Rarely Pure Never Simple

Goin’ To The Candidate’s Debate

Written by Al Slivinski on September 24, 2026. Posted in Government, London, Politics.

Laugh about it, shout about it, when you’ve got to choose

Any way you look at it you lose.

I recently attended my first all-candidates debate this week, and I think ol’ Rhymin’ Simon got that about right.

This was another political first for Al, to go with the campaign sign on my lawn. The meeting I attended was for candidates for Mayor of my fair city, held at the august London Club, of which I used to be a member. Actually six of us went at the invitation of a friend who is a member, which was handy, as none of us are any more.

Good turnout I think, as such things go, We were told there were more than a hundred Londoners in attendance, and looking around, that seemed accurate.

To be even more accurate, although this was an ‘all-candidates’ gathering, only three candidates for Mayor were there, and there are 11 on the ballot.

Whether this was because the LC only invited these three or because only these three decided to show up I cannot say, but I am grateful, as those three are the only candidates likely to get more than a handful of votes. With 11 candidates present it would have been a useless event.

There was a moderator whose job was to ask questions which had been submitted prior to the event, and to recognize those in the audience who wished to step to a microphone and ask a question on the spot. Each of the three candidates answered each question, with time given for a response if some other candidate mentioned them in their answer.

As good a format as one could get, I suppose. A friend and I had worked on some questions to submit ahead of time, and two or three of them did get answered. My friend complained after the event that none of the candidates actually answered the questions. I think that is what one should expect, but you all know what a cynic I am.

That being said, I did learn some things from the event, and to tell you about that, I will first introduce the three candidates in attendance.

– Josh Morgan, London’s incumbent mayor, finishing out his first term after serving on City Council for two terms prior to being elected mayor.

– Susan Stevenson, a councillor currently, who has decided after her one term on Council to challenge Morgan for the mayoral office.

– Kirsten Krose, who has not served in public office in London or anywhere else, so far as I know. She’s obviously the newcomer.

I had never heard any of these people speak before. Morgan and Stevenson get quoted in the press from time to time, but this event gave me a chance to hear what they had to say in response to questions. While they did not in fact generally answer them directly, the thing about listening to people’s answers to questions is that they give you some sense of the kind of person they are, what is important to them, and how they think.

That seems to me useful to know about a potential public office-holder.

So here is what I think I learned about each of them.

Kirsten Krose

Ms. Krose spent more than a decade working in and around the Harper federal government in Ottawa. Not in an elected office, but as a bureaucrat and lobbyist. She moved back to London (where she was born) at some point, and in 2022 founded SWON Public Affairs, Inc. I would call it a lobbying and PR firm, Ms Krose might disagree.

To be fair to Ms Krose, she was the only one at the meeting who was not currently already in City government. That being said, every answer she gave to every question made it clear what she has been doing for her adult life. She sounded like a PR person in every instance, by which I mean, she strung together long, badly constructed sentences with very little substance.

If that were not enough, it turns out she held a fund-raising event for her mayoral campaign in Toronto. Really.

I guess she figured there is more money to be had there. Maybe true, but who wants a mayor who has been supported by people outside the city of which she is mayor? Not I.

I came away convinced Ms. Krose should not be in charge of any org that spends other people’s money, and that includes the City of London.

Josh Morgan

Morgan is in his first term as Mayor, after serving two four-year terms on the City Council. He first came to London as a student at UWO, where he earned a BA in Econ and Poli Sci as well as an MA in Poli Sci. I believe he held some administrative post in the Poli Sci Dept at UWO after the MA, because I would see him walking the halls of my building talking on a cell phone. I do not know what that position was. (Econ and Pol Sci shared the fourth floor of my building back in the day.)

Readers of this blog will already know I have not been a fan of Morgan’s policies during his first term. His general approach to the biggest issues I think London faces – crime, open drug use and homelessness – are of the ‘harm reduction’ variety. That means that he seeks to reduce the harm done to the homeless and drug abusers, not the harm done by them.

That is a remarkably common approach to these issues here in Canada, and many citizens of this city support it. As do all the ‘activists and advocates’ who get their views into the media regularly.

So, I admit that my first chance to hear what Morgan had to say left me with a better impression of him than I thought I would leave the room with. He’s not a fool, he’s just wrong. He seems committed to continuing much the same policies if re-elected, and my view remains that those policies have led to a substantial deterioration of the quality of life in London. He said nothing to dissuade me from that view.

Susan Stevenson

A ‘controversial’ councillor, if you read the usual media in London, she is finishing her first term as a Councillor, and the reason she gave for running for Mayor I found very interesting. She says that councillors are not given the information they need to make decisions in the interests of their constituents. Big decisions are made without any vote or discussion in Council, and they do not get to see a detailed version of the City’s budget before voting on it.

She said she found this unacceptable, and so decided she could not serve another term on a Council that operated in that manner. She’s running for Mayor so she can change the way the City is governed. [I add that Morgan had little to say in defense of the way Council currently operates.]

Beyond that, she pointed out repeatedly that London’s current homelessness and drug policies end up putting drug-users and the mentally unstable in buildings shared by low-income tenants, including seniors and families with children. This has led to terrible situations as the druggies and mentally ill tenants wreck their own units and terrorize their neighbours.

I have heard about this previously as a feature of many of the city-run and non-profit housing coops and shelters in the city, but Stevenson seems to be the only politician who is calling this unacceptable. Morgan agreed that ‘we made mistakes’ but Stevenson said ‘fine, but you don’t seem to be interested in changing the policies that led to those mistakes’.

I will add that Stevenson’s characterization of the way London is run jives with what I have heard previously; that the bureaucrats really run the city, and Council is little more than a rubber stamp.

That’s my take on those three candidates. Other observations from the 90 minute meeting.

One, it was said often that many of London’s current challenges are the result of provincial and federal policies. The province closed the mental hospitals down back in the 90s, and it has not expanded the local hospital system despite the growth in London’s population. Further, it is federally appointed judges who send people charged with crime back onto the street rather than holding them in custody, and who hand out minimal sentences to those convicted.

That is all true, and is not likely news to anyone, but the fact remains that the City is (or should be) obligated to do the best it can for its residents despite all that. It has not been doing that for some time, in my view.

Two, although ‘safety’ was discussed often, particularly with respect to the downtown core, there was no substantive discussion of the operation of London Police Service. What little I know about that subject, and what I see happen on the streets, particularly downtown, tells me there are major problems with LPS. Not with the front-line officers, but with the directives under which they operate. I don’t actually know how much influence the City Council and Mayor have over the operation of LPS, but London does have a Police Services Board. Two Councillors and the Mayor serve on that board, which suggests some oversight by Council. In any case, I would like a new Mayor and Council to take a hard look at staffing and policies at LPS, and I am sure Ms. Stevenson is more likely to do that than is Morgan.

As I noted at the outset, I feel like I got a (admittedly incomplete) look at the three candidates’ thinking, and the principles which guide that thinking. That was worth something, and nothing I learned about that at the meeting changed my intention to vote for Stevenson.

I will end this by going back to Rhymin’ Simon.

Sadly, I think Stevenson has little chance to defeat Morgan in the coming election, in large part for reasons I have stated previously. (Krose will come in a distant third.) Turnout will be very low again, and those who do bother to vote will not be a representative sample of Londoners. The folks who show up will be mostly from the chattering classes, a couple of whose members asked questions at the meeting. Actually, they made speeches rather than asked questions, one of them exhorting the crowd to ‘lose your bias’.

I add, finally that I am absolutely sure that the Councillor serving my ward will be re-elected. By a landslide.

So, while I am glad I went to the meeting, I expect that after the election we will get from our City government more of the same. Mostly from the same people.

Any way you look at it you lose, indeed.

News From The World of Non-Education

Written by Al Slivinski on September 18, 2026. Posted in Education.

Two items popped up in the news while I was on holiday. They seemed worth writing a quick word or two about. See if you agree –

1. In the US State of New York, it has long been true that students had to pass a set of exams, known as the Regents Exams, in order to graduate from High School. The Board of Regents in New York, from whence comes the name of those exams, has recently determined that NY State high school students will no longer be required to pass five of these exams (in English language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies) to earn a Regents Diploma, the standard credential for high school graduation in the state.

A member of that Board of Regents has explained why the requirement has been dropped:

New York Regents member Felicia Thomas-Williams on why she thinks students shouldn’t have to take Regents exams to graduate: “You don’t assess a fish on climbing a tree because fish can’t climb trees”

You can read the X post from which comes that quote and hear Ms. Thomas-Williams say this out loud here.

So, NY State high-schoolers will now get a diploma even if they can’t climb a tree. Or write a coherent sentence.

2. The NYT this week ran an editorial about the fact that the University of California is reconsidering its decision of some years back to stop using SAT scores in its admission process. The editorial is titled ‘This California Educational Juggernaut Doesn’t Need the SAT’ and was written by one Miriam Pawel.

Here is my favourite sentence from Ms. Pawel’s article:

Students on University of California campuses may struggle with basic math, but they are graduating at record rates.

It seems Ms. Pawel thinks the second fact she mentions is a good thing, despite the first fact.

To be fair, not all of the piece is as air-headed as that sentence, and I have written before that the idea of reinstating the SAT requirement, which originated with the faculty at these universities, is at best a highly imperfect way to deal with the real problem: public high schools in California are not educating their students. Ms. Pawel seems to get that the problem starts with the California secondary school system, although she sees the issue as one of ‘equity’ rather than competence. That usually means she thinks the schools that are doing a bad job need more money, although she does not quite say that in this article.

The hope of those who argue for reinstating the SAT is that it will provide a clear indication of which high schools are doing a bad job, and produce changes for the better at those schools. It may not work, teachers’ unions are powerful in California, and they will resist any attempt at making their members accountable for teaching high school students anything. And, the unions’ great allies are Democratic Party politicians, who are pretty much the only politicians who can get elected to any state office in California.

Racism Running Rampant on the Airwaves

Written by Al Slivinski on September 12, 2026. Posted in Popular attitudes.

Note to Readers: My Gal and I are off on a little holiday next week. That does not necessarily mean there will be no new posts to read during the next week, things worth writing about pop up in all kinds of situations. It does mean I am going to feel free from the (admittedly self-imposed) requirement to post something every week, so there might not be any posts next week. If not, there definitely will be the following week, so do keep checking.

It has been hard to avoid reading accounts and opinions on the Lindsay Clancy murder case over the last month or more. You no doubt know it ended in a hung jury, and the ether seems to have decided that hung jury was the result of a single juror sticking to a vote of guilty of murder.

There are many things that I have read about this that appall me, but I am not here writing about any of that. I will say that I am glad I did not have to serve on that jury.

This is about what has happened since the trial ended. It appears that a number of jurors have been willing to go out and talk to the media about what happened at the trial and in the jury room, and that news organizations have been more than willing to put them on the air or print what they have to say.

So far as I can see, since this post-mistrial circus started, there has been a widespread albeit not unanimous belief among those reporting/commenting on it, that the supposed lone juror did a terrible thing in not allowing Clancy to be acquitted by reason of insanity. As things go in our contemporary culture, the people who believe that want him/her punished.

To put it differently, it seems to me that Ms. Clancy’s legal claim of being in a psychotic state when she (by her own admission) killed her three children has been taken up as a cause by much of the US’s (and western world’s) chattering classes, and they are unhappy that she was not acquitted outright.

Today I read an account of an interview done on the CBS show CBS Morning of Clancy juror Paula Devlin by TV talkperson Gayle King. It is worthy of note in this case that Ms. King is black.

Here, according to the WSJ, is part of the interchange between Ms. King and Ms. Devlin during the interview, which aired live the morning of Sept 11:

King: I’m curious about the jurors themselves, because we know it was nine women, three men. What was the age range? What was the racial makeup? I haven’t heard any of that. What was it?

Devlin: Seventy—70ish to 22, and one person of color, and then everybody else was white. A lot of the jurors had children.

King: One person of color—was the person of color a woman or a man?

Devlin: A man.

King: A man. Is the holdout juror a person of—a black man?

Devlin: Yes.

King: A black man is the holdout juror?

Devlin: Yes.

King: Well, I have to sit with that for just a second.

Let me start at the top with King’s question. Why is King curious to know about the age and racial make-up of the jury?

I can think of an answer, but let’s go first to her reaction when Devlin tells her the holdout juror was a black man.

Why does that cause King to pause? Why does she have to ‘sit with that’ for a second? In clearer language, why is she so clearly surprised?

I will give one answer to both questions: Ms. King is a racist. She operates under the belief that one’s views are largely determined by one’s demographic characteristics. Thus, it is critical to know the age, sex, racial profile of the jury in order to understand their decision.

She would, I expect, be appalled if someone – say me, for example – were to note how much black folks like fried chicken, or how clever are Asian people.

That sort of racism is….well, evil and appalling. But her view that the votes of the jurors would follow from their race, sex and age, there’s nothing appalling about that.

And, the thing is, a lot of racial, sexual, age, ethnic and other stereotypes have something real behind them. I would not be at all surprised if a careful survey of residents of the US found that black folks eat fried chicken and watermelon more often than do white folks on average. Neither would I be shocked to have any particular black person in the US tell me they hate fried chicken and never eat it. It is foolish to confuse proportions and percentages with universals, but people do it all the time.

It seems Ms. King had a clear expectation of how a black male on that Clancy jury would vote. Apparently the particular black male who was actually on that jury violated her expectation. It is impossible to say if Ms. King had contemplated or ever would contemplate the possibility that his vote had a lot to do with what he heard during the trial. Reality is complicated, and sometimes it just bites your expectations on the ass.

Coda: I will mention something else I think is obvious but that no one else seems to have said or written. There is no way to verify anything these blabbing jurors say. Jury deliberations are not recorded. And there are few more universal motivations for behaviour these days than the desire to be famous, however briefly. It is perfectly possible the holdout juror was a white chick. Hell, maybe there were two holdouts, but the jurors going on the TV shows know a lone holdout is a better story. We will never know.

Epilogue:

(I believe ‘coda’ is actually a musical term. True or not, I am grateful the English language has two terms for things that are added on at the end.)

I read deep into the comments on the WSJ piece from which I got the interview transcript above, after I had written my piece. One commenter suggested a somewhat different reason for Ms. King’s having to ‘sit with’ the info about the lone juror.

That is, Ms. King was preparing to vilify on air, even if only anonymously (and oh-so-subtly), the person who prevented Lindsay Clancy’s acquittal. Finding out it was a black person caused her cognitive dissonance. Person who voted guilty = bad. Person who is black = good. She did not know immediately how to respond in light of that.

I cannot dismiss that explanation for Ms. King’s reaction. If it is true, it still fits in with my view of racism as the key factor.

The Evil That Is MicroSoft

Written by Al Slivinski on September 11, 2026. Posted in LBOs.

I bought a new laptop a couple of weeks ago. The old one is still working fine, and I have no particular problems with it (I have many problems with the company that built its operating system), but I use my laptop a lot, and feel that I should always have two in working condition, in case one goes kaput, as they can do without warning.

For example, the old one I am still using was purchased because the power input on the one I had been using previously disintegrated one day, out of the blue. Geek Squad told me they could not repair that, which meant I had just the amount of time left on the battery charge to get a new one and transfer important shit to it. Fortunately, I keep all of my files for this blog and everything else I care about on memory sticks, which I back up from time to time on an external hard drive.

The other reason I bought this second laptop was that I am a hopeless multi-tasker. I have no cable TV, so if I am watching videos or sports streamed from a laptop to my TV, I like to have a second laptop on which I can read and write and travel the web while I am watching the stream.

That all being said, I hated the idea of buying a new laptop. Although I bought one made by the same company as the one I have, I expect all kinds of unpleasant surprises with any new computer, no matter how many deeply perceptive questions about it I ask the salesman.

So far the new laptop has not been as much of a pain as I expected. I told the guys who set it up to remove any whiff of AI from it, and they did what they could, and I have since managed to remove/supress whatever they missed without too much trouble.

My first really irritating feature on this computer just arose today, some two weeks after I started using it.

I started it up, and before it would let me do anything, I got an invitation to backup all my files. These would of course be put on MicroSoft’s cloud, which MS calls OneDrive.

I could not just shut this invitation down and move on to using my laptop. No, instead I was given exactly two options.

‘Continue’

…meaning ‘continue on to backing up all your files on our cloud’

‘opt out of backup’

I clicked on the second one, but that did not mean I could just move on. Not a chance. Instead I got another immovable screen with another two options:

‘Backup files’

‘opt out for now’

I did not wish to opt out for now, I wished to opt out forever, but that was not an option I was given. I clicked on that, and was finally allowed to use my laptop, but having clicked on that I know that every few days I will have to go through the same process, at no point being given the opportunity to click on ‘stop bothering me about this forever, assholes’.

MicroSoft figures if they confront you with this Hobson’s choice often enough, the odds are that eventually you will click on ‘backup files’ or ‘continue’, out of sheer exasperation, if not simple clumsiness. It’s probably a good bet for them.

As far as MS Evil is concerned, the operating system they put on every non-Apple computer is a device that they use to extract money and/or information from you. That is their business model. What the computer manufacturer pays them for the Windows OS, which of course you pay for when you buy the device, is just the down payment.

It’s the same with all their products. I am writing this post on my old laptop using Microsoft Word, for which I pay a yearly subscription fee. I can set Word to automatically back up everything I write periodically while I am writing it. That’s useful, it means there is always a very recent copy available of whatever you are doing, in case some glitch erases all your work. However, MS Evil will only let me do that if I back up everything I write onto OneDrive. No, thanks, MS. I have developed the habit of saving everything I write onto memory disks, as I noted. I simply try to remember to manually click on ‘Save’ often while I’m working.

If you believe that MS would never acquire or record or use in any way what you save on OneDrive, then I have some really great swampland to sell you at a fabulous price.

To be clear, I don’t really believe that MS Evil does not anyway have access to everything that I write in Word on this laptop, even though I never save it to their cloud. In fact, I suspect they would know everything I write even were I to go offline while writing, which I did consider making my routine at one point.

This belief in the ubiquity of MS Evil’s surveillance of me (yes, and you) is based on the following observation.

When I fire up this old laptop, it requires me to put in a four-number PIN. I did not ask for this feature, it was forced on me. Before I type in that PIN, the screen contains info about the weather in my hometown and various news headlines from around the world, as well as stock index numbers. Again, not my choice to see this shit, but I get it anyways.

But I do not have my laptops set to connect to my wi-fi automatically. I have to manually make that hook-up every time I start my computer, after I have put in the damned PIN, and it has booted up. (It takes me six seconds to log onto my wi-fi manually at that point.)

So how the hell is my laptop giving me all this info about the world before I have connected it to the internet?

I see only two possible answers to that question.

One, that info I see on the laptop screen before I input my PIN is pure bullshit, made up out of nothing by some program MS embedded in my laptop,

Two, my laptop is indeed connected to the internet as soon as I turn it on, even though I have not manually connected it. To put it differently, I can decide whether or not I connect to the internet, but I cannot choose whether or not my laptop is.

And note that even if possibility one is true, from whence comes this bullshit? The hypothesized program has to get it from somewhere, some time.

I conclude I am connected to the internet and MS Evil at all times, whether I want to be or not.

That, in turn, means that MS Evil knows and makes use of everything we do on every PC, no matter how we set those devices up. And there is not a thing we can do about it. As I said, we don’t buy these devices, MS Evil just lets us use them so we can provide them with money and info (which to them is even better than cash…..)

Good Things I and II

Written by Al Slivinski on September 10, 2026. Posted in Uncategorized.

Happenings in the Hood

I live in a very good neighbourhood in London, called Old South. Not full of rich folks, thankfully, but very pleasant for the most part. The recent policies of all levels of government are making the northeast corner of the neighbourhood, in which I live, slowly but surely less pleasant. However, one need only walk a block to leave that behind. Bottom line, I like living here.

One very interesting thing that My Gal and I have noticed on our joint and separate walks about our neighbourhood is a house about two blocks from me with a large tree trunk on its front yard. A tree of considerable girth clearly stood there at one time, now all that is left is a large flat surface just above ground level. The folks who live at this house – or maybe someone else, we don’t really know, has gotten into the habit of staging miniature dinosaur tableaus on this large flat surface. What the wee dinosaurs are doing varies, but it always happens on the flat surface of that tree trunk. We look forward to checking out what the dinosaurs are up to whenever we head out for a walk.

Here is a photo I took of the tableau from this past Sunday.

I am not a professional photographer, obviously, but it looks to me like the dinos are hanging out at the pool. Who’s pool? Couldn’t say.

If one looks up at the porch of this house, there are also dinosaurs cavorting about there.

Being a grandpa, I have a nontrivial collection of toys and books and games that I acquired when my grandkids were kids. Unlike me, the grandkids have grown older, and so most of these things are no longer of any interest to them. That includes a set of plastic dinosaurs My Gal picked up back in the day, thinking my grandson would enjoy them.

He definitely did, but now he’s outgrown them, so I got the bright idea that we should donate them to the folks who stage those mini-dinosaur events.

So inspired, on Sunday we walked over to said house with our gift of dinosaurs in a bag that included a note saying ‘They would like to join the fun’, and left the bag there next to the tree trunk.

I should note that the dinosaurs we contributed were of a larger scale than the ones you see in the photo above.

Well, this morning, Monday, one day after we left our reptilian contribution at the tree trunk, My Gal went by the tableau house on her usual morning run, and stopped to take the photo below.

As you can see, our larger-scale dinosaurs have been nicely incorporated into the proceedings, pushing a pram full of wee-er dinosaurs.

We are very pleased to see our donation has been accepted, and look forward to what the tableau-makers, whoever they may be, get up to in the future. I do wonder what is the source of the props like the pram and the swimming pool, but it doesn’t really matter. Creativity, once unleashed, cannot be contained.

I should also mention that when we walked over to drop off our bag of dinos on Sunday, we were both wearing T-Rex costumes. My Gal bought herself one of these some years ago, and had so much fun with it she bought another, so what our neighbours saw was two six-foot-plus tall T-Rexes bopping through the neighbourhood, one carrying a camera, the other a bag of mini-dinosaurs.

We got a lot of honks and waves from passing cars on our journey – what does one do when passing a T-Rex other than wave – and we also set a lot of the dogs in the neighbourhood to howling and barking. I guess that is what dogs do when they spot a T-Rex….or two. One lady stopped her car and got out to take a selfie with the two T-Rexes. My first selfie, I’m pretty sure.

Anonymous notoriety is kinda fun, I have to say. We have plans to appear as The Two Ts again.

Good Garrison

I just finished reading another recent acquisition from my last trip to The Book Addict: Leaving Home: A Collection of Stories from Lake Wobegon, by Garrison Keillor. These are in fact lightly edited transcripts taken from his radio broadcasts, and every one starts with the same sentence: ‘It was a quiet week in Lake Wobegon.’

I never listened to A Prairie Home Companion when it was on NPR, and that is my loss. There are very few writers whose work can get me to laugh out loud while I’m reading it, but Keillor is certainly one. The stories are perceptive, often heart-warming, sometimes tragic, and at times very very funny. Stories about people living their lives in a small place, for whom a road trip to St Cloud is a big deal.

The closest thing to Keillor’s work here in Canada I think is The Wingfield Series, which was a cycle of seven one-man plays written by Dan Needles. In them Rod Beatty played Walt Wingfield, a Toronto stockbroker who bought a 40-acre farm and went off to change his life and be a farmer.

I saw some of those Wingfield plays over the years, and they were very much in the spirit of Garrison Keillor’s stories of Lake Wobegon, as Dan Needles did actually do what his character Walt talked about, although he made up the location of Larkspur, Ontario, in Persephone Township. Each play consisted of Beatty reading letters Walt had written to his friend, the Larkspur newspaper’s editor. I laughed a lot at those, too.

I’m pretty sure I also saw some Wingfield on CBC, which showed what were essentially half-hour videos taken from the stage plays. Not hard to do for a one-actor play. That was when CBC was actually good for something….

Anyway, I will look for more of Keillor’s books once I finish this one, and I recommend his writing to you all. You don’t gotta be Uhmurikan to appreciate Mr. Keillor’s stories, and it turns out you don’t have to be (born) Canadian to enjoy Wingfield’s Follies,

AI, eh?

Written by Al Slivinski on September 5, 2026. Posted in Education.

I have been reading a lot lately about various post-secondary education institutions putting in specific courses or sets of courses in which the use of AI by students is forbidden. I wonder about the possibility of enforcing such rules, but I write here about something closer to home.

The good old Fraser Institute sent out a survey to Grade 6-12 teachers across Canada about the use of AI. Those teachers were in particular asked about their students’ use of AI. FI did not survey the students themselves, probably wisely. You can read the entire report of their survey results here if you like, no paywall. So far as I can tell, the folks at FI used the usual methods to obtain a sample of over 750 teachers around the country. I am not expert on that sort of thing, I will just repeat that there is always a legitimate question as to whether the results of any voluntary survey are representative of what you would get from surveying every teacher in the country.

Here is one finding from said survey:

Nearly all teachers (95.6%) surveyed believe at least some of their students use AI for homework, and 42.2% believe more than half do. Of those students perceived to use AI, teachers believe that more than half (55.9%) use it to do their work for them.

As worthwhile as it may be to know what teachers believe regarding AI use by their own students, here are the results from the survey I find most interesting.

A majority of teachers polled (67.7%) are using AI to assist in their teaching, and 68.4% of those teachers are using it frequently (at least weekly).

You can be sure, and a few still-working faculty I have spoken to recently have told me as much, that instructors at every level in the educational system are using AI a lot to make putting together and teaching their courses easier.

This is what AI does, why it’s use will continue and increase: it makes writing and organizing and research easier, less time consuming. That plus human nature means that instructors at all levels will use it, and use it more as time goes on, and why any moves to limit the use of AI by students are surely doomed to collapse from the weight of sheer hypocrisy.

I will add that it may also be why post-secondary education will collapse, finally, from its own implausibility. I have a longer post brewing on that Very Big topic, but the bottom line is pretty much this –

There is almost nothing that PSE students are currently asked to do in their classes that AI cannot do for them, to at least a mediocre level of quality. Given that the goal of the vast majority of PSE students today is precisely to ‘get through it’, to get that degree to allow them to get that good job, how can PSE not become a pure festival of AI? All the instructors will use it to set up their courses, and then use it to mark the work that the students use AI to do for them. Faculty can also have AI write and submit any reference letters that are requested by any student’s AI chatbot.

At that point, it seems to me it will be impossible to maintain the fiction that all this is worth paying some $40k and four years of one’s time, or in the US, maybe $400k over four years.

The only problem remaining will be what to do with all those buildings and parking lots.

War is Hell, Just Not For Everyone

Written by Al Slivinski on September 3, 2026. Posted in Economics, Government.

I write to try and provide some perspective on what has happened recently regarding the ‘tariff war’ between the US and Canada, since it got another boost at the beginning of this month. Most of what I read in the press about it I find deeply uninformative, and I was an economist for a long time. If I’m confused, perhaps you are, too, so this is an attempt to make things clearer. Hopefully…..

Let’s start simple. In 2023 (the most recent annual figure I could find), Canadian exports to the U.S. totaled $368.5 billion. All numbers quoted here will be in US dollars unless otherwise noted, because that is the standard unit used for nearly all international transactions.

The tariffs Trump imposed when the trade talks broke down are levied on 5% of US imports from Canada, we are told. I presume those will be greater by 2026 than that number from 2023. So, 5% of (say) $380B means some $19B of Canadian exports to the US now have these 50% tariffs levied on them by US Customs when they enter the US.

There is no doubt that a 50% tax – because a tariff is indeed a tax – is a BIG goddam tax on anything.

The effect: whoever in the US was buying those tariffed goods is going to buy less, perhaps none, and what they do buy will be more expensive, because the prices will rise. No exporter of those goods from Canada to the US is likely to lower their selling price by 33%, which is what would be required to have the post-tariff price to a US buyer stay the same. [Arithmetic — If you were selling in the US before the tariff for $1, then after the tariff is imposed you can lower your price to $0.66, which, with a 50% tax added once it enters the US brings the price to $0.99]

On the other hand, the harm those tariffs do in Canada is to the firms that were selling those products to buyers in the US. The higher tariff-inclusive prices in the US will mean fewer purchases. If they do lower their prices to absorb part of the tariff, then they will also earn less profit on what they do sell.

The harm in the US is to those who buy those imported goods from Canada, in that they will pay higher prices if they can get them at all. Or, the US buyers might switch to non-Canadian suppliers, but their prices will be higher, because if they were not, the US buyer would have bought from the non-Canadian sellers without the tariff. It is indeed possible that some products will simply no longer be traded between the countries at all, since a 50% tariff could be big enough to make any such trade entirely unprofitable. We are going to find out which ones, I guess.

All of this works in reverse regarding the 50% counter-tariffs Carney put in place in Canada on goods imported from the US. These hurt Canadian buyers of those products in the same way, but also hurt the US sellers by reducing the Canadian demand for their products.

Carney imposed those tariffs on a set of goods whose value as imports came to the same number – about $20 billion. That is what he meant by ‘dollar-for-dollar counter tariffs’.

If you like you can go here and read just which products from the US the tariffs are being imposed on come Sept 8. Note that it states that tariffs are being imposed on $27.6B of goods going each way, but that is the number in Canadian dollars, that being a Canadian government website.

The other thing to note about all this is that in my attempt to explain who and how is hurt by these tariffs and counter-tariffs, at no point did the names Trump, Carney or Ford appear.

Other things worth noting.

Tariff ‘war’ as an unfair fight. Canada’s David vs the US Goliath.

That characterization refers to the fact that the USA imported $3.35 Trillion in goods from the world in 2024 (the latest year I could find a reliable figure for). Yes, that is Trillion with a T, and if you get out your calculators class, you will see that $20B is about six-tenths of one percent of $3.35T. That is, 20B/3.35T is about 0.006.

In other words, the amount of Canadian goods that the US has imposed tariffs on is a tiny fraction of what they import. The amount of damage done to the US by what Trump did last week will be small, to say the least.

On the other hand, Canada imported some $US564B worth of goods in 2025, so that same $20B worth of US imports that Carney put the 50% tariffs on represents some 3.5% of the value of all goods imported into Canada. Not a massive percentage either, but 0.035 is nearly six times as big as 0.006.

You could do the same calculations for the numbers as a percentage of what each country exports to get a feel for how hard the various producers in each country are being hit. The numbers would be different, but the conclusion that the percentage hit on Canadian producers is much greater than on US ones would stand.

So – David, meet Goliath.

What seems to me to be likely to be more important for determining what happens next in this trade war is the politics of it. As in any war, if regular folks start to get upset about the damage they are taking – and they are always the ones being damaged, just like in a shooting war – the pressure will build on the respective governments to try for a truce.

My impression is that right now Carney has more public support for this war than does DJT, but my impression is also that DJT does not generally give a flying fuck about what the public wants. If he thinks he’s right, and he typically does, that is what counts with him. Maybe the US midterm elections will change that. Again, we will see.

Targets

Those percentages are of course meaningless for most people. If you are operating a business in Canada that sells nothing to the US and that buys no significant inputs from the US, then the impact on your business and your employees from all this will be pretty close to zero. But if you are very much in the business of exporting to the US or using US-produced inputs (that are on Trump’s tariff list), this all could be very bad for your company’s bottom line. As always, the pain is not going to be spread evenly.

And, let us not forget, some Canadian companies may benefit from these tariffs. If you are selling something in Canada for which a major competitor is a product imported from the US, a Canadian tariff on that product will make it possible for you to sell at a higher price and/or sell more. Same goes for US producers competing with tariffed Canadian imports.

For us Canadian consumers, things are even murkier. You can go to that page above and read through the list of 648 US products that will have a 50% tariff imposed on them by our government as of Sept 8, and try to figure out how much more expensive your future trips to the grocery store or Canadian Tire will be. We Canadians buy a lot of stuff that originates in the US, but then we also buy a lot of stuff that originates in China. The last time I bought lemons (I make kick-ass lemonade in the summer) they came from South Africa.

Canada buys stuff from all over the world, and there is no way to predict how much those 50% tariffs will raise the prices we pay for US-originating goods, as we don’t know how much of those tariffs the sellers will eat. Maybe none, maybe a lot.

It’s complicated, as I often write, but I really really doubt it will be fatal. Some folks will take a big hit, others will be relatively unscathed, and we will all see some price increases.

One thing is quite clear. It was Doug Ford, not Mark Carney who insured that I can no longer drink Bourbon, no matter what price I might be willing to pay for it.

Which brings me to –

Other strategies.

This comes up only infrequently, I suspect because there is no way our Canadian Federal government would seriously contemplate going this route, but it is an available strategy.

The mirror image of an (import) tariff is an export tax. During the early years of US Prohibition, it was perfectly legal in Canada for Canadian distillers to sell whiskey to the US – so long as they paid the Canadian export tax on it before it left the country. (What happened to it then was of no concern to the Canadian government, after all.)

Well, it is obvious to anyone who knows much about Canada/US trade that if Canada wanted to do something that would not be easily shrugged off by the US economy, it could put export taxes on two goods before they are shipped to the US: crude oil and potash.

Potash is used primarily as an agricultural fertilizer (plant nutrient) because it is a source of soluble potassium, one of the three primary plant nutrients. Canada’s province of Saskatchewan has a lot of potash, and it sells much of it to fertilizer producers in the USA. Here’s a quote from the US publication Fertilizer Daily:

Currently, the U.S. imports about 90% of its potash, predominantly from Canada, the leading global producer.

The US of A would definitely notice the imposition by Canada of a 50% export tax on potash. DJT, being not hopelessly dense, has not put a tariff on imports of potash from Canada.

Nor has he imposed an import tariff on Canadian crude oil, most of which comes from the Alberta tar sands these days.

Here is a graph of the history of US annual imports of Canadian crude oil and other petroleum products. It’s from the US government’s Energy Information Administration.

Those imports have more than tripled since 1995. Here’s a line on the most recent year of this history, from Stats Canada:

In 2025, Canada provided 63.4% of the crude oil and close to 100% of the natural gas imported by the U.S.

None of those ‘zero out to two decimals’ numbers here, folks.

So, the US of A would also notice the imposition of a Canadian export tax of 50% on oil and natural gas, especially the latter.

Export taxes are not really different from tariffs, except for the accounting details. Both hurt those on both sides of the market, so these possible Canadian export taxes would hurt US buyers of potash (fertilizer producers, mostly) and crude oil and natural gas (refiners and utility companies, mostly).

They would also hurt the potash miners in Saskatchewan and the oil sands companies in Alberta. Just like in a shooting war, the Big Question is – ‘who’s volunteering to take out that machine gun nest?’

The headline on an August 26 article in the G&M read:

Alberta, Saskatchewan push back on calls for oil, potash export levies in retaliation for U.S. tariffs

Well, sure. Those provincial governments are pushing back against measures that would hurt firms in their provinces.

The quote below from that article refers to the Premiers of those two provinces, Danielle Smith and Scott Moe:

They voiced support for Ottawa’s planned dollar-for-dollar countertariff strategy, while simultaneously railing against the idea of using the industries that underpin their economies in the fight.

Yes, it’s not our job to take out the machine gun nest, but we will certainly voice support for doing so. Interestingly, neither Alberta nor Saskatchewan have pulled US booze from the shelves of their liquor stores. (Too bad for me, here in Ontariario.)

I finish with this quote from the G&M article:

Mr. Moe, like Ms. Smith, emphasized that he is on board with Canada’s targeted retaliatory tariffs.

“But only when those tariffs are focused and targeted to have a minimal impact on Canadian industries and families – and a larger impact on our trading partner that we want to bring back to the table,” he said.

See, that’s the thing. Anything that has a large enough impact on the US (our beloved Goliath of a trading partner) to bring them back to the table must, necessarily, have a large impact on (some of) us.

And a 50% tax on something the US gets 90% or 100% of from Canada – I’d say that qualifies as large, even in the US.

Taking out a machine gun nest is a very risky thing. Hard to find volunteers.

What’s Goin’ On – Part III: Tug of War

Written by Al Slivinski on September 3, 2026. Posted in London.

I wrote this post on August 14 in which I noted that the homeless encampment that had arisen at the corner of Wellington and Horton in London, and which I had photographed for a previous post, had disappeared. The tents, brollies, garbage that had been there just a week before were all gone.

I hypothesized that this was the work of London’s CIR, a city organization whose existence a reader had put me on to.

Well, just yesterday, on Monday, Aug 31 I drove through that intersection again and the encampment was back, but worse. Twice the size and a whole lot more garbage strewn all over the sidewalk and into the street. It was visually a bigger shit-show than when I first wrote about it.

Well today, Sept 1, I drove through there again and once again the people and tents and garbage are gone. 24 hours later.

So, there is clearly a tug of war going on between the forces of cleanliness and order – maybe led by the London CIR, maybe not – and the homeless, at that location in London, and perhaps at others.

Mini-Postscript

I went by once again a day later, and the corner was still free of tents and garbage, but there were two London Police Service pickups parked at the curb, and some constables were interacting with some folks on the corner.

Some London cops drive pick-ups now, some the familiar sedans, others SUVs, all with the same LPS markings. It occurs to me that the vehicle driven signals something about the various officers’ missions. Or something. But I don’t really know.

This Surprised Me

Written by Al Slivinski on August 28, 2026. Posted in Economics.

I came across a new website this week, titled Economist Writing Every Day. It is full of interesting posts, and also led me to another good site about which I will write more down the road.

Below I paste in a figure from EWED whose content surprised me quite a bit. The increases in prices at the grocery store in both Canada and the US have been much in the news of late, and all the data says food inflation has been high in the last couple of years.

However, one can ask a longer term question: how expensive is food today compared to some time in the past? Say, 1980? I like that choice of year, as it is the year I started my new job as an assistant prof at UWO. (I’m sure that is not why the folks at EWED chose it.)

Not only have grocery item prices gone up since 1980, so have wages. So, how to do the comparison? One way to do this is to look at the change over that period in the ‘time price’ of various grocery store items. The time price of, say, bacon, is the amount of time a worker earning the average wage has to work to buy, say, a pound of bacon. The average wage went up since 1980, and so did the price of bacon. How has that turned out? Has the time price of bacon gone up or down?

The figure below, taken from a post on the EWED blog, answers that question for a list of grocery items in the US, and the surprising thing is that the time price of every item listed has dropped since 1980.

That surprised me, so I post it here for your information.

Of course there are only 24 items here, and there are many more than that which one might buy at the grocery store. The original author of the post points out that these 24 items are not cherry-picked. They are the 24 items that the US Bureau of Labor Statistics had data on for both 1980 and 2026.

[I also note that the biggest time-price drop in the US over this period was for chicken legs. I have been able to find no similar data for Canada, but I suspect that with our poultry marketing boards, this would not be the case here.]

Jason and Leopold

Written by Al Slivinski on August 28, 2026. Posted in Standards.

Way back on August 8 I posted this article about the sad and disturbing case of one Jason Arday, academic extraordinaire, who had resigned his faculty position at Cambridge University after it became undeniable that he had plagiarized and/or faked much of his research, while also telling massive lies about his own life. That story was sad and disturbing when I wrote it, and that was before Mr. Arday committed suicide on August 14, leaving behind a wife and two children.

The chattering classes went into overdrive once Arday killed himself, most folks being willing to point a finger in print at ‘the other side’ as the reason for his suicide. I am not going to wade into that: any suicide is a tragedy, and my interest here is only in what happened up to the point at which Arday resigned from Cambridge.

The relevant facts are that Arday was appointed to a faculty position at Cambridge, fawned over (on camera, no less) by the Dean of the Faculty in which he served, and feted far and wide as being the youngest black faculty member ever appointed at Cambridge.

A further fact, although I know many will say that this is only my opinion, is that even had Arday written every word in every research paper he published, and conducted every interview he claimed to have done, as an academic researcher his value-added to the understanding of humanity was zero. Zilch and nada.

The kind of ‘research’ he published is little more than polemic. One does not have to go to graduate school to acquire the skills needed to write the papers he wrote, one learns the right words and phrases to use as an undergraduate in the Sociology or Social Work or Black Studies or Education program in most universities, and one learns that praise follows from repeating those words and phrases.

I qualify those previous two paragraphs only to the extent that I admit I did not read everything Arday wrote during his career. I read enough to be pretty sure of what the rest of it looked like, having read a lot of such drivel over the years, but I admit the possibility that somewhere in his corpus of work there might be something that could accurately be called ‘research’.

So, his story up to his resignation is sad and disturbing because it demonstrates that a supposedly prestigious and trustworthy institution like Cambridge, and the supposedly highly educated faculty and administrators within it, could be so blinded by those words and phrases, written by a photogenic black man with a great but largely fabricated back-story, that they did zero due diligence before hiring him.

They did more than that, as the questions about Arday’s research and life story had apparently bubbled up years before his resignation, and they refused to deal with them, but I will leave that aside.

My goal here is to juxtapose this sad and disturbing story with a more recent one, the story of one Leopold Aschenbrenner.

He is another apparently bright and accomplished young man, younger than Arday, and also very photogenic.

Here’s a photo of him from a recent WSJ article:

Good looking young man, and he just got married. Lucky gal, eh?

Leopold also has a great backstory, although he is at this point only 24.

He migrated from Germany to the US at a young age and went to Columbia University, from which he graduated in 2021 at age 19. His BA was in Economics and Mathematical Statistics (those are real subjects, hard to do well in) and he was his graduating class valedictorian.

He headed out to California after graduation and went to work for the philanthropic arm of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange FTX before joining OpenAI, where he worked in the niche field of AI superalignment. I have no idea what that is, but I read that it is concerned with preventing AI from destroying humanity.

Huh.

Aschenbrenner was fired from OpenAI in 2024, the company says for revealing sensitive internal info, Leopold disagrees that it was sensitive.

Shortly after his departure from OpenAI, Aschenbrenner wrote a 165-page essay titled “Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead”, published in June 2024. I have not read this document, but it apparently predicts that by 2027 AI will be able to conduct independent research on itself, leading to runaway superintelligence. This got him the moniker of ‘The Nostradamus of AI’.

Huh, again.

So, what does an unemployed young feller do after all this? He founds a hedge fund, of course, and titles it Situational Awareness.

Good titles are so important, I think.

This AI-focused investment firm managed about $45 billion at its peak in July 2026.

Do keep in mind that if a hedge fund manages that much money, it is because people and firms voluntarily gave it that much money to invest.

Actually, that’s what you might think – I certainly did – but here is how the WSJ puts it:

Aschenbrenner piled into concentrated positions in AI stocks, aided with debt and other tactics to supersize the bets. His early success turning a few hundred million dollars into $45 billion earned him a cult following in online circles, where his firm’s routine regulatory filings were pored over like scripture. His sweaters and dark turtlenecks added to his reputation as a reclusive oracle of AI.

Image matters (see photo above). Anyway, he was given only ‘a few hundred million’ by others. Got it.

Let us now go back into history, folks, to 1929, a year in which mostly the US stock market just rose and rose, just as it had been doing for some years previous. Everyone wanted to get in on the money being made, but how could ordinary people do that?

Easy, buy stock on margin. That is, you buy $10k worth of stock by giving your broker $5k, borrowing the other $5k from said broker, and putting the stock you bought for $5k up as collateral for the loan. You could also do this by borrowing the extra $5k needed from a bank, and putting the stock you purchased up with the bank as collateral.

This works great so long as the value of the stock you bought keeps rising. You make money, the bank or broker is happy because your collateral is worth more than you owe them and of course you are paying them interest on the $5k you borrowed.

But what if the stocks go down? I do wonder if any of those Econ classes Leopold took at Columbia mentioned this. If those stock prices go down, as they eventually did in October of 1929, then your bank/broker is no longer happy, and they call you to provide them with more collateral on your loan.

Oops.

How do you get more collateral? Well, you could sell some of your stocks, but if their prices are dropping you don’t sell them for as much as you paid, and if everyone starts doing this, well – lots of selling means stock prices just keep dropping.

1929, as I say.

In Leopold’s case, only Leopold was in trouble, but he had to start selling some of what was in his Situational Awareness fund when the value of those AI stocks he had put up as collateral for his loans started to drop.

Oops.

Another quote from the WSJ article:

Aschenbrenner wrote to his investors that the firm had instead sold a portion of their public stocks in order to pay off the money it had borrowed, allowing it to keep its shares in private companies. His fund was down 67% on the month, he wrote. “These dynamics are essentially similar to a bank run: vulnerability begetting more vulnerability,” he wrote.

Ok, so Leopold learned a thing or two about bank runs, at least.

But down 67%?

Oops.

Here are the parts of this story I find most telling, courtesy of the WSJ:

Situational attracted an investment from Jane Street, the big quant-trading firm that rarely allocates capital to outside money managers.

Situational quickly signed up a roster of the biggest banks, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Citigroup and Bank of America, to finance and execute the firm’s trades, according to regulatory filings.

‘finance and execute’ is a great term, I think.

For every $1 of capital, Situational would upsize its positions by borrowing an additional $3 to $4, or sometimes more, people familiar with the matter said, well above the leverage used by funds trading such volatile kinds of shares.

All that leverage resulted in deep losses. As they intensified, banks issued margin calls demanding additional collateral to stand behind their loans of stock. Situational dumped stocks to raise cash and asked investors for additional capital. It met its margin calls as recently as Wednesday.

By the way, ‘leverage’ is the modern word for ‘margin’.

Here are the words which end the WSJ article on Leopold’s rise and fall:

In a letter to his investors Thursday, as wedding guests began to arrive in Carmel, Aschenbrenner said he would focus on changes to his portfolio management and risk teams in the coming weeks “to ensure a higher level of resilience going forward.”

“I take full responsibility for these events,” he wrote.

Good for you, Leopold.

So, it would appear that the young Mr. Aschenbrenner will live to invest another day. He found someone to buy some of his fund’s portfolio (at a deep discount, of course) so Situational Awareness is still solvent. For now.

I wonder how he will do getting new investors?

Actually, he’ll do fine, I expect.

I mean, look what happened here. This young dude, on the basis of nothing but an undergraduate degree in Econ and Stats, and having written a paper predicting the future (during which he did not wear the Wizard of Id hat, I’m sure) got supposedly savvy people at top banks to give him hundreds of millions of dollars to invest.

Who could have imagined that anything might go wrong?

Circling now (finally) back to Mr. Arday, there are some obvious parallels with Mr. Aschenbrenner and some just as obvious differences.

Both men were savvy or lucky enough to display the kind of characteristics, behaviour, attitudes and photogenicity* that would earn them the plaudits and confidence of some segment of contemporary society’s movers and shakers.

Those movers and shakers, being blinded by the superficial light of these men, made decisions to put them in positions of importance. In the case of Leopold, this meant entrusting him with a lot of money. All Cambridge entrusted to Arday was their students – and perhaps a bit of their reputation.

But Leopold survived his downfall, at least so far, as Arday did not, because Leopold had the good luck to entwine his own fate with that of people with serious money. Letting Leopold go bankrupt would possibly have meant they went down. All Cambridge had to give Jason Arday was the mantle of elite recognition, and once his presence on campus became inescapably embarrassing to Cambridge, they had no reason to give him that any more.

Moral of these two stories: To a large and depressing extent, there are no adults in charge of anything important anymore.

___________________________

* Webster thinks that is not a word. I think it should be.

Integrity Is So 20th Century

Written by Al Slivinski on August 27, 2026. Posted in Standards.

One of the new activities I took up after retirement was playing bridge. A good friend offered to teach me, and I said sure, fairly bursting with my usual over-confidence about my likely skill at this game.

Ha. Bridge is hard, and I really sucked at it for quite some time, but my very patient friend stuck with me, and now I think I am a not-annoying partner for her. I play a fair bit now, and it’s fun as well as challenging.

In for a penny, as they say, so I joined the ACBL at the start of my bridge journey. That is the American Contract Bridge League, and by joining I got access to useful things on their website, as well as being mailed a glossy periodical full of stories and tips about playing, as well as ads for bridge cruises and the like. All good.

Last week, I got the following email on my old UWO email account. (Professors Emeriti keep their work email accounts at UWO until death do us part.)

The email came from one Shirley Su, email address shirleysu2364@gmail.com, which looks pretty legit, and the subject line was:

‘Seeking your bridge perspective on non, full information scenarios’

The body of the email was as follows. I have not edited it at all:

Hi Andrew, I’m Shirley, a TPM from Desert IT in LV, NV.

Sorry to bother you. I noticed your commitment to bridge at ACBL and greatly admired your ability to develop rigorous strategies.

Our team is currently building an AI decision-making model. During the research, we found that the risk assessment logic of the model is highly similar to the “offensive and defensive game under perfect information” in bridge. Therefore, we very much hope to ask for some intuitive judgements from experts with rigorous logical thinking like you.

We are currently evaluation a specific scenario. If it’s convenient for you, could I ask you a few quick questions?

Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

Best wishes,

Shirley

Alert readers might realize that my name is not Andrew. Readers might also wonder, as I did, whatthehell is a TPM?

At first glance, there might seem to be some logic here. I used game theory in my teaching and research back in my working days at UWO, and it would be easy to find that stuff once you have the UWO email address. Further, in the language of game theory, bridge is certainly a game of imperfect information.

But then the flattery about my ‘rigorous thinking’ kind of gives the real point away, as does the utter inanity of this sentence:

During the research, we found that the risk assessment logic of the model is highly similar to the “offensive and defensive game under imperfect information” in bridge.

Neither a game theorist nor a bridge player would ever write that sentence. An LLM chatbot might.

The idea here is clearly to flatter me into thinking some high-level ‘TPM’ wants my brilliant advice, which will induce me to respond to this email. What would happen after I did I can only guess, as I did not respond, and got two more emails over the next two days saying they haven’t yet gotten my reply, and they hope they didn’t bother me.

Right. So stop bothering me, assholes.

This would all be some mix of funny and stupid except for one thing: These turkeys clearly got my email address from ACBL. I signed up to join that org, and I always use my work email for such things, precisely to keep the email client I use to communicate with people I know and like free of such shit. I no doubt clicked some box that said ACBL could do whatever they liked with my info, cuz we have no choice. So what did ACBL do? They gave (sold, more likely) my email address to some assholes who run email scams, who then gathered up info from the web about my working days and then sent that email to the address they had purchased from ACBL.

Well, thank you, ACBL.

The enshittification of the world continues apace.

Cancelled

Written by Al Slivinski on August 22, 2026. Posted in Government.

I had written a post this week specifically about PM Carney asking the Canadian provincial premiers to put US booze back on the shelves. He asked this at a point when the rumour mill said a Canada/US trade deal was close.

The Canadian chattering classes fairly exploded with questions and opinions about this – –

Why did Carney ask this ahead of the deal?

The premiers should ignore the request from Carney.

The premiers should go along with Carney, be part of Team Canada.

People should refuse to drink US booze even if it does show up back on the shelves.

No one should tell me what to drink.

And so on….

I had some thoughts on some of these questions and opinions which I thought worthy of posting.

Well, as we know, the ‘almost done’ trade deal has collapsed, and the two countries are now engaged in an MMA-style tariff match. So, I have filed that article away rather than posting it. Kinda irrelevant, now that it is clear no premier will be doing any such thing.

However, I have filed it, not killed it.

There is one thing we know – this ain’t over. With DJT in the White House, nothing is ever over, nothing is ever settled. Might be another set of negotiations, or maybe Trump will TACO, or perhaps the US Congress will wake from its deep sleep. So many possibilities are still, well – possible.

Stay tuned. I’m keeping my powder dry.

Learning Without Fail

Written by Al Slivinski on August 21, 2026. Posted in Education, LBOs, Standards.

I have come to think that most of the absurdities of decision-making within educational institutions comes down to laziness. More specifically, finding ways to reduce the workload of those who work within such institutions, both staff and faculty. A recent example of this is to be found at the University of Michigan, which has announced that as of the Fall of 2027, incoming students will not receive a letter grade in any of their first-semester classes. They will instead get just an indication of ‘pass’ or ‘no-credit’, the word ‘fail’ for the latter category being presumably too trauma-inducing.

Now this will only be the policy in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts. That is apparently one big school at UM, in fact the biggest, as half the incoming class of 8,000 enrolls in that College at UM each year.

The reason for this new policy? According to the WSJ,

A Michigan spokesman declined to comment about how the university reached the decision to enact the pilot. Although grades won’t be recorded on student transcripts or affect grade-point averages, professors will still assign them internally to track eligibility for scholarships and academic awards.

An interesting half-assed kind of policy, then. It’s a ‘pilot’, so it might be abandoned, and of course those first-year, first-semester students will know that they did get a grade in every class they took, it’s just that they won’t be told what it is. So, half-assed and sneaky, I guess.

Another quote from the WSJ is given without attribution, and it says UM is doing this ‘to “curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals,” according to the school.’

This crisis is not unfolding among the 4,000 students who enter UM’s other schools, then? That seems odd.

And half-assed.

One thing this policy will do is prevent special pleading by incoming students. Any 21^st century faculty member knows that once grades are given, there follows a parade of students who need theirs to be higher for very good reasons. Said students will email or visit their prof – repeatedly if necessary – to make their case. This new policy means that won’t happen – maybe – to faculty teaching first-year first-semester students. (What I suspect will happen is students pestering their profs to tell them what grade they ‘really’ got in the class.)

I am sure that at UM just as at UWO, that first semester is when a big percentage of the special pleading happens, as students who have been assured all through their high school careers that they are excellent students find that A’s are rather harder to come by in University. The WSJ notes that this new policy ‘comes as schools wrestle with grade inflation and the need for remedial instruction for freshmen ill-prepared for college-level classes.’

So, the solution is to put off telling them how ill-prepared they are at least for a semester.

My prediction: the pilot will end with a recommendation to extend this to students’ entire first year at UM. Then students can just be notified at the end of that year that their secret grades indicate that they have failed to attain the (hidden) GPA needed to stay at the University, without their having been given any marks to complain about along the way. Easy-peasy, at least for the faculty and the counselling staff.

But hey, that’s my cynical view. The WSJ asked people on the ground what they thought of this. One of those was Summit Louth, the current head of UM’s student government, so clearly a man with his hand on the pulse.

Louth, 20 years old, said he earned all A’s and one B in his first semester and doubted he would have worked as hard had the classes been pass/fail. But he thinks he would have learned more from his classes without the pressure of earning high marks.

That makes perfect sense. He would have worked less hard and learned more. I believe that. A sure-fire formula for lifetime sucess.

However, the best take on this comes from someone with a PhD, a prof at UM, who says this:

Derek Peterson, a history professor and former chair of the faculty government, said he believes the move is generally beneficial because it will give students a chance to explore subjects more freely.

Students are under more stress today than their predecessors, he said, including the distraction of social media, bleaker job prospects and less secure economic conditions.

“The idea that our kids are somehow more coddled is simply not true,” Peterson said. “If we can find ways to open up space for students to experiment while also protecting their future employability, which means protecting the GPAs, I think it is a good idea.”

Explore, Experiment – and don’t forget Experience. The Three E’s. Just be sure to protect that GPA.

And, ‘coddled’? These students? An outrageous thought.

One great virtue in having a PhD of which most people are unaware is that it enables one to formulate noble-sounding reasons to support one’s own self-interest. Professor Peterson is a fine exemplar of that. Assigning marks to students and their work is a difficult task, unless of course you give all of your students A’s, which is the preferred strategy of many faculty, as well as some entire universities. Students are unhappy when they get low marks and they bother you about raising them, sometimes relentlessly. Some students even enlist their parents in the effort to lobby a professor to reconsider the failing mark he gave Johnny.

The most common response one hears from faculty to the undeniable grade inflation in contemporary education is to eliminate grades altogether. Any self-respecting PhD can provide high-sounding motivations for that policy, also – like ‘Explore, Experiment and Experience’. But there is no denying one fact: being a faculty member in an institution in which no grades are given, or alternatively, in which all grades given are As, is way easier than being in one in which you are expected to give marks that range from A+ down to F.

The recognition of that undeniable fact by secondary-school teachers (and their unions and administrators) and their ability to act on it is what got us to this place in PSE. It is not a surprise that university faculty want to follow suit.

