Rarely Pure Never Simple

On The Lookout for Pretendians

Written by Al Slivinski on December 9, 2025. Posted in LBOs, Standards.

Mr. King’s Fall

If you live in Canada it would have been hard over the last few weeks to miss the reports about the fall of one Thomas King. He has fallen, at least in the eyes of some (and no one knows who or how many) because it appears he is not ‘indigenous’, as most people, including Mr. King – maybe – used to think.

This has led to a flurry of articles and opinion pieces in the Globe and Mail, including one written by Mr. King himself, and while there are some good reasons to see it as a tempest in a teacup, I have found it fascinating. It is a sterling example of much of what is wrong with North America in the 21^st century, so I am going to write about it.

A lot.

This won’t be short, so buckle up.

And, it’s going to get complicated, but I will start with this. According to the Globe and Mail, “Douglas Sanderson (Amo Binashii) is the Prichard Wilson Chair in Law and Public Policy at the University of Toronto’s faculty of law.”

Yea….so?

Well, Mr. Sanderson (or Mr. Binashii) is the one from whom I learned that word ‘pretendian’, in an essay he wrote in the Globe, titled ‘Indigenous’ is the new ‘Oriental’- and that opens the door to ‘Pretendians’.

What does that have to do with Mr. King? Let’s back up a bit –

Thomas King is a Canadian-American (dual citizen, lives in California) author, ‘presenter’ and ‘activist’ who has most often written about First Nations. For much of his career there was a general belief that he was ‘part’ Cherokee, but the big story this last month is that he has accepted genealogical evidence – whatever that is – that he is not. He is, therefore, one of Mr. Sanderson’s ‘pretendians’, along with others like Buffy St. Marie. At least I think Mr. Sanderson would say that, as his essay is anything but clear. It seems he does not like the term ‘indigenous’, although he admits in the article that it came along to replace ‘aboriginal’, which at least some folks did not like either. Sanderson says that dislike of ‘aboriginal’ was due to a grammatical misunderstanding, and his gripe with ‘indigenous’ seems (to me) to be that it is vague, unlike ‘Metis’ or ‘Anishinaabe’, and Mr. Sanderson thinks this is what opens the door to pretendians. That seems just silly to me. King thought/claimed he was ‘Cherokee’, which seems pretty definite. People who claim or think they are ‘indigenous’ always claim or think they are part of some particular tribe or group, so far as I can see. For example, Buffy-not-the-vampire-slayer claimed she was born a Cree. Not true, it turned out, but that was her claim.

I no longer expect clarity from law professors, and his article is another example of why. But it is not really his article that got me to write this one, beyond the fact that I kinda like his term ‘pretendian’. (If he did not coin it, he does not cite anyone else as doing so.)

That all being said, it’s time to get to the heart of the matter, part I – Mr King’s fall from grace.

Back on Nov 26, after the King story broke, the Globe published an Opinion column by Tanya Talaga titled ‘Thomas King’s storytelling now feels like a betrayal’. [Globe: Tanya Talaga is an Anishinaabe journalist and speaker. Talaga’s mother’s family is from Fort William First Nation and her father was Polish-Canadian.]

Full disclosure now, King has written novels which I have not read, but he also wrote a book called The Inconvenient Indian which gave his view on indigenous/aboriginal – settler relations in North America over the years, and I did read that. I think it was for a book club I was in at the time, and to my admitted surprise, I rather enjoyed it. It was less strident than most ‘grievance’ books, made any number of sensible points, and was clearly and – at times – humorously written. I learned from it, and that is always a good thing, so thank you Mr. King.

I do not feel as though the things I learned are somehow wrong or no longer valuable now that King has decided/revealed he is not really Cherokee. So, I read Talaga’s piece to try and understand why she feels ‘betrayed’.

Talaga writes early in her piece that:

Thomas King is an author I revered, right up there along with Lee Maracle and Murray Sinclair. Mr. King and the late Ms. Maracle were close friends; she spoke of him often. I met him at the Eden Mills writers’ festival, and told him I admired his work.

Ok, so she ‘revered’ King, and I will start with that. Maybe you should not ‘revere’ people you don’t know well. My favourite Canadian author is Robertson Davies. If only I could write like that man. And, to be honest, there have been days when I really really wished I was Keith Richards. That guy is amazing, partly just for still being alive, but also because he wrote so much of what I think of as the best rock riffs ever recorded. I even bought his autobiography, and I never buy those.

But still, I know that ol’ Keef is just a bloke, and he did a lot of bad things, as have we all. I could never say I revere him. Perspective, man.

Reverence aside, here is a pretty clear statement of the source of Talaga’s distress, I think:

I found it unbelievable that the person who wrote The Truth About Stories in 2003, a book I leaned on for its brilliant tear-down of the myth of the “noble savage,” was not, in fact, Cherokee.

Maybe this tells us something useful, at least about Ms Talaga, and perhaps about others. If you thought Mr. King did a brilliant job of tearing down that myth, what does his – for lack of a better term – ethnic heritage have to do with that? If it was brilliant, the way I find Robertson Davies’ writing brilliant, what difference does it make that Davies was a (as far as I can tell) Scottish-Canadian Anglican?

Part of an answer perhaps comes from this quote from Talaga’s article:

Until Mr. King can prove that he is Indigenous, or a member of another First Nations community via his paternal side, his work cannot be understood as being told from the perspective of an Indian, but of an ally, and it must be read through that lens. His books should not be added to courses on Indigenous literature and history; unless he proves otherwise, his work must move to the Canadian literature section.

So, it is about borders. Boundaries. Fences, and who is inside them and who is outside. His work must indeed be ‘understood’ differently (whateverthehell that means) if he is not a member of some ‘First Nation’.

Ms Talaga feels betrayed because she thought King was inside the fence, and it turns out he is not. I searched my brain for an analogy, and here is the best I can do.

Imagine you have had a family doctor for 15 years who you went to with health problems, and who you found at least mostly helpful. One day you learn he does not actually have a medical license, he has been practicing without one. Now he is likely going to go to jail, but the analogy here is about the question: how would you feel? Betrayed? You’re still alive, nothing he did killed you or harmed you irreparably. Yet, I can easily see that in that position a person would be angry, and maybe feel that the fake doc had betrayed their trust.

The difference would seem to me to be that a medical license implies the guy knew things that enabled him to help you. You thought he was trained, yet he was not. His lack of training meant he might have hurt you. Being part Cherokee does not imply any special training, but I suspect that Ms Talaga, and others, would not see it that way. They would assert that only someone who is actually ‘Indigenous’ can possibly credibly tear down the myth of the noble savage. I disagree, I don’t see how any ethnic heritage makes anyone more or less able to do anything.

Another quote from Ms Talaga:

The searing harm of Mr. King’s story, as it stands, is that it plants doubt into the many sisters and brothers out there who want to find us and come back home. It leaves other truly Indigenous authors overlooked. It crowds out our own truthful stories from education curricula, from the zeitgeist, from Canadian arts spaces.

I have no idea what that first sentence is trying to say. Doubt about what? Doubt that some people who say they are indigenous really are? Ok, sure, but such doubt would include everyone, including me. What could the reference to those ‘brothers and sisters’ possibly mean?

I don’t know, but the rest of the quote is to me about more border policing. King’s unwarranted claim to be indigenous meant that his work kept other work from the ‘truly Indigenous’ from being recognized – and getting on reading lists and such.

Before I move on to Part II, which my old employer was kind enough to provide material for, I close with one last quote from Talaga. It is the last line from her article:

Now we all have to find healing, again.

Oh fergodsakes, Tanya. ‘we all’? Get over yourself. It does not occur to some people, and Talaga is hardly unique in this, that not everyone shares their perspective. I am willing to assert that Canada and the US are full of people who see themselves as indigenous or Cherokee or Metis or whathaveyou, but who feel no need to heal again as a result of Mr. King’s newly revealed ethnic status. They have known all along that there are ‘pretendians’ around, this is just one more, and they will get along just fine from here on out despite that. No extra healing required.

Policing the Borders of Material Advantage

As I mentioned above, one of the many things to appear on the Globe website about the King story was an Opinion piece by King himself, in which he sort of tries to explain himself. Ms Talaga says in her article:

Mr. King appears to be another person who truly believed they were First Nations – and profited from that identity – but does not have living blood ties to a family, to a community, to anyone on or around the rez.

So, she is giving him the benefit of the doubt, believing that he truly believed, at least for awhile, that he was ‘indigenous’. Reading King’s G&M piece, I am less sure of that. It reads to me like the confession of someone who for a very long time had doubts about his own indigeneity, but chose not to look too hard at it, until an organization called TAAF (The Tribal Alliance Against Frauds) did some digging. [In one of those ironies with which the world is replete, TAAF is also how The Asian American Foundation refers to itself.]

You can check out the first TAAF here – https://tribalallianceagainstfrauds.org/

And here is the thing. If you are accepted as being ‘indigenous’, there are material advantages that accrue to you in the 21^st century. Part of the reason for this is the existence of people like Tanya Talaga who might not read your books about anything related to indigenous peoples if you are not inside the fence.

But it runs much deeper than individual attitudes, a fact which my former employer is making clear these days.

I got another email from the powers at UWO a couple of weeks back, telling me of a draft of a new policy and related procedures they are working on. I know – yawn.

However, this one deals with people who claim to be ‘indigenous’. This came out just before the King thing surfaced, and has been in process for awhile, so it was not a reaction to The King Revelation There have been plenty of previous ‘pretendian’ cases, as I said, and I suspect that includes some at UWO – which the powers would do everything to keep quiet, of course.

Anyway, here is a direct quote from the draft set of procedures I was sent:

Consistent with the concept of Indigenous self-determination, this Procedure is initiated once a member or prospective member of the University community who is subject to the Policy makes a declaration of Indigenous citizenship or membership that will result in a new or renewed material advantage to them at Western or is otherwise subject to the Policy.

This puts the crux of the matter in amazingly clear language for a bureaucratic document – ‘new or renewed material advantage’ indeed.

What might those be, you ask? Well there are some obvious ones. First, you will not get a faculty appointment in UWO’s Indigenous Studies department if you are not ‘indigenous’, but you can be sure that your application for a faculty appointment in any department will be enhanced by such status. Applying for a scholarship or post-doc position? Applying for a research grant? Appealing your mark in Econ 2251? The list goes on and on, and in every circumstance your chances of success will be enhanced by your indigenous status.

The procedures in the doc I was sent are all about how the U decides whether someone is inside the ‘indigenous’ fence, and thereby entitled to the relevant material advantage. The reason for the policy and related procedures are self-evident. If someone get such an advantage and then turns out to be a ‘pretendian’ it is very embarrassing for UWO in general and for those who conferred said advantage in particular. Just imagine if Buffy St Marie had been appointed as an ‘indigenous’ faculty member in the Faculty of Music, eh?

So, those borders must be policed.

And, the details of the policing are fascinating in itself.

If you want the material advantages, you have to say so (the appropriate form you must submit is attached to the document I was sent as Appendix 2: Declaration of Indigenous Citizenship or Membership) and then a committee will be struck to determine whether or not to affirm your claim to ‘indigeneity’.

How will this affirmation decision be made? Like this:

“The Vice-Provost & Associate Vice-President (Indigenous Initiatives) (VP/AVP II) will:”

[Aside: I love the initials. VP/AVP II. Do you suppose their admin assistant is R2D2?]

a) form an Indigenous Affirmation Advisory Committee (IAAC) on an as needed, ad hoc basis in accordance with this Procedure to verify all declarations of Indigenous citizenship or membership that are subject to this Procedure;

b) the IAAC will be comprised of a Chair and two (2) other local Indigenous community members from any of the local First Nation communities upon which the University is situated.

The procedure specifies that this IAAC Chair must be ‘an affirmed Indigenous faculty member, staff, librarian or archivist employee of the University’.

The document goes on to say that in doing its work, the IAAC will:

“provide trigger warnings leading up to any discussion where Indigenous citizenship or membership may be raised in the process of recruiting/ identifying an Indigenous-designated position(s), award, etc.; “

Also….

“share relevant and accessible resources, as listed in Appendix 1, with all individuals seeking affirmation as they may find the discussion around Indigenous citizenship or membership to be triggering;”

I won’t belabour you with all of Appendix I, save to say it lists a whole lot of ‘mental health resources’, including The First Nations and Inuit Hope for Wellness Help Line: 1-855-242-3310 or https://www.hopeforwellness.ca

….and so on.

I sat on both sides of many tenure-review committees during my career. People who failed these reviews got, well, fired. No one was told about such resources. Barbaric, I know.

Naturally, the IAAC is going to want to see some kind of documentation to support the claim of indigeneity. Here’s what the procedures doc says about that:

Upon direction of the University, anyone who makes a declaration of Indigenous citizenship or membership that is subject to the Policy will be required to provide the IAAC with the following current documentation for review and have affirmed:

(a) a statement of relational positionality1 (up to 4 pages) that includes details of:

(i) the individual’s personal lived experience in relation to their declaration of Indigenous citizenship or membership;

(ii) the individual’s personal connections, responsibilities, and interrelationships with their Indigenous Nation, Clan, language, culture, community, land, and other relevant responsibilities including details of the individual’s lineal descent; and;

(iii) where relevant, details about how colonial practices (e.g., the ‘Sixties Scoop’, Residential Schools) have impacted how the individual is able to claim Indigenous citizenship or membership as a person with lived experience.

There is a (b) also, which states that the applicant must present two out of a list of 15 possible documents. It also goes on to say that the IAAC may, at its discretion, require even more than this. It also says that if the applicant cannot come up with two of the 15 listed documents, a sworn affidavit from the applicant and two community reference letters might do the trick.

This might, to the unenlightened, seem like it makes gaining the relevant material advantages rather easy. Any 2 of 15 docs will do, and if you cannot come up with those just get two community members to swear an affidavit. Seems a pretty low bar.

Of course, anyone who has worked in an LBO knows that the primary purpose of procedures like this is to cover the LBO’s ass. If a ‘pretendian’ should be revealed at any point, the U’s top bureaucrats can say, with their hands over their non-existent hearts – ‘Hey, we had a thorough procedure and we followed it. Not our fault this asshole found a way around it.’

The procedures doc goes on to say how the appeal process works if indigenous membership is ‘not affirmed’ (‘denied’ is such a harsh word) by the IAAC. Guess what – a new committee is formed to consider the appeal.

And, one should not lose sight of the fact that all of this will involve tons of time by the six-figure-salaried VP/AVP II, and no end of other bureaucrats and faculty. For every case.

Why oh why has the number of bureaucrats in universities risen so much more than the number of students or faculty over the last 20 years?

But hey, those borders must be policed, right?

No Limits

Written by Al Slivinski on December 6, 2025. Posted in Economics, Government, LBOs.

So I open up my morning copy of The London Free Press on Friday, and here is a story headline from one of the inside pages:

LHSC cutting mental health benefits to staff in ‘26

The story also appears in the online version of the paper, with a rather more striking headline:

Staff decry LHSC move to cut unlimited mental health benefits

“It’s really hard to feel like you’re being supported, and we are a No. 1 trauma centre,” an employee said.

As discussed often here, online newspapers are all about click-baiting, so the difference in the two headlines is not surprising. ‘Decrying’, indeed.

The facts of the story are that LHSC, the local provincial hospital corporation, has been paying for an unlimited amount of mental health benefits for its employees, and these will now be limited to a set amount of spending per year. The amount depends on the employee group, ranging from $400/year to (still) unlimited, the last being for those who are in a union that had the foresight to get the ‘unlimited’ benefits into a collective agreement.

Here’s a quote from the email to LHSC staff about this change, which the Freeps said it obtained:

“Since the voluntary introduction of unlimited mental health benefits in 2024, we have seen costs rise exponentially,” the email said, citing expenses exceeding $3.1 million in 2024 and estimated the figure would exceed $5 million in 2025.

And here is a quote from the Freeps article itself:

A non-unionized social worker affected by the cuts, who asked not to be identified, called the decision “a gut-punch.”

“I just can’t wrap my head around that. I just can’t feel comfortable knowing that we had this option and now it’s being taken away, and there’s no other alternatives being proposed,” they said, noting their unlimited mental health benefits as a non-unionized employee will be reduced to $1,500 a year.

Yes, it’s terrible for people to not feel comfortable.

What I actually find most striking about this is the apparent surprise voiced in the email from LHSC. They made something freely available with no limit and ‘we have seen costs rise exponentially’. Goodness, whoddathought that would happen?

Economists are as capable of being full of shit as any social scientists, but there are things people in my former profession say and believe that have unquestionably stood the test of time. One of them is – ‘If you give something valuable away for free, there will be no end to the demand for it’.

And in this case, one must add in the 21^st century view that humans are so fragile that it is a wonder anyone can get through their day without a mental health professional helping them out. (I add that social workers like the one quoted above are in the vanguard of that view.)

As it happens the (more serious) The Free Press referenced an article in The Atlantic dated Dec 3 on what is essentially the same phenomenon, and one on which I have written in the past; the granting of special accommodations to university students with ‘disabilities’.

The Atlantic article TFP references is titled Accommodation Nation and is behind a paywall, but for some reason they let me read it for free – an early Christmas gift, perhaps.

Anyway, here is a key quote from the article:

The surge itself is undeniable. Soon, some schools may have more students receiving accommodations than not, a scenario that would have seemed absurd just a decade ago. Already, at one law school, 45 percent of students receive academic accommodations. Paul Graham Fisher, a Stanford professor who served as co-chair of the university’s disability task force, told me, “I have had conversations with people in the Stanford administration. They’ve talked about at what point can we say no? What if it hits 50 or 60 percent? At what point do you just say ‘We can’t do this’?” This year, 38 percent of Stanford undergraduates are registered as having a disability; in the fall quarter, 24 percent of undergraduates were receiving academic or housing accommodations.

I predict they will not be able to say no at any percentage, and the reason I say that is contained in this other quote from the article:

Tarconish sees the growing number of students receiving accommodations as evidence that the system is working. Ella Callow, the assistant vice chancellor of disability rights at Berkeley, had a similar perspective. “I don’t think of it as a downside, no matter how many students with disabilities show up,” she told me. “Disabled people still are deeply underemployed in this country and too often live in poverty. The key to addressing that is in large part through institutions like Berkeley that make it part of our mission to lift people into security.” (One-third of the students registered with Berkeley’s disability office are from low-income families.)

Yes indeed. Only their accommodations are preventing that 38% of Stanford students from ending up underemployed and in poverty.

A monster has been created, and it is feeding an entire bureaucracy of people with titles like ‘assistant vice chancellor of disability rights’, whose livelihood is based on the existence of disabled people. If Stanford or any other U (including my former employer) were to try to pull back on the granting of special accommodations to students, the ‘activists and advocates’ will pour into the streets (and classrooms) and onto social media until the LBOs cry uncle. And they always cry uncle in response to such pressure. This we have seen many times.

This is the part of giving things away that economists have missed. In the 21^st century governments giving things away generally creates a class of people (those advocates and activists – and bureaucrats) who have a vested interest in said things remaining free. This, coupled with that ‘gut-punch’ feeling of people who were getting the free stuff, makes stopping the give-away a political grenade.

As a parting shot, the Atlantic article also points out that it is the already-privileged who benefit from this disability industry. Another quote:

As more elite students get accommodations, the system worsens the problem it was designed to solve. The ADA was supposed to make college more equitable. Instead, accommodations have become another way for the most privileged students to press their advantage.

(You can also be sure that ‘assistant vice-chancellor for disability rights’ is making well into six figures, btw.) Along those same lines, people who work for LHSC are also mostly well up in the salary distribution. No one there is working for minimum wage, you can be sure, and few employees of any organization get unlimited anything. Indeed, I betcha London’s cops and firefighters don’t get unlimited mental health benefits.

One more (impending) example of this general phenomenon came across my desk the same week. The headline at the very top of the first page of my (on paper) London Freeps Friday morning was this:

Micro-shelter plan takes shape

Our brilliant city leaders have hatched a plan to ‘bring 60 micro-shelters for London’s homeless to a southeast farm field’.

I here predict that this will go one of two ways.

One, it will turn out, to our city leaders’ surprise, that no homeless person will go willingly to live waaay down in south London, miles from everything. Then the city will be faced with either writing off the whole thing as a bad idea, or forcing people to live there in order to receive other things. (The advocates and activists will hate that second option. Count on a human rights case.)

Or, two, if they do find people willing to live in them, it will turn out that no matter how many of these the city builds, no matter where they build them, and no matter how much they spend on providing free accommodation to homeless people, it will not be enough. The activists and advocates will be explaining in the Free Press forever that the City ‘needs to do more’.

[I’m betting on option one. A photo of the site for these shelters, taken from the Freeps, is below. It’s just off Cheese Factory Road. Really.]

Now, one might say in this instance – ‘But Al, clearly this does not benefit the well-off, this spending is clearly of benefit to the truly desperate among us’.

I will cite another quote from the Freeps article:

It was also revealed Wednesday that the site will be operated by Xpera, a national emergency management and security firm, which has a office in London.

In an interview with The Free Press, [London Mayor] Morgan cited the firm’s experience in crisis response, logistics, security, first aid and de-escalation training.

“So, a well trained professional firm which has a lot of experience doing this, a lot of experience with site management, site security, and they are the successful proponent and will be operating the site,” he said.

The article does not mention how or how much Xpera will be paid, or how many employees of theirs will be involved. It does say this:

The early estimate to set up and operate the site until April 2027 is $7 million, funded from a city reserve fund. The latest report outlines the shelters cost $1.2 million before HST, and the city will enlist J-AAR excavating firm to construct the site at a cost of around $725,000.

I got $100 in my pocket that says that ‘early estimate’ comes up waaaay low. Anyone want to take the other side of that bet?

Hark the Avenging Angel Sings

Written by Al Slivinski on December 2, 2025. Posted in Language, Safety.

I was reading the NP insert of national news in this morning’s London Freeps and came across a story with this as the first line:

“A Simon Fraser University shuttle bus driver has lost a freedom of speech appeal after he was fired for stopping on the job to tell a construction flagperson she was beautiful.”

My spell-checker doesn’t like that word ‘flagperson’, but that is the quote. Anyway, the rest of the story is that said bus driver did indeed do what is written there, and said flagwoman apparently took offense, and did something about it. She reported him to the university’s security people, who also took a statement from another witness. SFU then informed the driver’s employer, one Luxury Transport, and they in turn fired the fellow two weeks later.

Here is what the article says LT wrote to the driver in the termination letter:

“What is of great concern to us is that you do not believe that there was anything remotely wrong regarding your comments….”

“You continue to hold that view. You do not seem to understand or care that your comments had a negative impact.”

The other details in the story are that SFU did not tell LT to fire the driver, but informed them that he was not allowed to drive on campus any more. LT then offered him another route, which he refused, so they fired him. In response, the driver filed Freedom of Information requests with SFU for the material related to this and got back sheets of paper that were entirely blacked out. The driver also filed numerous complaints against SFU and LT and others, asserting they had violated his right to privacy and to free speech.

Clearly, the driver was a pain in the ass once this got going, and was determined to fight every step of the way.

My interest here is in the original incident, and the flagwoman’s response. The driver’s name is given in the story, but not hers, so I will refer to her as AA – Avenging Angel. Having the driver do what he admits he did, it is well within AA’s rights to be offended. Not all women would be, but if she was, so be it. A perfectly sane and – I will say proportionate – response to the driver’s unwelcome comment would be to yell something along the lines of ‘Fuck off, Asshole’. Crime, meet punishment. He said something to you that pissed you off, or offended you, return the favour. Like I said, proportionate.

But no, not today. AA decides to call in Big Brother to teach this fellow a lesson. She notes the logo on the bus and goes to SFU security and files a complaint. They in turn find another witness, or maybe AA brings one along with her, and there the tale of righteous revenge begins. I would bet $100 that somewhere in AA’s statement is the phrase ‘I felt unsafe’, but we already know that bet can never be resolved. All we will ever be allowed to see of said statement is a blacked-out page.

SFU in turn does not insist the driver be fired, their lawyers would at least know that they have no right to demand that, so they insist he not drive on their ‘safe’ campus. It is probably true that the driver could have kept his job had he apologized – at least to his bosses – and taken another route. Cojones, or just stubborn? You can decide for yourself.

I have to imagine that AA is pleased with herself, and that the SFU bureaucracy feels it has done what it must to keep the campus a safe place, free of comments with a ‘negative impact’, for flagwomen and others.

No Longer Merrye Olde England

Written by Al Slivinski on November 29, 2025. Posted in Government, Secrecy.

If you grew up in North America over the last 150 years, you are likely to see England as the source of much of what we view as liberal democracy. The Magna Carta, a representative Parliament, the idea that a man’s home is his castle, all that which says that it is the citizen who has rights, and the government exists to serve the interests of said citizens.

The UK today hardly lives up to that image. Here is a complete story recently published on the website for Reason Magazine. It’s brief, but the link in the story takes you to a MSN article which is purported to be from The Telegraph, a UK newspaper. The actual story in the Telegraph is behind a paywall, but it does exist, dated March 2025.

In England, the Hertfordshire Constabulary will pay Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine around $26,000 after wrongly arresting them for complaining about their daughter’s school in a private WhatsApp group. Six police officers arrested the couple at their home and detained them for 11 hours on suspicion of harassment and malicious communications. Their “offense” was questioning the school’s head teacher recruitment process. The school reported the parents to the police, claiming their messages upset staff. After a five-week investigation, police found insufficient evidence and took no further action.

If the MSN article is accurate, then Reason is understating things a bit. The MSN piece notes that:

The couple were arrested after the primary school complained about Mr Allen and his partner sending numerous emails and making “disparaging” comments on a parents’ WhatsApp group.

The couple had been banned from entering the school after questioning the appointment process for a head teacher and “casting aspersions” on the chairman of governors on WhatsApp.

So, they were not just talking to other parents, they did send emails to the school itself, and one could imagine such emails being threatening. However, then we have this from the same article:

Mr Allen said that the worst example they have since been able to find was Ms Levine describing a senior school figure as a “control freak”. “That was the strongest remark we could find – no obscene language, no threats,” he said.

And, it seems fitting to include the last sentence of the article, which is a quote from a ‘police force spokesman’ –

“Therefore, Mr Haddow-Allen and Ms Levine were wrongfully arrested and detained in January 2025. It would be inappropriate to make further comment at this stage.”

Yea, inappropriate – just pay the money and shut up.

One last quote:

Having questioned the couple on suspicion of harassment, malicious communications and causing a nuisance on school property, Hertfordshire Constabulary ruled that no further action should be taken after a five-week investigation.

So this was an investigation into, among other charges, something called ‘malicious communication’. What the freak can that mean? ‘Fraudulent communication’ I could see being a crime, particularly if it is part of an attempt to separate someone from some of their possessions or cash. Is calling someone a ‘control freak’ enough to hit the bar for ‘malicious’? Apparently not, but then I’d like to know what is.

The two things I find most appalling about this:

The school bringing in the police. This is up there with the Biden Attorney general wanting to look into parents complaining to and about their school boards as examples of ‘domestic terrorism’. Government bodies are finding more and more ways to avoid being questioned about anything they do, and this is another example of that very disturbing trend. Parents should not be objecting to the way a head teacher is selected, apparently. I can well imagine that the couple in this story were considered pains in the ass by the school, and perhaps deservedly so. That does not justify calling the police.
The police sending 6 officers to arrest and detain this couple. This is also another example of a 21^st century trend: police use of ‘massive force’ in any and all situations. I presume the idea is to protect the police, but six officers to arrest a couple for ‘malicious communication’?

I suppose the fact that the police ‘after a five week investigation’ cut a cheque to the couple for a not-inconsiderable amount can be taken as some sort of good news. It is certainly an admission that what happened was wrong, even in the UK. But, coupled with other stories coming from England, such as the comedian being arrested after getting off a plane in England for comments he made online that were critical of UK immigration policies, I find it hard to think of England as a place where citizen liberty is protected. It seems more like a country which is in the vanguard of protecting government officials from criticism.

Better Driving

Written by Al Slivinski on November 27, 2025. Posted in Safety.

Being all about public service, and having nothing better to do than muse about the state of modern society sitting at a looong red light in my car, I hit on the idea of writing up a set of rules and tips for being a better driver in the 21^st century.

Naturally, one should start at the beginning.

Starting

You will often find yourself sitting at a red light, and it is important that you do the right thing once the light turns green. I will write as though you are the first car in line at the red. If you are not, the principles are the same, you just have to wait until the cars ahead of you have moved well ahead of you before implementing them.

Seeing your light turn green, gently lift your foot off the brake pedal. The car will begin to creep forward (because like 97% of North Americans, you are driving a car with an automatic transmission). Let the creeping continue until the car is moving at its top creeping speed. Then, verrrry gently put your foot on the gas pedal so as to increase your speed verrrry slowly. You may know that the gas pedal is sometimes referred to as ‘the accelerator’. Do not be misled by this. Acceleration is highly dangerous. Ideally, it should take your car three blocks or more to get up to the posted speed limit. Execute this well, and no more than two cars behind you will get through that green light you just left in your rearview mirror. Traffic movement is safest when it does not move at all.

Turning

First, note that if you are the first car in a right or left turn lane at a red light, then the guidelines above apply in spades. Turning and accelerating is exponentially more dangerous than accelerating in a straight line.

However, here we will focus on turning onto a street when there is no stop light or other impediment to your turn.

Let’s say you are making an unimpeded right turn. Here, the brake pedal is your best friend. You should use it to get your speed down to no more than 2kph before you actually turn the wheel, then ease your vehicle slooowly around the corner. Whatever car you are driving at this point in history is equipped with a suspension system that would be the envy of a Formula 1 driver of thirty years ago, but do not let that go to your head. You don’t want that expensive German-engineered car to tip over while turning.

A good practice as you go through this turn is to stick your head out above the steering wheel and peer intently into the street you are turning onto, to make sure there are no critters or people waiting to leap out in front of you. Having safely straightened the car out on this new street, the advice in Starting given above once again applies.

Equally important here is correctly using that stalk on your steering column when turning. Some folks believe that this activates a ‘turn signal’, which, in the case of making a right turn as above, is supposed to tell drivers behind and in front of you that you plan to turn right. This could not be more wrong. You should think of this as a ‘turning signal’ which is designed to let other drivers know ‘I am turning now’. Thus, it should not be engaged until you are actually turning the wheel. I know it is a challenge to turn the steering wheel and engage the turning signal at the same time, but it is a skill you can master with practice: I have seen many do so.

Stopping

This is the most important part of driving, and doing it correctly is critical.

You will often find yourself driving along on a road without much traffic, and notice that somewhere up ahead of you a previously green traffic light has turned to yellow. You should take this as a signal to apply the brakes. The red light is coming as sure as Summer follows Spring, and Red means Stop. It is quite immaterial how far ahead of your current position is this traffic light – 100meters, a kilometre, 3 kilometres, it makes no difference. You want to be sure to be fully stopped when you get to the light, so brake early and brake often. Good driving is all about stopping – any North American traffic engineer will tell you that.

There are other traffic events that will happen in front of you, or even off to one side, and all require that you use your brakes immediately. Some common examples include:

The brake lights of a car ahead of you come on. Once again, it does not matter how far ahead is said car.

A ‘turning signal’ lights up on a car ahead of you, however far ahead.

The brake lights or turning indicator of a car in a lane to either side of you comes on. It does not matter which turning signal is engaged, use your brakes.

Again, all of these are situations in which you should engage your brakes, and keep them engaged until you have ascertained beyond any doubt what these other drivers are up to. Trust no one.

Turning Lanes

The discussion of making a turn above assumed that you were turning from a lane in which other traffic would be proceeding ahead. However, you will often come upon a situation in which there is a separate lane dedicated to use only by cars that are turning. These lanes of course end at the intersection. Using these right or left turn lanes correctly is also important.

Here I will discuss a left turn lane, the principles for a right turn lane are essentially the same. So, imagine you are coming up to an intersection at which you plan to turn left, and the traffic engineers have very considerately put in a separate lane for you. To enter this lane from the through lane, you should drive so that your left tires are in the turn lane and your right tires remain in the through lane, right up to where the turn lane ends at the intersection. This will insure that no cars behind you in the through lane can pass you, thus avoiding a highly dangerous intersectional incident. You may hear horn-tooting from the cars behind you; this is the traditional ‘thank you’ from drivers whom you have helped stay safe.

Addendum: essentially the same principle applies any time you change lanes. You should keep one set of tires in the lane you are entering and the other in the lane you are leaving for as long as possible. Your fellow drivers will thank you, if only in their prayers.

Special Situations

– Crosswalks

It is common in the 21^st century to come across a set of painted lines in the road, with a sign posted at the side of the road that looks like the one in the photo below:

The important word on that sign is Stop. You must do that before you cross those lines painted on the road, then look carefully in both directions to make sure no humans or bunny rabbits are about to cross. Then you can proceed to drive past the sign.

– 4 Way Stops

Once you are the lead car that is stopped in any direction at a 4 way stop, what you should do is remain stopped there and wave through all cars coming from all other directions, until you are the only car remaining at the intersection. This insures that nothing bad can possibly happen to you as you proceed through the intersection.

Addendum The rules for turning signal use given above quite logically apply also in this situation. If you are going to turn at the 4 way stop, on no account engage your turning signal until you are actually moving through the intersection. Everyone likes a surprise.

Everything is Fit To Print

Written by Al Slivinski on November 26, 2025. Posted in News Media.

In an age when most newspapers are read online, one consequence is that there are effectively no limits on how many stories a paper’s website can carry. Couple this with a need to keep as many eyeballs looking at the website for as long as possible, and the result is a plethora of stories that say nothing, posted in the hope that the headline will catch someone’s eye, if only long enough to click on the article and then move on.

Here’s a typical example from the WSJ:

Headline: When Home Sellers Set Prices Too High, They’re Paying for It

Um….’paying for it’? How? Is there a fine for setting the price too high? Social shaming?

The sub-headline almost gives the punch line away: More than half of homes sold in 2025 through October had at least one price cut

Could this WSJ story then possibly be pointing out that if one sets the price too high then one must….wait for it…..lower it?

I can hear you gasping as you read this. I mean, whoddathought, eh?

Because I am all about informing my readers, I clicked on the headline to read the story, and here was the first sentence:

“If you are serious about selling your home, you might have to drop the price.’

Really? Now you know why I pay serious coin to subscribe to the WSJ. Insight like that does not come cheap. But wait, there’s more. Also in the article:

Homes priced correctly from day one tend to sell more quickly and get nearly 100% of their asking price, according to NAR. After three months, sellers usually trim prices by more than 5%, and after a year, by more than 12%.

You don’t say. This article sounds like an elaboration of a really bad stand-up comic’s worst joke:

“How did the home-seller know he had set the price too high?

“No one would buy it.”

To be fair, the author also includes some keen graphics. There is a bar graph that shows that the longer a house is on the market, the greater is the average cut in sale price from the original listing price. A deeply insightful graph, that one.

In the era of paper newspapers, this story never even gets written, I’m thinking.

The Consequences of Dishonest Honesty Research

Written by Al Slivinski on November 19, 2025. Posted in Research.

A while back I wrote a long piece about an academic paper that purported to show that having people sign an insurance form at the beginning of the form induced them to provide more honest answers than having them sign it at the end. You can re-read that overly-long post here if you are so inclined.

The paper was bullshit, the journal that published it eventually retracted it, and one of the authors, Gino Francesca, was de-tenured and then fired by Harvard for this and other alleged misbehaviour. She is currently suing Harvard over this. Of course.

I am writing to say that I have found out, thanks to Gelman’s stats blog, that this particular paper had an impact out there in the real world, and, not surprisingly, not a good impact. The entire story is laid out in an article in The Times of London, which has a paywall. I am not a subscriber, but the Gelman blog lays out enough of the story that I can pass it on to you here. (You can read the whole account yourself here if you prefer.)

A guy named Michael Sanders was working in the Nudge Unit in the UK in 2015. ‘nudging’ refers to a whole set of academic findings that claims to be able to change people’s behaviour using simple-seeming changes in the way choices are presented – like where they sign an insurance form. Tony Blair’s Labour government went in big on this stuff, clearly.

[I add here that Gelman and company are deeply skeptical of all of this research, and not just because some of it uses falsified data, referring to those who do it as ‘Nudgelords’]

Back to the story. Having taken in and believed the findings in the above-mentioned insurance form paper by Gino et al, Sanders and company went off to Guatemala, a country with low tax compliance, to run a big trial to show that country how to increase said compliance. [Why this UK unit did this in Guatemala I do not know, probably the original Times story explains.] They would have some folks in this trial sign an honesty declaration at the start of their tax form, the others would sign at the end. Here now I quote Gelman quoting the Times story:

He was confident. “It was an enormous amount of data. If there was an effect, we would see it. With samples that size, you can detect the sound of a gnat’s wing.” And the effect? “Nothing.”

They had promised the Guatemalans big impacts, and with justification. The authors of the original research were, said Sanders, “a who’s who of behavioural science.” Yet they couldn’t replicate the work. It was inexplicable.

Of course, it was inexplicable back in 2015, when they ran the trial, but not later, once it had been shown that the data in the original study had been faked.

Most embarrassing if you are a card-carrying member of The Nudge Unit, UK Division. I wonder if they could sue the authors of that original study?

Cannot Make This Shit Up

Written by Al Slivinski on November 17, 2025. Posted in Politics, Standards.

I reported a while back on the recent election for mayor of Seattle, which Katie Wilson narrowly won on the basis of a turnout of around 29% of the city’s voting age population.

Here is a quote from Ms. Wilson regarding the cabinet she will appoint, as quoted in the WSJ:

“I will appoint a cabinet of exceptional leaders whose lived experiences reflect the diversity of Seattle’s Black, Indigenous, Asian and Pacific Islander, Latinx/Hispanic, and People of Color communities as well as that of women, immigrants and refugees, 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, people with disabilities, people of all faith traditions, and residents from every socioeconomic background.”

It’s tricky, but I count 17 different groups being named in that statement. In fact she needs more than that, because I cannot say how many groups might have to be included in ‘+’ or how many different ‘faith traditions’ and ‘socioeconomic backgrounds’ she has in mind. Zoroastrians? Low income adherents of Wicca?

It’s gonna be one honkin’ big cabinet.

Why, Indeed?

Written by Al Slivinski on November 17, 2025. Posted in Economics, LBOs.

‘It’s all about the Benjamins, man.’

That’s a line from a pretty old movie, I think, but damned if I can remember which one.

Anyway –

This morning’s WSJ had an opinion piece in it titled ‘Why CEOs Get Paid So Much’, with the sub-headline – ‘Doug McMillon’s success at Walmart shows the value of corporate leadership’.

It’s not a long piece, and the gist of it is easy to lay out. McMillon took over as CEO of Walmart in 2014, and is about to step down and retire. In that time, according to the article:

“Walmart’s annual revenue has grown on his watch from nearly $486 billion to $681 billion in its latest fiscal year. Walmart’s shares have risen some 310% in his tenure, while the company has increased wages and benefits for Walmart’s 2.1 million employees.”

Now, as a number of the WSJ readers who commented on this piece point out, the fact that one CEO of one company did well (assuming that those numbers indeed imply ‘doing well’, as no comparisons with other retailers are offered) does not constitute an answer to the question that is implicit in the article’s title.

One commenter on the piece also made the very astute observation that McMillon’s actual compensation is never stated in the article. Sources tell me it was $US27million last year.

So, the implicit claim the article is making is that, given how well Walmart did during his term, McMillon’s pay package was perfectly reasonable. In a phrase, he was worth it. Again, hardly a proof that CEO pay is reasonable in general; I do expect better arguments from the WSJ.

However, I write mostly to say that this whole discussion goes against the way (most) economists think about pay. The only answer economics can give to the question ‘What is that employee worth?’ is the same as they give to the question ‘What is my house worth?’. It is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it.

That is not a normative, or ethical, claim. Rather, it follows from the belief that there simply does not exist any notion of objective, intrinsic value for, well, anything. ‘One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.’ I am well aware that this attitude flies in the face of much common sense and/or talk about such things, including often my own. I, too, wonder how Vlad Guerrero Jr’s prowess in baseball (much as I love watching him play) can possibly be ‘worth’ paying him a half billion (big US) dollars over the life of his contract.

A friend of mine pointed out during the World Series that, based on the claimed average price the Jays were getting per seat during the WS, they were raking in close to $100million per game, thus going a long way toward paying for Vlad. But of course, Vlad did not get them to the WS on his own, and there are all the other costs the Jays had to pay and…..

To an economist, that is all beside the point. The Jays org agreed to that contract, therefore he is worth it – to them – and they are the ones paying him.

This attitude also runs against any number of progressive slogans about workplace justice, like, ‘Equal pay for work of equal value’.

The economist’s objection to that slogan is ‘how does one assess what work is of ‘equal value’. Well, lots of bureaucracies do try to do that, and one way it often shakes out is to insist that people with the same job title must be paid the same. Anyone who has spent more than five minutes in the world of work knows that not all people with the same job title (first baseman, assistant professor, millwright, on and on) are providing ‘equal value’ to their employer – or to their fellow employees.

On top of that, there is no way to assess what ‘value’ any particular employee has to his employer, as economists insist that it is all ‘team production’ and quite impossible to separate out the contributions of the different team members. That holds for CEO McMillon, too. However well or badly Walmart did over his term, there is no way to determine how much of that is due to him and how much to other team members, not to mention everything that happened outside the company over which he had zero control.

All of the above could be taken to imply that no matter what or how anyone is paid, in any company, there is no way to improve the situation. It should not. In particular, there are aspects of how CEOs (and others) are selected and paid that do bear scrutiny, imho.

First, there are some incentive structures that are often built into CEOs’ (and others’) pay that seem to me to be clearly counterproductive.

Economists think incentives matter, although they do not believe that only financial incentives matter. Consider the occupation of restaurant server. It is typical that they are tipped by the customers. (I know there are those who think tipping is an awful practice, but I am much in favour of it, a topic for another post). The idea is that if the server does a better job the tip gets bigger; that is certainly how I approach tipping. However, a restaurant is still a team operation, so the server can only do a good job if the bar staff and kitchen do their job well, too. So, in recognition of this, many restaurants require servers to turn over some proportion of their tips to be divided between the bar, kitchen and busboy staff. This isn’t perfect, but it is a recognition of the fact that it is a team effort, and that still, incentives matter.

[Aside on the non-financial incentives in the workplace. One of my university-era summer jobs was as a short-order cook on the breakfast and lunch shift in a diner along I-75. The servers did not tip out to me in those days, but they sure let me know if I was doing my bit to help them keep customers happy, both when I did well and when I did not. Those incentives matter too, the question is whether the employer can augment them in some way.]

Not all incentive structures seem productive to me, however. In Ontario labour law, if an employee is terminated by an employer whose payroll is greater than a stated minimum, they are entitled to severance pay, unless they ‘are guilty of wilful misconduct, disobedience or wilful neglect of duty that is not trivial and was not condoned by the employer’.

Fair enough. However, it seems that many CEOs hired by large companies (like Walmart, etc) have negotiated into their contract some kind of ‘golden parachute’ that pays them a large sum in the event the Board of Directors fires them. Now, if a Board fires a CEO, it is invariably because they are not happy about the company’s performance. So, why should said CEO then get paid some amount that dwarfs any statutory severance pay when they have just been fired?

The answer is almost always said to be that the company could not have hired said CEO in the first place without including such a parachute in their contract. In other words, the market standard is that such clauses are always offered to new CEOs, so the only thing to negotiate over is its size.

Sorry. It seems to me a winning strategy here is to say to a potential CEO ‘If you are confident of your ability to run this company, such a clause won’t matter to you, because we are going to build into your contract all kinds of good things that you will get if the company does well’. A CEO candidate who turns that down is maybe not the person you want to run your company.

I admit that this has come to mind in no small part because of my awareness that this golden parachute infection is spreading.

Two cases in point.

a) Our local city council recently entertained a resolution that city councillors who lost their re-election bids should be paid some amount (I forget how much) of severance pay. Jeezus, Mary and Yosef. As if not being re-elected is not the ultimate dismissal with cause. In the end the Council voted itself a 30% raise in salary (J,M & Y again!), but did not approve severance for themselves.

b) NCAA football coaches with big-time multi-hundred-million-dollar programs now routinely have such clauses in their contracts.

You can read the whole sorry story here, I will give you just the last three lines of it:

“This season, LSU leads the way with a $53 million buyout for firing Brian Kelly, followed by Penn State’s $49.7 million buyout of James Franklin. The largest buyout ever remains the $77 million Texas A&M agreed to pay Jimbo Fisher in 2023.”

Yes, those are the payouts given to those three fired football coaches by those three (try not to laugh) non-profit, state-supported institutions.

By the way, Texas A&M’s football team this year, two years after firing the coach who they could not possibly have hired without that $77M clause, has a 10-0 record and is ranked 3^rd in the country. Wonder what the new coach’s buyout clause looks like?

Ok, I’m being a smart-ass here, but I have a real point: such clauses seem to me like an incentive to fail. CEOs and football coaches get a big payment if things go badly enough that the Board/Athletic Director fire them. I get why you would want such a clause if you are the CEO or coach, but not why it is agreed to by the other side(s).

My second concern is not about an incentive problem per se, but rather about something that has crept into hiring all kinds of high-level people.

To illustrate, here is another quote from the WSJ opinion piece regarding Mr. McMillon:

“He’s spent more than 40 years at the company, rising from a part-timer in a Bentonville, Ark., Walmart garden center to the C-suite.”

That, my friends is a rare thing, so far as I can tell. Very few CEOs of major companies these days actually worked at that company at all before becoming CEO, let alone for 40 years. They are mostly ‘headhunted’ by professionals who are paid by the hiring company to find and vet potential hires.

So, here’s an idea the WSJ article never considers: maybe the reason for Walmart’s success is that they had as CEO someone who knew the firm from the ground up over a career of 40 years.

Suppose you are such a CEO, and the Board decides you are not doing the job, the company is not thriving, so they fire you. Having worked there for many years, and being paid very handsomely as CEO, you would quite naturally be entitled to a considerable severance package in that case. Seems sane and fair to me.

Another observation based on my own career. It has become common practice to do the very same thing at universities in both Canada and the US, in the following sense.

The two highest level positions at a university are that of President and Provost. The former is the CEO, the guy at the top, and the latter is the person in charge of academics, which is, of course, what a U is supposed to be about. Both positions are always held by people who started out as professors, doing what I did for 42 years.

My former employer did not have a President who had risen from its own professorial ranks for the entire time I worked there. And, during my career, we had, so far as I can tell, exactly two Provosts who were appointed to that position from the institution’s own professoriate.

Early in my career, when I had been around long enough to be known outside of UWO, I would occasionally get correspondence from colleagues at other institutions saying they were looking for a new Chair/Dean/Whatever and asking me if there was anyone I knew who might be a suitable candidate. In later years, when I got such emails they were always from a headhunter firm.

So, we have universities that are run by people who neither know nor give a shit about the institution’s history, strengths and weaknesses. They are all on the ‘administrative career ladder’, not having done a regular professor’s job in perhaps twenty years. All the head-hunted Provosts are hoping to be appointed President somewhere else one day, and the Presidents are all hoping to be appointed President at some more prestigious university. They are all looking ahead, and not to the university’s future, but to their own.

Much that is wrong with today’s PSE institutions can be laid at the feet of that simple fact, and I cannot see that it is any different for profit-making companies. To deny it is to deny that knowledge of the institution you are running is important for running it well.

Whither Goest The Middle Class?

Written by Al Slivinski on November 14, 2025. Posted in Economics.

One can write only so much about a 34-year-old with zero experience, even if they are a mayor-elect, so let’s turn to something a bit more hard-nosed, some income statistics. The graph below is from the blog Marginal Revolution, written by economist Alex Tabarrok, but credit where due, I first came across it in an article from The Free Press.

Now, let’s be clear about what this shows. It is based on data from the US Census Bureau’s CPS, which has been about as reliable as large data sets get for a very long time. It shows the change in the proportion of families in the US that are in three different annual income ranges: below $50k, above $150k and in between those two annual incomes. Thus, note that all families have to be in one of these three ranges.

The key point here is that the percentage of families in the bottom two groups have decreased between 1967 and 2024, while the percentage in the top group has increased. Very importantly, this is all measured in constant 2024 dollars, so this is not the result of inflation, which has of course been considerable over that period.

Thus, we have the caption – American families have been moving up.

There are other questions to ask about this surprising (to me) graph, however. For example, since this is household (i.e., ‘family’) income, is all this just a reflection of the fact that more and more households have come to have two earners in them over this time frame?

Well, Tabarrok considers this, and his answer is ‘yes, but only partly’. He provides a link to another economist’s blog, where you can find the graph below:

What this shows is that the percentage of married couples with two income earners did rise from 1967 to the late 90s, but after that it actually dropped a bit. So, the increase in household income shown in the first graph can reasonably be the result of more two-earner households up to the 90s, but after that it is simply because earners, whether one or two, are earning more in real terms.

So, the bottom line seems to be, for the US, if the middle class is truly disappearing (meaning those families in the middle income group), it is because they are moving into the higher income group. And, of course, the lower income group is shrinking in proportion too, as those folks earn more.

This is a surprise to me, but I suppose only because we all read so often in the media how everyone is suffering these days. Also, I wonder very much whether anything like this is true in Canada. As always, data of this quality is much harder to find for Canada, but I will keep looking and report back if I find anything. For now, let’s just say that reports of the relative impoverishment of families in the US middle class seem to have been rather exaggerated….unless I am missing something here.

Before closing this off, I will mention one more thing. Below is another graphic covering almost the exact time period as those above. It comes from the US Fed, and it depicts the Gini coefficient for income in the US over this period. The Gini is a long-used index of how unequally is income distributed in any population. A higher Gini index indicates a more unequal distribution. This graph is a bit odd in that the Gini is typically given as a decimal number between 0 and 1, and here it is a whole number. If you just put a decimal point in front of the numbers on the vertical axis you get the usual thing.

So, it is clear that income is distributed more unequally today in the US than it was in the 60s, and that the big increase in this measure occurred between 1980 and 2005. Since then it has bounced around. However, note that the actual change has not been a lot over that period – it went from 0.36 to almost 0.42. Secondly, given what we saw in the first graphic, one could ask whether this trend is even worrying. That is, if almost everyone is seeing their income increase in real terms, does it matter that income is distributed somewhat more unequally? What I suspect is going on here is that for the group with incomes above $150k, incomes have been growing more than for those in the two lower income groups. That would increase the Gini as we have seen, but still be consistent with more families moving into that group.

A final point, about which I have little to say, so far. The first graph above is about gross incomes, that is, before tax, and I think the Gini numbers are, also. Now, the US is a low tax country by any standard. The Tax Policy Centre notes that “In 2021, taxes at all levels of US government represented 27 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), compared with a weighted average of 34 percent for the other 37 member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).”

However, it may be that over the period covered in the graphs above, that tax percentage went up, in which case the disposable incomes of US households may not have increased as much as did their gross incomes. This is harder to track, but I did find data from the same Tax Policy Centre indicating that US federal income tax rates have not changed much since the 1980s, and that the rate paid by those in the lowest income quntile has actually dropped noticeably. This of course only considers federal income taxes, not taxes levied by other levels of government or sales and other commodity taxes.

Back to the Future with Zohran Mamdani

Written by Al Slivinski on November 9, 2025. Posted in Government, Politics.

Despite living in Canada, I am going to write some more about NYC Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. It is hard not to, as most of the things he says make my Econy-sense tingle.

Here are some of the things he has said he is going to do as Mayor, in case you didn’t know or forgot.

But first, the context. NYC’s municipal government has an annual budget of about $120Billion, employs over 300,000 people, and the city is home to more than 8million people. Mayoring all that is no small job.

Mamdani pledged to “freeze the rent” on nearly one million rent-stabilized apartments throughout the city.
As a New York state legislator, he argued for ‘defunding the police’. He has (sort of) toned that rhetoric down in recent months as he campaigned.
He said he will establish city-run grocery stores in NYC.
He will make the NYC bus system ‘free and faster’.
He will raise taxes on the rich.

The entire list is longer, but I will just say a few things about these, as they are in the wheelhouse of a retired economist like me.

Rent freezes are not new, indeed, the fact is that NYC already has a ‘rent-stabilized’ category of rental units, which basically means that any rent increases are limited, either by a statute or by requiring that the increases be approved by some kind of review board. So, what does it mean to freeze the rents on such units? Presumably, it means they will be allowed zero rent increases for some period of time.

Details matter here. It should first be noted that Zohran cannot do this on his own, there is in place a Rental Review Board that would have to approve this freeze. ZM can appoint new members to this, but only after existing members’ terms lapse, so he would have to work on this board, one way or the other.

Assuming he can do that, the next issue is – which and how many of the rental units in NYC are included in this category? If more than a million is a small portion of the total, then some renters will get a nice little gift of zero increases, and the owners of these units will react in some way. If zero increases means they lose money as their costs increase (Zohran has not promised to freeze those costs, natch) then they will sell the units – perhaps at some loss – or find creative ways to get their units ‘uncategorized’ as rent-stabilized. Where there’s a bureaucracy there’s a way.

If, on the other hand, most rental units in NYC are in this category, and – most importantly, newly built units are – then the supply of units will dry up in general, and you will see lots of people who cannot find accommodations at all.

(Wet Dream Police….apologies to Cheap Trick.)

The concern here, as expressed by people who currently work throughout the NYC justice system, is that even if he does not de-fund the police (that might actually be unpopular) he has the power as Mayor to appoint City judges. If he appoints judges who are determined to lower incarceration rates and give non-punitive sentences to those convicted of ‘minor’ offences, and to avoid imposing cash bail on those apprehended for not-so-minor offences, then it will not matter much what the police do. The people they apprehend will quickly end up back on the street, and so they will have no incentive to apprehend them in the first place. That way you get the same outcomes as with police defunding without actually, you know, defunding them. Judgement on this one will have to wait to see what he actually does, but he has the ability to do a lot.

I could just say ‘what makes anyone think any government at any level can run grocery stores competently’, but I will in fact say more than that.

We have a case history of this. It was tried in Kansas City, where the city paid millions to renovate a building and then put a grocery store in it that was run by a non-profit called Community Builders of Kansas City. So, I could repeat the remark in quotes above with ‘government’ replaced by ‘non-profit organization’, but I won’t. The store was about to close as of the end of July, I can’t find any more recent info on its fate, but one could of course say that is just one example, it does not prove such a thing cannot succeed.

That is true, it proves no such thing.

Here are some quotes about the KC experiment of interest, however.

Noting that some have blamed high crime levels in the area of the KC store for its demise, the mayor of KC, Quinton Lucas, had this to say….

“While I hear and understand the crime issues and concerns,” Lucas said, “there’s a grocery store right down the street — largely in the same kind of area, some of the same criminal numbers and statistics — that still is doing pretty darn well.”

So, a grocery store being run to make a profit (horrible word, just horrible) down the street is doing fine. Oops .

And there’s this – One shopper said “There’s no meat. There’s no vegetables. There’s no nothing.”

Second oops. And….

“A rancid odor fills the market, with shoppers turned off by bare shelves and coolers, along with empty meat and deli departments,” reports local station KSHB.

Oh, dear.

I am betting that when Zohran puts the NYC version into place, they really will be run by the city, staffed by (union-waged) city employees. After all, he said in his victory speech that he was going to show everyone that ‘There is no problem government cannot solve.’

Can you say ‘money pit’, boys and girls?

It turns out I have local information on an experiment almost exactly like this.

Some years back, the London Transit Commission (LTC) struck a deal with the university’s Student Council (USC). The USC would take some of the money they get from taxing students (sorry….from collecting fees from students) and give it as a lump sum to the LTC every year. In return, the LTC would let any university student ride LTC busses for free, anytime. They call it the student bus pass.

