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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Every day or two I visit The Croydonian, and today The Croydonian links to an amazing report. Papua New Guinea is having a row with Australia, about an Australian evildoer who escape in a Papua New Guinea airplane, and Papua New Guinea is now threatening a range of nasty things against Australia, of which this, apparently, is the most nasty:
The most serious step being contemplated is the suspension of significant elements of Australian aid deemed not essential to PNG, the Herald understands.
Yes, you did read that right. Papua New Guinea is threatening to cut off aid, from Australia to Papua New Guinea! Imagine the consternation that must now be sweeping through the Australian aiding classes. They do not want us to help them any more! Worse: Perhaps they do not think we were helping.
Is this an idea whose time has come?
For those of you in London, there’s a free showing of a new film on Wednesday looking at "the dark side of environmentalism". I saw Tom Clougherty on the internet TV station 18 Doughty Street (view recording) discuss the film against some statist from the Green Party. Clougherty’s view was that while there is something of the Michael Moore about this film, it makes an important point. It’s about an underdeveloped town in Romania full of unemployment and poverty. Capitalists want to create jobs by building an environmentally-friendly mine, but Western environmentalists swoop in from overseas and try to force the locals to stay poor, saying that the locals are happy being poor. The showing is at One Great George Street, Westminster, London SW1P 3AA. Doors open at 6:30pm, the film starts at 6:45pm, there is a Q&A session at 7:50pm, and there is a drinks reception at 8:15pm. RSVP to iea@iea.org.uk. View the trailer here:
The film is also available on DVD from here.
If this deal goes ahead, it will be the largest example yet of an Indian firm buying a British one. How the world has turned, 60 years on from the end of the British Empire in India.
Anglo-Dutch steelmaker Corus Group Plc is set to recommend a 4.1 billion pound takeover by India’s Tata Steel Ltd as soon as Friday, sources close to the matter said.
Corus’ board met on Wednesday evening to rubber stamp the deal but is waiting until Tata’s board meets, which is expected on Thursday or Friday, before making an official announcement to its shareholders, the sources said.
It will be interesting to see how those anti-globalisation campaigners, who in the past were the same sort of folk to demand that the rich West gives aid to “Third World” nations like India, respond to Indian business purchases of British and other European firms. That is the trouble with fighting evil capitalists – one minute they are wearing pin-striped suits and speak in posh English accents, the next, something quite different. It must be very annoying.
I cannot have a situation where businesses close haphazardly.
– Rt Hon Alistair Darling MP, speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme about the Sub-Post Office network, and neatly demonstrating the dirigiste mentality of the Scottish Raj
Tom Clougherty, the new face at the Globalisation Institute, linked earlier today to a fascinating Wired piece about a new way of extracting drinkable water from “thin air”.
Clougherty is wise enough to use the phrase “If reports are to be believed” when talking about the huge benefits that this invention might have. So, the question is: will it work?
It being, approximately, and give or take a big dollop of industrial (and presumably military) secrecy this:
“People have been trying to figure out how to do this for years, and we just came out of left field in response to Darpa,” said Abe Sher, chief executive officer of Aqua Sciences. “The atmosphere is a river full of water, even in the desert. It won’t work absolutely everywhere, but it works virtually everywhere.”
Sher said he is “not at liberty” to disclose details of the government contracts, except that Aqua Sciences won two highly competitive bids with “some very sophisticated companies.”
He also declined to comment on how the technology actually works.
“This is our secret sauce,” Sher said. “Like Kentucky Fried Chicken, it tastes good, but we won’t tell you what’s in it.”
He did, however, provide a hint: Think of rice used in saltshakers that acts as a magnet to extract water and keeps salt from clumping.
“We figured out how to tap it in a very unique and proprietary way,” Sher said. “We figured out how to mimic nature, using natural salt to extract water and act as a natural decontamination.
“Think of the Dead Sea, where nothing grows around it because the salt dehydrates everything. It’s kind of like that.”
The 20-foot machine can churn out 600 gallons of water a day without using or producing toxic materials and byproducts. The machine was displayed on Capitol Hill last week where a half-dozen lawmakers and some staffers stopped by for a drink.
More about this at engadget, where there is comment on the same Wired piece.
Do any of our more tech-savvy commenters have any other news concerning this apparently wondrous gizmo, or any opinions about whether such a thing is, in principle, likely to work?
