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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For the last couple of weeks I’ve been trying to treat my setback at work as a chance to contemplate things like The Transient And Illusory Nature Of Material Things and Attachment As The Root Of Suffering – the bits of yoga that actually matter. And today I did a fairly intensive backbending practice – perhaps not the best possible idea in the circumstances. Backbending has a tendency to be emotional-turmoil-inducing at the best of times, let alone at the end of a weekend spent brooding on the Cruelty Of Fate. Even today, though, the peace that comes from just watching the breath going in, watching the breath going out, was there eventually. Even if it was only for the last four or five breaths of a two hour practice, that’s enough.
– Alan Little just breathes
This evening The Ashes start to burn again. I have Australia as heavy favourites.
We all had them as heavy favourites last time around, last summer, after game one when McGrath ruined England in the space of hardly more than a few minutes. And if McGrath had not trodden on a ball just before game two, we would have all been right. Having been the Aussie match winner in game one, he was never the same bowler for the rest of the series.
Since then, on the bowling front, England have lost the excellent and under-rated Simon Jones, and for Australia McGrath is now fit again. Gillespie, the weak spot in the Aussie bowling in 2005, has been replaced. For England, is Saj Mahmoud good enough, or will the Australians rip him apart as he has already been ripped apart in one-day cricket? They are just the ones to do it. Ditto Monty Panesar.
On the batting front, England have lost Vaughan and now Trescothick. Meanwhile Australia, who batted poorly in England, look likely to bat batter. Katich is now gone, and Hussey will surely strengthen them. Hayden, Langer and Gilchrist did badly in England and will surely improve, and if they do not, Jacques is ready in the wings.
Australia have surely lost any thought that to win they only have to show up, and all in all, I think, as I thought before the 2005 series only more so, that England have a chance, but only a chance, and this time around only an outside chance. When you consider that, despite doing better than Australia for long periods in 2005, England only just managed to squeak to their two wins (England were one dodgy caught behind from being 2-0 down), having been heavily defeated in game one (by McGrath – see above), it will not take much to change the 2005 result.
England might still win, or draw and keep the Ashes, if Harmison and Pietersen both play out of their skins, and if Flintoff is his usual excellent self despite also being the captain, and if Panesar does well, and Bell, and Strauss, and blah blah blah if if if, and if Australia again underperform (perhaps through more bowling injuries), all of which might still happen. But there are far two many ifs for my liking. But I hope I am wrong and I live in hope.
I found it via engadget and The Raw Feed, but I might have found it in the Guardian. The Raw Feed reported it this way:
In the belief that the world’s most surveilled society isn’t surveilled enough, eight London cops are getting HEAD-MOUNTED VIDEO CAMERAS to record their run-ins with drunks, soccer hooligans and unrestrained American tourists. The battery-operated cams will record police interactions, and may be used in court.
I do not see this as a problem. But what if the day ever comes when only government employees may use such gadgets? If present trends continue that may become the rule, especially when you consider that in a few short years time, we will be talking about devices that are pretty much invisible.
Next step, having to have a license.
Yes indeed:
Miss Israel has been given permission not to carry her assault rifle during service in the Israeli army because she says it bruises her legs.
This has everything that a Samizdata quote of the day should have. It is about a beauty queen. It is not just something said by or about some dreary politician. Plus, guns are involved.
But: Is this decision evidence that Israel is going soft, or does it display a fine understand of the balance that must always be struck between the needs of national defence and the need not to damage that which is being defended?
Road pricing has just got a big push in the Queen’s Speech. Quoth Her Maj:
A draft bill will be published to tackle road congestion and to improve public transport.
More detail here:
The government will press ahead with plans to introduce trial road-pricing schemes across England, in an effort to cut congestion.
The draft Road Transport Bill gives councils more freedom to bring in their own schemes in busy areas and will look at the scope for a national road toll.
It also gives councils a bigger say in improving local bus services.
I am in favour of all this. At present, transport in the entire Western World is a mess worthy of the old USSR, the extra dimension of insanity being that the queues for the products park themselves on top of the products.
To me, this is the most interesting bit:
If the trials are successful, a national scheme could be investigated – with drivers possibly paying £1.34 a mile to drive on the busiest roads at rush hour. Black boxes in cars could work out how far they travel on toll roads.
