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.
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Alex Tabarrok over at the Marginal Revolution blog has an interesting item that pushes back against the idea that the items we buy, such as clothes and household appliances such as electric toasters, fridges and vacuum cleaners, don’t last as long and that is something terrible and a fault of modern capitalism, yadda-yadda.
He concludes: “appliance durability hasn’t collapsed—it’s evolved to meet consumer demand. We’re not being ripped off. We are getting better products at better prices. Rising incomes have simply redefined what “better” means.”
One part of it, as Tabarrok said, is that the “Baumol Effect” shows that the cost of repairing stuff rises vs the cost of buying that new toaster, flat-screen TV or whatever. And that seems to make sense. I’ve also noticed with a lot of modern tech, it is less reparable. That is partly, I think, a function of moving to a digital from analogue world. I am just about old enough to remember how to service my first car, including changing the spark plugs on the engine, etc. Nowadays, the chance of maintaining a modern car engine rank alongside how I’d fix the human brain.
The MR post also cites this excellent and detailed Rachel Wharton article in the New York Times’ “Wirecutter” publication, which contests the idea that “planned obsolescence” – some fiendish business tactic – is the cause.
Read the article and you will learn a lot about the market for fridges. You will thank me later.
“The Covid ‘lab leak’ theory isn’t just a rightwing conspiracy – pretending that’s the case is bad for science”, writes Jane Qiu in the Guardian.
That’s right. In the Guardian. My surprise at the location of the article was equalled by my surprise at the location of its writer: “Jane Qiu is an award-winning independent science writer in Beijing.” I didn’t know there were independent science writers in Beijing, but I guess there must be for an article on this particular topic written by someone describing themselves as such to appear. Anyway, she writes:
Some scientists assert evidence supporting natural-origins hypotheses with excessive confidence and show little tolerance for dissenting views. They have appeared eager to shut down the debate, repeatedly and since early 2020. For instance, when their work was published in the journal Science in 2022, they proclaimed the case closed and lab-leak theories dead. Even researchers leaning towards natural origins theories, such as the virus ecologist Vincent Munster of Rocky Mountains Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana, told me they lamented that some of their colleagues defend their theories “like a religion”.
No one embodies the crisis of trust in science more than Peter Daszak, the former president of EcoHealth Alliance. A series of missteps on his part has helped to fuel public distrust. In early 2020, for instance, he organised a statement by dozens of prominent scientists in the Lancet, which strongly condemned “conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin”, without disclosing his nearly two-decade collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a conflict of interest.
Similarly, he denies that his own collaboration with the Wuhan lab involved gain-of-function research, even though Shi Zhengli – the Chinese scientist who led the bat-borne coronavirus studies – has openly acknowledged that the lab’s work produced at least one genetically modified virus more virulent than its parental strain. (That work is not directly relevant to the origins of Covid-19.)
The documentary [Christian Frei’s Blame: Bats, Politics and a Planet Out of Balance, short title Blame] claims that attacks on EcoHealth Alliance and the spread of lab-leak conspiracy theories have fuelled distrust in science. In reality, it’s the other way round: public distrust in science, fuelled by the unresolved H5N1 gain-of-function controversy and by lack of transparency and humility from scientists such as Daszak, has driven scepticism and increased support for lab-leak theories.
This is not news to anyone who has read Matt Ridley and Alina Chan’s book Viral. Or to anyone who does not entirely get their news from the Guardian, the BBC and the New York Times, come to think of it. Still, better five years late than never. Why now, I wonder? Did someone at the Scott Trust take Katharine Viner to one side and gently suggest that it would be nice if the customary Guardian delay between “this is an absurd far right conspiracy theory” and “it’s the fault of the far right for talking about it before we did and using up all the available words” was not too far out of line with the nearly four years it took to admit Hunter Biden’s laptop was real and Joe Biden was senile? Or is something big about to break?
Sadiq Khan, the Labour mayor of London, and Anne Hidalgo, the Parti Socialiste mayor of Paris, have written a joint article for the Guardian called “In London and Paris, we’ve experienced vicious backlash to climate action. But we’re not backing down”. They write,
“We welcome efforts such as the EU’s Digital Services Act, which requires online platforms to counter the spread of illegal content, including disinformation, and lays the groundwork for holding platforms accountable. But much more is needed. For example, the UK’s Online Safety Act could be strengthened by explicitly recognising climate disinformation as a form of harmful content.”
It is remarkable how people who would be ashamed to support a law to “counter the spread of illegal speech” happily praise a law that “counters the spread of illegal content.” The magic of words: just re-label “speech” as “content” – as being inside something – and it can now truly be contained, as in “restrained or controlled”.
