Esprit de Corps Canadian Military Magazine
Published Apr 22, 2024The Liberal government have finally released their long awaited Defence Policy Update which promises billions of dollars in increased spending for the CAF. Critics wonder if such promises are worth the paper they are printed on. History says that when it comes to military budgets, promises are made to be broken. Good Grief.
(more…)
April 23, 2024
KICKING IT TO THE MOON? Canada’s Military Procurement: A history of broken promises
April 15, 2024
The MOST INCOMPETENT Railroad You’ve Ever Seen!
Southern Plains Railfan
Published Jan 6, 2024In today’s video, we recount the time Penn Central let nearly all of Maine’s potato harvest rot in Selkirk yard; ruining thousands of lives and nearly taking down other railroads in the process.
Merch Shop: http://okieprint.com/SPR/shop/home
Comments Off on The MOST INCOMPETENT Railroad You’ve Ever Seen!
April 14, 2024
More evidence of Canada’s dwindling state capacity – not enough judges
Matt Gurney discussed this issue along with several others in this week’s Line podcast (highly recommended listening/watching, by the way):
Superior Court of Justice building on University Avenue in Toronto (formerly the York County Court House).
An evolving line of defence we see from the federal Liberals is that they’re actually doing a great job. It’s those darned provincial premiers that are screwing things up.
We touched on this in our last dispatch. And you know what? There’s some truth to it. Some, I stress. A lot of issues that are much vexing Canadians today aren’t fully or even primarily in federal jurisdiction. Health care and housing are two obvious examples. Canada is a complicated place, and the Liberals no doubt prefer to not talk about things that they’ve done that have exacerbated challenges faced by other orders of government. But the basic point is fair: Justin Trudeau ain’t to blame for all that ails you. Or at least, the blame ought to be spread around some.
This national disgrace, though, lands squarely on him.
You might have read about the shortage of judges across the country. It’s a pretty niche issue, so you might have missed it. Even if you’ve heard about it, you may not have paid much attention to it. Most Canadians won’t have much contact with the criminal justice system over their lives, let alone make their careers in it. But the crux of the issue is this: appointing judges to provincial superior courts, where many of the most serious matters are heard, is in the federal jurisdiction. Solely. Ditto appointments to the courts of appeal: totally in the federal jurisdiction. And the feds have fallen way behind on filling vacancies and aren’t appointing judges fast enough to erase the backlog. Despite a spate of recent appointments, there are dozens of vacancies across the country. These are funded positions that ought to be filled and overseeing cases. But they aren’t, entirely because the feds haven’t made the necessary appointments. That’s the issue.
A lack of judges is creating bottlenecks in the justice system. Arrests are being made and charges are being laid and cases are being prepared and then … nothing happens. Because you can’t hold a trial if there isn’t a judge available to oversee it.
The Toronto Star‘s Jacques Gallant has established something of a bleak speciality in his recent reporting. He’s written a series of articles in recent months documenting serious criminal cases that are being thrown out of court, with the accused set free, because their trial has been delayed so much that it cannot be completed before the Supreme Court-ordered limit for a “reasonable” wait for a trial runs out. That’s 18 months for more minor issues, and 30 months for serious ones.
To be clear: the decision to throw out the cases is, in a legal sense, correct. Indeed, it’s mandatory. The Supreme Court determined what a hard limit should be, and a case that exceeds that is dead. Full stop. That’s the law of the land. The judges forced to preside over these dismissals are not to blame, and are increasingly venting their frustration in their rulings. They’re mortified, and they’re criticizing the government in unusually blunt terms, to put it mildly. You don’t often read court rulings that come off more like op-eds, but we live in weird times.
But it’s a good thing that they’re saying something. Because these vacancies are having appalling real-world consequences. Gallant wrote recently about a case that I felt would mark the low point in the entire embarrassment. A woman had accused a man of raping her. She did a brave thing and reported it. The police believed her and made an arrest. The Crown reviewed the evidence and believed her, and proceeded with a trial. A jury believed her, and after considering the evidence against the accused and hearing his defence, convicted him of the crime.
