Quotulatiousness

April 15, 2025

Learning from history can be helpful … if you learn the correct lessons

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

Tim Worstall explains why Donald Trump and his advisors pointing to the historical experience of high tariffs after the US civil war fails to take into account all the technological changes that happened during that time:

Trump and his economics team clearly believe that tariffs work (at least for certain values of “work”)

Post US Civil War tariffs rose strongly. Doubled and in some cases more than that. It’s also true that the US economy expanded remarkably in that period. Went from the exploitative frontier (and slave) economy to the world’s richest manufacturing one in fact. So, yay for tariffs, obviously.

Except US trade kept increasing over this period. So, tariffs were not reducing imports. Or rather, the total level of imports did not fall because tariffs even as tariffs obviously had an effect upon limiting imports — without tariffs there would have been more.

So, what happened here? The answer is the ocean going steamship.

Tariffs are only one barrier to trade, one cost of trade. Paperwork is another, local standards a third, the theft by rapacious dockside unions a fourth and, obviously enough, the cost of transport a fifth. And we can go on — the cost of information flow a sixth and soon enough we’ll be Richard Murphy shouting eleventhly.

The ocean going steamship reduced the total costs of trade by more than the tariffs raised it. Therefore trade carried on increasing.

Now forward a century, the 1970s and following. We’re told that there’s been some grand policy turn to free trade. That everyone decided to gut the rich world of real manly jobs and ship them off to sweating coolies who could be paid peanuts. The GATT, WTO, just proof of the contention and look, look, they lowered tariffs!

But the container ship (which did for those rapacious dockside unions in most places other than the US), the jet liner, the telephone and now the internet have lowered all those other costs of trade massively. The total costs of trade have dropped massively whatever we could have, should have, done about tariffs. Global trade was going to expand by multiples whatever GATT or WTO did that is.

Which is why these tariffs now have to be so large and bigly. Because to get back to that 1970s – let alone 1870s — it’s necessary to raise total costs of trade to where they were, not just tariffs.

April 13, 2025

They really are trying to shut down “wrong” speech on the internet

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’ve always been a huge fan of free speech, which has been under continuous and escalating threat by many governments both in person and online. A side-note in the ongoing Canadian federal election has been Liberal leader Mark Carney’s commitment to addressing “online harm” as he defines it:

At a campaign rally in Hamilton, Ontario, Liberal leader Mark Carney unveiled what can only be described as a coordinated assault on digital freedom in Canada. Behind the slogans, applause lines, and empty rhetoric about unity, one portion of Carney’s remarks stood out for its implications: a bold, unapologetic commitment to controlling online speech under the guise of “safety” and “misinformation”.

    We announced a series of measures with respect to online harm … a sea of misogyny, anti-Semitism, hatred, conspiracy theories — the sort of pollution that’s online that washes over our virtual borders from the United States.

He then made clear his intention to act:

    My government, if we are elected, will be taking action on those American giants who come across [our] border.

The former central banker, who now postures as a man of the people, made it clear that if the Liberals are re-elected, the federal government will intensify efforts to regulate what Canadians are allowed to see, say, and share online. His language was deliberate. Carney condemned what he called a “sea of misogyny, anti-Semitism, hatred, conspiracy theories” polluting Canada’s internet space — language borrowed directly from the Trudeau-era playbook. But this wasn’t just a moral denunciation. It was a legislative preview.

Carney spoke of a future Liberal government taking “action on those American giants who come across our borders”. Translation: he wants to bring Big Tech platforms under federal control, or at least force them to play the role of speech enforcers for the Canadian state. He blamed the United States for exporting “hate” into Canada, reinforcing the bizarre Liberal narrative that the greatest threat to national unity isn’t foreign actors like the CCP or radical Islamists — it’s Facebook memes and American podcasts.

But the most revealing moment came when Carney linked online speech directly to violence. He asserted that digital “pollution” affects how Canadians behave in real life, specifically pointing to conjugal violence, antisemitism, and drug abuse. This is how the ground is prepared for censorship: first by tying speech to harm, then by criminalizing what the state deems harmful.

What Carney didn’t say is just as important. He made no distinction between actual criminal incitement and political dissent. He offered no assurance that free expression — a right enshrined in Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms — would be respected. He provided no definition of what constitutes a “conspiracy theory” or who gets to make that determination. Under this framework, any criticism of government policy, of global institutions, or of the new technocratic order could be flagged, throttled, and punished.

