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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Let us imagine you are working on software for a mobile phone. When an SMS text message comes in you might think it would be cool to display it and highlight any email addresses or phone numbers in it. The user would tap an email address to add it to his address book, or tap a phone number to call it. It is a fairly obvious idea.
There are a few different ways you could implement it in software. I would probably have a bunch of regular expressions that matched phone numbers and email addresses, and for each type of match there would be a list of things that you could do. Have a think about what you might like to appear in a pop-up menu after you tapped an email address that appeared in a text message on your phone. I bet you can think of two or three things. Later you might think of new things to do with an email address, or new things that appear in a text message that could be highlighted so the user can tap them to perform actions on them. For example if someone sends a message saying “meet me at 7pm”, the user could tap where it says “7pm” and this time could pop up in the calendar to show whether there are already any appointments at 7pm. There are lots of things like this you could do.
To handle the possibility that you will think of these new ideas in the future, you write your software in a general way. You design general concepts like a pattern matcher that can look at some text and decide whether it is a phone number or an email address or some other text that you have not thought of yet. This sort of thing is done so often in software that the regular expressions I mentioned above were invented. This is a notation for describing strings of characters. For example the expression [0-9]+pm matches one or more of the digits 0 to 9, followed by the letters ‘pm’. Because this is done in software so frequently there are freely available software libraries that anyone can use and that given a text message and a regular expression will spit out a list of all the matching items in the text message.
There is some work in hooking up the various parts, but the point is that all the parts are known to programmers. We all know when regular expressions are useful, and we can all imagine how you would use lists of items that display actions such as “Add to address book” on the screen and then perform the action when activated by the user. I could write some code that would solve this problem in a general way in less than a day from first hearing a vague description of it.
The point is that it is obvious to anyone who writes software. Solving problems like this involves putting together some well known pieces in well known ways. I am emphasizing how obvious this sort of thing is.
The existence of patent 5,946,647 is not obvious. I can not really think of how I would find out about it without reading every single patent and I can not think of a guaranteed way to even know what to look for.
But if I write my obvious code in half a day, there is a good chance I would violate patent 5,946,647.
It is not certain. I have read the patent and it manages to convey the obvious idea in far too many words. So many that I would never be sure whether any given implementation fitted the patent. But there are only so many ways to do something this simple in software, and truly original ideas are rare. So the likelihood is high.
And Apple sued and a judge ruled that HTC has violated the patent and as a result will not be allowed to import devices with this software into the USA. This sucks.
Every so often, when I hear people tell me that the Cold War is a long-lost issue and that we need to “move on”, to use that cant expression, I remember that there are, unbelievably, people out there who still think that the Soviet Union and its empire was a benevolent force and no worse than that of the NATO alliance that successfully helped to bring it down, and who therefore regard people who helped thwart the Soviet regime, like Vaclav Havel, as bad men. Case in point is this creature by the name of Neil Clark, writing in the Guardian newspaper:
“No one questions that Havel, who went to prison twice, was a brave man who had the courage to stand up for his views. Yet the question which needs to be asked is whether his political campaigning made his country, and the world, a better place. Havel’s anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgement of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women’s rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first.”
Absolutely. Presumably, that explains why there were millions of downtrodden, poor people attempting to enter the Soviet Empire from such hellholes as West Germany. That explains why East Berlin erected the Wall, to contain the flood of people trying to enter it. Yes, that must have been the reason. (Sarcasm alert).
I guess the fact that the Soviet System created a two-tier society: the Party and Everyone Else, must have escaped Mr Clark’s gimlet-eye attention. Perhaps the Gulag, the shootings of political opponents, the construction of the White Sea Canal (with slave labour), etc, were in fact all features of ensuring that the “needs of the majority” came “first”.
For what it is worth, on a more theoretical level, the horrors of collectivism can be summed up in Marx’s dictum: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”. For if you believe that the needs of the majority trump such pesky issues as rights or liberties, then so much the worse for such liberal principles. But in practice, of course, the history of the Communist world was littered with stories of shortages, famines and shabby, crappily produced goods and services.
I had actually forgotten about Neil Clark’s existence. Alas, his ghastly prose now comes back to haunt me. I remember reading about this character about five or six years ago, when writers such as Oliver Kamm and Stephen Pollard tore this man’s sophistries to pieces.
Thanks to Michael Blackburn for the pointer. Christina Odone also rubbishes Clark.
