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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There are two reasons why I could not possibly let this one pass by without comment.
First, while the free market argument against anti-smoking laws (such matters should be decided by means of individual choice and the exercise of property rights) are both meritorious and rational, nowhere near enough attention is actually paid to questioning the decades-long propoganda war against tobacco. Far too many people have now accepted as fact that inhaling tobacco smoke is a uniquely dangerous activity.
However, it is my view that, while smoking tobacco is not entirely risk-free, the dangers of doing so have been grossly exaggerated.
It has taken some time (these things usually do) but now some people are prepared to start challenging this taboo:
As for smoking bans in “public places”, there are three reasons why they’re unjustified. First, pubs and clubs are actually private property. Second, bars don’t have to be smoky any more, with the air-cleaning technology available. But most importantly: no danger from “second-hand smoke” has ever been proven. Unlike most journalists, politicians and, regrettably, doctors, I’ve gone through all of the more than 40 studies. Only a few show any risk, and it’s statistically insignificant. There are higher risks from drinking milk, using mouthwash and keeping pet birds. I swear I’m not making this up! People who use this sort of “junk science” to stigmatise smokers and to nag and bully us out of our pleasures should be bloody well ashamed of themselves.
So they should. Regrettably, they appear to be all too bloody well pleased with themselves.
Secondly, the above broadside was angrily discharged by Joe Jackson, the Grammy Award-winning British singer and recording artist and that makes it doubly significant. Like everybody else I have grown weary of members of the entertainment industry seeking more attention than they could ever possibly deserve with some conformist, fashionable claptrap about ‘saving the planet’ or similar bunkum. So it is encouraging to note that not everyone in that industry has lost the capacity for critical thought.
My warmest congratulations to Joe Jackson. Twice!
[My thanks to Kevin McFarlane who posted this link to the Libertarian Alliance Forum.]
Last year saw a further rise in anti-semitic incidents in the United Kingdom. Both Muslim fundamentalists and the far right were involved in a more assertive and targeted campaign against prominent Jewish citizens. This indicates that anti-semitism in Britain is conforming to the European pattern, established on the continent in the first years of this century, without a strong response from many governments.
Whilst disagreeing with pundits who view this phenomenon as a cultural shift towards dhimmitude and Eurabia in that Europeans recognise and accommodate the superiority of Islam, there is no doubt that the issue of Palestine and the actions of Muslim fundamentalists has provided a lodestar for more traditional anti-semites. To this can be added a countervailing bias in the media that has promoted a discourse where all terrorist casualties in Israel are unfortunate and where all Palestinian deaths are victims. This has also stimulated a Manichaean view of the conflict with goodies and baddies, a framework that its supporters consider is the defining stupidity of those they oppose. As a consequence, the view of Israel and of Judaism in general has merged, and an unsympathetic span of views with shared arguments has arisen that shades from dislike of Israel to out and out anti-semitism. → Continue reading: British Anti-Semitism
We Brians must stick together, so here is a plug for this campaign by Brian Whiley (linked to by b3ta.com) to replace either Greg Dyke or That Bloke From The City as BBC DG or BBC Chairman, whichever.
What was Gilligan’s crime? That, early in the morning – at a time when nobody except insomniacs and farmers would be listening – a bleary-eyed journalist embellished a report that, in all honesty, probably needed it. My first duty would be to defend to the last BBC journalists from a Government that feels the need to hound reporters whose only error has been to make a boring story a little more interesting by inventing conversations that never took place.
I particularly like the promotional products peddled on this website, which downplay the “Whiley” aspect of the situation in a way that will surely meet with widespread approval here.
Ed Driscoll wrote a piece about evolving guitar technology in Friday’s installment of TechCentralStation, and after searching desperately for any thinly-veiled excuse to write about it, I stumbled across an angle.
With a lot of manufactured goods, their production tends to get ‘outsourced’ to the third world because (1) eventually everyone figures out how to do it and (2) capital markets can finance production almost anywhere on the globe. The only thing more predictable than this evolution is that politicians will never stop whining about it.
One trend that Driscoll does not pick up on is that this is also happening with guitars. Just as American streets are filling up with Korean-made autos (more Korean cars are sold here than German cars) the American guitar shops are filling up with Korean-made (and now Chinese-made) guitars. The Korean manufacturer Samick now accounts for almost half of the world’s guitar production. Even Gibson, best known for its estimable and pricey Les Paul (see photo below) is offering high value from its Epiphone series guitars (which Samick builds for them in Korea.)
If you have ever picked up a surviving ‘bargain’ guitar of the ’60s in a pawnshop or a secondhand guitar store — a Harmony, Kay, Eko, etc. — you would likely find cut-rate construction, weak intonation, mediocre playability and thin-sounding pickups. But today’s ‘bargain’ brands offer workmanship and playability that sometimes give the premium brands a run for their money. Danelectro, for example, makes hip, great-sounding guitars that are easy to play and can be had for about US$200.
To give you an idea as to how far this trend has already gone, I personally own a $40 guitar. I was ordering the Line 6 Guitar Port (the guitar-to-PC interface that Driscoll mentions in the article) when I discovered that the vendor was offering the device a la carte for $160 or packaged with an electric guitar for $200. My curiosity got the best of me – how bad can this $40 guitar be? – and I ordered the package deal. And you know what? The cheapo guitar is terrific. It does not hold its tune as well as my main Gibson, but it is easy to play and sounds good to boot.
