Quotulatiousness

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.

Britain slides further down the free speech rankings

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At The Conservative Woman, Bruce Newsome reports on the parlous state of free speech in the United Kingdom:

SINCE 2021, the Index on Censorship has ranked Britain as “partially open” (the third tier). Britain ranks 20th for press freedom (worse than Trinidad and Tobago).

Just released: The US State Department concludes that in 2024, Britain’s human rights “worsened” and the British government is partial in protecting rights and freedoms: “Significant human rights issues included credible reports of serious restrictions on freedom of expression, including enforcement of or threat of criminal or civil laws in order to limit expression; and crimes, violence, or threats of violence motivated by antisemitism. The government sometimes took credible steps to identify and punish officials who committed human rights abuses, but prosecution and punishment for such abuses was inconsistent.”

There are three main categorical freedoms being routinely violated in Britain. In US Constitutional law, they are known as speech, assembly and press. British authorities need a reminder.

Let’s fully understand how this started, more than 25 years ago. In 1999, the Macpherson inquiry into the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence recommended that police should record hateful incidents as a matter of intelligence, even if the incidents were not criminal. Quangos led by the College of Policing encouraged police forces to record non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs). Police took it upon themselves to visit the supposed haters, to “correct your thinking“, to intimidate them with warnings of escalation, and even to strong-arm them into taking thought-correction classes with the police, at cost.

The 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act criminalises hatred of protected characteristics. It was once sold as a protection against violence, but was soon wielded to criminalise speech.

Police make more than 30 arrests a day (more than 10,000 per year) for online speech and record 66 non-crime hate incidents per day.

Despite several administrations claiming to review and restrict the definitions of hate speech and NCHIs, the definitions remain too vague to prevent police from repressing speech they don’t like. In 2024, the Free Speech Union submitted freedom of information (FoI) requests to all 43 police forces in England and Wales to see if recording went down since a new code of practice of June 2023. The number has actually increased. This year the current government sneakily signalled its appreciation of NCHIs in response to a petition to abolish them.

The latest statute aimed at free speech came into force on July 25: the Online Safety Act. The Bill was marketed as a necessary legislation to protect minors from harmful material such as pornography, self-harm forums, and bullying towards suicide. Like the Hatred Act, the Online Safety Act is being used to suppress politically inconvenient content.

British public authorities (and social media) are suppressing speech and the press selectively with political, religious and ethnic prejudice.

August 13, 2025

“[A]ll those land acknowledgments weren’t just symbolic: they [were] advance notice”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Law, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Free Press, Rupa Subramanya discusses the — in my opinion, insane — court ruling in British Columbia that invalidated existing land titles in part of the Vancouver area, handing the titles to the properties over to the Cowichan First Nation:

A B.C. Supreme Court judge has granted several First Nations a portion of a 1,846-acre land claim on Lulu Island. B.C. Supreme Court

It turns out that all those land acknowledgments weren’t just symbolic. They may have been advance notice.

When Canada adopted its constitution in 1982, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau slipped in a ticking time bomb: an explicit recognition of indigenous land rights without constitutional protection for property rights for other Canadians. That constitutional clause has fueled decades of lawsuits from First Nations — Canada’s indigenous people — asserting claims to huge portions of their ancestral territories.

Last Thursday, the British Columbia Supreme Court ruled that the Cowichan Nation holds “Aboriginal title” to about 1,846 acres of land on the south shore of Lulu Island in Richmond, and constitutionally protected rights to fish in the south arm of the Fraser River.

This 275,000-word judgment doesn’t just affect government-owned lands. It also includes private property now owned by third parties. So if you’re a Canadian who is a property owner in British Columbia and not indigenous, your claim on what you think you own has just been superseded by indigenous claims, called a “senior” claim in legalese. Down the road, your land or house could be expropriated by the federal government and turned over to an indigenous group that claims ownership.

That has already happened in Ontario, where three northern Ontario First Nations claimed in a lawsuit last month that a 14-acre public park in Kenora called Anicinabe Park is actually unceded territory and should be returned.

“In constitutional terms, aboriginal rights trump private property rights,” Bruce Pardy, a professor of constitutional law at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, told me. He pointed to last November’s ruling by a New Brunswick judge that the court might be in position to order the government to seize private property and turn it over to an indigenous group making a claim on it.

As Prime Minister Mark Carney tries to fast-track major infrastructure projects — roads, bridges, pipelines, power plants, and more — all part of his plan to boost Canada’s global competitiveness and reduce reliance on the U.S., some of those ambitions might be snarled by indigenous land claims that take years to resolve. The British Columbia case began in 2019 and is considered to be the longest trial in Canadian history.

