Quotulatiousness

November 2, 2020

Federal government to web giants: “BOHICA!”

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

Michael Geist provides an unauthorized backgrounder on the Canadian government’s quixotic attempt to shakedown the likes of Netflix for money to give to “struggling” Canadian media companies:

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020.
Screencapure from CPAC video.

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault is set to introduce his “Get Money from Web Giants” Internet regulation bill on Monday. Based on his previous public comments, the bill is expected to grant the CRTC extensive new powers to regulate Internet-based video streaming services. In particular, expect the government to mandate payments to support Canadian content production for the streaming services and establish new “discoverability” requirements that will require online services to override user preferences by promoting Canadian content. The government is likely to issue a policy direction to the CRTC that identifies its specific priorities, but the much-discussed link licensing requirement for social media companies that Guilbeault has supported will not be part of this legislative package.

These reforms mark the culmination of a dramatic reversal in government digital policy. After then-Heritage Minister Melanie Joly unveiled her 2017 digital cancon strategy that focused on market-based solutions and emphasized exports of Canadian culture, extensive lobbying gradually let to a major policy flip flop. The CRTC reversed its prior position on Internet streaming regulation in 2018 with a regulate-everything approach, the deeply flawed Yale report released earlier this year provided the blueprint for CRTC-led regulation, and Guilbeault jumped on board with a declaration that his top legislative priority was to “get money from web giants.”

On Monday, the government will undoubtedly line up the lobby groups that supported the reform to provide positive quotes, suggest reforms will lead to billions in new revenues, and claim the bill ensures regulatory fairness by requiring that everyone contribute. Yet much of the policy is based on fictions: that this levels the playing field, that there is a Cancon crisis, that discoverability requirements respond to a serious concern, that this will result in quick payments to the industry, that this is consistent with net neutrality, or that consumers will not bear the costs of reform.

None of this is true. But beyond those issues – each discussed in further detail below – this most notably represents a significant new source of speech regulation. We do not require government authorization to publish newspapers, blog posts, or to simply voice our views in a public forum. That we require governmental authorization in the form of licensing for broadcasters was largely justified in furtherance of cultural policies on the grounds of limited access to scarce spectrum. That justification simply does not apply to the Internet, no matter how many times Guilbeault refers to the inclusion of Internet companies within the “broadcast system.” This is not a matter of Internet exceptionalism. Laws and regulations such as taxation, competition, privacy, and consumer protection are all among the rules that apply regardless of whether the service is offline or online. But speech regulation by the CRTC should require a far better justification than the lure of “free money” from Internet companies.

October 15, 2020

Twitter will now helpfully prevent you from committing thoughtcrime, citizen!

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

When you appoint yourself the guardian of speech, you quickly become the gatekeeper of all speech:

QotD: What the GDP is failing to show (even though it’s there)

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

There simply isn’t a technology that has come anywhere close to arriving in the hands of actual users as fast as the smartphone and mobile internet. The next closest competitor is the mobile phone itself. All others running distant third and behind.

Our problem is that we know technological revolutions produce growth. Yet economic growth is limp at best, meagre perhaps a better description. So, there’s something wrong here. Either our basic understandings about how growth occurs are wrong and we [are] loathe to agree to that. Not because too much is bound up in that understanding but because too much of it makes sense. The other explanation is that we’re counting wrong.

[…]

We know that we’ve not quite got new products and their falling prices in our estimates of inflation quite correctly. They tend to enter the inflation indices after their first major price falls, meaning that inflation is always overstated. Given that the number we really look at is real growth – nominal growth minus inflation – this means we are consistently underestimating real growth.

[…]

The more we dig into this the more convinced I am that our only real economic problem at present is counting. Everything makes sense if we are counting output and inflation incorrectly, under-estimating the first, over- the second. If we are doing that – and we know that we are, only not quite to what extent – then all other economic numbers make sense. We’re in the midst of a large technological change, we’ve full employment by any reasonable measure, wages and productivity should be rising strongly. If we’re mismeasuring as above then those two are rising strongly, we’re just not capturing it. Oh, and if that’s also true then inequality is lower than currently estimated too.

