Quotulatiousness

March 2, 2026

Remember this when they tell you grocery prices are high because of greedy corporations

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Food, Government, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison explains why the headline profits of grocery stores bear almost no relation to the far smaller actual profits in the grocery retail market:

“Leader IGA” by daryl_mitchell is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

The 32% Illusion: A Grocer’s View from Behind the Till

I used to own the IGA in Hamiota. Small town. Thin margins. Real bills. So when I hear that Loblaw Companies Limited is raking in “31–32% profit”, I don’t get angry. I get tired.

Here’s the move. Take a gross margin number. Call it profit. Add a dash of politics. Serve hot.

Gross margin is revenue minus cost of goods sold. That’s it. It doesn’t include payroll, hydro, insurance, property tax, refrigeration repairs at 2 a.m., shrink, theft, advertising, transport, interest, or the banker breathing down your neck. Net profit is what’s left after all of that. In grocery, that number floats around 2 to 3 percent in a good year. Some years less. Some years negative.

When I ran my store, payroll alone could swallow most of the gross margin. Then add freight. Then add utilities. Manitoba winters are not kind to freezers. Then add spoilage. Bananas do not care about your ideology. They rot on schedule.

People think grocers “set prices”. That’s half true at best. Suppliers raise costs. Fuel goes up. Wages rise. Carbon costs ripple through trucking and farming. You pass it on or you close. It’s arithmetic, not greed.

Now here’s the uncomfortable part. Food inflation hurts. It hurts seniors. It hurts young families. It hurts the clerk stocking shelves. But blaming a 30% “profit margin” is a shortcut. It feels good. It’s wrong.

Big chains make money on scale, pharmacy, cosmetics, financial services. Those categories carry higher margins than milk and bread. That lifts the consolidated gross margin number. It does not mean grocery aisles are printing cash.

We should argue about competition. We should argue about supply management. We should argue about taxes embedded at every step of the chain. Good. Let’s do that. But at least use the right numbers.

I spent years watching pennies. Grocers survive on volume and efficiency. A few cents per dollar is the game. Always has been.

If you want lower food prices, focus on input costs, transport, energy, regulation, and competition. Start there.

And before sharing the next viral graphic, ask one question: gross or net?

That single distinction separates outrage from reality.

February 27, 2026

Brookfield, Carney, Freeland, and Ukraine – cui bono?

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

Melanie in Saskatchewan goes digging in the less-publicly-visible parts of Canada’s massive support of Ukraine to see who is gaining the benefit from all that money and all those political and economic manoeuvres … and you probably won’t be surprised to hear that it’s not ordinary Ukrainians or their soldiers fighting on the front line against Russia:

Image from Melanie in Saskatchewan

I need you to stop for a moment and really sit with this. Ask yourself a question that should make your stomach drop. What if the billions of your tax dollars being sent to Ukraine are not just about solidarity, democracy, or defending freedom? What if they also intersect with private financial interests connected to the very people making those decisions?

Because that is the bombshell.

And once you see the connections, you cannot unsee them.

Canada has now committed more than $25.5 billion to Ukraine. Just days ago, Prime Minister Mark Carney announced another $2 billion in military aid. Armoured vehicles. Equipment. Sanctions. More money flowing outward while Canadians juggle mortgage renewals, grocery bills, and heating costs that feel like ransom demands.

[…]

And to the Ethics Commissioner, Canadians deserve clarity. The Conflict of Interest Act is widely described as a disclosure regime. It relies heavily on what office holders report and on screening mechanisms that operate within defined boundaries. Committee testimony has acknowledged that screen administrators do not know the specific underlying assets within the Brookfield Global Transition Fund and that a significant portion of Brookfield’s broader portfolio is outside those screens. Mark Carney is the architect of Brookfield’s Global Transition Fund. He KNOWS what the assets in that fund are. He also has carried interest structures in that fund. If Konrad von Finckenstein does not take note and act, then I cannot validate the need for his position. We might as well install a potted Boston Fern in his chair, we’d still get the same results.

So the question becomes simple. If an issue of this magnitude does not justify proactive scrutiny and clear public documentation, then what does? Canadians are not asking for drama. They are asking for written determinations, documented recusals, and visible oversight that goes beyond procedural minimums.

Were Canadian Ukraine policy decisions structured, timed, or insulated in a way that ensures there is absolutely no benefit, direct or indirect, to any financial exposure connected to Brookfield-related structures? Have recusals been documented? Has the Ethics Commissioner issued written determinations? Has conflict screening been publicly disclosed?

Where is the paperwork?

If everything is clean, then showing the documentation should be effortless. If everything is arms-length, then release the recusal letters. If there is nothing to hide, then open the books.

Canadians are not children. We understand complexity. What we resent is opacity.

To Moose on the Loose, credit where it is due. Independent researchers willing to comb through filings, contracts, and timelines are the reason these overlaps are being discussed at all. Without that digging, most Canadians would never see the full picture.

Now it is on us.

Share this. Ask your MP. Demand written answers. Demand documentation. Demand transparency from Mark Carney.