The day before the Cowichan Nation ruling in British Columbia, a Yukon First Nation announced that it would oppose all new mining claims on its traditional territory while a regional land-use plan is developed. Yukon First Nations leaders said that new claims are “unwelcome” and “unlawful”, and that they plan to challenge the mining industry to protect the land from further industrial activity.

Stefan Labbé in BIV last week:

A B.C. court has handed the Cowichan Tribes and other First Nations title over a chunk of federal and city land in Richmond that for centuries was used as a winter fishing village, before colonial administrators evicted the people who lived there.

The landmark Aug. 7 ruling was handed down after more than 500 days of litigation before the B.C. Supreme Court.

It gives the Cowichan Tribes, the Stz’uminus First Nation, Penelakut Tribe, Halalt First Nation — as well as the Lyackson First Nation in a supporting role — Aboriginal title over the Tribes’ historic Tl’uqtinus village on the southeast side of Lulu Island.

The ruling also gives the First Nations fishing rights at the mouth of the Fraser River.

In a joint statement, the First Nation plaintiffs said: “We raise our hands to the generations of leaders” who fought for the return of the Tl’uqtinus village lands and their fishing rights in the Fraser River.

B.C. Supreme Court Justice Barbara Young suspended her decision for 18 months “to allow for an orderly transition of the lands” in keeping with the principle of reconciliation.

“Now that this multi-year journey has concluded, it is my sincere hope that the parties have the answers they need to return to negotiations and reconcile the outstanding issues,” she wrote.

Jamie Sarkonak in the National Post wrote on Monday:

This case of “land back” in action (Cowichan Tribes v. Canada) casts a shadow over the country’s property system. It jeopardizes the default means of owning land in Canada — the estate in fee simple, where owners have exclusive rights to sell land — wherever Aboriginal title is found to exist.

Aboriginal title is the right of an Indigenous group to use, control and reap benefits from the land. It’s granted to claimant groups that can prove they are descended from the sole occupants of an area at the time the British asserted sovereignty. Unlike regular fee simple ownership, it’s enshrined in Section 35 of the 1982 Constitution and impossible to sell to anyone but the Crown.

The Cowichan claim covered the site of their summer village near the mouth of the Fraser River, where they had established continuous, exclusive seasonal occupancy dating back to European contact in the 1790s.

In 1846, the British Crown asserted sovereignty over that land and the rest of what would become B.C. The following years would see property being surveyed and auctioned off to public and private buyers — but not the Cowichan summer village. Instead, it was set aside in 1860 and continued to be used as a settlement for the group. Colonial officials considered the possibility of making it into a reserve, and took initial steps to do so. After B.C. joined Canada in 1871, however, the summer village was carved into parcels and sold over the years until 1914. Purchasers included private parties (including “well-placed men” in the colony) and even the municipality itself; some of the land purchased privately would eventually be sold back to the Crown. Today, about half of these lots are held by public bodies, with the other half falling under private ownership.

A map shows the Cowichan title lands outlined in black. (B.C. Supreme Court) Photo by B.C. Supreme Court

The question before the B.C. Supreme Court was whether the taking of those village lands was legal to begin with. Justice Barbara Young (a Harper appointee, by the way) concluded it was not.

August 12, 2025

Britain warns online platforms about “overzealous” interpretation of online safety law

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

“Ben the Layabout” posted a note over at Founding Questions linking to a Telegraph article [archive.ph link] that seems to indicate the British government is demanding that online services both enforce the letter of the law and the spirit … whatever that might mean at any given moment in time:

Social media giants face huge fines for curbing free speech by “overzealous” enforcement of online safety laws.

Ministers have told platforms including Facebook, X, Instagram and TikTok they must not restrict access to posts that express lawfully held views.

The warning, in an apparent change of tone from ministers, comes amid a backlash over websites blocking users from viewing material, including parliamentary debates about grooming gangs.

Campaigners have said that free speech is threatened by the Government’s application of the Online Safety Act, which is meant to protect children from harmful content.

JD Vance, the US vice-president, used a visit to the UK this week to warn ministers against going down the “dark path” of censorship.

Whitehall sources have expressed concern that social media firms, some of which have criticised the law, “have been overzealous” in enforcing it and must be “mindful” of the right to freedom of expression.

The Science Department, which oversees the legislation, told companies they could face fines if they failed to uphold free speech rules.

A spokesman said:

    As well as legal duties to keep children safe, the very same law places clear and unequivocal duties on platforms to protect freedom of expression.

    Failure to meet either obligation can lead to severe penalties, including fines of up to 10 per cent of global revenue or £18m, whichever is greater.

    The Act is not designed to censor political debate and does not require platforms to age gate any content other than those which present the most serious risks to children such as pornography or suicide and self-harm content.

    Platforms have had several months to prepare for this law. It is a disservice to their users to hide behind deadlines as an excuse for failing to properly implement it.