And then the judge tossed the case, setting aside the verdict and letting the accused go free, innocent in the eyes of the law. Because the clock had run out.
Comments Off on More evidence of Canada’s dwindling state capacity – not enough judges
April 10, 2024
We can expect to see a lot more commercial bankruptcies in future
Although Tim Worstall is talking specifically about commercial properties in the UK, I suspect the same basic mechanism is in place here in Canada, the US, and many other countries and the outcomes will be broadly similar: declining retail sales intersecting with rising rents do not result in healthy retail markets.
The specific point is something that has become common to near universal in commercial property leases in the decades since the War. This is that rents can only ever be revised upwards.
So, the standard thing about commercial property is that it’s not so much rented as leased. The difference is not wholly clear but, roughly enough, you can leave a rental and you can’t leave a lease. That is, if you’ve a 21 year lease and you want to leave before the 21 years are up then it’s up to you to find another tenant. Not the landlord — and if that tenant that you do find then leaves/goes bust/doesn’t pay the rent then you have to. At least a rental you can leave.
OK — but that’s all pretty standard. The UK has one more thing. Obviously, there are rent reviews during the period of the lease. Inflation taught landlords that this was something they needed to do after all. OK — but the standard, and it really is standard in UK commercial leases, rent review is upwards only. Now, for most of this past 70 years this hasn’t been a problem. The country has been getting richer, inflation has persisted, retail’s been ever more of the economy, rents have been going up.
Ah, but now, eh? Firstly, we’ve the internet eating retail.
About, and roughly, 1% of the total market each year moves online. We all thought that the lockdown boom was going to persist and it didn’t. This caused all sorts of problems for all sorts of people — Boohoo ended up terribly overstocked. Made.com was able to come to market and then went bust as the right hand end of that chart happened and we returned to trend after the blip. Revolution Beauty had its own problems but the overvaluation was at least partly to do with this and so on.
But this had already been happening — Intu went bust well before the pandemic, as we know. It’s now about true that 15% or more of UK retail space is empty. Because sales are moving online. This — naturally enough — means that prices, rents, of retail are falling. Well, OK.
But now this meets upwards-only rent reviews. If you’re a new retailer looking for space then the High Streets are your mollusc of choice. You can probably get in on low rents, substantial rent-free periods and even get the landlord to pay your fitting out costs (landlords would much rather give rent-free periods, pay costs of moving in, than let at low rents. Because the terms of their own mortgages and loans make it better for them to keep headline rents stable whatever the hell the truth of the real value is). But if you’re a long established retailer paying high street rents then you’re screwed.
Your new competition might be able to get in by paying half the rent you are. And yes, rent is a really, really, big part of retail in the UK. You are, in fact, fucked and right royally.
Comments Off on We can expect to see a lot more commercial bankruptcies in future
CDR Salamander says it’s “time to drag LCS out of the gimp box again”
CDR Salamander has never held back on his dislike of the Little Crappy Ship (Littoral Combat Ship) design(s) the US Navy settled on nearly 20 years ago:
As promised yesterday, time to drag LCS out of the gimp box again, because it fits in well with last week’s 3×8 Grid of Shame, flavored in no small part with the Navy’s decision to pull its head inside its shell and cancel its ship briefings.
To solve the many problems we have created for ourselves, we must have a foundational change in our culture. Expecting a different result without changing that, I’m not sure how we get any headway.
From our FITREPs to our shipbuilding plans to the testimony by our leadership to Congress. We spin, mindlessly drone talking points and carefully scripted PAOisms, and from our FITREP to awards system, we willfully share untruths, obscure, hope things just blow up on someone else’s PCS cycle.
[…]
Now, let’s take a look at this second pic. On its face it demonstrates that LCS is a direct byproduct of an institutional habit of not being honest with the American people, their elected representatives, and hell … even ourselves.
Besides both this pic and the first one showing the USN ship being the most out of formation, what catches you eye?
The ship furthest away in formation should look the smallest … but there is nothing “small” about an LCS in the visual spectrum.
