Quotulatiousness

January 26, 2023

Ukraine to receive Challenger II, M1 Abrams, and Leopard 2 tanks … both a solution and a new set of problems

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, History, Military, Russia, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney outlines some of the benefits Ukraine will receive with this new transfusion of AFVs … and also the new and exacerbated set of practical problems that goes along with fielding so many different makes and models of tanks:

A British army Challenger Main Battle Tank, of 1 Royal Regiment of Fusiliers (1RRF), is shown returning to base after completing a firing mission as part of Exercise MedMan.
1RRF Battle group were based at the British Army Training Unit Suffield (BATUS) in Canada.
MOD photo by Mike Weston via Wikimedia Commons.

A column getting into all the details of why [the German government] were withholding said blessing would be several times longer than this one will be. Suffice it to say this is just the latest manifestation of Germany’s extreme discomfort with this war. Some of it relates to the lingering fallout of Germany’s blood-soaked history. But we would be naïve not to attribute at least some of the reluctance to Russia’s deep influence among some segments of the German ruling elite.

Germany has contributed to the defence of Ukraine, and it would be unfair to deny that. It would not be unfair to note that Germany has typically only done so later than the other allies, and under enormous pressure.

As part of the deals being announced, the United States will be sending several dozen of its M1 Abrams tanks, and Germany will send Leopards. Berlin will also allow other allies to send further Leopards. (Canada hasn’t committed to sending any of ours yet, but our few remaining Leopards are reported to be in poor shape, and are also all the way across an ocean, so we might not even be asked.) The British will send the Challengers. This gives Germany the ability to claim, with a reasonably straight face, that it has not chosen to escalate the conflict. Heavens, no! It’s simply moving in lockstep with its allies! As fig leaves go, it’s a pretty small and transparent one, but for the purposes of diplomacy and maintaining the appearance of allied solidarity, it’ll do.

And this brings us to the problem that the plan is exacerbating. A year ago, the Ukrainian military was largely armed and equipped along Russian lines — both militaries were, after all, descendants of the Soviet Red Army. Since then, much of its original equipment has been destroyed or lost, but this has generally been offset by an influx of Western weapons into the country as the allies empty their arsenals and get their production lines running again. This has allowed Ukraine to keep fighting, far more effectively than the Russians, among many others, expected. Despite huge losses of manpower, the Ukrainian military seems to actually have grown stronger as the war has gone on, thanks to the power of its new weapons.

Sending news is good news to that extent. It will make Ukraine stronger still. But it is also producing a situation where the Ukrainians are armed with an absurdly unwieldy mix of weapon systems. This is laying the groundwork for a future logistics disaster.

Any individual soldier can learn to use any specific piece of equipment. That’s just a matter of training and experience. Soldiers are smart. The longer they serve, the quicker they’ll get at picking up new pieces of equipment and kit. The challenge is more on the backend. The logistics of sustaining an arsenal of completely mixed weapon systems is a nightmare. Not only must Ukraine procure a huge variety of calibers of ammunition, it must also procure, sort, and then distribute a bewildering array of spare parts to keep all these weapons running. It’s not that this is impossible. The fact that Ukraine fights on is proof that it is not. But it adds tremendous cost and complexity, and requires a much larger effort to sustain than would be the case if Ukrainian units were equipped with standard weapons across comparable units.

The numbers of NATO tanks are initially small enough that only a few battalions can be re-equipped with the donated AFVs, but each different “brand” needs its own specialized support in the way of maintenace, repair, and re-supply. Ukraine is going to have to have at least a company-sized, fully trained maintenance unit for each battalion of NATO tanks and the logistics system will have to ensure that the different types of ammunition and ordinary wear-and-tear maintenance spares are delivered quickly enough to keep those battalions combat-ready. Some NATO nations with much better facilities sometimes struggle to do this for a single type of AFV, never mind for several different types.

Update: Can’t help but agree with Matt here.

January 25, 2023

Sometimes – rarely – the boss really does embody all those “creative genius” tropes

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

At The Honest Broker, Ted Gioia considers the impact Steve Jobs had on Apple:

I share these reactions, because many other sectors of our culture (especially music) suffer from a similar malaise. And in most instances, the problems start at the top.

I’ve seen in so many different circumstances how the entire organization takes on the personality of the CEO — for better or worse. I’ve also seen how the replacement of a single individual can turn a bad situation into a great one, and vice versa.

