Farage’s support for relaxed gun control is particularly controversial given there is a cross-party consensus that restricting firearms helps reduce gun crime and protects communities.

Emphasis added. Consider yourselves warned.

The Daily Mail informs us that the “Thatcher haircut” is the rage in central London, with one salon claiming to be overwhelmed by demand.

Italian-born Christina Bellucci, 37, a digital consultant, said she felt the look reflected a modern attitude.

‘This is a strong style and gives me authority,’ she said.

‘When I walk out the door I feel a few inches taller, it gives me power without sacrificing any of my femininity.’

I would not have described myself as a libertarian back then even though I more or less was (and indeed I was only vaguely aware of the term, preferring ‘Classical Liberal’ in the
...continue I was a Thatcherite]]> I am a child of the Cold War. Nostalgia for me involves talk of the Fulda Gap, the Three Day Week and rats in London streets due to uncollected garbage, Genesis (the group not the Biblical one), Deep Purple, terrifying flairs and garish wide ties, Nationalisation, Arthur Scargill, Bloody Sunday … followed by Adam Ant, Ultravox and New Romantic shirts, Frankie says RELAX, Privatisation and… Margaret Thatcher.

I would not have described myself as a libertarian back then even though I more or less was (and indeed I was only vaguely aware of the term, preferring ‘Classical Liberal’ in the non-debased non-US sense). And I still do not call myself one really, even though I more or less am. But for more than a decade I did indeed take delight in calling myself a Thatcherite (even though I only ‘kinda’ was), primarily because it was a wonderful shortcut for discovering all I needed to know about whoever I was speaking to at that time, just by watching their reactions.

I fully expected the Cold War to end in either a global Götterdämmerung or at least with ‘us’ and ‘them’ killing each other in the streets of Britain as our utterly worthless political class (plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose) finally imploded and the decades of animosities boiled over. No one was going to change the fundamental direction things were headed and I did not just expect to have Molotovs thrown in my direction, I was expecting to be throwing them myself because I hated ‘them’ as much as they hated ‘us’. And I still do.

And then… Thatcher happened.

She was the leader of the Stupid Party Conservative Party and yet she was saying a great many of the things I was thinking, even if I was not always saying them. Years before LOLcats and the internet, there was a caption above my head that read “WTF?”

The more I listened, the more I could hardly believe my ears. We needed a whole lost less state domestically and rather more state pointed Eastwards, because if you did not like the state we had now, you really would not like the one those guys (and assorted domestic traitors) wanted for us. This was only… sort of, kind of… what happened but there was no disguising that this was very clearly not the future the Evil Party Labour Party had in mind for us… and she was making it actually happen.

All this and all Thatcher did needs to be understood within the context of the Cold War (and winning thereof, against both the Soviets directly and their domestic UK stooges).

Even back then I knew she was not even nearly radical enough but the important thing was she actually talked openly and eloquently about the limits of state power. And she did perhaps the most masterful and subversive single act of any modern politician I can think of: right to buy… turning recipients of state largess into private property owners, permanently removing a valuable asset from state ownership.

Maggie Thatcher pissed off all the right people and I swung her name around like a handbag with a brick in it.

And of course ever since the day she was brought low by her own party, I have been looking for the next Thatcher, someone who can pick up the pieces and tie off the contradictions and replace that succession of worthless dissembling jackanapes from Major (the Grey Man) to Cameron (Heath-lite). Portillo had promise but proved to have feet of clay… David Davies had (and indeed still has) real promise and actually believes in civil society and the notion that Conservatives should be (gasp) conservative. But as a result the Stupid Party hate him and instead of Nigel Lawson, we have a moron like Osborn who five years after what happened in 2008, wants it all to happen again.

There is no new Thatcher on the horizon that I can see, unless by some improbable miracle Nigel Farage manages a 1922 style permanent reordering of the current dire political order of things. But then I could scarcely believe the likes of Margaret Hilda Thatcher could have happened either.

Requiescat in pace.