January 29, 2026

The steel industry in North America didn’t die … but it had to re-invent itself

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

When I first started paying attention to the news in the early 70s, one of the big stories both in the US and in Canada was the plight of the steel industry. It had been an enormously important part of the industrial economy for over a century, but every new story painted the picture blacker. Mergers, plant closings, consolidations, bankruptcies, and layoffs were consistent themes. Yet there is still a significant steel industry in North America. Tim Worstall explains what happened:

Dofasco’s steel plant on the harbourfront in Hamilton, Ontario

A little digression. To make steel from iron ore you use a blast furnace first. This uses coke (from coal), iron ore and limestone (moderns might use more than just limestone) to produce pig iron. You feed the pig iron into a basic oxygen furnace to make the steel. Yes, we can get much more complicated than that but let’s not.

The US now makes mebbe 20 million tonnes of pig iron a year. Imports are up, a bit, but nowhere near enough to make up the difference. That’s the big change because that’s from the 80 and 90 million tonnes a year of the 1970s. The change is the same whether we measure by domestic production of pig iron or by apparent consumption. Well, the change is the same either way close enough for this to be the big point to make.

What’s actually happened is a change in technology, not a change in trade. Nucor is now 50% or so of US steel output (no, not US Steel, but US steel). Nucor has never used a blast furnace in its corporate life. It collects scrap steel and makes new steel by recycling that. It skips, entirely, the blast and BoF stages. Back in the 1950s Nucor was a couple of scrap yards and a gleam in the corporate eye — now it’s that half the market.

Again, yes, we can get more complex if we wish to. But this is the basic pencil sketch. Yep, we’re more economic in our use of steel these days. Imports of steel are up and so is the importation of things made with steel. But the real change in the steel business over the past 60 to 80 years is the replacement of the steel making business with the steel recycling business. We don’t — and by this I mean the rich countries in general — make all that much steel these days. We recycle an awful lot of steel these days. And that’s what’s really changed.

That’s also what has near entirely screwed over the steel industry of places like Gary, Indiana. For they ran those basic steel making processes, iron ore in, basic steel out. Which isn’t something that has been replaced by imports, it’s something that has been replaced by just not doing it at all.1

Arnade goes on to point out that there are plenty of people still using steel to do things with, make things out of, which is all entirely true. But this idea that the Japanese, or China, killed the traditional US steel industry just isn’t true, not at all. It was Nucor.

All of which makes it just so much fun when it’s Nucor that shouts the loudest about the need for tariffs on steel imports. For Nucor points to the collapse of the traditional industry as its proof. Yet Nucor benefits from those tariffs — they can charge higher domestic prices as a result — even while Nucor is in fact the cause of the traditional collapse.

  1. “not at all” is rhetorical hyperbole, not a factual statement.

January 24, 2026

QotD: General Electric

Filed under: Business, Economics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

If you were to pick one company that symbolizes how America has changed and been changed over the last half century or so, it would be General Electric. The company founded by Thomas Edison is in many ways a microcosm of the American economy over the last century or more. It rose to become an industrial giant in the 20th century, the symbol of America manufacturing prowess. It then transformed into a giant of the new economy in the 1990’s, a symbol of the new America.

Today, General Electric is a company in decline. After a series of problems following the financial crisis of 2008, the company has steadily sold off assets and divisions in an effort to fix its financial problems. In 2019, Harry Markopolos, the guy who sniffed out Bernie Madoff, accused them of $38 billion in accounting fraud. The stock has been removed from the Dow Jones Industrial composite. […] General Electric transformed from a company that made things into a financial services company that owned divisions that made things. Like the American economy in the late 20th century, the company shifted its focus from making and creating things to the complex game of financializing those processes.

Like many companies in the late 20th century, General Electric found that their potential clients were not always able to come up with the cash to buy their products, so they came up with a way to finance those purchases. This is an age-old concept that has been with us since the dawn of time. Store credit is a way for the seller to profit from the cash poor in the market. He can both raise his price and also collect interest on the payments made by his customers relying on terms.

For American business, this simple idea turned into a highly complex process, involving tax avoidance strategies and the capitalization of the products and services formerly treated as business expenses. Commercial customers were no longer buying products and services, but instead leasing them in bundled services packages, financed at super-low interest rates and tax deductible. Whole areas of the supply chain shifted from traditional purchases to leased services.

[…]

That is the real lesson of General Electric. The company became something like the old Mafia bust-outs. The whole point of the business was to squeeze every drop of value from clients and divisions. Instead of running up the credit lines and burning down the building for the insurance, General Electric turned the human capital of companies into lease and interest payments. They were not investing and creating, they were monetizing and consuming whatever it touched. […] The cost of unwinding the company back into a normal company will be high, maybe too high for them to survive. The same can be said of the American economy. It will have to be unwound, but there will be no bailout. Instead, it will have to unwind quickly and painfully, in order to become a normal economy again. [NR: According to Wiki, “GE Aerospace, the aerospace company, is GE’s legal successor. GE HealthCare, the health technology company, was spun off from GE in 2023. GE Vernova, the energy company, was founded when GE finalized the split. Following these transactions, GE Aerospace took the General Electric name and ticker symbols, while the old General Electric ceased to exist as a conglomerate.“]

The Z Man, “GE: The Story Of America”, The Z Blog, 2020-06-29.

