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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Every now and again I have one of those “It’s amazing what you can buy nowadays” moments, when I am confronted with some aspect of the modern world that is working really well. As parts of it most definitely are, even as other aspects of human civilisation remain shambolic or worse. So it was yesterday, when I saw and snapped this, through a rather grubby and blurry shop window, just across from the ticket barriers at Piccadilly tube station:
 I know. 32 gigabyte SD cards have been around for months, and for many were no big deal in the first place. I actually seem to recall seeing a 64gb SD card yesterday also, somewhere in Tottenham Court Road, but for some reason this didn’t amaze me so much, probably because the price was so huge that I wasn’t so gobsmacked by it. It was the fact that the above 32gb SD card wasn’t just in existence, somewhere foreign and only reachable via the internet, but in existence right there in a pokey little shop window like this one that hit home to me. This was a 32gb SD card, and it was no big deal. That was why, for me, it is such a big deal. For me, all this is amazing. I can remember having a hard disc in my PC that was only 30 megabytes. → Continue reading: A 32gb SD card!
I am going with my son to the Royal Institution on Friday to hear the debate between Roger Pielke, Jr, and Bob Ward, of LSE’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment (Bob Ward recently starred in a Samizdata post by Brian Micklethwait). The debate is titled ‘Has Global Warming increased the toll of disasters?’ Not hard to guess Bob Ward’s answer. A flavour of Pielke’s position is given by this extract from a Wall Street Journal opinion piece (not by him) from last June. According to the WSJ, a report by the Global Humanitarian Forum (prop. Kofi Annan) warns:
that climate change-induced disasters, such as droughts and floods, kill 315,000 each year and cost $125 billion, numbers it says will rise to 500,000 dead and $340 billion by 2030. Adding to the gloom, Mr. Annan predicts ‘mass starvation, mass migration, and mass sickness’ unless countries agree to ‘the most ambitious international agreement ever negotiated’ at a meeting this year in Copenhagen.
To which Pielke Jr replies:
… ‘To get around the fact that there has been no attribution of the relationship of GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions and disasters,’… the Annan ‘report engages in a very strange comparison of earthquake and weather disasters in 1980 and 2005. The first question that comes to mind is, why? They are comparing phenomena with many ‘moving parts’ over a short time frame, and attributing 100% of the resulting difference to human-caused climate change. This boggles the mind.’
Doubtless he will be boggling our minds on Friday along these lines.
I did not realize untill I started writing this post that RPj and Ward had such a long history with each other. Just lately there has been massive to-ing and fro-ing between the two of them on RPj’s blog. Ward helped with the notorious report produced by the boss of the Grantham Institute, the Baron Stern of Brentford. The report just took a serious hit from Pielke, for silently correcting an important number in a table after publication:
Interestingly, it looks like Stern chose to change the report rather than issue an Errata. Either way (though an errata would have been more proper from an academic standpoint), the issue lies not with a typo, but what problems are revealed once the typo is corrected. … Correcting the typo does not make the analysis correct, just obviously wrong… None of this excuses altering a published government report quietly and without notice, after its publication and wide dissemination.
Bob Ward does not hesitate to use the ‘vested interest’ smear against opposition. There is an interesting piece on the Grantham Institute’s own vested interests at Climate Resistance.
This is going to be interesting. What a change there has been in the climate-change climate these last few months!
Tom G. Palmer, a writer I greatly admire, nicely calls out some rather boorish behaviour by the leftist writer, Jonathan Chait. I am a bit surprised: I always figured that Chait was one of the more reasonable leftists, so it seems a bit disappointing that he is a sneering jackass.
Mr Chait’s powers of reasoning are in any event, somewhat over-rated. I fisked something by him in relation to the Great Depression some time ago.
Given that we think, as most of us seem to do, that the production of such goods as cars, vacuum cleaners, and frozen vegetables should take place in a regime of market competition, why do so many among us nevertheless agree that it makes sense to exclude the production of money from these same forces? Why must the production of money be entrusted to a monopoly called the central bank?
– My thanks to Jerzy Strzelecki for drawing my attention to this mises.org piece by him, written when the recent banking tumult was at its most tumultuous, entitled The School of Salamanca Saw This Coming. Quite brief and well worth a read. You don’t have to believe in God to understand phrases like “usurpations of God’s knowledge”.
Tiger Airways flight 308 (Singapore – Hanoi). Jan 31, 2010.
Just out of interest, although this couple were watching a movie together on an iPhone screen in an impressive display of marital harmony, they did have his and hers iPhones regardless. Perhaps even more impressively (if you are Steve Jobs, anyway) all five people in my row on the plane were at one point using iPhones or iPod touches simultaneously. I think all of us would have our experiences enhanced using the larger tablet.
On the other hand, Apple victim as I am, I don’t think I will be getting one myself. For me, the killer issue is the lack of an SD card slot. Normally, I travel with a netbook, and I am constantly taking photographs and backing them up. I do not want additional accessories that I have to remember to bring with me and can lose along the way. I certainly do not want additional accessories that have proprietary Apple connectors and that I cannot replace in obscure shops in strange parts of the world. No SD slot but works with USB card reader = annoyance. No SD slot and card reader with proprietary connector = deal breaker.
This is a shame, because iPad as media player, web browser, and photo management tool that would import my photos to iPhoto and then sync with my Mac when I got home would be great.
Plus there is the small matter of VLC and a bit-torrent client, which for unstated reasons that are fairly obvious, are much more useful to me when on the road than when at home, but let’s not mention that. This may be less of a deal breaker, as I suspect there are teams of jailbreakers and hackers on the job already.
In my browsing through the Web I enjoy the site of David Thompson. After getting a pointer from Brian Micklethwait on his own site, I started to check in on Mr Thompson’s site pretty regularly. On Fridays, he manages to get his hands on all sorts of weird and wonderful stuff, often with fabulous photographs.
