Samizdata

Samizdata quote of the day

Perry de Havilland (London) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 18:03:28 +0000

If big government were the key to economic success, France, with more than half of its GDP accounted for by government, would have rapid economic growth rather than an unemployment rate of 11 percent and negative growth. Yet France, Britain and the United States are demanding that the low-tax jurisdictions increase their taxes on businesses. They also demand more tax information sharing among countries. The officials of the G-8 assure us — as if they think we are all children or fools — that sensitive company and individual tax information will be kept confidential and not be used for political targeting, extortion, etc. The U.S. Internal Revenue Service had a reputation for being less corrupt and less incompetent than tax agencies in many other countries, which only illustrates how low the global standard is.

- Richard Rahn, the Tyranny of the Taxers

Brief thoughts on journalism

Johnathan Pearce (London) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 10:39:51 +0000

“Journalists have to get more creative and entrepreneurial. And I think that’s the problem. There’s not a less risk-taking crowd than a bunch of journalists who like to tell everyone how to run their businesses and then, like, couldn’t run a business to save their life.”

- Kara Swisher

She was quoted on this Linkedin page here – so readers might have to log in first if they are members.

In fact, quite a lot of the journalists I know and have worked with in the smaller, more startup-style organisations are pretty entrepreneurial. They have to be. Even the process of cultivating new sources, raising awareness of who you are and what you cover, represents a sort of adventurous frame of mind that gels with business to some extent. Of course, there are journalists who despise business, want to just bank a paycheck, do a 9-5 fixed day and no more. And they tend to have a romantic view of “old Fleet Street” and its foreign equivalents, dreaming of the great days of 4-hour lunch breaks, expense accounts and all the rest of it. But in some respects that mindset is not as prevalent as it used to be, at least not based on my own personal experience.

Of course, such journalist/entrepreneurs are also, by and large, more resistant, one hopes, to the desire of the State to regulate the media in the manner suggested by the recent Leveson Report in the UK, which seems, I hope, to have lost some of its momentum (I live in hope).

At Bloomberg, it appears that some of the staff there have been a tad too entrepreneurial, if allegations are to be believed.

Fundraiser for a public space telescope

Dale Amon (Belfast, Northern Ireland/Laramie, Wy) — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 03:44:56 +0000

Planetary Resources is raising some of the money for a small space telescope via a Kickstarter and are close to their minimum goal of $1M. That such sums of money can be raised for worthy projects and in such short timescales strikes me as interesting in another way: might we be in the early days of a new way to deal with ‘the commons’? Could technology be delivering us a way to replace much of coercive government funding with true voluntarism?

And by the way, support these guys. I know several of them, and it is a way to push New Space forward in the public perception.

What I learned from Rob Fisher’s talk about open source software

Brian Micklethwait (London) — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:39:03 +0000

Rob Fisher’s posting here a while back entitled Open source software v. the NSA reminded me that on April 26th, in my home, Rob Fisher gave a talk about open source software. I flagged this talk up beforehand in this posting, but have written nothing about it since. I don’t want to get in the way of whatever else Rob himself might want to write here on this subject, but I do want to record my appreciation of this talk before the fact of it fades from my faltering memory and I am left only with the dwindling remnants of what I learned from it.

My understanding of open source software, until Rob Fisher started putting me right, was largely the result of my own direct experience of open source software, in the form of the Linux operating system that ran on a small and cheap laptop computer I purchased a few years back. This programme worked, but not well enough. Missing was that final ounce of polish, the final five yards, that last bit of user friendliness. In particular I recall being enraged by my new laptop’s inability properly to handle the memory cards used by my camera. Since that was about half the entire point of the laptop, that was very enraging. I wrote about this problem at my personal blog, in a posting entitled Has the Linux moment passed?, because from where was sitting, then, it had. I returned with a sigh of relief to using Microsoft Windows, on my next small and cheap laptop.

I then wrongly generalised from my own little Windows-to-Linux-and-then-back-to-Windows experience, by assuming that the world as a whole had been having a similar experience to the one I had just had. Everyone else had, like me, a few short years ago, been giving Linux or whatever, a try, to save money, but had quickly discovered that this was a false economy and had returned to the fold, if not of Microsoft itself, then at least of software that worked properly, on account of someone having been paid to make it work properly.

