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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CNetnews.com has an article about radio frequency identification that has become a hot concept, promising to streamline how businesses track and stock inventory, warning that companies may need to rethink their software infrastructures in order to make RFID work as advertised, say analysts and technology makers.
Early resistance to RFID adoption has come from civil liberties groups, which fear that the technology could lead to unprecedented surveillance of consumers. But industry watchers and technology vendors have identified a more mundane potential problem for RFID adopters. They warn that in the rush to launch RFID projects, businesses may be overlooking a crucial element necessary to allow the technology to work smoothly: Making sure back-end databases and business applications can handle the massive amounts of information generated by RFID-enabled systems. Kara Romanow, an analyst at AMR Research in Boston said:
Companies are going to have problems when they drop RFID on top of shaky infrastructures. In order to do RFID right, to see a true return, the first thing (a company) needs to do is finish a data synchronization initiative, and do it right.
Romanow believes that there are two popular scenarios among businesses working to develop RFID capabilities today: those doing just enough to keep demanding companies like Wal-Mart as a customer, and those with real long-term vision. According to the analyst, the first group will garner few returns other than short-term bragging rights to getting RFID up and running, while the second group will see true return on investment down the road.
I rarely write articles about ongoing discussions in the comment sections of Samizdata.net, but I think this is an appropriate continuation of the discourse.
Whilst I find being referred to as ‘dear leader’ a bit disconcerting, Frank McGahon does ask the questions which have vexed me for quite a long time. I refer to myself as a ‘social individualist’, as does Gabriel Syme. I also have no problem with ‘minarchist’. Others tend to call me a ‘libertarian’. Whatever… the general thrust of what I think is no secret to any regular reader of this blog. I see the state as at best a necessary evil and generally just an evil; I see constrained democracy as a tool to secure liberty, not an end in and of itself; I am all for free markets and ‘Austrian’ economics; I regard several property as the key underpinning of any civilization worth having; I see individual liberty as first amongst many virtues. Label all that as you wish.
So how does a person with such views, i.e. someone who is profoundly at odds with the system of regulatory democratic governance that prevails in the First World, and who regards so much of underpins everyday life in a legal sense as essentially illegitimate, act to advance his or her objectives? Or more particularly, how does one take action without legitimising what they regard as nothing less than threat-backed theft? How does one act without either fatally compromising one’s beliefs or alternatively retreating into intellectually pure ineffectiveness?
This is a question I keep kicking around… over and over again. The problem with voting Tory (or in many states in the USA, voting Republican) is that it rewards both outright lying when they describe themselves as ‘the party of free trade’ and does little more than slow the rot of regulatory statism rather than reverse it. If they know you will just hold your nose and vote for them regardless just to keep Labour out (or the Democrats out), what possible motivation do they have to actually pander to your views in any meaningful way? → Continue reading: Going for the zeitgest
Our most splendid Frogman has added another wallpaper to the Samizdata.net wallpaper page (scroll down to the bottom of the page). Check them out!
A 365 day per year strike of course, but I suppose that is too much to hope for.
Tens of thousands of civil servants of sundry favours are walking out in all manner of protests at plans to cut the vast throng of half a million or so people employed by the state by a paltry 80,000.
Yes, I realise those people will get paid for the time they are off the job but I wonder what might happen if folks noticed that the world did not come to an end just because chunks of the state stopped working? Perhaps people might actually get used to the idea of living without them.
More and faster, please.
Far from replacing newspapers and magazines, the best blogs – and the best are very clever – have become guides to them, pointing to unusual sources and commenting on familiar ones. They have become new mediators for the informed public. Although the creators of blogs think of themselves as radical democrats, they are a new Tocquevillean elite. Much of the web has moved in this direction because the wilder, bigger, and more chaotic it becomes, the more people will need help navigating it
– Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom
For a wonderful account of the BBC’s world famous dispassion and impartiality, check this out.
Some views are more welcome than others it seems.
“It’s not the age, it’s the mileage.”