In an age where satellites with multi-spectral surveillance capability matched with artificial intelligence, look at that first pic. Is there any way to hide that wake?
Of course not.
Then look at the LCS’s weapons capability compared to the other ships. Is she ready for combat in the littorals against an enemy that will bring modern air, surface, and subsurface threats to her?
Should people only realizing this in the third decade of the 21st Century be taken seriously?
No. I don’t buy any of what they are selling. Either they are lying to my/our face, or they lack the critical thinking skills to see what this kludge was/is/will be.
Comments Off on CDR Salamander says it’s “time to drag LCS out of the gimp box again”
April 2, 2024
Gear-Ratio-Accelerated? Yep, It’s a Thing: French MAT 1955 Prototype
Forgotten Weapons
Published Dec 20, 2023EDIT: Shoot, I managed to get the gear ratio backwards. Sorry! The recoil action provides the necessary delay, and then the gear ratio provides acceleration to ensure the bolt can open reliably, akin to the accelerator in a Browning M1917 or 1919 machine gun, or a Lahti L35 pistol. Please excuse the error …
In the search for an improvement to the MAS 1949 rifle for the French military, all the French arsenals proposed new designs. MAS supplied an updated version that was ultimately adopted as the MAS 49/56, but the Tulle Arsenal (MAT) had a wacky idea of its own. In 1955, they presented a short-recoil, tilting bolt, gear-ratio-delayed system. It was an open bolt firing rifle chambered for the 7.5x54mm cartridge, using detachable 20-round magazines. Today we have one of the first models to look at, and there was a second iteration in 1956, which lightened the rifle by replacing some steel parts with aluminum. Neither was successful, much to the relief of the French Army …
Many thanks to the IRCGN (Institut de Recherche Criminelle de la Gendarmerie Nationale) for allowing me access to film this unique rifle for you!
(more…)
Comments Off on Gear-Ratio-Accelerated? Yep, It’s a Thing: French MAT 1955 Prototype
March 26, 2024
Why the USN isn’t using their “Littoral Combat Ships” in the Red Sea littoral zone
CDR Salamander explains why the US Navy has chosen not to deploy the ships specifically designed and built to operate in environments like the Red Sea:
LCS USS Independence (LCS-2)
On yesterday’s Midrats, my co-host mentioned that recently in the Red Sea our Navy has seen the most littoral combat it has in a very long time, but our Littoral Combat Ships are not to be seen. Why? Simple. They cannot conduct combat on the littorals.
This AM, fellow “First LCS Critic” Chapomatic sent me a link to an article from September of last year that I think at the time I made a passing comment on over at X, but did not bring here. Well, let’s fix that.
Why do we need to periodically drag LCS out of the gimp box and hoist her up for all to behold? Simple; as an example to others. We simply cannot afford another CG(X) or DDG-1000 situation with DDG(X) or any other ship we have in the design phase. We have already lost one generation of ship design due to the Age of Transformationalism.
With the Constellation Class FFG we now have building, we are at last taking the course I first suggested in 2006 to correct the error of LCS. That is our version of FREMM that was first commissioned by the French in 2012, a dozen years ago.
LCS was not a problem with our shipbuilding industry or even our design people – though there are areas to critique there. No, this was a people problem, a mindset problem, a culture problem.
It needs to be dragged up regularly. I last did a dedicated post on it back in August 2023. It is time.
As we dive into the details remember this; since the disaster of LCS no senior personnel have yet been held to public account. We have the same acquisition system. We have the same incentives and disincentives as before. Critics of LCS were pushed over to the off-ramp; its most NORK-like advocates promoted.
There is no guarantee this won’t happen again.
Joaquin Sapien at ProPublica and his extensive almost novella – not just an article – on LCS that even opens with a quote of the phrase that first came into the general conversation here on CDR Salamander; The Inside Story of How the Navy Spent Billions on the “Little Crappy Ship”.
Sadly, we did not even get a mention or link – though most of the arguments are the same ones we’ve been making here and on the OB Blog since 2004 – if you spot me six months or so, two decades ago.