The truth of the matter was clarified by Rob Fisher, and by the rest of the computer-savvier-than-I room, at that last-Friday-of-April meeting. Yes, there was a time a few years back when it seemed that closed source software looked like it might be making a comeback, but that moment was the moment that quickly passed. The reality was and remains that the open source way of doing things has just grown and grown. All that I had experienced was the fact that there has always been a need for computer professionals to connect computer-fools like me with all that open source computational power, in a fool-proof way. But each little ship of dedicated programming in each gadget floats on an ever expanding and deepening ocean of open source computing knowledge and computing power.

It wasn’t Linux that was bad, nor even the particular version of it that I tried to use, and still less the general principle of open source software. It was simply that the makers of my laptop just didn’t bother to do, or perhaps didn’t manage to do despite their best efforts, that last little bit of work that would have seen me entirely happy with it. And far from there having been a passing open source moment, it would be truer to say that there was a passing closed source moment.

It wasn’t gone into on the night, but I’m guessing this was because of the sudden and explosive growth of personal computing during the 1980s. This phenomenon had been predicted, because I remember reading in the mid-1970s about how personal computers were about to catch on big. But the suddenness and scale of the personal computer phenomenon, when it eventually erupted, was a surprise. Just for a while, there was a greater demand for cheap software than there was open source software, and open source software expertise, available to meet it cheaply, so instead that demand was met rather expensively. The desktop publishing programme that I then got stuck into, which cost me many hundreds of pounds, which I used both to make a living and to make libertarian waves, was a typical example of that moment in computing history. For a while, they charged large gobs of money for personal computer programmes because they could, both for programmes you bought in the shops and for much of the software built into personal computers. And then, in a blink of history’s eye, they couldn’t charge great gobs of money any more. Programmes of far greater complexity than anything you could buy in the 1980s and 1990s now change hands for pennies, or, just as likely, for nothing. Microsoft was a creature – the creature – of this closed source moment. It once seemed about to rule the world. But its work is now done and its glory days are over.

The underlying reality, meanwhile, is that computer software was and is a fundamentally open source phenomenon, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Simply, open source software is the knowledge of how to make computers work. Computer professionals, such as Rob Fisher, master various large chunks of this knowledge, and earn their livings providing that last few yards of usability that my little Linux laptop so crucially lacked, for laptops, and for all the other gadgets that now get made which involve computer software, in other words for just about every gadget that now gets made. For as long as there is new hardware and new things for that hardware to do – and it is hard to see that stopping any time soon – there will be a need for the Rob Fishers of this world to do their little bits of paid work to make whatever new gadgetry is coming on stream work properly, in the hands of people like me.

That was the main thing I learned from Rob Fisher’s talk, but this was not the only thing he said, and actually some of the things I “learned” that night were things that were not said. (He merely got me thinking such things.) But plenty of other important open source things were said, in particular the matter of how open source offers some hope of protection against Big Government and Big Business snooping. But since Rob has already explained all that (see the first link in this, above) in far greater detail than I ever could, I will leave it at just saying that this was mentioned.

It was also mentioned, during the Q&A period, that the state of affairs as described above for computer software resembles the state of affairs for science, as described by Terence Kealey. There too, most of the knowledge is freely shared by scientists, just as the earliest computer software was also shared, and also in an academic context. And industry hires scientists to apply that vast ocean of knowledge to the making of new stuff. Just as it suits everyone for software to be mostly open source, the same applies to scientific knowledge. As Kealey points out, this is true no matter who pays for the advancement of science, government, industry or rich amateurs, which means that, contrary to prevailing opinion, government funding for science is superfluous. (Damaging, actually, but that’s another argument.)

To summarise, then: I found Rob Fisher’s talk very interesting and informative, and (just as important) provocative of further thought that he did not himself expound. This is a belated thank you to him for giving the talk.

An unspeakably inhumane regime

Michael Jennings (London) — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 12:44:05 +0000

Young, ambitious, Chinese officials are being required to read Tom Friedman if they want to get ahead.

I knew the Chinese government was cruel, but until now I had no idea just how cruel.

Samizdata quote of the day

Brian Micklethwait (London) — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 23:16:15 +0000

Once we take measures to not be threatening to the government, it should finally stop harassing us. And then maybe we can learn to live together in peace, simply paying the government whatever tribute it demands and abiding by whatever rules it decides to impose. And while we may witness the government committing some atrocities in the form of spending excesses and insane regulations, we will have to resist the urge to once again try to invade it and fix things. Because any future political attacks on the government will only give it reasons to come after us. So we’ll have to ignore the minor slights so we don’t anger it into lashing out in more extreme ways. Any attempts to reduce the government’s power will only make it worse — unless, you know, we completely obliterate it, reducing the government so much that it barely has any power over its citizens whatsoever.

