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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Snow in London last night. The BBC news report I just watched (having come home past the BBC’s television studios which were covered in the white stuff) mentioned it on the East coast of England, but no mention of it in London.
For those not familiar with London weather, the last time I can find when snow was even claimed here this early in the autumn was 1974. One eyewitness suggested it was really hailstones. I don’t remember. All I know is that today, October 28 2008 is the earliest proper winter that I can record.
Now here’s where it gets interesting. Only a few weeks ago, we were hearing that South Africa had snow, and not just that, but of the very late variety (South of the Equator, this time of year should be warming). But don’t worry, we must have a flexible view of reality: when it gets hot, it’s warming; when it gets cold, it’s warming; and when it seems to stay the same, it’s warming twice as fast.
Does global warming predict the weather right now? Only in the sense that Nostradamus predicted the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II in the 1985 edition, and the fall of the Shah of Iran in the 1980 edition.
What does predict the weather we’re having is the sunspot cycle and we can now add some idea of what reduced solar wind does. [Hat tip, Instapundit]
Here’s a somewhat better forecast of the end of 2008’s weather than anything cooked up by the “capitalism causes tsunamis” crowd. Farmer’s Almanac? Maybe astrology is more scientific than the ecofascists.
Recessions can be the tool of ‘creative destruction’, if governments get out of the way and do not prevent the next wave of entrepreneurial experimentation by ‘softening’ the impact of the recession and distorting the efficient allocation of capital. Gordon Brown, take note: companies and governments have to fail. George Gilder, always an enthusiastic prophet, writes of the coming possibilities in Forbes. He identifies four areas that the financial wizardry of venture capitalism can nurture: ‘cloud computing’, graphics processing, nanotech engineering and energy saving construction materials. Gilder is useful for identifying waves of start-ups and linking them to wider technological change.
A great line is where Moore’s law is referenced as insufficient for our needs:
This vast expansion of the scale of computing across the network, however, renders Moore’s Law doublings inadequate to meet the need for speed. A key answer is the movement of optical technologies to chips themselves by such companies as Luxtera, a venture startup in Carlsbad, Calif., technologies based on Caltech advances that link fiber directly to chips. Azul Systems of Mountain View is pioneering a combination of Java-based parallel processing with virtualization software to produce multitrillion-bit-per-second performance in data centers.
A contentious but thrilling point if we wished to measure the proximity of a singularity event. As a useful summary of tech developments, Gilder is hard to beat. Nanotech filters allow pure water to be sucked up from a fetid puddle and new construction materials allow towers to be lighter and stronger and more radical. Hopeflly we can welcome new radical architecture: wierd, wonderfu to live in and wandering off the set of last century’s sci-fi cityscapes.
*One has to look elsewhere for exciting biotech, Gilder’s blind spot here.
Don’t be gloomy because innovation loves a crisis. Jonathan Schwartz of Sun emailed his company pointing out that now was the time to go on the offensive. The necessities enforced by the credit crunch will be the mother of invention. To save money, companies will be forced to automate, innovate and think about how they sell in order to make that profit. Less capital means fewer customers means greater competition.
You’re not going to hear from any of our customers, “let’s stop buying technology and hire more people to do the work.” They’re going to default to the opposite – automating work, and finding answers and opportunities with technology, not headcount. And in that process lies an opportunity for Sun – to engage with customers in driving down cost, driving up utilization, and driving the changes that yield immediate and long term benefit. The right question for every customer you meet is – “how can I help?” I assure you, they’ll have ideas for us. And we have no shortage of ideas for them. Personally, I’m reaching out to customers and partners just to check in and offer help – I’d recommend you do the same.
At the end of the day, the public debates may not really matter. They are there for politicians and economists to weave a myth of control and pretend that they steer our lives, using our money to justify their drivel.
It is the private debates amongst companies, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs that really matter. With less money to go around, there is a strong incentive to accelerate change and adopt business models that profit from the information revolution rather than kick against it. As an example, the mainstream media may enter its death rattle as consumers shift towards online business, because it is cheaper, better and quicker.
The downside is that a general downturn may cause research programmes which do not have an immediate or predictable return to falter, as sources of capital dry up. Therefore, the immediate consequences of this crisis could be an acceleration of information technology permeating everyday lives but a longer curve for the development of nanotechnology, stem cell research, robotics and other technologies.