The non-aggression principle allows the use of violence in defence of property. This is because if I spend an hour of my life mixing my labour with the land to make a widget, and then someone steals my widget, they have stolen an hour of my life. Some might say that if I spend an hour of my life on some intellectual pursuit then it is possible for someone to steal that hour of my life
...continue Forming an opinion about intellectual property]]> I have been on the fence about intellectual property for a long time. The suicide of Aaron Swartz set me thinking about it again.

The non-aggression principle allows the use of violence in defence of property. This is because if I spend an hour of my life mixing my labour with the land to make a widget, and then someone steals my widget, they have stolen an hour of my life. Some might say that if I spend an hour of my life on some intellectual pursuit then it is possible for someone to steal that hour of my life by stealing my ideas. Violence is then justified in response. But is that really what is going on?

Imagine I spend time writing a novel, print it on paper, then hand over the printed paper to Bob in exchange for money. Bob copies my novel out onto another piece of paper and sells it to Charlie. Clearly no theft has occurred; the state of my possessions is unchanged. If I devote a significant portion of my life to writing a novel because I hope to make a profit, and Bob makes so many copies that I am unable to, still no theft has occurred. I still have the original copy of the novel I wrote. What I have done is mix my labour with paper and ink to make some paper with a novel written on it. That it takes intellectual effort to make a novel that people want to read rather than paper scrawled with gibberish does not make Bob’s actions into theft.

Perhaps I can come to some agreement with Bob. I sell him my novel if he agrees not to make copies of it or let anyone else see it. If he does, I can attempt to punish him in some way appropriate to breaches of contract. When Bob shows my novel to Charlie and Charlie makes a copy of it, I can punish Bob. But I have made no agreement with Charlie, who can make copies with impunity.

If it is difficult to make copies of novels and only a few people can do it, I might be able to make a business selling paper copies because no-one who is able to will want to break agreements with me. But once someone invents a device that allows anyone to easily make copies, my profits will be affected. But still no theft has occurred. I can not resort to violence.

If I am clever I might invent some way to encrypt my novel and make sure it can only be viewed on devices registered to specific individuals all of whom have made agreements with me. But if David, who has made no agreement with me, examines the device, finds a flaw in it, and starts to make copies of my novel, still no theft has occurred. David is using his ingenuity to modify objects he already possesses.

Aaron Swartz copied scientific papers onto his computer. He did this by getting his computer to ask JSTOR’s computer to transmit them, and JSTOR’s computer did so. For this he faced 35 years in jail.

That is just one paragraph from a guide to filling in a form related to my pension. I do not want this stuff filling up the hard disk in my head. I want to free up space for
...continue Knowledge I do not want]]>

Protected Rights is the money accumulated from ‘contracting out’. It is also known as
‘contracting out of SERPS’, a ‘rebate pension’ or an ‘Appropriate Personal Pension (APP)’,
and may contain an element of National Insurance contribution by means of a rebate into
your APP. Until 2012 Protected Rights benefits will have to be kept separate from non
Protected Rights within your fund.

That is just one paragraph from a guide to filling in a form related to my pension. I do not want this stuff filling up the hard disk in my head. I want to free up space for important things like the plot of the Lord of the Rings fan fiction I am reading or the details of Climategate or even some mathematics or the rules to Magic: The Gathering.

But no, the great game of Nomic that officialdom plays goes on, and the boring stuff requires ever more attention.

The sculpture is called “Rush Hour”. It said so, on a sign in the ground in front of it. I also photographed the sign. This is a good habit for a photographer to get into. Cameras are not just for taking pictures. They are also for taking notes.

What struck me about this sculpture, as I looked at it and photoed it, was how depressed they all look, especially when compared with London’s
...continue Two different photographs of the same London sculpture]]> Here is a photograph of a sculpture, which I recently chanced upon, in the part of the city that is London known as the City of London:

The sculpture is called “Rush Hour”. It said so, on a sign in the ground in front of it. I also photographed the sign. This is a good habit for a photographer to get into. Cameras are not just for taking pictures. They are also for taking notes.

