We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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It has been a memorable weekend for yours truly, nearly all for very nice reasons. Over the past few days, the weather in much of the UK – after a truly crap summer – has been glorious. There are few things to beat than walking along in a leafy park, with the autumn season turning the leaves into golds and reds, then sitting on the side of a river, cold beer in hand, in the company of close friends. I did all that in Cambridge over the weekend. The credit crunch and the worries of the financial world seemed, if only for a few hours, very far away. But then when walking with a friend around the Quad of Pembroke College, I felt as if I could have been in another century.
But perhaps I should have been prepared for a surreal weekend when I opened my mail on Saturday morning. First off, I got a letter from those admirable folk at the NO2ID campaign urging me to help contribute some money. I have already paid over a cheque and was happy to send another (please follow my example). And then I opened another, very different letter, from the UK Department Of Health. The DoH has something called a “Biobank”. This is a government-run research project designed to track the health of a cohort of the UK population aged between 40 and 69. As I and my wife are both in our early 40s, we are obviously in the cohort. I was informed that a “provisional appointment” had already been made on my behalf and that I nevertheless had the option to refuse. I have refused. While checking the health of certain people and attempting to judge their vulnerability to certain diseases or conditions can be a worthwhile thing for say, a private insurer to do, I had no desire to go along with a government programme. The reason is not simply that it would involve acquiring yet more intimate health details on myself, but recent embarrassing losses of government data give me no confidence that such details will not be lost. Also, one has to ask to what purpose will the “Biobank’s” findings be put? Presumably, to help drive government policy to cajole, encourage or indeed coerce UK citizens to change their personal habits. I consider that taking part in such a campaign would involve my giving my sanction to such things.
Well, at least I had the option to refuse to take part in this project, which is something. But one wonders how long such indulgence might last. Sooner or later, the DoH might consider it necessary to make involvement in such surveys compulsory.
Just when you start believing Russia has returned to its old ways, something like this happens. A religious group attempted to get the license of a TV station pulled because it felt a South Park cartoon was hateful to Christians and Muslims. In return Russians rallied behind South Park, demonstrated, collected signatures on petitions… and… won????
The people’s voice, apparently, was heard. On September 25, Russia’s Federal Competitive Bidding Commission on Broadcasting voted unanimously to recommend that 2×2’s license be renewed. The final decision is up to another federal agency, but it is expected to follow the recommendation. 2×2, in turn, will comply with the commission’s request to expand its programming to include TV movies and non-animated series, as stated in its official description; the channel’s general director Roman Sarkisov has promised that the new fare will be “faithful to the style of 2×2.” Meanwhile, South Park stays on the air except for the “offending” episode, which has been shelved pending further investigation of “extremism.”
I think this shows the danger of oversimplifying your view of a large nation with a complex political history. Russia is what it is and does not fit neatly into any of the categories we have heretofore used to describe it. Russia is no longer a simple ‘evil empire’. Today it is simultaneously many things, some of which are opposites. It is a place where organized crime has great power; where ex-KGB officers long for the old days; where very smart and well educated people create new ideas and companies; where old imperialist ideas and suspicion of foreign influence exist and the Orthodox church has regained much power over society. It is such a hodge-podge of pulls and counter-pulls that virtually anything I can say about it will be wrong.
This of course makes it a fascinating place to watch.
Don’t be gloomy because innovation loves a crisis. Jonathan Schwartz of Sun emailed his company pointing out that now was the time to go on the offensive. The necessities enforced by the credit crunch will be the mother of invention. To save money, companies will be forced to automate, innovate and think about how they sell in order to make that profit. Less capital means fewer customers means greater competition.
You’re not going to hear from any of our customers, “let’s stop buying technology and hire more people to do the work.” They’re going to default to the opposite – automating work, and finding answers and opportunities with technology, not headcount. And in that process lies an opportunity for Sun – to engage with customers in driving down cost, driving up utilization, and driving the changes that yield immediate and long term benefit. The right question for every customer you meet is – “how can I help?” I assure you, they’ll have ideas for us. And we have no shortage of ideas for them. Personally, I’m reaching out to customers and partners just to check in and offer help – I’d recommend you do the same.
At the end of the day, the public debates may not really matter. They are there for politicians and economists to weave a myth of control and pretend that they steer our lives, using our money to justify their drivel.
