There’s that word: “investments.” That’s what Canadians — Ontarians and Quebecers, certainly — have been trained to expect in these situations: An elaborate mating dance culminating in a greasy press conference where corporate leaders hail bold new provincial and federal “investments” in the company and its workers and its world-beating widgets. Critics are assailed as uncaring and testily reminded that every jurisdiction subsidizes the widget industry.
Traditionally, this is later followed by outrage when it emerges the company has used taxpayers’ bold investment to pay out lavish bonuses or dividends. In the fullest version of the performance, the company just pulls up stakes and leaves town anyway — sometimes having fulfilled its stated obligations, sometimes not, but always leaving behind a bad taste and a per-employee subsidy rate that makes no sense in hindsight.
If the company is Bombardier, it might extract lavish subsidies from government for an airplane project on the theory the Canada needs an aerospace industry, then turn around and sell the project to a foreign competitor for basically nothing.
Chris Selley, “A reminder that governments don’t ‘invest’ in businesses. It’s just corporate welfare”, National Post, 2018-11-28.
December 19, 2018
QotD: Maple-flavoured corporate welfare
December 17, 2018
American Jeep vs German Kübelwagen: Truck Face-Off | Combat Dealers
Quest TV
Published on 23 Oct 2018Bruce puts two iconic World War II trucks to the test: the iconic American Jeep and the German Kübelwagen. Which truck will come out on top? #CombatDealers
December 5, 2018
The true lesson to be learned from GM Canada’s economic plight
Andrew Coyne tries to encapsulate the key economic concept that should be taken away from the GM Canada collapse:
Think of it this way. Governments have proven more than ready in the past to pay whatever the auto companies demanded to hold onto threatened jobs. If there were any chance whatsoever of buying the plant’s reprieve, no matter how foolishly or expensively, can there be any doubt they would have? That they did not — apparently GM waved them off — tells you how hopeless the plant’s prospects really are.
Many have recalled that the closure of the Oshawa plant comes less than a decade after the Canadian operations of GM and Chrysler were bailed out with $14 billion in federal and provincial money, $4 billion of which was never recovered. The lesson some have drawn from this is that GM is a devious ingrate, which may be fair comment but is not especially helpful. The real lesson is this: when you try to buy jobs with public money, the jobs last only as long as the money does. In the end, all you will have done is to lure people into taking or staying in jobs that were long since doomed.
Like most of economics, this is wholly alien to popular wisdom. There is a rich vein of commentary to the effect that the laws of economics are effectively optional, something we can resist by force of will: we can either bend to “market forces,” or we can “stand up” to them in some fashion. But in fact the latter option is entirely imaginary, at least in the long run. You can perhaps lure plants and jobs your way at the outset with subsidies and other goodies. But the only assurance they will stay is if it makes economic sense to the company to keep them there.
If not, then all you have won with your subsidy is the right to go on providing more subsidy, which is a fairly accurate description of Canadian automobile policy in recent decades. The workers whose jobs successive governments boasted of creating or saving were effectively hostages; as in all hostage-takings, the payment of ransom only stimulates further demands for ransom. Until one day when the money runs out, and the workers whose jobs were supposedly saved find themselves abandoned. This may be many things, but one thing it is not is compassionate.
December 3, 2018
The Mini-14: A Cost-Effective Scaled-Down M14
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 10 Nov 2018https://www.forgottenweapons.com/the-…
http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
The Ruger Mini-14 is certainly not a “forgotten” weapon, but I think there are some valuable insights to be taken from it. As a company, Ruger has an outstanding track record of making not flashy and exciting guns, but rather guns that are economical and dependable. The Mini-14 is an excellent example of that, with hundreds of thousands sold since its introduction in 1972. So today we will take a look at how Jim Sullivan simplified the M14 design when he scaled it down to 5.56mm for Ruger, and how the company used its investment casting expertise to further reduce production costs.
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
PO Box 87647
Tucson, AZ 85754
December 1, 2018
CAFE killed the North American passenger car
The move by GM to close many of its remaining car manufacturing facilities in Canada and the US is a belated rational response — not to the market, but to the ways government action has distorted the market. In the Financial Post, Lawrence Solomon explains how, step-by-step, the CAFE rules have shifted drivers out of sedans and wagons and into minivans, pickup trucks, and SUVs:
Before the U.S. government introduced Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards to increase the distance cars could travel per gallon of gas, sedans and full-size station wagons were popular and SUVs were unknown. CAFE, which effectively governed the entire North American market thanks to the Canada-U.S. Auto Pact, incented manufacturers to artificially raise the cost of large passenger cars in order to favour smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. It soon claimed its first victim: the full-size station wagon, whose flexible interior accommodated both passenger and cargo needs, and which, at its peak, came in 62 models to satisfy different tastes.