The same people regularly proclaim that Europe is a place which has banished censorship of the press. That is almost true, although both the EU and the UK governments are working to restore their old powers. In the meantime they are willing enough to temporarily refrain from censorship of ideas spread by old technology if it gives them cover for censoring ideas spread by new technology.
Do not go along with their word games. The term “Freedom of the press” is not restricted to words conveyed to the public by means of a a mechanical device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a print medium. Nor does “freedom of speech” only refer to words that come out of mouths by the action of tongue and lips. In the words of a source they claim to respect, Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says,
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Emphasis added.
And while I’m emphasising things, let me also emphasise this: the minute I learn that an idea is being censored, I give that idea more credence.
No, that does not mean that I automatically believe any censored idea entirely. (How could I? A million contradictory falsehoods are censored alongside the truth. The problem is that the act of censorship destroys our ability to tell which of them is the truth.) It means that I strain to hear what is being said behind the gag. It means that I start to wonder how real the claimed consensus is, if those who depart from it are silenced. It means that I start to wonder why the proponents of the “accepted” view feel the need to protect it from counter-arguments.
I said in 2012 that my belief in Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) was two and a half letters to the left compared to most commenters on this blog. Damn, it should have been one and a half letters to the right. Oh well, you knew what I meant. With regard to CAGW or whatever they are calling it now, whether I phrase it as my belief moving to the left or my disbelief moving to the right, the surest way to make that movement happen is to pass a law defining “climate disinformation as a form of harmful content”. Then I will know that the so-called scientific consensus on climate change is no such thing. If certain hypotheses cannot be discussed, not only is there no scientific consensus, there is no science.
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A related post, but focussing on self-censorship rather than the government censorship that Mayors Khan and Hidalgo favour: “Bubbles, lies and buttered toast.” Any form of censorship is fatal to science.
Today’s Guardian has up an article with the title “Climate misinformation turning crisis into catastrophe, report says” and the strapline “False claims obstructing climate action, say researchers, amid calls for climate lies to be criminalised”.
Quote:
Climate misinformation – the term used by the report for both deliberate and inadvertent falsehoods – is of increasing concern. Last Thursday, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and climate change, Elisa Morgera, called for misinformation and greenwashing by the fossil fuel industry to be criminalised. On Saturday, Brazil, host of the upcoming Cop30 climate summit, will rally nations behind a separate UN initiative to crack down on climate misinformation.
“It is a major problem,” said Dr Klaus Jensen, of the University of Copenhagen, who co-led the Ipie review. “If we don’t have the right information available, how are we going to vote for the right causes and politicians, and how are politicians going to translate the clear evidence into the necessary action?
An hour ago the Twitter account “NHS Nurses”, @SocialistNHS, posted a video to Twitter that shows a fat White British man with a can of Stella in his hand and a Union Jack painted on his belly complaining about immigrants.
“They’re taking all our jobs,” says the man.
“What qualifications do you have?” asks the female interviewer.
Our man replies with a choice piece of nonsense: “None – they are taking all our qualifications as well”.
The NHS Nurses mock this reply with the words,
“They’re taking all our jobs and all our qualifications”
Jesus wept… Our NHS and social care is made up of highly skilled migrant workers
How can this ever be a bad thing?
It is in fact possible to conceive of circumstances in which this would be a bad thing. There is an obvious conflict of interest between migrant workers and native born workers – or would-be workers. To observe this conflict of interest is not to take a side, but it is stupid to pretend it does not exist. A commenter called Robert Ferguson raises another way in which “Our NHS” being made up of migrants is not necessarily a good thing when he says, “Stealing other countries healthcare workers is not a good look.” I think Mr Ferguson’s belief that workers belong to their states of origin is fundamentally mistaken on moral grounds – and states which try to keep “their” workers by force are poorer than those which do not – but, still, the question of why this transfer of labour from Africa and South Asia to the UK takes place needs to be addressed rather than treated as a law of nature.
I found the tweet via this comment from a group called “Labour Beyond Cities”, who said:
A large swathe of the left is both too thick to realise this is an AI video and also too thick to realise that class hatred towards white working class people is strategically very poor, divisive and alienating.
So the stereotypical fat, white, useless, racist Brit in the video is not real. He was a little too exactly like a socialist’s idea of a Reform voter to be true. As one of the comments a proposed Community Note says, if you need confirmation, look at the gibberish written on the pub sign. And one can just about still tell it is A.I. by something “off” in the way the man moves.
