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.
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Rob Fisher has a couple of postings up about coffee, which I enjoyed reading. I am strictly a Gold Blend man myself, and am as interested in the structural qualities of coffee jars as I am in their contents, but even I notice how the price of Gold Blend can fluctuate quite wildly, which is what the second of Rob’s coffee postings is about.
In the first and more substantial of Rob’s coffee postings, the whole matter of Fair Trade coffee is gone into. Like many free marketeers, I assume this to be a fairly (actually not that fairly) foolish enterprise, better at separating money from dimwitted Westerners than at helping poor coffee growers in faraway countries. But what are the facts? Read Rob to learn more, and also read Has Bean, the quality coffee blog which Rob links to and discusses some of the content of.
Unlike me, Rob does care a lot about the quality of his coffee, having just purchased a coffee grinder. Apparently, the smaller the time gap between grinding and drinking, the better the coffee tastes. Unless you prefer Gold Blend.
Earlier in the week I was visiting family in the old family home, the nearest railway station to which is Egham. And just outside Egham Station, I spotted this rather remarkable sign, erected (I presume) by the local council, Runnymede.
It seems that Lucinda Campbell Jackson of St Cuthbert’s School (see the verbiage top right) did a really quite witty piece of art, on the theme of CCTV surveillance. But the odd bit is Runnymede Council (see the verbiage top left) – and yes that is Runnymede of Magna Carta fame – thinking that using this bit of school art on an official sign is a good way to publicise the fact that everything you do in public in Egham is being recorded on video.
For me, what this illustrates is that all those who still oppose public video surveillance in all public places in Britain (personally I am still rather undecided) have comprehensively lost this argument, insofar as it ever was an argument in the first place. These local councillors know their business. They know that, if there was any serious public opposition to ubiquitous CCTV surveillance, it would not be in their interests to make public jokes about it. As it is, they are extremely keen to advertise their enthusiasm for CCTV surveillance with a bit of humour, knowing that many will laugh, but that very few will grumble, still less complain out loud.
I mean, if you have nothing to hide, you obviously have nothing to fear. Right? Except looking badly dressed.
Instapundit has just asked if, in the words at the top of the piece he links to, Israel will be the third nation on the moon.
Oh I hope so. I really do hope so.
I am an optimist, in the sense that I always want to be an optimist, which I suppose is what an optimist is. But of late, being an optimist has been very hard. This notion, even as a mere possibility, has cheered me up no end. The nearer it gets to actually happening, the happier I will be about it.
And the more all the right people, as in the deeply and repellently wrong people, will get angry.
Computer modellers have long been accused of inventing extreme weather events at some deliberately vague point in the future. But here is an Australian story about how another kind of modelling invented extreme weather conditions at an exact moment in the recent past, that other forms of actual measurement didn’t register.
The claim by SEQWater in its official report that a “one-in-2000-year” rainfall event occurred over the Wivenhoe Dam at a critical stage on January 11 has been widely reported in the media and cited by senior public servants to justify the near loss of control of the dam at the time.
But no such rainfall event was measured by any rainfall gauges. Instead, the claim was manufactured by SEQWater after it modelled the rapid rise of levels in the dam, repositioned rainfall data to an area immediately upstream of the dam, and then doubled it.
After extrapolating in this unusual way to achieve an extreme number, the SEQWater report states: “Rainfall of this intensity and duration over the Wivenhoe Dam lake area at such a critical stage of a flood event was unprecedented.
“The resulting run-off could not be contained without transition to (an operating strategy that led to the operator opening the dam’s gate for huge releases).”
But:
Senior independent engineer Michael O’Brien, who has spent the past nine weeks analysing the performance of the dam and SEQWater, said that while the rainfall was heavy, he did not believe it was extreme and he doubted it was ever close to the range claimed by the operator.
This is no mere academic spat. SEQW’s allegedly flawed decision making contributed hugely to the serious flooding that recently hit Queensland.
Mr O’Brien, who has mounted a strong case that the devastating floods in and near Brisbane would have been almost completely avoided with better management of the dam, said the one-in-2000-year event was an “invention” that could not be taken seriously.
The modelling-trumps-measurement vibe to all this is the reason that climate skeptics like Anthony Watts are already onto this.
Delingpole hasn’t yet had a gloat about it all, but doubtless he will, because this just begs to be amplified into a big story, of the sort that the world’s Old School Media will either run with, or make further climate-prats of themselves by ignoring.
