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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The good news: those polars bears killed by “global warming,” were not.
From the AP:
Charles Monnett, an Anchorage-based scientist with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, or BOEMRE, was told July 18 that he was being put on leave, pending results of an investigation into “integrity issues.”
… observations suggested the bears drowned in rough seas and high winds and “suggest that drowning-related deaths of polar bears may increase in the future if the observed trend of regression of pack ice and/or longer open water periods continues.”
Bad news for some, I reckon.
Rob Fisher, fellow Transport Blogger and a favourite blogger of mine generally, has a posting up at his personal blog about the coming-real-soon-now Asus Padfone. Instead of each of us having a phone and a computer with a screen, this gizmo will combine the two. When you want a phone, you use the phone. When you want a computer, you shove the phone into the screen.
The central point being that phones are now big enough and serious computers are now small enough, for a phone to contain a serious computer.
It seems like the future. The amount of stuff that can be done on a smartphone-sized device is about to hit some critical level. Already desktop PCs are only needed for high end games and serious number crunching. The PC has become a laptop has become a netbook has become a phone. The only problem is the ergonomics, and a single device with multiple form factors is a good solution.
Well, I don’t know about that “only needed for high end games and serious number crunching” bit, but in principle this has to be right. Maybe not now, but any year now.
Asus has form (as in good form) for spotting when something has got small enough to be seriously different. A while back, they lead the world into genuinely portable and genuinely cheap computers, with the Asus Eee PC. I got one. At first I liked it, but eventually I got fed up with its geek-friendly but human-hostile operating system and with its just-too-small keyboard, so I sold it on to a geek child, and got a proper netbook with a proper operating system that I was able to work properly (not least because it was identical to the one on my big old home computer). Even so, despite my eventual disappointment with this Asus offering, I always liked and still like what it was trying to do.
This Asus Padfone immediately started ringing the same bells in my head. It looks like this Padfone, or something very similar, could be the natural successor to that netbook of mine, and to my regular phone, and to my ridiculously antique mobile phone, and to my Filofax, and even, in the fullness of time, to my big old home computer. Microsoft look out. Google really is taking over the world.
Asus also understands that low prices cause a lot more people to become interested in whatever it is. If this thing is as cheap as I hope it is, that will hurry things along, just like the ultra-cheap Eee PC did.
I will probably be holding off this time, waiting for others to respond with their versions of the same thing, and even then it may not really suit me. However, next time I meet Rob I will definitely be cross-examining him about this latest triumph of consumer capitalism. Despite all the financial chaos, they just keep on coming, don’t they? Why can’t schools, hospitals and, above all, banks be like this, getting more effective and cheaper and just all-round nicer with every year that goes by? Well, we know why. The rules for making these latter things should be a lot like the rules for making Padfones: make a Padfone if you want to and sell it to whoever will pay you what you ask. If you go bust, that’s your problem. The rules for schools and hospitals and, above all, banks are instead sadly different.
There are several other recent postings up at Rob’s Blog, and I recommend all readers here to have a scroll down there, if they haven’t already done this recently.
While some of its members may genuinely believe they are doing good by their fellow human beings in protecting health and potentially dangerous things, as they think genetically modified plants to be, the dangers of the Precautionary Principle are highlighted to a stark degree by the activities of Greenpeace activists in Canberra, Australia. According to a report, trials in producing GM wheat have been badly damaged.
The persons who did this will, hopefully, be caught and punished with the full weight of the law. Remember, if these guys had their way, the Agricultural Revolution that took place in the decades leading up to the Industrial Revolution might not have happened, or at least to the same degree.
Here is an article by the excellent Ronald Bailey on the GM crops issue.
This was one of the more splendid comments that we have had on Samizdata in quite some time: David Gillies, regarding this manifest steaming pile: the deceptively named “World Health Organisation” claiming mobile phones increase the risk of brain cancer.. even though there has been no observed spike in brain cancer despite the explosive growth in the use of such phones world wide….