And that’s the point.

Mark Carney isn’t interested in dialogue. He wants obedience. He doesn’t trust Canadians to discern truth from fiction. He believes it’s the job of government — his government — to curate the national conversation, to protect citizens from wrongthink, to act as referee over what is and isn’t acceptable discourse. In short, he wants Ottawa to become the Ministry of Truth.

In Britain, their equivalent to Canada’s “online harms” legislation has induced Bitchute to discontinue service to users in the UK:

A READER alerted us to this statement posted on the Bitchute homepage, visible to geolocated UK users:

    After careful review and ongoing evaluation of the regulatory landscape in the United Kingdom, we regret to inform you that BitChute will be discontinuing its video sharing service for UK residents.

    The introduction of the UK Online Safety Act of 2023 has brought about significant changes in the regulatory framework governing online content and community interactions. Notably, the Act contains sweeping provisions and onerous corrective measures with respect to content moderation and enforcement. In particular, the broad enforcement powers granted to the regulator of communication services, Ofcom, have raised concerns regarding the open-ended and unpredictable nature of regulatory compliance for our platform.

    The BitChute platform has always operated on principles of freedom of speech, expression and association, and strived to foster an open and inclusive environment for content creators and audiences alike. However, the evolving regulatory pressures — including strict enforcement mechanisms and potential liabilities — have created an operational landscape in which continuing to serve the UK market exposes our company to unacceptable legal and compliance risks. Despite our best efforts to navigate these challenges, the uncertainty surrounding the OSA’s enforcement by Ofcom and its far-reaching implications leaves us no viable alternative but to cease normal operations in the UK.

    Therefore, effective immediately, BitChute platform users in the UK will no longer be available to view content produced by any other BitChute user. Because the OSA’s primary concern is that members of the public will view content deemed unsafe, however, we will permit UK BitChute users to continue to post content. The significant change will be that this UK user-posted content will not be viewable by any other UK user, but will be visible to other users outside of the UK. Users outside the UK may comment on that content, which the creator will continue to be able to read, delete, block, reply and flag. Users outside the UK may share UK-user produced content to other users outside of the UK as normal. In other words, for users in the UK, including content creators, the BitChute platform is no longer a user-to-UK user video sharing service.

This is the exactly the kind of consequence we at TCW feared a result of the overly restrictive and poorly written Online Safety Act 2023, which has now come into force.

The way the technology works is that websites can use a geolocation service to analyse the IP address your internet service provider has given your service, and use this to determine where you are. Google does this to tailor ads to you, Amazon does this to get you the most convenient version of their website.

Now Bitchute are using this service to protect themselves from the UK Government’s overreach.

The good news: there is a way round this.

April 3, 2025

English Electric Lightning – the F-22 of 1958

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

HardThrasher
Published 14 Jul 2023

In which we explore one of the more bonkers aircraft of the Cold War and all the reasons it made no sense whatsoever whilst being awesome in practically every way.
(more…)

March 28, 2025

The argument to keep the F-35 for the RCAF, despite Trump’s tariff war

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Government, Military, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

About a week ago, I linked to Alex McColl’s argument for splitting the Royal Canadian Air Force’s new fighter program into a small tranche of F-35s (because we’d already paid for the first 16 of an 88-plane order) and a much larger number of Swedish Gripen fighters from Saab, which on paper would give the RCAF enough aircraft to simultaneously meet our NATO and NORAD commitments. In the National Post, Andrew Richter makes the case to stick with the original plan, pointing to Canada’s truly horrifying history of cancelled military equipment and the costs of running two completely different fighter aircraft:

Canada does not have a very good track record when it comes to cancelling military contracts. About 30 years ago, the Liberal government of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien decided to cancel a contract that the Mulroney government had negotiated to purchase helicopters from a European consortium. Chrétien likened the new aircraft to a “Cadillac”, and maintained that our existing helicopters, the venerable Sea Kings, were still airworthy (despite their advancing age).

So the contract was torn up and the Canadian government paid a total of $500 million in cancellation fees. It would be another decade before a replacement helicopter was finally purchased (the American-made CH-148 Cyclones), and it was only in 2018 that the last Sea King was retired from service. The whole episode has been described by more than one observer as the worst defence procurement project in history. Which brings us to the tortured history of the F-35 purchase.