The case of Steve Jobs is fascinating, and perhaps alarming too. He left Apple twice, and both times something similar happened.

In the first instance, Jobs was fired as CEO in 1985. The last thing he did before losing his job was launch the Macintosh computer. When he returned to Apple 12 years later, the single biggest source of revenue for the company was still the Macintosh. After more than a decade, the company was depending on the creativity of the guy they fired.

Steve Jobs died in 2011, and we have now reached the exact same time lag as before. Twelve years have elapsed since Jobs’s final departure, and the last big project he undertook before his death was the iPhone. And now after a dozen years, Apple’s largest source of revenues is still the iPhone. Once again, they are riding the momentum of his creativity, and have done shockingly little to expand his legacy.

By the way, in the interim between the two stints as Apple CEO, Jobs founded NeXT and ran Pixar. Fifteen Pixar films now rank among the 50 highest grossing animated films of all time, and they have won 23 Academy Awards. And because of his sale of Pixar to Disney, the entrepreneur’s widow Laurene Powell Jobs inherited 138 million shares of Disney stock.

That’s pretty good results for the lull in your tech career after you’ve been fired.

I know Jobs has many detractors. And maybe he was a hardass boss. In fact, he almost certainly was a hardass boss. But it’s tough to ignore those results — which not only changed a company but the entire culture of our times.

The “everyone is literally Hitler” expert

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

Chris Bray helpfully points out that Benito Mussolini combed his hair, which is also what Emmanuel Goldstein does:

We’re overproducing hysterical expert-scolds. I keep finding more of them in social media, loud and weirdly nasty, like feral cats in a hay pile. Here comes a shrewd take from Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at NYU who has a highly marketable sideline as an expert on authoritarianism, responding to some genius-level political analysis from a guy with the requisite Ukrainian flag in his profile:

Observation: Marjorie Taylor Greene wore makeup on television.

Analysis: “That’s what Fascists do.”

See, members of Congress usually go on television in just an old pair of gym shorts and a dirty Schlitz Lite t-shirt, but this one particular person is trying to be Literally Adolf Hitler, so she wore a necklace and some lipstick. Textbook fascism!

Meanwhile, the governor of Florida just said that students in schools should put their phones away until recess, so they can focus on learning. This, too, is precisely identical to blackshirts marching on Rome:

Spend five minutes with this person’s social accounts, if you must, because this is what she does. It’s fascinatingly random, like a lady who lives on a bus bench wandering around the neighborhood describing random objects as Nazis. That’s a Nazi tangerine! That scrap lumber invaded Poland! Discarded juice boxes are Francisco Franco!

Eventually, if you make enough completely random angry noise, you get tenure and a book deal.

January 24, 2023

The Vietnam War still has echoes in US politics

Filed under: Asia, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In UnHerd, Dominic Sandbrook outlines the end of US involvement in the Vietnam War:

From George L. MacGarrigle, The United States Army in Vietnam: Combat Operations, Taking the Offensive, October 1966-October 1967. Washington DC: Center of Military History, 1998. (Via Wikimedia)

In the course of his troubled presidency, Richard Nixon spoke 14 times to the American people about the war in Vietnam. It was in one of those speeches that he coined the phrase “the silent majority”, while others provoked horror and outrage from those opposed to America’s longest war. But of all these televised addresses, none enjoyed a warmer reaction that the speech Nixon delivered on 23 January 1973, announcing that his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, had achieved a breakthrough in the Paris peace talks with the North Vietnamese.

At last, Nixon said, the war was over. At a cost of 58,000 American lives and some $140 billion, not to mention more than two million Vietnamese lives, the curtain was falling. The last US troops would be brought home. South Vietnam had won the right to determine its own future, while the Communist North had pledged to “build a peace of reconciliation”. Despite the high price, Nixon insisted Americans could be proud of “one of the most selfless enterprises in the history of nations”. He had not started the war, but it had dominated his presidency, earning him the undying enmity of those who thought the United States should just get out. But the struggle had been worth it to secure “the right kind of peace, so that those who died and those who suffered would not have died and suffered in vain”. He called it “peace with honour”.

