… because they should be replaced by driverless trains sooner rather than later.
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July 8th, 2015 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
 William Hague got a terrible press at the time of his leadership of the Tory Party (no hair, Northern accent, etc etc). So he can be forgiven for a tinge of bitterness as he looks back and recalls his laser-accurate predictions in the 1990s over the follies of single, monopoly currencies such as the euro:
Meanwhile, China’s A-shares (mainland) equity market is tanking. It is arguably far more of a serious issue for the global economy than Greece, but you would not believe that judging by the brokerage notes I get at the moment.
July 7th, 2015 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Boris Johnson is of the view the government should strongly encourage UK companies to eliminate low paid jobs, be it via automation or off-shore outsourcing. You can tell he thinks that because he supports the notion of a state imposed ‘living wage‘, by which low productivity employees are priced out of a job entirely, thereby ending up welfare dependent wards of the state. I really do look forward to his attempt to become the leader of the Tory Party 😐 July 6th, 2015 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
There are many reasons for my diminished Samizdata productivity. For my friend Johnathan Pearce, it is pressure of work. With me, it has been more like laziness and cowardice. As I get older, I find that my desire to tell others what to think, although still vestigially strong, is now in decline. I find myself more and more interested simply in noticing or learning about how things are, and (increasingly) how they once were. If I tell others what they should think, they sometimes hit back with great vehemence about how I should dump what I think and think something different, and us oldies don’t enjoy even virtual fighting as much as we used to. I think what I think, you think what you think, and let’s just leave it at that, is my attitude, more and more. This doesn’t quite chime in with banging away here, day after day, about all the various and numerous people who are wrong on the internet. Faced with the choice between (a) getting back into the swing of posting stuff here, or (b) wandering about in London taking photographs of how things in London merely are (or are in the process of becoming), and writing about such things at my personal blog, I more and more choose the photoing and the personal blogging option. I’m talking about photos like this one, which I took recently, of the Shard:
I posted this photo at my personal blog a week or more ago, and ruminated upon why I particularly liked the way the Shard had been looking that day. But then came this comment, from a blogger in South Africa whose blog I like and who likes my blog, an expat from Sheffield who calls himself 6k:
My first reaction was: Hey, 6k liked my photo! But I did also notice the next bit. What?!? Need permission?!? What is he talking about?!? What 6k was talking about can be found here, that being a link he helpfully supplied in his comment, immediately after the words quoted above. → Continue reading: On the future of photography in public (and on what I think of the EU) July 6th, 2015 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
I came across this “Trigger Warning” blog and the whole article is a jaw-dropper in terms of how it describes a world utterly alien to me:
FFS. When I asked out my now-wife 12 years ago after our initial encounter in the heart of London, I don’t recall thinking about this sort of stuff or worrying about “low dating market value” or somesuch. But perhaps I am the one at fault here. After all, Jane Austen wrote about “dating market value” in her own way through her early 19th Century novels, if you think about it. (Yes, dear readers – I haven’t posted a lot lately due to pressures of work, etc. But I intend to fix that soon with an item on the offshore world and how it is changing. Watch this space. It stems from a talk I recently gave at one of Brian Micklethwait’s end-of-month events.) July 6th, 2015 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
I saw the mom and her two little kids camped out in the shopping center parking lot. She held a sign asking for help to feed them. I bought some oranges and bananas for them. Imagine if someone from the government had swooped in to explain that my bag of fruit was hardly sufficient to feed the struggling family. What if the government then passed a law saying that if anybody decided to donate food (or cash) to people begging on the street or in a parking lot, the contribution had to be worth at least $15? Anybody caught giving, say, a $1 bill or a small bag of fruit would be fined heavily. Does that sound like “pro-homeless” legislation? July 5th, 2015 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
[Putin] is not an easy man … But I don’t think there is any substitute other than constant engagement. I would like to think she means an endless conveyor belt of ATGWs and artillery ammunition so that the Ukrainian Army can keep Putin’s assorted employees under ‘constant engagement’. But I think she might actually mean doing nothing very much other than exchanging LOLcats and Vines daily via unsecured e-mail. July 4th, 2015 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