There is no need here to review the astonishing array of twists and turns that have taken place over the past few decades with regards to it. Suffice to note that when the F-35 contract was signed a few years ago, numerous defence analysts were in disbelief; many had long since concluded that it would never happen, and that Canada would continue flying our CF-18s until they literally could not fly anymore.

Any decision at this point to overturn the contract and go with the second-place finisher in the fighter jet competition — the Swedish Gripen — would have serious consequences. First, as with the helicopter cancellation decades ago, there will likely be financial penalties to pay, although so far the government has not commented on this.

In addition, a decision to buy the Gripen would mean that our Armed Forces would operate two fighter jets moving forward, because the first tranche of 16 F-35s is already bought and paid for. This would necessitate a wide range of additional costs, including training, maintenance and storage. Over decades, these costs would add billions (likely tens of billions) to the defence budget.

There are also issues of bilateral military co-operation, potential loss of affiliated contracts and force inter-operability to consider. The Canadian military has been primarily buying American military equipment for decades. This has been done both because our military generally prefers U.S. equipment and because it helps strengthen defence ties between our two countries. Deciding to buy a foreign aircraft would jeopardize these ties.

March 24, 2025

Postcards from academia’s zombie apocalypse

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

Ted Gioia points out exactly why them there kids ain’t learnin’ no more:

[High school students] just care about the next fix — because that’s how addicts operate. They have no long term plan, just short term needs.

They can’t get back to their phones fast enough.

How bad is it for educators right now?

Check out this commentary from one experienced teacher, who finds more engaged students in prison than a college classroom.

This comes from Corey McCall, a member of The Honest Broker community who recently posted this comment:

    I saw this decline in both reading ability and interest occur firsthand between 2006 and 2021 … I had experience teaching undergrads who hadn’t comprehended the material before, but hadn’t faced the challenge of students who could read it but who simply didn’t care …

    Since 2021 I’ve been teaching part-time in prison, and incarcerated students really want to learn. They love to read and think along with authors such as Plato, Descartes, and Simone de Beauvoir. I am teaching Intro to Theater this semester (the story of how this happened is interesting, but is irrelevant here) and students have been poring over Oedipus the King and asking why this amazing play isn’t performed more regularly alongside plays like Hamilton and The Lion King.

    I believe that there is hope for the humanities and perhaps for culture more generally, but it will be found in unusual places.

I’ve made a similar claim in this article — where I look outside of college for a rebirth of the humanities. It would be great if it happened in classrooms, too, but I fear that they are now the epicenter of the zombie wars.

Alas, I fear the number of zombie students is still growing — and at an accelerated pace.

Jonathan Haidt, who has taken the lead in exposing this crisis — and thus gets attacked fiercely by zombie apologists — shares horrifying trendlines from Monitoring the Future.

This group at the University of Michigan has studied student behavior since 1975. But what’s happening now is unprecedented.

Students are literally finding it too hard to think. So they can’t learn new things.

Below are more ugly numbers from another in-depth study — which looks at how children spend their day. It reveals that children under the age of two are already spending more than an hour per day on screens.

YouTube usage for this group has more than doubled in just four years.

Poor and marginalized communities are hurt the most. As your income drops, your children’s screen time more than doubles.

In other words, these children are getting turned into screen addicts long before they enter the school system.

This is why teachers are speaking out. They see the fallout every day in their classrooms.

The Concorde of the English Channel – Hoverspeed

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Ruairidh MacVeigh
Published 23 Nov 2024

Hello all! 😀

In something a little different from cars, trains and planes, we take a look at what has often been considered the Concorde moment for cross-channel ferry operations, the introduction of routine hovercraft services between Britain and France by the Hoverlloyd and Seaspeed companies, and later the Hoverspeed firm following their merger.

Hoverspeed was a truly exceptional mixture of speed and technological prowess, skirting across the surface of the English Channel and reducing journey times to but a fraction of what they were aboard regular ferry boats, but due to increasing costs, a fragile business case, and the arrival of the Channel Tunnel, Hoverspeed, much like Concorde, is now but a fading memory of a bygone era for international travel.

Chapters:
0:00 – Preamble
0:44 – Rise of the Hovercraft
3:04 – Tapping an Untapped Market
7:15 – Into Service
10:33 – Heyday of the Hovercraft
13:05 – Fragile Foundations
17:21 – Coming to the End
21:55 – Conclusion
(more…)

March 19, 2025

Solving the “Spotify problem”

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

Sadly, as Tim Worstall explains, it probably can’t be done:

It’s that time of year for the ritual complaints about Spotify. Woes, musicians can’t get any money.