Fifty years on, Nixon’s proclamation of peace with honour has a bitterly ironic ring. As we now know, much of what he said that night was misleading, disingenuous or simply untrue. South Vietnam was in no state to defend itself, and collapsed just two years later. The North Vietnamese had no intention of laying down their weapons, and resumed the offensive within weeks. And Nixon and Kissinger never seriously thought they had secured a lasting peace. They knew the Communists would carry on fighting, and fully intended to intervene with massive aerial power when they did. But then came Watergate. With Nixon crippled, Congress forbade further intervention and slashed funding to the government in Saigon. On 30 April 1975, North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the gates of the presidential palace, and it really was all over.

Half a century later, have the scars of Vietnam really healed? It remains not only America’s longest war but one of its most divisive, comparable only with the Civil War in its incendiary cultural and political impact. The fundamental narrative trajectory of the late Sixties — the turn from shiny space-age Technicolor optimism to strident, embittered, anti-technological gloom — would have been incomprehensible without the daily images of suffering and slaughter on the early evening news. It was Vietnam that destroyed trust in government, in institutions, in order and authority. In 1964, before Lyndon Johnson sent in combat troops after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, fully three-quarters of Americans trusted the federal government. By 1976, a year after the fall of Saigon, not even one in four did so.

It was in the crucible of Vietnam, too, that you can spot many of the tensions that now define American politics. Perhaps the most potent example came in May 1970, after Nixon invaded nominally neutral Cambodia to eliminate the North Vietnamese Army’s jungle sanctuaries. First, on 4 May, four students were shot and killed by the National Guard during a demonstration at Kent State University, Ohio. Then, on 8 May, hundreds more students picketed outside the New York Stock Exchange, only to be attacked by several hundred building workers waving American flags.

The “hard hat riot”, as it became known, was the perfect embodiment of patriotic populist outrage at what Nixon’s vice president, leading bribery enthusiast Spiro Agnew, called “the nattering nabobs of negativism … an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterise themselves as intellectuals”. Today it seems almost predictable, just another episode in the long-running culture wars. But at the time it seemed genuinely shocking. And with his brilliantly ruthless eye for a tactical advantage, Nixon saw its potential. When he invited the construction workers’ leaders to the White House two weeks later, he knew exactly what was doing. “The hard hat will stand as a symbol, along with our great flag,” he said, “for freedom and patriotism and our beloved country”.

An alternative theory about German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s hesitation to allow Ukraine access to Leopard 2 tanks

Filed under: Germany, Military, Russia, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’ve been going on the assumption that the German government was terrified of Russian reaction if they allowed some Leopard 2 tanks to be donated to the Ukrainian forces, but eugyppius points out there’s another strong contending explanation:

Leopard 2A6M in Afghanistan

Years of peace in Europe, an ageing population and a corresponding focus on expensive social programmes have caused Germany to put its defence industry into near-hibernation. Only a little over 2,000 Leopard 2s have ever seen the light of day. Each one is a hand-built machine that takes two years to make. If Germany permits the export of the European supply of Leopard 2s to Ukraine, the Russians will grind them to nothing within months, and then Europe will have no tanks except the tanks that the Americans sell them:

    Defence industry representatives, who wish to remain anonymous, report that the Americans are offering their own used tanks as replacements to [European] countries able to supply Leopard 2s to Ukraine, together with a long-term industrial partnership. Any country that accepts the American offer would be hard to win back for the German tank industry. Berlin’s influence in armament policy would decrease correspondingly.

Tanks are driven by men, who have to be trained in the operation of specific models. Their use moreover requires a whole supply chain of munitions and especially spare parts, which the Americans are eager to offer. The upshot is that, once Europe opts into American armour, it will never switch back, and Germany will be out of the game for good. Nor should we lend much credence to the idea that our very few tanks will make any difference either way for Ukraine’s prospects. The insistence that Scholz release the Leopard 2s is simply an attempt to edge Germany further out of the European arms industry and into a position of lesser political and economic influence in Europe, so that the United States can fill the gap.

Noah Carl, over at the Daily Sceptic, drew attention last week to remarks by the French intellectual Emmanuel Todd that “this war is about Germany“:

    After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Zbigniew Brzezinski called Eurasia the new “great chessboard” of world politics … The Russian nationalists and ideologues like Alexander Dugin indeed dream of Eurasia. It is on this “chessboard” that America must defend its supremacy – this is Brzezinski’s doctrine. In other words, it must prevent the rapprochement of Russia and China. The financial crisis of 2008 made it clear that with reunification Germany had become the leading power in Europe and thus also a rival of the United States. Until 1989, it had been a political dwarf. Now Berlin let it be known that it was willing to engage with the Russians. The fight against this rapprochement became a priority of American strategy. The United States had always made it clear that they wanted to torpedo [Nord Stream 2]. The expansion of NATO in Eastern Europe was not primarily directed against Russia, but against Germany. Germany, which had entrusted its security to America, became the Americans’ target [in the destruction of the pipeline]. I feel a great deal of sympathy for Germany. It suffers from this trauma of betrayal by its protective friend — who was also a liberator in 1945.