What struck me about this sculpture, as I looked at it and photoed it, was how depressed they all look, especially when compared with London’s sculpted warriors. The warriors depicted on war memorials had any number of agonies to contend with, yet they stick out their chests, jut out their chins, look the world proudly and defiantly in the eye and tough out whatever challenges and horrors they are obliged to endure. These office drudges, on the other hand, have given up. Their eyes point downwards, avoiding any contact with the world or with me and my eyes. They trudge forwards, following the person immediately in front. They do not look like people fighting a war, successfully. They look more like prisoners of war, in a war that their side is losing.

But, when I got home I checked out the website mentioned in the sign in the ground under the sculpture, the sign that I had photographed, and when I did, I got quite a shock. I was confronted by this:

These city commuters are facing the cares and stresses of their lives with a degree of stoical optimism, even heroism, that their cousins in my photograph conspicuously lacked. Urban drudgery may defeat lesser beings from foreign lands, but Britain can do it! We shall prevail! Final victory over financial services industrial monotony will be ours!

I actually had to study the above two photographs quite carefully before being entirely convinced that they are both of the same thing. Are there, I wondered, several versions of this sculpture, in different places? I slowly worked it out. These are the same statues, in each photograph. But the photo at the website was taken by someone crouching down, very low, and perhaps even lying on the ground (which means, for instance, that at least one of the figures at the back is entirely blocked from view). The figures are not on a pedestal, as both photographs make entirely clear. But this other photographer makes them look as if they are.

Particularly significant, as I say, is the matter of eye contact. In my photograph, the commuters dare not look at me. Instead they look downwards. This is why they look so defeated, so ashamed even. But in the website photo, they are looking straight at the camera, and although not happy exactly, they seem proud of what they are doing, and confident that they can face any challenges life presents them with.

The lighting is different, and that does make a difference. But mostly, the difference is in the angle of vision.

The point of this posting is not that the angle you see things from makes a difference. Most of us know this. My point is that, when it comes to the particular matter of human statues, it can make a very big difference, far bigger than I, at least, had realised, until I spent those minutes checking these two photos to be sure that they were of the same thing.

What, I wonder, might be the effect of photographing war memorial statues, statues that are on a pedestal, from a position of vertical equality, or even slight superiority? Suppose, while photographing the figures at the centre of the recently unveiled memorial to Bomber Command, that I had somehow raised myself up to their level, or even somewhat above that level. Might my photographs have looked different in their psychological atmosphere? Would the figures suddenly have seemed less heroic, less like the masters of their fate and more like the victims of it that many of them must surely have felt?

If so, it would appear that pedestals are an even more significant part of our civilisation than I had realised.

Now that Natalie, to whom deep thanks, has done the I-told-you-so posting that I feared I might have to do for myself, by linking to the piece I wrote last week in the privacy of my personal blog entitled Reasons to think Romney is going to win big, I thought I would follow up her posting and mine, by saying why I want Romney to win big.

First, I really want Obama to lose, big. A few years back, someone made up a quote about how America could survive another four years of Obama.
...continue Three reasons (and one reason in particular) why I want Romney to win big]]> And none of them is Romney.

Now that Natalie, to whom deep thanks, has done the I-told-you-so posting that I feared I might have to do for myself, by linking to the piece I wrote last week in the privacy of my personal blog entitled Reasons to think Romney is going to win big, I thought I would follow up her posting and mine, by saying why I want Romney to win big.

First, I really want Obama to lose, big. A few years back, someone made up a quote about how America could survive another four years of Obama. It would be plenty tough enough, provided Obama himself was the only problem. But could America survive a longer term future in which it contains, decade after decade, all the people who re-elected Obama? That’s pretty much how I feel about Obama winning, this time around. An Obama victory would do quite a bit of harm. But worse, far worse, would be what it meant.

Second, if Obama loses, something bigger and more powerful and more important will lose with him, namely the USA’s Mainstream Media. The crowing of these people if Obama were to win would be unbearable. Their humiliation will be exquisite, when Romney, as I now believe he will, wins big.