So online sites big and small are required to obey the British law, but only as and how the British government wants it enforced or they’ll levy massive punishment. Too lax? Punishment. Too strict? Also punishment. It’s almost as if Britain wants to be cut off from the rest of the internet …

August 11, 2025

Smug Canadian boomer autohagiography rightly antagonizes the under-35s

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Education, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Fortissax had an argument with one of his readers over a smug, self-congratulating meme about how wonderful Canada was in the 1990s and early 2000s:

What we lived through long before Trudeau was the Shattering, the breakdown of Canada’s social cohesion, driven by left-liberalism with communist characteristics applied to race, ethnicity, sex, and gender, and punitive almost exclusively toward visibly White men. My generation, those millennials born on the cusp of Gen Z, saw post-national Canada take shape not in the comfortable suburban rings of the GTA or the posh boroughs of Outremont and Westmount, but in self-segregated, ghettoised enclaves of immigrants whose parents never integrated and were never required to.

Memes like that are dishonest because they feed a false memory. The 2000s were not normal. Wages were stagnant, housing was already an asset bubble, and immigration was still flooding in under a policy that explicitly forbade assimilation. Brian Mulroney had enshrined multiculturalism into law in 1988. Quebec alone resisted, carving out the right to limit immigration under the 1992 Quebec–Canada Accord. After Chrétien, Stephen Harper brought in three million immigrants, primarily from China, India, and the Philippines in that order.

The Don Cherry conservatives of that era were Bush lite. They were rootless, cut off from their history, their identities manufactured from the top down since the days of Lester B. Pearson. They conserved nothing. For Canadian youth, it was the dawn of a civic religion of wokeness, totalitarian self-policing by striver peers, and the quiet coercion of every institution. My memories of that decade are of constant assault — mental, physical, spiritual — from leftists in power, from encroaching foreigners, and from the cowardice of conservatives.

Your 2000s might have been great. For us, they were communist struggle sessions. In 2009 we were pulled from class to watch the inauguration of Barack Obama, a foreign president, as a historic moment for civil rights. Our schools excluded us while granting space to every group under the sun: LGBT safe spaces and cultural clubs for Italians, Jamaicans, Jews, Indians, Indigenous, Balkaners, Greeks, Slavs, Portuguese, Quebecois, Iroquois, Pakistanis — every culture celebrated except our own. Anglo-Quebecers and Anglo-Canadians got nothing but an Irish club, closely monitored for “white supremacy” and “racism” by the HR grandmas of the gyno-gerontocracy of English Montreal. Students self-segregated, sitting at different cafeteria tables and smoking at different bus shelters. At Vanier, Dawson, and John Abbott College, these divisions were institutionalised. I remember walking into the atrium of Dawson, my first post-secondary experience, greeted by a wigger rolling a joint while a Jamaican beatboxed to Soulja Boy.

We became amateur anthropologists out of necessity, forced to navigate a nationwide cosmopolitan experiment from birth. We learned the distinctions between squabbling southeastern Europeans of the former Yugoslavia, and we did not care if Kosovo was Serbia or whether Romanians and Albanians were Slavic, they all acted the same way. We learned the divides within South Asia, the rivalries between Hindutva and Khalistani, the differences between a Punjabi, a Gujarati, a Telugu, a Pakistani, a Hong Konger, a mainlander, and a Taiwanese. We know the shades of Caribbean identity, the factions of the Middle East, and the intricacies of North African identity. We should never have needed to know these things, but we do.

For us, childhood in this cesspit was the seedbed of radicalism. We never knew an era when contact with foreigners was limited to sampling food at Loblaws. All we know is being surrounded by those who hate us, governed by a state that wants to erase us, with no healthcare, no homes, no jobs that are not contested by foreigners, and no money to start families.

Stalin’s Death: The Day the USSR Changed Forever! – W2W 39

Filed under: Government, History, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 10 Aug 2025

March 1953: Stalin’s sudden death triggers a whirlwind of conspiracies, paranoia, and a deadly battle for control inside the Kremlin. As Beria, Khrushchev, and the Soviet elite scramble for power, the fate of the world’s largest superpower hangs in the balance. Was Stalin murdered by his inner circle, or did his own regime consume him? Discover the truth behind the downfall, the rise of Khrushchev, and the birth of the KGB in the Cold War’s most dramatic turning point.
(more…)

The problem with the theory that local government is more responsive is … people

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

Poor Chris Bray is having a moment of deep cognitive dissonance over the vast chasm between his prior belief that local government is more sensible, more grounded, more responsive to the electorate than huge, distant, impersonal big government:

The more you deal with government, the more you are likely to agree with Thoreau

The problem of underlying principles and structural assumptions in a moment of profound cultural decay.

