I’m getting really sick of manufacturers trying to extend their user base by appealing to younger people, playing on their unsophisticated and undeveloped taste buds by adding Kool-Aid flavors to grownup drinks. (Chocolate vodka? are you fucking kidding me?) This is akin to trying to get more women to shoot guns by making gunpowder smell like lilacs.
I am, by the way, fully aware of how innovation works — that most of civilization has occurred because someone, somewhere said: “Y’know, I bet if we just changed …” — but that’s confusing improvement with extension. Tinned fruity-flavored gin is not an improvement.
I know that raspberry-flavored beer may have caused more people to take to beer drinking, but that’s changed things, and not for the better. Go into any bar and look at what beers are on tap these days. Barely a drinkable one available, and worse, they’ve pushed all the decent beers into bottles (or out of stock) while hipsters and chickies are catered to with the latest fad, Strawberry IPA [pause to be sick].
Basically, booze manufacturers are changing their products to appeal to people who don’t like booze. In the old days of marketing, we used to call that pointless endeavor “catching eels” (try catching an eel in mid-air when someone tosses it in your direction and you’ll see what I’m talking about). Not only is it pointless, it’s mercurial because what’s popular today won’t be popular tomorrow as your fickle new customers chase after the next “Flavor Of The Month”, and you’ll have gone from catching one eel to catching multiple eels. That’s something they don’t teach in the Marketing section of the typical MBA course because MBAs are all about theory (“line extension”, “product enhancement”, etc.). And don’t tell me I’m talking nonsense because I’ve seen the curricula.
Kim du Toit, “Gilding the Lily #268”, Splendid Isolation, 2018-05-24.
August 6, 2020
QotD: Selling booze to the immature
July 16, 2020
QotD: The young Herbert Hoover
His father died when he is 6, his mother when he is 10. The orphaned Hoover and his two siblings are shuttled from relative to relative. He spends one summer on the Osage Indian Reservation in Oklahoma, living with an uncle who worked for the Department of Indian Affairs. Another year passes on a pig farm with his Uncle Allen. In 1885, he is more permanently adopted by his Uncle John, a doctor and businessman helping found a Quaker colony in Oregon. Hoover’s various guardians are dutiful but distant; they never abuse or neglect him, but treat him more as an extra pair of hands around the house than as someone to be loved and cherished. Hoover reciprocates in kind, doing what is expected of him but excelling neither in school nor anywhere else.
In his early teens, Hoover gets his first job, as an office boy at a local real estate company. He loves it! He has spent his whole life doing chores for no pay, and working for pay is so much better! He has spent his whole life sullenly following orders, and now he’s expected to be proactive and figure things out for himself! Hoover the mediocre student and all-around unexceptional kid does a complete 180 and accepts Capitalism as the father he never had.
His first task is to write some newspaper ads for Oregon real estate. He writes brilliant ads, ads that draw people to Oregon from every corner of the country. But he learns some out-of-towners read his ads, come to town, stay at hotels, and are intercepted by competitors before they negotiate with his company. Of his own initiative, he rents several houses around town and turns them into boarding houses for out-of-towners coming to buy real estate, then doesn’t tell his competitors where they are. Then he marks up rent on the boarding houses and makes a tidy profit on the side. Everything he does is like this. When an especially acrimonious board meeting threatens to split the company, a quick-thinking Hoover sneaks out and turns off the gas to the building, plunging the meeting into darknes. Everyone else has to adjourn, the extra time gives cooler heads a change to prevail, and the company is saved. Everything he does is like this.
(on the other hand, he has zero friends and only one acquaintance his own age, who later describes him to biographers as “about as much excitement as a china egg”.)
Hoover meets all sorts of people passing through the Oregon frontier. One is a mining engineer. He regales young Herbert with his stories of traveling through the mountains, opening up new sources of minerals to feed the voracious appetite of Progress. This is the age of steamships, skyscrapers, and railroads, and to the young idealistic Hoover, engineering has an irresistible romance. He wants to leave home and go to college. But he worries a poor frontier boy like him would never fit in at Harvard or Yale. He gets a tip – a new, tuition-free university might be opening in Palo Alto, California. If he heads down right away, he might make it in time for the entrance exam. Hoover fails the entrance exam, but the new university is short on students and decides to take him anyway.