This has been headline news in every newspaper I have seen, including the leading daily here in Costa Rica, and none of ’em have been fit to wrap fish in (I’d wager there’s a far higher carcinogenic propensity in the ink used to print this shit.) Non-ionising radiation? Check. Sub-milliwatt power levels? Check. No causative mechanism that survives the laugh test? Check. Decades of use and no detectable increment in tumours at the lax 2.0 relative risk for publication in a halfway-reputable journal? Check. Defeats the null hypothesis at the 95% confidence interval? Ha ha ha, oh my sides. Soundbite-ready quacks straining in their traces to leap into the running on CNN and Fox and Sky and the Beeb to peddle doom-mongering (but possibly book-selling) crap? Mais bien sur, a regiment of them. The disgusting WHO ready to dip its grubby fingers into the whole stew of idiocy and rent-seeking? Ho, yus, my chilluns, and when were they ever not? Pathetic.
If you cannot, within say 30 seconds, get a ballpark figure for the photon energy in microelectronvolts of an 1800 Mhz photon (and why that matters), or describe qualitatively what a femtowatt is (not quantitatively, oh no, that won’t do at all) or give a fairly robust description of what ‘3 dB/octave’ means when it comes to microwave absorption coefficients then shut your face, crawl back under your silly epidemiological stone, and die of something real and not imagined. Maybe the publication-hungry pseudoscientists that infest this field might be able to do all of the above as some sort of parlour trick, but the notion that your average journalist could is as laughable as spaniels doing differential equations. And this isn’t the argumentum ad verecundiam, like it is with the global warming zealots. There’s practically no-one in the hard sciences who thinks that microwave radiation is a causative agent in cancers. It’s lies, sophistry and nonsense. The really big question to ask (like with the AGW scam) when you see a scientific fraud being perpetrated on this scale is, as ever, cui bono?
– David Gillies
Ultracapacitors are my bet for the way to replace gasoline fueled vehicles. Hydrogen is just not dense enough even in hydrides and there is no infrastructure for it. Batteries are too heavy, too short lived, have complex temperature and charging requirements to maximize life, take too long to charge and are not improving quickly enough. Synfuels are possible but require a lot of new plants and the fuel is going to be expensive.
Electricity, on the other hand, is available everywhere. Once you have the ability to connect a plug and ‘fuel’ your vehicle at least as quickly as you currently do and have a range equal or greater than you now have with gasoline or diesel, there is simply no contest.
The electric car, with a motor on each wheel, gives neck-snapping acceleration, handling and braking that are awesome and all in a much simpler package. No differential, no coolant system, no transmission, no high temperature combustion, no crankshaft, piston rings or rockers, no oiling system… in the ultimate electric car there is little more than batteries, power distribution, four motors and a bunch of computers to control them. As much as I loved my old MGB, the internal combustion engine is unlikely to outlast the middle of the century. It simply will not be able to compete.
A Tesla in every garage… I can deal with that.
Our own Dale Amon has just been named Space Activist of the Year by the National Space Society. Well done Dale.
In light of the recent killing of OBL and the use by the military of drones and other surveillance gizmos to track down where the villain was hiding out, it is worth noting that these pilot-less aircraft are not just in the hands of military people. You can get some pretty sophisticated ones via the regular commercial market, a fact that is both beguiling for aviation enthusiasts and modellists, and presumably, a bit of a concern for the military who want to keep the airspace all to itself.
Chris Anderson, head honcho at Wired, the techno magazine, has his own website devoted to the whole business of building and using the things. Anderson, of course, is also author of The Long Tail, one of those books that I need to read again.
On a related theme regarding drones, robots and high-tech in war and defence, here is another reference to a book by PW Singer, that I blogged about the other day in a piece about sea piracy.
There is finally some news on the Polywell fusion tests that are under funding by the Office of Naval Research. This, as you may remember, is the project started by Dr. Bussard before his death and the one ‘small fusion’ project most of us take very seriously.
The report that it operated the way it was supposed to says a great deal to those of us who have been following them for the last several years.
The impact of these devices on our civilisation has been immense, whatever certain Luddites might claim. Wired magazine has a nice item about the 50th anniversary of the first microchip to be patented.
