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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Further to my brief remarks yesterday on the UK government’s plans to intensify scrutiny of the internet (although it may be that the government is changing its tack), comes this piece of crap from Dan Hodges, a Labour Party supporter who writes approvingly of the Big Brother state. This man is beyond irony.
Take this as an example of his thinking:
“I don’t want less surveillance, I want more of the stuff. My idea of the perfect society is one where every street corner has a CCTV camera, everyone has a nice shiny ID card tucked in their wallet and no extremist can even think of logging onto a dodgy website without an SAS squad abseiling swiftly through their window.”
And of course this is his idea of the killer argument:
“For one thing, I have a relatively benign view of the state. There are some things it does much better than others, and I realise it’s high time it learnt to cut its coat to suit its cloth. But on balance I view the state as a force for good, rather than some giant, menacing monolith, and that’s especially true when it comes to stopping myself, my family and my friends getting blown up by crazed terrorists.”
“I have an equally benign, if unfashionable, view of our politicians and our security services. I’m not the greatest fan of either Theresa May or David Cameron, but if they say they need to have access to my emails in order to ensure the security of the nation, I’m inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. Just having a quick look, my last three were from Middlesex County Cricket Club, Woolworths and the editor of Total Politics magazine. And if the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister are really that bothered, they’re welcome to them.”
Ah, “only the innocent have anything to fear” argument. Mr Hodges is undisturbed by the thought of mistaken identities, or youthful radicalism catching up with anyone. No sir, ordinary good men and women of the UK can rest easy in the knowledge that their innocuous, dull messages to friends and business will not incur the suspicion of those men from GCHQ or wherever.
This sort of thing is mildly terrifying to the extent that it shows how trusting so many people are of the modern state and its apparatus. And there is simply no space in Mr Hodge’s mind, it appears, for any suspicion of how such intelligence might be misused. If the recent allegations of corruption by the UK police over the supply of data to bent journalists has taught us anything, it is that if we aggregate vast caches of data into one place, someone, somewhere, will be tempted to make wrongful use of it. It boggles the mind that Mr Hodges does not see this.
Mr Hodges also argues, not very convincingly, that recent some miscarriages of justice would not have happened had we British not been so precious about privacy:
“The civil libertarians, from both left and right, have been out in force this week. But if you look at any of the most prominent modern miscarriages of justice, they have resulted not from the state accumulating too much intelligence on its citizens, but too little. I wish, for example, the Metropolitan police Operation Kratos team had been able to access, in real time, more information about the true identity of Jean Charles de Menezes, before shooting him dead at Stockwell tube. Those wrongly incarcerated for the Guildford and Birmingham pub bombings spent decades in jail precisely because the police and intelligence services did not have sufficient information on the real perpetrators of those attacks, and buckled to public pressure to bang up the first Irishmen they could lay their hands on.”
Ah, yes, if only Britain had been completely festooned with CCTV and the rest in the early 70s and later, then all those folk banged up for killing people would have been free.
I would recommend Mr Hodges spends some time reading the thoughts of security expert Bruce Schneier before opining again about the “benign” nature of an all-encompassing surveillance state.
The Financial Times reports that from tomorrow there will be
…marked changes to the government’s complex tax credit system. The first reduction is for 850,000 families losing all their child tax credit, worth about £545 a year. The second is up to 212,000 working couples losing their working tax credit – of up to £3,870 a year – if they are unable to increase their weekly working hours from 16 to 24.
Important semantic point: what are tax credits? The HMRC website is unhelpful:
Tax credits are payments from the government.
Wikipedia has a general definition:
A tax credit is a sum deducted from the total amount a taxpayer owes to the state.
So assuming “tax credit” does not mean something else in Britain (and I would not put it past politicians to play such games with words), what we have here is a large tax increase for poor people who nonetheless work.
Here’s a hint to any future chancellor: you get more of what you reward.
Update: In the comments, Paul Marks says that “tax credit” means welfare and that most people who get tax credits do not pay income tax.
