Gender is too important an issue to be left to people who think it’s more important than anything else.
– James Lileks (yesterday)
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December 21st, 2002 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Today I visited my mother, and maybe I got my enthusiasm for Isn’t Capitalism Great? stories from her, because like me she thinks that good news is important. And she told me of some very good news that was in last weekend’s Independent On Sunday. I made a copy of the cutting.
The professor is a man called Joshua Silver, and the glasses he has devised are as remarkable an invention as I have ever heard about. With normal glasses the lenses are made of solid glass. But Professor Silver’s lenses are filled with liquid (silicon oil), and you can alter the focus of these lenses by pumping liquid into or out of them so that they expand or contract. You fiddle about with them until they are just right for you. And if your eyesight changes, which for most people means your eyesight getting worse, you can alter them, just by twiddling a couple of knobs on the side of the glasses. You only ever need one pair of glasses in your entire life, and you never need visit an optician in your entire life. None of this is now a particularly big deal in somewhere like London SW1 or New York City (although it quite soon may become important there as well), but in Africa, for millions upon millions who are now blurry-eyed losers, this is the chance to make visual sense of your world for the first time in your blighted life. Africa just doesn’t have opticians on every street corner the way rich countries do. Many Africans with bad eyesight never even learn to read, for this one reason. Educated people who used to have good eyesight but don’t any more now have to retire early. All that could now be about to end. → Continue reading: Adjustable spectacles from an Oxford physics professor – £6 a pair and they last a lifetime December 21st, 2002 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
A friend of mine insists that the Cato Institute is nothing more than a sell-out, obsessed with media coverage at the expense of intellectual integrity. This view seems to have been shaped by the jealousy of a less media-effective think-tank. In Britain, the Libertarian Alliance has the ambition of being/becoming the world’s second best libertarian website after Cato. Having been sent a copy of a recent publication: “Cato Supreme Court Review 2001-2002” I admit that I’m impressed with the quality of the content, the actual book itself, and the fact that it is possible to produce a commentary on the performance of the Supreme Court. I have not read the Supreme Court Review from cover to cover yet. But leafing through I learnt about the practice of “fast-track plea bargaining” and the conundrum posed by obscenity laws on the one hand and the provisions of the Bill of Rights on the other. I discovered that 90 per cent of criminal cases don’t go to trial by jury in the federal courts because of the “fast-track” system and that British law on defining “child pornography” would be thrown out, probably with a 7-2 majority, if attempted in the USA. The contrast with the United Kingdom is stunning. No British think-tank has the intellectual quality to produce such an academic work. None produces this level of production quality. And our absence of a constitution makes such a project redundant. The so-called “unwritten constitution” is precisely worth the paper it’s not written on. My only suggestion for future editions would be that it would be handy to have a listing of all Supreme Court cases over the period, with an indication as to which cases were covered in the various chapters. Otherwise, I welcome the appearance of this tome which deserves to become both a tool for the academic study of the US Constitution in practice, and an essential campaign guide to the wins and losses of individual freedom in America. December 20th, 2002 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
December 20th, 2002 | Comments are closed
China is a country that appears to be attracting increasing interest from the blogosphere and elsewhere and not without good reason. We all sense the potential lurking in this Asian giant. Depending upon one’s point of view this is either worrying or exciting or, possibly, both. Only yesterday I took delivery of a new dining table and set of chairs and couldn’t help the raised eyebrow upon noticing the legend ‘Made in China’ stamped on the box. Jolly smart it is too. I admit to being lured into the ranks of the China-watchers, so I tend to regard throwaway news items like this to be noteworthy:
How ironic that, despite the unarguable ghastliness of their ruling regime, the Chinese are constantly embracing new ideas of enterprise and weath-creation whilst the ruling elites of the West are searching for ever-more elaborate ways of suffocating both. For us fans of capitalism, watching China is a bit like watching a child develop, from the first utterance of ‘Mamma’ to taking the stabilisers off of their bikes. Just wait until those hormones begin to kick in! December 20th, 2002 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last Wednesday evening, I had the pleasure of being wined and dined at the Chez de Havilland in the company of the man himself, Brian Micklethwait and a delegation of student bloggers responsible for the St.Andrews Liberty Log. Spending an evening with these fine, upstanding examples of student life rather put my own persistant grumbles into perspective. Judging from what they have to say about their fellow students at that fine old institution, it has become a Seat of Unlearning. Our dinner companions, it would appear, constitute an oasis of sanity amid a vast, barren desert of addled brains. One example that sticks in my mind, is a story related by one of the students, Alex Singleton. I believe I recall the details with reasonable accuracy but I’m sure I will hear smartly from Alex if this proves not to be the case. It seems that St.Andrews University Student Union has its