And here is a useful roundup of links for deniers of socialist brutality. Clark makes the list, unsurprisingly.
When I heard Gordon Kerr speak in the House of Commons a week ago, I wished that he had done so with a microphone attached. Very early this morning he spoke in public again and this time he did have a microphone attached, because he was on Bloomberg Television. Turn up the volume on your computer and you’ll find it a lot easier to hear what he said this morning than I did last week.
Kerr confirmed my definite impression that the Austrianist team is now starting to win this argument. (By “this argument”, I mean, approximately speaking, this argument.)
Whereas regular academic economists talked about how this banking crisis was all over bar the recovery in 2008, the Austrianists have consistently predicted further disasters. As these disasters have duly occurred, the books and writers and ideas that the Austrianists keep referring to in their increasingly frequent public performances (Kerr mentions Hayek in this performance) are now breaking out of their academic-stroke-hobbyist ghetto and reaching the mainstream.
My favourite moment in this quiet little early morning Bloomberg TV conversation was when the man whom Kerr was arguing with said: “But if banks told the truth about the value of their assets, that would cause chaos.” His argument being that therefore making the banks tell the truth is a disastrous policy. Which it sort of is. But Kerr’s point, the point made by all Austrianists, is that disaster can’t now be avoided. The decisions that have made disaster inevitable have all now been made. By postponing the recognition of disaster, you only make it all the greater when it finally erupts.
Intellectual self-confidence is hugely important in a battle of ideas, such as we are witnessing now. The Keynesians, anti-capitalists, the more-of-the-samists, the borrowers-and-spenders and the rest of them, all want to believe that capitalism has to be managed by them if it is to work properly, in approximately the manner in which these people manage it now and have been managing it for the last few decades. Some of them still want to believe that capitalism itself ought to be smashed up, and entirely replaced by a planned economy. But how many people really think that this kind of thing would actually make the world more prosperous? The point is: the hatred of truly liberated, untramelled, uncontrolled, un-managed capitalism is all still there. But, the conviction that there is a superior statist alternative, not strong before this crisis became evident but briefly puffed up by the early stages of the crisis, is now fading away in front of our eyes.
Passionate and sincere belief in a viable, partly or wholly statist alternative to capitalism used to exist, in the early part of the twentieth century. Then, Marxists really believed that capitalism was colossally wasteful and inefficient, as well as colossally cruel and unjust and unfair, and that replacing it with a world run by small clumps of smart people with dictatorial powers, based in small but dictatorially powerful offices, would genuinely be a colossal improvement. They really and truly thought this. They believed it with the same certainty that naval tacticians, then and since, have believed (rightly) that vulnerable merchant ships are safer, during a merchant shipping war, if they all sail together in a convoy, rather than if every merchant ship sails alone. That being one of the arguments they used. This colossal Marxist and statist intellectual self-confidence was contagious and, when crisis hit Russia during World War 1 and the West at the end of the 1920s, it was hard to resist.
Now it is the Austrianists and only the Austrianists who have any genuine confidence in the correctness of their own ideas. Tiny in number but growing in number by the day, we Austrianists (I count myself a very junior member of this team – a fan rather than any sort of player) truly believe that we are right about how the world works, and about how it could eventually be made to work a lot better. This is why we are winning.
By winning, I don’t just mean convincing of our rightness third parties with no stake in how things are being done now and no power to make any difference, although that also will happen, in the fullness of time. I mean making our now hugely powerful opponents (powerful in the sense of having the power to go on doing huge damage) realise that they themselves are entirely wrong, and that we Austrianists, who until recently they had never even heard of, are right. I mean especially them. The bewildered onlooker tendency, vastly more numerous than any of the intellectual teams directly involved in this debate, is likely to remain confused about all this for a much longer time. They’ll only hear about this argument after we have won it. But the powerful people who presided over this long catastrophe, and who made and continue to make it ever worse with their ever more panic-stricken decisions, are mostly going to emerge from the wreckage with no doubt in their minds that their Austrianist critics understood everything far better than they did. They may not admit it out loud, still less formally surrender, although there will probably be some very public changes of mind. But most of these people will know in the privacy of their own minds that they were utterly defeated, by events, and by those who proved with their prophecies, observations and post mortems, that they understood these events, as they did not begin to until it was far too late.
