor, New York, New York, 10019.
Penguin Random House LLC is owned by Bertelsmann, a media conglomerate in Gütersloh, Germany, but legally and operationally, it is a US company. Its executive leadership, including CEO Nihar Malaviya, works out of the above address. Strategy and publishing priorities are set in New York, and profits in PRH’s many far-flung international divisions flow to New York. So the prime minister of Canada is publishing his book with the Canadian branch plant of a US company.
Other recent prime ministers have done the same. Justin Trudeau published Common Ground with HarperCollins. Steven Harper published Right Here, Right Now with Signal, and his forthcoming memoir sits there, too. Jean Chretien released My Stories, My Time with Random House Canada. Most of our politicians have published with branch plants of American firms.
I should add that many of our best writers publish at these same branch plants, if not directly with US publishers. (Even middling scribblers like me have published directly in the US.)
But, again, the world has changed. To quote no less an authority than Mark Carney, Canada’s old relationship with the US, “based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation, is over”. We need to “fundamentally reimagine our economy”, “retool” our industry, and enhance our self-sufficiency.
He sees our cultural relationship with the US as part of this project. From the Liberal platform: “In this time of crisis, protecting Canada means protecting our culture, our journalism, our perspectives. The Americans have threatened our sovereignty and issued inflammatory statements about our economy; we need to be able to tell a story that fights back.”
Right under the cultural section of the platform was a “Buy Canadian” plank. “At a time when our economy is under threat, consumers want to do their part as patriotic Canadians, buying things that are truly made here.” Team Carney promised to make it easier to determine what is and isn’t a Canadian product and prioritize made-in-Canada suppliers in every sector of the economy, limiting bidders from foreign suppliers, and so on.
So it’s “eLbOwS uP!” for the voters, but carry on publishing your next book through a US-owned subsidiary, eh? You have to admit they wear their hypocrisy proudly.
June 18, 2025
Canada’s Supply Management system – protecting us from cheaper milk, eggs, and chicken
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, The Food Professor celebrates the latest achievement in Canada’s omni-competent supply management system:
The Chicken Crisis Supply Management Won’t Admit
Canada’s supply management system—once heralded as a pillar of food security and agricultural self-sufficiency—is failing at its most basic function: ensuring reliable domestic supply.
According to the latest figures from the Canadian Association of Regulated Importers (CARI), Canada imported over 66.9 million kilograms of chicken as of June 14 — a 54.6% increase from the same period last year. To put that in perspective, this volume could feed 3.4 million Canadians for an entire year, based on per capita poultry consumption. That’s roughly 446 million individual meals — meals that, under a tightly managed quota system, were meant to be produced domestically.
To be fair, the avian influenza outbreak in Canada has disrupted poultry production, and it partially explains some of the shortfall. But even accounting for that disruption, the numbers are staggering. Imports under trade quotas established by the WTO, CUSMA, and CPTPP are all running at or near pro-rata levels, signaling not just opportunity — but urgency. Supplementary import permits — meant to be emergency tools — have already surpassed 48 million kilograms, exceeding the total annual import volumes of some previous years. This is not a seasonal hiccup. It is systemic failure.
Canada’s poultry sector is supposed to be insulated from global volatility through supply management. Yet internal shocks — like the domestic avian flu outbreak — have shown how fragile the system truly is. When emergency imports become routine, we must ask: what exactly is being managed?
The original intent of supply management was to align production with domestic demand while stabilizing prices and farm incomes. But that balance is clearly off. The A195 production period, ending May 31, 2025, showed one of the worst underproduction shortfalls in more than 50 years. Producers remain constrained by rigid quota allocations, while consumers continue to face rising poultry prices. More imports. Higher costs. Diminished confidence.
Some defenders will insist this is an isolated event. It’s not. This is the second week in a row Canada has reached pro-rata import levels across all chicken categories. Bone-in and processed poultry products — once minor parts of emergency programs — are now central to keeping the market supplied.
The dysfunction extends beyond chicken. Egg imports under the shortage allocation program have already topped 14 million dozen, up 104% from last year. Just months ago, Canadians were criticizing high U.S. egg prices — yet theirs have fallen. Ours haven’t.
All this in a country with $30 billion in quota value, intended to protect domestic production and reduce reliance on imports. Instead, we are importing more — and paying more.