“Teach you I cannot, my young Padawan.” As a science fiction reader I am used to meeting strange words and either guessing their meaning through context or not guessing and enjoying the story anyway. So I was only slightly hampered when reading a story in yesterday’s Times headlined “New York Mayor fights drain of IPOs to London” by my complete ignorance of what an “IPO” is and the complete failure of the story to enlighten me. You can tell me all about it in the comments if you must, but as far as I am concerned “eye-pee-oh” could be replaced by any other sequence of sounds, such as snurg-ah-poog or plibble. Plibble it is. Plibbles must be pretty nice things, because the mayor of New York is so concerned that all the plibbles New York used to win (apparently plibbles are things you win) now being won by London that he has appointed management consultants to investigate causes and possible remedies for the Great Plibble Crisis. Concern has focused on the fact that since the passing of the Somebody-Whatsit Act, London has gained a 26.4 per cent share of the global plibbles. Hurrah for London, I think. New York’s problem is that doing whatever you have to do to comply with the Somebody-Whatsit act before you can get your plibbles is one big hassle. So the plibbles go somewhere else.
Blimey, I could have saved Mayor Bloomberg a packet on consultancy fees and I still have no idea what a plibble is.
Come to think of it, anyone could work out that if plibble-getting is made tedious and expensive in your country then plibbleseekers will get their fun somewhere else.
Even if you do not know your plibbles from your twogbots.
This seems like a good idea
The Financial Services Authority (FSA) is to hold a six-week exercise to test the resilience of the UK’s financial institutions to an avian flu pandemic.
Starting on 13 October, some 60 banks, insurance firms and other financial businesses will take part.
The exercise will look at a number of factors including how firms could cope with a greatly reduced workforce
Yes, I know that we free market purists might argue as to why we need a big regulator like Britain’s FSA to set this up, but even in the absence of such a body, smart businesses would be looking to stress-test their systems against a potential serious problem like avian flu. And it is serious. Naysayers may jest about how much effort was expended on the Y2K technology issue (remember that?) but I am encouraged that these sorts of issues are taken seriously. The health of the London-centred financial system is critical, not just to the British economy, but to the wider trading system as well.
Tyler Cowen, hardly a scaremonger, has thoughts about possible preparations that should be taken.
There is a military coup in Thailand, a crazed leader of Iran denying the Holocaust and prattling about the return of the “12 Iman”; a Venezuelan demogague brandishes the work of terrorist sympathiser Noam Chomsky; there are riots in the streets of Hungary, a major hedge fund loses billions in the gas market.
What do the world’s economic markets do in response to all this? Well, as historian Niall Ferguson notes, they do remarkably little:
The price of crude oil for November delivery fell 5 per cent last week, even as Messrs Ahmadinejad and Chávez were holding their rant-fest. On news of the coup in Bangkok, the Thai currency declined by little more than 1 per cent against the dollar – nothing compared with its spectacular gyrations during the Asian crisis of 1997. Investors in the Hungarian stock market are not having a great year, it’s true, but recent political events have barely registered. If you invested in Budapest two years ago, you have still nearly doubled your money.
To see just how far politics and economics have parted ways, just consider which of the world’s stock markets have done best so far this year. In pole position is Morocco (up 58 per cent in dollar terms since January 1). Next is none other than Mr Chávez’s Venezuela, up 49 per cent. In third place is Indonesia, where three Christian men were executed on Friday for their part in sectarian violence, sparking riots (34 per cent). Russia, where it is bankers who get the bullet, is not far behind on 32 per cent.
He goes on to argue:
investors are continuing to mistake liquidity for security. Despite the much-trumpeted tightening of interest rates by the world’s principal central banks, the reality is that monetary expansion has barely slowed. In Britain, for example, the broad money measure M4 grew at an annual rate of 13 per cent in July, a remarkable figure. Money may be dearer, but it is still amazingly plentiful. That seems to be encouraging a rather cavalier approach to risk assessment.
So it would seem.
Mr H. Benn (the ‘Overseas Development’ minister) has announced that the British government will withhold £50 million (US$ 94 million) of taxpayers money that it was to pay to the World Bank to be lent out to ‘Third World’ governments.
Mr Benn said this was protest against the World Bank’s policy of demanding free trade and privatization in return for loans. Actually the World Bank does not do that very much any more. These days it normally just demands that a loan (for example) for education actually be spent on education – rather than go in corruption.
However, I still think the government was right to withhold the money (and not because I am against free trade or privatization – or think that the same economic principles can produce good results in one country and bad results in another, as a weird editorial in the Daily Telegraph claimed), but because I do not believe that taxpayers money should be taken by the government and given to the World Bank.