In a few months we won’t be able to tell.
What difference, if any, does the man’s nonexistence make to the arguments involved?
“We live with the risk of injury or death in every other human endeavor, from mountain climbing to skydiving, from driving to flying. But for some reason, space-related activities are held to a different standard. Why is it that we see the death of test pilots as an unfortunate consequence of their job, but not for astronauts?”
– Rand Simberg, Safe Is Not An Option: Overcoming The Futile Obsession With Getting Everyone Back Alive That Is Killing Our Expansion Into Space. The book was published in 2013, around a time when Elon Musk and his SpaceX business, as well as others, was not quite as in our public consciousness as it is now. Published 12 years ago, the book retains much of its power and persuasiveness, and lessons apply far beyond spaceflight. Simberg is one of the early bloggers out there, like Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.
In Ms Harvey’s universe – occupied by the likes of Corrêa do Lago, Greenpeace and the UK’s very own ‘Mad Ed’, the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero – the science is settled, the energy transition is an imperative and decarbonisation will not only save the planet from an impending environmental catastrophe but also bring about economic growth and prosperity. Harvey’s article hinges on the tired assertion that the science of climate change is settled, with a ‘97% consensus’ among scientists that human activity drives catastrophic global warming. This figure, derived from John Cook’s 2013 study, has been debunked repeatedly for its methodological flaws — most notably by scholars like David Legates, who found that only a tiny fraction of the studied papers explicitly endorsed the catastrophic narrative.
– Tilak Doshi
“This will be in textbooks”, writes Maria Avdeeva.
Ukraine secretly delivered FPV drones and wooden mobile cabins into Russia. The drones were hidden under the roofs of the cabins, which were later mounted on trucks.
At the signal, the roofs opened remotely. Dozens of drones launched directly from the trucks, striking strategic bomber aircraft.
And — Russia can’t produce these bombers anymore. The loss is massive.
Nothing like this has ever been done before.
In one sense, of course, it has been done before. The military history of the twentieth century contains many examples of large numbers of planes being destroyed on their airfields – by the Japanese at Pearl Harbour, by the Germans at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, and by the Israelis in the first hours of the Six Day War, to name but three.
But such damage being done by itty bitty little drones that were considered little more than toys a few years ago is new.
Renewables don’t risk blackouts, said the media. But they did and they do. The physics are simple. And now, as blackouts in Spain strand people in elevators, jam traffic, and ground flights, it’s clear that too little “inertia” due to excess solar resulted in system collapse.
– Michael Shellenberger
Also… here.
A song from the late 90s by Len. But this request (not to) was in vain, the UK government has announced £50,000,000 of funding to ‘dim the Sun’, in a bid to counter climate change, reports the Manchester Evening News, on the back of a paywalled report in the Daily Telegraph.
Scientists are planning on ‘dimming the Sun’ in a bid to curb global warming. The UK government is set to announce funding of up to £50m of funding for Sun-dimming experiments in the coming weeks, the Telegraph reports.
Does no one remember our wise Danish King Canute? He showed, over 1,000 years ago, that the State is all but powerless in the face of Nature. Of course not. Here is more on the plans.
It comes as the National Environment Research Council (NERC) announced on April 3 that it will invest £10 million of new funding to study these solar radiation management schemes (SRM).
According to Professor Mark Symes, the programme director for the Government’s advanced research and invention funding agency, known as Aria, there would be “small controlled outdoor experiments on particular approaches”. These experiments could include injecting aerosols into the atmosphere or brightening clouds to reflect sunlight.
Crucially, there is an acronym ‘SRM’, so this is one of those funding streams that will take on a monstrous life of its own. One might think that the Manchester Evening News (think Seattle but without the glamour) might have something to say seeing as it is a notoriously rainy city, but not a peep about the absurdity of it. Nor has there been any comment on the impact on solar energy generation, which provides ‘carbon neutral’ energy (but what about the deuterium lost in solar energy production?).
The UK government seeks to control the Sun, and how much it shines on you. Chairman Mao and the four pests comes to mind.
To be fair, these proposals have generated plenty of online ridicule, but that won’t stop it. That the UK is circling the drain is perhaps better shown by this Icarian hubris than anything else.
And of course, once you accept their premises, you are only arguing about tactics and strategy, not the ends.
In the comments to my previous post, Zerren Yeoville was inspired by the Pogues’ 1987 classic Fairytale of New York to pen the following lines for Birmingham in its current travails:
‘They’ve got rats big as cats
They’ve got rivers of mould
The smell goes right through ya
You’d best have a cold
When you first took the bins out
On a cold winter’s eve
You promised me dustcarts
were “waiting, you’ll see”….’