I’m looking forward to spotting (and snapping) my first one of these on the streets of London. The telephoto lens and the iPhone, I mean, not the mere iPhone.
I was expecting such an add-on to be priced at well over a hundred quid, if only because it has such a rich-guy’s-toy vibe about it. But actually it’s around fifty. But, does it work well? As yet, there appear to be no reviews. But click here to read the press release. In German.
My hope, and actually my expectation, is that as the years roll by and as cheap and cheerful camera technology continues to develop, my immense archive of cheap and cheerful snaps of cheap and cheerful cameras in action will get ever more fun to look back at.
A drawback of this lens might be, for some, that it makes it clear that you are definitely using your iPhone to take photos. There is no doubt that many of the powers that be would like to ban photography in public places altogether, by everyone except their noble selves, either because they really would or just for something to do. Historically, one of the more significant achievements of mobile phones with cameras may prove to be that they have made it impossible for some goon in a uniform to tell if you are taking photos, or merely texting or some such thing. If challenged while doing the former, you can protest that you were merely doing the latter. Simply, they couldn’t and can’t ban public photo-ing because they can’t spot when it’s happening.
A friend just emailed me to say that he is moving to a place in France somewhere, providing the name but nothing else. As it turned out, I guessed right about where this is, approximately, but it was only a guess. Within a minute I was able to turn a mere guess into pinpoint accuracy. It’s like having a complete A-Z map of the entire world with you at all times. Yeah, yeah, like, you didn’t know this. Of course you know this. But for me, resorting to something like Google Maps is still something I have to remember, from time to time, that I can do. And when I do, I feel like an Ethiopian of a hundred years ago seeing his first ocean liner.
If you grew up with this kind of thing, or if it arrived when you were a mere teenager, you wouldn’t regard it as very remarkable. No more so than I regard electric light if I flick a switch as remarkable, or fresh water if I turn on a tap. But, I didn’t and it didn’t.
Not everything in the world is getting better to put it mildly (and see below), but things like this are.
In response to a recent response of the economic collapse of Portugal, commenter EndivioR had the following to say:
I lived in Spain during Gonzalez and Aznar. Foolishly, as I saw motorways roll out across the plains, buildings shoot up, high-speed trains whistle past, and cool graphics appear on TV news intros, I thought that some seriously good country management was going on. Now I realise that “economic miracle” means what it says. A miracle is something that defies the laws of nature. Spain is a mirage floating over the quicksand of unredeemable loans. I hope there are still people around there who know how to steer a donkey.
Oddly enough, Spain and Portugal remind me of something I have seen before. In the 1990s, we had a telco bubble. In mobile telephony, most places had two or three digital 2G mobile networks built. The spectrum was usually obtained cheaply by these companies, and the resultant networks were valuable, and useful, and there was a good return on the capital put up to build them. One or two companies made enormous amounts of money by figuring out something was happening early in the piece, building suddenly immensely valuable companies, and selling out, often to incumbent telcos who had read things less well than they had. Telecoms equipment manufacturers made huge amounts of money as their business was suddenly much bigger than it had been before. Other people got excited by this, and governments got excited by this, and there was an enormous piling in by new entrants to this industry. The equipment manufacturers (many government backed) wanted to follow up their first round of sales with subsequent rounds, and there was massive pressure to keep building. Many of the people and organisations who entered this business late were, shall we say, more dubious than some of the earlier ones. In many cases, they were the well connected rather than the prescient.
One thing that came from this, towards the end of the bubble, was a lot of what is known as “vendor finance”. Someone probably well connected wants to make money by building a telco, and probably selling that company on to someone else once it was built and had a customer base. A telecoms equipment manufacturer would lend the new telco money which the telco would then use to pay the manufacturer to build the network. This was all great as long as the network could be build, credit remained cheap, the network could gain customers and profits could be gained from these customers. In short, it was great as long as the bubble continued. Lots of people were making money as long as the bubble continued, and didn’t really care how it continued.