But third, and by far my most important reason for wanting Romney to win big, is that an Obama win of any sort would be a horrible set-back for the Tea Party, given that the Tea Party has now thrown its considerable weight behind Romney. A big Romney win, on the other hand, will greatly strengthen the Tea Party, and I think that would be very, very good.

The more I learn about the Tea Party and their sayings and doing, the more I am proud of that posting I did here, well over a year ago now, which said that they are Good people with good ideas (a notion confirmed by the commenters responding to this later Tea Party posting I did). It seems that a great many Americans now agree with me. In my opinion this is, politically, just about the best thing that is now happening in the world.

Early last week, in a favourite London haunt of mine, the second hand classical CD shop Gramex, its socialist owner (we are good pals despite our differences – and so we should be given how many classical CDs I’ve bought from him over the last three decades) announced that clearly nobody in their right mind would consider voting for Romney. I’d vote for Romney in a blink, I responded, instantly. And then I had one of those moments when you find out what you think by hearing what you say. I continued orating, still without skipping any beats. “I would vote for Romney because the Tea Party supports him. They say that the US government does too much, spends too much and borrows too much, and I entirely agree. I’d vote with them.” And I’m retro-editing that for fluency hardly at all. Those were pretty much my exact words. I continued, describing the Tea Party as a coalition between Goddists and Libertarians, with both sides setting divisive opinions aside (God and “social libertarianism”) and concentrating on their overlap, see above, and I’m totally for it. Yes, I actually said all this, out loud, in a London shop, with strangers present, some presumably (like most in the classical music tribe) of a deeply anti-Romney-ite persuasion. That’s how much I meant it!

I considered cutting the above paragraph, and finding a home for it at my personal blog. But I do not think it irrelevant to what I am saying here. There is more to what you think than merely being right about it. There is also the matter of how strongly you feel about it, and how comfortable you feel inflicting it upon strangers. Something tells me that many Americans have recently also turned this particular corner.

Anyway, back to what I think as opposed to how I think it.

Suppose that the Tea Party, in the course of its big confabulation amongst itself just after Romney had been nominated, had followed the Perry de Havilland line and decided that they were going to urge people not to vote for Romney, and instead to vote for, e.g., Gary Johnson, on the grounds that he would, unlike Romney, really cut US government spending. Or for some Goddist candidate of equal fiscal and financial clarity and rectitude, who likewise wasn’t going to win, but who likewise might cause Romney to lose or at least to give him a serious fright. Or suppose they had decided to urge everyone to vote for nobody at all. Suppose they had decided, in the words of de-Havillandist commenter “August” (on this) that …

It wouldn’t seem too much of a stretch to me to think Wall Street is running the whole show now. Obama got in because he’s a compliant tool, but now he’s up against one of the finance world’s own. They’ll lock down the private profit, public risk/losses model and keep making us pay for their mistakes until there isn’t anything left.

Suppose that, instead of electing Romney the Even More Compliant Tool, the Tea Party had decided to do everything they could to shaft him, and get Obama to win. And then, having demonstrated their power to break any candidate they did not like, they tried to arrange a candidate whom they did truly like, in 2016.

Well, I can’t vote for anyone in this, but I can blog my preferences, and maybe help to shift a few dozen American voters in my preferred direction. So, suppose the Tea Party had said: Don’t Vote Romney.

I would probably now be saying that also.

Not because I have a huge loathing of Romney, any more than I now have a huge liking for him. What I do have is a huge liking for the Tea Party. I want the Tea Party to win this election, big. I agree with what they decide. I want the Tea Party to emerge from this election as a Huge Fact about American politics, which any politician ignores at his peril.

For what it’s worth, I think the Tea Party made entirely the right decision to go all out for Romney, for reasons which I may or may not expand upon, some other time. But that’s not my point here.

