Fun as it is to play Galileo, the author, an Oxford academic called Jay Griffiths, is not calling for the Holy Office to resume work against climate “deniers”. Oh no, she’s far too nice and British for that sort of thing. She reveres democracy: One more thing is required of academia: to play its role right at the
...continue A scary Guardian article, somewhat neutralised by a mole among the sub-editors]]> Let us salute the heroic secret agent at the Guardian who subverted this quietly sinister article by giving it a brazenly sinister title and undid most of its power to persuade at a stroke: Don’t give climate change heretics an easy ride.

Fun as it is to play Galileo, the author, an Oxford academic called Jay Griffiths, is not calling for the Holy Office to resume work against climate “deniers”. Oh no, she’s far too nice and British for that sort of thing. She reveres democracy:

One more thing is required of academia: to play its role right at the heart of democracy. Being adequately informed is a democratic duty, just as the vote is a democratic right. A misinformed electorate, voting without knowledge, is not a true democracy. Society needs the expertise of academics in the most important issues: climate science above all.

And

I would propose a system of certification for media articles in which there is a clear issue of social responsibility – a kitemark of quality assurance. It would be awarded by teams of academics, and be given to the article, not the journalist, recognising the facts, not the sometimes spurious credibility of being a “personality”. It would be awarded when the article is accurate, using reliable sources and peer reviewed studies. There already exists the Climate Science Rapid Response Team, which answers journalists’ questions to help them achieve accuracy. A misinformed electorate, voting without knowledge, is not a true democracy.Accuracy must not only be achieved, but be seen to have been achieved.

The certification should be voluntary.

I am relieved that she saw fit to add that it should be voluntary, but even with that, there is a whiff of early Dolores Umbridge here. “A misinformed electorate, voting without knowledge, is not a true democracy.” The modern tendency to make a god of democracy has its own dangers, but it is still the least worst form of government – and a democracy is not denatured by a misinformed electorate, or any other sort of wrong electorate. That’s the point of democracy, actually.

In so far as Jay Griffiths’ proposal is not merely the class interest of an academic talking, I suspect that it is another eddy in the same current of opinion that has led Michael Mann to sue Mark Steyn for libel.

“….–can you think of other things (along the lines of marriage and indentured servitude) where things used to be for sale (expressly or implicitly) and today they are not?”

Some of the comments are hilarious. One guy points out that you cannot pay to watch dwarf tossing any more, at least not legally. I guess not.

Mandelson:

The bigger question is how the domestic media market can be made economic and subject to any form of regulation in an era when, a click away, there is access to information that respects no national boundaries and the laws of no single national parliament or the basic standards of conventional journalism. It is hard to see how some of the best-known
...continue The Prince of Darkness complains about “uncorroborated, undigested and unmediated news”]]> I was tempted to make this, by Peter Mandelson, today’s SQotD, but I might be misunderstood as agreeing with it. As it is, of course, I share the glee that Guido (to whom thanks) feels about it.

Mandelson:

The bigger question is how the domestic media market can be made economic and subject to any form of regulation in an era when, a click away, there is access to information that respects no national boundaries and the laws of no single national parliament or the basic standards of conventional journalism. It is hard to see how some of the best-known sources of quality English-language journalism – the Times, New York Times, the Guardian spring to mind – will ever make money again. We come to grips with the fact that the internet is giving public access to uncorroborated, undigested and unmediated news, all in the name of free speech, is becoming one of the defining issues of the 21st century.

Indeed it is.

And I love the idea of “information that respects no national boundaries”. In the old days information used to be far more respectful.

The world has become a pretty grim place of late. This Mandy moan cheered me up no end.

The idea that all this monetary madness is only temporary, only to help us get out of the crisis, and that the central banks have an ‘exit strategy’ – a term that I have not heard or seen in any discussion of central bank policy since spring of 2011! – is getting less tenable by the day. There is no exit strategy. Not in the US, not in the UK, not in
...continue Detlev Schlichter is back from his holiday …]]> And he returns to find the state of the world slightly worse. Things were, of course, pretty bad to begin with, so that’s like Hell being slightly hotter.