Like my old friend James Madison, the core of my understanding of political power is that authority becomes more rational and balanced as it gets closer to the people who are governed. Starting from home in my list of ideological priors, centralized power is usually going to be a steamroller, managed on top-down premises by people you’ve never met; local government, government by neighbors, is usually going to be more adept at listening and adapting. Your mayor is down the block, mowing his lawn. You can wave to him. When I worked at small town newspapers, I’d have breakfast with the city manager and the police chief — mostly so they could threaten to call my editor and have me fired, but still. They were here, right in front of me. I could talk to them. In the town where I’ve lived for a few years, now, I’ve waited at Trader Joe’s for a city councilman in cargo shorts and an old t-shirt to move over so I could get to the ground beef. They aren’t distant autocrats.

Sadly, though, a good few of them turn out to be proximate autocrats, and almost miraculously stupid. The problem with the theory of relatively well-balanced local authority is that some of the biggest goobers I’ve ever met have served on small town city councils and school boards, and your HOA board of literal neighbors makes Mussolini look like a hippie.

[Deleted a video here of an HOA officer being arrested, because it was staged.]

I wrote a quite carefully reported newspaper story about wasted money at a suburban school district, decades ago, that was critical but fair and elaborately sourced. The subsequent conversations I had with the members of the school board made me wonder if they had actual brain damage. No one on earth is more susceptible to psychotic conspiracy theories than small town elected officials, who respond to mild criticism by demanding to know WHO PUT YOU UP TO THIS, WHO ARE YOU REALLY WORKING FOR!?!?!?! WHAT’S YOUR TRUE AGENDA!?!?!?! WHO SENT YOU!?!?!?!? If you ask me for a list of the top ten people I’ve known personally and can’t stand at all, roughly eight of them were elected to local government positions in towns with low-five-figure populations, and I start grinding my teeth at the sound of their names. Wait, no: nine.

This topic is back on my mind this week because of Lina Hidalgo, though a county of five million people may be a bad example of real localism and neighborhood authority. Hidalgo is the county judge — in Texas, the chief executive officer — of Harris County. And she’s mad as a hatter. Click on the link to watch the video, but a tax increase is “not about politics, it’s about kids.” Never heard that one before.

[…]

Making appalling decisions at the head of broken institutions, they respond to criticism by hiring men with guns as a shield against ordinary human contact. Like I said, the mayor is down the block, mowing his lawn, so you can wave to hi—STOP RIGHT THERE, GET ON THE GROUND.

The spirit of the NSBA letter lives on in a thousand local offices, where the problem with running schools is that parents exist, and the problem with running cities is that they have people in them.

August 10, 2025

Nova Scotia rediscovers the joys of dictatorial power

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

Clearly hankering for those glorious days when Canadians cowered in their homes due to the government’s public health diktats, Nova Scotia has now banned almost all outdoor activities in wooded areas across the province:

Image from Junk Economics

Nova Scotia’s Premier has decided that walking in the woods — yes, walking — is now so dangerous it carries a $25,000 fine.

Not for lighting a campfire. Not for running your ATV through dry brush. Not for tossing a cigarette. Just walking. In a province where there are currently four active wildfires … all under control.

This is not about preventing wildfires. This is about the politics of safety — and how governments turn fear into obedience.

I was born in Halifax, and my family’s roots run deep in Nova Scotia — deeper than the roads and towns that stand there now. Generations of my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents — along with uncles, aunts, and cousins — are buried in its soil. My family weathered centuries of storms, wars, and political upheavals there, carving out a life from raw wilderness. This isn’t some detached policy rant from a distance. It’s personal. And it’s infuriating to watch a government use “safety” as a smokescreen for inaction, punishing people for living their lives while leaving the real problem unsolved.

The Problem They Didn’t Solve

In 2023, Nova Scotia suffered its worst wildfire season in history. At the time, the province had four Airbus H125 helicopters to fight fires.

In 2025, after all the smoke cleared and the “lessons learned” speeches were made, Nova Scotia … still has four Airbus H125 helicopters. Newer paint jobs, slightly upgraded safety features, same firefighting capacity. No fixed-wing aircraft. No surge ability. No major investment in manpower or pre-positioned crews.

The province didn’t fix the problem. They just hit refresh on the equipment list.

[…]

The Legal Overreach

The ban covers 89% of provincial land (Crown land) plus private forested land. Even if you own it, you can’t invite your mother over to walk her dog in your woods.

Section 7 of the Charter protects liberty, and the Forests Act was never intended to give cabinet the power to impose a province-wide walking ban. That’s legislative overreach wrapped in administrative convenience.

And the $25,000 fine? Grossly disproportionate — and in practice, quietly plea-bargained down because it’s more for optics than enforcement. A scarecrow penalty to make the Premier look tough on camera.

The Snitch Line and the COVID Flashback

Just like pandemic tip lines, Nova Scotia has invited citizens to report on each other for the crime of going for a picnic.