Herbert Hoover is the first student at Stanford. Not just a member of the first graduating class. Literally the first student. He arrives at the dorms two months early to get a head start on various money-making schemes, including distributing newspapers, delivering laundry, tending livestock, and helping other students register. He would later sell some of these businesses to other students and start more, operating a constant churn of enterprises throughout his college career. His academics remain mediocre, and he continues to have few friends – until he tries out for the football team in sophomore year. He has zero athletic talent and fails miserably, but the coach (whose eye for talent apparently transcends athletics) spots potential in Hoover and asks him to come on as team manager. In this role, Hoover is an unqualified success. He turns the team’s debt into a surplus, and starts the Big Game – a UC Berkeley vs. Stanford football match played on Thanksgiving which remains a beloved Stanford football tradition.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Hoover”, Slate Star Codex, 2020-03-17.
June 1, 2020
How to be a Pirate 🏴☠️
CGP Grey
Published 30 May 2020‣ Adapted largely from The Invisible Hook. It’s great, go read it: https://amzn.to/36PLKSE
‣ Thank you, my Patrons, for making this video possible: https://www.patreon.com/posts/37699725## Special Thanks
Peter T. Leeson for reviewing a draft of the script. Check out his newest book, WTF?!: An Economic Tour of the Weird: https://amzn.to/3eEMm09
## Crowdfunders
Steven Snow, Bob Kunz, John Buchan, Nevin Spoljaric, Donal Botkin, BN-12, Chris Chapin, Richard Jenkins, Phil Gardner, Martin, سليمان العقل, Steven Grimm, Colin Millions, Saki Comandao, Jason Lewandowski, Andrea Di Biagio, David F Watson, Ben Schwab, Elliot Lepley, rictic, Bobby, Marco Arment, Shallon Brown, Shantanu Raj, emptymachine, George Lin, Henry Ng, Jeffrey Podis, Thunda Plum, Awoo, David Tyler, Derek Bonner, Derek Jackson, Fuesu, iulus, Jordan Earls, Joshua Jamison, Mikko, Nick Fish, Nick Gibson, Orbit_Junkie, Ron Bowes, Tómas Árni Jónasson, Tyler Bryant, Zach Whittle, Oliver Steele, Kermit Norlund, Kevin Costello, Ben Delo, Arctic May, Bear, chrysilis, David Palomares, Emil, Erik Parasiuk, Esteban Santana Santana, Freddi Hørlyck, Frederick The Great, John Rogers, ken mcfarlane, Leon, Maarten van der Blij, Peter Lomax, Rhys Parry, ShiroiYami, Tijmen van Dien, Tristan Watts-Willis, Veronica Peshterianu, Dag Viggo Lokøen, John Lee, Maxime Zielony, Bryan McLemore, Elizabeth Keathley, Alex Simonides, Felix Weis, Melvin Sowah, Giulio Bontadini, Paul Alom, Ryan Tripicchio, Scot Melville
## Music
David Rees: http://www.davidreesmusic.com
May 25, 2020
QotD: Sociopaths and politicians
The key thing about the modern sociopath is the ambivalence toward the truth. They think saying something is the same as doing something. What matters is if the words get the listener to do what the sociopath wants them to do. Standing in front of crowd, making false claims, is fine if it causes people to buy product. If the truth sells more product, then the truth is better. From the perspective of the modern sociopath, the difference is about the results, not the accuracy of the statements. The truth or a lie, whichever works.
Now replace “sociopath” with “politician” and “product” with “votes” and you have the modern managerial democracy. It’s not that our politicians lie. It’s that for them, a lie is indistinguishable from the truth. That’s why they seem so utterly shameless. Shame requires a sense of right and wrong, a knowledge that what you said or did is intrinsically wrong. For the people who rule over us, right and wrong only exist in the context of their own ambitions. Something is “right” if it benefits the person in the moment.
“The Z Man”, “Rule by Sociopath”, The Z Blog, 2018-02-21.