The thing is, the more we study the details of these questions the more it becomes clear that we are mismeasuring, and mismeasuring enough that all of the claimed problems, the low growth, low productivity rises, low wage growth, simply aren’t there in the first place. And if they ain’t then nothing needs to be done about them, does it? Except, perhaps, count properly.

Tim Worstall, “Where’s All The Economic Growth? Goldman Sachs Blames Apple’s iPhone”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-07-03.

October 1, 2020

Far from being in trouble, Canadian film and TV investment has nearly doubled in the last 10 years

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

The Canadian government — particularly Canadian Heritage minister Steven Guilbeault — is eager to pass legislation to “get money from the web giants” and their primary justification is the claim that Canadian TV and movie funding has been shrinking. As Michael Geist explains, that’s a pants-on-fire lie:

CMPA Profile – Financing, Sources: CMPA Profile 2019, 2016, 2013

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault has said that his top legislative priority is to “get money from web giants.” While much of the attention has focused on his ill-advised plan to require Facebook to obtain licences for linking to news articles, his first legislative step is likely to target Internet streamers such as Netflix, Amazon and Disney with new requirements to fund Canadian content and to increase its “discoverability” by making it more prominent for subscribers. Based on his comments at several town halls, Guilbeault is likely to also create new incentives for supporting indigenous and persons of colour in the sector with a bonus for those investments (potentially treating $1 of investment as $1.50 for the purposes of meeting Cancon spending requirements). Much of the actual implementation will fall to the CRTC, which will be granted significant new regulatory powers and targeted with a policy direction.

Guilbeault’s case for establishing new mandated payments is premised on the claim that support for the film and television sector is declining due to the emergence of Internet streaming services, which have resulted in decreased revenues for the conventional broadcast sector and therefore lower contributions to Cancon creation. In fact, Guilbeault recently told Le Devoir that without taking action there would be a billion dollar deficit in support in the next three years. He says that his objective is to actually generate a few hundred million more per year in local production by the Internet streamers. In other words, he’s expecting roughly $2 billion in new investment over three years in Cancon from U.S. entities due to his planned regulations (moving from a billion dollar deficit to a billion dollars in extra spending).

While Guilbeault frames these regulatory requirements as a matter of fairness and “rebalancing”, industry data over the past decade tell a much different story. Indeed, there has been record setting film and television production in recent years, much of it supported by companies such as Netflix. CRTC chair Ian Scott last year said that Netflix is “probably the biggest single contributor to the [Canadian] production sector today.” While that is not entirely true – the data suggests that Canadian taxpayers are the biggest contributor with federal and provincial tax credits consistently the largest source of financing – the claim that there is a billion dollar deficit coming or that foreign streamers do not contribute to film and television production in Canada without a regulatory requirement is simply false.

September 23, 2020

Federal minister admits the Libranos’ plan is a shakedown to “get money from web giants”

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

Michael Geist on a rare moment of honesty from Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault on the federal government’s atrocity of an internet regulation plan:

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020.
Screencapture from CPAC video.

As Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault prepares an Internet regulation plan that features the prospect of licences for linking, undermining net neutrality, and trade sanctions, he has typically argued that “it’s about fairness”, suggesting that foreign companies unfairly benefit from the Canadian market at the expense of domestic companies. Yet when Guilbeault appeared at a production sector town hall last week, he was far more candid. Guilbeault told the sector that in a minority government situation, his department had to choose between a massive bill changing “everything under the sun” or to slice it up into smaller pieces. Having chosen the piecemeal approach, Guilbeault pointed to his top priority: get money from the foreign Internet companies (his exact words at 47:58 were “the most pressing thing we needed to do was to get oxygen into the system, which is money. And go and get that money where that money is. Which is web giants.”)

In certain respects, the acknowledgement that this amounts to little more than a shakedown makes sense. CRTC Chair Ian Scott has said that Netflix is now probably the largest contributor to film and television production in Canada and the sector enjoyed record production numbers pre-COVID-19, so the data simply does not support claims that the streamers are hurting the industry. As for the news sector, the Minister has failed to deliver millions in promised tax credits and seemingly now wants an alternative that involves creating a licensing regime for linking to content.