It’s hard to overstate how corrosive this is: encouraging suspicion, legitimising neighbour-against-neighbour policing, and normalising the idea that the government can criminalise any movement it decides is risky.

Of course, the commentariat is having a wonderful time of it:

And what may be the first issued fine under the provincial ban went to Jeff Evely:

August 9, 2025

Carney hints at backing away from Trudeau’s digital policy catastrophes

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Michael Geist on the possibility that Prime Minister Mark Carney is starting to recognize just how damaging to Canadian interests the previous government’s various online bills have been:

Digital policies did not play a prominent role in the last election given the intense focus on the Canada-U.S. relationship. Prime Minister Mark Carney started as a bit of a blank slate on the issue, but over the past few months a trend has emerged as he distances himself from the Justin Trudeau approach with important shifts on telecom, taxation, and the regulation of artificial intelligence. Further, recent hints of an openness to re-considering the Online News Act and heightened pressure from the U.S. on the Online Streaming Act suggests that a full overhaul may be a possibility.

This week’s decision to let the CRTC’s decision on wholesale access to fibre broadband networks stand is a case in point. Last November, the Justin Trudeau-led government sent the CRTC’s initial ruling back to the Commission for reconsideration, noting that it “has concerns about future and ongoing investments in broadband infrastructure and services in Ontario and Quebec, including in rural, remote and Indigenous communities, and concerns that those investments could, if they are unprofitable, lead to a decline in quality and consumer choice in the retail Internet services market”. Nine months later, the CRTC came back with the roughly same ruling. That led to yet another request for a cabinet review but this time the government stood by the CRTC despite significant industry opposition. New leader, dramatically new approach.

The CRTC is example was preceded by the decision to eliminate the digital services tax. While the strategic approach seemed misguided – dropping the DST should have garnered more than just an agreement from the U.S. to return to the bargaining table – some noted at the time that perhaps Carney wasn’t a supporter of the DST and had few qualms with rescinding it. The tax had been a foundational part of the government’s campaign to “make web giants pay” but in a matter of 72 hours in late June it was gone.

The government has also shifted its approach on AI regulation. After months of supporting Bill C-27 and the EU-style AI regulatory approach, a new government brought a new minister and a new approach. Evan Solomon, the newly installed AI and Digital Innovation Minister, used his first public speech as minister to pledge that Canada would move away from “over-indexing on warnings and regulation” on AI. That too represents a significant shift in approach, particularly since Trudeau had embraced the EU style regulatory model.

Then there is the Online News Act and Online Streaming Act. When asked about the Online News Act this week, Carney seemed to suggest he was open to change, stating “this government is a big believer in the value of … local news and the importance of ensuring that that is disseminated as widely and as quickly as possible. So, we will look for all avenues to do that.” While that isn’t a clear commitment to change, it is far from an ironclad commitment to legislation is viewed by many to have done more harm than good. Further, reports indicate that the U.S. Congress is escalating pressure to rescind the Online Streaming Act, which may put that law on the chopping block, particularly if a court appeal strikes down elements of the bill or the CRTC’s implementation of the law puts the bill on the Trump radar screen.

August 8, 2025

China’s short- to medium-term reaction to Trump’s tariffs

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

In Reason, Liz Wolfe outlines some of the reasons China has not been suffering under the tariffs President Trump has levied on them over the last few months (unlike, say, Canada):

President Donald Trump and PRC President Xi Jinping at the G20 Japan Summit in Osaka, 29 June, 2019.
Cropped from an official White House photo by Shealah Craighead via Wikimedia Commons.

Total Chinese exports surged in July … but not to us. Compared to July 2024, Chinese exports were up 7.2 percent last month. “Its exports to Southeast Asia and Africa, key regions for reshipment to the United States, rose more than twice as fast as its overall exports”, per The New York Times‘ reading of the data. “China’s exports to the European Union, its main alternative to the American market, were also up very strongly.”

Specifically, “data released Thursday by the customs authorities showed the pickup was driven by strong growth in shipments to the European Union, Southeast Asia, Australia, Hong Kong and other markets, which more than made up for the fourth month of double-digit declines in US purchases”, reports Bloomberg.

Predictably, even the threat of tariffs has been enough to dampen trade. Remember, Washington and Beijing are still operating under a 90-day truce — set to expire on August 12, though it could be extended if a new agreement is reached — that holds off the imposition of higher tariff levels, namely, the tit-for-tat tariff increases that both countries had threatened. The truce also staves off export controls on certain critical rare-earth minerals and items that fall into the technology category. But still, current tariff levels mean a baseline 30 percent tariff on Chinese imports, which has been enough to depress trade.