Good and Gooder

Written by Al Slivinski on August 21, 2026. Posted in Culture, Standards.

I read a lot of books these days, the time to do that being one of the great gifts of retirement. After a lifetime of reading, I am in the position of the US judge (don’t recall the name) who said ‘I can’t define pornography, but I know it when I see it.”

Well, I think I know good writing when I read it, but don’t ask me to define it, or even enumerate its key ingredients. That being said, I have recently had some reading experiences that I think point at one key ingredient of good writing.

I was on a long history-reading jag for a while, which included re-reading Martin Gilbert’s very good history of WWI and then an even longer (but not as good) history of the Napoleonic Wars, which were probably the actual first world war(s). Gilbert’s book is notable because along with the narrative of the war itself, it includes what a lot of not-famous people had to say at the time. Some of those people are just folks caught up in the maelstrom, like a British woman who went to Serbia to nurse wounded soldiers, and a Cpl in the 2^nd Royal Fusiliers who finds himself in the hell of the first Battle of the Marne, and writes home about it. Some folks whose words are in the book are playing minor roles, but will become major figures in WWII two decades later. People like Harry S Truman, Erwin Rommel and Douglas MacCarthur.

I noted that the Napoleonic Wars history was not so good, and I think it is easier to describe good historical writing than to describe good fiction writing. Good history needs to be grammatical of course, but it really needs to be clear and precise. The grammar in the Napoleonic Wars book was bad, but it looked like much of that was just bad editing. Words missing, or the wrong word used.

More seriously, the author did not always seem up to the task he had set himself. He wrote an entire chapter on Napoleon’s so-called Continental System, which was an attempt to keep English goods from being imported into the European continent (so more French goods would be purchased. Sound familiar?)

The key questions are – one, what mechanisms did Bonaparte put in place to make this work, and two, how effectively did it actually work. The chapter is a mess, with seemingly contradictory claims appearing on different pages. I think the author was simply not up to the task of understanding the details and workings of an admittedly complex economic and military system.

But that’s the deal with history and other non-fiction. Either you do the job of explaining clearly the phenomena you are writing about, or you don’t. Thus, either your writing is good or it is not, on that criterion.

To be sure, some historical writers like John Keegan, Victor Davis Hanson and Martin Gilbert are also able to write in such a way that the history they are relating is also an interesting tale. US Grant’s long campaign to take the Confederate fortress town of Vicksburg is a great story. Read Keegan’s or Shelby Foote’s account of it and that will be clear.

What makes good fiction writing I find harder to say, as I noted. Here’s my one recent insight.

I came out of that long history period mentioned above and did what I do. I made an expedition to The Book Addict and bought myself five new (to me) used books, all of them fiction. They cost me $31.

The first book I read from my cache was The Old Devils, by Kingsley Amis, published in the mid-80s. Amis had a long, successful career as a writer, which started with the publication of his best-known novel, Lucky Jim, in 1954. I think I read that long ago, although I remember nothing about it. Well, The Old Devils is very good, and no doubt I think that at least partly because it is a novel about old people, written by Amis in his 60s. However, and this is key for me, it is also very well-written. Amis is a talented writer.

The second book I read was The Apocalypse Watch by Robert Ludlum, published in the mid-90s. Ludlum is one of the most-read spy novelists of the 20^th century, with an estimated 300 million copies of his books printed, in 33 languages and 40 countries – according to Wikipedia. A number of his books have been adapted into movies or mini-series, a sure indicator of popular success. I had read his stuff before, as on my shelf is a very large tome that contains four of his earliest novels. I don’t remember anything about them, but I don’t recall hating them, and I bought The Apocalypse Watch because I thought a good thriller would be a worthy addition to my set of fiction.

Be that as it may, my enjoyment of Ludlum’s book was quite noticeably diminished by having read The Old Devils first. I was barely into the Apocalypse Watch when I started thinking to myself ‘people don’t talk like that’. It was an inescapable, intrusive thought during the entire time it took me to read the Ludlum novel – and it took a while, it’s a looong book.

As I wrote, I think I recognize good writing when I come across it: Robertson Davies, Mark Helprin, E. M. Forster, others. I could not, however, for the life of me tell you what are the ingredients for good writing, but this experience showed me one; writing dialog that sounds like people talking to one another. Dialog that allows you to form a picture of each character in your head when you read the words they are saying.

The dialog in The Old Devils is like that, but in the Ludlum book, not at all. The characters in The Apocalypse Watch talk like characters in a spy novel, not like people. Part of it is that their sentences include all kinds of details that two people who know each other would never feel the need to include. I suppose this is a way for the author to convey information about a very complicated situation to his readers. But still, the situations in The Old Devils are also complex, even if they don’t involve some international intrigue. Amis just knows how to have his characters talk to one another in what sounds like real language, but also conveys info.

So, I think now that is part of what good writing contains. It’s not the only thing, I’m sure, but is one I can at least articulate. Beyond that I will say that reading good writing leaves me feeling mentally refreshed. Reading Ludlum is an exercise in getting to the end.

I am not dissing Ludlum – well, maybe a little – as I did finish his book. I really wanted to find out who the Top Bad Guy was, and whether the two key characters would survive to live happily ever after. (They do.) He does induce you to keep turning the pages. And it is surely presumptuous to say someone who has sold so many books is not a good writer. But Amis is definitely gooder.

Perhaps the ultimate indicator of quality is that I am sure I will not read the Ludlum book a second time, but there is every reason to think I will read The Old Devils again. It will go on my shelf to stay.

What’s Goin’ On – Part II

Written by Al Slivinski on August 14, 2026. Posted in Government, London.

The Universe is full of randomness. Some weeks it is all I can do to come up with anything worth writing about in this space. Other weeks, like this one, offer up more topics than I can justifiably expect people to read about. So, I will put out only three posts, but given that self-imposed limit, what you read below had to be one of them.

To my surprise and delight, a reader responded to the challenge to solve a puzzle I laid out in this post, that being to explain the regular clearing of the rail underpass on Richmond Street of homeless people and debris.

Said reader sent me this link, suggesting it might hold the answer:

https://www.informationlondon.ca/Services/basic_needs/Display/223232/Coordinated_Informed_Response_CIR

It’s from the London city website (london. ca) and describes something called Coordinated Informed Response (CIR).

The page that link takes you to includes a Description of Services for CIR, that says this:

Daily outreach for people living unsheltered in the city * enforcement of bylaw and safety issues regarding encampments * focus on cleanliness and safety of city space while connecting unsheltered people to necessary resources * team includes municipal employees, London Police Services, and London CARES

That’s intriguing but cryptic, but the page also includes another link, where there is a good deal more info:

https://london.ca/living-london/community-services/homeless-prevention-housing/coordinated-informed-response

You can go there and read everything about CIR yourself, but my take is that they look after and provide services to those who are homeless, while also assisting London businesses that have to deal with the consequences of having those folks around their establishments.

One paragraph on the latter page goes like this:

The Downtown Response Team is part of the City of London’s Coordinated Informed Response (CIR). They provide an on-the-ground presence along Dundas Street from the Fork of the Thames to Quebec Street, as well as along Richmond Street from Oxford Street to Dundas Street.

If you know London then you know that means this DRT’s territory does not include the underpass along Richmond nor along Wellington beneath the RR tracks. It doesn’t even include the section of Richmond from Dundas to Horton, which is certainly a haven for homeless folks. But we are all big boys and girls, and realize that what is written on a website rarely contains the whole truth.

It is also true that I could find nothing on the CIR website that indicated unambiguously that they were in the business of clearing people and/or their stuff from anywhere. The closest statement to that is the following:

Report an issue with an encampment

If you notice an encampment in your neighbourhood, please do not enter the area yourself. If someone appears to be in danger or there is a violent situation, call 911 immediately. For other concerns, you can report an issue through the Service London online portal, over the phone by calling 519-661-4570, or by emailing service@london.ca.

So if you see danger or violence, call the Police (well, duh) but other than that, file a report by phone or internet. Not encouraging. No statement that CIR or anyone else will even investigate.

This ambiguity is reinforced by the following caption just above a map:

The following map identifies locations where encampments are proactively enforced. These are mixed use spaces that are regularly utilized for multiple purposes.

What does it mean to ‘proactively enforce’ an encampment?

All this means that I am not ready to say it is certainly these CIR folks who are regularly clearing out those underpasses, but it is indeed the best answer out there right now.

That being the case, I say here in this (sorta) public forum that if the reader who sent me this answer (he knows who he is) shows up at the Richmond Tavern any time between 6:30 and 9pm on Wednesday, September 2, then I will personally see to it he drinks for free as long as he stays. I am not without influence at The RT. Just sayin’…

(The music will be awesome, too, btw.)

A final piece for this ongoing puzzle. If you have been following along at home, you will recall the tent and umbrella village from Photos 5, 6 and 7 of my previous post, situated at the south end of the Wellington Road underpass.

As I noted, I do not walk that route, but I do drive along Wellington often, and when I last drove by that location on August 11, that village was gone. No tents, no brollies, no garbage. People, for sure, but no one who looked like they had taken up residence there.

That village looked pretty well-established to me when I took those photos. My gal agreed. But it is gone, at least for now.

CIR’s doing? Again, I dunno, but it remains the only live possibility I have.

Experiences Unlimited

Written by Al Slivinski on August 14, 2026. Posted in Economics, News Media.

Readers will know that I subscribe to a number of online media sites, including the Globe and Mail, NYT and the Wall Street Journal. I also use an adblocker on my web browser. For the last month or so, whenever I open the WSJ site, or open a story from the WSJ into a new tab, a large banner opens up at the top of the page, saying something like ‘We see you are using an adblocker. Please turn it off to directly support our journalism.’

An interesting request. The way I see it, I am already directly supporting the WSJ’s journalism by paying them something like $60-$70 Canadian each month for a subscription (the amount varies with the exchange rate). They want me to also see ads, but here’s the thing. All my adblocker does is detect when a website is bringing in content from some other IP address, and blocks it. If the WSJ were to embed any ads they want me to see right into the site – you know, the way ads used to appear in the pages of a newspaper – my adblocker would be powerless to stop them. It can’t tell the difference between an ad and a news story if both are part of the site.

Indeed, the almost-worthless London Free Press website, for which I also have a subscription, is nothing but ads, which must therefore be built into the site. This, plus the minimal news content in The Freeps does put me on the verge of canceling my subscription every time I open it, as the site is all but unreadable due to the ads.

Here’s a screenshot from today’s LFP site:

More ads than news is what one is confronted with in scrolling down through the site, as you can kinda see above. Still, I keep the scrip, as I want some source of local news, bad as it is.

Back to the WSJ, my response to this banner popping up all the time has been to ignore it. The content I want to read is all below the banner and free of ads, so it is no more than annoying.. Should the WSJ at any point not allow me to be on the site with my adblocker on, then I would cancel my subscription, but they certainly know that, and so they just go with the annoying banner.

Until today. They have adopted a new strategy now, which I think is called lying. As of today, when I open a story I want to read into a new tab, this appears at the top of that story:

Something is impacting your experience

A browser extension may be affecting how this site works.
Try turning off any ad-blocking extensions to get everything running smoothly again.

In truth, everything is running quite smoothly from my point of view, I can read everything I want to, just as I always could. Why the people in charge of the WSJ site think this is an effective lie to tell their readers with adblockers I cannot imagine.

Now there is one aspect of the WSJ site which is not impacted by anything my browser does, but which I really wish was. As I scroll down, rather than ads popping up, videos are embedded in the site, and when I get to one the site stops me from scrolling down further and turns the goddam video on. I don’t watch videos, I go to news sites run by newspaper people because I expect clear, thoughtful, carefully crafted writing. If I wanted videos there are a thousand podcasts I could watch.

But, neither my browser nor my adblocker is any help with this, I have to shut down each video as I come to it, then click someplace innocuous on the site to resume my scrolling.

I actually complained to the WSJ when these videos first started appearing and trying to force me to watch them, but got no reply.

One final subterfuge in the pursuit of profit, and this one comes from my favourite LBO, the University of Western Ontario. Specifically, it came from this fellow:

Mark Durnin, CPA, CMA, HBA

Director (Facilities Management – Business Operations)

Folks who work at universities, be they bureaucrats or academics just love credentials, so everyone puts as many letters after their names as they can muster up. A recent email announcing some talks by job candidates (I may write more about this faculty opening later) had ‘Dr’ before each candidate’s name and then ‘PhD’ after each name. Y’know, in case you forgot. Actually, the Germans are the best at this, as professors in German U’s have the title Herr Doktor Professor.

Anyway, Mr. Durnin sent out an email about a change in the parking regime at UWO. It does not affect me, as I have an old guy pass that restricts me to paid visitor lots, and this change Durnin is alerting everyone about affects current staff, faculty and students.

Anyone from any of those groups can have any parking permit they like at UWO, as long as they are willing to pay for it. Previously, there were three levels of parking permit you could purchase. The most expensive was Reserved. Paying for that did not actually get you your own reserved spot, but it did guarantee that you could park in one specific lot, and that there would always be a place there for your car, as for each lot, only as many permits as there were spaces were sold.

I had one of those for the Social Science lot during my last 20 years of work. It cost over $100/month, and it was worth it. Some of the other Reserved SS spots were occupied by student-driven BMWs and Audis.

The other two possibilities are a Core permit or a Perimeter permit. Some parking lots are designated as Core lots, those being the ones nearest the buildings at the centre of campus. Other lots are Perimeter lots, and parking there means a long walk. Needless to say, Core parking is preferable, but you gotta pay more for such a permit, so folks had to decide how much they were willing to pay for a shorter walk.

Durnin’s email says the U is eliminating the Core/Perimeter distinction for non-reserved spaces. You get a Reserved permit, or a Non-reserved, and if you choose the latter, you can park in any non-reserved lot – if you can find a space.

So, we know everyone with a non-reserved permit wants to be close to the building they work in, so they will try to park in a Core lot, but not everyone will be able to. Not nearly enough such spots.

So, kids, it’s kinda free-for all time. Folks who tend to arrive early in the morning will have the best shot at the Core spaces, but no guarantee.

Think of it this way. Before there were c people with Core permits trying to find a spot in the C lots that were designated Core, while at the same time there were p people with Perimeter permits trying to find a spot in the P lots that were designates as Perimeter. Once the permits were bought, the two groups did not compete with one another for spots.

Now we have p + c people all competing for spaces in P + C lots. Everyone is competing with everyone for spots. Way more fun to watch, I suppose, but not for those people trying to find a parking space so they can go to work. Durnin’s letter implicitly acknowledges this, by offering the following hopeful sentence:

‘Overall parking capacity remains sufficient to meet the needs of all employees, and lot selection typically stabilizes by Thanksgiving weekend.’

So, a month and a half of chaos, then all should be well. (In fact, student and faculty schedules change every semester, so that is a month and a half of chaos twice a year forever, I expect.)

As I read this, I could not really understand why the Parking gods would do this. Why piss everyone off so? There is nothing in the email to suggest there was any problem with the old system. One can imagine that in doing this they also set a single price for non-reserved permits that generates more revenue than did the old two-price system, but if you just want to raise more revenue from parking, they could have just raised both Core and Perimeter permit prices. They do that every year anyway.

I did not understand the motivation for this until I read this later, less-than-honest sentence in the Durnin email:

‘In response to customer feedback throughout our communications, Parking Services is increasing the number of Reserved stalls in former Core Non-Reserved lots to address greater interest in a Reserved parking experience.’

Once I stopped laughing at the concept of a ‘Reserved parking experience’, the light bulb went on – UWO Parking is adopting the airline strategy!

You know, make flying Coach so unpleasant that more people are willing to pony up for Bus or First Class seats, and to pony up even more for them in order to avoid the nightmare that is Coach.

Indeed, this works even better for parking, because a First Class seat does at least cost an airline more to provide than a Coach seat, since First Class has to mean giving the passenger more room than in Coach. But a Reserved parking spot is the same size and the same cost to provide as any other spot. It just has to get the parking client out of the circus that finding non-Reserved parking will now become.

Ol’ Durnin learned his lessons well when he got that HBA degree. Or maybe it was the CMA. Actually, I don’t know what CMA stands for. Don’t care.

But really, well done, UWO Parking Experience, Inc.

Takin’ What They’re Givin’

Written by Al Slivinski on August 13, 2026. Posted in Standards.

…..actually, I’m not workin’ for a livin’ any more, but still, Huey and his News had the right idea, and it was long ago. Modern life requires one to just shut up and deal with it, like it or not.

So, fair warning, this article will be in the vein of ‘old grumpy guy is pissed off’. Very unusual for me, I know.

Still, it’s my blog, so pull up a chair.

I went to Canadian Tire this afternoon with a short list of items to seek out. I love Canadian Tire. Resolutely Canadian, they stock so many useful things, as well as things I didn’t think I needed until I saw them, and sometimes their staff are even helpful about finding things and offering advice.

This afternoon I found exactly four things, three from my list plus a bonus, and needed no staff help to find them. Happy, I walked to the checkout with my basket of goods and a bag of my own to put them in. (I suspect that most of you have a bag full of bags in your car, now that stores no longer provide them for free.)

I put the items on the counter, the young cashier laser-checked them through, and I paid with my credit card. While I was paying, the four items and my self-provided bag sat there on the counter between us. After I finished paying, there they still sat. I looked the young feller in the eye and said ‘Don’t worry, I got this’ and proceeded to put the four items into my bag. It is possible I saw some flash of recognition in his eyes that I was calling out his choosing to stand there with his hands on his hips while I paid and then packed up my own stuff. Possible, but not certain.

This is de rigueur behaviour at most retail outlets, these days. Now that we must supply or buy our own bags, the staff see no reason to pack what we buy into said bags. Back when the stores provided bags, their employees packed them. The logic of that change in position eludes me, but there it is. (Perhaps they think our self-provided bags have cooties? Maybe.)

At this point I do nearly all my grocery shopping at either Sobey’s or Farm Boy, and I think it is not a coincidence that they now share the same owner. They are the only two grocery outlets at which the clerks reliably, willingly and cheerfully pack up my purchases. I stopped going to the Metro store right near my home precisely because they won’t do that, and the clerks are positively surly. Who needs that? In a supposedly competitive business with very small profit margins, why would you allow your employees to behave that way?

I dunno, so I do the only thing I can – shop elsewhere.

I also shop in the village neighbourhood independent grocer a fair bit, because it is so damned close and convenient. The clerks there are split between surly and helpful. Not long ago it was a small friendly place to shop. It’s still small, only occasionally friendly. The surly clerks specialize in sending the next customer’s purchases down the chute while you are still packing up your own. I think our scrambling to keep our purchases separate amuses them.

As long as I’m on a roll, and since it also happened today, one more rant about service. I own an Epson EcoTank printer, which I bought because the ink re-fill thing seemed superior. When the ink gets low, you just buy inks in bottles and re-fill the various tanks. Easy.

Well, despite my penchant for reading things on paper, I owned the printer for a long time before much ink had gone, and then last week it refused to print, saying the ink was too low. The printer has windows so you can observe the ink levels directly, and although the black was the lowest, none of them were really low.

But we know there is no use arguing with software, so I went and bought a bottle of the black ink – two, actually, as the clerk at Staples sold me the wrong one at first, which I exchanged.

Having refilled the black ink, is that the end of it? Hell no, then you have to go into the printer software and follow the instructions to manually ‘reset the ink levels’. Now, if the software was telling me the ink was low in the first place, why do I have to do this manually? How did the software know the ink was low, but now that I have refilled it, needs me to tell it the levels? Small minds like ours can never answer such complex questions, I suppose.

Naturally, doing this re-set requires punching a handful of tiny buttons on the printer in a way that strictly conforms to instructions that appear on a screen the size of a postage stamp. Punch the wrong button and you get ‘invalid’.

Well, I did all that with only minimal amounts of blue language, then had to futz around with it all some more, but eventually I got it to print a few things I needed.

Today I tried to print a one page pdf. The goddam printer refuses to do so, and even more infuriating, up pops a little window on my laptop screen telling me all the ink tanks are empty.

Buy Epson Ink it says at the bottom.

Guess what I said in reply to that.

Having failed in all my attempts to get the infernal thing to print that one page, I have done what we all do, and let’s be honest, what the techie types also do – I have turned the goddam printer off and unplugged it.

I also told it to sit and think about what it had done.

Or not done, in this case.

What do you think are the chances it will print when I turn it back on?

What do you think are the chances I could learn to build IEDs?

Follow up: PO + 1.5 hours

I turned the printer back on, and tried once again to print the desired one page PDF.

Nothing happened for perhaps five minutes, then I got a message on my laptop ‘Printer ET-2500 could not print Job 1’ .

….followed by another message indicating again that my printer was entirely out of ink.

Hearing noises from upstairs where the printer lives, I went up: the one page had printed.

We’ll see what happens next, I am not optimistic.

What’s Goin’ On? (with apologies to Marvin Gaye)

Written by Al Slivinski on August 8, 2026. Posted in London.

This is going to be long, but it will include plenty of photos. My second attempt at photojournalism, so to speak.

It is motivated by my continuing concern at the decay of my city, but it will also include what I consider to be a puzzle regarding London. I will ask below if my readers have any ideas regarding a solution to said puzzle, and in anticipation of that, I note right off the top that your proposed solutions should be sent via Canada Post to:

Al’s Puzzle
P.O. Box NaNoo-NaNay
London, ON. Canada

Solutions will not be returned to the submitter unless the submission includes a SASE, with postage. Lots of postage. Or just enclose cash.The best submitted solution will win its author an all-expense paid trip to the Richmond Tavern on the first Wednesday of any month of the winner’s choosing.

Back to my essay. I have mentioned in a previous post my intent to vote for Susan Stevenson for Mayor in the October municipal election, and I have already sent her the maximum donation the law allows (a pittance) and requested a campaign sign be put up on my lawn. I think she has no real chance to win, and doubt she can change much if she does, the instances of lawlessness and homelessness that plague London being very much a provincial (health care) and national (law enforcement and judiciary) problem.

But support her I will because it is all I can do, other than the low-key rabble-rousing I present here.

I walk around London a good bit, and in particular I walk north into our ever-decaying downtown an average of twice a week. Another walk I have more recently started is due to the ongoing road construction on Wellington Road, which makes what used to be a short drive to pick up my old-guy prescriptions into an obstacle course. So, now I walk to the pharmacy, a 45-minute round trip, which is good for me. On that walk I go through a vacant lot on the corner of Baseline and Wellington, and below are a few photos I took of what that lot looks like.

Photo 1

That is a pile of garbage, photographed up close in that lot.

Here’s another:

Photo 2

A different pile of garbage, photographed from further away.

So far as I know, this lot has been or will be expropriated by the City as part of that aforementioned roadway reconstruction. Signs at the front of the lot at least seem to suggest that. Now I have not seen any homeless hanging about on this lot, so this garbage (there are more piles than these two, trust me) may have just been dumped there by random assholes looking for a place to dump their shit. Indeed, some of those dumpers might well have been neighbours of mine. The point from my perspective is that it has been there for some time, and no one seems interested in cleaning it up – including the City.

Let’s move on now to my walks downtown. There are two obvious routes for me to walk there and back, one of which would be along Wellington Road, but this time heading north rather than south. I never take that route. Taking it would involve walking under a railroad underpass for a ways. Here is a look at said underpass, the photo being taken one bright and sunny afternoon when my gal agreed to accompany me on a photojournalistic expedition.

Photo 3

This is taken from the north, looking along the sidewalk into the dark underpass.

Photo 4

This is in the underpass itself. Note that it is unoccupied.

Next is a photo taken of what is on the sidewalk on the southern end of that same underpass as you emerge into the daylight.

Photo 5

What you see in the centre-left of that photo is a little tent-and-umbrella village, which is indeed occupied by people. And garbage. Here’s a slightly closer look:

Photo 6

And another:

Photo 7

So, here is minor puzzle one: why is this little village not under the underpass? These photos were taken on a summer day, so weather is not an issue, but when it is hot, or cold, or raining or snowing, being under the underpass offers protection from all those things.

Hold that thought, and stay with me for a bit longer.

I don’t walk that route to downtown and back because I have no wish to be anywhere near that village during my walk, which is in the dark on the way back home, invariably.

Instead, I walk north on Richmond, which runs parallel to Wellington Road, and where the same railroad tracks run over another underpass. Here is a look at that underpass from the sidewalk south of it.

Photo 8

And here is a look at someone who has taken up residence just at the southern end of said underpass, on the other side of the street.

Photo 9

You can see the possessions and accumulated junk that such a resident typically brings with them. We were just across the street from this little scene.

Now, we head under the underpass, and although this photo is a bit dark, you can see the silhouette of someone relaxing there on this bright summer day.

Photo 10

As I noted, this guy’s chosen spot is out of the heat and sun.

Now we get to my puzzle. When I walk this route, on average twice a week each way, there is very frequently someone there, as we saw in the previous two photos. Sometimes it is just one person without much shit about them, but sometimes it is someone with a whole pile of stuff and accumulated garbage around them. Occasionally there are a few people cooking up drugs, sometimes just one person lying there looking dead, surrounded by debris.

The puzzle is this. None of those people are there the next time I come through, and neither is any of their shit. We did this photo tour on holiday Monday, and I went back through this Richmond underpass the following Wednesday to catch some tunes at the Richmond, and neither of the people in these last two photos were there, and the sidewalk was (mostly) clean.

This has happened too many times by now to be a fluke, I am convinced that someone or some org is making a sweep through that Richmond underpass on a regular schedule and clearing out anyone they find, and – most surprisingly – getting rid of their shit. Believe me, sometimes said shit is just that, half-eaten food and/or goo whose exact nature I prefer not to think about.

If I am right – and I see no other way to explain what I have observed over a period of a couple of years – who/what is doing this sweep and cleanup?

I am eternally grateful to whoever it is. When folks like this started showing up in that underpass way back when, my first thought was that my days of walking downtown and back were about to end. I would have to drive.

But, as I say, they are never there long, and often the underpass is empty, just like the one on Wellington.

So, readers, I ask: What’s Going On?

And, how can we make this happen more widely?

Homelessness and the Globby Mail

Written by Al Slivinski on August 8, 2026. Posted in News Media.

It has been my impression for some time that the quality of the Globe and Mail newspaper, not terribly high to begin with, has been deteriorating noticeably in the last couple of years. This is just an impression, fueled partly by the proportion of fluffy articles that appear on its website, like the one titled ‘The Birkin index: Should this pricey handbag be part of your portfolio?’ in today’s paper. Yes, I know, all papers publish that kinda stuff, it’s all about eyeballs.

However, today’s website also included an article on a serious topic, homelessness, with the title ‘Rising cost of low-end rental units driving increase in homelessness, report shows’.

The writer is one Alanna Smith, said to be a ‘Health Reporter’, and she, and the Glob, should be ashamed of themselves.

The article relates the results of a ‘first of its kind national analysis’, contained in a report by The Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness.

Nope, never heard of them either. It’s chief executive is one Tim Richter, and here is what the Glob says he says about the report:

He said it has long been assumed that homelessness is driven by housing-market conditions, but this research is among the first to make that case by comparing changes in the rental market with homelessness rates, using data from 2018 to 2024.

Mr. Richter said the analysis also challenges common assumptions that other factors, such as mental health, substance use and poverty, are the reason behind climbing homelessness rates.

I suspect that author Smith did not actually read the report, as I seriously doubt she would be capable of doing so. More on her below, but I went to that org’s website, and with some difficulty found a pdf of this report. It’s title is ‘Homelessness is a Housing Problem in Canada: Preliminary Findings’.

You say ‘preliminary findings’, I say ‘bullshit’.

Let me explain the basis for the claim in that first quoted sentence above, Saying that they compared changes in the rental market with changes in homelessness rates. These intrepid researchers picked 36 cities, and regressed variable H on variable R for those cities. Variable H is the percentage change in the count of homeless from a federal survey. They have three years of these counts. The variable R is the percentage change in the average lowest-quartile rent, from CMHC data for those same 36 cities.

They used a simple statistical software package on that data – there are many such packages – to do a linear regression of variable H on variable R. Acrobat no longer lets one copy things from a pdf file without payment, so I have reproduced a reasonable facsimile of the graphical display of what this package spit out below, drawn on my own. The original in the report also includes blue dots that are supposed to represent the actual data points, I presume. I did not reproduce those dots here.

The N = 36 is in the original graph, and this is a puzzle. They claim to have used data from 36 cities, but they also claim to have three observations of the variables for each city. That implies 3 X 36 = 108 data points, not N = 36.

Either way, they ran their data points through statistical software and it produced a linear equation with the coefficient of 3.86. Specifically, it spit out the equation H = a +3.86R, where a is some number that they do not report, but which every such package produces. The coefficient of 3.86 on R, being positive, is why that red line in the graph slopes up, and why they claim that increases in the rents on low-rent housing leads to increases in homelessness. Is that 3.86 coefficient statistically different from zero? Don’t know, nothing is said about that, either. With only two variables and 36 data points (or perhaps 108), it probably is, but that is rather beside the point. Look at the second sentence in the quote above, the one about the ‘analysis’ challenging common assumptions about the other causes of homelessness.

If your analysis includes variables that capture none of these other potential causes, then just how does it challenge those assumptions? These bozos could have gotten data on drug ODs, mental health cases, poverty rates and included those in their regression. That is called multiple linear regression, and any econ undergrad knows how to do it. Of course, with all those other variables now in the analysis, statistical significance becomes rather less likely. And there is no reason to expect the coefficient attached to the variable R would any longer be 3.86 once you added those other variables. Hell, it might not even be positive. But why go to all that trouble, eh?

Nope, get the bullshit result you wanted from the start and publish it.

Actually we could go these folks one better and do a simple regression of their homelessness measure H on any one of a billion other single variables….S, T, U, V, whatever. If we did that, the statistical package would sure enough spit out a coefficient, just as it did for R, no matter how idiotic were the other variables we chose. Stat packages have no brain, you put in data, they spit out numbers. Always. Think of all the ‘causes’ of homelessness we could uncover using this study’s approach. Better, if the package happened to spit out a negative coefficient for any variable we came up with, we would have found a cure for homelessness. More S means less H, hurrah!

Sigh…..

That such utter bullshit would be printed and touted by this org is not surprising. They are a non-profit with no actual interest in ending homelessness – that would put them out of business, eh? – but rather an agenda to push. All’s fair in love and propaganda.

But, for the Globby Mail to uncritically repeat these claims is unforgiveable. Sadly, Alanna Smith’s profile on the Glob includes this: ‘She holds a Bachelor of Journalism and Women and Gender Studies from Carleton University in Ottawa’. So, Ms Smith learned nothing in her time at Carleton that would enable her to ask questions about statistical significance or credible science. I really doubt she read the actual report, because it does have numbers and data in it. Gender studies people don’t do numbers, generally.

Her job is to repeat the party line; it’s not their fault and governments have to give people more stuff.

And The Glob should really be ashamed.

A 21st Century Fable

Written by Al Slivinski on August 8, 2026. Posted in Education, Standards.

I have a sig at the bottom of my personal emails, and it includes a quote from Mark Steyn. Steyn is a Canadian author and commentator (I guess that’s the word) whose acid-dipped pen and highly sensitive bullshit detector I have always admired. I think he has not been well in recent years, so his visibility has dropped, but the quote of his at the bottom of my email is this:

‘Our leadership class’s real accomplishment is resume padding.’

I think that is very accurate, and it seems this is my week to write about such resume padding among the lanyard class. The adjacent post about the Globby Mail’s article on homelessness is basically pointing out that GM’s so-called Medical Reporter is deeply unqualified to write about much of anything, despite the letters after her name and the list of awards on her webpage.

Well, here comes an instance of resume padding that puts that one to shame. If I had not been an academic myself in the years after 2012, I would find it hard to believe.

Some years ago, but not many, Cambridge University in the UK hired a shooting star of a young professor. His name is Jason Arday, and Cambridge appointed him to a position as a Professor of Sociology of Education.

Now, had I been on the hiring committee (fat chance) I might have pointed out that the two academic disciplines that stand just behind all the ‘xxx Studies’ disciplines in terms of academic worthlessness are sociology and education. So, why bother to fill this position at all?

Which is why I would never end up on that hiring committee.

Cambridge hired him into that position nevertheless, and the academic world was agog at his achievements, academic and otherwise. Here’s a partial list, much of which I credit Nellie Bowles of TFP for putting together:

He says he has autism and didn’t speak until he was 11, then at 18 he learned to read and write and went to university.
He says he did volunteer work overseas for a particular water charity.

(The charity now says it never sends volunteers abroad).

He says he ran 600 miles between Edinburgh and London in six days, and that he ran 30 marathons in 35 days, adding that he did the last nine marathons on a broken leg.

(I believe that. Millions wouldn’t, but I do.)

Prior to his Cambridge appointment, he claimed he was a visiting professor at the University of Glasgow, Ohio State University, and an honorary professor at Durham University.

(All three institutions deny that Jason held these positions.)

Btw, here is a picture of the wunderkind:

Great dreadlocks, eh?

All of this would have, I suspect, stayed under a very large rug at Cambridge U, except that some other academics took a look at some of Arday’s actual research, and said the dreaded word: plagiarism.

Or, perhaps worse. Here’s a quote from an X post on some of Arday’s published work from a U of T (yep, Toronto) prof:

I don’t want to pile on to the Cambridge situation, but media coverage saying “plagiarism” are really missing the boat. There is pretty obvious fraud – literally claiming he did interviews that couldn’t have happened and so on – in like every paper of his that I looked at.

Sounds kinda bad, eh?

This whole thing is sufficiently indicative of the madness of 21^st century universities that it has crept into some of the mainstream media outlets on both sides of the Atlantic. I will, I hope, note some aspects of it you may not have read about elsewhere.

Predictably, once the various forms of lying and fraud perpetrated by Arday had begun to surface, a set of ideologically devoted but ignorant folks rose to defend him, and – no one can be surprised – to accuse Arday’s accusers of racism.

I found an instance of this online, in a publication known as The Good Law Project, which put online an article titled ‘Stand in solidarity with Jason Arday’

A meter off to the right of the article title says: 17,203 have signed. Let’s get to 25,000

Make of this what you will, but under that meter one finds this:

Gloria signed 2 minutes ago

Liar signed 9 minutes ago

Karen signed 9 minutes ago

Eye signed 17 minutes ago

Um….. Liar? And Eye?

There is a photo of young Arday that starts the article off (he does look quite young) and under it this statement:

“Jason is the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s history. Rightwing newspapers are trying to smear him with fake accusations of plagiarism. We can’t let them. Stand up to their hate and division by adding your name.”

I dunno, it seems to me it is other academics who are accusing him of plagiarism, and the ‘rightwing newspapers’ are reporting it. Those newspapers include the NYT, by the way. Here is a quote from one recent story in the NYT about this:

Ahead of its publication, reports from other academics, independent journalists and a number of British news outlets have cast doubt on both Arday’s scholarship and biographical assertions, including his claim to have once run 30 marathons in 35 days while raising as much as 5.5 million British pounds for charity and that he was visited twice at his office by a masked intruder, once while wielding a knife.

Arday has said previously that mistakes in his early work were the result of his autism and inadequate supervision from professors, and that the current accusations of plagiarism are part of a racist smear campaign.

The publication referred to in the first paragraph is a memoir Arday wrote, about to be released by Simon and Schuster.

The ‘masked intruder’ bit is new to me, he appears to have said that after the storm about his research really broke. The use of the racism card is predictable, sadly. The NYT story includes a link to a story in Times Higher Education (yet another right-wing outlet) in which reporter Jack Grove reports that he sent emails to Arday querying him about the plagiarism accusations, after which Groves was visited by a police constable who told him to leave Arday alone. Can’t make shit like that up. You can read Groves’ THE story here. Also, the folks at Retraction Watch, who publicize cases of academic fraud, published a story about all this early on, which you can read here. They did no investigation of their own, but they do assert that Arday hired a high-profile law firm to write THE a letter, at which point THE spiked their initial story about Arday.

You can also go here to read what those brave supporters of Arday at The Good Law Project write about all this, if you wish.

By the way, on the day I posted this article, the NYT ran yet another column chastising Cambridge and academia in general for the way they tend to handle cases of malfeasance by faculty. Damn those right-wing newspapers.

Appendix

I was dismissive at the start of this article about the value of any academic work done by anyone who claims to be a professor of sociology or education or the sociology of education. In my view, those fields are wastelands in which nothing resembling research (i.e., attempts to understand how the universe and the humans in it work) is ever done.

I went and found some of Arday’s academic papers online, and I present below a handful of direct quotes from them, and say – ‘I rest my case’.

Quote one:

This paper employs a Critical Race Theory (CRT) a storytelling method, which operates as a counter-narrative in attempting to conceptualise my own professional experiences of negotiating normative Whiteness, diversifying Eurocentric curricula and conceptualising the racial mirco-aggression. The narratives proffered demonstrate the subtle but powerful ways in racism unfolds within in the Academy and the nuanced, everyday forms of racism that persist against a backdrop of Whiteness.

That quote is from the Abstract of Dismantling power and privilege through reflexivity: negotiating normative Whiteness, the Eurocentric curriculum and racial micro-aggressions within the Academy, published by Arday in 2018 in the journal Whiteness and Education. The bad writing is entirely from the original article, it was not inserted by this white guy.

Another quote:

Recognising the impact of precarious employment on various societal institutions, this article attempts to explore the impact of the ‘gig economy’ in higher education, with a particular focus on the impact upon staff of colour with the Academy. The study draws on critical race theory (CRT) and a thematic analysis methodological approach to illuminate the experiences of staff of colour encountering precarious employment. Importantly, the article will argue that systemic racism plays an integral part in existing cultures of dehumanisation and exploitation within the Academy.

Just after this he writes:

The study emanates from the marginalised voices of 18 Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic members of staff on precarious contracts within the higher education sector, across the Russell Group and post-92 institutions.

Those quotes are from ‘‘More to prove and more to lose’: race, racism and precarious employment in higher education’ published in The British Journal of Sociology of Education in 2022.

A small comment on that one. His data consists of conversations with 18 subjects, all of them from ‘oppressed’ groups. If he really wanted to learn something about their experiences, would it not have been sensible and wise to also interview, say, 18 workers from the oppressor groups? You know, some white folks. Would not differences in their stories – assuming such differences were found – be instructive about the very topic he claims to be interested in? I suppose doing so would implicitly acknowledge that those damned oppressors end up in precarious employment also.

Ok, Ok, if you insist, just one more quote from Arday’s oeuvre –

In this one he actually cites numbers, rare for a 21st century sociologist:

The percentage of HE [Higher Education] staff that are Black, Asian and minority ethnic has doubled from 8.6% to 15.4% over the last decade and a half. Importantly, despite this steady rise, Black HE staff remain statistically underrepresented in comparison to the UK Black population, with only 2.8% of staff identifying as Black compared to 3.3% of the general UK population (UCU, 2021).

OMG. A half of one percentage point difference between the percentage of Blacks in the UK population and the percentage among HE staff?!! Appalling!! No wonder Arday writes so much and so convincingly about systemic racism. What else could cause such a disparity?

That last one is from ‘the black professoriate: assessing the landscape within British higher education’, published in on_education: Journal for Education and Debate [the capitalizations or lack therof are not mine but the journal’s]. That one came out in 2022.

I don’t expect Mr. Arday or any of his supporters at The Good Law Project will waste any time thinking about what all this might mean for the hiring of black and minority candidates into HE in the future.

Liquid and Private

Written by Al Slivinski on August 1, 2026. Posted in Education.

I subscribe to The Claremont Review of Books, because the reviews in it are extremely well-written and actually about the book being reviewed. This is published by The Claremont Institute, which any self-respecting lefty thinks is where Satan goes to party. The Institute is, to be sure, pretty right-wing, and by virtue of my subscription, they send me a lot of stuff via email other than the Review, which gets delivered on good old-fashioned paper.

Much of what is in these emails I ignore but I got a link to an article titled The College Replacement Economy that I think has something sensible to say, so I will lay it out in brief here. You can read the original here as there does not seem to be a paywall. The original is longer, as it covers more ground than I will.

The basic point of the article is largely captured in this quote from it – ‘Higher education now sells back what American society once provided for free.’

What American society used to provide for free was the social capital embodied in networks of people and organizations that allowed young adults to move into the world of work and family. That social capital included, again quoting from the article – ‘the free inheritance of trusted neighbors, functional public schools, safe streets, and marriageable norms that previous generations received at no cost’.

Nowadays, to get on in life is more expensive, meaning ‘expensive’ in monetary terms.

‘Because that commons has been liquidated and privatized, young people must now repurchase its components individually at market prices.’ Those now necessary components are ‘Expensive homes in good districts, private schooling, daycare, credentials, and more’.

The quote referring to the commons being liquidated and privatized also contains an implicit answer if we care to wonder ‘how did this happen?’

The liquidation was largely done by government, which fell down in its supposed duty to provide safe streets and functional public schools, while I would suggest that the erosion of trust in neighbors and norms regarding family and marriage were accomplished largely by the intelligentsia, who resided for the most part in the universities, and now in the education system more generally.

Private institutions willing to provide the substitutes at a price were quick to spring up: universities to provide credentials, real estate speculators and the entire home renovation industry to provide the means to construct good (meaning expensive) neighbourhoods and a cooperative effort by governments and private organizations to provide the hired daycare that allowed both parents to work and give young children a safe environment in which to grow.

I am not here suggesting, anymore than did the original author, that this all came about through a massive conspiracy among government and the educational industry. A conspiracy is hardly necessary for things to change for the worse. Inattention probably helps, though.

I think the job market presents the clearest illustration of this general thesis. I again quote from the article:

The [bachelor’s] degree became essentially mandatory in the professional economy, not because the jobs changed but because the free-sorting infrastructure was dismantled. Four years and $40,000 in debt now purchase legibility that a grandfather got with a [high school] diploma and a reference.

Having taught people getting their BAs for 42 years, I can say with confidence that nothing they learned in my classes (which were in the supposedly ‘practical’ discipline of economics) trained them for the jobs they got upon graduation.

We were, indeed, only providing a screening service. People who did well in our courses were likely smarter and more disciplined than average, and those who got a BA were able to maintain that for four years. And, to spend a lot of money. However, we also know that the price of a BA has increased much more than the CPI has gone up, particularly in the USA. This was certainly not because the product that student tuition purchased got better, hell it hardly changed at all. Rather, governments cut back their funding of universities while also increasing the demand for BAs by subsidizing university education, largely via low-interest, government-backed loans. The increase in the cost of Post Secondary Education is very much demand driven, and that demand increase has partly come from increased subsidization of the purchase of a BA.

There is another factor that has driven up demand, and the price. People, including economists, often point at what is called ‘the college wage premium’ as the reason to get a BA; it pays. This premium is the increase in expected lifetime earnings of someone with a BA relative to someone with a HS diploma. The article author writes:

This reframes the wage premium. A good can command a higher price because it becomes more valuable or because alternatives are destroyed. The college premium is overwhelmingly the second kind: not a bonus paid to the educated but a fine levied on the uncredentialed, whose access to stable employment collapsed.

I think he’s got a point. Another quote:

So the young are told the degree “pays,” and in the narrow accounting, it does—the way bottled water “pays” once the well is gone. They have spent four years and taken on five figures of debt to buy back, at retail and in degraded form, a certification their grandparents’ society produced for free as a byproduct of functioning schools and legible communities.

It is true, of course, that someone who skips university and becomes a certified master carpenter or electrician, or any number of other skilled trades, can do quite well in life. And, it remains to be seen whether – as some have predicted – the coming of AI will result in the end of university education as we know it. That is, if AI allows anyone to get a BA, the degree’s value as a screen disappears.

However, as a description of what has happened in the last 60 years or so, and the reason getting ahead in life has become more difficult and expensive for young adults, I think this little essay has something valuable to say.

Not My Job

Written by Al Slivinski on July 31, 2026. Posted in Research, Standards.

I write a fair bit on here – too much for some of you, I expect – about academics and their research. Besides the fact I was in that business for 42 years, my motivation is simple: I want to convince you – indeed, I would like to convince the world – that you should ignore almost every claim made by every academic researcher that you come across.

They are surely not all bogus, but the fact is that the most interesting and surprising ones are those most likely to be publicized by an uncritical press, and are also those most likely to be bogus. As part of my ongoing effort in this regard, I offer you a look into the thinking of one very esteemed academic as regards his responsibility to keep bogus research from being published.

Yes, it’s statistician Gelman again, and he recently posted a short article titled ‘I don’t see journal review as a gatekeeping process that will keep erroneous articles from being published’

The title kinda says it all, and you can click on that title and read for yourself what he wrote, but I will give you the gist.

‘Journal review’ refers to the review by other academics of research articles that are submitted to journals for publication. Most people think – as did I at one time – that this process is designed to make sure that the research was competently done, and that any claimed findings are sound and backed up by good scientific practice. Seems kinda important, eh?

One would like to believe that if researchers publish a paper that finds that, for example –

Offering substantial performance-based compensation to highly effective teachers in the lowest-achieving schools leads to dramatic improvements in student achievement, nearly closing the gap between the targeted schools and the district average

…then that finding is legit. In fact, that is (a close paraphrase of) the claim from a recent article published in an Econ journal.

Publication in that journal means it was peer-reviewed, and the reviewers found no errors or other reason to think the finding is not valid. The data analyzed is indeed evidence that the claim is true.

Gelman says – nah, you can’t expect that. At least not if Gelman reviewed the paper.

A quote from his post –

I don’t think it is a requirement of a reviewer for a journal to investigate a submission in detail. Ultimately the correctness of an article is the responsibility of the author.

To put it another way, I don’t see journal review as a gatekeeping process that will keep erroneous articles from being published; rather, I see it as providing some information to the author and editor.

See, his loyalties are to the academic(s) who submitted the article to be published. If he/she/they think it is fine, it’s not up to reviewer Gelman to say otherwise, he just provides some helpful info to the author(s) and the editor of the journal.

A more succinct statement of the ‘I scrub your back you scrub mine’ mentality of academics is not possible.

I already noted in a previous post Gelman’s statement that it was not up to him to file a formal complaint that the APSA had given an award to a massively plagiarized book. Not his thing, either.

There is a common thread in these two separate positions of Professor Gelman, and although I witnessed it up close throughout my career, I did not grok it until I left – academics are not much interested in putting in effort on anything other than getting their own research published.

Teaching, reviewing others’ research, running the university so the bureaucrats cannot – none of that is worth their attention, time or effort.

I can only say again – if you read that ‘a new study shows X’, then put your money on ‘not X’. The author of that study was likely willing to do all kinds of dodgy shit to produce ‘X’, and no one in the academic community has any incentive to look for such dodginess.

Coda

Angry as Gelman’s utter self-interest makes me, I should not really claim that all academics refuse to take their journal article reviewing duties seriously. Many in my old discipline of Econ did, and I was one of them. I am guilty of much during my career, for sure. However, my referee reports to editors ran to pages and pages, as I did put in hours going through whatever article I was sent, looking for bullshit, and telling the editor whenever I found any. Of course, the articles I reviewed, as well as those I wrote myself, were purely theoretical, so their impact on anyone outside of my intellectual circle was nil. Nada. As in, zilch. That is not so for research like the article from the econ journal that I cited above, or the kind of articles Gelman gets to review. That kind of work can be used to construct or modify actual government policy that affects thousands, if not millions. Someone should be checking that it is goddam correctly done.

I hope the percentage of Gelmans in academia is small. I fear it is not, because much bullshit does get through.

Pay Up, Folks

Written by Al Slivinski on July 25, 2026. Posted in Government, Politics.

I came across some info recently that was a revelation to me, and may be to you, also. I tip my hat to Juno News, to which I subscribe, for publishing the article that put me onto this. I will add that Juno News is not really a news site, it contains mostly opinions and the occasional polemic. However, I subscribe (it is not expensive) because it covers things the Globe and Mail will not. Like this. The Juno article, dated July 10, is titled –

Provincial politicians take about twice as much pay as their American counterparts: Study

The ‘study’ referred to was done by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, a nonprofit org, and I went to that org’s website and – with some difficulty – found said study. What I write below comes from that.

The key finding, as the title indicates, is in this quote from the study (all figures below are given in Canadian dollars, and refer to annual salaries):

The median salary for provincial politicians in Canada is more than double what the median American representative makes, at $113,637 and $45,002 respectively.

Those of us living in Ontario will enjoy this quote:

Ontario MPPs draw the highest salary among Canadian provincial politicians at $157,350. Legislators from only three of the United States’ 50 states take a higher salary than Ontario MPPs — New York, California and Pennsylvania. However, these states are outliers within the U.S.

As a less than talented applied statistician, I have to point out that there is a highly varied distribution of salaries in both these countries, and comparing distributions is not a straightforward thing. Here is yet another way to look at it, again from the study:

Only 18 per cent of American representatives make over $100,000 CAD while 70 per cent of Canada’s provincial politicians earn more than $100,000.

The study also goes on to look at the GDP per capita of these subnational jurisdictions in comparison to what their legislators earn. Another quote:

North Dakota pays its politicians $10,193 and is a wealthier state on a per-person basis than every Canadian province. Of the 19 American states with a higher GDP per capita than all Canadian provinces, 13 of those states pay their representatives less than any Canadian province.

New Mexico, the only subnational jurisdiction across Canada and the United States that doesn’t pay its representatives, is wealthier than eight of 10 Canadian provinces.

In that last sentence, ‘wealthier’ means ‘has higher GDP/cap’.

Readers will know how dubious I am of articles of the ‘studies show’ type. However, while the Juno News article provides little reason to be more confident in the findings of this study than of any other such, the CTF study itself does a good job in its final chapter, titled Methodological Notes, of laying out where its data comes from and its exact nature. It looks carefully done.

A few things I am led to wonder further about after reading this –

It appears this study leaves out US governors and Canadian premiers. My expectation is that the comparison would be similar, but it would be interesting to see. The roles are different, of course, Canadian premiers are members of the legislature, US governors are not.

Similarly, I wonder how municipal councillor and mayoral pay differs across the two countries. Figuring that out would be a much bigger task, of course.

The study points out that in general, Canadian politicians are paid more than in the US while Canadian provinces collect more in taxes from their residents than do US states. Not a surprise, and the underlying reason to me is that Canadians, by history and inclination, are more prone to expect their government(s) to take care of things than are Americans.

There is one possibly important aspect of this that is entirely missing from the study. No job can be characterized wholly by its attached salary. So – for how long do US state legislatures typically meet each year, compared to Canadian? How do the fringe benefits (pension, insurance, expense accounts, etc) that the legislators get in the two countries compare? My strong expectation is that those are generally better in Canada, also – high salary jobs typically come with better benefits, too – but we don’t really know.

I suppose the key message the CTF is trying to deliver is that paying government office-holders more does not imply better results for citizens.

Point made, point taken.

He Nails It!

Written by Al Slivinski on July 23, 2026. Posted in Politics.

A while back, in this long post, I did something I try to never do, and which I strongly advise others against: I predicted the future. I suggested (admittedly due to an inspiration from a former colleague) that the UK Labour Party were headed down a path similar to that trod by the US Democrats, and that it seemed likely to result in a similar outcome: the eventual rise of a populist UK Reform government led by Nigel Farage.

As a sensible person, you my faithful reader had every reason to react to that post with ‘Oh, Al’s finally lost it’. Predicting the future is for fools.

Fair enough, but dammit, the UK Labour Party seems absolutely intent on making me look like a wizard, and this short post is just to let me gloat a bit.

I suggested Keir Starmer would eventually face a leadership contest among his Parliamentary caucus, and be gone. Well, didn’t ol’ Keir eliminate the need for anything as messy and drawn out as all that by reading the writing on the wall and just offering to resign.

Thank you, Mr. Starmer.

Even better, Andy Burnham resigned as Mayor of Manchester to run for a seat in Parliament for the express purpose of running for Labour leader, and what does the rest of the 400+ contingent of Labour MPs do? They all step aside, and say ‘right this way, Andy, the job is all yours’.

‘We don need no steenkeeng leadership election’.

Instead, they held a coronation, and Andy Burnham is the UK’s new PM.

Thank you, Labour Party MPs.

I cannot help but note the parallel. When Biden, like Starmer, finally faced the music in 2024 and shut down his campaign for re-election, the Democrats could have chosen democracy. They had a convention of party delegates scheduled anyway, they could have told contenders to throw their names in, and had the delegates gather to have a good old fashioned debate and vote on who should run in Joe’s place against that goddam Trump guy.

But the Dem royalty (Obama, Clinton, etc) did not want that, so they decreed that it shall be Kamala, and the delegates all fell in line. And Kamala, the affirmative-action-VP, having never won so much as a single primary ever, went on to run a disastrous campaign that ultimately gave us DJT II.

Labour and the similarly-crowned Burnham does not have to face an election for a long time. Rather, they have to govern, which is way harder. Plenty of room and time to set the stage for a big Reform UK win when the election finally arrives. I will be watching, and gazing further into my crystal ball.

Just let the record show – I have bloody well nailed it so far.

EDS And Its Consequences

Written by Al Slivinski on July 23, 2026. Posted in Popular attitudes, Standards.

TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) is a real thing. Readers know I have no use for the man, but to some people he is the embodiment of all that is wrong with the universe, and the cause of anything they do not like; and, they cannot stop writing about him.

I have noticed recently the emergence of something similar – Epstein Derangement Syndrome. This is a different kind of thing, those infected with it cannot stop writing and talking about what that man did, and what gossipy tidbits are to be found in the massive cache of files on him recently released by the Trump administration.

What put me on notice about this syndrome is that Andrew Gelman, the statistician whose blog I follow pretty closely, seems to be infected with it. At one point he posted three articles on his blog in a single week about what was in the Epstein files, mostly related to university types whose names had appeared in them. Gelman seems to really really really dislike Larry Summers, the Harvard economist, presidential advisor and former Harvard prez. Summers is in those files a lot, and Gelman takes particular glee in pointing this out.

Gelman’s manifestation of EDS had subsided for a while, but then he posted another article this last week, titled ‘More scientists in the Epstein files, including a roboticist and an ESP researcher

In his post he lists 9 scientists who apparently appear in the Epstein files, and says he got their names from a blog post on the site FancyComma LLC, an interesting name for a website.

I went and had a look at this original post, done by one Sheeva Azma, M.S. You can read it too, here.

In it Ms Azma does indeed provide quite a long list of scientists who she says are mentioned in the Epstein files. The post is titled Here’s every scientist I found in the Epstein Files

She says she spent two weeks going through these to compile this list, posted it on March 2, and writes that she will no longer update it. That was apparently not enough time to go through all the files, so her list, already long, could be longer.

I found her list, and the notes she provides about these people, quite fascinating. Before I tell you why, I should add what the FancyComma website says about Ms Azma herself:

Sheeva applies research, policy, science, marketing, and communications expertise to craft strategic messages.

Ah. A strategic message crafter. I love those folks.

In what follows below, I will underline the names of (some of) the scientists who appear on her list, then put in italics below that what Ms Azma writes about their presence in the files.

Paul Greengard

– shared Nobel Prize with Kandel in 2000

– 22 mentions in files

– donated his Nobel Prize money to support women in science, but Epstein friend Leon Black funded OCD and depression research in his lab; Ghislaine Maxwell attended a dinner with Greengard

Kandel, by the way, refers to Eric Kandel, who won that shared Nobel in neuroscience in 2000. Kandel appears on the list also.

Eric Kandel

– 86 mentions in files

– Epstein wants to get dinner with him and colleagues in the files; Kandel sat next to Epstein at a formal Columbia dinner

OMG, this man sat next to Epstein at a formal dinner where one’s seat is surely determined by a name card placed by the dinner organizer. The perfidy! And Greengard. He attended a dinner that Ghislaine Maxwell also attended. Wait, is that sentence above supposed to indicate that Ghislaine was Greengard’s date? Coulda been, right?

Azuma writes this at the beginning of her post:

Before we get to the list of scientists, I would like to clarify that not all of the scientists mentioned here were talking to Epstein. Some are just named and do not have any record of correspondence with him.

Really? Um, which ones, Sheeva?

….crickets.