Instapundit:
I remember reading a Robert Heinlein essay from the 1940s on how absurd it would be to have your car hand-built in your driveway by a collection of artisans, and how homebuilding as practiced was equally absurd. I think he was right.
Rather than assume the rightness of this outsider’s snap judgement, I consider it more interesting to think about why things haven’t developed this way. When I was an architecture student, way back in the seventies, people had already been dreaming for decades of prefab houses. It didn’t happen then, and it isn’t, on the whole, happening now.
Here are some guesses as to why factory made houses are not happening.
Homes are not in themselves mobile. Cars, which are made in factories, are mobile. Cars have their own means of transport built in. Houses do not. Unless they are campervans or caravans. In other words, the question: Why aren’t homes made in factories? is actually a rather similar question to: Why don’t most people live in campervans or caravans? Because the engines and wheels mostly do nothing? They’re terrible to live in? People can steal them? Regular homes are simply much cheaper to make? To be transportable, whether on wheels or on a lorry, home pods have to be able to hold themselves together when being swung around by cranes, shoved about by fork lifts, etc. This extra structure is wasted, once the pod is in place. All it then has to do is stay up and solid when immobile.
Homes, especially of the more industrial looking ones, often have to do another structural job as well as a life support job. They often have to be able to support more homes on top of them. Therefore they have to be different from the ones above, and they have to be different from the ones above, and so on. Unless you just stick pods into a structure. A really heavy home pod piled on top of lots of other home pods is a shocking waste of structure, because weight at the top demands more structure under it, and so on down to the bottom.
Actually, homes are, more and more, already made in factories, but it’s the bits that are made in factories, rather than assembled into homes in factories. After failing as an architecture student I briefly worked in the actual building trade, as an ignorant sub-lieutenant “commanding” (“Carry on sergeant”) workers in the trenches. I was struck then, again back in the seventies, by how complicated and intricate and clever lots of the bits were, and how fast they were developing. And this was in suburban mini-stately homes that looked impeccably hand made, once they had been covered up with bricks and tiles. Underneath they were getting more and more like airplanes. From what I now see on building sites, that trend has not stopped. The smaller an object is, the less of a structural problem it has. Ask the insects, and the elephants. Homes are more like elephants. It makes sense to build them, on site. Out of insects. So to speak.
Washing machines, microwaves, toasters, sinks, etc. are, if you think about it, home components. They are all made in factories, because that makes sense.
Besides which, isn’t a building site a temporary factory, where it makes sense to have it? And is it really true that workers in regular factories are all morons by comparison? Surely, lots of them, more and more now, are “artisans” also. Having also done jobs at various times in my life that were supposed to be totally “unskilled”, I came to believe that, actually, there is no such thing as unskilled labour. The factory made homes proposal is just an argument about where the home assembling artisans should practice their art.
I know, I know, buildings made with shipping containers. But these kinds of buildings are not really catching on, are they? I suspect this is mostly fun/concept architecture, rather than a serious spreadable idea. Like living in a sculpture (which is a trend, I do admit).
The relative cost of land and mere home-building must have something to do with this. Home-building means making the absolute most of each site, and each site is different, unique even, which makes mass production of homes less viable, as opposed to mass producing windows or drainpipes. Roads, on the other hand, are just roads, although even more expensive than mere land. A bit of road is a flat surface the whole point of which is to be just like all the other bits of road. Roads are also assmbled on site, rather than made in factories and then just unrolled on site, for similar reasons to why homes are assembled on site, only more so. Tanks and other tracked vehicles being the exception, because they do unroll the road in front of them wherever they go.
There is a new computer game out there, called Spore, which takes up on the theory of evolution. Looks like fun and educational, as many such games are, a fact that critics of computer games rarely seem to take on board.
Here is another item about this game.
In the late sixties and seventies I lived in DuPage county, Illinois. This was/is a county remarkable for the concentration of scientific and physical research conducted there. In addition to Argonne National Laboratories and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, there was the largest of Bell Laboratories many facilities, the one in Naperville/Lisle, Illinois that employed about 11,000 people. That period of time was the zenith of Bell Labs legendary status. In the seventies its employees received two of the six Nobel Prizes for Physics that have been awarded to Bell Lab’s researchers.