Others have been complaining about how long it has taken, but I have been surprised at the speed with which the West has responded to events in Libya, and have been unable to shake the feeling, until today actually, that the reports I was reading were send-ups for comic purposes of some kind.
I am an agnostic about Western intervention in foreign parts rather than an outright atheist, but I respect the atheist position and deeply fear the true believer, “nation building” idea. Governments are good at destroying stuff, but tend to be shambolic at any kind of creativity. The more creative they try to be, the more destructive they typically end up being. People do creative, not governments.
This operation seems to be mostly destructive, which is all to the good. I think it reasonable to hope that it accomplishes some good, rather than only fearful that it will all go horribly wrong.
The West’s leaders are telling Gadaffi that maybe he can rule his country, but not the way he has been for the last fortnight or so. Bombing it and shelling it into submission is not allowed. Do that and we’ll do the same to you. Govern your country with riot police. Maybe arrange some elections, and then fix them. Bribe people into supporting you, rather than just killing them like they are armed soldiers. Above all, and now I’m going by what David Cameron said this afternoon, don’t announce ceasefires and promise them to your fellow members of the Head of Government Club, but then not deliver them.
This was one of the big things that Saddam Hussein did wrong, as I understand that earlier story. He didn’t just invade Kuwait. He told other members of the Head of Government Club that he wouldn’t. Lying to your people is okay. They all do that. That’s business as usual. But lying to fellow members of the Head of Government Club is not the done thing. Do it and you get blackballed, by which is meant that your armed underlings, the basis of your power, get slaughtered. Provided, that is, you are not bossing a serious power, and Westerners slaughtering your underlings would start a serious war, as opposed to an “asymmetric” war (i.e. a slaughter of your slaughterers).
LOL!!!: Just watched a British military talking-head-in-a-suit on the BBC, when asked to say what success for this operation would mean, say: “removing Saddam”, and then hurriedly correct himself.
People who see virtue in doing without electricity should shut off their fridge, stove, microwave, computer, water heater, lights, TV and all other appliances for a month, not an hour.
– Ross McKitrick abhors Earth Hour.
Incoming from Michael Jennings, which started with the link to this Fukushima update piece in The Register (subtitled “Still nothing to get in a flap about”) which at the end says this:
Reaction to our earlier piece praising the actually rather brilliant response of the Fukushima reactors and their operators in the quake’s wake has shown that hoary myths and legends surrounding Chernobyl persist, and that one will still, even after all this time, generally be pilloried for suggesting that Chernobyl – far and away the worst nuclear incident ever which didn’t involve an atomic bomb – was genuinely not that serious.
We here at the Reg attended the launch of this rather excellent recent book, Flat Earth News, in which veteran Guardian investigative journalist Nick Davies dared to include the Chernobyl myths of thousands dead (actually the established figure is 56) alongside other great, baseless modern scares like the Millennium Bug.
Davies said that nothing else he has ever done in his life earned him as much flak as that.
Michael says:
I think most people are unfamiliar with the story of what actually happened at Chernobyl in 1985, beyond “There was a meltdown”. Basically, pretty much every possible fuckup happened one after another (from reactor design, to reactor management, to employee supervision, to safety procedures (there weren’t any, quite seriously) to after the fact disaster recovery. This of course had little to do with problems with nuclear power and quite a bit to do with problems of the Soviet Union. Not that I need to tell you this.
But I do need to pass it on.
How to give the proper sort of nod towards the Japan earthquake? Not by saying that we are right in some opinion that we already hold that we can somehow hook onto it, that’s for sure. A disaster means uncontroversial urgency. To use it to pontificate about mere importance, and controversial importance at that, is to change the subject. Importance is important, but it can wait.
I went to Flickr, to see what “japan earthquake” yielded, and my favourite discovery so far, although I realise that is not quite the proper adjective, is this:
Which I found among these.
That is going to take a lot of sorting out, not least because cranes will be needed, and look what happened to the cranes that were there. Yes, every one of the thousands of deaths (did anyone die in those cranes?) is terrible for all of the dead and for all of their loved ones. But I’m guessing that the typical, as opposed to worst, stories will involve the immense labour of cleaning up all the mess, and the immense derangement done to various plans, business and otherwise.