Yet if the goal is simply a matter of wanting more money from Internet companies that can be used to support Canadian cultural policies, it is not clear why this is a matter for the Heritage Minister. Everyone wants more money from the Internet companies and countries around the world have a credible argument that the huge global Internet revenues should be more equitably apportioned among them. In other words, the way to “get money from web giants” is for Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland to tax them on their revenues. Those tax revenues would go into general tax revenues and can be spent in an transparent manner without the need for specialized subsidy programs. This isn’t easy. The U.S. unsurprisingly objects to a potential reduction in its tax revenues, which means that Canada must find allies with other countries in seeking global solutions on tax. Further, Guilbeault candidly recently told a publisher town hall that changes to the tax code is far more difficult than direct program spending.

The problem with Guilbeault’s preference for direct program spending subsidized by Internet companies is that it raises a host of complications and negative effects. For example, mandated Canadian content spending for companies such as Netflix could require the companies to pay into a fund that supports Canadian content production. However, the current rules make it challenging for those same companies to access those funds for their own productions. That leads to either a trade challenge (and the possibility of tariffs against key Canadian sectors such as dairy and steel) for being forced to pay into a system that is inaccessible to foreign providers or a reform to the system that would open things up to foreign providers and in the process undermine the competitiveness of domestic producers and broadcasters who are more reliant on tax credits and funding programs.

September 19, 2020

QotD: Dictatorship of the Cancel Culture proletariat

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics, Quotations, Sports, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This sort of thing is, to put it mildly, not good. There are at least three major problems with cancel culture. First, almost anyone could be cancelled, on the basis of the (claimed) standards prevalent on the modern “social justice” left. Secondly, cancellation tends in practice to be a non-random process targeted at political and ideological opponents, rather than a genuine attempt at a new moral standard. Finally, and most importantly, the declaration by wokesters that many conversations are now simply off-limits prevents the communication of important information that would make it possible for citizens better to judge the arguments of movements like Black Lives Matter.

While not the most important, the first of these points is the most relevant on a day-to-day basis. Without endorsing these behaviours, the plain fact is that the huge majority of people have probably at some point told an ethnic or regional joke, sent a pornographic or un-PC snap, had sex while intoxicated, used a slur tied to sexual orientation / race / gender online or in the lockerroom, worn a St Paddy’s Day or Cinco de Mayo outfit they would really prefer a mulligan on, or committed other Cardinal Sins against Wokeness. As a result of this, many young people are intently aware that Twitter and Facebook wars involving the unearthing of old content generally end with egg on the face of everyone involved. Caucasian NBA point guard Donte DeVincenzo was humiliated in late 2018 by the revelation that – at age 14 – he had described his hoops handle as “ballin’ on these nig*as like I’m Derrick Rose”. He ended up deleting his entire social-media presence. The point of monitoring this sort of thing, for the many people and organisations that do so, is not punishing the tiny minority of real racists and abusers out there so much as keeping normal citizens too terrified by the potential unearthing of past indiscretions to comment lustily on the issues of the day.

The fact that virtually anyone could in fact “legitimately” be cancelled leads into extreme partisan hypocrisy. While anyone who attended church as a lad might correctly suspect that the hard right is capable of similar behaviour, cancellers today are overwhelmingly concentrated on the “social justice” left – and they are, at least occasionally, reluctant to eat their own. This often results in remarkable and hilarious double standards. In February 2018, for example, liberal Virginia governor Ralph Northam – nicknamed “Coonman” – escaped any serious censure after he was revealed to have apparently appeared in a mid-1980s high-school yearbook photo wearing shoe-polish blackface.

To be fully fair to Northam, the same photo included a student dressed in full white robes as a Ku Klux Klansman, and CNN has noted that Northam has never actually said “whether he was wearing the Ku Klux Klan outfit or [the] blackface”. Oh, fair enough. At any rate, he serves as governor of Virginia today. Not to be outdone by any of his neighbors to the south, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau was revealed that same year to have worn black- and brown-face several times, and as late as 2001, once apparently painting his entire body to appear in costume as Aladdin at an Arabian Nights revue! He, too, remains solidly entrenched in office today.