May 23, 2020
QotD: Computer trade show tchotchkes
You can see them staggering back to their hotel rooms, arms full of corporate-branded freebies, where they have prepared an empty suitcase specifically for shipping it all back to their BOFH Central at the end of the show.
Sure, it’s all crap. It’s usually the likes of childish desk toys, cable tidies that will snap within the week, pencils and logo-shaped erasers (as if you use such items all the time, right?), and Swiss army knives that will be routinely confiscated as you pass through airport security for the trip home. No matter, just turn up to the expo and companies will toss gifts at you like you were the GitHub messiah taking a seaside donkey ride into sysadmin Jerusalem.
Well, nobody tosses any in my direction. No blotchy ballpoint pens for me. No evil-smelling pads of sticky-notes that don’t stick to anything. No spongey stress balls. No smartphone stands. No sharply angular keyfobs that stab into my bollocks when I sit down.
Me, when I visit an IT exhibition stand on the cadge, I have to provide evidence of my media accreditation, two forms of photo ID, an electricity bill, birth certificates of my family going back four generations (originals only, please) and a DNA swab before I qualify to receive a boiled sweet.
Alistair Dabbs, “‘Don’t tell anyone but I have a secret.’ There, that’s my security sorted”, The Register, 2020-02-21.
May 7, 2020
QotD: Chestnuts
Which is why they have been fed to pigs, these last few hundred years; that, and the appalling propaganda mounted against chestnuts by our culinary elites. The European poor once ate them in quantity, as their filler; made bread from chestnut flour. Italians, harder to intimidate by fashion than most others, still adore their subtle flavours.
These thoughts were occasioned by a sealed bag of peeled chestnuts, casually purchased the other day as a snack while walking. They were candied in a rather disagreeable way. But worse, I unfortunately failed to read the label attentively, or would have noticed that the contents were “organic”. No intelligent consumer will buy anything on which this warning is prominently displayed. Quite apart from the doubling or tripling of the price, the product itself may be missing some important ingredient.
Children raised on “organic” food become weak and sickly. Those raised “vegan” as well are likely to die. If you find a child perishing in this way, be merciful and fill him with meat and chestnuts.
David Warren, “Chestnuts”, Essays in Idleness, 2018-01-29.
March 25, 2020
QotD: The broken feedback mechanism that brought down the chain bookstores
And then the left dominated publishing establishment had a brilliant idea. For decades they’d been trying to forecast failure and success, and failings. Books they pushed out the wazzoo (A river in Sundon’tshine) died on the vine when bookstores refused to stock them because the owners had read them. The books they had designated as to be ignored caught someone’s fancy, and suddenly were all over.
This was inefficient. It caused way too much printing that never got distributed, and much last minute rushed reprinting. (Even leaving aside how often people chose to read the WRONG things, something that started to matter more and more in the last two decades.)
So they came up with the push model. It was, from a certain perspective, brilliant.
That perspective is the one where the real world doesn’t really exist, so you don’t need to hear from it.
Because the managers of the big corporate bookstores ALSO didn’t read, they took instruction beautifully. So the publishers could say “you’ll take 100 of x and 2 of y” and they DID.
For a little while it worked beautifully, in the sense that there were no surprise bestsellers, (and publishing houses hated those. I know someone who unexpectedly sold out her print run in a week. The publishing house took the book out of print. No, seriously.) and the books that got seen and talked about were picked by the publisher. (BTW this wasn’t even always or primarily political. Sure, that existed too sometimes, but mostly it was the crazy fads that publishing convinced itself of. For instance, sometime in the mid two thousands they convinced themselves no one wanted historical mysteries — they weren’t selling, true, probably because they were on NO shelves — but everyone wanted “chick-lit mysteries” that had covers with lots of shoes and dresses and whose plots were “Sex in the City with murder.” I remember trying to find something to read, giving up and going to the used bookstore (then a hundred miles away in Denver) for my mystery fix.)
Of course, they sold less. In fact, as time went on and people got out of the habit of going to the bookstore, because there was never anything they could find to read. I mean, I remember being chased from Science Fiction to Mystery to finally History, to at last the sort of “utility” book you find in the discount bins you know “a chart of history” type of thing just to find something to buy on our bookstore night.