January 23, 2026

The Rise and Fall of Watneys – human-created video versus AI slop

Filed under: Britain, Business, History — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

YouTuber Tweedy Misc released what he believed was the first attempt to discuss Watneys Red Barrel, the infamous British beer that triggered the founding of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA). His video didn’t show up in my YouTube recommendations, but a later AI slop video that clearly used Tweedy’s video as fodder did get recommended and I even scheduled it for a later 2am post because it seemed to be the only one on the topic. I’m not a fan of clanker-generated content, but I was interested enough to set my prejudices aside for a treatment of something I found interesting. Tweedy’s reaction video, on the other hand, did appear in my recommendations a few weeks later, and I felt it deserved to take precedence over the slop:

And here’s the AI slop video if you’re interested:

Dear Old Blighty
Published Dec 20, 2025

Discover how Watneys Red Barrel went from Britain’s biggest-selling beer to its most hated pint in just a few short years. This video explores how corporate brewing, keg beer, and ruthless pub control nearly destroyed traditional British ale, sparked a nationwide consumer revolt, and gave birth to CAMRA. From Monty Python mockery to boycotts in local pubs, Watneys became a national punchline and a cautionary tale in business failure. Learn how one terrible beer accidentally saved British brewing culture, revived real ale, and reshaped how Britain drinks forever.

#Watneys #BritishBeer #UKNostalgia #RealAle #CAMRA #BritishPubs #RetroBritain #LostBrands #BeerHistory #DearOldBlighty

January 18, 2026

Mark Carney’s actual jobs before becoming Prime Minister

Filed under: Britain, Business, Cancon, China, Government — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Ezra Levant explains the various jobs Mark Carney has held compared to what many Canadians think he’s done:

    Laura Stone @l_stone
    Unifor President Lana Payne calls China EV deal “a self-inflicted wound to an already injured Canadian auto industry”. Says providing a foothold to cheap Chinese EVs “puts Canadian auto jobs at risk while rewarding, labour violations and unfair trade practices”. #onpoli

I think there’s a misconception amongst Canada’s chattering classes that Mark Carney is an experienced and successful businessman and executive.

He wasn’t. He wasn’t CEO of Brookfield. He was its chairman, overseeing quarterly board meetings and spending the rest of his time flying around to different globalist conferences at the UN or WEF.

He was more of a mascot, a symbol, an ambassador of Brookfield. He didn’t negotiate deals or turn around companies. He did photo-ops.

Before that, he worked at the Bank of England, and before that, the Bank of Canada.

No Googling: can you name a single actual duty of that job? Can you tell me what Carney actually achieved?

He wafted up from fake job to fake job — like Justin Trudeau did, but instead of being a surf instructor and a substitute teacher, he had meaningless executive jobs.

And now when it’s time to shine … he doesn’t know what to do.

It’s been a year, and he has no deal with Trump, despite saying that was his chief focus.

What exactly did he achieve in Beijing? The tariffs against Saskatchewan were lifted — so that merely brings us back to the status quo ten months ago. Nothing else. No investments in Canada, which was the pretext of the trip. Just a capitulations, to allow the dumping of 49,000 Chinese EV cars, with their spyware and malware.

But he looks good in a suit and says ponderous words like “catalyze” and “transformative”. And that’s enough to impress the Parliamentary Press Gallery. Not that they needed much impressing — they’re all on his payroll already, through his massive journalism subsidies. They’re too busy holding the opposition to account to take notice of this latest disaster.

But the regime media shouldn’t feel too bad about being conned. Carney tricked Doug Ford pretty good, didn’t he?

January 17, 2026

Scott Adams, RIP

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Business, Humour, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Another Scott, Scott Alexander, has a long essay about the career and life of the late comic strip artist, author, and internet personality. When I first encountered his Dilbert comic strip, I was living the cubicle life and far too many of the jokes and situations felt like Adams must be in the same company — possibly even the same department. I read a couple of his non-Dilbert books, but I didn’t follow his work very much after I escaped the cube farm, so reading this essay told me a number of things about Adams that I didn’t already know:

Thanks to everyone who sent in condolences on my recent death from prostate cancer at age 68, but that was Scott Adams. I (Scott Alexander) am still alive.1

Still, the condolences are appreciated. Scott Adams was a surprisingly big part of my life. I may be the only person to have read every Dilbert book before graduating elementary school. For some reason, 10-year-old-Scott found Adams’ stories of time-wasting meetings and pointy-haired bosses hilarious. No doubt some of the attraction came from a more-than-passing resemblance between Dilbert’s nameless corporation and the California public school system. We’re all inmates in prisons with different names.

But it would be insufficiently ambitious to stop there. Adams’ comics were about the nerd experience. About being cleverer than everyone else, not just in the sense of being high IQ, but in the sense of being the only sane man in a crazy world where everyone else spends their days listening to overpaid consultants drone on about mission statements instead of doing anything useful. There’s an arc in Dilbert where the boss disappears for a few weeks and the engineers get to manage their own time. Productivity shoots up. Morale soars. They invent warp drives and time machines. Then the boss returns, and they’re back to being chronically behind schedule and over budget. This is the nerd outlook in a nutshell: if I ran the circus, there’d be some changes around here.

Yet the other half of the nerd experience is: for some reason this never works. Dilbert and his brilliant co-workers are stuck watching from their cubicles while their idiot boss racks in bonuses and accolades. If humor, like religion, is an opiate of the masses, then Adams is masterfully unsubtle about what type of wound his art is trying to numb.

