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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Running your own business is a pretty good way of disabusing yourself of any lingering enthusiasm for state regulation and mandatory collective provision. That those in business tend to be capitalists is an obvious, platitudinous assertion but there remains one profession which is perversely immune to free-market reason and where public sector boosterism persists, my own: architecture.
If you take the most prominent prosperous ‘progressives’ subtract the entertainers and journalists, those cosseted in extravagant public sector sinecures and those endowed with a generous inheritance, you can be sure that there is a preponderance of architects among the ‘productive’ remainder. Take George Galloway’s podium partner and erstwhile Blair buddy: Richard Rogers. He is arguably one of Britain’s most celebrated architects and certainly one of its wealthiest, yet his political beliefs are barely more developed than the average student union firebrand.
The architectural media shares the same core assumptions about society, economics and the public sector as the likes of The Guardian, The Independent and the BBC and if you are unfortunate enough to wade through a turgidly worded missive from the Architect’s professional institutes – in Ireland we have the RIAI, in the UK, the RIBA – you will find little from which a Guardian-reading career bureaucrat would demur. Sustainability, Public Realm, Social Justice etc. etc.
Leaving aside the obvious fact that architects in the public sector or benefitting significantly from public sector work tend to favour an expanded public sector, there are a number of factors which explain why architects in general are often prone to left-leaning politics. → Continue reading: Why so many left-wing architects?
State funding of abortions is, however, a completely different matter. The pro-choicers say it’s a matter of choice. Let it stay that way, then, without forcing people who oppose infanticide to fund it.
– Tomas Kohl
Mathematician John Allen Paulos, in his most recent book (A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market, Basic Books, 2003) coined a term which I had hoped would catch on throughout the finance community. He describes under-researched puff pieces on personal finance (e.g. Five Hot Stocks to Pump Up your 401k NOW!) as “financial pornography.”
One of the biggest purveyors of financial pornography online is the MSN.com website, and this column doesn’t disappoint: Seven Signs a Stock is Ready to Soar. The author purports to explain how to locate ‘hot’ stocks, those that are about to appreciate rapidly in price, by reviewing some research on what types of conditions most often preceded (notice I did not say caused, and neither did the research) a price increase.
It should not take a Wharton MBA to figure out what is wrong with the premise of the article. The cited research identifies the seven conditions that most often preceded a big run-up in the price of a particular stock, but nowhere does it suggest that these conditions were sufficient (or even necessary) to cause a stock price to take off.
Obviously, all of the conditions that make up the ‘CANSLIM’ acronym are desirable things for a corporation — for its management and for its ownership. But that doesn’t mean that the stock in question is about to outperform the market. I’m not a hard-and-fast believer in the semi-strong efficient market hypothesis — I think a few super-stud investors can outperform the market — but for the average investor reading MSN’s Money Insight column, the CANSLIM approach is not going to turn those people into super-stud investors. EMH is still going to apply to those investors; there are just too many other investors who have the same type of information and insights at their fingertips.
In his 1974 commencement address to Cal Tech, the late Richard Feynman described what he called “cargo cult science:”
In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During [World War II] they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas — he’s the controller — and they wait for the airplanes to land.
Feynman (about whom I will have much more to say in an upcoming post) was using the term to deride psychics and ‘paranormal’ advocates like Uri Geller. But the MSN piece is urging investors to do exactly what Feynman describes the naive south island natives as doing: falling hook, line and sinker for a post hoc fallacy.
Almost everyone has heard about the list of persons and organizations purportedly bribed with oil by Saddam Hussein. You can find the partial list here at MEMRI.
Enjoy!
The US bureaucracy’s space branch (NASA) wants to scrap a Shuttle flight to carry out a servicing on the Hubble telescope. A petition has been started by Fernando Ribiero, a Brazilian, to “Save the Hubble“.
As one commenter on the site points out, it is easy for someone living outside the USA to demand that US taxpayers’ money and US lives be risked in a leaky Space Shuttle. For all sorts of American reasons there is a petition but only Americans can sign.
