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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In China, the government wanted to build a road where there were some flats. Instead of evicting the residents, they lured them away with money. But for one couple the money was not enough, so the rest of the building was knocked down and the road was built anyway. The couple who refused to move now live in the middle of the road.
The article does not mention whether they still have water and electricity, but it does give some other examples of similar situations where utilities were disconnected.
This is China, so it is likely that there is more going on than meets the eye. But on the face of it no property rights have been violated. The land the road sits on was bought fair and square. This situation demonstrates that compulsory purchase and eminent domain are not necessary to solve the problem of recalcitrant landowners: if all your neighbours sell it is likely that your property is about to lose value and you would be wise to sell also.
In recognition of the increasing impact television has on decision-making by bringing world attention to conflicts and threats to peace and security and its potential role in sharpening the focus on other major issues, including economic and social issues, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 21 November as World Television Day (through resolution 51/205 of 17 December 1996).
Clearly someone does not have enough real work to do.
Keynesian policies will keep us in a constant loop of distorted markets and growing imbalances. They guarantee us a Groundhog Day of economic depression.
— Detlev Schlichter, 8th November 2012
…triple-dip recession…
— The Bank of England, 14th November 2012
Patrick Crozier, Michael Jennings and Brian Micklethwait are currently sat around my television discussing the election. We plan to stay here eating pizza and drinking beer for as long as we can stand. I will be posting some sort of running commentary in a hastily prepared chat room. If you want to join in, give yourself a username and leave the password blank.
In primary school I very much enjoyed arithmetic. I distinctly remember rattling through activity books with names like “Starting Points” and “Fletcher”. One day, someone, possibly a teacher, alluded to a kind of mathematics that involved letters instead of numbers. It sounded very interesting, and I looked forward to “getting to” that. That was how it was, in school. You sort of learned what you were told to learn.
At the time it did not occur to me that I could just go and study algebra. In fairness I remember individual teachers in later years who gave me out-of-curriculum books to take home. But looking back on this I am left thinking that it is very easy for schools to hold children back, and even beat the enthusiasm out of them. I think the unschooling movement gets a lot of things right. Self-directed learning is more efficient because you are always studying what you are interested in.
Meanwhile, in Ethiopia, we find out what happens when you leave a big pile of tablet computers (loaded with Neal-Stephenson-Diamond-Age-esque software) in a village with no school.
We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.
The US Supreme Court is going to be discussing the legal doctrine of first sale today, in a case that has something to do with school textbooks but will ultimately have further repercussions. Your right to first sale means that you are allowed to sell on books and DVDs that you bought. However publishers are attempting to license, rather than sell, such materials, and these end user license agreements seek to prevent such selling on.
I find it hard to agree with either side in the debate. On the one hand, if you want to sell on a book that you bought in a book shop, this should not be answered with violence. On the other hand, if you write a book and want to sell it on the condition that the buyer does not then sell it on to someone else, this should not be answered with violence. What if you attempt to make this agreement and the buyer then breaks it? Refuse to deal with that buyer again and tell all your friends. Not practical? Consider alternative business models. The state should neither uphold nor prohibit specific business models, and I suspect it should not be involved in contract enforcement either.
For a publisher there are plenty of non-violent solutions, such as encryption, digital rights management, watermarking, subscription services or being so awesome that everyone wants to throw money at you.
I have been reading the libertarian sub-Reddit lately. I recommend it. Interesting links are posted, discussion ensues, and thanks to the voting system, interesting comments float to the top. Such as:
Due process has now been reduced to a signal from a dog, which doesn’t even have to be documented.
And why did we do this? What cause was so noble that its pursuit justified the mutilation of our one protection against arbitrary punishment? Oh yeah – protecting people from their own bad decisions.
This is from the discussion of a story from the Institute for Justice about police using an alert from a sniffer dog as an excuse to seize assets even if no drugs are found.
The Institute for Justice is “our nation’s only libertarian public interest law firm”. They have also taken an interest in eminent domain.
