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This coming Friday evening (Aug 3rd), there will be a talk, at my home, on the subject of Bitcoin, given by a German libertarian who is now visiting London named Frank Braun.
Frank Braun is an acquaintance of Detlev Schlichter. Detlev wanted London to offer Frank Braun some kind of libertarian welcome, but many of the usual libertarian welcomers are now out of the country, on holiday and fleeing the Olympics. So, I’m doing some Frank Braun welcoming. Which suits me well because I have for some time been thinking of cranking up my Brian’s Fridays, and this will be a good way to see if that really appeals. Plus, any acquaintance of Detlev Schlichter is an acquaintance of mine. Certainly, this particular talk ought to be interesting.
There is a posting up at my personal blog about the event. If you’d like to attend, and are near enough actually to do that conveniently, please email me (follow the link to see how).
Now, back to all the tidying up that I must do before Friday. That has now become urgent. Which was another reason why I said yes to Frank Braun dropping by.
World’s biggest eco-toilet scheme fails
Not that I wish to discount the idea of improvements to the current design of toilets entirely. One must not be too quick to pooh-pooh new ideas.
If conservative Republicans can’t understand that fewer people want to associate with them because they lied when they said they favored a government that did less and spent less, nothing can save the party of Lincoln from eventual receivership. And if liberal Democrats can’t fully grasp that voters are turned off not by the color of Obama’s skin but by the failure of his presidency, they too will continue to see fewer and fewer people marching under their banner.
– Nick Gillespie
There is controversy over empty seats at sold out events at the Olympics. People who could not get tickets are annoyed to see them.
The way that tickets were sold is odd. I know people who applied for tickets in ony the events they were interested in and were allocated no tickets. I know other people who applied for lots of events and got tickets they were not interested in. It would not surprise me if some of those empty seats belong to people who decided against going to events they had tickets for because they were not interested enough. The tickets were sold this way to stop the prices getting so high that poor people could not afford them. The tickets can not be transferred for the same reason.
The trouble is that you either have a market or you have a lottery. There are no other choices, no matter how you try to dress it up. The trouble with lotteries is they do not allocate resources efficiently.
I enjoyed this posting, at David Thompson’s blog, which includes a bit about a Guardian writer who (the horror!) has an inclination towards sending her daughter to a private school.
And I particularly enjoyed this comment attached to it, from “sackcloth and ashes”:
During the early 1980s, my mother taught at an inner city comprehensive which was going downhill fast, largely due to the efforts of the Inner London Educational Authority and the trots in the NUT.
Staff room discussions were usually dominated by the iniquities of private education, and how socially divisive it was, up to the point she let slip that she sent both her boys (self included) to a fee-paying school.
As a consequence, she often found herself being button-holed in the corridors by the most hard-left revolutionaries amongst her colleagues, all of whom wanted her advice on how to get one’s kids into an independent school, rather than a failing comp like the one they were working in.
In my opinion a pro-state-education lefty who sends his/her kid to a private school, because that’s the best school they can contrive, is doing the right thing. I disagree with them about the goodness of state education, not with them doing their best for their kid. What is really creepy is if you send your kid to a terrible school, which you know is terrible, purely in order to be ideologically consistent. Sending your kid to a good school, even though you officially don’t approve of such behaviour, is a tad hypocritical. Deliberately sending your kid to a terrible school, when you had the choice not to, is downright evil.
In 1980 the Olympics ceased to be what they had been for most of their modern history and even remained a little in Montreal in 1976, which was a great festival of amateur sport intimately linked to the grass roots of sport and became a curious combination of the Soviet and the commercial. Since then they have failed to fit either of the two justifiable models of modern games because they are neither amateur activity done for the love of it nor are they entertainment organised commercially. The overwhelming majority of Olympic sports have no spectator following of any substance and in the case of those which do (such as tennis, basketball and football) the event is peripheral and a nuisance to the normal calendar. Olympians are no longer the outsiders who make it in their own way – as Harold Abrahams was or Don Thompson who won a walking medal in 1960 training on his own, using his own methods. Nor are they genuinely commercial stars like Lewis Hamilton or Didier Drogba. They are Soviet-style, state-subsidised creatures, competing for the benefit of their political masters: “Team GB” with the PM as skipper.
– Lincoln Allison
Dr Frederick L. Hoffman, speaking at the International Eugenics Congress, as reported in the Times of 27 July 1912:
He said the statistics were taken from the [Rhode Island] State Census of 1905. They showed two things – first that half the population of this typical New England State were of foreign extraction, and, secondly, that fewer native-born women were married and had families as compared with foreign-born women. The statistics also showed that a far larger percentage of Roman Catholic married women were mothers. Therefore, this originally Protestant State was in a fair way of becoming Roman Catholic. He thought these figures showed an alarming tendency in American life.