But, although CAFE priced the station wagon out of the market, the market still demanded a vehicle that offered its flexibility. Enter Lee Iacocca, the chairman of Chrysler, who helped develop the minivan and convinced the U.S. government to deem it a truck rather than a passenger vehicle, thus exempting it from the strict CAFE standards that killed the station wagon. The minivan took off — the first 1984 model, built in Windsor, sold 209,000 its first year — followed by the SUV, which also was deemed a truck rather than a passenger vehicle. By 2000, the passenger car had less than half the market. Today it accounts for only about a third.
CAFE standards didn’t only claim certain car models as victims, they also made the whole industry a victim by making it dependent on government whims and then handouts. CAFE also distorted the market by creating credits for ethanol and electric vehicles and by creating a lobbyist’s dream through ever-changing regulations that led car manufacturers to continually game the system to favour their own vehicles over those of competitors.
Perversely, by improving mileage, CAFE also increased distances travelled and emissions of pollutants such as carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides. The 2025 CAFE targets (since cancelled by President Trump) ran to almost 2,000 pages and were estimated to add an average of US$1,946 to the cost of a vehicle. Tax loopholes also helped accelerate SUV sales — like all light trucks, they were exempted from the gas-guzzler’s excise tax and also given preferential tax treatment as business vehicles.
October 19, 2018
QotD: “None of us are standard issue”
Our own age, still, has the “image” of the mass-producing society that brought unparalleled prosperity and riches to the world in the last century (along with some truly horrible mass killings.)
The mass killings, Marxism (which people inhale without knowing, even in American Universities), behaviorism, and a passion for numbered, standardized everything are part of the ethos of the industrial age.
It is perhaps too much to ask people working on standard machines, to produce standard sizes, using standardized movements to conform to the machine’s mechanical exactness not to think in terms of “standard sizes” and “Models.”
You see this more strongly in the works of early science fiction writers, who expected psychology to to be standardized, numbered and filed and then all problems of mankind would be solved.
This stopped around the forties or fifties, when there was starting to be a suspicion that humans were not in fact standard issues, and that they had a disturbing tendency to be … human on an individual scale. I.e. “Nobody is normal” started penetrating the collective consciousness, but people STILL try to be normal. A part of the craze for transgenderism (other than that the progressives decided this was the next hill to die on) is this idea that there are standard models of people. Note I don’t say every transgender person is the result of that. There are cases of such profound mismatch between mind and body that even flawed and ultimately mutilating surgery (which is all we can do right now) is preferable to going on with the mismatch. These cases are, needless to say, very rare. But I swear at least half of the generation after my kids identifies as transgender, or gender queer, or gender fluid, or some other form of gender nonsense that has absolutely nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with the fact the poor dears have imbibed this flawed version of humanity as easily filable and definable. If you think that a girl who prefers trains and toy cars, a boy who prefers dolls […] a boy who is better at verbal than math, a girl who is the reverse, all of these are TOLD they are abnormal, if not in words, in the reaction of other people, until they feel they must have a problem.
In fact, none of us are standard issue. The very fact that, say, the medieval world, a communitarian world under stress (compared to us) of disease and famine, which needed to eliminate odds to operate, spent SO MUCH time decreeing what men and women COULD do meant that men and women kept blurring those lines, which for that time and place were FAR more clear than they are now. (I am an odd. In the world I grew up in, which retains a lot of medieval characteristics, I not only was pulled away from groups of boys I was playing with and told that girls play with girls and boys with boys (sounds like a motto for a gay bar) but I was also severely suppressed when I was about 8 and developed a fascination with whistling. I was told that women who whistle and men who spin (thread) are both going to hell. This must be a medieval thing, as I have clue zero why whistling should be masculine. In my family’s defense, this might have been an attempt at just getting the horrible noise to stop.
Sarah Hoyt, “Gears and Patterns”, According to Hoyt, 2016-12-16.