Teachers hate legislation. The Association of Teachers and Lecturers is a British teaching union. In 2010 its then president Lesley Ward said:
What was being debated in the 1970s is pretty similar to what is being debated four decades later. I am onto my 15th secretary of state for education and my 29th minister for education. I have lived through, endured, survived, call it what you like, 54 pieces of education legislation since I started teaching. One more and it would be one for each year of my life.
Clearly she wants to get the government out of education and her life. “Trust us and leave us to do our job,” she concludes. Good for her!
Then yesterday:
A motion at the [ATL] conference called on ministers to introduce “stringent legislation” to counter the “negative effects some computer games are having on the very young”.
I imagine that most teachers have no difficulty holding both of these views. Most people would like government to leave them alone and stop other people from annoying them.
Having been very busy these last few days, I hadn’t had a lot of time to comment on the latest attempt by the UK government to tighten its surveillance powers over the internet and other forms of communication. Another article at the Daily Telegraph gives some flavour of what is at stake.
Any relief that the Cameron administration had decided to scrap proposed compulsory ID cards when it got into power have been short-lived. As predicted, once the first flush of some liberal optimism had faded, this government, like all of its peers, reverts to type. In fact, I am slightly surprised it has taken this long.
Last week I took a trip up to the top of the Monument, which is a memorial to those who died in the Great Fire of London. I of course took lots of photos. And in a posting on my personal blog (now revived from recent hibernation), I also had a moan about the new wire netting that they have installed at the top of the Monument, in place of the old, more digital camera friendly, prison bars that used to be there.
Here is one of the snaps I snapped that day, featuring this new wire netting:
Now, it so happens that earlier last week, the night before my trip to the Monument, I also watched a TV show about bees. Most of it was about African bees migrating across the Savannah, with lots of lurid close-ups of bees looking like alien monsters. But, as this lady explains, at the end of this show they bolted on a short and quite different segment about how bee keeping, waning in the British countryside in the face of mechanised agriculture and pesticides, is now on the rise in the big city. It was like two entirely separate shows. Very peculiar. Luckily for me, I found both shows interesting.
Anyway, take a look through the centre hole in the photo above. What do you see? I’ll tell you what you see. You see beehives. Here’s a closer look at them:
And at two of them even closer:
The first of those three beehive snaps was taken by mistake, as it were. As in: I only realised that bee hives were involved in it when I got home. But, provoked by having watched that TV bee show, I photoed the two subsequent bee hive snaps on purpose.
The anti-technological-progress, anti-capitalist take on this story is that technological progress, capitalism etc. is making life hell for bees in the countryside. And for the time being, technological progress stroke capitalism is indeed turning the countryside from bee heaven into something rather less bee hospitable, although it may soon work out how to refrain from doing this and how to switch the countryside back to being bee heaven again.
Meanwhile, cities like London, with all their gardens full of varied flowers, are becoming new bee heavens.
The other day at a Starbucks in a motorway services I was served by a young man who was, frankly, a bit useless. He couldn’t do anything without help from another member of staff who looked somewhat exasperated. I found myself speculating about whether he was worth £5 an hour.
Tim Worstall has for a long time been writing about the connection between the minimum wage and youth unemployment.
The British government obviously understands it, but won’t get rid of the minimum wage. Instead, starting today, if you employ fewer than 50 people you can apply for a £2,275 wage incentive in return for employing a young person.
In an amusing side-note, the Department for Work and Pensions, whose idea this is, seems slightly worried about age discrimination legislation. The big game of Nomic is getting increasingly self-contradictory.
The thing I learned from the Beaconsfield by-election was that wars make Prime Ministers popular.
– Tony Blair, quoted by Max Hastings in a BBC television programme this evening about the Falklands War and its impact upon subsequent British military policy. The by-election in question happened during that war, and was a landslide victory for Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives, and Tony Blair’s only electoral reverse.
I was rather pleased when my previous posting generated a large number of excellent comments – that’s not always the case. However, I was less pleased when many of them suggested (shock-horror!) that I might be wrong.
