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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According to the New York Times:
In an attempt to erase a $210,000 penalty the utility said the company owed for [over]estimating its power use, Microsoft proceeded to simply waste millions of watts of electricity, records show. Then it threatened to continue burning power in what it acknowledged was an “unnecessarily wasteful” way until the fine was substantially cut, according to documents obtained by The New York Times.
To which my initial reaction was, “hell, yes. Go Microsoft! You kick ass!”, and my more considered reaction is, yes, that is perfectly rational. Microsoft used “giant heaters” to burn $70,000 worth of electricity in three days and avoid the penalty; an impressive feat.
[Edit for clarity]: The utility “requires large industrial customers to file load forecasts each fall for the next calendar year and face a penalty if they are off by a significant margin in either direction”. Microsoft used less electricity than it forecast and realised it could just burn some up to avoid paying the penalty.
The obvious question is, why would the penalty for overestimating use be more than the cost of the estimated use? It is a question that commenters at the Verge, where I first read this story, are speculating about. My favourite comment here is a response to complaints that all the comments are excusing Microsoft: “I don’t think it’s MS apologists in this instance. They seem more like libertarians and climatology deniers.”
It could simply be that the fees really are in line with the utility’s costs, but in that case Microsoft’s actions would be nothing for anyone to complain about. It seems more likely that some sort of market distortion is going on. The “utility” in question is Grant County Public Utility District, tagline “Community Owned and Operated”. Perhaps there are some clues there.
The Verge also reports on a New York Times crusade against the energy cost of the Internet. Sigh.
Occasionally a taxi driver will complain to me about the costs of licensing or the expensive safety test he is about to send his car in for. I always suggest that there is no need for taxi licensing at all. The taxi driver does not like this one bit. Of course not: the main purpose of licensing is to restrict supply and keep prices high.
This is rarely admitted. Instead we are warned of the dangers of unlicensed taxis. And dangers there are, but it is nothing that can not be solved with private certification schemes or branding.
The makers of a smartphone app called Uber are currently having various battles with taxi licensing authorities. They want to make it easier for people to order and pay for taxis and presumably in return take a cut of the fares. Price controls, metering and rules about how drivers are paid are getting in their way.
Meanwhile in Chennai, auto-rickshaws (known elsewhere as tuk tuks) are not metered. There is a campaign to have meters installed in them to fix the prices along with “proper” regulation and licensing. One problem people are complaining about is high prices; another is the behaviour of drivers, such as choosing customers and forcing people to share rides. These problems suggest to me that there is a shortage of auto-rickshaws, but my friend from Chennai disagrees. She explains that there are plenty of drivers, but they agree amongst themselves who will take which passenger so that passengers can not choose between drivers to get a better deal. This sounds like union behaviour, and an obvious question with perhaps an obvious answer is: what stops drivers operating outside of the union?
Here is a typical comment from the Missing Meter Facebook page:
the auto stand in my area itself (near perungudi bus stop – OMR)…… they will ask triple the charge if they see me in urge of going (dressed like professional)…. they will not let the autos to stop which are passing by… so we will end up in negotiating with those guys & pay atleast double the amount of real charge… apprx – 20 rs / km… this happens almost all the time….
Establishing free markets is never easy.
A friend I have regular discussions with wrote this in an email in 2006:
Even the Americans are slowly blinking in the dawn of realisation. It’s not even worth trying – on one side you have massive amounts of peer-reviewed solid evidence. On the other side, you have Rob regurgitating conspiracy blogs. What can you do?
Just the other day, on Google Plus, the same friend linked to a paper called Germany’s Solar Cell Promotion: An Unfolding Disaster, containing section headings like “The Immense Financial Consequences of PV Promotion”.
Something has changed.
Michael Jennings quotes Douglas Adams speculating that curing all disease will leave us bored.
…total cures had a lot of unpleasant side effects. Boredom, listlessness…
A typical response to any suggestion of labour saving devices or increased automation or robots in factories is that this will lead to people being bored and not having enough to do.
Related, I think, to this, is the worry that if longevity technology works then the planet will be overpopulated and anyway who would want to live forever? Surely one would get bored. This is exactly what happened in the comments to a Gizmodo article about research into making stem cells from normal blood cells.
Live forever and do what? Continue to work six days a week to pay for your life-extension medical plan? That doesn’t seem worth it.
I propose that people will not get bored so easily. The removal of one set of problems simply makes the next set of problems more urgent. Humans are infinitely imaginative at finding problems to solve. There will always be challenges. I present as evidence Paul Miller who has taken a year off the Internet. He uses computers but does not send emails or read Twitter or surf the web. He writes articles for the Verge by giving them to his editor on a USB stick. He does not read the comments to his articles. People think he is mad and wonder how he copes. He makes interesting observations.
Without the internet, everything seemed new to me. Every untweeted observation of daily life was more sacred. Every conversation was face to face or a phone call, and filled with a hundred fresh nuances. The air smelled better. My sentences seemed less convoluted. I lost a bit of weight.