This is the basic engine of Dilbert: everyone is rewarded in exact inverse proportion to their virtue. Dilbert and Alice are brilliant and hard-working, so they get crumbs. Wally is brilliant but lazy, so he at least enjoys a fool’s paradise of endless coffee and donuts while his co-workers clean up his messes. The P.H.B. is neither smart nor industrious, so he is forever on top, reaping the rewards of everyone else’s toil. Dogbert, an inveterate scammer with a passing resemblance to various trickster deities, makes out best of all.

The repressed object at the bottom of the nerd subconscious, the thing too scary to view except through humor, is that you’re smarter than everyone else, but for some reason it isn’t working. Somehow all that stuff about small talk and sportsball and drinking makes them stronger than you. No equation can tell you why. Your best-laid plans turn to dust at a single glint of Chad’s perfectly-white teeth.

Lesser lights may distance themselves from their art, but Adams radiated contempt for such surrender. He lived his whole life as a series of Dilbert strips. Gather them into one of his signature compendia, and the title would be Dilbert Achieves Self Awareness And Realizes That If He’s So Smart Then He Ought To Be Able To Become The Pointy-Haired Boss, Devotes His Whole Life To This Effort, Achieves About 50% Success, Ends Up In An Uncanny Valley Where He Has Neither The Virtues Of The Honest Engineer Nor Truly Those Of The Slick Consultant, Then Dies Of Cancer Right When His Character Arc Starts To Get Interesting.

If your reaction is “I would absolutely buy that book”, then keep reading, but expect some detours.

  1. As is quantum complexity blogger Scott Aaronson.

At Ace of Spades H.Q., Buck Throckmorton remembers Scott Adams:

Scott Adams’ death is being eloquently covered by others, so there is not much I can add. But I do want to offer up a few quick thoughts. Aside from Dilbert being my favorite cartoon for decades, I was a loyal reader of Mr. Adams’ blog for many years before his greater celebrity during the Trump era. Mr. Adams often expanded my views, and occasionally frustrated me, but he helped me understand how rational people can understand things differently.

Back in 2016, when I doubted that Donald Trump was in any way conservative, and when I thought Trump had no chance to beat Hillary in the presidential election, Scott Adams was one of two writers who made an impact on my attitude toward that election. Mr. Adams famously wrote about the reasons why Trump was likely to win. He was right. (The other writer was John Hinderaker of Powerline, who was the first legacy conservative I read who stated that of course we traditional Republicans needed to vote for Trump.)

I was flattered once when Scott put out a call for Dilbert topics and he ended up using one of my submissions. As I recall, his invitation to the public was something to the effect of “You provide the workplace situation and I’ll provide the humor“. I wrote him and offered up what a special hell it was to be working for a company campaigning for recognition in a local “Best Places to Work” contest. Shortly thereafter he used that in a cartoon.

Finally, my favorite Dilbert character was one who got very little screen time. Scott Adams may be gone, but Mordac, The Preventer of Information Services lives on.

I think of Mordac every time I have a spontaneously obsolete password, or I’m blocked from being able to access a system necessary for my job, or I can’t access an SaaS app because there are too few licenses, or I’m logged out of a system because I got called away for a short meeting, etc. In all these circumstances, I give a tip of the hat to Mordac, and I applaud his success in protecting my employer by preventing me from doing my job.

January 16, 2026

“During the 1990s, the midlist disappeared at major publishing houses”

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

It’s no secret that the publishing industry has changed substantially — and from most readers’ point of view, for the worse — but when did it happen, and why? Ted Gioia points to the mid-1990s in New York City:

Everybody can see there’s a crisis in New York publishing. Even the hot new books feel lukewarm. Writers win the Pulitzer Prize and sell just few hundred copies. The big publishers rely on 50 or 100 proven authors — everything else is just window dressing or the back catalog.

You can tell how stagnant things have become from the lookalike covers. I walk into a bookstore and every title I see is like this.

They must have fired the design team and replaced it with a lazy bot. You get big fonts, random shapes, and garish colors — again and again and again. Every cover looks like it was made with a circus clown’s makeup kit.

My wife is in a book club. If I didn’t know better, I’d think they read the same book every month. It’s those same goofy colors and shapes on every one.

Of course, you can’t judge a book by its cover. But if you read enough new releases, you get the same sense of familiarity from the stories. The publishers keep returning to proven formulas — which they keep flogging long after they’ve stopped working.

And that was a long time ago.

It’s not just publishing. A similar stagnancy has settled in at the big movie studios and record labels. Nobody wants to take a risk — but (as I’ve learned through painful personal experience) that’s often the riskiest move of them all. Live by the formula, and you die by the formula.

How did we end up here?

It’s hard to pick a day when the publishing industry made its deal with the devil. But an anecdote recently shared by Steve Wasserman is as good a place to begin as any.

He’s describing a lunch with his boss at Random House in the fall of 1995. Wasserman is one of the smartest editors I’ve ever met, and possesses both shrewd judgment and impeccable tastes. So he showed up at that lunch with a solid track record.

But it wasn’t good enough. The publishing industry was now learning a new kind of math. Steve’s boss explained the numbers:

    Osnos waited until dessert to deliver the bad news … First printings of ten thousand copies were killing us. It was our obligation to find books that could command first printings of forty, fifty, even sixty thousand copies. Only then could profits be had that were large enough to feed the behemoth — or more precisely, the more refined and compelling tastes — that modern mainstream publishing demanded.