The reason for this is that we out here, the Great Unwashed, value recorded music at something just above toss. Therefore musicians get paid, on average, just above toss. And there we have it, there’s the whole and the complete of the thing.

    Spotify is trumpeting big paydays for artists – but only a tiny fraction of them are actually thriving

Yep.

    $10bn is a hefty number, but it needs to be closely examined. This money, around two-thirds of its total income, is what Spotify has paid through to record labels and music publishers. Spotify cannot be held responsible for egregious label and publisher contracts, but it needs reiterating that only a portion of that $10bn will make its way to the people who wrote and recorded the music.

    The company also says this $10bn is “more than any single retailer has ever paid in a year” and is “10x the contribution of the largest record store at the height of the CD era”. That may be true, but it says less about Spotify’s benevolence and more about how streaming’s market share has mostly consolidated into the hands of four global heavyweights – Spotify, Apple, YouTube and Amazon.

Only one part of that has any relevance. The $10 billion and the 2/3rds.

Obviously there are costs to running a company. To running the servers which hold near all of all recorded music. Of being able to get that out onto the internet.

The $10 billion (OK, 15) is about what people think music is worth to them.

[…]

The reason your really important socially relevant indie band is touring the upper peninsula, still after all these years, the bogs are your changing room and the only rider you’ve been able to achieve is access to tap water, is that the general public values your output at some fraction above toss. Therefore you earn that fraction above toss.

Really, that’s it. It’s not capitalism it’s general public indifference. Really, folk just don’t care.

March 13, 2025

This explains a lot … IRS employees aren’t issued personal computers (in 2025!)

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:11

You sometimes read a small item and the information in it is so unexpected, it’s like being suddenly dumped into icy cold water, like this little item from Reason‘s “Morning Roundup” email:

Everything’s computer! But not at the IRS.

“The upheaval at the IRS is already having real impacts,” reports The Washington Post, referring to plans (already underway) to reduce the workforce by half. “Sources familiar with the agency report that its level of phone service is falling, in part because employees are spending their time waiting to use shared computers to respond to [the Department of Government Efficiency’s] requests for weekly emails detailing their work. (Not all IRS employees are issued their own computers.) And they report that taxpayer behavior is already adjusting to the reality of a diminished IRS workforce: IRS receipts — taxes paid already and taxes the agency is scheduled to receive from those who have already filed — are significantly lower than they were at this point last filing season.”

Wait, back up. They don’t have their own computers? And they’re sitting in a queue like schoolchildren in the library, waiting to use a single shared computer to respond to Musk’s five-things-you-did-last-week emails? How long does it take to write those emails? And why don’t they have computers?

Look, I’m worried by the slapdash approach Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has taken. But the continued federal employee freakout over being asked to justify their jobs by detailing what they’ve done at work makes no sense to me.

I know a girl from college who is a “Work-Life Specialist and Mindfulness Facilitator” at the U.S. Department of Transportation. She leads yoga sessions and “meditation made simple” workshops for federal employees, per her LinkedIn. This is a job I don’t want my taxpayer dollars funding. For Musk to apply scrutiny to this type of thing is a huge win for the American people.

There are lots of legitimate criticisms to make about whether cuts in staffing will actually lead to a better IRS. Taxpayer services will surely suffer if there are fewer people available to answer phone calls and emails; refunds might be delayed, which comes at a real cost to people. Worse tax collection means less revenue for the government, and it’s not like spending is under control — expect the fiscal hole we’re in to get worse if this continues. But “we just can’t figure out how to ration computer use in the year 2025 to craft a bullet-pointed email” is an absurd line that elicits no sympathy, and just leaves me confused about what the hell they’ve been doing all this time. Everything’s not, in fact, computer in the federal government.

March 7, 2025

Bricking the internet

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

In The Line, Phil A. McBride explains how the “net giants” have steadily nibbled away at the built-in resilience of the original internet design so that we’re all far more vulnerable to network outages than ever before:

The Internet was originally conceived in the 1960s to be a resilient, disparate and distributed network that didn’t have any single point of failure. This is still true today. While there are large data centres around the world that aggregate traffic, we don’t depend on them. If one were to go offline, things would slow down, but the data would still flow.