[…]
But now that not having internet is no longer new, just normal, the zen calm is gone. I don’t wake with the sunrise while chirping birds pull back the covers. I still have a job. I feel pressure and stress and frustration. I get lonely and bored. My articles aren’t always submitted on time. Sometimes my sentences aren’t good.
I’m just stock Paul Miller. No more Not-Using-The-Internet custom skin; I’m just myself. And it’s not all sunshine and epiphanies.
[…]
But I’m still Paul.
“I just wasn’t made for these times,” sing The Beach Boys. “Sometimes I feel very sad,” goes the refrain, and sometimes I do, indeed, feel very sad. But after switching myself to a pre-internet era, I can assure you “these times” don’t have much to do with it. It’s just, you know, life.
Not having the Internet has not changed Paul. He does the same things; some are easier and some are harder. This means that in the reverse, gaining the Internet will not change Paul either. His challenges will be different in some ways and the same in others. I think the same would be true of any other technology. There may be net changes in productivity but increased productivity does not lead to boredom.
I suspect the mistake made by those who fear solving too many problems is an assumption that nothing else will change either. If we are all perfectly healthy we will attempt the same feats that we attempt now but find them too easy. Of course this is ludicrous; we will attempt more challenging feats. If we can build everything we need today with robots at the push of a button we will get bored. Of course not, we will build more stuff.
If we can live for 10,000 years we will overpopulate the planet and run out of things to do. Of course not. We will probably only have children every few hundred years (plenty of time to develop hydroponics and colonise space) and in the meantime we can lead as many different lives as we like.
Wise words from Zed A. Shaw:
To me indoctrination is the enemy of education because it creates people who can’t think for themselves and can only function in the culture they’ve been raised. It makes them into little mental slaves that can’t question what’s going on and see the world for what it really is.
Instead I want people who will question the way things are, try to find out how things are really built, explore the world and build new stuff without worrying about whether they’ll anger some community. They can’t do this if their thinking is constrained by these arbitrary social norms that only exist to keep them in line with what the community wants, or worse what the leaders of the community want.
When you teach people social norms as if they are universal truths you are actually indoctrinating them not educating them.
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Then again, this is probably the reason these social mores are enforced and taught. Teaching social mores as universal truths keeps people dependent on […] use of them.
Keep in mind though I’m not saying teaching these social mores is wrong and should be avoided. I’m saying teaching them as if they are the universal truths is bad. I teach them too, but I teach them as if they are just arbitrary bullshit you need…
I am probably being unfair by quoting him so out of context. Shaw is writing about programming. But still.
Almost a SQOTD, but Guy beat me to it:
The technical and economic advantages of coattailing on the economies of scale of the trillion-dollar mobile-phone industry are astounding. If you want to understand why the personal-drone revolution is happening now, look no farther than your pocket.
That is Chris Anderson in Wired writing about how automated flying aircraft happen to need just the same sensors and processors that are found in smartphones, and hobbyists and increasingly serious people like farmers surveying their crops are taking advantage of this.
I suspect his first sentence applies more generally.
This is a long and detailed review of a gadget which might be more at home on a specialist tech blog than on Samizdata, but it serves also as a snapshot of the world of mobile electronics, a world that is perhaps less encumbered by regulation than is usual, which might explain the rate of improvement.
By far the most exciting developments in consumer electronics right now are in mobile devices, in particular smartphones. System-on-chip manufacturers such as Qualcomm and Nvidia are cutting prices and transistor sizes while increasing performance such that a new generation of devices with significantly improved capabilities comes along about every 18 months or so. A lot of learning is going on about what kinds of devices work best. The original iPhone had a 4-inch touch screen and only one button. Since then physical keyboards have somewhat gone out of fashion, tablets have appeared in various sizes, netbooks have disappeared, ultrabooks have appeared, and phones have got bigger, in contrast to a few years ago when everyone was trying to make them smaller. The point is that no-one really knows which kinds of devices fit in best with people’s lives and which do not. With formerly successful companies dying out, capitalism is mercilessly finding out.
No company is having more fun finding out than Asus. They pioneered the netbook — a small, cheap laptop — with their Eee PC. They combined the tablet with the netbook with their Transformer series of devices by making the screen detachable from the keyboard. And just recently they have taken this idea to a new extreme by sticking a smartphone inside the tablet. → Continue reading: Asus Padfone
There is controversy over empty seats at sold out events at the Olympics. People who could not get tickets are annoyed to see them.
The way that tickets were sold is odd. I know people who applied for tickets in ony the events they were interested in and were allocated no tickets. I know other people who applied for lots of events and got tickets they were not interested in. It would not surprise me if some of those empty seats belong to people who decided against going to events they had tickets for because they were not interested enough. The tickets were sold this way to stop the prices getting so high that poor people could not afford them. The tickets can not be transferred for the same reason.
The trouble is that you either have a market or you have a lottery. There are no other choices, no matter how you try to dress it up. The trouble with lotteries is they do not allocate resources efficiently.