Wasserman countered with infallible logic:

    I pointed out, if such a principle were raised to the level of dogma, none of the several books that were then keeping Random House fiscally afloat — Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (eventually spending a record two hundred and sixteen weeks on the bestseller list, and adapted into a film by Clint Eastwood), and Joe Klein’s Primary Colors (published anonymously and made into a movie by Mike Nichols in 1998) — would ever have been acquired. None had been expected to be a bestseller, and each had started out with a ten-thousand copy first printing.

But it was a hopeless cause. And I know because I’ve had similar conversations with editors. And my experience matches Wasserman’s — something changed in the late 1990s.

The old system offered more variety. It took greater risks. It didn’t rely so much on formulas. So it could surprise you.

In a post about the jinned-up anger about CEO pay versus average worker pay, Tim Worstall briefly touches on the plight of writers:

Or even more fun perhaps.

    In 2006, median author earnings were £12,330. In 2022, the median has fallen to £7,000, a drop of 33.2% based on reported figures, or 60.2% when adjusted for inflation.

That’s median earnings so 50% of all authors earn less than £7,000. And note this is only among those taking it seriously enough to join the Society of Authors (a number which does not include me). Even at my level of scribbling 5x to 10x, depends upon the year, of those median earnings can be gained.

But top level authors, well, they do earn rather more. No, not thinking of the JK Rowling level of global superstardom. But it would astonish me if Owen Jones is earning less than 50x those median earnings (yes, Guardian column, books, Patreon, YouTube and whatever, £350k would be my lower guess).

Writers display that similar sort of income disparity and range, no? Because we’re not about to suggest that Owen is top rank earning now, are we, even if it is a damn good income there.

Which shows us what is wrong with the Cardiganista’s1 initial calculation. They’re pointing only to the incomes of the very tippy toppy of the income distribution for that job. If we apply the same sort of reasoning to writers or footie players (and it’ll be the same for actors and all sorts of other peeps) we find very similar distributions.

  1. They all seem to be Guardian retirees and their byline pictures have them wearing cardigans — or did — therefore …

January 15, 2026

QotD: Process knowledge

Filed under: Asia, Books, Business, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Dan Wang, in his wonderful essay on how technology grows, describes process knowledge as the sine qua non of industrial capitalism, more fundamental than the machines and factories that everybody sees:

    The tools and IP held by these firms are easy to observe. I think that the process knowledge they possess is even more important. The process knowledge can also be referred to as technical and industrial expertise; in the case of semiconductors, that includes knowledge of how to store wafers, how to enter a clean room, how much electric current should be used at different stages of the fab process, and countless other things. This kind of knowledge is won by experience. Anyone with detailed instructions but no experience actually fabricating chips is likely to make a mess.

    I believe that technology ultimately progresses because of people and the deepening of the process knowledge they possess. I see the creation of new tools and IP as certifications that we’ve accumulated process knowledge. Instead of seeing tools and IP as the ultimate ends of technological progress, I’d like to view them as milestones in the training of better scientists, engineers, and technicians.

    The accumulated process knowledge plus capital allows the semiconductor companies to continue to produce ever-more sophisticated chips. […] It’s not just about the tools, which any sufficiently-capitalized firm can buy; or the blueprints, which are hard to follow without experience of what went into codifying them.

Process knowledge lives in people, grows when people interact with other people, and spreads around when skilled individuals relocate between cities or companies. But this also means it can wither and die, can be lost forever, either when old workers shuffle off to the Big Open Plan Office in the Sky, or when an ecosystem no longer has the energy or complexity to sustain a critical mass of skilled workers in a particular vocation. Some East Asian societies have gone to extreme lengths to retain process knowledge, for instance by deliberately demolishing and rebuilding a temple every 20 years.

In fact this is far from the most extreme thing East Asian societies have done to retain the process knowledge that lives within their workers! There are some components of an ecosystem, whether natural or technological, that are especially important keystone species. In the technological case, these species can be unprofitable at the current scale of an ecosystem, or inefficient, or they might not make economic sense until one or more of their customers exist, but those customers might not be able to exist until the keystone species does. Venture capital is very practiced at solving this kind of Catch-22, but in the East Asian economic boom it was national governments that actively sheltered keystone industries until they could get their footing, thus making entire ecosystems possible. A wonderful book about this is Joe Studwell’s How Asia Works, but if you can’t read it, read Byrne Hobart’s thorough review instead.

Process knowledge is so powerful, the ecosystem it enables so vital, it can break the assumptions of Ricardo’s theory of trade. Steve Keen has a perceptive essay about how the naive Ricardian analysis treats all capital stock as fungible and neglects the existence of specialized machinery and infrastructure. But naive defenders1 of trade liberalization often make an exactly analogous error with respect to the other factor of production — labor. Workers are not an undifferentiated lump, they are people with skills, connections, and expertise locked up in their heads. When a high-skill industry moves offshore, the community of experts around it begins to break up, which can cripple adjacent industries, stymie insights and breakthroughs, and make it almost impossible to bring that industry back.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Flying Blind by Peter Robison”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-02-06.

  1. Like all coastal-Americans, I am generally in favor of trade liberalization, but I’m consummate and sophisticated about it, unlike Noah Smith.