Then we gave up.
Eventually the broken feedback mechanism gave us the demise of Borders — and B & N is not feeling so good itself — and a yawning, desperate chasm in customers’ need for books that meant the way was wide open for Indie and Amazon. Even the early badly proofed indie books were like a breath of fresh air because for the first time I could read outside the trends being pushed.
Sarah Hoyt, “Breaking the Gears”, According to Hoyt, 2018-01-03.
March 15, 2020
QotD: The latest breakthrough in psychological therapy
All psychotherapy books bring up the Dodo Bird Verdict – the observation, confirmed in study after study, that all psychotherapies are about equally good, and the only things that matters are “nonspecific factors” like how much patients like their therapist. Some people might think this suggests our form of therapy will only be about as good as other forms. This, all therapy books agree, would be a foolish and perverse interpretation of these findings. The correct interpretation is that all previous forms of therapy must be equally wrong. The only reason they ever produce good results at all is because sometimes therapists accidentally stumble into using our form of therapy, without even knowing it. Since every form of therapy is about equally likely to stumble into using our form of therapy, every other form is equally good. But now that our form of therapy has been formalized and written up, there is no longer any need to stumble blindly! Everyone can just use our form of therapy all the time, for everything! Nobody has ever done a study of our form of therapy. But when they do, it’s going to be amazing! Nobody has even invented numbers high enough to express how big the effect size of our form of therapy is going to be!
Consider the case of Bob. Bob had some standard-issue psychological problem. He had been in and out of therapy for years, tried dozens of different medications, none of them had helped at all. Then he decided to try our form of therapy. In his first session, the therapist asked him “Have you ever considered that your problems might be because of [the kind of thing our form of therapy says all problems are because of]?” Bob started laughing and crying simultaneously, eventually breaking into a convulsive fit. After three minutes, he recovered and proceeded to tell a story of how [everything in his life was exactly in accordance with our form of therapy’s predictions] and he had always reacted by [doing exactly the kind of thing our form of therapy predicts that he would]. Now that all of this was out in consciousness, he no longer felt any desire to have psychological problems. In a followup session two weeks later, the therapist confirmed that he no longer had any psychological problems, and had become the CEO of a Fortune 500 company and a renowned pentathlete.
Not every case goes this smoothly. Consider the case of Sarah. Sarah also has some standard-issue psychological problem. She had also been in and out of therapy for years, tried dozens of different medications, none of them had helped at all. Then she decided to try our form of therapy. In her first session, the therapist asked her “Have you ever considered that your problems might be because of [the kind of thing our form of therapy says all problems are because of]?” Sarah said “No, I don’t think they are.” The therapist asked “Are you sure you’re not just repressing the fact that they totally definitely are, for sure?” As soon as Sarah heard this, she gasped, and her eyes seemed to light up with an inner fire. Then she proceeded to tell a story of how [everything in her life was exactly in accordance with our form of therapy’s predictions] and she had always reacted by [doing exactly the kind of thing our form of therapy predicts that she would], only she was repressing this because she was scared of how powerful she would be if she recovered. Now that all of this was out in consciousness, she no longer felt any desire to have psychological problems. In a followup session two weeks later, the therapist confirmed that she no longer had any psychological problems, and had become the hand-picked successor to the Dalai Lama and the mother of five healthy children.
Previous forms of therapy have failed because they were ungrounded. They were ridiculous mental castles built in the clouds by armchair speculators. But our form of therapy is based on hard science! For example, it probably acts on synapses or the hippocampus or something. Here are three neuroscience papers which vaguely remind us of our form of therapy. One day, neuroscience will catch up to us and realize that the principles of our form of therapy are the principles that govern the organization of the entire brain – if not all of multicellular life.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: All Therapy Books”, Slate Star Codex, 2019-11-21.
March 11, 2020
QotD: Orthorexia
Our culture accepts as a scientific fact that organic food is healthier than non-organic food. You can watch TV, read popular magazines, or listen to healthy-living gurus, and overwhelmingly you will be told that organic food is healthier than non-organic food. Recipes tend to call for organic produce and ingredients. And it goes beyond organic foods. Genetically-modified foods are slandered as “frankenfoods” concocted by mad scientists in a laboratory. Further, we are admonished to avoid anything that is not “natural.”