Wilfred Reilly, “They can’t cancel all of us”, Spiked, 2020-06-17.

September 16, 2020

The Canadian echo chamber on American political issues

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

Ben Woodfinden’s latest for The Dominion looks at the weird effects political passions in the United States have on political stances in Canada:

Restricted and prohibited weapons seized by Toronto police in a 2012 operation. None of the people from whom these weapons were taken was legally allowed to possess them.
Screen capture from a CTV News report.

Participatory media increasingly defines and shapes our discourse. It submerges us in a broader reality but only does so by filtering it into a digital reality that offers a distorted reflection rather than picture of the real world. This has been going on for at least a decade now, but the pandemic has accelerated this transformation of our discourse and politics. By locking us in our homes the pandemic forces us to view the world through a digital lens even more than we already did, and in a world where we’re all viewing everything through our screens that digital reality becomes closer and closer to our primary reality.

One of the specific, and most pernicious effects of this, as I lamented in The Critic is that it turns us all into online Americans participating in their politics through the digital medium, rendering us virtual participants and not just foreign observers. I won’t repeat myself too much, I’d recommend just reading the piece [link], but the online realm is American, and what digital politics does is make politics everywhere more American. We participate in it as a game and a form of entertainment. This bleeds back into our own politics.

Americanized Discourse

Gun politics is one particular political issue where Americanized discourse is most pronounced. It captures perfectly how Americanization plays out. Every time there is some sort of tragic shooting or discussion of gun violence in Canada the debates play out in depressingly predictable ways. Progressives and Liberals paint a picture in which Canada suffers from the kind of rampant gun violence and mass proliferation of firearms as in America. This is the framing used to justify often highly symbolic or ineffective new gun laws and restrictions that, while often not all that effective, make the Liberals and progressives seem like the party for gun control in the face of this rampant violence. But only if you pretend we live in America.

And it’s not just the Liberals and progressives who play this game. Listen to some of the more vocal advocates of “gun rights” in Canada and you’d think we have a second amendment in the Charter. One side wants to make it seem like Canadians are walking around with and easily able to acquire assault weapons, the other side wishes it were so! The reality of course lies somewhere in between. Gun possession is heavily regulated, but lawful citizens can still buy firearms if they want to, and there is no explicit right in the Charter that prevents the government from regulating and restricting firearms. Talking about gun “rights” in Canada is itself quite a foreign and imported concept. At the same time we don’t have an epidemic of gun violence, and while we have experienced some horrific mass shootings, like the recent Nova Scotia tragedy, gun violence in Canada pales in comparison to the United States.

But because both sides are essentially happy to help paint a phantasmic picture of gun violence and/or gun regulations in Canada, we end up with a surreal politics around guns. Sensible debates around guns are made harder by this because debates take place on top of a framing and narrative that draws explicitly on American political culture more than it does Canada’s. Both sides want to take on American roles and are happy to contribute to this framing.

Gun politics is just one example, and there are so many others. Our discourse is so often built around framings that make it seem as if the issues and political cleavages here are indistinguishable from American ones, but it only happens because we import American framing and narratives into our own discourse and then build are arguments around these phantasms. We, like many other countries around the world, are in the middle of a moment of racial reckoning, or whatever you want to call it, because of something that happened in Minneapolis, not in Canada.

Racism is a real thing in Canada, no honest person should deny this, because there is racism in absolutely every country and society. But in the wake of George Floyd’s killing we ended up having a conversation about racism that reflected the particular ways racism works in America.

September 11, 2020

Canadian government heading toward “the worst of all worlds on Internet regulation”

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

Michael Geist on the bull-headed determination of the Canadian federal government — and specifically Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault — to “solve” a problem by introducing savagely anti-consumer internet regulations:

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020.
Screencapure from CPAC video.