The advent of the cloud, though, has completely changed how we use the Internet, especially in the worlds of business, education and government. And the cloud, alas, is not nearly as resilient.

Fifteen years ago, your average small or medium business would have their own servers. Those servers would be used to send/receive email, store files, and run various business or collaborative applications. Some of these servers may have been hosted offsite at a data centre to provide better security or speed of access, but the physical infrastructure belonged to someone — it was something you could touch and, more importantly, account for. Many companies kept their servers on site.

If a company’s server or network went down, it affected that company. They couldn’t send or receive email, they couldn’t open files, collaborate with staff or clients. They were offline.

But only they were offline.

Fast forward to today. Microsoft 365 dominates the corporate productivity services market with an estimated 45-50 per cent market share worldwide, with Google Workspace coming second, with around 30-35 per cent. This means that approximately 80 per cent of businesses are dependent on one of two vendors for their ability to transact business and communicate at even the most basic level.

Government and government-provided services, like education, health care and defence, are just as reliant on these services as the business world.

In today’s world, when Microsoft’s or Google’s services suffer a hiccup, it doesn’t affect one business. Or ten, or a hundred. Tens of thousands of business, and government offices and civil society institutions, all go offline. Simultaneously. Mom-and-pop stores, multi-billion-dollar corporations, elementary schools, hospitals, entire governments, all go out, all at once.

And we haven’t even talked about how Amazon, Microsoft and Google control almost two-thirds of the world’s web/application hosting market share. If one or all of those services go down, most of the websites you go to on a regular basis would suddenly become unreachable.

Kinda-sorta related to the above is Ted Gioia‘s “State of the Culture” post:

So remember the first rule: The culture always changes first. And then everything else adapts to it.

That’s why teens plugged into the most lowbrow culture often grasp the new reality long before elites figure it out. This was true 50 years ago, and it’s still true today.

So that’s our second rule: If you want to understand the emerging culture, look at the lives of teens and twenty-somethings — and especially their digital lives. (In some cases those are their only lives.)

The web has changed a lot in recent years, hasn’t it? Not long ago, the Internet was loose and relaxed. It was free and easy. It was fun. There wasn’t even an app store.

We made our own rules.

The web had removed all obstacles and boundaries. I could reach out to people all over the world.

The Internet, in those primitive days, put me back in touch with classmates from my youth. It reconnected me with friends I’d made during my many trips overseas. It strengthened my ties with relatives near and far. I even made new friends online.

It felt liberating. It felt empowering.

But it also helped my professional life. I had regular exchanges with writers and musicians in various cities and countries—without leaving the comfort of my home.

I made new connections. I opened new doors.

And this didn’t just happen to me. It happened to everybody.

“The world is flat,” declared journalist Thomas Friedman. All the barriers were gone — we were all operating on the same level. It felt like some imaginary Berlin Wall had fallen.

That culture of flatness changed everything. Ideas spread faster. Commerce moved more easily. Every day I encountered something new from some place far away.

But then it changed.

Twenty years ago, the culture was flat. Today it’s flattened.

I still participate in many web platforms — I need to do it for my vocation. (But do I really? I’ve started to wonder.) But now they feel constraining.

Even worse, they now all feel the same.

Instead of connecting with people all over the world, I now get “streaming content” 24/7.

Facebook no longer wants me stay in touch with friends overseas, or former classmates, or distant relatives. Instead it serves up memes and stupid short videos.

And they are the exact same memes and videos playing non-stop on TikTok — and Instagram, Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, YouTube shorts, etc.

Every big web platforms feels the exact same.

That whole rich tapestry of my friends and family and colleagues has been replaced by the most shallow and flattened digital fluff. And this feeling of flattening is intensified by the lack of context or community.

The only ruling principle is the total absence of purpose or seriousness.

The platforms aggravate this problem further by making it difficult to leave. Links are censored. Intelligence is punished by the dictatorship of the algorithms. Every exit is blocked, and all paths lead to the endless scroll.

All this should be illegal. But somehow it isn’t.

March 4, 2025

“Rare metals” are not really rare at all

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

On the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, John Ringo explains why the US doesn’t exploit its own vast reserves of “rare metals”:

I love every single time someone goes ‘CHINA HAS A LOCK ON RARE METALS! WE NEED TO ALLY WITH COUNTRY X TO GET RARE METALS! WE NEED RARE METALS!’