Leveling Up – And Down

Written by Al Slivinski on July 16, 2026. Posted in Standards.

There is an old aphorism which says that people tend to find their own level, whether in their work life, their social life, or in a new hobby. The implicit corollary to that is that there may be a fair bit of up and down before that happens.

A less benevolent but more modern version of this is the Peter Principle, which says that in any organization, people tend to be promoted above their level of competence. That is, they do well at one level in the org, and so are promoted, and if they do well there they get promoted again, but eventually they get promoted to a level at which they don’t do well. The implicit corollary to that Principle is that once there, it is very hard to move them back down to a level at which they might again be competent.

I offer here a small example of the value of having an electoral system, if only as a way to defeat that corollary to the Peter Principle. Below is a recent photo from the internet of the former Boy King, showing him to have once again found the level he was at prior to 2015:

It Happened Again

Written by Al Slivinski on July 16, 2026. Posted in Education, Standards.

Some of you may remember two posts I wrote recently, here and here, about a cheating ‘scandal’ that occurred at my old employer. Nothing more has come of that, so far as I know, but to my surprise, an almost-identical event has recently been covered in The Free Press. This university cheating story has a local connection too, so I will tell you a bit about it.

The TFP article, posted on July 12, is titled:

I’m a Brown University Professor. Half My Students Are Cheating.

Brown is an Ivy League U located in Providence, Rhode Island. The Professor is one Roberto Serrano, and he is the reason for the local (and personal) connection. When Serrano had just completed his PhD in Econ, he was looking for his first faculty position, and my old Department invited him to UWO for a campus visit. Nothing remarkable about that, but what is remarkable about Serrano is that, as well as being brilliant, he is totally blind. In those days, people gave talks about their research by either writing on a blackboard or projecting transparencies on a screen. Serrano did neither of those things at UWO, he stood in front of the room and spoke for 90 minutes about his highly mathematical research.

It was an amazing performance, we voted immediately after his visit to offer him a faculty position, but Brown U felt the same way, and that is where he went. He is still there 34 years later, and has written this article for TFP about his recent encounter with student cheating.

The tale is nearly a carbon copy of the one I wrote about at UWO. Serrano gave a take-home midterm exam in a senior undergrad econ course, and realized that nearly all his students had cheated on it. He reported this fact to Brown’s Committee on The Academic Code.

The Committee ignored him. Serrano, angry, went public, writing an entire story about the event for a publication called El Pais. This was then picked up by Inside Higher Ed, which Serrano writes ‘inspired a further cascade of coverage’.

That all prompted the Committee to finally respond to Serrano, asking for more information about student cheating.

Now, this event inspires in me the same question that arose in the UWO case: Why in the hell would any prof give his class a take-home exam? Worse, Serrano says he gave the students an 11-hour window in which to complete and submit the answers to a two-hour exam.

His reason is rather typically 21^st century. You may recall that there was a shooting on the Brown campus a while back. That had just happened, so Serrano writes

‘…due to the tragic shooting that took place at Brown on December 13 during a review session for a final exam, I decided to move my course’s two exams—the midterm and the final—from an in-class exam to a take-home, closed-book format. I thought that would help students deal with exam anxiety.’

I’m sorry Roberto, brilliant though you may be, that makes no sense. It is exactly the kind of thinking that has resulted in a reported 40% of Stanford undergrads being granted extra time to take tests. Misplaced empathy. Or maybe sympathy. Definitely misplaced.

There is more. When the midterm take-home test turned up all this cheating, Serrano reversed himself and announced to the class that the final exam would be a three-hour in-class test, instead of the take-home.

Enrollment in the class, which had historically been only about 15 students, had swelled to 86 when Serrano announced at the beginning of the term that the midterm and final tests would be take-home. Only 59 took the final exam, the rest having dropped the course. Of the 27 who dropped, 20 had gotten a mark of 100 on the midterm. The average on the take-home midterm was a mark of 96/100 while on the in-class final it was 48.

I quote from Serrano’s TFP article again:

Incredibly, Love Wallace, the associate dean of the College for the Academic Code, who reviews all academic code allegations, seemed to agree with them. “Students who violate the academic code,” she said, “are almost never doing it from a malicious place. Generally speaking it’s a split-second decision that comes from a place of trying to handle immense external or internal pressure.”

Serrano calls bullshit on that. I do, too. I also hasten to note that a person whose parents actually gave her the name ‘Love’ is just the sort of person who ends up in academia as a useless associate dean.

I think the brilliant Professor Serrano did ask for this by giving that take-home midterm, but I stand with him in being appalled by the attitudes of university administrators, whether at UWO or Brown or wherever, toward student cheating. That refusal to enforce standards of academic integrity goes back to long before the advent of AI, however.

One of the last lines that Serrano writes is:

Academia is supposed to be one of our great beacons of truth.

Well, yea, Roberto – ‘supposed to’ is right.

CODA: CBC shows up late

After I had written this post, I came across an article on the website of our fearless public news organization, the CBC, titled

A U.S. prof suspects most of his students used AI to cheat. It’s a growing concern here, too

It recapitulates the Serrano story I just told you. Sadly, I didn’t get government money to write mine. But, typical of the CBC, it gives credit for first covering it not to that terrible right-wing rag TFP, but to El Pais, which, to be fair, was published first, on June 28.

Also true to form, the CBC writer went to the trouble to find an ‘expert’, one Rina Garcia Chua, who ‘manages’ UBC Okanagan’s Academic Integrity Matters (AIM) program.

Ms Chua is quoted as follows regarding students who cheat:

“Most are students who are confused. There’s miscommunication. They’re overwhelmed,” she said, noting that most tend to be first-year students.’

Yea, No, Rina. Serrano said his course was a senior course, not a first-year student in the room. Did anyone actually read what Serrano wrote?

Stay Calm, Everyone

Written by Al Slivinski on July 16, 2026. Posted in Government, Safety.

I seem to be writing a lot about traffic of late, but it has become a prime topic of conversation in my fair city. I wrote in an email to my gal a while back saying that ‘I can’t get anywhere in this town’, which she suggested – accurately – sounded like a country music song title. Be that as it may, I am not the only one to express such a sentiment.

A major reason for this is that some years back our fearless city leaders embarked on a plan to cover the city (some of it, anyway) with what they call Bus Rapid Transit. This involves doing many things, including installing previously non-existent dedicated bus lanes on some of our major streets. This, in turn, requires tearing up said streets, for looong periods of time, leading to traffic re-routing leading to traffic congestion. OK, can’t have BRT without breaking some eggs, I get it, but some of the things that have been done have been insane. One street downtown, King, got torn up for months then put back together three different times in two years. Great planning, eh?

But my topic for today kids is what is going on in my general area of Old South. This is bounded on the east and west, respectively, by Wellington Road and Wharncliffe Road, two north-south four lane (or more) thoroughfares.

Wellington Road is set to have the BRT run right down the middle of it, so they are tearing it up going south out of downtown. This too, has been going on for years, but the tearing up has recently reached the area near Old South.

I live between Wellington and High Street, another north-south street that is not a thoroughfare. Two lanes and no traffic lights, although busses do currently use it. A few weeks ago some new structures appeared on High Street, structures that traffic engineers refer to as ‘traffic-calming measures’. The ones nearest where I live are depicted in the photo below:

This faces south on High, so traffic heading south is supposed to drive between that 40km/h sign and the yellow island, while the traffic heading north is supposed to go on the other side of the 40km/h sign. There is room to the right of the yellow island for a bike to ride through, also.

Whatever the engineers call it, the point of this is to get traffic on High to slow down, but first let me explain why these suddenly appeared there. I doubt anyone in the City will say it out loud, but once the BRT construction hit Wellington Road and Commissioners (the southern boundary of Old South) and turned one of the busiest intersections in London into a parking lot, people started looking for alternate routes. If you are trying to drive north or south, High street is the first north-south street west of Wellington. So, traffic volumes went way up on High from traffic that would otherwise be using Wellington, and those diverted drivers were pissed off and in a hurry.

Enter ‘traffic calming’, which of course really means ‘traffic slowing’, and the first question for today’s class: do these things slow drivers down?

I have been observing this closely, one of them being a half block from my house, and the answer, as so often out in the world is – yes and no.

I saw some people stop when they drove up to one of these structures, presumably puzzled as to how to navigate it. That is a rare reaction, but in general, people have two reactions. One group, the FDs (Fearful Drivers) invariably hit their brakes as they approach and go through a traffic-slower. Other people (like your correspondent) realizing that the space one drives through is big enough for a city transit bus to get through comfortably, don’t even notice it is there.

I’m gonna suggest that slowing down those FDs is kinda pointless. They are not the people who would be driving at speed through Old South in any case. They find speed (and turning and many other aspects of driving) too frightening to do anything remotely non-calm. The rest of us are not slowed down at all.

However, none of that applies to another kind of structure which also appeared on High Street, but for reasons I cannot figure out, only at the southernmost end. There you will find two consecutive structures that look like this:

No yellow island, but there are two black and yellow….let’s call them humps….between the center post and outside posts. Traffic in either direction must go over these, and there is the point. London is full of speed humps similar to these, but which are built right into the asphalt. Those asphalt humps don’t slow anyone (like me) down very much at all, as one quickly realizes that if you straddle one evenly as you drive over it, your car’s suspension gets less of a jolt than it does from the average London city street pothole.

Trust me, folks, if you come upon humps like the ones above, slow down. I found out the hard way that going over one of those at even 40km/h will rattle your teeth, and not do anything good for your car’s suspension. I don’t know if they are higher or wider than the asphalt ones or what, but they are definitely designed to be punitive.

So the question now is – why were only two of these put up on High Street, and only at the southernmost end, just north of one of only two stop signs on that street? What is it about that end of the street that called for these more punitive ‘calming’ measures?

If anyone out there has an idea, I would love to hear it.

A final note. One of the side streets that runs off High has a structure on it that looks like this (all photos courtesy of Al Slivinski):

This street runs east and west between High and Wellington, so I imagine the idea is to slow down grumpy drivers who get tired of being on the Wellington parking lot and cut down here to get to High. But c’mon, engineers. No punitive humps, not even a yellow island and traffic cone. That thing won’t slow down even the FDs.

I think this is clearly a case of appearing to do something to appease the folks who live on this street and are upset at the higher traffic volume and speeds. Indeed, that is what all this is about, really. The city does something like tear up Wellington Road for 5 years, this has consequences, so then the city does something else, not necessarily effectively, to at least appear to deal with those consequences.

Note also that all of these structures will be removed come October, because you could not plow the snow off a street on which they remained. By the way, my gal sent me the photo below, from a street called Carfrae that runs north out of Old South.

Ooops.

Later, those outer barriers were removed from Carfrae entirely, leaving just the center post. Seems some Londoners just can’t navigate traffic-calming structures. Or, some kids decided to see how well that thing was fastened to the pavement.

I await further calming ideas from the minds of London’s traffic engineering dept.

Another Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight

Written by Al Slivinski on July 8, 2026. Posted in Research.

“Siblings that say they never fight are most definitely hiding something.”

– Lemony Snicket

The online London Free Press rarely contains much that I would call ‘news’. You know, information about important things happening in London. This is because they have no real reporters or other resources needed to gather news. What they have are ‘writers’ – and telephones and email.

Top articles this morning on the website are an interview with a retired UWO prof who was given an award, and a story about a school board trustee saying that the board’s deficit puts special education and class sizes ‘at risk’.

Not reporting. Just talking and then writing up what was said.

And, if you go further down the website, you come to a story with this title:

Two-thirds report sibling violence in first-of-its-kind Canadian study

With the subtitle –

Researchers say the findings highlight an often-overlooked form of family violence and its lasting effects.

Lord deliver us from findings that highlight an often-overlooked anything.

I dunno, do you think maybe it is overlooked because it’s trivial? Or silly, even?

Anyway, a King’s sociology prof, one Joseph Michalski, has apparently ‘co-led’ a ‘study’ to find out the incidence of ‘sibling violence’.

I went to the King’s website and found Michalski’s info. Sadly, one cannot find there any actual details of said study, only that it has been funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council. Perfectly good federal tax dollars, in other words.

That means that all I can judge this by is what is written in the Freeps.

One thing that is written is that ‘Michalski and his team interviewed 606 young adults aged 18 to 24 from all 10 provinces, asking them to recall their experiences of sibling violence and bullying between the ages of 12 and 18.’

I can imagine those interviews. ‘So, Bill, when did your brother stop beating you?’

More seriously, how were those 606 interviewees selected? No idea, and it matters. A lot. What we do know, and I have written often about this, is that this is a voluntary survey, hence the respondents are all, by definition, self-selected. They are thus not, and cannot be, a random sample of the population. Not possible. And, because we don’t know anything about the process by which they came to be interviewed, we don’t know how bad that self-selection bias might be.

Here’s the big finding, and you had to see this coming:

The study found 67 per cent of participants reported experiencing or perpetrating sibling violence. The figure was slightly higher among male participants, at 72 per cent, than among female participants, at 62 per cent.

My god, a 67% incidence of violence. The horror!

I am led to wonder, what counts as ‘violence’ in this survey?

Don’t worry, the prof is on it.

Michalski said the study does draw a line between typical sibling rivalry, such as roughhousing, and abuse.

And where is that line?

The most common forms of violence reported were what Michalski described as low-grade violence, involving some form of aggressive behaviour such as pushing or slapping that did not result in injury.

Right. Pushing that did not result in injury. That got classified as ‘violence’. Low-grade, but violence.

Man, I had a violent childhood. Well, 2/3 of us apparently did, right? Survey says!!

Std Testing

Written by Al Slivinski on July 8, 2026. Posted in Education, Standards.

If all the letters in that first word above were in caps, we would be discussing something very different here, but they are not……

This post will likely be a bit long, and it is about post-secondary education, but really about education in general. The facts below come from the US, but I will point out at the end the significance for PSE in Canada, too.

Writing this was triggered by an article in the NYT titled ‘A Great University Undermines Its Mission’ posted on July 6 and credited to the NYT editorial board.

The ‘great university’ referred to coyly in the title is in fact a university system, that of California. Just so all you Canadians and others understand, the state of California does have a pretty highly centralized PSE system. There are a whole whack of publicly funded universities in the state, and the UC system consists of 10 of them, including many you would likely recognize: Berkeley, UCLA (UC at Los Angeles) and UC San Diego. There is a second tier of state universities in California, the ‘Cal State system’ that includes places like Cal State Fullerton and San Jose State – 22 in all. The Cal State system is of lesser prestige and – generally speaking – easier for a student to get into. There is also a large set of community colleges in California, also state funded, and featuring mostly two-year associate degree or diploma programs.

What are not in any of these systems are private universities like USC (the University of Southern California) or Cal Tech, which is also private but subsists largely on government, aerospace and defense contracts. When I visited it some 20 years ago, it had the distinction of having more faculty members than undergrads. It is truly a place for rocket scientists – it houses the famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as well as a bunch of economists. And some historians, even. Go figure. Cal Tech is certainly elite, but is not part of the UC system.

Back to the UC system and the NYT editorial, it opens by noting that in 2019…..

‘….the University of California system appointed an 18-member committee to study the use of standardized tests in its undergraduate admissions. The committee included professors from all 10 campuses and a range of disciplines. They spent a year studying the issue and published a 225-page report full of evidence and recommendations.

The committee concluded that scores on the SAT and ACT, the main standardized tests for college admissions, did a better job measuring student readiness for college than high school grades. High test scores were particularly good at finding talented students from low-income families and underrepresented minority groups. For these reasons, the committee recommended the system continue to require applicants to submit SAT or ACT scores.

The university’s leaders disregarded the report.

The ‘university’s leaders’ are its Board of Regents, and they are the ones who ignored the report by declaring that these tests no longer be used for admission into the top-tier UC system.

The EB at the NYT, not exactly a haven for right-wing extremists, write about what has happened since that decision. I will just provide you with quotes from the editorial itself:

At the University of California, San Diego, a faculty group last year reported “a steep decline in the academic preparation” among entering students. Last fall, for example, nearly 12 percent of first-year U.C.S.D. undergraduates were not qualified to take pre-calculus, a low-level class, up from only 0.5 percent in 2020.

Reading and writing skills have also deteriorated, and professors say they must spend time teaching elementary skills. “After the SAT was dropped, I got students who could not write a sentence,” said Janet Sorensen, an English professor at Berkeley.

More than 1,500 science and mathematics professors, including the chairs of more than 60 departments, have signed a letter asking the university to reinstate the test requirement. More than 700 humanities and social sciences professors have signed a similar letter.

Why do these faculty want these tests again used for admissions? Below is a graph which shows the fundamental reason, which can be stated in a sentence:

Scores on these standardized tests are a better predictor of success at university than any other measure available, and in particular better than high school marks.

Note please that the students whose data is depicted on this graph includes only ‘students at highly selective colleges’ where colleges is what Americans call universities. But those 10 UC campuses are supposed to be precisely that. The Cal State system is there for less highly-achieving students.

However, let me show you another graph from the article:

You can see the caption, and no comparative statistics, not even correlation coefficients, are provided by the EB. Although I will grant that I am sure that any such stats would clearly show that the SAT test is better than HS grades at predicting grades in university, it can hardly be said that HS grades are worthless in predicting university grades. They are just not as good, as indicated loosely by the tighter adherence to the line in the first graph.

Fine, fair enough. And, the reason the NYT published this editorial now is that the UC Board is about to meet to consider reinstating the use of these tests in admissions. The EB is trying, as EBs do, to convince them to do so. Again, fair enough.

But what the editorial ignores is the elephant in the story. If it is true that the UC system is admitting thousands of students unable to do even pre-university calculus, or to write a sentence, then is not this story really about what is going on in California secondary schools? Clearly HS students in California are graduating with grades good enough to get into the UC system even though they don’t know basic math and writing.

Reinstating the tests is a solution to this only in the sense that the HS teachers cannot influence the marks their students get on the SAT, other than by doing a better job of teaching them what they need to know to succeed in university – which is what the UC profs want.

I suspect all those distressed UC system professors understand this, and understand that it is out of their power to get the High Schools to do a better job, so they turn to the reinstatement of the tests to do it for them. If a HS finds that many of its ‘top’ students are bombing on the SAT, and so not gaining admission to the UC institutions, parents with aspirations for their kids will get upset, and maybe things will change at the HS level in California. Maybe.

Opponents of standardized tests, including those given to students in the Ontario primary and secondary educational system, are wont to complain that they force teachers to ‘teach to the test’ rather than teaching important knowledge and skills. Well, ok, but in a system in which students are being taught little, ‘teaching to the test’ is a big improvement, as it means something is being taught.

Let me say that I hold no reverence for standardized tests. Their one advantage is that they cannot be gamed by HS teachers, which is why such teachers – and their unions – are mostly against them. They provide a (admittedly imperfect) audit of how good a job those teachers are doing.

I began my career as a University instructor back when the Ontario secondary system still had a requirement that to go to University a student had to complete Grade 13. It was their performance in that year that determined which, if any, Ontario university they could enter.

Coming from the US, as I did, I was (happily) astounded at how good and well-prepared were the students who entered UWO. However that system worked, it was operated with integrity, and did a good job of sorting students out by ability. You don’t need an SAT test, you just need a system that imposes genuine academic standards, and it seems that right now the UC professors see the SAT and ACT tests as their only route to that happening.

Of course, Grade 13 disappeared in Ontario long ago, and I spent 40 plus years witnessing the decline in the abilities and preparation of students at UWO.

That all being said, let me point out something I came across after reading this NYT editorial. It is a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in the US, which means, I hasten to add, that it has yet to be peer-reviewed.

It’s titled REASSESSING THE ROLE OF STANDARDIZED TESTS IN UNIVERSITY ADMISSIONS, is written by four economists (yea, those folks) and it seems to offer a counter to what the EB and the committee of seven years ago in the UC system had to say.

I have not yet read the entire paper, it’s a long one, but in its Abstract is included the following:

Consistent with past work, we find that GRE scores substantially improve predictions of first-year grades relative to predictions based on GPA alone. However, when these predictions are used to inform admissions decisions, we find that test scores only modestly improve the expected academic quality of admitted students.

The GRE is a standardized test used to screen students who already have undergrad degrees and are applying to a graduate program. So, this is not the same kettle of fish as discussed above; the students in question have already succeeded in some kind of undergrad program. And, the authors also note that their study is confined to a decade’s worth of applicants to one master’s program in public policy. (I confess to being suspicious of all PP programs.) Still, there is reason to have a look at this recent research – you can be sure I will – and report back.

Based on my experience as a faculty member, I think the overall problem is the refusal of those throughout the education system in Canada and the US to maintain standards. The inflation of HS grades in Ontario during my career was massive and unmistakable, and Ontario universities have never used standardized tests of any kind in their admission decisions. Basing university admission on HS marks has led to the same problems that the UC professoriate is complaining about – that is my strong opinion.

Stay tuned.

Stop, I Say

Written by Al Slivinski on July 4, 2026. Posted in Government, Standards.

If you live in London, you may have noticed that our Traffic Bosses, whose motto is ‘The only safe vehicle is a stopped vehicle’, have instituted a new regime at many of the traffic-light-controlled intersections in our fair city.

To wit; when the light turns from green to yellow to red for traffic going in one direction, the light controlling the cross direction also remains red for some time. I would guess for 3 or 4 seconds, the lights are red for all traffic. It’s the city’s version of ‘Nobody move!’

One can easily imagine that the reason for this is to prevent anyone who runs through a red light from causing mayhem.

A good friend of mine, a person of high moral standards, is deeply offended by this. She sees it as yet another example of society stooping to accommodate law-breakers. She would, I think, prefer to see red-light-runners dragged from their cars and hounded through the street, being pelted by over-ripe fruit and rocks.

I understand that sentiment, and share it to some degree, but I am a prisoner of my own training, and so am led to point out a presumably unintended consequence. Once the kind of person who is inclined to run red lights figures out that this new regime reigns at our controlled intersections, the fact that it gives them an extra 3 or 4 seconds during which they can safely run a red light means we are going to see more, not less, red-light-running. Humans are immensely adaptable, a fact which bureaucrats of all stripes seem incapable of appreciating.

I admit this situation will be temporary, as it is evident to me that the ultimate goal of our city’s traffic-engineering department is to have every intersection in London become either a four-way stop or controlled by traffic lights with automated red light cameras.

Traffic Engineering Heaven, that will be.

Oh Dear, Keir

Written by Al Slivinski on July 3, 2026. Posted in Politics.

Some of you may recall that I wrote a looong post a while back about what was going on in the UK politics-wise. I suggested that maybe they were going to end up with a right-leaning populist government being led by Nigel Farage of Reform UK. The first step in the suggested timeline would be the defeat of current PM Keir Starmer as Labour Party leader by another Labour MP.

Well, ol’ Keir was kind enough to speed that along for me recently by declaring he would resign as Labour Party leader and PM by September.

We will see what happens next, but this brief article is not about that, but about Mr. Starmer himself. You can go on X yourself here and see a video of part of a speech he recently gave.

All I really want to say about it is that any official who stands in front of any group of people and – with a straight face – says this:

“I’m really proud that we’ve got the gayest parliament, I don’t think just of all time—anywhere in the world. I don’t think there’s any parliament that is gayer than this one.”

….is just not connected in any way to the real world. And, therefore, should not be in charge of anything remotely important.

Unprecedented: But Why?

Written by Al Slivinski on July 2, 2026. Posted in Government.

I don’t much like writing about Donald Trump. Too much is written already, and anyone who has not yet understood what an utterly unprincipled ass he is, is not going to be swayed by anything anyone writes, including me.

The question of what really allowed him to become US President twice is an important one, to be sure, but everyone has a different view on that matter. I mostly blame the Democratic party. Whatever.

I am here going to write something that is at least partly about DJT, but I am doing it because of an editorial in The Free Press about him, in which I learned something that surprised me greatly. I aim to inform here, and I suspect my readers will be just as surprised about it as was I.

The Free Press editorial of which I speak is titled Trump’s Art of the Self-Deal, is indeed credited to The Editorial Board at TFP, and has the subtitle: ‘There is no modern parallel for the scale and shamelessness with which the president is enriching himself in office’

It is dated July 1. Canada Day. There’s an irony for you.

Some quotes from the editorial, to set up why the editors attached that subtitle to what they wrote.

‘…President Donald Trump’s financial disclosure report showing that he had reaped at least $2.2 billion in gains since returning to the White House, largely due to the cryptocurrency businesses set up by his sons Eric and Donald Jr.’

‘Trump’s financial report shows, for instance, that his accounts executed nearly 4,000 trades during just a three-month period, many involving companies that need to stay in the administration’s good graces. That is practically the definition of conflict of interest.’

‘Whatever the Bidens may or may not have done, it pales in comparison to the influence peddling that has taken place during Trump’s second term. A president who pardons a convicted money launderer who helps him make money in the crypto business is sullying the presidency, as is a president who gives a foreign nation access to advanced chips after one of its top officials buys $2 billion worth of his family’s stablecoins.’

There is plenty more like that in the editorial. It also references a story in the NYT that provides more details on what DJT and his family have been doing to earn cash during his second term.

OK, so now let me get to the informative bit from the article I mentioned. I quote from the editorial:

‘As Trump himself has pointed out, the federal conflict of interest laws that apply to executive branch officials exempt the president and vice president. No one paid much attention to that fact before Trump because no one had to.’

Holy Shit. The laws exempt the Prez and VP? Why, for godsakes?

Well apparently they do, and the NYT article in particular goes to some lengths to document what previous presidents have done to avoid appearances of conflict of interest during their terms of office. Bush Jr sold off his stake in the Texas Rangers MLB team, LBJ’s wife transferred her radio and TV stations to an outside trust, and Jimmy Carter did the same with his peanut farm.

Farms get federal subsidies, TV and radio is federally regulated, and the MLB had (and maybe still has) a federal anti-trust exemption. You get the picture. Those previous presidents apparently wanted to avoid any appearance of conflicts of interest while they were in office.

DJT does not. And, it seems he is breaking no laws.

Bloody hell.

AC For Me, But Not For Thee

Written by Al Slivinski on July 1, 2026. Posted in Standards.

It’s Monday morning, June 29, and the Environment Canada website that I check for the local weather and forecast currently features this:

I think the tiny ! over on the left is a cute touch.

Anyway, a ‘heat dome’ is about to settle over Southwestern Ontario, and the media are predictably all aflutter over it. They have for some time been reporting in breathless prose about the heat dome over western Europe, but this local event is much better for them, of course. Coincidentally, I came across a story on the Politico website about that European event, dated June 26, and titled:

EU Commission HQ forced to shut down air-conditioning amid heatwave

The EU Commission HQ is in Brussels, definitely under that heat dome.

So – Question One. ‘forced’? By who or what? Some loopy regulation? That is possible, as I also came across a report in The Telegraph that local planning council enforcement officers had forced some London UK homeowners to remove AC units they had installed. They were judged to be ‘unjustified’.

The Politico article is rather murky on this Question. The sub-headline is ‘As Brussels bakes, the Berlaymont building’s AC stops working.’

Stops working? It shuts down when the temp gets too high?

I doubt that, in part because the Politico article also includes this quote:

Staff working at the Berlaymont building received a text at midday, reading: “BERL — URGENT — Due to extreme weather conditions, forced shut down of air cooling system from floor 1 to 7 for the rest of the day.”

The 13-story building is home to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, her 26 commissioners and about 3,000 staff. Von der Leyen works on the 13th floor, and most of her commissioners’ offices are housed on floors eight or above.

Now we get it, right? The peons on floors 1 to 7 were ‘forced’ to go without AC. The important people working on 8 and above – AC still works for them.

A worker from those lower floors is quoted in the article as saying ‘It’s like feudalism’.

At least they didn’t say it’s like fascism.

The article’s last sentence is yet another piece of opaque nonsense:

The European Parliament has also faced blackouts this week due to energy consumption from cranking up its cooling system.

So that sentence literally says the EU Parliament cranked up its cooling system, which then increased energy consumption – I’m good with the logic so far – and that in turn caused blackouts.

Sorry, that last bit does not compute. What is meant by ‘blackout’? And how could that be caused by increased energy consumption by the EUP? Are we to believe that the EUP shut down the grid by cranking up its own cooling system? An impressive cooling system, if so.

That is 21^st century reporting for you.

Stay tuned

Back when I was working, I would indeed be in my office in the summer, and on hot days like the ones that are forecast for this coming week, we would get emails saying that ‘due to the heat, the AC will be cycling down in mid-afternoon’, or words to that effect.

Bureaucratic logic – when the heat is the highest, we will cut down on AC. The claim seemed to be that this generated savings for the university through some agreement with the local electricity provider, London Hydro. So, again, bureaucracy. The U would rather save money than provide a reasonable working environment for its employees. Our AO would often send our underpaid staff home if it got too hot in the office. My faculty colleagues would just stay home.

My question then was always – ‘I wonder what the temp is like over in the President-and-Poobah offices?’

I await the arrival of further UWO Admin emails this coming week…

1. Later on the same day that I wrote the above, no email from the UWO bosses, but I did note this on the Environment Canada website:

So, it’s an orange warning, now. I am guessing that indicates greater danger. Or something…….

2. Ok, it is now Wed, July 1, Canada Day. No emails regarding AC have come from the university admin here on the third day of the ‘heat dome’, even though the temp at noon is already 31C. I am guessing that it finally dawned on someone in the admin that sending emails to your employees telling them you are cutting down on the AC to save money just pissed said employees off. I don’t go into the office anymore, so I don’t know what the temp has been like in my old building during all this.

On the other hand, I did get an email from AlertWesternU, the hapless automated system that warns UWO people about dangers of all kinds.

This email had the subject line: Heat.

The actual content of the email is copied directly from the Environment Canada website. It is what comes up if you click on that orange thingie I pasted in above. Go, AlertWesternU, what would we do without you cutting and pasting to keep us safe?

Said content includes all kinds of insightful advice like:

Close blinds, or shades and open windows if outside is cooler than inside.

Turn on air conditioning, use a fan, or move to a cooler area of your living space.

And my personal favourite:

Never leave people, especially children, or pets inside a parked vehicle. Check the vehicle before locking to make sure no one is left behind.

Yes, indeed, no child left behind.

3. A final take on this, circling back around to AC in Europe. My thanks to the WSJ for reporting on this one. The article starts with this:

France has been broiling in a record heat wave, yet Paris Mayor Emmanuel Grégoire declared last week that “individual air conditioning is a scourge,” and “public authorities must act quickly” to prevent a rush to install home AC units.

I can’t see even the generally hopeless Mayor of London, Josh Morgan, trying that one out.

However, the Mayor of Paris left it to the deputy mayor to suss out the cause of French overheating:

“OMG, this is so rich!” Paris Deputy Mayor Audrey Pulvar wrote online late last week, responding to American criticism. “As the second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, you bear a significant responsibility for global warming and the consequences we, in France, are experiencing. Your cities, ‘90% air-conditioned,’ are not unrelated to this.”

Note that she did not blame Donald Trump. I admit that I cannot help wondering if the offices of the Paris Mayor and staff are air-conditioned.

No Votes for You

Written by Al Slivinski on June 27, 2026. Posted in Politics.

Readers will know that I have an abiding interest in elections, stemming partly from my academic career, but also from my ongoing interest in how they work in contemporary democracies. This interest has become very local, as the City of London will hold a municipal election in October of this year, and a number of candidates have already declared themselves for the offices of mayor and city councillor.

I am of the view that London is currently being terribly run, and so will not vote for the incumbent mayor, Josh Morgan, who is indeed standing for office again. One Susan Stevenson, who is a councillor in the current city council, is also running again, but this time for mayor, and unless something drastic changes over the next few months, I expect she will get my vote. She is not my councilwoman, but she is, so far as I can see, the only councillor who tries to stand up for the interests of her working constituents against the utterly misguided policies of Josh and the other councillors. Her ward is one of those most harmed by homelessness and crime, and she spoke out against the current view that lawbreakers should not be incarcerated no matter how often they offend, and that it was evil to remove drug-addled street people from the sidewalks in front of businesses.

I don’t think she has a hope in hell of winning, and the reason for my belief is one of the reasons for this post.

I start with this fact. Turnout in the 2022 London municipal election was 25% of registered voters. That means it was somewhat less than 25% of those eligible to vote, because not everyone registers, even though it is an incredibly easy thing to do in Canada. There is every reason to expect that percentage will be similar in this 2026 election.

Hold that thought, and let us travel now to the Great State of New York, in the US of A. They just had a primary election for positions in the US House. House members are elected for only a two-year term, and the next such election will happen this coming November. The primary elections are held to determine who will be the candidate in that November election from each of the Republican and Democratic parties. House members are each elected to represent a particular geographical district, just like MPs in our Parliament.

There has been a lot of hoopla in the US press about the fact that in districts that include NYC, Democratic candidates supported by mayor Mamdani of NYC won.

Let us then look at one of those candidates, a woman who has won the right to be the Democratic nominee for the 13^th New York State congressional district, which comprises Upper Manhattan and part of the Bronx in NYC. Note that as the Democratic nominee in that particular district, the probability that she loses the general election in November is effectively zero.

I here quote from The Free Press:

Her name is Darializa Avila Chevalier, a 32-year-old who has spent the last seven (!) years studying for a PhD in sociology at the City University of New York.

You read that right. She has been studying for her Soc PhD since she was 25, which necessarily means she spent (at least) the 4 years prior to that getting an undergraduate degree. In other words, Ms Chevalier has never had a job, and has spent most of her adult life in the warm cocoon of academia. She is, however, quite photogenic:

A social media post from 2020 has surfaced in which she called Joe Biden a rapist (not a senile rapist, apparently) along with another from 2021 in which she wrote ‘Fuck Kamala Harris’. (Ms Harris has not, so far as I know, replied to that.)

Ah, but we all say intemperate things in our youth, eh?

Ms Chevalier was interviewed by a team of NYC journalists in mid-June, just before the primary election. You can read the whole interview here if you like. She is on record as wishing to abolish prisons, so one of the reporters asked her what should happen to a guy who kills another guy. Apparently this reporter had been sitting in on a trial about exactly that event. Ms Chevalier gave a three paragraph answer that out-word-saladed anything Kamala ever put on the record. The reporter, noting that she had not actually answered the question, put it to her a second time, and here is what she said:

Well, this is what I’m saying is that when that happens, and as someone who has sat in so many courtrooms, to me, all of that is tragic. The fact that the murder happened is tragic. The fact that there was a circumstance in which that could even come to pass is tragic, and all of that is a reflection of systems that allowed that circumstance to be possible. And so, you know, I have always focused my attention on how do we create systems where that’s not even the possibility.

So, I guess she is going to go to Congress to work on building a system in which murders simply do not happen. Welcome to government, Ms. Chevalier.

How did this person get nominated?

The short answer to that question is that she got 32,790 votes, which was 49.4% of the votes cast, while the incumbent Democratic congressman, Adriano Espaillat, got 30,464, or 45.9%. A third candidate got another 2,340 votes, meaning the total votes cast in this district Democratic primary were 65,594.

News organizations in the 21^st century are little interested in digging up and reporting facts, so I did some digging and some ciphering on my own, and came up with the following facts. The numbers are solid, and I think my calculations make sense. Judge for yourself.

The population of that Congressional district, according to the US census bureau, was 747,000 in 2024, of which some 20% were too young to vote, leaving a voting-age population of about 597,000. Now, not all of those people are eligible to vote, as some will be non-citizens, and some will be disqualified by virtue of a criminal record or not having lived in the district until very recently. So, at a guess, some 450-500 thousand people in the district were eligible to vote, and since this is a highly Democratic district, let’s say 60% of those could be registered as Democrats, if they bothered to register at all. Registering to vote in the US is rather more work than it is in Canada, so many do not bother. None the less, that leaves some 270-300 thousand people who could have, if they’d made the effort, voted in that 13^th district Congressional Democratic primary. Only 65,000 did, at best 25% of that potential number.

So, 25% of the possible Democratic primary voters in NY’s 13^th Congressional district have decided, by a 49/46 percent margin, that Darializa Avila WordSalad, Sociology PhD student extraordinaire, should also be their party’s candidate for Congress – a seat she is almost certain to win.

Back to Canada. I had electricians in my house for much too long last month, but when tradesmen are in your home making your life miserable you end up talking to them, largely in self-defense. One, named Gerald, let out that he never votes, because all politicians are the same, and your vote does not matter.

I admit ruefully that I essentially agree with him. Your vote does not matter, not because all politicians are the same, but because whether or not you show up at the polling booth will have no effect on the outcome of any election, whether in London, Ontario or NY’s 13th district. And, we all have other important things we want to do with the time it takes to vote.

So, we get 25% or less turnout in elections, and we get Josh Morgan as Mayor of London and Ms WordSalad as a member of the US House of Representatives.

Back to Ms Stevenson for mayor of London. In adulthood she not only had a job, she was an accountant. I am confident that this means that she is not intimidated by arithmetic, nor does she think that it is an instrument of oppression. I think familiarity with arithmetic should be a basic requirement for holding any elected office.

Although I think she has no hope of victory, I will support her in the small ways that I can. I will donate to her campaign, although there are strict limits on how much I can give her. I will put one of her signs on my lawn, but I looked at the City by-law regarding campaign signage (actually I looked at the pdf summary, which was itself 24 pages long) and learned I will be allowed to put up only one sign, and only a rather small one at that.

However, the reason she has no hope of winning is that no matter what I do, the usual 25% will turn out to vote, and in London that will mean that the actual set of voters will see over-representation by the woke, the university types, the teachers union faithful, and those who do not live downtown or in neighborhoods full of the homeless and drug-addled. (In case I failed to mention it, current mayor Josh Morgan has never had a real job, either: university student council president, then some hard-to-describe job at UWO, then elected to city council.)

This is The Paradox of Democracy. Average Gerald is absolutely right in believing that his/her vote does not count, so the electorate is made up of those who get a personal charge out of voting and politics. Those people are not at all representative of the population at large. Hence, we see ourselves governed by those who think that getting rid of prisons, letting people shit on the sidewalk and refusing to incarcerate lawbreakers are all noble, progressive ideas.

The Revenge of the Lanyard Class, I guess.

And….I have no idea of how to change this.

Clueless and Special

Written by Al Slivinski on June 27, 2026. Posted in Standards.

I read Andrew Gelman’s Stats blog regularly because he is one of the few academics I know about who spends space and effort calling out academic fraud and bullshit. That being the case, he is no more clued in about his utter isolation from the world in which most of us live than any other academic. Academics rarely realize how unlike the rest of the world is the environment in which they operate, and they tend to go even further and believe that academia, whatever its faults, is truly ‘special’- in a good way.

A case in point. Gelman’s last post was about some white collar criminals who were likely going to get away with fraudulently obtaining millions of dollars, due to the corruption in the Trump Justice Department. The lesson from this Gelman wants to focus on, however, is that ‘getting justice can require a lot of effort’.

Ok, Andrew.

He goes on to describe a past situation in which he, as a working political scientist, wrote a long letter (he included the entire text in his post) to The American Political Science Association to point out that they had given a prestigious award to a book that had been revealed to be plagiarized. In a big way. Not just some paragraphs, but in fact largely stolen. Shame on the APSA, but what’s interesting is Gelman’s take on it.

He got no answer from the APSA until he contacted them for a third time, at which point they said ‘Well you did not file a formal complaint, so we cannot do anything’.

Really, APSA? Cannot do anything?

Prof Gelman then writes:

Fair enough. I didn’t think it would be right for me to file the complaint myself, given that I’m not at all knowledgeable about this area of political science.

Um, you said it was plagiarized. What expertise is needed? What do those letters after your name mean, exactly? He further notes that he thinks it ‘unfair’ that the book full of plagiarism got an award, and the books from which the material was stolen did not.

I would agree with that. Then he writes this, and I quote again:

Anyway, my point is that it takes work to pursue these things, and it’s more my inclination to point out the problem than to go through the political and administrative steps needed to rectify the problem.

I’m not dissing “the political and administrative steps”–I have a lot of respect for people who can do these things!–it’s just not something that I’m good at.

There you go. The Ivy League Prof is just not good at those political and administrative things, so taking the time to turn the long letter he had in any case already written into a formal complaint? Not his thing.

Wow.

It gets better. Many of Gelman’s readers commented on this post, and the discussion in the comments took a number of interesting turns. One commenter noted that he had seen a story from the AP in which is reported that the US National Park Service has backed Trump’s story that it was vandals who caused the water in the Washington DC reflecting pool to turn green. The commenter writes ‘I’m saddened that I can’t trust the US National Park Service either’.

Gelman responds as follows:

I feel the same way. When Harvard professors lie and cheat, sure, whatever, they’re trying to climb the greasy pole. I’d expect better from Park Service employees, for sure.

Yea, right. Those Harvard professors, one can understand that they are trying to climb that greasy academic ladder, so it’s no wonder they do fraudulent research, or plagiarize others’ work. I mean – whatever, eh?

But NPS employees? Their bad behaviour is surely beyond the pale. I mean, what could possibly happen if they didn’t go along with Trump’s story? They get fired from their piddly little jobs? What is that compared to not getting tenure at Harvard?

That’s an academic for you, and it is, I suspect, all the worse if they are Ivy League. Utterly clueless about the world, and utterly clueless as to just how clueless they are.

The Puritans of Massachusetts

Written by Al Slivinski on June 20, 2026. Posted in Culture, Popular attitudes, Standards.

One never knows what sort of stories one might encounter in the Wall Street Journal. This week I came across one with the title:

Cigars, a Canceled Lacrosse Season and the Scandal Rocking a Massachusetts Town

It seems some young lads gathered for a photo on a Massachusetts beach in celebration of their high school graduation. However – those lads had cigars in their mouths. And, some of those lads had medals draped over their graduation robes. Those medals were the result of being on the Ipswich High lacrosse team. And, some clueless parent got their hands on this picture and – yep, you guessed it, posted it on Facebook. Took it down fast, apparently, but – too late. A local Puritan saw it, and reported it to the school.

There were six fellows from the lacrosse team in the photo, and, to quote the WSJ, ‘administrators suspended all six from a playoff game two days later for violating state athletic association rules against tobacco use.’

Of course they did. One local resident, echoing Puritans everywhere, is quoted thusly:

“Kids have to learn the consequences when they do something wrong,” she said. “You have to abide by the rules. It just takes one slip [to] ruin everything.”

I absolutely agree that kids have to learn that there will be consequences if they do harm to others.

Another quote from the article:

The digital trail triggered a district investigation that included interviews with students and parents. Authorities said they leaned on the athletic association’s strict chemical health policy, which is incorporated into the Ipswich Student-Athlete Handbook.

Yes, a full investigation was triggered. Lots of well-paid people put time and effort into ascertaining that indeed, those lacrosse players had smoked stogies. And, having determined that they had, well this violated a ‘strict chemical health policy’.

May the Lord deliver us from strict chemical health policies.

There is more, too sad to tell. Some parents jumped in and apparently lied, saying the cigars were actually made of clove, and produced a receipt to show that’s what had been bought. Bogus receipt, it seems. A lacrosse Dad went to the principal’s office, the local cop was called – no fisticuffs, no damage, fortunately. One local is quoted as saying that a cigar is a long-standing HS graduation ritual in Ipswich. Too bad about that chemical health policy.

The battle continues in the little town on social media, naturally.

A final quote from the story: apparently from a social media post:

“The biggest villain in this story has to be the parent that posted the pics to Facebook.”

No. The ‘biggest villain’ is whoever ran to the authorities with those photos after they were posted, and made a stink. No doubt they did this anonymously, so no one but their righteous self and the authorities knows who they are.

That posting parent? Maybe ‘most clueless’.

It is the 21^st century, you know? Impossible to imagine any parent could not see down the road to where that posting of the photo(s) was likely to lead. The Puritans are everywhere. Always have been, but now they have the internet as a nice complement to their flaming torches.

A Comparison

Written by Al Slivinski on June 20, 2026. Posted in Language, Politics.

I recently read through for the second time Victor Davis Hanson’s 2017 book The Second World Wars, a book I have mentioned here previously. It’s a good 600 pages and well-written, so well worth a second read if you like that sort of book, as I do. It is not a history of WWII, but rather more of a post-mortem. What decisions were made, by who, and were they wise at the time – or not, and did they turn out well – or not.

I have noticed on the second reading that VDH is slightly repetitive, so it could probably have been less than 500 pages with some tougher editing, but that is a minor complaint. It is hugely interesting and I have learned a lot from it.

This article is not really about that book, however. It is about one small thing in it, in a chapter titled Supreme Command, which looks at all the major wartime national leaders. How they came to decisions, what those decisions were, and their overall strengths and weaknesses, as seen by VDH, looking back from 2017.

Before I tell you the bits I found interesting, a caution. Ever since he entered presidential politics, more people than anyone could count have referred to Donald Trump as either ‘a fascist’ or ‘another Hitler’.

I want to put on the record my view that all such references are bullshit. People who say or write that typically have no idea what is fascism, and comparing him to Hitler is a way of saying they think he is an asshole. They just think ‘fascist’ and ‘Hitler’ is a worse label than ‘asshole’, and so they go with that. I am happy to agree that, based on the evidence I see, Donald Trump is an asshole. If assholes were disqualified from office, it would be hard to fill most government positions.

Ok, that said, I am going to quote here some sentences from Hanson’s discussion of Hitler as a leader in his book.

Without a moral sense, Hitler assumed that those weaker than himself were ethical only in word as a substitute for strength in deed. For someone who bragged about willpower and the unconquerable spirit, Hitler counted only on the power of things, not of ideas and human emotions.

Then later on the same page:

Hitler also suffered from the symptoms of the autodidact: superficial knowledge without depth or audit, energized by a forceful character dulled by a lack of subtlety.

An autodidact is someone who is self-taught, but it is the symptoms of that which I see so clearly in the current president of the USA. Superficial knowledge, no depth of understanding of anything, including the US government, and no audit, meaning no internal (or external, for that matter) checks on what he believes to be true.

A forceful character? Sure, that’s what made him successful on TV, but a lack of subtlety? There should be a photo of DJT in the dictionary next to the entry for ‘subtlety; antonym’.

There’s my thoughtful Hitler/DJT comparison for you, but it is about personality, not political beliefs or world view. Had DJT and Hitler ever met I predict they would have hated one another. And I add as a footnote that this is indeed my comparison. VDH never mentions Trump once in his book. He has more interesting and important fish to fry.

Accidental AI(A-Eye)

Written by Al Slivinski on June 20, 2026. Posted in Standards.

For those interested in the world of ‘can’t make shit like this up’, I point you to an article in the NYT from May 19 (I know, old news, but I just saw it). It reports that a book titled The Future of Truth, just published this May, includes a bunch of quotes that were either misattributed by AI or completely fabricated by……go ahead, guess. Yes! By AI!!

Said book’s author is one Steven Rosenbaum, who appears to be an actual person, and before I tell you what he had to say about all this, let me first tell you how the NYT describes Mr. Rosenbaum:

Mr. Rosenbaum is a well-known convener in the media industry. He is the executive director of the Sustainable Media Center, a nonprofit that, according to its mission statement, is dedicated to giving “a new generation of media consumers” and creators “ownership of their increasingly media-centric lives.” The center has drawn together media and technology luminaries for in-person gatherings and online interviews.

He’s a ‘convener’. A well-known one. He brings people together, nonprofitably, and then they do gatherings and interviews. Clearly a step up from being an ‘influencer’, don’t you think?

Here’s some of what nonprofit-convener Rosenbaum had to say about the fake quotes:

The Times asked Mr. Rosenbaum about the quotes on Sunday and Monday. On Monday night, Mr. Rosenbaum acknowledged in a statement that the book had “a handful of improperly attributed or synthetic quotes” and said that he had started his own investigation.

He said that the inclusion of the incorrect quotes was an accident and that he had “no intention of fabricating any viewpoints” while writing the book.

There you go. It was an accident, and the author of the book in which these accidents happened has started an investigation. I know I’m re-assured.

The book was published by Ben Bella Books, for which Simon and Schuster is the distributor. You’ve probably heard of S&S. The NYT could get no comment on this accident from anyone from either of those two companies. Of course not.

(AI-Generated Bull)

I should say that nothing could persuade me to part with good money for any book with the title ‘The Future of Truth’. A title like that fairly screams ‘Lotta bullshit here’. And I would have felt that way before learning that the book contained ‘accidental AI’ bullshit.

And, here’s the thing. I bet this article appearing in the NYT did not hurt sales of that book at all.

Summer Jobs

Written by Al Slivinski on June 13, 2026. Posted in Economics.

The Free Press this week had an article – a memoir, actually – by one of its writers, recalling her youthful summer jobs, largely in the restaurant industry. She waxed on about what they had taught her about people and life, and I could only nod as I read. My first job at 15 at MacDonalds – which is sortof like a restaurant – as well as later ones delivering furniture and working in a couple of factories, had a lot to do with my growing up. Or so it seems here from the perspective of my 70s.

That article was titled ‘The Death of the Summer Job’, and one of its last sentences is ‘I’m sorry for the teens who won’t get these experiences.’

My impression is that teens working at summer jobs is indeed a disappearing phenomenon, but on the other hand, she also writes ‘A third of teens—roughly five to six million of them—will still find jobs this summer…’, referring, of course to the US.

This got me wondering, retired economist that I am – is the summer job truly disappearing?

As it happens, there had appeared an Opinion column in the WSJ previously in the week by another economist, one Roland Fryer, titled ‘Why Teenagers Stopped Working in the Summer’. It is teasingly subtitled ‘For the most part not because they couldn’t find work. They found better opportunities instead.’

Before I try to explain what Fryer lays out (it is a bit complicated) let me add a few details about the author. He is indeed an academic economist, with a position at Harvard, no less. That would often be enough for me to ignore him, but he is not your typical Harvard econ prof. For one thing he is black, which does not really make him unusual at Harvard of all places, but he is also what one might call a black sheep. In 2018 Harvard barred him from his own research lab due to accusations of sexual harassment. What really happened there? I cannot say. Fryer eventually published a public apology for having “allowed, encouraged and participated” in a collegial atmosphere at EdLabs that included “off-color jokes”, which makes it all seem like yet another tempest in a teapot. Yet, he was suspended without pay by Harvard for two years, before being allowed back on the faculty in 2021.

He also published a paper in 2019 in The Journal of Political Economy, one of my profession’s most esteemed outlets, concluding that although African Americans and Hispanics are more likely to experience police use of force than whites, they were not more likely to be shot by police than whites in any given interaction with police. This generated controversy, to be sure.

So, a black sheep in several senses, but he now writes occasional columns in the WSJ on economic issues, and this one caught my eye.

Here, as clearly as I can manage, seems to be the gist of what he asserts. The data is all from the US, as usual, and the unfortunate thing to me is that Fryer says nothing about from where any of this data comes. So, I can say nothing about its reliability. That said, I have no reason to doubt its accuracy.

First, he notes that on the surface, we have this –

The classic summer job has been disappearing for nearly half a century, ever since teen labor-force participation peaked at 57.9% in 1979.

I note in passing that all my summer jobs came before that, as did likely most of yours. I was finishing my PhD by ’79.

However, Fryer points out in this quote that it is more complicated than it seems.

The share of 16- to 19-year-olds holding a job has fallen by a third since 1979, from 48.5% to 31.1%. Yet the teenage unemployment rate—the share of teens looking for work who can’t find it—is lower today, at 14%, than the 16% registered in 1979.

To get what he is saying, you need to understand something fundamental about what is meant by ‘the unemployment rate’ in general. The rate mentioned above for teens of 14% means that 14% of teens who are looking for a job cannot find one.

This is key to Fryer’s article. Fewer teens are looking for jobs than did in the past. And he has a specific explanation for that, which goes like this.

Imagine dividing teens into two groups. Those whose parents are relatively well off, and who are therefore likely to go to university, and those whose parents are of lesser means, and likely to enter the work force after high school.

Fryer says the first group is indeed unlikely to hold summer jobs these days, and the second group is likely to be looking for them, but less likely to find them. Why? Here is point one:

The wage premium a college degree brings roughly doubled between the late 1970s and 2000, from about 40% to nearly 80%. The hour a 16-year-old once spent folding shirts at the Gap now carries a much higher opportunity cost; spend it instead on anything that bends the arc toward college, and the lifetime payoff is significantly larger.

If you are someone who might go to university, it pays to spend your time in pursuits that will increase the probability you get into one, and the better the university you enter the better for you. Get SAT tutoring, go to science camp, do an unpaid internship to meet the right people. Thus, it is these relatively well-off kids who are no longer really interested in the classic ice-cream-shop summer job, and that is what is driving the fact that fewer teens are looking for summer jobs.

Point two. For the kids lower down the family socioeconomic ladder, that summer job in the ice cream shop still has all the value it did for people from my generation. Fryer writes that he worked bagging groceries in Lewisville, Texas at 15, and that the structure that job gave his life, along with the spare cash, were things a kid in his situation (abusive dad, absent mom) desperately needed. ‘That minimum-wage job might have been one of the most valuable things that ever happened to me.’

The only things those kids from the lower group have going for them these days is that they are competing with fewer teens from the upper group for the jobs that are still out there.

His bottom line:

The vanishing summer job is two experiences buried in one statistic. For most American teenagers, the decline is a rational bet on a future that rewards their time elsewhere. For the kid I once was, the same number means the opposite.

So, yes, says Fryer, the summer job as a life experience is disappearing, or at least shrinking, but the reason for and implications of that for young’ns depends on where on the socioeconomic ladder their family resides. That, he writes, is in itself concerning, as those lower-class kids are looking for summer jobs in an economy in which the number of such available is in fact shrinking. This is thanks in no small part to a rising minimum wage. That has led MacDonald’s and other such potential teen employers to find ways to do business with fewer teenagers and more machinery.

There is another aspect of the teenage job market about which Fryer says nothing, and on which I have only anecdotal evidence, largely gathered from people I know who own businesses in the restaurant and retail sectors. They tell me often that the teenagers (and twenty-somethings) they do hire are to a distressing extent overwhelmed by the requirements of retail and restaurant work. They are constantly off for reasons of ‘mental incapacity’ and show little initiative or industry when they do show up. One of the business owners I have talked with on this topic said to me that ‘None of these young people seem to be well-adjusted human beings.’

I leave those impressions – which is all they are – with you, as I seek to find more solid info about this.

Postscript

That original article mentioned above in The Free Press included a lot of commentary by readers, much of it nostalgic reminiscence about their own summer job experiences. However, I do find that Free Press reader comments are in general more articulate and wise than those in either the WSJ or NYT. Here is an excerpt from one such TFP comment that I think is very well put and right on the money –

When I was young, a summer job was a temporary arrangement whereby adults paid teenagers a modest sum to make mistakes with expensive equipment. This was considered educational. Today we have decided that education should occur only under the supervision of certified professionals armed with background checks, reflective vests, and a 47-page safety manual.

I can say only ‘Amen to that’.

Aesthetic Bankruptcy

Written by Al Slivinski on June 13, 2026. Posted in Standards.

There has been a lot written about DJT’s golden renovation of the White House’s Grand Ballroom, his putting up the infrastructure for a UFC event on the White House Lawn, and plans for a goddam Arch and yes – it is all appalling. Hugely so.

Yet, yet, I hasten to add that most members of the lanyard class – and DJT is surely one, although I expect he is not required to wear one when in the WH – might as well be from the planet Klingon in their attitudes about what constitutes an appropriate use of space, or of what might be aesthetically pleasing or uplifting for normal people.

As evidence, I offer below a photo I stole from the UK’s Guardian newspaper of the soon-to-open (June 19) Obama Presidential Center. Note that it is not called a library as with past such monuments. Likely it houses no books.

First, the caption the Guardian put under the photo:

Towering over a low-income area of Chicago, and wrapped in a speech that’s hard to decipher, this controversial monolith feels like a menacing sci-fi HQ. Is it a monument – or a mausoleum?

It cost just under $1B to build, by the way, showing that money does not buy beauty.

Also, if you visit it, at $US30 per admission, you can buy your very own replica in the gift shop:

I’m dying to know what one of those things costs, but could not find out.