The World Bank should not exist (and nor should the IMF). If ‘Third World’ governments want state education (or some other folly) they should pay for it themselves – as they will have to after the loan money runs out anyway. All the loan achieves is to give them a debt to pay back on top of the future state education (or whatever) bill.
The senior Russian central bank official who was shot dead this week was a prominent campaigner against money-laundering. No matter what one thinks of some of the more oppressive laws against money transfers – as a libertarian, I find a lot of such laws counter-productive and intrusive of privacy – there is no doubt that Russia has a terrible reputation for financial skulduggery. By going against financial hoodlums, it sadly appears this guy signed his death warrant.
Funnily enough, this story does not appear to have caused much of a stir outside the business sections and some of the foreign bits of the press. I find that a bit odd, if not chilling. A senior central bank official gets murdered. Imagine the reaction if a top official working for the Bank of England or the Fed got killed.
Russia has a long, long way to go before it becomes a place in which civilised people will want to do business.
This by George Reisman, economist and free marketeer:
The New York Times reports that the European Commission has “ordered Microsoft to disclose secret code in Windows XP needed by rivals to allow them to write programs that work properly with Windows. And it required the company to introduce a second version of Windows XP with its audio and video player removed.”
The European Commission is also reported to be drafting a ruling that will require the world tennis champion Roger Federer to share the secrets of his play with rivals, to enable them, for example, to better integrate their returns with his serves.
In still another development, the European Commission is reported to be contemplating barring the sale of automobiles and other motor vehicles equipped with radios, CD players, or video players. The ruling is held to be necessary to preserve the separate markets of the suppliers of these devices and not allow them to be monopolized by automakers.
Here is more about anti-trust pursuit of Microsoft by the European Union, in a slightly less irreverent vein.
As did many many countries, Australia prior to the 1980s had a state owned telecommunications monopoly. This company, part of the Post Office until 1976, after that named Telecom Australia and now named Telstra Corporation, charged too much, took several months to connect new telephone lines, and was generally ghastly and bureaucratic. As was also common in those days, the management of this organisation also had a rather grandiose sense of its own importance and its great civilizing and statist mission to bring telecommunications to all of the people of Australia, wherever they might be. Australia’s capital city of Canberra is a fair way inland, a long way from anything else of significance, and is full of large edifices built with taxpayers’ money. In the 1970s, Telecom decided that it needed an edifice of its own in the capital city, and Telecom Tower was built on Black Mountain (actually a not terribly large hill) overlooking Canberra.
 This was ostensibly a communications tower with a viewing gallery (and revolving restaurant) for admiring the view as well, but was actually a large bureaucratic organisation building a monument to its own Ozymandius like belief that it was an organisation of great permanence and importance. I last visited the tower about a decade ago, and even then it seemed a remnant from another age. There were signs talking about when and where it had been built and about the significance of telecommunications, diagrams comparing it to other structures around the world, a plaque stating it was a member of some global organisation of towers, pictures of engineers shaking hands at the groundbreaking, pictures of politicians declaring the tower open, and an extraordinary lack of humour of any kind. The word that the friend I visited it with used to describe it was ‘Soviet’, and it was hard to disagree.
Which was why it was interesting to visit another television tower a couple of weeks ago, the tower in Tallinn in Estonia. This can be seen in the distance from many parts of the city, and of course, rather than the TV tower in Australia that merely seemed Soviet, this tower actually was Soviet, so I had to see it. I knew just looking at it from a distance that this had been built as much as a symbol of Soviet domination and power as for actual telecommunications purposes, and that one way that this would be asserted would be through a viewing gallery and restaurant here, also. As I often do I was carrying a Lonely Planet guidebook. As is expected in such a guidebook, the book mentioned the TV tower by sneering at it, suggesting that the writers and readers of such a book would be much too good and much too authentic travellers to go up something as touristy as a viewing gallery in a TV tower, but we none the less have a duty to mention it in the guidebook.
 So, I caught a bus to the TV tower. When I got there I found it to be rather run down. There was an attendant at the gate collecting money, but the lift lobby was deserted and I had to push the button to be taken up myself. However, in the lower gallery were the expected signs explaining how “Expert engineers from the Moscow design bureau” had designed the tower, pictures of workers shaking hands at the groundbreaking, pompous looking bureaucrats strutting around at an opening, diagrams comparing the tower to others elsewhere, and that kind of eerily familiar thing.
 But there was something else, of course. Something much more historically interesting. → Continue reading: On telecommunications, tanks, Soviet housing estates in Estonia, and ethnically complicated shipping containers
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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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