The US has huge deposits of pretty much everything we need. Lithium? Got it. Neodymium? Got it. Silver? Spades. Montana’s practically made of it.

The reason we don’t mine it here is the stupid ways our laws are written and allowing the Chinese to play us.

There’s an area in TX that has as much neodymium as the Chinese deposits that supply 98% of the world’s neodymium. (Critical material in rare earth magnets which are in turn critical in … so many things. Drones. Electric cars. Etc.)

There’s even a registered mine. Which was open.

Why is it closed?

The Chinese drop the prices below production cost (dumping) every time they open. Then jack the price and play political games with it when it closes.

There’s a silver mine in Montana (critical in modern solar) which has been trying to open for FIFTEEN YEARS.

Why can’t it open?

Tied up in environmental lawsuits because Congress won’t amend the EPA act that allows anyone to sue for any reason whatsoever and damn having mining or manufacturing WE DON’T NEED THAT WE NEED TO SAVE THE WORLD!

AND SLAVA UKRAINE YOU MAGA BASTARDS! TRUMP IS PUTIN’S COCK HOLSTER! WE NEED TO MANUFACTURE MORE WEAPONS TO SEND TO UKRAINE BUT ONLY IN A PERFECTLY ENVIRONMENTAL FASHION!

‘Environmental’ emphasis on the ‘mental’.

Autarchy is the idea of a country neither importing nor exporting. Just keep everything in the country. Ourselves alone.

A few have tried it from time to time. India did at one point.

Nobody can do it. There’s ‘something’ that you need from outside.

Except the US. We more or less need some tropical stuff. Like coffee, tea, sugar. Palm oil. (Super important in soap.)

But we can, in reality, even dispense with tree rubber. We can make it all from artificial.

Which comes from oil.

And we have enough oil. Thank a fracker. We’ve got enough oil in Southwest Texas to supply the WORLD for a thousand years.

(Touch expensive compared to Persian Gulf. But the price is constantly coming down.)

All we need to do is change laws, and we can almost go it without any other country. Without import or export.

I’m not suggesting we do.

But I am suggesting we dedicate some serious attention to things like China manipulating trade to ensure they have a lock on rare metals.

That we prioritize internal production.

That we decouple critical issues from other countries.

Cause the way the world is going, we’re reaching a point we’re gonna have to go it alone and if we have allies and trade partners, I’d suggest they be in the Western Hemisphere.

Cause those fuckers cross the pond be crazy.

Fifteen years ago, Tim Worstall explained why China’s rare earth monopoly won’t stand up in the long run.

QotD: Twitter-thought and the basic university student

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

Like most people, I gave [Twitter] a look-see when I first heard about it. I quickly concluded that it wasn’t for me. Not because it was vapid garbage, you understand — Facebook was always vapid garbage, but it had some utility for all that, as Twitter does — but because I just don’t think in discrete chunks the way Twitter requires. I just can’t process the fact that “replies” are their own distinct utterances, devoid of all other context, that can come in at random times. A Twitter “thread” is a mad babble of people shouting past each other; it’s not “communication” in any sense my brain can handle, so I dropped it …

Alas, Twitter is still a thing that exists, so even though I tried it for about five minutes and promptly forgot all about it, my students didn’t … which explains, like nothing else can, their bizarre approach to classwork. For every quiz I gave, no matter how straightforward the question, I’d have at least one barracks lawyer coming to me afterwards, trying to weasel her (always her, mentally if not biologically) way back into some points, with some elaborate rationale why her picking the wrong answer was really my fault, because in class I said “The Russians won the Battle of Stalingrad” and the question on the quiz was “Who lost the Battle of Stalingrad?” and how is she supposed to be expected to recognize that “lost” is the opposite of “won” when it comes to battles and blah blah blah (thanks, Greta!).

Or the other depressingly common thing, which was when that same kid, who went to the fucking mattresses for one point on one quiz — which amounts to something like 0.01% of her final semester grade — just didn’t turn in the term paper. This happened at all academic levels, from community college (where you often lose half a class or more by the end of a semester) all the way up through the SPLACs, which cost something in the neighborhood of $70K a year all in. I never could figure this out — I mean, how can they not know that the term paper is 30% of your final grade, while all the quizzes put together amount to 10%? — but then it hit me: Twitter.