Well, if you have thought of living in a tree house (as I did as a young boy on my parents’ farm in Suffolk), then check out this.
“When one studies the history of money one cannot help wondering why people should have put up for so long with governments exercising an exclusive power over 2,000 years that was regularly used to exploit and defraud them.”
F.A. Hayek, Denationalisation of Money: The Argument Refined. Page 33. Published by the Institute of Economic Affairs and Ludwig Von Mises Institute. The book is quite challenging and complex in some of its arguments, but I find the broad thrust of it – that competition is good for currencies as it is for other aspects of economic life, to be unanswerable.
Tim Worstall takes a look at what sort of thoughts rattle around inside the head of the man likely to be Britain’s next finance minster, George Osborne. He does not like what he sees, and in the process, makes this vital point:
“What in buggery are “intrinsic values”? If we’re all the way back to Thomas Aquinas and “true value” then we’re about to march off a very steep cliff. For there isn’t and aren’t any such things. The value of something depends upon the value of everything else: we cannot say that 1 kg of gold is worth $12,000, or x tonnes of wheat, or y tonnes of fresh water or z numbers of smiling babies, without having some idea of the relative values of fresh water and smiling babies. Which in turn depend upon the state of knowledge (medical knowledge tells us what our forefathers did not know, that unfresh water leads to definitely not smiling and in fact dead babies) and the state of technology (how much effort do we have to put into freshening water to get smiling babies?) and indeed where we are at any one time (less effort if we’re by a clear mountain stream, more if we’re on a boat out in the ocean). Values are thus relative, always, all the time, not intrinsic.”
Or as PJ O’Rourke once put it when taking Marxist economics (surely a contradiction in terms, Ed) apart, the problem with the left, in general, is that they cannot accept that the value of anything in a market is ultimately no more or less than what a person wants to pay for it. That makes such leftists angry. Well, that’s life.
The Channel Four report on the issue can be seen here on their internet TV viewer (which ought to be called the FourPlayer, but is regrettably known as Channel4OD). Their report is clearly from a green perspective, but does at least cheer us all up with a snippet from the Hide the Decline video.
Choice quote from Bob Ward “if you are less than transparent then people think you might be hiding something”. To which one is tempted to respond that if you say you are hiding something, people might also conclude that you are hiding something. Like a decline for example.
– Bishop Hill stays right on top of the ongoing Climategate story. If you have not already done so, order your copy now of the Bishop’s recently published book, The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science.
Before Christmas, the Bishop (aka Andrew Montford) talked with me over the phone. Be warned that there are some seriously annoying clicks right at the start of this, but after a couple of minutes they go away and the remaining half an hour or so is okay. That caveat aside, listen to that here.
Andrew Neil, former Sunday Times editor, now TV pundit and all-round-media mogul and stirrer, has a fine column here about the latest developments surrounding the scientific credibility, or lack thereof, of the IPCC.
I notice that the Times (of London)’s front page splash is on the unfolding scandal of what sort of data has been concealed as inconvenient to the AGW alarmists. As some of us have noted in recent weeks, the MSM has been a very slow – to put it politely – to pick up on this issue. But not now. The other night, the issue even figured on the evening news on the BBC’s flagship news channel.
Of course, it is unclear how far the effect of these stories will go. The other day, chatting to an investment manager who was talking about a climate change fund he was promoting, I casually mentioned the University of East Anglia scandal, and he gave me a funny look. The problem is that a lot of money is now tied up with this AGW stuff, not to mention a lot of political credibility.
All of which proves a point that the new media forms are now breaking stories that could and should have been broken in the days of yore. The internet is having an effect. I’d even go so far as to say that one of the reasons why Barack Obama cannot count on fawning coverage any more is because, while the MSM was in adoration mode, the internet and related channels ensured that the less flattering aspects of his administration got attention. And sooner or later, people noticed.
I see that today’s Samizdata quote of the day spot for today has already been taken. By me, but taken. Had it not been, I might instead have offered this:
The main argument now, increasingly, is between those who view the state as an enabler and those who view it as, at best, a sometimes necessary irritant. To employ a massively oversimplified analogy, statists seem to think that the state should act as captain, coach, physio, kitman, ballboy, PR department, groundsman, ticketing department, FIFA representative, the guy with the half time oranges, agent, translator, WAG, turnstile operator, matchday police, the guy selling the big flags outside the ground and the guy confiscating the big flags on the way into the ground. Libertarians just want a guy with a fucking whistle.
As I often have (or at any rate want) to remind people when I shove up an SQOTD, the fact that I think whatever it is to be a snappy bit of prose doesn’t necessarily mean that I completely agree with it, even as I usually reckon it to have its heart in the right place.
A complaint about the above quote, for instance, is that it omits to mention the most obviously foolish of all state activities, which is that states now routinely insist on striding onto the pitch and trying to play, like that embarrassing games teacher played by Brian Glover in the movie Kes, even as (like Brian Glover) they continue to be the ref.
I recently heard President Obama say on my television that the job of President is (I quote from memory as best I can) “making decisions and helping people”. President Obama thinks that he should be both the referee and a player, in other words. And since he cannot possibly help everyone in the USA, he ends up playing for one side (helping only some people) against the other side (at other people’s expense), and his refereeing gets bent out of shape to reflect his competitive preferences.
Presidents shouldn’t be helping. They should be maintaining and defending the circumstances within which people can help themselves.
The fascinating thing about this response is that it demonstrates that Cameron, whose only claim to fame is that he is a politician, isn’t even very good at politics.
– Richard North describes Conservative Party leader David Cameron’s stonewalling response to suggestions that he might want to rethink his attitude towards the climate change debate
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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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