Some people have critiques of ProPublica, especially from the right side of the spectrum, but I’m sorry – their critique here is spot on.
It starts right in center mass;
The USS Freedom had its own special place within the armada. It was one of a new class of vessels known as littoral combat ships. The U.S. Navy had billed them as technical marvels — small, fast and light, able to combat enemies at sea, hunt mines and sink submarines.
In reality, the LCS was well on the way to becoming one of the worst boondoggles in the military’s long history of buying overpriced and underperforming weapons systems. Two of the $500 million ships had suffered embarrassing breakdowns in previous months. The Freedom’s performance during the exercise, showing off its ability to destroy underwater mines, was meant to rejuvenate the ships’ record on the world stage. The ship was historically important too; it was the first LCS built, the first in the water, commissioned just eight years prior.
The summary of their findings in spot on, especially the last sentence;
Our examination revealed new details on why the LCS never delivered on its promises. Top Navy leaders repeatedly dismissed or ignored warnings about the ships’ flaws. One Navy secretary and his allies in Congress fought to build more of the ships even as they broke down at sea and their weapons systems failed. Staunch advocates in the Navy circumvented checks meant to ensure that ships that cost billions can do what they are supposed to do.
Both inside and outside the Navy, LCS critics warned two decades ago that 2024 would find the Little Crappy Ship roughly where it wound up
Comments Off on Why the USN isn’t using their “Littoral Combat Ships” in the Red Sea littoral zone
March 21, 2024
French NATO Standardization: the MAS 49-56 in 7.62mm
Forgotten Weapons
Published May 27, 2019In the late 1950s, France was still part of the NATO integrated military structure. When the 7.62x51mm cartridge was adopted as standard for the alliance, France looked to be in a good position to simply convert their MAS 49-56 rifles to use it. After all, the 7.5mm cartridge the rifle was designed for was very similar to the new NATO round. After several years of trials, however, the project was dropped as impractical. It turned out that the much different pressure curve of the 7.62mm round would require significant redesign of the MAS rifles. They suffered from poor extraction, broken parts from high bolt velocity, and other issues (not coincidentally, the exact same problems reported with the 308 MAS 49-56 rifles imported by Century …). The St Etienne factory only made a total of 150 of them in 7.62x51mm before the project ended.
(more…)
Comments Off on French NATO Standardization: the MAS 49-56 in 7.62mm
March 20, 2024
This “should be a reality check for the technocracy”
Ted Gioia on the SXSW audience reaction to being presented with full-quill AI enthusiasm that didn’t match the presenters’ expectations at all:
Tech leaders gathered in Austin for the South-by-Southwest conference a few days ago. There they showed a video boasting about the wonders of new AI technology.
And the audience started booing.
At first, just a few people booed. But then more and more — and louder and louder. The more the experts on screen praised the benefits of artificial intelligence, the more hostile the crowd got.
The booing started in response to the comment that “AI is a culture.” And the audience booed louder when the word disrupted was used as a term of praise (as is often the case in the tech world nowadays).
Ah, but the audience booed the loudest at this statement:
I actually think that AI fundamentally makes us more human.
The event was a debacle — the exact opposite of what the promoters anticipated.
And it should be a reality check for the technocracy.
If they were paying attention, they might already have a hunch how much people hate this stuff — not just farmers in Kansas or your granny in Altoona, but hip, progressive attendees at SXSW.
These people literally come to the event to learn about new things, and even they are gagging on this stuff.
It’s more than just fears about runaway AI. Prevailing attitudes about digital tech and innovation are changing rapidly in real time — and not for the better. The users feel used.
Meanwhile the tech leaders caught in some time warp. They think they are like Steve Jobs launching a new Apple product in front of an adoring crowd.
Those days are gone.
Not even Apple is like Apple anymore. A similar backlash happened a few weeks ago, when Apple launched its super-high-tech virtual reality headset. The early response on social media was mockery and ridicule — something Steve Jobs never experienced.
This is the new normal. Not long ago we looked to Silicon Valley as the place where dreams came from, but now it feels more like ground zero for the next dystopian nightmare.
