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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We Brians must stick together, so here is a plug for this campaign by Brian Whiley (linked to by b3ta.com) to replace either Greg Dyke or That Bloke From The City as BBC DG or BBC Chairman, whichever.
What was Gilligan’s crime? That, early in the morning – at a time when nobody except insomniacs and farmers would be listening – a bleary-eyed journalist embellished a report that, in all honesty, probably needed it. My first duty would be to defend to the last BBC journalists from a Government that feels the need to hound reporters whose only error has been to make a boring story a little more interesting by inventing conversations that never took place.
I particularly like the promotional products peddled on this website, which downplay the “Whiley” aspect of the situation in a way that will surely meet with widespread approval here.
In addition to loving skyscrapers I also have a thing about bridges, and I periodically feature a picture of a bridge at my Culture Blog. Sometimes the pictures are taken by me, of one or other of the many bridges of London. Sometimes they are acquired from the infinity of information that is the Internet.
Some while ago I featured the Coronado Bridge, which is next to San Diego. In that connection someone else drew my attention to another splendid bridge in Macao. Commenting on that posting, Phil Cohen has this to say about the Coronado Bridge:
The original design for the Coronado Bridge was a much shorter, and almost straight span to the Island (actually, peninsula). Then in order to qualify for federal funding, (whereby our government pays most of the tab), the City of San Diego curved and lengthened the bridge to meet the minimum length standard that would qualify the Coronado Bridge for Federal funding.
How about that for an unintended consequence of taxpayer funding. They help you if yours is a long bridge, so San Diego builds a long bridge instead of a short bridge!
If you want to see even more clearly what Phil Cohen is talking about, just take a look at this map!
It is very rare that government spending has such conspicuously visible results. Normally, when governments waste money – which is what they mostly do with money, after all – the waste all happens tucked away in offices and in the form of a few thousand quietly invisible salaries for suburbanites. For every Concorde or Space Shuttle or daft piece of architecture there are a hundred bits of wastage that are no more exciting to look at than evaporating water. But this Coronado Bridge story really makes the point.
Personally I prefer the highly visible kind of government wastage. First, it is often, as with this bridge, and as with Concorde, very pretty to look at. Second, it very prettily dramatises how wasteful government spending can be, and I like that even more.
I rather think this may be the first posting about animal rights and their potential violation here on White Rose. (For some dumb reason I can’t make that link work, so go via the link below, where for some equally dumb reason the exact same link does seem to work.)
Anyway, this just in, via Dave Barry:
AKRON, Ohio – More stray cats could find their way home under a proposed plan to implant microchips that would electronically identify the cats’ owners.
Democrat Renee Greene introduced legislation Monday to implant microchips beneath the fur of 1,000 cats, giving the animals a permanent identification tag. A runaway cat’s owner would be identified by scanning the chip, which would be about the size of a grain of rice, then checking the scan against a voluntary registry maintained by the city.
Buying and installing the microchips would cost the city nearly $10,000. The City Council still must approve the legislation.
The legislation is an amendment to a cat law passed about 18 months ago that added cats to the city’s laws governing dogs and gave the city’s animal wardens the right to capture free-roaming cats, which can be killed if they aren’t claimed. The Summit County Animal Shelter, where stray cats are taken, already has the scanners that would be used on the microchips.
First they came for the cats …
Do you also get the feeling that humans will be next?
Two decades ago I used to love arguing about the rights and wrongs of capitalism, socialism, social democracy, collectivism, communism, etc. Now, I don’t have the adrenalin for it. Now I prefer to offer observations, big or small, and let others fight about them while I cook up my next observations. Thank God (by which I of course mean Perry de Havilland and his editorial confreres – thank goodness might be a better way of putting it) for Samizdata.net, because here I can do just that.
But if you want a good old libertarians-versus-collectivists row to join in on, this Chris Bertram post together with all the comments it has provoked could be just your ticket.
Chris Bertram says this about the Morecambe tragedy in which nineteen Chinese cockle pickers perished:
But one thing that needs saying is that such tragedies are a normal and predictable consequence of capitalism and not simply the result of coercion and abuse by a few criminals.
Bertram’s piece is a classic example of what one might term Implied Collectivism. Capitalism, says Bertram, regularly causes violent deaths. The clear implication is that therefore “capitalism” needs in some way to be severely hobbled, if not done away with altogether, and that if that happened, poverty would likewise be diminished or even done away with too. But he doesn’t dare come out flat with the claim that capitalism ought to be cut back, still less got rid of, on poverty relief grounds, because that would be too daft. He doesn’t even think this, because he does have more than a trace of intellectual efficacy and moral sanity in that befuddled head of his. Nevertheless he allows the implication to float in the air, because he wants it to be true, or seems to. Not admirable. He ends his piece thus:
But we mustn’t forget that the root cause of many such tragedies is that poor people need to risk themselves in order that they and those they love may live. Unless they cease to be poor, and cease to face such unpalatable choices, such events will happen again and again.