The website for it is live, and yes, there are plenty of ‘Donate’ buttons to be found there.

https://www.obama.org/

I end with the Guardian’s very British take on all of this.

Lacking a royal family or a state religion, the US presidency has swelled to fill the void, transforming over the decades into a national personality cult, complete with its own secular temples to these powerful men.

The Lanyard Class

Written by Al Slivinski on June 6, 2026. Posted in Uncategorized.

Ever heard that term? I certainly had not, until I came across it in an article I was reading in one of my many news sources (I have honestly forgotten which one). You can read an entire learned disquisition on the concept here, but the definition is pretty clear and intuitive. Members of this class in the advanced countries are people whose occupations require them to wear a lanyard all or much of the time.

By that definition, I was indeed a member. I was only expected to wear a lanyard (containing my name and academic home and perhaps whether I had paid for a dinner) at certain times. Usually it was when I was at a conference somewhere, but also at my home institution, if attending any event that included people from across campus. Interestingly, at one point late in my working life, the Powers at UWO decreed that they would institute a regime in which all faculty, staff and students would have to wear a lanyard at all times on campus, which would contain a bar code that was the only way to open the doors on campus buildings.

Right. The stated reason for this absurdity was ‘security’, as though it was in any way possible to keep undesirable folks off of a 1120-acre campus. The proposal was really all about Control, and for once my faculty colleagues rebelled. Sadly, the argument that was most instrumental in stopping this absurdity was that wearing a lanyard was somehow particularly oppressive for marginalized folks – you know the ones.

For myself, I think for once I responded well to this initiative. I put a chair in the hallway outside of my office with a carboard box on it, and a sign on the wall with an arrow pointing at the box, and the caption ‘lanyards here’. Got a fair number of kudos for that.

One more lanyard story. One of the very first professional conferences I attended was the annual gathering of economists from all over the world known as the AEA meetings. [AEA = American Economic Association]. They were being held in San Francisco, and I was all of maybe 28 years old, having lived my whole life before joining the UWO faculty in the Midwest.

This was in the 80s, long before San Fran had relocated itself to the third ring of hell, and I was a bit starry-eyed about the whole affair. Big, sophisticated city, famous (to me) economists giving learned talks, it seemed very cool. But here is the only event I still remember from that conference. I was on a shuttle bus taking people between hotels (thousands attend these things) when I looked out the bus window and saw a San Fran cop lecturing a group of earnest young Asian folks. Grad students, judging by their ages, likely there interviewing for jobs. I picked up just from what I could see that the cop was telling them to remove their conference lanyards while walking around in the city. You do not want to identify yourself as a clueless tourist in any big city. A kind act by said cop, but the bus moved on before I could tell definitively whether they had taken his advice.

Ok, back to the lanyard class. First, although I suspect it is unnecessary, here’s a picture of the key device:

Another, earlier term for the people who populate this class would probably be ‘Managerial class’, except that sounds like it refers only to people who work in the corporate world. In fact the lanyard class comprises those who work in the non-profit (including educational) sector, in governments of all levels, and those who work in the professions, like law, health and accounting. Not coincidentally, I think, most of them are employed by some LBO or other.

I will mention one other recent attempt to categorize the same group of people, then tell you why I think this is a useful and perhaps important concept.

A sociologist named Mussa Al-Gharbi has coined the term ‘symbolic capitalist’ to denote what is – I think – essentially the same group of people. He thinks the important thing that distinguishes the class is that ‘symbolic’ thing. These people’s work involves working only with symbols. By that definition, I was a member of this class, too. I wrote papers and wrote lecture notes and evaluated what students and other faculty wrote. All of it in symbols, which is what words and math and numbers are. Symbols.

That part of his definition I am good with, it’s the ‘capitalist’ bit that I think is off mark. None of these people own any capital in the usual sense. They have what economists call ‘human capital’, a broad term intended to capture all of the skills, talents and abilities people have. However, carpenters and plumbers also have human capital, just of a different sort.

It is clear that another thing that all members of the lanyard class share is having spent a lot of time acquiring education. The only possible exception to that might be in the political world, where there are a few politicians kicking around without some sort of university degree. [Ontario’s Premier Doug Ford attended Humber College for two months before dropping out.] Even DJT has a BS in Economics from Penn, which perhaps says something about how hard it really is to acquire that Ivy-League credential.

Here is why I think this is a useful distinction. I paste in below some findings from a survey done by pollster Scott Rasmussen (in the USA) on the difference between the attitudes of ‘elites’ and average Americans on a variety of questions. The analysis defines an ‘elite’ as anyone having at least one post-graduate degree, earning at least $150,000 annually, and living in high-population density areas (more than 10,000 people per square mile in their zip code). So, this notion of elite would comprise just the most highly educated subset of the lanyard class. I have seen other surveys with similar results, but this one is illustrative. Here is a summary of what is in the report Rasmussen wrote about the results of this survey, which was done in 2023. It details some of the answers people in his elite group gave to various questions :

In a time when most Americans have suffered a loss of real take-home pay, 74% of elites say they are financially better off today than in the past, versus 20% of all Americans.
Nearly six in ten say there is too much individual freedom in America – double the rate of all Americans.
More than two-thirds (67%) favor rationing of vital energy and food sources to combat the threat of climate change.
In stark contrast to the rest of America, 70% of the Elites trust the government to “do the right thing most of the time.”
Two-thirds (67%) say teachers and other educational professionals should decide what children are taught rather than letting parents decide.
Somewhere between half and two-thirds favor banning things like SUVs, gas stoves, air conditioning, and non-essential air travel to protect the environment.
About six of ten elites have a favorable opinion of the so-called talking professions—lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, and journalists.

My point is this. Virtually everyone who has any influence on our governments’ behavior is a member of the lanyard class, and their attitudes toward virtually everything of importance are in direct opposition to the attitudes of the rest of the population.

Ok, that is admittedly an extreme characterization of the survey results, and to be clear, I have no idea how good a job Rasmussen did on this survey. But as I say, I think I have seen similar findings from other surveys, including one done by Princeton. I shall continue looking for those and report in when and if I find more data and analysis.

For now, I am suggesting that if most of us think most politicians and university types are out of touch with reality, this is a major part of the reason.

One last point. I wrote previously about the miserable turnouts in the US primary elections for federal office that determine which candidates end up in general elections. People in the lanyard class are much more likely to vote, because their income and education levels are high, and all the data says those two characteristics are positively related to voting. Thus, more of the people voting in primaries are from the lanyard class than that class’s proportion of the population.

To be clear about my point, here, I am pointing out the possibility of a government that exhibits what I would term ‘mismatch’. The people in positions of responsibility in our major institutions, including the government, seem to all come from a certain class of people, and that class of people seems to have very different attitudes than does the rest of the population regarding many important matters. If somehow it happened that most people in government and educational institutions came from rural, farming families, they too might have attitudes that differed from the rest of the population, and we would again see such mismatch.

The question of whether the attitudes of the lanyard class, which get folded into governmental policy, are in themselves wrong-headed is separate. I think many of them are, but not all, and again – the point here is that class sees many things differently than the rest of us.

Good News Happens

Written by Al Slivinski on May 29, 2026. Posted in Government.

Having reported previously on unsettling events regarding private property vs indigenous title claims, it is only fair that I report when something sensible happens, too. This is from a story in the Globe titled ‘Supreme Court won’t hear First Nations’ appeal in New Brunswick private land case’

That almost tells the story, but there are implications, as the article notes. According to the article, a New Brunswick Appeal Court judge said in December that a declaration of Aboriginal title over privately owned lands “would sound the death knell of reconciliation with the interests of non-Aboriginal Canadians.”

That is one crappy sentence from that judge, but the upshot is that he refused to rule that the Wolastoqey First Nation had rights to property in New Brunswick to which non-tribe members currently held private title. The Wolastoqey appealed to have this NB decision reviewed by the Supreme Court of Canada, and it has refused to hear the appeal, meaning the ruling stands. There is no higher court to which the Wolastoqey can appeal.

Not surprisingly, the folks out in BC who are planning to appeal the Cowichan Tribes decision that I (and plenty of others) wrote about previously are very interested. That decision asserted that the First Nation holds Aboriginal title over a parcel of land on the Fraser River, which includes Crown, city and private property.

The SCC’s refusal to reverse or even hear the NB case sets a precedent those appealing the Cowichan decision can use. Or so my non-lawyerly mind understands the matter.

A final quote from the Globe article:

The Cowichan ruling has led to concerns that it puts private property at risk, although the Cowichan Tribes have said they are not seeking to lay claim to private land.

Ok…..what exactly are you Cowichan folks trying to do, then? Cuz I see no other reason to have brought that case.

Home Free Home

Written by Al Slivinski on May 29, 2026. Posted in Government.

Here’s the headline from a CBC news story of May 22:

Region of Waterloo can’t remove residents of Kitchener encampment, court rules

The region wants to use the land on which the encampment sits to build a transit hub. I hate transit hubs. I do.

But I am writing this article to tell you about the reason for this ruling. I quote from the CBC:

In his 88-page decision, Ontario Superior Court Justice Michael R. Gibson says the encampment is currently the only place in the region where people experiencing homelessness can legally set up a tent or structure and it acts a refuge of last resort.

“No one should romanticize or be starry-eyed about the encampment. It is a miserable and desperate place,” Gibson said.

“But it represents the only remaining safety valve for the region’s homeless as a refuge of last resort.”

I wonder how the judge knows that last sentence to be true? More basically, what does that last sentence even mean? If those folks had been evicted, you can bet that every one of them would have gone somewhere else. That, of course, is another real problem, the fact that if you do push squatters off a piece of land they just go find another one. So, what makes the encampment on the land Waterloo region wants to use a ‘last resort’?

Here’s another quote from the article:

The region previously tried to clear people from living on the site in 2022. In January 2023, a Kitchener judge ruled the region couldn’t evict people from the site unless they gave them another place to live.

And there is the heart of the matter. It is fundamentally the responsibility of government (which means you and me, kids) to provide these people with a place to live. Why? Not because that is what Jesus would do, although that is sortof what I was taught. No, this all goes back to PET’s damnable Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It includes statements like

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.

So. What is security of the person? What does that right actually grant to a Canadian? Well, whatever a judge decides it means, and in this case the judge determined that it means Canadians have a right to have a place to live. Um….provided by who or what, exactly? Well, by default, you and I. If some government is responsible for this, then it’s taxpayers who are on the hook.

Let us have a look at the closest thing to this idea in the US Bill of Rights. It is the 6^th article:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Note that it states what Americans have the right to specifically. Namely, to be free of having their person, house, papers or effects unreasonably searched or seized. There is plenty of ambiguity in that ‘unreasonable’ adjective (although there is some detail provided on that, too), but the important point is that it lays out what government cannot do. It does not require the government to provide any American with anything.

Canada is teeming with ‘property is theft’ folks, and I am going to write a longer piece about private property soon, but here I will just note the following implication of this judge’s ruling. It suggests that if you or I or anyone decide to throw it all in, give up our jobs and stop working so hard, if we set up a tent somewhere – even on someone’s lawn – then we cannot be evicted unless the government can show there is someplace else we could go.

Wait, wait, you say. No one with a decent job and any income would just shuck that off and go live in a tent in a park somewhere.

No, likely not. But everything happens at the margin. There are people who are not doing well in life. They may be trying, but they are unable to generate much income for themselves and maybe for a family. It is sad, but it is true. They are living a life just at the margin of getting by. Those marginal people, realizing that if they pitch a tent somewhere their fellow citizens must then provide them with a spot and maybe more, then maybe they will. And there are always marginal people like that.

No doubt plenty of the folks at this Kitchener encampment have drug or mental problems or both. It is indeed our joint fault that there is nowhere for them to go and get help. But saying the government has to provide them with a spot to live, rather than a chance at help and treatment, just makes matters worse – for them and the rest of us.

A quote from the article about something else the judge said:

He added the region could ask people to move if they provided an alternative legal encampment site or a tenting protocol, similar to the cities of London and Thunder Bay.

What the hell is a tenting protocol, and does my city have one?

I looked. It definitely has a ‘Health and Homelessness Response Community Encampment Plan’. It is long, and it is scary. I should have guessed.

It includes this section:

The following outlines the rights-based approach to supporting encampments:

And here are the things included in that ‘outline’.

Access to safe and clean drinking water

Access to hygiene and sanitation facilities

Resources and support to ensure fire safety

Waste management systems

Social supports and services

Resources to support harm reduction

Resources that support food and food safety

The Plan gives details under each of these, here is part of what is under the last one.

Encampments are often more susceptible to foodborne illnesses due to a lack of storage, cooling appliances, improperly cooked foods, and limited or no access to clean water.

Okay, so….what is to be done about that? Here is the only thing the Plan says:

One of the best ways to prevent the spread of illness is to provide resources that enable the encampment to implement food safety measurements.

Food safety measurements? What does that mean? To provide encampments with meat thermometers? Bacteria testing equipment? I am betting the bozos who wrote this meant ‘measures’, but lacked the knowledge of English to get it right.

If you are skeptical of the notion that the Waterloo region judge’s ruling is an invitation to go off the grid and live rough, do note that London says if you do that and move to an encampment they will be obliged to provide all those things above for you. Clean water and toilets and waste disposal and oh so many things.

If you decide you want to build a new house on a piece of land in London, you gotta pay for all that. Not at an encampment.

London’s plan is 41 pages. I will likely write more about it in due course, but you get the drift. Canadian judges have been interpreting the Charter to mean governments must provide you with material resources, starting with a place to live. Many Canadian politicians are keen to do that. With your money.

What could possibly go wrong?

Update on UWO Cheating Story

Written by Al Slivinski on May 23, 2026. Posted in Education, Standards.

I said I would report more on this as things developed, and although not much new of substance has arisen, here is my report anyway.

The next publication day after the original cheating story, the Freeps ran a story titled

Western student explains why she used AI on closed-book exam

Students feel pressure to achieve high grades, especially those who want to go to medical school, the Western University student said

Pressure to achieve high grades is of course a brand new phenomenon in 2026, so this was a very useful story. It contains a lot of self-justification by one student who took the exam, like:

“In certain situations people just want to do well, students, and I fall into this category, that knows cheating is not right, you just go along with it because the robot is going to be better at wording of a professional essay,”

Wanting to do well is also a never-before-seen feeling. Of course the Freeps talked to an expert. This one –

Daniel Adleman, an assistant professor in the teaching stream in writing and rhetoric at the University of Toronto, researches ChatGPT and academic integrity.

Definitely an expert. One quote from him –

“It would be naive to assume on the part of any institution that an un-proctored exam is the right way to go.”

There ya go – the cheating was the prof’s fault.

I will come back to that thought, but yesterday the Freeps published yet another related story, this one titled

In an AI and online exam age, how can students resist urges to cheat?

University students need to have “almost superhuman” strength to resist cheating on online exams, says an expert in cheating.

Only Superman or Wonder Woman could realistically be expected not to cheat on an online exam. An expert says so.

Not a surprise, it is not at all hard to find faculty and other experts who will absolve students of all blame when it comes to academic dishonesty.

Another quote from this piece:

“There is just too much temptation, and the temptations are so strong,” said James M. Lang, author of Cheating Lessons, a book exploring the root causes of student cheating, and a professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

“I think you will never get 100 per cent compliance in un-proctored, online assessment and blaming the students in that context seems to be shortsighted,” he said. “Temptations are so built into the system that it also seems like entrapment sometimes to me.”

Entrapment, yes indeed. You know, it’s like when retailers just put merchandise out on the shelf – how can any reasonable person not just stuff it under their coat and walk out? How can you blame them if they do? That is why shoplifters should never be prosecuted.

And those packages from Amazon that get left on porches all the time; if you’re walking by, how can you be expected not to just run up and grab them? And of course we have all had the experience of getting a restaurant bill that has a couple of items you ordered left off of it. It is utter nonsense to expect people to tell the server about the mistake before paying, obviously.

Here’s a quote from the article that goes in another direction:

“We have entered the brave new world of ethical and moral decay in education,” said Appleby College teacher Dave Suchanek. “AI is dumbing down our students.”

I disagree with that first sentence only to the extent that I saw us entering that world long ago. AI is just one more way to walk through it, but the path of ethical decay has been well-trod in universities for years.

Foolishly thinking the Freeps might be interested in reporting on academic dishonesty at UWO and in general, I wrote a letter to the editor after that first story appeared. I rarely do this, in large part because when I do the letters are never printed. I expect that is because my letters don’t fit well into whatever narrative the Freeps is pushing on any issue. This time I wanted to encourage them to go beyond the statements of official spokesmen at UWO regarding this issue. As you can see from the two follow-up articles they did publish, they have not done this. Just more quotes from ‘experts’, none of them knowing anything about what actually goes on at UWO.

I expected as much, but since I wrote and sent it, I re-print my entire letter below, just so you know what I did write. In vain, as it happens.

Regarding the story titled ‘Overwhelmingly clear students cheated on exam: Western Professor’ (May 16). I could only laugh at the statement from UWO’s spokesperson Alison Springate that “Academic integrity is the cornerstone of Western University.”

I would have laughed just as loud at such a statement before I retired from the faculty at UWO in 2022, before AI was widely available to students. As it happens, I was at a social gathering of current and retired UWO faculty the evening that story came out, and my reaction to Springate’s assertion was, so far as I could tell, universally shared in that group. One person suggested that UWO had gone into the business of ‘just printing diplomas’.

The Free Press might want to ask people not paid to parrot the UWO administration’s party line what they think of that administration’s commitment to academic integrity. In my last years as a faculty member, it was close to non-existent.

I signed it as a Professor Emeritus at UWO, just so they could check my bona fides if they wished. I’m still on the Econ website as such. I doubt they bothered.

Postscript:

My thanks to the Free Press’s TGIF column for this. Here is a headline from a recent story on the BBC website: Selling children to survive: Afghan fathers forced to make impossible choices

Abdul tells us he is willing to sell his girls for marriage, or for domestic work. “If I sell one daughter, I could feed the rest of my children for at least four years,” he says.

And, lest we forget who is in charge in Afghanistan….

The choice to sell daughters over sons, is because culturally sons are widely seen as future breadwinners, and here in Afghanistan, with the Taliban’s restrictions on education and work for women and girls, it is even more pronounced.

It’s cultural, don’t you see? The Taliban, well, that just makes the culture ‘more pronounced’

Besides, the BBC and all right-thinking people know who is really at fault here –

The US – once the top donor to Afghanistan – cut nearly all aid to the country last year. Many other key donors have also significantly reduced contributions, including the UK.

What does using AI to do better on a test have in common with selling a daughter?

‘It’s not my fault.’

Doing That UK Shuffle

Written by Al Slivinski on May 23, 2026. Posted in Politics.

I was at a gathering of economists recently, both still-working and retired. Not something I do often anymore.

Anyway, it was good fun, and I got to talk with some people I don’t see often and genuinely miss. One of those was a former colleague who I have for years considered ‘the most interesting man in the world’. Remember those Dos Equis commercials?

That is this fellow. You want to know where is a good jazz club in Shanghai? He knows, but it’s in a basement, so you better get directions. They’re complicated. Where to get a first-quality suit made without paying a ridiculous price? He can tell you. And, his knowledge of Economics is the kind that is useful. He knows the stuff I do, but also knows about how it matters in the world when it does.

So, he came up to me at the party and said he had just come back from Jolly Old England. He goes there a lot, loves London. Then he said – ‘They are going down the same goddam path as the US’.

What do you mean? says I. ‘Populist nonsense’, he says.

I thought for all of 10 seconds, and said ‘and for the same reasons’.

‘Yes, exactly’, he said.

This led me to today’s post. I had been thinking about this a bit anyway, and gathered up some data on it, but my old colleague’s comment lit a new bulb in my aging head – I think he’s got a point.

Here’s the logic of it in 6 steps.

1. The Labour Party of England won the last parliamentary election in a landslide, at least if you measure landslide a certain way. Labour now holds 402 of the 650 seats in the British parliament, a massive majority. The next highest number is the 116 seats held by the Conservatives. By that measure, Labour kicked everyone’s parliamentary ass.

There is a caveat. Of all the votes cast in all the ridings in that British election, only 33.7%, were cast for Labour candidates, the lowest of any governing party on record in England.

Now, that is the way the system works, and I have no wish to cast aspersions on the results of that election. When Brits go to the polls, they are voting for one thing only – who will represent them in Parliament. The same is true in the Canadian Parliament and in the US Senate and House.

2. Since that election in 2024, the Labour Party and its Leader, Keir Starmer, appear to have lost popularity. A lot.

According to pollcheck.co.uk, on the day I am writing this, when they asked people ‘For which party’s candidate would you vote if another election were held today,’ they got responses that look like this:

Labour is third, behind Reform UK (more on them below) and the Conservative party, which led the government before the last election. Now if 33% is a small number, 27.9 is even smaller, but 18.1 is smaller still, so what does this mean?

By itself, not much, I would say. Asking people about hypothetical votes when there is no election looming doesn’t tell us much about what would happen if an election actually were called. On the other hand, something more substantive happened in Britain recently, which does not bode well for Labour.

3. England’s government is highly centralized, with most important functions carried out by the federal government. There are no provinces or states. So, the next level of government down is local. Elections for local councils were held last May 1, and unlike in Canada and the US, the national parties put up candidates for these local councils. Elections were held in 136 multi-member local councils, and here is what the BBC says were the results as regards the number of seats held by candidates from each party:

I know the results are small and hard to read, but if you do, there is only one word for this – a thorough, unequivocal ass-kicking. It is worth working through these numbers.

Reform UK had candidates holding two(2) seats on these local councils before the elections. They now hold 1,454 seats. Labour held 2,566 seats before the election, and they lost 1,498 of those, some 40%+. Indeed, the Labour loss of seats is almost the same as the Reform UK gain.

These are real elections, with real people casting votes that count, and Labour (and to a lesser extent, the Conservatives) lost bigtime, while Reform UK surged.

4. One repercussion of that outcome is that the members of the British Parliament from the Labour party are not happy, and, according to the BBC, some 90 of them have called for Starmer to resign as party leader and PM.

We saw a somewhat similar situation in Canada at the end of The Boy King’s reign as PM, but unlike here, there is a process in place to actually replace Starmer. If 81 Labour MPs sign up to support an alternative Labour MP for PM, then a leadership election is triggered. And….wait for it….Labour MP Josh Simmons is voluntarily resigning from Parliament to trigger a by-election in which the current Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, has said he will run, for the purpose of opposing Starmer for party leader.

The plot thickens, eh?

5. Here, finally, is where my old friend’s comment about the UK following the US path hits the road. Starmer has insisted he will not resign, and his policy moves since the council election debacle have been, if anything, more leftward. This Burnham fellow planning to challenge Starmer for the leadership seems rather more to the left than Starmer. One source says ‘Burnham positions himself on Labour’s centre-left, championing policies such as wealth taxes, public ownership of key utilities and scrapping the two-child benefit cap.’

In his time as Mayor of Manchester, he has become known as The King of the North, and I have to say some of the things he seems to espouse make a lot of sense. Here’s a quote from a UK newspaper about him.

[Burnham’s] philosophy centres on the argument that Britain’s persistent economic underperformance, high inequality, and degraded public services are the direct consequence of over four decades of overcentralisation — the concentration of both political power in the Treasury and economic power in the hands of private capital — and that the route to recovery is through long-term, collaborative, place-based investment led by empowered regional governments.

Wes Streeting and Angela Rayne are other Labour MPs who might have the support to stand against Starmer, and Streeting resigned as health minister in Starmer’s cabinet just recently. I don’t know enough to evaluate the chances of any of these people, but I also read that many of Labour’s 400 MPs are upset with what they see as Starmer’s cozying up to the US and Trump, and his positions on the Israel/Palestine issue.

6. So here is the parallel my friend saw, and I can see, too. Labour has a leadership contest, Starmer goes down and is replaced by someone who is in general further left, because that is what most Labour MPs want. Maybe Burnham, maybe someone else. That it is Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, a party they would surely call ‘far right’ that is currently leading in the preference poll would not stop them. That the not-so-far-right Conservatives have nearly the same support as Labour wouldn’t, either. If the Labour-Lefty MPs want a ‘bolder’ set of policies, that is what they will do.

The illuminati of the US Democratic Party saw no problem with avoiding an actual nominating convention and simply anointing Kamala Harris as the new presidential nominee when Biden’s candidacy blew up in their faces back in 2024. That made it easy for the GOP and Trump to paint the Democrats as far left of the average citizen (as indeed I think they were) and so the world got Trump 2.0.

So, in the UK after this leadership contest, Labour swings further left at the behest of its new Leader and many of its MPs, the polls move more against them, they just keep keeping on, and the UK gets Farage the ‘populist’ as PM with a Reform UK majority at the next election.

To be sure, Reform’s current 27.9% voting preference doesn’t look like enough for a majority, but 33.7% never was, either, and besides, the next UK parliamentary election is a long way off. A lot can happen, particularly if Labour keeps tacking further left. My suspicion is that it will matter a lot how, if at all, the current UK government moves to control the illegal immigrants who are coming across the channel in apparently great numbers. That is to my mind the issue that had the most to do with sinking the Dems in 2024. No, immigrants in Ohio were not eating dogs, but that doesn’t mean people were not upset about illegal immigrants and legal refugees.

I should also say that I don’t know enough about Farage to have a meaningful opinion as to what he would be like as PM, or how close to Trump 2.0 he would be. I know he led the Brexit charge, and is accused of spreading ‘misinformation’ during that time, but that is a charge that is levelled at nearly every politician these days. And probably accurately; telling the truth is so 20^th century. Or 19^th, maybe.

So we shall see how this all shakes out. The US/UK parallel is not exact, but it is interesting.

You Get What You (Don’t) Vote For

Written by Al Slivinski on May 22, 2026. Posted in Politics.

There has been a lot written this week – and not just in the US – about the fact that one Thomas Massie lost the Republican Primary election for the US Congress in the 4^th district of Kentucky. This is a historically solidly Republican district, so the primary winner is almost sure to be elected to Congress in the general election. Massie was the incumbent in that seat. The reason for the attention is that he was defeated by Ed Gallrein, also a Republican, of course, but who got a ringing endorsement from none other than President Trump.

Let me be clear here that I have no opinion on who would make a better Congressman for Kentucky. My interest in who serves in Congress from Kentucky’s 4th district is too small to see.

However, the US (and other) news sources are pointing at this as a sign of the iron grip that DJT has on the Republican Party.

Yea, maybe, but here are some interesting facts.

First, here are the official results of that primary election.

That 55 to 45 victory margin is pretty significant as US elections go, so – another sign of Trump’s power, right?

Here’s a quote from before the primary from a Kentucky newspaper regarding this 2026 election:

Statewide, 12.7% of Kentucky’s more than 3.5 million registered voters cast ballots in the 2024 primary, according to state data. Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams has projected turnout could climb to roughly 20% this year, or an increase of more than 50%.

Yes, Mr. Adams is very excited about this anticipated increase in turnout, but look at what has him excited – a projected turnout of 20%. That sure is better than 12.7, but it still means that who ultimately runs for office in Kentucky is decided by 20% of voters. And, to finish the logic, it is much easier to sway the outcome of an election, no matter who you are, the fewer are the people voting. Would DJT have pushed his preferred candidate to a win if 80% of Kentuckians voted in this primary? We will never know, but maybe not.

I did some more digging, and found that the population of the 4^th district in Kentucky is 776,082. At a guess, some 600,000 of them are old enough to vote, citizens, and not otherwise disqualified from voting. Then guessing that some 60% of those are Republicans – it could be more, it’s a solid Republican District – that leaves 360,000 Republicans eligible to vote in the 4^th district primary, of which, by the results above, some 105,000 bothered to do so. Less than a third, then. Probably all the pre-election reporting about the Trump/Massie dust-up increased turnout above the paltry 20% expected across the state. So, again, what would have happened had the other 2/3+ of eligible Republican voters in Kentucky’s 4th district bothered to show up and vote? We will never know.

It is the primary elections that determine who runs for office, and that includes for President, and it is common that almost no one votes in any of those. Turnouts of less than 20% are the norm.

Does anyone see a problem here?

Stay Tuned, Folks

Written by Al Slivinski on May 16, 2026. Posted in Education, Standards.

As I was getting ready to put this week’s blog to bed, so to speak, the Saturday edition of my local rag, The Freeps, landed on my doorstep with the following headline on the front page:

‘Overwhelmingly clear’ students cheated on exam: Western professor

In my experience that’s a pretty common occurrence in university exams, so why the big headline? Well, said professor is refusing to use the results of the final exam in his class in calculating final marks, because he is sure that some high proportion of the students who wrote it cheated by using AI.

Interestingly, it is a class in health law, and the prof gave an online take-home exam which included instructions that no outside resources (no book, no notes, no AI) be used. A brave – or maybe foolhardy – move by the prof. I should say that back during Covid lockouts I gave a few exams that way, and it worked pretty well. The students have to upload their answers within a certain time limit after downloading the questions themselves. The time limit meant that if they tried to go back and use their notes to come up with answers to my questions, they were doomed anyway, and there were no AI chatbots back then. The marks on my exams given in this way were not much different than on exams given in-person.

I regard this as a developing story, which I will continue to follow, as I am very interested in a) what UWO does about this, and b) whether the Freeps stays on it.

For now, let me note what the university spokesperson said to the Freeps:

Western University provided a statement from Alison Springate, director of stakeholder relations for Western communications, in response to questions from The Free Press about the exam and Shelley’s response to it.

“Academic integrity is the cornerstone of Western University,” she said.

I will take the writer’s prerogative here to interject – ‘Oh, horseshit, Alison.’

“To protect the integrity of our investigation process, and the privacy of students, we do not confirm if an investigation into suspected or actual individual scholastic offences is taking place.”

More horseshit. What that signals is that UWO will try to keep all of this as quiet as possible, so they can find a way to weasel out of punishing any students. That the prof, one Jacob Shelley, has apparently already gone public on this has the Powers at UWO in quite a state, I’m sure, which is why I will follow this. They are going to do their utmost to put a lid on this and on Shelley, and quickly. That quote above is them preparing the ground to impose radio silence on this whole affair.

To his great credit, Shelley sent an email to his entire class of 288 students explaining what he was doing, and has resisted the UWO bosses suggestion that he try to sort out who cheated and who did not, and mark accordingly. Good for him. He says that he is not at all confident he could identify every student that cheated, and he has no wish to let those he misses get high marks on the basis of that cheating. In any case, if he did what the bosses want, all the students who were fingered would appeal to the minions of those bosses and in the end not be punished in any significant way. That is a movie I saw many times during my career. UWO in the 21st century hates punishing cheaters.

Some last words from Prof Shelley, from the Freeps article:

Shelley said his big concern is that Western doesn’t have adequate policies to prevent cheating.

“There is no real attempt to address this – we’re not doing anything about it. We’re accepting it,” he said. “We’re wilfully blind to it.”

Shelley also said this year he saw the poorest attendance in his classroom he has ever seen.

“Students are just not coming to class . . . in my class of 288, one week I had 104 (attend),” he said.

As I said, stay tuned, folks.

Reading, Writing, no Rithmetic

Written by Al Slivinski on May 16, 2026. Posted in Culture, Language, Standards.

Some weeks back one of my hiking buddies sent me and some others this article: Who is Blake Whiting?

It’s from something called American Scholar, of which I was previously unaware. You can click the link above and read it all yourself, but the gist is this: Blake Whiting is a ‘historian’, who, as the article says –

‘In one week alone last fall, he published 13 books on a host of complex archaeological and historical subjects, ranging from the collapse of Near Eastern civilizations in 1177 BCE to the recent discovery of a huge Silk Road–era city in Central Asia.’

To get right to the punch line, no human can do that, and indeed, BW is a LLM. Moreover, it is an LLM which produces books that are pretty straightforward rip-offs of the work of actual people, and then are sold on Amazon. What the LLM appears to do is appropriate but re-word the stolen material, never using quotation marks but also never citing the stolen work. Plagiarism, by any other name.

The books are not copyrighted, because copyright belongs to a person, and there is no Blake Whiting. Amazon was contacted by the author of the piece, and here’s a quote from the Big A’s spokeswoman:

“We have content guidelines governing which books can be listed for sale and remove books that do not adhere to those guidelines, whether AI–generated or not,” Amazon spokesperson Jennie Bryant said. She declined to comment on Whiting’s works.

Of course she did. What could she say? I mean, the fact that this ‘person’ published 13 books in a week, that didn’t violate any of Amazon’s guidelines, apparently.

So, LLMs are now being used to rip off actual authors to produce fundamentally plagiarized books for sale at a speed that no actual human researcher can match. And Amazon has no hesitation in selling these rip-offs at a profit.

As another quote from the AS article puts it:

If an AI program accesses your just-completed dissertation and salts it with data and text from other sources, then that book you planned to write for a general audience, based on years of research, might be available online before you can get your proposal to a potential publisher.

But wait, there is more good news about LLMs and publishing, this time from my own personal experience.

I read a lot of history, and one such book I read recently was titled ‘The Last Days of the Ottoman Empire’, by Ryan Gingeras, published in 2022. The Ottoman Empire lasted for hundreds of years, and at its height included the Christian and Muslim Holy Lands, Greece and the Balkans in Europe, a large chunk of North Africa and Egypt. It was centred in what is now Turkey, and by the time of the First World War, it had been in decline for some time. The book details those last years, from WWI into the 1920s, when it finally broke apart completely, leading ultimately to the formation of the modern state of Turkey. The Ottomans made the (perhaps understandable) mistake of siding with Germany and Austro-Hungary in WWI, so things fell apart fast from 1918 on.

It’s a fascinating read. The many languages, cultures and ethnicities involved, with all the conflicting motivations those engendered, make it a highly complex narrative to follow, but Gingras does a pretty good job, and for an academic, he is a decent writer.

Consider this passage, detailing what happened in Istanbul in 1920, after a French military force was forced to abandon its garrison at Marash by a Turkish military force fighting to create an independent Turkish state.

Three days later, British and French troops fanned out across Istanbul. By the afternoon, leading members of The Chamber of Deputies were placed under arrest. With the aid of British troops, many of them Muslims from South Asia, key ministries were stormed and occupied. In the days preceding the takeover, the Allies had given no public hint of this coup. Yet in moving against each of the principal arms of government, British and French forces brazenly asserted that Istanbul now fell under their authority…In making their presence felt, British officials arrested eleven of the most outspoken Nationalists in the capital, including Rauf Orban and Kara Vasif, co-founder of the Karakol organization. All were then deported to Malta for internment.

The Empire had been ruled by a religious figure, the Sultan. Gingeras further writes:

How the Sultan greeted the occupation of his capital is not clear. Mehmed VI, according to British intelligence sources, was delighted at the apprehension of so many prominent Nationalists. The Allied seizure of power likely saved the Sultan from attempting ‘a similar “soft” coup with inferior forces and a considerable risk of failure’.

Even in this one episode we see many players, and complicated motives and moves. But it is clear from the passages quoted what happened here, right? The French defeat at Marash induced the British and French to respond by staging a coup in the capital of Istanbul, arresting Deputies, taking over Ministries and deporting Nationalist leaders. The Sultan, wanting to maintain his own position, is perhaps not too unhappy at having these Nationalist leaders out of the way. The Nationalist movement was a secular one, after all, and not likely to keep the Sultan in charge if they prevailed.

Ok, decent book, not up to the standard of John Keegan or even Victor Davis Hanson, but a good read, on a topic of which I was largely innocent. It taught me stuff, and there is no higher praise than that.

Some while after finishing this book, I saw a review of a book in the TLS called Mafia: A Global History. The review is written by one Ian Thomson, and although I did not notice it at the time, the author of this book is none other than Ryan Gingeras. This book got a pretty good review from Thomson, his last words being: ‘….Mafia is an excellent history of all things murderous and mobster.’ His one complaint was about some ‘clunky generalizations’ in the book.

Now, I pay little attention to reviews, but I bought a copy of this very recent (2026) book because the topic seemed fascinating. It was not until I started on it that I actually noticed the author was Gingeras. Bonus, I thought – this should be good.

Wrong. The writing is miserable. It resembles the kind of writing I used to get from a mediocre university student whose idea of doing research is to look up a bunch of hopefully relevant things in Wikipedia, then string them into a barely cohesive list of sentences.

Here is Gingeras writing about San Francisco:

Since its heyday as a mining hub, the town had developed a reputation for crime, corruption, and loose morals. Single men seeking to strike it rich in the nearby Sierras gave rise to hundreds of gambling establishments in the city. Local card halls and betting parlors attracted gamblers as well as legions of thieves and ruffians. Casual violence was commonplace at the many saloons and dance halls of the city’s core. By the 1870s, several neighborhoods fell under the influence of gangs comprising young miscreants and petty crooks. San Francisco’s prostitutes attracted the greatest attention.

Um….attracted the greatest attention from who? The press? The city government? The public? Those gangs of miscreants and crooks? And I know what a thief is, someone who steals things, but just what the heck is a ‘ruffian’?

And, by the way, the first sentence clearly should read ‘During its heyday as a mining hub….’

Then comes this sentence, sitting all alone and friendless in the middle of a paragraph:

Xenophobia and other anxieties, such as widespread alcoholism and opium use, colored local impressions of those involved in “trade”.

Why did xenophobia color anything? Were most of the prostitutes from foreign countries? Nothing is said about that. What is meant by calling alcoholism and opium use ‘anxieties’? Is he suggesting they were not really all that widespread, yet people were anxious about them? Hell, could he even be bothered to tell us how widespread they were in San Francisco in those days?

From slightly later in the book, here is a passage, which seems like it ought to be quite central to the book’s thesis. In 1909 a fellow named Theodore A Bingham wrote about criminal organizations in New York City, and he stressed that these were not just a disconnected bunch of criminals, but were ‘thoroughly organized’.

Here is what Gingeras writes about this:

Bingham’s conclusions correspond to a critical moment in the formation of modern-day mafias. Since the beginning of modern Western efforts to control or eradicate vice, many presumed that the forces of law could prevent the masses from indulging in prostitution and gambling. By the early twentieth century, it appeared in many places, first perhaps in the United States, that this was wrong. The state itself was part of the problem. But why petty officials and local policemen allowed vice to go unchecked spoke to something more than political corruption. As “organized crimes”, illicit gambling and prostitution drew upon the support and complicity of a range of conspirators, including representatives of the state. The development of the white slave trade showed that the laws of supply and demand were making prostitution an increasingly globalized trade. What appeared to drive vice was not simply venality, but the profits it could generate. Vice had become an industry.

That paragraph is a string of ideas with no attempt to develop any connection between them. Further, the paragraph has no apparent connection to Bingham’s central point – crime in NYC is ‘organized’. One might expect a discussion of what Bingham meant by that term, and what were the facts that at the time suggested he was right – or maybe wrong. Instead we get this disjointed paragraph.

Here are the separate ideas laid out in the paragraph –

Something changed in the early 20^th century regarding the control of ‘vice’, first in the US.
Officials of the government could be bribed to look the other way when crimes were committed.
supply and demand globalized prostitution.
vice was driven by both venality and profit.

Let me start with 3. First, is it the case that prostitution became globalized in the early 20^th century? The only thing I can imagine that meaning is that there were women from country A practicing prostitution in country B. Was that true? If so, did that really start in the early 20^th century? Gingeras seems uninterested in offering up any evidence or explanation for this claim.

As to 4, does Gingeras really wish to assert that vice being driven by the profits it could generate first became apparent in the early 20^th century? You can say the demand for prostitution and gambling is driven by venality if you wish, but surely since the beginning of time, their supply was motivated by profit. There are not and never have been any non-profit brothels or gambling houses.

Similarly, regarding 2, I am willing to bet a lot that officials have been looking the other way during the commission of crimes since money was invented. No, actually, since before that.

There is a connection one could make between vice being profitable and officials being willing to overlook it, but Gingeras cannot be bothered to be explicit about it, so I will take up the task.

If vice is profitable, then it is also surely profitable for criminals to bribe officials to leave your operation alone, since that increases the likelihood that you can go on making those profits, rather than ending up in jail. The two things are connected, indeed. If Gingeras realized the logical link, he did not bother to lay it out for his readers.

Again, a paragraph like the one quoted above I would have categorized as Wikipedia writing back in the day. A string of assertions, with no attempt to provide a coherent logical argument.

But this is 2026, and although I ran into no LLM writing back in my days as an instructor, I have seen it since. My strong suspicion is that Gingeras used an AI chatbot to do much of the writing of this Mafia book. I can see no other explanation for the steep drop in the quality of writing since he wrote the Ottoman book, as that was back when chatbots were neither very good nor very available. A key reason for my believing this is actually my first remark above, noting that Gingeras wrote ‘since’ when logic indicates he should have written ‘during’.

It is a hallmark of LLM writing to get it just ‘a little wrong’ in that way. To use words that are ‘close’ to correct, but not really. The book is bristling with that kind of prose.

If I’m right, then the Blake Whiting example shows that he could do even better if he just got out of the way and let the chatbot do all the work. 13 books in a week. Way more impressive than two in four years.

Now I know almost nothing about the TLS reviewer of this book, Ian Thomson, but he is supposed to be an author himself. Given that, I also suspect that he had a chatbot write his review. How anyone could read the entire Mafia book and then write that the book is ‘excellent’ is beyond me. I quit reading maybe halfway through. The continuing stream of barely connected and not-quite-right sentences felt like someone was throwing warm oatmeal at my face, and I was not learning a damned thing.

Postscript: Just before I posted this, some days after writing it, I had another thought. Perhaps another explanation for the drop in quality in Gingeras’s writing from 2022 to 2026 is that in the early 2020s, his work was edited by someone at his publishing house. By 2025 or so, Avid Reader Press was not willing to pay for a (human) editor, so Gingeras was on his own, or, worse – he or his publisher employed an LLM editor.

Start Me Up

Written by Al Slivinski on May 9, 2026. Posted in Economics.

The reason I have posted only two quite short articles this week is that my internet router has gone AWOL, and Start.ca informs me that they will not get a new one to me until next week some time. Doing anything on the web, including posting articles here, requires me to go to my gal’s house. A pleasant prospect, but somewhat limiting.

The tale of my being in this situation is worth telling, beyond any excuse for my failing to post. It’s a lesson in 21^st century capitalism.

I became a subscriber to Start.ca when it was a new startup here in London, Ontario. I had been a customer of Bell Mobility for years, and was getting sick of the shitty quality of their internet and their pathetic customer relations department. So, I canceled Bell, started with Start, and was instantly delighted. The quality of the internet itself was indeed much higher, but even better was the customer service.

I rarely had a problem, but when I did, I called a number with a local area code, and my call was answered with little delay by somebody who spoke clear English. They were helpful to a fault.

Some years after I became a Start customer, this very successful local company was bought out by Telus, the national telecommunications company, who coincidentally provides me with my dumbphone service.

I have nothing good to say about Telus, and so I instantly saw trouble on the horizon regarding my Start service.

It took a few years for Telus to fuck Start up, but as of this morning, they have officially arrived at that position. Royally.

I called the 866 number for Start this morning when I realized the reason I could not reboot my internet connection was that my router was simply dead. No lights, no nothing. The recorded voice on the other end, after giving me a pep talk on how awesome Start is, said:

‘We detect that the phone number you are calling from is connected with one of our services. Is this the service about which you are calling?’

I was calling from my cell, so I knew this referred to my cell account with Telus. I hit 2 for ‘No’.

The voice then said ‘Enter the telephone number for the service you are calling about.’

I entered my home phone number, which is now a VOIP line carried by Start, and heard yet again;

‘We detect that the phone number you are calling from is connected with one of our services. Is this the service about which you are calling?’

I said some bad words and hung up. Poured myself another cup of coffee.

Feeling my blood pressure drop sufficiently halfway through that second cup, I called again, listened to the pep talks again, and simply waited, doing and saying nothing, while the voice said repeatedly, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t get that.’

Eventually it said it was switching me to an agent. Ah.

After punching my way through a menu I was advised to ‘stay on the line to maintain your place in sequence.’

Music played, and from time to time I was told I was listening to Sting Ray Music. It was dreadful.

Now and then I would hear a helpful hint like ‘try turning your equipment off and back on’ and my favourite: ‘Did you know you can go to www.start.ca for helpful troubleshooting hints?’

Assholes. Why do you think I am in this phone queue?

It took I would guess 10 minutes to get a person on the line, which is not so long by modern standards. To my surprise the human spoke impeccable English. I told him what was going on, and after listening to his advice to ‘unplug it and plug it back in’ [did that twice] and to check the electrical outlet [did that too] he said they would send me a new router. Not that I could go somewhere local and pick one up, as would have been the case back before the takeover. I would just have to wait for delivery. Next week.

At the end I told the person to tell their boss that I would be looking for a new internet service provider, now that they had destroyed the best feature of the company they took over. He said he would. Perhaps he will, but I have no illusions it will matter in any way. Nor do I expect that I will actually be able to find an ISP that does not provide so-called customer service in the same shitty manner.

I have written about these matters before, it is the part of economics that I tried to teach students about for much of my career, an area of economics that actually matters to people’s daily lives – competition policy.

Telus should never have been allowed to buy Start. Loblaws should never have been allowed to buy Shoppers Drug Mart, nor should Sobie’s and Farmboy have been allowed to merge. Tangerine should not be owned by Bank of Nova Scotia or TD or whoever the hell bought it when it was called Ing.

I know the criteria by which the Competition Bureau in Canada and the FTC in the US judge these mergers and takeovers, and those criteria entirely miss the point of having competition policy. The only force that keeps firms from treating buyers as nothing more than profit sources is competition. These mergers eliminate competition, because competition on a day-to-day basis for people is about one thing only – do you have choices?

Mergers always reduce choice, and hence are inherently anti-competitive, no matter how much bilge about efficiencies and synergies and scale economies the corporate lawyers pump out.

I will indeed look for a new ISP once my Start internet is back up and working – is that ironic or what? But I am not hopeful of doing better.

Disappointing But Expected

Written by Al Slivinski on May 9, 2026. Posted in Education, LBOs.

A while back I wrote this long post about self-censorship and free speech in Canada, and in Canadian academia in particular. It was long enough that I broke it into three sections, and the last section told the story – taken from a Statement of Claim from a lawsuit – of the ordeal that the Faculty of Education at UWO put one Margaret Munn through when she did not meekly ingest and repeat the views they wanted her to.

So, Ms. Munn filed a lawsuit against UWO after she graduated, and I promised to keep my eye on it and report again when and if UWO’s Statement of Defense became available.

Well, Ms. Munn did indeed file her Statement of Claim in Ontario Superior Court, No. CV-25-00000091-0000.

A friend of mine who is more used to dealing with courts actually went to the courthouse and inquired as to where one might find the associated Statement of Defense, since we could not locate it in the online system. He was informed by the nice lady at the courthouse that no Statement of defense was filed by UWO.

Well, one cannot just ignore being sued, so you don’t have to be a lawyer to figure out what happened.

I wrote that UWO and everyone in it should be ashamed at the findings from the internal SRBA hearing regarding the Faculty of Education’s treatment of Ms. Munn. It is apparent that the Powers Who Rule at UWO are indeed ashamed, at least to the extent that they had no wish to try to defend the indefensible behaviour of their employees, either on paper or in court.

So, they offered Ms. Munn a sum of money if she would withdraw her suit and – I bet – sign an NDA regarding the matter.

I can understand why Ms. Munn would do this; getting some cash out of UWO in compensation for their abysmal treatment of her must feel like some kind of personal vindication. And trying to win the suit would have taken a great deal of (expensive) legal help and a lot of her time. Lawyers at LBOs are masters of delay, and there would be no guarantee of getting more out of UWO than she did from the settlement. But of course this means that this matter will be known to almost no one. If it had proceeded to trial, UWO would have had to file a Statement of Defense which would then be on the public record. Perhaps then even our local rag might have thought it worthy of some coverage.

Better for UWO to pay Ms. Munn to go away, and to keep quiet about it, than to have all that happen.

This also allows the University of Western Ontario to post lies like this as part of their Freedom of Expression Policy:

Freedom of expression is essential to the pursuit of truth, the advancement of learning and the dissemination of knowledge. All members of the University community, including guests and visitors, have the right to freedom of expression, which includes the right to examine, represent, question, advocate for and comment on any issue without reference to prescribed doctrine. It also includes the right to criticize the University and society at large.

Just not indigenous faculty, right? It’s not OK to criticize them or their prescribed doctrines. Or to express doubts about the notion of cultural appropriation. Or to suggest that spanking children is not a heinous crime.

Universities run mostly on hypocrisy these days. Had the Munn suit gone to court it might have shone a light on that hypocrisy for at least a bit. But instead, J Kelly Nestruck and the rest of the media can continue to assert there is nothing untoward happening on Canadian campuses. Only drama queens believe otherwise, because if there really was any abuse of people, we would all know about it. Right?

Disappointing, as I said. But pretty much what I expected. I do at least hope Ms. Munn got a BIG bundle of cash out of this. If she did, UWO, which claims to be in dire financial straits, won’t miss it. It’s all other people’s money.

Imitation Competence

Written by Al Slivinski on May 1, 2026. Posted in Economics, Government.

As his legions of fans never stop reminding everyone, our current PM Mark Carney was the central banker for two G7 countries.

The implication being – we’re in good hands here in Canada. At least when it comes to, you know, financy-type things.

Or not.

A headline from the G and M on April 27:

Politics Insider: Canada will launch sovereign wealth fund, Carney says

Then the first two sentences of the article:

Prime Minister Mark Carney says Canada will launch its first ever national sovereign wealth fund, an investment vehicle he says will ensure all Canadians reap the rewards of government support for major new projects.

The Canada Strong Fund will begin with an initial endowment of $25-billion, Carney told a news conference in Ottawa today.

According to the dictionary, an ‘endowment’ is Funds or property donated to an institution, individual, or group as a source of income.

So, Canada has found a sugar-daddy….er, donor?

Cool. I wonder who it is?

Before getting further into this Carney idea, I did a little research on sovereign wealth funds in general.

First, there are many.

The United Arab Emirates has a sovereign wealth fund, called Emirates Investment Authority. According to Business Chief, it has $US87B in funds currently, putting it well down the list of Middle East sovereign wealth funds. The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority has almost 10 times that.

Who was EIA’s sugar daddy? Or Abu Dhabi’s?

It’s hard to find that out. According to Wikipedia, which should not be taken too seriously regarding anything serious, ADIA’s goal was to invest the Abu Dhabi government’s surpluses across various asset classes, with low risk.

Government surpluses? Now there’s a concept. Canada has not had a federal government budget surplus since 2007, with Stephen Harper as PM.

Norway has an SWF, too. According to its own website:

Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global holds the title of the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, in terms of total assets under management. Recently, the fund’s assets have surpassed USD $1.6 trillion, a staggering amount.

This monumental size is a result of decades of careful saving and investment of surplus revenues from the country’s oil and gas sector.

There’s that word ‘surplus’ again.

Closer to home, the province of Alberta has The Alberta Heritage Savings Trust fund, established in 1976 under former premier Peter Lougheed. Norway didn’t start theirs until 1990. Yay Alberta.

Here’s a look at how the amount in the fund has changed over time.

It grew nicely for the first 10 years, but since…..kinda flat, eh? I don’t think this is inflation-adjusted, either.

This was created initially by a transfer of $1.5 billion from the Province’s General Revenues (i.e, from Alberta taxpayers) but they then committed that 30 per cent of the province’s annual non-renewable resource revenue would go into the fund.

No sign of the word ‘surplus’ there, just a commitment to put 30% of non-renewable resource revenues into it. I’m pretty sure all those Middle East sovereign wealth funds also received funding from oil sector revenues, too.

So, Norway and the Middle Eastern countries, along with Alberta (if somewhat ineptly), found themselves earning greatly increased revenues from their petroleum sectors way back when. They decided to create glorified savings accounts in which to place some or all of those revenues, so the funds in those accounts could then be invested to create even bigger funds. Norway’s fund indicates it invests in bonds, stocks, real estate, you name it. What I don’t get is – what do these SWFs do with all this accumulated wealth, other than re-invest it?

My pension fund looked much the same as these funds, if much smaller. However, it’s sole purpose was very clear – to provide me with income in my days as a wastrel retiree. I can find nothing concrete regarding a purpose for any of these SWFs, just virtuous phrases like these:

‘We work to safeguard and build financial wealth for future generations.’ (Norway)

‘Our main objective is to advance the UAE and its citizens. We will invest the country’s income in pursuit of this goal and, in doing so, successfully build our nation.’ (Abu Dhabi)

‘EIA is mandated to strategically invest funds allocated by the Federal Government to create long-term value for the UAE and contribute to the future prosperity of the country.’ (UAE)

Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund invested in a new golf league that offered professional golfers huge paydays even if they didn’t win any tournaments. That experiment just ended, with the fund pulling funding and the league likely shutting down. Did that investment benefit the citizens of Saudi Arabia?

If these are ‘rainy day’ funds, what counts as a rainy day? You can be sure it is not the citizens of the various countries with these funds that get to decide when or what the money is spent on. The most positive statement I can find about this is that Norway’s fund is called The Government Pension Fund of Norway. Does that mean it pays for pensions for all Norwegians? That would be a nice benefit, if so, but nowhere is that explicitly said.

So I admit I find the general idea of a sovereign wealth fund dubious. It is an accumulation of – let’s call them ‘unanticipated revenues’ – which are then re-invested in various ways to get the SWF to grow even larger. That they actually benefit the typical citizen of any of the countries that have them is not at all clear, unless they really are being used to fund universal pensions or a healthcare system or such. That they are so used is not clearly stated by any of them.

Given that, back to the question the above Globe article first put in my head: why and how is Carney getting into this game? In Canada resource revenues belong to provinces, so the federal government has no petroleum sector revenues to put into such a fund. What then is to fund this entity, which he says he wants to call The Canada Strong Fund? I don’t really believe Mr. Carney had an anonymous donor come along and offer us $25 large to get it going. If that initial $25B is coming from government revenues, then Carney is going to borrow it in the bond market, because the feds are running a deficit already.

Alternatively, here’s a line from a later Globe story: ‘Federal Transport Minister Steven MacKinnon said Ottawa’s efforts to potentially monetize airports are in the early stages, in response to questions about vague references in this week’s fiscal update that linked such options to a proposed new sovereign wealth fund.’

Oh.

For those of you who have never been a central banker, ‘monetize’ means ‘sell’. So, Canada is perhaps going to sell its airports to fund the CSF. This leads me to wonder – what else might Mr. Carney’s now-Liberal-majority government seek to sell?

I checked, and the Government of Canada claimed it held some $127B in non-financial assets in 2025. No details on what is in there, but airports would be one item, I suppose.

According to another Carney quote from the Globe:

“Over time, the fund will grow through asset recycling and reinvestment, creating even greater opportunities for future generations,” he said, adding that Canadians will be able to invest directly in the fund if they wish.

Oh, yea – sign me up for a $100 donation to that: ‘greater opportunities for future generations.’ Sure. Do I get a tax receipt?

I’m sure the ex-central banker could also explain just what is ‘asset-recycling’.

[Ok, I checked. ‘asset recycling refers to the practice of selling off underperforming or idle assets and using the proceeds to invest in new projects or additional assets that have a greater potential to generate returns.’ Brilliant, eh?]

So Carney is proposing to do pretty much what those other countries with SWFs did years ago. He is going to start up an entity that will take some money, invest it in whatever and then re-invest and recycle it to make said fund grow and grow, for purposes just as vaguely noble as all those earlier SWFs proclaim. The one difference is that he has no money with which to start this entity, other than borrowing more and selling whatever assets Canada’s government already owns. One could see this as a poor-country imitation of an SWF, I guess.

I have seen a similar movie to this in the past, so I offer another perspective.

When I finished my doctorate and had in hand a very welcome offer of employment from The University of Western Ontario, the ex and I had been earning very little income for some time. The income from my new faculty position would not start for months, yet we had to find a way to get ourselves and our infant son – and our stuff – from Indiana to London, Ontario. What to do?