…out of my cold, dead hands. I am always using the tech industry as an example of how wonderful things can be when largely unregulated by governments. But of course it is not really true.
There are currently seven specifications for graphics cards – G1, G2, G3, G4, G5, G6 and G7. Graphics cards of the G7 classification have a bandwidth of 128 GB/s (GigaByte per Second) and more, without an upper limit today. The category depends on the performance – in this case measured in memory bandwidth. These GPU categories are also paired with a certain level of energy efficiency. If a graphics card doesn’t live up to the standard set by the EC it can be removed from all markets within the EU. The rules will now be constricted, which threatens next generation graphics cards.
Blah, blah, blah, etc. The thing to realise is that the EC is taking an arbitrary measurement (memory bandwidth), making arbitrary categories, and then applying energy consumption limits to the categories. But innovation does not work that way. Specialised graphics processing hardware might choose any number of other trade-offs than memory bandwidth to achieve other goals. What will happen now is that human effort will be spent on maximising performance within constraints set by bureaucrats.
Hat-tip to the libertarian sub-Reddit.
Update: The source article has been updated (thanks to Sigivald for noticing). It seems graphics cards with a high enough memory bandwidth are now said to be exempt from the regulations. But this is in itself a restriction and regulations only ever get more restrictive.
ARMA III is a realistic first person military simulation game set on an accurate, high-definition rendering of the Greek Island of Lemnos which is close to Turkey. Last year the mayor of Lemnos expressed his displeasure at this, citing the Island’s peaceful reputation, while the head of the town council worried about national security.
This year, two of the game’s developers visited the island and ended up in prison for allegedly taking photographs of military installations there. Perhaps they had not heard of what happens to plane spotters in Greece. They are having to wait in jail for their trial for a long time because Greek judges have gone on strike in protest against austerity measures.
I am not sure what all this means but I will be considering other holiday destinations. Hat tip to Reddit.
What I like about these fake London Underground signs is the implicit disrespect of authority. If this idea catches on, some poor Transport for London official will have to make a statement about the importance and seriousness of signage on the London Underground and the terrible risks of meddling with it. This will only add to the fun, much as the fake cigarette health warning stickers were made funnier by the neo-puritans’ humourless reaction to them.
I want to see more of this kind of misbehaviour.
Participants completed a survey asking them to agree or disagree with statements such as “large scale governmental surveillance of e-mail and Internet traffic ought to be forbidden as a means to combat international crime and terrorism”. When they reviewed their copy of the survey their responses had been covertly changed, but 69% failed to notice at least one of two changes, and when asked to explain their answers 53% argued in favor of what they falsely believed was their original choice
Whoah. This is from a post on Less Wrong, wherein some more details and links to the study and video, along with discussion.
Anand, I’d like to thank you on behalf of pretty much every single person on the planet. You’re doing an amazing job with making companies actually care about their customers and do what is right.
Thank you so much, and keep up the amazing work.
This comment was left on the Anandtech review of a solid state data storage device. Anandtech is something of a force in the tech world. It reviews computer components, developing ways of testing and comparing them. It describes in detail how they work and how this affects what they can and can not do, and how relatively well they do this or that thing. Because so much detail is provided, and because Anandtech listens to its commenters and makes corrections when errors are noticed, I find it is usually sufficient for my needs to skip to the end of a 10,000 word review, knowing that I can trust the summary.
The quote above is in response to the description of an email conversation between the site’s founder, Anand Shimpi, and top executives at the company producing the solid state drives. The essence of the discussion is that Anand has found that use of internal components from different manufacturers affects the performance of the drive. Customers can not tell what they are getting just by looking at the outside of the product, so he would like the company to label their products accordingly so that customers can decide which ones to buy.
Anandtech is such a force in the tech world that the company immediately agreed.
Imagine that. Improved product labelling without any government regulation required.
Update: title changed as suggested by Brian in the comments.
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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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