For those in the Trump administration who are worried about trade deficits in particular, I suppose the good news is that we’ve made progress there: “For the last several decades, China has been selling as much as $4 worth of goods to the United States for each $1 of American goods that it buys”, reports The New York Times. Following China’s admission into the World Trade Organization, the trade deficit rose. Now, “tariffs have begun to reduce the imbalance. The United States announced on Tuesday that its overall trade deficit had narrowed in June to $60.2 billion, the smallest in nearly two years.”

It’s not clear why Trump administration officials, and the president himself, are so worried about trade deficits as something to eliminate for their own sake. We are dependent on Chinese goods to a rather substantial degree, which would pose a problem in the event of war with China (which is why the previous administration focused on improving our semiconductor manufacturing capabilities back in 2022). But you can just as easily make the case that it’s the vast volume of trade between the two countries — the deeply intertwined economies so reliant on each other (despite China’s claims of autarky and, more amusingly, communism) — that are incentivizing continued decent relations.

A few factors are at play that might help to explain why you likely haven’t felt a drastic increase in prices just yet. First, since there’s been a long lead-up to this trade war, many larger importers have stockpiled product over the last few months, so shortages haven’t been felt yet — they’ve just been selling off product they’ve been storing. Second, China has already managed to divert some stages of manufacturing to other countries—namely Vietnam — and some larger companies already have factories up and running in other Southeast Asian countries to avoid the “made in China” or “shipped from China” labeling. Expect more transshipping and manufacturing-locale creativity as a means of throwing customs officials off the scent.

August 7, 2025

“The Beer Store seems to be going down faster than, well, a nice, cold beer”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Line Scott Stinson discusses the precipitous fall in the fortunes of Ontario’s former beer retail behemoth now that beer is available in — shock! horror! — grocery stores and even (gasp!) convenience stores:

“The Beer Store” by Like_the_Grand_Canyon is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

A major Ontario retailer announced last month that it would permanently close 20 locations in August. This follows the closure of 10 of its stores just over a week before that, and precedes the planned shuttering of 10 more locations in September.

What business could possibly be swooning this much? A general retailer pummelled by Amazon? An exporter battered by Trump’s tariffs?

Nope: Beer. Seriously. The Beer Store seems to be going down faster than, well, a nice, cold beer.

Welcome to the uniquely weird world of alcohol sales in the province of Ontario, where somehow selling beer has become a struggling business.

Some background is probably required, for those who, understandably, must think by this point that I am full of shit.

For ages the vast majority of Ontario’s beer sales ran through The Beer Store, a chain of 450-ish outlets that was co-owned by Canada’s largest brewers. You could also get beer at the provincially owned LCBO, but the largest size available there was a six-pack. That was it. This system was exceedingly unfriendly to consumers, but owing to our puritan roots and the fact that the brewers had excellent lobbyists at Queen’s Park, it remained that way through decades — and governments of all three major parties.

About a decade ago, the Toronto Star got its hands on one of the agreements between The Beer Store and the province, which revealed what a sweetheart deal it was getting. Among other things, the deal greatly restricted the degree to which the LCBO could compete in beer retail, which caused much frothing over the fact that The Beer Store, long since owned by multinational conglomerates, was getting preferential treatment over the province’s own booze outlet.

The Liberal government of the day responded by loosening The Beer Store’s stranglehold on beer retail, but just a little: allowing it to be sold at a limited number of grocery stores, a hilariously small step but one that in Ontario was nevertheless a great leap forward.

Doug Ford’s Conservative government had long wanted to expand alcohol sales much further, but always stumbled over the fact that The Beer Store had a deal that prohibited such expansion until 2026. But then Ford wanted to hold an election last spring and he convinced The Beer Store to let him break that deal a year early for $225 million, which always seemed like an awfully steep price to move up that expansion by what amounted to a number of months.

It’s only in recently, though, that it has become clear how spectacularly dumb that giant payment was in the first place.

August 6, 2025

Actual data demolishes the “climate catastrophe” narrative

Filed under: Environment, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At The Conservative Woman, Paul Homewood summarizes the findings of a new report for the US Department of Energy:

A report by five independent, eminent scientists has blown apart the myth of catastrophic climate change, destroying the case for Net Zero in the process.

Judith Curry, Roy Spencer, Ross McKitrick, John Christy and Steve Koonin are all highly respected leaders in their respective fields. Their report was commissioned by the US Department of Energy (DOE) but written with no editorial oversight by the DOE and with no political influence whatsoever. Although it specifically covers the US, its findings have worldwide ramifications.

The 151-page report, A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the US Climate, reviews scientific certainties and uncertainties in how anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions have affected, or will affect, the nation’s climate, extreme weather events, and selected metrics of societal well-being.

Maybe the most relevant part concerns extreme weather. According to the report: ‘Most extreme weather events in the US do not show long-term trends. Claims of increased frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and droughts are not supported by US historical data. Additionally, forest management practices are often overlooked in assessing changes in wildfire activity. Global sea level has risen approximately 8 inches since 1900, but there are significant regional variations driven primarily by local land subsidence; US tide gauge measurements in aggregate show no obvious acceleration in sea level rise beyond the historical average rate.