We put together all the precious metal we owned, which wasn’t much – my high school class ring and some US silver dollars, as I recall. Then we went to a Holiday Inn by the highway, where some dudes had advertised they would be buying such things. A guy sitting on a bed in a hotel room with a .38 by his side (loaded? I have no idea) weighed it all up and gave us $US80 in exchange. Not a great sum, equivalent to about $US340 in 2026, but it helped get us to Canada.

That was an act of necessity, if not desperation, on our part. We had to get through a couple of months without income and get to Canada. Fortunately, we had not accumulated a big pile of debt, and I can’t say we missed the ring or coins later in life. I mean, it’s not like we sold an airport.

Final Question: What is Carney’s goal in starting this CSF?

Perhaps he just wants Canada to do what all the cool kids are doing. Fake it ‘til you make it.

Or maybe he thinks borrowing more and selling stuff to fund a SWF that will ‘create opportunities for future generations’ will enhance his reputation as a financial wizard, and thus win him the next election. Record deficits? Nothing to see here, folks, but just look at our Canada Strong Fund.

Maybe it should be called The Carney Slush Fund.

Know Thyself….Or Not

Written by Al Slivinski on April 23, 2026. Posted in Uncategorized.

I was recently looking for contact information for a newly opened pub in my town. The Freeps had run an article saying it would open on April 17, and I wanted to call them to insure that it would be open for lunch on the following Friday so that my hiking group could try it out after our walkabout. Alternatively, a website giving opening hours would do.

Well, you can find anything on the internet, right? So, I typed the name of the pub in from the article, and found – nothing. No website, no phone number, nothing to help me in my quest.

What I did find was a site announcing the Grand Opening of the place, but that site gave only a street address for it. No phone number to call, no website info. Not helpful. What I also found on the site, whose only purpose was to publicize the already-past Grand Opening Event, is what I have screenshotted below, from the very bottom of the page:

AI is gonna be so cool. We won’t need to know anything about ourselves – that’s always such a bother, isn’t it?

We can just ask Claude or Perplexity (Perplexity? Really?) if any particular event or pub or food or person or occupation or color suits us. AI knows all, after all.

But What Does it Mean?

Written by Al Slivinski on April 23, 2026. Posted in Economics.

Readers know that I subscribe to the WSJ, and I do so because I expect it to maintain reasonably high standards for reporting on economic and financial matters. I mean – Wall Street, right?

WSJ manages to disappoint me on that score regularly. There is an Opinion column in today’s issue with this headline:

In Defense of the McDonald’s Cheeseburger

It’s cheaper than it was in 1948, when gauged on a sandwich-per-hour basis.

Um…..sandwich-per-hour basis? What the heck does that mean?

So of course I read the column to find out, and here is what it means to the writer, one Faith Bottum. The key paragraph from the article says this:

A cheeseburger in 1948 cost 19 cents, while the federal minimum wage was 40 cents an hour. Today Mac-Menus reports the price of a cheeseburger at around $3.89, depending on region. And McDonald’s workers average $12 to $14 an hour (with California’s minimum wage for fast-food workers at $20). Even with the lower average wage, that’s 3.1 cheeseburgers an hour today, as opposed to 2.1 in 1948.

Ok, so 40/19 = 2.1 and 12/3.89 = 3.08, or roughly 3.1.

That is Ms. Bottum’s arithmetic, clearly. What does that mean? She says it means a cheeseburger is cheaper than it was in 1948. I don’t think so….

If you want a read on whether a McD cheeseburger is cheaper for a buyer than it was in 1948, then you compare the rise in the price of a cheeseburger over the relevant time period with the rise in the general price index, known as the CPI. Or, even better, you compare the cheeseburger price rise with how much the average or median earnings of a worker have changed over that time period.

Doing the CPI calculation is easy. The US CPI stood at 24 in 1948 and at 330 at the start of 2026. So, the CPI went up by a factor of 330/24 = 13.75 over the relevant period, while the price of a cheeseburger went up by a factor of 3.89/0.19 = 20.47.

Sorry, Faith. From the viewpoint of a consumer, a McD cheeseburger has gone up in price at a much higher rate than the prices of consumer goods in general, making it a less good deal than other things a person might spend their money on, relative to what it was in 1948.

(Yes, I know, very few people who bought McD cheeseburgers in 1948 are still around to do so today. I did not pick that year, Ms. Bottum did.)

Ms. Bottum ends her little piece with this:

Maybe this is why I’ve always had a fondness for the fast-food chain and its cheeseburger. It’s both delicious and a pretty good bang for your buck.

Well, you may be fond of them, Faith, but your numbers do not support ‘good bang for your buck’.

Now, the calculation she presents is not useless, it just doesn’t tell us anything about the relative cheapness of a McD Cheeseburger today vs 1948. It does tell us something from the perspective of McD as a profit-seeking company.

In 1948, McD had to sell 2.1 cheeseburgers to pay for one hour’s wages for an employee. In 2026 it has to sell 3.1 cheeseburgers to cover one hour’s wages. That’s what Bottum’s numbers tell us, and I doubt that makes McD happy in any way. The reason for that is that the hourly wage McD must pay for its workers has gone up by a factor of $12/$0.4 = 30, much higher than the increase in the CPI over that period, which we calculated above as rising by a factor of only 13.75.

It’s actually kinda simple. If the wage you gotta pay workers by law goes up a lot, then you are gonna have to sell more stuff and/or at a higher price to pay that wage.

Ain’t economics fun?

Full Disclosure: My first-ever-real-job (paid by cheque, tax withholding, etc.) in 1968 was at McD’s. I earned $1.20/hr, and I recall a hamburger being $0.49 and a cheeseburger $0.59. On a busy Friday supper hour, there would be 15 or more pimply-faced teenagers in the restaurant cranking out burgers and fries to feed the masses. You will never see that many youngsters working in a McD’s at one time today.

A Long Road to Freedom

Written by Al Slivinski on April 17, 2026. Posted in Education.

This is a long post that meanders across a number of things, so you might want to leave some bread crumbs as you read. I have broken it up into three sections.

A CBC Documentary

I read an op-ed, denoted as being ‘Contributed to the Globe and Mail’ a couple of days back, with the title ‘Self-censorship has become the safest form of expression’.

The title surprised me, but the content did so even more. It was written by a ‘Canadian documentary director’ named Ric Esther Beinstock, whose documentary titled Speechless was about to be shown on the BBC and CBC.

I have not seen this documentary, but in the Globe op-ed, Bienstock describes what she said she found as she moved across the US for 10 years making this film. I will give you a taste with a couple of quotes from her Globe op-ed:

Words I thought I understood had been quietly redefined. White supremacy no longer referred to neo-Nazis. It referred to things like being on time, setting agendas, and believing in objectivity. Safe space no longer meant protection from physical harm. It meant protection from ideas that challenged your world view. A documentary organization I was involved with arranged an anti-oppression training session. We were shown a pyramid that started with non-inclusive language and microaggressions (eg., asking someone “Where are you from?”) at the base and ended with genocide at the top.

She later writes:

Erec Smith is a Black professor of rhetoric who disagreed, in writing, with a colleague’s argument that teaching standard English to students of colour was an act of white supremacy. He was called a white supremacist by white colleagues.

Her article ends with this sentence:

Because once we decide that some ideas are too dangerous to hear, we have already conceded the argument to the people who would silence us.

Now, let me be clear, I am writing this piece not because I want to warn you about all of this (although I do) but because I was so shocked to read this piece in the Globe. Even more shocking to me was the fact that the CBC was planning to show Beinstock’s documentary.

This was Stage I in my journey. I thought that just maybe if the CBC was willing to air such a film, and the Globe was willing to give it free publicity by allowing this op-ed to appear in its pages, perhaps the worm was starting to turn. Maybe some of our media at least were beginning to see that ideas like the oppressiveness of punctuality and the need for safe spaces were madness. Maybe there was hope for a return to sanity in the 21^st century.

Nestruck Turns the Worm Around

Then, a couple of days later, another article appeared in the Globe by one of their regular writers, J Kelly Nestruck, said to be the G&M’s ‘Television Critic’. His article is titled Speechless, CBC’s tedious campus speech doc, rehashes moot debates.

This took me to Stage II of my journey.

As you may guess from the title, Mr. Nestruck does not think much of Beinstock’s documentary. A quote from his review:

It is a doc that essentially restates the concerns of the Harper’s letter of 2020 (signed by, among others, Canadians Margaret Atwood, Michael Ignatieff and Jeet Heer), which argued that illiberal elements of the left were aiding in the rise of the anti-democratic far right.

That’s a pretty moot point now in the middle of Donald “a whole civilization will die tonight” Trump’s second term.

It seems that Nestruck thinks the doc is all old news which has been superseded in importance by what DJT is doing today. He seems to have entirely missed the point of the 2020 Harper’s letter he mentions. He also takes a cheap shot at Biekenstock when he writes:

This is the most muddled, insufficient section of Speechless – though it was also when I realized the film is less about the ideological capture of colleges than the addiction of Bienstock’s generation to watching drama unfold.

Ok, maybe a cheap shot at her entire generation.

Nestruck ends his piece with one admittedly good question: why did the CBC give so much airtime to a documentary that is wholly about US campuses? I suspect that no one had the cojones to make such a doc about what is happening in Canada, but Nestruck thinks that would not be of interest anyway. He notes that Biekenstock did mention two examples of the limiting of speech on Canadian campuses in her op-ed in the Globe, but then he writes:

If you’re still worked up about an exercise class cancelled more than a decade ago while the world is burning, it’s time to break from your phone and return to reality.

So, back to ‘the world is burning, courtesy of DJT’, and so there is nothing important to see on Canadian campuses. It’s a clever take. If you are concerned about freedom on Canadian university campuses, you must be a drama queen.

Nestruck’s piece reminded me that the Globe remains a home to plenty of folks who think that the only thing wrong with the 21^st century is the rise in the popularity of ‘alt-right’ figures like Trump, and they of course had nothing to do with facilitating that.

The UWO Lawsuit

By pure coincidence I came across a story that is very relevant to all of the above, regarding something that had recently occurred on a very familiar Canadian university campus – that of my former employer. It was apparently covered to some extent last year in The National Post, to which I do not subscribe, but I came upon it quite by accident, in the process also discovering a blog by another former UWO prof.

On to Stage III of my journey.

The UWO story concerns one Margaret Munn, a Scottish-born woman in her 60s who had earned a BA at UWO in the 90s, and returned there in 2022 to get a teaching degree. Here is a quick summary of what happened to her, from an article about it on The Free Speech Union of Canada website:

In her first week of classes, she asked a question in a course called, “Indigenous Education: Towards a Decolonizing Pedagogy.” Specifically, she wanted to know what was meant by ‘decolonization’ and how it translated practically to the business of teaching children math, chemistry and the like. This question, and other mild challenges to the ideological instruction being imparted in the classroom, were not well-received, and triggered what became a Kafkaesque nightmare for Margaret for the next two years.

In fact, nightmare not withstanding, Ms Munn got her teaching degree, and filed a lawsuit against my former employer last year. Her statement of claim can be found here in pdf form, courtesy of The FSUC. It is dated January of 2025.

Now, this is Ms. Munn’s side of the story only, to be sure. I went looking in the Ontario court system for any reference to this case, and/or a response by the defendant, UWO, but could find none. That may be due to my ineptitude at searching that site. I intend to keep looking.

Here is some of what Ms Munn claims:

a. The instructor of the course mentioned in the FSUC quote above was one Robyn Michaud. According to Munn’s filing,

On October 31, 2022, the conversation in Michaud’s classroom turned to “cultural appropriation” in the context of discussing Hallowe’en costumes. Munn opined that you cannot stop people from wearing costumes and noted that people “appropriate” Scottish cultural symbols such as kilts all the time. This prompted a further complaint by Michaud to Hibbert.

Hibbert was an Associate Dean in the Faculty of Education, about whom you will read much below. I am quite sure that in my 42 years at UWO not once did I think it appropriate to complain to a dean – or anyone else – about something a student said in my class. (Ok, I probably complained to my girlfriend a few times.)

b. Michaud went further. Munn’s filing says:

Michaud then escalated the matter and called an emergency meeting with the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (“EDI”) Committee. The EDI Committee agreed to convene the meeting because the teacher-training program had become an unsafe space, citing concerns about Munn’s “hate speech.” The EDI Committee recommended the immediate expulsion of Munn and communicated this to Hibbert.

c. On Friday Nov 4, 2022, Munn was told she must attend a meeting on the following Monday morning. Here is what Munn says happened:

A two-hour long meeting was held on the Monday, with Munn, Hibbert, Tattersall, and a friend of Munn’s for support. Hibbert advised Munn that the EDI Committee had no independent authority to order disciplinary measures against individual students, but that she took their recommendations seriously. During the meeting, Munn was accused of being racist, colonialist, transphobic and an advocate of child abuse (apparently for saying that she had received corporal punishment as a child and was none the worse for it). Munn was told not to attend Michaud’s classes, although she was still expected to complete the assignments.

d. Students in the Teaching program in the faculty of education (a two-year program) are assigned ‘placements’ as student teachers in the surrounding school boards as part of the program. According to Munn:

The following day, Munn received an email from Joanne Lombardi, placement coordinator for the Faculty of Education, advising her that her forthcoming placement was suspended. No reason was given for this.

e. But the hits kept coming:

On November 16, 2022, Munn had yet another two-hour meeting with Hibbert, Tattersall and her support person. Hibbert advised that more allegations had come in and that she had interviewed students and faculty about Munn. No names were provided, nor were there written complaints to view—it was all hearsay.

And then:

On January 11, 2023, Munn was required to meet again with Hibbert, along with Tattersall and Munn’s support person. This meeting also lasted two hours. Hibbert advised that her investigation was complete and a decision had been made to formally move Munn to “conditional status.” Hibbert told Munn that the Student Code of Conduct Office had also completed an investigation, and it did not lead to further action (there never was such an investigation, Munn later learned). Hibbert further advised that any appeal had to be filed within 3 weeks (it was actually 6). Hibbert informed Munn that a makeup placement session could be done in May or June (although this never happened)

f. Here is my favourite – as in most maddening – bit from Munn’s claim:

During this meeting, Hibbert reviewed the results of her investigation, describing how various informants had denounced Munn for her views. Munn was instructed that she was not allowed to challenge Indigenous faculty members and must just accept their teachings because they have lived experience that she does not have.

I could go on, there is much more. Munn was never expelled, in fact, in my opinion because the assholes thought the ongoing threat of expulsion aimed at a woman in her 60s who just wanted to get a teaching degree was more likely to keep her submissive.

Amazingly, Munn did graduate, but even more remarkable is that Munn decided in February of 2023 to file an appeal of her ‘conditional status’ in the program with UWO’s Senate Review Board Academic. I spent a few painful hours in one of those back in the day, it is the final body of appeal for all students regarding any aspect of their academic status.

Munn won. The SRBA panel unanimously upheld her appeal, ordered the assholes to lift her conditional status, and then issued a 74-page decision in which the Board Chair noted all of the following:

Hibbert behaved as though there was a finding of plagiarism, which was procedurally unfair and therefore unreasonable;
Hibbert relied excessively on hearsay and double hearsay;
Hibbert withheld details of accusations until meetings;
Hibbert injected subjective standards into the decision-making process;
The school failed to inform Munn of the rules she was accused of violating; and
Conditions placed on Munn were designed to compel her to “think and speak in a prescribed way” leading Munn to be “afraid to participate in class discussions”.

The Senate panel also held that “the classroom environment needs to feel safe for all students, including students like Munn who seek clarification and critically examine the content of a course. Students should have the opportunity to express and discuss a range of opinions regardless of their being in a professional program.”

The cynic in me suspects that the SRBA panel looked at the record, which included recordings of the many meetings Munn was made to attend, and saw a lawsuit looming. As it happens, they got one anyway.

This ought to feel like some kind of victory, but look at what Ms Munn had to go through, and most of all, look at what the assholes in the Faculty of Education thought was appropriate behaviour on their own part.

After reading about all this, I had a look, and Katherine Hibbert is no longer an Associate Dean in the Faculty of Education, but she remains a faculty member, and – get this – a Distinguished University Professor. She had a paper published last October titled ‘Judging the institution: Simulated jurisprudence and the governance of professional futures’

I look forward to reading that one. Katherine’s pronouns are she/her, in case you were wondering.

I could not find any reference to Robyn Michaud anywhere on the Faculty of Education website. But I know how this stuff works, so I went to my old faculty of social science, wherein resides the Indigenous Studies program. No mention of her on that website, either. Last chance, I used the U’s person search feature and got a hit. She is listed as Ms Robyn Michaud, and supposedly is affiliated with the Faculty of Education, with the following job title: Lecturer, Visiting Appointment (Indigenous Teaching Scholar Secondment).

An office is listed also, but I don’t plan to go looking for her. Although she is still listed in the Directory of the Education Faculty, she does not appear on the Faculty Profiles page. Pity, I would really like to have checked out what she gets up to when she is not intimidating students.

Conclusion

The Munn vs UWO debacle illustrates clearly that Canadian Universities and other ‘elite’ organizations have a long way to go before I will feel like the worm has really turned away from what Bienstock writes about in her Globe op-ed and apparently filmed in her documentary. And, J Kelly Nestruck is the one who needs to return to reality. I suspect it is not a reality he is prepared to acknowledge. Most disturbingly, it is precisely the supposed educators of our educators, like Hibbert and Michaud, who are most to blame for all this. The list of findings by the SRBA in Munn’s case should make everyone at UWO ashamed. However, I am sure no one in that entire organization but the lawyers and the parties involved know about them.

Postscript

I alluded above to my discovery of a blog by another UWO prof – it’s called Mulcahy’s Miscellany and you can check it out here. I only know he’s a retired UWO prof because he mentioned it in passing in one post. He has a post on his site about the Munn affair at UWO, so like me he keeps up with the goings on there. Our blogs are quite different. One thing you will find on his site is a bunch of posts about the history of London, Ontario, which celebrates the 200^th Anniversary of its ‘founding’ this year. Some of those posts are pretty interesting.

The Real Scoop

Written by Al Slivinski on April 14, 2026. Posted in Uncategorized.

As readers know, I write about homelessness, both local and general, with some frequency. However, I’m just an old retired guy whose contact with this problem consists of what I read and what I see as I move around my home town.

I was sent and read a post about the problem, which you can read too, right here:

We are Loving the Homeless to Death

Just click on it, no paywall.

The reason you might want to read it is that it is one of many posts on this problem by one Kevin Dahlgren. Besides writing the blog Truth on the Streets, from which the above comes, he has worked in social services for over 25 years. As he says on the blog:

I started reporting on the homeless and addiction crisis a few years ago after many years of watching our government fail in ending this crisis.

There are many other posts on his blog worth your attention; he seems to be based in Oregon somewhere. What he has to say about these issues is way more credible than anything I write.

You’re welcome.

Extreme Avoidance

Written by Al Slivinski on April 11, 2026. Posted in Education, News Media.

I read a story in the New York Times (I am now a subscriber, at least temporarily) with the headline

Student Debt Burdened Them, So They Moved Abroad and Stopped Paying

Whoa, says I. Did not occur to me that was a way to avoid any debt. I mean, if they can’t find you they can’t collect, and a good way to be hard to find is to move to another country, that I can see. But this seems a drastic step to take, and I’m pretty sure it does not actually wipe out the debt, so going back to the US ever would be off the table.

Before I get to the NYT article on this, I thought I should go looking for some general facts about US student loan defaults. I did, and found the graphic below:

90 days past due is not technically in default, I believe, but it is the step just before default. And clearly the percentage of these loans at that stage is much higher than it was just before the Covid Catastrophe. So, OK – things have changed for the worse in those 5 years. I could not find any more current numbers, but 30+% at 90+DPD seems like a big number to me.

As to the NYT article, the first thing it does is quote one Amanda Lynn Tulley, who moved to Prague a year after graduating with a Master’s degree in historic preservation from the U of Oregon. She has not made a loan payment in over 7 years – way more than 90 days.

The quote from the story:

“I was never financially stable because I was never taught to be financially stable,” Ms. Tully, 37, said.

Ah. It’s mum and dad’s fault. I should add that Ms Tully is taking a beating on social media, according to a story in the New York Post, because of that quote, and because it turns out that the payment she went to Prague to avoid was $60/month.

NYT likes telling personal stories, as do most media these days, and in the article is also featured one Eric Cooper. He graduated with a degree in logistics and $60k in student debt, but got a job right away paying $50k/year, so the repayment amount was leaving him in tough financial shape. Easy to see why, since his pre-tax income would have been just over $4k/month, meaning maybe $3k and a bit per month take-home.

He took a different tack. His loan was through his parents, so he knew that if he bailed on it, they would be responsible for repayment. He therefore consolidated the loan into a personal loan in his own name, moved to Southeast Asia to teach English and continued making minimum payments while applying for citizenship in his new country. He stopped paying when he got citizenship in 2019.

However, the last word in the article goes to one Michele Zampini, associate vice president of federal policy and advocacy at the Institute for College Access and Success.

Here is the last two paragraphs of the NYT article, all from Ms Zampini:

Ms. Zampini said she was concerned about the narrative that defaulted borrowers living abroad were “gaming the system,” or being such a small minority of borrowers that their experiences shouldn’t motivate policy change.

“This is one piece of the bigger puzzle of how borrowers are managing,” she said. “The fact that someone would need to make such a drastic life change driven by student debt is, itself, an indictment of a broken system.”

Yes. That a borrower would leave the country to avoid a $60/month loan payment surely shows that it is the system that is broken.

From the mouth of a VP of policy and advocacy to your ears.

Failing Econ 2129

Written by Al Slivinski on April 9, 2026. Posted in Economics.

Sometimes the world hands a blog-writer a topic on a silver platter. All one can do is say ‘Thanks, world’. Then write the article.

Reading the WSJ this week I came across a story with this headline:

Delta’s Ace in the Hole for Surging Jet Fuel Costs: Its Own Refinery

Airline’s 2012 acquisition of Pennsylvania refinery has been called both prescient and pointless

I taught Delta’s acquisition of that refinery as a case study on vertical integration in my Managerial Econ class back in the day. And, wouldn’t you know it, everyone who has anything to say about it in the WSJ article would have done rather badly in my course.

Here’s the sitch. Delta Airlines did indeed buy a (money-losing at the time) refinery in Pennsylvania in 2012. In principle, this seems to make some kind of sense. There is no doubt that fuel costs are an enormous fraction of the cost of flying people around in airplanes. So, the thinking goes, buy an oil refinery, and you can supply yourself with jet fuel from your own refinery, without the markup that other refiners would charge you. Instant savings.

The technical term for that argument is – ‘wrong’.

First, just think about it for a minute. If that argument is correct, then every airline should own a refinery, and every automaker should own a steel plant, not to mention a tire company, and every grocery chain should own dairy farms and cattle ranches.

And yet – they do not. There are some good reasons for vertical integration, some situations in which it can increase profit, but ‘cutting out the middleman’ ain’t one of them.

The reason is not that hard to see. Suppose Delta is flying planes and being charged the going price of $4/litre for jet fuel by its usual suppliers. That is a cost to Delta, and is revenue to the refiners it buys from.

Now it buys a refinery, and the idea is that it sells the jet fuel to itself for only the cost of producing the fuel, which is, say, $3/litre. It thus saves $1/litre, and if it buys 1million litres per month, it adds $1million per month to its bottom line because owning that refinery lowers its fuel cost that much. Its rivals are all paying $4/litre. Advantage, Delta.

But wait a minute, ‘Delta’ now consists of an airline and an oil refinery, and that reduced $1million in cost to Delta every month is also a reduction of $1million in revenue to the refinery. Why? If the going price is really $4/liter, it could sell those 1 million litres to other airlines at that price, but it does not, it sells it to Delta at cost.

The Delta division of the integrated company will have $1million in reduced costs and the refinery division will have $1million less of revenue each month. Not an advantage, just a change in the bookkeeping entries for the two divisions of newly-integrated Delta.

Now, there is a way for Delta to increase its profits at the expense of its rival airlines, and that would be to buy up nearly all of the jet fuel refining capacity available. That would make it a monopoly in jet fuel production, always good for the bottom line, and it could sell to itself at a price lower than it sells to other airlines.

Of course, the anti-trust authorities would not allow that to happen – or so I would hope.

Let’s go to the WSJ article, folks.

Ed Bastien is the CEO of Delta. Here’s a quote:

“We don’t know where fuel is going to go, but to the extent fuel stays elevated, that refinery will continue to help us,” Bastian told reporters this week. The airline said the refinery will boost its expected second-quarter earnings by $300 million.

Bastien runs the airline, not the refinery, so he need not mention that the refinery’s earnings will be down $300m. And of course, no one ever sees money you did not make, not even the accountants. Think how much better Delta’s earnings could be if their refinery paid Delta to take the jet fuel and burn it in their jets. I bet Ed never thought of that one.

Here’s another quote which is just complete nonsense:

Delta’s refinery is run by a subsidiary that sells its jet-fuel output to Delta at market rates. The arrangement allows Delta to avoid paying outside suppliers for the work of churning oil into fuel.

Um, if the subsidiary is selling the fuel at ‘market rates’, then Delta is paying the same price it would if it bought from another refinery. That is what market rate means. So then it is in fact paying the same as it would to an ‘outside supplier’. Like I said, those two sentences make no sense at all.

Fortunately, some economists are quoted in the piece also. They will sort things out for WSJ readers, I’m sure. Here’s one quote:

Ed Hirs, an energy economist at the University of Houston, said the refinery has been a costly mistake.

You tell ‘em, Ed.

Then he says this:

“They bought the bakery but not the wheat field,” he said.

Oh, dear. No, Ed, it does not matter that they did not buy the wheat field, which in this context means that they did not buy oil wells. My argument above holds, no matter how many stages back into the production of fuel – or bread – you go. It does not help profitability.

Happily, there is a second economist on the job, and he is quoted as such:

Philip Verleger, an energy economist, said the purchase made sense for Delta.

“Everybody was highly critical of Delta when they did it,” he said. “I thought this was a really smart decision. The oil companies treated airlines as cash cows.”

Folks, real economists don’t use the term ‘cash cow’. We prefer ‘customer’.

The thing is, economists do not have a guild, so there is no one I can write to and file complaints about Mr. Verleger and Mr. Hirs for engaging in economic malpractice. Anyone can claim to be an economist, and say any damn silly thing they like, it turns out.

I’m afraid that CEO Bastien and ‘economists’ Hirs and Verleger would have failed my Econ 2129 class. As did others, back in the day.

Asked And Answered

Written by Al Slivinski on April 9, 2026. Posted in News Media.

I went to the Wall Street Journal website this morning, as is my habit, and there I found headlines for two separate stories, side by side.

On the left was:

Why Iran Thinks it Won the War

Despite Huge Military Losses

and right next to it was:

Iran Tightens Its Grip on

Hormuz Despite Cease-Fire

That was easy.

The First Casualty – and The Last

Written by Al Slivinski on April 7, 2026. Posted in Government, Standards.

I think we live in a world in which facts are of rather little importance. One reflection of this is how few actual facts are reported by news media. So many of the stories they run are about how someone feels about something, or about group/person A ‘calling out’ group/person B for something they said or did. Not to mention endless, fact-free quotes from ‘activists and advocates’.

The Prez of the US is notable for his casual relationship to the facts, but our late great Boy King was no better on that score, albeit less flamboyant.

I write below a rather short piece, precisely because there are so few facts to work with. That I have anything at all to say about it is because I keep an eye on Juno News, a non-mainstream and definitely right-leaning online media outlet. They ran a story today that I have not seen covered anywhere else in Canada. (I went through every inch of the Canadian Press website and could find nothing.)

The Juno piece is an op-ed, but it contains a report of what was said at a March 25 update to members of the Canadian Senate Standing Committee on Indigenous Issues, provided by Rosanne Casimir, Chief of the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation (Kamloops Indian Band). Ms. Casimir announced on May 27, 2021 that the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School had been found buried near her reserve’s former boarding school.

This shocking announcement was much-covered in all the media, a very few of whom pointed out that it was supported by results from ground-seeking radar, which, so far as I know, cannot possibly reveal the existence of bodies. What it shows are basically shadows.

Note that this announcement came almost 5 years ago, The story quotes Senator Scott Tannas of Alberta as follows, along with Casimir’s reply:

“I just wondered, coming up on the fifth anniversary of the initial discovery that you were a part of, the 215 graves, how many people have you identified that you believe are within that 215?” asked Senator Tannas.

“That is out of my realm right at this time,” replied Chief Casimir.

So, none have been identified. The Canadian government has given the band $12.1million to find out what happened here, if anything. No exhumations have been done or even attempted in five years. Here is Casimir again:

“Well, I definitely see this here, it’s definitely not a one-, three-or five-year process,” replied Casimir. “I definitely see it as a longer process that is going to take some time.”

And more money, I am guessing. If any of the Senators asked what had been done with the $12million, it is not reported in the article.

I will add that the op-ed is not, on the whole, very good. It goes on about the appropriation of the well-documented Jewish Holocaust by Chief Casimir, and it is not very well written or argued. But it is the only source I can find for this ‘update’ having actually taken place, and what was said there.

And, so far as I know, the following statement from the op-ed is quite accurate:

…there is not a single, authentically documented case of a student murdered by a staff member at any government-funded Indian Residential School in Canada during the 113 years these schools operated.

As I noted above, I checked the Globe and the Canadian Press website for stories about this meeting, and found nothing, Here are some stories I did find on the CP site:

Grassy Narrows chief wants Carney to apologize in person for comments about protester

‘Absolute betrayal’: First Nations blast Eby in leaked transcript of DRIPA meeting

No difference between suspending and amending DRIPA, says First Nations leader

N.S. premier blasts First Nation highway blockades, calls for RCMP to be respected

As it says at the top of the CP site:

Yewbetcha.

If You Build it, They Will…?

Written by Al Slivinski on April 4, 2026. Posted in Government.

I offer here a look at two seemingly unrelated stories about housing. They are in fact related, and sadly so, as I think you might see.

First, the Freeps and CBC London have not written anything about this so far as I recall, but a letter to the editor in today’s Freeps put me on to it, surprisingly. There is a housing co-op in East London called Tolpuddle where many of the units are rented on a Rent Geared to Income basis. A story on CTV news from early March, which you can check out in its entirety here, indicates that it includes at least 15 units which cannot be rented out because of the damage done to them by previous tenants. There are photos and video at the link above. The co-op also says it cannot afford to repair these units, and is asking the City to agree to fund those repairs. A number ‘between 1 and 2 million’ is mentioned.

A salient quote from the CTV story:

According to the Co-op President, city hall’s housing access waitlist determines which tenants are chosen for RGI units, but some of those individuals have not had their mental health or addictions stabilized prior to moving in.

That’s led to some chaotic tenancies that attracted drug use, drug dealing, damage, violence, and trespassing.

The story says the building has 134 units, 94 rented on a RGI basis. The article also says there is a ‘multi-year waitlist’ for RGI units in the city.

There was, however, a ‘story’ on the new modular units on Cheese Factory Road on the CBC site last week. CBC found one resident there who was unhappy about the remote location and the no-visitors rule, as well as the amount living there was costing him. Rather typical CBC reporting, telling us almost nothing about how things are going there. A Freeps story reported that all the units there are occupied, with a waitlist of 100 people.

So, we have a significant ‘shortage’ of low-rent units, it seems, the units that exist get trashed by at least some of the tenants who occupy them, and guess what – there are calls to spend more money on such housing; build more units, and repair the ones that have been trashed.

Well, here is the second, seemingly unrelated-but-not-really story, coming to you all the way from NYC. It is all in the graphic below.

A summary of what is in that graphic – I know the numbers are not easy to read:

From fiscal year 2019 to fiscal year 2025, that is six years, real, inflation adjusted spending per homeless person in NYC on services for that population went from $28.4k to $65.8k. Not quite tripling, but keep in mind that is per person and adjusted for inflation. Over that same period, the population served by that spending went up 26%, from 3,588 to 4,504.

As I say often, the human universe is a very complex thing. One cannot point at those numbers, stark as they are, and say – spend a lot of money on the homeless and you will get more homeless.

However, it can be said unequivocally that those stark numbers also do not support the idea that spending money on the homeless will reduce the number of homeless.

If You’ve Got the Money, Honey, I’ve Got The Time

Written by Al Slivinski on April 3, 2026. Posted in Culture.

I think we all go through our lives with certain basic beliefs about the world. Call them perspectives or hypotheses or attitudes, or whatever. I have my own, formed partly from what I read (and I do read a lot) and partly from what I see around me as I go about my days. My hypotheses about the world have changed over time, I think because the world has changed, but there is no denying that I have changed, also.

One of my key current hypotheses is that the world – let’s say North America – is populated by too many people who have too much time and/or too much money to spend. Put differently, they are in a position to spend time and money on things that seem to me – well, nutso.

Readers know that I like watching sports, and I like listening to live music even more. In my day I went to a lot of concerts by talented performers. The Stones, Blue Rodeo, Allison Krause, the Hip, Guess Who, Steely Dan, Chris Isaak, REM, the list is long.

However, these days going to a concert by a first-tier performer is eye-wateringly expensive. A website called The Pricer gives the following info as of October of 2024 for Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour of that year.

Taylor Swift’s average ticket prices range from $400 on the low end to over $3,500 for the best floor seats via primary sales.

The same article noted that

According to an article on Fortune, the average ticket prices for her U.S. tour range between $2,000 and $8,500 on the resale market.

That ‘resale market’ is important, as that is how a vast majority of people obtain their tickets to big-name concerts these days. (I’m no fan of Ms Swift, but her prices are only one example; I am not picking on her.)

As a contrast, I saw The Stones in 1998 at Aloha Stadium in Honolulu. Long time ago, yes, but that means they were still an ass-kicking band, and the price on the ticket (which I still have) is $US65. Reserved seats, great view, great sound.

Bigtime sporting events are similar. According to the NY Post, writing at a time when the two teams for the 2025 World Series were set:

At the time of publication, the lowest price we could find on tickets for any one game in Toronto was $1,244 USD including fees on Vivid Seats.

Prices start at $755 including fees for games in La La Land.

Here is a quote from a recent Globe article about the World Cup, coming soon to North America:

On FIFA’s own resale marketplace, a ticket for the final was being listed for as much as US$230,000 this week. FIFA does not resell tickets or set prices on the platform, but can cash in for a second time by taking a 30-per-cent cut from any sale.

30% of those prices adds up to a chunk of change, eh FIFA?

FIFA is among the most corrupt organizations on planet Earth, but those prices are at those levels only because there are schmoes in North America willing to pay them. Hence, my hypothesis.

One must have a lot of ‘spare’ income and time to attend the World Cup, the World Series, or a Taylor Swift concert. But this article was actually inspired by my coming across some more mundane illustrations of my basic hypothesis.

Here they are:

Poop Monitoring

I was reading an article in The Free Press, as I do, and it referred to something called Throne.

I went and looked it up on the interweb thing, and here is a quote direct from the top of their website:

Throne is a smart, toilet-mounted sensor that turns everyday bathroom moments into personalized gut, hydration and urinary insights — no manual tracking, no food logging, no routine changes.

That last bit would be clearer if they had written ‘no changes in your routine’, but – you get the picture.

This is a sensor you put on your toilet, and it – well, it checks your poo every time you go.

Why?

Well, as the website says:

Stop guessing.
Start understanding your body.

Who does not want to understand their body, after all?

More quotes from the site – I really do love the way they put things:

Automatic, hands-free detection turns bathroom moments into health signals you can use the same day.

The ‘hands-free’ bit is definitely important.

Then there is this:

Gut Health, Hydration, Bathroom Habits and Urinary Function scores make patterns easy to see and easier to act on.

I can just see myself checking my scores every day……

I know, some of you degenerates reading this are thinking…..Hey, but…..

The Throne people are on to you. The site also says this:

What the sensor actually sees

Throne’s optical sensor faces downward into the bowl. It is physically incapable of recording the person using the toilet.
Additionally, each frame passes through privacy filters that automatically delete anything that could contain human anatomy.

No, you cannot capture photos of your guests’ jolly bits on your iphone, folks. Sorry.

And….for those worried about their own privacy, well:

How we protect your data

Your data is encrypted with bank-level security.

- Use the toilet as usual, just bring your phone!
- Throne uploads your TLS 1.2 encrypted session data to the cloud for analysis.
- Throne’s AI turns raw session data into health insights. These are protected with AES-256 encryption.
- Your health insights are securely sent to your phone via the Throne app.

Obviously, if it’s TLS 1.2 and AES-256 encrypted, nothing could go wrong. And – poo data being analyzed in the cloud. Now that is an image.

Not surprisingly, the most prominent thing on the Throne site is a Shop Now button. It’s everywhere. I clicked on one, and am happy to inform you that Throne One can be had for only $399.99.

US dollars, I’m afraid, and I expect there is some Shipping and Handling added once you get down to ordering. Cheap, though, compared to a Taylor Swift or World Cup ticket, and it will provide months, if not years, of happy poo-gazing.

You may of course be wondering if you should not wait a bit for Throne 2.0. Tough call.

Beating the Odds

For this next one, I will admit I am not sure it really illustrates a society full of people with too much income or one with too little smarts. However, I am mindful of the adage that a lot of people have more money than smarts, and this is surely an illustration of that.

To give credit, I was pointed at this modern wonder by the fine folks at Gelman’s statistics blog. As you will see, it is not surprising that a bunch of practicing statisticians had something to say about Lotto Champ.

Statisticians, as well as most reasonable folks, take the view that the outcome of a State or Provincial lottery is random. However, it should be admitted that what exactly it means for some process to be ‘random’ is murky. One might want to say that it means it is unpredictable, but the weather two weeks from now is quite impossible to predict (despite what your local forecaster claims), but it is the result of deterministic natural processes. It’s just that the processes are so complex that we have no hope of predicting them. So, things can be unpredictable that are not really random, but if something is truly random, then it is certainly unpredictable.

I play online solitaire, in which the deal of the cards is said to be ‘random’, but they are in fact the output of some kind of carefully constructed computer algorithm. I can’t predict them, but I don’t think the cards I see dealt in each game are arrived at randomly.

When we try to make things random, like when we shuffle cards before dealing in a game of poker, we are just doing physical actions that we think mix the cards up from the last deal, and which we are unable to control, and which – important if you don’t want to get punched – our fellow players believe we cannot control.

You have probably seen the numbers for a Powerball lottery drawn, they are printed on balls that blow around in a container until one pops up through a chute, to be read by the lovely young lady employed for that task. The point of all that theatre and equipment is so that no one thinks anyone is determining which numbers come up. I was convinced, back when I had cable and could watch these things. There is just no reason to believe that any particular one of the balls in the container are more likely to pop to the surface than any other. However, if one could predict which balls were more likely to pop up, well – maybe one could make some money on the Lotto, eh?*

That’s what Lotto Champ does for you. Sortof. Maybe. Below is a photo from the website of the box in which the fine folks who ‘invented’ Lotto Champ will send you their software. It will only cost you $197 (marked waaaay down from $970 – something about 9 and 7 is attractive to these folks).

I hear all you skeptics out there asking – just what does this software do? Well, it is –

The Advanced
AI-Powered Tool For
Smarter Lottery Wins

Not only is Lotto Champ AI-powered, it is Advanced.

Do note that it says ‘smarter’ lottery wins, not ‘more frequent’.

I won’t bore you with details, you can find it online yourself easily, and the language on the site is remarkable in avoiding any claim that you will actually win more, or even win anything at all. It just tries to impress you with how awesomely cutting edge it all is.

And, the site guarantees ‘100% Satisfaction’ and a ’60-Day Money Back Guarantee’.

Class, what do you think happens if you go to the site and try to claim your money back after purchasing a Lotto Champ?

This is out and out fraud, but what is further notable is that these assholes don’t stop at trying to sell you a random-number generator, they also build fake ‘Review’ websites that pretend to have evaluated Lotto Champ and found it ‘100% legit’.

Here is the bottom line from one of these ‘independent review’ sites:

If you’re someone who plays the lottery regularly and wants to increase your odds with a smarter, AI-driven strategy — Lotto Champ is a game-changer. It’s affordable, easy to use, and packed with value thanks to the bonuses and lifetime access. With nothing to lose (thanks to the money-back guarantee) and everything to gain, this might just be the smartest lottery decision you ever make.

It is tempting to see this as another example of the enshittification of the world by the internet, but to be fair, these kinds of things have been around since governments first realized that state-run lotteries were a way to tax people with low numeracy. The internet only makes it easier to market this crap.

And, given that all the data on government lotteries I have ever seen makes it clear that the players are overwhelmingly from the bottom half of the income distribution, it is not likely true that Lotto Champ is mostly purchased by those with too much money. More likely, those with little money and even less smarts.

Which I think makes it more depressing.

_____

* It’s actually harder than that, because governments earn revenue from their lotteries. That means they pay out less than they take in. Always. That ‘vig’ means you have to do a lot better than random picking to hope to make money above what you spend on tickets.

What is it Good For?

Written by Al Slivinski on March 28, 2026. Posted in Government.

Absolutely nothing, some have written regarding war, but it strikes me that it is at least sometimes necessary. WWII was in that category, I would say, once Germany and Japan got it started. But it’s hard to tell when that point is reached. Britain and France clearly waited too long back in the 30s, but hindsight is easy.

History is full of wars that seem unnecessary in hindsight – or at least unwise – started by various nations for various claimed reasons. What is shared by all wars is death and destruction. A relatively new aspect of this, on full display in the current war in the Middle East, is that so many of the deaths that accompany the destruction are of civilians. Modern military strategy and hardware makes it easy for the military to stand back and destroy things without losing many of their own personnel. Richer nations are better at this, as the requisite technology is expensive, and the US is one of the best at it. However, what the Ukraine/Russia and current Middle East war have also demonstrated is that drone technology makes ‘stand back and blow shit up’ a more viable strategy for less rich combatants, too. I don’t know if that is a good thing or not.

I suspect this all makes it easier to start a war. The potential to do a lot of damage without having to witness flag-draped coffins coming home makes war an easier choice for national leaders, particularly in a democracy. I think that was a key factor in the willingness of the Bush II Administration to start the ‘shock and awe’ Gulf War II.

That conflict went on for a very long time, and of course the flag-draped coffins did start coming home eventually, although not in anything like the numbers generated by the Vietnam or Korean wars.

Memories of all that came back to me when the US and Israel began their attacks on Iran some weeks ago. I felt no sadness at the news of the death of a Supreme Leader who had so recently overseen the killing of some tens of thousands of his own people for the sin of massing to protest his government. But I still felt a big dose of – WTF?

We’ve heard many things from members of the US administration at different points. The calls to the Iranian people to ‘rise up’ against their leaders seemed to me a fantasy. First, what reason was there to believe they could now effectively do that when they were cut down in the streets for trying simply to protest only weeks ago? Second, what reason is there to think they want to in the face of attacks from outsiders that are – inevitably – killing their friends and relatives?

History Lesson 1: Poor white dirt farmers did the overwhelming majority of the dying for the Confederacy during the US Civil War. They hated slavery more than most Northerners, not out of moral compunctions, but because that institution robbed them of a means of feeding their families. None the less, they fought and died for the Confederacy with considerable bravery because the goddam Yankees had invaded their homes. People do that.

Niall Ferguson, a born-again Trumpist, wrote an article in The Free Press on Feb 28, asserting confidently that this would not be a long war. To quote him directly – ‘One thing I can confidently promise about the US-Israeli war against the Islamic Republic: it will not last long’.

History Lesson 2: That was precisely the belief on all sides at the start of WWI. It is something like Military Principle No. 1 that ‘No plan survives first contact with the enemy’. (Helmuth von Moltke, 1871, I believe). Ferguson is supposed to be a historian, and here we are now with the Straits of Hormuz all but closed and the world price of oil dancing around $US100/barrel.

The next two articles by Ferguson in The Free Press were titled ‘Could This be the Start of WWIII?’ and then ‘This is How the Iran War goes Global’.

So much for ‘it will not last long’, I guess.

DJT at one point a bit after this war started said it could only end with the ‘Unconditional Surrender’ of Iran. It is doubtful the US President could recite any of the occasions in the USA’s past where it demanded ‘unconditional surrender’ of an enemy.

One was U S Grant in the aforementioned Civil War. Indeed, it was eventually said that was what his initials stood for. He insisted on those terms because he (and Lincoln) had determined that the Southern combatants were traitors, and because he and W T Sherman had by 1864 built a military machine that the South had no hope of matching. The North had simply out-produced and out-manned the South, Grant had Lee in a corner, and Sherman was burning and pillaging his way across the heartland of the South. The war was clearly headed to a Union victory.

Another case was in WWII, when Roosevelt, Churchill and (sadly) Stalin agreed that those would be the only terms on which they would end WWII. Again, once the US had entered the war, those three powers commanded wartime economies that Germany and Japan could never match. WWII was also clearly going to end with an Allied victory, so they could declare how it must end. The same Allies had also put some 8million military boots on the ground in Europe, North Africa and the Pacific.

Now, I read in the WSJ that Trump is ‘seeking a dealmaker’ in Iran while the Iranian government says that no talks with the US are occurring or planned.

Here is a quote from the WSJ story:

The U.S. sent Iran a 15-point plan to end the war, which centers largely around previous Trump administration demands of Tehran. Iran’s military spokesman suggested the U.S. was negotiating with itself to get out of a “strategic defeat.”

Um, you don’t send a ’15-point plan’ to an adversary of which you are demanding ‘unconditional surrender’. And from what I can tell from reading the news about what is happening in the Middle East at this writing, ‘Iran’s military spokesman’ is saying things much closer to the facts than anything DJT has said recently.

I also read that Israel has killed the Iranian naval commander responsible for blocking the Straits of Hormuz. Does anyone think that will re-open the Straits to oil tankers? The Supreme Leader was killed on Day One, and that did not stop the war. Iran is a nation with a gang government, like modern Russia and China and the old Soviet Union. It is run by a clan in which there is always another clan member available to step up. (Being a gang nation, the one who steps up may have had to kill – or ‘purge’ – some of the others, that’s how gangs work.) The Supreme Leader was quickly replaced by one of his sons (a family business kind of thing) and the naval commander will be replaced by another naval officer – perhaps not his son. I don’t think you can kill the entire clan. Perhaps they are going to try.

Just today, after I had already written two drafts of this post, another article appeared in the Free Expression section of the WSJ, by one Matthew Continetti.

It ends with the following:

Even as the White House pursues negotiations to end war with Iran, U.S. ground forces are moving into position near the Persian Gulf. Marines, special forces and paratroopers will give the president options. They can be used to secure Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium, open the Strait, guarantee freedom of navigation and fulfill his objective of ending the threat from the Islamic Republic.

The White House says Mr. Trump will “unleash hell” if Iran doesn’t accept a deal. Sometimes hell isn’t enough. The president must see Operation Epic Fury through to a successful conclusion—and finish what he started.

Mr. Continetti’s article leans heavily on the US’s failure to remove Saddam Hussein in Gulf War I in urging the US to ‘finish the job’ in Iran. He mentions the failed campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan in Gulf War II, but does not seem to see the lessons of those conflicts as relevant to the current situation. Why Mr. Continetti believes that this time it will be possible to finish what Trump started is not at all clear.

It is a terrible thing to start a war. It is a sin of the highest order to start a war, to begin sowing death and destruction, without a clear-eyed assessment of what you want to accomplish, and a carefully constructed plan to achieve it. If the USA went into this with such a plan, it has indeed not survived contact with the enemy. I see no reason to believe Iran will ‘surrender’ in any common meaning of that word, and the Middle East will be a bigger ongoing mess than it was before the bombing started.

I hate to write it, but this looks to me like another ignorance-based major military fuck-up by the USA. The list of those is already much too long. I do hope that I am wrong, but that is at this point only a hope.

Do The Right Thing

Written by Al Slivinski on March 27, 2026. Posted in Culture, Safety.

I wrote last week that the 6^th anniversary of the start of Covid Madness and the coincidence of the two years’ dates had triggered some memories of that time, and I promised to write more.

I here offer you a condensed account of what was for me the most infuriating of the many infuriating things that occurred during that time.

It was in the Fall of 2021, and I was still a working stiff. We had finally been allowed to go back into our offices at UWO (although many of my colleagues were almost never there) and in-person meetings could again happen – with various restrictions, of course.

A big event that happened every Fall in Econ was the Prospectus Meetings, at which senior PhD students presented their plans for what their dissertations would look like. Almost all faculty attend these, along with most grad students, even the ones not presenting. Afterward the students are all sent out of the room and the assembled faculty come up with detailed commentary on each proposed dissertation and, finally, a decision as to whether the proposal should be passed (good to go ahead) or not (the student has to re-work their ideas and come back and try again).

A big moment for the grad program and the Dept in general, as you can imagine, and we could once again do it together in a room, face-to-face. Ya-hoo.

There is a limit to how many of these one-hour sessions one can digest in a day, so the proposals were scheduled to happen over two successive Fridays, with four presentations on the first Friday. A bigger room than any available in our building was arranged for, and we met.

A few days after that first meeting, an all-Dept email was sent out reporting that someone at that first meeting might have Covid. Oh. Our Chair then sent out a very sensible email saying that the current university policy if someone in a class is diagnosed with Covid is to just proceed with the class. We would do likewise. Ok, then.

Some days after that we got another all-points email saying the person in question had taken a Covid test, and it was negative. So – relax.

Except not.

Before the second prospectus meeting on the following Friday could take place, we got a third email saying that (I will never forget the phrase) ‘out of an abundance of caution’ the second prospectus meeting would occur only on Zoom. No more in-your-face presentations or discussions would occur.

Just after this last email landed, one of my youngest colleagues came into my office, angry. I cannot remember his exact words, but it was along the lines of ‘what the hell are we doing?’

I said ‘I guess we have decided to abandon Bayes Rule’ and he said ‘yea, that’s fair’.

I’m going to now tell my faithful readers about Bayes Rule, because otherwise you cannot understand what an absolute abrogation of our duties as academic economists it was for that second meeting to be moved to Zoom.

The Reverend Thomas Bayes (1701-1761) was the English minister and mathematician who was, so far as we know, first to codify a rule for updating one’s beliefs about anything uncertain in the face of new information. His Bayes Rule, or Bayes Theorem, is absolutely essential to Economics and any other science that studies decision-making under uncertainty. Very few of the economists in the world do not teach some version of Bayes Rule in any reasonably advanced class. I taught it in my Political Economy class because it is central to understanding how people update their views of political candidates during the course of an election campaign. Decision theorists use it, management gurus use it, psychologists use it, statisticians use it.

And, without dragging you into the weeds with me, I can assure you that the only Bayes-rule-consistent decision that could possibly emerge from our learning about the person who had the negative Covid test would have been – ‘Next Friday’s Prospectus Meeting will be back in person and in the same room’.

Indeed, it is really common sense. All we had learned between the two meeting dates was that one person at the first meeting had tested negative for Covid. Not a reason to do anything different. None.

Had I set this scenario as a question on an exam, asking students ‘Under what conditions should the second meeting be held?’, any student who answered ‘Only on Zoom’ would have gotten an F.

But it was my Department that earned an F. And that includes me.

I have no idea who made the decision to move to Zoom, it was certainly not the administrator who was given the task of sending the email.

I did not try to find out, and I did not march into that person’s office, whoever it was, and ask them ‘What the Hell is wrong with you?’

One very simple, almost costless thing I could have done is Reply All to that stupid third email, saying ‘So I assume we will no longer teach Bayes Rule in any of our classes?’

The young colleague who came into my office understood that, every other economist in the Dept would have, also.

But I did not do even that small thing.

So, the minor lesson from this story is that supposedly smart people are willing to abandon their principles in the face of…..I don’t know what it was, but I suppose ‘fear’ is as good a word as any. I am told it was Jordan Peterson who coined the term ‘terrified tyrants’ for the folks who made most of the big decisions during the Covid Catastrophe. They locked us all down and imposed all sorts of nonsensical rules on us, and suggested that anyone who protested against any of it was asking to kill Granny. This from people who let Granny die alone in a room with no family to comfort her.

The Major lesson from this episode for me, however, is personal. It is always easier to shut up and go along, and that is what I did, and I am still kicking myself for not saying or doing anything about this particular piece of madness back in 2021. That it was madness from my own colleagues rather than some dipshit administrator makes it worse.

What each of us does is what the world is made of. It’s goddam hard to do the right thing, often, which is no doubt why we see it done so seldom. But it’s still the right thing. And if no one does it, methinks the world just goes to shit. As it indeed is.

Memories

Written by Al Slivinski on March 20, 2026. Posted in Government.

Not something I write about a lot here….or maybe I do. But this memory goes back six years – exactly six years.

Sunday, March 15, 2020 was my granddaughter’s birthday, just as was Sunday, March 15, 2026. The Ides of March. On the following Monday in 2020, my buddy and I went out for our usual Monday night dinner and drinks and bullshit. We had been doing this for years, but unbeknown to us, the world was about to get very weird.

We stopped first at our favourite pub, to find it closed. The publican, recognizing us at the door as two of his regulars, let us in, and said ‘we’ve been told we have to close down tomorrow, so we were closing early tonight’.

Covid.

Remember? The next day was to be St Paddy’s, party party party, just as it was a Tuesday this year. Being a good guy, said publican got his kitchen to make us some schnitzels (the deep fryer was still on, he said) and poured us a couple of beers. He did not charge us for anything but the beers but said ‘Tip my staff well, they won’t be earning anything for a while’. We did.

He also said, ‘This is good, close everything down for a few weeks, the virus will subside, and we can all get back to life’.

Ha.

Having left our tips, we headed off to another of our regular haunts, which was still open (it survived the lockdowns, but has since closed), had a couple there, and then headed to the good ol’ Richmond Tavern, of which I have written here. No music that night, it was Monday after all, but we had one (might have been more, the memory is foggy at this point) there, and then headed home to see what tomorrow would bring. No St Paddy’s day celebrations would occur, the supposed reason for closing down on that night.

And on it went…..

And on…..

Little did we know, eh?

I remember many months later, probably more than a year later, being back in the Richmond under one of the serial Byzantine sets of regulations imposed on us in those days, and the bartender yelling at us ‘If you sit down you can remove your mask, but once you stand up, you damn well better put it back on!’

No sipping while standing.

Poor guy. He was just trying not to get fined. Or jailed.

I think we should not forget those days. The serendipity of the fact that these dates/days this year coincide with the same dates/days from 2020 has inspired me to post something I wrote up many years ago, but never posted. It’s long, but pertinent, so I will edit it down some and post it soon. Lest we forget……

Stay tuned.

The Utter Decadence of The American Broadcasting Company

Written by Al Slivinski on March 19, 2026. Posted in Culture, LBOs.

Really, you can’t make this shit up.

I will start this off by saying once again that I watch no broadcast or cable TV anymore, I ‘cut the cable’ a long time ago. Seems like 10 years, certainly close to that.

However, the mainstream media does report on things like the Oscar awards ceremony (whose audience has cratered since 2014, see chart below), and other TV ‘events’.

So, I hear things about TV shows. Or, rather, I read them, and today’s WSJ had quite the TV story, titled ABC Pulls ‘The Bachelorette’ After Video Showing Star’s Alleged Violent Behavior Toward Ex

Lest all the feminists go ballistic, let me quickly point out that the ‘star’ mentioned in that headline was one Taylor Frankie Paul – a chick.

A video has surfaced on the website of TMZ. TMZ used to have a cable TV show back when I had cable. Don’t know if they still do, but they do have a website. According to the WSJ “…TMZ published a video that appeared to show its popular lead, Taylor Frankie Paul, being violent toward her former partner with a child present.”

I went to the website, it’s easy to find, there is a video there whose caption suggests exactly what the quote says. I did not watch it.

I hear you wondering – who is this Ms Paul?

I quote from the article in the WSJ:

A 31-year-old mother of three with more than 6 million TikTok followers, Paul became a breakout star of Hulu’s popular reality show “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.” Her “Bachelorette” casting announcement in September brought fresh buzz to ABC’s reality dating show.

So now she has brought an even ‘fresher buzz’, I guess. The article also says this:

Paul did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Wall Street Journal has not independently verified the authenticity of the video, which appeared on TMZ hours before ABC pulled the “Bachelorette” premiere.

