Those who would change every aspect of our economic lives are using environmental collapse as the excuse.
|
|||||
|
April 29th, 2023 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
 “Heat pumps: How do they work and how do I get one?” asks the BBC. Fun fact: heat pumps are born from magic cabbages that have been pollinated by combi boilers. Obviously you cannot buy a heat pump, but if you promise promise promise to look after it, the government will let you adopt one. Be warned, you may have to outbid all the other prospective heat-pump mummies and daddies out there! Or maybe not. After the enthusiastic headline, the first paragraph of the BBC article admits that despite the government offering households ÂŁ5,000 to replace their gas boilers with heat pumps, take-up of the Boiler Upgrade Scheme has been so low that the Lords Net Zero Committee has warned that the national target for green heating is “very unlikely to be met”. This is scarcely surprising when, as the Telegraph reports,
From what I hear, heat pumps can be a good heating solution for newly built houses, but putting one in an older house costs a lot more than ÂŁ5k. Where houses are crowded close together, the bulky outdoor unit is just one more ugly council-mandated eco thing to sit next to the ever-increasing number of wheelie bins that block the pavements. If anything will prompt a revolt against Net Zero in the UK, the proposed ban on gas boilers will be that thing. April 28th, 2023 | 23 comments - (Comments are closed)
April 28th, 2023 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
In late 2021, Wired, the formerly libertarian magazine that now champions surveillance and censorship, called for spying on private messaging in the name of preventing harm. Encrypted messaging apps âare intentionally built for convenience and speed, for person-to-person communication as well as large group connections,â wrote Wired. âYet it is these same conditions that have fueled abusive and illegal behavior, disinformation and hate speech, and hoaxes and scams; all to the detriment of the vast majority of their users. As early as 2018, investigative reports have explored the role that these very features played in dozens of deaths in India and Indonesia as well as elections in Nigeria and Brazil.â The Omidyar report explicitly argued against the right to privacy in text messaging. âPrivacy is essential to building trust, but it is not a singular standard for safety,â wrote Omidyar Foundation authors. âWe believe online safety is the result of trustworthy technology and enlightened regulation. While the shift toward adopting end-to-end encryption has reinforced trust between users, the technological architecture that encourages scale, virality, and monetization has ultimately facilitated the rapid and large-scale spread of dangerous, distorted, and deceitful content.â It is a shocking statement to read, especially when you realize that Omidyar, with a net worth of $9 billion, has long claimed to be a champion of free speech and privacy. He even bankrolled the online magazine, The Intercept in response to revelations by Edward Snowden that the U.S. government was illegally spying on American citizens. What is going on here? Why is the censorship industry now trying to spy on and censor our private messages? April 27th, 2023 | 49 comments - (Comments are closed)
“It might be exhausting just trying to keep up with Musk and he will get plenty wrong. And yet, all the criticism is hopelessly wide of the mark. Our political and economic culture sneers at and neglects men and women like him. But if Musk and his ilk ever chose to go on strike, like a seemingly endless number of workers in both the public and private sectors, the system could grind to a complete halt.” – Matthew Lynn, Daily Telegraph. Lynn’s article (ÂŁ) is spot on. Yes, Musk received public subsidies for Tesla and the SpaceX business gets deals from NASA, but the point is also that he has made, particularly in the spacefaring area, a tremendous go of massively reducing launch costs via the recoverability of the rockets. He did it when far more expensive ways of space flight failed to deliver. If he did nothing else, that puts him on my list of heroes. The line about him ever going on strike makes me wonder if Lynn thinks of Musk as a sort of Ayn Rand hero. It’s almost uncanny. Of course, some people, including Musk himself, tend to think of him more as a bit of a Tony Stark. Musk can be maddening to some, and vexatious even to his admirers. But overall, I am glad he is around. April 26th, 2023 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