Surely the answer is obvious: privatise Hubble!
I am sure someone could set up a website taking credit card donations to pay for the upkeep of Hubble. Without the NASA inter-departmental bickering, it should be feasible for a few dollars per subscriber a year. I for one would consider this a far preferable use of my money than most government schemes I can think of.
If no trips to service the Hubble telescope are made, it will cease operating by 2007. At some point after that we can assume that the telescope would come crashing down to Earth (statistically not going to do any damage). So the privatisation method I would suggest is that used by the British government to dispose of the Trustee Savings’ Bank in the late 1980s. A price was set, to encourage some sorting out wasters from serious operators and the net proceeds were used to boost the bank’s capital. A variation of this method should keep Hubble up for the next 10 years.
India has closed the deal for the purchase of the ‘Admiral Gorschkov’, a Cold War era Russian aircraft carrier. It is expected this ship will come into service with the Indian Navy around 2008, just in time for the retirement of the INS Viraat, their current aircraft carrier.
It is quite interesting that there is a continuing armaments relationship between the Russians and India, despite the seismic geopolitical changes of the last decade. An untutored alien landing for the first time on Earth would make no sense of it. The roles of the US and the USSR in that region should be reversed, Russia should be partnered with the alternating military dictatorship and semi-democratic kleptocracies of Pakistan and the US with India, the oldest liberal democratic state in Asia.
Relations between nations have layers within layers and oft-times deep and conflicting historical roots, I am aware of some of the public history of the region, but cannot help wondering if there is a bit more to it, an unspoken geopolitical undertext.
India has centuries of liberal European traditions behind it. It is also not likely to change very much even under severe pressure. Generations would come and go before the paperwork for change was properly submitted, checked, authorized and filed. In a Cold War world the risk of India actually going Red was rather slim and thus of less worry than perennially unstable Pakistan.
Pakistan borders China and is within spitting distance of Russia across a ultra thin panhandle of Afghanistan. The region is wild and uncontrolled and right in the hotspot is the contested Kashmir Province. Given the location and the consistant interest in access to the oil and southern oceans shown from Tsarist through Soviet days, Northern Pakistan was absolutely ripe for fun and games with the KGB. It seems obvious checkmating this move was of far more Realpolitik value than telling the Indians how much we admired their history.
With the end of the Evil Empire, much of Geopolitics changed, but the full extent of the re-alignment of interests in this part of the world did not really click into place until September 11th, 2001. Islamic fundamentalists were already a clear and present danger to the Russians. Nutcases don’t even have to board an airliner to get to Moscow. They can drive there. After 9/11 they were also top priority to the US.
Over the last century or so, the Russians have ticked off a lot of people on their borders and they know it. They’ve done a far better job at this than the US… so it is somewhat in their interest for the US to take the brunt of whatever direct ire is caused by sorting out the problems. Otherwise they would have to deal with it, and given their level of success in Afghanistan and Chechnya, I would not have much hope for solutions from that direction.
From the Russian viewpoint, it is ideal if the US stabilizes Pakistan and acts as the lightning rod for fundamentalist ire; meanwhile they help arm India so that in the worst case, a fundamentalist takeover of Pakistan, India can keep Pakistan occupied and looking away from Russian territory.
The Russians see the regional problems up front and personal; they are damned pretty much whatever they do and aren’t very good at building stable liberal democracies. They haven’t even worked the bugs out of their own yet. The US is somewhat less at risk from the downsides of action in the region since it is far, far away and bordered by oceans and democracies. Not that such is a total protection. It just means the crazies have to expend more energy and more resources to carry out their attacks. To put it bluntly, the US stands to lose a smaller number of cities to the fundies than would Russia.
So there is method to this madness. You just have to sit a moment in everyone’s chair and ask ‘what’s in it for me?’
The Director-General of the BBC, Greg Dyke, has now resigned.
Mr Dyke’s decision to step down came 20 hours after BBC Chairman Gavyn Davies resigned following the Hutton Report.