OK then. Vaccines are genetically modified, lab-made, and certainly not natural. Being anti-vax seems a logical extension of the natural, organic lifestyle.
I know several people — including family members — who have so completely bought into the natural-organic hype that they genuinely believe GMO and non-organic foods are poisonous. They would rather starve themselves and their children to death than ingest a gram of non-organic food. They look at the shelves of a regular grocery store and see rows and rows of poison. There is a medical term for this fear of safe healthy food — it’s called “orthorexia.” I am not shocked that some of these individuals are anti-vaxxers. Instead, I am shocked (and relieved) that some of the orthorexics I know actually do vaccinate themselves and their children.
Buck Throckmorton, “Organic Food & Anti-Vaxxers – Does The Fear of Safe Food Lead to Fear of Safe Vaccines”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2019-12-08.
November 23, 2019
What? No minister for socks? How will Justin decide what to wear?
Chris Selley on the quirky decision to appoint a “Minister of Middle Class Prosperity” to Justin Trudeau’s new cabinet:
Typical image search results for “Justin Trudeau socks”
Wednesday’s Cabinet shuffle featured the usual head-scratching reorganization of portfolios and outright invention of others, “bigger” being for some reason a stated goal. Joyce Murray, for example, becomes Minister of Digital Government. It has a very pre-Y2K ring to it, but then again the government in question accepts payment for access-to-information requests by cheque, and sometimes fulfills them (if at all) via CD-ROM, and it can’t manage a simple payroll system. So maybe it’s not such a bad thing to have someone on that job specifically.
Then there’s Ottawa-Vanier MP Mona Fortier’s new job. I literally assumed people were joking about the Liberals’ obsessive branding, but it’s true: No word of a lie, she is an Associate Minister of Finance and, specifically, the Minister of Middle Class Prosperity.
Should a government need a minister whose job is to ensure Canadians are prospering? One might reasonably hope that’s the goal of pretty much any minister when she rolls out of bed in the morning. But they sure don’t always act that way, so maybe a Minister for Making People Richer isn’t such a bad thing.
But the “middle class” flourish is so ridiculously on-brand that it turns the very idea into a joke. Recalling Trudeau’s 2015 catchphrase, many wags asked: “Shouldn’t it be the Minister of the Middle Class and Those Working Hard to Join It?” And they have a point. After four years in government, the Liberals have a good story to tell on social mobility: Poverty rates are at an all-time low. And yet they remain officially obsessed with a middle class that was never as imperilled as they claimed.
August 8, 2019
An excellent illustration of market segmentation
The Wikipedia entry for “market segmentation” defines it this way:
“BEER”by Jonnee is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Market segmentation is the activity of dividing a broad consumer or business market, normally consisting of existing and potential customers, into sub-groups of consumers (known as segments) based on some type of shared characteristics. In dividing or segmenting markets, researchers typically look for common characteristics such as shared needs, common interests, similar lifestyles or even similar demographic profiles.
No single product is going to be universally popular, and it’s generally a bad idea to present it that way. The producers of a new product ideally try to identify the groups of potential customers who are more likely to want to buy the new product, and tailor their advertising to those groups. The more accurately they can identify and communicate with these customer groups, the greater the chances that the product will be a success in the market.
Beer isn’t universally popular (Gasp! Shock! Horror!), so brewers try to identify different kinds of beer drinkers and market their brews to those sub-groups:
The point about a market being that you can put your stuff out there and see who buys it. The buyers will – they are rational beings after all – select from the varied offerings and their selections will be the ones which best increase their utility by their own measurements of that utility. Thus the Shagmenowbigboypint might get a bit more business toward closing time, who knows? Not necessarily entirely female business either.
And even to stop being puerile about it. We’ve only this one system that does provide multiple choices – that’s what a market is. But in order for ever finer meeting of utility it’s necessary for ever finer slices of the market to be addressed. That is, we need to have free market entry so we can find out what it is that actually meets peoples’ desires.