It was with sadness and some sense of foreboding that I learned via Instapundit this morning that Bell Labs is abandoning basic research and instead “focusing on more immediately marketable areas”. I say “foreboding” for the likelihood that Alcatel-Lucent will join the chorus (if it hasn’t already) of companies demanding that tax-payers assume the sole cost of basic research ‘for the common good’. I also say it because I believe it is the inevitable consequence of a long trend of companies being taken over by accounting priorities and run for short term profits. At least as recently as the late nineties, four Bell Labs researchers were awarded two Nobel Prizes for physics, one received his for cooling and trapping atoms with laser light and, three shared one ” for the discovery and explanation of the fractional quantum Hall effect “. No, I have no clue. If you must know, look it up. Bell Labs has been my number one example that it is possible to do pure research without being part and parcel of the state.
I encourage you to read in the Wikipedia entry some of the history of Bell Labs. Perhaps some commenters can cheer me up with information about other profit motivated corporations (or individuals) engaging in pure, no application yet visible, research.
… or so they say:
As IDF came to a close, Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer, presented a keynote speech in which he explained just how close the outfit was to realizing “programmable matter.” Granted, he did confess that end products were still years away, but researchers have been looking at ways to “make an object of any imaginable shape,” where users could simply hit a print button and watch the matter “take that shape.” He also explained that the idea of programmable matter “revolves around tiny glass spheres with processing power and photovoltaic for generating electricity to run the tiny circuitry.”
What I want is a shower I can step into, only it is not a shower. You just press a button that goes zxzxzxzxzxzxzxz, and ten seconds later you step out, with both you and your clothes completely clean.
The way things are going, soon they will be printing houses!
I like this, from a blogger I have only recently discovered, Will Wilkinson:
Climate eschatology really is the ultimate in big lie crisis politics. The far-left has failed so comprehensively to make the case for its vision of society and economy that the only thing left to do is to brazenly and repeatedly assert that the world will literally collapse unless we implement this otherwise indefensible vision.
Well said. The rest of Wilkinson’s blog, which goes by the name of The Fly Bottle is well worth a regular look also, in the event that you need telling.
One of the things that irritates me about propagandists on my side is that they are often reluctant to spot a great victory, even when they have just won one. Wilkinson’s point is not just that climate chaos-ism is nonsense, a claim that I increasingly find myself agreeing with completely, not least because the now undependable notion of “global warming” has been replaced by the idiotic phrase “climate chaos”, or, even more idiotically, “climate change”. When was there ever a time when the climate did not change? What Wilkinson is also noting is that the hysteria whipped up around the changeability of the climate was whipped up because these lunatics came to realise that they had no other arguments against a more-or-less capitalist, more-or-less-free-market world economy. They have now conceded – not in so many words, rather by changing the subject – that capitalism works, and the only nasty thing they have left to say about it is that it works so well that it ruins the planet.
I do not want to suggest that this is a dazzlingly original observation. I merely thank Wilkinson for clarifying something that most of the regular writers of and readers of this blog all know, in the sense of agreeing when they are told it, but which they might not have said to themselves with absolutely clarity before. One of the reasons I noticed this posting of Wilkinson’s was that I had made precisely the same point in something else I was recently writing, about how well I think capitalism has been doing lately, both in practice and in the ideological enthusiasm sense.
Wilkinson continues:
I think the point is that the clock really is ticking. If we don’t “do something” soon, we’ll probably see that we don’t really need to do anything really dramatic, and then the window for radical social change will be closed. So I expect the volume to get much louder.
Exactly. As and when it comes to be agreed that capitalism is not now ruining the planet, that will be another huge victory for the forces of sanity. Two-nil to us, that will make it. What idiocy will the lunatic tendency think of next, I wonder (comments welcome), to take everyone’s minds off that huge defeat?
I know I know. The incorrigibly pessimistic part of our commentariat will now want to say that the damage has been done, etc. Maybe so. But although ideological shifts do not necessarily have immediate consequences, they do have consequences, and these shifts will have good consequences. They already are, I would say.
However, I do agree with the point that Johnathan Pearce makes from time to time that it would be good for us to ponder what would be the least-worst arrangements for if and when capitalism ever does start ruining the planet for real. I favour technical fixes rather than global regulations, but then I would, wouldn’t I?
A few days back, I watched a programme, or least about 15 minutes of it, that speculates on what the Earth will look like once humans disappear. There is lots of stuff about how houses, roads, bridges, airports and sewage systems start to crumble, how rats and other animals take over. There are lots of photographs of wrecked cars with plants growing out of the windows. On one level, if you are into wildlife or the study of botany, some of this is pretty interesting. The programme is very slickly put together.