After the anti-Russian sanctions regime and its clear deindustrialising effects on the German economy, followed by the attack on the Baltic Nord Stream pipelines, and even smaller things, such as the high-profile anti-industry protests by the American-funded activist group Letzte Generation, I am willing to believe many conspiratorial things about the Ukraine war.

January 23, 2023

Monte Cassino, the Battle Begins – Ep 230 – January 21, 1944

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Italy, Japan, Military, Pacific, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 21 Jan 2023

The Allies have reached the linchpin of the German defenses in Italy, but a first attack proves disastrous. It does, though, divert troops from where they soon plan to make landings behind enemy lines. Meanwhile in the USSR, the huge Soviet offensive in the north makes great gains against the stunned Axis forces.
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January 22, 2023

The Scientific Reason Your Wife Is Always Right. Don McMillan

Filed under: Humour, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

A Little More Dry Bar
Published 23 May 2022

The scientific reason your wife is always right as presented by Don McMillan in this clip from his first ever Dry Bar Comedy special. Whether you’re someone who appreciated power points and graphs, or you just enjoy a good laugh, this clip form Don McMillan’s Dry Bar Comedy special is sure to have you laughing from start to finish.
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January 19, 2023

Tanks Chats #164 | M-50 Sherman | The Tank Museum

Filed under: France, History, Middle East, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published 23 Sep 2022

In this episode of Tank Chats, David Willey discusses the history of the M-50 version of the Sherman.
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January 18, 2023

Our western gerontocracy

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

In The Free Press, Katherine Boyle outlines the death-grip that elderly boomers retain on so many of the levers of our shared society, from government to business to (of course) the legacy media:

“Millennials” by EpicTop10.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0

The tens of millions of Americans that are, like me, millennials or members of the generation just younger, Gen Z, have been treated as hapless children our entire lives. We have been coded as “young” in business, in politics, and in culture. All of which is why we shouldn’t be surprised that millennials are the most childless and least home-owning generation in modern American history. One can’t play house with a spouse or have their own children when they’ve moved back into mom’s, as 17 percent of millennials have. 

Aside from the technology sector — which prizes outliers, disagreeableness, creativity and encourages people in their twenties to take on the founder title and to build things that they own — most other sectors of American life are geriatric.

The question is why. 

There are many theories — and many would-be culprits. Some believe it’s the fault of the Boomers, who have relentlessly coddled their children, perhaps subconsciously, because they don’t want to pass the baton. Others put the blame on the young, who are either too lazy, too demoralized or too neurotic to have beaten down the doors of power to demand their turn.

Then again, life expectancy is growing among the healthy and elite in industrialized nations, so perhaps this is all just progress and 70 is the new 40. But one can take little solace in the growing life expectancy of the last 200 years when comparing ourselves to more productive generations that didn’t waste decades on extended adolescence. 

Every Independence Day, we’re reminded that on July 4, 1776, the most famous founders of this country were in their early 20s (Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr) and early 30s (Thomas Jefferson). Even grandfatherly George Washington was a mere 44. These days much of our political class, from Bill Clinton (elected president 30 years ago at age 46) to financial leaders like Warren Buffett (92), and Bill Gates (67) who launched Microsoft 48 years ago, are still dominant three and four decades after seizing the reins of power. CEOs of companies listed on the S&P 500 are getting older and staying in their jobs longer, with the average CEO now 58 years old and staying in his or her role 10.8 years versus 7.2 a decade ago. And our political culture looks even more gray: Twenty-five percent of Congress is now over the age of 70 giving us the oldest Congress of any in American history.

The Boomer ascendancy in America and industrialized nations has left us with a global gerontocracy and a languishing generation waiting in the wings. Not only does extended adolescence — what psychologist Erik Erikson first referred to as a “psychosocial moratorium” or the interim years between childhood and adulthood — affect the public life of younger generations, but their private lives as well.

