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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I loved this, which I have only just found, “The Warblog of J. Alfred Prufrock”. It was posted on March 4th of this year, so I think it okay to give away the ending.
I must post…I must post…
I shall link to bloggers that get linked to most.
Shall I write a scathing essay? Do I dare to make a stink?
I shall make my page quite shocking, with my fonts fluorescent pink.
I have seen the A-list linking, link to link.
I do not think that they will link to me.
I have seen them writing onward down the scroll
Thirty posts daily makes a breathless tale
Plus columns and interviews and e-mail,
I have waited for this moment in the sun
On web-sites read and stored in my cache
Then InstaPundit links me! And I crash.
I don’t remember Samizdata attending to this on, say, March 5th, but I am very occasionally wrong about things blogular, and even sometimes about things generally. No doubt I’ll be humiliated by some commenter. “Sorry Brian, but …” Oh well.
More seriously, I want to say that whereas a “week-old piece of election commentary” would indeed be tiresome (I read that somewhere last night but sorry, didn’t keep a note of where), a nine month late blog-reference to something of enduring entertainment value is surely okay. Is not one of our blog-duties to keep the best bloggage from months and years ago alive, even as the rest sinks into the informational sediment that will be of interest only to future generations of info-archeologists?
There is an interesting posting by David Farrer over at Freedomandwhisky, about the now quite familiar experience most of us have had of buying an incredibly cheap airline ticket. David talks of the Edinburgh to London route, because although Edinburgh and surrounding parts is the Freedom & Whisky target-rich commentary environment London is obviously the centre of the universe and he has to visit it from time to time to keep in touch, but of course it’s the same for everyone.
One of the reasons airplane tickets can be so cheap is that buying and selling them has got so much cheaper. You can now buy airplane tickets on the internet at a price that fluctuates from day to day – even hour to hour or minute by minute – according to the vagaries of supply and demand.
This is one of the most characteristic uses of computers in our time. A new business has not in any obvious sense been invented. What’s happened is that an old one – ticket touting – has been re-invigorated. And I think I’m right in saying that the same principle is now being applied to cinema tickets, and of course the package holiday trade has been doing this kind of thing for years.
This experience surely helps to spread libertarianism. Oh, I don’t mean that, as soon as you’ve booked your ticket for your last-minute emergency trip to Athens to get your mad uncle out of jail and been flabbergasted by how little you had to pay for it, you experience an uncontrollable desire then to log in to amazon.com and purchase the collected works of Murray Rothbard. What I do suggest is that several very important libertarian memes, about such things as the fact that prices are a totally subjective matter in no way dependent upon the history of how much it cost for the thing being sold to be made in the first place, and concerning the general desirability of free markets as the best way to coordinate complicated collective activities (such as a hundred or so more people all deciding to share the same plane trip to Athens – tomorrow morning at 6 am) surely are being popularised by these kinds of arrangements.
Note the word “collective” there. Collectivism not only messes with individual activity (because that’s its nature); it also can’t now do collective activity nearly as well as voluntarily co-ordinated individual choice-making.
The plane trip has already been decided upon by the airline, and they can’t now cancel it. The taking-off and landing slots, the crew, the maintenance and the petrol have all been committed to. Whether you are on the plane or not makes hardly any difference at all to the airline’s fixed costs. What does one less empty seat cost them? So if there’s a chance they could maybe fill the plane in a last minute rush by damn near giving away the seats, it makes sense for them to try to do just that. So, you get your bargain ticket.
An airline ticket futures market, you might say. My point is: computers are now turning everyone into Gordon Gekko. Gordon Gekko’s opinions are accordingly that much more likely to spread to everyone.
That’s not an original thought, but it is quite a thought.
I spent yesterday (this is the small hours of Sunday morning) at day one of the conference referred to below, and for my money the star of the show so far has been Terence Kealey, Vice Chancellor of Buckingham University and author of this. Kealey’s performance was terrific, both in terms of content and because the man is blessed with such a clear and mellifluous speaking voice – which was a great asset in what proved to be a tricky accoustic given that no microphones were in use.
Having forced myself up at such a vile hour in the morning to get there in time for the start, I’m too knackered to say more now. I hope to report further and less superficially after tomorrow’s proceedings, and there’s a good chance that one or some of David Carr, Patrick Crozier, Alice Bachini, David Farrer, Paul Marks and Antoine Clarke, also all present, will also have things to say, here and/or elsewhere.
For more of my first thoughts about this conference, I have posted some reactions to another of the speakers, Professor Christie Davies (author of a book called The Mirth of Nations) over on my recently started Education Blog.
This from Friedrich Blowhard is right on the money. It’s a piece about the financing of “high” art in America, and identifies one of the the key facts: the tax laws.