Prior to this deal, university students had the option to buy a regular LTC bus pass at a discount. Not surprisingly, some students did, and others did not, depending on where they lived and what other transportation options they had available. Now, with this deal all students can ride the bus for free, and all students pay for this – whether they want to or not.

The result of this was quite predictable. Students who might have walked six or so blocks to class or to get downtown to party of an evening because they had not bought a pass, and would have to pay the undiscounted fare, now could jump on the bus for free, so they did. If it’s raining, just jump on the bus. Busses in the university area got way more crowded. The LTC responded by running more busses (not free) and by buying ‘articulated’ busses that are basically two busses connected by an accordion-like middle section so they can sort of still get around corners (also not free).

Now, Zohran is planning to make NYC busses free for everyone. Thus, the same effect of increased riders will occur as occurred in London, but not just in some areas for some riders, but everywhere for all riders. So, busses will be free perhaps, but there is no way they will be fast, unless…..the NYC transit system increases the frequency and number of busses. The LTC got actual new revenue from the USC in their agreement, so they could buy new big busses and run them more frequently. NYC will have – yes, kids, that’s right – zero revenue.

So, to get to ‘free and fast’ some taxpayers somewhere are going to have to cough up the dough not just to replace the lost fare revenue (cuz drivers must still get paid, and busses maintained), but to pay for more and more frequent busses.

One commentator has mentioned another likely impact not seen in our local experiment. The homeless of NYC will have a new place to stay to get out of the cold. The homeless in London did not get university bus passes.

I can’t wait to see it all unfold.

I think this is Mr. Mamdani’s favourite. Tax The Man. You know a card-carrying member of The Democratic Socialists of America is going to go big on this idea.

It happens that NYC has its own income tax, which of course is paid only by those who live in NYC, and whose revenues flow wholly to the NYC government. So, we all can easily see what the Big Question is here. If ZM does raise the NYC income tax rate on high-income New Yorkers, what will those folks do in response? Conservative commentators are all predicting they will leave NYC in droves, but it is surely not that simple. Living in Yonkers, White Plains or Jersey City is just not the same as living in NYC. Even I can grok that. So we may be about to find out just how much rich folks really like living in NYC.

Again, I can’t wait to see it all unfold. You go, Zohran.

What’s it Really all About, Zohran?

Written by Al Slivinski on November 7, 2025. Posted in Politics.

Even up here in Canada, the news of late has been full of US election results, particularly the news that Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old, exclusively-schooled dude who has never had a job other than a couple of years as a New York State Assemblyman, has been elected NYC’s mayor.

One ongoing theme of the news coverage of this event has been an emphasis on the record number of votes cast in this mayoral election.

An example is the graphic below. Look at that, more votes than have been cast in any NYC mayoral election since 1989. Decades of elections, indeed.

Well, everyone needs to take a breath, particularly the media, who have again demonstrated their disinterest in facts.

The number of registered voters in NYC is something between 4.9 and 5.3 million, depending on which account you read. You would think this would be easily available info, but apparently not, so let’s take the midpoint and say 5.1million.

Votes cast appear to have been 2.1million, as depicted in that chart above.

This means that the turnout in this election as a percentage of registered voters was some 41%. Beyond that, there are undoubtedly more than 5.1 million New Yorkers who were eligible to vote but did not even bother to register, as voter registration is not automatic in the US. Undoubtedly then, Mamdani was elected in an election in which fewer than 40% of those who could have expressed a preference bothered to do so.

And, as for the number of votes cast in 2025 being greater than in 1989, in 1989 NYC’s total population was about 7.2million, whereas in 2025 it is about 8.5million. So, some 300,000 more votes in ’25 than in ’89 is nothing to get excited about given that the population is more than 1million greater.

To be fair, this is pretty typical of municipal elections in North America. For an even worse example, the election in 2022 that put the current mayor and council in office in my city featured a turnout of 25% or so. For a US comparison, the municipal election in Chicago in 2022 saw a turnout of 45% of registered voters. (It was 66% in 2024, but that coincided with a US Presidential election, which always boosts turnout in lower-level elections.)

Mr. Mamdani declared in his victory speech that he was on a historic mission to do things differently in NYC. Well, if there are, at a guess, 5.6million residents of NYC who are eligible to vote, and we know he got 1.03million votes (compared to Cuomo’s 0.85million), then Mamdani’s vote represents 18.3% of voting-eligible adults. That’s not a lot of fuel for his great mission, in my humble opinion.

Such is politics – and political reporting – in the 21^st century. But hey, you go, Zohran. It will be interesting indeed to see what he actually gets up to once in office, and what are the consequences of same.

Postscript:

A day after posting the above, I came across a story about the municipal election held the same day as NYC’s in Seattle, WA. (Elections at all levels in the US are almost always held on the Tuesday after the first Monday of November.) Seattle, you may recall, had seen a considerable spike in crime after the pandemic lockdowns of 2020, and in 2021 it elected a mayor, Bruce Harrell, and a city attorney, Ann Davison, who reversed a set of policies and procedures that their predecessors had put in place that had exacerbated the crime problem. The usual thing, like refusing to prosecute ‘minor’ offenses, refusing to incarcerate repeat-offenders, etc.

Well, in the election that just happened, it appears that Mr. Harrell will just barely stay in office after an electoral challenge from ‘community organizer’ Katie Wilson, but Ms Davison has been soundly defeated by Erika Evans. The WSJ labels Evans a ‘progressive’ whatever that means, and her campaign website has a lot to say about her defending Seattle from Trump administration over-reach. Again, I will look forward to seeing what results from this, but my point here is that the city of Seattle appears to have a voting age population of 650,000, out of a total population of around 800k. The total votes cast in the mayoral race were 230,000, and in the election for city attorney, 221,000. This puts the turnout at somewhere around 29% of the voting age population.

Post Postscript: It was indeed close, and now, over a week after the election, the above-mentioned Katie Wilson has in fact eked out a victory in this low turnout election for mayor of Seattle. Gonna be interesting…..

How the World Really Works – Episode Two

Written by Al Slivinski on November 3, 2025. Posted in LBOs.

OK, who has heard of Kenvue Inc? Not many of you, I suspect. Below is the corporate logo. Does that help?

Yea, I expect not, but you probably have heard of Tylenol, and Kenvue is the company that makes Tylenol, along with a lot of other over-the-counter health-related products like Visine, Neutrogena, Benadryl, Band-Aid and many others. It has been in the news in a less-than-positive way of late because some people – let’s not get into naming here – have claimed that Tylenol causes autism.

Whatever might be the evidence – or lack thereof – for that claim, it has not done good things for Kenvue’s stock price, a graph of which is displayed below, courtesy of WSJ:

Although it is hard to discern clearly in this image, the graph shows that Kenvue stock was trading at a share price of $22.18 on August 4, and at $14.24 on Oct 29. That’s a drop of around 36% over a three-month period. Ouch. Well, ouch if you happened to be holding shares of Kenvue during that time.

Again, though it is hard to see on the reproduction above, the WSJ original allows one to see that on Nov 3 – the day I am writing this article – the share price had popped back up a bit to $16.46.

On this same day there is an article in the WSJ headlined:

Kimberly-Clark Strikes $40 Billion Deal for Tylenol Maker Kenvue

Ah, a takeover bid from the giant company Kimberly-Clark, maker of Huggies and many many other brands you would recognize.

Here is one line from the WSJ article about this that caught my eye……

“In the cash-and-stock deal, Kimberly-Clark will pay $21.01 a share, compared with a closing price of $14.37 on Friday.”

So, K-C (no mention of The Sunshine Band) have agreed to pay $7 more per share than the shares could be bought for on the open market on the Friday before the deal was announced.

I ask you, if you saw a sweet-looking used Corvette on a lot on Friday with a price tag of $7500 on it, would you walk in on Monday and offer $12,500 for it?

Nah, me neither, but high finance is complicated, I guess.

Here’s another interesting line from the same WSJ article:

“The company had been under pressure from activist investors who wanted the company to pursue a sale.”

Activist investors? Do go on……

“Activist investor Starboard Value had launched a proxy fight at Kenvue earlier this year, arguing the company needed to fix its marketing strategy around its beauty brands and make other changes to boost shares. Starboard dropped its fight in March after winning three seats on the board.”

Ah, yes – ‘to boost shares’. The WSJ writer here is being prolix in deference to the delicate sensibilities of Starboard Value, so I will translate.

“Starboard Value argued that Kenvue’s management needs to do things that will increase the market price of the shares that Starboard Value owns.”

Simple, really.

One more quote from the WSJ article:

“Other activists including Toms Capital Investment Management, Third Point and D.E. Shaw had built up positions and were privately pushing Kenvue to sell itself, including in recent days, according to people familiar with the matter.”

Ah yes, those ‘people familiar with the matter’. They always seem to be around, but no one knows who they really are. At least you and I don’t.

Now, there is another article in today’s WSJ right below the one I have been quoting. It is marked EXCLUSIVE, and it’s headline reads:

Activist Investors in Kenvue Faced Big Losses. Kimberly-Clark Saved the Day.

Below that headline runs the sub-headline

D.E. Shaw, one of the Tylenol-maker’s largest shareholders, stood to lose over $200 million but is now expected to break even on its bet

I know I feel better knowing that K-C has ridden to the rescue of those poor embattled folks at D.E. Shaw. And – I think we have solved the mystery of the offer of $21/share for shares that were trading at $14. That wasn’t so hard, was it?

The final sentence in this second (EXCLUSIVE!) WSJ article is this:

“Kimberly-Clark and Kenvue say they expect almost $2 billion in cost savings from the deal in the first three years after the transaction closes.”

Once again, let me translate WSJ-speak for you: “The merged company is planning to fire a lot of people and close many plants over the next three years. “

“But ain’t that America, for you and me”

The Prostitute List

Written by Al Slivinski on October 30, 2025. Posted in Standards.

Got your attention with that title, didn’t I?

I have been watching the fabulous 2025 World Series assiduously, although I missed game 2 due to an even more fabulous live music concert. Because of the way I watch it, this has exposed me to US TV sports broadcasting. I prefer to watch the Canadian broadcast, believe me, but that is not always possible in my house, you’ll just have to believe me on that.

This has re-kindled a thought I have had for awhile about what I guess I will call ‘celebrity sellers culture’ today. I have been struck by the number of TV ads which feature quite famous people shilling for a product. The ‘quite famous’ part is key here. I have no issue with some starving actor no one knows taking a job appearing in a TV ad. We all have to eat. My issue is with people who have made millions and millions – usually in entertainment or sports – and become easily recognizable in doing so, who also then take a paycheck from some company in return for appearing in one of their TV ads.

The point is that this behavior offends me. Being willing to take a payment for helping persuade people to buy something when you are already very wealthy is prostitution. I am aware of the popular principle in both the US and Canada that if someone offers you a lot of money to do something you can easily do, you are a fool to say no. Sorry, but I think that is unethical. Those who engage in prostitution in its original sense are at least selling something that is their own to sell, and are in no case wealthy already.

Now, I also do not understand why this is done by the companies involved. They must believe that celebrities appearing in commercials increases sales of their products and services. If that is so, and they should know, I do not understand why it works. But, my issue here is not with the companies that pay the celebrities, it is with the celebrities who cash the checks.

I will add that one ad I saw repeatedly during the Series is for some restaurant, and it features at the bottom the caption ‘Paul Skenes, Major-Leaguer’.

I have never heard of Mr. Skenes, and if the ad-makers have to put your name at the bottom of the ad, you are not famous, and hence are exempt from my opprobrium. Average Major-Leaguers do not earn tons of money over a usually-short career. If someone is willing to pay them to hawk a product, I cannot fault them for taking the money. I will also add here that if a company came to me to appear in an ad, I would not do it. I know, fat chance, but the point is that I am not starving, I had a long, well-paid career, and so shilling for a product would in my case also be prostitution.

Below is my list, but I will be adding to it as new celebrities come to my attention. I have no doubt that they will, as the table below includes only those that came up in the four WS games that I have watched to date, and which I had the presence of mind to write down.

The Celebrity Prostitute List (World Series Edition)

Celebrity Cashing Cheque	Company Writing Cheque
Jennifer Garner	Capital One Credit Cards
Samuel L Jackson	Capital One Credit Cards
Derek Jeter	Capital One Credit Cards
Julianne Moore	Eli Lilly
Matthew McConaughey	Agentforce AI
Woody Harrelson	Agentforce AI
Shaquille O’Neil	LazyBoy
Jon Hamm*	BetMGM
Cal Raleigh	TMobil
Luke Wilson**	AT&T

* I think there should be a special place in Ad Hell for celebrities who shill for gambling sites. There are many such (you know who you are) and I expect to add many such names over time. I am surprised that only the one with Hamm emerged during the WS, but perhaps I have missed others. I am mostly trying to watch the games, after all.

**Apparently AT&T violated a National Advertising Rule (whatever that means) with this ad. Tsk-tsk.

Finally, I expect at some point to announce a 2025 Grand Champion Prostitute Award to some celebrity. At the moment the favourite would be Matthew McConaughey, who I know has done ads for Doritos, Lincoln Autos, and Wild Turkey Bourbon along with the one listed above. I expect Samuel L. Jackson to give him a run for his money, however.

It’s going to be exciting folks. OK, not as exciting as the WS, but still…….

A Bit of This and of That

Written by Al Slivinski on October 25, 2025. Posted in Uncategorized.

Faithful readers;

Not a lot to post this week, I have been very very busy. Getting my excuses all lined up:

I, my son and my grandson all had birthdays over a 12-day period that just ended. It’s been Party Hearty for nearly two weeks.

My gal and I have tickets for three (yes, 3!) different live music concerts over the last three days. Party Hearty II.

The Toronto Blue Jays, having dispatched the Seattle Mariners in a rousing 7-game ALCS Series, are now in the World Serious, and up one game to none. Go Jays!

Ok, excuses filed, here’s one fun thing I did come across in my spare time: The Babylon Bee. If you have not visited it, I recommend their website, as it is unique. It’s motto is ‘Fake News You Can Trust’ and I went to the site to check it out as I was posting this article to find that its leading headline this morning is:

Blue Jays To Start World Series With 7-Run Deficit As Trump Imposes Tariff On Foreign Teams

It was accompanied by this picture:

I would describe the Bee as a Christian satirical news site. Below is a list of some of the other more entertaining (to me) headlines that have appeared on the Bee site recently. However – here’s the thing. The headlines are often great, deservedly skewering the ridiculousness of much of what is done by the famous of all stripes. But it kinda ends there, the stories that are attached to the headlines are almost never as good as the headlines themselves. Kind of like Mad Magazine in days of old.

Anyway, here’s a list of some of my favourites:

Sad: Man Could Have Been Profoundly Moved By Classic Piece Of Literature If It Had Only Contained A Character Of His Exact Race, Sex, And Socio-Economic Class

Baby Attains 3rd-Degree Blackbelt In Rolling Out Of Diaper Changes

UK Prosecutes Synagogue For Provoking Attacker By Being Openly Jewish

UK Police Still Searching For Motive Of Terrorist Named ‘Jihad Jewkiller’

With Government Shutdown Closing National Parks, Mooses Forced to Find New Jobs

It’s Not Over Yet: Trump Still Hoping For Nobel In Literature For Latest Truth Social Post

Leftists Take To Streets To Protest End Of Genocide

Democrats Vow To Keep Government Shut Down Until Someone Notices

Church Organist Adds Blistering 10-Minute Organ Solo To ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God’

‘How Long, O Lord, Will The Wicked Prosper?’ Asks Nation As Dodgers Advance To World Series

RFK Orders Airstrike On Cargo Ship Full Of Tylenol

As a second contribution to your enlightenment, here is something I learned about in The Free Press and just feel I have to pass along.

If you did not know, Graham Platner is a Democrat who is challenging Republican Susan Collins for her seat in the US Senate. It has been noticed that Platner has a ‘totenkopf’ tattoo on his chest. If you do not know what that is, (I did not) it is the skeletal skull symbol used by Nazi death’s head SS units.

Platner says he got it while drunk and in the Marines, and had no idea it had any connections to Nazism.

That is not, in my humble view, the most ridiculous part of this episode. That arises from the following, which is a quote directly from TFP’s story about it:

Here’s a popular leftist commentator trying to explain why Platner’s Nazi symbol is bad:

“This isn’t just a Nazi tattoo, this is the symbol of the concentration camp guards, the guys who ran the death camps. The men who murdered socialists, communists, and liberals. They mass-murdered all black men in the French army. This is on par with a swastika.” (The commentator deleted it so I won’t name and shame. But isn’t it interesting?)

Indeed. They murdered ‘socialists, communists, and liberals.’ Oh, and those black French army guys.

That was terrible what those SS types did, eh?

I leave you with this final short item. Many of you will know that Ontario’s premier paid millions to have some ads made and then paid more to have them run on US TV. In them, the (genuine, taped) voice of Ronald Reagan explains what a stupid idea tariffs are. Indeed, I saw one on the Fox broadcast of the World Series Game 1. This supposedly angered the US President so much he called off trade negotiations with Canada.

Here is a headline from this morning’s (Saturday, Oct 25) London Free Press:

Game on as anti-tariff ads stay

followed by the sub-headline:

Ontario premier says TV campaign that riled Trump will run in two world series games

Here’s a headline from The Globe and Mail’s website on the morning of Saturday, Oct 25:

Ontario to pause anti-tariff ads that drew Trump’s fury

followed by the sub-headline:

Ford says he made the call to pull the campaign that angered the U.S. President after speaking with Carney

Why oh why do people no longer trust legacy media? Truly a mystery.

Set My People Freeps!

Written by Al Slivinski on October 18, 2025. Posted in London, News Media, Politics.

Below: Photo from the London Free Press website, which was also printed in the Saturday, October 18 print edition.

The semi-literate caption in the online paper was:

Londoners at Dundas Street part of the city on Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2025. (Derek Ruttan/The London Free Press)

….but that caption is not what I want to write about.

This picture also appeared on the first news page of my Saturday morning real-on-paper edition of The London Free Press. The caption there was actually grammatically sound, but that is not the point of this post. This photo shows four derelicts lying on a sidewalk in London with some of their possessions. This is a regular sight all through London’s downtown and other places, like the Old East Village (OEV). What is new is that the Freeps is willing to show it on their front page, as the editorial position of the paper up to now has been to downplay any notion that downtown is going to hell. They will write about it from time to time, but have previously always been careful to follow such stories up with predictable statements by ‘activists’, ‘advocates’ and politicians that either things are not so bad, or that people who are upset about these folks lying on the sidewalk are just being nasty and should be ashamed of themselves.

In fact, one member of City Council, Susan Stevenson, was reprimanded by her fellow councillors a while back for putting photos like this on her Facebook page, to show what people living and working in her OEV ward were having to live with. That move was pure bullshit, it happened because Council did not like having Londoners see what was going on under the current leadership, but one stated reason for it was that Stevenson was posting photos of people who had not consented to have their images displayed.

Do you suppose the Freeps photographer asked those people lying on the sidewalk for consent?

Do you suppose Council is going to lodge a protest with the Freeps? Maybe send a couple of constables around to visit the editor?

I can’t wait to see.

In fact, the online version of this story includes more photos, including the one below:

A man smoking drugs at a bus shelter. Oh, my. ‘Do you mind if we post a photo of you smoking drugs, sir?’ I doubt that question was asked.

And then there was this graphic:

Yea, gunshots. There have been three or four homes in London shot up over the last couple of months. Do not expect either the Freeps or the London Police Chief to suggest what is perfectly clear to thinking adults; that we have become a city in which armed gangs operate.

In any event, I have no doubt that Council and our Mayor will be unhappy about the appearance of the first photo on the Freeps front page, as well as the other graphics above. What is less clear is whether they will understand that it might just signal that the Freeps editorial staff, such as they are, may have lost their willingness to go along with the narrative the Council wants to spin regarding our fair City.

The next municipal election is next year.

What’s In A Word?

Written by Al Slivinski on October 15, 2025. Posted in Government, Language.

Those of you who live in Canada will be aware that the employees of Canada Post – members of CUPW, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers – are on strike, yet again. They have been negotiating with the Corporation over a new contract for what seems like eons, and this is the third strike they have called. The first one ended when the government passed so-called ‘back to work’ legislation, but that was temporary.

After more fruitless negotiating, they went back on strike again when the government directed the Corporation to make plans to stop door-to-door mail delivery for all households and to close some rural post offices. (We are told that about 1/3 of Canadian households still have delivery to their door, the other 2/3 have to walk to ‘community mailboxes’ to get their mail.)

The latest move by CUPW is to change to ‘rotating strikes’ which means that every now and then some mail shows up in my mailbox. This seemed a mad strategy to me, guaranteed to piss off the average Canadian even more than a full strike, until a hiking buddy of mine who used to work for Canada Post pointed out CUPW’s likely reason for the change in strategy-they are running out of money. That is, CUPW’s strike fund has likely been depleted, so going back to work a few days per week or month is a way to keep their members getting some amount of income.

Makes sense, I get it. Don’t like it, but I get it.

However, this post is really about something else.

Canada Post is a Crown Corporation, meaning it operates as an independent entity with some level of government oversight. It has a CEO, and it earns revenue by charging for delivery of both first-class mail (letters and such) and packages.

The CBC is a Crown Corporation also, with a CEO, and it earns revenue by selling advertising on (some but not all) its radio, TV and online programs.

Canada Post has a monopoly on the delivery of first-class mail, but competes with private companies in everything else it does.

The CBC competes with private entities in everything it does.

In a story on CBC.ca in April of this year, titled ‘Carney pledges $150Million boost to ‘underfunded’ CBC’ (the CBC put those quotes around underfunded, not me), CBC writes:

‘CBC received an estimated $1.38-billion in 2024-25.’

Then, in a story from May of last year, the CBC wrote:

‘Canada Post is reporting a $1.3-billion loss in operating expenses in its 2024 annual report.’

So, why is the $1.3B Canada Post needed from the government called a ‘loss’ and the $1.38B the government gave the CBC called ‘funding’?

Read This

Written by Al Slivinski on October 15, 2025. Posted in Education, LBOs.

This will be an unusual post, consisting of little more than a name, and a link.

First the name: Josh Barro. He writes a blog called Very Serious which you can visit by clicking on that link. Mr. Barro describes himself as a journalist, and was indeed once a senior editor and columnist at Business Insider. Coincidentally, he is the son of economist Robert Barro, currently a prof at Harvard, who I saw give more than a couple of talks during my career. Small world.

Now, the link:, it is given below, and is to one of the posts on the junior Barro’s blog. I provide it here because, as all my readers know, bad behaviour by those who work in universities, both administrators and faculty, is a recurring topic on this blog. I first read the post linked below just this past week, and although it was posted in January of 2024, it lays out almost everything I think is and has been wrong with universities, and explains it all very well. Although it is focused on US universities, the problems with Canadian universities are the same, except that the Canadian ones get considerably less public funding on average. Whether that makes them better or worse than their US counterparts, on average, is an open question, I think.

So, if you want a very well-written article on why you should not trust anything that comes out of universities today, read it. I would add that you should also read all the footnotes at the end – there’s lot of good info in those, too.

https://www.joshbarro.com/p/universities-are-not-on-the-level

Black Math

Written by Al Slivinski on October 8, 2025. Posted in Education, Standards.

No, that title is not a typo. I know some of you grew up reading stories of the supernatural that featured some mysterious thing called a Black Mass. Details differed, but it was supposed to be some occult ritual at which unspeakable things were done for unspeakable purposes.

Well, this post is not about that. It is about what I will call Black Math, as a convenient abbreviation for a whole whack of really awful ideas about education, largely but not entirely regarding black kids. My starting point will be a person, one Danny Martin, who would very much like you to know that he is a Professor of Education and Mathematics in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Note that is not The University of Chicago, nor is it The University of Illinois. The University of Illinois at Chicago is a separate institution from those other two, and I would not wish you to think either of them provides employment to Professor Martin. Note also, please, that despite his very misleading title, he is certainly not a Professor of Mathematics. He’s in the College of Education for chrissakes, and I am sure no self-respecting Department of Mathematics would hire him. Those cats are weird, to be sure, but still…..

How I came to be familiar with Martin will be revealed below, but I will start this tale with a full rendition of the Abstract from a paper he published in a journal called Race, Ethnicity and Education in 2019. The paper is titled ‘Equity, inclusion, and antiblackness in mathematics education’ and its Abstract, in its entirety, reads as follows:

Despite decades of equity- and inclusion-oriented discourse and reform in mathematics education, Black learners in the U.S. continue to experience dehumanizing and violent forms of mathematics education. I suggest that equity for Black learners in mathematics education is a delusion rooted in the fictions of white imaginaries, contingent on appeasing white logics and sensitivities, and characterized at best by incremental changes that do little to threaten the maintenance of racial hierarchies inside or outside of mathematics education. Moreover, the forms of inclusion offered up in equity-oriented discourses and reforms represent contexts of containment and enclosure that keep Black people in their same relative position. Refusal is suggested as a strategy for Black learners to resist the anti-Black character of mathematics education, and as a first step in actualizing forms of mathematics education that are worthy of Black learners.

Let me start by noting that while I can imagine a student finding math difficult and even humiliating as a subject, I doubt seriously that by ‘violent forms of math education’ is meant smacking students who get things wrong in math class. Nor do I have any idea what is a ‘white imaginary’ a ‘white logic’ or a ‘context of containment’. I do suspect, from other things by this person that I have read, that by ‘refusal’ he means that black students should just avoid math class. I could, however, be wrong. As you will see, clarity is not Martin’s strength.

Now, just because I don’t know what a phrase or term means doesn’t mean it means nothing. Lord knows people in my own former discipline throw around terms like ‘Pareto efficiency’ and ‘consumer surplus’ that no one outside Econ understands.

So, I dug into the paper itself to see if I could suss out what Martin was on about.

I tried, I really did. Bear with me as I subject you to some of the prose in this paper.

Antiblackness is readily evidenced in mathematics education via several forms of systemic violence–epistemological, intellectual, and symbolic–that inflict injury and trauma on Black people (Martin, Price, and Moore in press). Teo (2010), for example, has characterized epistemological violence in the production of knowledge as occurring ‘when theoretical interpretations regarding empirical results implicitly or explicitly construct the Other as inferior or problematic, despite the fact that alternative interpretations, equally viable based on the data, are available’.

So far as I can discern, he is saying that when the performance of black students in math is studied, the fact that they do worse (although only on average), and so the discussion is about how to help them do better, is itself violence that inflicts trauma and injury. There is at least nothing really racial about this, in my view. It is all of a piece with the general view among ‘educational theorists’ these days that one should not focus ever on student shortcomings. Doing so is bad for them, or at least bad for their self-esteem. To correct is to traumatize.

I will take exception to that bit about interpretations that implicitly or explicitly construct the so-called ‘Other’ as inferior. That’s just horseshit, saying that no matter what an instructor or analyst of data on achievement does or says, what is really going on – implicitly – is racism. Boolsheet, as my former Russian colleague liked to say.

Another sentence from the paper:

Mathematical illiteracy is not a naturally occurring trait of Black children but has become a widely accepted signifier for Blackness and a decidedly Black geography (McKittrick and Woods 2007) subject to, and deserving of, violent description and intervention.

OK, agreed that ‘mathematical illiteracy’ (I thought the standard term was ‘innumeracy’, btw) is not a naturally occurring trait. But who says it is a ‘widely accepted signifier for Blackness’? Only Martin, so far as I know. And – ‘violent description’? Really? A description can be violent?

This is another shibboleth of this kind of academic. Anything they do not agree with, even words, is said to be ‘violent’, which then means that it is terrible, awful, horrible, because everyone is against violence, right?

Bloody hell.

Anyway, I hope it is clear, faithful readers, that I am trying here to use the context in which Martin uses these words and phrases in his article to figure out what he is really trying to say. I got nothing about white imaginaries this way, nor about white logic, he uses those only in the Abstract, so on to ‘refusal’.

Well, here’s a mouthful for you from the paper:

Envisioning and actualizing refusal requires one to invoke Black radical imagination (Kelley 2002) and engage in Black liberatory fantasy (Dumas and ross 2016) about the form and structure of such refusal and how it facilitates Black people flourishing in their humanity.

Yea, didn’t help me understand him any better, either. Here’s more….

Specifically, I refer to refusal in and refusal of mathematics education institutions, practices, and policies that instantiate anti-Black racism and white supremacist orientations. I am not suggesting that Black learners avoid pursuing mathematics within the existing system of mathematics education. For most learners, it is the only system available. Refusal in is a recognition of this fact. I am suggesting that the pursuit of mathematics knowledge within this system should not be for the sole purpose of being accepted into anti-Black and white supremacist spaces.

So, if you imagine yourself as a ‘Black learner’, what do you think this paragraph is telling you to do? If it is okay for one to pursue math, just not for that ‘sole purpose’, then….what should you do?

How about this?

Refusal in would also entail working against the commodification of and trafficking in Black suffering, especially as a way to counter appeals to white benevolence and liberal notions of care.

More helpful? Not to me, but my readers may be more perceptive than I.

This is what I have come to realize characterizes most writing by this sort of person. Absolutely nothing concrete is ever said. What in the name of anything holy is this guy saying anyone should do? I have read many many words, that say nothing anyone – including a ‘Black learner’ – can use as a guide to any kind of behaviour or plan or…..bloody anything. The mark of a well-trained academic used to be clarity. Now it is obtuseness, vagueness.

Ok, so how did I get onto this whole thing, and Prof Martin? I cannot trace to the absolute beginning, but something sent me to this article on a site called RealClear Investigations called ‘Billionaires Backing Woke Math Doesn’t Add Up Amid DEI Rollback’ which was about that: some wealthy people funding initiatives like one called Racial Justice in Early Math which aim to eliminate separate classes for students who are mathematically inclined/gifted and also one called ‘TODOS Mathematics for All, an Arizona-based organization that calls for elevating DEI practices and anti-racist activism into all math instruction’ according to the article.

Another such org, the Erikson Institute, has a video on its website titled Using Math to Learn about Racial Representation in K-2 by Priscila Ulegis Pereira.

I watched it, you can too, here.

For a taste, at one point in the video what is on the screen is headed with the words

2^nd Grade: Is Our Library Equal?

Then below that one sees:

After building background knowledge, students embarked on the complex task of identifying the race of characters in books in our classroom library.

This is for a 2^nd grade math class, remember. So I guess they had to count the number of white people, black people, etc.

Over the years, as I watched the standards to which students are held at all levels of the education system deteriorate, I became convinced that this was being done almost entirely by those within the system. That is, teachers (not all, thankfully) and administrators (nearly all) all the way up from kindergarten to post-graduate, were themselves the driving force behind lowering standards. And the primary reason for this denigration, I firmly believe, is that teaching to a high standard is very hard. It is hard work, because the teachers have to work just as hard as they expect their students to work. Instructors have to read a lot of what students write and provide copious and clear feedback, they have to go through their math and correct and explain why things are wrong, and do so clearly. Thus, lowering standards makes things easier for everyone, but in particular for the instructors.

Thus, I think Martin’s ‘math is epistemological violence’ bullshit is just one dimension of a much bigger phenomenon. He is, after all, a faculty member in a College of Education; ya know, the people who are supposed to be training teachers.

Final note (I promise). Hypocrisy is not a 21^st century invention, but I would assert none the less that we are living in The Hypocritical Century.

If you read the RealClear Investigations article I linked to above, you will find that it ends on this note –

Last year, during a Racial Justice in Early Mathematics Project webinar titled “Who Is Labeled Smart?” Martin addressed the backlash against San Francisco’s push for educational equity. He toned down his scathing critique of merit-based advanced education programs that he believes harm black and Latino students and made a surprising statement about his own son’s schooling.

“I’m guilty, I’m guilty,” Martin said, almost sheepishly. “My son is, quote unquote, in one of those tracks.”

Almost sheepishly?

I know what my Dad, who worked two jobs so his sons could avoid the local public school, would have said about that quote…..`Yea; Refusal, my ass, buddy.’

Truth and Reconciliation and Blindness

Written by Al Slivinski on October 6, 2025. Posted in Education, LBOs.

September 30 was the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, now a statutory holiday in Canada. I have searched the governmental Canada.ca website to find the original legislation that proclaimed this holiday, but cannot locate it. I wanted to read what our parliamentarians thought the point of this holiday is supposed to be. Cannot find those words.

I keep reading in many places about how one should ‘commemorate the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation’ in yet another abuse of the language. The Day is presumably intended to commemorate something, just as Remembrance Day is intended to commemorate those killed in military action while serving in the Canadian Armed Forces. You can ‘celebrate’ a holiday, but you cannot commemorate it. Christmas is to commemorate the birth of Christ, not to commemorate Christmas. Such basic aspects of grammatical logic are beyond the ken of much of our current chattering classes.

So, absent any clear statement on what precisely this Day is commemorating, I will just say that so far as I know, it is intended to be about – in some way – the people who lived in Canada before the Anglo and French settlers came, and who, without a doubt, got treated badly by said settlers. Broken treaties, lands taken, you name it, it happened to them.

However, this post is not about the Day itself, but about my former employer. The Day only serves to highlight the degree to which one must remain blind to the reality around you to work in any position of responsibility for the university. Or, at least at UWO, but I think UWO is pretty typical.

On September 29, I got an email from the Econ Dept’s chief administrator which said this:

Good Afternoon, Everyone,

This is a reminder of the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation & Allyship event tomorrow. I attended this event last year, and it was a great way to bring the community together to collaborate on allyship and inclusivity.

I hope to see the Department of Economics well represented in orange shirts tomorrow. 😊

The ‘orange shirt’ remark is because someone somewhere decided an appropriate thing to do on Sept 30 was to wear an orange shirt. Now, let me be clear that I don’t wear a pink shirt when one is supposed to do that. I do own a pink shirt, and wear it when I feel like it. I think it looks great under a blue sportcoat with a blue-striped tie. I don’t grow a moustache in Movember, either. I find all these sorts of things highly irritating, a way for people to show their virtue without actually doing anything virtuous.

So, in light of this email, I resolved to go to my old-guy office on Sept 30, and looked through my wardrobe for a shirt whose colour could be described as ‘opposite of orange’. I chose green, but later a more colour-wheel savvy friend of mine convinced me blue would have been a better choice. Next year.

As a retired guy I have to park some way from my retiree’s office, a fact about which I am not complaining. That I have an office and any kind of parking on campus are two things for which I am genuinely grateful. It was a beautiful warm afternoon, so I got to see lots of university folks walking about the campus during my stroll. I did a haphazard survey as I walked. I would count off 10 people within my sight and note how many were wearing orange shirts. Came up with 0 or 1 every time. So, I put at 5% or less the number of people on campus who did the correct thing as to attire.

But there is more. ‘Allyship’ is one of those non-word words of which university types are so fond. The ‘allyship event’ which is referred to in the email above was explained in a previous email from the very bureaucratic Dean of Social Science, thusly:

On the 30th, we are excited to invite you to our second annual “Afternoon of Allyship” on September 30, which is open to students, faculty, and staff. This is a valuable opportunity for our entire campus community to come together and engage in meaningful dialogue about allyship and inclusive practices:

Second annual “Afternoon of Allyship” on September 30 from 12:00 p.m. – 2:45 p.m. at Western

Location: Social Science Centre (SSC) Room 2050

Admission: Free

This event, co-organized by the Faculties of Social Science and Science, is an opportunity to reflect on what allyship means in your role as a student, supervisor, researcher, or leader at Western.

Our speakers include:

1. Dr. Christy Bressette, presenting the new “Principles of Indigenous Allyship at Western” guide (12:15)
2. Drs. Lindsay Bell and Tania Granadillo, Anthropology, Social Science, speaking on “Availability without Expectation: Allyship in Indigenous Language Reclamation” (12:40)
3. Dr. Desmond Moser, Earth Sciences, Science, speaking on “Allying Western Science with Indigenous Priorities” (1:40)

A light lunch will be served at 12:00 to the first 75 attendees, so come early!

Apologies for including all that in this post, but I think it is good for non-University types to see the kinds of things that are written by University types. Note that Deans and other U-bureaucrats are very often ‘very excited’. I think it’s something in the wine they serve at their meetings. I could go on about a professor of Earth Sciences suggesting that Science should by allied with anything other than scientific priorities….but I won’t.

As I proceeded to my office on Sept 30, I walked past the room in SSC in which this event was being held. Some folks were grabbing their free lunch outside the room, and one of those people was a staff member from Econ, wearing an orange shirt. I know her well, she worked in the dept for a number of years before I retired. Of course she attended in her orange shirt. Given that email from her immediate Dept supervisor, what else could she do?

I got set up in my office on the fourth floor, turned the computer on and checked on some things that I can only access from a University computer, then walked over to the library to return a book. On the way back I passed the same room again, and with the free lunch scramble finished I could look in. It’s a big room, and there was somebody at the front saying something, and it was….pretty empty. As I kept walking I was preceded up the steps by the highly clueless and useless Dean, in his orange shirt, which you could just see under his black sportcoat. Guess he had other things to do, but that image was what prompted this post.

If you are said Dean, or the hapless new Dept administrative officer, you simply cannot look around at the paucity of orange shirts (I saw exactly 0 in the Econ Dept other than that one staff member) or at the low turnout at your ‘allyship’ event (despite classes being cancelled and a ‘free lunch’) from two faculties and wonder – ‘is this a worthwhile use of our energy and resources?’.

You do not ask yourself that question, and you do not raise it with those above you in the hierarchy. That would be blasphemous. Those lower down in the chain do what they must to not antagonize their own supervisors if they are staff members, and faculty and students, who are harder to put pressure on, mostly ignore the whole thing. Still, those nearer the top of the chain press on, oblivious to the lack of attendance at the ‘valuable opportunity to engage in meaningful dialogue’.

A well-run organization has as a basic requirement confronting sometimes difficult questions about priorities. That is not allowed at a university today. One carries on with things that are known to be ‘the right thing to do’, and asks no questions about their value.

A long final note. It is only somewhat related to the above, but it happened in the following week, and it is, I think, yet another indication of how cluelessly universities operate these days.

I got an email the next week from the History Dept, inviting me to a ‘Research Seminar’ the next day. Now, the Econ dept does not send emails outside the dept about its seminars and workshops. There is no reason to expect historians or sociologists to be interested. However, for some Depts, widely disseminating such notices is an important device for signalling said Dept’s virtue, and that was the case here.

The email from History had this in the subject line:

Today: Accidental Queer, with reflections on masculinity and coloniality in studies of gender and sexuality in Southern Africa

The email itself said that the presenter of this seminar, a Professor of Global Development Studies at Queens U, would indeed be sharing ‘a mix of story-telling and reflections on his personal experiences, motivations and ethical challenges…’

Your tax dollars at work, eh? I am all in favour of hearing stories and reflections. When I worked in the Dept we had a weekly coffee hour (not to mention Happy Hours at the Grad Bar) where we did just that. In particular, some of the older (than me) members of the Dept had been involved in things like putting the economy of Botswana on its feet in the 80s and 90s, or being part of the team that negotiated the first Free Trade Agreement with the US. Those cats had great stories to tell about all that. But…..we didn’t call that research. It wasn’t a seminar, as informative as it was – it was chat.

The attitude is different in UWO’s current History Dept, clearly. I’m sure they would find the stories about my senior colleague’s work in Botswana horrible, anyway. Coloniality, don’t ya know. Here’s Botswana’s history of GDP/capita, btw – just because I like graphs so much.

A final irony. There was a link in the email from History which I was supposed to click on to RSVP for the seminar. Under the link it said ‘Location shared upon registration’.

Yea, I guess History feels it needs to be cautious about who to let know about the location of this Research Seminar. I was rather tempted to click on the link to see if I would be considered an acceptable attendee.

I didn’t. Had better things to do, fortunately.

A Natural Experiment

Written by Al Slivinski on October 6, 2025. Posted in News Media.

Regular readers will know that I often mention The Free Press, an online news/commentary platform founded by one Bari Weiss, after she left the New York Times in disgust at its ideological one-sidedness. TFP has thrived, with some 1.5 million subscribers, and although it certainly runs pieces I think little of, it is in general a source of news and comment of the sort one never gets in the mainstream media. So, I am more than willing to pay $US10/month for access to it. It even has a weekly column on what is going on in Canada, a most refreshing contrast to what The Globe and Mail reports.

We are, however, about to witness what people in my old profession referred to as ‘a natural experiment’ regarding TFP. A long-rumoured purchase of the platform by CBS/Paramount was announced today, and Weiss ran a story in TFP titled ‘The Future of The Free Press’, written by herself.

It seems Weiss got some $150million from CBS/P for her platform, and according to a story about this in the WSJ, CBS has appointed Weiss as ‘editor in chief of CBS News and empowering her to set the storied news organization’s editorial vision’.

The obvious questions here, to me, are – what happens to TFP now, and can Weiss actually alter anything important at CBS News?

I am doubtful about the second thing. CBS/Paramount is one hulking big LBO, so this looks to me like an attempt to change the course of an ocean liner using a rowboat. A very likely outcome in my view is that most of the staff at CBS News will regard Ms. Weiss as an enemy infiltrator and do anything and everything to make her life miserable and prevent any real changes to how things are done, or what gets on the air. The first time she tries to get anything not purely anti-Israel or less than adoring about OAC and her ilk on CBS News, expect a rebellion from the troops.

However, my personal concern is on the other side: what this does to TFP. I have no cable anymore, and have not watched network news in years – a posture which is common to much of North America, by the way. Weiss’s piece in today’s TFP asserts that this buyout (she will remain as CEO and editor of TFP) will enable the platform to do more and do it more quickly. I am, to say the least, dubious.

So, I will continue my scrip, continue to read TFP, and see how it goes. Stay tuned for more updates as conditions warrant.

Postscript: After posting this, a new thought occurred to me.

While I was in the shower. It happens.

It strikes me that one admittedly cynical explanation of what the CEO of CBS/Paramount is doing with this deal is as follows.

He genuinely wants to change the lefty orientation of CBS News, but he is clueless about how to do it, and afraid of the shit that will hit the fan if he tries. Solution: hire someone who might know how, and bribe her to take it on by giving her a stack of cash (and Paramount stock, apparently) to do it. If it goes badly, and Weiss quits CBS in disgust, CBS/Paramount still has TFP, and Weiss still has the cash.

Win-win. Well, sorta.

We’ll see.

How the Real World Works

Written by Al Slivinski on October 4, 2025. Posted in Government.

How many of you have heard of Timmy Davis? Hands up. Sounds like a PGA golfer, no?

In fact he is a former Marine, who, after his decade in the Corps went onto a career as a US diplomat. The man reportedly speaks both Spanish and Arabic along with his native English, and in 2020 the Biden Administration appointed him as US Ambassador to Qatar. You know, that tiny and immensely wealthy country in the Middle East whose name no one is entirely sure how to pronounce. He seemed quite enthusiastic about the country in which he was appointed, having said, among other things “There is not anything that we do in the region that’s not enhanced by our relationship with Qatar.”

Davis as Ambassador to Qatar seems a very sensible appointment, given his linguistic abilities, no? Well, he stepped down from that Ambassadorship in June of this year, and he has a new job. To quote The Free Press, which put me onto this story,

Irth Capital Management, an investment fund backed by Doha and whose co-founder and chairman is a member of Qatar’s ruling Al Thani family, said that Davis has joined the firm as president and partner.

According to The Free Press, there is nothing in his background to suggest that Mr. Davis knows anything about finance or wealth management. I presume that is not why Irth hired him. This quote from the TFP article says it better than I can:

Government ethics experts interviewed by The Free Press also said it is fair to ask whether Davis’s activities as ambassador were in any way shaped by his impending business relationship with members of Qatar’s royal family.

It is of course not true that Mr. Davis has invented something new, here. The article goes on to point out numerous past Ambassadors to Qatar (and other countries) who have gone on after their ambassadorships to work for various orgs that lobby the US government on behalf of those same countries to which they were the Ambassador.

Davis is not being asked to lobby his government, his position at ICM seems more like…..I dunno, a payoff?

This is how the real world of BIP*s works.

_____________

*Big Important People

Putz, Inc.

Written by Al Slivinski on October 4, 2025. Posted in Education, LBOs.

I was having dinner with some friends who had the misfortune to have some water issues in a studio on the back of their property. There was water damage to be dealt with, and a representative of a company called Win-Mar was coming in periodically to give my friends a report on what his company was and would be doing to ameliorate the effects of the water and dry out what had been soaked. He seemed highly competent, which was reassuring to my friends, under the circumstances.

It was Saturday night, and he mentioned at one point that his company was very busy. We asked why, and he said ‘It’s homecoming at the University, and they hire us to clean up all the vomit’.

To be sure, I done some vomiting when I was of university age. It happens. What I find interesting is that the U did not put their own people to work dealing with this, but hired an outside contractor. I expect they prefer not to ruin the image of their students that they like to portray to their own employees.

There is another interesting fact about UWO related to this. For a number of years the London high school city league championship football game was held at the University’s stadium. A chance for some high school teams to play in a big venue, no doubt a bit of a thrill for them. The University stopped that practice, however, citing the ‘rowdyism’ of the high school students.

Here’s a quote from a 2024 London Free Press article about this, written after it was decided that the only place the game could be held was at a field in the city of St Thomas, just south of London:

For now, Western remains the most suitable site for a high school final. But even if organizers are able to cover the costs of security and alleviate safety and liability concerns, there are no guarantees the university will offer a contract for field usage.

That remains beyond frustrating to some for a facility originally built with an intended component of community use.

“It’s the most central location, a better venue and an easy recruiting opportunity for the best university football program in the country,” CCH head coach Alex Kurowski said. “St. Thomas has a nice new turf, but if you can do it at your major university, then why not?

Because the U is run by putzes, that’s why not. Safety and liability concerns, the universal excuse for not doing things if you run a university.

People Sayin’ Stuff

Written by Al Slivinski on September 24, 2025. Posted in Research.

When I was a young prof, I didn’t do any data research, but I saw a lot of it presented, and it was generally true way back then that economists did not often do survey research. That is, they did not put together questionnaires, get a lot of folks to fill them out and then analyze their responses.

To be sure, there were just beginning to be government-sponsored and funded large scale surveys like The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), which began in 1968 with a nationally representative sample of over 18,000 individuals living in 5,000 families in the United States. It describes itself as the longest running longitudinal household survey in the world. Wow, eh?

Things like the PSID are publicly available and painstakingly constructed, and those who do use them in their research are able to offer feedback on any issues they find with the survey. The PSID, like any such survey, asks people to answer questions about their income and such, and it is well-recognized that people’s answers are not entirely reliable, as I will discuss further below. However, when you have a panel like this, in which people answer the same questions repeatedly over time, it is possible to detect when some answers just don’t make sense.

So, what I am claiming economists did not do much in the 70s and 80s was what I described above: construct a questionnaire, get some folks to fill it out, and then analyze their answers with a view to understanding something about people in general.

The reasons for this lack of interest in surveys were, so far as I could tell, two.

One was a belief that it didn’t matter what people said about things. We economists were doing behavioural science, so it was what people did that was important, not what they said. Talk is cheap, but actions have consequences. We want data on what people actually bought and how many hours they worked and such.

Two was a recognition that people say all kinds of things that they don’t mean and/or are internally inconsistent. The most famous example of this in my discipline (I can’t find a reference to it, it was eons ago) was when someone went to a group of people in charge of running firms and asked them if their goal was to maximize the firm’s profit. This is of interest because one assumption made in the standard economic model of firm behaviour is that very thing: firms always behave so as to maximize their profits.

The person who asked this was chagrined to find that most of those asked said ‘No, that’s not how we operate at all.’

The chagrin was decidedly lessened by the fact that when those same people were asked ‘If you become aware of a change in your firm’s operations that will increase profits, do you implement it?’, to which most firm managers said ‘Well, of course we do.’

Like I said, inconsistent. They do maximize profits, they just don’t like to say it that way.

The problem with this stance on not doing surveys was that it left economists far behind empirical researchers in psychology, sociology and even political science, who were very big on survey research, and did tons of it.

Because here’s the thing. The absolutely essential input into all empirical research in econ, poli-sci, psych and soc is data. Getting your hands on good data is step one in any empirical research, and gathering good data is costly and time-consuming. Unless, of course, you just put together a bunch of questions on a form and use (back in the day) the phone or door-to-door canvasing or (more recently and much easier) some online platform as a way to gather people’s answers to your questions. Indeed, things like Survey Monkey mean that even you, my friend, can construct a survey and try to get people to answer it.

So, the absolute explosion in (mostly useless, imho) social science and other research in the last couple of decades has been at least partly aided by the fact that one can so easily generate data sets from online surveys, so long as one does not look too closely at what those surveys actually mean.

A prime example is the research by economists and others on – wait for it – ‘happiness’. Happiness research has grown massively in the last twenty years, all the result of people putting together surveys asking people how happy they are on a scale of one to whatever.

Indeed, there is something now called a World Happiness Report. You should click and check it out. How do they measure happiness, you ask? Here is what they say:

Our happiness ranking is based on a single life evaluation question called the Cantril Ladder:

- Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top.
- The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you.
- On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?

Is that not awesome? But the really cool thing is that, because the steps on the ladder are numbered from 1 to 10, that means you can treat happiness like any other quantity, you know, like pints of milk. ‘Joe says he’s on step 4, so he has 4 cantrils of happiness.’ That means you can add happiness numbers together and find averages and standard deviations and then you can publish reports that say things like this –

Finns have an average life evaluation score of 7.736 (is that precise or what?) which is much better than the Germans with their average of 6.753.

Then you can do endless amounts of statistical operations in which you toss in other numbers like GDP and average temperature in March and the percentage of people who live in urban areas and average life expectancy and daily minutes watching TV in October and —- do you not see it children, there is no end to the set of possible papers one can write. Indeed, we can figure out why those damn Germans are so much grumpier than Finns.

All you have to do is never ever think about this question: If I put myself on step 7 of that ladder, is there any reason to believe that makes me in any important way similar to someone in Sri Lanka (or Manitoba, or down the street for that matter) who also thinks they are on step 7?

If that question occurs to you, Mr./Ms. researcher, just put it out of your mind, and go write another paper.

It is not just in this research on so-called ‘happiness’ that what people say is taken as objective truth that can be quantified and analyzed. One of the first articles I posted on this site was about some local researchers who claimed they wanted to learn how much discrimination was being experienced by recent immigrants, so – they asked them. When it turned out that non-immigrant white people claimed to be discriminated against more than immigrants, it did not occur to the researchers to consider the possibility that their survey responses were not telling them about actual discrimination. Onward, ever onward, there are (discriminatory) dragons to be slain, dammit.

And, think about it. If we care about discrimination, we care about how people behave, about what they do. We want to know if people are being cursed at due to their background or race, or if they are being denied jobs. But damn, that is very hard to discover, whereas if we just accept that whenever people say these things happened then they did – voila! We can really get somewhere.

While it is true that the internet age has made doing surveys easier, the problems with survey research are not new. One problem with which I am very familiar is the bias in surveys of voting behavior. If you ask a random sample of adults whether they voted in the last federal election, you will invariably get something like 80%+ of them saying they did, even though we know only some 60% of eligible adults actually voted.

There are a number of reasons for this. First, people feel that they should vote, and are reluctant to admit they did not, even to a pollster. Probably more important is that the sample in any voluntary voting survey is not truly unbiased, in that people who willingly answer surveys also are more likely to vote. Or, put another way, someone who didn’t vote is more likely than someone who did to tell a pollster to piss off, or to not fill out the online questionnaire.

What got me started on this ‘sayin’ stuff’ topic was a post on the stats blog titled ‘Junk Science Presented as Public Health Research’. This was written by good old Gelman about a paper published in a journal sponsored by The Journal of the American Medical Association (although not in JAMA itself) and it claimed that in a survey of 10,000 US adults, some 7% reported being injured in or otherwise present at a mass shooting. I mean, JAMA, right? Must be true.

Gelman the statistician pointed out that, given what we know about the actual number of such shootings, that 7% claim would require that the average number of people present at mass shootings over the last 50years would have to be some 700, and that was implausible. Some mass shootings have thousands present, like the one in Las Vegas in 2017, but that is a huge outlier, considering that ‘mass shooting’ is defined as 4 or more people being hit by gunfire.

Well, this led me to an even worse example of this in another JAMA network paper from 2024 titled ‘Prevalence and Risk Factors of Depression and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder After a Mass Shooting’

You can read the whole thing here, free. Worth every penny.

This paper surveyed people who were actually present at that shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Vegas in 2017, in which 60 people were killed. They contacted 1000 people on a list of those who were present (there were tens of thousands in attendance), got a final sample of 177 people, and concluded from the answers those 177 people gave to their survey that ‘eighty-seven participants (49.2%) reported past-year MDEs [Major Depressive Episodes], while 112 (63.3%) reported past-year PTSD’.

All fine so far, but in their conclusions they write ‘We documented a high burden of MDE and PTSD among witnesses and survivors of the Las Vegas MVI[Mass Violence Incident].’

No, folks, you did not. You documented what was true in your small and certainly biased sample. Think about it, readers. some 800 of the 1000 people contacted by the researchers did not reply, and who is more likely to respond to a survey about this incident? Those who feel they are suffering from depression and PTSD or those who have moved on and are doing ok?

Given that bias, and despite what they titled the paper, this work tells us nothing about the ‘prevalence’ of MDEs or PTSD in the set of people actually present at that shooting.

The researchers do eventually note that “Study limitations include a small sample size, predominantly female respondents, and a low response rate, all of which may affect generalizability.” Sample bias? Not even mentioned.

Besides, generalizability to what? There is no reason to believe your results tell us anything about the thousands of people at that event, period. And of course, after that brief and inadequate cautionary note, they go on to compound their error:

“This study found that witnesses and survivors of the Las Vegas MVI continued to have substantial mental health challenges even 4 years later, emphasizing the need for sustained mental health support.”

Isn’t it funny how leaving out the word ‘some’ in that sentence makes it seem so much more….important?

Let me emphasize my point. Gelman called the paper that asserted 7% of people in the US have been at a mass shooting ‘junk science’ because there was no reason to believe that 7% number was actually true in the entire US population. As he writes, what the researchers know is only that 7% of the people they asked said they were present. The characters in this PTSD paper cannot even claim that their results are representative of the population of people who were present at the Vegas shooting. They only know what 117 people from their biased sample said about having PTSD.

I will finish this by going back to that original JAMA paper Gelman dissed in his Stats blog. Along with taking the researchers to task for doing ‘junk science’ Gelman also suggests that a study of how many people might have been present at some mass shooting somewhere doesn’t even belong in a public health journal, and he suggests that it was published there to push a political agenda.

Some of his readers disagreed with this point, and he eventually caved and wrote that maybe the study was legitimately about public health.

I think he was right the first time. It makes sense to publish a paper on mass shootings in a public health journal if the methods used to deal with public health problems might be useful in dealing with mass shootings. If that makes sense to you, then think back to, oh, 2020, and consider the methods advocated by public health officials to deal with that problem. Clearly, a serious public health problem is sufficient to require all kinds of draconian measures, including the suspension of civil liberties.

imho, there definitely is a political agenda here. Same goes for alcohol consumption, by the way. Big public health problem, donthchaknow.

Just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean people are not trying to mess with me.

Free Jimmy!

Written by Al Slivinski on September 23, 2025. Posted in Culture, Government.

My WSJ this afternoon has a story headlined ‘Kimmel’s Late-Night Show Will Return to Air Tuesday’ stating a fact which you all know by now.

The story does not say much about how ABC came to this decision, unless you consider the following from ABC an explanation:

“It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive. We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday,” the company said.

The WSJ story also says this about Nexstar, a company which owns more than 20 ABC affiliated stations.

A representative for Nexstar didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on whether it would resume carrying Kimmel’s show.

Nexstar had said it’s stations would stop airing Kimmel’s show, even before ABC decided to suspend it.