Meanwhile, Bill C-202, now before the Senate, aims to shield supply management from future trade negotiations, making it even harder to adapt or reform. So we must ask: is this what we’re protecting? A system that fails to meet demand, relies on foreign supply, and costs Canadians more at the checkout?
Our trading partners are seizing the moment. Chile, for instance, has increased its chicken exports to Canada by over 63%, now representing nearly 96% of CPTPP-origin imports. While we double down on rigidity, others are gaining long-term footholds in our market.
It’s time to face the facts. Supply management no longer guarantees supply. And when a system meant to ensure resilience becomes the source of fragility, it’s no longer an asset — it’s an economic liability.
June 13, 2025
The new marketing strategy is “Always Be Annoying”
Ted Gioia explains that the rules of marketing as explained in Glengarry Glen Ross no longer apply:
The rules of marketing never change. That’s what they told me in business school.
If you could peer inside the meetings at head office, you would see a never-ending loop of Glengarry Glen Ross.
Always be closing. Those are the A-B-Cs of business.
But that’s not true anymore.
In recent days, a new marketing strategy has emerged. I’ve never seen it before. And I wish it would go away. You probably do too.
It’s a new way of advertising. It’s a new way of marketing. It’s a new motivational tool.
It didn’t exist when I studied marketing back at Stanford GSB. I had the best marketing teachers in the world, but they never dreamed of doing this to customers.
Here’s the new marketing playbook of 2025:
- Do NOT try to close.
- Do NOT try to sell.
- Do NOT try to persuade.
- Don’t even listen.
The goal now is merely to ANNOY. The big companies do it on purpose.
Big streaming platforms are the experts at this new marketing tool. They want you to pay for a premium, ad-free subscription. The more annoying the commercials, the more likely you are to pay.
You will pay just to get rid of the ad.
In this topsy-turvy world, the more painful the ad, the better it works. The digital platforms have studied this — YouTube has tested using up to ten unskippable ads on users.
That’s not marketing — it’s water-boarding. But they need to test these techniques. Their business model is built on optimizing the level of annoyance.
And guess what? Even paying for premium doesn’t guarantee escape from ads. Welcome to the new digital platforms — which increasingly resemble prisons.
[…]
We once lived in an industrial economy — built on industry. Then we shifted to a consumer economy — built on consumption. And more recently we lived in a service economy — built on service.
But we now are entering the age of the Annoyance Economy. And it is the inevitable result of corporations battling for your attention.
They monetize your eyeballs — measured in clicks and microseconds — and they will do anything to hold on to them. This increasingly involves annoying, intrusive actions that no business would have dared to implement in a consumer-oriented economy.
QotD: The Subaru BRAT
If you know this truck, you also know why it’s no longer available.
Such fun things are no longer allowed.
They are not saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaafe! “Moms” are “concerned”!
But in 1977, the Safety Cult — which ended such fun things — was still a backwater aberration, like dancing with rattlesnakes — and most people still esteemed fun over fear. There were roofless Broncos and K5 Blazers — and cars with beds.
You could buy all kinds of different stuff back when America was still a fairly free country — and the Subaru BRAT was as different as it got.
BRAT — all caps — was short for Bi-Drive Recreational All-Terrain Transporter. It was superficially similar to other small import pickups of the ’70s, such as the Datsun 620 and similar models from Toyota (SR5), Mazda (B210), and Chevy (via Isuzu) Luv.
But unlike them, it was a four seater — with two of the four in the bed, facing the other way. The seats were made of all-weather plastic and far from the most comfortable — but the view was spectacular. Watching the world recede as you progressed is another one of many freedoms denied today in the name of “safety”.
Subaru wasn’t “unconcerned” about “safety”. Grab handles — to keep passengers from bouncing out of the bed — were included. Though holding onto them made it harder to reach for a cold one in the cooler. That was another fun thing people did in pickups back in the day — before the Safety Cult put the kibosh on that, too.
The seats were actually a dodge — of a federal fatwa known as the “chicken tax”, which was a retaliatory tariff of 25 percent applied to import-brand pickups manufactured outside the United States as tit-for-tat for tariffs applied by foreign countries to American chicken exported outside the United States.
The “chicken tax” hit trucks with just two seats — at the time almost exclusively the small import models, which didn’t offer the extended and crew cab configurations that are commonplace today.