Because of the shapes involved, and their repetitiousness, this picture reminded me – in a kind of compare-and-contrast way – of pictures like the one I put on my personal blog at the time of Hurricane Katrina, of semi-submerged school buses in New Orleans, when water made a rather more slow motion mess of that city, nearly five years ago. And I see that I had very similar thoughts then to now, although this disaster is far greater.
It’s good, I think, when disaster strikes anywhere on earth, that thanks to things like Flickr we can feast our eyes and minds on the wreckage and adopt the appropriate attitude, but without all of us getting in the way.
LATER: Uncontained chaos. I have to admit that when it comes to big time disasters like this one, which is getting bigger by the day, the old school media really do come into their own. I think that’s because there are so many facts, and those facts are so very, very photogenic. It also makes a big difference that this particular disaster is massively better to comprehend if a few people (it mustn’t be too many) take to the air to photo it, with really expensive cameras.
LATER: Richard Fernandez talks about urgency.
LATER: Maybe the old school media are not doing so well (thank you Michael J):
The whole sequence of events is a ringing endorsement for nuclear power safety. If this – basically nothing – is what happens when decades-old systems are pushed five times and then some beyond their design limits, new plants much safer yet would be able to resist an asteroid strike without problems.
But you wouldn’t know that from looking at the mainstream media. Ignorant fools are suggesting on every hand that Japan’s problems actually mean fresh obstacles in the way of new nuclear plants here in the UK, Europe and the US.
That can only be true if an unbelievable level of public ignorance of the real facts, born of truly dreadful news reporting over the weekend, is allowed to persist.
So, we’re back to contained chaos. And to talking about importance, but in reaction to other importance talk that is importantly wrong.
Says Michael: “The big deal is that Japan has lost as much of 25% of its electricity generation capacity.”
I have worked in government for 28 years as an economist, and for the last 20 years I have worked on environmental programs. In that time I have not seen a shred of evidence to justify global warming, let alone man made global warming and I have not seen a shred of evidence that there is going to be a green economic boom. The only evidence I have seen is that there is a green economic bust, that money invested in green technologies is usually wasted and simply consumes investment that could be better used elsewhere. I think that anybody in government or industry who can not understand this is either dishonest, stupid, or both. That applies to Cameron – I think he is both.
– A comment on a Christopher Booker article. Bishop Hill already has this as his quote of the day, but I think it really deserves to get around.
It is often assumed by opponents of big government that all those on the government payroll are automatic believers in big government, because it suits them to be. But it just doesn’t follow. They may start out believing in big government, but what they then learn when part of big government may cause them to have second thoughts.
LATER: Yes, I have demoted this posting, as it were, basically by pretending that this went up an hour sooner than it really did. This is because I have been updating the posting that is now next, and because I consider that posting, although no more important than this one, to be be more urgent.
The gradual but inexorable illegalisation of smoking is arriving at its end-game, as many bloggers of the sort I like have been complaining about, and no doubt as many bloggers of the sort I don’t like have been celebrating.
Here is the Radio Times, describing a show done by Panorama last Monday (March 7th) entitled Smoking and the Bandits:
Criminal gangs are believed to be supplying half of all hand-rolled tobacco and in five cigarettes in the United Kingdom. … their products are also up to 30 times more toxic than ordinary cigarettes.
I saw that coming in 1987. Under the bit in that pamphlet entitled THE BENEFITS OF ADVERTISING, AND OF PROPERTY (page 3) I wrote about how gangsters would, if the illegalisation process I was writing about even then continued, soon be running the tobacco business, supplying “these now genuinely lethal products”. Not that I was alone in possessing these prophetic powers. Just about every libertarian then writing saw this coming. Illegality equals toxicity. You merely had to apply what everyone already knew about other drugs markets that already were, even then, illegal, or for that matter acquaint yourself with a one page summary of the story of Prohibition, and the pattern of future events, if they insisted on continue to bear down on smoking with the force of law.
But going back to that bit in the Radio Times, where I put “…” above, it also says this:
However, not only are the criminals depriving British taxpayers of £4 billion in revenue, …
That’s right, there goes the exact same warped logic as Natalie Solent noted in her posting earlier today, immediately below this one. No, Radio Times, depriving taxpayers is what you do when you tax them. These “bandits” are thriving because, unlike our tyrannical government, they are not doing that.
It seems that the commenter quoted by Natalie is mistaken. It is not “only in the mind of Ms Lucas” that such warped thinking is being thought.
Gold is not going up at all, paper money is going down.
– Detlev Schlichter
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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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