The idea that all this monetary madness is only temporary, only to help us get out of the crisis, and that the central banks have an ‘exit strategy’ – a term that I have not heard or seen in any discussion of central bank policy since spring of 2011! – is getting less tenable by the day. There is no exit strategy. Not in the US, not in the UK, not in the Euro Zone.

Calling Mitt Romney. Don’t worry about losing. Worry about winning.

While such conclusions
...continue The right answers to the right question – Steve Baker MP and the Ron Paul tendency]]> My favourite MP in Britain is Steven Baker, and he has a very interesting take on the Left. His attitude is not: “Wrong answers, you idiots!” It is: “Good question!” The question being, along the lines of: “What the hell is happening?!?!”, and Steve Baker’s answer being variations on the theme of Austrianism. Government-controlled money ruining us. Sort out the money, and take the financial bad news that will come with a return to monetary sanity. Then: progress! Tim Evans has a recent piece up at the Cobden Centre blog in which he adopts exactly this approach:

While such conclusions are wrong, they are at least borne of people starting to try and articulate the right question.

The comments on this are mostly full of scorn (most especially those from Paul Marks). Maybe good question, but bad answers, is their line.

Does it accomplish anything to try to insert Austrianism into mainstream British political debate in this way, on the back of a basically Leftist campaign of anti-capitalist scorn and outrage? My sense is: in Parliament, maybe. When trying to get a hearing on the BBC, definitely. Elsewhere, maybe not. I used to think this was a great tactic. Now, I’m genuinely unsure. Is it really possible to try to hijack someone else’s spiel like this? Well, the answer is: maybe it is possible. Like I say, I am genuinely unsure. Steve Baker and his Cobden centre supporters (I am one) have done lots of media spots, in which they have taken this line. Maybe the Cobden Centre narrative just awaits another bout of British financial turmoil to take centre stage in Britain.

Meanwhile, my eye was caught by a couple of passing remarks about similar arguments in the USA, both of which suggest that a similar tactic in the USA to that adopted by Steve Baker MP, over here, may already be working well, over there.

Exhibit one is from a piece about an economic model of the forthcoming Presidential election, which is almost entirely about the relative fortunes of Dems (very bad) and Repubs (very promising). But right at the end of the report there is this:

Bicker and Berry also did not factor in third party candidates, such as Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson, who Public Policy Polling, a Democratic-affiliated polling firm, has noted could significantly diminish Obama’s chances of winning New Mexico.

Note that. Here’s a libertarian taking votes from Obama. This must be another manifestation of that new and improved two-party system that Instapundit posted about recently.

And then this morning, I was struck by this comment, on this piece, which is about some Democrat supporting interlopers at the Republican convention, one of whom is a Ron Paul supporter. The commenter (comment number 8 by “stmarks” at 9.25pm on Aug 25 – forgive the comment-standard spelling and grammar) says, in among a lot of other stuff about conservatives and liberals, this about Ron Paul supporters:

… And I am convinced 90% of these Ronnies [Ron Paul worshipers] are ex-democrats who are too ashamed to admit so, but still hates GOP with a burning passion.

I freely admit that I may be reading far too much into two tiny snippets of comment. (I am posting this here in order to find out more about that.) But, what these snippets, snippets though they are, tell me is that Austrianist arguments (such as those of the Ron Paul camp most definitely are) are making headway in the USA, and are drawing people away from pro-government and anti-capitalist answers towards anti-government and pro-capitalist answers. Democrats, at least some Democrats, are morphing into Ron Paulites.

A generation of people who regard the Republicans as most emphatically part of the problem are staying anti-Republican, and accordingly pro-Democrat if that’s the only option they are offered. But if someone comes to them, as Ron Paul supporters did during the early stages of the Occupy Movement, saying: “You are right about the problem! The banks are indeed screwed! But let us tell you who screwed them and how to unscrew them. The government screwed the banks, and the way to unscrew the banks is to get the government out of the banking business” … well, that cuts some ice. “We believe this stuff because we believe it. We are only Republicans tactically, insofar as we can push them in our direction. To join us, you do not have to be a Republican.”