It was like this with that earlier collapse of statist power, the fall of the USSR. The people who presided over that collapse had no doubt concerning the inferiority of their own economic arrangements, which was a big part of why those arrangements collapsed. It wasn’t merely that Soviet communism collapsed because it was hopeless. It collapsed because the Soviet communists who ran Soviet communism themselves came to realise that Soviet communism was hopeless.
Perhaps this is why Gordon Kerr talks so quietly. He is right. He knows he is right. He feels no need to shout.
Allow me also to remind you about Jamie Whyte‘s recent radio performance. He also spoke with utter certainty in the rightness of what he was saying, and he never once felt the need to raise his voice either.
LATER: Steve Baker MP comments.
The other day I had a pub conversation with a friend that went as rapidly from, “I favour reducing the size of the state” to “but poor people will starve” as any such conversation I’ve had before. There are certain things, such as roads, schools, health and welfare, that are so strongly connected in people’s minds to the state that intelligent thought about them is almost impossible. I wonder how this happens. It means that no shortcuts are possible. To be understood, you have to assume no shared knowledge with your interlocutor and start again from first principles. But this does not work well in a pub conversation or, for that matter, in a TV interview.
At one point I was told, “if you got your way, I would emigrate.” My friend was imagining a dystopian hell on Earth, which suggests, among other things, I had not properly made my motives understood. There is a tendency to assume that one’s political opponents want to enrich themselves at the expense of others. This may be a good assumption a lot of the time. When a socialist suggests taxing the rich to give to the poor, I might wonder how much he will cream off the top for himself. When I suggest that taxes should be reduced, it is obviously because I do not like paying tax and I am prepared to let poor people starve so that I can buy more gadgets. The universe is a zero-sum game: what else could I possibly mean?
So I need to spell out explicitly what it is that I want, because it turns out that it does not go without saying: everyone to be much richer, so that necessities and most luxuries are almost free; vastly increased life expectancy and improved health; less overall time spent on menial tasks and more time spent doing interesting things; in general more wealth, opportunities and happiness for all.
I know how to get there, too. A smaller state means faster economic growth. Nothing I want breaks the laws of physics, so the technology is just a matter of time and leaving people alone to get on with it.
What I want sounds to me like something that would sell. Maybe we should do what our opponents do and repeat it loudly, often and everywhere, and point out that anyone who opposes it is causing poor people to starve. It is the sort of approach that might work well in a pub conversation or, for that matter, in a TV interview.
“It was Havel who helped, as much as anyone, to put across the idea that Communism was built on an illusion and that, once people began to doubt the illusion, it would collapse.”
– Ed West
It says much about this great Czech that he had the signal honour of being sneered at by Noam Chomsky.
I still haven’t got round to visiting the Czech Republic yet, although I have relations across the border in Germany. I must get around to dealing with this oversight soon.
Here is the headline:
EU digital exclusion is ‘unacceptable’.
The clear implication of the quotes in that headline is that whereas the person being reported doing the talking indeed said “unacceptable”, that doesn’t mean that the word makes much sense, and in fact it is probably rather ridiculous. Quite so.
But to me the word “exclusion” is at least as much deserving of sneer quotes.
I do not have a car, a smart phone, a garden, a hi-fi system that would enable me to get full sonic value from the quite numerous classical SACDs that I have acquired over the years, a cat, a Kindle, a wife, an exercise bike, an actual bike, any paintings on my walls, a Spurs season ticket (even though I like it when Spurs do well), a snooker table, a Bible (I lent mine to someone and never got it back), a blender (I did have one but didn’t use it much and didn’t much like it when I did so I sold it to a friend), a yacht, a space exploration company, or a collection of ornamental hippos. Just yesterday, I made the arrangements to get rid of my photocopier. I do have a personal blog, and also write for an impersonal blog (this one), but I use neither Twitter nor Facebook. Of none of these various things that I don’t have or don’t use does it make sense to say that I am “excluded” from them. I merely choose not to have or use these things, or, in the case of the rather expensive or inconvenient ones, I am put off by the money it would cost to buy or to accommodate them, and the effort that would be involved in acquiring the money to pay for such transformed personal arrangements. (I would really like a cat, but that would mean me getting a different home.)
Martha Lane Fox says that lots of EU citizens not being connected to the internet is “unacceptable”. But instead of “not being connected”, she says “excluded”.
Speaking to The Telegraph, Lane Fox described the gap as “terrifying”.