A few graphs from the report tell the story, and you can see them at the end of this article.

  1. US landfalling hurricanes show no long-term trends, either in frequency or intensity;
  2. Heatwaves were much worse than now before the 1960s;
  3. Temperature extremes are reducing, as a greater number of extremely hot days is more than offset by fewer extremely cold ones;
  4. There has been a marked decline in the number of the strongest tornadoes, EF3 to EF5, since the 1970s. The increased numbers of weaker tornadoes is the result of better observation methods, including Doppler radar, not an actual increase;
  5. US droughts were much more severe for most of the historical record going back to 1895;
  6. While wildfire activity has marginally increased since the 1980s, it was considerably worse up to the Second World War. Most of these long-term changes are caused by fire management practices, not climate changes;
  7. Tide gauges all around the US show the same story – a slow and steady sea level rise beginning in the mid 19thC. The rate of rise can vary considerably from station to station because of local factors. New York and the rest of the Atlantic Coast, for example, has been subsiding since the Ice Age; Galveston is sinking as a direct result of groundwater withdrawals.

The scientists pour scorn on weather attribution computer models, which have become the media’s go-to source for climate apocalypse stories. These attribution models routinely claim that extreme weather events have been made more likely because of global warming. They are dismissed in the report, which highlights the lack of high-quality data and reliance on deficient climate models. Other scientists have not been so kind!

August 5, 2025

High tech and lust for power are a bad combination

Filed under: Business, Government, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Spaceman Spiff discusses the malign confluence of technocrats and amoral power-seekers (BIRM):

Today’s technocrats, assisted by billionaire tech bros, want to implement a digital surveillance grid that will eradicate any notion of anonymity or privacy forever.

Every major country, including the United States, is working on this with enthusiastic support from governments and their many agents.

The sales pitch is primarily platitudes about protecting people from harm, especially children.

What they seek is the end of the internet as it currently is, which means it will look a lot more like licensed corporate TV than the current free for all. From here their goal is to extend their surveillance operation into every aspect of our lives, from the energy we consume to the food we are permitted to eat.

This will probably cause a lot of damage, but it will ultimately fail.

Tech bro arrogance meets managerial control freakery

We are witnessing a partnership between the technocratic elite, with a limited understanding of technology, and silicone valley titans, who are blinded by the promise of technology.

Each group believes draconian surveillance systems combined with fancy data analysis will solve many societal problems and usher in a new era with them at the helm.

To the technocrats it promises full-spectrum control of all our choices. The food we eat, the material we consume, the ability to travel.

They are salivating at the thought of the ultimate control, the issuing of government-controlled digital currencies they can deactivate on a whim. No steak for the memelords, and no road trips for those without the right carbon profile.

They have been discussing these things for many years with a degree of enthusiasm bordering on mania.

The technologists see a chance to keep in with the powerful, to join the club. If they can be the trusted partner of the visionaries currently wrecking our world they will cash in and perhaps be spared from the concentration camps.

The technologists have powerful tools that promise amazing things. Machine learning, predictive programming, behavioural modelling.

Spotting patterns within trillions of data points is appealing to society’s tinkerers, all the better to predict problematic behaviours and to spot trends. Combined with nudge units and related horrors of social engineering this promises to be the holy grail for a technocratic managerialist regime absolutely convinced it can steer society in enlightened directions, just like they imagine they did during Covid.

It is all very futuristic, and it has clearly impressed our technology gurus as well as those who love control.

But along with the outsized data stores will come outsized cockups they cannot properly plan for.

Climate modelling has promised immense benefits and accuracy for decades and we have yet to see a single successful prediction. Indeed, some of the most famous climate predictions are almost comically wrong but nonetheless trigger endless rounds of funding, chatter, conferences and hubris. Such is the lure of anything that can be adapted to enforce top-down social control.

There have been many attempts to harness technology to predict the stock market, another obvious target. None of them worked either. It doesn’t seem to matter. No one is checking the track record. It is sold on its promise and that works because of who is buying. Or, rather, the type of person who embraces these schemes.

Digital surveillance, digital currencies, digital voting, digital IDs. Everything we do tracked and stored. Such absolute total control would make our superiors into gods as they exploit these powerful tools to direct us towards better versions of ourselves.

There is a delusion at play here. Those closest to this seem lost in their fantasies. They are blind.

Will the courts take away Tariff-master Trump’s favourite toy?