Sound familiar? Of course it does. These are exactly the same fears we hear today and they are no more valid now than they were then. Well, I say that. I assume that Rhode Island is a functioning state albeit a social democratic one.
As this is a eugenics conference I can’t help being reminded of this choice quote from Niall Ferguson:
The crucial point to note is that a hundred years ago work like Galton’s was at the cutting edge of science. Racism was not some backward-looking reactionary ideology; the scientifically uneducated embraced it as enthusiastically as people today accept the theory of man-made global warming.
The conviction of Paul Chambers for making an obvious joke on Twitter about blowing an airport sky high has been quashed in the High Court.
So someone in the justice system has a brain cell to call his own. Pity the case had to get as far as the Lord Chief Justice, the aptly named Lord Judge in the job he was born for, before that person was found.
Tell you what is “clearly menacing”, though, if the future of liberty in this country means anything to you at all. The airport security manager who finked on Chambers to the police, the police who arrested him, the Crown Prosecution Service lawyers who prosecuted him, the magistrate who first convicted him, and Judge Jacqueline Davis who refused his initial appeal all still have their heads attached to their necks.
I jest.
Probably.
“Russ in Texas” (actual name: Russ Mitchell) commented most interestingly on this posting here about 3D printing, the point being that he had, or soon would have, personal experience of actually doing this stuff. I urged him to write about any such experience, and here (with apologies to him for the delay in doing this posting) is the email he recently sent:
Here’s my experience:
3d Printing is mature and ready to go NOW – if you need something in plastic, resin, or maybe ceramics. If you need functional metal parts, the revolution is not here yet.
Background: decent-enough 3d modeling skills with graphics/animation software like Blender/3dsMax.
Tools Used: TinkerCAD (godsend!), 3dsMax.
Formats needed by Pros: STL, DWG.
So, modeling arrowheads, etcetera, based on historical artifacts was not very hard. In some ways, this was preferable to scanning because of distortions called by corrosion (holes in artifact), rust bumps, bits missing, etcetera. TinkerCAD online proved to be REALLY fast for slapping together the rough models for figures based on intuitively jacking together various shapes (and then distorting them) – those who have difficulty visualizing in 3 dimensions might have trouble seeing how a pyramid, rotated, stretched, and then narrowed, gives you a scalene triangle, but it’s there and very doable.
The providers: Sculpteo and Shapeways. Their setup: entirely painless. Their materials? Affordable enough. Some of the arrowheads can be duplicated for a couple of bucks a pop in resin or plastic, up to 10-12 bucks…. COMPLETELY affordable.
Metal?
Write it off. 3d printing in metal is still OBSCENELY expensive (a 70-dollar arrowhead, made in 20-hrc stainless that can’t hold an edge??), and what I wound up having to do was take models to a guy I know with a laser/waterjet rig… who then recommended old-school forge dyes and stamping.
So that’s where we are now. It’s coming, and for the right material, it’s here now: stupid-easy modeling programs like tinkerCAD will get somebody 90% of the way to a useable model for simpler stuff, (almost) no skills required. But the material’s the clincher.
The more I hear about this stuff, the more revolutionary (in a good way) it strikes me as being. And we are now only at the beginning of the story.
“What I find fascinating is how many intelligent people are willing, even feel urged, to provide intellectual support for a system that is not the result of intellectual discourse but came about – rather non-intellectually – through sheer power politics, opportunism and hubris, and that is evidently failing. Our financial system (or non-system) offers a great example of Nietzsche’s dictum that investigating the true origin and the true motivation behind things most often leads to surprising results. The purpose and the clever design that most people later believe to be behind various institutions are often only projected onto them with hindsight.”
– Detlev Schlichter.
As regular commenter “Laird” said the other day, compared to the chicanery that is modern central banking, the row about the LIBOR business is small beer indeed.
Incoming from Michael J, drawing my attention to this video of the Mayor of London flagging up the Olympic Games in appropriately manic style, minus a great deal of piss that has been edited out of him, so to speak. The official grand opening is tomorrow.
Right at the end, in the one bit of Not Boris, someone shouts: “I hate Sebastian Coe!” This, if I am not mistaken, was Jeremy Paxman. I did not know he felt that way about Coe. (LATER: He doesn’t. Or not publicly. Not Paxman. See first comment.)
This sort of thing is the twenty first century’s version of pelting those who consider themselves Great and Good with vegetables.
Enjoy.
More on Boris Johnson here: here and here.
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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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