Many complained about my views on modern German music. Let me explain where I am coming from. As far as I am concerned rock (and I use the term in the widest possible sense) started in 1962, peaked in 1967/8 and had fizzled out by 1987. Very little of it was German.
A good example of this is provided by a programme called “Pop goes the Sixties” which occasionally gets repeated on the British channel Yesterday. Recorded at the very end of the 1960s, it is a joint Anglo-German production even down to the presenters. While featuring plenty of British artists such as The Who, The Kinks and Sandie Shaw, it manages time for but one, single, solitary German (Horst Jankowski, in case you should be wondering).
And after 1969? All I can think of are: Frank Farian, Giorgio Moroder and Kraftwerk. Sure, there may have been others (Tangerine Dream and the Krautrock scene got a mention) but they weren’t massively successful. I am not even sure they were particularly influential but I am happy to be corrected.
That’s up to 1987, where my knowledge fizzles out. And that seems to be about where the German rock that people were talking about starts.
Which makes sense. In his comment, Brian Micklethwait suggested that there are two types of knowledge: implicit knowledge, favoured by the British, and explicit knowledge, favoured by the Germans. A few years ago, at a railway conference in Cologne, I encountered a rather good example of this. German Railways had decided to spruce up their stations. So, what was the first thing they did? Spend a year working out what a station was. Of course, they did. What else would you do?
So, it comes as no surprise that the Germans were no good at pop music in the 1960s – no one had written the manual.
Talking about something other than music. I was kind of pleased when one commenter suggested that German car makers weren’t nearly as cutting edge as I’d thought. This all fits into the idea of Germans thinking first, writing second and acting third.
Unfortunately, that leaves the mystery of how they invented the car (and, one might add, the A4 rocket and Me262) in the first place. Perhaps it required a lot of the explicit knowledge that science supplies.
In one of my many jobs I had to look over thousands upon thousands of staff records. I learnt many things. Among them was that plenty of those staff who had had significant time off for stress or other mental problems not only returned to their old jobs and performed satisfactorily but went on to success and promotion. Before this I had believed in my heart of hearts that a month off for stress was about the limit. Anything more than that and the person was a write-off in terms of doing any useful work ever again, although it might not be politic to admit it.
Perhaps not by coincidence a month off for stress was about the limit of what had befallen anyone I knew well enough to be told about it. Since I began to think more deeply about this issue I have twigged that other people I know have almost certainly had bouts of mental illness they did not make public. My impression is that the libertarian and intellectual types likely to be reading this are more likely than average to have experienced mental illness.
There is a lot to agree with in what the Mental Health Foundation says about mental illness – it is common, most people who experience it either get better or can manage it, it need not be a barrier to success in many fields, public fear of the mentally ill is out of all proportion to the risk they actually present.
I just wish they wouldn’t over-egg the pudding. These words from the Mental Health Foundation article I linked to above are typically evasive:
Many people believe that people with mental ill health are violent and dangerous, when in fact they are more at risk of being attacked or harming themselves than harming other people.
Pardon me, but the fact that the mentally ill are more at risk of being attacked or harming themselves than of harming other people says nothing whatsoever about the absolute level of risk that they will harm other people.
Annoyingly, the Mental Health Foundation didn’t have to raise my hackles by indulging in this common evasion. The absolute risk that a mentally ill person will attack you is very low. It is higher than the risk that a non-mentally ill person will attack you, but only slightly. I don’t have the numbers to hand, but I have seen them and that is the position. Why the Mental Health Foundation cannot just show some confidence in their own position and give the numbers I do not know, unless it is that to acknowledge the obvious truth that, yes, a very small minority of mentally ill people really can be dangerous would mess up their nice simple victimhood and “anti-discrimination” agenda.
As a libertarian, I think all forms of discrimination should be legal, including those I find irrational or even morally abhorrent, but put that aside. The link correctly says,
The Equality Act 2010 makes it illegal to discriminate directly or indirectly against people with mental health problems in public services and functions, access to premises, work, education, associations and transport.
