World War Two
Published 13 Jan 2022While Nazi Germany keeps on escalating its War Against Humanity, the United Nations alliance decides that they will escalate their war on Germany.
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January 14, 2022
The Revenge Bombing of Germany – WAH 050 – January 1943, Pt. 1
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Industry with 1% profit margins accused of earning “record profits”
Joe Lancaster on Senator Elizabeth Warren’s renewed assault on the top-hatted, monocle-wearing robber barons of the grocery business:
“Piggly Wiggly” by afiler is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
… Warren could hardly have picked a worse industry to use as an example: Grocery stores consistently have among the lowest profit margins of any economic sector. According to data compiled this month by New York University finance professor Aswath Damodaran, the entire retail grocery industry currently averages barely more than 1 percent in net profit. In its most recent quarter, Kroger reported a profit margin of 0.75 percent, during a time in which Warren claims that the chain was “expanding profits” due to its “market dominance.”
In actuality, for much of the last year, grocery stores have seen enormous boosts in revenue, but not increased profitability, for the simple reason that everything has been costing more: not just products, but transportation, employee compensation, and all the extra logistical steps needed to adapt to shopping during a pandemic. Couple that with persistent inflation — which Warren also recently blamed on “price gouging” — and it is no wonder that things seem a bit out of balance.
Warren has had an itchy trigger finger for antitrust laws for some time. In 2019, as part of her presidential platform, she called for using the laws to forbid retailers from selling their own products. This would affect industry leaders like Amazon and Walmart, but ironically, it would have a devastating impact on grocery stores as well: Grocers increasingly rely on their own proprietary goods to stock cheaper alternatives alongside name brands. This provides not only less expensive options for consumers, but lower costs to the stores themselves. Store brands also help fill gaps created by external supply shortages.
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Why Real Explosions Don’t Look Like Movie Explosions
Tom Scott
Published 8 Mar 2021Explosions on film are made to look good: fireballs and flame. In reality, though, they’re a bit disappointing. Here’s how Hollywood does it.
• Produced with an experienced, professional pyrotechnician. Do not attempt.
Thanks to Steve from Live Action FX: http://liveactionfx.com/
Filmed safely: https://www.tomscott.com/safe/
Camera: Simon Temple http://templefreelance.co.uk
Edited by Michelle Martin: https://twitter.com/mrsmmartinI’m at https://tomscott.com
on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tomscott
and on Instagram as tomscottgo
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QotD: The stagnant field of theoretical physics
Physicists used to be serious and bloody minded people who understood reality by doing experiments. Somehow this sort of bloody minded seriousness has faded out into a tower of wanking theorists who only occasionally have anything to do with actual matter. I trace the disease to the rise of the “meritocracy” out of cow colleges in the 1960s. The post WW2 neoliberal idea was that geniuses like Einstein could be mass produced out of peasants using agricultural schools. The reality is, the peasants are still peasants, and the total number of Einsteins in the world, or even merely serious thinkers about physics is probably something like a fixed number. It’s really easy, though, to create a bunch of crackpot narcissists who have the egos of Einstein without the exceptional work output. All you need to do there is teach them how to do some impressive looking mathematical Cargo Cult science, and keep their “results” away from any practical men doing experiments.
The manufacture of a large caste of such boobs has made any real progress in physics impossible without killing off a few generations of them. The vast, looming, important questions of physics; the kinds that a once in a lifetime physicist might answer — those haven’t budged since the early 60s. John Horgan wrote a book observing that science (physics in particular) has pretty much ended any observable forward progress since the time of cow collitches. He also noticed that instead of making progress down fruitful lanes or improving detailed knowledge of important areas, most develop enthusiasms for the latest non-experimental wank fest; complexity theory, network theory, noodle theory. He thinks it’s because it’s too difficult to make further progress. I think it’s because the craft is now overrun with corrupt welfare queens who are play-acting cargo cultists.
Physicists worthy of the name are freebooters; Vikings of the Mind, intellectual adventurers who torture nature into giving up its secrets and risk their reputation in the real world. Modern physicists are … careerist ding dongs who grub out a meagre living sucking on the government teat, working their social networks, giving their friends reach arounds and doing PR to make themselves look like they’re working on something important. It is terrible and sad what happened to the king of sciences. While there are honest and productive physicists, the mainstream of it is lost, possibly forever to a caste of grifters and apple polishing dingbats.
Scott Locklin, “Quantum computing as a field is obvious bullshit”, Locklin on Science, 2019-01-15.