Where do you suppose TMZ got the video? I dunno. Don’t imagine they are saying.

Ok, so – who cares, Al? These shows are shit, but they get few viewers anymore. No one is surprised there are bottom-feeders out there like Ms Paul, the ‘breakout star’ and ‘influencer’, and the folks who watch her and are, um, influenced by her. What of it?

Well, you know my love for LBO’s, and the American Broadcasting Company is still certainly an LBO. Indeed, it’s part of the Disney empire now, and there ain’t many LBO’s Bigger than that. With that in mind, here is the most telling quote from the WSJ article on this:

In 2023, Paul was arrested by police in Herriman, Utah, over allegations of domestic violence after an argument with Mortensen. At the time, Paul pleaded guilty to aggravated assault.

In 2023 that happened, so over two years ago. If the WSJ knows this now, then so did the American Broadcasting Company.

I checked, it is easy to do here.

Aggravated assault, to which Ms Paul pleaded guilty, is a third degree felony in Utah.

But, hey – there was all that buzz.

Ah, The Irony

Written by Al Slivinski on March 19, 2026. Posted in Government.

No one talks about irony any more. I suppose so much that occurs in the world is so absurd that pointing out irony seems like mentioning that rain causes puddles.

I bet Ontario premier Doug Ford thinks it has something to do with laundry.

From the Globe on March 16:

Ontario Premier Doug Ford says his government is looking into livestreaming bail hearings, despite federal laws that routinely prohibit the publication of many of the details of these proceedings both to protect victims and to ensure the right of an accused to a fair trial.

Another excerpt:

“I am sure Premier Ford knows that the current state of our law would not permit bail proceedings to be broadcast, for multiple reasons. So this is not a realistic proposal that is being made,” Mr. Bytensky said in an interview.

But Mr. Bytensky said he welcomed the idea of providing the public with more information about how bail is administered, which he argues would put to rest the common refrain from politicians such as Mr. Ford that it is granted too liberally.

Yea, well, I think you’re missing Dougie’s point here, Mr. Bytensky. Realistic or not, he wants bail hearings public, not explanations from you or anyone else about how bail is set. Dougie thinks judges do a terrible job at setting bail, allowing too many people out of custody who should not be, and he figures if said judges knew their decisions were publicly witnessable they might stop behaving that way. Dougie just doesn’t trust judges to do the right thing.

I expect I agree with Ford on that, although I am not at all sure livestreaming would change their behaviour with regard to granting and setting bail. Judges, like almost all public servants these days, are mostly committed ideologues. But, at least we would see the consequences of their attitude in real time.

In fact, I would suggest that we not stop at bail hearings, I would like to see a law passed that makes all public proceedings – trials, bail hearings, meetings of Parliament, Cabinet, City Councils, and yes, even all meetings at public universities and hospitals, completely on the record. Livestream them all, and make transcripts of all of them available within one hour of the conclusion of every meeting. Hiring meetings, firing meetings, disciplinary meetings, budget meetings, everything. Nothing should be ‘in camera’. If you work for a government org, everything you do is on the record. No more of this privacy shit.

I will come back to my proposal in a moment, but first let’s get to the irony I advertised above.

In the same issue of the Globe, a story ran with this headline:

Doug Ford says his cellphone records must remain hidden to protect privacy

Last week his government announced that the Premier, cabinet ministers and their offices would no longer be subject to freedom of information requests

This is more sloppy writing by the GM. Here is what his government actually did.

If passed, the legislation, to be introduced in the spring, would quash existing and future requests for any document held in the Premier’s office and the offices of any of his cabinet ministers, such as their e-mails, internal memos and meeting schedules.

This is legislation. Proposed legislation. We have a legislature and a legislative process that must be followed before there can be any change in FOI laws, people. So, what they announced was that they would introduce a new law limiting FOI requests.

Another quote:

Ontario’s freedom of information watchdog condemned the exemptions. In a statement last week, Information and Privacy Commissioner Patricia Kosseim called the proposal “shocking” and “alarming.” Noting that existing rules protect personal and confidential information, she said the change is “about hiding government-related business to evade public accountability.”

And she linked the move to Mr. Ford’s phone-records case: “By changing the law retroactively, the government’s message is plain: if oversight bodies get in the way, just change the rules.”

I see nothing to disagree with in those two paragraphs, but then this is hardly unique to Mr. Ford. No one in public office – and I mean no one, irrespective of party or ideology – wants what they do and say to be public. The Ontario Liberals and NDP will decry this move by Ford, but if they get in office I can promise you they won’t rescind this law if Ford’s government actually passes it.

Ford does not trust judges to do the right thing – I don’t either – but we gotta trust him and his Cabinet to do the right thing.

Bullshit. I don’t. Either of them.

Like I said: ironic.

Hence my radical proposal. I know, people will say people need privacy to make good decisions. Horseshit, people need privacy to make bad decisions.

People will say that no one will serve in government if everything is public all the time. I say that I am not suggesting government employees, elected or appointed, have to have their private activities made public. Ford can have a private phone and an official Premier phone. Hell, I had a private phone number and an office phone number when I worked, what is so hard about that? And if you call Dougie’s public number about anything, your conversation will be public. He’s a goddam public servant, that’s why you called him.

Maybe what we would get from this regime is only people who are willing to be public servants in public.

I know someone who went through the process of becoming a cop. So far as I can tell, they had their life investigated with a flashlight, vise grips and a machete. Fair enough, if you are to be given the right to run around town with a gun and enforce the laws, we need to be as sure as possible nothing in your life suggests you are not fit for that job. If you are one of the people in charge of those people, same deal. No secrets. Actually, I want to give the pols and bureaucrats in charge a much easier deal. We won’t comb through your past, like an applicant to be a cop, but once you are elected or hired, no secrets. If you drink too much, not a problem – unless you show up tanked to a meeting. Then everyone will know you did.

Want to take a meeting with some lobbyists? Go ahead, but it has to be recorded and the transcript posted.

I think this would be great for democratic governance. I also know that it has not a snowball’s chance in hell of happening.

Addendum: People will also say that we cannot possibly have our federal Cabinet on record when they discuss matters pertaining to foreign policy and relations with other countries. I grant that, only because those other countries would not have similar rules in place, and that asymmetry would put Canada at a disadvantage. However, as soon as an exemption was granted for matters related to external affairs, you can bet the pols will find a way to claim that everything is related to external affairs, and so gut the rules at the federal level. No matter, as I wrote, this ain’t ever gonna happen anyway. But it should.

Debtor Nation?

Written by Al Slivinski on March 13, 2026. Posted in Economics, Government.

I came across one of those ‘explainer’ stories in the Globe and Mail the other day, titled

Rather than paying down debt, Canadians are happily borrowing even deeper

Being by now rather skeptical of anything the G&M publishes on matters economic, I thought I would see what it said. The theme is clear from the above headline; us crazy Canucks are borrowing more and more. Here is a graphic from the article:

The graphic above is about household debt. There is also some chatter about government debt in the article, which I will get to, but let me separate those two and start with us plain folks.

A. Household Debt in Canada and Elsewhere.

The clear lesson of the graphic above is supposed to be that Canadians were carrying more debt in ’25 than they were a year ago in all categories, although credit card debt showed the smallest increase. That mortgage debt grew the most is slightly surprising, as the graph below from good ol’ FRED indicates that average residential property prices in Canada, after hitting a peak in the first quarter of 2022, have since been dropping. Perhaps people are moving up in the size (hence price) of their houses, now. Hard to say. There are many reasons people might be carrying bigger mortgages, but it does seem they are, on average.

In any case, all that original graphic from G&M tells us is that household debt in Canada has increased some over the year from ’24 to ’25. Is that anything to be concerned about? Is that a big increase? Big compared to what? We need a comparison, so –

Here is an international comparison from an article in The Hub which is where much of the info in the G&M article came from, anyway:

I only included the data from the most-indebted countries here to save space. What this shows is the total household (not government) debt in a country relative to that country’s GDP, which is a measure of how much income is generated in that country. So, Canadians are, by world standards, very highly indebted, indeed, relative to the income they generate. On the other hand, they seem to be in good company. I don’t think that anyone is too concerned that the Swiss or Dutch are in trouble. Do note that Canadian households are much more indebted than those in the US, relative to GDP, however.

My own perhaps idiosyncratic view of ‘debt trouble’ is when folks start running up their credit card debt. That may be misguided, but here is some data on that for Canada from The Financial Post:

The average card balance per customer has risen some over this two year period, but the average monthly spend not at all, and the delinquency rate – the most worrying sign – is up a bit, but still very low, below 1%. It’s always good to compare oneself to others, so let’s see what the situation is for US credit card holders. The data for the US in the table below is from The Motley Fool, and not directly comparable, but still useful.

The average credit card balance is clearly higher than in Canada at $US6500, and the flows into early and serious delinquency look much worse, but I believe those numbers indicate the percentage of balances that have gone into delinquency rather than the percentage of customer accounts.

Anyway, the credit card situation of Canadians is, on average, not obviously worse than that for Americans.

I am always interested in not just what the situation is, but how we got there. So, I got to wondering what household debt in Canada looked like in the past, and how it might have changed. As so often is the case, I had to go to FRED to get the info on this I wanted, and it is below.

So household debt in Canada was less than 70% of GDP back in 2005, climbed to over 90% in the next five years, and has continued to tick up slowly after that, with some ups and downs along the way.

What about the USA households? Well……

This is a very different history than Canada’s, to say the least. Household debt was very high in the US up until the 2008 debacle, and since then it has trended down, to sit at its current 60-something percent. This got me wondering, so I kept digging. Here is the same info for Germany:

There was no run-up in the years prior to 2008 in Germany, just a long slow decline, except in the years just following the pandemic. The UK looks much the same as the US and Germany. The only developed country I found data on that had that long upward trend was Canada, although I did not check every country, of course.

So….WTF? Canada’s household debt to GDP ratio is very high by international standards, and it got there via a run-up over 20 years during which other advanced economies saw household debt declining as a percentage of GDP. And, the increase in Canada started well before the run-up in real estate prices.

There is one other fact worth mentioning here. Canada’s GDP, and even more, its GDP per capita, has not been doing well in recent years. This is well-known and much lamented, but it certainly raises the possibility that the reason Canada’s household debt history looks so different from that of other countries is not due to debt itself increasing so much as its GDP (the denominator in those graphs) doing so poorly.

B. Government Debt in Canada and Elsewhere

As you might guess, the G&M article went on about government debt in Canada, also. Here is a graphic analogous to the one I started this article out with:

Once again, Canada seems to be a world leader in indebtedness (government this time) although no country comes close to Japan’s 237% of GDP.

However, there is something hidden in those numbers which is worthy of your attention, I think. I discovered this about a month ago after an evening out with the Diners group. We do talk about many things, and on this evening, someone at the table commented on the massive government debt being carried by the good ol’ US of A. I responded that I was pretty sure Canada was in a similar position, and afterwards went to find data to see if I had stuck my foot in my mouth (a not uncommon occurrence).

I came across some info much like what you see above, which indicated that as a percentage of GDP, Canada’s debt was not much below that of the USA. Vindication for Al…..but there’s a but.

I will turn to more historical data from the ever-reliable FRED to show you that – once again – it’s complicated. Below is FRED’s tracking of the history of general government debt in the USA as a percent of GDP.

It has surely skyrocketed since 2002, but here is the thing. This is debt by governments at all levels, including the US States. I could also show you a graph of just the Federal US government debt-to-GDP ratio, but it would not look much different from the above. A bit higher, but a tiny bit higher in recent years, because US States don’t borrow much. Indeed, many of them have ‘balanced budget clauses’ in their state constitutions that prevent them from running deficits.

Now let’s have a look at Canada. Below is FRED’s historical data on the borrowing by Canada’s central (i.e., federal) government as a percentage of GDP.

Notice that in 2024 it was around 65% of GDP, not the over-100% we saw in the graphic above. That is because that graphic above is for the total debt of all levels of government. Canada’s provinces, unlike US states, are big borrowers. According to the Fraser Institute, a generally reliable bunch of mostly-economists (I know, I know) the federal government held just over 60% of total government debt in Canada and the provinces just under 40%.

Here is an interesting twist on this. Ok, interesting to me.

If there is a reason to worry about growing government debt, one is that the need to service that debt – that is, to pay the interest on it – begins to override other government spending possibilities. People like to say that governments are not like households but actually, they very much are. If a household borrows too much, eventually its interest payments chew up its income to the point that it cannot afford to spend on, you know, food and shelter. Government is the same. To illustrate the point, here’s a nice cogent line from an article in the National Post from last August:

In 2024/25, the federal government alone spent a record $53.8B on debt interest — more than the $52.1B it paid to the Canada Health Transfer.

As the ‘alone’ in that sentence suggests, the provinces were making significant debt service payments, too.

Now, if that debt service gets too big, and this has happened to governments from time to time in history, what can be done? The Feds have two options. One, default, and two, print money. Not with a printing press, but the Bank of Canada can certainly create more. This second approach is known as ‘inflating the debt away’, or ‘monetizing the debt’. The Provinces have only the one option, as they have no Bank of Ontario, etc, which is in control of the money supply.

Oh, and another often-heard bit of silliness is ‘government debt doesn’t matter because we owe it to ourselves.’

First of all, Canadian government debt is held by all kinds of people and orgs, many of which are not Canadian. You can be sure it matters to them if Canada’s government(s) take the first option and default on their debt. More to the point, if I lend money to my brother, and he decides not to pay it back, in what sense does that ‘not matter’? I was expecting my $20 back, and if I do not get it, it matters, even if it was my brother who bailed on the loan. You probably have Canadian treasury bonds in your pension fund. Would it not matter to you if Canada’s government decided to default on those?

A Summary – sortof…..

I started this out with an investigation of Canadian household debt, and the one clear finding from that is that Canada’s households do seem to be carrying world-class levels of debt, and they got there over the last 20years, while other countries’ households were contracting theirs. Why the difference? Right now, I dunno, but the possibility that this is mostly driven by Canada’s crappy GDP growth cannot be discounted.

Canada’s various governments also hold world-class levels of debt, but what is unique here is that so much of it is the responsibility of provincial governments. One might wonder – if, say, Ontario’s government got to the point of having trouble servicing its debt, what, if anything, would the Feds do to help them out? Again, I dunno, but I am confident that no one else does, either.

Elon Musk, Herrenvolk, and Representative Democracy

Written by Al Slivinski on March 13, 2026. Posted in Politics.

I am a general fan of the stats blog of one Andrew Gelman of Columbia U, as regular readers know. However, I am a fan largely because of his exposure of really bad and sometimes fraudulent science. I would not look to him for wisdom on many other points. For example, his blog has included wayyyy too many posts about the Epstein files, and I believe it is because it allows him to disparage people he does not like. He seems to have a real antipathy towards economist Larry Summers, for one.

He also does not think much of Elon Musk, and I am no fan of Mr. DOGE, either. He is one of too many ego-inflated rich guys in the world today. However, just like DJT, not everything Musk does or says is evil or even wrong.

A recent post by Gelman which featured yet another shot at Mr. Musk seems to me just a bit much. And….it reminds me of an idea I used to torture my senior Political Economy students with, just to be mean. So, another post in two parts.

A. Elon Herrenvolk

Gelman teaches an advanced course in Political Science at Columbia with the intimidating course title:

Rationalizing the World: The Hopes and Disappointments of American Social Science, 1900 to the Present

Week 6 of the course is devoted to ‘Democracy and Totalitarianism’.

Go big or go home, eh? I expect it is a very interesting course. I’d love to sit in.

This course – at least week 6 of it – comes up in a post on his blog titled ‘Herrenvolk democracy and objections to ethnic political representation’

In the post he writes the following about week 6 of his course: ‘ In particular, we have several readings related to “herrenvolk democracy,” which is the term used for countries such as apartheid South Africa and the U.S. south that had democratic governance but with the vote restricted to members of the ruling ethnic group.’

OK, I had never heard of ‘herrenvolk democracy’, and it is clearly a German term and that is no coincidence. The online Merriam-Webster dictionary translates it from German into ‘master race’. Gelman’s post was triggered by Elon writing a comment on an X post in which he writes ‘I’m sure that’s about to happen any day now’ followed by a laughing emoji.

So, what is the post that Elon commented on in this way? Here is the entire post right from X. Gelman left much of this out, also not a coincidence, I think:

Will there ever be a day a scottish woman becomes leader of a Pakistani region and creates a video where she proudly in a thick Glasweigan accent surrounded by tartans and scottish stuff…announces she is the first Scottish mayor in Pakistan and it’s been long long overdue and she will overcome the tyranny of Pakistan only ever electing Pakistanis to represent them

?

why is the opposite happening here not considered as absurd?

This X post was by someone known as chatnoir of whom I know nothing, and the context is the following. In 2023, Scotland’s Prime Minister became one Humza Yousaf, a Muslim of Pakistani heritage. He did not last very long, being replaced by one John Swinney in May of 2024. I know nothing of Scottish politics, so I don’t know what happened to end Yousaf’s time in office. (Swinney, by the way, looks to me like he could be the younger brother of Patrick Stewart, one of my favourite actors. Make it so, Jean-Luc.)

So, chatnoir writes the post above regarding Mr. Yousaf, Musk responds with ‘I’m sure that’s about to happen now’ and Gelman writes this about it:

I can’t be sure, but I think that in the above post, Musk is expressing support for a sort of politics of ethnic separation, where Pakistan is populated by ethnically Pakistani people with Pakistani accents and wearing Pakistani clothing and Scotland is populated by ethnically Scottish people with Scottish accents and wearing Scottish clothing.

Yea, Gelman ‘can’t be sure’, but the entire post, which you can read here, sure reads like he is quite sure about this. He spends a lot of energy picking this attributed-to-Musk ‘herrenvolk’ viewpoint apart. That Musk is from South Africa gets mentioned, naturally.

However, one of the other things I love about Gelman’s blog is the diversity of people who read it and write comments. One such commenter, going by the moniker of Padang Itik (that may or may not be his/her name) goes after Gelman on this particular post, and does not let up. He writes many things in a back and forth with Gelman, but here is his opening sentence:

I don’t think it’s right to say that Musk’s post indicates that he’s an advocate for apartheid, herrenvolk democracy, or ethnic separation. His response to the idea of a Scottish mayor in Pakistan is not “God forbid” or “hope not,” but instead is a sarcastic implication that it would never happen.

Exactly, Padang. Musk, as well as chatnoir’s original post, is making a point about the asymmetry of attitudes toward immigrants from culturally alien places in Scotland versus Pakistan. I think it was Mark Steyn (I’m sure Gelman would dislike him, too) who got lots of shit for saying something along the lines of ‘If you want to compare country’s cultures, compare the number of Egyptians in Sweden with the number of Swedes in Egypt’.

Gelman is willing to attribute bad motives to people he does not like, and he is hardly unique in that, but it is disappointing in someone who is by any measure a serious academic. And, in the 21^st century, there is no motivation one can attribute that is badder than racism.

Still, I am heartened by Padang’s push-back, which did end up in Gelman backing off a fair bit in the end.

B. Democratic Representation

Now, on to some fun on the topic of representation in democracies. The fundamental idea that drives this form of government is that groups of people in a democracy vote for representatives to a national legislative body (Congress, Parliament) to represent their interests in that body, which is in turn tasked with writing and passing legislation. This is a difficult job, as there are many different people with many different viewpoints in any Congressional district or Parliamentary riding. Still, that’s the job.

That job has, in my view (and that of others, too) been seriously perverted in modern times. In the US gerrymandering has been used so that most Congressional districts are sure wins for the candidate from a particular party. In Canada, riding candidates for most parties must be approved by the Party leader, guaranteeing that they will represent the Leader who chose them rather than the people in their riding.

That is all very sad, but let us ignore that for a moment and ask the following question:

Why are ridings and districts defined geographically?

Presumably the idea is that people in a given area will in fact share a lot of ideas and interests, but not all, for sure. No system of representation will do this perfectly, there will always be a diversity of views in any district, however you define it. That’s why we have elections.

Given that, I had a proposal (let’s call it Al’s Great Big Idea – AGBI) for a different means of definition. Let’s define a riding/district by birth dates. Each riding would consist of every person born between two consecutive dates, with those dates being set such that each ‘age-riding’ contained about the same number of constituents. This can easily be done using census data. It would not be exact, but current geographic ridings in Canada vary considerably in the number of people they hold. If any single date contained too many people (unlikely), you could then further divide those folks up alphabetically by the letter that begins their last name. Or, use SINs.

The ridings at the top of the age distribution would eventually shrink in size (old people do die) and would have to be consolidated and eventually eliminated, and new ridings would have to be created for those at the bottom who just reached voting age. A computer program could do all this easily. Don’t even need AI (ae-eye).

The members of each single riding would share one characteristic; their age. In the current system, they also share one characteristic; their geographic location. There would be ‘neighbouring’ age districts just as there are currently neighbouring geographic districts.

This would make gerrymandering impossible. It might well turn out that some age-ridings always voted Liberal or Democrat or whatever, but that is itself not a problem. The problem lies in parties being able to manipulate the boundaries of ridings so that their party always wins. And, the voting pattern of any given age district might well change significantly as the district aged.

The biggest problem I see would be in representatives being able to meet with their constituents, both during the campaign and while in office, because their constituents would be scattered all across the country. That could be done on Zoom, of course, but I hate doing things on Zoom. And, organizing a district association of Republicans, say, would be a nightmare.

So, it’s not perfect, for sure, but neither is our current system. Sadly, AGBI would not by itself eliminate the problems caused by party leaders selecting candidates. That would require party members to change their own rules. Fat chance, I know.

My point in introducing AGBI to my students back in the day was to get them to think about how representative democracy really works (few of them did, but a guy’s gotta try).

One can imagine other ways of organizing ridings, of course. Ethnic background is one, but the problem with that is that it is hard to determine (see my post on ‘Pretendians’). The government knows your date of birth and nothing anyone does can change it.

Income levels, based on the previous year’s income tax return, is another possibility. Harder to do, maybe, but it would have the (to me) valuable effect of allowing only those who file a tax return to vote.

So, readers…..other ideas?

Me, I gotta million of ‘em.

Property Wrongs II

Written by Al Slivinski on March 11, 2026. Posted in Government.

I got a couple of responses to my post last week about the Canadian government signing an agreement with the Musqueam band in BC. (Folks do write me from time to time.) One was from a resident of the contested area saying she and her neighbours are indeed concerned about what it means for their own property holdings. Here are two quite separate follow-ups to that post.

1. Marc Miller

Marc Miller is the federal minister who negotiated the Musqueam agreement. The Globe ran a story on March 9 titled

Musqueam deal ‘nothing to do with’ private property, says Marc Miller

In the article Miller is quoted by the Globe as saying exactly that. The article also includes this:

The government says the agreement recognizes Musqueam Aboriginal rights “including title within their traditional territory,” which the nation asserts is an area encompassing much of Metro Vancouver.

That sentence, coupled with Bruce Pardy’s explanation of the court ruling that aboriginal and individual, fee simple rights cannot co-exist, would indeed have me worried if I lived where my western correspondent does, and I would not find Mr. Miller’s quote claim reassuring. Nor would this sentence from the Globe story do any better:

Miller says “opportunistic political types” and “a bunch of ignorant people” were weaponizing the ruling, which was about acknowledging rights of one of the “more oppressed Indigenous groups in B.C.”

Call me ignorant, but it might be harder to ‘weaponize the ruling’ if a) it had not been negotiated in secret and then announced only after its signing, and b) Mr. Miller or someone in the federal government took the time to explain what the agreement actually does.

Ok, so I guess I should not expect that, and thus went here to read the agreement for myself. It did get published after it was signed. I guess that’s like a labour contract. You could read it too, but I warn you – it’s long. And abundantly opaque.

This appears in the Agreement’s Preamble:

D. Musqueam has unextinguished Rights and Title within the Musqueam Territory. Musqueam has and continues to exercise Rights and Title within its traditional territory. The existence of Musqueam’s unextinguished Rights and Title within Musqueam Territory is not contingent on recognition by court declaration or any agreement.

Here is what the agreement says about its own purpose:

2.1 The purposes of this Agreement are to:

a) recognize Musqueam’s Rights and Title within Musqueam Territory;

b) demonstrate progress in incrementally implementing Musqueam’s Rights and Title;

c) contribute to the implementation of the UN Declaration;

d) provide a foundation for reconciliation and an ongoing mutually beneficial relationship taking into account Musqueam’s and Canada’s interests;

e) set out Fundamental Principles, General Provisions, and procedures to guide and facilitate the Incremental Implementation Agreements; and

f) to guide Future Discussions and Negotiations of potential future Incremental Implementation Measures

based on a new nation-to-nation, government-to-government approach and in accordance with Canada’s commitment to implement the UN Declaration through measures developed cooperatively with Indigenous peoples, including Musqueam.

I reckon it is a) and b) above that I would be worried about if I lived in the affected area, as per Pardy’s analysis of aboriginal title. But it says nothing specific. Of course not.

A section 5 titled General Provisions includes this:

 5.1 This Agreement does not constitute a treaty or lands claims agreements within the meaning of sections 25 or 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982.

 5.2 This Agreement does not create, amend, define, establish, abrogate or derogate from Musqueam’s Rights and Title.

So, I dunno. What is it that has been agreed to here? Possibly not much – yet – but I really cannot tell.

2. McGirt vs. Oklahoma

Another regular reader (they’re out there, really) wrote me to ask if I was familiar with the McGirt vs Oklahoma case in the States. In fact, I had read something about it back in the day, but had forgotten all of the details. So, I went looking to see if this US case was in any way parallel to what is happening in BC.

In fact, it seems quite different. In a 2020 decision, the US Supreme Court ruled that the land reserved for the Muscogee Nation by Congress had never been ‘disestablished’, and so the State of Oklahoma had no right to prosecute members of that band for crimes committed there. This was extended to nine other Indian bands by a lower court, applying the McGirt ruling, so that most of the eastern half of Oklahoma is now free of state law enforcement. The original case was brought by one Jimcy McGirt, a registered Seminole, who was charged with sexual abuse. In June 1997, McGirt was found guilty, and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus two consecutive 500-year sentences. The Supreme Court ruling meant that his charge and conviction under Oklahoma law was invalid.

In the immediate wake of McGirt, Oklahoma courts began reviewing past criminal cases involving Native Americans, vacating past convictions, and transferring the matters to the federal courts for criminal prosecution. However, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals effectively ended this practice by issuing a controversial ruling that McGirt was not retroactive. Apparently federal law still applies on these lands, as they remain part of the USA. An FBI press release dated Feb of 2021 notes that this has led to a large increase in the case load of the FBI in Oklahoma.

So far as I can tell, the repercussions of this remain unclear but ongoing. For example, in August 2023, the Supreme Court declined to hear a decision from the Tenth Circuit US court which ruled in favor of a tribal member who was ticketed for speeding by the Tulsa police within the portion of Tulsa that was within Muscogee territory. The member challenged the ticket on the basis of McGirt. The ruling from the Tenth Circuit asserted that because of McGirt, the city could not enforce municipal regulations against tribal members on the parts of the city in tribal lands.

So far as I can tell no one in Oklahoma is going to lose their home or property due to this SCOTUS ruling, and no one in BC is saying the Vancouver police cannot charge Musqueam band members with speeding. I guess we will wait to see further developments.

Property Wrongs

Written by Al Slivinski on March 7, 2026. Posted in Government.

I will start by saying I owe much of the substantive content in this post to Bruce Pardy and his blog, First Principles. Bruce is a Law Professor at Queens U who I have heard speak more than once over the years, and had a few conversations with. When my former employer put forward a new ‘sexual harassment’ policy back in the day, Bruce was good enough to give me his lawyerly opinion of what it meant. (It will end badly, was the essence of his view).

He is one very sharp dude who says what he believes, and says it well.

Some of you may have heard of the recent agreements between our Federal Government and the Musqueam Indian Band. The Globe published a story on it on March 3 which said this:

The text of the rights recognition agreement, which runs 30 pages, was not released in February when the deal was signed. It does not reference private property, an issue of acute public interest since the B.C. Supreme Court ruled in a separate case last August known as the Cowichan decision. It stated that Aboriginal title is a “prior and senior right” to land, over and above the “fee simple” title that private landholders have.

Bruce also wrote about the Musqueam in a blog post titled Ottawa pours oil on the fire burning up B.C. property rights: The Canadian government has surrendered Vancouver on March 4.

You can read Pardy’s entire post here, no paywall.

Here are some of the more interesting things he has to say….

The Canadian Constitution does not include property rights. But it does guarantee Aboriginal rights.

I had a look, and yes, Canada’s Constitution includes this clause 35(1):

The existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed.

Just for fun I searched the Constitution for the word ‘property’. Professor Pardy is right, it appears nowhere. As we all have been taught, property is theft, after all.

What that means is that if the Government of Canada decides that an aboriginal band has rights to your property, giving them to that band does not in any way contradict any rights you might think you have – cuz you don’t have any. As Pardy writes –

Those agreements promise to honour private property interests. But “fee simple” and Aboriginal title are incompatible. According to the Supreme Court of Canada, Aboriginal title is a collective right. It cannot be parcelled out into individual lots. No individual, Indigenous or not, can hold exclusive property rights in a plot of land subject to Aboriginal title. Moreover, a group that holds Aboriginal title cannot surrender the title to anyone but the Crown. When it does so, Aboriginal title is extinguished. If Haida Gwaii is subject to Aboriginal title, then in principle no fee simple interests can exist on Haida Gwaii. Those who own property there must now wait to see what the Haida Gwaii agreement will mean.

Aboriginals do have treaty rights, which leads to the following conundrum.

You may also recall that in 2024 the B.C. and federal government recognized Aboriginal title to Haida Gwaii, an archipelago off B.C.’s northwest coast. Here’s what Pardy has to say about that:

And now the federal government has announced that the Musqueam hold Aboriginal title to Vancouver and its suburbs. In an interesting twist, the area covered by the Musqueam agreements appears to include Richmond, where the B.C. Supreme Court found Cowichan title to exist.

How does that get worked out? Two different bands having title to some of the same land? Could we see a return of band warfare? Of course not, we know those folks never engage in violence. However, people who thought they had fee simple title to their homes in Richmond, BC, well…..incoming!! You’re just caught in the middle.

Bruce gets a tad upset by the end of his post. But I don’t think he is wrong in what he writes below. I was in a discussion this week in my seniors’ learning group about contraceptive policy in the 1950s in Canada and the US. We were discussing what could have been the reasons it was so restrictive. In Canada one could possibly blame the oversize influence of the Catholic Church. I pointed out that the Roman Catholics had rather little influence in the US, so that did not explain similar restrictions in the US. One woman in the group pointed out what was to her an obvious driver of restrictions on the use of contraceptives – ‘colonialism’, she said.

So, Bruce has a point when he writes this about the typical Canadian’s attitude toward the government’s ongoing usurpation of the property rights of its own citizens:

If you are surprised, you haven’t been paying attention. If you are outraged, you must be a settler. If you are a property owner in the Lower Mainland, suck it up for reconciliation. After all, we live on native land. Haven’t you been paying attention to land acknowledgements?

Many Canadians cannot even recognize the attack. Their obsequious devotion to reconciliation gets in the way. They are stuck in a stupor of acquiescence and disbelief. The beaver is too good for Canada’s national symbol. The country deserves the ostrich.

Noah Meets Nash

Written by Al Slivinski on March 5, 2026. Posted in LBOs, Standards.

My dumbphone service provider is Telus, a big company. They send me an email each month with my bill in it, but they send me plenty of other emails, too. The subject line of this one caught my attention.

Introducing a convenient new way to connect with a human expert about your services

Here is the step-by-step way to do this, according to the email:

How it works:

On the Web

1.	Log in to My TELUS online
2.	Select the Virtual Assistant icon in the bottom right corner of the screen to start a chat
3.	The Virtual Assistant will quickly transfer you to the TELUS Expert Messaging platform

Reading the rest of the email made it pretty clear you should not expect a reply from the ‘human expert’ immediately. Just go about your day, and you will get a reply eventually. My real question is: why would I believe that I will get a response from a ‘human expert’? I have to send my request to the Virtual Assistant first, meaning a chatbot. First, there seems to be a missing bit of info: what does one type at the Virtual Assistant to let them know you want your query to be answered by a human? And, whatever that requires, there is no way to know whether whatever response you get back is really from a human.

I almost never need to contact Telus, thankfully, another advantage of having a dumbphone. However, this ‘convenient new way’ looks to me like another step in the online enshittification of everything. All companies are quickly moving to using LLM/chatbots for all customer enquiries, guaranteeing a miserable experience for us all.

However, the world remains teeming with AI enthusiasts. One of these is Noah Smith, an economist (yea, one of those) whose blog Noahpinion I generally recommend. He has recently posted an article titled:

Superintelligence is already here, today

It’s going to revolutionize science. It also might take control of this planet.

You can kindof guess what he has to say just from that, and if you want to read the whole piece, it is freely available here.

What I want to write about here is something that his article illustrates really, really well. The tendency for people who are enthusiasts about something to abandon all their critical thinking skills so as to promote the idea about which they are enthusiastic.

Here is a quote from Smith’s article titled as above:

This doesn’t mean that AI can now do everything a human being can do. Its intelligence is “jagged” — there are still some things humans are better at. But this is also true of human beings’ advantages over animals. Did you know that chimps are better than humans at game theory and have better working memory?

Now, notice that he is not saying here that animals are better at physical things than humans. Yes, cheetahs can run at speeds no human can match and bald eagles’ distance vision puts ours to shame. No, Noah wants us to believe that animals – chimps, specifically – are better at some mental tasks than us. One of these, as quoted above, is at game theory. If you click on the link there, you will be taken to an article in something called Science, which indeed has the headline ‘Chimps best humans at game theory’.

Here’s a quote from that article:

The chimpanzees trumped the humans. They learned the game faster than their human counterparts and performed in line with the Nash equilibrium—hitting the theoretical benchmark.

Here’s the deal – ‘trumped the humans’ is bullshit.

Some background info on game theory, first. Nash equilibrium is named for John Nash, the brilliant but troubled academic who was portrayed by Russell Crowe in the movie A Beautiful Mind, based on a book of the same name.

His equilibrium concept is indeed the central piece used by economists and others to try to understand human behaviour in strategic situations. What is a strategic situation? Any situation with more than one participant in which the payoff to each participant depends on what they do as well as on what the other participants do. This includes all the games you can think of – poker, monopoly, bridge – hence the name ‘game theory’. However it also applies to important economic situations, such as two gasoline station owners at the same intersection trying to decide what prices to set. Economists got very very interested in game theory right when I joined the profession, because strategic situations as I just defined them include almost everything that happens in the economy.

John Nash’s equilibrium gave us the first idea of how to predict the choices that would actually be made by those two gasoline station owners. Nash won a much-deserved Economics Nobel for this idea.

However, it is highly problematic idea. In plenty of games, there is no Nash equilibrium, and in others there are many many of them. For a concept that is supposed to be predictive of human behaviour, those are serious deficiencies. So is the fact that if you watch humans in actual situations, they often don’t behave as Nash’s concept predicts they would.

But none of that is the real problem with the Science article, or with Smith’s jumping on it to explain to us non-believers that animals are sometimes smarter than us.

What is very well known to all economists is that the Nash equilibrium choices in a strategic situation are almost always inefficient. That is, there are other choices the people in the situation could make that would be better for all of them than the ones Nash’s theory predicts. Indeed, in my two-gas-station example, if the two owners would get together and agree on a couple of higher-than-Nash prices for their gasoline, they would both make more profits. (This is illegal, by the way, but it happens frequently.)

So, what the Science headline should say is ‘Nash’s equilibrium concept does a better job of predicting chimp behaviour than it does human behavior in some situations’. The experiment described, with monkeys and humans, tells us something about Nash’s equilibrium concept’s usefulness. It tells us nothing about the relative mental ability of humans and chimps, as there is nothing ‘better’ about those Nash equilibrium choices the chimps make more often.

And Noah Smith, who is supposedly an economist, should know that, too. But that would not help him make his point about AI – and that is what he desperately wanted to do, the truth be damned. He later in his post writes:

But if what we’re talking about is domination of the planet’s resources, and control of the destiny of life on Earth, we don’t actually need AI to be better at every cognitive task. Humans conquered the planet from animals despite having worse short-term memories than chimps and being worse at differentiating sounds than rabbits.

So now he’s back to the ‘chimps have better short term memory’ thing.

Smith mentioned that in the original quote above, too. Well, I looked into the basis for that claim , also, and it is in fact based on yet another game theory experiment with chimps and humans playing. Here’s a quote about it:

In Camerer’s experiment, it turned out that chimps played a near-ideal game, as their choices leaned closer to game theory equilibrium.

Again, not ‘ideal’ in any normative sense, just closer to the theoretical equilibirum. I doubt ol’ John Nash appreciated that he had developed a first-rate theory of chimp behaviour. (He died in 2015.)

He’s an AI-believer, is Noah, so he is all about selling it to the rest of us, never mind the truth.

Honestly, I do not worry about AI taking over the world or destroying mankind. Get real. I do worry about what humans – like the people who run Telus – are going to do to life for most of us, with their chatbots and general attitude toward customer service. However, they were enshttifying our lives before AI came along. AI may well make the enshittification worse, and the true believers and cheerleaders like Mr. Smith will just help that along, I guess.

You Better Believe It!

Written by Al Slivinski on February 26, 2026. Posted in Government, Language.

I spend most of my time with Canadians since retiring, and rather little with Americans. My old Dept had a fair number of Americans in it, as NAFTA meant that if you were going to hire foreigners into any academic position, it was easier to hire Americans than Europeans or other nationalities. And, given the scarcity of Canadians with PhDs in Econ, it was pretty much necessary to hire non-Canadians to fill vacant positions. So, I spent a lot of time in a world swimming with Canadians and Americans, and we all got along just fine.

Living in this – shall we say – more purely Canadian environment since retirement has caused me to notice more the rather knee-jerk tendency of Canadians to rag on the US and Americans. Not on me, personally, just on the country and the way ‘those folks’ go about things. This hit me in particular at the last session of my retiree learning group, which is what got me thinking about writing this piece. Well, that and another thing. See below…..

Any regular reader here will know that I am neither an apologist nor a cheerleader for the US of A. Their current President is an ignorant asshole, and the country has plenty to answer for going back decades.

That being said, the US has also had some excellent ideas at times, and just as importantly, has managed to avoid taking on some truly terrible ones. In particular, there is no such thing as a ‘hate crime’ in the US, nor do they have any so-called Human Rights Tribunals.

Which brings me to the other igniter of this article: John Cleese.

Yes, that John Cleese – one of the funniest men to ever walk the planet. If he had done no more than be part of Monty Python’s Flying Circus we would owe him much, but of course after that he went on to some great TV and movie roles (A Fish Called Wanda, anyone?) and a career as a stand-up comedian.

What does this funny Brit have to do with anything – I know you’re wondering.

This morning’s National Post included a story with the headline Cleese opts to avoid BC over gender ideology.

Yes, Mr. Cleese is about to do a comedy concert tour of Canada, and has gone on record as saying he would do no shows in the lovely province of British Columbia.

Why? Well, the BC Human Rights Tribunal decided on February 18 that one Barry Neufeld, a former school trustee, should pay the amount of $750,000 to ‘an unnamed consortium of transgender teachers’ because he has questioned the province’s policy that an individual’s gender is whatever he or she declares it to be.

The Tribunal decision apparently goes on for 143 pages, noting, among other things, that Neufeld had engaged in ‘extremely serious and damaging speech’.

I know nothing of Mr. Neufeld, but unless he is massively wealthy, that amount is bankruptcy territory.

The NP story also notes that the terms of the decision make it clear that it was not Neufeld’s role as a trustee that generated it. Anyone in BC who were to express the same view would be subject to the same sanction under the BC Human Rights Code. The same dollar amount? I expect that would depend on the case, and the attitude of the BC Human Rightists regarding it.

Hence, we have Mr. Cleese’s decision. The NP article notes that he once wrote in a post that ‘deep down, I want to be a Cambodian police woman. Is that allowed, or am I being unrealistic?’ I find that funny, and on point. The BC Rightists would not, I expect.

So, I guess he figured it was either sanitize his jokes to avoid running afoul of the BC Human Rightists, risk a fine, or just stay away; he picked door number three. Probably wise.

Here is my absolute favourite quote from the Rightist Tribunal’s decision in the Neufeld case, as quoted by the NP:

A person does not need to believe in Christianity to accept that another person is Christian. However, to accept that a person is transgender, one must accept that their gender identity is different than their sex assigned at birth.

What that first sentence does not say, but we know, is that if you choose to not believe a person’s claim to be a Christian, the Rightists will not come after you. That is to say, if someone you think is a mendacious asshole says ‘I am a Christian’ and you reply ‘The hell you are’, they will get nowhere filing a complaint with the BC Rightist Tribunal. Substitute ‘Muslim’ for ‘Christian’ in that sentence and….well, I dunno. ‘Indigenous’? Hard to predict. I wouldn’t chance it if I were you.

What the second sentence makes clear, without quite completing the syllogism, is that we must believe whatever someone says about their gender. Disbelief is not an option if you don’t want trouble. Well, just as in the Soviet Union in days of yore, you don’t actually have to believe it – just don’t say so. It was, after all, Mr. Neufeld’s speech that was ‘extremely serious and damaging’.

Which brings us full circle. In the US of A, you are free to believe any damn fool thing you like. And other people, hearing of your belief, are free to tell you that you are full of shit.

Call me a non-Rightist, but I think that’s the way it should be.

Doing the Reciprocity Shuffle

Written by Al Slivinski on February 25, 2026. Posted in Economics, Government.

The things you can learn by reading a book. I have been working my way through The Penguin History of Canada lately. It has been on my bookshelf for ages, and I have no memory of how or from where I got it. It was published in 2006, so it ends with the first Harper minority Conservative government, but starts waaay back with what is known about the first humans to inhabit the current territory of Canada.

It is not a great book by any stretch, and rather condensed, covering hundreds of years of recorded history in just over 500 pages. Still, one can learn things from such a book, and one thing I recently came across that was illuminating was a discussion of The Canadian–American Reciprocity Treaty of 1854, also known as the Elgin-Marcy Treaty.

Now, despite that name, this was legally a treaty between the US and Great Britain, as Canada was not yet a country in 1854. The chief negotiators were James Bruce, the 8^th Lord of Elgin for Great Britain, and William L Marcy, Secretary of State for the US, and it did concern trade between the US and what would later become Canada.

Britain’s North American colonies had up to 1846 done most of their trading with the mother country. Britain in those years had high tariffs on most imports, including those of food and timber, due to what were known as The Corn Laws. The Colonies were given ‘Imperial Preference’ in England, however, and so escaped the tariffs that the Brits imposed on, say, wheat imported from the US. However, in 1846, seized by a fit of ‘Free Trade-itis’, Britain axed the Corn Laws, which meant US grain and other products could be imported free of tariffs, also. This put a big dent in the amount of staples of all kinds that Britain imported from Newfoundland, the prairies, and Upper and Lower Canada.

This gave the merchant and agricultural interests in those colonies the idea to see if they could get access to the US market for their products, which was in those days also protected by pretty high import tariffs. The remarkable thing was that it worked. An agreement was reached, and listed most colonial raw materials and agricultural produce, most importantly timber and wheat, as goods to be admitted duty-free to the US. The treaty ended the US 21% tariff on natural resource imports, at least those from north of the US border.

In exchange, the Americans were given fishing rights off the East Coast. The treaty also granted navigation rights to each other’s lakes and rivers.

In those days, the treaty was championed by the Democrats in the US, but the Republicans, the party of business, opposed it. It should be said also that at this point the Democratic party in the US was the pro-slavery party, while the Republicans would soon nominate Abe Lincoln, the Great Emancipator (as some call him) for US President, marking the start of the Civil War.

I have read a claim, hard to substantiate, that this was one of only three trade treaties signed and ratified (by the Senate, as must all treaties be) by the USA in all the years between 1789 and 1931. That’s a long time.

The general consensus seems to be, as far as I can tell, that this treaty didn’t have much effect on the already-larger US economy, but it did do a lot for colonial exports. They grew by some 33% in ten years, while the US exports north grew by only 7%.

Part of this was due to the fact that when the US Civil War broke out in 1861, the British colonies did a nice business in keeping the northern states of the US supplied with agricultural and raw materials. It is often said that war is good for business, if not for human beings. That being noted, it should also be pointed out by your former-economist correspondent that it is quite difficult to determine how much of that increase in exports to the US can really be attributed to the treaty. There was a lot going on, on both sides of the border in those years.

However, nothing is either all-good or all-bad. The treaty reduced tariff revenues to both the British colonial governments and the US federal government, in an age when tariffs were the primary source of tax revenue for both. Further, the increase in north-south trade reduced east-west trade in Canada to some extent, which reduced the profitability of the recently built canals in the future Canada.

The treaty was set to have a ten-year term, after which it could be abandoned by either side with one year’s notice. In fact, the treaty was abrogated by the US in 1866, a year after the end of the Civil War, and a year before Confederation. I can find nothing coherent regarding why that happened, although it was certainly the case that the Republican Party was the party in power in the US at that point, still.

Whatever the reasons, one source I consulted suggested the abrogation in 1866 did not have all that much effect on British North America. Here’s an extensive quote from one retrospective study in The Journal of Economic History from 1968:

Trade with the United States briefly declined from the stockpiling peak of 1865 but by 1870 was as high as ever. Among the British North American colonies trade expanded rapidly, with exports from [Upper and Lower] Canada to the Maritimes rising from $935,000 in 1863 and $1,571,116 in 1865-1866 to $3,418,000 in 1866-1867. Exports to Britain doubled from 1867 to 1874, and Dominion revenues reflected this prosperity, also doubling over this period. Customs revenues increased by $5 million to $14 million and tax returns increased 60 percent.

Hey, maybe there’s a lesson here. Trade deals with the US might not be the most important thing for Canadian prosperity. Really.

Notably, after Confederation both the US and the new country of Canada put up significant trade barriers. A second reciprocity treaty was negotiated between the US and Canada in 1911, over 40 years later, between Sir Wilfred Laurier’s Liberal government and the US administration of William Howard Taft. Ah, but then…..politics – Canadian politics.

The Conservatives made reciprocity the central issue of the 1911 Canadian Parliamentary election, warning that this new reciprocity treaty would turn the economy over to American control. The Liberals were decisively defeated in that election, and Robert Borden’s new Conservative government refused to sign the treaty.

Ya just never know, eh?

Human Flags

Written by Al Slivinski on February 24, 2026. Posted in Government, Standards.

The 2026 Winter Olympics is over, and I gotta admit the ending of the men’s hockey final was a kick in the ass. I thought going into that game the Canadian team was going to get whupped, based on the preliminary rounds, but I could not have been more wrong. From the 2^nd period on (which is all of the game that I watched) Canada pretty much owned the ice. That Hellebuyck guy was great in goal for the US, and once you get to 3-on-3 OT, the outcome gets to be a crap shoot. Canada lost. I will survive. As will Canada.

The end of the Games has produced the quite-inevitable post-mortems here in the Land of Ice and Snow, and one article of this genre was in yesterday’s Globe and Mail, written by their sports columnist, Cathal Kelly, titled:

Canada risks making its Olympic program a country club without proper federal funding

I expect that headline gives you the drift. Kelly’s column argues that Canada’s federal government needs to increase (to a ‘proper’ level) its funding of the Olympic program or only rich folks will be able to compete for Canada at the biannual Olympic games.

For those who don’t know, Kelly’s modus operandi, his very reason for being in the Globe, I would say, is to be cranky and controversial. For the entire NHL season he rags on the Toronto Maple Leaf organization (perhaps deservedly so) and the rest of the time he writes negative columns about whatever else in sport he can find. That’s all fine with me, sports writing is full of hero-worship generally, so some spice to go with all that sugar is welcome.

This column is no exception, and here is one of his opening lines:

CBC does a lot of things, but to me, it is the Olympics. Without the Games, our national broadcaster is PBS, minus the thrills.

So how do we explain that we publicly fund the national broadcaster to the tune of $1.4-billion a year, but won’t give a fraction of that to the event that gives it its main purpose?

Well, as it turns out, we (meaning Canadian taxpayers) do give a fraction of that to the Olympics. Kelly also writes this:

According to COC CEO David Shoemaker, the government funnels about $220-million annually to all the various sports organizations that make up the Canadian Olympic tapestry. They would like a raise – by $144-million – to $364-million annually.

Punching all that into my calculator, that means we give just under 16% of the CBC annual budget to ‘the Canadian Olympic tapestry’, every year, and the COC (Canadian Olympic Committee) would like to see that increase to 26%. Definitely a bigger fraction. And percentage.

I would note in passing, as I have in the past, that the taxpayer also gives more than a billion dollars to Canada Post, except….apparently we don’t ‘give’ it to Canada Post, it is a ‘loan’. Canada Post recorded an ‘operating loss’ of $1.3B in its 2024 annual report, almost exactly the subsidy that we ‘give’ to the CBC. So, we (taxpayers) loaned CP the money to keep going.

One might ask – why a ‘grant’ to CBC and a ‘loan’ to Canada Post?

The amount that goes to Olympic sport is, it would appear, also not a loan. I mean, how would they ever pay it back, even the gold medal winners? I don’t actually see how Canada Post is ever going to repay its loans, either, but this is an article about the Olympics, so let’s move on.

The Great Alabama/Canada Battle: Round 1

Written by Al Slivinski on February 20, 2026. Posted in Economics.

I haven’t written anything geeky in a while, and this article was prompted by a non-geeky article in the Friday Globe titled

How Canada became poorer than Alabama

That sounds just wrong, doesn’t it? I mean, the very idea that Canada is ‘poorer’ than Alabama.

So, let me get the easy part out of the way first. What the article means by that ‘poorer’ adjective comes from comparing the GDP per capita of Alabama to that of Canada. To quote from the article itself:

After adjusting for foreign exchange and some cost differences in both countries, the average for Canada’s 10 provinces was estimated at US$55,000 in 2022, the same as Alabama. Shortly after, the IMF found Canada had actually fallen behind the southern state.

If you click on the link in that quote above, it will take you to an article in The Hub, about these numbers.

The Globe article in itself is said to be an ‘In Depth’ one. It’s quite long, and the writer actually went to Huntsville, Alabama, so you know they put some resources into this.

What I want to do here is just suggest a couple of better ways to compare the typical economic situation of someone in Alabama to someone in Canada (which is, by the way, muuuuch bigger and more diverse in climate and geography than Alabama).

Yes, economic prospects are not the only thing that matters to people, but let us just focus on those for this discussion.

First, what is this GDP/cap number anyway? The article says this:

To measure this, they calculated gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. In simple terms, it’s the size of the Canadian economy in a given year divided by the population. The same was done for Alabama.

Ah, jeez. Typical G&M. That’s not ‘in simple terms’, it’s confusing. ‘size’? How does one measure the ‘size’ of an economy? Is that in square inches or square kilometres?

So….GDP is a calculation of the dollar value of everything produced in a country (or state) in one year. Then you divide that dollar amount by the population. So, it gives you the dollar amount produced per person.

Is a comparison of those numbers for Canada and Alabama a useful thing to do to determine which place is ‘poorer’?

It’s not useless, but there are certainly issues.

If some company produces $1million worth of stuff in a year and sells it, then that money is used to pay out profits to shareholders and wages to workers and to pay suppliers, who in turn use that money to pay their shareholders and workers. Fine, but – even if the company is in Alabama, some of those shareholders are almost certainly not in Alabama. Same with the suppliers. So, $1million in sales by an Alabama company does not necessarily translate into $1million of income to Alabamans.

Presumably, if you want to do a ‘poorness’ comparison, you want to compare incomes in the two places, and GDP doesn’t quite do that. GDP tells you how much income is being generated per Alabaman, but not how much is being earned. If you are deciding where you would rather live (unlikely, I know) it is what you might earn that matters to you.

But, stats are available on incomes in these places, too. However, I am going to here suggest that we do not really want to compare income per capita (that is, average income) in the two places. Average income in two places can be the same yet it might be very differently spread around. To ease that problem a bit, I suggest we try to find out how median incomes compare in the two places. The median income for a jurisdiction is the income such that half the income earners earn more than that, and half earn less. Thus, it gives you some information about how incomes are distributed to all individuals. Not a lot, to be sure, for that you want to see the entire income distribution for Alabama or Canada, but that is complex to compare. We’re trying to keep things fairly simple here. [I’ve put in an example at the end of this post for those not familiar already with median vs average.]

Comparing earned incomes has its own issues. Like with GDP, you have to adjust for the exchange rates, but beyond that, income data is typically gathered in a number of different ways. Income per earner and income per household are the two biggies, with the latter including all the incomes earned by anyone in a household. Ya gotta compare apples to apples to learn anything.

So, I went looking, and as usual, finding what I wanted for Alabama was easy, as it is in the US, and that country is full of orgs that work hard at compiling and displaying such data. Canada is always tougher.

Below, first, is data I took from a site called World Population Review, which says the original data comes from the Current Population Survey, which is administered by the US Census Bureau. Below I only present the data for a selection of US states that includes Alabama. As you can see, they give different numbers for different size households. In 2023, for a two-person household they say the median income is $71,147.

Median income in US states, selection, 2023

In Canada, StatsCan does not gather or display the data in the same way. This makes comparisons tricky. Canada uses the concept of ‘economic family’, which includes singles living alone as well as households of various sizes. They do say the following –

According to StatsCan: Median market income for Canadian families and unattached individuals was $68,700 in 2023, a 1.5% increase from $67,700 in 2022.

Of course, that is in $C, and so the 68.7k is notably less than the $US71k for Alabama, for a household of two people, which seems to be as close as we can get to the Canadian ‘family’ concept. Ideally, one wants to use a ‘purchasing power parity’ exchange rate to ‘accurately’ compare these numbers, but I am not going to go there. I think what I show below is more revealing.

A factor which the G&M article mentions in passing is history. Whatever might be the exact comparison between Canada and Alabama right now, what do these two places histories’ look like, and how do they compare?

I did some more digging, and below is a graph from the always reliable St Louis Federal Reserve:

This depicts the median household income in Alabama from 1985 to 2024 in constant 2025 dollars, meaning with inflation taken out. It is a notable path, starting at around $17k way back when, and hitting $65,560 in 2024.

Here is a roughly comparable graph for Canada as a whole: (this is in constant dollars, but I can’t tell which year)

The graph we want to look at is the blue one, which is for all families, since the FRED data is for ‘households’. The time frame is a bit different, starting back in 1976 and ending in 2021, again in constant dollars. The median in 1976 was $65,200 and in 2021 it hit $78,200. Once again we have a currency rate to consider, but let’s just ignore that, and ask ourselves the following – in their own currencies, with inflation factored out of both, how have median incomes changed over this time in Alabama and Canada?

A quick use of the calculator (yes, I still have one) tells us that the real median income in Alabama increased by some 280% over 40years, whereas in Canada it increased by some 20% over 45 years.

Now, it is a matter of arithmetic that it is easier to get big percentage increases in something when you start from a low number, as is true for Alabama. Still, that comparison is so one-sided that, independent of exchange rates and all the other things that happened over that long time horizon, it does answer one of the questions in the G$M article; what happened? On purely economic grounds the economic case for moving from Canada to Alabama in, say, 1980, would have been hard to make. In 2025, it’s a very close call. What happened is that Canada chugged along in a perfectly acceptable fashion, while Alabama just took off.

Now, the hard question, as always, is why did that happen? That it did is hard to argue against.

Appendix: Mean vs Median

Imagine a very small place with 5 people in it, all earning income. The four poorest folks earn annual incomes of $10k, $15k,$25 and $30k per year. The one rich guy earns $100k per year. So, total income earned is $180k/year, and the average, or mean annual income is $36k.

However, the median annual income is only $25k/year.

And, more importantly, if the rich guy’s income doubled to $200k/year while everyone else’s stayed the same, the mean income would go up to $56k/year (280/5) whereas the median income would stay at $25k.