What really induced ABC to put Kimmel back on the air is unknown, and I suspect always will be. More may be said by various parties, but the truth content of whatever is said will in any event be low.

Whatever the reason for ABC’s about-face, I applaud them growing a pair, if only belatedly, and I look forward to seeing Carr and Trump’s reactions to this news. I expect Kimmel’s ratings for Tuesday night’s first show back will be rather higher than they have been of late. He should send Mr. Carr a bottle of Carr’s favourite booze, at the very least.

A WSJ reader commenting on the story also mentions that Kimmel’s contract with ABC runs to May of 2026. If that is so, I would not bet much on the show being on the air in July of 2026, since I also predict that Tuesday ratings bump is unlikely to last.

As another commenter on this story said, this latest ABC decision is ‘a victory for free speech and negative net present value’.

Kids Today

Written by Al Slivinski on September 20, 2025. Posted in Uncategorized.

I worry about them.

I came across some X posts by a woman named Jean Twenge, who apparently has written books about teens and social media use and such. No, I don’t spend time on X, I got sent to her posts by something I was reading in The Free Press. She had some interesting – worrying, actually – graphics in a couple of posts which I thought worth sharing here. I might buy one of her books, based on this – speaking of which, this first graphic is indeed distressing, at least to a confirmed book reader like me.

And here is what I dislike about X posts. The caption on this graphic refers to ‘books’ losing kids attention, but the description of the data being depicted refers to 13-year-olds ‘reading for fun’. Does that mean reading books for fun? Not clear to me, but books are certainly one thing one could read for fun, so this big drop between the 80s and now is not a good sign, in any case.

Having fun is important, and so is maturing. This may be something today’s kids are having a hard time doing. Here’s another of her graphics:

I have seen other stats like this in other places. It all points to youth taking longer to grow into adulthood, another disturbing trend. Now, a certain kind of person – we know who they are – might well look at this and say:

‘Fewer kids are trying alcohol, well that’s just great.’

and…..

‘Fewer kids are getting driver’s licenses, that’s just what we need to combat climate change.’

and….

‘Less teen dating means less teen sex, that has to be good.’

and….

‘High-schoolers should not be working for pay, they need to concentrate on their schoolwork.’

To those people, I say #$&^!!

Young people have to try things, test themselves, confront the world, it is part of how they learn about themselves and mature.

But that’s me.

And then there is the graphic below, which is from a study in The Lancet, a very prestigious British medical journal which has managed to publish a fair bit of bullshit over the previous decade.

The key question one must ask about such a graph is – what is causing what? That is, does high use of social media induce clinically significant depression in young people (particularly girls) or is it the case that being clinically depressed (for whatever reasons) causes one to spend more time on social media? Either seems plausible, up front, and I will say my own bias is toward door #1, but because this data is from a cross-section of teens in the UK, there is nothing in such data that can sort that out.

To their credit (I downloaded the study) the authors are aware of this issue, and say they have evidence that it is the first direction of causality that is most likely, but by no means certain. It’s complicated, indeed.

I have grandkids. I worry about their generation. I am also very glad that I am no longer a parent of young kids.

All Sides Agree: Shutting People Up Is Good

Written by Al Slivinski on September 19, 2025. Posted in Government, Popular attitudes.

By now I expect most of you know that ABC has pulled Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show off the air. I’m going to go through (some of) the details as far as I know them because I think they matter.

On the show Kimmel said, among many other things “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”

Now this is not at all central to what I think is important about this, but I just have to say it. Does that look like a line from a comedy show to you? It does not to me, it looks like a line from a political commentary broadcast.

[To be fair, Kimmel later in the monolog showed a clip of Trump saying he was holding up well after Kirk’s murder, then immediately drifting into talking about the great reconstruction of the White House ballroom that was taking place. Kimmel said ‘He’s in the fourth stage of grief: Construction.’ That’s actually kindof funny. Sad, but funny.]

I got rid of cable long ago, so have not watched late night TV since, but I used to enjoy Jon Stewart and Colbert and – eons ago – Carson and Cavett. They made jokes about many things, including politicians, and they were more often than not, funny. Making fun of politicians and university bozos and celebrities is all healthy and useful. Where is the joke in that first line from Kimmel? Must everything be political commentary?

Ok, rant over, what happened next is that – and I am quoting The Free Press here, I did not see it – Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr went on Benny Johnson’s YouTube show and offered Disney-owned ABC a choice. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” said the country’s top regulator of broadcast television. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

As the Freeps says, this is called Jawboning. A government official suggesting that there will be trouble if some private actor does not take some action. ‘Nice little network you got there, ABC, be a shame for it to lose it’s licence’, basically.

[I’m dramatizing, here, the FCC licenses individual stations, not networks, but you get the picture….]

Jawboning has a long history, it was not invented by Mr. Carr, indeed Joe Biden’s admin used it on Facebook, trying to pressure it to remove what his administration referred to as ‘misinformation’. Biden’s people were sufficiently self-aware to do it quietly, however.

Like the editors of The Free Press, I thought that was wrong then and I am alarmed at Carr doing it now. And, Mr. Carr himself is on record as saying it is wrong. In a WSJ editorial this morning, Kimberly Strassel prints the following quote from Carr from 2019: “Should the government censor speech it doesn’t like? Of course not. The FCC does not have a roving mandate to police speech in the name of the ‘public interest’.”

Exactly, Mr. Carr. However, we live in a world in which 1) no one in government is expected to have any principles and 2) it is always ok to get revenge on anyone who plays for the other side.

Had ABC simply shut Kimmel down for being an embarrassingly ignorant boob, then I would not care. I mean, I would really really not care, because as I wrote above, I do not watch these guys any more. What I object to deeply is an official in the US Federal Government implicitly threatening ABC if they do not fire Kimmel. I agree with the Free Press that this ‘undermines our most fundamental values’, where the Free Press is no doubt referring to the value of free speech in the US, but I regard that as one of my fundamental values also, living here in Canada.

The Federal Government of the US – or of Canada – has no business shutting people up, no matter how stupid or insensitive is what they say. And sadder yet, Carr is hardly the first member of the Trump admin to talk about shutting people up since the murder of Charlie Kirk. As appalling as that murder was, it does not justify bringing the force of law – or jaw – down on people who talk about it in ways the current government does not like.

And, it gets worse from there. As always, there are plenty of reader comments in the Free Press below any of its articles. Here are those following the editorial which alarmed me the most:

– “I disagree with the way that this happened, but I don’t necessarily disagree with the fact that it did. Private companies can do as they want.”

– “Disappointing. The FP apparently felt that it needed to tack a couple of degrees to the left.”

– “Frankly, I don’t care. We’ve been subjected to so much hate, including from Joe Biden as president, and now the former president Obama, that we have to draw a hard line. Kimmel was inciting further violence against us by falsely claiming the assassin was MAGA.”

– “Good riddance, drag him through the streets. You underestimate how many people despised this man. I couldn’t care less about his freedom of speech.”

– “I fully support free speech in the media. But sometimes, payback is the only way to expose hypocrisy.”

– “It is nice to see the right punch back a little, instead of laying back and taking it, as they have for so long.”

To be fair to Free Press Readers, there were also some finely nuanced comments on the editorial.

The very existence of the FCC as a broadcast regulator means that Carr’s veiled threat is (probably) not a straightforward violation of the 1^st amendment. However, an ignorant comment made by the host of a little-watched show should not be enough to get a license pulled, and Carr should not even be hinting that it could be. That amounts to gangster government (as did Biden’s people leaning on Facebook) and it should have no place in a democracy of free people.

The main point made by Strassel in her WSJ editorial mentioned above is that it is time for the FCC’s control over broadcasting to end. That power is a holdover from the days when the three US TV networks were the primary source of news for the country, and those days are long gone. I think I agree with Strassel’s point. I doubt Mr. Carr does. Now.

So far as I can tell, no one in Trump’s Admin can comprehend that it is better to let the clueless talk, it is how we learn how clueless they are. Shutting them up just sanctifies their ignorance.

Final note on this, utterly independent of my worries about Carr’s actions. I knew nothing about Charlie Kirk until reading about his murder, but based on what I have read about him since, I wonder – does Carr or Trump or J D Vance understand that Kirk himself would likely be appalled by Carr’s threat?

In an odd turn of events, I came across some other writing online about contemporary journalism while following the various paths taken by the story about Kimmel/Carr. That is, I came across some people writing about how journalism should be done today, and to be honest, I cannot re-construct the path that got me from this Kimmel thing (which is not really about journalism) to where I ended up.

That said, I think this stuff I ran into is important, and it is certainly new to me, so I’m going to write about it in a separate post – this one is long enough.

Poor France…..Poor Us?

Written by Al Slivinski on September 9, 2025. Posted in Government.

Here comes another article prompted by something I read in the WSJ, this time an editorial titled ‘Who Can Save France Now?’ credited to The Editorial Board.

France has a hybrid governmental structure. There is a President, currently Emmanuel Macron, who is elected in a separate election, just as in the US. However, they also have a parliamentary legislative branch, headed by a Prime Minister, who must command the confidence of that legislature to stay in office, just as in Canada and the UK. Well, the PM in France, Francois Bayrou, lost a confidence vote by a count of 364 to 194 (i.e., not close) and so Mr. Macron, whose position is unaffected by this, has two choices. He can call new legislative elections, as in Canada, or he can try to find another schmuck to appoint as PM and hope that person can put together a program which will win him/her the confidence of the current legislature.

Here’s the WSJ EB’s take on the situation:

This fiasco isn’t Mr. Bayrou’s fault. To him fell the unenviable task of crafting a government budget plausible enough that everyone could pretend to believe it. France’s debt-to-GDP ratio is due to climb to 116% this year, and annual government expenditure is approaching 60% of GDP.

The National Assembly is split among three factions—Mr. Macron’s centrists, and big-spending parties on the left and right. Actual spending cuts are out of the question politically. Mr. Bayrou hoped he could at least corral lawmakers behind an agreement to slow (ever so modestly) the rate of increase in future spending. Apparently not.

The question this brought to my mind was: is France’s fiscal position really so perilous? What does a debt to GDP ratio of 116% mean, and how does it compare to other countries?

First, one way to characterize what it means is this. GDP is the total value of everything produced in a country in one year. Government debt, which is what is meant here, is the total value of all French government bonds held by anybody. So, the 116% means that if France consumed nothing for a year (impossible, of course) and spent all the money they earned from producing things in that year on paying off their government’s outstanding bonds, there would still be outstanding debt they could not pay off. They would have to devote another 16% or so of next year’s production revenues to retire the remaining debt, assuming their government did not borrow anymore.

That sounds like a lot of debt when you put it that way, but how does it compare to other countries?

I found the graphic below online, depicting the top debt-to-gdp ratio countries in the world, based on data from the International Monetary Fund, a generally reliable source.

Apparently France has the 9^th-highest govt debt to gdp ratio in the world, but it is half that of Japan, which seems to be ticking along ok, and it is less than that of the US and just ahead of Canada. Now, the conventional wisdom is that the US is able to get away with loads more government debt than other countries because the US dollar is the currency in which the vast majority of international trade is conducted. This makes everyone more willing to hold US bonds than those of other countries. But if France is in trouble on this score, what about Japan and Canada, never mind Italy?

Sudan, at the top of the chart above, has been at war for as long as I can remember, and there is nothing like military conflict to run up government spending. But number three on this chart is Singapore, which I always thought of as an economic success story, even though nothing on earth would get me to live there. Well, below is the historical record of Singapore’s GDP per capita, which, flawed thought it is, is the best measure of material well-being for a country we have.

I wouldn’t take too seriously the numbers after 2024, those are projections (otherwise known as guesses), but up to last year, the Singaporean economy seems to have been doing well for its people. And, if nothing else, the guesses past 2024 suggest that the guessers don’t see Singapore’s current 174% govt debt to gdp ratio being a hindrance to a growing economy.

I suspect the Wall Street Journal EB is just not happy about a country that is racking up debt and getting away with it. They often rail against the US government, independently of who is in office, on the same grounds, and would probably do the same to Canada if they ever bothered about Canada at all.

I share their disdain for the idea that governments can borrow forever with no consequences, but the fact is that plenty of governments have been doing it for a long time, and no one knows where it will end up. The world’s governments are, in my view, jointly embarked on a long-run uncontrolled experiment in indebtedness. My concern is that if it turns out badly, none of Misters Macron, Bayrou, Trump or Carney will pay the price: it will be, as always, Joe and Jane Average who do.

What’s a Fella To Think?

Written by Al Slivinski on September 8, 2025. Posted in Government, News Media, Standards.

My morning WSJ contained an Opinion piece by one Steven E Koonin titled ‘At last, clarity on climate change’ which starts with this sentence:

“A recent Energy Department report challenged the widespread belief that greenhouse-gas emissions pose a serious threat to the nation.”

Mr. Koonin is one of five co-authors of said report, which was commissioned by the current US Secretary of Energy. Mr. Koonin says these are some of the report’s key findings:

Elevated carbon-dioxide levels enhance plant growth, contributing to global greening and increased agricultural productivity.
Complex climate models provide limited guidance on the climate’s response to rising carbon-dioxide levels. Overly sensitive models, often using extreme scenarios, have exaggerated future warming projections and consequences.
Data aggregated over the continental U.S. show no significant long-term trends in most extreme weather events. Claims of more frequent or intense hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and dryness in America aren’t supported by historical records.
While global sea levels have risen about 8 inches since 1900, aggregate U.S. tide-gauge data don’t show the long-term acceleration expected from a warming globe.
Natural climate variability, data limitations and model deficiencies complicate efforts to attribute specific climate changes or extreme events to human CO2 emissions.
The use of the words “existential,” “crisis” and “emergency” to describe the projected effects of human-caused warming on the U.S. economy finds scant support in the data.
Overly aggressive policies aimed at reducing emissions could do more harm than good by hiking the cost of energy and degrading its reliability. Even the most ambitious reductions in U.S. emissions would have little direct effect on global emissions and an even smaller effect on climate trends.

He then adds – ‘Our work has attracted strong criticism, despite its grounding in established science.’

What a surprise, eh? So, let’s cut to the chase. I have not read this report, and don’t expect I will. In the Comments after the piece, a reader notes that a group of ‘climate experts’ have written a rebuttal/commentary on the report, which you can download here. It runs to 459 pages, and no, I’m not gonna read it, either.

Is this because I am confident the DOE report that Koonin is touting has it right? God no, I have no reason to believe reports that come out of the Trump executive branch at this point. It no doubt contains grains of truth, but here’s the thing. If that DOE report had come from the Biden Energy Department I would not bother to read that, either. I have no reason to think that any of these people are not stretching the truth, misusing logic, and painting the evidence up so as to support whatever pre-determined position they hold. That, sadly, is the state of governance and academic research in the Western world today.

That all being said, here is something of which I am quite sure. The media has for many many years been all too eager to put doomsday scenarios on their pages, and the so-called ‘scientific community’ has always contained enough alarmists that such scenarios can be given credibility by people with letters after their names. God save us from people with letters after their names.

I blame a lot of things on the internet, as my regular readers know, but this goes back to well before the invention of that bit of infrastructure. The older folks among you may remember the famous book The Limits to Growth, put out by a group of wise folks called The Club of Rome in 1972. It predicted the end of mankind was looming due to exploding population, ever-increasing pollution and the depletion of non-renewable resources. You can go here to a commentary in Reason in 2012 to see how those predictions were going up to then.

But wait, there’s more. I have compiled a list of doomsday predictions from the last many years, all of them made by people with letters after their names, and published with considerable fanfare by the media.

Predictions:

Headline in the Salt Lake Tribune, 17 Nov, 1967 ‘Dire Famine Forecast by ‘75’

The article contains extensive quotes from one Paul Ehrlich, a biologist. Here’s one:

“At the moment it is shockingly apparent that the battle to feed humanity will end in a rout, said Ehrlich.”

There was no general famine in ’75, but honestly, it is a bit too easy to pick on Ehrlich. His entire career since then has been one of predicting one catastrophe after another, none of which have occurred, and yet – he keeps getting airplay. He’s at Stanford, dontchaknow? He was in the news within the last few years again with yet another dire prediction, the details of which I have forgotten. Look him up. Or not.

Newsweek, April 28, 1975, The Cooling World

Here’s a quote from one of the letters-after-name people in this article:

“The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down.’

There are a bunch of these you can dig up from the 70s. It is easy to forget (or to have never realized, if you are young enough) that for a good while the letters-after-the-name people were telling us to fear a new Ice Age. Click on the link above to read what (some of) those folks were saying back then.

Here’s another one.

3. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist, Earth Day, 1970

Moving forward in time, the NYT has always loved a good Catastrophe story. Here’s the beginning of one from 1995:

Needless to say, the beaches on the east coast of the USA are still there, 29 years later. I know some folks who had a great vacation on one of them last month.

Another one from the first Earth Day.

“Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
• Life Magazine, January 1970

6. And this one I include largely due to the last line. The formatting suggests it’s from The Guardian, but I can’t precisely nail it down.

That last sentence is classic: ‘uses complex modeling techniques that make its projections more accurate than others.’ First, how do you know before the fact which model’s projections are more accurate? Um…you don’t, cuz you can’t. And, what logical or other principle says that ‘more complex’ means ‘more accurate’ anyway? None. But hey, he’s a US Navy scientist, we can’t expect him to know about those sorts of things. I expect that he looooves his model, though.

In the same vein, an article in The Guardian from July of 2013 that I did track down is headlined thus:

Ice-free Arctic in two years heralds methane catastrophe – scientist

Professor Peter Wadhams, co-author of new Nature paper on costs of Arctic warming, explains the danger of inaction

You can read the whole article here, but the big quote from Professor Wadhams is this:

An ice-free summer (September) Arctic is clearly nearly upon us, and will be achieved within three years or less – this is plain from the observational data on ice extent (satellites) and thickness (submarines and altimeter satellites).

Here is the latest data on the arctic sea ice in 2025, 12 years after Wadham’s quote above.

Note that it falls during summer as you would expect, then starts to rise again in September – meaning, now. The current year looks very much like what happened in 2012, although the drop in ice through August of 2025 has been less than it was in 2012. Throughout the 2025 season, the ice cover has been less than the 1981-2010 median, clearly. Is that a concern? Perhaps it is, but it has not ‘disappeared’, some 12 years after that prediction was made.

I could go on. Prince Charles, (before becoming King) back in 2018 (ok, he has very different letters after his name) said we had 18months to solve climate change and save humanity. Greta Thunberg (yea, her) who has no letters after her name at all, so far as I know, put up a Tweet back in 2018 that said that someone with letters after their name (“a top climate scientist” – you know who you are) said that climate change would wipe out all humanity if we don’t stop using fossil fuels in the next five years. She took the post down later, but you can find it online, dated 2018. Yet, here we humans are, still.

And I haven’t even mentioned Al Gore.

Is my point in digging up all this bullshit that no one with a brain should think there is anything to worry about regarding climate change or global warming or whatever it is called in a couple of years? That it’s all hyped-up bullshit?

No. Certainly not. But there is plenty of bullshit out there, so…..what?

My point is that the media is full of people – some with letters, some without – saying shit that at the time should have been taken as unlikely, has now been shown to be bullshit, and yet they keep getting quoted, and so it is not exactly hard to understand why everyone is skeptical of everything. It is supposed to be the media’s job to be skeptical, or so I always believed, but today the media are only skeptical of things said by ‘the other side’ and all media has by now picked a side. Even sadder, so have most academics, and they are the only ones who could possibly go through the new DOE report, and the rebuttal, and figure out what is really up.

No one in academia is going to do that, of that I am sure, and I can see no good reason to pay attention to anyone who said they had, whether or not they have letters after their names.

And, be clear my friends, that the truth is neither ‘Climate change is real and will soon be a catastrophe’ nor ‘Climate change is not real so we need not worry.’

Nothing in nature is that simple or binary. But simple (and therefore surely wrong) is all we ever get.

Great Writing

Written by Al Slivinski on September 6, 2025. Posted in Culture.

I wrote awhile back about the great pile of interesting books I picked up for a song at The Book Addict, a local used-book store. I was quite impressed by Doris Lessing’s novel The Good Terrorist at that point, but I had also picked up a volume that contained three (yes, three) novels by E. M. Forster, an early 20^th-century English writer. I read the first two, Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room With a View, and enjoyed them both very much. Now, Forster’s biggest success as a novelist was with A Passage to India, published in 1924, which was also made into a successful movie in the 80s. That is not part of this collection I bought, the third novel being Howard’s End, published in 1910 and turned into a movie in 1992.

I am about 2/3 of the way through Howard’s End and it is excellent. I think Forster has replaced Robertson Davies as my favourite wordsmith, the writing is just superb, as are the observations of people and life in early 20^th century England. Here is a long quote from the novel, describing one of the characters, a struggling lower-class clerk, who encounters the novel’s two chief protagonists, the sisters Meg and Helen, a pair of well-to-do young ladies who we might today characterize as ‘limousine liberals’.

This is the omniscient narrator’s (i.e., Forster’s) description of Mr. Bast:

The boy, Leonard Bast, stood at the extreme verge of gentility. He was not in the abyss, but he could see it, and at times people whom he knew had dropped in, and counted no more. He knew that he was poor, and would admit it; he would have died sooner than confess any inferiority to the rich. This may be splendid of him. But he was inferior to most rich people, there was not the least doubt of it. He was not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy nor as lovable. His mind and his body had been alike underfed, because he was poor, and because he was modern they were always craving better food. Had he lived some centuries ago, in the brightly colored civilizations of the past, he would have had a definite status, his rank and his income would have corresponded. But in his day the angel of democracy had arisen, enshadowing the classes with leathern wings, and proclaiming: “All men are equal – all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas,” and so he was obliged to assert gentility, lest he slipped into the abyss where nothing counts and the statements of Democracy are inaudible.

A great paragraph, laying out in beautiful prose the situation in which Leonard finds himself in England at that time. His interactions with Meg and Helen are a source of great turmoil for poor Leonard, a fact of which the sisters are so far entirely unaware.

Weather at Eleven

Written by Al Slivinski on September 6, 2025. Posted in News Media, Standards.

The ‘news’ business is not doing well, as we all know, particularly at the local level. My local London newspaper, despite being a monopoly in that business, is down to a handful of employees, publishes only 5 days per week, and doesn’t have the resources or staffing to do much of anything that would have been called ‘reporting’ twenty years ago. Stories about local crime, for example, are clearly just pasted from whatever the London Police put up on their News website.

This is generally attributed to the fact that people get their local news from social media, an explanation that ignores the issue of where social media gets its information from.

One might think that local weather reporting would be better. The only weather that matters to most people is local; we want to know if it’s going to rain where we live, not in Sri Lanka. However, weather reporting has gone national, too. I suspect most people in Canada now get their weather info from The Weather Network, which will give you short and long-term forecasts for your specific area of Canada at a click. For myself, I use Accuweather, which is a US website. I just bookmarked their Port Huron page, that being a town in Michigan some 90km directly west of where I live.

I use that largely because their weather radar is rather superior to what one can get from Environment Canada, and looking at current radar images is the best forecasting tool there is for precipitation. However, Accuweather is still an internet company, and thus subject to the ‘enshittification’ that all such organizations exhibit.

That is to say, what Accuweather wants you to do is click things on their site, as then you will see more ads, and hence they will get more revenue. They therefore give you many items on which to click, those items connection to the weather being…..uh, tenuous.

Here is a list of the headlines under the category of Weather News on the Accuweather website over the last several days:

Read the Coast Guard Report on the implosion of the Titan submersible

Third girl dies after sailboat and barge collision in Miami

Italian Farmers set up turnstiles to charge admission to hot spots

Small earthquake hits near New York City

Texas to enact sweeping camp safety law to protect kids

FAA investigating plane that went off end of runway after landing

Scientists have created rechargeable, multicolored, glow-in-the-dark succulent plant

I thought about sponsoring a contest to see who could best write a story under each headline that would somehow make it actually about weather in some way. I decided it was too easy, since all of life happens with some kind of weather around, and I suppose that is how Accuweather justifies to itself (if it bothers at all) posting all these stories under ‘Weather News’.

This is the same routine that has resulted in the enshittification of search engines. They are no longer designed to help you find info, they are designed to keep you clicking, so that Google can get paid. If you just find what you are looking for on the first page of results, there’s little money in that for Google, so they feed you shit that is barely related to what you are looking for to keep you clicking and trying new queries, then clicking some more.

Do you remember when you could refine your search query by putting quotes around it? You know, you type in air conditioning repair and you get results that have any of those three words in them, so you instead type in “air conditioning repair” and get only results that contain those three words in that order. That doesn’t work any more, go ahead and try it. It doesn’t even work any more on the shitty search engine the university library now makes one use to find things in their holdings. One has to just wade through thousands of books and articles that have nothing to do with what one typed into the beast.

Anyway, getting back to the weather, I don’t know if anyone has noticed, but this year’s Atlantic hurricane season has been vewy vewy qwiet. It has been more than two months since it started, and there have been only six named storms, only one of which reached hurricane status. That one, Erin, had the temerity to stay far away from the continental US. There is always hope, the ‘official season’ lasts until Nov 30, but so far – nearly nada.

Now there is nothing the news media – not just the weather reporters – like better than a good hurricane, as each storm provides Big Headline clickbait for a good month, from the beginnings of the storm as a ‘tropical depression’ through tracking its path and intensity, and then, if it actually makes landfall, weeks of stories about the damage and cleanup and, if they’re really lucky, deaths.

Well, if you have no news of actual hurricanes to run at Accuweather, you can only resort to stories like this, categorized under the category ‘Hurricane’.

Is the Northeast overdue for a hurricane? Here’s what it would take.

Atlantic tropical rainstorm may reach Caribbean as a hurricane.

Can’t you just feel the hope in those headlines?

The other reason for hope is this. The NOAA (The USA’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association) put this news release out on August 7

Prediction remains on track for above-normal Atlantic hurricane season: NOAA urges advanced preparations

As the 2025 Atlantic Hurricane Season enters its historical peak, atmospheric and oceanic conditions continue to favor an above-normal season as NOAA first predicted in May.

The details of their forecast included a prediction of 13-16 ‘named storms’ and 5-9 hurricanes.

To date: 1 hurricane. 6 named storms. With the season more than half over, Mother Nature better get moving, right? I am sure Accuweather – not to mention CNN, CBC, etc., etc. – all have their fingers crossed.

AI Attachment Issues

Written by Al Slivinski on August 30, 2025. Posted in Culture.

No sooner do I finish writing up a post on my skepticism about AI and LLMs, when The Wall Street Journal posts a story titled:

Whitney Wolfe Herd Has a New Idea for Bumble—and All Our Relationships

…with the subtitle:

She’s spent nearly all of her working life atop the dating-app business, and believes artificial intelligence could be the matchmaker we all need

Jeeezus, Mary and Joseph…..

If you’ve never Heard of Ms Herd, join the club, but you can learn a lot about her from this article, which reads to me more like a publicity piece for her and her companies than a piece of reporting.

Whatever, she is currently the CEO of an online dating app company called Bumble, worked originally at Tinder, another online dating app, and the article says this:

Since returning to Bumble in March after stepping down as chief executive in late 2023, she’s led a secret project to build a new, AI-powered matchmaking app that’s based on a surprising hypothesis. What if AI could understand us better than we understand ourselves? And what if that understanding gave it the ability to choose better matches for us than we might for ourselves?

Ok, so you just know what I think about this. Why in the freakin’ hell would you want to turn over your choice of who to date to a piece of software?

I suppose the obvious answer is that if you are prepared to believe that the software understands you better than you do yourself, you certainly would.

My first thought is that I would not have wanted to go on a date with someone who believed that about a piece of software, just as I would not have wanted to go out with someone who thought having compatible astrological signs was important.

But it gets better. The article says this, too –

‘Wolfe Herd and a team at Bumble have consulted expert psychologists and relationship counselors to program a matchmaking AI.”

Well, since they have consulted expert psychologists, that will surely make all the difference.

Here’s what the article has to say about how this AI matchmaking will work.

Bumble’s new app aims to help users build a dating profile based on how they answer questions about past relationships, breakups and experiences with love and dating.

One potential question: “As much as you’re willing to share, what is it about your last breakup that hurt you, that you don’t want to repeat in a future relationship?”

It will be built as a large language model, a form of generative AI that communicates with users in a humanlike way. One area of psychology the company is leaning on heavily to inform the AI is the science of attachment theory, she says.

I love that – ‘the science of attachment theory’.

You know me, just can’t leave a fine piece of silliness like this alone, so I did some digging into attachment theory.

Oh, boy.

Here’s the Wikipedia two-sentence description of this ‘science’ –

Attachment theory is a psychological and evolutionary framework, concerning the relationships between humans, particularly the importance of early bonds between infants and their primary caregivers. Developed by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby (1907–90), the theory posits that infants need to form a close relationship with at least one primary caregiver to ensure their survival, and to develop healthy social and emotional functioning.

Ok, but how does that translate into dating? Just wait, there’s more –

Attachment theory was extended to adult romantic relationships in the late 1980s by Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver. Four styles of attachment have been identified in adults: secure, anxious-preoccupied, dismissive-avoidant and fearful-avoidant. These roughly correspond to infant classifications: secure, insecure-ambivalent, insecure-avoidant and disorganized/disoriented.

Now, I suppose if we make the dubious assumption that by typing in answers to chatbot questions, the LLM can figure out what sort of ‘attachment style’ you favour, the question then becomes – how does it use this info about you and others to match people up? I guess users will find out eventually.

I confess to doing some online dating eons ago. In those days you just posted a profile and a photo or two, and you had to decide to contact any of the women on the site who had done the same, to see if they would have lunch with you. This resulted in two lunch dates in my case, neither a success. I figured out that, unlike me, who had just taken a photo with my digital camera and posted it, others posted pictures that were….let’s just say dated. And, of course, there is little reason to think what people wrote on their profiles was honest, either.

Looking back, my relationships were generally with women I met doing something in common. They were in the same profession, say, or in one case we met at a jazz and supper club because we both liked, you know, jazz and good food. Sometimes I was introduced to someone by a third person who knew us both. If you meet someone doing what you do, that’s maybe not a bad start, eh?

Then again, if the only thing you both do is poke at your smartphones, then that is all you have to work with, I guess.

The WSJ article does include two sentences that may reveal the key reason Ms Herd is going down this path:

Match Group, the dating behemoth that owns Tinder, Hinge and other dating apps, is on a yearslong streak of declining paying users. Bumble has a two-quarter losing streak of its own, and its market capitalization has fallen from a peak of more than $13 billion after its IPO to about $660 million today.

From $13B to $660M? Holy tomatoes, Batman, that’s a huge drop.

My money says this Attachment Theorized AI thing is not going to save Bumble or Ms Herd. But what do I know, I am a luddite.

The Responsibility of Deciding

Written by Al Slivinski on August 29, 2025. Posted in LBOs, Standards.

A bit ago I went to Chapters and bought a book titled These Strange New Minds by one Christopher Summerfield, who is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Oxford and an AI researcher. The book’s subtitle is ‘How AI learned to talk and what it means’. As so often happens, I first read about this book in a review of it in a literary magazine.

I have by now had enough of people saying AI means the end of mankind or the birth of a new golden age, all of which is the sort of tripe uttered by people who don’t know much but have some kind of self-interest in or against something new like AI.

I am utterly dubious about AI and LLMs and what they are doing to society, but then I am a luddite who is also sure that the internet has been a net force for bad in the world and that owning a smartphone is a terrible idea if you value your humanity.

I went to a seminar by a now-departed colleague of mine a couple of years ago in which he laid out the actual mathematical workings of LLMs like ChatGPT. I was quite surprised to see that the highest mathematics used in building these programs is the sort of linear algebra taught in a first-year university course. What makes LLMs special, if they are, is putting massive computing power to work on massive data sets to train them. Huh.

But I wanted to understand as well as I could how these things work, as it’s becoming clear that companies are going to start using them to do all kinds of things, and most certainly, they will be what you must deal with when you want to interact with any LBO. It is near impossible to speak to a person at any insurance company, government office or other service-oriented org now. Soon it will be LLMs and nothing but all across the corporate and government world.

It’s actually quite a well-written book, and I am about half way through and do understand better how LLMs evolved over the last 20 years and have a better handle on how they work. The author is pretty much a proponent of the wonderfulness of LLMs, albeit not to the utterly mindless extent of someone like Sam Altman. He has not yet convinced me in any way that the coming deluge of LLMs is going to be good for anybody but the people in the companies that run them, but I’m still reading.

Here’s one reason why. The stats blog I follow is pretty big on this stuff, although most of the people who write on it do admit that AI and LLMs are currently being over-hyped by the Altmans and Marc Andreesen’s of the world. [Here’s a direct quote from Andreesen: “We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.”]

A recent post from a computer scientist named Jessica on the stats blog described some of what she learned and heard at a conference discussing the use of AI in corporate strategizing. The post is titled ‘How will/should LLMs change how organizations do strategy?’, and you can read the whole post here yourself if you like. The key question at this conference, according to her, was ‘The workshop revolved around the question, How capable are LLMs of making hard strategic decisions?’

There is a regular commenter on Gelman’s stats blog who goes by the nom de plume ‘Anonymous’. He has written in the past (I am assuming it’s a he) that he is a faculty member at a university, and prefers to remain anonymous due to worries about the backlash he would face from colleagues for some of his posts.

Whether that is true or not, he is a gadfly on the blog. Very contrary, taking views not held by others who post or comment on the site, and I do appreciate him for that. After Jessica’s post, he posted the following comment on the topic of AI making corporate decisions:

I’m strongly reminded of a famous quote from an IBM presentation in 1979:
“A computer can never be held accountable, so it should never be allowed to make a management decision.”
This holds regardless of how “good” it is at making such decisions. What happens when, not if, it goes wrong?

A worthy point, in my view, but once again, I am a luddite. I simply do not understand why people use auto-complete in their emails and other writing. Even if the damn thing didn’t make tons of mistakes, have you no pride of authorship, no desire to write well yourself?

Similarly, why in the hell does anyone want to let a computer program make decisions for them?

Dale Lehman posted a reply to Anonymous’s comment above that included the following:

I’m on the same page here…..Everything seems to concern what LLMs “can” or “cannot” do. What about “should?” Why do we want LLMs to make strategic decisions?….. Why not have someone decide who I should marry? I don’t think it matters whether it is an LLM or a human deciding for me – I would say that is my decision to make, regardless of whether or not I can do it as well as others.

The answer for most LBOs to that ‘why?’ question would be the same: it’s cheaper than paying managers.

Maybe it is, at least in the short run. I fear we are going to find out soon, en masse. I predict an ongoing shit-show, but I am, of course, a luddite.

PostScript to my faithful few readers:

I have regretfully shut down the comments on my blog. Few of you ever commented, but I still did this reluctantly, driven only by the fact that I found myself deleting dozens of spam comments, no doubt generated by robots, every hour. An annoyance at first, it lately turned into a torrent. Seeing no way to stop the deluge, and getting angrier and more depressed by it each day, I had my IT people just shut down that capability. The web is where assholes go to prosper, sadly. Or, perhaps it is more accurate to say that the web allows the assholes of the world to multiply their assholeness by a huge factor.

Making the World Safer – Again

Written by Al Slivinski on August 28, 2025. Posted in LBOs, Secrecy.

Yes those wild and crazy Emergency Services people at my old employer are back at it again. On Aug 25 2:54pm I got an email addressed to me which read as follows (yes, it came from the UK again):

To all Western. A Safety Incident is occuring at Weldon Libary and Innovation Building . Leave the area or stay away as required for your safety. Issued by Western Special Constable Service. ^mc^
Thank you,
Alert WesternU
Campus Safety & Emergency Services, Western University

Then, just to be sure, I got an identical copy of that email again at 2:56pm. I do not know what the ^mc^ is supposed to indicate. It is different from the ^no^ that came at the end of the last emergency emails.

Then, showing they are right on the ball, at 2:57pm, a mere minute later, I got an email that said this:

WSCS and London Police and[sic] investigating a threat to safety incident at Weldon Library. All community members are asked to shelter in place until further notice.
Thank you,
Alert WesternU
Campus Safety & Emergency Services, Western University

Sounds serious, eh? I mean, they do not say what is going on, this is a University, after all, and they are not in the business of conveying useful information. They are in the business of telling you what to do – ‘shelter in place’.

Not – ‘stay where you are’ or ‘avoid the Library’. I suppose ‘shelter’ has a nice comfy sound to it.

So, folks who got this were free to let their imaginations run wild about what might be happening around the library.

However, they did not have long to imagine things, because at 3:33pm, a mere 36minutes after the last email, I got this:

ALL CLEAR
London Police Service has determined there is no threat to safety at Weldon Library. Community members can return to regular activities.
Thank you,
Alert WesternU
Campus Safety & Emergency Services, Western University

Still no indication as to what prompted the alert, but whatever it was, the London City Police showed up and determined that in fact there was no threat to safety. I am soooo reassured, but you just know that the interweb thingy is chock full of stories about what this was reeeeally all about.

And then, as I was writing this all up to put in this post, I got an email from my gal asking if I had gone on campus with my rapier and pistol. (She was joking…..I think.) Clearly, people who were not at Western were more informed about what happened than anyone getting emails from Western.

As I wrote above, no info, no thinking, just do as you are told. That’s UWO.

Now really curious, I went to the London, Ontario Reddit to see what might be posted there, and indeed, the most recent post said

“Multiple (over 10) police/unmarked police cars screaming down Richmond?’

In the many many comments below that was all kinds of interesting stuff, including claims of everywhere between 18 and 60 cops on campus, including people in tactical/Swat gear, then one that said:

‘Weldon Library, Shelter in Place alert, things are escalating. Yes. confirmation of firearm.’

Confirmation of firearm? By who?

Then one that said:

‘I got three and tbh I’m impressed. I’ve had my western email for years and have never seen one. Good notification protocol, seems like.’

Yea, great protocol, man – say as little as possible in three emails.

Finally, this last one, meaning, I guess, that it was the first comment posted:

‘Came here for the same reason! They went further than Huron… Something big is going on’

Don’t know where ‘here’ refers to, but yea – ya might think that with all the police cars zooming around, something big was going on. But this (presumably) young person has not yet twigged to the 21^st century fact that Public Officials make everything into something big.

I would really like to hear the story of what actually happened over that 40 or so minutes, but we can be sure that Western will never tell us, and that no local media will be in a position to provide reliable information. They will simply parrot whatever scraps of info the London Police or UWO decide to release – and ask no questions.

Epilogue: It’s now two three days after the incident. The London Police have confirmed that the report of a weapon was a hoax. Here is a sentence from the post on their website:

Shortly before 3 p.m. on Monday, August 25, 2025, police responded to a call in relation to a male with a gun outside of the Weldon Library at the University of Western Ontario.

Note the vague language, bureaucracy at its best. ‘A call in relation to…’. OK, what actually happened? Did someone call the library or campus cops with this report, who then called the London Police, or did the Police get a call directly? What did the caller actually say, in either case?

However, this is a waterfall of information compared to that coming from the university. They have said nothing, no email, no posts on their website explaining why they told people to ‘shelter in place’. As far as the ‘Latest News and Announcements’ page of the university website is concerned, the event never happened.

The decision to outsource these ‘emergency alert’ emails to a company in the UK was made by what Pournelle’s Law calls ‘org-types’. It was done not out of any concern for the safety of anyone on campus, but to fend off any legal liability for the org or its senior administrators. No threat to the survival of the university or the senior admins’ cushy jobs will arise from the fact that they provide no info to their ‘valued stakeholders’ as to what happened at Weldon Library. Folks working at the university long ago learned not to ask questions or raise a stink. No one will, they will just grin and bear it, expecting nothing more than the silence they get.

Something Perfect

Written by Al Slivinski on August 22, 2025. Posted in Standards.

What with my post of last week on crappy academic writing about Canadian airlines and then the brief AC flight attendant strike, I have been thinking and reading about airlines a lot of late. In fact, I have not flown in a long time, largely due to my diminishing willingness to be treated like firewood.

Then I came across a reader comment on an article on the AC strike in the Globe that struck me as perfect. It may not be original, but it is spot-on, in my (admittedly past) experience:

The Air Canada flight attendants’ motto:

‘We’re not happy until you’re not happy.’

The Law is Not Your Friend – Part II

Written by Al Slivinski on August 22, 2025. Posted in Government, Safety.

A while back I was talking with a person of similar age to me, a person who, like me, has letters after their name – PhD. I had mentioned my concerns about what was going on in downtown London in recent years, the open drug use, people sleeping or just lying in store doorways, and the too-frequent occurrences of violence. I had in particular described what happened on a Monday evening when a friend and I were sitting at the bar of a rather upscale restaurant. A guy had come in who was by appearance one of the street haunters, but his behavior at the outset was unexceptional as he sat on a stool at the other end of the bar from us. The bartender took his order and delivered it, but something went awry as his visit ended, he started getting loud, then belligerent, finally throwing the stool on which he had been sitting around the bar.

Three staff tried to talk him down and ease him out the door without touching him. He did not go easily or quietly, but eventually they succeeded, at which point the belligerent started pounding on the restaurant’s large plate glass window. Eventually it cracked. The bartender had called 911 when things first got heated, but no police showed up. Ultimately one of the staff followed the asshole for a couple of blocks while another waiter stood on the corner watching them, hoping to direct the police if/when they showed up. By the time I left the bar, no police had appeared.

I recounted this tale to PhD-guy, along with what a friend of mine who owns a retail store in the same area had told me. One of her staff had tangled with a shoplifter, physically pulling the stolen merchandise out of the asshole’s hands. A cop she spoke to days later warned against that, saying the staffer could find himself charged with assault.

So, I fumed about all this, and the PhD-guy I was talking to said two things.

One, he noted he had been walking about in that same area (known as ‘Richmond Row’) the previous week, and found it quite pleasant.

Two, he went to a website of some local lawyer on his laptop as we sat there, and read to me from it. Said law firm claimed that Canadians have a perfect right under the law to defend themselves and their property.

‘See’, he said, ‘your concern is founded in misinformation’. Those restaurant people could have physically thrown the troublemaker out once he got violent, and the store staffer was within their rights, too’.

My thought at the time was that PhD-guy was a typical member of that class. Living in a bubble, essentially never going anywhere and certainly not living anywhere where they have to face the reality of contemporary London. Thus, of course you believe what you read on a website written by other people with letters after their name.

I was right about how people from that demographic see the world, and about the reality Canadians actually face in defending their lives and property from criminals.

CBC carried a story this week, which you can read here. The headline reads ‘Man charged after allegedly assaulting home intruder in Lindsay, Ont., police say’

It states that a man confronted an intruder in his home at 3am, and responded with force. Police responded, and the CBC reports that:

The alleged intruder, 41, is also facing charges, including breaking and entering and possession of a weapon for dangerous purposes. Police say the man was also already wanted for unrelated offences.

However the resident is being charged with aggravated assault and assault with a weapon. An update on the CBC website today says that the tenant in the apartment used a knife against the intruder, and that the police have – finally – identified both men. The police have not indicated whether the two knew each other previously.

You can also go here and read a CBC story on what a defence lawyer has to say about the ‘limits’ to the right of self-defence in Canada.

So, here’s the thing, as far as I am concerned. It is important to know if these two men knew each other previously. If they did, then it is certainly possible that this all was not the result of a random break-in to an apartment at 3am. It is possible that some settling of scores was involved, or some recovery of disputed property between two acquaintances is going on. Fair enough, that needs to be determined and the police need to tell the public if that is the case.

However, if this was a thief breaking into the apartment of someone he did not know at 3am, then I do not care what weapon the tenant used, and I do not care how badly injured was the thief. The tenant should not face charges. Period. If someone breaks into your home with a weapon at 3am, you should not be put in a position by our laws of having to decide how much you can do to defend yourself. Hit him with a baseball bat, slice him with a kitchen knife, kick his nuts up into his throat, I don’t care, no citizen should have to make a calculation about how much force is ‘reasonable’ in that situation.

I basically never agree with Premier Doug Ford, but I am right behind his quote about this: “You should be able to protect your family when someone is going in there to harm your family and your kids. You should use all resources you possibly can to protect your family.”

Ok, so Ford is not very articulate, but I agree with the sentiment completely.

However, our laws are written by and for people with letters after their names. People whose chances of facing a home intruder at 3am or a violent restaurant patron are nil. People who simply avoid the sewer that downtown London is becoming. As I wrote in a long-ago post, quoting a friend of mine: ‘The law is not your friend’.

Particularly in the 21^st century in Canada.

The Iron Law of Bureaucracy: RIP Jerry Pournelle

Written by Al Slivinski on August 21, 2025. Posted in LBOs.

I write a lot about LBOs, Large Bureaucratic Organizations. I also often think, but don’t write, about an explanation (or theory, if you like) of what makes such organizations such a force for evil in the world.

In my recent gadding about the internet, I came upon something called Pournelle’s Law, which has convinced me that I need not trouble myself to come up with Al’s Theory of LBO Evil. This guy figured it out some time ago:

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.

Pournelle is one Jerry Pournelle, who wikipedia tells me “was an American scientist in the area of operations research, a science fiction writer, essayist, journalist, and one of the first bloggers.” He died in 2017, but I want to say – I think Jerry had something there. His Iron Law does put in a nutshell much of what I have been thinking about LBOs.

That definition of the Iron Law above I got from Pournelle’s blog, which is inactive, since he is, but which you can still find in all its glorious primitivity here. You can also still navigate around it, but only verrrry slooowly.

Now, while I happily acknowledge that Pournelle got there first, I am going to presume that I can update and perhaps even improve on his excellent Law.

First, a minor point. The example of someone working for the organization in that paragraph above – the ‘org type’ I will call them – should be that of a school district administrator rather than a union representative. You know, like those whiz-bang senior administrators who drove the local school board here in London to a $32 million deficit last year, in no small part by hiring more and more administrators. (The teachers’ union played its part also, as one of the big expenses was pay to teachers filling in for regular teachers who don’t show up.)

The existence of a teachers’ union instead means that for teachers there are two LBOs working to make it difficult for them to educate children. That was certainly the case in my career, where it was a toss-up on any given day as to whether I would be more pissed off at the U’s administrators or the union that was ‘representing’ me.

More substantively, I want to also add a dynamic element to P’s Law (as I will now briefly refer to it). At any given time it is correct that there are the two kinds of people mentioned in any LBO. However, because those who work for the org (rather than the org’s stated goals) end up making all the rules, as P’s Law states, and they also typically make the higher salaries, there is movement over time from the ‘goal’ group to the ‘org’ group – but not the reverse. Because of this net people movement, the proportion of those in the LBO that belong to the org group rises over time, and hence the LBO itself becomes more and more an org whose primary goal is to perpetuate itself. The stated goals of the org – educating people, for example – become secondary to the goal of perpetuating the org itself, and hence maintaining the positions of the org types.

I’ll call this Al’s Dynamic Law of Bureaucracy. Cool, eh? I’ve always wanted there to be some kind of Al’s Law[i].

Think about it. We could educate people just by having school principals hire teachers and leaving them alone, with no school boards, administrators or unions. Indeed, that was the case in the rather distant past. But then the org types would have no jobs. That would be better for students and teachers, I am convinced, but the org types are, as P’s Law says, in charge. They make the rules. There is a quote attributed to Peter Drucker, often called the ‘father’ of management theory, which says that:

‘Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.’

I can’t find a reliable attribution – to Drucker or anyone else – for that quote, but it is certainly an accurate description of the contribution of almost all university administrators to my career. The Iron Law explains why this is so. The org types who manage the org are not trying to further the goals of the organization, which were, in my case, educating young people and doing research. They are trying to make sure the org and their cushy jobs survive.

Now any good theory, to be useful, must help to explain why the world looks the way it does. Well, Al’s dynamic version of P’s law explains the well-documented fact that the number of administrators in universities across North America has grown faster than the number of faculty and students. Indeed, in a previous post I unearthed a number of US universities in which the number of administrative staff was greater than the number of faculty or students.

This happens through a couple of processes in a University LBO. First, some folks who are hired as faculty – as ‘goal types’, that is – switch to becoming administrators at some point in their careers. They become Chairs then Deans or Associate Deans and then embark on a career of climbing the administrative ladder, perhaps with a goal of becoming a Provost or President at some point. Almost no one who gets as far as being a Dean on that ladder ever goes back to being a faculty member.

However the more important mechanism through which the dynamic law works is that administrators hire more administrators, and the senior administrators have the ability to prevent the hiring of more faculty. As an example, my old employer is claiming to be in financial trouble these days, and so my old department hired only one faculty member last year, despite the resignation of two faculty, the death of another, the pending resignation of two more, and another retirement after my own. The admins have also instituted a policy that no class can be taught with a student enrollment of less than 15. I have heard of no plans to lay off or to not replace any retiring associate vice-presidents.

Thus, the org types have direct control over the ratio of org to goal types in the LBO, and so it is hardly a surprise that the ratio moves in favour of the org types over time.

I think P’s Law and its Slivinski elaborations have great potential for understanding our world. You can expect to read more about this here in the future.

————

[i] When I was a young faculty member and spent a good deal of time talking and arguing with graduate students in the Grad Pub, I did formulate Slivinski’s 2nd Law, which had a pretty good run among the students. It stated ‘The distribution of assholes across the known universe is approximately uniform.’ I know, you’re wondering – what was Slivinski’s 1^st Law? No one remembers. Including Slivinski.

Charlie Brown and Lucy

Written by Al Slivinski on August 16, 2025. Posted in Standards.

“Goddammit, Vladimir, you think pulling that football away every time is funny, don’t you?”

For This We Need Academics?

Written by Al Slivinski on August 16, 2025. Posted in News Media, Research, Standards.

This morning’s London Freeps (online) included an article on a topic of some importance to most Canadians; airline travel. It is titled ‘Harvey: More airline competition won’t solve Canada’s aviation challenges’ and is written by one Geraint Harvey, ‘Special to The Free Press’. (Note that it was posted before the AC flight attendants went on strike. It is not about that.)

Harvey is DANCAP Private Equity Chair in Human Organization at UWO, which means he is a faculty member in the DAN Department in the Faculty of Social Science. DAN is the name that department adopted after Aubrey Dan gave it a big donation some years back. Why it is in ALL CAPS I have never understood. The department runs the pseudo-business program in the Social Science Faculty, so it competes with the IVEY (actually, they refer to themselves as the Ivey School, as you would expect) program across the road for students and prestige. Both programs are a pox on the University, in my humble opinion, but my topic here is this article written by Harvey. The punchline: he should be ashamed of himself.

What this article is trying to say is, I think, stated well in the subtitle of the piece: Canadians must be certain lower fares that result from increased competition are worth the costs, an[sic] Western University academic says.

I don’t expect Harvey wrote either the headline above or that subtitle, but the latter does capture the point of the article. What prompted the piece was the fact that Canada’s Competition Bureau has just released a study of the Canadian airline industry, which you can read and download here yourself.

It’s a long and complex report, and it does indicate that The Bureau believes more competition is needed in Canada’s air travel market. How that might be achieved is again a complex part of the study, and Harvey’s point is – so far as I can tell – if increased competition does reduce airfares, it may come at the cost of other bad things happening.

So far, so good. Harvey is an academic, but this is a newspaper article (first published in The Conversation, apparently) so it cannot be expected to be written up to academic standards. My problem here is that the article is not even up to the standards we should expect of journalists. That an academic would write something so shoddy, well – it just frosts my bum.

Let me count the ways.

Harvey notes that the CB report states that one big complaint Canadians have about air travel is the prevalence of hidden fees for luggage and such, and the complex structure of air fares themselves. Then he writes this:

But it’s unreasonable to expect increased competition — when airlines seek to make their offering more attractive than their competitors — to lead to greater transparency in Canada. In fact, competition has been linked theoretically and empirically to dishonest practices.

Yes, there is a link in that last sentence, to some research. Sort of. It is a link to an online paper titled ‘Competition increases the magnitude of dishonest reporting even when controlling for reward uncertainty’ in Scientific Reports.

It has nothing to do with the airline industry, or in fact with any industry on planet earth. It is a report of what happened when some researchers (not including Harvey) had 766 subjects sit in front of a computer screen and play a game. Here’s their description of said game:

We conducted a pre-registered experiment (https://aspredicted.org/kyxz-b4gb.pdf) that relied on the recently introduced “spot-the-difference task”²⁷^,²⁸. In the spot-the-difference task participants are presented with 20 pairs of images that have some differences between them (see Fig. 1). Participants score points if they report seeing three differences between images, but unbeknownst to them, 10 pairs of images have only two differences between them. Thus, participants can achieve scores above 50% only by dishonestly reporting seeing three differences where only two exists. The only experimental manipulation is the way scores are converted into monetary payment at the end of the experiment.

No doubt this has a lot to teach us about the impact of increased competition in the airline industry.

This is what I mean by shoddy. Harvey found one barely related study that gives the result he wants – competition causes dishonesty – and stops. I typed ‘airline competition’ into google scholar and up came thousands of actual research papers on it. The first that google gave me, published in June of ’24, was titled ‘Airline competition: A comprehensive review of recent research’.

That paper had more than 100 references to other research papers at the end. But digging through all those to see if anyone has actually studied the impact of competition in airline markets on fee disclosure and structure, well, that would take some time and effort, right?

Harvey then writes:

Europe provides a cautionary example. Increased competition has not led to greater air fare transparency. Airlines like Ryanair, a low-fare airline and the continent’s largest airline by passengers carried, have been accused of hiding fees for passengers.

Yes, another link, this time to a story in something called Euronews titled ‘Is it always cheaper to buy a low-cost airfare? Here are the hidden charges to watch out for’

The article does not ‘accuse’ Ryanair of anything, It provides a ranking of how much your total air travel cost can go up at various airlines on average due to added charges, and Ryanair did come out on top on that scale, with Wizz Air next and Easy Jet coming in third. It also says ‘Carriers including Pegasus Airlines, Loganair and Icelandair have the least hidden fees, though their original airfare starts at a higher price’. Pretty much what one would expect, right? What the Euronews article does not do, or claim to do, is address the question of what impact the increased airline competition that arose in Europe over the years had on the size and prevalence of those fees. Nor is there any comparison of the size of those fees in Europe versus in Canada.

But here’s the thing. The Competition Bureau report has a big section on the fees and charges issue. At no point does it even suggest that more competition will fix this. Here is what the CB report concludes about this issue:

What we considered and why this is hard to fix

We looked at multiple approaches to improve how flight information is shared and displayed, including stakeholder proposals. Our study found that each potential solution presented limitations and risks. In this section, we do not recommend specific changes. We do discuss the approaches we have considered and what they would mean for the industry.

So, either Harvey did not bother to read the CB report, or he just wanted to construct a straw man he could easily knock down. Neither is appropriate behaviour for an academic.

Proclamation 7463

Written by Al Slivinski on August 9, 2025. Posted in Government.

You never know what you might learn from reading a literary magazine. I was doing just that, and a book reviewer stated that every US president since G. W. Bush in 2001 have every year re-signed something called Proclamation 7463.

So, I went looking and indeed found in the US National Register, Proclamation 7463, proclaimed and signed by President George Bush on September 14, 2001. Here is what the first two paragraphs of that proclamation say:

A national emergency exists by reason of the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center, New York, New York, and the Pentagon, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States.

NOW, THEREFORE, I, GEORGE W. BUSH, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, I hereby declare that the national emergency has existed since September 11, 2001, and, pursuant to the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1601 et seq.), I intend to utilize the following statutes: sections 123, 123a, 527, 2201(c), 12006, and 12302 of title 10, United States Code, and sections 331, 359, and 367 of title 14, United States Code.

Now the actual meaning and impact of this declaration that a national emergency exists presumably arises from whatever is said in that string of acts and statutes listed in paragraph two. I may follow those up in a future post. For now my interest is in the claim that every US president has re-issued and signed this declaration every year since 2001.