“There’s a formula to them: a pro forma acknowledgment of a lack of democracy and freedom followed by exercises in moral equivalence, various contorted attempts to contextualize authoritarianism or atrocities, and scorching attacks on the U.S. foreign policy that precipitated these defensive and desperate actions. Throughout, there is the consistent refrain that economic backwardness should be viewed as cultural authenticity, not to mention an admirable
...continue On today’s travel guides]]> As it is holiday season, this item – via Instapundit - got my attention. It is about why some kinds of travel guides tend to be mealy-mouthed about some of the countries they write about:

“There’s a formula to them: a pro forma acknowledgment of a lack of democracy and freedom followed by exercises in moral equivalence, various contorted attempts to contextualize authoritarianism or atrocities, and scorching attacks on the U.S. foreign policy that precipitated these defensive and desperate actions. Throughout, there is the consistent refrain that economic backwardness should be viewed as cultural authenticity, not to mention an admirable rejection of globalization and American hegemony. The hotel recommendations might be useful, but the guidebooks are clotted with historical revisionism, factual errors, and a toxic combination of Orientalism and pathological self-loathing.”

There is a related point, also. When I occasionally read of how a region or place is “unspoilt”, it often is just an aesthetic comment that area X or Y has not been buggered up by ugly buildings. Fair enough. Even the most ardent defender of laissez-faire does not have to like all the consequences of some buildings. But there is a danger that this can sometimes tip over into a dislike of building and human activity per se. To take one example: I love certain big cities precisely because they are “spoilt” by the energy and sometimes crazy creativity of the people who live in them and build them.

By far the most exciting developments in consumer electronics right now are in mobile devices, in particular smartphones. System-on-chip manufacturers such as Qualcomm and Nvidia are cutting prices and transistor sizes while increasing performance such that a new generation of devices with significantly improved
...continue Asus Padfone]]> This is a long and detailed review of a gadget which might be more at home on a specialist tech blog than on Samizdata, but it serves also as a snapshot of the world of mobile electronics, a world that is perhaps less encumbered by regulation than is usual, which might explain the rate of improvement.

By far the most exciting developments in consumer electronics right now are in mobile devices, in particular smartphones. System-on-chip manufacturers such as Qualcomm and Nvidia are cutting prices and transistor sizes while increasing performance such that a new generation of devices with significantly improved capabilities comes along about every 18 months or so. A lot of learning is going on about what kinds of devices work best. The original iPhone had a 4-inch touch screen and only one button. Since then physical keyboards have somewhat gone out of fashion, tablets have appeared in various sizes, netbooks have disappeared, ultrabooks have appeared, and phones have got bigger, in contrast to a few years ago when everyone was trying to make them smaller. The point is that no-one really knows which kinds of devices fit in best with people’s lives and which do not. With formerly successful companies dying out, capitalism is mercilessly finding out.

No company is having more fun finding out than Asus. They pioneered the netbook — a small, cheap laptop — with their Eee PC. They combined the tablet with the netbook with their Transformer series of devices by making the screen detachable from the keyboard. And just recently they have taken this idea to a new extreme by sticking a smartphone inside the tablet. The Asus Padfone is a smartphone. It has a 4.3 inch touch screen, which may just turn out to be the screen size that most people prefer. It has one of the latest generation of systems-on-chip, the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4. This chip has two ARM CPUs, a graphics processor, and circuitry for all the various radio standards that smartphones must support integrated onto a single piece of silicone. The Padfone runs the latest widely available version of the Android operating system. You can do everything with it that one can do with smartphones: browsing the web, navigating with maps, taking, editing and uploading photographs to the Internet, finding out the train times, checking in to eating and drinking establishments, reading comics, taking notes, typing up blog posts and even making phone calls.

If some of these things seem frivolous or pointless, that is at least in part because people are still in the process of figuring out what is useful and interesting to do with a powerful computer that fits in your pocket and is permanently connected to the Internet. Some of the things people try are solutions looking for a problem, some of them are passing fads, some appeal to niche markets, and some turn out to have unexpected uses. For example, I always check-in to Foursquare when I go to a pub, and it turns out that browsing my own history of check-ins is very useful when someone asks me to recommend a venue because I can look up the exact name and address of a place rather than vaguely remembering a nice pub I went to once. In any case, a lot of people find playing with this stuff and figuring all this out extremely fun, and that is reason enough to do it.