Oh, actually, now that I think about it, I kind of like that obliteration option better than appeasement. Forget what I just wrote; instead let’s get a sledge hammer and smash apart this government until all those bureaucrats who think they can bully us are completely powerless to do anything but whine at deaf ears. Rubble don’t make trouble.

- Frank J. Fleming

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists… investigating people on behalf of governments worldwide

Perry de Havilland (London) — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 17:28:45 +0000

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists are an interesting outfit, a group crowd sourcing denouncing people to various states across the globe.

Just as we see the edifying example of Edward Snowden revealing routine US surveillance of hundreds of millions of people, we have as a counterpoint the ICIJ, who are folks that clearly think there is not nearly enough surveillance being carried out by nation states… and so they want to see if like minded folks can help nations worldwide ensure there is nowhere anyone can keep their money free from appropriation by the world’s tax men.

The ICIJ no doubt warms the cockles of Tory leader Dave Cameron’s heart as much as the likes of Edward Snowden scare the crap out him.

Yet I suspect many people who have not really thought this through very well might assume people like NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden on one hand, and the ICIJ on the other, are actually doing much the same thing.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The unimaginable happens on Greek television – to Greek television

Brian Micklethwait (London) — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 12:36:51 +0000

Last night I, and millions of others, saw a little bit of television history. Television history is not when they do a particularly fine historical drama. It is when the drama happens to television itself. Yesterday it did, to Greek television anyway, when Greece’s equivalent of the BBC was shut down, in mid show, live, on television. The BBC showed it, last night. Then they showed one of the sackees saying, in English, to the BBC, that the public sector of Europe was indeed rather too “bloated”.

Someone described in the headline above this piece as the “Europe TV chief” has said that Greek TV should be switched back on immediately:

The head of Europe’s public broadcasters has arrived in Greece to show support for 2,600 fired state TV and radio staff and demand that the country’s conservative government put the stations back on the air.

I had not realised that there was a “head of Europe’s public broadcasters”. Blog and learn.

Jean-Paul Philippot, president of the Switzerland-based European Broadcasting Union, said he would meet with Greece’s Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras to hand him a petition signed by 51 European broadcast executives calling for the broadcaster’s signal to be restored immediately.

A “petition”, “calling for” business as usual to be restored forthwith. Yes, that’ll do it. Clearly, these people fear that they and their underlings could be next, as they could if the Euro-crisis gets worse, as it will.

What I particularly like about this drama is that it changes what is imaginable. Public opinion does not tend to waste its time desiring what is unimaginable. But when what is unimaginable becomes imaginable by actually happening, that can also change what is then desired.

Names can be complicated

Michael Jennings (London) — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 19:32:20 +0000

There is, in this world, something called the Budweiser trademark dispute. The giant American brewery Anheuser-Busch produces a beer named Budweiser, an industrial mass produced lager that is not greatly revered by beer connoisseurs but which sells in large quantities, and a brewery called Budweiser Budvar Brewery in the Czech city of České Budějovice (Budweis in German) produces another beer called Budweiser, which is considered an excellent beer by most beer lovers. The two breweries have been fighting in courts throughout the world with respect who has the right to the name Budweiser ever since the end of Communism in Czechoslovakia. In some countries the Americans have won and the Czechs have had to find a different name, and in others the Czechs have won and the Americans have had to find a different name. In Britain the courts have made the eminently sensible ruling that both brewers can use the name and drinkers are smart enough to be able to tell the difference, but I don’t believe this has happened anywhere else.

Beer lovers are often sympathetic to the claims of Budvar, because the beer is better and because it actually come from Budweis, and this is therefore the “Original Budweiser”.

This is not really true, however. Anheuser-Busch started brewing the American Budweiser in 1876, due to the fact that the beers of Budweis were famous, including amongst German Americans. However, the Budvar brewery did not exist at that point. This brewery was not founded until 1895. At some point after that, they also started using the name Budweiser, possibly because the name had been given further fame by Anheuser-Busch. At least to some extent, the Czechs at Budvar may have started using the name because of the use of it by Anheuser-Busch, and not the other way round. Budvar was founded by ethnic Czechs, and the only reason they would have had for using a German name was that the German name had already been made famous by other brewers.