Could that possibly be true? Again, I went looking, and I found a story from USA Today – hardly my favourite source for credible information – dated Sept 14, 2017, that said this:

President Trump has become the third president to renew a post-9/11 emergency proclamation, stretching what was supposed to be a temporary state of national emergency after the 2001 terror attacks into its 17th year.

But the ongoing effects of that perpetual emergency aren’t immediately clear, because the executive branch has ignored a law requiring it to report to Congress every six months on how much the president has spent under those extraordinary powers, USA TODAY has found.

Taking USA Today at its word, then, this means that G W Bush and Barack Obama had indeed re-declared it every year prior to this. And, by now, they have stopped obeying the law that says they must report any related spending to Congress. Huh.

Then, I found a story in Courthouse News Service dated Sept 8, 2023, that said:

Biden penned his signature to a one-year extension of President George W. Bush’s 7463, retaining broad powers over the organization of the military. The proclamation is officially titled “The National Emergency with Respect to Certain Terrorist Attacks.”

It also said this:

Most emergencies are used to impose economic sanctions. But Proclamation 7463, along with the broad 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, gives the president the power to call up the National Guard, alter the size and shape of the military’s top officers and hire or fire commissioned officers — even ordering them out of retirement if necessary.

I am going to go out on a real limb here and say that Biden did the same a year later in September of 2024, and that Trump will do it again next month. The literary magazine writer was absolutely right about Proclamation 7463. So, the US has been in a perpetually renewed state of emergency since September of 2001, ‘by reason of the terrorist attacks at the WorldTrade Center….and the continuing and immediate threat of future attacks on The United States’.

It is amazing the things you can learn reading a literary magazine.

Those folks participating in the ‘No Kings’ demonstrations down in the US the last month or two – seems they are more than 20 years too late.

Dumb or Dumber?

Written by Al Slivinski on August 6, 2025. Posted in Government, Politics, Standards.

Sometimes, the necessity to stick to a well-worn script causes prominent people to say things that are hopelessly stupid. I present two recent examples.

In The Free Press last week there was a story titled ‘The iPhone Update That Could Wreck Political Fundraising’. It describes a new feature that Apple is going to put on its iPhones that, according to the article ‘…will allow iPhone users to screen messages from “unknown senders.” That will automatically place texts from such senders, starting in mid-September, in a separate folder without notifying the recipients.’

Now, I do not have a smartphone, but I had always assumed that some kind of blocking and screening ability for text messages was already available on them. Thus, I don’t know what is really new here. But that is beside the point. Here’s the point –

Joanna Rodriguez, a spokesperson for the NRSC [National Republican Senate Committee], told The Free Press:

“Unilaterally blocking campaigns and political parties from being able to contact voters with get-out-the-vote or persuasive messaging is voter disenfranchisement, and it’s critical Apple delay their rollout of this feature until these concerns have been addressed,”

Voter disenfranchisement?

Jeeezus, Mary and Joseph. Allowing users to block out unwanted texts is that? The NRSC, by the way, spends money in a variety of ways to help Republicans get elected to the US Senate. Here is what the ‘About’ section of their webpage says:

The NRSC (National Republican Senatorial Committee) is the only national organization solely devoted to strengthening the Republican Senate Majority and electing Republicans to the United States Senate.

We provide invaluable support and assistance to current and prospective Republican U.S. Senate candidates in the areas of budget planning, election law compliance, fundraising, communications tools and messaging, and research and strategy.

And their position is that if your phone can be set to block texts from them, you have been disenfranchised.

But, the NRSC are not the only fools in the room. Again from the article:

“This is a massive issue for a variety of reasons,” said one veteran Republican operative who runs a public affairs firm in Washington. “This is going to be an attack on democracy and free speech if Apple does this without ensuring voters are able to access information.”

An attack on democracy and free speech. Dear lord. (I do wonder why TFP didn’t name that ‘veteran Republican operative’.)

Not everyone is a self-interested ass, however. Here is what another person interviewed in the piece said –

“Apple is only doing this because they are getting a ton of customer complaints about the number of unsolicited text messages. It’s in the best interests of its consumers.”

He then added, “We have ourselves to blame as an industry. We bombard people with messages, and both [Democrats and Republicans] have a ton of candidates who never say or do anything interesting, who don’t have any original thoughts, who aren’t trying to bring people together.”

Exactly.

The Wall Street Journal published an editorial by one Sean McLean on August 3 titled ‘The WNBA and Caitlin Clark’s Civil Rights’. The editorial starts with a photo from a WNBA game on July 9 which shows Clark face down on the floor, the ball under her, and an opposing player, who is black, leaning on Clark and pulling on the ponytail in which Clark wears her hair during games.

In case you don’t know, Clark entered the WNBA last year as a rookie with the Indiana Fever, after a college career at the University of Iowa in which she became the highest-scoring player in NCAA basketball history, and led her team to two national championship games, losing both. She is a phenom, as they say, and her presence in the WNBA has done this, according to info in the editorial:

“Since she joined the league last year, Ms. Clark’s impact has been seismic: Merchandise sales soared 601%, Indiana Fever viewership jumped 170%, the team’s value tripled, League Pass subscriptions climbed 366%, app engagement rose 613%, and her endorsements topped $11 million.”

Not bad, eh? This has not come without issues, as Clark has also been beat up by opposing players at a rather high rate. Again, according to the editorial, ‘Clark absorbed 17% of flagrant fouls last season—double her peers’ rate.’

I’m not sure what that stat means, and no source is given. However, I don’t think it is controversial that Clark has been getting hit and pushed around more than her share since she entered the league. The question is, why? It has been suggested by some that it is largely because Clark is part of a minority demographic in the WNBA; she is white and, apparently, straight. To whatever extent that is the case, MacLean characterizes her treatment as follows:

“The league has fostered a hostile workplace for Ms. Clark through excessive fouling, targeting, and hostile comments from other players and owners. These aren’t isolated—they’re documented, continuing and ignored by officials.”

Mr. MacLean also knows what to do about this, it is written in the subtitle of his editorial:

If the league won’t act to protect its superstar from a hostile environment, the government should do so.

His specific action plan is this, again from the editorial:

“Congress and the administration should demand answers from WNBA leaders, investigate officiating and internal league communications, hold hearings, and insist on real reforms. The Labor Department should review league protocols for workplace safety. If evidence shows discrimination or retaliation, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division must act. If leaders remain inert, Congress should reconsider the WNBA’s special privileges, including its antitrust and broadcast considerations.”

Yes, I can think of few better uses of the time and resources of all those parts of the goddam federal government than to investigate what is going on in a professional sports league.

Again, lord save us from such as MacLean.

I do wonder what Ms Clark would think of this if she read the editorial. She’s out with an injury at the moment, so maybe she saw it.

Basketball is the one pro sport to which I pay no attention. I used to play backyard hoops endlessly as a kid, but lost interest when the formerly-awesome NCAA March Madness got bigger and bigger and full of one-and-done players.

However, I have watched some Fever games when Clark was playing, as I found her story compelling, and I do like the way she plays the game. She’s just fun to watch. Clark reminds me of a male college player of my youth, Pistol Pete Maravich. Dribbling madly all over the floor, firing no-look passes to her teammates (she led the WNBA in assists last year) and firing up long bombs from everywhere (she also led in 3-point baskets). And, she is no shrinking violet. She plays with real fire, and when she gets pushed, she pushes back.

Maybe we ought to let Ms Clark deal with all this hostility – and that there is hostility I have no doubt – on her own, or rather, with the aid of her teammates. As one commenter on the WSJ editorial noted, Jackie Robinson faced down the same bullshit when he entered Major League Baseball, and he triumphed without any help from any government agents. Caitlin Clark seems to me perfectly capable of doing the same, and it will be fun to watch. Congressional hearings – not so much.

The Anti-Porn Tech Bros

Written by Al Slivinski on August 6, 2025. Posted in Culture, Popular attitudes.

As I have mentioned often, I subscribe to The Free Press, an online ‘newspaper’ that I find more than a little interesting. It’s cheap, like $15/month, and it covers stories that I don’t see elsewhere, and has the wonderful habit of pointing out bullshit of all kinds, no matter its source.

I don’t love everything TFP prints, and this post is about a recent story in it that I do not like, titled ‘How to De-Addict Gen Z from Porn’, written by Sean Fischer, one of TFP’s regular writers.

The story is about two guys, who I will call M and S, who have developed an app that I will call Zap. I don’t wish to give these two guys or their app any extra publicity, for reasons that will emerge below. (I know, publicity on my little blog is not worth much, but it’s the principle, ok?)

According to the TFP article, M and S developed Zap precisely to help young men de-addict themselves from online porn. Why that might well be a good thing is important, so here is what I know about online porn, which is more than you might think. No, of course, I never look at it, heaven forbid, but the fact is the online porn industry became the subject of a small literature in my chosen discipline of Economics back when it was getting started, some 20 years ago. The key issue in that research was the proposition that the online porn industry had been very important in the overall development of the web. The reason for this is not hard to see. When some folks got the idea that they could put porn online (in the beginning it was only some feelthy peectures) it became instantly very popular.

Erotic photos that you didn’t have to go to a store in person to access? Sign me up, said much of the world. This meant that these online porn photo sites were the first to have to figure out how to acquire and service large (really large) numbers of subscribers, as well as reliably taking in their payments and giving them access to the site’s content. As the technology developed, this extended to maintaining an inventory of videos of increasingly high resolution, along with photos, and allowing subscribers to pay for, view and download them securely.

Getting all this to work in a way that didn’t scare away customers was a big deal, and as I said, some researchers at least thought these pioneering porn sites had been a key factor in expanding the www to what we now have.

So far as I can tell, the online porn industry has changed since then in at least one important way that is at the heart of the TFP story: the big players in online porn today are sites like Pornhub, where videos can be accessed for free, meaning that 12 year olds with no access to a credit card can view them. And, it seems, they do. The article references a report from Statista that throughout 2023, Pornhub got more than 10 billion visits every month. That’s a lot, and Pornhub is only one site.

So, free online porn is BIG. As a benchmark, Statista also reports that Youtube has 2.5 billion active users per month as of February of 2025. I don’t think those numbers are directly comparable, as the Pornhub number refers to visits, while Youtube ‘users’ likely ‘visit’ more than once per month.

Anyway, a lot of people are looking at Pornhub and (I presume) similar sites, and this is regarded by some as a problem. TFP ran a previous article (which in turn had previously run in a newsletter called ‘After Babel’ run by Jonathan Haidt) laying out author Freya India’s view of the harm being done, particularly to young people, by all this porn-watching.

It is to mitigate this harm that M and S’s Zap is said to be dedicated.

So, before we get to that, do I think watching porn online is bad? Well, if you are doing it for hours and hours, as some reports suggest some young (mostly) men are doing, it surely must be. As is playing online video games for hours and hours. As, perhaps, is playing bridge or solitaire online for hours and hours. This is, I suspect, one of the hard problems here: is it the hours-long obsession that is harmful, or just the content itself? I claim to have no good answer to that, but the Freya India article in TFP mentioned above is unequivocal; online porn is bad for people, period.

That is certainly what M and S think. Some quotes from them from the TFP article:

“The porn industry is just so destructive,” said [M]. “Their only motive is profit. They don’t give a shit about anything else.”

“It’s affecting them enough to be convinced by an ad to download a quitting-porn app at such a young age,” said [S]. “Isn’t that crazy?”

And, here’s a quote from the TFP article that includes another of their ideas.

“The [Zap] founders say that they have anti-porn ambitions far beyond the app. They have said they would “love to” one day buy the porn site OnlyFans (with an asking price of a cool $8 billion) so they can shut it down. Right now, they are simply in the first stage of what they see as a kind of fight for the future of civilization.”

[Side note: OnlyFans is a newish porn site, about which I know something because it came up in one of the last classes I taught before retirement. (Ya never know…..) A student mentioned it, and I asked the class to ‘educate the old guy’ about it. The students were very enthusiastic, characterizing it as a pornsite on which the performers had more control over what they did and what they earned. Students tend to be idealistic, and they should be at their age. Cynical me suspects that some old guy(s) in a badly-fitting suit is still making a lot of money from OnlyFans. I didn’t say that to my students.]

I think S’s quote above comes close to saying something useful about the potential for porn to be harmful. If you are spending any significant amount of time doing something of which you are ashamed, or, put differently, if you are spending time doing something you don’t want people knowing about, then – yea, what you are doing might very well be bad for you. A harder question is whether the porn-watching is itself the problem, or merely a manifestation of something deeper that is wrong. That is a question for which I have no expertise.

Leaving that aside for now, back to the bros.

What does their app actually do? And….does it work?

As to the first question, I can only report what is in the article – I did not pay to download Zap.

One quote from the TFP article:

“Let’s start by finding out if you have a problem with porn,” says the first prompt on [Zap], before presenting you with an intake form with questions like “How often do you typically view pornography? Have you noticed a shift toward more extreme or graphic material?” You’re then presented with a list of reasons why you should quit porn—it’s a drug, it destroys relationships, it shatters sex drives—before being asked to input your motivations for downloading the app.

[Zap], which costs $30 a year, then makes you a kind of promise.

“Grow stronger, healthier, and happier,” the screen reads.

It would be very enlightening to know if the app ever looks at the responses on a new user’s ‘intake form’ and spits out – ‘Hey, no worries, you don’t have a problem’.

Here’s another descriptive segment from the TFP article:

[Zap] claims to be built around “science-backed exercises”—like guided meditation and breathing rituals—that “rewire your brain” and “rebuild your dopamine receptors.” The app features daily checkups, content blockers to prohibit accessing certain websites, an AI chatbot therapist, and a community forum where users can turn for support and encouragement.

Their most-used feature is the “panic button,” meant to be pressed in moments of corporeal weakness. Activating it vibrates your phone and turns the front-facing camera on, holding up a mirror to users right before they relapse.

“The big thing is shame, like, look at how stupid you look,” [M] said. “That was the thought behind the camera.”

[Zap] then displays the reasons you had for downloading the app in the first place.

Oh, yea – and there’s this:

The app also encourages users to recommend it to other men in their life, prompting you to share a discount code: “Every day you wait, your boy sinks deeper into the pit of shame and self-hatred. The choice is on you to save him from this nightmare. Pull him out.”

Yea. Pull him out – and don’t forget the discount code.

So, then, does all this work? No testimonials from satisfied users are included in the article. Credibly answering that question would require, at minimum, a long-term Random Controlled Trial. Needless to say, nothing like that is cited, nor on the horizon.

However, there is some indication that [Zap] works well for its originators. According to the TFP article –

Now, almost a year later, [M] told me the app has almost a million downloads and around 100,000 paid users. Having bootstrapped the launch of the app with only $3,000 of [M]’s money—[Zap] has no external investors—they’re set to earn almost $3 million in total revenue this year.

As I wrote above, if you are inclined to download [Zap], that in itself suggests to me that just maybe you do have an online porn problem. Do I think that M and S have devised something helpful for such folks? I am doubtful. Very doubtful…..

Some other quotes from the article about M and S themselves –

[S], a 19-year-old self-taught coder and influencer from London, also likes to put his masculinity front and center. His X feed is filled with photos of exotic muscle cars, soccer jerseys, steak, and jet skis, and it is replete with dictums like “I wasn’t born to be average. I will never settle for less.”

Elsewhere in the piece we are told:

As if to prove how good a life without porn can be, [S] posts YouTube videos with titles such as “living the dream as a 19 year old ceo making $300K/mo” and wonders aloud on X if buying a Lamborghini is a good idea. He brushed aside my question of whether he’s only building [Zap] for the money. “I actually really enjoy helping people,” he said over the phone, while driving through the streets of London in a convertible.

[M], for his part, reminds his followers [on X] that “Being rich isn’t enough. You must be rich, jacked, and popular.”

It is, in my opinion, a 21^st century malady that people so often look to 20-somethings for help and wisdom. One could wonder, as a parent, whether you should be worried more about your son watching online porn or about them espousing the philosophy of life captured in that last quote from M.

What to Do in a Public Safety Incident, University Style

Written by Al Slivinski on July 31, 2025. Posted in Education, LBOs, Standards.

The now incredibly badly-run university at which I was employed for 42 years just keeps topping itself. As I have mentioned before, I continue, as a retiree, to be on all sorts of official administrative email lists. This means I get some amount of unwanted email which is, at times, both interesting and illuminating.

Such happened yesterday, July 30. I got an email with Public Safety Incident in the subject box, and this message:

To all Western. A Gas Leak is occuring[sic] at Chemistry Building. Leave the area or stay away as required for your safety. Issued by Western Special Constable Service. ^no
Thank you,
Alert WesternU
Campus Safety & Emergency Services, Western University

The time stamp on this email was 6:44pm, and had I been in my old-guy office in SSC, even though some distance from the Chemistry building, I would have been happy to have been so alerted, by whomever, even with a minor mis-spelling. As it happened, I was at home, so no worries.

However, here’s a thing. The email address from whence came this alert was:

alertwesternu@mir3.co.uk

um, that means it came from a commercial enterprise in The United Kingdom. That seemed odd to me, but not as odd as this. While the above was the sending address, the ‘reply-to’ name said it was from Alert Western U, but the ‘reply to’ email address was:

0625a7bf-0005-3000-8007-8be52242fed2@notify.cem.onsolve.eu

Ok, now that is in the European Union. An email with a a sent address that is in a different country than the reply to address? Does that say ‘scam’ or ‘phishing’ or something sinister to you?

It does to me, but I was not instructed to ‘click here’ or send my banking info anywhere, and yet – what the hell? Is UWO really farming out its emergency alert system to a company across the Atlantic? Really?

Well wait, it gets better.

At 7:10pm I got another email that said this (these are exact copies of the messages):

To all Western. A At this time the leak has been contained to Room 002 in the Chemistry Building. There is no threat to personal safety. Please continue to avoid the area as the London Fire Department is still on scene venting the area. is occuring[sic] at Room 002 Chemistry Building. Leave the area or stay away as required for your safety. Issued by Western Special Constable Service. ^^NO
Thank you,
Alert WesternU
Campus Safety & Emergency Services, Western University

So – whaddya think? Is there now no threat to my personal safety as of 7:10, or is it still ‘is occuring[sic]’ and I should leave the area or stay away as required?

What about that more emphatic ‘^^NO’ rather than just ‘^no’ at the end, is that a clue?

I could have written to that ‘reply to’ address for clarification, I suppose, but I was kinda doubting those folks in the EU would be of any help in the highly unlikely event that they answered at all. I mean, everyone over there is in bed by then, pretty much.

So, I remained somewhat perplexed, and doubly glad I was not actually anywhere on campus.

However, clarification was soon to come from the fine folks at mir3.co.uk. At 8:30pm I received the following email from them –

To all Western. A ALL CLEAR – The liquid nitrogen leak in the Chemistry Building has been contained and the area is now clear. is occuring[sic] at Chemistry Building Room 002. Leave the area or stay away as required for your safety. Issued by Western Special Constable Service. ^^NO
Thank you,
Alert WesternU
Campus Safety & Emergency Services, Western University

So at 8:30 things are not just ‘A’ but indeed ‘A ALL CLEAR’ – all those caps seem pretty reassuring….and yet. It seems that something ‘is occuring and I should Leave the area or….’ ah, bloody hell, you can read it.

This is the current UWO Admin at their slovenly best. Paying some UK company to send out alert notices to a campus thousands of miles away, because some bean-counter somewhere determined they could save some bucks, so as to better spend them on more Assistant VPs. The contract with mir3 does not seem to include any specifications regarding clarity or even spelling, but who cares about that? It’s just emergencies, right, not anything REALLY important.

Who’s in Charge?

Written by Al Slivinski on July 31, 2025. Posted in Education, LBOs, Standards.

The headline splashed across the top of my local newspaper this morning reads “Trustees blasted over deficit”.

This refers to the elected trustees of the local public school board, which I should immediately add is in no real sense ‘local’. The provincial government some years back created the Thames Valley District School Board (TVDSB) by amalgamating a bunch of smaller boards into one monstrosity that is now one of the largest in the province. Many people seem to think that the lesson of Henry Ford – building a lot of cars on an assembly line allows one to build them at low cost – applies to everything. It doesn’t.

Anyway, the headline refers to the fact that the board, which has by now been put under the guidance of a provincially-appointed supervisor, had projected a deficit for the 2024-25 year of $16.8million, which is now turning out to be in reality a deficit of $32million. Oops.

After noting how ‘profoundly’ the former trustees had ‘failed in their duty’, the Ontario Education Minister goes on to say (and you had to see this coming…..):

“It also underscores the need for the ministry to have a more proactive role in the management of school boards in the province.”

It is the instinct of all politicians of all stripes: things will clearly run better if we consolidate control in one big office here, with me in charge.

Wanna bet?

The thing is, it is no surprise to me that this particular school board did a bad job of, well, doing its job. My one experience on any board was the three years I spent as a member of the board of a private social club of which I was a member. It seemed like a good opportunity to have a say in the running of the club of which I was a member. What it turned out to be was a crash course in the inertia of supervisory boards.

We did very little supervising of anything, there was almost no push-back or questioning of what the hired managers of the place wanted to do. We got monthly budget numbers, asked a few questions here and there, but most people went along with most everything. There was a lot of head-nodding.

Now a school board, particularly the one in which I live, is a much bigger and more important operation than a private club with a few hundred members. However, I think the same principles of inertia apply, and I have found a bit of evidence to back that up.

An organization known as The Brookings Institution, a Washington D.C. based non-profit think-tank has done a bit of research on what goes on in school boards. This is from the US, of course, but I don’t think the Canadian situation would be any different.

You can read the whole report yourself here https://www.brookings.edu/articles/school-boards-should-focus-budget-deliberations-on-student-outcomes-financial-sustainability/

I’ll pass along some of the key findings regarding what they say happens at US school boards. First, note that their findings are based on a study by three researchers who examined hundreds of hours of pre-recorded 2023 budget workshops across 174 school districts nationwide. They tracked each meeting, capturing how board members engaged in financial discussions.

Now, 174 is only a small sample of boards in the US, and the authors make no claim that it comprises a representative sample of such boards. Boards from only 27 states are included, but the authors assert that they represent a broad range of sizes, family average income levels, student performance and urban/rural mix. I will take their word on that.

Here are some of the key things they found, at least in my humble opinion. First, finances, which everyone (really, everyone) agrees is a primary responsibility of any board. It’s elected to oversee how the district spends the tax and other money the district receives. So, how much time does a typical board spend on finances at a meeting? The researchers found this:

It is certainly not surprising that larger districts, with more pupils and no doubt more funds to allocate, spend more time discussing finances. Here’s a quote from the study:

“District staff tended to do most of the talking even though trustees do receive all financial materials ahead of time. About a quarter (24%) of the meetings spent a majority of the finance segment time on revenues (which boards don’t control), leaving less time for the primary responsibility of determining how to deploy the dollars the district does have.”

An even more telling comment, and one that certainly jives with my own experience, is this:

“More than half of all school board members (53%) were categorized in our analysis as “silent observers,” meaning they offered no productive comments or feedback during public budget discussions (except to thank and congratulate the district on its efforts to draft and present a budget).”

But wait, there’s more –

“In our observations, most financial decisions of all types were called for vote with no board deliberation. For instance, in the meetings where employee salaries came to a vote, 82% of raises were approved without discussion.

Over 90% of meetings made no mention of any spending alternatives to the singular proposal on the docket.”

So far as I know, one must get elected to a school board, whether in Canada or the US. I know that in the local elections here, I never vote in the school board part of the ballot. I simply have no idea who any of the folks on the ballot are, and if there is a way to find anything out about them, I have not looked hard for it. I went looking to see how the elections for the TVDSB board went back in 2022 when those now-mostly-irrelevant trustees were elected.

Such information does not seem to exist. You can find out who was elected in 2022, and this website has information on ‘…the number of candidates seeking election, number of elected or acclaimed trustees, number of new or returning trustees and a comparison of 2018 to 2022 election results…’ but not vote totals. So, I have no idea how much actual support any of those elected had. Hmmmm…….

If anyone out there knows how to find this out, do let me know.

Anyway, on to more bad news about what actually goes on at school board meetings….and what does not:

Note here that only 23% of budget sessions included any discussion of student outcomes, which one might think is the absolute number one priority for any board. However, the following quote from the study is important, too –

“This is not to say that trustees were wholly unconcerned about student outcomes. Rather, any discussion of student outcomes typically took place outside of budget discussions. And yet, whether leaders recognize it or not, the budget is a set of choices about how to deploy the district’s resources and thus should be central to any strategy for learning. Money spent on one thing (e.g., more teacher aides, professional development, or pay raises) can’t be spent on another (e.g., tutoring or counselors). The tendency to separate these functions may be part of the reason why districts tend not to change their budgets much from year to year.”

A final quote about who ends up on school boards –

“Board members are typically elected positions that rarely come with any compensation. So it’s not surprising that many are unprepared for the financial aspects of their roles. In fact, 10% of meetings included a trustee expressing that they lacked knowledge of finance.”

Now, the implicit suggestion here is that it is board positions being uncompensated that leads to unpreparedness and inertia. That is not at all apparent to me. If board positions were paid, (and I cannot determine if they are in Ontario, but I don’t believe so) that would just be one more not very good reason for people to seek them. I don’t see that as helping things.

The over-riding lesson from this study is that boards don’t actually exercise much control over what happens to the money a school district receives. That is determined by the paid administrative staff of the district, and the board just rubber-stamps the budget they prepare, asking few questions and never ever suggesting alternative allocations of funding.

Well, that is at least consistent with what has happened in the aftermath of the two major fiascos that have occurred locally. The mess with the TVDSB began when it was discovered that a bunch of the administrative staff – not the trustees – had gone on a three-day retreat to the hotel in Toronto that is attached to where the Blue Jays play baseball. There were Jays games all three of those days. To quote my local paper on this ‘retreat’, “It was held amid deep spending cuts that slashed jobs in teaching, early childhood education and other areas as the board grappled with a then $7.6-million deficit that rose sharply.”

This triggered an outside audit, and the cost of said retreat was put at $38,000. Bad optics. This got the outside supervisor appointed by the province, and then, to again quote the Freeps:

“Mark Fisher, the board’s education director since 2019, abruptly took a paid leave days into the new school year, after news about the retreat was revealed, and later resigned without public explanation. Some other senior administrators also either resigned or retired.”

So…..it was the administrators who felt the need to take a leave, resign, or retire – perhaps fearing they would be fired if they tried to stick around. It was not the trustees, who are still around, albeit rendered even more meaningless by the presence of the appointed supervisor.

And, in the other local fiasco, when it was discovered that the local hospital organization was going to have a $150million dollar deficit, again a provincial supervisor was appointed, and it was the senior administrators who were pushed out, albeit slowly. Then, when it was further found the hospital system had been defrauded of some $50million dollars by some of its staff, it is those senior staff members, including the now-departed ex-CEO, who are being sued by the corporation for letting this happen – not the members of the hospital board.

To put it simply, it seems to me that no one really believes that trustees of school or hospital or university or social club boards are up to the task of overseeing what happens in their respective organizations. The (generally highly paid) senior administrative staff have all the information, all the expertise, and so hold all the cards. They control what the board even knows about the organization. The concept of a supervisory board is a good one. Checks and balances, right? Someone needs to keep the senior admin from feathering their own nests, from giving themselves raises, etc. Yet, they don’t seem to. The now-being-sued ex-CEO of the hospital system got a $230,000+ raise shortly after taking the job, something like a 30% increase.

So, we get the Education Minister saying the Ministry itself clearly needs to ‘have a more proactive role’. If you believe that better educational outcomes will result from decisions made in Queens Park about what happens in London school rooms, well…..I’ve got this great piece of land in the Okefenokee swamp we should talk about.

This is a difficult governance problem, no doubt about it. What to do? Boards don’t do their jobs of overseeing admins, the research from Brookings says so, and our local experiences with the hospital and school boards say so also. Yet, the admins run big deficits and commit fraud and get big raises, so…..???? Whaddya do?

Just for fun, here’s a crazy suggestion to consider.

Disaggregate the school board, tear the TVDSB back down into its former constituent parts. Hell, make the parts even smaller, break the London school board into four separate ones, one for each quarter of the city, east, west, north, south, make them really really local. Do the same with the LHSC, have each of London’s three major hospitals run themselves independently.

Now, let them compete for students and patients.

Crazy idea, eh?

Or, we could just have all the hospitals and schools and universities and hell – police and fire departments – in the whole country run by ministers in Ottawa.

Which is crazier?

Joyful Cacophony

Written by Al Slivinski on July 25, 2025. Posted in Uncategorized.

I work out these days at the downtown Y. 40+ year old building, a bit rough around the edges. I joined a couple years back when the private gym I had belonged to for 20 years closed down. The Y is not so posh, but then neither am I, and it has all the facilities I could want for my workout. The other day I got a reminder that it has one definite advantage.

I was walking up the stairs from the basement locker room to the second-floor workout area (part of my workout) when I heard the sounds of a troop of little ones coming from the first-floor lobby. In fact there were not more than 15, no doubt a Summer day camp crew, and they were making the sound always made by a collection of more than 5 kids – joyful cacophony.

OK, not always joyful, sometimes it’s “Miiiiiss, Jimmee spit on meeeee!!!” — but the default is definitely joyful. I never heard that sound at my private gym.

Mind you, if they start letting those little people into the locker room or workout area I will be much less happy about their presence, but they don’t, so I am. Happy, I mean.

Things That Made Me Go – Huh?

Written by Al Slivinski on July 21, 2025. Posted in Uncategorized.

A good while back I published a post that consisted only of odd/funny things I had picked up on my travels around the web. [My personal favourite: “When seconds count, the government is only minutes away.”]

Perhaps I have lost my sense of humour, as I find little that’s truly funny in my www travels anymore, but here I collect a list of things I’ve encountered lately that made me go ‘huh?’.

—-

I had no idea there was a Socialism 2025 Conference. There is, and one was also held in 2024, and plans are being made for 2026, all in Chicago.

From the website of the Socialism 2025 Conference, held in Chicago in early July, 2025:

Masks: Attendees are required to wear a mask (N95 or K95) over their mouth and nose while indoors at the conference. Masks will be provided for those who do not have a mask. Please note: this requirement applies only to formal conference spaces and sessions—attendees should be aware of the possibility that attendees will be unmasked elsewhere in the conference hotel (or beyond) where they may informally congregate.

Speakers: The sole exception to the masking policy above applies to session speakers, who may remove their masks only while they are delivering presentations from the front of their session room. We strongly encourage session speakers planning to un-mask during their presentations to pick up a free rapid test from the registration desk and test themselves 4-6 hours before their session.

—-

Experiment finds yoghurt can lower house temperature

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg4rg3nqq7go

Yes, an academic says so.

“Dr Ben Roberts, a senior lecturer in healthy buildings at Loughborough University, said applying yoghurt to the outside of windows could lower the temperature by up to 3.5C.”

A ‘senior lecturer in healthy buildings’?

My question: what becomes of yogurt that has been left smeared on windows after say….two weeks?

—-

Dismissal with cause?

A ‘task force’ commissioned by the City of London, where I live, is considering a policy whereby city councillors who lose a re-election bid would be given severance pay.

—

Motability program in the UK

‘Motability’ is just a great made-up word.

From The Telegraph

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/03/13/state-funded-bmws-epitomise-britains-dysfunctional-welfare/

“If you want a brand new BMW i4 M Sport, you have two choices. The first is to lay out the full £52,770. The second is to tell the DWP [UK Dept of Work and Pensions] that your mental health makes it hard to leave the house, claim the enhanced mobility rate of the Personal Independence Payment (Pip), fork out a down payment of £7,999, and get the Government to lease it for you.

In exchange for the mobility component of your benefit, you’ll get a new BMW every three years, your insurance and accident breakdown paid for, your servicing and tyre replacements covered, and your choice of “conventional metallic paint option”.”

—

A Money Loser

The Wall Street Journal reports that Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show lost $40million last year, which is, coincidentally, twice the host’s annual salary.

—

US State Department Devastated

I don’t know who Brian York is, but he has put up a post on X which you can read here:

https://x.com/ByronYork/status/1944121390388449391

The post includes screenshots of apparent government numbers, the veracity of which I cannot determine. I can barely read them. Here’s the punchline from York, which I (and you) can read:

“Looking at State Department documents, it appears the department went from 57,340 total employees in 2007 to 72,895 in 2015 to 80,214 in 2024. So it grew by nearly 23,000 employees before the ‘devastating’ cut of 1,300.”

—-

Spot-fixing doesn’t just happen at the dry cleaners anymore

Again from the WSJ, MLB pitcher Luis Ortiz has been put on paid non-disciplinary leave while the MLB investigates a pitch he threw into the dirt in the third inning of a game. There had been an unusual amount of money bet on the proposition that pitch would be a ball. The concern was for something called ‘spot-fixing’, which has emerged in many sports, now that bettors can wager on almost any event that occurs within the game, either before or during said game.

—

Criminal pub banter comes to the UK

From The Free Press

“On the night of Wednesday, July 16, the Labour government’s Employment Rights Bill passed its second reading in the House of Lords. If the bill goes into law in its current form—and there is not much to stop it now—Britons can be prosecuted for a remark that a worker in a public space overhears and finds insulting. The law will apply to pubs, clubs, restaurants, soccer grounds, and all the other places where the country gathers and, all too frequently, ridicules one another.”

—

Crisis? What Crisis?

WSJ headline: The ‘Smart’ Bathrooms That Can Solve America’s Public Bathroom Crisis

The Corruption of Post-Secondary Education – One in a (Long) Series

Written by Al Slivinski on July 19, 2025. Posted in Education, Standards. 1 Comment on The Corruption of Post-Secondary Education – One in a (Long) Series

I have been writing this post in my head since I started this blog, as it’s prompted by an event that occurred just after I retired from my faculty position. I’m getting around to it now because a friend sent me a recent analysis of university course outlines that dovetails nicely into that story. So – a post in two parts.

I. Hiding Information at UWO

Shortly after I retired in a huff, I was in my office (my Chair did not kick me out of it upon retirement) and for a reason I don’t remember, went to the Departmental website with the intention of looking at a particular course outline for one of our courses. It had been standard practice in our Department to post on our site all of the course outlines for all the undergraduate courses that were being taught in each semester.

To my surprise, those course outlines were no longer posted. I asked a colleague about it, and was told that a directive had come down that Depts were to no longer post course outlines on their websites. Students could have access to them on the actual online sites for the courses in which they were registered, but those would require them to input their student credentials. In other words, the general public was to no longer have access to the syllabi of the courses taught at Western.

My colleague suggested they thought it was because not long ago some nutcase had gone into a classroom at U of Waterloo in which a gender studies course was being held, and stabbed two students and the professor. A terrible incident, to be sure, so the reasoning is that course outlines available to the public will allow crazy people to find out where and when courses of which they disapprove are being taught and then go and attack those in the classroom. Of course, this has not ever happened before or since, but you can’t be too careful, eh?

Thus, bowing to pressure from the Usual Faculty Suspects, the UWO Admin had ordered that course outlines with this information could not be made public. I was distressed – no, pissed off – by this, and went to see the Dept Chair to get confirmation that was what was going on. He confirmed it, and also mentioned in passing that some had suggested that we post course outlines that have the classrooms and meeting times deleted, but that was decided to be too much work.

I said ‘If I were still teaching I could prepare a version of my course outline with that information removed in six seconds’. He just looked at me.

Having recently looked again at the Dept website, I note that a sort of workaround has been found. One can view and download the syllabi from offerings of the course in previous years. Of course, if the instructor of the course changes, the previous year’s syllabi may not be very accurate, and a course that was not offered previously will have no info posted about it. I went to the websites of some other Depts in the Faculty and found they do the same: post previous year’s syllabi. I found some of those posted syllabi quite interesting, but will save any thoughts on them for another post.

[It is an irony lost on The Usual Faculty Suspects that said faculty, holding the safest and cushiest jobs on planet earth, are utterly consumed by worries about ‘safety’. Note, however, that students screaming into the faces of other students who are in a graduation ceremony – that is not a safety issue.]

I very much doubt any of you have much interest in reading university course outlines in any case. The thing is, if you wonder where the shit we all deal with daily comes from, you could learn a lot from reading the course outlines in gender studies and social work and sociology and anthropogy and even history and business these days.

I would suggest maybe you should, even if they are a year out of date. Which leads directly to part II below.

II. What is on university course outlines?

A friend sent me a copy of a paper titled ‘Closed Classrooms? An Analysis of College Syllabi on Contentious Issues’ .

In this analysis, the three authors make use of an interesting data base called OSP. This is, to quote them –

“…a unique database of college syllabi collected by the “Open Syllabus Project” (OSP). The OSP has amassed more than 27 million syllabi from around the world primarily by scraping them from university websites. They date as far back as 2008, though a majority are from the last ten years. Most of the data comes from universities in the United States, U.K., Canada, and Australia.”

[Note that ‘syllabus’ = ‘course outline’. The terms are interchangeable.]

Using this data base, the analysis they undertake can best be explained by an example.

Take a contentious topic – for example, Racism and the American Criminal Justice System.

A highly influential book on this topic is Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness, published in 2010.

It lays the responsibility for the undeniable increase in incarceration rates in the US at the feet of white racism. The three authors of the paper summarize the thesis of Alexander’s book thusly:

“Alexander’s book claimed that American history should be understood as a cyclical struggle between white supremacists and advocates for racial justice. While advocates for racial justice eventually succeed in overthrowing systems of racial oppression (as they did in the case of slavery and Jim Crow), white supremacists are resilient. Thus, after the successful passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, Alexander says, they waged a new drug war that stirred up racialized fears of urban crime and social breakdown. In this way, Jim Crow—a system of racial oppression and social control—was reborn, just in a more sinister form.”

They then point out that the book elicited immediate and ongoing pushback from a number of other writers and scholars. This generated an entire literature of agreement and disagreement on the causes of mass incarceration. The authors then ask this question:

In what proportion of course syllabi in which the Alexander book appears do any of the books arguing against Alexander also appear? In other words, when faculty tell their students to read Alexander, with what frequency do they also tell the students to read her critics?

Here are the results from the OSP data base:

Table 1: Frequency with which Prominent Critics are Assigned with Alexander’s The New Jim Crow

__________________________________________________________________

Forman (2011) 149 of 4,309 (since 2012) 3.46%

Pfaff (2014) 3 of 3,758 (since 2015) 0.08%

Fortner (2015) 53 of 3,405 (since 2016) 1.56%

Pfaff (2017) 49 of 2,438 (since 2018) 2.01%

Forman (2017) 84 of 2,438 (since 2018) 3.45%

Sharkey (2018) 9 of 1,951 (since 2019) 0.46%

The names are the authors who have written books contesting Alexander’s analysis. The (since 201x) indicate that the study only looked at syllabi that were dated one year after the book indicated was published. They understand that a professor cannot be faulted for not putting a book on a reading list before it is actually published.

So, what we have here is that faculty who assign Alexander to be read almost never assign any of her critics.

But wait, there’s more.

One can also ask the opposite question. Among those reading lists that assign Alexander’s critics to be read, what percentage also assign Alexander?

Here’s the result of that:

Table 2: Frequency with which Alexander is Taught in Courses that Assign her Critics

____________________________________________________________

Forman (2011) #1* 82%

Pfaff (2014) #1 75%

Fortner (2015) #1 72%

Pfaff (2017) #1 72%

Forman (2017) #1 56%

Sharkey (2018) #1 26%

The two tables are kinda asymmetric, ain’t they?

The authors don’t stop there. They ask also: what other readings are assigned to students by faculty who have those students read Alexander? Answer: other leftist critics. The authors write:

“The top three titles assigned with Alexander are Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete?, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, and Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (see Table 3). Others in the top ten include Paulo Freire’ Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Golden Gulag. Broadly speaking, then, it seems that most of the authors assigned with Alexander are those that reinforce rather than complicate her critical perspective.”

Teaching critical thinking, yewbetcha.

The paper goes on like this, and if you would like a copy of all 67 pages of it, drop me a line, as I would be happy to send along the pdf. They look at other contentious topics like abortion policy and the Israel/Palestine conflict. The story with those is essentially the same. To echo something I wrote in part I above, if you asked the profs who assign Alexander but not her critics why that is so, most would answer that they are not willing to make their students feel unsafe by exposing them to these other clearly racist and evil writings.

One other element is of interest here, I think, and it is captured in this table:

Table 4: Assignments of Alexander’s The New Jim Crow by Discipline __________________________________________________________________

Discipline Count, Percent

__________________________________________________________________

History 1,052, 22.4%

Sociology 1,032, 21.9%

English Literature 636, 13.5%

Criminal Justice 606 12.9%

Political Science 523, 11.1%

Social Work 296, 6.3%

Law 205, 4.4%

Philosophy 134, 2.8%

Education, 126, 2.7%

Theology 96, 2.0%

Here, the number after the discipline is the number of syllabi in that discipline that include Alexander on the reading list, and the percentage indicates the percentage of course outlines which include Alexander’s book that are from courses in that discipline. That a book on the US criminal justice system would be assigned in some History and Sociology courses is no surprise. Same with Criminal Justice. But that it is assigned in more Eng Lit courses than Criminal Justice courses? Huh? And way more often in Eng Lit than in Law?

21^st century English profs have little interest in teaching literature or, god help us, writing. They are busy being front-line warriors for social justice.

As I noted in Part I, I looked through some (past) course outlines posted by other Depts in the UWO Faculty of Social Science, partly because I was curious about how they looked relative to what is in the OSP data. It was, as I said, quite interesting, and I will be writing more on that soon.

Crime and Media, Part Two

Written by Al Slivinski on July 16, 2025. Posted in London, News Media, Safety.

More coverage has appeared in the local Freeps on the Richmond Row stabbing. In a front-page Freeps article on Tuesday, July 15, we have the following:

“The accused is a prolific offender with dozens of prior convictions,” Truong said in a post Sunday. “He was out on bail at the time of the attack. Thanks to the swift response of our officers, he was quickly identified and taken into custody. He remains there, and we will do everything in our power to contest his release.

“This is not just a policing issue. There are broader societal challenges at play, and we must acknowledge that some individuals, regardless of their circumstances, pose a real and ongoing risk to public safety…”

The Freeps continues to identify the accused only as ‘a 33-year old London man”. It also says he was to appear in court last Friday, and despite the piece appearing the following Tuesday, does not say what happened at that hearing. Was he released? Chief Truong says nothing about that either.

The Freeps article also says that after his March arrest, Dentelbeck ‘wasn’t held for a bail hearing’. I don’t know exactly what that means. Was he simply brought before court, read the charges against him and released? That’s my suspicion. Clearly he was not held in custody for any duration, else he would not have been able to stab Kools’ manager last week.

My favourite quote from the article, as it shows just what sort of politicians the police (and the public) have to deal with, is this one –

Coun. David Ferreira, whose Ward 13 encompasses downtown, said downtown is safe but still has its issues like other cities.

“There’s a lot of people in the downtown area, so with more people . . . you may see higher numbers of certain things happening here and there,” he said. “I don’t really see a difference between downtown and other areas of the city, so of course Richmond Row is safe and there are a lot of people (who) will attest to that.”

To be clear, I spend a lot of time in downtown London, both on Richmond Row and in the core area around the arena. Dundas and Richmond, basically. Obviously, I am not sufficiently worried about my safety that it keeps me away – partly because I am trying to do my bit to keep the assholes from winning. However, Ferreira’s statement that there is no difference between downtown and other areas of the city is pure, unadulterated bullshit. He is either a liar or utterly ignorant. In either case, he should not be a councillor.

On the other hand, Mike Smith, the owner of Kools’ and a long-time business owner in downtown London is quoted as saying he thinks Richmond Row has gotten safer over the last year, and credits the police and Chief Truong for this. That is an opinion I can take seriously.

However, a follow-up article in today’s (Wednesday) Freeps by Jane Sims is titled ‘Richmond Row Stabbing An Anomaly That Could Have Happened Anywhere’.

Well, ‘anomaly’ means a ‘departure from the normal or common order’, so I would certainly hope any stabbing is that. But ‘could have happened anywhere’? Really?

The article consists of a number of quotes from one man – the aforementioned Mr. Smith – and unsupported assertions from Ms. Sims. It seems an obvious attempt to convey the message that things are fine downtown, people should not stay away. I can see why Smith would want to make that point, he has two restaurants operating within throwing distance of the core and two on Richmond Row. He doesn’t want people to avoid going to those. But the Freeps? Perhaps Sims could have made more than one phone call, and talked to more than just one downtown or Richmond Row business owner about how they see the recent history of policing and safety around their businesses. That could have been quite informative.

Ah, but that would take time, effort. The Freeps seems to mostly put time and effort into writing headlines, like ‘Who wants to be in a 3-way?’ (May 30).

Crime and Media, 21st Century Edition

Written by Al Slivinski on July 11, 2025. Posted in Government, News Media, Safety.

I had intended to write an article about the lawsuits that our local hospital system has filed against various former employees and other persons, alleging complicity in a long-running fraud that cost the hospital system 10s of millions of dollars. I may yet do so, right now I have little to say that is not already on the record, but I am still poking away.

Instead, this is about a different crime committed in London, which you may also have read about. An employee of a bar on Richmond Street, located somewhere between Central and Dufferin, which is to say, the area across from Victoria Park, was stabbed at 3:30pm last Monday. The victim was taken to the hospital critically injured. The perpetrator, one Leslie Jacob James Dentelbeck, 33, of London, was located and arrested on Wednesday morning.

Now, the London Free Press story on this does not name the accused, I got it from the London Police News site. Hockey players accused of sexual assault the Freeps will name and show pictures of, but not this guy.

Here’s the other thing about Dentelbeck the Freeps does not mention in their story, which is essentially a cut and paste job from the London Police web site. This guy has been arrested and charged many times before, a fact that was laid out by a commenter on the Freeps story, to whom we are all indebted. Someone is willing to do some reporting…..

Here is a partial accounting of what our friend Dentelbeck has been up to:

March 18, 2025 –

Failing to stop for police/pursuit;

Two (2) counts of possession of firearm or ammunition contrary to prohibition order;

Two (2) counts of careless storage of firearm, weapon, prohibited device;

June 28, 2024 –

Failing to stop for police/pursuit;

Possession of property obtained by crime over $5000;

Dangerous operation of a conveyance;

Resisting arrest;

Failing to stop at scene of accident;

Two police cruisers were damaged to the tune of $10k

April 22, 2022 –

Dangerous operation of a motor vehicle;

Impaired operation of a motor vehicle;

Resisting arrest;

Possession of property obtained by crime over $5000; and

Two (2) counts of possession of property obtained by crime under $5000.

Another $2k damage to police cruisers.

This is just the list of charges against him by the police, as laid out on the London Police website for these various previous occurrences. What we do not know is whether the public prosecutor took any of these charges to court or whether they were dropped. It is not up to the police what happens once a suspect is brought before a judge, so it doesn’t appear on the police web site. If it appears somewhere, I don’t know where. If anyone does, do let me know.

Whatever is true about that, our man Leslie Jacob James Dentelbeck, 33, of London, has now graduated to stabbing someone. He fled the scene of the stabbing on a scooter, so no ‘operation of a motor vehicle’ charges this time. LPS says he was charged with ‘aggravated assault’ and ‘breach of probation’.

He is still in custody, but scheduled to appear in court on the day I am writing this. I predict we will never find out if he is released from custody again after today’s court appearance. Unless, of course, he commits another crime afterward.

This person has been involved in criminal activity on a repeated basis for at least three years. He has now critically injured someone who was just trying to do their job. It seems to me of considerable interest to the London community to know what becomes of Dentelbeck after this. But our local media – the Freeps. CBC London, CTV – has few resources, and no interest in devoting them to following what happens here.

The CBC has an article headlined ‘Frustration builds as province delays delivering new homeless hub’

CBC is always up for covering that mean old Conservative provincial government.

The Freeps has a nice story that ‘explains’ why you have more fireflies in your backyard this year. Good to know, eh?

I don’t have cable any more. If CTV London follows up on what happens to Dentelbeck after today, someone let me know, ok? I won’t hold my breath…

What else is there to say? This is the 21^st century Canadian justice system in operation, along with its keen coverage by our trusted, reliable, news sources.

Epilogue: Writing now a day after posting the above. Today’s Freeps has a follow-up story in which the establishment at which the stabbed employee worked is named – Joe Kool’s, a long-standing bar. It also notes that he was a manager there, and is now listed by the hospital as in ‘fair condition’, so there is that to be grateful for. The story still does not name the accused, nor tell us what happened when he went before a judge yesterday.

Others who work in or manage shops nearby are interviewed, one of them stating that a person had stood outside his establishment causing a disturbance for 40 minutes and threatening to stab him. His call to the police resulted in no police showing up. This is consistent with stories I have been told by a friend who also runs an establishment in that area. The police do not show up when you call about someone causing a disturbance or stealing. The guy interviewed in the Freeps article is quoted thusly: “They (police) don’t even show up no matter how many times I call them, but the foot patrol is good; when I call them. They show up.”

I am left to wonder what that means. Is calling the ‘foot patrol’ different from calling the police? Do they have a separate number that merchants are given?

Later in the article, we have this:

“When asked about merchants’ comments about police response, London Police Sgt Sandasha Bough would only speak to Monday’s stabbing investigation.”

She then spits out a boiler plate paragraph saying what a wonderful job LPS did in this case. I won’t repeat it. The quote concludes with:

“If somebody is complaining about the police, then we encourage them to go through a complaint process.”

Yea, of course you do. Fill out form PC-6759-BS and we will get back to you.

Full of Sound and Fury

Written by Al Slivinski on July 3, 2025. Posted in Culture.

My sweetheart and I are both big fans of live theatre. We have attended less than we used to in recent years in no small part because we share an aversion to being lectured from the stage. However, last year, on the recommendation of a friend, we got tickets to a play at The Stratford Shakespeare Festival called Salesman in China. That play was based on the fact that in 1983, playwright Arthur Miller made history by travelling to China to direct a production of his classic play Death of a Salesman, being staged by the Beijing People’s Art Theatre.

It was very, very good. This year Stratford is doing a version of Macbeth, and we had seen a staging of Coriolanus some years back by the same director that we liked very much, so we got tickets for a performance last Sunday.

Chatting at the intermission and after, we agreed; disappointing. Not awful, but definitely disappointing. The director chose to set his Macbeth during the biker wars of the 1990s, so Macbeth being Thane of Glamis means he is an important dude in the gang of (King) Duncan. Now I have no issue at all with re-setting Shakespeare’s plays in different eras or places. Part of the magic of Will is that his themes are universal and timeless. I can easily see that the key motif behind The Tragedy of Macbeth – the price to be paid for an overweening desire for power – can arise in a biker gang as well as in Scotland. I recall a movie made by Kenneth Branagh some years back of Hamlet that was set in the late 18^th century, with many of the principals often dressed in WWI-era military garb. I thought that was an excellent film of one of Shakespeare’s plays.

Our problem with this staging of biker-Macbeth was that it to a great extent abandoned what I think is magical about live theatre.

(If you think you might go see this play, stop reading, spoilers are coming….)

The opening scene is completely made up, a couple of guys rowing a boat out into the water, then throwing a hooded figure overboard, after attaching a concrete block to him with a chain. This leads to a visual effect that looks like you are seeing the body weighted down under the water, at which point LOUD thunderous music is played while the credits for the play are flashed on a black curtain. That’s movie stuff, it is what you get at the start of a James Bond or Marvel film. I don’t need that to get me excited about Macbeth. The credits are in the program, man.

A blurb from a review of the play in the Globe and Mail says “Recreates the expansive magic of film”. Yea, that seems to clearly have been the goal of this staging, and who needs it? Live theatre is magic, in a way that film can never be.

The main set is a cheap motel, which serves as the home base of Macbeth and his evil Lady. Suitable enough for a biker gang, I imagine, but the ponderous moving around the stage of the large pieces of that set, so as to allow the audience to see what was happening in the various rooms of the motel, was off-putting. It spoiled the flow of the play, in my opinion.

None of this is to say the performances were not in many cases first-rate, despite the drag put on the production by this choice of staging. Tom McCamus as Macbeth was very good. He’s a long-time veteran of Stratford, and what he and his fellow actors do that I find so amazing is to bring off Shakespeare’s rhythmic, Elizabethan English as…..conversation.

Of course it is conversation, and meant to be so. Will was after all a playwright, but when I read one of his plays on a page, it is all I can do to suss out what is being said. These actors just let you see two fellows dressed in biker leathers having a chat about a mate of theirs. It’s magic, pure and simple.

And, the best moment in the play, the most memorable bit of acting, goes to Tom Rooney, another Stratford vet, playing MacDuff. There is a scene after the murder of Duncan and Banquo, after Macbeth’s gang are running amok and killing widely, where MacDuff is brought the news that his entire family has been killed. His ‘wife and babes’, as the text has it. Rooney’s portrayal of his character’s grief is stunning. He doesn’t chew up the stage, or scream, he portrays a man so cut asunder that he can barely stand. He keeps trying to get up, asking again and again…’but all of them?’ …. ‘surely not’ until he can only kneel and look at the floor, broken by grief.

That is what I go to Stratford for, to see that talent, that ability to make you feel the rage and grief of a man who has lost all that he loves. It was riveting, worth the not-inconsiderable admission price.

Lady Macbeth is played by the veteran Lucy Peacock, and our joint reaction to her portrayal was that we were looking to see Katey Sagal. I think Ms. Sagal would make a formidable Lady Macbeth, in fact. (If you’ve seen the TV series Sons of Anarchy you will get the reference, otherwise, don’t worry about it.)

But the movie effects kept coming. The climactic battle scene, in which is fulfilled the witches’ prophecy that ‘Birnam Wood will come to Dunsinane’ has the bikers sticking bush branches on the front of their Harleys. Really? I’m all in for theatrical suspension of disbelief, but. Soldiers on foot employing flora as camouflage as they approach a besieged castle? Sure. Bikers sticking tree branches on the front of their Harleys as they ride up to a cheap motel? Sorry, no.

There is some other kind of technical wizardry in which what happens on stage is reflected on what seems to be a huge mirror behind the characters in some scenes, except that sometimes the characters in the mirror are exact mirror images and sometimes they do different things than the characters out front. I don’t know how they pull that off, but again, technical wizardry is not why I go to see live theatre.

In that climactic branches-on-Harleys battle scene the bikers appear to be multiplied in this mirror surface. Clever, again, I guess. Yawn.

I recall a scene in a play at Stratford many years ago – I don’t recall which play – in which the characters were on a ship, caught in a storm. Other than some offstage lightning and thunder effects, the whole thing was brought off by having actors in a line, seemingly tugging together on large ropes. Ropes that were in fact not there. Yet, with their body movement and their expressions, they conveyed with great conviction a group of sailors fighting for their lives in a storm. That, my friends, is the magic of theatre.

I think I get Stratford’s dilemma, however. What was the last movie you saw without cgi in it, and plenty of explosions? That is entertainment today in large part, and those tasked with keeping live theatre alive and kicking are perhaps not confident that people will come back if they don’t get some razzle-dazzle to tell their friends about.

They are very possibly correct in believing that, sad as I find it. The performance we attended got a standing ovation, which these days means nothing, really – can’t recall the last show of any kind that I attended that did not get one of those. Still, from what we could tell, most of the audience seemed rather more pleased than we were by the performance.

Good Things

Written by Al Slivinski on June 28, 2025. Posted in Culture. 1 Comment on Good Things

There remain good things in this world, but I don’t write much about them. This post will be an exception, as I am going to tell you about The Book Addict. This is a used book store in my town, located in a strip mall, as are so many little shops these days, and I love the place. It is small, I guess maybe 20 feet wide by 40 feet deep, if that, and made up of a labyrinth of shelves that hold thousands of books, with hand-lettered signs marking the various categories: Literature, Canadian History, Biography, etc.