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January 13, 2022
Sniper Rifles of 1942 – WW2 Special
World War Two
Published 12 Jan 2022Even the best sniper needed a reliable and accurate rifle. During the Second World War, all warring nations fielded designated sniper and marksman rifles, but different manufacturers had different ideas, from optical sights to breech-loading mechanisms, to gas-piston systems. Some preferred traditional bolt-action, others favored the new semi-automatic approach.
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Canadians believe we have the world’s best healthcare system … we’re sadly deluded about that, as the pandemic has demonstrated
In The Line, Harrison Ruess points out how far down the international “league table” Canadian healthcare ranks, despite our fervent beliefs that it’s our healthcare system that somehow “defines” what it is to be Canadian (I’ve honestly never understood that particular belief):
Toronto General Hospital in 2005.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Millions of Canadians are extremely proud of our health-care system. They defend it and are utterly convinced of its greatness. They react with hostility to any hint of change.
But on what basis could Canada make a claim to health-care greatness?
According to OECD data, on life expectancy Canada ranks 16th. On morality rates from avoidable causes, we’re 23rd. On cancer survival rates we range from 13th down to 18th, depending on the cancer type. On the number of one-year-olds vaccinated for diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, we rank an abysmal 37th (even the U.S. is higher here at 27th. Gulp.). One area where we do rank closer to the top is spending as a proportion of GDP, where we sit at seventh.
In modern parlance of TL;DR, what the OECD data says is that Canada spends a disproportionately large amount of money to get strongly mediocre health outcomes.
For an overall picture we can look at the World Health Organization’s ranking system, which measures, “responsiveness (both level and distribution), fair financing, and health inequality, in addition to the more traditional goal of population health.” Here, Canada ranks 30th overall.
“But …” I’m sure you’re about to say … “Canada has universal health care!”
Yes. And that’s good. But the shortfall of that argument is that dozens of other countries have universal health care and many also have far better overall outcomes. In short, universal health care access is not a unique feature in Canada. For instance, a few notable countries from the WHO’s top 10 include France, Italy, Singapore, Spain, Austria, and Japan. These are hardly countries that let citizens go bankrupt or die in the streets when they need health care.
So why are we so darned committed to defending the Canadian status quo?
I genuinely can’t make sense of it. Canadians are smart, sensible people. We want the best for ourselves and our children. But at the same time, we have a very long history of refusing to change and improve our health care despite every piece of evidence that says we desperately must do better. The COVID pandemic has made this especially clear over the last couple years, but none of this is new.
As Robyn Urback recently asked in the Globe & Mail, “When do we admit Canada’s health-care system just isn’t working?” and as Matt Gurney pondered on TVO, “When can we start trying to make it [better]?”
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How A Village Keeps India’s Handmade Shuttlecock Industry Alive | Still Standing
Business Insider
Published 10 Sep 2021Jadurberia village is the shuttlecock capital of India where workers have been making badminton birdies for generations. But the rise of mechanized assembly lines and the popularity of synthetic shuttlecocks are threatening to shut down small factories like the Niyogi family’s Dodo Shuttles.
For more information, visit http://www.dodoshuttles.com/.
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QotD: A libertarian view of government
Jonathan David Morris, “The Non-Aggression Principle”, The Libertarian Enterprise, 2005-06-05.
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January 12, 2022
Sniper Warrior – Vasily Zaitsev – WW2 Biography Special
World War Two
Published 11 Jan 2022From the woods of the Urals to the burning city of Stalingrad, Vasily Zaitsev went out to hunt his prey. As a sniper, he learned his trade in the grim reality of Stalingrad street fighting. Deep in the ruins of the factories, he stalked his enemies with a team of battle-hardened snipers. For days on end, they would lay in wait for valuable targets to show up. With a finger on the trigger, they would decimate the German ranks within a few deadly moments.
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“You feel instantly at home when you arrive in Kenya because Kenya was once everyone’s home!”
When I was in middle school, my favourite teacher was a huge fan of the Leakey family’s discoveries in central Africa, and took every opportunity to show us films on the latest hominid remains uncovered (and by “latest”, it usually meant several years old, as 16mm films distributed through the county school system were rarely all that “new”). I assume she was a frustrated anthropologist herself, honestly, although I found her to be a very good teacher even if she’d “settled” for teaching as a career. In The Iconoclast, Geoffrey Clarfield remembers the late Richard Leakey, “the last Victorian scientist”, who died earlier this month in Kenya:
Richard Leakey at the WTTC Global Summit 2015.