There is as much truth in that bit of writing as in any where the words “root” and “cause” are to be found next to each other and in that order, but so what? Why blame “capitalism” for that? This is like blaming oxygen for forest fires.
And if poor people are to cease to be poor, what they need is more capitalism, different bits of capitalism to choose between, not less of it. If those wretched cockle pickers had had more and consequently better choices, they might not have chosen the risk of drowning for the sake of £1 a day. And … oh, but I’ve said all this, argued all that. → Continue reading: An argument about the root cause of poverty
This, a report from the London Evening Standard, is going to make David Carr very happy:
London’s rivals for the 2012 Olympics have already started exploiting a row between British and Irish officials over Northern Ireland which could seriously damage the bid, Standard Sport can reveal today.
The row has become so inflamed that Ireland’s International Olympic Committee member Patrick Hickey, one of the leading figures in European sport, has said the British Olympic Association, who organise this summer’s team for Athens, could look like “clowns”.
The Olympic Council of Ireland, who say they have traditionally had jurisdiction over the area, is angry that the BOA have suddenly decided to add the words “Northern Ireland” to their team contracts for the Athens Olympics.
But what is so clownish about that? This story explains the situation rather better:
Hickey said, “they would have to withdraw those letters in the team agreement where they have added Northern Ireland. Otherwise they will look completely foolish when we turn up in Athens with seven to 10 members of our team from Northern Ireland and nobody from Northern Ireland on the British team. They would look like clowns”.
Yes, that would be clownish all right. But there is more involved than that. The Irish suspect that the British use of the words “Northern Ireland” in those team contracts could be a sign of action to come, at some time in the future. Back to the Standard:
The BOA strongly deny they have attempted to change anything and played down the dispute. The Irish see the move as a threat to the future of all-Ireland sports teams. …
Odd, those “all-Ireland” sports teams. The only game I know about in this connection is Rugby Union. (Irish people do not concern themselves with cricket very much.) And yes, next Saturday, the opening match of the Six Nations Rugby Union championship will be France v. Ireland, at the Stade de France in Paris. Ireland as in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, with two different Irish national anthems if I am not mistaken. No doubt this arrangement was arrived at during an era when sport and politics inhabited different universes, and the politicians regarded what the sportsmen did as entirely the business of the sportsmen. Also, in former times, whatever arrangements the British made with their neighbours were no-one else’s business. Now, sport is big business and big politics, and Britain is just one beast in the global sporting pack. Now, the mere wording of a team contract can take on a huge international significance:
Hickey revealed today that several bidding cities, keen to take advantage of London’s problems, had already contacted him since this newspaper broke the story about the dispute last week.
My guess is it was one of David’s lawyer friends (all lawyers know all other lawyers – this is a well known fact) who wrote those contracts, in a deliberately provocative manner, and then rang up all the competing cities to tell them about this row. After all, if enough people say there is a row, there is!
So David’s No Olympics for London campaign is getting nicely into gear, and I congratulate him on progress so far.
Paul of Manchester United Ruined My Life has this to say about ID cards, and the claim that they might prevent horrors like the recent mass drowning of those unfortunate Chinese:
The recent tragic death of 19 Chinese cockle pickers demonstrates why ‘Mad Dog’ Blunket’s ID card scheme will fail to address his issues.
If you are willing to live in terrible conditions as reported here by icWales (40 to a house, no bedding, etc) and work for £1/day, do you seriously think that you could care less about a voluntary ID card?
It simply shows that if you are willing to break numerous laws, that the police can’t enforce anyway, then further legislation introducing ID cards, is a futile measure when it comes to stopping criminal activity. In fact the only people ID cards will significantly affect are the law abiding citizens of the UK who will not doubt adopt and follow the rules to the detriment of their own personal freedom.
UPDATE: Blunkett is saying more of the same (Thur 12th) again, so so is Paul of MURML again.
There was a nice little post yesterday at Daryl Cobranchi’s homeschooling blog:
A teacher’s union official has said that g-school teachers are incompetent. I’m sure she didn’t mean to but it is the only logical conclusion.
1. Teachers are underpaid (according to the union official)
2. “If you don’t pay competitive salaries, we’re never going to get competent teachers.”
Therefore, the current teachers must be incompetent. Q.E.D.
Cruel, but correct.
Friedrich Blowhard’s latest and pleasingly whimsical posting is called Visual Google. What he was doing was typing in words, albeit words with visual connotations and consequences. Hello “clouds”. Hello “sky”.
Says Friedrich:
It may be an exaggeration to describe a Google search as “found art” but I generally like the results at least as well as a John Cage musical composition.
Indeed.