He’s not just a curmudgeonly nay-sayer (that’s more me than him), and has some specific things that are clearly turning a majority of technology users against the very technology that they once eagerly adopted:
They’re doing so many things wrong, I can’t even begin to scratch the surface here. But I’ll list a few warning signs.
You must be suspicious of tech leaders when …
- Their products and services keep getting worse over time.
- Their obvious goal is to manipulate and monetize the users of their tech, instead of serving and empowering them.
- The heaviest users of their tech suffer from depression, anxiety, suicidal impulses, and other negative effects as a result.
- They stop talking about quality, and instead boast incessantly about scalability, disruption, and destruction.
- They hide what their technology really does — resisting all requests for transparency and disclosure.
- They lock you into platforms, forcing you to use new “features” and related apps if you want to access the old ones.
- They force upgrades you don’t like, and downloads you don’t want.
- Their terms of use are filled with outrageous demands and sweeping disclaimers.
- They destroy entire industries not because they offer superior products, but only because as web gatekeepers they have a chokehold on information and customer flow — which they use ruthlessly to kill businesses and siphon off revenues.
Every one of those things is happening right here, right now.
We’re doing the technocracy a favor by calling it to their attention. If they get the message, they can avoid the coming train wreck. They can return to real innovation, with a focus on helping the users they now so ruthlessly exploit.
Comments Off on This “should be a reality check for the technocracy”
March 19, 2024
Canada’s new international role: the object lesson in failure and tyranny
Tristin Hopper rounds up some of the foreign impressions of Canada’s descent into the west’s object lesson in what not to do in almost every area:
In just the last week, there have been two separate columns in British newspapers framing Canada as a model of what not to do.
Both were inspired by the tabling of Bill 63, the Liberals’ Online Harms Bill. The Spectator said that it effectively engendered the founding of a Canadian “thought police”. The Telegraph cited it as evidence that “Canada’s descent into tyranny is almost complete”.
This didn’t used to happen. It wasn’t too long ago that Canadian politics were famously inaccessible to the wider world. For Canada’s 2008 federal election, The Spectator covered it with a blog post that mostly mused on how nobody cared. “It’s curious that Canada receives almost no foreign coverage, even in Britain where there are, after all, plenty of people with Canadian relatives or connections,” it read.
But now – on topics ranging from assisted suicide to housing affordability to internet regulation – it’s not infrequent that Canada will be cited in foreign parliaments and in foreign media as the very model of a worst-case scenario.
It was just six months ago that The Telegraph scored a viral hit with a mini-documentary framing the political situation in Canada as a “warning to the West”.
“Under Justin Trudeau, Canada has sought to position itself as the global bastion of progressive politics,” reads a synopsis for the film Canada’s Woke Nightmare, which has garnered more than five million views.
The documentary notes that Canada is now at the absolute global vanguard of progressive issues including harm reduction, assisted suicide and gender ideology.
[…]
If the Online Harms Act is suddenly garnering headlines across the rest of the Anglosphere, it’s not because Canadian politics are inherently interesting to the wider world. Rather, it’s because Bill C-63 – just like any number of Trudeau policies before it – is proposing to do things that no other Western democracy has yet proposed.
While plenty of Canada’s peer countries have hate speech controls, Bill C-63 was able to raise even European eyebrows with life sentences for “advocating genocide”, and a provision for police to mandate house arrest merely on suspicion that a Canadian was likely to commit a hate crime.
The Wall Street Journal, for one, profiled the bill as a real-life example of the 2002 film Minority Report, which depicts a dystopian future in which citizens are jailed for “pre-crime”.
Or in the critical words of The Spectator, “this legislation authorises house arrest and electronic tagging for a person considered likely to commit a future crime … if that’s not establishing a thought police, I don’t know what is”.