very own ‘Equal Opportunities’ Commission. Or, at least, it used to have one because our Alex managed to get himself elected to head it and then promptly proceeded to trash the entire operation and render it unusable. Chalk one up for the good guys. However, in the midst of performing this great service for mankind, Alex was approached by a diminutive fellow student who wanted Alex to take up her claim that she was a victim of discrimination because of her lack of height. December 20th, 2002 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Two of my blog-colleagues are struck down with computer-related grief. Natalie Solent, who has been unable to blog since last Saturday, has asked Samizdata.net to pass on to as many of her regular readers as we can reach that she has not abandoned them on purpose, but has been wrenched away from them, by an attempt to upgrade from Windows Complicated to Windows Even More Complicated which has proved to be very complicated indeed. But she will be back, just as soon as it’s all sorted. And if you’re wondering why it’s techno-moron me telling you this rather than Perry de Havilland, well as you may have guessed already from his recent blog-silence, he too is having computer-related troubles, this time involving a hardware failure. It isn’t going to be too expensive (it’s one of the small connecting boxes rather than the big box itself which has collapsed), but the problem is proving to be time consuming, while Perry queues with other afflicted souls for the services of his computer-guru. He too is doing all he can to get back on line. December 19th, 2002 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
TransOrbital, a member of the Artemis Project, will soon carry out its’ first launch, an engineering mockup of their lunar probe. The vehicle is scheduled for launch into low earth orbit (LEO) tomorrow, Dec 20th, on a Russian Dnepr former-ICBM. TransOrbital hopes to launch the first commercial lunar probe in late 2003. From all of us at Samizdata: “Good luck and clear jets TO!” More information is available here December 19th, 2002 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
The 2004 International Space Development Conference (ISDC) will be held in Oklahoma City. The ISDC is the annual National Space Society (NSS) conference. This is a direct inheritance from the L5 Society which began the conferences in Los Angelos in 1982. The NSS Executive committee voted the final approved of the 2004 site candidate on Dec 12th. The 2003 conference is in Palo Alto, California this coming May. Please check out the web page for more information. Just for the sake of full disclosure… I chair the committee that makes the location recommendations to the NSS Board of Directors, so I sort of knew this for a few weeks now. December 19th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Yesterday I found myself reflecting on that monstrous half-truth, consumer sovereignty. It’s a half truth because the places where consumers do their consuming are also sovereign. (I seem to recall the late Murray Rothbard having some good things to say about “The Myth of Consumer Sovereignty” in Chapter 7, I think it is, of Man, Economy and State). Shops can also do things as they wish, and if you don’t like this then ultimately your only course may be to run away. I don’t favour shop sovereignty extending to the point where they can bolt the door while you’re still there and force you to do things their way, take back what you just said, buy things you don’t want, and so forth. But short of that I like the occasional shop where the constomer has to walk on egg shells to avoid a proprietorial tantrum or to avoid knocking huge tottering piles of random items all over the grubby floor. Sure, there must be proper shops where the customer is always right and which are helpful, clean, efficient, full of good stuff well displayed and reasonably priced, etc. etc. But not all shops should be like this. There used to be a wonderful place in Dover Street, just off Seven Dials (a bit to the north of Covent Garden tube station), which was crammed to the ceiling with hardware of every kind you could possibly want or imagine, provided it could be found. I remember three things in particular about this place, aside from the general mess and dirt and confusion and lack of walking space. First, the front window was literally a rubbish dump. There it was, displaying a kind of archaeological system of sediments from previous eras of the shop’s history. Nails from the late nineteen fifties, drill bit sets from the early sixties, crushed cardboard boxes, rolls of insulating material, bags full of obscure and complicated joinery items, long discontinued workbench kits, and of course inch upon inch of genuine actual rubbish. All this could be clearly enjoyed through the front window of the shop. → Continue reading: Retailer sovereignty December 19th, 2002 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
Brian asked if Japan was only pretending to do badly. He seemed to think that there were some grounds for doubting the news of Japanese economic stagnation. Looking at the World Economic Freedom report I discovered the following interesting figures.
Note that Japan is consistently higher than the OECD average. Note also that Sweden’s business taxation always was low. The US corporate taxes may be close to Japan’s, but the US economy hasn’t needed tax cuts for the past ten years to stimulate growth. My conclusion is that Japanese “stimulus packages” are clearly not addressing incentives to produce. Finally, the overall ranking between 1990 and 2000 is highly revealing: USA 3rd in 2000, 4th in 1990 Before David Carr wonders how the heck a Labour government pushed the UK up 2 places: 1) independent Bank of England, 2) you should have seen what other governments were like… A case example of (relative) economic freedom being a precondition for (relative) economic prosperity. December 19th, 2002 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
December 19th, 2002 | Comments are closed
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