Once you have “black boxes” in cars, the way is open to start arguing that the black boxes need not provide the Total Surveillance State with a constant stream of surveillance material, but only with information about whether the fees have been paid or not, for that particular black box. Obviously that will not be how the scheme starts by being implemented. The black box will reveal everything about you, your fingerprints, your grandmother, etc.. But nevertheless, these black boxes just might be the thin end of a wedge that separates road pricing arguments from civil liberties arguments, sane pricing of road use (good) from the Total Surveillance State (bad).
I now have an Oyster card for use on the London Underground which I bought, without telling them even my own name. This is just a debitable ticket. Black boxes in vehicles could be like that. Like I say, they won’t be. But they could. Black boxes could merely be the automation of the process of chucking a coin out of your car window into a big bucket and proceeding on your way.
Black boxes will surely also make it possible to have much more precise pricing, of how much road you use, and when. At present, in London, all you are allowed to do is buy the equivalent of a one-day all zones travel card, or not. Those are your only choices, even if all you want to do is pop into the edge of the C-zone for a quick lunch, and then pop out again.
Could it be that those people who have been stealing number plates to pass their London Congestion Charges on to the poor suckers they stole them from are the ones we have to thank for this? Could that be what blew the whole photo-everyone’s-number-plates paradigm for road pricing out of the water? If so, well done them.
Or am I being just too crazily optimistic? But please note: I am not saying that any such separation, between pricing and surveillance, ever will occur, merely that it will become a little bit easier to argue for.
Today is Remembrance Sunday, and outside Westminster Abbey there is a Field of Remembrance. The field’s crop consists of young men, each commemorated by a wooden cross. I took photographs there last Thursday.
The most effective pictures for evoking what it all looked like were those which hinted at the sheer number of wooden crosses, which in their numbers of course only hinted in their turn at the number of young men killed in war in recent decades.
Who, I wonder, is that particular young man, who was, like me, taking photos? Probably, also like me, just going for an effective shot, rather than remembering anyone in particular. He is (as I later did in the exact same spot) photographing the backs of the crosses nearest to him. The nameless dead.
Other photographers focused tightly in on one particular name and one particular cross.
The oddest photograph I took that day was of a car number plate, on what looked like an official, government, chauffeur-driven Rolls.
At any other time, and with no poppies on the front, that would be a good laugh. But with poppies everywhere, it seemed very peculiar.
Here, alas, is another relevant BBC story.
I was on 18 Doughty Street intertelly last night, and I really enjoyed myself, not least because Iain Dale, presiding, also seemed satisfied with the efforts of me and my fellow late night chatterers. I was also on 18 Doughty Street on only its second night in action, and it was a mild relief to get asked back. That is the only compliment that really matters after you’ve been on something.
Many intriguing things got alluded to, but the basic message I want to put across here, now, is that, basically, 18 Doughty Street is doing very well. When I was first on, there was a palpable air of panic, with people saying things like “I can only do one thing at a time” through clenched teeth and with that terrifying evenness that people do just before they explode. This time, things were working more smoothly. Which is just what you would expect. → Continue reading: 18 Doughty Street TV is doing very well
I do not know (I seldom do) whether this is original or not, but it sounds like a very significant achievement, which these people have at least copied and marketed quite well, or, better yet, may actually have semi-invented.
Gizmodo reports:
An amazing innovation in the software world today: ALIPR (Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures) is a program that takes a look at digital images, applies some fancy math and then spits out a list of appropriate tags for the picture. It isn’t perfect, but the designers claim it has a 98 percent accuracy rate. They’ve been letting it dig through Flickr and the software has matched at least one user-defined tag almost every time.
As a constant searcher for photos, I have often found myself exclaiming “I wish you could search pictures!” By that I do not mean merely search the titles and wording that people have attached to pictures. I mean search the actual pictures themselves. It would appear that this process is now well and truly under way.
But, does this stuff have a dark side? How soon before you can take a photo of someone, and say to the internet: Show me all the other photos you can find of this person. You could learn a lot, including quite a few things he might not want you to know. Imagine that kind of thing combined with searching through pictures like these, which I like to take of London tourists.
