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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I have a friend called Don Riley, who originates from New Zealand. He is a property developer. He owns – lucky man – property next to London’s new Jubilee Line. The Jubilee Line, as everyone in the Anglosphere surely knows, is the latest addition to the tube, that is to say to the London Underground railway system.
Don is also an International Man of Mystery. He’ll tell you all kinds of stories about how he sold computers to the Russians in the seventies, and he still has numerous deeply mysterioso friends from behind the ex-Iron Curtain. He occasionally goes on “birdwatching” expeditions to places like Morocco. So if he isn’t a spook of some ex- or pensioned or maybe even current variety, he has a lot of fun pretending to be.
Last year Don wrote a book, about “public” transport and how to finance it without the government crawling all over everything. Book. You remember those? A pile of paper joined together at the side. Paper? Well, it’s flat and usually white, about the same size as the average screen but you generally point it upwards rather than sideways, and it’s very user friendly but for the time being rather hard to update … oh never mind …
Anyway the point is, unlike the usual drivel perpetrated by businessmen who fancy themselves as political stirrers without troubling to learn the trade, Don’s book is actually quite good. I haven’t read it properly, despite Don’s telephone nagging, but Patrick Crozier over at UK Transport has, and I commend his review to your attention, and the book itself.
Patrick Crozier has given two of my last-Friday-of-the-month talks, which are a regular fixture of the London Libertarian scene: last year about the general background and history of the British railway system and why the privatisation of it went so wrong (subsequently published as Libertarian Alliance Economic Notes No. 91), and, this February, on the political foreground of it – very fraught just now and likely to remain so. During these talks Patrick mentioned that in Japan there exists an interesting exception to the general rule these days that all railways are a mess and getting worse: a superbly efficient, profitable national railway network. Write it up, Patrick, everyone said. Well, now he has, not at huge length but very usefully, over at his recently launched UK Transport blog.
A point Patrick is fond of making about railway systems is that they aren’t so much a matter of seizing upon the very latest whizz-bang technology, as of simply using relatively mundane kit and making all of it work properly, all at once, all the time. I got a sharp email ticking-off (which I hope in due course to respond to more directly) from Neel Krishnaswami for being “fuzzily mystical” about “Asian values” in my earlier Japan related posting of March 06 2002. But, might not the Japanese railway system be an example of the Japanese playing from their stereotypical strength – consensual cooperation, and from their equally stereotypical “weakness” – unwillingness to fly off at an anti-consensual innovatory tangent? Patrick’s point being that this weakness may also be a strength when it comes to running a good railway.
Patrick Crozier has a good article On Corporate Manslaughter. He notes that the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) will be prosecuting Railtrack (the company which ‘owns’ the actual railroad infrastructure in Britain, recently in effect re-nationalised by the State). Thus one part of the state is trying to make another part of the state pay fines to yet another part of the state.
Patrick makes several excellent points and avoids the usual stale perspectives on these sort of issues.
Those of you who are Unix users will be familiar with the fortune cookie program. I am uncertain when it was first written, but it is rather ancient as such things go. That is why some of its’ many thousand quotes hark to a different era of computing, political thought and even humour. Although it does nothing “useful” it is fun and one of the items I consider mandatory for any computer I work with. If you include the non-politically correct ones there are some truly fine old bawdy limericks and the occasional ROFL (Roll On The Floor Laughing) stories that take the piss of any imaginable group or subgroup of humanity.
There are also many thought provoking quotes. Some make you just sit back and think. The following is one of those.
By the middle 1880’s, practically all the roads except those in the South, were of the present standard gauge. The southern roads were still five feet between rails.
It was decided to change the gauge of all southern roads to standard, in one day. This remarkable piece of work was carried out on a Sunday in May of 1886. For weeks beforehand, shops had been busy pressing wheels in on the axles to the new and narrower gauge, to have a supply of rolling stock which could run on the new track as soon as it was ready. Finally, on the day set, great numbers of gangs of track layers went to work at dawn. Everywhere one rail was loosened, moved in three and one-half inches, and spiked down in its new position. By dark, trains from anywhere in the United States could operate over the tracks in the South, and a free interchange of freight cars everywhere was possible.
– Robert Henry, “Trains”, 1957
I wonder how long the study would take today? Not to mention the environmental impact statement, the regulatory battles, the labour negotiations…
Sometimes one has to admit we have not advanced ourselves. We have only made complex what was once deemed simple.
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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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