Comments Off on Canada’s new international role: the object lesson in failure and tyranny
March 12, 2024
The recently admitted “death spiral” for the Canadian Armed Forces is nothing new
“Shady Maples” outlines just a few of the historical procurement fuckups Canada’s armed forces have had to work through, showing that the recent admission that the armed forces are in a “death spiral” by MND Bill Blair is almost “situation normal” for the troops:
The Canadian Armed Forces are fucked. By this term of art, I mean that the CAF:
- are in dire circumstances; and
- are being used for such aggressive political gratification that it’s practically perverse.
You don’t have to take my word for it. The Minister of National Defence made the following remarks last week:
because, the bottom line is the Canadian Armed Forces must grow. We’re short a lot of people. Almost 16,000 in our regular forces and reserves.
If that wasn’t bad enough, he added:
more than half of our trucks, more than half of our ships and more than half of our planes are not available for service because they are in need of parts and repair. We’re going to have to do better.
Translation: we are fucked.
The MND’s remarks come eleven months after the CDAI published an open letter on the state of national security and defence:
Years of restraint, cost cutting, downsizing and deferred investments, have meant that Canada’s defence capabilities have atrophied. Our military capabilities are outdated and woefully inadequate to protect our landmass and maritime approaches. We have also fallen short in meaningful contributions to burden sharing for the collective defence and security of our allies and partners.
Translation: we have been fucked for awhile.
More recently, the Vice Admiral Tophsee made waves on the RCN’s official YouTube channel by stating the obvious:
Colleagues and Shipmates, the RCN is facing some very serious challenges right now that could mean we fail to meet our Force Posture and Readiness commitments in 2024 and beyond. La situation est grave mais nos problèmes ne sont pas uniques et je sais que l’aviation et l’armée sont confrontées a des défis similaires. [The situation is serious, but our problems are not unique, and I know that the Air Force and the Army are facing similar problems.]
Translation: we will be fucked for the foreseeable future.
He then shows that this sort of thing has been part-and-parcel of Canada’s delusionary approach to national defence since the year before Confederation. Canada’s WW1 army was sent off with fantastically bad equipment — from rifles to web gear, from automobiles to artillery ammunition — all scandals of the day that no lessons were learned from.
Soldiers and officers at the tactical level will readily tell you that these headlines are only surprising because senior leaders are finally saying the quiet part out loud: the CAF is undermanned, under-equipped, under-trained, and unprepared. We know this because we live it every day: situation normal, all fucked up. But you don’t need a source or a leak to learn about our deplorable state of readiness. Here is a link to DND’s 2023 audit and evaluation reports. They paint a bleak picture: we have insufficient equipment and what we have keeps breaking. We have insufficient personnel to match with commitments, and we are struggling to recruit, train, and retain more. Go have a look at the reports, they lay it all out.
March 6, 2024
You had me at “Cartchy tuns, exarserdray lollipops” and “a pasadise of sweet teats”
Charlie Stross checks in with a Willy Wonka-adjacent story from Glasgow that utterly failed to live up to the billing:
This is no longer in the current news cycle, but definitely needs to be filed under “stuff too insane for Charlie to make up”, or maybe “promising screwball comedy plot line to explore”, or even “perils of outsourcing creative media work to generative AI”.
So. Last weekend saw insane news-generating scenes in Glasgow around a public event aimed at children: Willy’s Chocolate Experience, a blatant attempt to cash in on Roald Dahl’s cautionary children’s tale, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Which is currently most prominently associated in the zeitgeist with a 2004 movie directed by Tim Burton, who probably needs no introduction, even to a cinematic illiterate like me. Although I gather a prequel movie (called, predictably, Wonka), came out in 2023.
(Because sooner or later the folks behind “House of Illuminati Ltd” will wise up and delete the website, here’s a handy link to how it looked on February 24th via archive.org.)
INDULGE IN A CHOCOLATE FANTASY LIKE NEVER BEFORE – CAPTURE THE ENCHANTMENT ™!
Tickets to Willys Chocolate Experience™ are on sale now!
The event was advertised with amazing, almost hallucinogenic, graphics that were clearly AI generated, and equally clearly not proofread because Stable Diffusion utterly sucks at writing English captions, as opposed to word salad offering enticements such as Catgacating • live performances • Cartchy tuns, exarserdray lollipops, a pasadise of sweet teats.* And tickets were on sale for a mere £35 per child!