I recently had this conversation on Twitter:
Rupert Murdoch said something and I replied. Someone else overheard and I sent him a link to Madsen Pirie’s series of videos about economics. Well, how would you answer that question in 144 characters? Now one more person knows that there is such a thing as Austrian economics.
I am not surprised to encounter people who have never heard of it. “Economists” are presented as a homogeneous blob by the mainstream media. It is nice to be asked about it and to have the answer be appreciated.
I have been playing on my Asus Padfone (review to follow) with an app called Zinio, which lets users buy electronic versions of print magazines. It came with a free sample of the November 2011 edition of India Today. As far as I can tell the magazine is run and written by Indians. According to Wikipedia it is published in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam as well as English. So I imagine it provides some kind of snapshot of the opinion and thinking that is going on inside India, rather than an outsider’s view. The cover story was about cotton farmers who are committing suicide because they can not pay their debts. A boxout by Dhiraj Nayyar entitled “Government the Culprit” reads:
Rahul Gandhi has a straightforward explanation for why farmers in Vidarbha commit suicide. Speaking on the perils of globalisation on October 18, he said, “The farmer in Vidarbha drinks pesticide as global prices tumble.” The economics behind the suicides of cotton farmers in Maharashtra is more complex.
Contrary to Rahul’s claim, it is the Government which has done more to depress the prices of cotton than the international market has. The Government has imposed numerous restrictions on the export of cotton since April 2010. This has led to a decline in the domestic price that farmers get.
…
The use of genetically modified Bt cotton has been at the centre of controversy, with activists blaming it for the plight of farmers. Evidence suggests that Bt cotton has been good for farmers. A position paper published by the Foundation for Biotechnology Awareness and Education, an NGO, quotes five independent academic studies conducted after the launch of Bt cotton in 2002, that say that Bt cotton has increased yields in India by 30.9 per cent to 63 per cent. The increase in profit to farmers, according to these studies, has ranged from 50 to 110 per cent over non-Bt cotton.
This seems like sound thinking so far. I wonder why the Indian government would restrict export of cotton.
While Bt cotton is resistant to pests, it is not resistant to droughts. So crops still fail.
In normal course, farmers are entitled to a concessional financial bailout from the local administration or public sector banks. They don’t always get it. “The administration will only help if the farmer was using a seed approved by the Government. A lot of farmers use unapproved seeds”, says [agricultural economist Yoginder] Alagh. By his estimate, there are 20 large firms and anywhere between 200-300 small firms which sell Bt seeds. Most small firms aren’t Government approved but sell seeds cheap. Banks are usually reluctant to lend to indebted farmers because they lack collateral. That sends farmers into the clutches of moneylenders who charge between 25 and 40 per cent interest instead of the 7-9 per cent charged by banks. It isn’t Bt cotton that has failed farmers. It is the failure of back-up systems that has.
I am not so sure about this appeal to government bailout schemes. The implication here is that the government is wrong to favour seeds from certain suppliers. There may be rational reasons for doing so, such as seed quality, or there may be political connections with certain suppliers. I imagine that a free market solution, such as insurance or futures trading, would be more likely to make only rational and proportional restrictions. Could the government scheme be crowding out such solutions?
In any case, I am encouraged to detect a somewhat pro-free-market stance in a mainstream magazine in India.
I would like to think it means something that this story is in the Metro, a London free paper, but it is probably there only because the video of the robbers running for their lives is so funny. Other than where it appears, there is nothing unusual about the story. Gun use for self defense seems quite common.
3D printing is about to change the world, the news app on my tablet is telling me (as has Brian Micklethwait, for some time). Although the technique has been used for years for making 3D mock-ups, advances in materials mean that it is increasingly used to make the real thing.
But for years, the plastics and the metals that were used were just not robust enough to create a prototype that you could be proud of. They resembled paraffin waxes. They could create the parts, but those parts tended to be flimsy. Because the end product didn’t have structural integrity, the technology was really just for engineers who were creating a product in CAD and needed to see what it looked like in real life.
The revolution took place when companies like 3D Systems started designing radically new materials. (See the article Substance Before Form for more.)
They came up with nanocomposites, different blends of plastics, and different blends of powdered metals. They were then able to create a part that, if you held it in your hand, you’d think it was steel. You can throw it down on the ground against cement, and it looks and acts just like steel.
It’s impressive how the industry has graduated from flimsy, waxy plastics to very, very robust materials that can literally be used as a machine part, rather than just a prototype of a part.
The industry graduated from just being about rapid prototyping—i.e., this is going to be something that’s only an R & D function—to becoming a manufacturing strategy. We can make parts through this method, and the parts can go on the car, and the parts can go on the plane. They can also go in the human body, in the case of dental or medical applications.
Prosthetics is just the sort of area where one would expect 3D printing to take off first, because of the high degree of personalisation needed. Now it seems people are taking it seriously as a mass manufacturing method and investing their money in this direction. I expect this degree of personalisation will spread to other things, where it is merely desired.
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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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