There are two ways to view this film. Perhaps it taps into a very powerful theme amongst what I might call the dark Greens – the idea of Homo Sapiens as a disease, almost a curse, on the “pure” Earth. While the narrator has a civilised tone of voice, it is hard not to miss a sort of gloating at the demise of humans and their artifacts.
On the other hand, it is quite useful to be reminded of what happens once the basic infrastructure of modern civilisation goes into decline, such as electrical power, clean water, mass transportation, and so on. Which is why it matters a great deal if we forgo important sources of power generation, for example, all because of coming to the wrong conclusions about supposed Man-made climate change, for example. So maybe one perhaps unintended consequence of this sort of film is to sharply remind us of what happens when we take our modern civilisation for granted and flirt with “going back to nature”.
This story will not come as a surprise to the techies that read this site, nor many other bloggers, but I was still struck by a report from TowerGroup, the research firm, that says that the day is approaching when millions of people on low incomes living around the world will be able to switch funds to their relatives and friends over the mobile phone with as much ease as downloading tunes on to an MP3 player.
This is big money, when gathered together. The market for remitting money is worth about half a trillion dollars, although goodness knows quite how one quantifies this accurately. Existing middlemen will be cut out of the equation.
“Ultimately, TowerGroup expects mobile phones will do for financial services what Apple iPods did for music – spur a sea change in the way consumers access services and suppliers deliver them,” one of executive said.
Just think what this will mean to parts of the world like Africa, already a continent where it has been easier to put in mobile phones than bother with the traditional wire-based stuff.
As far as I can see, the key issue to get right is security. But then that applies to Internet banking already.
Science writer John Tierney – one of my “must-read” columnists – has a good post which gets us to consider why it is considered so terrible for sportsmen and women to take performance-enhancing drugs, or have special surgery done to make themselves stronger, faster, more flexible, and so on. In years to come, suppose that say, a footballer has a knee operation and as a result, he is able to ride over a tackle, pass the ball more swiftly. Or a fast bowler at cricket has the same operation done to make it easier to send down a delivery to a batsman (bowlers often get injured because if they are big guys, the strain on their knees and back can be large). It seems to me that the key issue is disclosure. If you had an “anything-goes” games, with sports folk free to do what they wanted, there could be no complaints about cheating. And the boundaries between what is and what is not considered okay are not clear cut anyway, but they are more readily solvable than just adopting a puritanical zero-tolerance approach on enhancements. I cannot also help wonder whether some of the constant sniping at sports folk for taking drugs is not so much about cheating per se, as about taking the drugs in the first place. There is a sort of desire for “purity” in sport which is a part of the more general puritanism in our culture.
Like I said, the key is disclosure. If any cyclist, swimmer, footballer or for that matter, F1 motor racing driver takes drugs as part of their sport, then it should be okay so long as they disclose it. One could always use a handicapping rule anyway. For instance, if a motor racer is taking a drug to enhance his concentration during a race, maybe the race organisers can impose a 5 second penalty.
As medical technologies progress, this issue is going to become more pressing. Rather than continuing to hold out against any of this, the sports world should focus on disclosure and be adult about it.
Ronald Bailey at Reason has a nice response to the Prince of Wales’ latest attack on GM foods. The Reason comment thread is also pretty good too. One thing that does not seem to cross Prince Charles’ mind – not a long journey – is the fact that by using disease-resistant strains of crops, it will reduce the need for pesticides, which surely any “Green” should support, right?
The Telegraph seems to have a strange indulgence for this sort of fogeyish/Green/oh-god-this-science-stuff-is-ghastly sort of thing. I wonder if snobbery has anything to do with it – “organic” food tends to be more expensive, after all. But to be fair, that newspaper has carried robust defences of modern science and farming, such as this article by Bill Emmott a few months back. Worth re-reading.
Update: Stephen Pollard thinks Prince Charles should shut up. That seems a bit excessive. I do not think that Charles is overstepping some sort of ancient constitutional rules by saying what he thinks. It seems a bit odd for an opinionated fellow like Stephen to be telling people in public life to put a sock in it. If he were King, and had to deal with tricky political issues, then Stephen might have a point. But let’s face it, being heir to the throne for decades is a pretty desperate situation to be in. If Charles wants to hold views on archicture, the teaching of English or the environment, why not?
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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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