It is the private debates amongst companies, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs that really matter. With less money to go around, there is a strong incentive to accelerate change and adopt business models that profit from the information revolution rather than kick against it. As an example, the mainstream media may enter its death rattle as consumers shift towards online business, because it is cheaper, better and quicker.
The downside is that a general downturn may cause research programmes which do not have an immediate or predictable return to falter, as sources of capital dry up. Therefore, the immediate consequences of this crisis could be an acceleration of information technology permeating everyday lives but a longer curve for the development of nanotechnology, stem cell research, robotics and other technologies.
The people at ISRO, the Indian Space Research Organization, have scheduled their first lunar probe for October 22nd.
You can read the Times of India and The Hindu for more information.
I sometimes wonder if we will see a second ‘Race To The Moon’, this time betwixt India and China for pretty much the same reasons as the first. If so, I hope to be sitting in the lounge watching the news with a Guinness in hand after flying Virgin Galactic to the Bigelow Luna.
Speaking of tourism… Richard Garriot flies to the space station today. There is no bar there, but hopefully the Russians keep a little stash of vodka for ‘medicinal purposes’.
Richard’s aunch occurred successfully at 3am EDT. Docking will happen Tuesday and there will be live coverage on NASA Select starting at 0530 EDT.
I am a sovereign wealth fund. This is a position that I never expected to be in. I and every other British taxpayer.
I have been told that this was necessary or indescribable consequences entailing the destruction of my life and welfare would have followed. This hypothesis was not tested, due to the supposed costs, and, therefore, I became a sovereign wealth fund.
This sovereign wealth fund is not like other sovereign wealth funds, in that the Chairman is one Gordon Brown and the money that he uses to purchase whatever assets he likes is mine. This does not give me confidence, and I suspect the wealth in the fund will decline in value. This is what Gordon Brown does.
There will be a shareholders meeting in 2010. I think we need to vote for a return of all assets to the shareholders. Voting for these managers certainly has not worked and the alternative consultancy offers more of the same.
Last night I attended a Libertarian Alliance talk/discussion evening at the Evans household, the talk being given by Antoine Clarke. Here is what Antoine said in an email about his talk beforehand. I learned several interesting things which smarter people than me doubtless already realised but which were new to me. The most interesting thing I learned, assuming Antoine was right about it, was that after the first mega-billion dollar bale-out package failed to be agreed by the politicians of the USA, the market immediately went up. But then, as soon as a revised bale-out package, containing more bribes, was agreed, the market went down. “We should do nothing” is a tough political sell, but the smart move, said Antoine. And McCain should have gone with what, according to Antoine, were apparently his instincts and torpedoed the whole damn bale-out operation, and thereby clung onto a chance of being the next President of the USA.
My take on this is that there is a crowding out effect going on here, big time. I trust we are all familiar with this idea. It says that big government plans of any kind not only do harm because the government plans fail and all the wealth it wastes on them is wasted, but, and arguably even worse, because people with better plans in the same line of business are frightened into inactivity. In this spirit, I recall the disgraced former Tory MP Neil Hamilton once saying at a meeting I attended long ago that the money that an earlier Labour government had spent on buying up and ruining the British motor industry would have done a great deal less harm if it had just been put into several thousand suitcases and chucked into the sea (I daresay this would have been good for inflation also). That way, saner motor car entrepreneurs could have gone to work making cars and car stuff in better ways than then prevailed, unimpeded by the fear of great walls of government “investment” screwing up their plans, bidding up the prices of all the people and all the things they wanted to hire and buy and put to good use.
Well, now, exactly the same thing seems to be happening in the banking industry. Were I one of the immensely rich and immensely sensible banking people who had (a) seen this crash coming and cashed out at roughly the right time, and who now (b) has plans to gobble up failed banks and reorganise them along more sensible lines, I would now, despite all my hopes of profitable new business, be sitting on my hands, waiting for all the government plans to do their immense damage before I went wading in and god chewed up too. Only when these government plans had become an obvious failure, and the politicians had just totally given up, would I be ready to move in and sort things out. Only when the politicians lapse into inactivity, which for a brief shining moment looked as if it might happen straight away, does economic optimism, among the people willing to back their optimism with money, reassert itself.