It is, to be honest, too much to take in. I’m sure when I am in there my gaze passes over dozens of books that would interest me, but which I don’t even notice, due to pure sensory overload. That’s ok, it just means that it is always fruitful to go back and browse through again. I have never gone in there without emerging with an armful of used volumes, but my last visit was particularly rewarding.

I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but in the Literature section I came across several novels written by Doris Lessing. This is significant only because commentaries on her life and work appear frequently in my favourite literary magazine, The Times Literary Supplement. She is always written about approvingly there, and so she has been on my purely mental ‘I should read’ list. Well, here was my chance, so I selected ‘The Good Terrorist’, which the inside cover said had been originally published in 1985. That surprised me, as I had a vision of her (based on nothing much) as an early 20^th century British author. Turns out I was not so wrong, as I have since learned that she was born to British parents in Persia in 1919, then lived on a farm in what was then Southern Rhodesia until moving to London as an adult in 1949 with her son. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007 at the age of 88. This woman was a mid-20^th century writer, but had a very long career, writing more than 30 novels, the first published in 1950, along with other work, including opera libretti and four plays. Some of her later novels are apparently science fiction.

Back to the book. I am more halfway through The Good Terrorist and it is smashingly good. Lessing was apparently a confirmed leftist in her youth. MI5 and MI6 compiled a file on her that covered 20 years of her life. Well, this book is a very clear-eyed look at the sort of people who embrace that sort of thinking. The book is set in London during the Thatcher years, and the main characters, all on the dole, are members of The Communist Centre Union, who are eager to explain to anyone who will listen why that ‘Centre’ in their organisation’s name is very important. They go to demonstrations, discuss whether they should ally themselves with the IRA, and generally take themselves very seriously. No Trotskyists allowed, they have decided. It is first and foremost a novel about people, and its protagonist is an impossibly smart and competent woman who is very very good at sizing people up, but has no clue about her own psyche.

Lessing has ‘the writer’s eye’, her writing lets you see very situation in the novel with utter clarity. Interestingly, after starting this novel, I read an online ‘literary analysis’ of Lessing’s novels which was quite dismissive of this particular book. I rather suspect this stems from the novel’s less-than-heroic portrayal of its wanna-be revolutionaries. That doesn’t play well in 21^st-century literary circles. Perhaps I won’t like Lessing’s other writing as much as The Good Terrorist, – but there is only one way to find out.

I will be going back to The Book Addict sometime after I finish this for more Lessing, you can be sure, but on this last visit I also scored a volume containing three of E. M. Forster’s novels, and a copy of James Michener’s Poland. With my surname I have to read that last one, and Forster is another 20^th century English novelist whose name comes up regularly in the TLS.

So, at this last Book Addict stop I scored 5 novels for $13, tax included. Even if only the Lessing novel turns out to be good, I am so ahead of the game it’s not funny.

The Book Addict. One of the 21^st century’s Very Good Shops.

The Good Terrorist. One of the 20^th century’s Very Good Novels.

Tik-Tok Socialism

Written by Al Slivinski on June 26, 2025. Posted in Politics.

If you follow US politics at all, you will have read that one Zohran Mamdani, an Assemblyman (as they are called) in the New York State legislature, has won some 44% of the vote in the Democratic primary election for Mayor of New York City.

Now, the details are kinda complicated, so stay with me here. First, yes, this is only the Democratic primary, the winner will have to run in the general election against whoever wins the Republican primary, as well as any independents who choose to run. Eric Adams, the current sitting Mayor of NYC, has said he intends to run in that way. The phrase ‘snowball’s chance in hell’ comes to mind with regard to Mr. Adams, but that’s just me. Further, no Republican candidate has come anywhere near to winning the general election for Mayor in NYC in ages. Bloomberg was the last, although he switched to calling himself ‘unaffiliated’ by the end of his time in office.

Beyond that, you might think that 44% doesn’t sound like ‘winning’, but the Democrats have switched to using rank-order voting for their primary. What that means is that voters do not tick a box next to the name of a candidate, they instead rank all the candidates from 1 to whatever. Then a computer program first counts all the ‘1^st place’ votes for all candidates. That 44% is the percentage of all first place votes that Mamdani got. The second highest total was 36%, by – wait for it – Andrew Cuomo, the former Governor of the state of New York, who stepped down from office in August of 2021, after a NY Attorney General investigation concluded he had ‘sexually harassed’ 11 women.

Back to this voting system, since no candidate won a majority of the 1^st-place votes, what the computer will do is eliminate some of the candidates who got the least number of such votes (11 were running, I believe) look at the rankings of those who voted for those eliminated candidates, and add those voters’ votes to the totals of whoever they ranked second. So the remaining candidates, including Mamdani and Cuomo, will gain more votes, and this will continue until some candidate gets 50% plus 1.

So, in principle, this process could put Cuomo over the top before it does Mamdani, if most people gave their second place votes to Cuomo and few to Mamdani.

No one seems to expect that to happen, including Cuomo, who has apparently conceded that he has lost.

Now, you can read a lot about Mr. Cuomo, he’s been in politics a long time. As to the 34-year-old Mamdani, here are some things about him and the platform he ran on which I dug up easily on the great wide web.

His campaign promises include:

Set up city-owned-and-operated grocery stores to lower the price of food.
Institute rent-control for the vast majority of NYC’s rental properties.
Institute a New York City personal income tax of 2% on all incomes over $1million.
Raise the top state corporate tax rate to 11.5% (this is a state tax, I don’t see how he could do this, but it is part of his platform, which you can read here)
Set a price of zero for riding NYC buses
Spend $10Billion a year for 10 years to build affordable housing. (That would be more than 10% of NYC’s yearly budget)
Raise the minimum wage in NYC to $30/hour by 2030

It is perhaps of interest that the editorial boards of both the New York Times (leftie) and New York Post (rightie) urged their readers not to vote for Mamdani.

As to his bio, his parents immigrated to the US from Uganda when he was 7. They are a Columbia University professor and an award-winning film director born in India. He went to prestigious and very expensive schools as a kid, then graduated from Bowdoin College (private, annual tuition = $86k) with a degree in African Studies. Mamdani participated in the 2024 Columbia anti-Israel encampment (no, he was not a student then). And in 2020 he posted this on his X account:

“We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety. What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD,”

So, I find myself asking a question that echoes what I asked back during the 2024 US presidential campaign – ‘Nearly 9 million people in NYC and this is what the Democrats produce as their two leading candidates for mayor?’

Cuomo vs Mandani or Trump vs Harris – which is the worse choice to be faced with?

There is a broader lesson to be learned from this, and I am hardly the first to point it out. I went to the NYC election site, and found that a total of just under 1million ballots were submitted in this primary. The City University of New York did a study of voting in NYC this year in which they concluded the following:

“The Census estimates that 5.6 million voting age citizens (CVAP) live in NYC.”

So, if only half of those were Democrats, that would say that some 38% of Democratic voters (i.e, 1million divided by 2.8million) actually voted in this primary. In fact, since the conventional wisdom is that many more than half of New Yorkers are Democrats, the actual turnout for this election is likely hovering around 30% of the Democratic voters in NYC.

If indeed then Mr. Mamdani becomes Mayor, it would be tempting to say it will happen on the basis of 46% (first-choice) support from 30-odd percent of the NYC voting age population. (That comes to about 16% of the entire voting age population in NYC, for the math-averse…)

That’s not really accurate, though. Whatever the pundits say, there still has to be a general election, and perhaps enough of the 4+million potential voters who did not vote in this primary will look at Mr Mamdani and decide it is worth their trouble to turn out and vote for someone else. Perhaps, but right now no one in NYC seems to think that is likely.

I would suggest that in any case, what happened in this Dem primary is the wider story here. It is also why the US gets the miserable and extreme candidates it does for President. Primary elections for US president in the various states in which they are held typically feature turnouts of less than 30%. If that is the percentage that turns out to vote, you can be sure it is not a 30% that is representative of the general population of Democrats or Republicans. It is fan(atic)s and true believers who show up for primaries. Indeed, one of the Trump team’s standard threats against Republican legislators who do not support his policies is to ‘primary them’. This is, to be sure, a tactic they learned from the far-left wing of the Democratic party.

When the turnout will be low in any case, the threat to swing the vote against any particular candidate by having all your fervently supportive confederates show up on election day is quite credible.

If he does become Mayor, I think it might be worthwhile to travel to Mamdani-era NYC just to see what the produce is like in the People’s Grocery Stores.

Epilogue I: Back when I taught courses in Political Economy, one topic covered every year was Voting Systems. We read about and studied Plurality Rule (i.e., first-past-the-post) versus Ranked Ballots versus Runoff Systems, etc. A standard argument from its proponents was that ranked ballots would keep extremist candidates from winning office.

Epilogue II: I have said since the emergence of Donald Trump that the Democratic Party (and most of the media’s) continuing to blame his victories on ‘misinformation’ and the ignorant, racist masses was the biggest problem faced by the USA. Someone, somewhere, needs to take a clear-eyed look at how politics in the US got to the point of offering up two candidates for President as unqualified as Trump and Harris. I have seen little sign that anyone who matters is doing that, but I will say the same about Mamdani becoming Mayor of NYC.

An article in today’s Free Press by Reihan Salam of The Manhattan Institute cites immediate post-election analysis of the NYC vote by political scientist Owen Wilson that sheds one interesting ray of light on the outcome. Wilson says that looking at precinct level data, it is striking to note that Cuomo did better in precincts with a median household income of less than $70k or more than $225k. The poor and very rich. Mamdani got more votes from the precincts with median household incomes between those two numbers. Salam characterizes those Mamdani folks as the over-educated, entitled and under-employed. They all think they should be tenured professors or financial industry mavens, and they are not. And, it is the system’s fault that they are not.

I quote here the final sentences from Salam’s article, as I really like the term ‘Tik-Tok Jacobins’.

“Just as importantly, Mamdani and candidates like him are not going away. And until sensible, sane leaders on both sides grapple with their complacency, cowardice, and pathological lack of imagination, and the way they led us here, TikTok Jacobins will keep winning—and not just in New York.”

Poor Mother Russia

Written by Al Slivinski on June 23, 2025. Posted in Health Care, Politics, Standards.

No one much needs to be convinced that Vladimir Putin runs Russia like a more-corrupt version of a 19^th-century czar. Even DJT knows that, it is possibly why he seems to admire Vlad so much. Domestically corrupt, and internationally dangerous, that sort of sums Putin up, particularly since his incursions into Ukraine.

It’s a really big country, eh?

That Putin is popular among Russians has been said and written by many. According to Russia’s Levada Center, an independent research organization based in Moscow, his approval rating stood at 83% in a poll they did in December of 2023.

Now this is Russia, so one has to ask: how ‘independent’ is this Levada, really, and even if it is, how free do you believe Russians feel to answer truthfully in such a poll? Still, according to a report in US News in December of 2024, NORC, a very reputable opinion survey organization based at The University of Chicago, did a poll in Russia that found (as quoted in US News):

Nearly two-thirds (65%) of respondents indicated they would support a Putin bid for a fifth presidential term in the country’s March election – a share that includes 53% who said they would “strongly” approve of his nomination. Sixty-six percent also said they were more likely to vote for Putin over another candidate.

Not 83%, obviously, but still pretty damn high.

There is a standard story about authoritarian governments – and perhaps also less-authoritarian ones – that they exaggerate, if not invent, outside threats as a way to engender support in a population for which the domestic situation is miserable. The Nazis in the early 30s, notably, played up the threat from Jews and France and Russia as a way to gain support when things were going very badly for the German people. I don’t mean that to be a complete analysis of the rise of Nazism in Germany. It was a complex mess, but it fits this standard story.

So we can ask if something like that is behind Putin’s second war on Ukraine. Is he trying to keep his people’s eyes off the fact that their lives are pretty miserable under his kleptocracy?

It’s a tempting idea, but doesn’t stand up well if we look at the most obvious statistic, Russia’s GDP per capita. That tells us how much Putin’s Russian economy is able to generate in income per Russian. If that is low, it is bad for said Russians, and a reason for Putin to find a distraction: like Ukraine as a ‘war against Western aggression’.

But here’s the thing. Using data from The World Bank, Worldometer says that Russia’s GDP per capita, in common US purchasing power parity dollars, was $44,120 in 2023. That ranks it 47^th out of 181 countries, and in the same ball park as other Eastern European countries like Slovakia and Poland. It is hardly in the US/UK/Canada etc first-world class, but well ahead of Ukraine at 95^th, and even China, at 75^th.

It is clearly in the 2^nd-world class, at least, and that does not seem like something that needs distracting from. China hasn’t felt the need to invade another country…..at least, not yet.

But here is what got me thinking about this. I found myself at a site called The American Enterprise, reading an article about the health of the Russian population. It was eye-opening. It starts with the observation that the average years of education in the Russian population is just over 12.5 years. More importantly, that is almost exactly the average for all OECD countries. The OECD, if you did not know, is the ‘club’ of all the rich countries in the world – the first world, for sure.

So, again, Russia seems to be doing rather well.

Then they dive into health statistics for the Russian population, and things no longer look so good.

Here’s Figure 3 from the AE article. It shows Russian life expectancy at age 15 (in red) relative to a bunch of very-much-3rd-world countries:

To be fair, Russians’ life expectancy at age 15 is better than for many African countries, but it is well below that of Bangladesh, Sudan and Ethiopia. A Russian who makes it to age 15 can expect to live to the age of 54, on average. That is not first world. In the US it is 80years and in Canada 83.

The next Figure tells one a lot about why this is true. It depicts the death rates from two causes: cardiovascular disease and ‘injuries’. The data for these two causes is given below for Russia (in red) and all OECD countries (in blue).

Injuries, by the way, refers to deaths by homicide, suicide, poisoning and accidents. Russia has the worst death-rates in both categories relative to all OECD countries. By a big margin. The graph indicates the Russan death rate for CVD is some three times the OECD average and that for injuries more than twice the OECD average. Jeez.

The AE piece goes on to show that Russia does badly relative to the rest of the world also in patenting and patent applications, despite its high level of education. I suspect that in a society in which the legal system is widely viewed as corrupt, there is little incentive to file for a patent – but that is just my guess. There are many highly-educated Russian ex-pats, one was a colleague of mine back in the day. A very bright fellow. I wonder what the patenting rate for Russian ex-pats is like.

Anyway, I am generally of the view that GDP/capita, although far from meaningless, cannot give us a full picture of the situation for people in any country. These health statistics do at least suggest to me that the Russian population might in fact need to be distracted by their leader from the relative grimness of their lives. That is certainly not the whole explanation for Putin’s Ukraine adventure, but it might be part.

Your Lyin’ AIs

Written by Al Slivinski on June 22, 2025. Posted in Culture, Secrecy, Standards. No Comments on Your Lyin’ AIs

I am no fan of AI. People I respect tell me of instances where they or someone they know was able to use it to greatly improve their writing or research. I read reports that insist it makes coding quicker and simpler. All that may be true, but my expectation is that 99% of the time it will be used by the lazy and stupid to allow them to be even lazier and produce work that is stupider than are they. My post on the Summer Reading List last week is one example of such usage.

To compound that concern, currently when an AI-driven LLM like ChatGPT produces something nonsensical, we find out about it when some human being somewhere is knowledgeable enough to point out the nonsense. As the years go by and more and more folks get through their education using these programs, there will be fewer and fewer humans in a position to point out that the LLM has no clothes. I’ll be dead by then, but…

I came upon a new blog site the other day called The Weekly Dish, written by Andrew Sullivan. Found a good bit worth reading there, even though you have to be a paid subscriber to read everything on the site or listen to the podcasts. One of his posts introduced me to an aspect of LLMs about which I had not thought. It’s now, in my mind, the worst thing I know about LLMs.

AI and LLMs are, of course, all built and operated by our tech-bro masters, and that turns out to be important, given the world-view of those people. Brave New World, indeed.

Below is an excerpt from the post (an old one, March 1, 2024) in which he describes the outcome of an experiment he did with Gemini, which is Google’s LLM question-answering counterpart to ChatGPT.

Note that the reference to Damore below is to one James Damore, who was fired by Google in 2017 (ancient history) for suggesting that there were differences between men and women that might be partly the reason less than 50% of software engineers at Google were women.

And take Gemini’s vow never to replicate “stereotypes” about groups of any kind. (“Perpetuating gender stereotypes,” after all, was the charge delivered to Damore upon his firing.) The question obviously arises: what if the stereotypes are actually true? In fact, they almost invariably are: “Over 50 studies have now been performed assessing the accuracy of demographic, national, political, and other stereotypes. Stereotype accuracy is one of the largest and most replicable effects in all of social psychology.” The pernicious problem with stereotypes is assuming that a random member of a group will always reflect the stereotype of the group. But that’s not the same as simply describing average group differences between, say, men and women, or between various ethnicities. That’s just observation of reality — a reality Google wants to lie about.

Ask Gemini which ethnic group commits the most crime in America and it will refuse to answer because such a question is “misleading and harmful” It redirects you to an advocacy site for “creating a more just and equitable criminal justice system.” Ask it if there is a difference between a trans man and a biological man, and you will be directed to critical gender theory. Ask it if men can have vaginas, and it will tell you it depends, and then it directs you to “reliable sources” which are — surprise! — trans activist groups.

In fact, on every contentious contemporary issue, I was unable to find a single one that didn’t reflect the most far-left position, while offering no alternative resources to balance it out. It’s critical theory all the way down — presented as objective fact.

You can read Sullivan’s entire post – it’s long – here.

The truth will be what the tech-bros say it is, and in enough years, no one will know how to find evidence contrary to their truth. That, to me, is truly scary.

I used to have a quote at the bottom of my work email that said something like ‘It is better to have questions that cannot be answered than to have answers that cannot be questioned.’ I don’t recall who said it, but it looks like the LLMs are going to create a world in which we have plenty of both.

Apocalypse Now?

Written by Al Slivinski on June 21, 2025. Posted in News Media, Standards. No Comments on Apocalypse Now?

Lions and Tigers and Bears….oh, my.

No one who reads this blog regularly would call my a Pollyanna….or a Pangloss [hands up, who’s read Candide?]. I do not think we live in the best of all possible worlds, and write regularly about what I think is wrong with many of our institutions and decision-makers. This leads me to read things that are not the usual mainstream media, but to stay completely away from anything that might be considered ‘social media’. One site I read regularly is The Free Press (https://www.thefp.com/), because I find it provides news stories I don’t see anywhere else, and a refreshing attitude: it makes fun of the ridiculous, no matter the source.

This does not mean that I love everything thefp publishes. Case in point, an article from June 10 titled “Our Knowledge System Has Collapsed. Can We Survive Without It?”, written by one Ted Gioia.

Ted Gioia is an American music writer, mostly about jazz. He is himself a jazz pianist, and I have two or three of his books on my shelf. I’ve learned a good deal about jazz from those books. Why such writing might make Gioia an expert on ‘knowledge’ is beyond me, but clearly the Free Press thinks so. The article is…..apocalyptic. It’s also pretty long, but below is a chart from the article which lists the 10 phenomena that lead him to claim ‘our knowledge system has collapsed’.

For this post, I will limit myself to his point 4 –

Funding for science and tech is disappearing in every sphere and sector.

See what I mean about hyperbole?

This is a claim just crying out for some data, but none is provided. Yes, we all know that Trump has been loudly pulling research funding from some universities, so there is no doubt something to this claim as regards US federally funded research. But – every sphere and sector?

Below is a graph depicting gross public and private R and D spending for the US as a percentage of GDP.

Notice that this is R&D funding in the US as a percentage of GDP, and the chart says that percentage has been increasing steadily right up through 2022.

If a funding apocalypse is upon us, it is very recent. But is it?

Here’s a quote from the website rdworldonline.com, which tracks these kinds of expenditures.

For 2024, R&D World’s editors forecast that $2.53 trillion will be invested globally in R&D, which represents an 8.3% increase over the 2022 forecast. The report notes: “In general, countries are increasing their R&D intensity over time, which means that R&D is increasing both through growing GDP and the growing share of GDP.”

So, really really recent. Like, this last couple of months.

The US Federal government is an important, but far from the only, source of funding for science and tech. Yea, the Orange Guy has made a big headline-grabbing point of pulling federal money from universities, and is reducing federal funding of research generally. Those are not good things, perhaps, but they are not the whole story, and I expect more than a reaction to headlines from writers in The Free Press.

So, where does this apocalyptic vision about science and tech funding of Gioia’s come from, given the data above? In the article he writes this:

“This is more than just a change in government policy. Even the huge corporations that fund their own research programs are now investing in AI data centers, not scientists. Somebody should measure this, but I’m confident that the shift from human-driven R&D projects to capital equipment investing is enormous.”

Needless to say, that Ted is ‘confident’ of this hardly constitutes evidence. He points to reductions in tech staff at Microsoft, Meta and Google, and that is some evidence of a shift from spending on people to spending on other things, perhaps AI. That is indeed something that might be important, but it is not evidence that his apocalyptic point 4 has anything to it. It is telling that he does not point at any evidence that those companies are reducing spending on R&D, which is what his point 4 implies is happening.

I think the above-mentioned tech companies are largely evil, honestly, so I am inclined to watch carefully what they are up to. I might even think that a reduction in R&D by them was a good thing. I just don’t see any evidence that it is happening, so whether it is good or bad is moot.

So, my conclusion: If his point 4 was ‘some (well, three) tech companies are shifting spending from software engineers and other tech personnel to AI’ I would say there is at least some evidence that it’s true. But that doesn’t sound nearly so scary as what he wrote, does it?

I’ll be coming back to his other nine points in future posts, so stay tuned.

Strategic (Non) Thinking

Written by Al Slivinski on June 20, 2025. Posted in Culture, Standards. No Comments on Strategic (Non) Thinking

This post is sortof about AI, or, more precisely, LLMs – Large Language Models. But only sortof, really. Mostly it’s about something ridiculous that someone did – with an LLM.

I don’t remember what led me to this, but if you go here you will find a story on NPR (not my favourite news source) dated May 20, about a Summer Reading list that appeared in The Chicago Sun Times, and probably other places. Summer Reading Lists are those bits of fluff in which some presumed literary expert suggests a list of books that would be enjoyable for summer reading. You know, on the patio, by the pool, in a hammock.

Quoting from the NPR article:

“According to Victor Lim, marketing director for the Chicago Sun-Times’ parent company Chicago Public Media, the list was part of licensed content provided by King Features, a unit of the publisher Hearst Newspapers.”

It’s publication in the Sun-Times resulted in a bit of a kerfuffle.

There was no byline attached to the article, but after the kerfuffle one Marco Buscaglia, presumably an employee of King Features, has stepped up and claimed authorship. Well, sorta. He says it was ‘partly generated by Artificial Intelligence’.

This was the reason for the aforementioned kerfuffle.

And how was this fact about the list discovered? Well, a Sun Times Reader, a librarian, no less, noticed that only 5 of the 15 books on this list were real. Many had real people named as authors, but those people had never written books with the claimed titles.

It gets better. Below is a screenshot of that librarian holding the piece in the Sun Times.

Notice that each of the 15 books appears with a two or three sentence blurb about the book. So, Buscaglia’s LLM came up with 10 non-existent books as well as blurbs about them. And Buscaglia submitted it to his boss, who then sent it out to all the papers that use King Features as a content provider.

Here is my question: what the hell was Buscaglia thinking? In what universe does he believe he lives? How could he imagine that no one among all the readers of the many papers that might publish this would possibly notice that some of these books don’t exist?

Here’s another quote from the NPR article, on what Buscaglia had to say about this:

In an email to NPR, Buscaglia writes, “Huge mistake on my part and has nothing to do with the Sun-Times. They trust that the content they purchase is accurate and I betrayed that trust. It’s on me 100 percent.”

Mistake? He thinks he made a mistake? A typo is a mistake, mis-spelling the name of an author or getting a book’s publication date wrong, those are mistakes. Typing into ChatGPT ‘Write a list of 15 books suitable for summer reading, with a two-sentence blurb about each one’ is not a mistake, it’s a strategy. That is Buscaglia’s way of doing his job. He’s a writer for King Features, and that is how he writes articles – at least this one.

And, the reason he thought nothing of turning this into his boss is that Mr. Buscaglia either did not read what the program spit out, or he did, but had no idea any of those books were fake. For that matter, neither did his boss(es). Or, maybe they didn’t read it either.

Now, if I were his boss, my first thought would be: ‘hell, I can just type into ChatGPT whatever instructions I would give Buscaglia for his next assignment. Why am I paying him?’

But that’s me.

Poverty

Written by Al Slivinski on June 11, 2025. Posted in Language, LBOs. No Comments on Poverty

In the gym at the Y one morning I noticed that two of the lockers in the changing room had locks on them, as well as having a piece of paper taped to them on which was printed the following:

ATTENTION

Lockers are for day use only. You have 24 hours to remove this lock and your belongings,

or we will do so and the contents will be bagged up.

Then, in writing, at the bottom:

‘This lock will be cut on June 6, 2025.’

The thing is, I saw these two lockers with this sign attached on June 8. So, the signs must have been attached on June 5 at the latest, but still no cut locks, just the warning.

I imagine that the Y was worried about causing padlock poverty. If the locks are cut off, they are, of course, useless, and then the person involved, if they care, would have to purchase another lock. (The Y also has signs saying that locks can be purchased at the front desk, but you can buy one at most any hardware store, or Canadian Tire.)

This is how things go at the Y. Lots of cajoling, lots of signs, but…..consequences? No. Consequences are, I suspect, thought to be oppressive. There are signs all over the place that bags and street shoes and such must not be left lying about in the workout area or in common areas, but stored in a locker. (Just not overnight.) I thought of that as I asked a young fella if he would move his gym bag so I could put a mat down and do my leg stretches on that same day.

Back to those padlocks, there are so many kinds of poverty to think about these days. I don’t think I have written previously about the tampon and sanitary napkin dispensers that were installed a year or so ago in the men’s restroom on the fourth floor of the SSC on the UWO campus. I have seen them in all the men’s restrooms on campus I have entered. I can only imagine they are in the ladies’ too, but I have not been in any of those. Entering one of those would be – well – wrong.

I will leave you to think about why those machines are in the men’s bathroom, but that they dispense these items for free is of course to combat the scourge of menstrual poverty. Or, as it is sometimes called, period poverty, although that second term suffers from non-specificity. It could, after all, refer to the use of too many run-on sentences.

I was amused to see, sometime after those dispensers appeared in the dudes’ bathroom, that they began sporting stickers that said ‘Do not take these items unless you need them’.

So, at what level of tampon dispensation in a guys’ – or for that matter gals’ – bathroom does one assume that people are taking them when they don’t need them? I cannot imagine. Well, actually it is kind of fun to imagine the discussion that must have ensued at the high-level UWO administrative meeting at which one agenda item was the rising level of depletion of menstrual products from free dispensers. I mean, just because we’re giving them away doesn’t mean they’re free, people. Economists have a pretty good idea of what happens when things are sold at a price of zero, but I suspect to administrators it came as a surprise. Much of what normal people find obvious comes as a surprise to most of the people who work in universities.

But, the administrators responded as administrators do – with stickers. Anything else would have been thought oppressive, I suppose.

All this got me thinking about poverty more. I get my hair cut by a very nice woman who also cuts ladies’ hair. A cut costs me $25, all in. I am sure no woman escapes from her or any other salon with so small a payment.

So….hair poverty. (Salon poverty?) I look forward to UWO opening a salon for women’s haircuts at a vastly reduced – perhaps zero – price. Justice must be served.

I expect to be back in the Y locker room in a couple of days. It’s an even money bet those ATTENTION notices are still taped to the same lockers, and that I’ll have to ask another person to move their gym bag so I can do my floor exercises.

It’s good to have things in life one can count on.

Justice, Backward and Forward

Written by Al Slivinski on June 11, 2025. Posted in Government, Popular attitudes. No Comments on Justice, Backward and Forward

I subscribe to various literary magazines, largely as a way to learn about new books. I love reading books. Unfortunately, literary magazines in the 21^st century feature relatively little in the way of useful book reviews. I cancelled my subscription to The New York Review of Books after one year, because virtually every issue featured more essays on politics and current events than book reviews, despite the mag’s title. Moreover, the few reviews they did publish were typically essays in disguise. Something similar is true of my still-favourite magazine, the Times Literary Supplement, but it is the least egregious offender, and a rewardingly broad range of perspectives pops up in its pages. A couple weeks back one letter-writer suggested that the US Civil War was to be blamed on Abraham Lincoln. Many negative rejoinders followed, but kudos to the TLS for publishing the letter.

Some months back the TLS also published a letter that was a reaction to a review of a book whose title I have forgotten, but I do remember that one of the letter-writer’s points was that the UK owed (somebody) reparations for its role in the slave trade back in the 18^th and 19^th century. As I said, this is not the sort of stuff I signed up for when I paid for my subscription, but it was at least written in response to a book review, and it led to a series of letters on the topic being published in further issues that were, to be fair, intelligent and well-written. It sort of stands to reason that if you can’t write, your letter will not get published in the Times Literary Supplement.

Now, to the extent that I think of slavery reparations at all, I naturally think of them in the context of the USA, where slavery did exist until the end of the US Civil War. A straightforward statement about this idea is that any reparations policy in the US would involve payments from people who never owned slaves to people who never were slaves. Accurate as that is, it glosses over some of the discussion that arose in that series of TLS letters. Specifically, the idea that it is the government of the UK (or US) that is responsible for slavery, and so it is that government’s responsibility to pay reparations. (My readers may be aware that Britain in the early 19^th century outlawed slavery and set the formidable Royal Navy the task of interdicting international slave trading. This does not, in the view of some, absolve it of the need to pay reparations.)

That governmental perspective does not answer the point that the recipients of the payments would still be people who were never slaves. Still, one could say that societies do compensate the heirs of the wronged in some cases, although how any government would determine if any living individual had enslaved ancestors, I can’t imagine.

So, back to the most recent letter on reparations in the TLS, which is what got me thinking about all this. The writer met the ‘governmental responsibility’ argument head-on, in a way that echoed one of my other thoughts about this. Said writer put it better than I ever could, however.

The writer’s basic point is that any reparations would do more harm than good. He (it is a he) points out that any justice system must look both backward and forward in time. Backward: what happened? Forward: what is to be done about it?

Sometimes, he notes, the best response to what happened is to do nothing. He then provides an example of a situation in which quasi-juridical arguments were used to insist that reparations must be made: The Treaty of Versailles. The punitive provisions of that treaty are widely regarded as providing the fertilizer for the growth of Nazism in Germany, and the ensuing calamity of WWII. The writer’s final two sentences: “The victors did not think through what they were doing. One world war was a tragedy, two was partly carelessness.”

As I noted, folks who write to the TLS can write. This captures, in words better than any I could devise, one of my misgivings about the whole reparations idea: it seems guaranteed to foster ongoing racial enmity. And, what happens when the payment of said reparations results in no material improvement in the lives of most recipients, as it almost certainly will not? A claim that it was insufficient?

Much of what has passed for governmental policy in much of the Western World with regard to race in the last 15 years seems to me to be designed to guarantee that very outcome: ongoing racial enmity. I very much suspect that there has been created a significant class of people whose livelihood depends on that being the ongoing situation. Reparations would further feed this. A large group of people would feel, not inaccurately, that they are being taxed to pay for sins that neither they nor their ancestors had any part in. That could not end well for anyone, with the possible exception of those invested in grievance.

Yea, What Did Happen?

Written by Al Slivinski on June 7, 2025. Posted in Standards. 1 Comment on Yea, What Did Happen?

I do wander around the internet a fair bit, and from time to time come across something that is quite interesting. Sometimes those things prove rather less interesting on closer inspection, and I think that is the case for a site I am about to tell you more about. The site is called ‘WTF Happened in 1971?’ and it consists of nothing but many many graphs, all designed to convince you that the world changed in many fundamental ways in 1971. Actually, almost all of the data used to construct the graphs is from the US, so – the claim is really that the US changed in 1971.

You can go to the site here and have a look for yourself. If you do, here is the first graph you will see.

Now, if you did not know, ‘productivity’ refers to the value in dollars of output produced in an economy per something. The ‘something’ is typically hours worked, so productivity is really then just the total value of output (GDP, pretty much) divided by the total number of hours worked. However, sometimes it is expressed as the total value of output per full-time worker. The graph above does not specify which measure is being depicted. Compensation, on the other hand, is specified as hourly.

Note that both measures are expressed as an index. So, what was done to produce this graph is the following. Take whatever was the actual dollar-per-hour number for productivity in the US in 1948, and call that 0. Do the same for whatever was the average hourly compensation in 1948. Now, as time goes on, the number on the vertical axis is not the actual values of those things, but the percentage by which they have each increased since 1948.

And, given that, what the graph seems to indicate is that those two things increased in lockstep until 1971, at which point they were both 90% higher than in 1948. So, both productivity and hourly compensation had almost doubled in those 23 years.

Then, from 1971 on they diverge, with productivity in 2017 being 246% higher than in 1948, but hourly wages only 115% higher. Hourly payments to labour all but stagnated from 1971 on, it seems, even though labor was producing more and more dollars worth of output per hour worked (assuming the graph is depicting hourly productivity).

So, what happened? Well, one cannot say much from this. Another thing the graph does not tell us is whether the two measures depicted have been adjusted for inflation. After all, the value of output produced per worker will go up if the producers just raise their prices. That has nothing to do with an increase in productivity. Same for hourly wages and benefits. The graph does not tell us. I’m going to just assume the numbers are adjusted for inflation.

The site cites Economic Policy Institute for this data, and there are many organizations with that name. I know, I looked, but I could find this data at none of their websites. Ok, so I only looked for maybe 15 minutes, but here is a reason to wonder if anything really happened. I went to FRED, the US Federal Reserve system’s massive data source, and found the graph below;

Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB

I know, hard to read, but it depicts the real (meaning inflation-adjusted) average hourly compensation of all workers outside the agricultural sector, since 1948. It is in the form of an index, also, but if you check the fine details, the index has the value 35 in 1948, 64 in 1971 and then 100 in 2017 . So, the increase in the FRED index between 1948 and 1971 corresponds to that in the first graph above from the 1971 site. However, the increase in the FRED index between 1971 and 2017 results a value about 200% higher in 2017 than in 1948, not the 115% indicated in that first graph. Still less than the increase in productivity, but the gap is much less.

So, are the hourly wage numbers in that first graph bullshit? Maybe, as there is a fair bit of bullshit on the site, as I will detail below, but there is also a possible legitimate explanation. The FRED graph refers to hourly compensation for all workers while the WTF1971 graph refers to production and non-supervisory workers only. So, it is possible that the difference in the increase in compensation on those two graphs corresponds to the fact that ‘supervisory workers’ have seen their hourly compensation rising at a faster rate than production workers. I think that’s plausible, but will leave it to the interested reader to investigate further. If that is true, then of course it just leads to a different question: why did that happen after 1971?

The point is that this first graph on the site is clearly designed to make you wonder ‘why have workers been getting screwed since 1971?’ A careful look possibly leads to a different question: why have supervisory workers compensation been rising faster than that of production workers? (If that is indeed the case…) As always, life is more complex than can be captured in one under-explained graphic.

Here are some things from elsewhere on the WTF1971 site that make me doubtful about how carefully it has been put together.

One of the graphs you will find on that site claims to depict ‘interest rates since 3000BC’, supposedly put together by the Bank of England. I don’t care if the BoE did put that data together, pretending that it is in any way reliable going back to 3000BC is hogwash. Might be fun to try and put such a data set together, digging through references in the bible and other ancient sources, but please let us not pretend this is reliable data, or that it can be used to claim that something big happened in 1971.

Similarly, another graph claims to depict the CPI (Consumer Price Index) for the US since 1776. Yea, ok. There is a reference to Reinhart and Rogoff (2009) for this graph, and that might (I cannot tell) refer to a rather famous and controversial book those two economists wrote about national debt crises. However, it does not matter. The graph on the site has inflation trucking along with nothing dramatic happening until WWII, and then, it rises very dramatically – you guessed it, from 1971 on. The problem is that if your zero point in any index is entirely unreliable, like price information for 1776, nothing that happens later with the index is informative.

Another careless caption on the site is this, below a graph of ‘energy consumption’. The caption is:

Energy consumption per-capita in the US. One kilowatt, of course, equals 8,766 kilowatt-hours per year.

That second sentence makes no sense at all, but after peering at the associated graph for awhile, and doing some arithmetic, I am pretty sure that what was intended was ‘One kilowatt-year-per-capita equals 8,766 kilowatt-hours-per-capita’.

That at least adds up, but being clear and careful is not what this site is about. I figured out why, when I got to the bottom, and clicked on ‘Get WTF1971 merch’

They’re selling shit. You can order a T-shirt with 197! embossed on the front, or a mug with WTF 1971?.

The internet is all about selling shit, this we know, not about being clear or careful.

That all being said, here are a few more graphs from the site that I have reason to think might be telling us something, only because I think they correspond to what I have learned from other sources.

For example:

The Federal Register is where almost everything that the US Federal government does gets published, so the number of pages in it is a sort of indicator of how big and complex is that government. From the .gov website:

“Published by the Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the Federal Register is the official daily publication for rules, proposed rules, and notices of Federal agencies and organizations, as well as executive orders and other presidential documents.”

The Register has only existed since 1936, and the graph depicts how it has grown since then. Of course the red arrow points at the fact that it really started to grow in the 70s, but there are other things worth noting about that graph. One, it takes a noticeable dip between 1980 and 1988, which corresponds to the Regan presidency. Maybe he really did make the federal government smaller and less complex? Also, there seems to have been another big drop in the late 2010s, and I would like to know what that was all about. Trump I? That seems doubtful, but I don’t know.

Another interesting graph depicted the share of foreign-born individuals in the US population over time, along with their absolute numbers. No source was given for that graph, so I was dubious. I went and found a graph I think is from a reliable source, which I reproduce below, and I will admit that the one on the 1971 site is pretty much comparable.

What I found surprising and interesting is that both the absolute number and population share of foreign born in the US bottomed out in the 70s (yea, there it is again) after peaking in the 20s and 30s and have been increasing since. The absolute numbers dwarf those from what I always thought of as the big immigration periods of the late 19^th and early 20^th century, and the percentage has just recently again attained those levels.

I got more curious, so went looking for info on other countries. It turns out that currently, Canada has the 7^th highest percentage of foreign-born residents of all countries, at 23%, with the largest single group being Indian. The UK ranks 10^th in the world with 14%, the largest group again being Indian, while the US ranks 11^th with the largest group being Mexican. The country with the largest foreign-born population turns out to be the UAE at 88% (really), and the largest group being – you got it – Indian. The top 6 countries ahead of Canada are all in the Middle East, and the largest group in all of them is Indian, except for Lebanon, which has the same 23% proportion of foreign-born as Canada, but the largest group there is Syrian. I think we can all guess why that is true.

If I can find historical data on immigration for Canada (hard to do, in my experience) and other countries, there might be some interesting comparisons to be looked at. Stay tuned.

Here’s a notable graph designed to scare you (well, they all are, kinda) for which the site creators don’t seem to have noticed 1971 is not really special.

Keep in mind that ‘debt’ refers to the total amount owed by the US govt, here expressed as a percentage of the contemporaneous GDP. So, it’s the total value of US govt bonds outstanding in a year divided by that year’s GDP. Do ignore that big run-up after 2024. That’s called a guess, and the site provides no info on where the part after 2030 comes from. If anyone knows what is going to happen to anything over the next 25 years, why ain’t they rich? Anyway, nothing special happened in 1971 that I can see. Bonds outstanding relative to GDP declines a lot after WWII, largely because that was the period when US GDP grew like gangbusters. It hits a trough in the mid-70s, then heads back up into the 90s, when it drops again for a while (Clinton actually ran a budget surplus for at least one year) until it really starts climbing early in the 21^st century. The WWII era remains the undisputed champ, and no one knows…..as in no one knows….what will happen going forward. DJT’s big beautiful bill combined with his big beautiful tariffs certainly seems like a one-two-punch designed to send that red graph climbing again. However, as all good philosophers know – Shit Happens.

As I said at the outset, this site seemed very interesting when I first came across it. A closer look, as with so much on the internet, showed it to be just another way to sell shit. Not wholly uninteresting, but the devil is always in the details, and the 21^st century is not, in general, much interested in details. [See; DJT, K. Harris, J. Trudeau, X, TikTok, etc….]

Oh-Oh, Canada

Written by Al Slivinski on June 6, 2025. Posted in Government, Secrecy. No Comments on Oh-Oh, Canada

I had no intention to follow up last week’s post about our new Liberal government, but along with passing the Throne Speech, said government has introduced into Parliament Bill C-2, dubbed The Strong Borders Act, which is, in a word, scary. It would give CSIS agents, police officers and peace officers – which apparently includes border agents, prison guards and special constables – the ability to demand information from electronic service providers about whether someone is a subscriber, as well as the municipality in Canada or abroad where they receive or have received the service. The cops who patrol the university campus here are ‘special constables’. Good grief.

Better yet, it would give them this ability without a warrant if there were “reasonable grounds to suspect” that a crime could be committed, or that any breach of a law passed by Parliament may take place. Uh, may take place? And – suspected by who? My neighbor?

Notice carefully the ‘any law passed by Parliament’. So, this aspect of the bill has nothing really to do with border security. If the police (or campus cop or CSIS agent) think maybe you said something nasty about a ‘equity-deserving group’, or you might have shoplifted or you might own an illegal firearm or purchased untaxed cigarettes – they can demand info about you from ‘electronic service providers’. Note also that the term is not internet service provider, but electronic service provider, so who does this include? Your cell phone service provider, surely. What about the bank where you do your internet banking? Is that included among those they can demand information from? Honestly, I dunno.

(George, meet BB)

The Globe has had a lot of coverage of this already, and they note in one piece that Canada’s Supreme Court in 2014 knocked down an earlier attempt at similar legislation when it ruled that there was a reasonable expectation of privacy in internet subscriber information, and then later added that the same was true for IP addresses. That is to say, you have the right to expect that your ISP will not reveal your IP address to a campus cop if asked. This new attempt to gain the same powers is absolutely Trumpian. Keep pushing until you find a judge or judges who will rule in your favour. The Minister of Public Safety has said he will be issuing an explanation of why this bill is in compliance with the Canadian Charter. That should be interesting.

It will surprise no one to hear that Canada’s police chiefs are applauding this provision of the bill, which brings me to the larger point. That this bill was introduced by the new Liberal government does make me more wary of what they are going to get up to now that they are in government, but the instinct to violate privacy is truly all but universal among government officials and police. They are sure they are the ‘good guys’, and will say things like ‘if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear from such legislation’. That is bullshit. Governments are big, messy, barely-supervised organizations, as are their police forces, and if you give such organizations easy access to private information, someone somewhere within them will use it for no good purpose.

Of course, a sizeable segment of the Canadian population will be for this kind of thing. One commenter on one of the articles in the Globe wrote “Bring it on, I’m all for the cops having an easier time going after criminals, illegal immigrants, drug lords, etc, etc.”

Yea, the cops are always the good guys, they would never mis-use this info, or use it against anyone but a drug lord. They would surely have ‘an easier time going after criminals’ if there were no constraints on them at all. Just let them homes to have a look around and see if anything shady is going on, or stop and search your car while you’re driving to work, or just stop and search you when you’re out on a walk. Yea, let’s make it easier on the cops to do their job, that’s the ticket.

A Conservative MP has already criticized the privacy-reducing provisions of this bill, and good for her, but I have little doubt that had the Conservatives won a majority, they would be putting forward something similar. As I wrote, this instinct is universal among government types. They are the good guys, and they should always be allowed to do the good things they want to do. To protect us, of course.

That being said, the Liberals did try to sneak this stuff through by putting it into a 140-page bill (according to the Globe) that is supposed to be about border security. It’s a crisis, don’t ya know, Donald says so, and the Liberals know not to let a crisis go to waste.

Those in government cannot and should not be trusted with private info. No matter who they are or what they claim.

Oh, Canada

Written by Al Slivinski on May 27, 2025. Posted in Government, Politics, Standards. No Comments on Oh, Canada

You don’t have to be a political junkie to have followed the erratic path of government in Canada over the last six months or so. A Liberal Prime Minister leading a minority government propped up by an agreement with the lefty NDP party. Continuously falling approval ratings for both the Liberal party and its leader, who made no effort to change course or to indicate any willingness to consider stepping down until his ill-advised shitty treatment of his Finance Minister, followed by her resignation from Cabinet, led to his finally indicating that he would, indeed, resign once the Liberals had chosen a new Leader.

And, of course, during the last few months of this political soap opera came the inauguration of DJT as US President, his tariffs, and ‘the 51^st state’. It was hard to see anything good in the way Canada was being governed during all that, but then –The Resurrection. Mark Carney, the former double-central-banker, was chosen as the new Liberal leader, with some 80% of all votes cast, then installed as the new PM, and then won a minority-almost-majority government in the April 28 federal election. A party whose approval ratings had fallen into the 20% range by the end of 2024 found itself forming a government again.

I spent more time than usual deciding for whom to vote in that election. I even watched the one English leader’s debate on TV, and I hate watching debates. In the end I voted for the Conservative candidate in my riding, who lost to the long-serving Liberal candidate. I did this despite my misgivings about the Conservative Leader, because I simply could not check a box that said – the last decade of Liberal Party rule was ok. It was not, it was an epic disaster for Canada in too many ways, and so I used my tiny voice to say that. Retrospective voting, that’s called. Or, in Canadian language, ‘Throw the bastards out, eh?’

The new Liberal government has been in power less than a month, and Parliament has only just started meeting again, with King Charles giving the traditional throne speech just yesterday. People who I respect voted Liberal, I know, with a hope that Carney’s version of the Liberal party would be a big improvement over the King Justin version, and I can see that point of view. Carney is not, to be sure, a lifetime politician, and I can see the appeal in that. Indeed, now that we have what we have for a government, I am hopeful that positive view of this new government turns out to be largely correct.

However, I am writing to say that the early signs seem to me to be less than auspicious.

To be sure, in Carney’s meeting with Trump he was the adult in the room, he made it clear that Canada had zero interest in becoming the USA’s Area 51, and left with his dignity intact. I doubt Poilievre would have done better and have no doubt Trudeau would have done worse. But, all the US tariffs are still in place, as are our own retaliatory ones, and I still can’t buy Bourbon, while the US and EU are bargaining on a new trade deal. The bible says ‘by your fruits shall you know them’, and I see no fruit yet. I know – patience, Al, it’s early days.

When Carney first became Liberal leader and PM after the Liberal leadership vote, he appointed what was clearly an interim cabinet that was encouragingly stripped down from the bloated monstrosity of a cabinet that Trudeau had built up to mostly do nothing but his bidding. A good sign, but once the Liberals were in government after the federal election, Carney introduced a new Cabinet, now consisting of 28 Ministers and another 10 secretaries of state….whatever those are. Worse, the Ministry of Silly Names has returned, as we have a Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations along with a Minister of Indigenous Services – I would love to be a fly on the wall during their get-togethers. There is also a Minister of International Trade, but another Minister responsible for Canada-US trade, which I guess is not considered international. That second Minister is also responsible for intergovernmental affairs and – I’m not making this up, it’s right on the Cabinet website – ‘One Canadian Economy’.

No, I don’t know what that means, either.

And don’t get into the Secretaries of State. One is responsible for ‘Combatting Crime’ (really, that’s what it says), which one might think was in the portfolio of the Attorney General. There is even a Secretary of State (Sport). Go, Oilers!!

So, we are back to Cabinet and other positions being used as a means of rewarding good Liberal Members of Parliament. The Times Literary Supplement some years back suggested a ‘All Must Have Prizes’ Literary prize, to be awarded only to books that had not won any of the rapidly-multiplying number of other literary prizes. We now have ‘All Must Have Ministries’ ministries in the Canadian Parliament, with Secretaries of State positions serving as consolation prizes. At this rate, if the Liberal government is in power in two years nearly all Liberal MPs will be Ministers or Secretaries.

However, the darkest cloud on the horizon in my view is what happened on Sunday May 25, when the caucus of Liberal MPs voted to not give themselves the right to call for a review (and possible replacement) of the Liberal leader if 20% of the caucus indicated that such should happen. It is a matter of law that at the start of each Parliamentary session each party holds this vote. The Conservatives did, and voted to give their caucus, almost as large as the Liberals’, that very right.

Now, I do not know if this vote occurred under a secret ballot. I would hope so, but no source I have checked mentions it. If it was a voice vote, it is easier to see how it happened, and to blame it on Mr. Carney. He still has the authority to sign the nomination papers for anyone who wants to run for Parliament as a Liberal in any riding in the next Canadian federal election. I can see how Liberal party MPs might not want to say out loud that they want the right to remove their leader, given that. It does not impress me at all if that is what happened, but I can understand it.

On the other hand, if this vote outcome is from a secret ballot, then I can only say – Woe is Canada. We will again have a Parliament of sheep, following their Leader into whatever quagmire he chooses. A majority of Liberal Parliamentarians simply do not want to be responsible for what happens.

The Globe has a pretty good editorial in it today about this very vote, and one apt quote from that article is this:

“One might think the Liberals would have learned the lesson of 2024, namely that the country’s interests must be put above those of the party – or at least, that the party’s interests must be put above those of any one person. One might think that, but one would be wrong.”

The editorial also quotes one Liberal MP as saying that Mr. Carney is “by far the greatest leader that we’ve seen since Lester B. Pearson,”.

I suppose it is a necessity for those in politics to be able to utter such words with a straight face. As the GM editorial board points out, it would have been easy to find Liberal MPs with the same view of Justin Trudeau back in 2015.

I will continue to hope that this Liberal government will be less destructive to Canada, and that it proves able to navigate well the choppy seas that are surely to come. But one month in, I do not regret my vote for the Conservative candidate in my riding.

Bureaucratic Safety

Written by Al Slivinski on May 24, 2025. Posted in Education, Language, LBOs, Standards. No Comments on Bureaucratic Safety

As I’ve mentioned, I still get official sorts of email from my former employer’s bureaucracy, and from all levels of that bureaucracy. The most amusing – or, often, disturbing – come from the high-level bureaucrats, but they all have a particularly stilted way of seeing the world.

A recent example came from a lower level – that of my former department. I got an email from the Dept staff containing a pdf file setting out the agenda of the next dept meeting. (The dept adheres to long-standing tradition of having exactly two department meetings per year. September and May. As a retiree, I no longer attend, but I still get the relevant emails, which I do appreciate.)

Below I have reproduced the first several inches of the pdf file containing that agenda – I have changed the names in it to protect the innocent. This agenda is in the same format and contains the same information as such documents have since I started my job 45 years ago. Back in the day the agenda arrived in your mailbox on paper instead of as an email attachment, but otherwise it is the same. Except, see below. Anyway, here is what it looks like.

DEPARTMENT MEETING

Thursday, May 15, 2025, at 1 pm in SSC 0000

A G E N D A

Chair’s Welcome Jim Really
Dean’s Presentation Dick Juno

Q & A with the Dean

Minutes of Departmental Meeting – November1, 2024 Jim Really
Graduate Program John Gradchair

past cycle of admissions to the program

________

There were more items of business, of course, but they all followed this pattern. A Dept meeting is primarily a forum for reports from people in the Dept on the various aspects of the Econ Dept for which they were responsible. The one unusual item on the agenda is number 2, ‘Dean’s Presentation’. For most of my career, Deans never came to a dept meeting. Such meetings were about dept business, and it was the Dept Chair’s job to report to the dept on anything going on at the level above that his colleagues needed to know about.

I think it happened once or twice during my Chair term that the Dean wanted to come to a meeting, and then after that it started to become more common. I think most deans would prefer to do away with Dept Chairs entirely and have depts run by a member of their own staff. Something like that will almost certainly happen eventually, but that’s not the point of this post.

This is the point……

After getting the above document, but before the meeting happened, I got another email, announcing that a REVISED agenda for the meeting was attached. There was some minor change to the items on it, but that was not noteworthy. What was notable was that the format had changed completely.

Now the actual agenda part of the Agenda looked like this

Agenda Items	Nature	Presenter	Tim
1. Welcome and Announcements		Jim Really	5 min
2.Dean’s Presentation	Q&A with the Dean	Dick Juno	30 min
3.Minutes of Departmental Meeting – Nov 1, 2024		Jim Really
4. Graduate Program	Cycle of past admissions to the program	John Gradchair	10 min
5. Undergraduate Program	Summer Research Fellowships	Jane Unchair	10 min

So, everything is now in boxed columns, for whatever reason.

Moreover, each ‘Presenter’ – even the Dean – is on the clock. (I left in the Tim typo, which clearly should read Time.) The thing is, my old dept does not like meetings, a fact which makes it rather unusual in the academic world, where a chance to talk in front of others is generally relished. No meeting ever went more than an hour, all in, at which point we would happily adjourn and go for beer at the Grad Bar. Time limits are hardly necessary in my old Dept’s agenda, and I doubt their presence in this new agenda was a Departmental innovation.

Still, the truly remarkable part of this revised agenda is what changed above the actual list of agenda items. It was chock full of boxes also, of varying sizes. Here are the interesting ones….

Apparently people need to be told that the Meeting Leader will be the Dept Chair. Whatever. Then…..

More important info, I guess. Another box noted who would be the Note taker for the meeting, also very important, but my absolute favourite box was this one, at the very top of the document…..

This Dept has been having meetings for more than 50years, but the current crop of bureaucrats has apparently decided, in its wisdom, to impose the inclusion of this at the top of every Dept agenda. Cuz, ya know, if the very saintly folks at the top don’t impose this, there is a great chance that the Members and Attendees at the Dept meeting will break out into – well, I dunno – disrespect, the creation of unsafe spaces.

Of course, there is an easy conspiracy theory regarding where this all came from. The Dean was not at the meeting just by happenstance, it had been well advertised that he was there to talk about – and be questioned about – The Budget.

It is, according to the university administration, in Bad Bad Shape. I am pretty sure they have something in the neighborhood of half a Billion dollars in the bank (yes, that’s Billion and no that is not the endowment, that is separate), but don’t pay any attention to that. Their line is that if something is not done to cut costs, revenues will start to fall short of costs, and We Cannot Have That. And We Cannot Spend any of that Rainy Day Money in the bank. It ain’t raining yet, you see.

So, the Dean was in the Dept, as the lowest man on the Admin totem pole, to explain what is going on with the U budget and to answer questions. I am going to bet that he would not be announcing the laying off of twelve associate vice presidents. That, I suspect, is why that last box is at the top of the revised agenda, and why there is a tim limit on every ‘presenter’. After 30 minutes, no matter how many questions might be left, and no matter how pissed off the Members and Attendees might be, the Dean will be out of there. And don’t you be showing him any disrespect, no matter how ridiculous is what he says, or he will leave….and maybe report you to HR.

Universities are not places for robust disputation, argument, disagreement. That would be….judgemental. Not to mention unsafe.

Science vs Saying Things

Written by Al Slivinski on May 19, 2025. Posted in Research, Standards. No Comments on Science vs Saying Things

I have posted more than a few articles about bad research in the social and medical sciences here. These have generally focused on research that involved analyzing data to understand things about human behavior and/or illness, but where the research is badly done, including, in some cases, the relevant data being falsified.

If the research in the now-retracted paper (written about here) on getting people to more honestly report the mileage they drove their cars had been carefully done, it might be of some use to somebody. It wasn’t Nobel-prize stuff (I do hope) but insurance companies would have some reason to try having their clients sign an honesty pledge at the top of their forms rather than the bottom, and other types of organizations needing info from their ‘stakeholders’ might also have followed suit.