I have been browsing through John Battelle’s book The Search (no problem finding books on the internet) in recent days, and he has interesting stuff on the privacy-invading potential of this kind of thing. (And oh look, Battelle’s Searchblog reports on something very similar to the ALIPR thing, by the sound of it.)
Oh dear. The original idea of this posting was to be writing about something good, to counter the relentless temptation of those who want the world to get better but cannot help noticing all the ways in which it is getting worse. Never mind. Gizmodo has lots of other stuff like this. (Now you can do your work on one screen, and have crazy pictures on the other.)
As does this blog, which I also recommend. Sample quote:
Women aren’t even trying to pretend they don’t like having sex with robots any more.
More bad news. But the good news is that if you want more pictures along those lines, they just got easier to find.
Take my advice, never trust a politician. When a politician tells you they are going to look after your child’s education, it’s perhaps time to go private – or even to home educate. When a politician tells you they are going to ban guns – expect vast increases in gun crime. When a politician tells you they are going to ban dangerous drugs – watch out for your community being awash with these substances. My heart sinks when politicians get involved in anything. Invariably, they promise the earth, coercively tax you out of your hard earned money, and then they deliver bugger all when you really need the service.
– Helen Evans in the Nurses for Reform blog today (I thought it might liven up)
Today I received, from the Globalisation Institute, a press release, which began as follows:
Monday 6 November – A new report released today by the Globalisation Institute says that microfinance is not being taken seriously by the Department for International Development.
In October, it was announced that the Nobel Peace Prize would go to the founding father of microfinance, Dr Muhammad Yunus, who created the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. However, microfinance remains tiny in Africa and receives scant support or encouragement from DFID.
Okay, cards on the table. I am a big fan of the Globalisation Institute and of its bosses Alex Singleton and Tom Clougherty. I write quite frequently for the Globalisation Institute blog, my latest posting there, about mobile phones (which makes much of a comment at my blog by Michael Jennings on the subject), having gone up there only last Friday. Tonight, I am attending a Globalisation Institute do, to which I have been invited so that I can take photos. David Cameron will be present, and they want to be sure that his presence there is immortalised pictorially, so that they can blog about it and impress their many donors with their political plugged-in-ness. Very sensible.
But… and you could hear that word coming a mile off couldn’t you?… I have severe doubts about these latest pronouncements of theirs. → Continue reading: Memo to DFID – please do not take microfinance seriously
It is, I suspect, no accident that it is in Europe that climate change absolutism has found the most fertile soil. For it is Europe that has become the most secular society in the world, where the traditional religions have the weakest popular hold. Yet people still feel the need for the comfort and higher values that religion can provide; and it is the quasi-religion of Green alarmism and what has been termed global salvationism – of which the climate change issue is the most striking example, but by no means the only one – which has filled the vacuum, with reasoned questioning of its mantras regarded as a form of blasphemy.
– Nigel Lawson, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, quoted today by Guido Fawkes
Surprise, surprise:
London’s 2012 Olympic dream suffered a huge setback last night amid fears that the entire project will fall prey to soaring costs and interfering politicians.
You mean there are people who only worked that out last night. Olympic costs soar. Politicians interfere. These are fundamental natural forces. Everybody knows that. It is merely that lots of people do not care, because they will not – or think that they will not – be paying.
Jack Lemley, the American engineer drafted in to oversee the gigantic building project, quit suddenly two weeks ago saying that he wanted to spend more time on his construction business.
Makes a refreshing change from spending more time with his family. No doubt his construction company still loves him very much.
But last night, Mr Lemley, 71, the boss of an international engineering and consulting company, revealed that politics had driven him out and warned of soaring costs for the Olympic project.
In a body blow to hopes of a successful games, Mr Lemley told Idaho Statesman newspaper: “I went there to build things, not to sit and talk about it, so I felt it best to leave the post and come home.”
Very wise.
He said the London construction projects seemed likely to come in late and cost more than expected due to politics, and he feared that would ruin his reputation of delivering projects on time and on budget.
Which makes you wonder how much it will cost to replace the guy. And what kind of a jerk he will be.
The remarks have enraged Olympic organisers who privately say that Mr Lemley had left partly because of ill health and had agreed not to comment more about the project.
Privately as in don’t-say-I-said-it-but-do-say-it. Mr Lemley owes these people nothing, and certainly not his silence.
If only …
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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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