Learn more about the Paulist influence on the Republicans by looking at the comments on this recent posting by me here about the Tea Party.

So maybe Steve Baker’s approach is entirely right, and I am just being impatient.

LATER: See also this on the Tea Party, and of course: this on giving libertarianism a ‘left hook’.

LATER (via Guido): In Paul they trust ….

I still have the remnants of a cough. When talking at all volubly, I have to stop from time to time, to cough. Except that during this performance, I did not cough once. As soon as the official part of the conversation stopped, I coughed, and
...continue Doctor Theatre]]> I just did a recorded interview (for the Cobden Centre) with Patrick Crozier, and experienced the mystery that is Doctor Theatre. This is when you are ill, but performing. For the duration of the performance, the illness goes into a state of voluntary liquidation. As soon as the performance ends, back comes the illness.

I still have the remnants of a cough. When talking at all volubly, I have to stop from time to time, to cough. Except that during this performance, I did not cough once. As soon as the official part of the conversation stopped, I coughed, and Patrick said: that’s the first time you coughed during this entire conversation.

I talked about all this happening before it happened, with another friend. I thought that might spook it. But no. It happened exactly as predicted.

As to whether the conversation I had with Patrick, without coughing, was any good and at all worth listening to, that’s another matter entirely.

My first guess was that 3D printers are something like laser printers, which would accordingly soon enter all our homes, but I now think that’s wrong. 3D printing is not an enhancement of domesticity, or not yet. It is already, and has been for quite a few years, a technological development technique, and it is now morphing into a manufacturing
...continue 3D printing won’t be domesticated any time soon (but then again how it might)]]> The internet has a standing order from me to send me any news stories it has about 3D printing, and I am beginning to get a feel for how this story is playing out. (Maybe, what do I know?, etc.)

My first guess was that 3D printers are something like laser printers, which would accordingly soon enter all our homes, but I now think that’s wrong. 3D printing is not an enhancement of domesticity, or not yet. It is already, and has been for quite a few years, a technological development technique, and it is now morphing into a manufacturing technique, which is what most of the news stories are about. Here’s this new thing they are making with 3D printing! Wow!

But it’s “they” who are doing this. Only a minority of people reading or hearing these stories now want to get their hands on this kit themselves. If there is a parallel with personal computing, then 3D printing is still at the stage when mad techno-hippies were buying the first cheap (-ish) computers to play with in their dad’s garages, and learning how to program them, circa 1977(?). The only – although it was one hell of an “only” – killer app there was for those first small computers in those early days was if you wanted to learn how a computer worked.

Consider the following news story, from the Daily Mail. It seems that someone somewhere has worked out how to “print” a new kind of bikini, out of 3D nylon. Many may be excited by this story, such as women seeking nicer bikinis, and men needing a techno-excuse for drooling over the female bodies involved in advertising the bikinis, but while there may be a small stampede to the bikini shop to buy such new garments, this story will surely not cause any stampede to techno-stores to buy bikini-printers.

I wrote everything else in this posting before reading this piece by Ryan Whitwam, but he says pretty much what I say here. The problem with 3D printing, from the domestication point of view, is that it does too much, with too many materials, in too many different ways. If there already existed a 3D printer which could “print” everything of a certain size – and I mean everything (jewellery, small batteries, personalised contact lenses, artificial fingernails, soup nodules, sweeties, fake sugar pills, medicinal drugs (of all kinds), diet enhancement pills (ditto), picture storage cards for phone-cameras (perhaps with the pictures already on them), and so on and so on – then it might make sense to have such a magic machine in one’s home. But, unless I have been severely misunderstanding this technology, we are not anywhere near to all that yet, and if we ever do get there, then each person will probably only use his 3D printer for one or two apps, that he is familiar with and expert in producing, the way I use my computer to do only those things that I think I know how to do, like blog in the way that I blog, buy CDs off of Amazon, etc.. I don’t use my computer to forecast the North Atlantic weather or to calculate Pi to three million decimal places, even though, in a sense, I could. I don’t even use my computer to access the work of others in such realms, other than when I consult weather forecasts for London.