Detail of original photo by the World Travel & Tourism Council via Wikimedia Commons.
Kenyan paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey died on January 2nd at age 77, following an extraordinary career devoted to the scientific exploration of human origins. Richard was once my boss. And although we never became friends, I came to know him fairly well.
He died peacefully in his house overlooking Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, where he’d made his most notable discoveries, and which occupied his imagination from an early age until his final days. It was fitting that he was buried beside his home, amid the same terrain from which he’d dug up humanity’s long-buried early ancestors. As I once heard him say to a group of visitors, “You feel instantly at home when you arrive in Kenya because Kenya was once everyone’s home!” (Essayists are supposed to shun exclamation marks, but this was simply the way the man spoke.)
To an outsider, Richard’s work history may appear to comprise a series of disconnected, sometimes testosterone-driven adventures. By turns, he was a wildlife trapper and animal trader, safari guide, bush pilot, gifted (albeit informally trained) fossil hunter, archaeological excavator, scientific autodidact, museum and civil-service administrator, member of parliament, opposition leader, cabinet minister, conservation activist, Kenyan patriot, fundraiser, public speaker, and prolific writer. The public knew him best as a television and film presenter. But those who knew him privately will also remember him as an enthusiastic team leader and mentor of young talent.
In my case, he helped advance my own project to train young Kenyan researchers to record and document traditional music in the northern part of their country, the Turkana District in particular. When I’d raised funds for this initiative, he brought it under the auspices of the National Museums of Kenya (NMK), of which he was then director.
While he may have seemed like something of an (enormously) overachieving dilettante to some, there was in fact a unity to his life and work. The times being what they are, many will focus on the fact that he was a white man taking a prominent role in a largely black country. But in truth, he likely attracted more scrutiny for being a fervent admirer of Charles Darwin, and a secular atheist, in a religious part of the world. He once published his own edited and illustrated version of Origin of Species, which I read when I was working for him, and his contributions to that volume gave me insight into what I believe was his fundamentally edifying professional motivation. I still have it on my shelf.
Richard emphasized that humankind had evolved in the Great Rift Valley, and from there had spread “out of Africa”, as the saying goes. He also believed that a previously underestimated factor in human evolution had been our species’ relationship to evolving biodiversity and prehistoric climate fluctuation — “paleoenvironments” as they came to be called.
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Soviet PPD-40: Degtyarev’s Submachine Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 28 Aug 2017Degtyarev’s PPD-40 was the first submachine gun adopted on a large scale by the Soviet Union. Its development began in 1929 with a locked breech gun modeled after Degtyarev’s DP light machine gun, but evolved into a much simpler blowback system. It was accepted as the best performing gun of 14 different submissions in Soviet trials of 1931/2, and first entered production in 1934. In this form, it used a 25 round curved stick magazine, and was chambered for the 7.62x25mm cartridge. In 1938 Degtyarev made a number of changes, most importantly developing a drum magazine based on the Finnish Suomi m31 drum. The PPD-38 drum had a short section of feed tower to allow the gun to use either drums or stick magazines, and this was dropped with the final iteration in 1940 when the gun was again changed, this time to accept only 71-round drum magazines of the m31 type.
The PPD-40 finally entered serious production in 1940, with just over 81,000 made. This production would continue into early 1941 with another roughly 6,000 made before it was replaced by the faster-to-produce PPSh-41 submachine gun. The PPD-40 was a relatively heavy SMG at 12 pounds (5.45 kg) unloaded, and with a rate of fire of approximately 900 rounds per minute. This particular example was captured and used by the Finnish military, and appears to have a PPD38 bolt in it.
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QotD: Baumol’s cost disease in architecture and furniture
If stonemasonry is a low-tech industry, and new high-tech industries are arising all around it, stonemason wages could get prohibitively high (compared to everything else) until nobody wants to hire them anymore. This would create pressure for architectural styles that require as little masonry (or, generalized, human labor) as possible.
This has gotten me thinking about furniture.
I got a new place recently and have been looking for furnishings. Sometimes I look at people’s furniture Pinterests. If Pinterest is any kind of representative window into the soul of the modern furniture-enthusiast, people really like Art Nouveau. […] As far as I can tell, you can’t buy any of these anywhere — they’re a combination of antiques and concept pieces. The people who pin these and pine after these end up getting minimalist Scandinavian furniture with names like UJLIBLÖK, just like everyone else.