However, what of those earlier beers from Budweis, responsible for Anheuser-Busch starting to use the name? Well, there is another, much older, brewery in Budweis / Budějovický Budvar. This brewery, known as Budweiser Bürgerbräu until 1945, made beer in Budweis under the Budweiser name at least as early as 1802. It is almost certainly this company’s beers that Anheuser-Busch was copying when they started using the name “Budweiser”. This brewery was run by ethnic Germans from its founding until 1945, after which it was taken over by ethnic Czechs and de-germanised. The brewery is now called Budějovický měšťanský pivovar, which is a precise Czech translation of its original name. When de-germanisation took place, the brewery ceased using German words and names, including “Budweiser” (it regained some interest in using them post-1989). However, this brewery has by far the strongest claim that it produces the beer that is the original Budweiser.

That said, the trademark battles between the other two, larger companies have been so ferocious that Budějovický měšťanský pivovar has stayed clear of them, despite apparently having a stronger claim to the name than either of them. The brewery is quite a substantial one, and produces a significant quantity of (excellent) beer. It sells the beer under a variety of names including Crystal, Samson, B.B. Bürgerbräu, Boheme 1795, and more. It only uses the word “Budweiser” in places where trademark law is weak.

This is why I took the above photo, in Tbilisi in Georgia last month. It was certainly not the first time I had consumed beer from the brewery that actually gave us Budweiser, but it was the first time I had ever seen beers from that brewery actually using the word. It is not the most prominent word on the label, perhaps, but it is still prominently there.

Who watches the watchers? It really ain’t that simple…

Perry de Havilland (London) — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 15:39:40 +0000

There is an article in The Guardian by Paddy Ashdown that falls at the first fence… i.e the tagline at the very top…

NSA surveillance: who watches the watchers? It’s not the widening of state intrusion that’s wrong, but the weakening of the safeguards that should be there to protect us

No that is the key error. It is not the lack of safeguard that is the issue, it is the huge amount of power in the hands of the state. It is indeed the widening of state intrusion that is wrong because there are simply no ‘safeguards’ that can stop the abuse of that amount of power by whoever currently controls the political process.

As has been said before, this is not a “left vs. right” issue, it is a “top vs. bottom” issue. NO ONE and NO INSTITUTION can be trusted with that kind of power. Ashdown is one of the people at the top, there is simply no way for him to understand.

Samizdata quote of the day

Brian Micklethwait (London) — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 22:43:15 +0000

Who knew that China was being funded by the Koch brothers?

- WUWT? commenter Alphaeus responds to the news that the Heartland Institute’s anti-climate-alarmist publication Climate Change Reconsidered has been published, in Chinese, by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The most grotesque article I have read in quite some time

Perry de Havilland (London) — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 13:49:10 +0000

David Brooks has written an article for the New York Times called The Solitary Leaker that contains so many grotesque notions I will just point out one and leave the rest for you, gentle reader, to wade through yourself…

If you live a life unshaped by the mediating institutions of civil society, perhaps it makes sense to see the world a certain way: Life is not embedded in a series of gently gradated authoritative structures: family, neighborhood, religious group, state, nation and world. Instead, it’s just the solitary naked individual and the gigantic and menacing state.

State… nation… are not ‘mediating institutions of civil society’, they are mediating political institutions and the observation these are materially different things is hardly a new one. They are violence backed imposers of laws, the means of collective coercion… and the process for deciding who gets the guns pointed at them is what we call ‘politics’, which is quite quite different to how elective things like ‘family’, ‘neighbourhood’, ‘religious group’ (unless it happens to be Islam) and ‘world’ work as these are collections of people you can invite to mind their own damn business and turn your back on them, with all the good and bad things that might come of that… or embrace them wholeheartedly, as you see fit and as they deserve, generally without the cops kicking down your door one way or the other.

But of course to a statist like David Brooks, the realm of the voluntary, the elective give and take of the civil, the marketplace of not just things but customs and affinity, the realm of personal moral judgement, is subordinate to The Tribe, The Collective, The Institutional. Duty is not to moral truth or decency or charity, it is to The Hierarchy of your Betters and knowing your place in it. David Brooks’ world view is that which rejects the moral courage to say “No, to hell with your orders, this is wrong”. His is the view that does not care if something is ‘moral’, just so long as it is ‘lawful’.