Banning something that appeals to some slice of that market is thus defeating the point and object of that very market’s existence. Sure, lots of women won’t buy a sexist beer. Some will, as will some men. The aim and art of the whole exercise being to allow those who won’t not to, those who will to.
Or, as we can put it, every beer being Shagmenowbigboypint is as bad as no beer being Shagmenowbigboypint.
August 2, 2019
Doug Ford’s sudden onset “Winegate” scandal
Ontario premier Doug Ford is now taking flak for promoting an Ontario winery after his party accepted what some Toronto media reports characterized as a “generous” donation from the winery’s owner. How generous? Are we talking millions? Tens of millions? A thousand dollars. Toronto media considers $1,000 to be enough money to sway the provincial government and at least one local media outlet encouraged its readers to boycott the winery. But that turned out to be only the tip of the iceberg from a media investigation point of view: Ford’s ultra-cheesy “Ontario News Now” party propaganda channel had given Ford’s endorsement to at least four other mega-corporations whose political contributions may have gone as eye-wateringly high as $2,000! Torontonians may never have heard of these corporate puppet-masters who clearly now control Premier Ford’s every waking moment, but as Canadians have never seen corruption on this scale before — nearly ten thousand dollars in political contributions!! — they’re demanding all the usual things that media-ginned-up protests tend to demand.
“Pelee Island winery”by John Kannenberg is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
At the National Post, Chris Selley wonders why the Ontario Progressive Conservatives are acting just as badly as the Liberals they replaced:
When it comes to Canadian politicians and money, it might be difficult to explain to a foreign visitor exactly what’s kosher and what’s not. Ontario Premier Doug Ford got some bad press this week for having promoted the Pelee Island Winery in one of his impossibly cheesy “Ontario News Now” propaganda videos, just weeks after the winery’s owner, Walter Schmoranz, donated $1,000 to Ford’s Progressive Conservatives. In isolation, it didn’t look great. If it’s a coincidence, as the premier claims, then it’s the sort of coincidence a government wishing to claim moral rectitude should endeavour to avoid.
Viewed in the broad landscape of Canadian politics, however, it all seems rather overblown. Politicians regularly stump for certain products and businesses, after all, implicitly at the expense of others. More to the point they routinely give businesses free money without asking us, and not out of the goodness of their hearts.
According to David Akin’s indispensable @ottawaspends Twitter feed, the federal government doled out $723,000 to wineries and winery associations this year and last. The Nova Scotia Winery Association hoovered up $522,000 of the total, plus another $175,000 back in 2012. Perhaps it would be cynical to observe that the riding of West Nova, home to the Annapolis Valley wineries, is notorious for changing hands between the Liberals and Conservatives. Whoops — too late.
Here in Ontario, meanwhile, between 2013 and 2018, the province and feds collectively gave away at least $1.1 million to wineries and $1.5 million to breweries, plus $140-odd million more to an endless queue of cap-in-hand distillers, mushroom farmers, meat processers, goat dairies, sugarmakers and bakeries. Pelee Island Winery isn’t on that list, incidentally, which might put the premier’s non-financial contribution — quid pro quo or not — in perspective.
All that taxpayer dough got handed out under a program called Growing Forward 2, which was an “initiative that encouraged innovation, competitiveness and market development, adaptability and industry sustainability in Canada’s agri-food and agri products sector.” That’s a fancy way of saying “corporate welfare,” which can be unpopular in Canada when it comes to bailing Bombardier out of its latest fiasco or buying the Weston clan new freezers, but which is entirely uncontroversial when it comes to smaller, less obviously villainous businesses — especially if they happen to be farms.
July 4, 2019
Assorted green scams
David Warren briefly returns to the current day (away from his normal 13th-century preferences) to look at a few of the many green scams being run by various government and industry scam artists:
Speaking with a gentleman who vends in a neighbourhood farmers’ market, I learnt something interesting, and probably true. Surviving family farms usually lack “organic” credentials. This is because getting them, from the bureaucracies that dispense them, is an immensely time-consuming process, and involves costs that would erase most of the little farmer’s profits. You have to be a big, faceless, industrial operation to afford the official “organic” labels that sucker big city consumers into paying double for essentially the same goods. That the whole system is massively corrupt, can almost go without saying. It was designed to be.