Everything on social media has, of necessity, equal weight, in that whatever’s in your feed at the present time is the only thing that exists. So when Snowflake was in “schoolwork” mode and missed that one question on that one quiz, it was the only thing that mattered in her world. My quiz was at the top of her Twitter feed, so she had to put all her energy into battling me for it. By the end of the semester, though, she was in “sorority” mode, or “getting ready for that kickass ski vacation” mode, or “beefing with that basic bitch Becky” mode, so my term paper barely registered — if she bothered to turn anything in at all, it was copy-pasted straight from wikipedia, because who cares, when Becky is out there on Twitter, h8ing?

Severian, “Also Sprach Froggy”, Founding Questions, 2021-09-30.

February 24, 2025

QotD: Great Men when it’s time to do x

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

    Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry @pegobry_en
    This is obvious, but: Elon breaks libs’ brains because he is the living vindication of the Great Man theory of history. Literally nothing he built would have existed without him, and without him clearly exhibiting superior intelligence and indomitable will.

Not so fast.

I’m here to tell you, because I lived it, that the experience of being the “Great Man” who changed history can feel very different from the inside.

I’m not going to try to speak for Elon. Maybe he feels like a colossus out of Thomas Carlyle. I’ll just say that I didn’t feel like that when I was doing my thing, and I’m doubtful that he does more than a small part of the time.

Somebody was going to take the concept of “open source” to the mainstream fairly soon after general access to the Internet started to happen in the mid-1990s. But it didn’t have to be me; you get steam-engines when it’s steam-engine time, and it was time. Dennard scaling and cheap wide-area networking were the underlying drivers. Conditions like that generate ESR-equivalents.

Now it’s time for rockets to Mars. The drivers include extremely cheap and powerful computing, 3-D printing, and advances in both metallurgy and combustion chemistry. Conditions like this generate Elon-equivalents.

It is more than possible to look like the Great Man from the outside but to feel like — to know — that you are almost at the mercy of currents of change much larger than yourself. Yes, you have some ability to shape outcomes. And you can fail, leaving the role to the next person to notice the possibilities.

If Elon is like me, he sometimes plays the autonomous Great Man in order to get the mission done, because he knows that the most effective way to sell ideas is to be a charismatic prophet of them. But if he’s like me, he also feels like the mission created him to make itself happen, and if he fails or breaks the mission will raise up another prophet by and by.

I’m not claiming the Great Man theory is entirely wrong — it takes some exceptional qualities to be an Elon, or even a lesser prophet like me — but it’s incomplete. Great Men don’t entirely create themselves, they are thrust upwards and energized by missions that are ready to happen.

ESR, Twitter, 2024-10-31.

February 21, 2025

Tech enshittification continues

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

Ted Gioia notes that even the world’s biggest search engine provider is doing almost everything it can to make your search experiences worse and worse:

Almost everything in the digital world is turning into its opposite.

  • Social media platforms now prevent people from having a social life.
  • ChatGPT makes you less likely to chat with anybody.
  • Relationship apps make it harder for couples to form lasting relationships.
  • Health and wellness websites make it almost impossible to find reliable health advice — instead peddling products of dubious efficacy.
  • Product review sites now prevent people from reading impartial reviews by actual users of the product, instead operating as pay-for-play vehicles.
  • Etc. etc. etc.

You can often tell by the name. PayPal will never pay you a penny, and it’s certainly not your pal. Microsoft Teams only works if you stay away from your team. If you keep using Safari, you will never go on an actual Safari.

But the worst reversal is happening with search engines. They now prevent you from searching.

I’ve known Google up close and personal from the start. I initially found the company quirky and endearing — but those days ended long ago. The company is now clueless and creepy.

Almost every day I read some ugly news story about Google. Here are a few headlines from a typical week:

This company goes out of its ways to do mischief. Messing with people is in its DNA.

Meanwhile, its base business is degrading at an alarming rate. The company doesn’t seem to care.

In a strange turnaround, search engines don’t want you to search for anything. That’s because searching leads you on a journey — and Google doesn’t want you to leave their platform.

The search engine was invented as your gateway to the web. The inventors of this technology tried to index every page on the Internet — so that you could find anything and everything.

That was an exciting era. Search engines were like train stations or airports. They took you all over the world.

At Google today, the goal is the exact opposite. You never leave the station.

Techies once described the Internet as a digital highway. But we need a different metaphor nowadays. Web platforms want to trap you on their app, and keep you there forever.

So, instead of a digital highway, we have a digital roach motel. They let the roaches check in — but not check out.