Smartphones are now powerful enough to browse any web site, no matter how complicated. This includes things like online grocery shopping, filling in complicated forms to book plane tickets and composing blog posts for Samizdata. But the smartphone then starts to become a bit fiddly because of its small size. One starts to yearn for a big screen and a proper keyboard. It turns out that the phone is the ideal device for carrying everywhere and looking up specific information, the tablet is the ideal device for browsing, and the laptop or netbook is the ideal device for typing in text.

So one is resigned to owning multiple gadgets that best support each purpose. But there are overlaps between the various types of task, compromises in terms of which device is most convenient to use at a given time and place, and overheads associated with maintaining several devices, keeping their batteries charged up, updating their software and making sure the files you want to work with are accessible to the right device at the right time. Furthermore, if one is browsing a web page on a smartphone and decides that a bigger screen would be nice, one has to get out one’s tablet and navigate to the page all over again.

The Asus Padfone, with its accessories, aims to solve all this. The concept is simple: a single computer the size of a phone, that can be expanded into a tablet or a netbook by connecting these things to it, an action referred to as docking. The Padfone is supplied with the Padfone Station. It looks like a tablet, but contains little more than a screen and a battery. A hatch on the back opens to admit the Padfone. USB, HDMI and antenna connectors engage, enabling the computer in the phone to talk to the components of the tablet. The phone becomes a tablet. A second accessory, the Padfone Station Dock, is a keyboard that clips onto the tablet, turning the whole thing into a netbook.

The design has been received variously by critics as anything from the future of computing, to a stupid idea. I have been spending the last few weeks finding out where between these extremes the Padfone lies.

The bottom line is that it works very well. I am using the Padfone in netbook form to type this blog post into the note-taking app Evernote. When it is finished I will copy all the text and paste it into Samizdata’s web interface to publish the post. Recently I had a Twitter conversation with the Padfone in phone form, took a screen shot, cropped, resized it and emailed it to Perry with the Padfone in tablet form, and turned it into a blog post with the Padfone in netbook form.

Battery life is good because there are batteries in the phone, the screen and the keyboard. Last night I connected the single charger to the three parts assembled together and charged everything up to 100%, nice and easy. Now it is 8pm on Sunday and I have been using the phone all day for instant messaging, reading Twitter and browsing Facebook. There was a 90 minute video Skype call on the tablet involving my son and his grandmother, and now I am working on this post and I have 74% battery in the phone, 65% in the screen and 87% in the keyboard. When everything is connected charge is transferred intelligently between the batteries to maximise battery life when things are disconnected again. The end result is that I charge everything each night as is usual with a smartphone and do not worry about the batteries all day.

Performance is good. The CPU and graphics circuitry in the phone are powerful enough to drive the larger display. Everything beautifully responsive. The latest Android operating system is nice to use, too. I now feel able to recommend Android to non-techy friends and relatives, whereas before I might have said that an iPhone would be easier.

There are some compromises. While the Padfone in phone form is a current, top-of-the-range phone even better than the acclaimed HTC One S (it has the same screen and chipset with the addition of a micro-SD card slot), its tablet form is heavier and does not have as fancy a screen as the latest tablets, and its netbook form is heavier than most netbooks and not as powerful as the latest ultra books. However I find the advantages of only having to deal with a single computer far outweigh these.

When using the Chrome browser, for example, I can switch from phone to tablet configuration and all my web pages are preserved in their tabs. If I am lucky, even a partially filled in web form will be preserved across conversion between phone and tablet, though this is less reliable because sometimes the web page gets reloaded. We start to see here how the Padfone hardware is ahead of the software. Application programmers are used to their programs running on either a tablet or a phone. Many apps detect this at startup, optimise their user interfaces accordingly, and do not work properly after switching to a differently sized screen. The Padfone has options to deal with this; by default it will close apps when switching screens. This is not as bad as it sounds because in Android apps expect to be closed without warning anyway and usually save their state gracefully. I have managed to find apps in every category I am interested in that work well on the Padfone. I wrote up my findings in an article on a Padfone fan site.