Organic scams are far from new, but perhaps more insidious because corporations love to add that “organic” label on stuff to jack up the prices on all sorts of things, like spices, wine, and many, many other items. Restaurants do the same trick on their menus, frequently assuming nobody will ever check up on them. That said, it’s mostly the well-off who get fooled because, well, they’re eager to be fooled on that score. The US government even admitted that organic certification is not about food safety or nutrition: it’s all marketing.
By coincidence, the same day my eye caught, by accident on the Internet, the announcement of a Green Award to a big car assembly “park.” They had changed all the light bulbs in their factory buildings, thus saving themselves a few thousand dollars on their multi-million electric bill, and seem to have installed new toilets, too. This sprawling high-tech carriage works remains three hundred acres of unspeakable aesthetic horror, in which human beings are enslaved to machines. But now it is “Green.”
The greenwashing of modern industrial and commercial buildings is a long-running scam, with the much-desired “LEED Platinum” certification usually, if not always, awarded to those who game the system most successfully. “What LEED designers deliver is what most LEED building owners want – namely, green publicity, not energy savings“
The environmental business — currently buoyed by unprovable, often fatuous claims of anthropogenic global warming — is perhaps the most cynical. It has spawned vested interests on a global scale, that will not be overturned by occasional exposure. At its heart is the manipulation of statistics, and scare-mongering through compliant mass media. The general public are hypnotized by repetition. I have noticed in desultory dips into the news that e.g. anomalous weather will invariably be attributed to “climate change,” when more plausible explanations are easily at hand.
This zombification extends to most other areas of reportage: invisible bogeys blamed for imaginary trends. Solutions to “environmental problems” are proposed that will not make the slightest dent in them.
Of course, the constant demands for “clean energy” almost always explicitly reject the use of nuclear power because reasons.
Darlington Nuclear Generating Station in Clarington, Ontario.
Photo by Óðinn via Wikimedia Commons.
But nuclear power, most easily in the form of molten salt reactors (on which research was killed fifty years ago), could replace most uses of coal, oil, and gas within a decade, through much smaller facilities eliminating huge transmission costs. It would be the cheaper because the fuels are readily available to start in the form of recycled nuclear waste, and the raw materials would be abundantly available thereafter.
On the question of safety, the death toll from mining, drilling, hydro dams, &c, is quite considerable — in the tens of thousands at least, post-War. Except for Chernobyl (one of many Soviet-era environmental disasters), the death toll from nuclear accidents remains about nil. No one died at Three Mile Island. Not one death was caused by the flooded Fukushima reactors (though well over twenty thousand were killed by the tsunami that caused the difficulty there).
In short, “clean energy” is not a problem. It had to be made into one by the fright campaigns of the environmentalcases, whose own power and income depends on sustaining the problem, and preventing the most obvious solutions.
July 3, 2019
QotD: Elon Musk as a modern-day Ferdinand DeLesseps
I used to love Elon like everyone else. I still think that having four or five billionaires in a space race against each other is finally the world I thought I was going to get growing up reading Heinlein. The Tesla Model S was probably one of the most revolutionary cars of the last 50 years. But he lost me when he committed outright fraud in the Solar City – Tesla deal and since then have only become more skeptical about he and Tesla.
Elon Musk at the 2015 Tesla Motors annual meeting.
Photo by Steve Jurvetson via Wikimedia Commons.I sort of laugh when folks tell me that really smart successful rich people believe in Tesla. You mean like James Murdoch, on the board of Tesla and who also was lost his entire investment in Theranos? Or like Larry Ellison, an adviser and fan of Elizabeth Holmes who invested $1 billion in Tesla just 6 months ago and has already lost 40% of it? The window on this is probably closing, but over the last 10 years if you wanted to get Silicon Valley investors to throw a lot of money at you, find a traditional bricks and mortar business and devise a story in which you take that industry and convert its economics to that of the networked software world (see: Uber, WeWork, Tesla, and even Theranos in some of its strategic pivots).
