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Here is a tweet about a cat video:
I am sure there is some sort of political message in this response to it:
March 31st, 2017 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Marc Sidwell’s book How To Win Like Trump: Nine Simple Rules for Victory Against the Odds explains how Donald Trump won the US presidential election. It is written in the style of a self-help book and in simple Trump-like language. This makes it a fast and easy read: it does not take itself too seriously. And it avoids “Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity”. But it is packed with insight. For example, politicians and the press are between them largely acting out a fiction which has similarities to the kayfabe of professional wrestling.
It explains that Trump’s tweeting is partly about direct contact with people, and partly about quickly testing the product with real users.
This explains his constant changes of mind and hiring and firing, something that his opponents have claimed as a weakness. Another supposed weakness is his apparently defensive and petulant fighting back at anyone who criticises him, as he did with Megyn Kelly.
Marc argues that Trump’s consistent strategy is to maintain peace until he is attacked, and then consistently fire back, and that this is good game theory.
This makes him not such a bad person to be holding the nuclear button:
I am left wondering just how much of Trump’s strategies are luck rather than judgement, and it remains to be seen how long they will continue to work. But I do have more understanding of how the things he does that work, work. It is nice to see it all enumerated and made obvious. Highlights I have not mentioned so far include the description of the way Trump picked off his opponents one by one in the primaries, how he used Clinton’s 3AM phone call commercial against her, and how he makes himself relatable to ordinary Americans. And there is a good bit about how Trump gets inside his opponents’ OODA loops (a concept I heard about years ago from one of my favourite sources of inspiration, Eric Raymond). March 22nd, 2017 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
A university professor wondered what would happen if Donald Trump was a woman and Hillary Clinton was a man.
I would like to see more video than this short excerpt. But they are working on a film version, “shot for shot, as they were televised on TV.” March 7th, 2017 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
The YouTuber Techmoan reveiws electronic gadgets and for some time has been doing investigations into old gadgets. I just watched his highly entertaining video about Digital Audio Tape. DAT made it possible to make a perfect recording in the home. This got music industry people into a bit of a panic. In September 1986 Stanley Gortikov, president of the Recording Industry Association of America, wrote in Billboard that, “an assassination is in the making. The targeted victim is the world’s music industry.” In what I would call something of a semantic muddle, he went on to say, “your country overtly demonstrates that it has contempt for the copyright owners of foreign recordings”. He is not talking to Sony or Onkyo who developed DAT, but to the country of Japan. Perhaps he was hoping to shame the Japanese government into somehow preventing electronics manufacturers from manufacturing certain electronics. But I do find it very odd. In the end the US government made life difficult for the Japanese electronics manufacturers. Watch the whole video to find out about Serial Copy Management System and the Audio Home Recording Act, the technology and products that were available, and the practicality of using a DAT recorder to destroy the music industry (it is not very practical). Then watch all the videos. March 7th, 2017 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
So says Paul Joseph Watson. February 10th, 2017 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
When I was a teenager doing GCSE Science we had a guest speaker come in and talk about what I now know to be The Limits to Growth. We were told about peak oil and how oil production doubles every n years and blah blah blah and it sounded pretty convincing at the time. Fortunately I did not pay it much heed, much as I instinctively did not really care about acid rain or the hole in the ozone layer which were the subject of geography lessons around the same time. It was not until years later I found out about the Club of Rome. I still do not know how, exactly, that guest speaker came to be in that science class, but in retrospect it sounds pretty sinister. I like the band Muse. Their
Of course, as someone at genius.com points out, we have the sun, which should last long enough. I was reminded of all this in an instant messenger chat with Perry Metzger today. He was talking optimistically about solar power. I did a search to check that I was not just imagining that anyone ever took second law arguments about economics seriously. I found a paper.