Months after Zweig published his report on the Twitter Files, journalist Matt Taibbi published a separate deep dive exploring the Virality Project, an initiative launched by Stanford Universityâs Cyber Policy Center. The project, which Taibbi described as âa sweeping, cross-platform effort to monitor billions of social media posts by Stanford University, federal agencies, and a slew of (often state-funded) NGOs,â is noteworthy because officials made it clear that a goal was not just to flag false information, but information that was true but inconvenient to the governmentâs goals. Reports of âvaccinated individuals contracting Covid-19 anyway,â âworrisome jokes,â and ânatural immunityâ were all characterized as âpotential violations,â as were conversations âinterpreted to suggest that coronavirus might have leaked from a lab.â In what Taibbi describes as âa pan-industry monitoring plan for Covid-related content,â the Virality Project began analyzing millions of posts each day from platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Medium, TikTok, and other social media sites, which were submitted through the JIRA ticketing system. On February 22, 2021, in a video no longer public, Stanford welcomed social media leaders to the group and offered instruction on how to join the JIRA system. In contrast to Twitterâs previous internal guidance, which required narratives on Covid-19 to be âdemonstrably falseâ before any censorship actions were taken, the Virality Project made it clear that information that was true was also fair game if it undermined the larger aims of the government and the Virality Project. April 25th, 2023 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Flexible working is not a new phenomenon. It has been around for decades, with varying degrees of success depending on the companies and industries that have implemented it. You do not need to be a working-from-home (WFH) evangelist to realise that working patterns have changed in recent years. Certain jobs, such as lawyers or journalists, can tolerate a level of WFH without a noticeable impact on performance. However, it is important to note that prior to Covid, its uptake amongst businesses has been very limited. The only reason it is plaguing our economy now, is not because businesses and start-ups across the nation have realised the phenomenal improvement in productivity. Far from it. It is simply because government-directed WFH orders, subsidies, and now policies have created a false sense of normality as well as a false labour market. And it is doomed to fail, like many so many state interventions, created far away from business reality.” – Andrew Barclay, businessman. I was at a banking conference in Monaco (tough job, and someone has to do it) and this seemed to be the view of a lot of the folk present. Mind you, for a lot of my working life, my “office” is a table in a hotel business reception, airport lounge, cafe or my home. But I have done this for decades, and in my younger years (20-40) had the benefit of the cameraderie, mentorship and “culture” that comes with being in an office as part of a team. I follow a more “hybrid” approach these days, and it seems to work. (I actually think I work longer hours than when I was in an office.) I don’t see any reason for the State to intrude into this, either by penalising one form or working or encouraging it. A neutral approach is best. And what definitely should not happen is enshrining this or that way of working as a “right” beyond obvious constraints to protect life and health, both physical and mental. As ever (here comes the libertarian drum-roll sound), it is competition and vigorous enterprise that provides the best ways of people figuring out working patterns that suit them best, be they youngsters, middle-aged farts like me with or without children and dependents, etc etc. April 24th, 2023 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
However, what followed was an extraordinary one-sided item. Newsnightâs presenter, Victoria Derbyshire, proceeded to hold a three-way discussion between herself, a Just Stop Oil activist, Indigo Rumbelow, and, er, Rupert Read, formerly of Extinction Rebellion. Read now leads an embryonic organisation called the Climate Majority Project, whose web page suggests it has a strikingly similar outlook to Extinction Rebellion. There were obvious questions to ask Rumbelow: namely, who do you think you are, thinking you have the right to ruin a sporting event that is enjoyed by millions, either as participants or spectators? And why target a running event, which is surely all about doing something of which you ought to approve: getting about on foot? There were questions to be asked of Extinction Rebellion, too â given that it has offered to âpoliceâ the event. Are climate pressure groups now operating as a kind of protection racket, to which we are also supposed to go and negotiate before we are allowed to go about our day-to-day business? None of these questions got asked. Rather, Newsnight first ran a short video in which it asserted that âviolenceâ was being shown towards climate protesters; it illustrated this partly with a police officer doing his job and arresting a member of a mob vandalising a building with red paint. April 23rd, 2023 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Android users (may be somewhat different on different makes of phone). iPhone users. Because if the Covid years have proven anything, only a crazed conspiracy theorist would believe governments would think nothing of using heightened fear to induce mass formation psychosis, thereby hugely increasing its power over every aspect of life, right? I predict it will eventually be illegal to turn off such ‘warnings’ and phone makers will make it impossible, but then I am just a crazed conspiracy theorist đ April 22nd, 2023 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Two men admit removing body parts in âeunuch makerâ case”, reports the Guardian.
