I think we need a Samizdata crowd-sourced entry to the Spectator’s Erdogan offensive poetry competition. Get to work, commentariat!
Edit: apologies for the slow moderation. Comments here seem to be triggering the smite bot a lot for some reason.
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I enjoyed this tweet. Regulars might recognise the name.
April 22nd, 2016 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “One of my top scientists has four kids. How is he going to provide for his kids without profit?” So says Martin Shkreli on this week’s Milo Yiannopoulos Show. Shkreli is supposedly the most hated man in America for raising the price of the drug Daraprim from $18 per dose to $750. The way he tells it, it was like buying a wine company that was selling wine for $2.50 cents per bottle but losing money, when all the similar wine was selling for $100 per bottle. He saved the business. He described being interviewed on CNBC, a business news channel.
Milo laments the regression of America from a place that celebrated success to one where the media and the government like to punish rich people. Shkreli pointed out how people used to love to hate Bill Gates, but they do not any more, now that he is giving he money away. “What else did they think he was going to do with it?” he asks, pointing out that once you have one billion dollars, you can no longer really spend any more on yourself. Shkreli has been arrested on fraud charges. He says the charges against him make no sense, given that his investors are making lots of money. In the interview he comes across as a fun guy who annoys the right people. His Twitter feed is entertaining, too. Update: There is something of an Ayn Rand novel about his questioning from Congress. April 20th, 2016 | 83 comments - (Comments are closed)
Mars, owner of Dolmio and Uncle Ben’s food brands, is labelling its products to tell people which ones they should only eat once per week. It is something to do with trying to get people to eat less sugar, for some reason.
By which she means poor people who are too stupid to be allowed to make their own decisions. And who are Action on Sugar anyway? The writer of the blog Hemiposterical has found that they are the same people as Consensus Action on Salt and Health, funded largely by the mysterious Marcela Trust. What motivates them, I wonder? (Incidentally, even the NHS is very lukewarm about the harmful effects of salt, when pressed.) And where did this new war on sugar come from? There is a sugar tax. There is even an app. Made by a quango. It is like a conspiracy of very boring illuminati. And even evil multinational corporations are going along with it. Very strange. Perhaps it originates from inside the World Health Organisation, who last year urged “countries” to reduce people’s sugar intake by half to 25g per day for adults because sugar causes bad teeth, obesity and diabetes. Yesterday I drank a 330ml bottle of lemonade containing 33g of sugar. I am not obese, do not have diabetes and still have all my teeth. Put yourself in the position of the head of a government agency. You have an amorphous blob of population and you can poke it with various sticks (such as advice, regulation and taxes) and observe the effects (such as the amount of money spent on certain medical treatments). You can vary the pointyness of the sticks and the amount of poking and get different effects. You keep doing this until you get the effect you want. The truth of the stick is irrelevant. Individuals have no reason to think that there is any truth in government advice. It can be ignored (ignoring taxes is harder). What surprises me is that I observe people making some attempt to follow the advice and berating themselves for failing. April 18th, 2016 | 50 comments - (Comments are closed)
April 13th, 2016 | 67 comments - (Comments are closed)
Ethiopia again:
The ruling party in Ethiopia is the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front. The name says a lot. Wikipedia details concisely their ideology.
That would be the kind of decadence that lets us feed ourselves when the weather is bad. The Wikipedia article cites an article in the Addis Ababa university paper.
They fucking know what they have done, and what they should do to fix it.  April 7th, 2016 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
NASA, via The Guardian (and other old media) is trumpeting catastrophe again. “February breaks global temperature records by ‘shocking’ amount” says the headline. “We are in a kind of climate emergency now,” says Stefan Rahmstorf, from Germany’s Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research. On the other hand, towards the end of that article, they mention the El Niño. At Watts Up With That, Bob Tisdale provides some analysis and graphs. I think figure 6 provides the most useful overview, showing up to 0.17 degrees C per decade warming depending on who measures it. I suppose this might just be warming since the little ice age, or man-made but not terribly frightening. A Guardian commenter wrote: “We spend so much time debating and arguing over things like benefits and the economy. Stories like this end up disregarded. The truth seems terrifying – this is the single biggest crisis facing all of humanity.” I replied: “It’s either the single biggest crisis facing all of humanity, or an el Nino that fits in nicely with the between 0.12 and 0.17 degrees C per decade warming we’ve seen since satellite measurements began (which is what all this turned out to be back in 1998). Personally I hope the economy does well, because people with the wealth of middle-class westerners can cope better with a bit of bad weather than can subsistence farmers in the kinds of places that don’t have economic freedom.” March 14th, 2016 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Sam Bowman has written a rip-roaring article about the NHS junior doctors dispute. Instantly win any debate with your NHS-worshipping Facebook friends. March 11th, 2016 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Why I’m an engineer: I decided long long ago that I wanted to avoid any field where the measure of success was a subjective judgement by some authority. – Samizdata commenter ams, explaining why I am happy I became an engineer (of sorts) even if I was not consciously doing it for that reason at the time. March 9th, 2016 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
Someone has made a smartphone app that gets you on a video call to a police officer at the touch of a button. I am sure it has its uses, but take a look at the promotional video. As a Real Feminist, I have a better idea. So do many of the YouTube commenters. March 1st, 2016 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am not even completely sure this is really a thing. Surely Andrew Duffin is having a big laugh at my expense. That has to be it.
How bad can it be? Says a leaflet: “Being responsible means things like…Your child says sorry when they do something wrong…People who work with your child will check your child is responsible.” Just take that in for a moment. “Being respected means things like…Your child gets a say in things like how their room is decorated and what to watch on TV…People who work with your child will check your child is respected.” How are they taking this over at Netmums?
February 26th, 2016 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
February 13th, 2016 | 56 comments - (Comments are closed)
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