In 1990, the average age of first marriage in the U.S. was 23 for women and 26 for men, up from 20 for women and 22 for men in 1960. By 2021, that number had risen to 28.6 years for women and 30.4 years for men, according to the Census Bureau, with 44 percent of U.S. women between the ages of 25 and 44 expected to be single in 2030. Delayed adulthood has had disastrous consequences for procreation in industrialized nations and is at the root of declining fertility and all-but-certain population collapse in dozens of countries, many of which expect the halving of their populations by the end of the century.

“Twenty-five is the new 18,” said The Scientific American in 2017, pointing to research that extended adolescence is a byproduct of affluence and progress in society. Which is why the finiteness of a mid-thirties half-life is such a surprise to those in their 20s and 30s. It runs counter to every meme and piece of advice young people receive about building a career, a family, a company and in turn, a country. 

The prevailing wisdom in Western nations is that the ages of 18-29 are a time for extreme exploration — the collecting of memories, friends, partners and most importantly, self-identity. A full twelve years of you! Self-discovery aided by platforms built for broadcasting photos of artisanal cocktails and brunch. And with no expectation for leadership because there will be time for that, a generation can absolve oneself of responsibility for their actions. (Tragically, that was never true for half of the population, which is why we have a generation of extremely accomplished older women, who weren’t really aware how difficult it is to become pregnant at 39.)

Ask Ian: Why No German WW2 50-Cal Machine Guns? (feat. Nick Moran)

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 Sep 2022

From Nathaniel on Patreon:
“Why didn’t Germany or Axis powers have a machine gun similar to the American M2?”

Basically, because everyone faced the choice of a .50 caliber machine gun or 20mm (or larger) cannons for anti-aircraft use, and most people chose the cannons — including Germany. There were some .50 caliber machine guns adopted by Axis powers, most notably the Hotchkiss 1930, a magazine-fed 13.2mm gun that was used by both Italy and Japan (among others). However, the use of the .50 caliber M2 by the US was really a logistical holdover form the interwar period. The M2 remained in production because it was adopted by US Coastal Artillery as a water-cooled anti-aircraft gun, and commercial sales by Colt were slim but sufficient to keep the gun in development through the 20s and 30s. It was used as a main armament in early American armor, but obsolete in this role when the war broke out.

However, with the gun in production and no obvious domestic 20mm design, the US chose to simply make an astounding number of M2s and just dump them everywhere, from Jeeps to trucks to halftracks to tanks to self-propelled guns. And that’s not considering the 75% of production that went to coaxial and aircraft versions …

Anyway, back to the question. The German choice for antiaircraft use was the 20mm and 37mm Flak systems, and not a .50 MG on every tank turret. And so, there was really no motive to develop such a gun. The Soviets did choose to go the US route, though, and developed the DShK-38 for the same role as the US M2 — although it was made in only a tiny fraction of the quantity of the M2.
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January 16, 2023

The music industry fails to capitalize on the vinyl revival

Filed under: Business, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

It’s kind of hard to believe, but the companies that control the pressing of music into vinyl appear to have no clue about the business they’re in:

“Framed Vinyl Album Art: America ‘Homecoming’; Nick Gilder (Studio Copy of Singles From ‘City Lights’ Chosen for AOR); Climax Blues Band ‘FM Live’)” by JoeInSouthernCA is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

I’d heard so many grand claims for the vinyl resurgence, but the reality was tremendously disappointing. And I was a late adopter — the revival had been going on for a decade, but record labels still didn’t have their act together.

In my case, I ended up buying vinyl albums, but mostly used ones. I simply couldn’t find new pressings of the records I wanted. This was fine for me, but lousy for musicians and labels — who make no money on the sale of a secondhand vinyl album.

I have some experience in these matters — in my alternative career I worked with CEOs chasing after fast growth product categories. I know how they handle these situations. But, really, it’s no mystery. The strategies you use in this kind of business are very straightforward:

  1. You add manufacturing capacity aggressively — to make sure you have enough product to fuel growth.
  2. You bring down costs by getting scale advantages. But this only happens because unit costs drop as volume increases. So the single biggest goal is to grow sales as hard and fast as possible.
  3. You constantly reduce prices to keep demand building. In some cases, you even set prices below your costs to accelerate growth rates. When I originally saw companies do this I was skeptical — how can you make profits if you sell below your costs? But I soon learned that you eventually got a huge payback.
  4. You keep expanding the product line, so that you constantly have something new and exciting to sell to every potential buyer.
  5. You invest in R&D so that you eventually have a next generation technology to keep the growth going over the long haul.