An emotional Mr Dyke told BBC staff at their central London headquarters: “I don’t want to go. But if in the end you screw up you have to go.”
What with Gavyn Davies gone and now Mr Dyke, the corporation will hopefully be a bit less ‘hideously white’.
…is that so many people are astonished that a paragon of the establishment like Lord Hutton should take the view that whatever the government’s ministers say should be presumed to be correct whilst that of mere journalists, even those working for the state owned media, should be assumed to be dissembling.
Did anyone seriously think the outcome would be otherwise?
I realise this is The Story Of The Moment, but simply cannot get that worked up over the difficulties of institutions of which I have such low regard to begin with.
“God made the 20th Century to teach us that the notion that things work better when experts plan them is a fallacy. It’s a pity that a hundred-million or so had to die to illustrate the lesson. But now we got it. Right?”
– John Weidner
Glenn Reynolds has an article on the rapidly escalating Nano-War of Words. The technological possibilities outlined 25 years ago by Dr. Eric Drexler have the poor spin doctors (like Mr. Modzelewski) and a number of other Johnny-come-lately’s in the science world all bent out of shape.
It is, after all, not Dr Drexler’s fault lesser minds are jealous he got there first and rightfully will have his name in the history books as the Father of Nanotechnology. Whether he is correct in detail or not is irrelevant. The fact his detractors will not even debate him without veering off into ad-hominem attacks rather than meet him fairly on the field of equations shows the serious weakness of their position.
I will make no absolute claim that a Drexler Assember/Disassembler is buildable. Neither will I accept claims backed up by bluster and lack of experiment that such is impossible.
And yes, I do know Eric. Quite well in fact.
Dr. Eric Drexler (center) with Dr. Peter Vijk (left) at
the May 2003 National Space Society conference in San Jose, California
Photo: Copyright Dale M. Amon, all rights reserved
Brian reminds us that if Dr Kelly’s death was embarrassing for the BBC and the British government, the capture alive of Saddam Hussein is potentially very embarrssing for the French President Jacques ‘the Crook’ Chirac.
Following his story, I decided to check out TF1, the major TV channel, to see what coverage – if any – there was about the Bagdad story. It certainly is not front page news in Paris.
For good reason…
One of the leading stories in France today is the report of an investigative judge into the sale of frigates by what was then Thomson-CSF to Taiwan in 1991. Under the ethical trade (!) clauses in this 14 billion French Franc contract (about 1.9 billion US dollars), if it were proved that bribes had been paid, the guilty party would have to pay damages of up to 600 million US dollars.
The government at the time was the Socialist Party and the prime minister would probably have been Pierre Bérégovoy, who committed suicide by firing an indeterminate number of bullets into the wrong side of his head shortly before being called to appear in court on charges of channelling public funds into the bank accounts of most of his Socialist buddies, or arch-crook Edith Cresson, she of the dentist-gigolo hired at the European Commission who called English MPs a bunch of public-school homosexuals. I forget which.
Naturally the damages will all be paid by the French government, i.e. the taxpayers. The notion that the political party or the politician that stole the money should be held somehow responsible? Where would it end…
“Corruption scandal? Which corruption scandal?”
I took this photograph of a street in North London earlier this evening (with a camera-phone, hence the poor resolution).
The snow that the weather forecasters have been threatening us with for the past week or so has finally swooped down with a vengeance (well, by London standards anyway).
But as I gazed out of window at the swirling storm, I was struck by an interesting idea. You see, due to my meticulous and detailed observations over many years, I have concluded that snow seems to occur during periods of very cold weather. And, by coincidence, these periods of very cold weather are also marked by a dramatic decline in the number of lurid ‘global warming’ stories appearing in the British press.
Conversely, during periods of very hot weather said ‘global warming’ stories make a sudden and almost miraculous re-appearance.
Are these two phenomena linked in some way? Is this a clue to the existence of as yet unseen and mysterious forces that science has, hitherto, been wholly unaware of? I shall continue with my research in the hope that more will be revealed.
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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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