January 14, 2026

Is a World State Inevitable? Feral Historian vs Damien Walter

Filed under: History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 22 Aug 2025

Science fiction is full of depictions of global superstates and beyond, depictions of humanity as a single unified people. Is this possible? And if so, what might a viable world state actually look like? Or is it all just the fever dream of dirt-league Stalins? Join Damo and myself for a two-part discussion of the inevitability, possibilities, and acceptability of a world state.

00:00 Intro
03:32 A Story of War
09:08 Us and Them
10:52 Culture
17:24 Federation and Nationalism
22:03 Reminders from the ComBloc
23:45 The World State We Have

Check out Damo’s take • Is a World State…inevitable? Damien Walt…
(more…)

December 21, 2025

Women are walking away from the corporate world

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

On her Substack, Elizabeth Nickson starts her most recent post with the shocking headline that “400,000 women left the workforce this year”:

Digging into these reports, it seems the problem is that no one wants to mentor young women, as seniors traditionally have done for young men. No one seems to want to promote women as equally as they do men. Also women don’t want to “work as hard”. They aren’t “as ambitious” as men.

Also women do twice as much uncompensated labor as men, taking on the great majority of household chores, and, as well, are expected to organize the Christmas party. Not me, I might add — on a personal note. I cook. He does everything else.(editors note)

This means they are over-burdened and resentful and they are quitting. Four hundred thousand women left the workforce in 2025, putting down their tools and refusing to spend their lives working for “the man”.

The reports and accompanying “analyses” in the mainstream cry that government and corporations should do more! More of other people’s money chasing a fruitless dream that goes against human nature and sets sex against sex, turns family dynamics into a conflict zone, and takes away yet another chunk of private life to be traded on the market.

Quitting is the right choice.

    Rather than leaving a job they love, they are quitting for a better life. As one creator said, “Women, during the pandemic, got a sense of what it felt like to not be tied to a desk five days a week in an office. Women started to expand their dreams, expand what was inside of them, and they started to really tun into what was in their gut and in their heart. And a lot of that was ‘I don’t want to work for somebody else’s dreams. I want to spend more time with my kids, I want to spend more time in community, I want to launch a business, I wanna a robust side hustle. I want to be an author, I want to be a content creator.’ I’m excited to see what women build when they are untethered to a corporate job. For a lot of millennial women, it’s I’m going to do something better, I’m gonna do something different.”

This in fact, is enormously exciting to me. Because our towns and cities are bereft of female genius — which is not moving widgets around for McKinsey. Our main streets are mostly barren wastes of utility, and the only town center in most places is the parking lot of a big box store. Unless you live in a tourist town and then it’s commercial cosplaying of an earlier better time.

Charitable work is equally as utilitarian, and the assignment of care of the weak to government is brutal and failing. There are more homeless, more lost and broken people every single year. It’s as if the vast, resplendently-funded homeless bureaucracies think that filing quarterly and annual reports filled with noble-sounding “initiatives” is the same as actually solving the problem. I had one middle-class woman warrior in my house say that they were trying to get more hookers on the streets of good neighborhoods. These people are literally, insane.

Women individuating and returning to a private life indicates they are yearning after a more traditional and based occupation for women and I’m not talking about submission, early child bearing and a boss daddy. My pioneer family women, all ten thousand of them ran small businesses, a home farm, the general store, did bookkeeping, ran a workshop, and/or (usually and) some kind of business in town that was charitable, before that was taken over by corporatism and the ravenous maw of the public service who never saw an innovation they didn’t want to ruin by systematizing and ripping out the heart and purpose.

That and only that is the history of women in America, not this cobbled together whining, mewling, weak, oppressed, screeching, “stressed”, “exhausted”, victim. Women, from 1600-1950 had real problems to solve. They were fully adult.

The generations since tried corporate life. It sucked. And they’re not going back. I think this is a forerunner of the life pattern of women into the future. In fact, in millennial-world, one person with a W-2 job and one person with an entrepreneurial spirit is touted as how you game the system to perfection. Taxes are limited, security is up-levelled, and you can actually build something together, rather than both partners slaving away in the globalist maw.

I expect this to take flight almost immediately.

Because women in corporate life?

Nightmare.

This is what these reports are ignoring. Senior officers do not want to mentor or promote women because they are nightmares to work with. They have been trained by their universities and culture to be ideological freaks, demanding and whining and surreptitiously tearing each other down. There was a study done in the 80’s, before ideology took over social research, that found women in corporate life practiced Power Dead Even, which meant crabs in a bucket, baby. If someone was perceived as too powerful, tear them down.

Introduce that into corporate “culture” and nothing gets done. No wonder senior executives don’t mentor or promote women.

Update, 22 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

November 15, 2025

Canada’s flawed Industrial and Technical Benefits scheme – “We’re architects of our own dependency”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Posted a few days ago, but still of interest — Omar Saleh discusses a part of Canada’s defence acquisition process that provides the illusion of military self-reliance while actually allowing foreign companies to control more and more of our domestic defence manufacturing capacity:

Graphic stolen from Small Dead Animals.