Anyway, it hit the news (and not in a good way) and the event was terminated on day one after the police were called. Here’s The Guardian‘s coverage:
The event publicity promised giant mushrooms, candy canes and chocolate fountains, along with special audio and visual effects, all narrated by dancing Oompa-Loompas — the tiny, orange men who power Wonka’s chocolate factory in the Roald Dahl book which inspired the prequel film.
But instead, when eager families turned up to the address in Whiteinch, an industrial area of Glasgow, they discovered a sparsely decorated warehouse with a scattering of plastic props, a small bouncy castle and some backdrops pinned against the walls.
Anyway, since the near-riot and hasty shutdown of the event, things have … recomplicated? I think that’s the diplomatic way to phrase it.
February 26, 2024
QotD: Lockdown rebuttal
First, lockdowns were neither prudent nor essential. It’s not as if government officials considered the collateral damage to be inflicted on the economy, society, and health – not all health problems are caused by covid – by the lockdowns and then rationally concluded that the benefits of locking down outweighed these costs. No. The collateral damages were ignored. As the New York Times‘s Joe Nocera and Vanity Fair‘s Bethany McLean – authors of the just-released The Big Fail – write, “But there was never any science behind lockdowns – not a single study had ever been undertaken to measure their efficacy in stopping a pandemic. When you got right down to it, lockdowns were little more than a giant experiment.”1 In no universe is such a policy prudent.
Nor were lockdowns “essential”. As Nocera and McLean note,
… the weight of the evidence seems to be with those who say that lockdowns did not save many lives. By our count, there are at least 50 studies that come to the same conclusion. After The Big Fail went to press, The Lancet published a study comparing the COVID infection rate and death rate in the 50 states. It concluded that “SARS-CoV-2 infections and COVID-19 deaths disproportionately clustered in U.S. states with lower mean years of education, higher poverty rates, limited access to quality health care, and less interpersonal trust – the trust that people report having in one another.” These sociological factors appear to have made a bigger difference than lockdowns (which were “associated with a statistically significant and meaningfully large reduction in the cumulative infection rate, but not the cumulative death rate”.)
Second, the lockdowns were, contra Mr. Orrell’s claim, utterly unprecedented. Isolating individuals known to be infected, such as Typhoid Mary, is a categorically different measure than locking down whole societies. Such lockdowns were never used until China locked Wuhan down in early 2020. Here again are Nocera and McLean: “On April 8, 2020, the Chinese government lifted its lockdown of Wuhan. It had lasted 76 days – two and a half months during which no one was allowed to leave this industrial city of 11 million people, or even leave their homes. Until the Chinese government deployed this tactic, a strict batten-down-the-hatches approach had never been used before to combat a pandemic. Yes, for centuries infected people had been quarantined in their homes, where they would either recover or die. But that was very different from locking down an entire city; the World Health Organization called it ‘unprecedented in public health history’.”
It’s jarring to encounter in an essay that features many excellent arguments – as Mr. Orrell’s does – such irrational and utterly uninformed claims as Mr. Orrell offers about lockdowns.
Donald J. Boudreaux, responding to an article by Brent Orrell in Law & Liberty, 2023-10-31.
1. “COVID Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure.” Intelligencer, October 30, 2023.
Comments Off on QotD: Lockdown rebuttal
November 10, 2023
Only a government could waste this much money on the ArriveCAN boondoggle
Chris Selley is in two minds about the ArriveCAN scandal, in that thus far no minister has been implicated but we all may naively assume that the civil service was better than this sort of sleaze:
It’s tempting to want to forget that ArriveCAN, the federal government’s pandemic travel app that collected dead-simple information from arriving travellers and forwarded it to relevant officials for scrutiny, and that somehow cost $54.5 million — a figure no one has come within 100 miles of justifying, and don’t let anyone tell you differently. No one wants to remember the circumstances that supposedly made ArriveCAN necessary.
One could also certainly argue there are aspects of Canada’s pandemic response more desperately needing scrutiny. So, so many aspects.