February 12, 2025

Electric vehicles and cold Canadian weather

Filed under: Cancon, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Canadian government has been a noisy proponent for Canadians replacing their internal combustion vehicles with electric-powered alternatives, but unlike places like California it gets cold in Canada … very cold indeed at times. The CAA conducted some tests on popular EVs to find out how typical cold conditions impact the range of the cars:

Nissan Leaf electric vehicle charging.
Photo by Nissan UK

CAA is out with the results from their first ever road tests of how electric vehicles (EV) charge and perform in a Canadian winter.

They tested out 14 electric vehicles which included seven of the top 10 sellers in Canada. They were driven from Ottawa to Mont Tremblant and the temperatures during the drive ranged from -7 to -15 degrees Celsius.

Each vehicle was driven until the battery completely died to determine the range in winter conditions. The results were compared to the estimated driving range published by Natural Resources Canada. CAA says officially posted EV ranges (below) in Canada are based on overall, year-round numbers.

“CAA is responding to a top concern of Canadians when it comes to EVs,” said Ian Jack, vice-president, public affairs, CAA National. “We measured the effective range of electric vehicles in cold weather and how quickly they charge. These insights are critical for both current EV owners and those considering making the switch.”

The association says a recent poll revealed more than two-thirds of Canadians say the drop in driving range during winter is the top barrier to purchasing an EV. Out of those who own an EV, 65 per cent said they experienced a lower battery range in extreme cold weather.

The rest results showed the vehicles drove 14 to 39 per cent less than their official range.

“The vast difference in results really highlights the importance in truth and advertising when it comes to EV range and making sure that Canadians are comparing numbers when it comes to winter performance,” said Kristine D’Arbelles, Senior Director of Public Affairs for CAA National.

February 1, 2025

China produced DeepSeek, Britain is mired in deep suck

Filed under: Britain, China, Government, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the Sean Gabb Newsletter, Sebastian Wang discusses the contrast between China’s recent release of the DeepSeek AI platform that appears to be eating the collective lunches of the existing LLM products by US firms and the devotion of the British Labour government to plunge ever deeper into their Net Zero dystopian vision:

Net Zero image from Jo Nova

For those few readers who may be unaware, DeepSeek is an advanced open-source artificial intelligence platform developed in China. Released in late 2024, it has set a new standard in AI, outperforming American counterparts in adaptability and capability. It excels in natural language processing, machine learning, and data analysis, and — critically — it is open source. Unlike the proprietary models that dominate the American tech landscape, DeepSeek allows anyone to adapt, improve, and use it as he sees fit. It’s not just a technological triumph for China; it’s a serious challenge to American domination of information technology and an opportunity for those who want to break free from the stranglehold of Silicon Valley.

As a Chinese person, I take pride in this achievement. It’s a testament to what my people can achieve with focus and ambition. But my concern is less about taking pride in what China has done and more about lamenting how little Britain has contributed to this revolution. Britain, the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, seems to have no place in this new world of AI-driven progress. The question is why?

The answer is simple: The people who rule Britain have chosen decline. Crushing taxes on income and capital gains, and inheritance taxes, punish those who want to create wealth. Endless regulations stifle ambition, making it easier to conform than to innovate. Worst of all, there are the net zero policies, which have made energy costs the highest in the world, making electricity unaffordable and unreliable. Industries that depend on energy have been priced out of existence, and the dreamers and doers who might have built the next DeepSeek are being ground down by a system designed to reward mediocrity.

Net zero is not a noble goal born of misconception; it’s a disaster by design. It’s a wealth transfer scheme that takes from ordinary working people and hands billions to a small clique of green profiteers. The winners are the wind farm builders, the financiers running opaque carbon trading schemes, and the activists cashing in on government handouts. The losers are everyone else — families struggling to pay energy bills, businesses forced to close, and an entire country left unable to compete.

Compare this to China. DeepSeek wasn’t luck — it was the product of a system that rewards innovation. Electricity in China is cheap and reliable. Regulations focus on enabling progress, not blocking it. Ambition is celebrated, not treated as a threat. The ruling class there, for all its many and terrible faults, understands the value of creating wealth and technological self-reliance. Britain’s ruling class, by contrast, has abandoned the idea of building anything. They’d rather sit in the City of London, counting money made elsewhere, than see industry and innovation flourish in the country at large. They have chosen decline — not for them, but for us.

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress