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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It is getting mighty hot around here. For the last few days I have been saying a silent prayer to the inventor of modern office air conditioning. Without such technology, it is hard to imagine how much of our present-day economy could work at the pace it does. Large parts of the southern U.S., for example, as well as financial hubs like Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Frankfurt would be unworkable.
Come to think of it, air-conditioning is probably one of the most economically significant inventions of our time. It may even be more important than the internet, though I may be shot for even suggesting this.
Meanwhile, this report has some sizzling stats on how hot it is getting. I am a bit of a skeptic on the issue of the Greenhouse Effect, and naturally suspicious of the Green agenda thereon, but it is easy to see how this theory gains traction in such sweltering conditions as we have at the moment.
Right, time for an ice-cream.
The dominant ‘story’ of economic development is that science gives birth to technology, and technology makes money. But who pays for science? That has to be the government, the community, all of us. Because, who else will? So, economic development depends on a strong state, because only a strong state will pay for all that science.
Terence Kealey, in his book The Economic Laws of Scientific Research, tells a different story. Strong states destroy freedom. Weak states allow it, and thus allow capitalism, which pays for technology, which stimulates, pays for and is in its turn stimulated by science (the causal link between technology and science is that technology causes science at least as much as science causes technology), and technology also (Kealey accepts the usual causal link about this bit) causes increased prosperity.
The early chapters of this book supply an excellent potted history of pre-industrial Western Civilisation and its development. Here are the paragraphs that describe the fall of the Roman Empire:
So unconcerned with research did the Roman State become, that the Emperors actually suppressed technology. Petronius described how: ‘a flexible glass was invented, but the workshop of the inventor was completely destroyed by the Emperor Tiberius for fear that copper, silver and gold would lose value’. Suetonius described how: ‘An engineer devised a new machine which could haul large pillars at little expense. However the Emperor Vespasian rejected the invention and asked “who will take care of my poor?”.’ So uncommercial had the Romans become, their rulers rejected increases in productivity. In such a world, advances in science were never going to be translated into technology. Thus we can see that the government funding of ancient science was, in both economic and technological terms, a complete waste of money because the economy lacked the mechanism to exploit it.
The fall of the Roman Empire was frightful. The growth of the Empire had always been based on conquest, and the Empire’s economy had been fuelled by the exploitation of new colonies. When the Empire ran out of putative victims, its economy ceased to make sense, particularly as the mere maintenance of the Empire, with its garrisons and its bureaucrats, was so expensive. From the beginning of the second century AD, the State had to raise higher and higher taxes to maintain itself and its armies. It was under the Emperors Hadrian and Trajan, when the Empire was at its largest, that residual freedoms started to get knocked away to ensure that revenue was collected. Special commissioners, curatores, were appointed to run the cities. An army of secret police were recruited from the frumentarii. To pay for the extra bureaucrats, yet more taxes were raised, and the state increasingly took over the running of the economy – almost on ancient Egyptian lines. In AD 301, the Emperor Diocletian imposed fixed wages and prices, by decree, with infractions punishable by death. He declared that ‘uncontrolled economic activity is a religion of the godless’. Lanctantius wrote that the edict was a complete failure, that ‘there was a great bloodshed arising from its small and unimportant details’ and that more people were engaged in raising and spending taxes than in paying them. → Continue reading: Terence Kealey on the fall of the Roman Empire
Phil Bradley observes a nasty combination: voodoo science allied to voodoo economics
The European Parliament’s adoption last week, of ‘the world’s first Kyoto Protocol mandated multi-national emissions trading scheme (ETS) covering greenhouse gases’ gives me an opportunity to rail against the biggest government instigated boondoggle in the history of the world – namely the Kyoto Climate Change Protocol. Yes, it still rumbles along, destroying prodigious amounts of wealth without producing any measurable benefit. 117 countries are now signatories, although it has no material effect on most of them, except to funnel some money from rich countries into projects of dubious value. The latest signatory is Switzerland, who, reading between the lines, did so under pressure from the EU.
No one really knows how much Kyoto is costing, or how much it would cost were it to be fully implemented, which it never will be. All we do know is that it both reduces growth and diverts resources into economically pointless activities. This link estimates that by 2010, Kyoto will cost the UK around US$35 billion a year, and result in the permanent loss of half a million jobs. Reams of left-wing econo-babble has been written on how Kyoto will actually increase investment in windmills or whatever and stimulate economies. The simple fact remains that any increase in resources to produce the same result necessarily makes us poorer.
The Kyoto Protocol is an object lesson in what happens when you combine agenda-driven leftists with some dodgy science, a media that is mostly ignorant about most things, and politicians who want to be moral and righteous irrespective of the cost to the taxpayer. Bring them together in a UN sponsored framework that is not accountable to anyone, and you have the right formula for this madness.
Climate change is something I have been interested in for long time. In part, it probably stemmed from spending my childhood playing in the woods and fields situated on a glacial terminal moraine that marked the southern limit of last great ice advance across England. I recall being suitably awestruck when someone explained to me that 10,000 years earlier, where I was standing was the edge of a great ice sheet that stretched all the way to the North Pole.
Climate changes, has always changed and will always change. While we have an imperfect understanding of the mechanisms underlying the changes, we do have accurate data on the climate cycles themselves. These cycles vary from a few years to many thousands of years, and perhaps millions of years. To take England as an example, since the Norman Conquest, the climate has varied from about as warm as the south of France, to about as cold as south central Sweden. The last century has been more or less in the middle of the range for the last thousand years.
The weather is something people can relate to. It is immediate – they can see and feel it, and it affects their lives. In particular, extreme weather can be very disruptive to people’s lives. The Left is always on the lookout for anti-capitalist issues. When some scientists started to suggest that man-made increases in carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were causing a warming trend in the climate, then it did not take long for the media to start publishing alarmist stories of super-hurricanes, floods and droughts of biblical proportions, rising sea levels flooding whole countries, and wholesale extinctions of animal and bird species. It made great copy on a subject people were interested in, and was written by self-styled environmental correspondents. Most of whom graduated in media studies or similar and could not pass a basic high school science exam.
A number of unusually hot summers in North America have now given way to a number of unusually cold winters, in line with a well-understood short-term climate cycle. It also appears that much of the widely publicized increase in global temperatures over the 20th century was a measuring artifact due to most measurement points being in urban areas that are getting warmer for reasons that have nothing to do with global warming. Anyone interested can find more information here.
In the mean time, global warming was ‘clearly’ a problem for the whole world and of course that well-known fixer of the world’s problems, the United Nations, got into the act, resulting in Kyoto. Even if the world were facing a global catastrophe (and don’t imagine for a moment that it is), Kyoto doesn’t fix the problem. All it does, in line with left-wing agendas, is hobble developed countries with huge costs, it does nothing to limit the fastest growing carbon emitters – the developing world, and picks a ludicrously arbitrary target of some percentage of carbon emissions in a particular year for a country, and for which there has never been any scientific justification. If atmospheric CO2 really were a problem, then probably the only way to fix it would be to build a massive infrastructure to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere. Of course, it is not a real problem and Kyoto is not a real solution.
Of the countries that are affected by the Kyoto Protocols (and most are not), the USA has, as usual, taken the most rational approach, and rejected it outright. Japan has decided that compliance will be voluntary – what ever that means. In both Canada and Australia, Kyoto remains deeply controversial. Australia has yet to ratify it, and while Canada has, there is still substantial resistance from the provinces (you would think Canada would be in favour of some climate warming). Which leaves Europe left holding the UN’s baby, valiantly trying to save the world by implementing Kyoto, and in the process impoverishing its citizens. As usual!
Phil Bradley
How cool is this, says Alan Forrester without any question mark.
The United States is planning to build an unmanned hypersonic aircraft capable of striking any target in the world within two hours.
I know what he means, but I would prefer a question mark in there somewhere. Talk about power projection.
It appears that the philosophy is a development of the “shock and awe” tactics developed for the Iraq war.
According to Darpa: “The intent is to hold adversary vital interests at risk at all times, counter anti-access threats, serve as a halt-phase shock force and conduct suppression of enemy air-defence and lethal strike missions as part of integrated strategic campaigns in the 21st Century.”
In other words the United States will be able, using aircraft based on its own territory, to strike at individual targets without warning and without the need for foreign bases.
The whole project goes under the acronym Falcon – Force Application and Launch from the Continental United States.
The military journal Jane’s Defence Weekly, which broke the story in its latest edition, says that as well as this futuristic plan, the research agency also proposes a shorter term (by 2010) weapons system.
What I have in mind is the Antoine Clarke question. Imagine the button for this gadget on the desk of your least favourite President of the United States of, say, the last twenty years. Think Bill Clinton, wanting to divert attention from his latest sordid and very public grilling about his sex life, with the power to make big (but cheap) bangs anywhere on earth with a guarantee of no American body bags and timed to the second.
I’m starting to feel about Bush the way I now feel about Thatcher. She massively strengthened the British state, and its general habit of doing what it likes despite all criticism, for purposes (getting the state a bit more out of the British economy than it had been) that I approved of, and was then ousted and replaced by a very different political tendency. Now Bush is doing the same with the US state, to do other things I approve of.
And Bush too will eventually be toppled, if only by the inexorable force of the US Constitution that will only allow him eight years at the wheel. In a decade from now, when the Democrats have got their act together and when they get to own the White House for another decade, the world will be ruled by armed social workers for whom global gun control will be only the start. (Show us your banking records or bangs in two hours.) Bush will never get to play with this new toy. His successors will.
That’s “how cool” this is.
Ever since the US implemented software patents, the EU has been determined not to be left behind. According to an item in Debian News:
“More on European Software Patents. An article at ZDNet UK says that the EU bureaucrats aren’t even considering the numerous anti-software patenting opinions out there. According to a well-connected lobbyist group, they have determined there will be patents, and the only question is what kind.”
Software patents are a very bad idea as many have discovered in the US. They put a fence around parts of mathematics. Even worse, the government guardians of the fencemaking are not familiar with the field and its’ literature and are vastly understaffed to boot. This has led to some gawdawfully silly (and economically destructive) patents being granted.
Within the last couple years BT tried to claim a patent in the US on hyperlinks1. This was shot down after a massive search by the open source community. It ended with the web publication of a late 1960’s lecture discussing the idea.
Virtually everything in well done programming is “obvious” when you get “there”, down to the core of the problem at hand. Two top programmers given a reasonable time to attack a complex problem will very likely find large sections of their work very similar if not almost identical.
A program in a well formed language is equivalent to a mathematical expression. Such expressions are in most cases transformable into each other.
The Debian News cited article can be found here
1 = 01/07/2000 NewScientist p017 “The Net Strikes Back: BT tries To Patent links”
This item just in from Fox News:
“NEC initially plans to introduce a computer with a fuel-cell system able to run for five consecutive hours on a single cartridge of methanol fuel, but also plans to make a PC within two years that can run continuously for as long as 40 hours”
If they get up to 40 hours on a single refillable charge, the laptop becomes a useful accessory for wilderness work where power is far away. This will be a major boon to naturalists, geologists and other field scientists.
It will also be of immense advantage to Special Forces. A long lived and lighter portable equipment power technology is certain to be welcome in the backpack.
Usually when we feature pictures of posters in the London Underground the news is bad. But here is some good news, in the form of a poster advertising Steven Pinker‘s The Blank Slate.
The book itself probably doesn’t need much plugging here, but I’ll plug it anyway. It’s about true and false (as in the “Blank Slate” of the title) views of human nature, and about how they affect politics, education, aesthetics, and so on. Summarising brutally, if you think that human nature is something that a political system can simply shape at will, you’ll tend to say that your preferred political system should shape away, sometimes with murderous consequences.
To me the encouraging thing about this book is that here is a mainstream publishing event, so to speak, which is full almost to the point of saturation with references to the literature of liberty, of classical liberalism and of anti-collectivism. If you were a regular reader of the publications of, say, the Libertarian Alliance, or of the Reason Foundation, or of the Cato Institute, you’d find references to any number of debates and discussions and personalities which would ring bells with you. Among the many names, for example, listed in the References section are: Friedrich Hayek, Thomas Sowell, Robert Nozick, Kenneth Minogue, Ferdinand Mount, Wendy McElroy and Tom Wolfe, to name just a very few such. I suspect that the Reason foundation may deserve particular kudos for helping Pinker’s thinking along these lines.
When I first spotted this poster, there must have been quite a few of them around, but when, digital camera in hand, I went looking for it again yesterday, I had nearly given up when I found one still on view. Presumably this campaign was timed to coincide with this competition, for which The Blank Slate was shortlisted. (Pinker has been shortlisted for this prize three times, but has yet to win it.)
Since this is Samizdata, let me also mention that the lady in the poster to the left of the Pinker poster as we look at it is Eliza Dushku, star of the movie Wrong Turn. “A brutally exciting, savage shocker. Shriek, jump, enjoy!”
Ah, human nature.
Recently, I wrote a piece on my own blog discussing the question of whether today’s electonics products would look as clunky in 20 years as those of 20 years ago look today. My thought was that they probably wouldn’t, due to the superior quality of the design of many of today’s products. This spurred a rather lively follow up discussion, which particularly focused on mobile phone design. As it happened, after this discussion I discovered that I had lots more to say on both this subject and the question of just what features are and are not important to mobile phone users, and how the devices are evolving. People who read on can discover what exactly is I have to say, and will also get a bonus explanation of the meaning of this photograph of Perry.
 → Continue reading: Trends in mobile phone technology.
New Scientist has an article about the launch of a global internet laboratory, PlanetLab, that simulates tens of thousands of virtual users at more than 60 companies and universities.
It will be used to test new weapons for fighting internet worms and to develop better distributed computer programs, i.e. those that operate on many machines at once. It will also be used to engineer smarter protocols for the next-generation internet. Shankar Sastry, at UC Berkeley says:
The PlanetLab test bed will be an important addition to cyber security research efforts across the country. The ability to conduct cyber-security research on a global scale will have major consequences.
This is wonderful stuff. I am not an expert and cannot tell whether these kind of simulations can be accurate enough to be relevant to the real world battle for cyber-security. Probably yes. What I love about it is people coming together pushing the bounderies of technological progress. Never satisfied with the cutting edge, always reaching for the bleeding edge. That is part of our Western capitalist tradition.
The occasion of this unexpected eulogy to technology and progress was this bit of news read in the conjuction with the above article:
The Pakistani newspaper, The News, quoted a Taliban spokesman as saying Mullah Omar announced the formation of the body [ed. Rahbari Shura, leadership council] in an audio tape sent from his hiding place in Afghanistan. In the tape, Mullah Omar called on the Taliban to make sacrifices to drive out U.S. and other foreign troops and the “puppet” government of U.S.-backed President Hamid Karzai:
Now jihad will be waged against the U.S. and allied forces under a new military strategy.
This is bad news, not because Mullah Omar is frightening me, but because more deluded young muslims will latch onto his fundamentalist railings and die needlessly. What struck me was that this raving fundo uses audio tapes to broadcast his callings for jihad and extermination of Westerners. The technology would probably have never been invented had his ilk had their way. It is the very civilisation and culture he fights so benightedly, that enables him to be heard and spread his poisonous propaganda. Fortunately, Western civilisation fosters progress and innovation and will in the end win the unequal battle.
Do you want some software that is:
A value-added, leverageable global knowledge repository.
or…
Repurposeable, leading edge thoughtware that delivers results-driven value.
Then go to Bullfighter where you can download it for free. It will look at your documents and warn you if you have started talking corporate speak.
You know you need a future-proof asset that seamlessly empowers your mission critical enterprise communications.
Biotechnology may offer some relief to long-suffering sufferers of hayfever, according to this report.
The advance of summer is always slightly spoiled for me by this allergy. My eyes go red, I sneeze violently and have to take medication to keep the symptoms at bay, which for a son of a farmer from East Anglia is not very helpful.
So if the men in white coats can figure out a way to reduce this blight on my summers, here’s to them. Is modern technology great or what?
One of the more feeble but less important things about the euro is the actual design of the banknotes. It was decided early on that the notes would show pictures of bridges, supposedly to symbolise “the close cooperation between Europe and the rest of the world”. However, due to the fact that there were not going to be enough notes to show a picture of a bridge from each Euro-zone country, the notes were instead designed with pictures of bridges that don’t actually exist, but which resemble (in terms of style) bridges that do exist somewhere in Europe. (To my eye, a remarkably large number of them resemble real bridges that are actually in France, but that might be just me). So, rather than drawing attention to the great cultural treasures that do in fact exist in the euro-zone, European money instead gives us a sort of homogenised blandless.
(Euro coins have one common side and one side that the country that would issues the particular coin into circulation can do what it likes with. Just as with the state quarters in the US, which the states got to design, the quality of the designs is variable).
In any event, it was nice to see on the front page of this morning’s Times (which Samizdata does not link to) that the people who design British coins do not go for such blandness. From 2004 to 2007 Britain (assuming it does not join the euro) is going to release a series of four new pound coins showing great British bridges.
Of course, issues of everyone getting their turn come into this, too. As England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland all use the same coins, one of the four coins has to feature a bridge from each of the four constituent countries of the United Kingdom. (Curiously, the situation with the pound is the precise reverse of that with the euro. All of the UK uses the same coins, but England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland all have different banknotes).
This is where we get to the interesting part, which is the choice of bridges on the coins. Choosing for Scotland and Wales was undoubtedly very easy. Benjamin Baker’s Forth Bridge and Thomas Telford’s Menai Strait Bridge are so famous that it can’t have taken more than a moment to choose them. As for Northern Ireland, we have the rather more obscure Egyptian Arch from the Belfast-Dublin railway. Sadly, there are no really famous bridges in Northern Ireland, so we have to make do with what we have. I would rather a more famous bridge from somewhere else in the UK on the coin, but I guess Northern Ireland has to get a coin.
As for England, we have the very new Gateshead Millennium Bridge. This choice doesn’t impress me greatly, as I think the new bridge is more a piece of urban decoration than a piece of important infrastructure. (It illustrates that with modern super-strong materials, engineers and architects designing urban footbridges suddenly have immense freedom to be playful with the design of such bridges, as almost anything they can imagine has suddenly become technically possible and affordable. This is an interesting story, I am all for urban decoration, and I think the bridge is a very good example, but am not sure that this bridge is the right choice for a series of coins that celebrates great bridge building.
So what would my choice for the “England” bridge be? → Continue reading: Euro notes, British coins, and a tour of Britain’s finest bridges
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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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