But whenever the House of Commons operations committee sits down to investigate ArriveCAN, there are fireworks. And you start to think, maybe this godforsaken app is more key to understanding Canada’s pandemic nightmare than you first thought.
The latest blasts came on Tuesday, when Cameron MacDonald, director-general of the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) when the pandemic hit, alleged Minh Doan, then MacDonald’s superior and since promoted to chief technological officer of the entire federal government — pause for thought — had lied to the committee on Oct. 24 with respect to who picked GCStrategies to oversee the ArriveCAN project.
Doan told the committee he hadn’t been “personally involved” in the decision. MacDonald, who says he had recommended Deloitte build the app, says that’s garbage. “It was a lie that was told to this committee. Everyone knows it,” he said. “Everyone knew it was his decision to make. It wasn’t mine.” MacDonald said Doan had threatened in a telephone conversation to finger him as the culprit, and that he had felt “incredibly threatened”.
Crikey.
For those who’ve blissfully forgotten, GCStrategies consists of two people who subcontract IT work to teams of experts and takes a cut off the top — in this case a cut of roughly $11 million, for an app that should have cost a fraction of that, if it was to exist at all. Needless to say, that wasn’t the only fat contract GCStrategies — which, again, is two men and an address book — had received from the government over the years. Each GCStrategist made more money off ArriveCAN than I’ll likely make in my life. It makes me want to strap on a bass drum and sing “The Internationale” in public.
Comments Off on Only a government could waste this much money on the ArriveCAN boondoggle
October 30, 2023
The rapidly fading market for “song investing”
Ted Gioia called it over two years ago, and now it’s coming true:
The collapse finally came.
When I analyzed the song buyout mania, led by the Hipgnosis fund, back in June 2021, I predicted that this ultra-hot investment trend would “come to an unhappy end”. And now the collapse has arrived.
We’ve reached the endgame. The song fund’s share price has dropped 50% since I made that assessment — and now shareholders have voted to dissolve or reorganize the investment trust.
But where do we go from here? What are old songs really worth? And who will end up owning all these old rock and pop tunes?
Below I offer 12 predictions.
Much of what I have to say is harsh. That’s unfortunate — if I were a real judge, I’d err on the side of leniency. It’s never fun issuing such hardass verdicts. But if I claim to be the Honest Broker, I really have to stick with truths, even when (as in this case) they’re painful truths.
(1) Many musicians still want to sell their songs, but it will be hard to find generous buyers.
Bob Dylan got out at the top, but the times are now a-changin’. Musicians won’t get the big payouts available back in 2021. A telltale sign will be more deals with “undisclosed terms” — because nobody will want to brag about these lowball transactions.(2) Professional financiers have finally learned their lesson.
The two big finance outfits promoting song investing, Hipgnosis and Round Hill, have faltered and will now sell the songs they bought. Sophisticated investors no longer believe the hype. So don’t expect to see the launch of new song investment funds any time soon. The remaining buyers will be bottom fishers and the terminally naive (described in more detail below).[…]
(5) Look out for these vultures in all sectors of the music business.
When private equity firms knock on your door, it’s a sign that you’re already half dead. These folks actually enjoy picking on carcasses — which is easier work than hunting for live prey. I tend to avoid name-calling, but there’s a reason why some folks refer to them as vulture capitalists. That’s their specialty and their economic model is built on bottom-feeding. This is why private equity firms bought up lots of failing local newspaper, struggling local radio stations, etc. Guess what’s next on their list? Expect to see these tough hombres play a bigger role in all aspects of the music business over the next decade.[…]
(7) This whole situation is a case study in misallocated investment capital.
There’s a general lesson here too. I realized, early on in my consulting work, that the single biggest mistake large corporations make is investing too much to keep their old business units alive — when they would be wiser putting that cash to work in new opportunities. The major record labels in the current moment are poster children for exactly this mistaken sense of priorities. They will support the “old songs” business model at all costs — it’s a core part of their self image — but return on investment will be dismal.
Comments Off on The rapidly fading market for “song investing”