Neo-Toddlerism and AI

Written by Al Slivinski on February 19, 2026. Posted in Standards.

I’ve had a bug for about a week, and because I am a wuss when unwell, this has dented my productivity. Which is a fancy way of saying that I have not gotten much accomplished while feeling ill, including on this blog. As partial make-up while my health is on the upswing, I point you at a blog I like a lot, and which seems to be freely available, called The Prism. It is written by someone who calls themselves Gurwinder – I assume that is a family name, I can find no other identification of him on the site. This is what he writes about the purpose of his blog:

“…this blog is my attempt to describe the myriad ways in which technology and psychology conspire to fool us, and to explore how we can withstand the covert assault on our senses.”

That is a purpose I am happy to sign up for.

I’ve read and learned from many of his posts, but one in particular I will say a bit about here is titled The Rise of Neotoddlerism: Why activists are behaving like infants, which he posted in August of 2024.

You can read it yourself here, so I won’t go on at length about it, but it dovetails in an interesting way with something else I came upon, so I will write a bit about that.

The general point made in the Prism post above is that activists of all stripes, right, left, whatever, now engage in activities that resemble the behaviour of toddlers. They block streets, throw paint on paintings and statues, break into church services and lectures and shout down speakers, etc. etc. Simply put, they throw toddler-tantrums.

They do this because it is much easier than actually trying to solve difficult problems, and because it gets themselves and their cause plenty of attention from the media. That includes legacy media as well as the newer phenomenon of online/social media. It is the growth of that second thing since 2009 that caused neo-toddlerism to emerge as a preferred strategy for these people. That’s a rough outline of his argument; the post itself is long and full of examples, and as I say, you can read it yourself if you want to learn more.

The post is a bit dated, and one thing he does not investigate is the role of AI/LLMs in this ‘neo-toddler’ syndrome. One might imagine that this new technology makes it less costly to spread news about such behaviour on the internet, at minimum. One certainly reads reports – how accurate they are I cannot say – that AI has been used to flood the internet with misinformation of various kinds. So, one can imagine a cycle in which some neo-toddlers do something tantrum-like for their cause, and then their allies use AI to spread and amplify and, if necessary, distort what was done.

That’s not a happy prospect, in my view, but here is the other thing I came across recently that might begin to tell us something about this possible cycle, and, just maybe, offer some hope that things are not so bad as all that.

I was led to an article called More Articles are Now Created by AI Than by Humans on a website called Five Percent. Again, you can click on the title and read it yourself, it’s pretty involved, but here is what it is about. It describes the results of a project to determine how much of the written content now available on the great www is written by AI. The title of the piece gives the answer they came to, but one first has to appreciate what a major undertaking it is to try to answer that question. I am writing about it only because after working through everything on this site, I think these folks did a very careful job trying to accurately answer the question.

First, their ‘Key Takeaways’ from the project are worth listing in detail:

The quantity of AI-generated articles has surpassed the quantity of human-written articles being published on the web.
However, the proportion of AI-generated articles has plateaued since May 2024.
Despite the prevalence of AI-generated articles on the web, we show in a separate study that these articles largely do not appear in Google and ChatGPT. We do not evaluate whether AI-generated articles are viewed in proportion by real users, but we suspect that they are not.
Our study did not evaluate the prevalence of AI-generated / human-edited articles, and they may be even more prevalent.

The graphic below from the article does a good job of illustrating the first two of those takeaways:

I will come back to these, but my own key takeaway is that these researchers took seriously the difficulties inherent in their enterprise. Here are just some of those difficulties:

The number of www sites is so large that there is no hope of checking them all. Thus one must check a sample of them, which means that one must work very hard to make that sample representative of the entire www.
One must have a reliable way of determining when an article is AI-generated, something which is recognized to be difficult.
Given difficulty 2, one needs to reliably test whatever tool is used to detect AI-generated articles for its rates of ‘false positives’ and ‘false negatives’.

They acknowledge all this, explain in detail how they dealt with each item, the limitations inherent in what they do find. I was impressed.

As to what they do find in their Key Takeaways, my readers will not be surprised to hear me say that knowing that there is more AI-written than human-written stuff on the web now does not make me happy. However, all is not bad news.

First, it has plateaued. Maybe that is temporary, and it’s not at all clear why it has happened, but it is something.

Better yet, the authors third finding suggests something else. They note that Google and ChatGPT do not often reference the AI-generated stuff. Interesting, to me, if it means that no one is much reading the AI stuff. But I would want to push this farther. I don’t read random stuff on the web. Yes, I write about my ‘wandering the web’, but what that consists of is my being on some site I find useful and trustworthy, and having that site refer me to another site, which turns out to be interesting. Certainly I sometimes find myself looking at a site that I pretty quickly see is garbage, and so I move on.

If that is what most people do, then there is some hope that the web still has reliable gatekeepers, even if that is not how they see themselves. I start from sites like the WSJ and Gelman’s Stats blog and TFP and such, and for all my bitching about those sites (which they deserve) they do not send me off to read AI slop.

If the WSJ et al ever starts doing that, then we are doomed, I suppose, but so far that is not the case. And, for it to not do so, it must be true that the WSJ’s people know AI slop when they see it, and hence don’t send their readers to it. A sort of web of ‘reliable sources’ is what needs to exist. I am hopeful that is still the case, even on the Wild West Web as it exists today.

My remaining concern is that people who spend a lot of time on Social Media – X, Bluesky, Instagram, TikTok, etc – are rather more likely to be sent off to AI slop, because those platforms allow other usesr to send you to other sites. And, I confess to being surprised at the project finding that ChatGPT does not refer people to AI-generated content. I wonder why, and how long it will last.

Not being a SM or AI user myself, I don’t really know.

Final note – this same wandering took me to a paper titled ‘Quantifying large language model usage in scientific papers’ published in Nature: Human Behavior. The abstract suggests the authors tried to find out how much LLMs like Claude are being used to write academic research papers. I want to follow up on that, but it will require me to use my super-power of University Library access to journals with paywalls, so it will take some time – stay tuned.

In the meantime, I do recommend Gurwinder’s The Prism for thoughtful writing. I go back regularly.

Mayoral Race

Written by Al Slivinski on February 18, 2026. Posted in Government.

I have to admit this headline in a story in today’s Wall Street Journal made me stop and stare –

Mamdani Warns of Nearly 10% Property-Tax Boost if No Tax on Wealthy

New York City mayor says ‘drastic measures’ might be needed to fund his proposed budget

Yes, this is the newly-elected radical ‘democratic socialist’ mayor of New York City being quoted, and he is saying the ‘drastic measure’ of a 9.5% hike in property taxes will be needed to fund his budget if Governor Hochul does not agree to increase taxes on corporations and the wealthy – something only the governor of NY state can do, apparently.

My goodness, drastic measures. Here is what the property tax rates have done here in London, Ontario over the last three years: an increase of 8.7 per cent (2024), 7.3 per cent (2025) and 3.4 per cent (2026).

The increase in this third year was originally set to be over 7 percent, until someone in the Mayor’s office last year looked at a calendar and noticed that there is a municipal election in 2026. Still, with compounding (yes, it applies to tax increases, too) that adds up to twice Mamdani’s measly 9.5.

With property tax hikes over three years like that, do we have city-run grocery stores in London? Nope. Free busses? Not a chance. Free universal child care for all Londoners? I think the province has some kind of $5/day thing, but not free, certainly, and not funded by the city in any case.

What does London have?

Well, we have been told the city blew through the entire season’s snow-clearing budget by last January. Oh, and some 500 businesses and non-profit organizations that used to have their recycling blue-boxes picked up every week just like us homeowners, have been told they are going to lose that service. City won’t take on the cost to do it.

I don’t think London’s illustrious mayor, Josh Morgan, has ever called himself a Democratic Socialist. I’ve called him a few things, but never that.

If Mamdani can pull off all his campaign promises with a one-time 9.5% property tax hike in NYC, he’s a freaking wizard.

I know, I know, you’re thinking – ‘Al, don’t be so naïve. He’s only threatening the 9.5% hike for one year now to distract people. Just like London’s Josh and the Gang, he will be back for further increases in succeeding years, at least until another NYC municipal election looms.’

Perhaps that is so. I am not a huge fan of Margaret Thatcher, UK Prime Minister in the 80s. She was probably a tonic that the UK needed back then, but was also not the sharpest politician of the 20^th century, by a long shot.

She is credited with at least one well-aimed phrase, however: ‘The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples’ money.’

So, perhaps we should all just sit back and see if Zohran or Josh run out first. Or who gets run out first.

I’ve got a dog in this race, so you know who I’ll be rooting for.

Canadian News Updates: Unexplained, Modest, Unfair, and Smelly

Written by Al Slivinski on February 13, 2026. Posted in Education, News Media.

I am not an Olympics follower. The website of the Globe and Mail is dominated every day now by news of the Olympics and how Canadian athletes are doing there (not so well, reading between the lines). I am happy to report that the CBC-London website as well as my local newspaper contain rather little Olympics coverage. Thank you for that.

Anyway, here is some interesting Canadian non-Olympics news from the past week.

1. But, but….

I saw a graph and a headline in the G&M today that leaves me puzzled. Still. The headline:

Alberta imports of U.S. alcohol are back, but who’s drinking it?

Under that was printed

‘In Ontario, beer, wine and alcohol from south of the border have tanked 95 per cent due to the trade war’

That latter assertion was backed up by this graph:

The graph as well as the quote are what puzzle me. The drop in US alcoholic beverage imports into Ontario is not due to some nebulous ‘trade war’, it is – I thought – due to the fact that the Liquor Control Board of Ontario has stopped importing all such beverages, at the order of Premier Doug Ford. This leaves me wondering – why have they only tanked 95% rather than a hundred? Is this a ban, or is it not? What is still coming in? If I am reading the graph right, more than $1m worth of US booze came into Ontario in October of ’25. Is that what travelers from the US brought in with them? I really doubt that, if you are under the customs limit, no one even tracks that.

One might expect The Globe writers to dig into this. This was, after all one of their ‘Decoder’ articles, which purports to ‘explain an important economic chart’.

The article does say this:

At the same time, Ms. Martinez said there appears to be a booming interprovincial flow of alcohol from Alberta online retailers to residents in Ontario, even though the latter restricts such shipments.

“They’re selling bourbon like crazy, and a lot of it is being shipped to Ontario, and that could explain why the volume in Alberta has gone up,” she said.

Yes, but does it explain the remaining volume going into Ontario? The amount being imported into Alberta from the US is exactly the same as it was in October of ’24, so how do we know how much is going from Alberta to Ontario? Is that, or is that not included in those numbers for Ontario? If not, where is that $1+million in US booze into Ontario coming from?

It’s the Globe, and I have learned not to expect much in the way of curiosity or effort from their reporters, so I did some research of my own. I found an online Alberta liquor store (they are not provincially run as in Ontario, that was clear right away) called BSW. I found that I could purchase online a bottle of my favourite Bourbon, Woodford Reserve, for $62.24 plus shipping. I can guess shipping would be substantial, but the shipping form I would have to fill out already had my address as being in Ontario, so I assume I could definitely do this if I was willing to pay the freight, so to speak. This bit of research does not tell us, however, whether my ordering of that bottle (or three) of bourbon would be included in the amount of US liquor imported into Ontario in February.

I know, I expect Globe articles to explain things. Silly me.

2. A modest, unfair increase

I found a story on the CBC-London website stating that after 8 years of frozen tuition in the Ontario college and university system, the province is going to allow said tuition to go up two percent a year for the next three years.

A sentence from one of the CBC articles on this:

But representatives from universities and colleges said the funding and ability to implement “modest” tuition-fee increases will ease the pressures they were facing.

It is common practice in 21^st century journalism to put quote marks around single words. What does that signify? I can almost never figure it out. If the word ‘modest’ was used by someone who is being quoted, then that person should be named. My suspicion is that this is done so the media outlet can distance itself from the actual word. ‘Someone else used that word, we certainly would not.’ The CBC, being of the general editorial position that everything important should be available to all at a zero price, does not wish its readers to think that anyone at the CBC believes this tuition rise is modest.

Indeed, in another story on this increase, the quite-hopeless Prez of my former employer seems to characterize the increase as ‘modest’, so there is CBC’s plausible deniability.

Another quote from that same CBC story:

For the average yearly tuition in Ontario universities ($8,958), this could mean an average increase of $179 for the first hike. Ontario Colleges lists the average yearly cost of a diploma program at $2,400, leading to a possible increase of around $50.

I don’t understand the qualifications here. ‘could’? ‘possible’? Are those numbers equal to 2% or are they not? Perhaps the writer is just hoping that after 8 years of frozen tuition, some institutions will not raise theirs the full 2%. (If any reader or CBC reporter can name any other thing whose price has not increased over that 8 years, I will eat my hat. I own several.)

The CBC, ever on the side of the ‘little guy’, asked a couple of students what they thought of all this. Another quote:

“I don’t like that this funding had to come right out of my pocket, when as a student we already don’t have a lot of money to begin with,” said Alessia Dalimonte, a Fanshawe College student in her second-last year of studies.

No, Alessia, funding for the things we want is always better if it comes out of someone else’s pocket. And, just to be clear, the province also said it is boosting its general operating grants to universities, which does not come out of student pockets, but directly from taxpayers. Whether they or their kids went to college/university or not.

There is a photo in one story of one Taylor Timlick, described as a ‘second year student at Western University’ (that is to say, The University of Western Ontario, legally speaking) and this line:

Timleck said she finds both the tuition hikes and the changes to OSAP “unfair,” especially with the rising cost of living.

Indeed. Now that is a 21^st century university student speaking, for sure. That is the word they used to describe anything they did not like – a mark, a comment on an essay, or a refusal to accept a late assignment – ‘That’s unfair, Professor’.

It is the universal adjective, one of the few concepts that has been effectively drilled into students throughout their previous 12-plus years of education.

Note its selectivity, however. Having other people – whose cost of living is surely rising – pick up most of the tab for your post-secondary education – not unfair. Everyone knows that, even the CBC.

There are other changes coming to the Ontario PSE sector, too. The Ontario Student Assistance Plan (OSAP) has for many years provided financial support to students enrolled in PSE in the province. Currently, any award from OSAP to a student can consist of at most 85% in the form of a grant with the other 15% being in the form of a loan, on which no interest accrues until the student graduates.

The province is going to alter this to a maximum of 25% in the form of a grant, with the rest being a loan. So, students who rely on OSAP will graduate with more student debt. I see this as inducing more young people to ask themselves: ‘Is this worth it?’

As my career in the PSE sector in Ontario went on, it became blindingly apparent to me that I was seeing a lot of students in my classrooms who had zero enthusiasm for university. They were there because their parents and/or their peers and/or the general zeitgeist said they should be. That’s a waste of four years, not to mention a lot of other people’s time and energy.

I would like to see a purely academic scholarship program at every university that offers a tuition grant to any student whose secondary school performance indicates they are truly brilliant. However, recognizing brilliance in the current educational environment is all but impossible, as secondary school grade inflation means tons of students have basically perfect marks. Back in the day I got such a scholarship to university, but that was on the basis mostly of a competitive exam. 21^st century educators, particularly those in Ontario, just hate competitive exams, so I don’t see this happening. At least not in a way I could applaud. Such exams are, after all….oh, what is that word?……yea – unfair.

So it goes.

Smell Test

This headline on a story on the CBC website stopped me in my tracks:

Oshawa Generals apologize after asking fans to shower before games

Really??!!

Yea, really.

I can do no more than quote from the story:

“If you went to the gym or did something that produced body odour, please shower before attending the game,” reads the email sent out by Jason Hickman, the Ontario Hockey League (OHL) team’s director of ticket sales and service.

Here is another unsurprising quote from the article:

The team issued an apology on social media on Thursday, which said, “it’s not our place to overstep like we did. We are sorry and hopefully we can wash this one off.”

Ya think? My son played hockey growing up. Every hockey parent is deeply aware of the odour that emanates from any kid’s hockey bag by halfway through a season. You do what you can to minimize it, but mostly you just learn to live with it – and keep the bag in the basement between games. Nothing a hockey spectator could generate in the way of odour can possibly compare with that.

One fan of the Generals, name of Ashley, was interviewed for the CBC story, and offered some advice:

Ashley said she hasn’t noticed bad smells at games before. She called the email a blunder for the team, saying they should have addressed odours by approaching people in person.

I would have loved to see how that ‘in person’ approach went down had the Generals tried it. A potential Monty Python sketch, for sure.

Ah Jeez, Larry

Written by Al Slivinski on February 11, 2026. Posted in Education.

This article is prompted by a letter to the editor in today’s London Free Press, but I have to go back some for it all to make sense.

First, you will recall the 10,000 book purge at the Beal Secondary School library, which I wrote about here, back in early January. Still angry as hell about that.

The hero of that appalling story was one Larry Farquharson, who was the teacher-librarian at Beal who raised a stink about the purge, else we would not have heard about it at all. He got suspended for ‘insubordination’ for that, and eventually resigned his position.

Some time after that, a story appeared in the London Freeps on January 29 titled;

School board using vice-principals to fill library roles amid deficit: Union

A secondary teachers’ union leader says the assignments could reduce support for students and staff

That sub-title gives you the entire jist of the article. TVDSB ran a big deficit, they are now in receivership, being run by an appointee of the provincial education ministry, and that has resulted in some vice principals being give some teaching or librarian duties for part of their day as a way to save money.

Here’s what John Bernans, a local leader with the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation, had to say about all this to the Freeps:

“As a result, vice-principals have been assigned some teaching responsibilities,” Bernans said. “At some schools, they have been assigned to teacher-librarian jobs for part of the day.

“We asked that they be assigned to areas where they are qualified, but the board did not do that in all cases.”

Without appropriate qualifications, vice-principals are “not adequately trained to meet the needs of students and staff within the library,” he said.

“Because their responsibilities are divided across multiple areas, their capacity to assist staff in managing student behaviour is greatly diminished,” Bernans said. “In situations where urgent matters demand the vice-principal’s immediate attention, the library may even be forced to close.”

Library closed? Oh, Dear. We can at least console ourselves with the fact that many of those libraries have many many fewer books which students will not be able to access for a day.

I did not pay much attention to this article, it is full of the usual featherbedding stuff one hears from all unions. God forbid a vice-principal (what exactly do they do?) be put in the library for a while. They are not ‘qualified’ to be there. I admit to being ignorant of the deep and difficult qualifications needed to be a school librarian. Some familiarity with the particular library’s resources would surely be helpful. No way a mere vice-principal could acquire that, though….

Well, now that the letter in the Freeps (about which more below) brought this back to my attention, I have read the entire Jan 29 article, only to be very surprised to find this quote in it:

Larry Farquharson was the teacher-librarian at H.B. Beal secondary school until he resigned following last year’s removal of about 10,000 books from the library.

Using unqualified staff in school libraries is an insult to trained teacher-librarians and to students, who have “the absolute right” to access qualified teachers, Farquharson said.

“Teacher-librarians often invest significant extra time and effort to engage with and supervise students – many keeping the library open and accessible outside their assigned contractual duties,” he said.

Oh. My. God.

Larry.

He is parroting the union line. A union that could/would not protect him from getting suspended for insubordination, and he is on their side in this.

There is more. Larry doubles down. The letter in the Freeps today which I mentioned above is captioned ‘Demand Credentials’ and is signed ‘Larry Farquharson, London’.

In it Mr. F says this about putting ‘non-qualified’ vice principals in the library.

This practice undermines the legitimacy of qualifications and the requirement that a qualified individual be placed in a particular teaching (or administrative) position.

Parents and students must demand that vice-principals be assigned classroom instructional and co-instructional roles for which that are appropriately and legitimately professionally qualified, without exception.

Yes. Professional qualifications, indeed. Credentials. ‘Legitimacy’, even. Once a union guy always a union guy, I suppose.

I worked in one institution that provides those ‘credentials’ for teachers and librarians for 42 years. The so-called School of Education was probably the outfit at UWO that had the lowest academic standards in the whole place. Hell, when I was an undergrad in the 70s at BGSU, everyone knew that every student in the Faculty of Education had an A average. The teacher teachers got grade inflation going way before everyone else, which is pretty much how it took hold throughout the whole now-rotten system.

To be fair, if you want an MA or PhD in ‘Library and Information Science’ from UWO you go to the Faculty of Information and Media Studies. FIMS. It ends in ‘Studies’ – there is no more to be said than that.

From Hero to (Retired) Featherbedding Credentialist. Once again, the world disappoints me.

Oh for Crony’s Sake

Written by Al Slivinski on February 11, 2026. Posted in Government, Standards.

I have not been writing much about Mr. Trump in these pages of late. It seems pointless. He is an ignorant asshole who should not have been allowed to get within 1000km of the Oval Office. [I add that I have also said, often, that Joe Biden should have been removed from the Oval Office and any proximity to the Nuclear Codes by 2022 at the latest, and that Kamala Harris also did not belong anywhere near the Oval Office. Such is the stellar record of the D and R political parties of the US of A in the last decade or more.]

There is not much fruitful to write about DJT. Until and unless a significant portion of the Republicans in the US federal government grow a spine, he is going to fuck things up (mostly; I admit not everything he has done has been wrong) for his own citizens, Canada, and the rest of the world. It does not help that his opposition is a Democratic party that is as full of (a different flavour of) shit as is Himself.

I despair, so why write about it? I get angry, and that is not good for me.

However, I expect that few of my readers also read the Wall Street Journal, and it has an opinion piece in it today on Trump’s latest bit of bullshit – the Gordie Howe Bridge – that I really really want to write about. This won’t be long.

I don’t read Trump posts. I don’t read anyone’s posts, actually, but the WSJ says Trump posted what is below in regard to the Gordie Howe Bridge, which Canada paid for, btw.

I quote directly from the WSJ:

Mr. Trump complained that the bridge didn’t use enough U.S. steel and that Ontario reacted to his trade wars by boycotting American alcohol. He suggested China is conspiring to “terminate” Canadian ice hockey and “permanently eliminate” the Stanley Cup. “I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated,” Mr. Trump said, demanding that Canada show “the Fairness and Respect that we deserve.”

Ignorant bullshit, as per usual. No doubt the Chinese Communist Party has an entire committee devoted to undermining the Stanley Cup. Fuuuuck.

The Gordie Howe Bridge:

Here is what the WSJ writes next:

Then came news that shortly before Mr. Trump’s social post, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had met Matthew Moroun, whose billionaire family runs the privately owned Ambassador bridge. Will it shock readers to learn Mr. Moroun isn’t a fan of the competing Gordie Howe project? The Journal reports, citing an anonymous official, that Mr. Lutnick came away skeptical of the new bridge, and he “made that clear” to Mr. Trump.

The intervention is another illustration of the Administration’s governance by cronyism. All sorts of people are trying to reach Mr. Trump with special pleading, maybe even to present him with some gold-plated award that they invented yesterday. The bet is that, in return for their investment, they might soon have a pardon, or a tariff exemption, or even the President mucking up U.S. national interests to advance their agenda.

I have been very critical of the WSJ Editorial Board in the past, because they have richly deserved it. This time they hit the goddam nail on the goddam head.

Can you spell ‘banana republic’, America?

Doing The Math

Written by Al Slivinski on February 7, 2026. Posted in Standards.

The good old The Free Press (TFP) featured another story this week that made me despair for the future. I know, I know…..

There exists something that mere mortals like you and I have no way of understanding: AMC 12, the first in a series of math contests that lead to the International Mathematical Olympiad. This is not like the Math part of the SAT or some other test. This is a grueling series of tests taken only by the most mathematically gifted of high school students. The website for this test says the following:

Founded in 1950, the AMC is the preeminent math competition for students K-12. Today, over 300,000 students in 50 states and over 30 countries take the AMC to bolster their confidence and passion for math.

The AMC 12 refers specifically to the test taken by students in grade 12 – seniors in high school. This is a 75-minute test, with 25 multiple-choice questions. Those questions are arranged in rough order of difficulty; the last few are impossible for all but a handful of top students. For many years, the score needed to make the distinguished honor roll – meaning the top 1% of scorers – hovered mostly in the 120s, with a perfect score being 150. This is one hard test, folks.

[Note – I am good at math. It was this recognition in university that got me into economics, which in its modern form uses a lot of fairly sophisticated math. But ‘good at math’ does not get you a score of 130 on the AMC. That requires being truly gifted at what is an unusual activity: much like being a violin virtuoso, I suspect.]

Then, in 2023, when stolen (or bought) exams started to appear online before the test, the score needed to make the distinguished honor roll went from the 120s to the 130s.

This past year, something even bigger changed – getting into the top 1% required a perfect score of 150, as there were some 300 of those recorded.

What happened? Two things, apparently. Once again, some folks got hold of the test questions ahead of time. On top of that, they put the questions into an AI bot to be solved. I here quote from the TFP article:

What is happening in the world of competitive math is a warning for the entire education system. A combination of technologies has turned cheating into an industry. In the past, tests were stolen by unscrupulous proctors and sold online. Now with AI tools, if an exam is stolen, it can be instantly solved—and sold along with the answers. Or the cheating can be done in real time, right from the testing room, with cheaters discreetly photographing questions and sending them right to a chatbot.

Now, it seems to me that last thing can be easily stopped by not allowing any electronic devices into the testing rooms, and I have to wonder why that has in fact not already been the rule, if indeed it has not.

And, to be sure, the first method of cheating can be stopped if the exams are not allowed to be seen by anyone until the moment the test is to be taken. Rather more difficult to guarantee, I suspect, for a test that is taken in a thousand different places.

I quote again from the article:

The MAA declined to answer questions for this story; a spokesperson noted that the MAA “continuously reviews and strengthens its practices.”

The MAA – Mathematical Association of America – is the group that formulates the MA12 test. This test then is used – in part – to invite students to participate in the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME), a selective test open to top high school math students. This in turn leads to the international math Olympiad mentioned above.

I have a hard time deciding which part of this story depresses me more. The fact that proctors of this exam, given the question papers so they can administer the test, apparently make them available online for a price ahead of time, where test-takers buy them, or the fact that now they can make them available with the chatbot-generated answers – and no doubt charge much more.

An AI enthusiast, of which there are multitudes, might say about that second thing: who cares about finding top-flight math students if AI can solve all the problems anyway?

Yea….who cares?

After all, according to the TFP article:

Last summer, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI said that its latest tool could solve 94.6 percent of [the higher-level] AIME problems; now the best AI tools can usually solve the entire exam.

One last quote from the TFP article:

An admissions director of a highly selective math program for high school students told me, “Ironically, now when a student reports a high AMC score in their application to us, it hurts them in our admission process. We become more suspicious of them.”

“Sadly, the score distribution suggests that among the top scorers this year, there are more cheaters than honest people,” the admissions director added.

Yea, but c’mon – who needs honest people?

Epilogue:

After writing this post, I went back to the TFP article to read the comments from readers that appeared under it. This one expresses a view of AI that I mentioned above, and ends with a real kicker….

The important question here is, why would students want to devote time and energy to learning to solve these problems when the “AI” (more exactly, massive-scale plagiarism) programs are ubiquitous and effective? I’m a part-time college prof (retirement job) and this is something we’re all dealing with; academics seem more pointless than ever right now.

If he means academics as people, regular readers will know I find many, if not most, of them pointless already. But if by academics he means the study of the universe by curious people…god help us.

Music Hath Charms

Written by Al Slivinski on February 5, 2026. Posted in Music.

Last night I was sitting in my favourite honky-tonk bar, London’s Richmond Tavern, with some friends, listening to two superlative musicians: Tara Dunphy and Dean Harrison.

They do a show the first Wednesday of every month from 7-9pm, and if you have never gone to see them, then why the hell not? OK, if you don’t live in London Ontario, that’s probably a good excuse, but if you do – what is your problem?

There is music at The Richmond most days/nights, including some awesome Saturday and Sunday matinee acts. You can check out their live music calendar here:

https://www.richmondtavern.ca/upcoming-events

Tara and her husband Tom are the leading lights of the Rizdales, a great honky-tonk band, which you will find on that calendar, and Tom has his own country band that is well worth seeing, also. I can recommend Old School Rock and Roll, KJ and the MoTones, and McAdam Road, too. Oh-oh, if you ever have a chance to see The Jitterbugs, go. They used to play The Richmond from time to time, but have not lately. Great jump and swing.

Anyway, I said to one of my friends at the RT last night that, since I write on this blog about books and reading from time to time, then maybe I should put up an occasional post about music. Truth is, music, especially live performances, are more important to my good mental health than even reading. Sadly, in the 21^st century, finding good live music is harder than finding good books. The economics of the bar and restaurant biz today seems to be such that it is hard to support live music in any venue, which is why I love The Richmond. They keep doing it, and are rewarded at least some of the time by packing the place with happy, dancing, beer-drinking people. If you don’t walk out of a Rizdales Saturday matinee performance with a big smile on your face, check yourself for a pulse.

So, I will write about fine musical acts or performances that I come across from time to time, just as I have in the past written about particularly excellent dining outings my Diners group has had. Stay tuned for that.

Beyond that, I also want to write about other good music, and I will do that briefly here. Most of you are unlikely to have heard of one Joe Ely. He was a Texas story-telling songwriter from Amarillo who I caught on to a long time ago, and bought one or two of his cds. Then, by pure luck, I saw him perform live in, of all places, Austin, Texas, at some outdoor barbecue venue whose name I have forgotten. I was in Austin to give a talk at the University of Texas’s Econ Dept in the early 2000s, but the Chair of the Dept, who was an old friend and colleague of mine, sent me off with some of his UT colleagues to this BBQ place the night I arrived. This was not just a cool BBQ place, Joe Ely was playing a show there. I suspect my old friend had an assignation with a lady arranged for that evening, and needed me out of his house, where he was kind enough to billet me during my stay in Austin. Anyway, it was all a win-win, as I got some good BBQ and Ely did a great show. I can only assume my old friend had a pleasant evening, too…..

Joe died last December at 78, which set me to remembering all that, and to looking for more of his music.

Here’s a photo of Joe doing his thing some 20 years ago.

Country music artist Joe Ely plays during a concert in Austin, Texas to benefit the South Asia tsunami relief effort, January 9, 2005. Country music legend Willie Nelson organized the musicians and headlined the event. REUTERS/Jeff Mitchell JM

I have learned that the next best thing to live musical performance can be found on YouTube, which has videos of all sorts of musicians playing live. Some of the videos are of miserable quality, to be sure; some kid at a concert with a phone – but many of them are excellent. When I’m needing a lift and there is no live music in town to be heard, I just put on my headphones and type YouTube into my browser.

Below are links to two songs performed live by Joe, featuring just him and his acoustic guitar. (He had a full rockin’ band, also, and early in his career played with a band called The Flatlanders. They’re worth a listen, too.) These two performances I think will give you a good idea as to what was special about Mr. Ely. I highly recommend you use a pair of decent earphones to watch/listen to these:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbBw9F0cOmI&list=RDqbBw9F0cOmI&start_radio=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5zbUuxo-jU&list=RDo5zbUuxo-jU&start_radio=1

The man could write a lyric.

If you like those, there is plenty more Joe to be found on YouTube, playing solo or with his own and various other bands.

Oh, yea – and Tara Dunphy has plenty of great stuff on YouTube, too, just go there and type in her name. But c’mon, you can see her live if you live in London. Nothing’s better than that.

What Is Behind That Disturbing Graph?

Written by Al Slivinski on February 4, 2026. Posted in Health Care, Popular attitudes.

A couple of weeks back I wrote an article about Sorrye Olde England in which I stated that one of the many distressing things about the current UK was a graph showing an apparent large increase in the number of abortions in the UK over the last few years. I said then that I thought that was disturbing independent of what were one’s views on the availability of abortion.

A graph with a sharp uptake like that calls out for some digging, and Kara Kennedy, of The Free Press, which is where I first saw that graph, did some. I tip my hat to her for this. We should all be so diligent and inquisitive. She had some help, and I did a bit more digging of my own, and here is what I think I/we have been able to figure out.

First, Kennedy says she interviewed 12 British women who had abortions, and none mentioned financial difficulties as a reason for their decision to abort. She also says none of them mentioned getting any pressure to abort from anyone else. They just didn’t want to have a child.

Ok, fine, but I am not going to pretend I think we learn much from talking to 12 women in a country that is home to some 30+ million women.

Kennedy also writes this, which is more revealing:

The overwhelming majority of abortions in England and Wales in 2023—248,250 of 277,970, or 89 percent—were performed at two to nine weeks gestation. This involves taking two pills, and most of the time this can be done at home.

Apparently the number of surgical abortions then is quite small, although it too rose over the same period.

Then she writes:

Until 2020, women seeking an early-stage abortion were required to attend a clinic to take the first of the two medications under supervision.

This was changed during the pandemic, allowing women to take both pills at home, and the UK Parliament extended this in 2022.

So, most of the ‘abortions’ on that striking graph we saw in my previous post have since 2020 been women getting two abortion pills from an NHS clinic and taking them home. No one knows if they went through with taking them, whereas it would seem that a woman who took the first one in a clinic would be highly unlikely not to take the second at home.

There is therefore a real possibility that what that graph shows is more women worried about a recently revealed and early-stage pregnancy going to a clinic to get the pills, just in case. Before 2020 a woman went to a clinic to get an abortion by taking the first of two pills. Now they go to get some pills to take home, and those are two very different things. How many actual abortions occurred is very hard to say. As Kennedy writes:

Under the current system, an abortion is logged when pills are prescribed, not when—or even if—they are taken.

The graphic below from the TFP article is critical:

[I note in passing, that this graph displays monthly numbers through the end of 2023. The numbers in the previous graph that triggered all this were annual.]

Clearly, if all of those women who were prescribed the two pills took them both at home, then the upward spike in UK abortions is a real thing. But there is no way to know the extent to which that is true.

But there is still more to this. Kennedy says there has been a considerable drop in the number of UK females who use oral contraceptives. If you are brave enough to go here and work through some Excel tables, you will find she is right about that. So far as I can tell, in 2014-15 the NHS recorded some 426k females using them, whereas by 2022-23 it was only 126k. That is a huge drop, but the tables also seem to say that fewer females and males are using contraceptives at all. That may be partly demographic, as the total number using any contraceptive method fell by half over the same period. I don’t know what has happened to the total number of UK women of child-bearing age over this period, nor do I know how immigration, which has been considerable, has affected this. Still, what we have from these two pieces of info is a big rise in the number of women getting the abortion pills, while fewer are using contraception.

Kennedy says that the percentage of UK women using oral contraception as their main contraceptive method was 47 in 2013 and down to 27 in 2022. However, in 2021 the progesterone-only pill became available without a prescription, meaning the NHS has no idea how many women might now be using it.

So, guess what – it’s complicated. It seems likely that at least some of the women who obtain those two abortion pills don’t take them. They are provided free by the NHS, and having them gives one the option to abort, so why not get them if one is at all uneasy about the pregnancy? How many take the option is simply unknowable, but it seems likely to be less than 100%, meaning the spike in actual abortions is not so dramatic as the original graph suggested. Yet, at the same time, many fewer women are using contraceptive pills and (from those same Excel tables) fewer men and women are using every type of contraception, except for a small increase in the use of an ‘IU system’. I don’t know and cannot find out what that last thing is, but yes, fewer male condoms, too. (Does the NHS dispense those? Surely a guy can buy a pack at the corner store, still.) So we have a lot of abortion pills being dispensed while the overall use of contraceptives declines. Still not a happy story so far as I can see.

If the decline in contraceptive use is largely due to a decline in the size of the age group for who it is relevant, then it is even more alarming that so many abortion pills are being prescribed.

Finally, if I believed that all these women are aborting purely because they don’t think they should or are fit to have kids, as the women Kennedy talked to seem to say, well – I find that disturbing, too. These were not teenagers she spoke to.

I intend to see if I can find similar numbers for Canada and the US. I’m curious to see if similar trends are occurring there. Stay tuned.

Precise Bullshit

Written by Al Slivinski on February 2, 2026. Posted in News Media, Standards.

I write this blog in no small part because I believe something I used to tell my students: ‘Writing is thinking’. I know a lot of people watch or listen to podcasts, and good for them, you can probably learn a lot from them. My Wall Street Journal seems intent on turning itself into the YouTube of News, as its website features all kinds of videos. What I find disturbing is that the website does not allow you to ignore those videos. As I scroll down it automatically stops me when I get to a video, and then pushing the down key on my laptop starts the video playing. In other words, ‘Watch the goddam video!’

Instead, I stop the video and keep scrolling down to other articles I want to read. And, I cuss a lot. There is a long post on the blog Cultural Capital by James Marriot titled ‘The Dawn of the Post-literate Society’ if you want to get really depressed about the decline of reading and writing. I know I did. It’s free, and you can read it here.

Despite my belief as stated above, however, not everyone who writes a blog thinks very hard about what they write, sadly. Indeed, as I have pointed out elsewhere on this blog, not even the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal seems capable of thinking very hard about what they write, or understands the difference between information and bullshit.

In some recent meandering around the great WWW, I came across a blog post by one Ed West that made that point very clearly. West writes a blog called Wrong Side of History which is mostly behind a paywall, but whose freely available posts have in the past contained some interesting material. However, my willingness to believe anything he writes took a big hit when he wrote a free post called ‘The Mourning of the Elephants’ which you can read here.

It included the statement ‘Humans, in contrast, do not even rank in the top 30 of species who kill their own kind, despite the toll of wars.’

West gives no source for this remarkable claim, but includes the graphic below. It is not very legible in his post, either, and there’s nothing I can do about that, unfortunately. You can make out the numbers in it, however.

Before I say more, let me note that I took that line at the bottom of the graphic to heart, and went to the website of Nature, which is a high-visibility scientific journal, and tried to use that number 19758 to find the source of this graph. I got nowhere. I put that number into the search box, nothing. I tried various keywords like species killing and such, but nothing resembling this graph could be found, and keep in mind that I also could look through articles in Nature itself due to my faculty status at the university library. I got nowhere, so I have no idea where this graph comes from, or what ‘adapted from’ means in that caption.

Let us nonetheless see what the graph is trying to tell us. It is the foundation for West’s quote above, as it seems to rank the 30 (mammal) species in which the deaths that were caused by being killed by another member of the same species were highest. Humans, who are definitely mammals, apparently don’t rank that high. In other words, there are at least 30 other mammal species in which murder is a more frequent cause of death than it is among humans.

Here is the thing. Where in the hell does this data come from? How can anyone claim to know that 10.48% of all deaths of ‘white throated round-eared bats’ were due to murder? How was that data gathered? I am sure highly reliable data exists on the percentage of human deaths that are due to murder, at least in advanced countries like Canada and the US. That is because those countries keep track of all deaths, and when a death is at all suspicious a trained coroner comes in and determines whether it should be classified as a murder.

There are plenty of less developed countries in the world where any such data would be rather questionable, as it takes a lot of administrative machinery to keep track of all this. In some countries, when someone dies out in the hinterland, they are quietly buried and no report is made to any central authority. So, I say again, how does anyone come up with a number for meerkat murders? And note that the chart does not say it is believed that ‘somewhere between 15 and 23 percent of all meerkat deaths are due to murder’. No, no, it says that ’19.36% of all meerkat deaths are due to murder’.

Precision out to two decimal places!! What amazing exactitude! What bullshit!

Mr. West put this graph in his post because he could tell an interesting story with it. That the story is very possibly false is no matter, it is interesting. Sadly, and more worryingly, many social scientists take the same attitude to the data they use.

Addendum: Wait! Wait!

I have trouble leaving things alone, and the source of that graph above kept bothering me. And I found it! Well, sort of. I found Nature 19758. That is in fact the ‘title’ given to the pdf of an article in nature titled ‘The phylogenetic roots of human lethal violence’, which is a 10-page ‘letter’ published in Nature in 2016. Now, that graph above does not appear in said letter, but the authors do have things to say about ‘conspecific violence’ in different mammal species. It is part of the data they used for their statistical analysis. Here is what they say in the ‘Methods’ section of their letter:

Lethal aggression in mammals. To estimate lethal aggression in mammals (defined as the percentage of deaths caused by conspecifics) we compiled a database including the amount of conspecific killing observed in many species of mammals.

Um…..’many’? How many? A lot:

We found information about more than four million deaths in the 1,024 mammal
species (~ 20% of the total species) from 137 families (~ 80% of total families) and
the three main extant mammalian clades.

So, I went to that is called the ‘Supplementary Information’ for this letter to see what I could learn about this data on ‘conspecific violence’ in mammal species. Said information comprises some 168 pages. Jeeeezus. But hey, I’m a geek, so I found my way to the section on p. ??? (there is no page numbering) marked Data on Lethal Aggression in Mammals.

There is, indeed, a list of many many mammals by their latin names, and source codes (which I did not dig into) that indicates the reference from which data on that mammal came from. For each species they also give the number of deaths of that mammal that were observed, and the percentage of those deaths that were ‘conspecific’. At last we have a source from which the table above could be constructed. I can only guess that is what West or someone did. However, it is notable that the three authors of this article in Nature do not attempt to construct such a table of ‘most’ (or least) lethal mammals.

The data they have is, to put it mildly, highly varied. Some examples:

For species acomis cohirinus some 57 deaths were recorded in two different studies (don’t know if 57 is a total or an average) and 1.75% were ruled as conspecific. Don’t know what were the criteria for that ruling.

For species axis kuhli only 5 deaths by one study, none ruled conspecific.

For species axis axis on the other hand, some 8,317 deaths, 0% conspecific, in 15 different studies.

Are we starting to get the picture here?

For species canis simensis there were 46 observed deaths with a whopping 10.87% said to be conspecific, in exactly one study.

It is simply not good science, or good data analysis, to try to compare numbers that have been arrived at in many different ways, sometimes in multitudes of studies, sometimes in one, and with what had to be very different ways of determining the ‘conspecifity’ of a mammal death. The data on conspecific violence in any one of the studies cited would need to be taken with many grains of salt. No mammal species can possibly be observed in total. The meerkat, to cite one supposedly violent example, has a habitat that includes most of Botswana, Namibia and South Africa in southern Africa – around a million square miles by my reckoning. To observe anything about such a species without spending infinite amounts of cash, one sets up some kind of observation protocol in some particular area for some period of time, records what one finds, and then hopes that data is representative of the entire habitat at all times. In cases where several distinct studies were done for a single species, if the results were consistent with one another, that would be reassuring. If they are not, what does one do?

I stick to my adjective: 19.36% is bullshit.

So – It Does Happen

Written by Al Slivinski on January 28, 2026. Posted in Government, Health Care.

People living on the street in London is a problem, one about which I have written more than once on this blog. Reading the news, it appears to be a problem in many places. However, there has always been a belief about this problem floating around in my city, one that has been voiced to me by a variety of people of various stations in life. The idea is that the problem is worse in London than in other cities in Ontario because London is generally known to have the most available no-questions-asked services for the homeless. And, the idea goes on, this leads officials and health-care workers in other places to send homeless people in those places to London by some means or other.

Having heard this claim more than once, I have always been skeptical. It sounded to me like the sort of urban myth one often hears when people are upset about something. They want to blame it on ‘outside forces’. Indeed, it sounded to me like a conspiracy-theory-adjacent kind of belief.

My skepticism regarding this phenomenon has dropped recently, with the appearance of a story on the CBC-London website dated January 26, with the headline:

This homeless man was put in a taxi to London. Here’s who paid the $241 fare

The ‘who’ in the headline is revealed in the story’s first sentence:

A Huron County man who often uses shelters to avoid sleeping outside says the Huron Perth Health Care Alliance paid his $241.42 taxi fare to London, Ont., to free up space in a shelter where he’d been staying in Clinton.

Clinton is a town about 80km north of London, and much smaller than London. Now, according to this guy, one Stephen Webster, he was told there would be shelter space in London for him, which turned out not to be true once he got here.

Webster said he was being treated in the Clinton hospital for trench foot, after which they moved him to a shelter in Clinton. After seven nights there they said he had to make room for others, and a cab ride to London was all they could offer. Webster is quoted:

“They told me that they send a lot of people to London because London has the shelters.”

CBC did some more digging, to their credit. From the story:

CBC News has confirmed with a local taxi company that the transfer happened and that the $241.42 fare was paid by Huron Perth Healthcare Alliance, which operates four hospitals in the area.

So, Huron Perth Healthcare Alliance is much like LHSC here in London. It operates the hospitals in the area, which means that Ontario taxpayers paid Webster’s cab fare to London. Isn’t universal health care great?

Also from the story:

When contacted for comment by CBC News, the Huron Perth Healthcare Alliance would not confirm they paid for the cab trip, citing privacy reasons. However in a statement they said their outpatient mental health teams do not relocate people out of their community “unless it is their choice.”

The statement goes on to say they make an effort to provide care for people locally whenever possible.

Whenever possible. Sure. And ‘privacy reasons’. Um….whose privacy is being protected here, exactly? I suppose we should be impressed they did not cite ‘safety concerns’.

The story also details Webster’s itinerary of shelter stays once he got to London, which, by the way, seems to contradict the claim that there was no space available when he reached London. What appears to be true is that there was no space at the first place he tried, run by the Salvation Army. Here is where he did find space over the next several days:

City of London shelter at the Boyle Memorial Community Centre

Ark Aid Street Mission on Dundas Street, London

After hitching-hiking to Stratford on Thursday and finding no available shelter space there, he managed to find a shelter space in Cambridge, Ontario.

Now, I said there had been rumours about this happening for some time, but the CBC story also contains a link to a story they posted in August of 2023, headlined

Stop sending your homeless people to London, deputy mayor says to others

The story quotes deputy mayor Shawn Lewis as follows:

“It has been conjecture and speculation and rumour over the years, but now we are starting to get some hard data,” he said.

Lewis wrote a letter to the London City Council laying out that data, and saying that he was going to ask the Council to condemn “the relocation of homeless individuals under false pretences and against their will.”

As to that ‘hard data’, this is also from the earlier story:

According to Lewis’s letter, in the first six months of this year London helped connect 319 people back to “where they have a natural support network” after they came to London seeking service.

Of those 319 people, more than a quarter were sent to London “against their will or under false pretences by various individuals and organizations from outside London,” Lewis said.

I have not been able to determine whether Council passed Lewis’s suggested condemnatory motion, but I would put my money on ‘no’. Nor do I believe anything important would be changed by the passing of any such motion. Lewis’s letter is no longer available on the CBC website.

When I wrote about London’s approach to homelessness back when, I said that there would be no number of shelters or granny flats or sheds that would be enough. Mr. Webster’s odyssey shows one – but only one – reason this is true.

_____

Caption: Mayor Josh Morgan walks through the modular shelter site under construction on Cheese Factory Road in London on Friday, Jan. 23, 2026. The first tenants are expected to move next week. (Mike Hensen/The London Free Press)

______

Webster made his way from a shelter in Clinton to Victoria Hospital in London by the good graces of the Huron Perth Health Alliance. Once in London, however, he somehow got from Vic hospital, where the taxi dropped him off, to the Salvation Army shelter, to the Boyle Memorial Community Center, to Ark Aid Mission on Dundas. All without a car. Then he hitch-hiked to Stratford (that’s 60km) and, finding no space there, somehow made it to another shelter in Cambridge, Ontario, a further jaunt of 60 km. What enterprise, what diligence – what effort. No one at the CBC appears to have asked Mr. Webster why he was homeless. He is quoted as saying ‘I bounce around a lot’ and is said to have a number of health problems.

‘If you build it, they will come’, as the movie line puts it. Or, in a less Hollywood vein – give away something of value for free, and the demand for it will be unending.

AI Will Set You Free

Written by Al Slivinski on January 28, 2026. Posted in LBOs.

[Note of clarification: In the font used by my website, AI looks like my first name. In this post it should be read as ae-eye. You know, the technology that will change the world for the better.]

Here’s the title from a recent article in The Free Press by one Molly Cantillon, dated Jan 22:

AI Took Control of My Life and I Love It

Ms Cantillon is an executive in a tech company, as she writes –

“For context, I’m the founder of NOX, an AI-assisted inbox organizing tool, and I have a very busy schedule.”

Very busy. She says she was making commitments she could not keep track of, had put her phone in a constant state of Do Not Disturb and had no idea what she was subscribed to – and paying for.

She got various programs and fed them into Claude, the AI program, and had it cancel her subscriptions (after asking her if she needed each one), find and pay all her accumulated parking tickets, and she also had Claude write an app to ‘optimize her sleep’.

There’s more:

I hit inbox zero for the first time ever, thanks to Claude filtering and deleting spam while auto-drafting replies for all relevant inbound emails. It analyzed my bottomless pile of Apple Notes and meeting transcripts, found the things I’d procrastinated on and took care of them instantaneously—from confirming travel details to following up on action items from meetings.

Claude Code has taken over her personal finances:

Every morning, it scans the news and writes me a personalized brief on my portfolio and opportunities to buy or sell. Last month it flagged Democratic congresswoman Cleo Fields buying at least $500,000 in Netflix stock.

Whoa, Claude does insider trading on insider traders. [Aside: Ain’t democracy great, tho?]

She is, in a word, ecstatic about all this.

It’s hard to overstate the value of an impartial observer that reads all the data that makes up your life, catches what you’ve unconsciously dropped, notices patterns across domains you’d kept stubbornly separate, and—crucially—tells you what to do about it.

Two parts of that last quote struck me.

One, ‘impartial observer’.

Two, ‘tells you what to do about it.’

She says ‘Living with Claude feels like having a tireless chief of staff.’

Regarding One, if one did have a chief of staff, albeit a human, and thus, not-tireless one, it is fair to say that one could not be entirely sure that it was ‘impartial’. He might have an agenda. He might, for example, steer one away from any decisions or even information that he felt jeopardized his position, or in any way made him look bad.

I am left to ask: from whence comes Ms Cantillon’s belief that her AI does not also have an agenda? It is generally true that the AI chatbots that people use for various inquiries work hard to ingratiate themselves with their users. They are apparently ‘trained’ to behave that way. How is her Claude chief of staff trained? Does she know? Does she care?

As to Two, a human chief of staff would also tell (or at least ‘recommend’) what you should do. And, according to her, the default setting on her AICoS is that it asks her before it does anything in her name.

Ok, that seems wise, if it works. I guess you would not know if Claude went off the reservation on its own until shit started to happen. But I suppose that also would be true of a human CoS who went renegade on you.

Then she writes this.

Naturally, the watchtower has a landlord. Anthropic, Claude’s creator, sees every query you make. The value exchange is explicit: their visibility into your thinking for access to a small army of taskrabbits.

Indeed. And there it is. It is Anthropic, the corporation, in which one must have some level of trust if one is to do this. If AICoS has an agenda, Anthropic might just be from whence it comes.

She writes further:

“I know I am dependent. If Claude disappeared tomorrow, my day-to-day routine would fall apart.”

Ah.

She also writes this at the end –

“To paraphrase Charles Goodhart, the famed British economist: Meticulous optimization yields hollow victory.”

I have never heard of this Goodhart economist guy, but I am very sure I do not want to meticulously optimize my life, with or without an AICoS. I suspect, however, that such a move might have been more appealing to me when I was younger, more ambitious, climbing the academic career ladder.

Today, at this stage in my life, I find all this appalling. On reflection, that feeling has two levels to it.

One is, I think, highly personal. I could never trust Anthropic, or any other organization, to not take advantage of that ‘value exchange’ Cantillon mentions in the quote above. I have no doubt they would use all the info they gathered on me to their own advantage, and I do not see that serving my interests in the long run.

My second concern is more….social. I see looming a world in which all or most of us get the same info, make the same decisions, have the same ideas, because all of it is being run through a small set of incomparably complex programs that no one really understands. It is a future of the ‘hive mind’, a term Cantillon herself uses. We are all to become ‘dependent’ on this software, for everything. If it fails, or its ‘landlords’ just decide to fuck with us, things will indeed fall apart. Perhaps in a way that we will be unable to detect, or to do anything about if we do notice.

No, thanks.

Epilogue

After I had finished a third draft of the above post (I do write and re-write), an article appeared in The Free Press by Tyler Cowen, economist, titled ‘Can AI help us find God?’

Cowen is an AI enthusiast who has written a number of breathless articles in TFP about how great it is going to be for humanity. Might be a glitch here and there, sure, but in general – transformative. Awesome. He does go on.

I add in one quote from this latest Cowen article:

It’s common now to ask AI about the meaning of life, or about the ultimate nature of reality. From there, it’s only a small step to having AI be your major conversational partner about God, and then, for some people, a god or spirit as well.

Cowen presents no evidence for this, so I wonder: is it really common for people to ask AI those questions? God help us, if so. It’s a bloody computer program, it knows nothing that was not put into it. Actually, it ‘knows’ nothing, period.

Sorrye Olde England

Written by Al Slivinski on January 23, 2026. Posted in Standards.

I have written before on the sad decline of the UK in recent years. Sadly, I have more to report in that regard.

Policing

Shabana Mahmoud is a name you may not know, but she is the Home Secretary in the current UK Liberal government. That makes her responsible for policing, in particular. Here is what The Independent has to say about her new grand plan for policing in the UK.

The number of police forces in England and Wales is about to be slashed under major[sic] a major overhaul of the system.

Under the proposed changes, the number of forces, currently standing at 43, will be significantly cut.

The remaining, larger forces will be tasked with focusing on serious and organised crime, alongside complex investigations such as homicides.

Yea, right. We in Canada have seen this movie before. Centralize some government function, and that will save money and make everything better.

What we know is that any money saved does not go into more teachers (hey, big-ass school districts) or health care workers (hey, LHSC), it goes into more bureaucrats to run things.

But that is merely the usual clueless thinking that all politicians spout. Here is a quote from Mahmoud on her personal vision for policing:

When I was in justice, my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times. Similarly, in the world of policing, in particular, we’ve already been rolling out live facial recognition technology, but I think there’s big space here for being able to harness the power of AI and tech to get ahead of the criminals, frankly, which is what we’re trying to do.”

Nothing says good policing quite like ‘the eyes of the state can be on you at all times’. You go, Mahmoud.

Political musicians

I have Sirius XM radio still in my car(s), and have had for years. When I first got it, my favourite stations were the two that played Geezer Rock – Classic Vinyl and Classic Rewind. You know, all the 60s and early 70s rock that I enjoyed when I was a teen. I hardly listen to those any more, in no small part because both of them have an abiding love for the music of Pink Floyd.

Imho, they were easily the most pretentious of all the rock bands of that era, and that is saying something, but those two Sirius stations insist on putting their music on frequent rotation. There were times when each of the two stations was playing a different Floyd track at the same time.

If you were a PF fan, you will know that one of its guiding geniuses was one Roger Waters, born in Surrey, England, who pretty much took over that band when original co-founder Syd Barrett left in 1968. PF are no longer touring, although I think Waters still does as a solo. He’s 82, and has been reborn in all his glorious pretentiousness as a ‘political activist’.

Well, Piers Morgan (remember him?) interviewed Mr. Waters, political activist and Brit, on X. You can catch it here. It’s largely about Waters’ views on Iran, and I suggest you listen for the bit where he says “We know the Iranians don’t want regime change’ and “The government sent the police out to protect those grocers.”

‘We don’ need no education’, indeed, Roger.

Oh, my

Abortion is a contentious issue, this we all know. It seems to me that no matter what are your views on it, there is reason to be alarmed about the graph below:

What is going on? I have no earthly idea, but it is not something good, of that I am quite sure.

And then – Canada

I cannot let my home and native land entirely off the hook here. When DJT was in maximum sabre-rattling mode over Greenland this week, the Globe and Mail ran a story with the headline:

Military models Canadian response to hypothetical American invasion

The first line of that story was

The Canadian Armed Forces have modelled a hypothetical U.S. military invasion of Canada and the country’s potential response, which includes tactics similar to those employed against Russia and later U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, two senior government officials say.

Yea, right. Sorry, senior government officials. As usual, you know little about the citizens you are supposed to be serving. I don’t know any Canadians, including yours truly, who would be willing or able to go into the woods and engage in a mujahadeen-like insurgency against invading US troops. Do you?

That same G&M story includes the following sentence: ‘The officials, as well as a number of experts, say it is unlikely the Trump administration would order an invasion of Canada.’