But now here’s what I thought Friedrich might have been writing about. For some time now I’ve been wondering how you search the net for a picture, when all you have to go on is a bit of picture yourself. Suppose you have a rather blurry or unsatisfactory image, or perhaps a fragment of an image, or maybe a quite good drawing of an image, and you want the Giant Computer in the Sky to tell you what it is, and to show you a far, far better version of it … can you now do that? Are there truly visual search engines out there? And how about a visual description (“cubist woman, with transparent handkerchief in front of her face, crying, lots of yellow, red and blue”) but not the official title? Can search engines now – or will search engines ever be able to – respond intelligently to a query like that?
And how about music? Can you now, or will there ever be a day when you can, go “you know that thing that goes Dah dah de dah dit kabang swoosh …” and get five suggestions for the original track listed for you and ready to roll?
This has no connection with legalising drugs, abolishing income tax (see posting below) or the Samizdata.net metacontext, or no connection that I can now think of. But even so, I like it a lot:
Researchers have cracked the puzzle of how pigeons find their way home: they just follow the main roads.
…
Some pigeons stick so rigidly to the roads that they even fly round roundabouts before choosing the exit to lead them back to their lofts.
Animal behaviouralists at Oxford University are stunned by their findings, which follow 10 years of research into homing pigeons. For the last 18 months they have used the latest global-positioning technology, allowing them to track the ground the birds covered to within one to four metres.
I too am stunned, even though I am not an “animal behaviouralist”. Apparently pigeons do have an innate navigation system, but as soon as they identify a road-based route, they use that instead.
“Up until now, we have always thought about the way that birds go in terms of the energetics of the flight efficiency, which is the most direct route home … as in the phrase ‘as the crow flies’.
“But the answer is, they don’t go as the crow flies, and neither, it is my hunch, do crows. …”
No mate. Crows use the latest global-positioning technology.
Here is an interesting piece about the impact of the Data Protection Act on the world of higher education. As so often, the attempt to suppress badness results in the suppression of, if not goodness, then at least the entirely reasonable.
I do not know who David Butcher is, but I like him already on the strength of this, that he wrote in the latest Radio Times – which is published, be it noted, by the BBC. It is part of a plug for a programme to be broadcast tonight on BBC2 at 8 pm:
Having enjoyably milked all the clichés about olden times in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Terry Jones makes up for it here. The idea is to put the record straight by presenting portraits of how real life would have been for eight medieval archetypes, starting tonight with the dirty and downtrodden figure of the peasant.
The gist is that things weren’t nearly as bad for feudal serfs as received history and Monty Python films would have you believe. For a start, they had 80 days’ holiday a year, thanks to all those church feast days. And although they were forced to work 50 or so days in a year for their feudal lord, that’s rather less than most of us today work to pay our income tax. By the end of the programme, you may be feeling almost envious.
Well that may be going too far, but I do like that bit there about income tax, measured in days per year. And I bet these guys will be pleased about this kind of talk too.
Ever since I struck the chords of some of my libertarian friends with my Libertarian Alliance piece entitled The Fixed Quantity of Wealth Fallacy, I and several of the friends have been on the lookout for new uses for the phrase “fixed quantity of [insert new something whose quantity is not fixed] fallacy”. Well, here is another. See title above.
The beauty of the FQ?F is that all you have to do is state it. Much of the argument is made simply with the phrase. Jobs. Happiness. Travel. Linoleum. Blogging …
The point is that simply altering the price of something massively increases the demand for it. And when economists talk about demand, they are not merely discussing potential consumers standing about with stupid plackards and stamping their feet and getting in a rage – as in political ‘demand’ – they mean actual ‘effective’ demand, demand that counts for something, demand with cash to back it up.
Just to get the linking thing out of the way, I here give thanks to two recent articles which stirred me into saying what follows, one the already much linked-to Wired piece about how Indian programmers are now turning Silicon Valley into a dust bowl, and the other being a piece in today’s New York Times in which you can see the beginnings of the dawning light in the Western Official Mind that this might not all be entirely bad news after all.
So, let us think about this Fixed Quantity of Programming Fallacy. It applies, of course, to the row now raging about the way that those sneaky Indians are stealing all our – I use the words “sneaky”, “stealing” and “our” ironically – computer programming jobs.
Now I do not doubt that there are many computer programmers in the West who will, in the short run and maybe if they can find nothing else to do in the longer run as well, suffer severely. But it is also true that the availability to the West of much cheaper Indian programming power will create massive new economic opportunities in the West, and everywhere else.
Basically, what it means is that Western computer experts will have to stop writing programmes and start, well, demanding them. In less florid language, they will have to switch from writing programmes to writing specifications for programmes, from making programmes to saying what a new programme must do.
At the moment it is simply assumed that ‘writing a computer programme’ is something that only someone very rich can afford to finance. → Continue reading: The fixed quantity of programming fallacy
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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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