Crypto fraud, falling Sperm counts, and the BBC's show off World Cup plurals.
November 21, 2022 Volume 3 # 33
A Bigger Scam than Enron
The collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange looks more like a giant Ponzi scheme with every revelation. It made the cover the Economist this week.
It means the wild west of Cryptocurrency will soon be over. What took so long? Governments will start regulating it soon. According to an article in the Financial Times, Crypto isn’t regulated in the United States because of a turf battle between the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and banking regulators.
People who gambled on Crypto are getting burned. As the chart below shows, there isn’t anywhere near enough money in the FTX bank to pay `depositors’.
Two Predictions.
1-Sam Bankman-Fried is going to jail. If he did this in Canada he would be able to dodge the bullet. But some politically ambitious Attorney General in the United States will want him as a trophy conviction.
2- Elon Musk will not be the richest man in the world for long. It isn’t just Twitter. He is spreading himself too thin; no one can juggle this many balls at the same time. Much of his wealth is due to Tesla’s stock price. Tesla is about to get hit with a wall of competition. Examples: Hyundai’s latest Ioniq 6 has a greater range than a Tesla Model S, charges twice as fast and costs less than the spartan Tesla Model 3 and has a nicer interior.. And that’s just Hyundai. Other car makers have electric cars.
Bubbles Since the 1970s
Stocks you did not want to own:
And it is worse for them all since then. The people who started Door Dash and Spotify cashed in big time and are now set for a life of yachts and mega houses. The suckers who bought into the iffy ideas will have to work a few more years before retiring.
Worldwide drop in Sperm Count
This story reminds me of the scene in the Woody Allen film, Everything you Wanted to Know about Sex. Woody and friends are dressed as sperm ready to parachute with the job to fertilize an egg or die trying.
Woody and fellow sperm waiting the order to launch.
The story says there is a drop in sperm count on every continent and this makes making babies more difficult. Why is this a problem? This is the month when we passed the 8-billion count on the planet. When I was born the count was 2-billion.
Surely the problems of climate, energy, pollution and all related stuff are caused by overpopulation. Maybe nature is trying to redress the balance by lowering sperm counts, much the way that more male babies are born in country that loses men to war.
US States with a smaller population than Los Angeles County
And each one of them has two Senators. Same problem in Canada. Prince Edward Island, population 156,947, has four Senators, British Columbia, population 5-million+ has 6 Senators. In Canada the 105 Senators are appointed, not elected. There is zero chance of reform since the big provinces, Ontario and Quebec, each with 24, would have to agree and that will never happen.
The BBC says Stadia; I say Stadiums.
Talk of the World Cup in Qatar and the BBC talks of Stadia. This is show off hooey. The average English-speaking person says stadiums. Words in Latin that end in um, like Stadium, are second declension neuter and the plural would be stadia. In Latin, not in English.
Using Latin plurals breaks George Orwell’s fifth rule of clear writing, listed below. Latin is a foreign language. In my book this also goes for cacti, should be cactuses, octopi, octopuses please, and hippopotamuses. Also snotty academics like to prove how dumb we mortals are by saying “…the data are”, showing they know the word is plural. Ask 99% of English-speakers and they say the data is. Just a guess.
While we’re at it, what about the pronunciation of Qatar. The average person says Ka-tar, not Cutter or whatever announcers decide on. There is a section is style guides about English pronunciation of foreign words. We don’t say Paree for Paris. One of the worst was an announced I worked with who loved to pronounce Budapest, Budapesht. More show off hooey, and a snobby putdown to ordinary people who aren’t as clever as she is. Or so she thinks.
George Orwell’s six rules for clear writing.
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Taxi!
A reader sent me something about taxi fares which sent me off looking for a chart to explain it all. This one converts everything to British pounds. It is for capital cities, so picks Washington DC, which has the weirdest taxi service— they pick up other passengers on the trip— and ignores New York City where the fares are much higher. This week taxi fares in New York City went up 23%. Taxis are much more expensive in NYC than in London.
Essay of the Week
Jean Casselman Wadds, was the daughter of a politician, the wife of another and then an MP in her own right as the tenth woman to sit as a member of the House of Commons. She went on to become the Canadian High Commissioner in London from 1979 to 1983.
Her posting to London came at a dramatic time. Margaret Thatcher had been elected prime minister in 1979 and Pierre Trudeau, back in office after his re-election in the spring of 1980, was intent on re-patriating the constitution. Mrs. Casselman Wadds, as a Tory appointee and a woman with a diplomatic charm and political wiliness learned at her father’s knee, was on good terms with Mrs. Thatcher and was credited with helping bring Canada’s Constitution home.
The elegant, charming and clever Canadian High Commissioner and the Queen Mother
"I always said it was thanks to three women that we were eventually able to reform our Constitution. The Queen, who was favourable, Margaret Thatcher, who undertook to do everything that our Parliament asked of her, and Jean Wadds, who represented the interests of Canada so well in London,” said Pierre Trudeau in his memoirs.
She was made a member of the Order of Canada in 1982, in large part for her work in London.
Jean Rowe was born on September 16, 1920, in Newton Robinson, then a rural hamlet north of Toronto. Her father was Earl Rowe, a local politician who went on to become a member of parliament and Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario.
She went to a one-room schoolhouse for grade school and then to a boarding school in Cookstown, Ontario, for high school. At home she met many of the top provincial and national politicians as her father was a leading Tory first at the legislature in Toronto and then in Ottawa.