August 2, 2018
Manufacturing the Engineered Wood Floor Joists
Bob Vila
Published on 30 Mar 2015Bob visits the Willamette I-Joist Mill in Woodburn, OR, before returning to Yonkers where the crew is assembling the second floor walls with structural insulated panels.
July 22, 2018
Debunking the “King Cotton” school of history
In the current issue of Reason, Dierdre McCloskey discusses the claim that America became rich only or primarily due to exploitation of slave labour in the south:
Map showing which areas of the United States did and did not allow slavery between January 1861 to February 4 1861. On February 4 1861, the Confederate States of America was created. Territories and states which had not specifically banned slavery are colored red/pink.
Map by Golbez, via Wikimedia Commons.
In his second inaugural, Abraham Lincoln declared that “if God wills that [the Civil War] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk…as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'”
It is a noble sentiment. Yet the economic idea implied — that exploitation made us rich — is mistaken. Slavery made a few Southerners rich; a few Northerners, too. But it was ingenuity and innovation that enriched Americans generally, including at last the descendants of the slaves.
It’s hard to dispel the idea embedded in Lincoln’s poetry. TeachUSHistory.org assumes “that northern finance made the Cotton Kingdom possible” because “northern factories required that cotton.” The idea underlies recent books of a new King Cotton school of history: Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams (Harvard University Press), Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History (Knopf), and Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books).
The rise of capitalism depended, the King Cottoners claim, on the making of cotton cloth in Manchester, England, and Manchester, New Hampshire. The raw cotton, they say, could come only from the South. The growing of cotton, in turn, is said to have depended on slavery. The conclusion — just as our good friends on the left have been saying all these years — is that capitalism was conceived in sin, the sin of slavery.
Yet each step in the logic of the King Cotton historians is mistaken. The enrichment of the modern world did not depend on cotton textiles. Cotton mills, true, were pioneers of some industrial techniques, techniques applied to wool and linen as well. And many other techniques, in iron making and engineering and mining and farming, had nothing to do with cotton. Britain in 1790 and the U.S. in 1860 were not nation-sized cotton mills.
Nor is it true that if a supply chain is interrupted there are no possible substitutes. Such is the theory behind strategic bombing, as of the Ho Chi Minh trail. Yet only in the short run is it “necessary” for a good to come from a particular region by a particular route. A missing link can be replaced, as in fact it was during the blockade of raw cotton from the South during the war. British and other European manufacturers turned to Egypt to provide some of what the South could not.
July 20, 2018
Tank Chats #33 Panzer III | The Tank Museum
The Tank Museum
Published on 11 Mar 2017The thirty-third Tank Chat, this time presented by Curator David Willey. Including a fascinating insight into pre-Second World War German tank production and how the Panzer III worked alongside its fellow Panzers.
To find out more, buy the new Haynes Panzer III tank manual. https://www.myonlinebooking.co.uk/tan…
The Panzer III was conceived in 1934 as the principle combat tank of the Panzer divisions. The Museum’s Panzer III went into action in the North African theatre of war and is believed to have been captured at the Battle of Alam Halfa.
Support the work of The Tank Museum on Patreon: ► https://www.patreon.com/tankmuseum
Or donate http://tankmuseum.org/support-us/donate
July 13, 2018
How It’s Made: Laminated Wood Beams
Al Hilli
Published on 25 Apr 2013
June 22, 2018
A Brief History of the Jeep
KnowledgeHub
Published on 30 May 2018Jeeps are the original military vehicle that everybody loved so much, it became a civilian. So whats the history of these? Do you care? I mean you clicked on this video bub.
May 20, 2018
Labor Force Participation
Marginal Revolution University
Published on 17 Nov 2016The formula for the labor force participation rate is simple: labor force (unemployed + employed) / adult population, excluding people in the military or prison for both.
The total labor force participation rate has grown significantly in the United States since the 1950s. But the total growth doesn’t paint a clear picture of how the U.S. workforce has changed, particularly the makeup.
There are several big factors at play influencing the demographics of labor force participation. For starters, women have entered the labor force in greater numbers since the 1950s. At the same time, technology has altered the types of work available. Manufacturing jobs, which tended to employ lower-skilled, less-educated male workers, gave way to more service jobs requiring more skills and education.
In more recent years, the labor force participation rate, though still much higher than it was half a century ago, has been declining.
There are a number of factors influencing the decline. Many more women are working, but fewer men are employed or actively looking for a job. The United States also has an aging population with many Baby Boomers retiring from the labor force.