Given that these people were all consenting adults, I do not understand why their actions (other than the theft of the anaesthetic) should be a criminal offence, particularly as surgical operations to remove people’s penises are legal in male to female sex change operations. Does it make a difference in principle whether the appearance aimed for when surgically removing a penis is female or eunuchoid? My question is not designed to provoke the reaction “Of course it should be legal to do this, just as it is legal to perform sex change operations”. Nor is it designed to provoke the reaction “Of course it should be illegal to perform sex change operations, just as it is illegal to do this.” I can see reasonable justification for saying that changing someone’s body to be like lots of other people’s bodies is much more likely to go well than changing their body to a form few others have. By “go well”, I mean be likely to increase the wellbeing of the person upon whom the operation is performed, or be less likely to decrease it, and also to go well in the same ways that any surgical operation is judged a success or a failure. Related earlier Samizdata posts: Discussion point: circumcision from October 2013. Discussion point: can children consent to puberty blockers? What about other drastic treatments? from October 2020. If you feel moved to comment, please seek neither to be offended nor to offend, and try not to get hung up by questions of terminology. April 22nd, 2023 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
In the beginning there was Perun. He referred to there being Russian âmil-bloggersâ on Telegram. For those who donât know Telegram is essentially Twitter without âcommunity guidelinesâ. Seeing as I was on Telegram following Ukrainian âmil-bloggersâ it didnât seem such a great leap to include a few of their Russian counterparts. Coz balance is really good isnât it? I eventually found 3 Russian mil-bloggers to follow. The first I found was Donbass Devushka. This was maybe a couple of months ago. And now sheâs hit the headlines. It is claimed that she claimed to be a Russian living in Luhansk when in fact she is an ex-US Navy sailor living in Washington state. I never saw this claim; at least not on the Donbass Devushka – DD as I shall now refer to her – channel. Jake Broe has a good video about this. It is claimed that she solicits donations ostensibly for Russians affected by the war and the donations have not reached any Russians, affected by the war or otherwise. I cannot recall seeing any such solicitation. If solicitation there be it certainly isnât a regular occurrence. And anyway, where would you prefer money donated by gullible pro-Russians to end up? It is claimed that she was the first person to publish images – doctored images no less – of the US intelligence documents which have been such a big story in the last couple of weeks. I donât recall seeing any such post. If it were posted and I didnât see it there are good reasons why I might not have done. DD has a bad case of blogorrhea. Every day she – I say âsheâ, she claims the channel has multiple authors – posts something like 170 entries. Getting through that takes time. It is not helped by a bug in Telegram for Mac which means that page down doesnât work. Fortunately it is helped by another bug in Telegram for Mac which from time to time will skip 50-100 entries. Not that it matters much. Even if I had seen it I wouldnât have paid a great deal of attention. The published images donât look like an intelligence assessment to me. Colour! Flashy fonts! Large pieces of paper! In an intelligence document! Get away! And, anyway, I wouldnât have had the skills to make sense of it. So, if I managed to miss the big story what did I learn from following DD? A few things. I should point out that from the very beginning I was very sceptical about the things she said. I rapidly came to the conclusion that the channel was pure Kremlin propaganda. There was at no point any departure from the Kremlin line or criticism of Russia or Russian performance in the war. I was more interested in what sorts of stories she was promoting and what arguments she was making. Anything unverifiable – like a headling-grabbing intelligence report – I mostly ignored. So, a list:
Howâs about that for an anti-climax? April 21st, 2023 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
Recent Comments