By adding the extra seats in the bed, BRAT qualified as a passenger vehicle rather than a “light truck”, and thus Subaru evaded the chicken tax on a happy technicality — and was also able to sell the BRAT for less than two-seater rivals that had the cost of the tax folded into their MSRP.
Eric Peters, “Doomed: Subaru BRAT (1977-87)”, The American Spectator, 2020-04-26.
June 12, 2025
Why it’s economically impossible for Walmart to “eat the tariffs” as Trump demands
At FEE, Peter Jacobsen shows the clear financial reason why Walmart and other big US retailers are passing along the price increases due to Trump’s tariffs rather than “eating them”:
Recently, a post from President Trump on Truth Social went viral. An attempt to convince retail giant Walmart to keep prices down despite the tariffs, it read:
Walmart should STOP trying to blame Tariffs as the reason for raising prices throughout the chain. Walmart made BILLIONS OF DOLLARS last year, far more than expected. Between Walmart and China they should, as is said, “EAT THE TARIFFS”, and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I’ll be watching, and so will your customers!!!
Trump’s demand here is, simply put, unreasonable, and it reflects a basic misunderstanding of how pricing decisions are made in a market economy. Let’s unpack why.
Walmart’s Thin Margins
The biggest problem with the President’s view is that it doesn’t pass a basic numbers test. To break it down, let’s look at Walmart’s financials.
It’s true that Walmart generates billions of dollars in revenue each year, but revenue alone doesn’t tell us how much Walmart makes.
To understand that, we need to consider profit, which accounts for the company’s costs. More specifically, we want to look at Walmart’s net profit margin, because that’s an extremely important indicator of whether Walmart could realistically “eat the tariffs”.
Depending on the source, Walmart’s net profit margin is somewhere between 2% and 3%. Let’s split the difference and say it’s 2.5%. What does that mean?
That means, if Walmart sells you $1 of goods, it only keeps 2.5 cents in profit. That’s right, 97.5 cents goes toward inventory, employee wages, store maintenance, and a variety of other operating costs.
Put another way, if you spend $100 at Walmart, they make $2.50 in profit.
Now let’s say you buy a $100 television that Walmart imports. A $20 tariff is imposed — an added cost Walmart has to pay to import the TV. Before the tariff, Walmart was making $2.50 in profits. After the tariff, it’s now taking a $17.50 loss.
The only way Walmart can still sell this TV is by raising the price.
At this point, a tariff supporter might respond: “The easy way to fix this is to buy US-made TVs instead!”
Sure — you can avoid tariffs by only buying domestic, but the problem is that domestic TVs tend to be more expensive. If they weren’t, Walmart wouldn’t be importing them in the first place. So even if Walmart pulls international TVs off the shelves and replaces them with US-made ones, the prices still increase.
Here’s the key point: “eating” the tariffs is not an option. Walmart operates on slim margins, barely making pennies on the dollar — there isn’t room to eat 20% cost increases!
There definitely used to be a gender pay gap
I’m sure activists will keep slinging around the “women are paid 82 cents for every dollar men are paid” factoid, because it’s politically useful (if statistically untrue in the way most people interpret it). But it used to be true that women were systematically paid less for doing the same work as men:
Dame Stephanie Shirley, entrepreneur, IT pioneer, philanthropist, at her 80th birthday party in September 2013.
Photo by Lynn Hart via Wikimedia Commons.
At which point enter Dame Stevie:
Dame Stephanie Shirley, 91, is a tech pioneer and philanthropist who came to Britain on the Kindertransport in 1939. She built a £3 billion business, Freelance Programmers (later renamed F International), and 70 of her staff became millionaires due to its shared ownership structure. Since retiring in 1993 she has donated more than £70 million to charity. She was made a dame in 2000 and became one of the prestigious few members of the Order of Companions of Honour in 2017.
Back when she was building F1 the sexism in industry was such that she called herself Stevie, not Stephanie. You know, deniably pretending to be male sorta thing. Also, given that background, something of a tough nut and certainly nobody’s fool. F1, among other things, did the programming on the Black Box for Concorde. Proper, serious, company.