In an upcoming video, we’ll take a look at one of the big reasons behind why women have been able to enter and stay in the labor force during peak childbearing years: The Pill.
May 10, 2018
Manufacturing plywood boards: then and now
Victoria and Albert Museum
Published on 24 Jul 2017Plywood is a simple material made by glueing together thin sheets of wood, known as veneers or plies. These basic elements have remained broadly the same throughout its history. The most significant breakthrough in its production came in the early 1800s with the development of steam-powered machines that could cut veneers cheaply. The most influential of these was the rotary veneer cutter.
The cutter rotates a log against a wide, horizontal blade, causing it to ‘peel’ into a continuous sheet of wood. This enables the creation of longer, wider sheets of veneer than previously possible and with little waste. Using these machines meant that plywood could be manufactured quickly and inexpensively on a large scale.
This film shows the stages in manufacturing plywood boards in the mid-20th century and today. The process remains essentially unchanged, although today many of the machines are much faster and computer controlled.
Produced as part of the V&A exhibition Plywood: Material of the Modern World (15 July – 12 November 2017) https://www.vam.ac.uk/plywood
Sponsored by MADE.COM. Supported by the American Friends of the V&A
Find out more about plywood with our fascinating exhibition book, Plywood: A Material Story
https://www.vam.ac.uk/shop/plywood-a-material-story-148486.html
April 25, 2018
QotD: The “white magic” of the market process
Leonard Read explained what he called the “white magic” of the market process in his justly praised article “I, Pencil.” No one knows how to make an ordinary pencil; no one can ever know how to make a pencil. And yet pencils are produced in such huge quantities that they are virtually free for the taking. We have pencils not because some one person planned from the beginning the cutting of cedar trees, the mining of graphite, alumina, and bauxite, the extraction of petroleum and clay, or the organization of transportation to get supplies to pencil factories and pencils to retailers. When you contemplate the enormousness of all the tasks that are required to make a single pencil, you understand that no one can know how to do more than a tiny fraction of these tasks.
We have pencils (along with indoor plumbing, electric lighting, microprocessors, disposable diapers, camcorders, concert halls, …) only because for each of the countless tasks required for the production and distribution of each good there are a few people who specialize in knowing how to perform these tasks. But no one knows — or can know — how to perform all of the tasks required to produce even the most commonplace of goods. The free market works as well as it does because, when property rights are respected and fully transferrable, the resulting prices tell each of the producers at the innumerable different production “sites” just what (and how much) to produce and with what particular combination of resources.
For example, if the supply of crude oil falls, the resulting higher price will prompt manufacturers of paint to produce less petroleum-based paints and more linseed-oil or water-based paint. The resulting higher price of petroleum-based paints will prompt pencil manufacturers to paint fewer of their pencils with petroleum-based paints and more of their pencils with paints made of substances other than petroleum. As F. A. Hayek taught, the pencil manufacturer need never know why the price of petroleum-based paint rose; all that is required for this manufacturer to act appropriately is for him to conserve on his use of petroleum-based paint. The higher price of such paint achieves this goal.
Don Boudreaux, “A Pitch for Humility”, Café Hayek, 2016-08-05.
March 16, 2018
Mostly Weekly Series Finale: Creative Destruction
ReasonTV
Published on 14 Mar 2018In the final episode of the webseries, we tackle how markets make and break stuff.
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In free and open markets people are able to make new technologies and business models, which displace older, established ones. That process of starting new companies and jobs destroys some professions while creating others.
It’s entirely understandable that people who lose their jobs want to keep them. But industries like manufacturing, coal mining, and mall retailers aren’t dying out because of competition from China, they’re being outmoded by automation, cheaper fuel sources, and online sales.
Despite the uncertainty that markets bring, they also create new jobs and entirely new professions. There aren’t gangs of unemployed lamplighters roaming the land; their descendants became Uber drivers, social media coordinators, and webseries producers.
In the end, it’s better for everyone to look at the world as it is and to move forward than to try and halt progress through the force of law.
Mostly Weekly is hosted by Andrew Heaton with headwriter Sarah Rose Siskind.
Script by Andrew Heaton and Sarah Rose Siskind with writing assistance from Brian Sack.
Edited by Austin Bragg and Sarah Rose Siskind.
Produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg.
Theme Song: Frozen by Surfer Blood.