None of this is easy to do, but it isn’t impossible. It just takes investment, focus, management commitment, and hard work. And later you reap the benefits. You turn a small business into a huge one, and enjoy a big payday.

The record labels could have done that with vinyl. It was taking off — unit sales doubled in just 5 years. And these sales were insanely profitable, because much of the demand was for old music. So labels didn’t even have to pay to sign artists, and cover the costs of recording sessions. The music was already there, with the fixed costs amortized long ago.

They just had to press the bloody album and ship it to the store. How hard is that?

But what did the music industry do?

  • They hate running factories — which is hard work. So they tried to outsource manufacturing instead of building it themselves. Chronic shortages resulted.
  • They refuse to spend money on R&D, so they stayed with the same vinyl technology from the 1950s. In other words, the record business became the only entertainment industry in the world with no plan for technological innovation. In the year 2023, even bowling alleys, bordellos, and bookies are more tech savvy than the major record labels.
  • They want easy money, so they kept prices extremely high. That was bizarre because their R&D and catalog acquisition costs were essentially zero, and they could have priced vinyl aggressively. Instead they treated vinyl as a luxury product, even as they dreamed of it also becoming a mass market option. But you can’t do both without a careful market segmentation strategy — which the labels never even started thinking about.
  • They love hype, so they focused on high visibility vinyl reissues, which look good in press releases, but couldn’t be bothered to make back catalog albums available. After a decade of the vinyl revival, they still hadn’t taken even basic steps in offering a wide product line.

This is a lazy strategy — and the exact opposite of what they should have done. And the results are, of course, predictable.

January 15, 2023

Time to Liberate Leningrad! – Ep 229 – January 14, 1944

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Italy, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 14 Jan 2023

Three Soviet Fronts launch major offensives to try and finally free Leningrad, under siege for nearly two and a half years now. The Soviets are, in fact, making attacks along most of the Eastern Front. In the South Pacific, the Allies step up their aerial assault to wreck Rabaul’s air power, thus neutralizing it as a base.
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“Zoomers and Millennials are further to the left to begin with and, more critically, don’t seem to be moving rightward as they age”

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

Andrew Sullivan on the significant leftward orientation of younger Millennials and Gen Z’ers which does not track to historical models of political belief:

“Millennials” by EpicTop10.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0

It’s dawning on many on the political center and right that the current younger generation in America is not like previous younger generations. They’re immaturing with age. Zoomers and Millennials are further to the left to begin with and, more critically, don’t seem to be moving rightward as they age. A recent, viral piece in the FT added a new spark to the conversation, arguing that if Millennials matured like previous generations, then by the age of 35, they

    should be around five points less conservative than the national average, and can be relied upon to gradually become more conservative. In fact, they’re more like 15 points less conservative, and in both Britain and the US are by far the least conservative 35-year-olds in recorded history … millennials have developed different values to previous generations, shaped by experiences unique to them, and they do not feel conservatives share these.

And the key experiences, it seems to me, are: entering the job market in the wake of the financial crisis; being poorer than your parents when they were the same age; lacking access to affordable housing and childcare; growing up in a far more multiracial and multicultural world than anyone before them; seeing gay equality come to marriage and the military; experiencing the first black president and nearly the first woman; and the psychological and cultural impact of Trump and Brexit.

These are all 21st century phenomena — and simply not experienced by the generations immediately before them. Socially and culturally more diverse, the young are also understandably down on the catastrophic success of neoliberal economics. So of course they are going to be different. When it was their turn on the wealth escalator, it essentially stopped.

Sometimes we forget that these deep factors are what are most seriously in play. And the biggest mistake many of us on the center or right tend to make is assuming that all of the young’s stickier leftiness — especially the most irritating varieties of it — are entirely a function of woke brainwashing, and not related to genuinely unique challenges. A lot is — the indoctrination is real and relentless — but a lot isn’t. And it’s vital to distinguish the two.

The left’s advantage is that they have directly addressed this generation’s challenges, and the right simply hasn’t. The woke, however misguided, are addressing the inevitable cultural and social challenges of a majority-minority generation; and the socialists have long been addressing the soaring inequality that neoliberalism has created. Meanwhile, the right has too often ducked these substantive issues or rested on cheap culture-war populism as a diversionary response. I don’t believe that the young are inherently as left as they currently are. It’s just that the right hasn’t offered them an appealing enough alternative that is actually relevant to them.