The sexism in industry was such that there really was a gender pay gap. A general assumption — to the point of rigid rule — was that wimmins didn’t work after marriage and certainly not when they had children. So, Stevie went out and hired all those birds who had been programmers before parturition, set ’em up with a home terminal and paid ’em peanuts. Then went around winning vast contracts with her price advantage.
This worked. To the extent that Stevie is on record as saying the Equal Pay Act was the worst thing ever for her business (note, not societally wrong, but bad for her business).
Which actually gives us a nice test of something that bastard neoliberals like me insist upon. Or as Gary Becker pointed out. If it is true that wimmins is underpaid in our capitalist bastardry patriarchal society then it must also be true that it’s possible to deliberately and specifically hire women and so gain a price advantage.
Dame Stevie did this and did so very successfully. Which is a nice proof that the first part of the contention works. If women are underpaid then hire them and make a fortune. Cool!
The apparent fact that nobody else has done this is a strong indicator that there isn’t a significant gender wage gap these days.
June 8, 2025
Managerialism – threat or menace?
In the New York Times (don’t worry … link is to an archived version), Nathan Levine explains to NYT readers why there is such a push back against the over-mighty technocratic organizations that have been running more and more of our fading civilization:
It is the culmination of a once marginalized, now transformative strand of political thought about who really holds power in the modern American system. Namely, that our democracy has been usurped by a permanent ruling class of wholly unaccountable managers and bureaucrats.
Anti-managerialism is back. Well positioned to answer decades of frustration with mainstream conservatives’ failure to deliver results, this old idea has become the central principle of the new right.
In fact, much of what is commonly called “populist” politics can be more accurately described as part of an anti-managerial revolution attempting to roll back the expansion of overbearing bureaucratic control into more and more areas of life.
Though it has so far met with limited success amid stiff resistance, grasping the nature of this anti-managerialism is essential to understanding the Trump administration’s effort to transform America’s institutional landscape, from government to universities and major corporations.
The idea’s intellectual history begins with the political philosopher James Burnham, who argued in his seminal 1941 book, The Managerial Revolution, that the aristocratic capitalist class was in the process of being overthrown by a revolution — just not, as the Marxists predicted, by the working class.
Instead, the exponential growth of mass and scale produced by the Industrial Revolution meant that in both corporation and state it was now those people cleverest at applying techniques of mass organization, procedure and propaganda — what he called the managerial class — who effectively controlled the means of production and would increasingly come to dominate society as a new technocratic oligarchy.
The book made an especially significant impression on George Orwell, who remarked that a managerial class consisting of “scientists, technicians, teachers, journalists, broadcasters, bureaucrats, professional politicians: in general, middling people”, hungry for “more power and more prestige”, would seek to entrench “a system which eliminates the upper class, keeps the working class in its place, and hands unlimited power to people very similar to themselves”.
Orwell was particularly struck by Burnham’s observation that the major political systems of the day — fascism, Communism and New Deal-era social democracy — were fundamentally similar in their turn toward the bureaucratic management of society. He observed that everywhere “laissez-faire capitalism gives way to planning and state interference” and “the mere owner loses power as against the technician and the bureaucrat”. Believing that accelerating managerial control risked dragging every society inexorably into totalitarianism, Orwell made Burnham’s ideas the basis of his novel 1984.
While the Cold War persisted, the view that America’s government might share some traits with the Soviet Union unsurprisingly proved unpopular, especially among Washington’s conservative establishment.
Nonetheless, the managerial class continued to grow, regardless of which political party controlled the government. Cold War defense budgets drove a relentless expansion of security state bureaucracy and the military-industrial complex. The advent of Great Society welfare programs and the Civil Rights Act demanded a re-engineering of social relations, prompting a dramatic proliferation of lawyers, regulatory bureaucrats and corporate compliance officers throughout much of public and private life. An ever-greater proportion of Americans began funneling through the credentialing machinery of higher education, inflating demand for yet more upper-middle-class managerial jobs.
QotD: The ratchet effect
What ends up happening is a kind of “ratchet effect” on steroids. The “ratchet effect”, you’ll recall, was Margaret Thatcher’s explanation for how the Left kept winning on policy even though the Right kept winning at the polls (ah, God love ya, Maggie, and give you peace). When the Left is in power, they get whatever they want. When the Right is in power, they consolidate the Left’s gains, as this is now “the new normal”. Since The Right exists only to twiddle the knobs and levers of the Leviathan State in a more efficient, cost-effective, low-tax way, the “right-wing” “reformers” find jury-rigged quasi-solutions to the problems the Left’s insanity creates.
In a very real way, then, the “ratchet effect” means the so-called “Right” ends up doing the Left’s job for them, much better than they themselves could’ve.
Same deal inside the divisions of GloboHomoCorp. Same deal inside the Third Reich, which is why “working towards the Führer” turned so murderous, so fast. Since the only way to get noticed by the next higher-up level of “management” was to be more obnoxiously ruthless than everybody else at doing what the Führer seemed to be hinting that he wanted …
In the corporate world, then, I theorize, super-aggressive, ultra-obnoxious SJW-ism is a ground-up phenomenon. Does the Big Boss really want mandatory anti-Whiteness training across all divisions? Maybe … but maybe not. And though it’s tempting to say “He’s the Big Boss, he must know at least broadly what the big divisions are up to”, do I even have to ask if you’ve ever been in a situation where that’s true? Big Bosses the world over, in any field, be they CEOs or Generals or Chief Medical Officers or what have you, don’t have the slightest clue what’s happening structurally inside their commands.
All they know is what the next-lower level of management tells them is happening.
Severian, “On Selling Out”, Founding Questions, 2021-11-26.
June 2, 2025
The progressive case for unlimited immigration
Theophilus Chilton takes on the progressive arguments for bringing in as many “high quality” immigrants as humanly possible from his own professional background:
One of the constants that you can count on in any debate about the value of immigration (of every sort) is the inevitable assertion about the NECESSITY of immigration. Immigrants POWER AMERICA. Without them, NOTHING WOULD HAPPEN! They are ELITE HUMAN CAPITAL without which the White American chuds who did things like build the atom bomb and otherwise created modern technological civilisation would barely be able to keep the lights on in their single-wides. It’s not just that immigrants want a new life or might be useful — they are an absolutely necessity and the ones coming here are the cream of the world’s crop.
As a result, the recent move by Marco Rubio and the State Department to revoke visas from Chinese students in American universities (especially those associated with the CCP or who are in positions to commit especially damaging industrial espionage) will certainly not be well-received by this crowd. For example, witness Alex Nowrasteh, who’s whole schtick is to burble on about “meritocracy” and whine about “affirmative action for White Americans” while filling a useless sinecure at the Cato Institute that he got by being the token immigrant. He is appalled that we’d act in our own national interest rather than in the interests of a bunch of random foreigners.
Immigration man have big sad
Many people who know me on X already know this, but most readers here may not. Before I made a radical life-changing vocational choice a few years ago, I used to be a scientist in Big Pharma. For a little over two decades, I worked in the biotech/biopharma industry, covering a wide range of drug development stages and product types. I’ve developed vaccines (which is why I was skeptical about the Covid vaxx from the very beginning). I’ve developed small molecule drugs. I helped to bring to market several of the pharmaceuticals that millions take regularly and which you see advertised on television. I’ve done everything from bench scale analytical work to protein purification on 5000-liter batches used in support of human clinical trials. I’m proficient in literally dozens of different analytical techniques. Before that, in both undergraduate and graduate school, I specialised in synthetic organic small molecule development across a number of different subspecialties. And I’m good at all of this.
One other thing that I did throughout was work side-by-side with, and later manage, LOTS of visa holders and immigrants, especially from “tech heavy” countries like India and China, the stereotypical “H1-Bers”. As a result, I consider myself to be a pretty good judge of the value which visa holders bring to tech fields.
My judgment is, and has been for decades, that their value is minimal and it certainly does not live up to the hype. Indeed, one of the constants that I observed among most Indian, Chinese, and other visa holders was that they did not really, truly understand the science that was involved with the products being developed and the techniques being used to develop and test them. Most of these folks were the living embodiment of cramming to pass the test. When the test methods and the SOPs being employed were straightforward, these folks were great. They had a robot-like efficiency that comes with repetitively doing the same thing over and over and over again. Unfortunately, for anything requiring innovative or independent thinking, they’d be totally lost. If results from a test deviated from expectations and required some commonsense interpretation? That’s where the wheels came off. I mean, there was little to no capacity to deal with anything that wasn’t completely textbook.
Even basic scientific sense was often missing. At one job, there was an Indian guy who would takes dumps in the bathroom and then walk straight out back to his manufacturing suite in the cell line division without even washing his hands. I know this because I observed it for myself several times. I mean, even if you don’t care about getting fecal coliform bacteria all over door handles and whatnot, at least don’t carry them back into the suite where you’re helping to grow batches of genetically engineered E. coli. I assume he was properly gowned before going in, but still, there’s just that basic lack of sense there.
And then there are the ethics (or lack thereof) displayed by many visa holders (especially Chinese and Middle Eastern). Data manipulation, tweaked results, etc. etc. These tend to occur because both of those groups are under intense social pressure within their own cultures to “get the right results” rather than just dealing with the results you get. The “tiger mom” mentality carries over into the workplace. There is a reason for why these two groups are disproportionately overrepresented on the FDA’s debarment list. Indians can be subject to serious lapses in integrity as well, though theirs tend to revolve more around cutting corners and mistreating underlings, as I illustrated in a thread on X about three years ago where I recounted my time working for an Indian-owned company.
Over the years, my observations have been substantiated and reiterated by any number of people in various tech-heavy industry to whom I’ve related them. Whether it’s pharma or IT or medicine or metallurgy or whatever else, the familiar story is told. It’s really, really difficult to reconcile this mass of lived experience with the theoretical assertions made by people like Nowrasteh that immigrants are this valuable resource that we absolutely need to be or remain competitive in world markets.
In effect, the goal with this type of white-collar mass immigration is to “roboticise” tech fields which can’t be given over to AI or actual robotics just yet. The formula is to import masses of workers who can simply follow a script and save companies money on labour costs. If you think about it, this is really a low IQ, high time preference approach by corporations whereby they sacrifice real innovativeness and future competitiveness for short-term savings. I’d argue that the entry of H1-B and other visa holders in large numbers into American tech industries which accelerated around the late 2000s-early 2010s has actually led to a slowdown in real innovation. We may have tons of new apps for our phones, but fewer truly groundbreaking advances in tech across the board.
QotD: How to use your billions to influence those in power, without risking prosecution
In other words, there are no lessons there for us (except that people will tolerate shit like Fakebook and Amazon, which is indeed disturbing, but we already knew that). But blogs? Consider the Bulwark, or the Dispatch, or whatever it is (and if those are actually different things). Jonah Goldberg’s new outfit. I don’t follow this stuff, all I know is Ace of Spades calls it “The Cuckshed”, which is awesome, so let’s go with that. When Goldberg was pitching The Cuckshed to that Persian billionaire, he no doubt promised him all kinds of filthy, degrading acts of propaganda … in person.
I have to assume that the Cuckshed exists largely as his personal brand — he can go on whatever cable news shout show needs a “conservative” and the chryon says “Founder of leading conservative opinion site ‘The Cuckshed'” — and that’s what he pitched to the Persian, rather than reams of marketing data about the site’s literally hundreds of subscribers … but then again, maybe not, because I think we can all take it as read that 95% of the people who subscribe to The Cuckshed are fellow Swamp Things, no? Persians are a crafty lot, and this guy is no dummy, he understands the cardinal rule: Never write when you can speak, and never speak when you can nod.
To get his message into the [Washington, DC] intellectual ecosystem, then, the Persian Billionaire has two choices: He could either circulate a memo with “The Persian Billionaire’s Position on X”; or he could just have a flunky come into the room and start reading off a list of options, and he’ll nod when the flunky reaches the right one. Then the flunky slaps the list on the desk of a slightly lower-ranking flunky, pointedly tapping his finger at the chosen option. Then the lower-ranking flunky calls up one of his fart catchers, pulls out a highlighter, colors in the correct option, and hands it to him. Take that out through about six more levels of toadies, rump-swabs, and catamites, and it finally lands on Jonah Goldberg’s desk, at which point he starts punching up his “Word ’95” macros into a “column” telling the world what the Persian Billionaire wants them to hear.
Thus, if he’s ever called on the carpet by the Emperor’s Truthsayer, the Persian Billionaire can in all honesty say “I never told Goldberg to write that!” It just kinda worked out that way. As it always seems to. Every time.
Severian, “On Selling Out”, Founding Questions, 2021-11-26.