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

President Donald Trump’s second term in office has been dominated by his capricious and seemingly random deployment of tariffs as a bludgeon to intimidate and coerce America’s allies and enemies alike. In Reason, J.D. Tuccille considers the possibility of the courts taking away the one tool Trump has been using to get his own way in trade negotiations:

Everybody with a brain knows that tariffs are taxes. And they know that tariffs imposed on goods imported to the United States are largely paid by American businesses and consumers. The big question is whether tariffs unilaterally imposed by President Donald Trump under creative interpretations of emergency executive powers will withstand a federal court challenge. So far, the signs are promising for those hoping that a law intended to rein in the power of the presidency will not be read to permit the president to set trade policy of his own accord.

As CBS News reported this week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C. heard “oral arguments on Thursday in V.O.S. Selections v. Trump, a case brought by five small business owners and 12 states who allege they have been harmed by President Trump’s import taxes. V.O.S., the lead plaintiff in the case, is a New-York based wine importer.”

Representing the plaintiffs is the free-market Liberty Justice Center, along with co-counsel Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University’s Scalia Law School. The plaintiffs are challenging the Trump administration’s invocation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) as the basis for the “Liberation Day” tariffs on much of the world as well as related tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China.

A Law Intended To Trim Presidential Power, Not Expand It

The plaintiffs maintain that “under that law, the President may invoke emergency economic powers only after declaring a national emergency in response to an ‘unusual and extraordinary threat’ to national security, foreign policy, or the U.S. economy originating outside of the United States. The lawsuit argues that the Administration’s justification — a trade deficit in goods — is neither an emergency nor an unusual or extraordinary threat.”

What’s interesting is that Congress passed IEEPA not to expand presidential power, but to restrict it. According to a 2024 Congressional Research Service report, “following committee investigations that discovered that the United States had been in a state of emergency for more than 40 years, Congress passed the National Emergencies Act (NEA) in 1976 and IEEPA in 1977. The pair of statutes placed new limits on presidential emergency powers”. Under these laws, presidents are required to assess emergencies on an annual basis, extend them if necessary, and report on their status to Congress.

“Some experts argue that the renewal process has become pro forma“, the report acknowledges. “History shows that national emergencies invoking IEEPA often last nearly a decade, although some have lasted significantly longer — the first state of emergency declared under the NEA and IEEPA, which was declared in response to the taking of U.S. embassy staff as hostages by Iran in 1979, is in its fifth decade.”

August 4, 2025

The EU still dominates in one key area – over-regulation

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Economics, Europe, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Cláudia Ascensão Nunes identifies the one area that the EU has carved out a unique niche for itself … and it’s global in scope:

EU regulations delenda est

In a world where global power is measured by military strength, technological innovation, or cultural influence, it is striking that the European Union, without housing major tech giants or centers of disruptive innovation, has turned bureaucracy into a tool of global power. It shapes the behavior of global companies, including American big tech firms, which adapt their products to comply with European norms. This phenomenon is known as the “Brussels Effect” and has positioned the EU as the world’s regulatory superpower, fueling growing tensions, particularly with the United States following the re-election of Donald Trump.

The European market comprises 450 million consumers with significant purchasing power, making it an essential destination for global companies. However, access to this attractive market comes with detailed regulations based on the precautionary principle, ostensibly prioritizing consumer and environmental protection, and enforced by an efficient bureaucracy capable of implementing and enforcing rules with precision. This combination encourages companies to align their global operations with European standards, as maintaining different product versions for each region is costly and complex. In practice, this exports European standards worldwide.

American big tech companies such as Apple, Google, and Meta exemplify the impact of the “Brussels Effect,” as they face the requirements of legislations like the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the Digital Services Act (DSA). These laws have forced companies to overhaul their business models, often at high cost and with significant implications. The DMA, for instance, forced Apple to allow alternative app stores and third-party payment systems on iOS, leading the company to announce, in 2024, global changes to its app policy affecting users even outside Europe, with cost estimates in the billions of dollars to restructure its infrastructure and address revenue losses from the App Store.

Google, under the same regulation, was required to offer alternatives to its search engine on Android and to unbundle services such as YouTube, impacting its global strategy and requiring significant investments in new operating systems and interfaces. The company faced potential fines of up to 10% of its global revenue for non-compliance.

Meanwhile, Meta, under the DSA, was required to invest billions in content moderation systems, a serious imposition that openly seeks to control freedom of expression on a global scale. Operational costs increased by around 20%, according to market analysts. These costly adjustments are ultimately coercive due to the weight of the European market, demonstrating how Brussels shapes corporate behavior on a global scale.

These successive impositions and forced adaptations illustrate precisely Friedrich Hayek’s warning about the dangers of central planning. By replacing spontaneous order with top-down, uniform rules imposed by a technocratic authority, the capacity for local adaptation and respect for market complexity is lost. In this scenario, the European Union increasingly takes on the features of a regulatory Leviathan, a body concentrating disproportionate power in the hands of bureaucrats far removed from citizens, reducing freedom of choice and stifling innovation.

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