That doesn’t mean cringe pandering. It means smarter policies. Some obvious options: encourage much more house-building with YIMBY-style deregulation; expand access to childcare for young, struggling families; tout entrepreneurial and scientific innovation to tackle climate change; expand maternity and paternity leave; redistribute wealth from the super-rich to working Americans to stabilize society and prevent capitalism from undoing itself; and, above all, celebrate a diverse society — and the unique individuals and interactions that make it so dynamic and life-giving.

January 14, 2023

More on the Barnes & Noble turnaround

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

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte looks at the Barnes & Noble recovery story (discussed a couple of weeks back):

“Barnes & Noble Book Store” by JeepersMedia is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Back in 2018, the bookselling chain was losing $18 million a year. It had just fired 1,800 full-time employees. About 150 stores had been closed, leaving the company with 600. It had lost its fourth CEO in five years, this one to a sexual-harassment charge. The firm’s big digital initiative, the Nook e-reader, was a flop. The share price was down 80 percent.

Not only was the business failing: it was demoralized. As the writer Ted Gioia noted in a recent newsletter, B&N had lost faith in the public’s willingness to buy books from anyone but Amazon. Its leadership “shifted a huge portion of its floorspace to peddling toys, greeting cards, calendars, and various tchotchkes”. It doubled down on in-store cafes and even tried launching freestanding Barnes & Noble restaurants.

Just when it seemed B&N was certain to follow the path of its former competitor, the Borders chain, which closed in 2011, it was purchased for $638 million (US) by Elliott Advisors, a hedge fund.

SHuSH has been skeptical about the record of hedge funds in the cultural space. We are also skeptical of hedge funds in the retail space where they have a well-established record of buying chains, slashing costs, and driving them into the ground: Sears, Toys R Us, Payless Shoes, Radio Shack, Aeropostale, Sports Authority, etc.

Elliott Advisors is an exception.

The UK based-firm has a demonstrated commitment to bookselling (at least in the medium term — more on this later). It bought the Waterstones chain in 2018. Waterstones and its 283 stores had been rescued from near-bankruptcy in 2011 by lifelong bookseller James Daunt and a Russian backer. Elliott kept Daunt at the helm and a year later bought Barnes & Noble and added this second chain to his responsibilities.

Daunt acknowledged that Barnes & Noble was in rough shape when acquired by Elliott. Its stores were “crucifyingly boring”. But he was confident the chain could be turned around. There was no template or magic ingredient, he said. It was a simple matter of “running really nice bookshops”. To that end, he gives his stores unusual autonomy to develop their own personalities and tailor their stock to the interests of their communities.

Barnes & Noble stores have since dropped most of their crap: they no longer look like big-box flea markets. They’ve quit accepting payments from the major publishers to put their books on display, a practice that brought B&N revenue but left publishers in charge of what customers saw when they walked into stores. Local managers now decide how their books are presented based on what they think will appeal to their customers.

The company used the COVID lockdown to freshen up its dowdy stores. Managers were instructed to take every single book off the shelves and “weed out the rubbish”. Walls were painted, aged carpet replaced, furnishings upgraded. The result is a much improved browsing experience. Readers like to browse.

There were hard decisions, too. Daunt cut the B&N head office staff in half and shed about 5,000 of 30,000 employees.

All in all, it worked. Last spring, The New York Times reported that sales were up and costs were down at Barnes & Noble and that “the same people who for decades saw the superchain as a supervillain are celebrating its success. In the past, the book-selling empire, with 600 outposts across all 50 states, was seen by many readers, writers and book lovers as strong-arming publishers and gobbling up independent stores in its quest for market share … Today, virtually the entire publishing industry is rooting for Barnes & Noble — including most independent booksellers. Its unique role in the book ecosystem, where it helps readers discover new titles and publishers stay invested in physical stores, makes it an essential anchor in a world upended by online sales and a much larger player: Amazon.”

There are not a lot of reliable financial numbers available on Barnes & Noble because it is no longer a public company, but it reports that its 2021 sales in were up 3 percent over pre-pandemic times. Most importantly, sales of books were up 14 percent.

Colonial History on the Mississippi River

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Scenic Routes to the Past
Published 13 Jan 2023

This video explores the surprising traces of French and American colonial history along the 150 miles of Mississippi River between St. Louis and Cairo, Illinois.
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