The people who want actively to do 3D printing, now, are the people who already make stuff of a particular sort, and want to make better stuff of that particular sort, or people who want to get a start in stuff-making. 3D printing is not putting manufacturers out of business; it is putting them into new businesses. (It may, in particular, be putting a whole generation of First World manufacturers back into business. Discuss.)

A monochrome laser printer, on the other hand, does just the one thing. It takes the same black gunk every time, and shoves it, in two dimensions, onto paper, not “bog standard” paper but you know what I mean. Regular paper type paper. It doesn’t also print wallpaper, or bedsheets, or pancakes, or handkerchiefs or kaftans. It just shoves messages onto paper. Black on white. We almost all want that, and that’s why we almost all now have that.

Even something as simple as colour printing is now a service offered by lots of shops, for lots of people who only occasionally want it.

Here is a final possible insight. It occurs to me that I do already possess something a lot like a 3D printing machine, namely the big blundering oaf of a gadget that I use to “print” ice cubes:

Okay they aren’t cubes, they’re like big stubby thimbles, but in a crude way this is a lot like 3D printing. I insert a nice simple, cheap raw material: water. I crank up the power, and a few minutes later, alerted by satisfying rattling noises, I get big stubby ice thimbles, in three dimensions. Invaluable during the recent hot-and-sweaty spell that the weather forecasters so correctly saw coming. Invaluable when you are entertaining. And invaluable given that fridges make too little ice that you mostly don’t need and which fill the entire fridge with the wrong kind of ice, but then, when you really need ice, can’t keep pace with demand.

Also, ice is hard to buy and hard to store, especially during hot weather (which is of course when you want it). What you want, when you want ice, is a gadget that cranks it out fast, and then stops when you stop it. You want an ice making machine. In your kitchen.

Ice cubes are not like contact lenses or finger nails. When you want them, you want a lot of them. This is, I surmise, why food printing figures in so many of the 3D printing stories I read. Food is something that regular people might soon want to “print”, in their homes, in large quantities, again and again.

The reason I mention my 3D ice printer is that this is, already, a killer app. It does one vital thing, really (apart from being so ridiculously big) well.

And because it does just one thing really well, it is easy to operate. When I crank it up, I do not have to answer a lot of silly questions about what I want it to do. (Do I want contact lenses? No. Do I want fingernails? No. Do I want contraceptive pills? No. Do I want some ear-rings? No, I want effing ice thimbles, you effing moron machine. What’s that you say? How cold do I want the ice thimbles? I want them cold enough but not too cold! You should know that.)

What I am saying is, maybe, that if “3D printing” does soon enter the home, it will be in the form of “better ice thimble machines” (e.g. making ice something elses of your choice) rather than in the form of all-purpose, generic 3D printers that try to do everything, but do it all (but actually nothing like all) very badly and expensively.

It does occur to me, though, that maybe finger nails are quite like ice cubes, if you are a teenage girl. Presumably there are 3D printers for these already.

I included my toaster in the picture of my ice thimble printer not just to show how big the ice thimble printer is, but because a toaster is also (stretching the definition still further) a specialised 3D printer, sort of, is it not? (Toast with pictures of Jesus on it, anyone?) Does it tell us something that both the (sort of) 3D printers that I already possess involve making things that are either very cold or very hot and which lose their value unless they stay that way? (Yes, because that makes the things they print out a lot harder to buy in a shop.)

I could continue rambling, but will now stop and let others ramble instead.

So I guess we now know which football team we here do not now support.

Well played Everton.

My thanks to David Thompson.