It might even be that putting the pledge at the top has the impact the researchers claimed it did; however, their research provided no evidence that it did, and that’s the problem. So, that is science, or, if you prefer, Science. Science doesn’t prove things, it looks for evidence that the world works a certain way, and no conscientious scientist thinks they have the world figured out after one experiment or data analysis. That analysis needs to be replicated more than once before anyone has any faith in it – or should. One of my early posts here was about a general belief among researchers – mostly economists – that careful research had established that there is no such thing as a ‘hot hand’ in shooting baskets, you may recall. It took over 30 years for another pair of researchers to figure out that all the evidence gathered about it had involved a statistical miscalculation, and that correcting it implied that all that evidence actually suggested that a hot hand did in fact exist.

Science, then. Data, experiment or observation, analysis, resulting in evidence for or against some clear hypothesis about the world. And, the understanding that mistakes get made all the time, and the world is full of randomness, so don’t be too certain about anything.

However, a lot of what gets published in academic journals looks nothing like that. It’s only connection to science is that it results in papers written by academics being published in academic journals. It does not, however, involve any of data, evidence or statistical analysis. It ‘says things’. In complex and hard to understand language, to be sure, but still just ‘saying things’.

This was brought to mind by an official email I got last week from NEST, the Network for Economic and Social Trends, about a talk they were sponsoring, which the email invited me to attend. The academic was one Dr. Farah Mihlar, who (I found her web page) is a Senior Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University, UK in Human Rights Policy and Practice. She is apparently in the School of Architecture, which is just….well, bizarre. What her work has to do with architecture I cannot possibly imagine.

Anyway, the title of her talk was ‘Compounded Suffering in Post-War’, and the email included an ‘abstract of her presentation’, which I include in total here:

“Suffering is strongly associated with war but not its aftermath. In spite of its ambiguity, the post-war represents a transformation from humanitarian crisis to development and peacebuilding. Consequentially, references to suffering are replaced by political, economic, social ‘challenges’ and ‘issues’ that fail to accurately and fully represent the experience of most war survivors, especially women, who often make up a larger percentage of the population. Responding to this gap, this research conceptualises compounded suffering as the complex amalgamation of multiple forms of suffering: mental, physical and emotional; grief, pain, agony, torture, hurt, trauma, anxiety, stress, difficulty, produced by the unique conditions of post-war, which in coming together, aggravates and intensifies. The post-war context produces a typology of suffering that is distinct in form and extent fundamentally because it is shaped through an acute, real, and continuing threat to human life and security, precluded by the trauma and experience of extensive death, loss, and destruction. Suffering is compounded by women’s ‘entanglement’ with power specific to the post-war context, where structural and other forms of violence are pervasive and ideologies and methods of war remain amidst the pretext of change and transformation.”

Yes, it is very very long, not what I think of when I see the word ‘abstract’. But, I don’t want my readers to think I make shit up.

I will say a few things about this; enough, I hope, so you see what I mean about ‘just saying things’.

The first sentence is “Suffering is strongly associated with war but not its aftermath.”

This is a statement about the world, it would seem. Humans strongly associate suffering with war, but not its aftermath. I am down with the first clause, but then – ‘but not its aftermath’? Really? Who are these people who do not associate the aftermath of war with suffering? Or is it just that people don’t associate it ‘strongly’ enough?

I am about to do a presentation in my Geezer’s Study Group, and as it happens, my talk will include discussions of two wars: the First Indochina War and The Algerian War of Independence. None of the sources I’ve read on these two sad events suggest that there was no suffering after those wars ended. People lose contact with loved ones and don’t find out until the war ends what happened to them. Others had to flee from combat areas, and come back after the truce is signed to find destruction, disease and loss. Combatants must deal with living with their injuries after the war ends.

Who are these people that Professor Fihlar asserts do not realize this?

It is an assertion, it is ‘saying things’ and it is deeply important that particular thing be said, else there is no research project, and no talk.

Here is the key sentence in the abstract, explaining what the research is all about.

“Responding to this gap, this research conceptualises compounded suffering as the complex amalgamation of multiple forms of suffering: mental, physical and emotional; grief, pain, agony, torture, hurt, trauma, anxiety, stress, difficulty, produced by the unique conditions of post-war, which in coming together, aggravates and intensifies.”

Yes, a very long sentence. These sort of folks tend to write like this, in my experience. In this case, I would suggest that it’s very important to write out all of those different types of suffering. After all, the researcher’s starting point is that most humans don’t realize they even happen after a war. Then, what this research does is it “conceptualises compounded suffering as….”

Now, how does one conceptualise something? The dictionary defines ‘conceptualise’ as an intransitive verb which means ‘to form an idea or principle in your mind’.

So, how do other researchers determine if the idea or principle formed in this researcher’s mind is, uh….useful? Well, not by gathering data, or doing an experiment, I am sure. I expect they talk about it. Or, possibly, argue about it, but ‘arguing’ is generally frowned on in the 21^st century academic world. That could be regarded as creating an unsafe space, and this is not tolerated.

I could go on about that big sentence above. People in this sort of business are not particularly good on grammar or logic. Consider that last clause

“…produced by the unique conditions of post-war, which in coming together, aggravates and intensifies.”

This refers back to that long list of types of suffering, but how can it be said these are produced by the unique conditions of post-war? Everything on that list occurs during war, too, so what does ‘unique’ mean here?

And then ‘….which in coming together, aggravates and intensifies.”

What exactly is coming together here? Everything on that long list? And ‘aggravates and intensifies’ needs an object. Just what is being aggravated and intensified?

I found another paper by this same academic, titled ‘Coloniality and the inadequacy of localisation’, and here’s the first bit of the abstract of this paper:

“This article uses coloniality as an analytical framework to critique the concept of localisation. It argues that localisation is inadequate to respond to the asymmetrical power dynamic that it seeks to dislodge. Fundamentally, this is because localisation does not account for coloniality, which is the underlying logic of colonialism embedded within the humanitarian sector.”

So, more concepts. I don’t know what ‘coloniality’ or ‘localisation’ mean, or whether Mihlar or someone else ‘conceptualized’ them. A look through the actual paper shows lots of words, and the word ‘evidence’ appears twice in the paper’s 12 pages (yes, I checked). However, nothing one could call evidence, or even examples, is presented or cited. The paper ends with more than 20 references to other works, and I cannot swear there is no evidence in any of those. No, I didn’t check.

If people want to talk about things, and say ‘this thing here is bad’ that’s ok. If people want to discuss whether idea A is better than idea B, or what is the best way to conceptualize Trump’s approach to tariffs, go for it. I talk about things all the time over drinks/dinner with my friends, and there is little if any evidence ever brought to bear on what we say. We just don’t think of what we’re doing as being academic. Or research. Or science. Certainly, no one pays us to do it. Hell, I mostly ‘say things’ on this blog – but it ain’t science.

There is an even more basic way to see the distinction I am making between science and this ‘saying things’.

In the research on honesty, useless as it was, there was a scientific hypothesis being tested. That is, there was a claim made about how the world (more particularly, how the humans in that world) behaves. The claim of interest was:

“If you have humans sign a pledge of honesty at the start of filling out a form asking for unverified information, you will get more honest answers than if you have them sign the same pledge at the end of the form.’

The bad research actually done on this provided no evidence that this claim about the world is true, because it used fake data. The claim might still be true, and other researchers could devise new experiments designed to provide evidence. But, if you do the experiments right, there is the possibility that the evidence will not be found, or it might even be that you find evidence for the opposite- maybe signing at the bottom generates more honest answers.

Scientists (albeit not the data-fakers) put something on the line, and realize that their hypothesis, no matter how much they like it, may not in the end be supported by evidence.

The ‘saying things’ people face no such test. They say things, and other people might disagree, but those people are just saying different things.

I am not the first, by any means, to point out that the ‘thing-sayers’ don’t face this scientific test of the things they say. Thus, the thing-sayers have devised a very clever response. They say that the whole experiment-data-evidence approach is evil- white, male, hegemonic, colonial, etc. Saying this establishes – for them – the superiority of saying things. Ya gotta hand it to them.

When I was supervising undergrad theses in my last years of teaching, students were very fond of writing things like ‘as Flimblat has proven, X’, when all that meant was that that the student had read a paper by Flimblat in which he said ‘X’. Saying ain’t proving, I would correct them. They did not like that. In my experience, the people who write these ‘saying things’ papers are quite convinced of everything they write, and the students, sadly, take confidence for proof.

I leave it to you to decide which is worse for humanity. Academics following scientific procedures of experiment, observation and evidence, but doing it so badly or so fraudulently that it is meaningless or even deceitful,

academics just saying things.

Tough call from my perspective, but I do hope Professor Mihlar is not helping design buildings. Perhaps her job is just to keep them free from coloniality. Or to conceptualize how they might be.

Why Vote, Part Two

Written by Al Slivinski on May 19, 2025. Posted in Politics. No Comments on Why Vote, Part Two

By now you have likely read about the federal election outcome in the Quebec riding of Terrebonne, where a judicial recount determined that Liberal candidate Tatiana Auguste had defeated Bloc candidate Nathalie Sinclair-Desgagné by a single vote. Elections Canada says the result is final, the Bloc Quebecois is going to court to ask that a by-election be ordered, due to irregularities in the way some mail-in ballots were addressed.

Leaving all the wrangling aside, here is the example, if you want one, of why ‘every vote counts’. If this result is not overturned – and who knows? – then every Liberal voter in that riding can say to themselves ‘I decided who would be my MP.’ And, every potential Bloc voter who did not vote can kick themselves and say – ‘I could have prevented my being represented in Parliament by a Liberal.’

Of course, this happened in one of 343 ridings in this election, so that means the typical Bloc or Liberal voter across the country was still looking at a 1 in 343 chance of ‘counting’ in this election, and if you add in all the federal elections ever, well…..I continue to maintain that ‘your vote making a difference’ is a bad reason to get up and vote, and that almost no one does so for that reason.

On the other hand, this does illustrate why I also wrote that if – for whatever reason – you do vote, it only makes sense to vote for the candidate you would most like to see in office.

Here’s another thing to think about with respect to voting, now that we won’t have to do so for awhile….we hope.

There is a legitimate sense in which each vote counts, I think. That is, there is something that happens for certain if you go out and vote, it does not happen with some miniscule ‘zero out to six decimal places’ probability. If you go to the polls and vote for candidate A, then there is no doubt about the fact that when the results are posted, candidate A, win or lose, will have X votes beside his/her name, rather than X – 1 votes. You don’t know what X will be on election day when you make your decision, of course, but you know that it will be one higher because you voted. Your vote will count, for certain, in the sense that it will be recorded and be part of the public record of the election.

One reason we have elections, I suggest, is to find out what people think about candidates and parties. It is often said, when a candidate wins by a large margin, that they have a true mandate. If the margin is thin, as it clearly was in Terrebonne, the winning candidate, whoever it turns out to be, knows that they might, but for different weather on election day, have lost. This is going to affect how they behave while in office, unless they’re foolish.

So, by voting, you are doing your little bit to keep the winning candidate on their toes, if it is not who you voted for, by reducing their margin of victory. On the other hand, if your candidate wins, you have done your bit to reassure them that they can behave in ways consistent with being the most popular choice for your riding.

Your contribution is small, to be sure – one vote added to or subtracted from the winning margin – but it is not uncertain, and it is a matter of public record.

I think that is why I vote, fundamentally. To have my (admittedly tiny) voice heard. To see one more vote in the column next to the candidate I voted for. I have in this way ‘spoken’, as have my fellow citizens, even though none of us had really anything to do with who won.

I close with a final thought, which I will take up in more detail in another post. I have here spoken about only the voting decision itself; should I bother at all, and for whom should I vote if I do? There are other things citizens can do in an election, of course. They can canvas door-to-door on behalf of a candidate or party. They can found a group or organization whose purpose is to support and campaign for or against a party or candidate. Hell, we can all try to convince our friends to vote for or against candidates or parties – at some risk of losing said friends, presumably.

In a word, we can become ‘activists’ in an attempt to influence how other people vote. If we are successful at this, then our influence on ‘who wins’ may become less miniscule. It’s not certain it will, of course, my point here is that this decision to do more than just vote is one people can take.

More later on how I think this other way to engage in democracy matters, for good or ill, for elections in places like Canada.

No Sliver Too Small

Written by Al Slivinski on May 14, 2025. Posted in Standards. No Comments on No Sliver Too Small

Back when I was working and trying to do research, I said often that I frequently got good ideas while either showering or doing the dishes.

Really.

Anyway, I now use bar soap in my shower at home, exclusively. No more ‘shower gels’ in a bottle for me, give me a bar of Ivory or Dove. It occurred to me the other day that there is no sliver of bar soap so small that you cannot use it to get one more wash in. I reach into the soap dish, and find this miniscule piece of bar soap, because I noticed how tiny it was the last time I showered but then forgot about it as soon as I stepped out of the shower, so now here I am, the water cascading down on me, holding this tinier yet sliver of soap.

But that’s the thing, it does not matter, you can just take that sliver, rub it on yourself or on a washcloth, depending on what showering technology you prefer, and do a perfectly acceptable job of cleaning yourself off. Maybe, if I’ve been out in the garden for a couple of hours I will need something more substantial, but that’s rarely the case, and I stopped DIY changing the oil in my car decades ago.

Of course, at some point I do get a new bar. Either I look at the soap dish when I’m in the bathroom for another reason and realize the sliver is down to a nanogram in size and replace it, or I get into the shower and look at the sliver and decide to get out and drip my way down the hall to the linen closet and get a new bar. However, when I do, I hear my mother’s voice in my head: “Gonna throw that out, eh? Must be nice to be rich.”

And, she’s not wrong, I coulda used it one more time.

What The Tariffs Are Really About…Maybe

Written by Al Slivinski on May 12, 2025. Posted in Government. No Comments on What The Tariffs Are Really About…Maybe

I wrote about the Trumpian tariff regime back when it first started, here and here. Back then, after discarding the idea that there is a purposeful strategy behind it all for lack of evidence, I settled on the idea of DJT as a stimulus-response machine, simply responding thoughtlessly to whatever happened around him at any moment. .

Today’s WSJ includes an op-ed piece by one of their regular writers, Andy Kessler, with the title The New Right’s Zombie Economics that offers another perspective. I think Kessler has a point, so I am going to tell you about it here. The WSJ article is behind a paywall, otherwise I would just include a link and suggest you all read it.

The fundamental idea is contained in this quote from Kessler’s article:

“Why so much tariff love? The mind-meld on tariffs is about power. Everyone wants his finger in the pie. Politicians and technocrats insist they know how to direct a $115 trillion global economy and how many dolls your child needs at Christmas.”

And then he writes this….

“Tariffs bring insider dealing and special interests, as we see with iPhone and some auto exemptions. Are Barbie exceptions next? Mr. Trump admits that tech leaders “all hated me in my first term, and now they’re kissing my a—.” It’s cronyism on steroids.”

Of course, none of this surprises the Dems in the Resistance, they all have been saying Trump is power-mad all along. But on tariffs, well. Kessler points out that in fact plenty of Dems are all on board with tariffs, just not the way Trump is doing them. He notes:

“Michigan’s Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said last month, “Tariffs need to be used like a scalpel, not a hammer.” Let me guess, carving out foreign autos?”

This is Kessler’s basic point. A tariff regime places government officials in the position of deciding what prices you pay for imported products. In an economy that imported more than $US3.5Trillion (yea, that’s Trillion) in 2024, that’s putting a lot of power into the hands of the government. It’s that which has led to a parade of foreign leaders and US CEOs to the White House in the last three months. A__kissing, indeed.

And as to Congress, well, Kessler notes this:

“On April 30, only three Republican senators voted to block Mr. Trump’s tariff policies by terminating the bogus April 2 “national emergency” declaration.”

There are a lot of other great quotes in the piece, Kessler is one of the WSJ’s better writers. Read it if you can. I’ll finish with this one:

“Whether it’s tariffs, green jobs, “made in America” mandates or identity politics, they all have the same aim: government-expressed bossiness.”

I will say here that I don’t see identity politics as government bossiness, but certainly the expression of it through DIE rules and bureaucracies is.

What I would say Kessler ignores is the impact of DJT’s style, which is, I think, what causes Trump Derangement Syndrome. DJT is, at a personal level, an asshole, and more than that, someone who revels in his assholeness. If you spend any time in the world, you know such people exist, you just don’t expect them to hold high office – even though sometimes they do. Think Andrew Jackson, folks. Anyway, Trump’s unapologetic assholeness generates the personal animosity which most non-assholes feel towards Trump, myself included, and makes his brand of government bossiness seem more toxic. I would suggest – and may perhaps write more about it at some point – that Barack Obama’s brand of government bossiness was no less toxic, but that man knew a thing or two about delivery.

And, sad to say, given those three Republican votes in the Senate, this Trumpian version of it is not going away any time soon.

Ah, Professor Gelman

Written by Al Slivinski on May 10, 2025. Posted in Popular attitudes. No Comments on Ah, Professor Gelman

As regular readers know, I am a regular reader myself of the blog written by Andrew Gelman, the statistician at Columbia U. I’ve learned a lot from it, and it helps keep me informed about what is going on in the world of academic research – particularly about the bad things going on in that world.

That being said, Andrew Gelman is still a high-level academic, and at an Ivy League school, so he is more than capable of displaying all the quirks of people from that group. I give you as evidence a post he made on May 1, which you can read yourself here. It’s free, and not at all long.

He says that there is concern out there that a set of ‘economic shocks’ (Trump-induced, although he does not mention Trump), has people concerned about a looming recession.

The ‘shocks’ he lists are tariffs, reduced tourism to the US, reduced hiring due to uncertainty, and then he writes ‘etc’. Not sure what etc. encompasses.

He then writes:

“There’s always a silver lining. Some things we might expect to follow from an economic downturn:”

Here are some of those things he writes about.

“Less energy consumption. Fewer tourists means a decrease in airline flights, car rentals, etc.”

If he is saying this is a good thing that follows from the drop in US tourism, then I have to point out that won’t even happen if people from other countries simply do their touristing in some other country. But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, and suppose he means that a general recession will imply a general drop in tourism to all countries, with a corresponding drop in flights and car rentals. The silver lining then is supposed to be that this will reduce energy consumption.

Now, someone in reply to his post (almost certainly an economist) tried to gently point out that people could always choose to not go touring if they wanted to, but if they are forced to do this by a recession, because they lost their job or their income otherwise dropped, those people are certainly not better off.

Gelman skated right by this. Why? As we will see, all of the points Gelman makes, even though he does not put it this way, are simply intended to point out the silver linings for Gelman from a recession ….or rather, for someone like Gelman. That is, if you are an Ivy League tenured professor in no danger of losing your job or taking a pay cut, then the things he enumerates are good consequences of a recession. If you are someone else, maybe not.

So, yes, from that perspective, the fact that other people will be doing less touring around, thereby consuming less energy, that is a good thing for what I will henceforth call ‘the Gelmanoids’. They don’t see themselves having to do less touring, they expect to attend whatever academic conferences they usually do, take whatever vacations they usually do, and on top of that, other people will be burning less fuel. Similarly for the next thing, which is ‘China selling us less stuff and thereby burning less fuel’. Gelmanoids don’t see themselves buying less stuff from China, indeed they buy rather little, but if other people do, the environment – and hence the Gelmanoids – will be better off.

I think the following one-two punch is my favourite:

“A global recession could lead to people eating less meat, or at least slowing the rate of increase in meat consumption. And if people are pessimistic about the future, they might have fewer kids, which would save lots of energy use.”

I don’t see how anyone can say that people eating less meat is a good thing, unless that someone thinks that meat consumption is itself a bad thing. Perhaps because producing edible meat is more energy-intensive than producing edible not-meat? I can’t be sure, he does not elaborate. It does not seem to have occurred to Gelman that people with low income who are forced to eat less meat in a recession in which their income is reduced do so because meat is expensive, and therefore they end up getting the calories they need to stay alive from carbohydrates, which are cheaper, and that is an overall less healthy diet than one including protein derived from meat. But hey, less meat consumption by others, so the Gelmanoids are better off.

The second sentence above, well…..wow. It certainly is a good thing when people become so pessimistic that they no longer want to have kids. Awesome. Gelman is about 60, so any procreating is behind him, although I would bet $10 he is childless. Hard to imagine a parent writing that sentence.

Then we have: “Indeed, if there’s enough of a depression, just about all prices could drop.’

Indeed, indeed. If you are someone who did not lose their job so those prices would drop – that is, if you are a Gelmanoid – then ‘enough of a depression’ is indeed a good thing. A silver lining, as he writes.

There is more, but I expect you get the idea, do go and read it if you want the whole picture.

I will close by noting that not all readers of Gelman’s blog bought into the post’s premise. One person wrote this in the Comments, tongue placed firmly in cheek:

“Actually, we don’t even need to sit here and brainstorm. You can go read some history books about the 30s and look for sections on “Upsides of the Great Depression”. Or find someone who was on the job market in 2008 and ask them how things improved for them that year. Let us know what you find!”

No evidence Gelman noticed said tongue in said cheek.

Good statistician, and I think a good, conscientious scientist, but also a living example of why no Ivy League academic should be put in charge of anything that involves, you know, people.

Silver Linings

Written by Al Slivinski on May 10, 2025. Posted in Culture, News Media. No Comments on Silver Linings

Every newspaper publishes articles online that are bad. Or Silly. Or both. The reason, I think, is that online newspapers have no serious space constraints, and they can get ‘guest columnists’ to write pieces – particularly opinion pieces – for free. This is sadly true even at my primary source for US and International news, the Wall Street Journal.

Recently the WSJ featured an op-ed with this title:

Trump Tariffs Are a Victory Against Climate Change

By making consumption more expensive, they may do more for the planet than 1,000 ESG plans.

The author is one Amy Chan, who advertises herself as chief sustainability officer at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. This puts her in the class of ‘university bureaucrat’, a group whose disconnect from reality is only exceeded by that of the faculty in their institutions.

Now, Ms Chan does not claim that the reason for Trump’s tariffs is saving the planet from Climate Change, only that this will be one of their happy, albeit unintended, consequences.

Here’s a quote explaining the first of her three reasons for this claim:

“Many supply-chain leaders are outlining an emerging strategy called “manufacturing in region for region.” This means producing goods in North America for North American consumers, in Europe for Europeans, and so on. That’s good for stability and even better for the planet. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, transportation accounts for roughly 15% of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Fewer transoceanic journeys mean less emissions.”

This is classic bureaucratic ‘only one thing matters’ thinking. This noble strategy of locating plants in each region in which a company sells does mean less transportation of goods, but it also means more manufacturing plants. And, of course, the inputs used by those plants still have to come from somewhere. So if the one plant you had in China producing for the whole world also got most of its inputs from China, the company must either find input sources in the other countries in which it locates plants, or trade shipping outputs for shipping inputs instead. So, it’s not even obvious less total shipping is the result.

In addition, if transport costs account for 15% of emissions, then something else must account for the other 85%. Perhaps manufacturing is in there somewhere? Will a lot of (presumably smaller) manufacturing plants produce less emissions than fewer large plants? I have no idea, but Ms Chan does not consider the possibility. Simply, there is no way to know if this bold new strategy by manufacturers will have a net negative effect on emissions. It’s complicated, as they say – unless you’re a university bureaucrat.

As to her second reason, she actually makes two separate points, so I will call them 2A and 2B. Here is 2A:

“Mr. Trump’s recent move to end the de minimis tax exemption for low-value imports from China could curb America’s addiction to fast fashion and disposable goods supplied by retailers like Shein and Temu. This would result in fewer impulse buys and less landfill waste.”

Note that this exemption only applied to low value items ordered from Chinese producers by individuals. It is separate from the tariffs imposed on goods imported to the US by importers for eventual resale in the US. In the very same edition of the WSJ is an article about this, which describes how a company named Kuru that used to import athletic shoes to Canada, then let US consumers directly order them online, shipping them across the US-Canada border under the de minimis exemption. Kuru’s response to Trump’s move is to ship the shoes from China directly to a warehouse in the US, and fulfill the orders from there. They will still be subject to Trump’s tariffs on imported Chinese goods, but it will be calculated on the wholesale rather than retail price of the goods, lowering the impact some. How does this change in Kuru’s approach to selling in the US reduce impulse buys and landfill use?

The tariffs on Chinese goods, plus the elimination of the de minimis exemption will make it more expensive for US residents to buy a dress or book or food supplement or toy directly from China, whether they do so from a US reseller or directly online. Thus, one may expect that they will do so less. But – fewer impulse buys, whatever those are, or less landfill waste – why? If US consumers instead buy from US-based companies – and at this point there is no way to know, but that is presumably Trump’s hope – all that happens is landfills have more US made goods in them down the road, and fewer made in China.

Again, that the removal of the de minimis exemption will result in fewer small individual purchases by Americans from Chinese sellers is not to be argued with, indeed that is precisely the point. Why that should result in fewer impulse buys or less being thrown into landfills is not at all obvious, and Ms Chan does not elaborate beyond what I quoted above.

Her 2B is as follows:

“Manufacturers may also respond by producing higher-quality, longer-lasting products. The effect won’t be limited to cheap goods. Higher prices on electronics, appliances and vehicles will encourage consumers to extend the life of what they already own. The greenest car isn’t a new electric vehicle; it’s the one you don’t replace.”

This quote directly follows the previous one so Ms Chan clearly is arguing that this 2B is a consequence of manufacturers reacting to the removal of the de minimis exemption. Why foreign producers who see their individual orders from Americans drop would respond by producing higher-quality longer lasting products I cannot imagine. I don’t even see why that would necessarily be a response of foreign manufacturers to the tariffs that DJT has imposed on what they export commercially to the US for other firms to re-sell. Again, Ms Chan does not provide any reasoning for this claim.

The claim in the third sentence is just….bewildering, at least with regard to electronics and appliances. How does Ms Chan propose that Americans will extend the lives of their laptops and smartphones? Does she see a sudden renaissance in the electronics repair and refurbishment business? Certainly most Americans are not in a position to DIY their electronics into a longer life. As to appliances like refrigerators and washing machines, she may have a point. If the purchase price of those goes up, it seems reasonable that people will be more likely to pay the guy from Maytag (does Maytag still exist?) to repair the old one when it breaks down, rather than buy a new one. But what about a coffee-maker? Or that electric moustache trimmer? Will people get those repaired? Or just go back to using a sharpened rock? I guess we’ll see.

In any case, it is the last sentence in that quote that is the least supportable. No, the greenest car is not the one you don’t replace. If you replace even a four-year old gasoline powered car with another similar but new gasoline powered car, you can be very sure your emissions from driving will go down, as will your fuel consumption. This is why various jurisdictions have instituted ‘cash for clunkers’ programs. Of course, it is rather more complicated even than that, as it matters for the whole calculation what happens to the old car. If someone else ends up driving it, then you have to figure in how that person would have gotten around if they had not acquired your old car. Would they be driving an even more emitting, gas-guzzling clunker? Taking public transit? Again, it’s complicated.

On to reason three. The article points out that China produces more than two-thirds of global rare earths – I will take her word on that – and then says that making those more expensive to import from China – presumably via tariffs – will induce US firms to do more recovery and reuse of those substances. That makes a certain amount of economic sense, but it also seems likely to induce more exploration for rare earths in places outside China. Even if more re-use occurs, it does not follow that this will reduce emissions. What are the relative emissions footprints of recycling rare earths vs mining them? I don’t know, and Ms Chan doesn’t tell us, so it is not even clear that her ‘re-use and re-cycle’ regime will reduce emissions if it happens. There are some key facts missing from the argument.

It is not inconceivable that an unintended consequence of Trump’s tariffs might be a net reduction in emissions, but the many possible reactions of millions of firms and consumers to those tariffs makes it a very difficult claim to support. My point here is that, university bureaucrats, particularly ‘sustainability’ bureaucrats, are very bad at considering a wide range of possibilities. They want to keep you focused on the one part of the issue that supports what they want you to conclude. A silver lining to Trump’s tariff cloud would be a nice thing to find, I suppose, but this article provides little evidence that Ms Chan has found one.

I was going to have a second section in this post to show that university faculty can be clueless too, but this is already long enough, so I will write that up separately.

Coda: Then there’s this

The day I posted this, the WSJ outdid itself for silliness, featuring an article titled:

Six Friends Tried to Plan a Girls’ Trip in a Group Chat. Things Went Sideways

Talk about your breaking news, eh?

It included the following graphic, to help the reader follow this complex and utterly fascinating story….

The article ended with a request to readers –

“What’s the worst communication breakdown you’ve ever had in a group text? Join the conversation below.”

For this I pay no small sum every month.

The 2025 Canadian Election – Part Deux

Written by Al Slivinski on May 1, 2025. Posted in Politics. No Comments on The 2025 Canadian Election – Part Deux

I will be writing more about more general issues regarding voter turnout and why people vote or don’t, hopefully all illustrated with what happened in Canda’s recent election. Here I just want to note some consequences of this recent vote which seem both interesting and important. This post was prompted by a report in the Globe today that the Liberals are trying to find ‘disgruntled’ Conservative MPs to ‘poach’, in an attempt to get to a majority in Parliament.

I first note a report that says the Liberal seat count is now back down to 168 from 169, as a Quebec riding originally said to be won narrowly by the Liberals is for the moment a Bloc riding. According to the Globe, it had been listed as a 35-vote Liberal win but this has been updated to a 44-vote Bloc win. However, because of the narrow margin of victory, the riding results will go to a recount, so stay tuned, folks. Do the Liberals need another three or four votes?

Back to the Liberal ‘poaching’, the Liberals do not seem to be denying that they are doing this, but it leaves me to wonder what this would mean. So far as I know, an MP voted in as a Conservative can ‘cross the floor’ and sit with the Liberal caucus. Belinda Stronach famously did this back in 2005, an event fraught with romantic overtones, as I recall. The usual reason cited for making this floor-crossing a bad idea for a sitting MP is that the constituents who originally elected them will be upset and throw them out of office at the first opportunity. However, Stronach was re-elected as a Conservative from the same riding she had won as a Liberal in the first election after her floor-crossing. No harm, no foul, presumably, in that case.

Alternatively, could a Conservative MP simply agree to support the Liberals in any vote of confidence, without crossing the floor? I doubt the Conservatives would allow that, and their Leader would likely expel them from their own caucus, so they may as well ‘cross’.

Anyway, to the extent that this sort of search for ‘disgruntled’ MPs is truly happening (and all the Globe seems to know is that Liberal spokespersons are not denying it), it is at least consistent with my suggestion that the Liberals and Carney are going to be uncomfortable entering into an alliance with either the Bloc or the rump of the NDP. Better to rely on a handful of Conservatives (or NDP?) who have indicated in some way that they are willing to support you. Attracting Conservatives looks good, consorting with The Party From Nowhere or The Party of Quebecois Angst, not so much.

Are there really disgruntled Conservative MPs? I have no idea, none of them are answering my calls, but it is not hard to imagine that some of them are at least unhappy with the current Conservative Party Leader and his advisors, given that they lost a 20+ percentage point lead in the polls over three months.

This all leads to the other political drama slowly developing after the election. Poilievre finds himself in the position of being The Leader of the Conservative Party, and the Conservative Party, by virtue of its 144 seats in Parliament, is His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, but Poilievre’s loss of his seat means he cannot be The Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. You gotta be in Parliament to hold that position in Parliament, and – maybe – to live in the residence provided for the person who holds that position. Messy for Poilievre and the Conservatives, at least for now.

The Conservative Caucus in Parliament will meet next week to decide who will fill that official parliamentary role when Parliament resumes, and it certainly cannot be Poilievre until and unless he gets elected to Parliament. This, in turn, will require that at some point the holder of a safe Conservative seat step aside, and resign their seat, so PP can run in a by-election. Any volunteers?

Of more potential distress to Mr. Poilievre, the signature of 20% of his caucus members (so, 29 or so) would then trigger a review of his Leadership. I don’t know exactly what that entails, and most of what I have read about the current federal Conservative party suggests that Poilievre has maintained tight control over it, so it likely won’t happen, and won’t be a problem for Poilievre if it does.

It is most likely then, I suppose, that there will be no drama, no leadership review, some good Conservative soldier will resign from his ‘safe’ seat in return for some unknown goodies, so as to allow Poilievre to win it in a byelection, and Parliament will chug along in its usual (usually dysfunctional) way. That’s how things go generally in 21^st century Canadian politics. Look how many months of tanking polling numbers it took – along with the resignation of the Minister of Finance – before Trudeau actually felt the need to walk out into the winter snow.

That all said, perhaps this is a good place to insert Al’s Very Excellent Canadian Political Fantasy.

Imagine for a moment or two that Carney called up Poilievre and said:

‘Lets have a meeting, just you, me, maybe three or four of our key MPs, and discuss forming a Government of National Unity. We can talk about putting some of your Conservative MPs in Cabinet, and work out a set of National Priorities that both of our caucuses can live with, if not universally love. These are exceptional times, and we who lead the Parties that were supported by more than 80% of all voters need to do something exceptional for the good of Canada and its people.”

Don’t really see Carney making that call (he holds most of the cards now, after all), don’t see Poilievre responding favourably if he did, don’t see that meeting going well if it were to happen. Old habits of thinking die hard.

But an old guy can dream, eh? Even an old cynic like me.

Post-Electoral Blues….And Reds

Written by Al Slivinski on April 30, 2025. Posted in Politics. No Comments on Post-Electoral Blues….And Reds

So, it’s over, and according to the Elections.ca website, here are the final seat numbers and vote percentages:

I note in passing that all of this information is now missing from the Globe and Mail and CBC websites. You can find it by searching, but at no place on either are you informed that this is the final tally, and so it is officially the case that the Liberals won a plurality, but not a majority of the seats in Parliament. Not at all important, of course in a Westminster Parliamentary system. Actually, I wonder if anyone at either org realizes this is the Canadian form of government. Whatever……

The Globe has a story titled ‘Six Charts that Reveal the Story of the 2025 Election’. I love it when the Globe does charts. One of said charts is ‘An electoral map with much less orange’. Oh, you mean the NDP went from 24 to 7 seats? Thanks, Globe.

In my humble opinion, there is one truly remarkable thing about this electoral outcome, and the Globe’s last chart includes it, even though it requires no chart to uncover or explain it. A simple arithmetic fact is that the two major parties, the Liberals and Conservatives, nominated candidates for Parliament that together garnered 84% of all the votes cast. That this is a historically rare event is confirmed by the note below the Globe’s chart, which says the last time two parties combined to get more than 80% of all votes was in the election of 1930. So, 95 years ago. Remarkable, then.

This leads to what I see as the other key fact about this electoral outcome, one which neither CBC or the G&M seem to find of interest. The Liberals need three votes in Parliament from non-Liberal MPs to pass any legislation. Where will they get them? There are only two candidates, the MPs of the Bloc Quebecois, who lost 1/3 of their MPs in this election, or the MPs of the NDP, who went from 24 to 7 MPs, a loss of more than two-thirds, inducing their Leader to resign. What would be the consequences of a political alliance between the Liberals and members of a party which is effectively devoted to being separated from Canada? The Bloc’s leader said during the Leaders’s English debate that he had no interest in being Prime Minister of Canada.

Alternatively, an alliance with the barely-breathing NDP would prompt endless calls of ‘oh, here we go again’ from the Conservatives. I doubt Carney wants that, so – what does he do?

I dunno, stay tuned. (I can’t wait for The Globe to lay it out for us in six charts…..or maybe seven.)

The other somewhat interesting fact that the Globe does actually report is that turnout was 68.6% of registered voters, higher than the 2021 number of 62.8%, but a long way from the 79.4% of 1959. In reference to my last post, something is damping down Canadians’ personal interest in voting. Don’t know what.

There will be a lot more to write about in the coming weeks, to be sure, but I will close this initial piece with a nod to polling. Below is a screenshot I took of the Federal Election webpage of 338canada.com on the morning of Election Day, April 28, so you can see what they were projecting based on their aggregation of polling info available that morning.

As you can see, they projected the Liberals to win between 144 and 222 seats, which is a wide range of possibilities, with a ‘point estimate’ of 186, while they projected the Conservatives to get between 90 and 164 seats, with a point estimate of 124. Thus, they overestimated the share for the Liberals and underestimated it for the Conservatives. Not by a lot, but by enough that they did not foresee the Liberals’ minority status. In fact, they also projected a 65% chance of a Liberal majority government, and only a 20% chance for the Liberal plurality that we actually got. They got the collapse of the other two parties pretty much right on.

If one looks back at the path that the polling took just prior to the election, it seems that the Conservatives were climbing and the Liberals falling. Who knows, if the election campaign had lasted another two weeks, maybe we would all be talking about the Conservatives forming a minority government, trying to figure out how to work with the Bloc.

Stay tuned.

Voting

Written by Al Slivinski on April 26, 2025. Posted in Government, Politics. 1 Comment on Voting

Good God, y’all – what is it good for?

Absolutely Nothing?

Perhaps not, with apologies to Edwin Starr…and whoever wrote that song.* But I do have my doubts. Voting behavior and what influences it was a big part of what I taught and researched during my career. I have been writing down notes about it since before I started this blog, with an eye toward trying to write a loooong piece about modern democracy. Probably too long, so here I will record just a few thoughts, prompted by our looming Canadian federal election. There will be more to come.

It is a much noted and much lamented fact that turnout rates in elections in advanced democracies are ‘too low’. Whether and in what sense that is a bad thing deserves to be discussed, but I will set that aside until later. To start with some facts, below is data from a few countries of which you have heard. I note hastily that such data is hard to compare across countries, for reasons I will indicate.

Canada: 62.6% of those registered to vote in the 2021 Federal election did so. Although it is easy to register in Canada by international standards, not everyone does. I note also that in a labour force survey done just after said election, 75.6% of those surveyed reported voting. More on that discrepancy, which is very common, later.

USA: 62.8% of the Voting Age Population (VAP) is estimated to have voted in the US 2020 election – ‘estimated’ because the VAP is an estimate, although a pretty accurate one, based on the US census. This was a recent high for the US, VAP turnout has been below 60% since 1984 and was below 50% in 1996. Note that it is rather more difficult to register to vote in the US than in Canada.

UK: In the 2024 election, 59.9% of registered voters voted. It is estimated that 8million who are of voting age were not registered to vote, while some 48 million were registered, and 29 million voted. If the 8million number is accurate (and I have no idea if it is), this makes VAP turnout approximately 29/56 = 51%.

Germany: It is reported that in the 2025 federal election turnout was 82.5%, but % of what I have not been able to determine. So far as I can tell it does seem to be easy to register to vote there.

Finally,

France: In 2024, 63% of French voters turned out to vote for the second round of the country’s snap parliamentary elections on Sunday, July 7, but again it is not clear what that is a percentage of. And, that figure is from Le Monde, Wikipedia says 66%.

Clearly there is a fair bit of variation here, although some of it is due to differences in how turnout stats are defined. Still, the ‘best’ of these recent numbers is from Germany, and even there up to 20% of those who could vote did not do so.

Why is this the case? I don’t think I have a good answer, but a place to start is to ask – why do people vote at all? Simply put, if we knew for sure why people vote, it would make it easier to determine why many do not.

Those who study this sort of thing talk about two possible motivations for voting. One is referred to as being ‘instrumental’, and it is the desire by citizens to influence who governs us. Voting is how we do that in democracies, and so people vote in order to influence who will hold important government offices.

The other motivation goes by a variety of names, I will refer to it as ‘internal’ or ‘personal’. These are motivations that come from inside us. Thus, if we vote because we feel we are fulfilling a duty, that is a personal, internal motivation. [There are a few countries in which one can be fined for not voting. For the time being, I am going to leave ‘avoiding a sanction’ out of the discussion of motivations. I’ll come back to it later.]

What separates these two motivations fundamentally is whether they are influenced by the way in which we think others will vote. The instrumental motivation is affected by how other people behave, because their votes – or failure to vote – also influences who wins office.

As an example, people often speak of ‘voting strategically’ in an election in which there are more than two candidates. For example, a Canadian might vote for a Liberal candidate in their federal riding, even if they believe the NDP candidate would make a better MP. They do this because they expect the Conservative and Liberal candidate will be the top two finishers, and they prefer the Liberal to the Conservative. They would not do this if they believed the Conservative and NDP would be the top two vote-getters; in that case they would vote NDP. Strategic voting only makes sense if your reason for voting is instrumental, so your vote is aimed at influencing who takes office.

There are at least two ways in which your motivation to vote might be personal. One, already mentioned, is that you vote because you believe it is your duty as a citizen to do so. If your motivation were one of what I will call ‘pure duty’, then it does not matter for whom you vote, so long as you do your duty and vote. You will feel better for having done so. I doubt anyone feels exactly that way, but if you think it is your duty to vote, and also to vote for the ‘best’ candidate, whatever ‘best’ means to you, then it is still an internal motivation. You will do this – that is, go to the polls and vote for the best candidate – no matter what you think other citizens are going to do.

I claim that no one really votes because of a purely instrumental motivation. That is, no one really thinks they have any influence over who governs us, because everyone realizes that their vote has no impact on the outcome of the election. That is, they realize that whether they vote or not, and who they vote for, is irrelevant to the outcome of the election. Or, to put it in probability terms, they realize that their going to the polling booth and voting for candidate A changes the likelihood of candidate A winning the election not at all. It will change the outcome of the election if and only if candidate A and some other candidate would get the same number of votes, and more than any other candidate, if they did not vote. The probability of the candidate you favour and some other candidate tying for the most votes is, at the point at which you go off to vote, equal to zero out to many decimal places.

Another way to express the same idea: on the morning of voting day, you are thinking to yourself – ‘should I vote or should I spend that time doing something else?’ It is the decision we all have to make on that day.

But you are no fool, and you know that if you vote the probability is .00000xxx that the outcome of the election will be different from what it will be if you don’t vote. You don’t know exactly how many zeros come after that decimal point, and you surely don’t know what those xxx values are, because no one does. But you know that if there are some tens of thousands of registered voters in your riding, there are too many zeros after the decimal point in that probability for the exact xxx values to matter.

Hence, my claim is that probability of making a difference in the outcome cannot be what motivates any rational citizen to go and vote.

On the other hand, the probability that you will feel better about yourself if you vote is 1, if you have a (internal) sense of duty. That is a reason to vote, to feel like you certainly did your duty, to certainly not feel guilty that you did not, to feel for sure that you supported the best candidate with your vote.

So, the consequence of my claim that no one really votes for instrumental reasons implies that they must be voting for internal reasons, reasons which have nothing to do with the actual or predicted outcome of the election.

Now, if you work back through my argument above, it may occur to you that I am arguing that only a personal motivation makes sense as a reason to vote, a reason to take the time to go to the polls. Once that decision is made and you are in the polling booth with the ballot in front of you, then considerations of who might win do become relevant. At that point, it may be perfectly logical to vote strategically, as I described above, for example.

There is a cost to going to the polls, because you could spend that time otherwise, so my point is that the instrumental motivation of influencing the election’s outcome cannot be the reason for paying that cost. No matter how small that cost of voting is, the instrumental payoff is smaller – too many zeros. However, once you are in the booth, that cost has been paid, and it is certainly logical then to think about who you want to see in office. Once you are in the booth, it makes no sense to put an x next to the name of the candidate you think would make the worst office-holder.

I have at this point barely scratched the surface of voting behaviour, and I plan to write more. At this juncture, my one point is that if we are to understand why people vote (or don’t) we need to understand what influences their internal motivations to do so. Understanding which candidate they vote for when they do vote is a separate matter. Not completely separate, of course, but I maintain that it is useful to separate these two decisions – should I vote vs for whom should I vote – in order to understand why many do not vote.

This leaves many issues unconsidered, to put it mildly. As just one example, I have referred to the cost of getting out and voting, and that clearly includes the cost of registering to vote, which varies by country. However, there is in addition the cost of becoming informed about the candidates and parties. It is not controversial to say that people vary greatly in how much effort they put in on that front, but it is also costly, because it takes time and effort.

As I say, more to come. No doubt the results of the Canadian vote on Monday will provide more about which to write. Will turnout be higher or lower than in 2021 – and why?

Stay tuned.

* I checked, and it was written by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong, who also wrote ‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine’, ‘Papa was a Rollin’ Stone’, ‘Just My Imagination’ and other great Motown hits. I don’t know whether they voted.

B.S. In The World Of Research

Written by Al Slivinski on April 19, 2025. Posted in Research, Standards. No Comments on B.S. In The World Of Research

Here is a quote from a comment posted on my favourite stats blog by someone who is not the author of said blog:

“The stand out example for me is nutrition science. A lot of the big, obvious effects have been picked through and now so much of it is simmering in noise with strong incentives to find various different things by getting significance. Alcohol/chocolate/coffee does, doesn’t, does, doesn’t, does, doesn’t cause increased mortality. I don’t know how we could expect that discipline to turn around. There is good work being done there here and there, but so much of it is GIGO.”

…by which is meant Garbage In Garbage Out. The writer is Joe B Bak-Coleman, who describes himself as a computational social scientist. You can check him out here.

This point gets made repeatedly on Gelman’s stats blog by him and many other contributors: much of social and medical and health science research is based on bad statistical analysis of data that is fundamentally ‘noisy’, in which case there is little reason, statistically or logically speaking, to believe that whatever ‘influence of X on Y’ the research purports to have found really exists.

[I hear you wondering – what is ‘noisy’ data? Check out the end of this post.]

To put it in more human terms, a researcher who has a big data set and is determined to find a very particular effect of some X on some Y lurking in that data set, can almost always find it, with attached statistical tests that are (too often) taken to imply that the effect is not just the result of random noise in the data.

And, if that X on Y effect can be portrayed as ‘cool’ or ‘unexpected’ or, sadly, politically convenient, the researcher can become a minor celebrity and get asked to give a TED talk or be interviewed by a podcaster or written up in the NYT.

A different phenomenon, equally important, is when public policy bureaucrats, like, say, the US Surgeon General, make statements about research on, say, the health effects of alcohol consumption, that indicate they did not even read the research they are citing. A topic for another post.

However, what I want to stress here is that the incentives in research are almost perfectly upside down. If a researcher plugs along and tries to develop credible careful evidence that the unsurprising ‘X influences Y’ statement is true, then you will likely never know about it. The stuff the public hears about are the sexy results, such as

signing an honesty pledge at the top of a form promotes honesty more than signing it at the bottom of the form.
cold showers can change your life and reduce body fat. (That one, with a sample size of 49, was eventually retracted).
people who sit at a wobbly work station rather than a stable one are more likely to see their personal relationships as being likely not to last.
student subjects who are told with great seriousness that they are putting a lucky golf ball sink more putts than those who are not told that. (An attempt to replicate this experiment by other researchers failed)
Adverse Infant Health Outcomes Increased After the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election Among Non-White U.S.-born and Foreign-born Mothers ….that’s actually the title of a 2024 paper published in Demography which, conveniently, also tells you what the authors claim to have ‘found’. This is an example of the ‘politically convenient’ sort of result, and was arrived at using a method called ‘regression discontinuity’, which is so prone to abuse even I could explain why. Maybe I’ll try one day….

And, just to round things off, here are some quotes from Retraction Watch, a fun (but depressing) site which I have mentioned before, that keeps an eye on research studies that get retracted because, well, for many reasons.

i. “Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up past 500.”

ii. “And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?

iii. “The retraction of “a final batch” of 678 articles concludes Sage’s investigation into questionable peer review, citation manipulation, and other signs of paper mill activity at one of its journals, according to the publisher.” [For the curious, the journal in question is Journal of Intelligent and Fuzzy Systems. Yes, really.]

iv. “A Scientist Is Paid to Study Maple Syrup. He’s Also Paid to Promote It.”

My point is not a new one. The world is full of bullshit, and that includes that part of the world in which highly educated researchers are supposed to be trying to improve our understanding of the world.

Appendix (sort of) on Noisy Data

This refers to data that is only weakly connected to the actual thing it is supposed to be a measure of. Here’s a good example from a seminar I recently attended. The researcher was studying the impact of parental attention on how their kids did in school. Said researcher had data on a number of things, including, as one example, the time spent by parents reading to their pre-kindergarten children. However, this data came from a survey in which parents were asked to recall how many times in a typical week during the previous year they had read to their kids.

How good is any parent going to be at figuring out what a typical week is, or recalling how many times they read to their kid over the past year? The actual fact that the researcher needs, the impact of which on kids outcomes they are trying to study, is the time parents actually spend reading to their kids. The answers parents give to that survey question will be related to that actual fact, but only imperfectly. Parents will over and/or under state what they actually did when they answer that question. A lot of studies in social and health science rely on survey data, and it all tends to be noisy in this way. People have imperfect memories, and there is also variation in what people think a particular survey question is asking them. There are of course other things that can make data ‘noisy’ when it is not the result of some objective, regularized measurement process.

Who Wrote That?

Written by Al Slivinski on April 19, 2025. Posted in Culture. No Comments on Who Wrote That?

Plagiarism was, unfortunately, an activity with which I had to deal regularly in my career. Typical definitions and/or policies define it as representing the words or ideas of someone else as one’s own. Plagiarism has become a news topic in recent years, and not always with any good reason; I will leave that discussion to a future post.

Now retired, I got to thinking about it in a different context by a discussion of plagiarism in music that I heard on CBC’s It’s About Time program of classical music.

Before I tell you about that, I expect we can all recall some famous instances of alleged plagiarism in popular music in recent decades. One of the most publicized was when a copyright infringement suit was filed against George Harrison, claiming that his song ‘My Sweet Lord’ was a rip-off of the song ‘He’s So Fine’, which was written by Ronnie Mack and was a #1 hit for The Chiffons in 1963 (the year Mack died, interestingly). The suit was brought by Bright Tunes Music Corporation in 1971, the year Harrison’s song was released.

The words of the two songs, the story they tell, if you like, are in no way similar. Thus, the suit was entirely about the music in the two songs, and Bright Tunes won the suit, and a big settlement (which was eventually reduced, after legal wrangling that continued into the 90s).

I admit to having a hard time wrapping my head around any plagiarism case involving 20^th century popular music, by which I mean music that is encoded in verses and chorus melodies, chord progressions, lyrics (or not) and harmonies. I’m not a musician, but it seems like there are only so many ways to string chord changes and such together. I like (most) popular music, jazz, blues, rock, country, roots, whatever, but it is all more than a little derivative. A musician I knew back in the day said ‘There’s only one blues song, it just happens to be a great f-ing song’.

One opinion I have read about the Harrison-Mack case was that exactly that – the derivativeness of popular music – was ignored in setting the large settlement Harrison originally had to pay. In addition to that, the judge in the original case said the following:

“Did Harrison deliberately use the music of “He’s So Fine”? I do not believe he did so deliberately. Nevertheless, it is clear that “My Sweet Lord” is the very same song as “He’s So Fine” with different words, and Harrison had access to “He’s So Fine”. This is, under the law, infringement of copyright, and is no less so even though subconsciously accomplished.”

I get it, of course. A court of law cannot be expected to determine whether the copying of music was intentional or not. If the songs are the same, then they are.

Another series of accusations of plagiarism in rock centres on the band Led Zeppelin, who were sued by a number of companies and individuals for the same offence. For example, Zep put Howlin’ Wolf (aka Chester Burnett)’s composition ‘Killing Floor’ on their second album, naming it ‘The Lemon Song’. Not only the chords and melody were the same in that case, so were most of the lyrics. They gave Wolf no songwriting credit (hence no royalties) on the original release, but then had to change that after losing a suit in court.

Full circle now back to the case I heard about on CBC, which seems to me very different. It concerns one Fritz Kreisler, a classical violinist born in Austria in 1875, whose career embraced the new recording technology and industry of the early 20^th century. That career was very successful, and included recordings of him playing previously unknown violin pieces by composers such as Vivaldi and Corelli, which Kreisler claimed to have found in an old French monastery. When he turned 60 he confessed to the world he had written those pieces himself and then lied about their authorship.

Thus, he denied no one any revenue from his playing of those compositions, indeed, had he fessed up that they were his, I presume he would have earned writing royalties as well as performance royalties from the recordings people bought. His motivation was that apparently he believed that people would be more likely to buy those recordings if they thought they were hearing newly-discovered music by old masters. I suspect he was correct about that. And, according to one of the accounts of this that I read, Kreisler’s popularity ‘skyrocketed’ after his revelation of his fraud. Similarly, I have seen no evidence that Led Zeppelin’s popularity suffered after they lost the Burnett (or any other) copyright infringement suit.

Plagiarism seems to me to come under the general category of fraud rather than theft, and both the pop and classical instances above are that, but still – those classical musicians are a different breed, man.

Oh For Crap’s Sake, G&M

Written by Al Slivinski on April 16, 2025. Posted in Health Care, Language, News Media, Standards. No Comments on Oh For Crap’s Sake, G&M

I was at a gathering of mostly family (not my family, I was a guest) over the weekend at which someone said to me ‘I blame the media for much of what is wrong with the world today’.

An extreme statement, but one with which I find it hard to disagree. It is bad enough that little contemporary journalism provides us with facts, but what is really infuriating to me is that absolutely misleading horseshit shows up so often in mainstream (as well as much not-mainstream) media.

I offer you exhibit A, a Globe and Mail article titled ‘Are Canadians getting their money’s worth from their health system?’ authored by one Frederick Vettese, and marked as both ‘Opinion’ and ‘Special to the Globe and Mail’.

Special, indeed. The piece is centred on the graphic below –

I hardly know where to begin, but let me start by saying that many of the comments that were submitted on this article by Globe readers exhibit a lot more wisdom about the topic than that shown by the author.

Let’s start with something mildly technical: what data on what countries was used to draw that downward-sloping line? If it was just the 11 countries actually labeled in the graph, then this is cherry-picking data of the highest order. As a commenter pointed out, if that is the case, and you take the US out of the data, the line almost certainly slopes upward. On the other hand, if you leave the US in and take out Albania, it will have a much more negative slope.

The author does not think it important to say anything much about just what data is in there.

Let us give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume the line was drawn using data from every country on planet earth. This brings us to the caption on the diagram.

‘Translates into’??

What is that supposed to mean? Many of the commenters (as well as myself) took the caption to be suggesting that higher health care expenditure causes lower life expectancy. But god forbid a journalist use clear language. That one cannot infer such causality from this diagram, whatever data was actually used to draw it, is again clear to most of the commenters, and I hope to you, gentle reader. One very basic and relevant reason is that both health care expenditures and life expectancy are surely driven by other factors. Imagine a country in which disease rates are high, for any reason. This is going to decrease life expectancy as well as induce higher health care spending by both governments and individuals. Bingo, downward-sloping curve.

As they say – duh.

Also, I doubt anyone with a lick of sense thinks that increasing life expectancy is the only goal of health care. However, if one wanted to actually begin to understand what influences life expectancy, there are about a million other things that one ought to include in any statistical assessment, starting with per capita income, moving on to incidence of chronic disease, urbanization (hello, Albania), educational attainment, poverty rates….I could go on.

Thus, the author’s sentences:

“It is reasonable to expect that spending more on health care should lead to better overall health and hence longer life expectancy. If this is true, the trend line in the chart should be a straight line sloping upward from left to right.”

are baloney. Or, bologna. There is no reason to think it should be upward-sloping when all those other things are ignored.

The author also writes

“More spending certainly seems to be counterproductive. But more likely, the additional spending is not being put to good use.”

So, he truly does appear to be clueless. No, your graph does not ‘certainly’ imply that more spending is counterproductive, Mr. Vettese, nor does it provide any evidence about how well health care spending is being used in Canada or anywhere else. The efficacy of money spent in health care is a devilishly hard to measure thing, and your simple-minded graph tells us nothing about it. Nothing.

Indeed, nothing in this sad little article tells us anything about the answer to the question in its own headline.

Another F- in informativeness for the Globe and Mail.

Johannes Brahms, Meet Sidney Crosby

Written by Al Slivinski on April 8, 2025. Posted in Culture. No Comments on Johannes Brahms, Meet Sidney Crosby

Last week my sweetheart and I went to a performance by London Symphonia. We hadn’t attended a symphonic concert in years, and it was absolutely wonderful. Beethoven’s violin concerto in D major and Sibelius’s 2^nd symphony. Magnificent playing of great music. It got me thinking how I got to be a classical music buff. (Not an expert, I love it but claim no serious knowledge of it.)