Or how about true millennials and Elon Musk? Name a wealthy millennial supporter of Elon Musk and Tesla and I can bet you any amount of money they have not looked at Tesla’s balance sheet or cash flow or the details of its global demand trends. They have not thought about its dealership strategy or manufacturing strategy and the cash flow implications of these. They just like what Elon says. It sounds big and visionary. They buy into Elon’s formulation that he is saving the environment and everyone opposed to him is in a cabal with big oil (ignoring the fact that Elon routinely uses his Gulfstream VI to commute distances less than 60 miles). So saying that rich millenials adore Elon is effectively saying that they want to be associated with the same things Elon says he is for — the environment and space travel et al.
Elon Musk is Ferdinand DeLesseps. He is PT Barnum. He is Elizabeth Holmes. He is the pied piper. He is fabulous at spinning visions and making them sound science-y. But he is not Tony Stark. There is a phenomenon with Elon Musk that everyone thinks he is brilliant until they hear him speak about something about which they have domain knowledge, and then they realize he is full of sh*t. For example, no one who knows anything about transportation or physics or basic engineering has thought his Boring Company and Hyperloop make any sense at all. His ideas would have been great cover stories for Popular Mechanics in the 1970’s, wowing 13-year-old boys like me with pictures of mile-long cargo blimps and flying RV’s. He is like a Marvel movie that spouts science that is just believable-enough sounding that it moves the plot along but does not stand up to any scrutiny.
All of this would be harmless if he was not running a public company. I don’t really care about the rich folks who were duped by Elizabeth Holmes, but hundreds of thousands of small millenial investors who have totally bought into the Elon hype are literally putting their last dollar into Tesla, and sometimes borrowing more. Tesla shorts often laugh at these folks on Twitter, calling them “bagholders,” but it is a tragedy. Unless Tesla finds a sugar daddy sucker, and the odds of that are getting longer, I think it is going to end badly for many of these investors.
As a disclosure, I have been short Tesla via puts for a while now. It you really want to understand Elon, the best book I can recommend is The Path Between The Seas about the building of the Panama Canal. First, it is a great book you should read no matter what. And second, Ferdinand DeLesseps is the best analog I can find for Musk.
Warren Meyer, “People Who Express Opinions Outside of their Domain Seldom Have Really Looked into it Much”, Coyote Blog, 2019-05-28.
May 20, 2019
A “cutting-edge mediaeval Catholic” view of the modern economy
David Warren explains some of his disquietude about our modern world:
Gentle reader may object that none of these entities is a government department, except insofar as it is the subject of taxes and regulations, and as it grows larger, an ever more formidable force in lobbying for subsidies and legislation favourable to itself. Objection sustained. Verily, this is just my point.
Each entity made its way until the gobbling by means of mass consumer advertising, in which morally illegitimate methods of persuasion — principally hype, actual lies, irrelevant claims and endorsements — are instrumental to sales success. Honest advertising (e.g. catalogues with exact descriptions) is theoretically possible but practically extinct; campaigns are based on the tawdry manipulation of human “perceptions” — behaviourist psychology at the level of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, but elaborately quantified, with financial and pricing arrangements factored in.
Indeed, one may link most disastrous marketing decisions to the decline of intuitive reasoning, as statistical reasoning takes its place. The manager who knows in his gut, from experience, what might work and what won’t, or can’t, is displaced by the young analyst with computer modelling skills and all the jargon of “science” to express the platitudes he was drip-fed in school.
But here, too, “private” and “public” enterprise are fully integrated. Both are adapted to the “planning” paradigm, and each is utterly dependent on the other, in what is misleadingly called “the mixed economy.” The critics of abstract Capitalism, on the one side, and abstract Socialism, on the other, draw a false contrast between two administrative orders, when they are both bureaucratic in nature, inhumanly oversized, and habitually dedicated to the pursuit of monopoly.
Several of the readers with whom I correspond are under the immovable impression that I am against making money, or improvements in technology, per se. In fact my outlook is cutting-edge mediaeval Catholic. The moral questions are instead such as, How is the money made? And, for what are the improvements to be used? As I must remind e.g. my Chief Texas Correspondent, I am not against electricity or indoor plumbing. But I am against worshipping such things, or making them the criteria for high civilization.