Well, thank goodness for that, eh?

Scientists Go Bad….Again

Written by Al Slivinski on January 23, 2026. Posted in Research, Standards.

Time for another leap into the world of bad science, folks. I have two cases for you to consider.

I. Your Brain on Microplastics

I credit The Free Press for putting me onto this first one.

I suspect you all saw some mention last year of a research ‘finding’ saying that a careful investigation of the brains of human cadavers showed they contained an alarming amount of microplastic. That latter term is just the name for tiny particles of plastic that come off of plastic containers of all kinds, including those that contain potable liquids (e.g. Gatorade) and edible food. The original paper was titled ‘Bioaccumulation of microplastics in decedent human brains’ and it is open access from the Nature Medicine website if you want to read it.

This finding was publicized in CNN and many other mainstream media outlets, including one of the authors saying that the concentration of microplastics they detected in some brains would imply said brain contained enough plastic to construct ‘a plastic spoon’.

Alarming, eh? Who wants to think about having the makings of a plastic spoon in their skull? The mainstream media, having long ago abandoned any pretence of being skeptical reporters, played this up big time.

However, some other scientists did display the skepticism that ought to be the hallmark of good science, and so took a closer look at this and other related studies, finding a major problem. I will just quote one of these skeptics from an article that was published in The Guardian just this month. [You can read the entire Guardian article yourself here.]

“The brain microplastic paper is a joke,” said Dr Dušan Materić, at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany. “Fat is known to make false-positives for polyethylene. The brain has [approximately] 60% fat.”

Oops. It is, by the way, notable that The Guardian was one of the many mainstream media outlets to make a big deal of the original findings purporting to find all those microplastics in our bodies. Kudos to them for following up, even though it shows they were rather too gullible at the outset.

Anyway, it turns out the methods used to detect the microplastics have a hard time distinguishing between microplastic and the stuff our brains are in fact made of. That does seem to me a problem.

None of this is to say that the accumulation of mountains of used plastic is not a problem. To my mind the biggest issue right now is that all the recycling of plastic we do is often meaningless, as much of that stuff we throw in our blue bins is not recycled, unless you count shipping it to third world countries to be buried as recycling. I quote from the original TFP article:

To put it another way, while they may not pose the health crisis some hyperventilating scientists and newspaper writers warned of, they are threatening us with an irreversible ecological crisis. “The thing is, we are not getting this stuff out,” said ecologist Matthias Rillig of the Free University of Berlin.

A final twist on this, also from the TFP piece. Another often-repeated trope about microplastics is that we take in enough each week to construct a standard plastic credit card. The TFP author notes that retired industry chemist Mark Jones had looked into this claim, and written about it here. That credit card-per-week claim comes from a 2020 study done at University of Newcastle in Australia, which seemed to conclude that we take in 5g of plastic per week, which is about the weight of a plastic credit card. The problem is that 5g is the largest of three estimates that study came up with, by a large margin. The smallest estimate was 0.3g/week, more than 16 times smaller, and Jones has doubts about even that number. Jones’ piece is long, but you might want to read it. I will just end this segment with the following quote from it, as it echoes much of what I read from other scientists worried about what is happening to science and reporting about it:

The 5 grams of plastic per week is troubling in several ways. It illustrates the power of meme-promoted science. A compelling, if misleading, graphic can cement fact into the public consciousness. It shows few people take time to ask whether a value they hear feels correct. It shows even nonsensical values can become accepted. It shows when facts are widely reported, they don’t get corrected, and that clicks and eyeballs are more important than truth.

II. Corporate Bullshit and Academic Fraud

Speaking of mistakes not being corrected, here’s another one for you. It is not as compelling, I expect, because it is not about our own health. However, it displays even more clearly the appalling behaviour of some scientists and the scientific establishment when faced with evidence that some highly regarded research is baloney.

That fact, to me, is the real problem.

So, class, raise your hand if you can tell us what is meant by ‘Corporate Sustainability’.

No one?

Well, neither can I, but I know there is and has been much written about it in the last 10 years, and I know that it is generally thought of as A Good Thing.

To help us all out, I went looking for a definition. Here’s what Wikipedia says:

Corporate sustainability is an approach aiming to create long-term stakeholder value through the implementation of a business strategy that focuses on the ethical, social, environmental, cultural, and economic dimensions of doing business.

Um…approach to what? I think to organizational decision-making. I think. Given that ‘stakeholder’ is a blanket term for every person and group who might be affected by such decisions, all of whom will have different views of those decisions, and given that any decision that does well along one of those ‘dimensions’ is likely to do less well along the others, I would say this definition is close to meaningless. That is, it does not tell us how to determine whether or not a corporation is using this approach. Just for example, if a corporation decides to raise the wage rates of its lowest-level employees, that will certainly be good for those employees, and they are, after all, stakeholders. However, this same move will also certainly be bad for the company’s shareholders, who are, once again, stakeholders. So, is paying front-line bottom of the pile staff better an example of corporate sustainability or not? I dunno. The definition above does not let me figure that out.

Of course, Wikipedia is generally useless for anything at all complex, so let’s look elsewhere.

The OECD has this on their website:

Corporate sustainability entails integrating environmental and social considerations into a company’s business strategy and operations. It fosters sound governance and decision-making and helps investors better understand a company’s long-term risks and opportunities.

Hmmm. No mention of stakeholders at all. It seems to be all about investors; i.e., shareholders.

But what about the worker? The two definitions seem quite different. That’s a problem.

Ok, one more try. I found many attempts to define this concept, none of them satisfactory, but my favourite was from the UN, always a good source of bafflegab. One page of its report entitled Guide to Corporate Sustainability, featured this at the top of a page:

WHAT IS CORPORATE SUSTAINABILITY?

(The font was even bigger than that, and multi-colored. Very impressive.)

Here is the answer given below that question:

Corporate sustainability is imperative for business today – essential to long-term corporate success and for ensuring that markets deliver value across society. To be sustainable, companies must do five things: Foremost, they must operate responsibly in alignment with universal principles and take actions that support the society around them. Then, to push sustainability deep into the corporate DNA, companies must commit at the highest level, report annually on their efforts, and engage locally where they have a presence.

I know, there is no definition of the concept in all those words. Were you able to figure out the five things? Me neither. And, uh…..which universal principles are we talking about here? What actions count as ‘support the society around them’ do you suppose?

And yet….this overwhelming ambiguity is not the real point of this second part of my article. Yes, CS is boolsheet, as are so many 21^st century buzzwords and trends. It is much easier to claim you are doing something good when there is no clear definition of what that good is. Corporations can do whatever they want, and by filling out some (also vaguely worded) forms, claim that they are being sustainable. Actually, it’s not solely a feature of modern corporations, my former employer has been claiming to be a leader in sustainability for some time now.

What I want to write about is more research malfeasance, but it is research on this bogus concept of Corporate Sustainability, and it is all about a paper published in the academic journal Management Science titled ‘The impact of corporate sustainability on organizational process and performance’, in 2014 (I know, ancient history, but stay tuned).

The paper has three authors, two from Harvard, and one from London Business School. And, I can tell you that Management Science is near the top of the prestige rankings for business journals, so this paper is A Very Big Deal.

However, it now appears to also be very wrong. But even that is not the heart of the story.

I picked up this story from Gelman’s Stats blog, so credit where it is due for publicizing this. You can read that whole post here, but I warn you to put on your big-boy-geek pants. It is long and complex. I will here summarize only the key – and in my view most appalling – aspects of this saga. The intrepid scientist who uncovered this malfeasance is one Andrew King, and he gives his own account of what happened here. You can read that, too, much of the Gelman blog comes from King’s original post.

First, there is a lot in the original MS paper by the three Important Professors. To my mind, one of the key things it claims is that corporations that engage in the undefined bullshit of ‘Corporate Sustainability’ get higher stock returns than those that don’t. The reason that is important is that corporations are, after all, really in the business of making money for their shareholders. But if you are an academic who is convinced that CS is an inherently good thing and so you want corporations to buy into it, your cause is greatly aided if you can convince the people who actually run corporations that doing so will increase the returns to their shareholders.

Well, here is what King has to say about that particular result in the Very Important Paper:

The authors did admit to the editor that they had misreported a key finding —labeling it as statistically significant when it was not. The authors claimed the error was a “typo”. They intended to type “not significant” but omitted the word “not.” They did not address the implications of this “typo”—that it misrepresented the evidence for a central claim of the paper, that corporate sustainability increases stock returns.

Now, if you believe that shit about a ‘typo’, we should talk about this great piece of land I have put up for sale in Venezuela. I could get you such a deal. The point, in any case, is that this key finding, that CS improves stock returns, is not actually supported by the paper’s own statistics.

That is hardly the end of this appalling story.

The authors of the paper ignored King’s emails about this and other issues in their paper repeatedly. He wrote to the journal editor himself about it, and was told nothing would be done, indeed the record would not be corrected. Frustrated that MS would not publish a commentary containing his analysis of the paper’s flaws, including the fact that if he replicated what the authors claimed to have done, he got very different results from them, King decided to publish that commentary in a different journal. He then says this:

While revising my replication for publication, I became convinced of a more serious issue: the method reported in Eccles, Ioannou, and Serafeim (2014) was not the method actually used. Worse, the true method could not support their “findings”.

Uh-oh. Now we are talking about, well,…..fraud. No more ‘typo’ bullshit.

So, what does King do? He writes to the research integrity offices of the institutions at which these people work. Yea, Harvard and London Business School. King then writes:

Shortly after I submitted my complaint, the authors acknowledged they had misreported their method. But they did not ask Management Science to correct the text of their article.

And what did the Research Integrity offices do upon receiving King’s complaints? Harvard – nada, and LBS – a promise to address the author’s ‘poor practice’ with “education and training or another non-disciplinary approach.”

King wraps up as follows:

Eccles, Ioannou, and Serafeim (2014) remains only partly corrected in the pages of Management Science. Diligent readers may discover the erratum correcting the “NOT significant” finding, but they will not learn of the misreported method in the pages of Management Science. Thus, thousands of readers remain misled.

But there is yet another kick in the ass. King went to various colleagues for help in his quest to get this very wrong paper corrected, and got some of the following responses:

“I can’t do anything—it would cause conflict.”
“Your email is too long.”
“I’m underwater for the next month.”
“I’m too much of a coward.”

King notes –

The last came from an internationally respected scholar with a chaired position at a top university. I appreciated the candor. It revealed an uncomfortable truth: much of social science operates on a culture of go-along, get-along.

And, to amplify King’s assertion, I will close with this deeply troubling statement from some scholars who undertook and then published an in-depth investigation into what typically happens when someone tries to do what King was trying to do –

“Once a paper is published… it is more harmful to one’s career to point out the fraud than to be the one committing it” (Bloomfield et al., 2018).

Ain’t Science great?

Beal Book Purge, Part II – Nothing to See Here

Written by Al Slivinski on January 14, 2026. Posted in Education.

I wrote about the Beal Secondary School library’s 10,000 book purge here last week. Since then there was a second article in the LFP noting that the provincial Minister of Education had finally spoken up and said this sort of library culling of books must stop. Fine, Mr. Minister, but the books at Beal are already long gone.

Today’s Freeps has a third story on this, with the headline:

Expert downplays censorship fears after Beal 10,000-book cull

Well, an expert has spoken, so I am greatly reassured.

Who is this expert? Well, it is none other than James Turk, a director of the Centre for Free Expression at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Clearly, that’s the guy you want to hear from, eh? A quote from him from the Freeps article:

“I have gone through the list of the 10,000 books removed and checked the current online database of the items remaining in the collection and am satisfied that this case was not about censorship.”

There you have it. Oh, and the article also mentions that “Officials with the Thames Valley District School Board declined to comment”.

Turk does have more to say.

“It is normal practice in all libraries to make space for new books by removing those, for example, that have been damaged or that no one has taken out for a period of years or to meet new curriculum needs.”

Well, they certainly made a lot of space, eh? 10,000 damaged and seldom checked out books.

Turk is critical of the Minister for pausing all those book culls, though. Another quote from Turk from the Freeps.

“The provincial government’s role is to make sure that all boards have appropriate selection and de-selection policies but leave the selection and de-selection to the teacher-librarians within the board” he said.

That’s interesting, as it was Beal’s teacher-librarian who raised a stink about this cull (else none of us would even know about it), was disciplined by his superiors for doing so (for ‘insubordination’) and then resigned when he felt his job became untenable.

This all made me very interested in Turk’s credentials, and so I looked him up at this Centre at TMU.

Now, in my discipline every serious economist working at a University has a website where the public can go to see what courses we teach, maybe even some sample course outlines, a copy of our CV indicating what we have published and the positions we have held, and usually a list of the projects we are working on currently, with maybe some working papers available to download.

For Turk – nada. I found the website for this ‘Centre’ he directs, and he is listed as being its Director, indeed, but there is no info that I could find about his work as an academic. He appears in some of the podcasts listed on the Centre’s site, but no serious research that I could find. No CV, either. I looked at the TMU School of Journalism site, too, and he is not listed as a faculty member there, so no help.

I was left to the device of putting his name into Google Scholar to see if any research with his name attached came up. Sadly, as academics know, GS has become enshittified along with the rest of the web. All one can do is put the name in and then, since Turk is not exactly an odd name, up comes a million papers having nothing to do with him. It is impossible to pare this pile down by being very specific about his exact name, because GS wants to throw as much shit at you as possible.

On the first page of results I got these papers:

High sensitivite flow cytometry of membrane vesicles

Measuring power in families

Uterin neuroplasia in 13 cats.

All fascinating reads, I am sure, but listed only because somebody named Turk was one of many authors. I did find a book chapter he wrote which of course I could not read, titled ‘Protecting the integrity of academic work in corporate collaborations’.

And, I found one paper he co-authored, published in the Canadian School Libraries Journal in 2025, titled ‘Censors Are Targeting Schools: Hardly New but Deeply Troubling’.

It is not actual research, just a brief piece laying out his idea of what is going on regarding attempts to influence what books are stocked by libraries, both public and school.

There are some curious things in this little article.

Near the end the authors provide a list of historical attempts to get books removed that failed. They write:

Barbara Smucker’s Underground to Canada, recipient of numerous awards, is an historical novel for Grades 5 to 8 describing the underground railway that brought slaves escaping from the American South to Canada during the 1850s and 1860s. It has been challenged actively in both Winnipeg and in Nova Scotia’s Tri-County school district because of its use of the N-word. That has been the basis of demands for removal in various school boards across Canada of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and just this year of eminent Canadian author, Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes.

Yet Turk sees no problem with the removal of Steinbeck from the Beal Library?

Later, they write:

“This makes the schools vulnerable to individuals and groups who invoke phraseology such as “age appropriate”, aim to deprofessionalize librarians and educators, and press for removal of a challenged item without a transparent and fair review by those with the necessary education and training.”

Yes. Those with the education and training. Like Beal’s teacher-librarian Larry Farquharson, perhaps. or – no?

And the term “age-appropriate’ is ‘phraseology’? Hm.

The Beal policy document says of their purge “The project will focus on deselecting texts with harmful images, messaging, slurs, and racial epithets to facilitate the safety and well-being of all students.”

So, is that ‘phraseology’? Perhaps not. I suppose phraseology, like censorship, is in the eye of the beholder.

I learned a lot about what people at Turk’s Centre think about censorship through researching him, so I will be writing more on that in the future. For now I will just say that Mr. Turk (I have no idea whether he merits the term ‘professor’ given the paucity of info available on him at TMU) has not re-assured me in the least.

Those 10,000 books were destroyed (not passed on to others) mostly because the people who run Beal did not like what was in them. And they did not pass those books on to others because that would have made it too obvious what they were about to do, and a stink might have been raised before the books were gone.

About Those ‘Material Advantages’

Written by Al Slivinski on January 14, 2026. Posted in Health Care.

As I have noted often, I still get emails from a variety of university officials. One such is the new Faculty of Social Science Associate Dean for Research. The primary activity for all past holders of this position has been sending out emails. Lots and lots of emails. The current AD is no exception.

So, I got one today about a new ‘award’ from CIHR, which is the Canadian Institute for Health Research, which is the primary federal funding agency for research in health care. The email explained the steps one should take to apply for the award below.

Below is what the AD’s email says about this award. As you can see, only certain folk need apply.

_______________________________

The CIHR Research Excellence, Diversity and Independence (REDI) Award supports the professional development, career progression, and mentorship of trainees to establish and sustain strong, independent research programs in academia in order to advance scientific excellence and foster diversity in Canada’s research ecosystem.

REDI 2025 will support applicants through two distinct streams:

Stream A for trainees who self-identify as Black (any gender), racialized women, or racialized gender-diverse people, and
Stream B for trainees who self-identify as First Nations, Inuit, Métis scholars (any gender).

Award Value

The REDI award has two-phases across a maximum of 6 years and a maximum amount per award of $660,000 for up to 6 years.

_______________

$110,000/year for six years is some pretty good material advantage, no?

You Call This Journalism?

Written by Al Slivinski on January 14, 2026. Posted in News Media.

Regular readers know that I am in general despair regarding the state of 21^st century journalism. My local paper, to which I still subscribe as a matter of duty, has almost no staff, no resources, and the people employed there cannot even write English.

Here’s a recent LFP headline – yes, from the bloody front page:

Another Winter Weeather Wallop

Either they have no copy editors any more, or no one there knows how to spell ‘weather’.

The Globe and Mail, which is really a Toronto paper that tries to sell itself as the Canadian paper of record, gets worse almost by the week, but again I pay for a (online only) subscription as a way to stay informed about happenings in Canada. There is much that they ignore, so I also subscribe to The Free Press, which features a This Week in Canada post by one of its writers.

Then there is the Wall Street Journal, easily the most expensive of my many subscriptions, which I rely on for US and World news. It, sadly, is also becoming more and more staffed by badly trained, semi-literate and barely-numerate staffers. On top of that, they don’t seem to have any editors either, as the example below will indicate.

The top right hand of today’s WSJ lists a set of ‘Opinion’ columns, and the first one on the list is credited to The Editorial Board, titled The Affordability Problem in One Chart.

The sub-headline under that title says ‘Wages aren’t rising fast enough to counter still-rising prices’.

Ok, so we know the point of the story. Below is that ‘One Chart’ from the article that is supposed to convey this simple message.

So, let’s have a close look at it.

Along the horizontal axis we have the 12 months of 2025. Fine. Easy.

On the vertical axis the graph is labelled ‘average hourly earnings, Jan-Dec. 2025’

Um, guys…..earnings are measured in dollars, the numbers on the vertical axis are percentages. So, that is not what is on the vertical axis.

It must be in fact ‘the percentage change in hourly earnings’…right?

Ok, but wait a minute. A percentage change can only be measured as a percentage change from something. So, is this the percentage change from one year previously, the way the inflation rate is typically expressed, or is it the percentage change each month from the previous month?

Don’t know, but since we have been left to figure this out on our own, let’s just take a leap and assume it is the percentage change from the previous month.

The ‘Note’ below the charts says that Oct and Nov data are not available due to the lapse in appropriations. Ok, but…..why is the Jan, Feb, Aug and Dec data also not available? Dunno. Doesn’t say.

And, if we are right in guessing that those lovely blue bars represent the change in earnings from the previous month, then that missing data means that this ‘one chart’ tells us exactly nothing about what has happened to earnings over the last year. If the missing blue bar from Aug were, say, -2.4% then over the year earnings would have decreased terribly, but if it were, instead, +3.1% then whoo-hoo, things are going great. And of course that is only one of six missing months on that graph. Indeed, depending on what those missing six (half) data points are, anything might be true of the change in earnings over 2025.

And, and….it is almost embarrassing to go on like this….there is nothing in that graph about how much prices were ‘still rising’ in that same period. Nothing.

So, esteemed WSJ Editorial Board, your one mis-labelled graph with half of its undefined data missing tells us exactly zero about ‘The Affordability Crisis’. All it tells me is that the WSJ Editorial Board should all be fired. Ah, but then who would replace them?

Journalism was bad enough when people thought they could learn to be journalists by going to schools of journalism, rather than taking courses in English composition, History, Economics and Math. Now at my old employer they take courses in The Faculty of Information and Media Studies.

We all by now know the quality of education one gets from anything with ‘studies’ as the last word.

The Information Age, my ass.

Who Has the Tickets?

Written by Al Slivinski on January 10, 2026. Posted in Economics.

It has been a long time since I attended a big-time event for which tickets were sold by Ticketmaster. I go to hear a lot of live music, but these days that is always at a smallish local venue that either collects a fee at the door or uses its own devices to sell tickets.

The local Junior A hockey team, the Knights, play in an arena that is full to its 9,000+ seat capacity for every game, and if you want to try and get one of those seats, you are sent to a Ticketmaster site. I did that today just for fun and it indicated it had 14 seats available for today’s later game, out of those 9,000+. Prices were $56 each, plus a $5 fee.

I used to go hear the Toronto Symphony Orchestra quite frequently back in the day, so I also checked out some of their ticket prices. TSO has its own ticket sales site, and a ticket to hear Stravinsky’s Firebird and Brahms’ Piano Concerto #1 will run you just under $150 for a decent seat, plus an $8 service charge. This notion of adding a ‘service’ charge is also a regular feature of event ticket sales. It is curious, no? Can you imagine being charged a $15 fee when you buy your next microwave oven? Or a pair of jeans?

Anyway, this article is prompted by, and largely based on, of all things, a Powerpoint presentation I ran into on the web, put together by one Eric Budish, an Econ Prof at the U of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. He notes on the first page of the presentation that he bought his first scalped ticket in 1986 to see a New York Mets baseball game.

Ticket-scalping, which economists refer to as ‘secondary market sales’, and what to do about it, is the topic of his PP presentation.

Budish starts his slides with a story about a lecture given in Boston in 1867 by one Charles Dickens. Folks stood in line to buy tickets, and a limit of 12/buyer was imposed, to prevent ‘ticket speculating’. None the less, scalpers were soon selling tickets for up to $20 each, according to a story in The Boston Journal.

Scalping is an old phenomenon, is the point, but the second point he makes is that this ‘secondary market’ really went crazy once ticket sales moved to the internet. His talk is ultimately aimed at making some proposals for getting the event-ticket market to work better for fans and artists.

Before I get to that, it will be useful to go back over how things worked pre-internet, and what economics had and has to say about it.

When folks stood in line to get tickets for events, or made phone calls, some of those buyers were indeed speculators, who bought the tix with the intent of re-selling them at a profit. This was indeed speculation, since if the event was not all that popular, profitable resale would not be possible. You can’t re-sell tickets at a profit if there are plenty available at the original face value. However, what seemed to happen was that re-sale was always profitable for most well-known artists. Why? Economists saw this as in indication that the artists and their managers intentionally under-priced concert tickets. If it can always be anticipated by the scalpers that tickets can be re-sold at higher prices, why did the artists not set prices higher at the box office? Why let the ticket speculators make all that money, when higher face values would mean more money to the artists (and the venues)?

The typical explanation for this (from economists) was that the artists did not want to alienate their fans by extracting the highest prices possible from them. If a fan paid a high price to a scalper, that fan understood it was not their favourite artist who was profiting, hence no bad feelings.

Another possible explanation was the idea that the ‘best’ fans to have at the event, the ones who would cheer and dance the most, were not the ones who could afford high prices. (People who attend Toronto Maple Leaf hockey games tell me there is much to this. Leafs tickets are very expensive, and most fans are corporate types who sit on their hands. I have no personal recent experience of this.)

Anyway, the idea here in the pre-internet era was that this ‘under-pricing’ was in the long term interests of the artists and maybe even the venues.

Then ticket sales moved almost wholly to the internet for artists of any stature, and this introduced an old concept that was new to this old market, which changed things hugely: economies of scale. Now it was possible for a single operator to buy tickets for events all over the world and re-sell them. And it therefore paid such operators to invest in ‘bots’ and low-wage overseas workers to ‘get to the front of the electronic line’ and to defeat any safeguards put in place to limit sales to any one buyer.

Budish supplies a number of stories of how this changed things.

– Hannah Montana tour tickets in 2007 selling out in minutes, and dads paying $3,000 so their pre-teen daughters could attend a show.

– In 2018 tickets for an Ed Sheeran show sold out in 5 minutes, but here is the kicker – his management admitted they themselves sold tickets directly to re-sellers.

– Tickets for a three-day run of Grateful Dead ‘Farewell Tour’ shows in Chicago were offered for sale for $114,000 each on Stubhub.

– Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote an op-ed in the New York Times in 2016 titled ‘Stop the Bots from Killing Broadway’. By this point Ticketmaster had put anti-bot safeguards on its ticket site, but claimed that none the less a ‘bot army’ bought 30,000 tickets to performances of Hamilton.

As Budish says, the ‘secondary market’ had pretty much become the true market, with Ticketmaster saying that 20% of all tickets used by fans were bought on the secondary market, with the percentage hitting 90 for some events.

Things are now at the point where most of the money is being made by the organized re-sellers, like Stubhub, Seatgeek and Ticketmaster’s own secondary-market platform. There is an estimate (the slide does not specify which year) that some $15Billion in tickets sales happened on the secondary market, with Stubhub getting nearly $5B of that and Ticketmaster another $2B.

So – what to do? Budish has some ideas.

One, outlaw fees. If the fee must be paid no matter what the buyer does, then it is part of the price, and so must be stated that way. No adding fees when one gets to the point of giving credit card info.

That one is easy, and is not really related to the secondary market issue. The London Knights and Toronto Symphony sites I looked at both told me there would be a ‘service fee’. What I do not know, because I didn’t actually buy, is whether any other fees would have appeared when I got to the point of paying for the tix.

To shrink the secondary market, Budish proposes a technological fix. It is possible now to restrict re-sale of tickets by making them wholly electronic. If you buy a ticket to an event, it is downloaded to your online device (typically a smartphone) in a way that it cannot be transferred to someone else’s device. Sellers pair this with a limit to how many seats can be downloaded to any one device, and this (it is assumed) kills the resale market.

The curious part of his presentation is that he seems to think that with this technology in place, artists will naturally choose one of two scenarios.

One, they will restrict re-sale as just described, and set low box-office prices so their ‘true’ fans can afford tickets and come to the shows.

Two, they will not restrict re-sale and will set high ‘market-clearing’ box-office prices.

I do not understand why an artist who wants to set high box-office prices would not also employ the no-resale technology. When an artist and their management decide on concert prices, they can always get it wrong in either of two ways.

A, they set prices too high in the sense that tickets sit at the box-office unsold. An artist/maager who sees this happening as the date of the concert approaches can, I presume, lower prices for the remaining seats to try and sell them. This might piss off those fans who bought earlier, if they find out.

B, they set prices too low, and tickets go fast and end up on some re-sale market. Well, if artists really don’t want that to happen, then why not use the no-resale tech anyway? If you set prices too high it won’t matter, but if you set them too low it keeps money out of the hands of the scalpers.

It also seems to me that Budish assumes that artists don’t want to help ticket scalpers make money. Lin-Miranda’s op-ed suggests that may be true for him, but it is less than obvious to me that feeling is universal.

As noted above, in the pre-internet era, artists set low prices, (small-time) scalpers made money re-selling tickets, and the artists seemed mostly fine with that because they didn’t get blamed for the high prices.

It is clear that with the no-resale tech in place, the artists can set ‘low’ box-office prices without helping scalpers get rich. This is already how airlines sell their tickets pretty much. Pre-internet, airlines did this by requiring the ticket buyer to provide a full name that was included on the printed ticket. Airlines required you show a passport with a matching name when you boarded.

I just don’t see why artists who want to set high prices – whatever that means – won’t also put the no-resale tech in place.

However, another part of what Budish at least thinks about is how artists who want to set ‘high’ box-office prices might do that, and one option he considers is that they hold an auction. Or, more likely, some outfit like Ticketmaster would do it for them. You would go online to some site where you could bid the amount you were willing to pay for four Taylor Swift tix, for example. This should defeat the re-sellers, since in an auction the only way to insure getting lots of tix is to be willing to pay a lot, which pretty much kills any hope of profitable re-sale. Economists have done a lot of theoretical and practical work on auctions since I joined the profession in the 80s, and there is a consensus that auctions work much better than they used to because of their contributions. However, so far as I know, ‘work better’ mostly means auctions today generate a lot more revenue for the seller than they used to. I’m not sure that doing that for concert tickets will feel like an improvement, but Budish is an economist, so I expect he is in favour. And, it would mean that all that extra revenue would go to the artists and venues, rather than re-sellers. I suppose that is preferable.

Anyway, an artist that sells concert tix via an auction will have pretty much killed off any hope of a secondary market operating at even higher prices. Thus, they will indeed have no reason to also adopt the no-resale tech for their tix, so far as I can see. That would mean that someone who got a ticket in an auction but then had to miss the show, say due to illness, could re-sell the tix for something, at least.

One added note on the ‘hidden fees’ part of this. My strong intuition is that this is a pure internet phenomenon. A clothing retailer could certainly add a $5 ‘processing fee’ when you go to the cashier to pay for your new shirt or slacks. They do not do so only because they do not want their sales personnel to face the customer’s anger when that happens. When paying for something on an internet platform, there is no one to feel your anger; you just pay it or cancel the transaction, and since it’s ‘only’ $10 almost everyone pays it.

That being said, there are exceptions. It’s been a while since I bought a new car, but I do recall that once you sat down with the ‘Sales Manager’ to sign the papers, all sorts of things could appear. ‘Destination charge’ rings a bell,, as does ‘Dealer Prep’. So perhaps part of it is that the amount of the extra charge be ‘small’ relative to the price you are already paying. Small enough that you don’t walk away.

Back to Budish’s techie solution to the secondary market taking over ticket sales, I absolutely hate it for the obvious (to me) reason that it makes us even more prisoners of online-enabled devices. (It also assumes that the same geniuses who figured out how to employ ‘bot armies’ won’t also figure out ways to defeat it. There are billions of $ to be made from doing so, apparently.) And, there is nothing on earth that would induce me to participate in an auction to get tickets to any concert by any artist. There’s lots of great music to be heard here at The Richmond Tavern, and all I have to do is drink a couple of beers and drop a 20 in the jug when it comes around.

I will never attend a Taylor Swift (or Rolling Stones) concert, but might one day again want to hear the TSO play. My refusal to own a smartphone or participate in an online auction will perhaps make that impossible.

So, from a personal point of view, the ban on ‘charges’ aside, I am not convinced Budish’s ideas will make the ticket market better. Bad in a different way, perhaps.

But, hang in there, folks, if they have their way, grocery and other retail stores will soon be doing ‘surge’ pricing, and ‘personalized’ pricing and all sorts of cool things that will really piss us off – and we will be powerless to avoid. It’s all about extracting the maximum Benjamins from us, as the internet enshittification of life continues.

Angry as Hell

Written by Al Slivinski on January 7, 2026. Posted in Education.

There are days I think of quitting writing this blog, but only because some of the things I write about make me so angry that I suspect it is all bad for my health, mental and physical. Being angry is not good for one.

This post will be about such a thing.

The headline in my paper London Free Press this morning:

City high school library’s 10,000-volume ‘book purge’ sparks censorship debate

Here are the facts presented in the story, all of them coming from Larry Farquharson, who just resigned as the teacher-librarian at London’s H.B. Beal Secondary School. He says in the Freeps story that ‘It was untenable to stay’.

The library there once held 18,000 books, the largest number in the Thames Valley School District. It is now home to 8,300.

Here are the titles mentioned in the story which were eliminated. All of the info below comes from the Freeps story.

The purged books included 128 war history titles with another 15 from the library’s reference section.

They covered such topics the War of 1812, the first and second world wars – including seven books documenting Canada’s contributions – trench warfare and the Holocaust, including all but one of the school’s copies of The Diary of Anne Frank.

A copy of The Gallant Hussars also was removed. It’s a history of London’s First Hussars Regiment from 1856 to 2004.

Copies of works of fiction such as the Harry Potter novels, Lord of the Flies and Wuthering Heights were removed, as were books by such luminaries as John Steinbeck, Lucy Maud Montgomery and Kurt Vonnegut.

Needless to say, with nearly 10k eliminations, that is not a complete list.

Another quote from the Freeps story.

A Thames Valley document dated 2024-25 and titled “inclusive library collection revitalization project,” a copy of which was obtained by The Free Press, notes the London-based board has several requirements for choosing library resources.

The “revitalization project,” it states, “aims to revitalize the collections of (Thames Valley) schools to ensure they are culturally responsive, reflect our diverse student population and contain accurate and up-to-date information.”

It adds: “The project will focus on deselecting texts with harmful images, messaging, slurs, and racial epithets to facilitate the safety and well-being of all students.”

Thames Valley officials did not reply to a Free Press request for comment on the Beal library decisions or whether there are similar efforts at other schools across the board.

Of course they did not reply. And I have to point out that the headline on the Freeps story is a lie. There is no ‘debate’ here, the assholes at Beal simply unilaterally removed the books. They did not consult the public. That is not how these people operate. Nor did they move the books on so others could read them. There are many used book stores in London, not to mention a yearly used book fair at Centennial Hall, that would have been happy to have them. No, these books are not fit for anyone to read.

The brave Mr. Farquharson has provided us with a photo to show what happened to those nearly 10,000 books. It’s below, copied from the Freeps story and credited to him. Those books are gone, pulped into oblivion, as the assholes wished. This all started a year ago, according to Farquharson. The debate never happened.

As I said, so angry that my hands are shaking as I type. This is education in the 21^st century.

But Thames Valley students are safe from Kurt Vonnegut.

An Echo from X

Written by Al Slivinski on January 3, 2026. Posted in Education, LBOs.

I was reading an economist’s blog, and he linked to this random X post, from someone named ShoreKnight who clearly hasn’t got a clue about 21st century universities:

Academic life would improve if universities would dispose the 19th century decorum and be run like a business with clear roles: pure administration, pure research, pure teaching. Administration needs actual MBAs not theoretical physics PhDs.

You may recall my past post on Pournelle’s Law in this regard. However, someone else responded to this post directly on X, using words that I can hardly improve on:

Academia already did what you’re proposing. Universities are now run like businesses with professional administrators, branding strategies, risk management, consultants, and KPI dashboards. The result hasn’t been better research or teaching. It’s been the transformation of universities into brand-management and lifestyle companies, where prestige, expansion, and revenue extraction matter more than scholarship or education. Research and teaching don’t reliably maximize short-term financial returns, so they get crowded out. What grows instead is administration because once an administrative class is established, its primary function becomes self-preservation and expansion, not mission fulfillment. This is exactly what happens when a nonprofit adopts corporate logic without corporate accountability. You don’t get efficiency. You get mission drift and an institution optimized to look successful rather than to be successful.

The responder is known on X as Jason Locasale. Don’t know who he is, never heard of him, but – you got it right, Jason.

Londoners With Ideas

Written by Al Slivinski on January 2, 2026. Posted in Popular attitudes, Standards.

This is going to be about homelessness in my city, London. Unlike most posts here, this was not provoked by an article in the local paper, or any paper, although they write and report often on this topic. Rather, it was prompted by two letters to the editor I read in the Freeps a couple of weeks ago.

Homelessness is of great concern in London and many other places. There are people now who sleep on the street downtown as well as in the underpass I walk through to get downtown. There are also encampments in various places around London, and probably other examples of which I am unaware.

I will start by saying what I can about what I think a ‘solution’ to homelessness would look like. Number one, it would mean that when people were found to be sleeping outside as they do now, they would be removed and taken somewhere. That is indeed priority one as far as I am concerned. Absolutely no one benefits from having those people there, although I expect there are those who would say that they should not be removed from the street if they wish to stay there. The next issue is what happens to those people who are removed from the streets. Those with mental health and/or drug problems (I suspect one often comes with the other) would be put into mandatory programs to treat them. Anyone who knows anything about such programs knows that their success rates are very low. However, if someone is judged to have successfully beat a drug problem, or been treated for a mental health problem to the point that they can function in society, they should be given temporary shelter while they try to integrate back into society. Their families should be involved in all of this whenever possible, and those given such shelter should be charged with crimes if they commit any while in such housing. I add that last clause because I know people who have tried to run non-profit housing establishments for people in similar situations, and they say the biggest challenge and expense is repairing the damage done to them by some residents.

Now I strongly suspect that some of the people currently sleeping on the street will never be put in a position to again function in society by any program that can be devised. (Indeed, I think it likely that many of them never did really function.) I have heard stories from those in the health care sector that some long-term care beds in Ontario are now occupied by young people who have ODed and then naloxoned enough times that they are no longer physically or mentally functional. LTC homes are supposed to be provincial establishments for the elderly with no alternatives. They are, sadly enough, often little more than warehouses for those waiting to die. Such warehousing may also be the unfortunate final destination of some of the homeless.

My overall point here is that a solution involves taking them off the street and putting them into a system which moves them along to some final destination. That final destination will be unconstrained entry back into society only for those who can function there, without breaking the law, going back on drugs, or back onto a bed on the street.

The above is only a sketch of what I would suggest, there will be a million details to work out. I do not think this is in any way an easy problem to deal with, or even to make progress on. It is bloody difficult.

OK, that is prelude, I started this by saying it was prompted by some letters to the Freeps on the London homelessness problem. Each of them suggested a way of attacking the issue, and the first one I will note was written by one Stephen Orser. The Freeps staff titled it Reward Taxpayers, and in it Orser suggests that ‘We should look at a Homeowners Homeless Program’.

Orser’s idea is to have the city provide a forgivable loan of up to 10 years and $125k to build a separate granny flat on any homeowners property.

“Rent, at a reduced rate, would be paid directly by Ontario Works or ODSP to house homeless, drug-free, screened, police-checked individuals. The city would insure homeowners for losses caused by tenants and provide free sewer hookup and fast action for problem tenants.”

“Homeowners can save money while helping the homeless.”

He also finishes the letter with this:

“Instead, we’re spending $7million for 60 garden sheds by Highway 401 for three years.”

Now, I agree with the implied criticism in that last sentence of the City’s current plan, as I have written elsewhere. However, Orser’s alternative seems to be to subsidize homeowners to build those garden sheds in their backyards. I will admit that such sheds are more likely to attract the attention of people currently living on the street than are sheds miles from anywhere, but that is the only improvement.

No subsidy you can devise would induce me to build such a thing in my yard. My worry would be that I might live next to someone who did build one. In that event, I would have no faith that the city would provide ‘fast action for problem tenants’. My neighbor a few years back rented his basement to a bunch of young assholes, and the entire neighbourhood suffered for more than a year until they left and he stopped renting. I woke up one morning to find a pile of garbage at the end of my driveway from said tenants. No, thanks, Mr. Orser.

The second letter was from one Ron Pare, and the wags at the Freeps gave it the title Star Trek Solution. I have no idea why the Freeps feels it needs to give titles of any kind to letters, but I suspect in this case it was the headline-writer’s way of indicating he didn’t like the letter.

Pare’s letter contains a sentence that I think is right on the money.

‘We are currently treating homelessness like a storage problem. We try to find places to put people, like warehousing inventory, rather than fixing the underlying human fallout that surrounds us.’

Exactly, Mr. Pare. That is what the City is proposing with its ‘hubs’ and ‘garden sheds’. And that is not a solution.

Mr. Pare’s solution is detailed, even more so than what I wrote above. It starts with a 30-day period of ‘biological stabilisation’ to deal with drug and other health issues, then a 60-day period of helping people to acquire human capital of all kinds so they can more successfully re-enter society. Those are possibly sensible ideas for dealing with rather than warehousing homeless people.

Then he writes:

‘We need to stop debating where to put hubs and start debating what happens in them.’

Agreed again. I will add one thing, that was implicit in what I wrote above: no system, however detailed and well-conceived, will constitute an actual solution if entry into it is purely voluntary. If you are found living on the street, you go in, period. Where you end up depends on what happens next. That is something all the ‘activists and advocates’ who currently dominate all discussions of this problem will likely not tolerate.

And that, along with the general inability of our city leaders to do anything competently, is why I see no solution looming. The ‘garden sheds’ way down in south London will achieve nothing, and I see nothing else with a hope of success on the horizon. Not my system, and not Mr. Pare’s, because the City will simply not implement them in the face of predictable opposition from the activists and advocates – and likely also from various judges.

And, if my plan or one like it were to be implemented, I am sure that some people would end up involuntarily warehoused. That’s because I expect that some not-small portion of people currently sleeping on the street are there because of what happened to them when they were young. Terrible parenting, trauma, miserable nutrition, abuse….and on and on. The only way to heal from such as that, if there is one, is not something any ‘system’ is likely to deliver. That is also why I wrote that priority one is to get people off the street. If some street people cannot be healed, it is still imperative that the rest of us not have to live with them sleeping, taking drugs, defecating and occasionally being violent on those streets. Chaos must be tamed.

Epilogue

Various people wrote into the Freeps in reaction to the two letters above. One such reaction was titled ‘Fine, You Go First’ in which the writer invited Mr. Orser to be the first to build a granny flat in his yard. True to his beliefs, Mr. Orser wrote back volunteering to be the first to take up his program if the City would implement it. He also criticized Pare’s plan as being ‘too expensive’.

So, two further thoughts:

One, as I wrote, it is the Orsers of the world who worry me about his plan. If it were to be implemented, there would be those who saw it as a way to be ‘rewarded’ – and impose costs on their neighbours when their subsidized tenants caused trouble.

Two, yes the Pare plan is expensive, as would be anything like my own. That is not what London does, they prefer to spend money in ways that do not address problems – like their solution to snow-covered sidewalks.

Prostitute List, 2nd (Christmas )Edition

Written by Al Slivinski on December 24, 2025. Posted in Standards.

Below are the most recent additions to my list of megabucks-earning celebrities who shill for various companies’ products. I should add that once the World Series ended (badly) my US broadcast sports watching dropped precipitously.

Some other notes that have occurred to me since publishing the 1^st Edition:

These are all from TV. If anyone is shilling online or radio or….well, I don’t know where else shilling happens…then it won’t be on here. I have an adblocker on my web browser, so don’t get many ads when I am online.
I have seen more than one TV ad which featured some person in a way that suggests to me they might be famous and shilling for the product in the ad. However, I had no clue who said person was, so those people have avoided getting on this list. I’m sure they are relieved.

Prostitute	Client
Billy Bob Thornton	TMobil
Payton Manning	Nationwide Insurance
Steve Carell	Lavazza Coffee
Kevin Bacon	TMobil
Bradley Cooper	Uber Eats
Owen Wilson	Xfinity TV
Vince Vaughn	Xfinity TV
Benedict Cumberbatch	Amazon
Steph Curry	Google Phones
Danny Devito	Jersey Mike’s Subs
Eli Manning	Jersey Mike’s Subs
Peyton Manning	USBank
Jeff Goldblum	Xfinity TV

People? Who Needs People?

Written by Al Slivinski on December 23, 2025. Posted in Research.

I say this often:

There is no idea so bad that one cannot find some politician who will support it.

Exhibits 1 to 26 for the truth of this – most of what London City Council has done in the last three years, plus most of the policies espoused by Z Mamdani for NYC.

I have always also thought, though I say it less often, that there is a corollary to that axiom:

There is no idea so bad that one cannot find an academic to support it, if it will give them an excuse to write more research papers.

This corollary came streaking across the night sky and back into my brain as I was reading one of the latest posts from Gelman’s stats blog. You know the one. Gelman has a team of people who contribute posts from time to time, and this one is from one Jessica Hulman on Dec 19. It describes an idea that is breathtaking in its ignorance.

However, I will have to back up into some history of social science research to explain the whole mess. Do hang in there, I promise not to get geeky.

Sometime after I joined the ranks of economists, a new area of study in Econ was born called ‘experimental economics’. It had two branches, and the legitimate one involved doing field experiments. One such that I remember well was about charitable giving, an area in which I used to work. [The details here may be a bit off, it’s been awhile, but I trust researchers Andreoni and company will forgive me. I just want to give you the idea of how such research works.]

These researchers collaborated with the Salvation Army to put their kettles just inside the doors of a big retail store – might have been Walmart. The bell-ringers operated in two different ways. In Situation 1 they stood silently by their kettles and thanked anyone who might drop money in. In situation 2 they rang their bells, yelled ‘Merry Christmas’ and did their best to engage with the shoppers going in and out.

They then checked to see how much money was in the kettles in each situation, but the clever part was that in each situation they put kettles at every entrance/exit but one. A door around the side of the store had no kettle at all, but it did have someone noting how many people used that door. This allowed them to tell whether any difference in money taken in was partly due to people dodging the kettles more often in one Situation than in the other.

Not world-changing research, but you can imagine that Sally Ann and other charities would be very interested in the results (no, I don’t remember what they found).

That is a social science field experiment. One goes out into the field and tries something out to see how humans react. They are not easy to do, take a lot of time and money, and this one in particular required the researchers to get the cooperation of both Sally Ann and Walmart.

The other branch of experimental economics does lab experiments. That is what it sounds like, these researchers bring the participants into a ‘lab’ to be part of an experiment. What that usually involves is sitting them down at a computer where they interact with other participants and some software package. These experiments require the participants to make choices at their keyboards, and those choices comprise the data that is gathered from the ‘experiment’.

To be concrete, a classic example of such an experiment, also used to study people’s charitable behaviour, is to have them participate in a ‘public good game’. Each subject is given a pile of electronic tokens to ‘spend’. Any tokens they still hold at the end of the experiment are redeemed for actual money before they leave the lab. The participants are given the opportunity to contribute some tokens to a ‘public good’. Each participant of course gets to keep any tokens they do not contribute, but they also get some tokens paid out to them by the software, and the amount they get increases as the total amount donated by all participants goes up. Thus, each participant has to decide how many of his original tokens to keep, and now many to contribute to the public good, knowing that his contributions increase the payoffs to all participants, including himself.

The point here is that using the computer software, you can vary in a million ways how the tokens accumulate and are paid out. For example, you can mimic a ‘matching donation’ regime in which some outsider pledges to match the total number of tokens donated to the public good, thereby increasing in some measure the payoffs each donor gets. You can also put in a pseudo government that takes some percentage of each participant’s tokens, but also gives a tax deduction for any tokens each contributes to the public good.

You can have the participants contribute simultaneously, so no one knows how much anyone else gave when they make their own donation, or you can have people contribute in some order, so each knows how much has been given by those who gave already.

The possibilities are indeed endless, it’s all a matter of software and then writing down what happens.

There is a technical name for this sort of experiment, I’m trying to remember it…..oh, yea – Horseshit.

Ok, that’s my name for it, and here is why. Whatever happens when you put people in a room to participate in such a public good game, the idea that it tells us anything about how people’s real-world donations to charity respond to actual tax policies or actual matching programs or….anything – is laughable. The reasons are many.

The public good game is not having people support an actual charity. It is not,full stop, so their attitudes toward charity in general, or what a charity does with their donation, play no role.

The people are not spending their own real income in the game. The get some tokens they can keep if they don’t contribute, but the amounts are trivial. A subject might walk out of that experiment with an extra $20 in their pocket. Indeed, ethical considerations typically require that subjects not come out of the experiment with less money than they went in with, a real problem if you are trying to study gambling or other risk-taking behaviour in a ‘lab’.

Because the amounts earned or lost are trivial, there is nothing to guarantee the subjects are not just trying to fuck up the experiment in some way. It costs them virtually nothing to do so.

If researchers gave people $5,000 worth of tokens to start with that would not be much of a problem, and then they would be making real decisions about significant amounts of money. But that never happens because it would make the experiments frightfully expensive to run. And, it would still be true that people typically treat money they had to earn differently from money someone gives them that they can then try to keep.

The point then is: whatever subjects do in those labs, there is no good reason to believe it tells us anything about how they behave when they give to actual charities using their actual earned income. The experiments have zero ‘external validity’, as academics like to say. And, the point of social science research is not supposed to be to publish papers, it is to understand society. You know, the one we all live in.

Yet, thousands of such ‘lab experiments’ in Econ have been done since the 90s, and the results get published. There is now even an Economic Science Association which publishes a journal called Experimental Economics solely devoted to this stuff.

Why the popularity of this type of research? l have an answer. It is easy. You just get your university to build you a ‘Behavioural Economics Lab’, which consists of 30 or so computer terminals in a room, and some software, and you can do as many experiments as you can dream up…..and publish as many papers in EE as you can write up. For the universities that expense is minor, and if their faculty can publish tons of papers based on what happens in it, it seems like a good idea. Cuz what U-bureaucrats want is for their faculty to publish lots and lots of papers. Whether any of them are worth a plugged nickel is not the bureaucrats’ concern. They wouldn’t know, anyway.

Oh, and another key thing about this experimental research is that one cheap way to get subjects for your experiment is to require all the students in Econ 101 to sign up to participate in at least one experiment in order to pass the course. My Dept had none of these experimentalists so this did not happen, but the UWO Psych Dept had that requirement in their Intro Psych course for years. I don’t know if they still do.

One wonders how much of the field of psychology – and now, Econ – is based on the responses of disgruntled undergrads to surveys and computer games.

However – this has all been a description of history. The journal called EE marches on, you can get access to it here, no charge. [The phrase ‘You get what you pay for’ comes to mind, but that’s just mean, right?]

So much for background. The lightning bolt that prompted me to write this post was a post on the Gelman stats blog titled ‘Validating language models as study participants: How it’s being done, why it fails, and what works instead’

You can click on that title if you want read it yourself.

Quoting from the first paragraph of the post:

Earlier this year, I started paying attention to proposals to use LLMs to simulate participants in surveys and behavioral experiments. The idea is that LLMs can be prompted with experiment or survey instructions and a participant persona (e.g., demographic description), making it possible to simulate target human samples without the cost and headache of recruiting real people.

Yep, that’s right folks. Ms Hulman is looking into the use of LLMs (Large Language Models) like ChatGPT to be used as responders to surveys and to participate in behavioural experiments like the one described above. You just give them a ‘persona’ and see how they respond to your survey or observe what choices they make in a public good game. All without the ‘cost and headache of recruiting real people’.

We can do social science – the study of human society – without any humans at all. I ask you: is that just Fucking Fabulous or what?

It certainly is if you are an academic looking for ways to write more and more papers, which is how you get ahead in your career.

I can hardly wait to see the policy prescriptions that come out of this emerging new wave of research – and you better know, folks, that no self-respecting social scientist does research these days that does not generate a ringing endorsement of some policy or other.

Moreover, with that ‘cost and headache of recruiting real people’ gone there is truly no end to the number of papers any single social scientist can write. Hell, they can get an LLM to write them (actually, that’s already been happening for some time….).

As I said, this is breathtakingly ignorant of what social science is supposed to be. But academics have their eyes focussed on what matters to them – writing papers and getting them published. Three days after this article was published on the Stats blog, there have been four comments on it from other blog readers, and not one of them has suggested there is anything problematic here.

To sum up this admittedly long post –

The original experimentalists choose to ignore the fact that their human subjects are being observed in completely artificial situations, rather than in actual social settings. Now the LLMers want to ignore the fact that those observed subjects are not human.

Ya gotta love the academic mind, eh?

Mistress of Sloth

Written by Al Slivinski on December 22, 2025. Posted in Uncategorized.

At this time of year I like to post something positive in this blog. Peace on earth and goodwill towards men and all that. Unfortunately, reading the news everyday as I do does not give one much material to use in such an endeavour.

That being said, there is no doubt that at the personal level, if I look at my life and the people in it (which is what Life is all about once one is not working, and maybe even when one is), it’s pretty damn good. I am a lucky S.O.B. Thus, I give you some observations from that personal life on a subject on which I am no expert: cats.

I have never been a cat-owner, don’t know squat about them. Growing up we had dogs, as did my son when he was young. Indeed, my Dad had a distinct aversion to felines, prompted by his not unreasonable irritation over the fact that the cats in the neighbourhood in which I grew up seemed to do a lot of peeing on our front porch. That will not endear you to anyone.

Although I am not a pet-owner now, there have been a few occasions on which I have played innkeeper to my gal’s cat, who I will henceforth refer to as The Cat. It’s a she-cat, and a very interesting creature. Indeed, my time with her has me convinced that if there is reincarnation, I want to come back as a cat. They have things figured out.

Now, boarding The Cat is not an onerous task. Cats – in so far as one can generalize from The Cat – ask rather little of their humans. Keep them fed, keep the litter-box clean, and they are, so far as I can tell, content. There are things you can do that will piss them off, and I suppose those things might vary from cat to cat, but in the case of The Cat, it is definitely possible to pet her wrongly. I am not at all sure what the exact parameters of ‘wrongly’ are, but I know when I do it, because I get hissed at, or even a soft bite on the finger.

I back off, The Cat gets over it immediately, and life goes on. To me the most interesting aspect of the life of a cat is their unmatched ability to Do Nothing. There are two situations in which The Cat gets very excited and might race about and make a bit of noise. One, when she knows you are preparing her food, and two, when you entice her into attacking one of her toys or a catnip sack.

In the first case she runs madly about the kitchen mewling up a storm and standing up against the counter, which I interpret as a feline version of ‘Will you hurry up, already?’. In the second case she will wrestle the toy to the ground and beat it up with her back paws and maybe roll over on it. This I take to be an expression of her natural predatory instincts, but one must know that this second thing happens only if the mood seizes her. You can throw all kinds of things in her path and if she is not feeling it, she will ignore them without so much as a look.

Which brings me to Doing Nothing. Those periods of mad activity, by my admittedly casual reckoning (I did not keep a log during her time with me) takes up much less than one hour out of any 24. The rest of the time, The Cat Naps. She doesn’t read, and if she is doing philosophy during those snoozes she keeps it to herself – she just Naps. On a typical day I might leave the house at, say, 11am to do this and that, and as I exit The Cat is lying on a pair of pillows I put on a dining room chair for that purpose – catnapping. When I come back three hours later, there is no evidence she has moved an inch, so I take off my coat, and sit down in my Big Chair to read or write or watch a game or whatever. Quickly, The Cat is off the chair, walks slowly into the living room, stretching her legs as she goes, and in a trice is up on my lap, curled into a ball of fur, purring quietly as she….naps some more.

She will stay there on my lap happily for hours, but for the fact that her human innkeeper has to get up to do something from time to time.

When I finally head off to my own bed, The Cat sleeps. She wakes at some point in the morning to remind me about her breakfast, but if I ignore her, she goes and lays down somewhere until I am ready to feed her. Then, cue the 2 minutes of mewing at me and running about while I prepare her food.

I would not have thought the old saying that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master something applied to napping, but The Cat seems to think otherwise. Practice, practice.

Moreover, if I spend even one whole day at that level of inactivity, as I do, say, when I get a bug of some kind, my muscles and joints get so achy that it can be hard to sleep. Well, I can hear you saying, of course that happens to you, Al – you’re an old geezer. You gotta keep it all moving or it will just rust.

Fair enough, but The Cat is no spring chicken either. This is a mature, 12yo cat, not a kitten. Yet she can, if the mood takes her, jump from a standing start onto a three-foot high counter. Hell, I couldn’t do the equivalent of that when I was 22. All that lying about seems to in no way reduce The Cat’s ability to undertake great feats of derring-do when she wants to. I have had to chase her off my five foot high stereo stand and even higher fireplace mantel at times. And, if you can get her chasing the red light from a laser pointer, The Cat’s speed and agility is remarkable to behold. How is this possible for a creature that does nothing more than sleep most of the time? I have never known her to ask for my tube of Voltaren or an Advil after a good bout of chase-the-red-dot.

I wonder, do physiotherapists and athletic trainers study cats? Surely there is something to be learned about training for athletic endeavours from these creatures.

To go along with this remarkable and seemingly effortless physical prowess, cats have a knack for exuding calm. As I noted, they will hiss at you if pissed off, but it doesn’t last, and the rest of the time they are the embodiment of calm serenity. At least, The Cat is. You get her lying curled up on your lap, purring quietly, and it is very hard to get angry or upset. About anything, Well, maybe about the fact that you really really have to pee and so need to get up and disturb all that serenity.

Again, if there is re-incarnation, forget about coming back as a Captain of Industry or a Great Thinker, I want to be a cat. They got it sussed. Peace and Goodwill towards all, indeed.