The harm that will come from these policy choices is difficult to overstate. By focusing the tax burden on sales taxes rather than technology company revenues, consumer costs will go up and the company profits will be left untouched. The CRTC powers will lead to years of hearings and follow-on litigation, yielding few tangible benefits for creators. The mandated Cancon contributions will spark trade wars and make Canada a less attractive market for new services leading to fewer choices and less competition, while the link licensing requirement will result in blocked sharing of news articles on social media sites that hurts both Canadians and media organizations. All the while, the issues that really matter – privacy, anti-competitive behaviour, online hate, misinformation, a fair share of tech corporate profits – are left largely untouched.

How did the government end up with the worst of all worlds on Internet regulation?

The starting point was the 2015 election in which it committed to no new Netflix taxes (prompted by a Conservative pledge on the issue) and subsequent consultations on everything from copyright to digital cultural policy. The result was then-Heritage Minister Melanie Joly struggling to honour the no-tax commitment, while satisfying increasingly vocal demands from some stakeholders for one. Those calls increased after the results of her cultural policy consultation were released, which largely focused on a rejection of new Internet taxes and support for net neutrality.

In the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, worries about Russian election interference, and Christchurch massacre broadcast live online, the policy winds shifted and the government was clearly looking to become more active on the Internet regulation file. That led to Election Act provisions that were generally viewed as successful. It also paved the way for a 2019 election platform that was far aggressive on social media and the Internet, with commitments to address everything from privacy to hate speech online.

[…]

If the government were to address the real concerns, there would be long-overdue privacy reforms, a more aggressive approach on competition issues, measures to address online hate and misinformation, and pursuit of a global agreement on fair taxation of technology company revenues. If it wants to support increased film production from indigenous groups or help the news sector, it can make those policy choices and use general tax revenues without creating a massive regulatory infrastructure.

Instead, it is turning to the harmful policies noted above that raise consumer costs (digital sales taxes), regulate online Cancon with mandated spending requirements (even though the industry has record production led by Netflix), dispense with any pretense of maintaining net neutrality, lead to blocked sharing of news articles (mandated licence for social media sites merely for linking to news content), and result in services avoiding the Canadian market (market interference in payments from services such as Spotify). Much of this will be overseen by the newly empowered CRTC, leading to lengthy hearings that primarily benefit lawyers. After having badly mishandled Canadian digital policy, the government now seems content to take a pass on the important issues and leave the controversial non-issues to the regulator and the courts.

August 6, 2020

Congress legislating on high tech is like your Grampa telling you how to play your favourite online game

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

Brad Polumbo on the notion that the politicians in Washington (or Ottawa, or London, or Canberra, …) are in any way capable of sensibly regulating the high tech sector:

While many principled small-government conservatives, such as Sen. Rand Paul, still back a free-market approach to tech policy issues, Hawley is not an outlier by any means.

Indeed, President Trump has also backed the regulation of social media companies to combat perceived anti-conservative bias. And the most popular conservative media personality in the country, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, regularly rails against Big Tech — even agreeing with progressive proposals to use the heavy hand of government antitrust regulation to break up companies such as Facebook and Google.

So, if major figures from both parties can agree on regulating Big Tech, it must be a good idea, right? Not so fast.

From left to right, the intentions behind these regulatory proposals are often good. After all, most reasonable people would likely share Democrats’ desire to see Big Tech better handle misinformation, “fake news,” and foreign election interference, while conservative Republicans’ calls for political neutrality online are no doubt appealing in the abstract.

Unfortunately, in their haphazard rush to score political points through government action, would-be regulators from both parties are forgetting the inevitable “knowledge problem” that plagues any central planners who try to dictate the minutiae of complicated industries from the halls of Washington, DC.

Economic philosopher Friedrich A. Hayek diagnosed this fatal flaw of government control in his seminal work “The Use of Knowledge in Society.”

    “If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place,” Hayek wrote. “It would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them.”

    “We cannot expect that this problem will be solved by first communicating all this knowledge to a central board which, after integrating all knowledge, issues its orders,” he continued. “We must solve it by some form of decentralization. But this answers only part of our problem. We need decentralization because only thus can we insure that the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place will be promptly used.“

July 27, 2020

QotD: People on social media are the worst!