On November 4, the federal government tabled one of the most consequential defence budgets in Canadian history: an $81.8-billion expansion over five years, anchored by a $6.6-billion Defence Industrial Strategy, procurement overhauls, and a vow to claw back sovereignty from decades of polite deferral. It was framed as a national awakening – an overdue recognition that geography is no longer a moat, Russian submarines are testing our Arctic resolve, and allies are no longer willing to pretend Canada is pulling its weight.

But buried underneath all the ambition is a policy that will quietly sabotage it: the Industrial and Technological Benefits (ITB) framework – the mechanism Canada uses to ensure foreign defence contractors reinvest in the Canadian economy and the quiet architecture of our own dependency.

On paper, it’s a sound industrial strategy. So much so that other countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE – both of which are aggressively seeking to onshore the lion’s share of their own defence spending – have implemented very similar policies as part of their respective Vision 2030 programs.

In practice, however, Canada’s ITB is a compliance machine that has mastered the art of doing nothing loudly. It is a mechanism through which American and European primes deepen their control over Canada’s industrial base while giving Ottawa the comforting illusion of self-reliance. We’re not victims of clever contractors. We’re architects of our own dependency, moralizing away the muscle to build someone else’s blueprint.

The numbers are damning. Since 2011, more than one hundred thousand industrial activities have generated over $64 billion in promised economic activity. And for all of that motion, not a single global defence technology titan has emerged. The work done in Canada – machining, composites, test benches, components – is real, but when the world shifts and architectures evolve, the capability evaporates. It was never ours. The most strategically important capabilities are designed abroad, integrated abroad, and updated abroad. We have activity without ownership – a nation performing sovereignty instead of exercising it.

Call it what it is: Phantom Capacity. The illusion of industrial muscle – until the country is forced to lift something heavy.

The core flaw is structural. ITB rewards dollars spent, not capability created, even as it dangles multipliers of up to 9x for R&D and startup work. A prime receives one-to-one credit for $5 million in routine machining, yet could theoretically earn nine times that for backing a Canadian breakthrough. But the theory collapses in practice. Multipliers accounted for less than one per cent of fulfillment between 2015 and 2019, and auditors still cannot prove they delivered any meaningful innovation. The system does not discriminate between activity and advancement. And when a system does not discriminate, the market follows the path of least resistance.

Predictably, primes funnel work to the safest, most administratively convenient suppliers. It is the industrial equivalent of a potluck where everyone insists on homemade dishes but quietly prefers the store-bought tray. Innovation is welcomed rhetorically and ignored in practice.

This leads to the second, more corrosive consequence: Canadian startups are structurally excluded from shaping Canada’s defence future. They move on six-month innovation cycles. Their technology evolves. Their architectures iterate. But in a system where every offset must be pre-approved, credit-verified, documented, and mapped against a prime’s global program calendar, startups cannot operate on their own terms. They must reshape their roadmaps to fit into architectures designed abroad, updated abroad, and controlled abroad. The result is not partnership but subordination.

A Canadian company can build a breakthrough sensor, a next-generation autonomy stack, or a northern detection layer – but it cannot enter a Canadian program of record unless a foreign prime decides to adopt it. The startup becomes a module inside someone else’s strategy. Sovereignty becomes subcontracting with better branding.

November 2, 2025

QotD: The “Blob”, aka the Deep State

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The parasitic unholy alliance of Big Corporations, Big Government, Big Bankers and their entire fan club and cheer squad of supporters. Dangerously, this also includes the watchdogs: the Spy Agencies and large parts of the media. The Blob takes money from citizens, pays other parts of the Blob (eg USAID, The UN, The BIS, The World Bank etc), pretends to “help” some token victim group or environmental cause, or even to monitor or audit The Blob, but the outcome benefits The Blob more than the victims. They line their own pockets and increase their own privileges.

The Blob also includes a special category of “useful idiots” who naively assist them in looting Western Civilization. These people are paid in status or an illusory sense of purpose rather than money. They may not realize they are part of the self-serving Blob, and in the long run are not only harming the trees, birds and whales they say they want to save, but are harming their own health, wealth, national security, and worse, that of their children.

Jo Nova, “The Secret Ruling Class – Why the anonymous Blob needs to be invisible”, JoNova, 2025-07-18.

October 19, 2025

Printed Maplewash from Random Penguin “Canada”

Filed under: Books, Business, Cancon, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte discusses one of the most cynical and blatant attempts to “Maplewash” US product as 100% home-grown Canadian: a book of essays by living and dead Canadian authors, titled with the Liberals’ moronic “Elbows Up” slogan … with all the profits going to Random Penguin’s US corporate headquarters:

Ever since the Trump tariffs against Canada were launched last spring, US firms operating in Canada have been engaged in a variety of maple-washing tactics to shield themselves from consumer backlash. Some are as simple as new labelling — “prepared in Canada!” More audacious was McDonald’s effort to make everyone forget it’s the White House’s caterer of choice: a partnership with Canada’s sweetheart, Shania Twain.

You might think the McDonald’s gambit would be hard to top, but Penguin Random House has done it.

Penguin Random House Canada is a division of Penguin Random House LLC, corporate headquarters at 1745 Broadway, 3rd Floor, New York, New York, 10019. Penguin Random House LLC is in turn controlled by Bertelsmann, a media conglomerate in Gütersloh, Germany, but legally and operationally, it is a US company. Its executive leadership, including CEO Nihar Malaviya, works out of the above address. Strategy and publishing priorities are set in New York, and profits in PRH’s many far-flung international divisions flow to New York. You can see why this firm, with its dominant position in the Canadian market, might feel vulnerable and want to camouflage its Americanness when everyone starts shouting “buy Canadian!”