Miss Rowe graduated with a BA from the University of Toronto in 1940 and then took a course at a business college. She worked for several years before marrying A.C. Casselman – Arza, always known by his initials-- of Prescott, Ontario, the Member of Parliament for Grenville-Dundas. He was 58, she was 26.
Her husband died in 1958, just after the election in which John Diefenbaker won a record 208 of 265 seats in the House of Commons. Mrs. Casselman ran in the by-election that same year and won the seat. She entered the house in January of 1959, along with three other new members, including Paul Hellyer, the future Liberal defence minister.
“The Prime Minister, the Hon. John Diefenbaker and my father, the Hon. Earl Rowe walked smartly down the length of the House to escort me to the Speaker,” wrote Mrs. Casselman of her first day in parliament.
She served as a backbench MP for her solidly Tory riding and then was made parliamentary secretary to the minister of health and welfare in 1962 and 1963. She was the first woman to act a parliamentary secretary. As part of her duties she represented Canada at the United Nations, the first woman to do so.
She had a spirit of adventure. She and another MP, Margaret Aitken, travelled to China in 1959, along with Diana Michener, the daughter of the speaker of the House of Commons and the future Governor-General. China was all but closed at the time, but this trip was the first commercial tour.
Two years later Ms Michener and Mrs. Casselman travelled by car across Europe and on to Moscow where Ms Michener was attending a science conference. Ms Michener bought a Volkswagen in Germany for the trip, which she took home to Canada. When driving in the eastern bloc countries they were told which roads to take, but never given maps.
They arrived in Berlin a day before the Berlin Wall went up and in Moscow the day of the return of Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space. The next day they went to the parade in Red Square to honour the cosmonaut.
“We marched with the crowds through the street and when we stood in Red Square we looked at each other and laughed, saying all we need now is some western journalist to take our picture. You a member of parliament and me the daughter of the speaker of the House of Commons,” said Ms Michener.
Jean Casselman was re-elected in 1962, 1963 and again in 1965. Her husband had first won election in 1921. The Casselmans were such a well-known family in the eastern Ontario riding that two of his opponents for the riding nomination were also named Casselman, both relatives.
But in 1968 she faced two forces over which she had little control: Trudeaumania and re-distribution. The sparsely populated riding expanded and was renamed Grenville- Carleton, reflecting that it took in some southern Ottawa suburbs, places suspected of having a Liberal bias. And she was facing the popularity of Pierre Trudeau running in his first election as Liberal leader.
In the 1960’s she married a Toronto stockbroker, Robert Wadds, and always used both names, Casselman and Wadds, though the marriage lasted only 10 years.
She was hardly idle in life away from parliament. From 1971 to 1975 she was National Secretary of the Progressive Conservative Party. Then she was appointed to the Ontario Municipal Board which rules on things such as zoning changes. Mrs. Casselman Wadds said she found the work interesting.
“I would never be given the longest, heaviest cases, but knowing also that the small, what one colleague called mickey mouse cases, suited me,” she wrote in her diary. In spite of her modesty her rulings were used as a kind of textbook for new commissioners.
“The applications by individuals for changes in their land holdings, either by severances or minor variances, produced daily skits for me. The endless variety, the human qualities of greed, courage, nervousness, intelligence all interested me enormously and total concentration became automatic when I entered a hearing.”
It was while she was at her OMB office in late 1979 that she received a call from the Prime Minister, Joe Clark offering her the post in London. She took a few days to consider it. Her father, then 85, told her she couldn’t turn it down. She never had any intention of doing that.
When she returned from London, Mrs. Casselman Wadds was one of the 13 commissioners on the Macdonald Commission into the economic future of Canada. Its final report recommended free trade with the United States.
“She was a remarkable person and a class act during her time in London,” said Donald Macdonald the former Liberal cabinet minister who was head of the commission and a High Commissioner to London from 1988 to 1991.
Because of her diplomatic, political and economic experience, Mrs. Casselman Wadds was in high demand as a member of blue chip corporate boards, including Bell Canada, Canadian Pacific and the Royal Trust. She received honorary doctorates from four Canadian universities: the University of Toronto, Dalhousie, Acadia and St. Thomas University in Fredericton.
Mrs. Casselman Wadds loved the town of Prescott and her house on the St. Lawrence River where she lived since 1946. Her daughter recounts the story that when her mother first moved into the house she didn’t know how to swim. “She took lessons in the same class as young children and she became such a keen swimmer she would sometimes swim five times a day.”
She was active in the local community and was on the board of local theatres and museums, including a museum across the river in Ogdensburg, New York. During the summers when the St. Lawrence Shakespeare Festival was on she held parties at her house for the cast and crew. The headline announcing her death in the Prescott Journal read: “Community mourns the loss of one of its greatest people.”
Mrs. Casselman Wadds enjoyed the peace and isolation of the house – known as the Issac Wiser House-- in Prescott and the time it gave her to read. During the ice storm of 1999 her daughter called to see how she was coping. Her only worry was about the cost of candles.
“She asked 'How much do candles cost?" I asked why and she replied `I've just re-read all of Voltaire by candlelight and I was just wondering’? When her daughter arrived a few days later she said there was wax on every table.
Jean Casselman Wadds died at home in her bedroom overlooking the St. Lawrence River. She was 91. She is survived by her daughter Nancy and her son Clair. There was a memorial service for her in Maitland, Ontario, near Prescott on December 10. Speakers included the former Prime Minister, Joe Clark, and his Minister for External Affairs, Flora MacDonald.