The other advantages of the single computer with multiple form factors are associated with only having to manage and maintain a single device. I only have to install apps once, set up preferences once, log in to web pages once, install updates once. And I only get notifications about new emails or instant messages once. I have the phone’s 3G connection no matter what I am doing so I only pay for one data plan and do not have to fiddle about with tethering.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is how well Android works when it has a full keyboard and track pad. A mouse pointer appears and the experience is very close to using a real laptop. There are home and end keys, and here in Evernote I can use shift and cursor keys to select text and Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V to copy and paste, though this varies from app to app. A dual core ARM CPU running Android appears much more powerful and responsive than an Atom-based netbook running Windows or even Linux ever did. This means we can expect these low-power-consumption mobile devices to gradually replace laptops. Even software-wise things look quite good. There is an SD card slot and I have an app that will edit photos at full resolution, so I can use the Padfone to work on photos from my SLR. Google Docs suits my office application needs, and there are plenty of Android apps for working with Microsoft Office documents. I even have a selection of terminal emulators for working with Linux servers and various programming text editors including one that lets me compile and run Java code right on the Padfone.

My main fear now is that in a couple of years’ time when I inevitably find a two-year-old device not quite up to scratch, there will not be a replacement that works as well as this. If the device does not sell well, there may not be a Padfone 2. But who am I kidding? In two years’ time the world of mobile electronics will likely be unrecognisable. Perhaps Google Glass points the way to a future like that described in Rainbows End or Accelerando.

It is an exciting time for mobile electronics.

The Padfone is still not widely available outside of Taiwan and some European countries, but national boundaries are not so important any more. I imported the keyboard accessory from Taiwan and the rest of it from Italy via eBay.

Despite what you may have read somewhere on the Internet, any income earned from Google Adsense is taxable income. It makes no difference whether you earn £5 or £10,000 – this money must be declared to the Inland Revenue as income derived from self employment. Moreover, you must declare yourself
...continue Wading through the treacle of bureaucracy without a paddle]]> Today I had an idea for a website that might be worth monetising. Nothing I could give up my day job for, but something that might bring in a few tens of pounds pocket money from Google Adsense. It would be fun; it might help fund my gadget habit. But:

Despite what you may have read somewhere on the Internet, any income earned from Google Adsense is taxable income. It makes no difference whether you earn £5 or £10,000 – this money must be declared to the Inland Revenue as income derived from self employment. Moreover, you must declare yourself as self employed as soon as you start work (this could be when you begin that new website or insert Google Adsense into a personal blog).

Says Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs:

If you’re self-employed on a temporary or part-time basis you must register for business taxes with HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) as soon as you start work. You’ll have to complete a Self Assessment tax return and are responsible for paying your own tax and National Insurance contributions on the income you earn.

Even if you don’t think you’ll earn enough to need to pay tax, you still need to complete a tax return.

Right now I pay my tax on Pay As You Earn, meaning my employer employs a department of people to do all the form filling. I like it that way. I have a very strong aversion to filling in official forms. When forced to do so my heart rate increases, I start to sweat, I hyperventilate, my writing hand cramps up, I have a stong urge to shout and throw things and people around me get nervous. This is partly indignation at being made to do something I do not want to do, partly the unease of spending time doing something that is not pleasant and not what I am skilled at (if I was good at organising paperwork and form filling I would have made different career choices), and partly irrational. And I can never find the damned supporting documents no matter how organised I have tried to be. I could elaborate yet further but thinking about it now is starting to induce symptoms so I must end this paragraph soon. The point is: the rewards would have to be very high to overcome this aversion, or I would have to make enough to pay someone else to do it for me.

A quick google suggests I am not the only one. Even for normal people, the cost, time and effort to fill in a tax return must be high enough to rule out all but the most serious of business ventures.

What is the cost to society of all the little side projects, hobbies and micro-businesses that do not get started because it is not worth the bureaucratic hassle?

Update: I found some tax examples graciously provided by HRMC. I particularly enjoyed the phrase “air of commerciality”. No grey areas here, then.