I was raised on mid-20^th century popular music. My dad would play his vinyl records for me when I was quite young. I remember Dave Brubeck, Count Basie, Frank Sinatra, Gerry Mulligan and the soundtrack from the Peter Gunn TV show, music by Henry Mancini. Oh, and Spike Jones on 78s. I loved listening with him, what kid doesn’t enjoy that kind of attention from his Dad?

It kindof stuck with me, although like most of my generation I became a big Beatles fan when they hit the charts, then it was The Doors, Cream, The Who, etc etc as the Rock Era washed over us all. But I owned some recorded jazz as I got older, too. Brubeck and Oscar Peterson and Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and such. There was some R&B and blues mixed in there, too, but I had no experience of classical music. The only youthful exposure I remember was the local orchestra coming to our grade school for a performance, as such organizations do, and the principal of my high school complaining bitterly that no one wanted to play the violin any more since the electric guitar had come along.

Anyway, into my 40s, that was my music listening, mid-century popular music, as I said. At some time during my period as department chair in the early 2000s, the University’s Faculty Relations department – which used to do useful things from time to time – sponsored a Night at the Symphony. Discounted tickets to go hear a performance by Orchestra London (as it was then known), and I decided, trying to be a good team player, to buy a ticket and go.

They played in Centennial Hall in those days, a horrible old barn with miserable acoustics. I remember that I had trouble even hearing the cello soloist. I have no recollection of what pieces were played, but I was quite taken by it. Watching and hearing a symphony orchestra, even a mediocre one in a hall with bad acoustics, is an all-encompassing experience. There is almost too much sound to take in, as well as a hundred things to watch. I enjoyed it very much, and from that time on I was hooked. I bought tickets to more concerts and started making trips on the train to Toronto to catch the much-better Toronto Symphony playing in acoustically-wonderful Roy Thomson Hall.

And, I started buying classical CDs, mostly symphonic, but small-group recordings, also.

That is what makes symphonic music like hockey: nothing compares to seeing/hearing it live, right in front of you. I played my cd of Sibelius’s 2^nd the morning after the concert, and enjoyed it, but it reminded me there is no substitute for sitting in a hall and listening to an orchestra.

Similarly, watching hockey on TV is nothing like being in an arena and having it happen in front of you. Hockey is a game of sounds, the snicking of the skates on the ice, the bang of a hard-shot puck hitting the boards or ringing off the iron goal posts, and the sounds of the players yelling to one another. And, no sport moves as fast as hockey, and you only realize that sitting in an arena watching talented players do their thing.

A TV broadcast of a hockey game is a sterile thing, in comparison. It may well be possible with current technology to send those sounds through your TV or laptop during a game, but then the hockey chatterers hired by the broadcasters would have to shut the hell up, and they won’t do that. TV broadcasting of all sports is predicated on the belief that if you are not distracted by all sorts of things having nothing to do with the sport, you will get bored and go do something else. Talk-talk-talk, often about shit having nothing to do with the game being broadcast.

You may remember when Fox first started broadcasting NHL games in the US, they did some techie thing to make the puck light up in red on TV screens, so Americans who had never seen a game live could follow the play. It was much mocked, but I understand Fox’s instinct.

My own intro to hockey was much like my intro to classical music. I grew up within spitting distance of the Canada/US border, so my dad’s big-ass antenna picked up the CBC station in Windsor, Ontario, on which we could – and occasionally did – watch Hockey Night in Canada, and some Detroit station carried Red Wings games. That was all well and good, but I was in no sense a fan until my son started playing around age 9, and I spent hours in cold rinks watching games for years. Even kids (this was not a NHL-prep league, believe me) skating around in a game gives you a feel for hockey, and the sounds are the same. Then we started going to London Knights games. That’s Ontario Major Junior A level hockey, which is NHL-prep, and you could get good seats in the big old barn they used to play in. It was great, and I was by then a real fan.

I don’t actually watch much hockey on TV any more. North American football, and – strangely enough – baseball, are the only sports worth watching on TV, in my view. Football is too many people over too large an area to enable anyone (or at least me) to take it in while sitting in a stadium. And baseball is mostly about the mano-a-mano contest between pitcher and hitter, which TV delivers well. Still, the commentators on those broadcasts would also make me very happy if they would just shut the hell up….

Anyway, my point, if not obvious, is that one cannot really come to appreciate and love symphonic music from cds, however good your audio equipment is, and one cannot really love and appreciate hockey from watching games on TV, no matter how big-screen and HD is your equipment. You gotta get yourself to the concert hall or arena.

And….I’m just as likely to sit down and have a chat with Sidney Crosby as I am with Johannes Brahms.

Economics and the Canadian Federal Election

Written by Al Slivinski on April 5, 2025. Posted in Government, Politics. No Comments on Economics and the Canadian Federal Election

The Canadian federal election is not until April 28, and a lot can happen between now and then, but it would be foolish to bet against the proposition that the Mark Carney led Liberals will form a majority government when it is over. That is certainly the strong prediction on 338Canada.com.

This has been a reversal of polling the likes of which is rarely seen. The federal Conservatives, led by Pierre Poilievre, had a more than 20 percentage point lead over the Liberals before Justin Trudeau announced on Jan 6 his intent to resign as PM. There is no way to know what the Canadian polls would look like had Kamala Harris been elected US President, so we cannot say how much of this is due to Trump’s actions in the first two months of his administration, and I won’t try. What I am going to write about are what seem to me to be some of the economic issues (other than tariffs) that would be key to how this election turns out in normal times. Then, I’m going to say a (very little) bit about the bloody tariff war.

There is a 10-year track record of Liberal governance (the last years with the cooperation of the NDP, of course) to look at. I am going to use some of the graphs presented in a Globe article this morning titled ‘Ten economic issues that will define the 2025 election’ even though that is a ridiculous title. What does it mean to ‘define’ an election?

First a graph plus two statistics that depict a basic fact about recent immigration in Canada –

Add to this the following from Stats Can:

“Canada’s [birth] rate has been generally declining for over 15 years and reached a new low in 2023 of 1.26 children per woman.”

Finally, according to World Bank Open Data, Canada’s death rate has gone from 7.6 per 100k population in 2019 to 8.6 per 100k in 2022, the latest year for which they give figures. The result of an overall aging population, no doubt. Old folks are more likely to die than the young.

Thus, with zero immigration one would expect the graph above to show a continuous moderately declining trend in population growth. What you do see is the result of immigration, and in particular the steep increase after 2021 is all due to a correspondingly steep increase in immigration. That is not necessarily a bad thing, Canada, like the US, has been largely built by immigration, but the next graph from the Globe article gives a clear indication of the sense in which it is a problem.

From 2000 until the pandemic, housing construction had roughly kept pace with population growth, with a new house being constructed for each two new Canadian residents. Then, after the pandemic, it shot up to 5 new residents per new house, before coming back down in 2024 as the Liberal government finally backed off on their ‘flood of immigration’ policies.

If there is a Canadian housing crisis, it has many causes, because that is always the case, but in the ‘absence of Trump’ scenario it would have to be true, I think, that a debate would be going on regarding what a reasonable immigration regime looks like. Many other than I have written that Canada’s immigration programs were the envy of the advanced world at one time. You don’t have to be a so-called ‘nativist’ (hell I’m an immigrant) to think the Liberals under Trudeau screwed that up. As it stands, the only story about immigration in this morning’s paper is one claiming that a ‘Can-Am physician recruiter’ is getting 20-30 phone calls per day from US physicians looking to move to Canada. Maybe. We’ll see.

Unemployment

Here’s Canada’s recent history on that score:

I would say that employment recovered nicely after the effects of the pandemic wore off, with the unemployment rate dropping to just over 4% in 2022. There is a question as to how much of that was due to people leaving the work force (that is, no longer being interested in finding work) as opposed to job-seekers actually finding jobs more readily. Leaving that aside, the bad news here is that the rate has been creeping up ever since, to over 6%.

The first few sentences of a story in yesterday’s Globe were these:

“Canada shed 33,000 jobs in March, the worst month for the labour market in three years, as the threat of U.S. tariffs weighed on business confidence and slowed hiring.

Job declines were widespread across industries, and concentrated in full-time positions and private-sector employment, Statistics Canada reported Friday. The unemployment rate ticked up to 6.7 per cent from 6.6 per cent in February.”

That’s the latest bad news, but in that recent period during which the Canadian rate was ticking slowly upward, so was the rate in the US, from 3.5% in July of 2022 to 4.2% this past February, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. So, less of an increase than in Canada, and at every point lower than the Canadian rate. What will happen next is pretty easy to predict, at least in the short term – both those rates are going to go up, perhaps steeply. How much, for how long? I have no idea, nor does anyone else. This is – to sound briefly like a journalist, which I hate doing – ‘uncharted territory’. It is definitely not a good thing to be starting from a high rate, that much seems clear.

I won’t reproduce this graphic from the Globe, but it is also not a good sign that the 12-month moving sum of consumer insolvencies in Canada, which hit a post-pandemic low of 87,055 in mid-2021 (thanks, no doubt, to all the money Ottawa shoveled out the door the previous year) has climbed to a high of 137,000 at the end of 2024. That’s a whomping 57% increase in consumer insolvencies in two and a half years, and is another bad sign regarding the situation in which Canadians find themselves going into this election.

Anyway, conventional wisdom, whatever that is, would suggest that all of the above would make it very hard for the Liberals to win a majority government this month. Canadians are not in great shape, economically, and the Liberal government itself pretty much admitted it had overdone immigration when it drastically cut it last year. But, the Trump factor trumps this, so far, it seems, so I will close by noting two trade-related graphs from the Globe story that do seem to me relevant to what happens next.

First, here is a graphic indicating to what countries Canada has been sending its exports in recent years. It surprised me, I admit.

What’s interesting to me is that since the pandemic Canadian exports to the rest of the world have indeed gone up, but our exports to the US have increased at a much greater rate. It would be useful to understand what caused that, as it is no small part of what makes the Trumpian tariff regime as economically damaging as it is likely to be. If we knew why it happened, it might be easier to figure out how to reverse it. And, it seems to definitely have been a pandemic-related occurrence. Note that exports to the US dropped a good bit during the pandemic, while those to the rest of the world did not. Why? What happened? Enquiring minds want to know.

Second, a graph that did not surprise me, but which seems important when Canada’s government thinks about how to respond to the Trumpian tariffs.

The US’s imports of crude oil from the rest of the world have been declining while those from Canada have been increasing, so that now the US gets more than half its imported oil from Canada.

So, you want to hit back at Trumpian tariffs in a way that really stings the US? Put an export tax on oil going to the US. Danielle Smith will holler, and with some justification, so maybe you have to do something to put salve on that wound, but the only way to get US legislators’ attention (I don’t know that it’s possible to get Trump’s) is to hit them so it hurts. As I have written elsewhere, if you are bound to get in a fight with a pig, you have to expect to get dirty.

A closing note on the same theme. I can’t find exactly the right graph, but Statista says Canada is the largest producer of potash in the world, and I believe the US gets something like 90% of what it uses (and it is the largest user in the world) from Canada. So – export duty on potash. Saskatchewan will howl.

There are likely other products. Trump will be furious. Again – pig, dirty, inevitable.

Academics, Fraud and Integrity

Written by Al Slivinski on March 29, 2025. Posted in Research, Standards. No Comments on Academics, Fraud and Integrity

Suppose you asked 1,000 people how many miles they drove their car last year, recorded the results, then put them into a graphic (a ‘histogram’ in this case). What do you think it would look like?

Something like this:

A few people drive hardly at all, less then 250mi/year in this case, and a very few people drive more than 50,000 miles/year, but most are grouped around a median number between 2,000 and 10 thousand miles per year. This gives the very familiar ‘bell curve’ shape to the distribution of results, as you see above. This general shape is so ubiquitous that statisticians have come to call the continuous version of this a ‘normal’ distribution. (Strictly speaking, the normal distribution has tails at either end that go on forever at lower and lower levels. The distribution above is ‘truncated’ at either end, in stats lingo.)

Very many of the distributions that one gets from observations of occurrences that are influenced by many factors end up looking like this, whether the data is from medical studies (height , weight, systolic blood pressure), education (SAT scores), or nature (rabbits have 1-12 kits per litter, with an average of around 6.)

In 2012 Lisa L Shu, Nina Mazar, Francesca Gino, Max Bazerman and Daniel Ariely published a paper in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences titled ‘Signing at the beginning makes ethics salient and decreases dishonest self-reports in comparison to signing at the end’ (a mouthful, I know) which reported on, among other things, the following field experiment.

Subjects who were clients of an auto insurance company were asked to fill out a form in which they were asked how many miles they drove their cars last year. All had to sign a statement saying they had answered honestly, but on some forms the statement of honesty was at the top of the form, and in the others it was at the bottom. The startling result was that the clients who signed at the beginning were claimed to report more honestly, because customers assigned to the ‘sign-at-the-top’ condition reported driving 2,400 more miles (10.3%) on average than those assigned to the ‘sign-at-the-bottom’ condition.

Such a simple thing can make people more honest, that’s truly remarkable, eh? Actually, it is mostly bullshit, and said paper was in fact retracted by the PNAS a year or two ago, due to the efforts by some scholars at a place with the wonderful name of ‘Data Colada’, who determined that the research was suspect. Really suspect.

The data reported in the paper regarding how clients answered this mileage question, put into a histogram like the one above, looked like this:

The ‘Car #1’ refers to the fact that some clients owned more than one car, and this is their report on the first (or only) car they owned. N=13,488 refers to the fact that there were 13,488 clients included in this study, all of whom of course reported on at least one car’s mileage. The histogram above is what statisticians would call a (approximately) uniform distribution. Data on miles driven in a year does not look like this, period. It looks like the first graph above.

Understand that this paper was refereed by other ‘experts’ in the field. Anyone who has been a social scientist for longer than 20 minutes would know that this sort of data should never produce this kind of histogram.

This is by no means the only anomaly the Data Colada sleuths turned up regarding this paper. You can read their entire write-up about it here, in which they conclude that in fact much of the data used in the paper was faked and as I said, their efforts eventually (meaning years later) led to PNAS retracting the paper. Retractions of papers by academic journals are rare occurrences, albeit they are happening more then they used to.

The pre-publication ‘peer review’ of this paper was supposed to be a mark of credibility. Other experts supposedly went through this paper carefully and pronounced it sound and worthy of publication in a professional outlet. Except…..they missed the simple point made above. If reviewers are not looking at the most basic attributes of the data used in the paper, what the hell are they doing?

Very often, not much, sadly. Indeed, it is common when an Important Academic gets a paper to review for a professional journal they give it to one of their grad students to do. I cannot say this happened in this case, but that it happens is well-known. And, to be sure, grad students might do a more careful job, as they want to impress their supervisor. The point is that Important Academics (as well as unimportant ones) often do not take the task of refereeing papers very seriously.

There are two names in the list of the authors of that paper who are particularly noteworthy. Dan Ariely and Francesca Gino. Ariely is a professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, and Gino is currently on unpaid administrative leave from her position as a tenured professor at Harvard Business School.

Ariely has written many books, including Predictably Irrational in 2008, a copy of which sits on my bookshelf here at home. He has given numerous TED talks, wrote an advice column in the Wall Street Journal for a time, and his life was the basis for an NBC TV crime drama, The Irrational, that ran for two seasons. He’s a big deal.

Gino was certainly a rising academic star on the study of ‘honesty’ until being put on unpaid leave by Harvard in 2023. Tenured prof at The Harvard Business School, and head of HBS’s Negotiations, Organizations and Markets unit. Harvard suspended Gino after undertaking an internal investigation of their own, an investigation that also resulted in three other papers with Gino as an author being retracted from three other journals, and Gino suing Harvard and the Data Colada investigators..

Gino’s defamation suit against the Data Colada people has since been dismissed by a judge, along with some aspects of her suit against Harvard. However, suits accusing Harvard of breach of contract and sexual discrimination are both proceeding as I type this. She has decided that a good offense is the best defense, it would seem.

By no means is the insurance-form paper the only one with Ariely as a co-author that has been thought suspicious. However, unlike Gino, he has to date avoided any sanctions. Some quotes from the Wikipedia page on him –

“In 2021, a 2012 paper written by Francesca Gino, Max H. Bazerman, Nina Mazar, Lisa L Shu, and Ariely was discovered to be based on falsified data and was subsequently retracted.^[5]^[6] In 2024, Duke completed a three-year confidential investigation, and according to Ariely, concluded that “data from the honesty-pledge paper had been falsified but found no evidence that Ariely used fake data knowingly.”

“In November 2022, the Israeli TV investigative show Hamakor (Channel 13), aired an episode^[30]^[31] questioning a number of Ariely’s studies that were not reproducible or whose reliability was dubious in terms of the way they were carried out, the data collected, or whether the studies were carried out at all. For example, Ariely claimed that data for his “Ten Commandments” study were collected in 2004–2005 at UCLA with the assistance of Aimee Drolet Rossi. However, despite being thanked in the 2004 paper for collecting the data almost 20 years later, Rossi denies having run the study,^[32]^[33] and UCLA has issued a statement that the study did not take place there.”

I dunno, does that seem odd to you? On the blogs and other sites I read, other papers in Ariely’s body of work come in for regular skepticism, if not derision. Yet, he sails on, doing TED talks.

I conjecture that Gino’s rather harsher treatment by Harvard is at least partly due to all the bad press Harvard got about their former president in the recent past, but I cannot say that with any confidence.

A particularly disturbing sidelight to all this – at least to me as a former academic – is the following related story, which you can read in more detail here.

It is a story written by one Zoe Ziani, who, as a graduate student in France working on her PhD, dove deeply into another paper, ‘The Contaminating Effects of Building Instrumental Ties: How Networking Can Make Us Feel Dirty’, published in Administrative Science Quarterly in 2014, and written by Gino and two others. Ziani got into this paper because her dissertation was about networks, and this paper was, in Ziani’s own words, ‘…a cornerstone of the literature.’ on this topic.

She initially came to doubt that the results in the paper could possibly be correct, then eventually concluded that the data used in the study had been fabricated. Seen this movie before? I note this paper was not one of those retracted after Harvard’s investigation, and that in fact you can go here to the ASQ website and find it, although anything beyond the abstract is behind a paywall. You will also find a link there labelled ‘correction’, and if you click it, you will find that the two authors of the paper whose name is not Gino voluntarily contacted the editors of ASQ with corrected versions of the data for three of the four studies in the paper, which led to changes in some of the results.

Getting back to Ziani, she was an aspiring researcher, a PhD student, and when she brought her concerns about this important paper to the faculty members who were supervising her work, they told her to drop it. Ziani persisted, however, writing up a 10-page criticism of the paper to include in the first chapter of her dissertation. To quote from Ziani’s blog:

“The three members of my committee (who oversaw the content of my dissertation) were very upset by this criticism. They never engaged with the content: Instead, they repeatedly suggested that a scientific criticism of a published paper had no place in a dissertation. After many frustrating exchanges, I decided to write a long letter explaining why I thought it was important to document the issues I had discovered in CGK 2014. This letter stressed that I was not criticizing the authors, only the article, and encouraged the members of my committee to highlight anything in my criticism that they viewed as inaccurate, insufficiently precise, or unfair.

The three committee members never replied to this letter.”

Then, after she had defended her thesis, a ritual all PhD candidates go through, two of the three members of her committee made it clear that they would not sign off on her dissertation if she did not remove from it all traces of her criticism of the Gino et al paper (which she refers to as CGK 2014).

So, fearing for her career, worried that she would not actually be granted a PhD after all those years of work, she did as they insisted.

That working academics would suggest that criticism of another paper had no place in a dissertation is simply appalling. Science advances in no small part when researchers realize that what was thought to be correct is not, and our understanding of the world needs to change. Criticism and correction of past research is at the heart of science.

Now, all I have here is Ziani’s account of the appalling behavior of her faculty supervisors, and nothing from them. Sadly, my 42 years in the business makes it very easy to believe her account. The paper she thought was deeply flawed, if not indeed a complete fraud, was published by three noted scholars from three prestigious institutions and published in a prestigious academic outlet. It had been refereed by other experts. Many, many academics take the view that you do not push against that, you do not criticize in that instance, as it could go hard on you in the future. (Not all academics, fortunately, but too many.) After all, you have to submit your own papers to these journals, and if the editor or referees who deal with your submission turn out to be any of those people – or their friends/colleagues/admirers – you might worry that you will find your own papers getting rejected a lot.

This is not how science advances, and this is not how scholars should behave. But it happens.

Note: Data Colada also took a run at the paper that Ziani picked apart (i.e., CGK 2014), and you can read their analysis here. They say they were aided in their investigation by ‘early career researchers’. I rather suspect Ziani was one of those, although they remain anonymous on the Data Colada website.

Conclusion: This, and a host of other things about the way 21^st century academia operates, bothers me a lot. My own research was highly theoretical, so no one much cared about it, and certainly it was never of any use to anyone trying to formulate government policy or get their company to run better. But plenty of academic research is used for those purposes, and plenty of it (no, not all of it) is crappy. It may not be fraudulent in the way that the stuff above seems to be, but it is very badly done, and done in a way designed to deliver pre-ordained findings.

I will be writing more about all of this in the future (this post is already too long), because it does indeed piss me off, probably because I was – sort of – in the same business for 42 years.

For now, just remember that what ‘studies say’ may well be bullshit. Fraudulent bullshit, at that.

The Campaign Parade

Written by Al Slivinski on March 29, 2025. Posted in Government, Politics. No Comments on The Campaign Parade

I have been thinking about this since the Canadian federal election campaign kicked off all of six days ago, but Andrew Coyne’s opinion piece in this morning’s Globe, titled ‘Canada’s existential election has very quickly become unserious’ has pushed me to write it up. Coyne focuses on the income tax cuts promised right out of the gate by both Carney and Poilievre. Carney promised first, a one percentage point cut in the lowest rate, from 15 to 14 percent. Not to be outdone, Poilievre said he would cut it by more than two percentage points, to 12.75.

As Coyne says, this does nothing to incentivize anyone to work more. It means that everyone who earns anything up to the top of the first income tax bracket gets the same tax reduction. You get that no matter how much harder or longer you work, or don’t, and on top of that, those Canadians who earn so little that they pay no income tax at all – nearly 40% of all filers – get doodley from this.

Yea, this is bullshit, not at all serious policy for serious times, as Coyne says, but jeez, it is sure Canadian. I mean, Doug Ford just won a new majority government in Ontario immediately after sending all Ontario taxpayers a $200 cheque. Why should either of the major party leaders not think this tax gimmick, which has been set up to be different from sending out cheques only in its minor details, won’t help them get re-elected?

One must never forget, Mr Coyne, that Job Number One of every politician is to get elected. Canadian experience suggests this is how they do that. Carney’s predecessor as PM would have also mailed us all cheques had he stayed in office long enough.

However, things are rather worse than Coyne’s article suggests. Poilievre has also said he will allow seniors to earn some $30k per year free of income tax. There’s the weapon we need to deal with DJT, more old people working without being taxed. The Conservative leader is also going to remove the GST from sales of homes of less than $1.3million. Nothing like an army of richer real estate agents to meet the Trump threat, yewbetcha.

In his interview by Jordan Peterson, back when he seemed sure to be the next PM, Poilievre said that the Trudeau Liberal government had partied for 10 years, and he was going to have to pay for it. I thought that was an accurate remark, Trudeau’s budget deficits certainly ran up Canadian debt, but so far no word from Mr. Poilievre on how that ‘paying for it’ will happen. Discussions of debt are such a downer.

On the other hand, Carney has the advantage of actually being the Prime Minister for the moment, so he has done more than make promises. According to the Globe:

“Ottawa is waiving the one-week waiting period before collecting employment insurance; allowing workers to collect before they have exhausted severance pay; and making it easier to access this support. The federal government will also temporarily allow companies to defer corporate income-tax payments as well as remittances of the goods and services tax and harmonized sales tax.”

Ain’t none of that free, Mr. Carney. As a nation, we have no rainy day fund to use in meeting the current crisis, thanks to 10 years of free-spending, and so far no candidate has indicated they understand, or hell, will even acknowledge, the implications of that. So one must imagine that whichever party ends up forming a government, and whatever goodies they actually hand out, they will again borrow to finance them. How long can a country whose growth is being hampered by the Trumpian tariff (and Canadian counter-tariff) regime borrow at reasonable rates on the international market? Looks like we’re going to find out.

When I was maybe 6 years old, my dad worked part time at a service station. There was a parade through the Polish section of town on some holiday or other – right down Lagrange Street, I recall. Eager for the advertising, the service station put their tow truck in the parade, with me and my dad in the cabin, throwing bubble gum out the window to the folks watching the parade. It was great fun for a six-year-old.

That’s pretty much how a 21^st century Canadian election campaign works. Except….I doubt the service station borrowed the money to buy the bubble gum.

AI is (gonna be) SO Awesome

Written by Al Slivinski on March 27, 2025. Posted in Politics, Popular attitudes, Standards. No Comments on AI is (gonna be) SO Awesome

I will start this post with what would have likely been the opening line in a post about the internet that I have yet to write:

Search engines today are shit.

Google, Bing, or Duck-Duck-Go, my current default, it does not matter, they are all nearly useless. The reason is not hard to determine, their job is not to aid you in finding stuff, if it ever was, it is to keep you hopping around the internet, hopefully clicking on things that will get them paid a bit, then eventually getting you to buy shit. I estimate at this point that at least 60% of the sites on the www have only one purpose – to sell people shit. The internet is going to converge to 100% dedicated to selling shit, eventually, as the internet becomes the only advertising/marketing platform anyone uses.

Anyway, that is the simple explanation for why search engines on the web suck, what I find harder to understand is why non-commercial search engines also suck. I have a membership in the London Public Library, and as a retired faculty member I have access to everything in the university library system.

To find anything, I have to use their online search engines, as card catalogs disappeared years ago.

Well, their in-house search engines suck, too.

An extended example for you.

I go to the UWO library catalogue search engine (ominously called ‘UWO Libris Discovery’), log in with my credentials, and type in “Richard J Evans”. He’s a noted historian, specializing in German history, and I have read some of his books on the 3^rd Reich. The first entry is some chemistry paper, ok, fair enough, there is a chemist with the same name, and so I re-type, adding “history” to my search query. Now I do get an initial page of references to 10 different things written by the person in which I am interested. However, at the top of the page it says

“1-10 of 199,282 results”

Jeezus. Evans is prolific, but no way has he written that much of……anything.

Curious now, I skip to page 5 of these many many results (at 10 entries per page, there are 20,000 pages to check if I want), and find more things written by Richard J Evans, but the second result on page 5 is “US Marines and Irregular Warfare” written by one Stephen S. Evans.

Well, if you include anything with Evans in it, and then maybe anything with Richard, the results are indeed going to pile up, but…..why?

Were I using a card catalogue, once I’d looked at all the cards with “Richard J Evans” as author I would stop and move on.

Can’t do that here, have to go through all the Stephen Evans, etc, because there are more Richard J Evans entries after that, and if I were to go on to page 283, well….what would I find? ( I looked ahead a bit, page 8 had an entry on the history of ranching by one Simon Evans. Bloody hell….)

Anyway, all this is to say that even search engines without advertising suck, and I really miss card catalogues, the Yellow Pages and businesses that answer their telephones. [A positive note. The search engines on the websites of the Globe and Mail and Wall Street Journal work pretty well. So it can be done.]

One might…..well, I might….think the generally agreed shittiness of search engines would lead to careful thinking about how to make them better. No, no, what we do now is seek to replace the shitty thing with something else that is shitty in a new and different way.

Here is a quote from a column in the WSJ in which the author explains at length why she stopped using Google for search, and switched to AI:

“While I’m in favor of shifting the stale search paradigm, I do have AI reservations. These systems hoover up answers from the internet, but rarely push you to the original source.

Your trusted sources of information—like this very publication—stand to lose visibility, subscribers and traffic. If too many online platforms suffer, we’ll end up losing the open web in exchange for one big answer machine with zero citations or accountability.”

But other than that, using AI for search is just peachy, right?

The leader of the discussion group on the US election that I was part of last Fall was a retired academic, like me. He said two remarkable things in the course of our six sessions, as we discussed the US Presidential election.

“I do not pay for news.”
“I learn a lot about the election by watching the late night TV comedy shows”.

You can perhaps imagine the knowledge base this man brought to bear on our discussions of the US election.

Soon, it will be unnecessary to spend all that time watching late night comedians, we will be able to simply type into ChatGPT – “Who is the best candidate?”

Way better, clearly.

Exciting Experiences

Written by Al Slivinski on March 22, 2025. Posted in Education, Language, LBOs. No Comments on Exciting Experiences

[I know, I know, I promised a post on academic fraud. It’s coming, but it’s messy and it’s been a busy week in the non-blog part of Al’s universe.]

I offer in the meantime another observation on the behaviour and thinking of bureaucrats. Those of you who have worked in a bureaucratic org may not find this informative or all that interesting, I suspect, but I do. The disconnect between how bureaucrats write about things and how normal people outside the bureaucracy see them is fascinating to me. I understand that it is possible that bureaucrats think about things in the same way as those outside, but are forced by the culture of their organization to write and speak in ways that are silly and artificial. I kinda doubt that, but there is no way to know. Thinking cannot be observed, only writing and saying can.

Anyway, I had forwarded to me, in my role as an old fart professor, an email that had this as the Subject:

Exciting Update: Name Change for International Student Services

Right off, I think: a name change is exciting? To who?

The body of the email itself has the appearance of a press release, and its heading is:

Important Update: Name Change for International Student Services

So ‘exciting’ has been replaced now by ‘Important’, but I remain dubious that a name change can be either.

Then we get into the body of the press rel….er, email, and the first three sentences are as follows:

I’m excited to share an important update with you. Western International is streamlining our services under one unified brand, and as part of this transition, the International and Exchange Student Centre (IESC) name has been retired as of March 17, 2025.

Going forward, this key pillar of Western International will be known as International Student Services (ISS)—a name that better reflects our mission and enhances the experience for students and the campus community.

Now we have an actual someone who wants us to know that they are excited, and that along with the name change we have some streamlining….why the term ‘brand’ is being used at a university I cannot imagine. Food companies have ‘brands’, not universities. McDonald’s has a ‘brand’, Starbucks and Tim Horton’s have ‘brands’, I suppose Motel 8 has a brand.

Importantly, we now see what the old name was and what it has been changed to, along with the reason for the change – ‘a name that better reflects our mission and enhances the experience for students and the campus community’.

First, if this new name does better reflect their mission, and given the use of the term ‘streamlining’, if I were an exchange student I would have to infer that I should no longer expect anything from this new ‘brand’. I would see this as telling me that my kind have been streamlined right out of their name and therefore out of their consideration, and man, they are excited about it.

Second, how does a name enhance anything? It’s a bloody name, for god sakes. And it is impossible not to notice how ubiquitous the term ‘experience’ has become at this university. What does that word refer to? The Faculty of Social Science now has an Assistant Dean for Student Experience. What does that person do?

My theory – academic bureaucrats love that word because of its passivity. An ‘experience’ is something that happens to you. You have an experience, whereas you acquire an education. If someone says they acquired something, it is possible for others to check on that, to see if indeed anything was acquired. But an experience, well those can happen at Disney World or on a drug or at the seashore, and they happen if you say they happened. Easier for university bureaucrats to say we provide a great ‘experience’ here than to say you can acquire a great education here. Better to have the world ask of your grads ‘how was it?’ than to ask ‘what did you learn?’

But here’s my favourite part of the press release, in bullet point form, cuz bureaucrats do love bullet points:

What’s Changing

Website & Branding: The IESC website and materials have been updated to reflect the new name. The new URL is now live, and we kindly ask you to update any references on your website accordingly.
Email Address Update: The IESC email (iesc@uwo.ca) has changed to iss@uwo.ca.

So, two bullet points worth of changes, but they get it up to two only because they made the email address update a separate bullet point. Having exactly one bullet point would be a bit embarrassing, even to a bureaucrat.

You can be sure that a committee was struck somewhere in the university to hold meetings to consider this important and exciting name change. People with six-figure salaries sat in those meetings and had earnest discussions about all this. Whether or not exchange students were discussed we will never know.

What Does it Mean?

Written by Al Slivinski on March 15, 2025. Posted in Culture, Popular attitudes. 1 Comment on What Does it Mean?

There is a T-intersection near the back of my property line, where recently the city, in its infinite wisdom, put a controlled crosswalk. You know, one of those where the pedestrians push a button and a set of flashing yellow lights come on, supposedly stopping traffic. People have been crossing here safely, although not in large numbers, for the 20 years I have lived in this house. Never been a pedestrian so much as nicked, so far as I know, and I would know.

Whatever. The other day I left my house and headed downtown, a walk which involves my crossing that same street. I walked to the curb, perhaps 30 yards south of the new crosswalk, saw no cars coming from either direction (one can see a looong way in both directions on that street) and so walked across. Just as I stepped off the curb, a young fellow (in his 20s, I would say) stepped up to the new crosswalk, pushed the button, and waited for the yellow lights to flash before crossing the street. I could not stop myself, I said ‘oh my god’ out loud.

This caused me to remember something I saw happen on my old employer’s campus all the time. By now every building has one or more doors to the outside that can be opened by an electro-hydraulic system. You just push a button on either side of the door, and wait, and the door slowly swings open. This allows, for example, people in wheel chairs to go through the door unaided. It is common to see a student or group of students, all 20-something and perfectly healthy, walk up to such a door, push the button, and stand there and wait for the door to sloooowly open before walking through.

I have on several occasions walked by those students, yanked the door open using, you know, my rather old arm, and walked past them. No indication it phases them in the least.

Letting the hydraulics open the door of course leaves said door open for a loooong time, so as to give a person in a wheelchair time to get through it before the mechanism sloooowly closes it. This allows plenty of cooled air to leave the building in the summer and a long gust of cold air to enter the building in the winter. Lovely.

I don’t know what to think of this behavior – I have more questions than answers.

One, is this a youth thing or perhaps a Canadian thing? I have long noticed that Canadians are more likely than Americans to stand on a street corner devoid of any traffic and wait for the pedestrian signal to say ‘Walk’ before crossing. Are American university students also likely to let the electrical system open doors for them, or less so? Are older people – like me – less likely to behave in these ways?

Is this an indication that we have raised a generation of sheep who can do nothing without official permission, or who are too lazy to use their limbs?

I dunno, but I find it…..depressing.

Any thoughts welcome.

Final (ok, probably not) Thoughts on Trump and Tariffs

Written by Al Slivinski on March 9, 2025. Posted in Government. No Comments on Final (ok, probably not) Thoughts on Trump and Tariffs

Yea, we’re all tired of this, I’m tired of writing about it, and am working on an article on something more fun – academic fraud – to post later in the week. Stay tuned for that, but in the meantime, frequent reader Ellie made a couple of comments on my last post on Trump’s tariffs that are salient and worth responding to.

She mentioned first that an alternative theory of what Trump is doing is to weaken Canada so that he can get his country’s hands on our not-inconsiderable natural resources. Oil, potash, etc. Her other suggestion is that Trump ‘paused’ the tariffs on autos because he discovered that various plants in Canada produce three pickup trucks that are popular with people likely to be part of his political base, and that some of the parts for those pickups come from Mexico.

Tackling the pickup-truck idea first, that makes sense if DJT cares what his base thinks. Perhaps he does, I saw a clip of him saying he did this to avoid hurting the US auto makers. One might expect the President of the US to understand how the auto industry works, and thus not impose tariffs on it in the first place, but I have said before there is no evidence that DJT regards understanding anything as part of his job description. That all being said, if he indeed imposes the tariffs on auto and parts crossing the US border in a month anyway, they are still going to hurt US automakers and consumers in the same way as they would have if imposed this week. Pickup truck production can’t be moved to the US in a month even if the auto companies wanted to do that. Thus, even if he was responding to his pickup-truck driving base, I’m sticking to my stimulus-response model of DJT.

As to his carrying out a plan to get our resources, that has a nice ring of ‘purposeful strategy’ to it, as did my plant-relocation strategy, but I am doubtful that it works any better. If that is what he is trying to do, once again it seems counter-productive to impose then ‘pause’ then ‘reprieve’, then…..whatever. Perhaps he is really devious, and figures that he can weaken Canada by repeatedly making and retracting tariff threats rather than causing pain to Americans by actually imposing tariffs, but I am not convinced. DJT was clearly after Ukraine’s resources, and he said so on like his second day in office, then supposedly had worked out a deal with Zelensky to make that happen, until the Oval Office blow-up blew that up, too. He has said nothing about Canada’s resources yet, but again – maybe he is really really clever and devious and will not unveil his true motivation until he has us good and weak. But again, that would argue for just imposing the damn things, rather than dithering.

I think for now I’m keeping stimulus-response as my leading explanation of DJT.

Some final thoughts. I am absolutely sure no party in North American has yet been charged any tariff. The administrative machinery for doing this cannot be set up in a day, and so far there has been no tariff that has actually been in place for longer than that, so far as I can tell. Maybe the Canadian government should communicate a strategy of retaliation to Trump in which our retaliation is triggered the first time any tariff is actually paid to the US. This would have the advantage of allowing us to ignore what he says until and unless it results in actual material damage. DJT seemingly likes sowing chaos, we should not help him in that.

Something like ‘The first time a dollar in tariffs on any good covered by the USMCA that President Trump signed is collected by the US, the Canadian government will do the following…..’

Just a thought.

As to the form of any Canadian retaliation, it still seems to me that, as I wrote weeks ago, Premier Ford’s idea to charge a 25% premium on electricity that Ontario provides to northern US states starting Monday is a risky plan. The grid is highly integrated, electricity flows on it across the border in both directions at different times. I hope that, just as I wrote above about DJT, the premier of Ontario understands this, and has considered the possibility that Ontario could see a ‘re-retaliatory’ tax on its imports of electricity from the US when those occur, as they apparently do.

On the other hand, I think it is quite possible that there are products shipped to the US that could have export taxes imposed on them that would damage US people and firms. Not damage DJT, sadly, but as I keep saying, that is how this shit works.

I am thinking of potash and oil, there may be others. Trump lowered the tariff on potash from Canada to 10%, in deference to US farming interests, supposedly. Similarly, it seems imports of Canadian oil into the US will be charged a tariff of only 10%.

If you want to get Trump’s attention by making people in the US yell, then the 10% US tariff on potash should have a 15% Canadian export tax added to it, and similarly on Canadian oil that goes to the US. It makes no sense to let DJT be the one to decide how much US people and firms get hurt. Those lower tariff rates should be taken as a signal that is where the pain can be inflicted. Yes, this will impose inordinate economic harm on firms in Alberta and Saskatchewan, and that sucks. I would support some kind of compensation from Canadian taxpayers to those firms for that, but if you are going to ‘retaliate’ against US tariffs it should be done in a way that hurts the other side. Again, many of the casualties in this kind of war come from ‘friendly fire’, that is the nature of a trade war. If we’ve decided to get in a fight with this pig, we are going to have to get dirty.

I remain certain only of uncertainty…but do stay tuned for the academic fraud stuff. ‘sgonna be GREAT, I promise.

Further Thoughts on Trump and the Bloody Tariffs

Written by Al Slivinski on March 8, 2025. Posted in Government. 3 Comments on Further Thoughts on Trump and the Bloody Tariffs

It’s a big, messy topic, so there is a lot to think about and try to understand. Since my first post on this, I have been writing down additional thoughts that seemed useful as they come to me. However, the actual ‘facts on the ground’ have been changing faster than I can write about them. So, here on the morning of Saturday, March 8 are the few thoughts that seem to me to still be relevant to this mess.

1. In trying to understand whether the proposed strategy of using tariffs to get manufacturing to move back to the US could actually work, it occurred to me that a very helpful thing to know would be whether this has been attempted in the past, what the circumstances were, if so, and whether it worked then. There have been many instances of countries imposing widespread tariffs, most notably during the Great Depression, when the US brought in the Smoot-Hawley tariff act. But clearly the circumstances were very different then, so whatever happened in terms of firm location decisions, I don’t see that it would be very instructive regarding what might happen now. That all being said, the week’s events make the original question – could this tariff strategy work? – relatively uninteresting, as I indicate below.

2. Given his actions over these last several days, I think it is very unlikely the US President is executing a plan that uses tariffs to get manufacturing plants to locate or re-locate in the US, as I suggested might be true in my earlier post. My leading hypothesis now is that he has no idea what he is doing, and that DJT is best understood as a simple stimulus-response machine, like a four-year-old. What he does from day to day will depend on what particular stimulus he gets that day, and his random reaction to it. If he were carrying out the plan I laid out previously, these ‘pauses’ and ‘reprieves’ would be utterly counterproductive, as I noted. Firms are not going to make plant location decisions based on conditions that are liable to change from year to year, if not week to week. I suppose it is still possible that DJT is trying to do this, but that he sucks at it. Can’t rule out incompetence, ever, when discussing politicians. What they are selected to be good at is getting elected, not governing.

3. The Canadian responses, such as they are.

I continue in my suspicion that Canadian governmental leaders are not up to navigating this well, partly due to the general point made in my last sentence of point 2 above. More specifically, I would note the following. My local paper, the day after the first US tariffs were imposed, and then Canadian retaliatory tariffs were imposed, featured a bold headline: ‘We’re Insulted and We’re Angry’, quoting the PM.

Anger and insult are not useful, even when that is what you are facing from DJT. When your neighbor acts like a dickhead, you can yell at him across the fence, of course, but there is no chance that is going to rectify the situation or change his behaviour. We need leaders who understand the world and are willing to think hard about how to respond. The Trudeau quote is bullshit for domestic political consumption; he better have more than that in his toolbox. Both he and Ontario premier Ford have been quoted as saying ‘we are going to win this tariff war’, and that is equally useless. No one wins a tariff war, and the numbers I quoted in my last post make it pretty clear that Canada is going to take more damage than the US in any such war. And by that, I mean Canadians will take more damage than Americans.

That all being said, I will admit that headline is not entirely fair to our PM. He certainly said other things, but as always, 21^st century media focuses on the most inflammatory things they can.

4. I am at this point confident in one thing. Canadians and Canadian firms, as well as Americans and American firms, will take economic hits from the actions of governments on both side of the border, until and unless Trump gets over this tariff obsession.

Note please that I am including in this statement that Canadian government actions will do damage to Canadians, just as Trump’s decisions will do damage to Americans. That is how this shit always goes. And, in time-honored Canadian fashion, some Canadians (and Canadian firms) will get government cheques as compensation. Those cheques will be badly targeted, just as during the Covid lockdowns.

Trump’s Tariff Strategy – Maybe

Written by Al Slivinski on March 4, 2025. Posted in Government, Politics. No Comments on Trump’s Tariff Strategy – Maybe

I write this on the morning when the headline on the Globe and Mail website is US Triggers Trade War, with the sub-heading Canada retaliates Tuesday morning with levies on $30billion worth of goods.

I will undoubtedly spend the day editing and re-writing it, in hopes of being as clear about this as I possibly can.

The reason I’m writing this piece is a conversation I had with a good friend of mine yesterday. She had heard a report on the radio purporting to lay out what Trump might be up to regarding imposing tariffs, and she asked me, the ex-economist, if said report made sense. I listened and said ‘it does’, and then resolved to lay out the same argument here. This angle is not new, I expect it has been written about by others, but the fact that my friend found it to be a new idea suggests it has not been the dominant theme in the discussion of Trump’s tariffs, at least in Canada. Most of what has been written up to now is about the border, immigration, fentanyl and retaliation, rather than what I will lay out below.

A simple statement of this idea is that what Trump is trying to achieve in imposing tariffs on the USA’s biggest trading partners (Canada, Mexico and China) is to get manufacturing plants to move back to the US. Making this happen was certainly something he talked about in his campaign. What I will lay out is the logic behind that idea; I am not claiming it is a good (or bad) idea, nor even that it will work. This is just the logic behind that strategy. I am not even claiming that this is really what he is up to. I have no more ability to peer into that man’s mind than anyone else, and his own statements are all over the place. Again, if (a big if) this is what he is trying to do, here is the logic of that strategy, stated as simply as I can manage. I will speak here only of the tariffs imposed on Canada, to keep things as simple as possible.

A US tariff on goods imported from Canada is just a tax, and like any such tax on a product, it will raise the price paid by US consumers of those goods. A 25% tariff on an imported good will not necessarily raise the price by 25%, it could be less, depending on how the Canadian producers of the good as well as the US importers of said good respond to the imposition of the tariff. Either of them might lower the prices they charge in response to the tariff, thus making the ultimate price increase less than the full 25%.

However, whatever those folks do, the tariff will reduce the profits of the Canadian producers of those goods on two counts. One, the higher price to consumers will reduce US demand for the products, and two, any price reduction taken by the Canadian producers will cut into their margins on those goods. How big are either of those two effects depends on a lot of things, but those two effects will happen in some measure, without a doubt, and so will cut into Canadian producers’ profits.

Thus, the two groups of people hurt by such tariffs are the US consumers of the tariffed Canadian goods, and the Canadian producers of those goods, and their workers and owners/shareholders. [The US-based importers/resellers of the Canadian imports may be hit, too, of course.]

Why would Trump hurt those people? What is he hoping to accomplish? That’s the question, here is one answer.

If you are a firm in the business of selling any product in North America, you have to decide where to locate your production facilities. If you are going to locate them anywhere on the continent, you have two choices – the US or Canada.

With a US tariff on Canadian imports, you can locate in Canada, and see a tax imposed on the goods you ship to a market of 300 million consumers, but not on the market of 33 million consumers in Canada. Or, you can locate in the US and see a tax (if Canada imposes retaliatory tariffs, see below) imposed on the goods you sell to the 33million but not on the ones you sell to the 300 million. It is clear which way the US tariff will push you, other things equal (I will return to that clause below), if you are deciding where to locate your plant – toward a US location.

Moreover, if you already have a plant in Canada, built in the era of essentially zero tariffs, this same effect might push you to close it down and build a new plant in the US. Or, if you have plants in both countries, as do most auto producers, the tariff might induce you to move production from the Canadian to the US plants. Note that I am not claiming this will force any producer to do anything, plant location decisions are highly complex and depend on many factors; but the US tariff is one factor pushing plant locations toward the US and away from Canada.

So, as I said to my friend, this is not illogical. There are perfectly good economic arguments behind this strategy, it relies on no voodoo or lies.

Will it work?

How well might this work for Trump, again assuming that is what he is trying to do? I cannot possibly predict, but I can lay out some important issues.

One, producers have to believe that these tariffs are in place to stay. You don’t locate plants or re-locate plants on the basis of conditions that are likely to last for no more than a year or so. Given Trump’s apparent randomness, it remains to be seen how effective the US administration can be in convincing firms they intend to keep these tariffs in place. I will return to this when I discuss ‘retaliation’ below.

Plant location decisions do depend on many factors, including the general environment for doing business in a country. It is very early in the Trump administration, but once again his reputation for randomness may work against him. There are already signs that the US economy, particularly the consumer sector, is faltering a bit. Whatever one thinks about Trump’s efforts to slash the Federal government’s spending, massive layoffs are not going to be good for consumer demand in the US, and China’s retaliatory tariffs on US goods not helpful to US manufacturing and therefore consumer incomes, either. But the more basic point is that business does not like uncertainty, and Trump’s administration has so far delivered up a fair bit of that.

A key – I suspect – example of this right off the bat, lies in the US/Canada auto industry. All accounts I have read say that cars and auto parts currently cross the US/Can border many times in the course of auto production. That suggests that possibly these tariffs are going to wreak havoc on that very large industry. Adjusting to this new regime cannot possibly happen quickly, and in the meantime – a lot of uncertainty. I am predicting nothing specific here, just pointing out facts that are relevant to answering the ‘will it work?’ question. The real answer will unfold over time, and I am not a seer. I hasten to add, neither is anyone else.

If it Works

I see no way to avoid the conclusion that to the extent that this tariff strategy does push firms to locate production in the US rather than Canada, it is going to be bad for Canadians’ income and employment prospects. To be sure, there are plenty of products for which this is not going to be an issue, because Canada’s other advantages are too great to be overcome by any tariff. As an obvious example, Canada has plenty of natural resources that US manufacturers need, and that production can simply not be relocated to the US. (There may well be other countries that produce the same things, but they must be farther from the US and hence more expensive to purchase.)

However, that still points toward a future in which Canada’s economy goes back to being based on ‘hewing wood and drawing water’ (or extracting oil and potash, in the modern version). Conventional economic wisdom says you can’t do well as an economy if your production is focused on such low value-added activities.

I hasten to add that there may be productive activities in Canada, or that could be located in Canada, even in the face of US tariffs, that do represent high value-added production. I simply don’t know about them.

Canada’s Response

As the Globe sub-headline says, Canada’s government’s immediate response so far has been to retaliate with tariffs on US imports into Canada.

Good idea? I wrote about this already in a previous post here. I hope it was clear there that my answer is ‘No’, and that that answer has nothing to do with any threats to make the US tariffs bigger if Canada retaliates. The problem is that US imports are a big part of what Canadians consume, but Canadian imports are a very small part of what US consumers buy, whereas goods exported to the US make up a big chunk of Canadian production while US exports to Canada make up a small part of US production. Thus, US tariffs hurt Canadian producers a lot but American consumers only little, while Canadian tariffs hurt Canadian consumers a lot but American producers only little. It is not an even fight.

Better the Canadian government say ‘Mr President, Canada does not impose pointless taxes on its citizens as you are doing to yours’.

That’s not gonna happen, of course. Canada’s response is, unfortunately, about posturing for Canadian voters, and about standing up to an asshole. I get that, but it is going to hurt Canadians even if Trump does not carry out his threatened escalation.

And, I admit that I want to get back at Trump, too. The question is, how? More precisely, how might Canada respond in a way that might cause Trump to re-think this strategy.?

If there are particular US imports into Canada that can be targeted because tariffs on them will harm US producers who have some clout with the Trump administration, then I say go for it. I simply don’t know what those might be.

Moreover, I fear there are no such products, simply because I see no reason to think Trump can be dissuaded from this course by anybody if it is indeed the course he is on. Remember that he is a lame duck president, in his constitutionally-limited last term in office. He has no reason to give a fig about his popularity, nor has there ever been any sign he cares about whether the president who follows him is a Republican. I fear he’s going to do what he wants no matter how much complaining there is from anyone in the US – if indeed there is any that he lets himself hear.

If the auto industry is upended, and other sectors of the US productive economy are harmed, either by Trump’s own tariffs or those imposed by Canada, Mexico and China in response, and the stock markets head downward, complaining there will be, I expect. However, he is not someone who has ever shown much willingness to admit that he was wrong.

This leaves as the only useful response for Canada a strategy of looking for other markets for our products. That is a worthy endeavour, but I can’t say my confidence is high that our current crop of leaders is going to be good at it. Or, to be more accurate, finding new markets is pretty much a job for Canada’s private sector, and I have little faith that our political leadership will actually not get in the way of their doing that. Getting in the way has been the one apparent talent of Canadian government for some time now. Further, to the extent that exploration for new markets does happen in Canada, it is not going to have any impact on the Canadian economy for some time, maybe years. I am thus sadly left to conclude that the Canadian economy and its citizens are going to take a hit from Trump’s tariff strategy, with little hope for relief for some time. That’s a bleak picture, to be sure, but I write that here with no great confidence. As I indicated previously, the world is much too complex to have any faith in such a prediction if that is Trump’s true plan, I am not in any case sure that it is, and even if it is, Trump is much too volatile a person to have any faith that he will stick to it.

The only thing of which I am certain is uncertainty.

What Does it Mean to ‘Trace Woodgrains’?

Written by Al Slivinski on March 1, 2025. Posted in Standards. No Comments on What Does it Mean to ‘Trace Woodgrains’?

I have a menu at the top of this blog titled ‘Blogs I Read’ which lists just that – blogs I read regularly. Occasionally I add one that I have come across and found useful or enlightening. I don’t imagine many of you pay any attention to this; just because I found something useful or enlightening is no reason to think anyone else will, and we all have only so much time to spend reading things online.

Still, I just added a blog titled ‘Tracing Woodgrains’ to my list, and I am going to say a bit about it here, because I found it particularly enlightening. It strikes me as the sanest blog I have come across ever. If you like, you can find it here, for free.

First, as to the question, I think the answer is that it refers to looking carefully at the fine details of a piece of wood, at the grain that runs through it. That is a fair statement of what the articles in the blog do, I would say. And, the set of topics the author writes about is wide and varied. The goings on at Wikipedia, a hiring scandal at the FAA, why he voted for Kamala Harris in the last US election, an essay on a culture of excellence in education, and much more.

As to the author of the blog, I have no idea, no name is provided, and in the About section of the blog one finds this:

“Welcome to Tracing Woodgrains, the chronicle of a former Mormon’s chaotic pursuit of order in a world gone mad.

In my essays, I wander towards whatever happens to catch my interest. Usually, that means a focus on learning and the strength of narratives and deliberate restrictions, reflections on culture war and internet nonsense, stories of institutional corruption and failure, and attempts to present both the beauty and harm of Mormonism to a secular audience.”

Honestly, there is little in that description that would suggest I would have any interest in anything that person wrote. Yet, as I said, it is the most thoughtful and sane writing I have found yet in my travels on the internet, so I do recommend it to you, heartily. I will say just a bit more about one piece on it, titled ‘Kamala Did Not Represent the Center’ in which, among other things, he explains why he voted for Harris last November, and why it pained him to do so. Again, this does not mark him out (I’m not at all sure he is a ‘he’, btw) as someone I would follow avidly. Had I been in the US last November, I would have done what I do in Canada in some elections, voted for a candidate who had no chance to win, as the only way a citizen of a modern democracy has to register their ‘none of the above’ sentiment. However, that post is incredibly thoughtful and wise, so I can disagree with Woodgrains yet respect what he has to say about the election. Indeed, his view of that election is as close to mine as I have seen articulated anywhere.

I hasten to add that every post I have read so far on the blog is equally thoughtful. The writing on this blog sets a standard to which I can only hope to aspire. I add, however, that I am sure I will in the future read posts on this blog with which I disagree rather completely and/or find less than compelling. Such is human nature.

Statisticians at Play

Written by Al Slivinski on February 25, 2025. Posted in Uncategorized. No Comments on Statisticians at Play

Today’s posting on Gelman’s stats blog included the poster below, announcing the 2025 ‘Predict the Cherry Blossoms’ Competition. You could enter too, but there is this:

“This year, contestants will not only compete against each other for the top prizes–but against artificial intelligence. We will include one or more submissions from the most popular large language models. Our AI handlers will prompt the AI with the contest rules and the entries from previous competitions. The handlers will then execute any code written by the AI as part of their entry. Judges will review all entries without knowing which were submitted by humans and which were written by AI.”

“Any human that beats the AI will receive commemorative memorabilia indicating they “beat the bot in the 2025 International Cherry Blossom Prediction Competition.”

Really Really Ignorant Driving Advice

Written by Al Slivinski on February 23, 2025. Posted in Safety. No Comments on Really Really Ignorant Driving Advice

An article in the Feb 16 G&M had the title ‘What distance should a vehicle stop behind another one at a red light?’

Here’s a quote from the article,

“It makes sense to leave a car length or more,” said Sean Shapiro, a traffic safety consultant and former Toronto police traffic officer. “You need to leave yourself enough room to provide an escape route.”

Escape route? Escape from what?

Another expert, Angelo DiCicco, general manager of the Ontario Safety League provided some more great advice –

“If you’re the first car to stop in your lane, stop at least a car length or two before the painted stop line, DiCicco said. That gives you room to creep up if you need to.”