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

This article asked many internet pioneers about how they think it’s all turned out. They’re not happy.

No one asked me, he said with a petulant sniff. I think it’s turned out well for those who regard it as a personal publishing platform, and don’t regard social media as an equivalent or replacement for the real world. It is a shadow realm full of tricksters and devils and angels and blokes and sheilas. It’s Second Life except it seems real because it contains Kardashians, who are the most important and fascinating people on earth.

Anyway, it’s mostly lamented now because A) Trump, and B) People are jerks.

    Rich Kyanka: Social media was supposed to be about, “Hey, Grandma. How are you?” Now it’s like, “Oh my God, did you see what she wore yesterday? What a f**ing cow that bitch is.” Everything is toxic — and that has to do with the internet itself. It was founded to connect people all over the world. But now you can meet people all over the world and then murder them in virtual reality and rape their pets.

Everything is toxic — and that has to do with the internet itself. I don’t think so. I think it has to do with people on the internet. People who otherwise wouldn’t say boo to you as you passed on the street, but feel as if it is their duty to yell at everything on Twitter, because there are no consequences. If you got into the elevator at work every day and acted rude to everyone in the car, eventually it would have consequences. The Internet is a hellish version of an elevator car — everyone is looking at everyone else and talking at the same time about everyone else and themselves.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2018-05-02.

July 8, 2020

Harry Potter fandom, Millennials, and the continued decline of traditional religious beliefs

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

In The Critic, Oliver Wiseman talks to Tara Isabella Burton about her book Strange Rites:

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books have been pivotal for many Millennials in encouraging them to move away from traditional religious beliefs.

I want to start with Harry Potter, which is — perhaps surprisingly — central to the argument you make in the book, so, as an introduction to your broader thesis, what does Harry Potter have to do with America’s new religions?

It’s funny. When Harry Potter first came out in the nineties, there was a flurry American Christian voices saying “This book promotes witchcraft. There’s going to be a whole new religious movement devoted to Harry Potter books.” In the way they meant it, that was absolutely not true. But I think that there was something to it in terms of an inadvertent change to the religious landscape.

What Harry Potter did, or, more accurately, what it was the canary in the coal mine for, was a transformation, linked to the rise of at-home internet access, in how we talk about cultural properties andhow we relate to cultural properties. The transition to an internet space defined by user-generated content and what is often called participatory culture coincided with the publication of the Harry Potter books.

Between the first Harry Potter book’s release in 1997 and the fourth book’s publication in 2000 we went from 19 million Americans with internet access to more than 100 million. It’s that backdrop that really explains the shift. You did have fan cultures before. There were Star Wars conventions, for example, but there was quite a high bar to entry. You had to get on the right mailing list and it was done via post. It was quite a lot of work. You couldn’t just log on and enter a community, which is really what could happen with Harry Potter fandom.

J.K. Rowling was also one of the first major writers to openly accept and embrace fan fiction. So what you ended up seeing was something that started with Harry Potter fandom that then became an element of fandom online more broadly which in turn, I would argue, shaped millennial-and-younger culture. It was this idea that you weren’t just a reader of consumer of texts. It wasn’t just a top down hierarchical thing. Instead, mediated through the anonymity of the internet, you a kind of tribalism from talking to people in different geographical areas as well as things like fan fiction and later meme culture that meant you could change, shift, reimagine a text in your own way. And what’s so interesting about that is that sensibility — the sensibility that we have not only the right but the responsibility, the authority as consumers to also be creators, to rework ideas outside of existing texts — has spilled over into all aspects of our political life and of our religious life. And that is really something that is the product of user generated content and the internet.

To bring this to religion more specifically, 36 per cent of Americans born after 1985 are religiously unaffiliated, compared to about 23 per cent of the national average. That’s a huge generational shift in religious affiliation and organisation. That is not the same thing as saying that these are atheists or that these people are not religious. Some 72 per cent of them say they believe in some sort of higher power. About 17 per cent say they believe in the Judaeo-Christian God.

We’re in a religious or spiritual landscape that privileges mixing and matching, and unbundling — a bit of tarot here, a bit of meditation there. And a resistance to institutional and authoritative declarations in terms of how religion should be practised is very much something that has its roots in internet culture, of which Harry Potter was a forerunner.