The rats as big as cats were also mentioned in the Sun‘s headline today:
NO END IN SIGHT Huge blow for locals in UK’s ‘third-world city’ where Army called in to tackle cat-sized rats & 21k TONS of rubbish
A major incident has already been declared by Birmingham City Council
Lest anyone think the Sun is being melodramatic, the BBC’s headline does not merely feature cat-sized rats but cat-sized rats who have begun their insurrection against humanity:
‘Cat-sized rats are attacking our cars’
NickM also provided commentary in verse on the Birmingham bin strike, but, unless I have misunderstood, that one was written by A.I. so it doesn’t count.
Gosh, ChatGPT is getting alarmingly good.
“Dark Laboratory: groundbreaking book argues climate crisis was sparked by colonisation” was the headline of the review of Tao Leigh Goffe’s magnum opus in the Guardian, but the headline is wrong. I have read the whole article, even the captions to the pictures (“The reggae artist Chronixx, whose lyrics form part of the implements Goffe uses to dismantle the superstructure of western science”) so I know all about it. Colonisation was only a symptom. The real villain was Carl Linnaeus. Now you probably thought of Linnaeus as the “biologist and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature” and as something of a hero to ecologists. Not any more!
Central to Goffe’s critique is the notion that European colonialism turned the islands of the Caribbean into a “dark laboratory of colonial desires and experiments … the epicentre of the modern globalised world”.
It was there that enslaving farmers first formulated the structures of modern capitalism, alongside a scientific method rooted in eugenics and racism that privileged the status of white men while denigrating Black and Indigenous forms of science.
Such experiments included the creation of monocrop agriculture, the clearing of terrestrial and marine ecosystems making territories vulnerable to extreme weather, the categorisation of wildlife along lines of superficial characteristics
Told ya Linnaeus was the real baddie. How much better off we would all be if his father had followed his first instincts and apprenticed him to a cobbler. Then we would have respected Black and Indigenous forms of science.
and the now equally discredited categorisation of different races along similar lines.
Um, how discredited is that? Richard Dawkins put an entertaining account of the vicious feud between the geneticists and the cladists in The Blind Watchmaker (a feud in which an announcement that some colleague had “gone over to the Cladists” was received with scarcely less horror than an announcement that said colleague had taken Holy Orders), but I thought the whole point was that it all washes up on the same shore in the end. And is it not one of the main conclusions of Linnaean classification that the test of whether Organism X and Organism Y are of the same species is whether they can interbreed? All humans can interbreed, making us one species, QE-categorically-D.
“In opposition to the land, the colonial approach has been one of razing and dynamite, eroding Indigenous relationships to the soil,” writes Goffe. We must, she argues, “connect the dots between the brutal system of chattel slavery and the degradation of the natural environment … The worlds Europeans built depended on making the lives of some disposable.”
The worlds everyone else built are so much nicer.
Related posts:
Not just physics, Indigenous Australian physics
Decolonise your mind!
and, just for the nostalgia value, here is one from back when when Greens liked science:
Climate change action: “The Science” gives way to “The Physics”
One last thought… having one’s superstructure dismantled by the use of reggae lyrics sounds a distinctly unsettling process. But that is what has been done to western science, we now learn. Therefore The Science no longer is Settled.
UPDATE: OK, so it wasn’t one last thought. More thoughts came overnight, and I want to get them down before I forget. I might expand what follows into another post later.
1) Tao Leigh Goffe is “dismantling the superstructure” of the branch upon which she sits. She says that racist western science caused capitalism, which caused the climate crisis. But the justification we are given for believing that there is a climate crisis comes from that same western science. And if some of us are less convinced than she thinks we ought to be about the scale and imminence of peril, that is not because we have lost faith in science but because we have lost faith in many of the people with “scientist” in their job title.
2) Science does not make men good. It does make them powerful. The article speaks of “a scientific method rooted in eugenics and racism that privileged the status of white men while denigrating Black and Indigenous forms of science”, but one reason that the white men were in a position to enslave and oppress others was that their science was the one that worked.
3) Modern science arose in Western Europe. There was a period of a few centuries where the resulting superiority of European technology – ships and guns at the sharp end, with the power of the ironworks and the printing press behind them – meant that scruffy bands of white “adventurers” could conquer whole continents. That period is over. The scientific method is now available to anyone who wants it. Which mostly seems to be the Chinese at the moment.
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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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