But, as I like to say from time to time when blogging, what do I know? I am no expert on the banking business, and as I say, I only realised this thing about the ups and downs of the world’s stock exchanges when Antoine Clarke pointed it out to me last night. So, did Antoine get this story right? And have I explained this phenomenon, even part of it, even approximately right? Tomorrow afternoon, Antoine, I, and fellow Samizdatista Michael Jennings will be getting together to record a conversation about all this, so comments now would be especially welcome.
Iain Dale quotes an astonishing piece of dialogue from a Daily Mail interview by Alison Pearson of Gordon Brown. First Dale recycles interminable chunks of sob stuff about Brown’s children and Brown’s eyesight. Pass. But then comes this:
When we finally manage to snatch some time in the study on the first floor, I ask if he has any regrets about his boast: ‘No more boom and bust.’
‘I actually said, ‘No more Tory boom and bust,’ he replies.
He did indeed actually say this, once, at a conference. So, not an actual lie. But, as Iain Dale points out, he said it without the “Tory” on many, many other occasions. The implication is that Labour boom and bust is fine. This is the kind of drivel that this man is now reduced to spouting.
Brown then explains that this particular Labour bust is not really a bust at all:
‘Fifteen per cent interest rates under the Tories! We’ve got interest rates of five per cent, that’s a bit different, isn’t it?’
Yes, and he’s managed to bring the price of oil down too. With his superhuman powers of self-delusion, and his apparently unshakable determination to continue wrecking my country, this man reminds me more and more of Robert Mugabe.
Brown himself is already a failure, doomed to electoral defeat. That is now a given. What interests me is what effect all this insanity, institutional and personal, will have on the Labour Party, whose recent feeble attempts to replace Brown seem now to have fizzled out. Sadly, there seem to be enough faithfully moronic Labour voters to keep a rump of Labour diehards in the House of Commons in quite substantial numbers. But then what? They promised an end to boom and bust. They boomed, after a fashion. They are now busting, and how. And they stuck with the lunatic who said and did all this to the bitter end. What sane person would vote for these incompetent and spineless nutters ever again? Labour could well go the way of the early twentieth century Liberals.
However, I suspect that David Cameron will actually be quite happy, after he wins the next election, to face opposition benches which are clogged up with Labour living dead, rather than populated by people with plausible things to say and serious complaints to voice like lots of new and young and optimistic Conservatives or Lib Dems. Blair coasted along for a decade on the public’s loathing of the Conservatives. Cameron now looks content to do the same, on the back of a near-universal loathing of Labour. I may be misjudging Cameron and I hope I am. But I fear that I am not.
Richard Garriot, son of Skylab astronaut Owen Garriot, will leave Kazakhstan for the International Space Station on Sunday, October 12. He is also going to be a bit creative with his sojourn:
Inspired by his artist mother, Richard will be hosting an art show in space. The show will incorporate art created by his mother, by sculptors, art submitted by artists through a competition and also art that Richard will create during his time in space. After Richard’s mission, the art will be put up for auction to benefit the Challenger Center.
You can find out more here.
I just want to remind any of our readers in Massachusetts to help keep up the pressure for the initiative to end the income tax. The time until eleection day is running out. Money and publicity are the things our folk need so get out there and do your damndest to assist them. The opposition are raising large amounts of money from the people with their snouts deepest into the swill and are doing their best to convince Massachusetts voters to keep feeding them money.
If you are unfamiliar with this ballot initiaitive, or even if you know all about it, you should find this episode of the Glenn and Helen Show is of interest.
Instapundit has been doing yeoman service in covering it and I hope the bar conversations I had with Glenn on this subject back in May had a little bit to do with it!
We could all use a bit of cheering up in these worrying times. Surfing the Net, I re-read some of the funniest content in the blogsphere, thanks to Harry Hutton. This post still makes me laugh out loud. It has not dated at all.
Economic historian Robert Higgs makes some interesting observations at the Liberty & Power group blog. I often disagree with some of its foreign policy views – it verges on outright pacifism – but its economics I like.
At least someone is enjoying themselves. The taxpayer has always paid his bills, except in his childhood, when God did. And now he gets to use unlimited power to seize whatever he likes and congratulate himself that he is punishing bad people for taking risks in the hope of making money for themselves.
pic hat-tip: Guido
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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