It was not clear that there would be an endless succession of extremely wealthy art-fanatics who would be willing to spend their money behind the scenes to prop up these institutions. The solution, oddly, was the 1894 income tax law, which included a provision that charitable donations to nonprofit corporations organized for “educational” purposes would be tax-deductible. This presented the wealthy with a choice of paying the government taxes or donating to nonprofit enterprises, which was a choice many less-than-religious supporters of the arts were willing to make – especially if they got to be a certifiable member of the social-cultural elite in return. In short, the income tax provided the incentive, and the nonprofit corporation the vehicle, to broaden the group “supporting” the uneconomic arts.
The biggest givers, while no longer required to assume a heroic burden like that of Mssrs. Morgan or Higginson, got another perk as well: they got control of the enterprise because they sat on the board. These wealthy, prestige-seeking board members, often determined to use their art institution to civilize the masses, had an intensely conservative effect on the material that was actually presented and how it was presented – no more of the wild and wooly hybrids of “low” and “high” art which we saw were financially successful for decades in New Orleans-style opera and on the vaudeville stage. No, by jingo, we were all going to take our “high” culture straight. So much for giving the customer (the American public) what they wanted.
→ Continue reading: High art – low art – art
I don’t recall any of those “wonders of capitalism” postings lately, so here’s one, scanned in from the November 2002 issue of Prospect (paper version so no link), referred to in an article about nanotechnology (“The Science of the Tiny”) by Michael Gross of Birkbeck College, London.
I’ve been hearing for years about how wonderful nanotechnology is just about to be. But where’s the stuff? Where are the nanotechnologically produced products that we can buy? In the shops? Says Gross:
… There is at least one that you can buy already. It is the self-cleaning window. It uses a combination of two clever molecular tricks. First, it contains a catalyst that uses the energy of light to oxidise common kinds of dirt, to convert them into smaller, more soluble molecules that wash away with rain water. At this point, the second trick comes in. Ordinary glass is fairly water-repellent (hydrophobic), which means that water does not cover it smoothly, but tends to form droplets. The surface of self-cleaning glass, however, is coated in molecules that attract water and encourage it to spread out. So, instead of sitting around as drops which leave drying spots when they evaporate, the rain will cover the surface evenly, dissolve what the photocatalyst made of the dirt, and run off. Simple. Yet it would not be possible without molecular design on the nanometre scale.
I don’t need it. Correction: I don’t want it. But I’m a big fan of skyscrapers, and skyscrapers are going to want this stuff by the square mile, and presumably they already do. I assume that technophiliac Samizdatistas like Dale Amon and Russell Whitaker have known of these magic window panes for years but this is the first time I’ve heard about them, and I’m impressed.
Who reads comments on Samizdata postings long gone? The writer of the original posting does because Perry sends them to us, so I read this one, from Chloe (of this blog), yesterday, about a posting whose only previous comment had been five days earlier. I had said that blogging is nicer, by its nature, than email chat-rooms. But Chloe said:
I see a difference between chat rooms, e-mail discussion lists, message boards, and blogs. I think it has to do with how easy it is to use the thing, and that reflects the mentality.
However, I believe if you haven’t read a blog you hate, you haven’t read many blogs.
Certainly there are rat-blogs out there. PLENTY of them. So many I hear of a new one every week.
But I guess it just depends on if you agree with it, or disagree with it. Maybe the hateful rat-blog I can’t stand would be the comraderie-laden paradise you love.
It’s all about perspective.
I sit corrected. However, here is further proof of just how subtly nice bloggers can be, when they’re trying to be. → Continue reading: Blogs across the sea
In a real democracy, the relationship between the media and the governing elite is that of a pack of rottweilers maintaining surveillance on a gang of burglars. In Scotland, it more closely resembles the relationship between the Brigade of Guards and the sovereign.
– Gerald Warner in yesterday’s Scotland on Sunday quoted in Freedomandwhisky.
(Early) this morning on Brian’s Education Blog I mentioned my unease about links to electronic newspaper articles that may, but may not, remain linkable-to. (I reproduced great gobs of an independent.co.uk piece, maybe superfluously.) John Ray (of this – which is a link that is likely to go on making sense for the foreseeable future) sent me this email:
I share your concern about linking to articles on sites run by newspapers. My solution is to put up on a separate site copies of articles that I think might “disappear”. See: www.foxhunt.blogspot.com.
I’d be particularly interested in comments on this matter. (For these purposes I suggest we treat the shambles that is the blogger/blogspot/whateverit’scalled archiving system as a separate issue.)
Much is made by bloggers of the notion of the “blogosphere”. We bloggers understandably focus on the distinction between a “blog” and a “not blog”. (See for example the critical comments on this Samizdata piece I did – and let’s all hope that that link still makes sense in five years time! – about what is apparently a “not blog”.)
But I believe that a more fundamental distinction is the one between all the stuff that is available at one press of one button (i.e. linkable to), for ever, and all the stuff that will perhaps not be available for ever, at one press of one button, either because it never was in the first place, or because, having dangled it in front of us all for a few months, the danglers are then instructed by their accountants and/or lawyers to put the stuff behind a registration and/or money wall.