QotD: Telecommuting in the post-Wuhan Coronavirus era

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

People are being stampeded into telecommuting. The thing is, dear media, once that happens, you can’t put it back in the bottle.

For two decades now, telecommuting and distance learning have been perfectly possible and even, frankly, beneficial. What has held it back is managers afraid they don’t know how to manage at a distance, corporations who think mega cubicle farms are a great way to be “important” and a general sense that only us, ne’er do wells, work in our pajamas on the sofa (I’ll have you know I’m wearing a sweatshirt and yoga pants. Never mind.)

If the panic lasts even two months (and the press will ensure it does before it collapses under its own weight) that reluctance to telecommute is going to be blown to hell. For one, once workers taste of THAT fruit, just anecdotally, 90% of them LOVE it. (The other 10% have very annoying children or spouses.)

And in the wake of the financial panic and wobbles, corporations are going to notice that they spend a lot less money when most of the workers work from home. At some point, they’ll also realize that they need much smaller facilities if they need facilities at all. And hey, money.

This will cause all sorts of other things, which I think will lead within two years to an exodus from the big cities everyone has crammed into because it’s where the jobs are. I think in turn this will lead to a world the social engineers really don’t like.

Sarah Hoyt, “Unintended Consequences”, According to Hoyt, 2020-03-12.

July 3, 2020

QotD: Pop music

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

The thing I always hated hearing from my grandfather was how modern music was terrible and not fit for civilized people. He was a man of his age and class, so he used colorful euphemisms to describe popular music. Even as a kid, I understood that every generation has their soundtrack. Maybe never having known anything but a world where pop culture dominated, this came naturally to me, while my grandfather still recalled an age before everyone had a radio and television. Maybe he knew things I couldn’t know.

Either way, I’ve always just assumed that once I passed my mid-20’s, pop music was no longer for me. Some stuff would be appealing, but most would be aimed at kids and strike me as simplistic and repetitive. There were some good bands in the 90’s that I liked, but most of it was not my thing. By the 2000’s, I was unable to name popular groups or the songs at the top of the charts. Today, I have not heard a single note from any song on the current top-40. On the other hand, I’m sure I’ve heard some version of all of it.

That may be why music sales have collapsed. A 15-year old can go on YouTube or Spotify and find fifty versions of the current pop hits, going back before their parents were born. They can also find stuff from previous eras that was remarkably well done and performed by people with real talent. Justin Timberlake may be very talented as a singer, but no one is confusing him with Frank Sinatra. It’s simply a lot easier for young people to see that pop music is just manufactured pap from Acme Global Corp.

“The Z Man”, “The Soundtrack Of This Age”, The Z Blog, 2018-03-15.

June 24, 2020

Trudeau government wants to introduce an Internet “link tax”

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

Michael Geist on the Trudeau government’s latest indications of support for a tax grab to benefit certain favoured groups and organizations:

Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault, 3 February 2020.
Screencapure from CPAC video.

Last week, Canadian Heritage Minister Steven Guilbeault called into question his own government’s policies on supporting news media, suggesting that those programs should be replaced by copyright rules that would open the door to payments from internet companies such as Google and Facebook. Mr. Guilbeault indicated that a legislative package was being prepared for the fall that would include new powers for Canada’s communications regulator and what are commonly referred to as Netflix taxes and internet linking taxes.

My Globe and Mail op-ed notes the government’s support for new internet taxes should not come as a surprise. There were strong signals that the spring budget – postponed indefinitely due to the current public health crisis – was going to include expanding sales taxes to capture digital sales such as Netflix or Spotify subscriptions.

[…]

It is Mr. Guilbeault’s plans for a link tax that should spark the most concern, however. The government has long promoted its policies designed to support the Canadian media sector, including direct funding for local journalism as well as labour and subscription tax credits. The taxpayer cost runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars, but is justified on the grounds that journalism is an essential service that requires public support.