It is not illegal to discriminate against people with mental health problems when appointing someone to a job, promoting them, or firing them. There is a movement afoot that it ought to be. Many compassionate people, correctly perceiving that discrimination against those who are suffering or have suffered mental illness is often irrational and hard-hearted, are being edged towards supporting a move to make it a crime.
That movement had a setback the other day. A JetBlue pilot suffered a meltdown and had to be restrained by passengers at the request of the co-pilot, who had locked him out of the cabin. Scary. Also memorable and quotable in debate.
Wishing the pilot well for the future is not incompatible with a firm belief that it would be irresponsible to allow him back at the controls of an airliner. There are also a good many less dramatic situations in which an employee being mentally ill ought justly to be grounds for reassignment or dismissal. A pretence this is not so harms the interests of mentally ill people. There is little an organisation fears more than taking on an employee who turns out to be “trouble” and there are good reasons for this fear. That was another thing I learnt from my thousands upon thousands of personnel records. One came to dread the thick files; the ones trailing stapled-on appendices and confidential notes directing you to yet other files; files that bulged with long, messy, sad stories of warnings and final warnings and appeals and getting the union involved and even the union giving up and offloading the troublemaker onto some other department only for it all to start up again.
If ever discrimination on the grounds of mental illness does become illegal, or even publicly unacceptable, be sure it will continue to be practised in secret – and the secrecy will make it more unfair. Instead of basing their assessment of suitability on the plain answers to plain questions in application forms, they will go by code words, or a quiet (and often slanderous) word in confidence at the canteen.
EMC2, the company founded to advance Dr. Bussard’s fusion technology to a practical state, has been flying so under the radar that you really have to hunt to find out what is going on. They are still moving ahead and the technology has not hit any major road blocks that I have been able to find out about. The US Navy ONR is still funding them and is the reason for keeping the profile low. This bit on Wikipedia is the only bit of really current news I have been able to find:
During 4Q of 2011, EMC2 modified the electron injectors to increase the plasma heating. The higher plasma density in WB-8 prompted the need for higher heating power. They plan to operate WB-8 in high beta regime with the modified electron injectors during 1Q of 2012.
This game is still afoot.
This is the truth of the Wizengamot: Many are nobles, many are wealthy magnates of business, a few came by their status in other ways. Some of them are stupid. Most are shrewd in the realms of business and politics, but their shrewdness is circumscribed. Almost none have walked the path of a powerful wizard. They have not read through ancient books, scrutinized old scrolls, searching for truths too powerful to walk openly and disguised in conundrums, hunting for true magic among a hundred fantastic fairy tales. When they are not looking at a contract of debt, they abandon what shrewdness they possess and relax with some comfortable nonsense. […] They know […] that a powerful wizard must learn to distinguish the truth among a hundred plausible lies. But it has not occurred to them that they might do the same.
– Eliezer Yudkowsky, in chapter 81 of the brilliant fan-fiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, on how those who wield political power are too caught up in their power games to take the time to obtain real knowlege. (For “powerful wizard” I read engineer, hacker, scientist, mathematician, Austrian economist, Samizdatista, etc.)
Have any of us mentioned here that Friedrich Hayek died exactly twenty years plus one week ago, i.e. on Friday March 23rd 1992? I believe not.
Sam Bowman, in a posting on March 23rd 2012, ensured that the ASI Blog was responsible for no such omission. He marked the occasion with a couple of Hayek quotes, from The Constitution of Liberty.
I particularly liked the second one:
It is because freedom means the renunciation of direct control of individual efforts that a free society can make use of so much more knowledge than the mind of the wisest ruler could comprehend.
One of the contrasts in the contemporary world that I keep banging on about here is how different the designing and making of high tech gadgetry (which still benefits – and almost miraculously so – from exactly the sort of dispersed knowledge and dispersed intelligence that Hayek was talking about) is from the management of the world’s financial system (the higher reaches of which are notorious for depending on the good judgement of a tiny few supposedly wise but actually all too fallible political appointees).
As Sam Bowman said, a week ago:
Hayek died twenty years ago today. His profound insights into economics and social philosophy might be more important than ever.
Indeed they might.
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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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