If you read the catalogue of spy tools and digital weaponry provided to us by Edward Snowden, you’ll see that firmware on your device is the NSA’s best friend. Your biggest mistake might be to assume that the NSA is the only institution abusing this position of trust – in fact, it’s reasonable to assume that all firmware is a cesspool of insecurity courtesy of incompetence of the worst degree from manufacturers, and competence of the highest degree from a very wide range of such agencies
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Large-scale deployment of synthetic fertilisers enabled the expansion and intensification of agricultural production, resulting in hitherto unprecedented surpluses and a steep decline in food prices that have made agricultural producers in the global North dependent on government subsidies. - Dr Heike Schroeder, senior lecturer in climate change and international development at the School of International Development, University of East Anglia, whose revealing drivel is currently being ridiculed over at Bishop Hill. (Warning, contains the word “governance”.) July 23rd, 2014 | 19 comments
 Oh halp, we need to keep them furners out! July 22nd, 2014 | 26 comments
If one gets into a discussion of evolution by means of natural selection with politically-minded people, and evolutionary mechanisms in economics and society come up, then those who consider themselves on the left, or ‘caring’, are highly likely—as surely as Godwin’s Law—to start emphasising that evolution proceeds not only by individual selection, but by group selection. The point intended by this trope is that group selection is how caring collectivity succeeds, and that market, and other pointwise-negotiated, institutions—what with their brutish know-nothing insistence on competition and individual benefit as the measure of all things—are arbitrary, unnecessarily harsh, and retard progress. Be careful what you wish for. Consider for a moment the social mechanisms we see everywhere that are calculated to the collective advantage of one gene pool over another. They are particularistic institutions with little truck with equality of treatment: the clan; the tribe; religious exclusivity; in-marriage, family honour and sexual repression; suspicion of outsiders; vendetta; genocide. I’ll stick with ‘the tyranny of choice’, thank-you. July 20th, 2014 | 28 comments
Yesterday, after a walk in the warm weather, I went into a pub. I am going to name and shame here – it was the King William IV in Chigwell. It’s a nice place with fancy decor, an elaborate menu and London prices. I attempted to order a pint of lager. However, beer was only coming out of the taps in a little dribble. One of the staff members vanished for a few minutes, returned, shook his head to one of his colleagues, and came over to me and said something along the lines of “Sorry, we are having a little bit of trouble with the draught beer due to the temperature in the cellar. This means that the beer is not coming through to the taps. It’s the hot weather, see”. The temperature was a horrific 32 degrees Celsius – 89 degrees Fahrenheit. As an Australian, I would describe this as fairly warm but not especially hot. In England, though, it becomes quite unpleasant, due to the lack of any infrastructure for dealing with it, for instance the ability to provide beer when temperatures go over 30. (Cold drinks in newsagents and other shops are normally kept in strange cooling devices that are open to the air, rather than in proper refrigerators with closed doors. These lose the ability to keep drinks cold when the weather gets hot – ie when you most want your drink to be cold). Buildings simply aren’t designed to keep heat out, nor are they designed to be easily cooled when it gets in. I could just say that the English inability to deal with warm but not especially hot weather is simply a consequence of their not hot climate, but then one also must think about the English inability to deal with cool but not especially cold weather, their inability to deal with weather that is a bit wet but not especially stormy, and indeed to deal with weather that is dry but not especially droughty. Seriously, though, a pub that cannot provide beer when the temperature gets over 30 belongs in an Australian comedy sketch. July 19th, 2014 | 67 comments
For any who have not seen it already, there is a very good interview with Edward Snowden on the Guardian website. July 18th, 2014 | 33 comments
You can think of corporate taxation as a sort of long chess match: The government makes a move. Corporations move in response — sometimes literally, to another country where the tax burden is less onerous. This upsets the government greatly, and the Barack Obama administration in particular. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew has written a letter to Congress, urging it to make it stop by passing rules that make it harder to execute these “inversions.” I’ve got a better idea: What if we made our tax system so attractive to corporations that they would have no interest in moving themselves abroad? I have actually read the letter sent by Lew to Congress, and right rollicking laugh it is too. It talks about a new sort of “economic patriotism” (which prompts me to think of Samuel Johnson’s famous line of patriotism being the last refuge of the scoundrel). Lew does actually admit in his letter that it would be preferable to go for root and branch reform and reduction of corporation tax. The US has one of the highest corp. tax rates in the industrialised world – 40 per cent – while the average for OECD members is in the mid-20s, and in the case of some countries such as Ireland, in the low teens. As a result of this system, US corporations have, according to figures I recently heard from JP Morgan, north of $700 billion held outside the US. The likes of Apple, Google and Pfizer, among others. This system is crazy; it is a sort of corporate twin of the equally mad US system of worldwide tax in which anyone born in the US, even if they have never set foot in Jefferson’s Republic in adulthood, have to file an IRS return. The situation in that respect has got worse with the enactment of the FATCA Act, a truly terrible piece of legislation. If the Republicans want to seriously act as a party that represents business and holders of equities – such as those with 401(k) plans, a big cut to corp tax makes sense. Firms will bring their money back home, either returning it to shareholders, or investing it in the US, etc. Sure, some vested interests that benefit from the current state of affairs will bleat, but screw them. (This is the sort of reform – practical, worthwhile and beneficial, that should be a basic proposal on the GOP table.) July 17th, 2014 | 43 comments
As Michael Jennings of this parish often points out, Australian political culture is as corrupt and nasty as pretty much anywhere else in the First World. But nevertheless, this is rather good news:
Of course it is not nearly enough, but it is a good start. The important thing is this destroys the aura of invincible inevitability that the Cult of Anthropogenic Climate Change has built up, tearing it off like the vestments of an unchallengeable priesthood to reveal what truly lies beneath. Now drive a stake through the evil beast’s green heart. July 17th, 2014 | 8 comments
My understanding is there was an argument inside government between the two halves of the coalition and that argument has gone on for three months. So what the coalition cannot decide in three months this House has to decide in one day. This seems to me entirely improper because of the role of Parliament – we have three roles: One is to scrutinise legislation, one is to prevent unintended consequences, and one is to defend the freedom and liberty of our constituents. This undermines all three and we should oppose this motion. …he is the one the Stupid Party rejected for Cameron. July 16th, 2014 | 15 comments
Yet another arm of the establishment is going to go on strike. Please guys, go out and stay out. Never ever come back, that’ll show ‘em! July 15th, 2014 | 23 comments
I too have acquaintances who, whilst aware of and loudly bewailing the many many failings of the NHS, and the unnecessary deaths – sometimes thousands of deaths – that it causes, will in the very next sentence say something like “but aren’t we lucky to have it, if it wasn’t for the NHS I’d be bankrupt and dead” or some such piffle. They are so brainwashed that they cannot even conceive that there might be any other way of organizing things – even though alternatives are all around us, and all of them without exception produce better outcomes. Astonishing. July 15th, 2014 | 7 comments
The public sector strike the other day, which Perry welcomed and I did not notice, was nominally about austerity. I have heard various conflicting claims about UK government spending, so I decided to find out myself and make my own graphs using figures from ukpublicrevenue.co.uk and ukpublicspending.co.uk.
Spending did go down a bit in 2012 and 2013, so I suppose that is the austerity. But it is still higher than in 2009, and much higher than revenue, even though the latter has increased every year, contrary to the narrative that austerity is to benefit rich taxpayers. The years 2014 to 2016 are estimates, which if to be believed indicate the plan is to resume the growth of the state. These are absolute numbers. Other charts I have seen correct for inflation or GDP and population. I do not trust official inflation figures, and I think government spending makes the GDP statistic less useful. So I got average earnings figures from measuringworth.com and using the population figures from ukpublicrevenue.co.uk calculated spending per person as a percentage of average earnings. This makes sense to me because the fraction of my earnings that are appropriated by the state is what directly affects me.
The graph ends in 2013 because I have no estimates for average earnings. There has been a slight decrease in spending by this measure in 2012 and 2013, but no return to conditions before the step change in 2008. In short, there is a lot of talk about not a lot of action. I have a suspicion that small cuts have been made to the wages of particularly vocal and popular public servants in order to make austerity seem like a bigger deal than it is while keeping powerful public servants in the manner to which they have become accustomed. You can see bigger graphs and my working out in my spreadsheet. Edit: I had mis-labelled the y axis on the first graph; it shows revenue and spending per person in Pounds. I have fixed the labels now. July 14th, 2014 | 26 comments
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