Like so many other bloggers have done, I could not resist generating a map of the places I have visited (though I feel India and Bahrain are a cheat because it was only changing airplanes)…
PS:
The daft furor over the outsourcing of job to India (and other places) is just another example of how amazingly primitive the understanding of economics is which prevails amongst the media and political elites in the USA (though no worse than elsewhere I might add).
The same troglodyte notions that lead people to think that cheaper foreign steel being imported into the USA is a bad thing (which is just another way of saying that manufacturing cheaper cars, homes and ships in the USA are a bad thing), lead the same people to in effect say that allowing Americans to purchase cheaper computer programs and requiring them to pay more for call center services is also a bad thing.
President Bush went on the defensive Thursday on the issue of outsourcing after a firestorm erupted over an aide’s contention that free flow of jobs, including the migration of services to India, benefited the US economy in the long run.
Although the aide, White House economic adviser Greg Mankiw, was merely echoing what was stated in Bush’s economic report to Congress, Washington’s political class came down on him like a ton of bricks.
Lawmakers from both parties, including Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert, demanded he be fired. The criticism forced Mankiw, a Harvard economist, to clarify that he did not mean to support or praise loss shifting of US jobs overseas.
Sure, if your IT or helpdesk job as just been outsourced to Bombay, it might seem like A Bad Thing for you personally… but then that is just as true if your job in New Jersey has just been taken by someone in Biloxi, Mississippi because your company has just relocated to where costs (and taxes) are cheaper… the overall effect is that companies, and outsourcable functions of companies, will go wherever it makes sense for them to go… and so they should!
However notion that India has such a comparative advantage just because they have produced a reasonable pool of IT and call centre people who will work for far less than their counterparts in California does rather miss the obvious fact that India is far from suitable for all or even most IT or call centre jobs. Troubleshooting a network in Texas is rather hard to do from New Delhi and to think people in Asia will have such a deep understanding of American (or British or European) cultural mores that all help desks and call centres will end up there is rather bizarre. Companies who out-source unsuitable jobs will end up being punished by the market if their quality falls below the point which lower costs can offset such a fall, and some jobs are very quality sensitive indeed.
It should be screamingly obvious that stopping people in India (and elsewhere) from exploiting their competitive advantages does not only hurt them, it hurts everyone who is a customer for those products. Rather than engaging in unbecoming grovelling, George ‘Steel & Lumber Tariff’ Bush should redeem himself by responding to the Troglodyte faction by pugnaciously asking them “So, what exactly did the American consumer do to you to make you hate them so much, guys?”
If a company is not free to run their business and the location of the people who make it work, to best suit the company’s interests, who pays in the end? The company’s customers do, of course. And that means you.
It seems to me that the latest suicide bombings in Iraq, targeted at Iraqis nascent army, should be met with a blizzard of public relations aimed not at minimizing the horror of what happen but rather making it clear that the perpetrators are trying to play the Iraqi people for fools.
Certainly seeking to play one section of Iraqi society off against another is potential a highly effective strategy for the bag guys. However by making the revelations such as the one Dale wrote about yesterday as widely known as possible within Iraq, this could be turned around in a most interesting fashion and perhaps used to promote a sense of solidarity within Iraq againt the Al-Qaeda/Ba’athist hardcore.
Perhaps the propaganda war will be the decisive battle in this struggle and paradoxically publicizing the enemy’s views as widely as possible might be the Allies trump card. By their own words they are revealed. Now let them be reviled for them.
An Australian swam 300 yards with a live shark clamped to his leg before driving a mile for assistance to have it removed (the shark, not the leg)!
They make ’em tough down-under!
G’day, Sport!
There is an interesting article by Peaches Geldof about the perils of being a little bit too free and easy with one’s innermost thoughts on-line.
Mandatory reading for all Journal Bloggers!
Now that it seems Saddam Hussain may not in fact have any weapons of mass destruction, Dubya and Blair are being pilloried for having gone to war to oust that particular mass murderous fascist regime.
Sometime in the not too distant future, when it looks like war with North Korea’s mass murderous regime is inevitable, Dubya and Blair (or their successors) will be pilloried for threatening war because the North Koreans have weapons of mass destruction.
And it will be the same people doing the pillorying in both cases.
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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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