Tim Worstall took a look at a document produced by the University of California: “Recognizing Microaggressions and the Messages They Send”. He found that “A person asking an Asian American or Latino American to teach them words in their native language” was a microagression. He then found that “Continuing to mispronounce the names of students after students have corrected the person time and time again. Not willing to listen closely and learn the pronunciation of a non-English based name” was also a microagression. The comments, understandably, have focussed on the way that these guidelines put whitemalemiddleclassheterosexualcisgender people in the wrong whatever they do. The rules are literally impossible to obey. The safest policy is not to interact with blackfemaleworkingclassLGBTQ people any more than you must. This avoidance will be yet more proof of your prejudice, but it’s not like there are any possible circumstances in which you would be declared unprejudiced. Not that anyone nowadays seeks wisdom from a dead white male, but Tacitus could have predicted the result of all this in AD 98: “Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris.” The doctrine of microagression teaches that the victim classes are forever being injured by your acts. Let us hope that human nature has changed enough in the last nineteen hundred years that Tacitus’ observation that it is human nature to hate a person whom you have injured no longer applies. What is it like to be the object of this code? – Lonely. You will feel surrounded by enemies. And all outside your exact caste must be enemies: it is impossible for friendship to develop across the divides of privilege when every mundane interaction that might in other circumstances have led to friendship is fraught with tension. Thus one one of the main benefits claimed to accrue from diversity on campus is lost. – Exhausting. You will be continually on the defensive, and for all your obligation to be constantly angry, passive and unable to control your own destiny. How could it be otherwise? You have chosen to centre your life on how your enemies perceive you. If black, your constant concern is what whites think of you; if female, what males think of you; whatever category you belong to defines you. One of the attributes of status is that other people have to watch what they say around you, to mind their P’s and Q’s. The demands of political correctness can force high-status people to temporarily behave to low-status people in this respect as if their positions were reversed. But victim status is a very poor imitation of actual status. For one thing the apparent respect you get is gone the minute your back is turned – or a deniable microsecond earlier if the microagressor decides that he might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb and go macro. For another it’s, like, victimhood. You are officially a loser. July 3rd, 2015 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)
It starts in a culture’s obscure corners and spreads out like an inkblot…
I suspect this and the feminazi reaction to it was the inspiration. July 3rd, 2015 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
So says “Kilroy”, commenting on a DSL Reports post about Netflix being charged a 9% amusement tax by the City of Chicago. He suggests that Netflix should just stop selling services to people in Chicago and instead direct them to their local lawmakers. If it happened it would be a fine example of a company refusing to cave in, but it is unlikely. According to The Verge, “Netflix says it’s already making arrangements to add the tax to the cost charged to its Chicago customers.” According to Ars Technica, what might stop this are conflicting federal telecommunications laws. On Reddit someone pointed out that this is rather in conflict with the idea of net neutrality. A side discussion on Reddit is about the extent to which companies can shop around for cities with favourable laws. Someone said, “see Detroit“. Did business move out of Detroit because of unfavourable laws and taxes? July 2nd, 2015 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
The overwhelming tendency of markets is to bring people together, break down prejudices, and persuade people of the benefits of cooperation regardless of class, race, religion, sex/gender, or other arbitrary distinctions. The same is obviously and especially true of sexual orientation. It is the market that rewards people who put aside their biases and seek gains through trade. This is why states devoted to racialist and hateful policies always resort to violence in control of the marketplace. Ludwig von Mises, himself Jewish and very much the victim of discrimination his entire life, explained that this was the basis for Nazi economic policy. The market was the target of the Nazis because market forces know no race, religion, or nationality. July 2nd, 2015 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Bitcoin offers a glimpse into the future of money a purely digital form of money that is individual, private, global, and free (free as in speech, not as in beer). Bitcoin is often compared with the existing banking system, juxtaposing its futuristic capabilities with the slow, antiquated, and cumbersome world of wire transfers, checks, “banking hours,” and restrictions. But the future will not be a choice between “old money” and cryptocurrency. Instead, it will be a choice between two competing visions of digital money: one based on freedom and choice, the other based on control and surveillance, a dystopian totalitarian system of control from which no one can escape. We are now at the crossroads, and we must choose the future of currency wisely. July 1st, 2015 | 64 comments - (Comments are closed)
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