[…]

There are at least four levels of cynicism to Elbows Up!

The first — let’s call it eye-popping — is that Penguin Random House Canada would use so many of its own authors as human shields in a trade war. I mean, that’s cold. You not only have to conceive it, you have to be confident the authors are so oblivious that they won’t notice — or so obliged that they won’t care — that they’re laundering the reputation and protecting the economic interests of a US multinational and that the net proceeds from their rousing defence of Canadian sovereignty are going straight to 1745 Broadway, 3rd Floor, New York, New York, 10019, along with the licensing rights to their contributions.

[…]

The third level of cynicism — gobsmacking — is that Penguin Random House Canada used its McClelland & Stewart imprint for this atrocity.

I’m not sure there’s ever been a more important Canadian cultural institution than M&S. In the second half of the twentieth century, it was synonymous with Canadian literature. It published the core of the modern Canadian canon — Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, Alice Munro, Mordecai Richler, Mavis Gallant, Robertson Davies, Rohinton Mistry, and many others. More than that, M&S was a symbol of our cultural sovereignty. Its catalog is the closest thing we’ll ever have to the Elgin Marbles.

Jack McClelland, who built the company, ran into financial trouble and sold M&S to strip-mall baron Avie Bennett in 1986. In 2000, Bennett cashed out, selling 25 percent of M&S to Penguin Random House and granting 75 percent to the University of Toronto because federal rules required majority Canadian ownership of cultural enterprises. It was an ingenious deal: UofT played the stooge of Canadian control; PRH had its way with the jewel of Canadian publishing; M&S remained eligible for federal grants because of its “Canadian ownership”. Then, in 2011, the U of T quietly transferred its shares to PRH, giving the multinational full ownership, never mind the foreign-ownership rules. UofT explained that playing the stooge of Canadian control was no longer “a core business” of the university. The house that built Canadian literature, along with its full catalogue of Canadian classics was now fully domiciled at 745 Broadway, 3rd Floor, New York, New York, 10019. The feds didn’t lift a finger.

I don’t know what you’d call that but a cultural crime.

And I don’t know what you can say about PRH using M&S for its maple-washing exercise beyond that it’s gloating.

The final level of cynicism — this one’s just sad — is that Elbows Up! is a forgettable book. It has none of the freshness, quirkiness, and genuine intellectual engagement of The New Romans. It takes as its title a partisan Liberal slogan from the last election (an act of toadying that probably qualifies as its own level of cynicism). A few of the essays, particularly those by the younger writers, are interesting, but none of them has much to say about Canada’s current predicament or the nature of the Canada-US relationship. I was struck by how many of the contributors can’t see beyond their narrow professional or personal identities. It’s as though they’ve never before been called upon to consider Canada as a whole. They lack the vocabulary to contribute anything meaningful. Also, the emotional tone is oddly flat from start to finish.

October 18, 2025

The corporate world is (slowly) backing away from DEI

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On his Substack, Andrew Doyle describes what he calls the “death rattles” of the diversity, equity, and inclusion grifters:

In 180 AD, the Roman satirist Lucian wrote an account of a man called Alexander who had founded a cult of the serpent-god Glycon. According to Lucian, Alexander was much in demand as a prophet, and would charge money to answer questions from those seeking the wisdom of the serpentine deity that he had invented. Lucian records that he “gleaned as much as seventy or eighty thousand [drachmas] a year”.

Some of our modern-day Alexanders take the form of “diversity experts” who have made a fortune from the snake-god of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion). These cheerless mountebanks form part of an industry that rakes in a whopping eight billion dollars annually. According to Glassdoor, a website that provides salary estimates, a Chief Diversity Officer earns an average of $250,000 per year. Oppression is a lucrative business.

Perhaps the most egregious example is that of Robin DiAngelo, a self-proclaimed expert in “whiteness”, who charges $14,000 for every speech, and earns $728,000 every year. At one of her speeches at Coca Cola, DiAngelo’s advice to employees was to “try to be less white”. As the comedian Heydon Prowse observed: “anyone who has had the misfortune of passing a group of Eton boys at Notting Hill Carnival will know that trying to be less white is literally the whitest thing anyone can do”.

But it looks as though the gravy train might finally have been derailed. Yesterday, the This Isn’t Working podcast posted an image of a statement from Jake Graf, a regular DEI speaker who, according to his website, “works with organisations to improve LGBTQ+ representation, mental health awareness, and trans inclusion”. In his statement, posted on LinkedIn, Graf struck a sombre note:

    The pendulum of progress swings in mysterious ways. Just months ago, following the Supreme Court ruling and subsequent EHRC interim guidance, businesses rallied with open arms and vocal support for their trans team and clients. Now, that warmth has slowly given way to a worrying silence, as if someone pressed pause on the march toward inclusion.

The half-hearted poeticism barely masks the anxiety of man who fears that his racket has been exposed. The predominance of the creed of DEI, and its usurpation of meritocracy as the guiding principle in the corporate world, is a testament to the success of culture warriors. They have made plenty of know-nothings very wealthy by promoting ideology as though it were uncontested truth. But now it might well be coming to an end.

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