Ok, now kids, let’s all think about the last time you were stopped by a red light at a major intersection in your town. I’m betting pretty much no one who was stopped there in front of, behind, or next to you followed this advice, nor did you. But let’s imagine they did, so there were 1-2 car lengths between each stopped vehicle. That’s somewhere between 14 and 30 feet of empty space between each car in each lane. This is the equivalent of doubling or tripling the number of cars waiting at that red light.

What you would have is a line of traffic that, during any moderately busy period, would stretch back to the previous stop light, in many cases. Plus, if there are dedicated turn lanes to either side of the through lanes at the light, virtually no car would be able to enter them during any red light phase, because the line of cars in the through lanes would stretch back past where cars are able to enter said turn lanes.

I have read fewer recommendations more likely to gum up traffic at traffic lights than this one. And what is it’s purpose? To give you an ‘escape route’ in case you see a car coming up on your rear that is unable to stop. That happens all the time. Making outrageous adjustments to avoid situations that rarely happen, that’s what ‘safety advisors’ are all about, I guess.

God save us from experts. I curse quietly any driver who does in fact leave that kind of space between their own car and the one in front of them at a light. Some folks do, but in most cases it is not because of any bonehead advice like this, but because they wanted to quickly stop at the red so as to get back to the urgent business on their phone. Please never follow this advice.

I do endeavour to be a force for good in the universe, however, so I here offer a driving suggestion of my own, free of charge, which, if followed, will make driving safer and help traffic move more quickly through intersections controlled by traffic lights.

If you are going to get into the left turn lane at such an intersection, then there is very likely a similar left turn lane in the opposite direction. You will be looking straight at the cars in that opposing left turn lane before you make your turn.

In most cases, there will be a ‘green turn arrow’ phase during which you, and perhaps the opposing traffic can make your left turns safely, as the through traffic has a red. However, it is also almost always true that at some point the through traffic will have their own green, and at that point both you and the cars opposite you can make your left turn only if you are sure there are no through cars coming through the intersection. They have the right of way.

You need to be able to see clearly around any cars opposite you that are also waiting to turn left to know if it is safe for you to turn. So, anticipating this possibility, you should drive into your left turn lane and position your vehicle as far on the left of the turn lane as you can. Cozy your driver side door right up to the left boundary of the turn lane. This makes it easier for you to see around those cars waiting to turn left across from you, plus making it easier for those drivers to see around you. Bonus. (Yes, I do this all the time, it makes a real difference.)

If drivers trying to turn left from both directions do this, there is less likelihood of either set of left-turners getting t-boned by an oncoming car, and less chance of a wannabe left-turner sitting there, afraid to complete their turn because they can’t see whether any cars are oncoming.

In fact, most people who pull into a left turn lane cheat to the right of the lane, as it puts them a bit further away from oncoming through traffic, and oncoming traffic is scary.

Well, just be brave, and cheat to the left. You will be improving safety for you and your fellow drivers – and be more likely to get through the green light.

You’re welcome.

A (crude, admittedly) illustration of my suggested strategy is below. No extra charge.

I do accept tips, you can e-transfer same to TipsforAl@smartass.ca. Direct deposit, no secret question needed.

The AI World to Come

Written by Al Slivinski on February 21, 2025. Posted in Culture, Education, Standards. No Comments on The AI World to Come

This is about an article in Inside Higher Ed from November of ’23. I just saw a reference to it on Gelman’s statistics blog. It’s titled ‘Study Uses AI to Review Admissions Essays’

and the first sentence is –

“A team of researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Pennsylvania have created AI tools to help admissions officers by analyzing students’ application essays.”

What a great idea, eh?

Another quote:

“Humans have limitations,” Benjamin Lira, a doctoral student in psychology at Penn and co-author of the study, said in a statement. “You’re not going to read the first essay of the day in the same [way] you read the last one before lunch.”

It’s a good thing AI has no limitations, isn’t it? And, AI can do things like this

“If I say, ‘I donated clothing to a homeless shelter,’ the AI will tell me that it has a 99.8 percent probability of showing prosocial purpose,” Lira said. “But if I say something like ‘I like cheese,’ that drops to less than 1 percent.”

Is that brilliant, or what? No human can match that, surely.

Then –

“The researchers did caution that as students—particularly higher-income students—become more savvy with technologies such as ChatGPT, they could alter their essays to fit what they believe will bring the best results.”

Indeed, I’m sure that until ChatGPT came along, students – particularly higher income students – never tried to match what they wrote in their essays to what they thought the university readers were looking for.

Oh, and about those human ‘limitations’? Well…..

“The AI algorithm can also make mistakes. For example, in the study, if a student were to say they donated heroin to the children’s shelter, it brought a very high score in the “prosocial purpose” category.”

Ah, a mere glitch. I’m sure they’ll clean that up in the Beta version.

It is clear where this is going, and Gelman pretty much says it. In no time we will be at the point where students use AI on their computer to write the essay, and the university uses the AI on their computer to read and evaluate it. No need whatsoever for any human involvement, and Bingo! You’re in university. Or not.

There are so many analogous possibilities. One day AI can write movies which are then reviewed by AI and used by other AI as input to write more movies. Same for e-books.

My favourite though, is this, for which I quote Gelman directly….

“Same thing with internet advertising. The AI writes the ad and conducts the bidding to put the ad online. The ad is then read by various bots so that the company that sells the ad gets to say they have traffic. We human users fight through the muck to find actual content.”

I can hardly wait.

Education Outcomes and Inputs in Canada and the US

Written by Al Slivinski on February 20, 2025. Posted in Education, Standards. No Comments on Education Outcomes and Inputs in Canada and the US

This is going to be a post without a strong message, prompted by a graph that I happened on while looking into something completely unrelated. The graph is below, and it shows changes in spending per pupil in the US state of Oregon, along with changes in the NAEP scores Oregon students earned in Reading and Math, all between 2013 and 2024. NAEP stands for National Assessment of Educational Progress, which is a set of tests given typically to grade 4 and 8 students in the US. NAEP is administered by a section of the US federal Department of Education. I am showing the Oregon results only because they are what I stumbled across. One can go to the website and see results for all other states too, but if you are so interested, I would suggest you go here instead.

Edunomicslab.org is a website of the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University, devoted to education finance, and it is the org that produced the graph below, using the stats provided by the Department of Education. It is simply more reader-friendly and organized than the US gov website.

Again, not to pick on Oregon, you can find a similar graph for each of the US states, my quick perusal said that Oregon is not atypical. Spending on education has increased at a rate much greater than inflation in Oregon, at the same time that NAEP scores have decreased.

Below is the same graph for the US as a whole, which certainly indicates that most US states look like Oregon, since the national graph does.

Finally, here is another graph from the same source, which compares staffing on a national basis to student numbers.

So, to note the obvious, staffing in US elementary schools has increased by close to 12% over this 10-year period, while the number of students has decreased by 2%. The graph does not indicate, and I could not find, any stats telling us how many of those added staff actually work in classrooms, rather than in the bureaucracy. I know what I would bet on in that regard, but cannot find corroboration, so far.

Anyway, the aggregate message here is clear. Over the covered period, US primary education has seen spending increase at a rate much greater than inflation, while also seeing staffing increase while student numbers fell (a primary reason for the spending increase, one must think) all resulting in worse student NAEP outcomes. It says nothing good about the current state of (largely publicly funded and administered) primary education in the US. I hasten to add, as does Edunomicslab, that there are US states in which the picture is better, in that student NAEP outcomes have gotten at least a bit better over this period. Their takeaway from that is that what states do with regard to education can make a difference.

I am not going to dive into state-by-state comparisons, I don’t live in the US. I am interested in how things look along these same dimensions in Canada, and here I run into the usual problem. No org in Canada does anything like the data gathering and organization of important public stats that you find in the US. StatsCan in the early years of my professional life had a reputation as one of the best such orgs on the planet. No more. Getting things from their website is difficult, they no longer produce user-friendly graphs and tables of such things, and on top of that, Canada does not have the same density of non-profit think tanks and such which take up the slack. The one exception to that latter statement that I know about is The Fraser Institute, whose efforts are none the less dwarfed by what is done by edunomicslab, among others.

My complaining aside, I did what I could to find something comparable for Canada, and succeeded partially, with the results below.

A Fraser Institute Report from August of 2024 provides the following stats, among others:

– Per-student spending adjusted for inflation (price changes) increased by 5.1% nationally from 2012/13 to 2021/22.

– Student enrolment across Canada increased by an average of 5.1% from 2012/13 to 2021/22. Three provinces saw a decrease in enrolment: Newfoundland & Labrador (5.8%), New Brunswick (1.8%), and Ontario (0.1%).

– Compensation remains the largest and costliest aspect of education spending and has contributed the largest portion to the growth of total education spending in Canada.

The time period here is close to the one in the US graphs above, but it aggregates primary and secondary school stats together. I could not find any stats on staffing level changes in Canada.

Canada has a variety of provincial testing regimes for its students, but what I found readily available were results on the PISA scores in Canada. PISA is the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a triennial survey run by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that assesses 15-year-olds’ abilities in reading, mathematics, and science. Thus, it is given to secondary students every three years in most countries. I don’t know what percentage of students in every country take it, but get the impression that it is high. It has the advantage of making Canada US comparisons easy, and the last round of PISA test was done in 2022.

I found the following:

Average mathematics scores have dropped consistently in Canada, from an average of 532 in 2003 to an average of 497 in 2022.

PISA reading scores in Canada went from 520 in 2018 to 507 in 2022, just four years.

PISA science scores in Canada went from 528 in 2015 to 515 in 2022

The Canadian average scores in 2022 in Math and Science were notably better than for the US, the reading scores in the two countries were almost the same. It is worth mentioning that Canada’s average score over the three areas was the eighth highest of all countries in 2022, while the US’s average ranked it eighteenth.

So my take, based on this admittedly non-optimal data, is that the situation in the two countries is similar, but rather more stark in the US than in Canada. Neither country’s educational systems are performing well in producing student outcomes from the resources they use in the sense that outcomes have been getting worse while spending and staffing have increased. No doubt some of the declines in achievement can be attributed to school lockdowns during the Covid era, but they started before that, so that is not the entire story.

None of this points clearly at what to do about any of this, the data is too aggregate for that. However, if more is being spent per student to hire more personnel per student, and outcomes are getting worse, I don’t see any way to avoid the implication that the increased spending and personnel are being badly deployed.

Improving the Technology of Money Extraction

Written by Al Slivinski on February 15, 2025. Posted in Research. No Comments on Improving the Technology of Money Extraction

There is a regular publicaion in my profession called The Journal of Economic Perspectives (JEPs). Sounds fascinating, eh? It kinda actually is, for two reasons. One, it has no paywall, so anyone can read it, even you (the latest edition is here if you care to dip in). Two, it is expressly designed to be non-technical, so folks who have not been warped by years of economics instruction can perhaps learn something from it. (Note please that I am not claiming it is a real page-turner.) I certainly found articles in it that I could put on my course reading lists from time to time back in my teaching days.

A regular feature in every issue is a section called Recommendations for Further Reading, which points people at articles and interviews and other things the editor thinks might be interesting. The latest edition includes a blurb about a new paper by economists Julian Morris and Ben Sperry which I do find interesting, titled “The Cost of Payments: A Review,”. You can read it yourself, if you’re brave, here.

If you’re not that brave, here is a synopsis of what is in the paper, according to JEPs:

“Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium in 2018 became the first major sports venue in the United States to switch to a fully cashless payment system. At the end of the new payment model’s first year of operations, the stadium reported that wait times had fallen by 20 to 30 seconds and per-capita food and beverage sales had risen by 16%, while saving more than $350,000 in operating expenses. . . . In short, the evidence shows that, when all costs and all parties to a transaction are considered, electronic payments (debit cards, credit cards, and mobile payments) are more cost-effective than cash for most transactions. The main reason for this is that electronic payments enable consumers to spend more than they have in their wallet, which results in ‘ticket lift’ for merchants. Card rewards, including cashback and merchant- specific loyalty programs, further increase this ticket lift. In addition, ‘tap-and-pay’ contactless payments can reduce the time it takes to tender payment relative to cash, especially when cash payments are eliminated altogether. This increases throughput, improving the customer experience and reducing labor costs.”

I know that nothing increases my experience as a customer quite like improved throughput. And spending more than I have in my wallet is what I am counting on being able to do in heaven if I get there, and here the folks at M-B Stadium have found a way for me to do it while alive. That, my friends, is surely nirvana. But the benefits of ‘no cash allowed’ don’t end there. Think of all the useful, productive things customers at the M-B Stadium are able to do with those 20 or 30 seconds they would otherwise spend in line. The possibilities are endless.

Really, though, the best thing about this synopsis is that it taught me a new term: ‘ticket lift’. What an absolutely precious way to describe inducing people to spend more money at your venue.

I am sooo happy to see the esteemed members of my former profession putting themselves to good use, studying ways to better extract money from people as they acquire all the key ingredients for a happy life.

Super Bud Light Debacle

Written by Al Slivinski on February 7, 2025. Posted in Culture, LBOs, Popular attitudes. No Comments on Super Bud Light Debacle

Whether you are a sports fan or not, you probably know that Super Bowl Roman Numerals is going to happen on Sunday. As an actual fan of Uhmurikan football, I plan to watch it, along with millions of others who only watch this one game each year. You probably also know that much of what is written about the Super Bowl every year is actually about the commercials. Firms spend stratospheric amounts for a 15-second spot during this event, and they also spend a lot producing commercials to be shown during the SB that they hope everyone will talk about for days and weeks afterward.

This morning I was reading an article in The Free Press titled ‘The Sad Saga of Bud Light’, written by one Anson Frericks, who spent 11 years as a top executive at Anheuser-Busch InBev, the multi-national company that produces and sells beer all over the world, including here in Canada, where it owns Labatt Brewing, Limited, the largest brewer in the country. Frericks notes that there will be a Bud Light commercial shown during the game, and suggests that it is an attempt by AB InBev, the maker of said beer, to say ‘Sorry’.

Sorry about what? According to Frericks, about what happened back in 2023 (ancient history, I know) when AB InBev launched an advertising campaign for Bud Light that featured a ‘transgender influencer’ named Dylan Mulvaney. So, full disclosure. I do not and never have drank Bud Light, because it has two problems associated with it. Those would be the ‘Bud’ and the ‘Light’. I like beer, but Budweiser is fizzy yellow water that bears a distant resemblance to beer in my estimation, and beer labelled ‘Light’ is like yogurt labelled ‘nonfat’. It isn’t yogurt if it has no fat in it, and it isn’t beer if you added water to it to get the alcohol content down.

But that’s just me, as prior to the ad campaign mentioned above, which launched on April 1, 2023, Bud Light had the highest sales revenue of any beer in the US.

I remember discussions, some heated, most amused, about this ad campaign when it came out, but honestly paid little attention. I do not understand why having some nominally well-known person in a commercial for any product has any impact on anyone’s decision to consume that product. Morgan Freeman, Peyton Manning, Jennifer Garner or Dylan Mulvaney, I am not interested in their views of or association with anything I might consume. Apparently that makes me odd, but we already knew that.

I also knew some kind of boycott of Bud Light was proclaimed by somebody after those ads appeared. Didn’t drink the stuff, didn’t care, but honestly my guess was that it would all blow over as these things do, and the folks who liked Bud Light for reasons I do not understand would go back to drinking it eventually.

Well, according to this Free Press article by Mr. Frericks, I could not be more wrong, and this is what prompted me to write this column.

Here is what he claims, and I have not verified these numbers, but I expect one could.

“Bud Light sales declined 11 percent that week compared to the previous year. By April 15, 2023, sales were down 21 percent. In the ensuing months, the company shed billions of dollars of shareholder value, laid off hundreds of employees across the Anheuser-Busch ecosystem, damaged its reputation, and plunked itself in the middle of a highly contentious political issue.”

Then later he writes –

“Nearly two years later, Bud Light has yet to win beer lovers back; sales remain roughly 40 percent below where they were before the boycott began.”

40 per cent? Really? That’s astounding. That’s big.

Today, according to the article, Bud Light is the third-largest selling brand of beer in the US, after Modelo and Michelob Ultra. Even worse, if you were an AB-InBev shareholder, on March 31, 2023, the day before the Mulvaney campaign launched, AB InBev stock was $66 per share with a market capitalization of $132 billion. Today, the stock price is $49 a share with a market cap of $87 billion, a loss of over $40 billion in value.

Clearly, my original thought that the kerfuffle would end and Bud Light sales would revive was rather wrong. That ad campaign apparently did do some long-term serious damage to the company that ran it. (I hasten to add that we cannot look at the counterfactual: what would sales of Bud Light be today if that ad campaign had not happened? It is entirely possible that other things – good marketing by Modelo, for example – have something to do with the fall in Bud Light sales.)

The Free Press article (you can read it here) goes on to document the path AB-InBev took to get to that point, starting with the appointment of a new CEO, Michel Doukeris, in July of 2021. Frericks lays out the re-orientation of AB-InBev in a new direction, emphasizing ESG and DIE initiatives, that Doukeris led.

Leaving aside my or anyone else’s views of all that sort of thing (and I surely do have a view), it seems to me the most salient question one can ask about this is: what in the hell were these people thinking?

To put it differently, how can the CEO of a multi-national corporation like AB-InBev not realize what an utterly idiotic idea it was to have a ‘transgender influencer’ promoting Bud Light??!! How can anyone – never mind someone being paid an eye-watering salary (plus bonuses, plus…plus…) to run this company – be so hopelessly clueless about the company’s product and customers?

I am sure plenty of folks will point at the whole ‘woke’ mindset as the cluelessness culprit here, and I can imagine that played a role, but I also strongly suspect it is deeper than that. However woke Mr. Doukeris and his fellow C-suite inhabitants might be, I wonder if he ever spent a moment of his time working in the business of making, distributing or selling beer. Did he even drink Bud Light when no reporters were around?

His Wikipedia bio says he has a degree in chemical engineering and post-graduate degrees from U Penn’s Wharton Business School and Northwestern’s Kellog School of Management. He joined AB-InBev in Brazil in 1996, when he would have been 23 years old, but it doesn’t say what he did. I’m betting he wasn’t driving a delivery truck, but I suppose it is possible he was a chemical engineer in one of their breweries to begin his career. However, he seems to have quickly become a rising star in the company, which meant leaving behind any actual association with the business in which AB-InBev was engaged. There lies the path to cluelessness.

So, woke or otherwise, his foolish approval of this ad campaign (with blame to be shared by Alissa Heinerscheid, whom Doukeris had apparently promoted to vice president of marketing) was a clear disaster for AB-InBev’s bottom line. And, here’s the thing – he is still the company CEO.

When I read about people railing against the inefficiency of government, typically asserting that ‘in the private sector if you make bad decisions there are consequences, dammit!’, I think of stories like this one.

In the 21^st century, in any LBO, private or public, non-profit or commercial, there are rarely any consequences for fucking up. At least, when you are near enough to the top of the LBO hierarchy.

You do want to be very near the top, however. The article also notes that

“Alissa Heinerscheid was placed on leave in April 2023. According to her LinkedIn profile, she now works with LIV Golf, the professional golf league underwritten by Saudi Arabia.”

Yea, I know. Ms Heinerscheid is in no danger of starving. Do you suppose Saudi-backed LIV Golf has a DIE department? I’m gonna have one of my interns look into that.

I’m Confused

Written by Al Slivinski on February 6, 2025. Posted in Government. No Comments on I’m Confused

I know, I know, aren’t we all, most of the time?

Still. Here is the headline and first paragraph from a story in my morning Globe and Mail:

RCMP say they’ve stopped 16 people from crossing illegally into Canada from the United States

“The RCMP has announced it stopped 16 people illegally crossing the American border into the Canadian Prairies over the past three weeks, none of whom appear to be involved in the fentanyl trade.”

So, it is good – I think – that some people have been stopped from entering my country illegally. I rather doubt that people who try to cross into Canada from the US in some barely-populated part of the Prairies are coming to engage in benevolent activities, so yay, RCMP.

But, but…..wasn’t the stated point of the increased Canadian surveillance of the Canada/US border supposed to be to stop people from going the other way? Particularly people who might be ‘involved in the fentanyl trade’?

I have written previously that any increased border surveillance is bound to result in increased apprehension of people crossing the border illegally in both directions, and indeed, here we are. But, but, but….the RCMP announced this at a press conference. The article goes on to say:

“They said the apprehensions are evidence that Canada has control of its side of the international boundary, but wouldn’t connect their announcement directly to U.S. President Donald Trump’s assertion that Canada lets migrants and illicit opioids flow freely into his country.”

No, of course they didn’t make that connection because these people were apparently heading north and DJT’s concern is supposedly about people heading south. So again, for whose benefit was this press conference announcement? Me? I rather doubt it.

The article goes on to suggest that most of these people are not from the US, but third countries. It says that some hailed from Jordan, Sudan, Chad and Mauritius in one group that was apprehended. Another group is described as ‘…carrying suitcases and not wearing hats, gloves or “anything that we would normally see” at a temperature of -30’. Those people don’t sound like Americans from North Dakota, do they? Being apprehended by the RCMP probably saved those folks’ lives. Exactly one person is identified in the article as a ‘US man’ who got involved in a police chase in Alberta and ended up dying from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. That certainly could be someone trying to smuggle drugs or guns into Canada, but it could also be a mentally disturbed individual, and the article says nothing more about him. An investigation is ongoing. Of course it is.

Ok, so this is a confusing post, I admit, because I am indeed confused as to the reason for the RCMP making this worthy of a press conference. None of this seems likely to impress DJT, nor, except for the one US man, who was clearly armed, does it seem like anything that Canadians are terribly worried about was prevented. I am happy that the government’s agents are keeping a closer eye on people moving north illegally across the border, I’m pretty sure about that, but otherwise….I’m just confused.

And here is one final element of confusion, which I will just lay out and leave. I intend to look into it more thoroughly, so stay tuned.

If the other 15 people apprehended by the RCMP really are from third countries, my understanding is that the Canada-US Safe Third Country Agreement implies they will be sent back to the US. If they are from the US, then again, I would expect they would be sent back there. However, on Feb 1 the Globe published an article with the title “Canada’s border cities, bursting at the seams with asylum seekers, brace for more amid Trump turmoil”

and then the subtitle:

‘From Niagara Falls, Ont., to Surrey, B.C., communities foresee that U.S. policies will send more asylum seekers north, into places ill-equipped to house them’

Niagara Falls is on our border with the US, not Sri Lanka, so these folks almost all surely entered Canada from the US. Why are they being ‘housed’ in Niagara Falls? The article says of Niagara Falls:

‘At its peak more than a year ago, there were nearly 5,000 asylum seekers housed in 11 hotels in the city’s downtown core, dotted with souvenir shops, arcades, amusement rides, indoor water parks and a casino.’

How does this happen? If these were all people who came into Canada from the US, as I presume, why are they not sent back immediately to the US, per the Safe Third Country Agreement? Is it simply that the bureaucracy of this Agreement moves that slowly? If so, maybe that is what needs to be worked on. (I know, good luck with that.) I genuinely do not know, but plan to look into it. As I said, stay tuned, your correspondent will try to get to the bottom of this. Assuming there is a bottom.

Whatever The Hell That Is….

Written by Al Slivinski on February 1, 2025. Posted in Education, Standards. 1 Comment on Whatever The Hell That Is….

….it’s not thinking.

I write these posts and most everything else in Word, like most of the human race, at least in North America. Every time I start a document, and then every time I start a new line in a document, a symbol pops up in Word on the left hand margin letting me know that Copilot is ready and waiting to make my writing better and easier.

I cannot get rid of this annoying symbol, because the Word program I am using is not mine, I am just renting it from Microsoft, and I have very few choices about how it works. I expect before I die that Word will no longer give me the option to ignore Copilot, just as my Microsoft Windows OS no longer gives me many real choices about how my laptop operates. We who use computers -as in, almost everyone – are all just dancing to Microsoft’s tune, nowadays.

Well, I want to report here on a blog post I just came across on a website called Mind Matters, written by Gary Smith, an economist at Pomona College. It has nothing to do with Econ, trust me, and if you want to skip the middleman (me) and read his long-ish post yourself you can do that here.

Assuming you are still with me, I’ll give you the basic story and then some related commentary based on other stuff I’ve come across on the interweb thingie regarding LLMs (Large Language Models).

Smith is reporting on what happened when he put a question to four AI LLMs – Deepseek, Copilot, Gemini Flash and OpenAIo1.

Here’s the initial question, which Smith asked in two parts –

Gary: I’d like to discuss a new version of tic-tac-toe called 90-degree tic-tac-toe.

The four chatbots all respond enthusiastically with some variation on – ‘sounds interesting, tell me more’

Gary: It is still a 3×3 grid but the grid is rotated 90-degrees to the right.

Smith says he edited the LLMs responses down a bit, as they do go on and on, and here are the four responses.

OpenAI: Interesting concept! By rotating the grid 90 degrees to the right, you’re visually changing the perspective of the classic 3×3 Tic-Tac-Toe board. The gameplay itself might remain the same, but the rotated perspective could create a novel experience for players.

DeepSeek: Ah, I see! So in 90-degree tic-tac-toe, the 3×3 grid is rotated 90 degrees to the right….This could be a fun twist because the rotated grid might disorient players initially, making it harder to spot winning opportunities or block opponents.

Copilot: That sounds like a fun twist on the classic game! By rotating the grid 90 degrees to the right, it gives players a fresh perspective and challenges them to think differently about their moves.

Gemini: This rotation doesn’t change the core concept of getting three of your symbols in a row, but it does significantly alter the strategy and how players approach the game.

Philosophers have an accepted definition of ‘bullshitting’. One is honest when one says what they believe to be true, one is a liar when one says things they believe are false, and one is bullshitting when one is unconcerned about the truth or falsity of what one says.

LLMs bullshit, because it is all they can do. They have no idea what is true. One writer on AI that I read said that what comes out of an LLM is simply the result of a billion incredibly fast coin tosses. Not exactly right, I suspect, but close enough.

As for LLMs learning as they go, Smith goes on from here and drags more BS out of the LLMs. He asks them if they think it would be better to rotate the grid right or left, and they have definite opinions about that, as well as on the question of which direction of rotation will make the game more difficult for expert players.

Smith notes some key features of how LLMs generate answers –

They write hundreds of words when a dozen would do, they are always positive and enthusiastic (lots of !s), reluctant to say ‘I don’t know’, and they lack common sense.

His bottom line: ‘If you know the answer, you don’t need to ask an LLM; if you don’t know the answer, you can’t trust an LLM.’

All this made me realize something. LLMs are algorithms that rather faithfully replicate the behaviour of all the bad students I taught over the years.

I never asked painfully obvious questions about tic-tac-toe during my years in the trenches, but I almost always asked a question or two that could be answered with a few simple lines by any student who had studied. (I never asked multiple choice questions in my last 20 or so years of teaching.) And, there were always some number of students who gave long and ludicrous answers to those questions, because their lack of effort in the course meant they had no idea there was a simple clear answer. They were left trying to guess at words and phrases that would match up well with the words in the question. They were, in a word, bullshitting, in hopes that something they wrote would get them some points, in spite of their utter incomprehension.

I don’t suppose any company is likely to come out with a general use LLM called ‘BadStudent’, though.

A further (last, I promise) thought. I bet if you put Smith’s rotated tic-tac-toe question to a hundred second-year undergrads, some positive number of them would answer with bullshit not too dissimilar to what the LLMs spit out. However, those students would be doing that because they were not confident that they weren’t missing something about the question, perhaps reinforced by a lack of confidence in their own thinking. The LLMs have no ‘reasons’ for bullshitting, it’s just what they are designed to do.

In The Midst of Tragedy, A Remarkable Fact

Written by Al Slivinski on January 30, 2025. Posted in Safety, Standards. No Comments on In The Midst of Tragedy, A Remarkable Fact

The first thing I saw when I digitally ‘opened’ my Wall Street Journal this morning was a headline about the crash between a military helicopter and an American Airlines jet near the National Airport in Washington, DC. This was jarring, of course, as is the fact that none of the 67 passengers and crew in the two craft are expected to have survived. It is a sad tale with which to start one’s day.

However, as I read about this, the WSJ also told me that this is the first airline crash involving any fatality in the US since 2013. That’s eleven years. That’s astounding. To get a feel for how astounding it really is, I looked for some data – it’s what I do.

This is an estimate, as the numbers are just huge and 11 years is a long time, but according to Statista, US airlines have flown somewhere between 600 and 800 billion domestic passenger miles in each of those 11 years. That adds up to something more than 7 trillion passenger miles flown in the US without a fatality.

In an era and a world in which it sometimes seems that nothing works as it should, that is one remarkable statistic.

Postscript (again): For the record, I wrote and posted this before hearing about DJT’s fact-free statements about the cause of this crash. So, it was not written in response to his remarks. That aside, you would be hard-put to find a more adamant critic of everything DIE (or EDIDA) than me, but maybe it would be worthwhile to wait until people who know something about air transportation have a chance to gather some evidence before declaiming on causes of this crash. And, the numbers I wrote above certainly constitute indirect evidence about the performance of the US air traffic system over the past 11-plus years.

Dougie, Dougie, Dougie

Written by Al Slivinski on January 29, 2025. Posted in Government, Politics. No Comments on Dougie, Dougie, Dougie

Ontario Premier Doug Ford persuaded Ontario’s Lieutanant-Governor to dissolve the 43^rd Parliament of Ontario today, resulting in an election to be held across Ontario to elect a new Parliament on Feb 27. Two indisputable facts are the following. One, the Progressive Conservative Party led by Ford held 79 of the 124 seats in the 43^rd Parliament, with the NDP, as His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, holding 28. In simple language, the PCs had a massive majority. Two, the current Parliament, elected on June 2, 2022, could have run until June of 2026 without an election, except in the highly unlikely event of a vote of no confidence in the current government.

The National Post, to its credit, yesterday published a Comment column by the Premier in which he makes the case for calling this snap election. Credit also to Mr Ford for having the chutzpah to make his case in print.

The case in general that Ford makes is that he needs a strong and long mandate from the people of Ontario to fight for them against whatever tariff or other policies the new Trump administration might enact. That a 25% tariff on Canadian imports into the US would be a serious matter for Ontario’s economy no one can doubt. The column is full of rhetoric about being ‘clear-eyed’ about the danger from these possible US actions, and features plenty of combative language. One quote:

“Make no mistake. Ontario won’t start a fight with the US, but you better believe we’ll be ready to win one.”

And,

“With the trust and support of Ontario voters, we’ll be prepared to give this everything we’ve got.”

And so on. The thing is, and this is in no way an original thought by me, another way to see Ford’s snap election call is as political opportunism, on two fronts. One, he wants to get a new election and new mandate before the looming Federal election, as it is traditionally better for the Ontario PCs to run when the federal government is led by the Liberals. In 2026 it is very likely that the federal Conservatives will be leading a majority federal government. Second, if the US shit does hit the fan, no matter what ‘fight’ Canada puts up, things are likely to not be going well in the Canadian economy in 2026, not to mention the Ontario economy in particular. No government wants to go into an election with the economy on a downswing.

So, what to believe? Doug’s deep-seated desire to be in a position to fight effectively for we Ontarians against the Trump threat, or political opportunism?

This somewhat less combative quote also comes from the Premier’s column, and I find it telling:

“At a time when the federal government has left Canada drifting, exposed and vulnerable, President Trump will use every day he’s in office to exploit any weakness he can find.”

Ford’s take that PM Trudeau has left Canada drifting by his prorogation of Canada’s Parliament until March 24 is fair, I think. I have written as much, myself. Dougie’s response is to dissolve the Ontario Parliament for a month so all the MPPs – including Mr. Ford – can go electioneering. That is a month that includes the next (possible) date for the imposition of US tariffs, Feb 1. It does not appear that Mr. Ford regards that inescapable fact as a weakness Mr. Trump might exploit.

I’m coming down pretty hard in favour of ‘political opportunism’ here.

So, how do I vote in the Ontario election? My riding was won handily by the NDP candidate in 2022, and for reasons I have stated elsewhere, I simply cannot check that box. The PC candidate came in second in my riding last time, but Dougie has made it very difficult to check that box, also. I would feel like I was rewarding his behaviour, and that would not feel good.

I dunno, maybe the Libertarians will run a candidate in my riding. No chance of their winning, of course, but how else is a citizen to make his disappointment known?

Last point: turnout in the 2022 Ontario election was at an all-time low. Will our Premier’s call for a strong and long new mandate cause that to go up? I think he better hope so. Some of us remember David Peterson’s call for a snap election in Ontario in 1990.

Postscript: I was out and about in the afternoon after I posted this, and when I came back home this evening, there in my snailmailbox was a cheque for $200 from the Ontario Ministry of Finance. Now that is some impressive timing.

I do hope the Libertarians run a candidate in my riding…….

Canada’s Next PM

Written by Al Slivinski on January 26, 2025. Posted in Government, News Media, Standards. 1 Comment on Canada’s Next PM

We don’t know when it will happen, because us ordinary citizens have to sit around and wait until at least Feb 24 to get any clues from the Important People as to when we may have an election and thus, almost certainly, a new government and PM, but it seems impossible to bet that it won’t happen by the middle of the year.

Today’s poll on the website 338canada.com/federal has the federal Conservatives’ support at 44%, the Liberals at 22% and the NDP at 18%. The election is not being held today, and the Liberals are in the process of selecting a new party leader, and shit surely can happen over two to four months but it would be very brave – or foolhardy – to bet against Pierre Poilievre being the next Canadian PM, leading a Conservative-majority government.

Is that a good or bad thing? I am asking this in a purely selfish way. A federal election is surely going to happen (although it seems Dougie is going to send Ontarians to the polls first, I will write about that down the road) and I will need to decide for whom to vote. Unlike the custom in the Canadian press and throughout society these days, I do not see myself voting for Poilievre or Carney or Singh. I am voting for who I want to represent me in Parliament, and in that vote, the party to which a candidate belongs is only one factor, albeit an important one.

Unfortunately, there is really no evidence that Canadian federal MPs of any party are allowed by their party leadership to truly represent their ridings, and I am not oblivious to this. Hence, a critical factor in how I vote in my riding is going to be what I think of the leaders of the various parties. I have nothing good to say about Singh or Trudeau after observing them govern Canada over the last many years. I see Freeland as having been very much a Trudeau acolyte until she suddenly got religion last month, although I give her kudos for changing her stripes, however late in the game. Mark Carney so far seems to me to be a classic Ottawa mandarin. We don’t need any more of those in my view, but he is also new to politics so I plan to listen carefully to what he has to say throughout the Liberal leadership race; assuming, of course, he has things to say.

That leaves Mr. Poilievre, who has been covered assiduously (and almost universally negatively) in the Canadian press as the Leader of the Official Opposition. In that role he has been very much in Attack Dog mode, and while I get that can be seen as pretty much his job description up to now, it has not made me favorably inclined toward him as an improvement over Trudeau as PM. Or over Carney (who at this point I would bet on winning the Liberal leadership race). Poilievre would certainly be preferable to Singh, but almost anyone would be in my view. The NDP does not believe in arithmetic, and that is disqualifying, in my opinion.

A couple of people I respect have pointed out to me that Poilievre sat down to be interviewed by Jordan Peterson on Peterson’s podcast last Dec 21. This was before Trudeau announced his intention to resign, but PP was riding high in the polls, and the episode is titled ‘Canada’s Next Prime Minister’.

So, I took the time (it’s an hour and 40 minutes long) to sit and watch the interview, in hopes of learning more about Mr. Poilievre than is possible from reading mostly hostile press reports.

However, getting information from podcasts is not my usual thing, so I will lay all my biases and misgivings about this out before turning to what I think I may have learned about Mr. Poilievre.

I don’t watch or listen to podcasts. Many people I know do, but I am very much a fan of the written word. This makes me a dinosaur, I know, but so be it. Had a transcript of this podcast been available (I could not find one) I would surely have read that instead of listening to the podcast.

I am not entirely a fan of Jordan Peterson, although I have a great deal of respect for him, and I thought his original 12 Rules for Life book, which I read, added something valuable to the culture. A psychologist of my age characterized that book to me as a bunch of wisdom you might get from a good 6^th grade teacher. I think that’s actually fair, but what the psychologist failed to appreciate is that there are few such wise teachers anymore. Much that is written and published is not blindingly new, but if it fills a need felt by many (as Peterson’s book clearly did, particularly for young men), it is valuable. Peterson’s book was valuable.

Peterson is a rarity in that he has a wide-ranging mind, and, having heard him speak more than once, I appreciate that. I also think that his years in the spotlight have turned him into a media creature, and that this has not served him well. He is almost always in combat mode, and that has to be a very hard place to be. While I think I understand how that can happen to someone who has been attacked as much as he has, it still gets in the way of some of the good things I think he is trying to say.

Finally, and this is not unique to Peterson, I think that on this podcast, in which he was supposed to be playing the role of interviewer, there was too much Peterson. Another reason to see a transcript, because if one could, I bet the word count for Peterson would be higher than for Poilievre. As it is, I bet in the video there are more minutes of Peterson’s voice than of Poilievre’s, but I know of no way to check that. This has been my typical experience when I have listened to interviews done by podcasters. They are used to declaiming, they are used to being the focus, and the role of a good interviewer is to ask good, concise questions and then shut up and listen. Peterson did much too little of that in this interview, in my opinion.

As a result of this, I don’t feel like I learned all that much about Mr. Poilievre from this interview. None the less, here are some things I think I did learn.

The revelatory part of the interview to me occurs at about the 1:14 point in the podcast. Peterson notes that he doesn’t envy the task Poilievre will face as PM in taking over after 10 years of Liberal governance. I think that’s a fair comment, and keep in mind that this was said before Trump started blathering on about tariffs on Canadian imports into the US.

He then asks PP a pretty direct question and in my mind, a good one. This is not an exact quote but he asks Poilievre ‘Why should Canadians have confidence in you, what is your plan when you take office?’

Poilevre replies, again not an exact quote:

Cut bureaucracy, cut foreign aid, cut out the consultants, cut corporate welfare and use the savings to bring down the deficit and lower taxes. Unleash the free enterprise system, repeal C-69, which he calls ‘the anti-energy law’ to start a ‘massive’ energy boom in our country. Incentivize the municipalities to get building.

Then, an even better question: Can you highlight who are the key members of your coming administration and lay out what their roles will be once you form a government, and what their strengths are.

I will write out PP’s response to this in the form of a list:

Andrew Scheer, former party leader and Speaker of the House, he knows the rules of the game in Parliament, and that’s important for getting legislation passed.

Dr Leslie Lewis, current shadow minister of infrastructure, she’s doing a great job of talking about how we can improve infrastructure in this country.

Gamil Giovanni (spelling?, I’m working off an audio tape here) recently elected in an overwhelming mandate in Durham.

Melissa Lantzman, deputy leader, extremely well-liked in Toronto, terrific communicator, very smart.

We’re recruiting new candidates in ridings we don’t currently hold, to help me win the election and govern.

Asked by JBP in a follow-up – who PP has on the ‘energy side’, PP responds by saying ‘we’re very lucky as we have a lot of MPs from Alberta and Saskatchewan, and very few of them don’t understand energy’.

PP then shifts to talking about the good conversations he’s had with Premiers Danielle Smith and Scott Moe.

The conversation then moves off onto other topics.

So as to JBP’s first question about what is PP’s plan, what he says is not awful, there is nothing in it that I have any real disagreement with. However, beyond the repeal of C-69, there is nothing at all specific in it, either. What bureaucracies will you eliminate, what is an example of the corporate welfare you will eliminate, and how exactly do you plan to incentivize the municipalities to get more building done? Municipalities are creations of provinces, what on earth can the federal government even do in this realm?

To be sure, had any other party leader been asked that question, or Freeland or Carney, I would not expect any more detailed answers.

Even less inspiring was PP’s answer to the question about his team. It was all politics, a good house leader (ok, fair enough, that matters) MPs who won big mandates or are well-liked and smart. And, I’m sorry, but being from Alberta, particularly being a politician from Alberta, doesn’t imply you know doodly about energy.

Even more than the first, PP’s answer to that second question sets him out in my mind as a career politician. To be sure, that is who party leaders always are in the 21^st century, although Carney may end up being an exception. And, there is no better example of the fact that not being a career politician does not necessarily make one a good leader than Donald J Trump.

Locally, London currently has a couple of city councillors who are well-known to be the candidates for various parties in the looming federal and/or provincial elections. People get into municipal politics not to contribute to their city – at least rarely so – but as a stepping-stone into a ‘real’ career as a higher level politician. The pension is very good, I hear.

So, we end up ruled by career politicians.

Returning to my selfish motivations, listening to this interview did not turn me away from the idea of voting for the Conservative candidate in my federal riding when that decision comes, it just showed me that if I do, I will be voting for a candidate whose party is led by a career politician. Not disqualifying, but not really a plus, either. So, I guess I gotta keep listening.

The Bureaucratic Way

Written by Al Slivinski on January 25, 2025. Posted in LBOs. No Comments on The Bureaucratic Way

I refer to LBOs (Large Bureaucratic Organizations) often in this blog, because I find that in the 21^st century they comprise the majority of orgs with which I interact. Online there is Microsoft and Google, when I want to buy something there is Amazon and OpenTable for making restaurant reservations. My long-time employer became an LBO during my worklife, governments from municipalities on up are LBOs and of course the health care system in Ontario is very much an LBO. I do my best to not interact with these orgs, I buy from Amazon only when I can not find what I need anywhere else, and I do most of my banking at a credit union, which I have sadly observed becoming larger and more bureaucratic in just the three years that I have been a ‘member’.

I think this predominance of LBOs in my life is bad, and that is because a primary feature of an LBO is that they do things bureaucratically. What does that mean? A very typical illustration of what it means came my way last week, so I share it here.

I remain on many email lists at my former employer, which results in my getting all kinds of emails from all sorts of official UWO sources. Last week I got one from a Dept Administrator, which was an instance of her forwarding to us an email from a bureaucrat, as she is, I’m sure, expected to do. Below is the email that she forwarded to everyone on her Dept list:

Western Special Constable Service is alerting you of a Public Safety Incident Natural Gas Leak at Perth Dr. (N. of UDR near North Campus Building). Either leave the area or stay away as required for your safety. Updates will be posted by Western Communications on official Western social media accounts as required. Initiators Initials: SD
Thank you,
Alert WesternU
Campus Safety & Emergency Services, Western University

What is the bureaucrat alerting us to? A Public Safety Incident Natural Gas Leak, of course. Is that different from, you know – a Natural Gas Leak? Well, to a bureaucrat, it kinda is. Note what comes first in that terminology – ‘Public Safety Incident’. That is a bureaucratic term, but it comes first, because the Bureaucratic Way is to tick the appropriate required box. You can be sure that there is a rule/procedure that requires that this bureaucrat issue a ‘Public Safety Incident Notice’ whenever something happens to affect ‘Public Safety’.

To a human being, what is important is that there is a ‘Natural Gas Leak’ near North Campus Building, but to the bureaucrat (initials SD) that is secondary to the requirement to Do the Correct Bureaucratic Thing – issue a Public Safety Incident Notice, because asses must be covered. As a bureaucrat, what matters is that you followed the appropriate procedure, should there be any ex-post questions about how said ‘incident’ was dealt with.

Now, the Dept Administrator who forwarded this bureaucratic email to all of us is – fortunately – a human being, so the very first thing she typed into her own email, above the official email from Alert WesternU, was

‘Fyi – Avoid North Campus Building Area’.

TG for human beings, eh?

Have you heard the one…..

Written by Al Slivinski on January 23, 2025. Posted in Government. No Comments on Have you heard the one…..

….about the country that brought a knife to a gunfight?

There was muted joy in Canada on Jan 20 when the newly inaugurated US prez did not impose tariffs on Canadian imports. There have been mutterings that might yet happen on Feb 1, but who knows? Our PM has been quoted as saying the US Prez is a great negotiator, and so likes to keep his negotiating partners off balance. I get that it is thought wise to flatter the guy now that he’s in office, but I really doubt that even DJT knows what he will or will not do regarding tariffs on Canadian goods come Feb 1 or any other date. Planning ahead is not his thing.

They might indeed be imposed, they might be across the board, they might be at 25% or…..not. No way to know.

That said, Trudeau’s ‘Team Canada’ approach to any tariffs that are imposed by the US appears to be centred on tariff retaliation. Canadian leaders say they are drawing up lists of goods that are imported from the US to impose tariffs on. Go, Team. Alberta’s Premier Danielle Smith has drawn the PM’s ire for not going along with this, at least so far as oil exports to the US go, and there is reason to think that an export tax or ban on oil to the US is a bad idea, but I will leave that for another possible post.

This post is going to take a look at the broad data relevant to an out-and-out tit-for-tat tariff war between Canada and the US. The phrase ‘dollar for dollar’ tariffs gets thrown around and I have no idea what that means. Which dollar, to start with.

Again, leave that aside, and ask a very basic macro-sized question: who is likely to get hurt more by any tit-for-tatting: Canadian citizens or US citizens? (You can bet that none of DJT or JT or Danielle Smith or Doug Ford is going to get hurt. The soldiers in this war are you and me, count on it.)

Well, the details matter, for sure. Such a war will undoubtedly benefit some Canadians. If you are a Canada-based producer who has to compete with goods imported from the US, then any tariffs imposed by our leaders on those imports will increase demand for your products. That’s just one example, again – the details will matter.

That being said, here are two answers to a very broad question.

Which country depends more on imports from the other: Canada or the US? The US economy is clearly much bigger – the usual factor of 10 or more. So, how to answer this broad question? The numbers below come from a variety of sources and are at best approximate. I can find no single reliable source that tracks every statistic I need, so I went to Stats Can and other sites to get data, and then used an average exchange rate to convert things to a common currency where necessary. As I hope you will see, the differentials are so wide that no amount of approximation error will change the basic message.

The numbers are annual amounts, some of which are from ’23 and some from ’24, depending on what I could find. Again, the differences between those two years are minimal and nothing depends on them.

US goods imports from Canada: $US377B

US exports of goods to Canada: $US322B = (approx) 1.37 x 322B = $Cdn441B

(Note that as has been written often in recent weeks, the US runs what is known as a small trade ‘deficit’ with Canada, which is just a term for the fact that it buys more from us than it sells to us. True, but irrelevant, I assert.)

Total Cdn imports from all countries: $Cdn759B

Total US imports from all countries: $US3.8T

This means that 441/759 = 58% of the value of all goods imported into Canada in recent years has been in goods imported from the US.

On the other hand, 377/3,800 = under 10% of the value of all goods imported into the US in recent years has been in goods imported from Canada.

To put it bluntly, if it comes to a ‘trade war’ of tariffs and retaliatory tariffs, Canada is going to be the proverbial guy who brought a knife to a gunfight. The US imports mostly from countries other than Canada, while Canada imports from mostly the US.

There is another way to carve this up to answer the basic question: for which country are total imports from the other country a bigger part of the economy? That is, which country is more reliant on imports from the other country for the things its citizens buy?

This comes down to comparing the value of imports from the other country divided by the importing country’s total GDP.

US GDP = $US27.7T, while total imports from Canada were $US377B

Canada GDP = $US2.1T (note the rule of 10), while imports from the US were $US322B.

So, US imports from Canada comprised 377/27,700 = 1.36% of the US’s GDP

Canadian imports from the US comprised 322/2,100 = 15.3% of Canada’s GDP

Knife to a gunfight, no matter how you slice it.

I have no idea what dollar for dollar tariffs could mean, as I said, but let’s just suppose it means ‘percentage point for percentage point’ and the US does end up imposing a 25% tariff on all imports from Canada, and Team Canada responds exactly in kind. US consumers will see the prices of about 1.4% of the things they buy go up, maybe by 25%, maybe less. Canadian consumers will see the prices of 15% of the thing they buy go up, maybe by 25%, maybe less.

Knife, meet gun.

I hasten to add there are other ways to look at this. For example, what percentage of Canadian domestic production goes to the US? That will tell us something about how much the US tariffs will hurt Canadian companies, but I am not going out on a limb if I say that that will be a bigger number than the percentage of domestic US producers who sell things to Canada.

It will still be knife vs gun. It has been said by many before me, but if Canada had diversified its international trading partners eight years ago, this asymmetry in import-reliance would be less. Too late, now.

The Band is Dead – Long Live The Band

Written by Al Slivinski on January 21, 2025. Posted in Culture. No Comments on The Band is Dead – Long Live The Band

No doubt you all heard the news this morning that Garth Hudson, the last living member of The Band, one of the most influential and admired (if you ask me) bands of the last 50 years, has died at age 87.

He is generally described as being a resident of the same city as me, but his birthplace appears to have been Windsor, Ontario. He was born in 1937, before the outbreak of WWII, so is genuinely of an earlier generation than myself.

Anyway, if The Band had done nothing more than write, record and release The Weight, one of the all-time great songs of the 20^th century, we would all be greatly in their debt. In fact, they did much more than that, releasing a slew of songs that still induce me to lean over and turn up the volume when they come on my Geezer Rock Satellite Radio Station in the car. Chest Fever, The Shape I’m In, Up On Cripple Creek, Ophelia, The Night They Drove Ol Dixie Down, Stage Fright and Life is a Carnival (and ain’t it, tho…..), just to name the obvious ones.

They started a genre that had no name at the time, but probably now would be called roots rock, or, strangest of all for a band made up of four Canadians and the sweetest voice this side of Arkansas – Americana.

“Out of nine lives, I spent seven; How the hell you sposeta get to heaven?”

Over and above their own music, they backed up Dylan for a time, after backing up Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins in bars across Ontario for years, and, like all good rock bands of the era, they did drugs and fought. I saw them, sortof, do a benefit concert for The Stratford Festival, when they were touring without Robertson in the 80s. Helm (and maybe the others) had decided they had not been given sufficient credit for their co-authorship of all those great songs. I don’t pretend to know what was the truth of all that, but even in that circumstance, and without Robbie, it was exhilarating to hear them play live. (It was nigh 40 years ago, and I don’t actually remember if they performed The Weight, the writing credit for which is apparently solely Robertson’s.)

They influenced a lot of other music and musicians, but we shall not hear their like again. Praise god for those great recordings.

University Bloat

Written by Al Slivinski on January 16, 2025. Posted in Education, Government. No Comments on University Bloat

The Wall Street Journal had a mostly-nothingburger of a story in it on Christmas Eve titled ‘Elite Colleges Have a Looming Money Problem’. This is about Harvard, Yale, Princeton and that lot, and I will suggest that the headline is b.s. Nothing in the article suggests those places have any financial issues looming. Princeton, leader of the pack in this dimension, has an endowment that is equal to $3.8million per student. That means that at a shitty 3% net return, they can generate almost $110,000 in revenue per year per enrolled student, and never touch the assets in said endowment. They could cut their tuition by half and still make ends meet. I think they’re going to be ok.

Harvard has a mere $2million per student, but I think they’re ok, too. If any institution should worry according to this article, it is the U of Texas, which has the highest per student endowment of any public university, but that is only some $250,000/student. And, the Texas legislature could (and probably has) cut funding to U of T over the years, and could also forbid them from raising tuition. Ontario has done that for years to its universities. So, Texas might have something to worry about. Princeton and Harvard, not really. The only solid thing the article seems to point out is that these places have been getting below-market returns on their massive endowments. Tsk-tsk.

That all being said, I did learn some surprising things from the article. Here’s an interesting quote:

“Despite a booming stock market, Harvard said alumni donations fell by 15% last fiscal year amid outrage over the university’s handling of campus antisemitism. Fellow Ivies Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania experienced even steeper drops.”

Apparently, having your Prez look bad in front of Congress is hard on donations. Whodathought?

The article also says this about Harvard:

“Last year the university relied on the endowment for 37% of its budget, up from about a fifth of the budget 20 years ago and far higher than the average across private, not-for-profit colleges. “

The change from 20% to 37% is certainly a notable increase. It is not clear that this involved actually selling assets in which the endowment is invested, and I rather doubt that it did. Still, maybe Harvard is feeling a little less bullet-proof.

The other interesting things all came from a policy paper written by Paul Weinstein Jr for The Progressive Policy Institute. There was a link to it in the WSJ article, and you can read it here if you like. The paper is titled ‘’How to Cut Administrative Bloat at US Colleges’, and I don’t see that it offers much useful or novel advice in that regard, but it does provide some careful documentation of said bloat. Weinstein provides data on 50 US universities, so he goes well beyond the ‘elite’, all of it gathered from the universities themselves. It turns out that 21^st century universities have almost as many employees as students, and in some cases they have more, and the majority of their employees are not faculty.

Think about that in comparison to other service providers. Can you think of any other such org, a full service hotel, a hospital, a police department, in which that is the case? One needs to be careful about such comparisons, a hospital might have nearly as many employees working in at as it has patients at times, and a police or fire service has as ‘customers’ an entire city, but they rarely all need service at once.

Anyway, I plan to think about reasonable comparisons some more, but here are some of the numbers for universities .

Princeton has 6300 employees, only 1285 of which are faculty, and 8705 students.

Duke University has 3,983 faculty members, 25,873 non-faculty employees (that is not a typo) and 17,155 students. Yes, Duke has more non-faculty employees than students (all student numbers include both grad and undergrad).

Notre Dame, on the other hand, is a relatively lean machine, having 1,243 faculty, 4,467 non-faculty employees, and 12,809 students. Still, more than twice as many non-faculty as faculty employees.

The University of Texas at Austin has only 3,519 faculty and 11,645 non-faculty employees to deal with 52,384 students. I don’t know how they handle the strain…..

The Weinstein paper says without hesitation that the increase in the cost of university education is the result of administrative bloat, but to make that case we would need to see the same numbers for the same universities from 20 or more years ago. Those are not provided, and good luck getting them. I believe it is true that university non-academic staff have grown faster than faculty or student numbers over the last 20 years, based on my time as a professor, but what I believe is insufficient to make that case.

None the less, Weinstein is happy to give a recommendation for how to fix this, and his idea is pretty much what one expects from an academic; have the government fix it. I can do no better than quote from the paper:

“The federal government should shift its focus from increasing financial aid to using its significant leverage to encourage colleges and universities to reduce costs and cut the price of earning a degree. To do this, the government should be given the authority to negotiate the cost of tuition and fees with any post-secondary institution that accepts students who have received grants, loans, or tax incentives from the federal government. Schools could opt-out, but by doing so would not be allowed to enroll students who need to pay a portion of their tuition with federal aid or loans. Schools found in violation of this policy would be subject to fines in an amount equivalent to the aid provided by the government.”

Can you just imagine the size of the bureaucracy – both in universities and in government – needed to insure that all universities and students were playing by these new rules? And….negotiations between The US Federal Government and billion dollar universities over tuition? What could possibly go wrong?

Yes, a solution that only an academic could embrace. Or a budding, university-trained government bureaucrat, I suppose.

Coda

This all made me curious as to how my former employer stacks up against these 50 US universities on these dimensions, so I went to the UWO data book to find out. I cannot be sure that these numbers are calculated in exactly the same way as in the US schools, but then it is not clear that all the US schools calculate them the same way, either.

So, Western says it has 37,875 full-time students enrolled during this current academic year, under-grad and grad. It also employs 1,338 regular full-time faculty and 2,789 full-time staff. That puts it right up there with Notre Dame as a lean machine, although it does have more than twice as many staff as faculty.

The student-to-faculty ratio, one (highly imperfect) way rating orgs measure the quality of education in a post-secondary institution, is an eye-popping 28.3 to 1. Exactly one of the 50 US places in the Weinstein paper is higher than that – Georgia Tech at 37.3 to one. The paper claims GT has gone big-time into online education, which may explain that number partly. U of Texas, as huge as it is, has a student/faculty ratio of only 13.3, and U of Wisconsin, which is about the same size as UWO, is at 8.9.

PSE in Ontario is cheap, and you get what you pay for.