Anything that even comes close to the above costs high four to five digits. I don’t know if this is because it’s antique, because it requires more labor, or both.
I’m harping on furniture because it avoids a lot of the complicating factors in architecture. There isn’t some vague collection of “elites” making our furniture decisions. It’s a pretty free market! There are lots of normal middle-class people spending big chunks of money on furniture, lots of them really really like the old stuff, and the old stuff is still either unavailable or unaffordable. It seems like it used to be affordable — it wasn’t just kings and dukes who had the old Art Nouveau stuff — but for some reason that’s changed. I think Baumol effects offer a tidy explanation here, and if we use them to explain furniture, then they start looking really attractive for architecture.
I want this one to be true, because it exonerates our civilization. If we could make things like the Art Nouveau furniture above, or the Taj Mahal, relatively cheaply and easily, then the question of why we aren’t doing that demands an answer. If it’s just a quirk of basic economics, then our civilization is fine, and maybe we can hope that stoneworking technology advances to the point where we can do this kind of thing again cheaply.
Scott Alexander, “Highlights From The Comments On Modern Architecture”, Astral Codex Ten, 2021-10-04.
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January 11, 2022
Through the North-West Passage 1940-1942
Vancouver Maritime Museum
Published 21 Aug 2020in 1942, the St. Roch became the first vessel to complete the west-east traverse of the Northwest Passage. This documentary chronicles the historic journey. This film was prepared in 1942 for the R.C.M.P. by Cst. F.S. Farrar, first mate of St. Roch from 1930-34 and 1938-43.
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Mailer, cancelled. Question mark?
In the most recent SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte outlines the “cancellation” of the late Norman Mailer by his Random Penguin editors … maybe … but probably not really:
American writers John Updike, Norman Mailer, and E. L. Doctorow at the PEN Congress, January 1986.
Photo by Bernard Gotfryd via Wikimedia Commons.
You have to feel for Norman Mailer, the late author of some forty books and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. There he lay, resting in well-deserved peace in the winter quiet of Provincetown Cemetery after a lifetime of fighting mankind’s greatest causes — civil rights, an end to war, the Great American Novel, his urgent libido — when out of nowhere comes a report that he has been canceled by his long-time publisher, Random House.
“With slow-mo hammer-dropping predictability,” wrote Michael Wolff in the newsletter, The Ankler, “Norman Mailer’s long-time publisher has recently informed the Mailer family that it has canceled plans to publish a collection of his political writings to mark the centennial of his birth in 2023, confirms the film producer Michael Mailer, the author’s oldest son.”
The reasons for the cancelation, according to Wolff, are “a junior staffer’s objection to the title of Mailer’s 1957 essay, ‘The White Negro’, a psycho-sexual-druggie precursor and model for much of the psycho-sexual-druggie literature that became popular in the 1960s. A Random House source also cites the objections of feminist and cultural gadfly Roxane Gay.”
Wolff’s scoop was promptly picked up and carried at face value all over North America, throughout Italy by La Repubblica, England by the Daily Mail, Chile by El Periodisto, and so on. It was the biggest cultural story going for several days, never mind that questions as to its veracity were raised almost the minute it broke.
Well, before it broke, in fact. Wolff himself scarcely seems convinced of his story. Yes, his headline is unequivocal: “Michael Wolff on Random House’s Cancelation of Norman Mailer”. But he admits in the newsletter that he couldn’t get anyone at Random House to confirm the news. Also that the Mailer estate didn’t actually have a contract for a book of political non-fiction with Random House for the publisher to cancel.
Wolff further allows that his one source at Random House steered him into a ditch, claiming that in addition to the anonymous junior staffer, Roxane Gay was involved. Wolff followed up with Gay, who told him she knew nothing of the controversy and had never read Mailer.
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Camden Town Marmite Ale – Weird Stuff In A Can #156
Atomic Shrimp
Published 25 Sep 2021Beer, made with Marmite, which itself is made from the yeast left over when beer was made. Marmite is savoury; beer usually isn’t. This is a weird idea whichever way you look at it, but how does it taste?
From the comments:
Atomic Shrimp
8 hours ago
Afterthoughts & Addenda
uR pOuRiNg iT aLl wRoNg!!! – really? Fine – this might not be a professional perfect pour, but this is *not my first ever beer*. I don’t claim to have any kind of professional technique, but this amount of head is not normal for this method of pouring. Note the copious foam emitting from the can when it is first opened.
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