John Ray’s solution seems unwieldy, and also vulnerable to small-print-wielding lawyers forcing him (or someone) to take the stuff down from his special site.
I’m not querying the right of electronic newshounds to behave like this – not in this posting anyway. (It’s costing them money to write these pieces, and our plan is that eventually we spoil their on-paper circulation numbers, right?) I’m merely wondering what we can do (that we have and will go on having a legal right to do) about it, in such a way that keeps all our postings making sense.
Because Perry de Havilland‘s solution – quote great gobs of the original piece thereby making the link less crucial – is not perfect either.
That’s the good news:
Survey: Big Business Eager to Hire Bloggers
(2002-11-03) — A new survey of Fortune 500 companies reveals that 81 percent are eager to hire weblog writers (called bloggers) at substantial pay rates. Many bloggers currently spend hours each day reading news and writing views. …
This new study, by the Center for the Promotion of Income for Bloggers (CPIB), found that many corporations are awakening to the value of having a “staff blogger.”
The bad news is … it’s Scrappleface. Thanks for the link to Instapundit, who also steers the blogosphere to those party photos below. I was genuinely excited, almost as if I was back at the party (I’m the one with the yellow British teeth). But then I read:
“Big business has begun to realize the need to have someone on staff who can express open hostility with cutting wit and a generous helping of obscenities,” according to the CPIB news release. “Of course, these qualities have been in rich supply within most organizations for years, but their expression has been reserved for private emails, and restroom stalls. Now, companies are willing to pay, and pay well, for these bitter screeds.”
The CPIB study was underwritten by income from a Pay Pal “tip jar” on its web site. The statistical margin of error is plus or minus 100 percent.
Well, you never know. There’s many a truth that started its career as a jest.
To me, a blog, Brian’s EDUCATION Blog, me and blog both doing well.
Well I hope we’re doing well. “Up and running” is the usual kind of expression used for such events as this. Up and staggering around bumping into furniture but mostly lying in pram and sleeping would be more accurate. After vital initial help from expert Movable Typist Alex Singleton (of Liberty Log) my blogynaecologist is now Patrick Crozier (UK Transport and Croziervision), but it still looks an ugly brute despite their best efforts. I know, what must it have been like before?
But the text is starting to roll. Yesterday I did a ramble about what BEB stands for, blah blah blah but necessary. And today, Patrick has just posted a piece about a Maths textbook entrepreneur, whose website he saw on the side of a van.
Alex Singleton has got the Liberty Log cranked up and running again, after a spell of very thin posting. (It’s not as if they had nothing to blog about up there, what with the Germaine Greer for University Vice Minister, or whatever it is, row.) Something to do with student lodgings, he said in a phone call to me just now – no internet connection, blah blah.
Anyway Alex has been thinking about coffee, and in particular “fair trade” coffee.
Several hours of research later, I found what I suspected: fair trade isn’t as fair as it seems. Most of the extra money charged fills the pockets of big business, not the coffee growers. Fair trade coffee is roughly 2.5p more expensive per cup. However, Costa charges 10p per cup extra. In other words 7.5p simply goes to Costa, or its first world suppliers, as profit.
World coffee prices have declined rapidly over the past ten years, and the reason is simple: since 1990, supply has increased by 15%. Much of the blame can be laid at organisations supposedly aiming to reduce poverty. The World Bank gave loans to Vietnam to set up coffee plantations. In Brazil and Columbia, producers were encouraged to switch from coca, used to make cocaine, to coffee. Oxfam and other charities have consistently encouraged existing farmers to increase production of coffee.
So there. My real reason for linking to Liberty Log is not coffee, nor even LL’s recent springing back to life. No, my main message is simply how good it is now starting to look. I particularly like the headings, but thank god also that the text (as here at Samizdata) is big enough to read. What is it with all the tiny lettering that lots of blogs use? Am I getting old? Is my screen too small and blurry? Anway, I can read Liberty Log.
More to the point, I still want to. As do others, or so Alex tells me. During the recent dry spell, LL was still getting plenty of hits, presumably from folks like me who were hoping that normal service – or what passes for normal service at a university – would soon be resumed.
It’s that time of the week when most of Samizdata’s readers and most of its writers like to creep away from their terminals and live a little. Time for another Brian screed with MORE in it.
But how can I reconcile my refined tastes with Samizdata’s preferred subject matter just now of monsters and war and mayhem. I’ve been making no secret lately of my liking for the blog written by The Two Blowhards, and for their sustained determination to talk about “culture” and not just about such things as politicians, Islamofascists and the exact guns and bullets and training manuals being used by the USA’s latest mass murderer. So what can this screed be about?
Well here’s a question that may connect these two camps: Why do so many of the villains of popular entertainment like classical music?
Not all fictional villains love classical music. But if a character in a TV adventure show does love classical music, then the chances are, overwhelmingly, that he’s the bad guy. One need only hear the tinkling of a classically played harpsichord or the smooth sound of a classically played violin to know at once Who Did It. → Continue reading: Classical villainy
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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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