Perry M said, “if all else fails, we can always use the hot air produced by leftists as a power source indefinitely.” I shared that link. He replied, “that paper alone, Rob, could power London for a month.” February 9th, 2017 | 47 comments - (Comments are closed)
Obama is described in the web novel Unsong:
This post was necessitated by a conversation at Brian’s Friday. January 27th, 2017 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
Sometimes I observe a public discussion and notice that each side is talking across the other and neither side is understanding. I wonder if a change to the language of the debate might be constructive. When Donald Trumps talks about making Mexico pay for the wall by imposing a 20% tariff on imports from Mexico, the left rightly point out that this means that Americans will pay for the wall. Similarly, those who want the UK to remain in European Union talk about the importance of trade. Nearly everyone agrees that tariffs are bad and trade is good. But dig a little deeper and soon it becomes clear that people are not talking about free trade at all. They are talking about the kind of trade that involves hugely complicated and interventionist multilateral treaties between governments. I often try to explain that I am in favour of free trade and that we do not need people in government to make complicated deals: we just need to leave people alone and they will trade with each other. I am met with various objections. Exporters will suffer because foreign governments will increase tariffs and people in foreign countries will find it too expensive to buy British goods. Foreign governments will subsidise production and people in foreign countries will be able to sell things cheaply to British people; so cheaply that British people will stop buying things from British companies until those companies go out of business. At this point the foreign people might put up their prices and if they time it right the prices might never go down again because skills required to restart British companies might be lost. My answer to these objections is that people are clever and they will find ways to make the most of the new situation. But it will be a situation in which people are, on the whole, richer than they were before. Cheap foreign goods make us richer. Not exporting things frees up labour to do other useful things. But I can not deny that in the short term people will lose jobs and will struggle to find new things to do. My arguments are all about how people can get richer in the end. People who think the government can help with trade want to help the man who works in the widget factory and wants to be still working in the widget factory tomorrow. Some Trump supporters and some people in favour of the UK leaving the European Union want to reduce immigration. I am in principle in favour of freedom of movement. I would argue that the ability of people to move to where there is demand for their labour makes production cheaper and everyone richer. But I can not deny that people moving around can make life uncomfortable for people staying still if the people staying still find their wages going down as a result. It is certainly not helpful to make accusations of bigotry in the face of such concerns as people on the left often do. It might turn out that we all agree about what happens when people are free to move and trade, we just have different time preferences. Interestingly, some of the same people who object to unilateral free trade are also in favour of freedom of movement, even though it is equivalent to unilateral free trade in labour. January 27th, 2017 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
I would like there to be some kind of high earnings cap, quite honestly – British opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, who apparently wants the rich to get poorer more than he wants the poor to get richer. January 10th, 2017 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am broadly speaking of Perry’s mindset, though should Trump win I would quite enjoy seeing the shock and horror on the faces of most of the people who are shocked and horrified by him. But that is because I think Trump and Hillary are in the same order of magnitude of badness. Then again, I have found Eliezer Yudkowsky to be right about a lot of things and thought provoking about everything. And he is writing on Facebook.
November 8th, 2016 | 48 comments - (Comments are closed)
I thought I would try to do the National Novel Writing Month thing. It is probably a terrible idea. Announcing it here is probably an even worse idea. I have half a dozen novel ideas I will probably be mashing up together. There will be aliens, strange people who invite strangers into their flats to give and listen to talks, and a not-too-in-your-face libertarian message. Or I might give up half-way through after realising that there is no value in the sleep-deprived ramblings of a man struggling to make an arbitrary word count by an arbitrary deadline. Use the comments thread for encouragement, to tell me I’m an idiot, give me ideas for scenes (I have some crazy alien technology that means I can do almost anything), announce your own similar efforts, or talk about what a libertarian novel might look like. November 1st, 2016 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
Ben Chu in the Independent describes 5 possible Brexit outcomes. The only interesting ones are 4 and 5. Brexit 4 is, “Leave the single market and customs union with no free trade deal in place and trade with Europe under World Trade Organisation rules.” Brexit 5 is, “Leave the single market and customs union with no free trade deal – but unilaterally scrap all import tariffs.” He thinks 4 will make us poor, and 5 is politically impossible because the exporters will make a fuss. I think we will end up with something between 4 and 5, with lots of bluster and threats but ultimately low-ish tariffs because British and EU politicians are not completely self-destructive. But I am a very optimistic person. Of course the tariff structures will be ridiculously complicated and riddled with special interest exceptions. This is funny, from Brexit 3, which is a comprehensive free trade deal that will somehow require a strong customs border: “There would additionally have to be a customs border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, with potentially serious political consequences.” I think any such border would be for appearances only and eyes would be blind to any goods moving across it. This is because trade deals are not really there to improve anyone’s economic prospects. They are to win favour with voters, so only outward appearances matter. They do not need to be properly enforced. Nobody in charge actually cares about smuggling. Incidental note: I was thinking of this song when I wrote the title. Postscript: Further to that, and with apologies to anyone not familiar with the best Megadeth album: Give me sov’renty, give me liberty, I master five Brexits, I master five Brexits I’ll get my coat. October 19th, 2016 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
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