More quotation marks, signifying more ridiculousness. Evidently Martha Lane Fox is a women who is easily frightened. What on earth is so “terrifying” about people not using the internet? Not so long ago, nobody used the internet, because there was no internet. Life went on.
Martha Lane Fox is apparently something called the “UK Digital Champion“. More sneer quotes there, this time from me. She was appointed this by Gordon Brown, and the current government carried on with this stupid arrangement. Should we perhaps start a series here, called something like: Public sector jobs that are stupid even by the usual standards of the public sector.
It all very much reminds me of this excellent posting here not long ago by Rob Fisher, in which he said, among various other wise things:
I imagine that libertarians are very much in the habit of questioning the deeper meaning of words.
This libertarian certainly is. The deeper meaning that Martha Lane Fox is in this case suffering from, and spreading, is the notion that Things Only Happen Because They Are Forced To Happen. I don’t have a cat or a Kindle, and that must mean that someone or something or some combination of someones and somethings must have forced me not to have a cat or a Kindle, just as if a gun had been pointing at me. Therefore, if “we” (another portentously wrongheaded word) think that cats and Kindles are good (as is many ways they are good, especially cats) it would be good also if “we” were to change the forces now forcing themselves upon me, and force me instead to have a cat and a Kindle. No more force would be involved. The forces in play would merely have been rearranged a little.
I do not describe such ideas as “unacceptable”. The title of this posting is ironic, despite its lack of sneer quotes. I must accept that many stupid people, such as Martha Lane Fox, are in the grip of these ideas, partly because of various words that rattle about in their heads for which they know no better alternatives, even if they might like to, and that as a result I and many others are subjected to force in circumstance where we ought not to be. But just as I choose not have a cat, so too I also choose not to think in this silly way myself.
Why don’t [union leaders] be selective and call out only those members who can cause damage to the government? There are places in the public sector that could go on strike for years and it would make little difference.”
– Letter in the New Statesman, 12 December 2011
Assuming the unions were to agree with that—which I suspect they dare not, and is indeed one strategic reason why one-day strikes are preferred—in what places in the public sector would staff striking for a significant period damage the government more than the unions? Maybe there are some. But it is hard to think of any.
Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations. Without internal peace, that is, peace among citizens and between the citizens and the state, there can be no guarantee of external peace
– Vaclav Havel, tireless fighter against communism and sundry other human absurdities, has died. Ave atque vale.
Just in case you missed it, the last of these Frank Jisms is this:
This morning I started work on my next book for HarperCollins. Thanks to the sales of Obama: The Greatest President in the History of Everything, I was asked to write another book. This one will be on my solutions for all the problems facing America. Hopefully it will start a movement when it comes out with me as leader.
Earlier in the same posting Frank J quotes (admiringly) from and links to a piece (by him) about how, if cars were invented only now instead of when they were invented, we wouldn’t be allowed to drive them. Funny, and probably true.
It’s been pretty quiet here today, and all the things I’m am personally working on need more working on before they’re ready. But, if it’s true that a picture is worth a thousand words, well, here are a thousand words:
I found this at the top of a piece by Daniel Hannan about how Britain might just be being pushed out of EUrope and back into the Anglosphere.
I won’t be holding my breath, but I have long thought this to be an attractive idea.
USA cricket captain Steve Massiah has been arrested, and then had his travelling restricted. Why?
According to the arrest warrant, a copy of which is with ESPNcricinfo, Massiah and two other men conspired “to execute a scheme and artifice to defraud a financial institution”, listed as Countrywide Home Loans, “and to obtain moneys, funds, credits, assets, securities, or other property owned by and under the custody and control of such financial institution, by means of materially false and fraudulent pretenses, representations and promises.”
Quite right. People can’t be allowed to swindle financial institutions by means of materially false and fraudulent pretenses, representations and promises. To be allowed to behave like that, you should be running a financial institution yourself.
Immigrants are incoming assets … in a global economy, their labour is vital both to tackle severe skills shortages and to fill long-term vacancies. Immigrants are not taking jobs that British workers could fill, but jobs which British workers are unable or unwilling to do … the idea that immigration is an intolerable burden on the taxpayer and the welfare state is baloney. Immigrants give far more than they take. It is estimated that they make a net contribution to the economy of £2.5bn …
– House of Commons Speaker John Bercow in an article in the Independent in 2005, quoted by Henry Oliver today in Adam Smith Institute’s Pin Factory Blog.
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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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