Yet Mr. Guilbeault now says that government should not be funding media, characterizing the policies as short term measures aimed at mitigating a media emergency. Instead, Mr. Guilbeault supports a controversial copyright reform measure that would establish a news publisher’s right to demand payment for services that link to their content.

This payment – effectively a tax on linking – raises a host of concerns, not the least of which is that the proposal was not recommended by the government’s own copyright review last year. Copyright reform in Canada is always complicated, particularly given that responsibility for it is shared with Innovation, Science and Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains, but delving into reforms that sparked protests in Europe could be politically risky for a minority government.

News organizations already benefit from large platforms linking to their content since the links generate visitors that increase advertising revenues and paying subscribers. Organizations that do not want the links can easily opt-out of appearing in services such as Google News or Facebook. In fact, after Google shut down its Google News service in Spain, studies found publisher website traffic dropped by 10 per cent.

June 11, 2020

In 1929, the warning sign was getting stock tips from shoeshine boys and elevator operators

Filed under: Business, Economics, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In 2020, as Jay Currie suggests, the warning sign might be robinhood.com:

“Jay Gould’s Private Bowling Alley.” Financier and stock speculator Jay Gould is depicted on Wall Street, using bowling balls titled “trickery,” “false reports,” “private press” and “general unscrupulousness” to knock down bowling pins labeled as “operator,” “broker,” “banker,” “inexperienced investor,” etc. A slate shows Gould’s controlling holdings in various corporations, including Western Union, Missouri Pacific Railroad, and the Wabash Railroad.
From the cover of Puck magazine Vol. XI, No 264 via Wikimedia Commons.

In the winter of 1928 Joe Kennedy, father of JFK and major stock market player, stopped to get his shoes shined. The shoeshine boy leaned in and said, “Buy Hindenburg”. Kennedy began unwinding his positions saying, “You know it’s time to sell when shoeshine boys give you stock tips. This bull market is over.”

I had a similar experience in late 1999 when a friend took out a mortgage on her condo to buy shares in the billion dollar online copy paper empire. She had a perfectly good job in retail garden supplies. Remembering Kennedy, I advised another friend that her Nortel was looking a bit overbought. As it happened she sold quite near the peak.

The 2020 equivalent of the shoeshine boy is the perfect storm is the free trading platform, robinhood.com. This is a nicely designed site where you can trade shares on your computer or phone. It has become very, very popular with younger, new investors. My late 1990’s day trading pals would have killed for this sort of interface and no brokers fees. It has spawned a whole host of reddit chats, twitter streams and countless YouTube videos on the excitement of swing trading. (One fun spot to watch Robinhood is the https://robintrack.net/leaderboard which shows which stocks the people on Robinhood are buying. It is a bit slow and buggy but a great front row seat.)

What is striking about the robinhood.com world is that it revolves around trading rather than any sort of “investing”. You hop into APPL in the morning, see if you can make a couple of bucks by noon and move onto the next thing. And Apple is a real, solvent, company.

Robinhood has been in the news recently because the herd has charged into the shares of a number of companies which are either in or near bankruptcy. Hertz Rent-a-Car dropped from $20 to $0.50 in three months as the market realized that with no travelers there would be no car rentals. Interestingly, we learn from robintrack.net that at $20 there were a little over 1000 users holding, as Hertz crashed the Robinhood users piled in, at $0.55 there were 44,000 and there are now 158,000. And many will have made money, lots of money, trading the gyrating price from $0.50 to back up to $5.00.

In the run up to the crash of October 1929, long after Joe Kennedy had pulled his money from the market, retail traders were coining it trading the “swings” on margin accounts. It didn’t matter what the company actually did, it was going up. The same “irrational exuberance” was a big feature in the dot com bubble.

The “Fearless Girl” statue faces the Arturo Di Modica “Charging Bull” on Wall Street (Wikipedia)

The lessons of the 1929 crash and the 2000 dot com bust were simple – get out early and be in no hurry to get back in. Right now the dinosaurs like Buffet and Ichan are sitting on stacks of cash. Just like Joe Kennedy was when Wall Street swan dived in October 1929. They got that cash by selling their shares to shoeshine boys and the bright lights at Robinhood.

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