Of course, few of these things remained true. Credit became expensive, and what customers newer telcos could gain were very low value customers. For a time, mobile phone companies were valued simply on the number of customers, with little attention paid as to whether they were good customers. However, this eventually stopped, as it had to. Credit became expensive. Vendor financed networks defaulted on their debts and went bust. The companies that did the vendor financing went bust too. Bye bye Lucent. Bye bye Onetel. Amazingly, the banking system as a whole did not go bust for more than five years after this.
Which makes me think of Spain and Portugal. These countries joined the EC (as it was then) in the early 1980s after many decades of authoritarian government: poor, and woefully lacking in infrastructure. They lacked the capital markets, the expertise and the international connections to build modern infrastructure themselves, but there was the potential to catch up rapidly if they were exposed to international markets and international practice.
The avenue through which they did this was the EC and later EU, of course. The benefits of rejoining the international economy were immense, and EU aid and expertise did help them and pay for infrastructure. The scale of this in the 1980s and early 1990s was surprisingly modest, actually, and the infrastructure that was built was fairly hardly argue with. Motorways from Madrid to Malaga, or Lisbon to Porto, eminently sensible, and the economic value created by the motorways obviously exceeded costs. Given that they were and are tolled, a fair bit of this value was even captured by the people who built and financed them. Looking back now, it seems fairly obvious that market mechanisms could have build the 1980s and 1990s developments. The sad thing is that market mechanisms did not build them, and Spain and Portugal instead got used to the EU way of doing this. Money flowed from France and (particularly) Germany and French and German banks via the EU institutions, and this money flowed back to France and Germany to the companies who did a lot of the work in building them. Vendor financing, shall we say. No particular harm was done, as long as the infrastructure being built was actually economically sensible.
However, the French and Germans and French and German banks, and the Spanish and the French and German engineering companies got used to this. The inevitable greasing of wheels and protection and paying off of the well connected created a while class of people whose interests were in this continuing, long after anything was economically sensible. So in the late 1990s and 2000s, Spain and Portugal got huge networks of motorways in absurd and pointless places. (One evening several years ago, I drove in the evening along the old road from Regua to Vila Real in Portugal. It was a scary, winding, narrow single carriageway. The next day I discovered that there was a new road, which was a beautiful dual carriageway, four lane motorway, apparently being used only by me). These later ones tend not to be tolled, as if you were to toll them it would become immediately obvious how few cars were using them and how economically pointless they are. Then, things got nuttier. Spain got an enormous network of high speed trains. These are particularly good from the EU aid point of view, as there are two different European technologies – one French and the other German – and the contracts can alternate between the two. Pointless, but great in terms of being financed by German banks and then bought from the Germans. Then Spain got the world’s largest system of wind farms. The further we went along, the more pointless the things being built actually became. We started more or less with sense, but because the incentives were all wrong, this evolved into madness.
So here we are. The EU vendor finance bubble has ended. The French and (particularly) the Germans created this mess, because their banks and their industrial companies were benefiting in the short term. Blaming the Spanish is beyond the point. The Spanish let the Germans lend them money and then build them stuff with the lent money, and they were foolish to do this, but it appeared they were having a rapid miracle of modernity, and given the history, I can see why they wanted to believe this. The German banks are screwed, after doing the bidding of the German government. If the German government has to bail them out, well they created the mess.
Except, the political class made the mess. As that political class keep wining and dining one another as they discuss how to make things worse fix things, it is actually the German taxpayer doing the bailing out. The mess is certainly not the fault of the ordinary bloke making Volkswagens in the factory in Wolfsburg, but he has to pay for it. Hopefully the anger of such people is with the German political class and the European political class, rather than with “The Spanish” or “The Southern Europeans” amorphously, because it is the political class who are responsible.
In the case of the vendor financed telco bubble that I discussed earlier, the companies that did the lending and the borrowing generally both went bankrupt, their assets gobbled up by new and more sensible companies. In the case of governments that have done the same thing, cleaning up is messier. The German and Spanish political classes are not just going to go away, however much we wish they would.
Perhaps there is anger with the German political class. Support for the traditional Christian Democrats and Social Democrats appears to be in serious decline, which has led to support for the Green party approaching 30%. Which is not going to help. It is hard to see any scenarios in which we are not totally fucked.
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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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