Driscoll is right that we are not going to see a lot of major innovations in electric guitars anytime soon, in large part because the players themselves are somewhat resistant to change. (Even the most avant-garde noisemakers tend to prefer traditional guitar designs.) What we are seeing instead is global capitalism commoditizing electric guitars and making quality instruments more affordable than ever for a generation of young players.
The sustain, listen to it!
Now see here all you bloody smoking bastards. They have just about had enough of you and your pathetic, juvenile, surly insolence. Why can’t you seem to get it through your amazingly thick skulls that this sort of thing just is not on?
They have tried to be reasonable. They have tried to be understanding. But, oh no, that wasn’t good enough for you, was it? Well, here’s a news flash for you, chummy: the party is over. Their patience is at an end. The ‘good cop’ routine has not worked, so its time to send in the ‘bad cops’. Yes, that’s right. The gloves are finally coming off:
Pictures of diseased organs and rotting teeth could feature on cigarette packets under new government plans.
Similar pictures appear in Canada, Thailand, Brazil and Singapore – now a public consultation will be held on whether to introduce them in the UK.
“We need to continue with fresh, hard-hitting ideas, providing more information that will help smokers quit,” Health Secretary John Reid said.
And if that does not force you to quit, well, then they are just going to have to break out the Celine Dion records and play them on a loop until you damn well come to your senses.
Don’t make them do it!
Ah yes, St. Valentine’s Day.  The shop windows are filled with endless tacky heart-shaped corporate eye-catchers and the air is filled with cupid’s arrows… and other rather faster moving objects.
Have fun.
In Euractiv, it is reported that the next Justice and Home Affairs Council on the 19th-20th February will pass a draft directive authorising the collection of Passenger Name Record (PNR) data from non-EU nationals by airlines flying to a Member State. The data will be transferred to agencies in charge of the EU’s external borders in order to aid the management of immigration.
Data will notably include the names, travel document used, nationality, date of birth plus point and time of departure and arrival. Airlines will face thousand euro fines if they have not transmitted data or if the data is incomplete or false.
The original Spanish proposal was watered down after the House of Lords, amongst other bodies, pointed out that this placed a huge burden upon air and sea carriers. The draft directive will fail if it has not passed by April 30th under the auspices of the Treaty of Amsterdam and the Irish Presidency has crafted a compromise whereby biometric data is excluded and the burden is limited to air carriers.
Statewatch had already raised the flag on this proposal to transform air and sea carriers into data collection and surveillance agencies for external border control agencies.
In addition to loving skyscrapers I also have a thing about bridges, and I periodically feature a picture of a bridge at my Culture Blog. Sometimes the pictures are taken by me, of one or other of the many bridges of London. Sometimes they are acquired from the infinity of information that is the Internet.
Some while ago I featured the Coronado Bridge, which is next to San Diego. In that connection someone else drew my attention to another splendid bridge in Macao. Commenting on that posting, Phil Cohen has this to say about the Coronado Bridge:
The original design for the Coronado Bridge was a much shorter, and almost straight span to the Island (actually, peninsula). Then in order to qualify for federal funding, (whereby our government pays most of the tab), the City of San Diego curved and lengthened the bridge to meet the minimum length standard that would qualify the Coronado Bridge for Federal funding.
How about that for an unintended consequence of taxpayer funding. They help you if yours is a long bridge, so San Diego builds a long bridge instead of a short bridge!
If you want to see even more clearly what Phil Cohen is talking about, just take a look at this map!
It is very rare that government spending has such conspicuously visible results. Normally, when governments waste money – which is what they mostly do with money, after all – the waste all happens tucked away in offices and in the form of a few thousand quietly invisible salaries for suburbanites. For every Concorde or Space Shuttle or daft piece of architecture there are a hundred bits of wastage that are no more exciting to look at than evaporating water. But this Coronado Bridge story really makes the point.
Personally I prefer the highly visible kind of government wastage. First, it is often, as with this bridge, and as with Concorde, very pretty to look at. Second, it very prettily dramatises how wasteful government spending can be, and I like that even more.
Of course I have sensitivity, you know… I just refuse to use it with my friends
– Adriana Cronin-Lukas
Compared to other people (or rather, other people of my acquaintance) I joined the internet revolution rather late. While most people I meet are able to boast that they have had an e-mail address since the late (or even mid) 1980’s, I was not similarly endowed until 1998.
But what I lacked in early adoption techniques I made up for in subsequent enthusiasm. This was a whole new frontier and I revelled and rejoiced in the exhilirating liberation it provided. I am sure that plenty of our readers have experienced that same feeling.
And it was while I was on this big journey of discovery and emancipation that I stumbled across a forum (there were no blogs in those olden times) run by LM Magazine. LM stands (or stood) for ‘Living Marxism’ and it was run by the same people who, today, run Spiked-Online.
As with most internet fora, there was a regular contingent of posters and, in the case of the LM Forum, this consisted of a whole gaggle of Marxists, Communists and Trotskyites. Into this lion’s den barged (or perhaps blundered) two libertarians; one of them was me and the other was an American called Ed Collins. → Continue reading: My friend Ed
If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?
– Frédéric Bastiat
The daft furor over the outsourcing of job to India (and other places) is just another example of how amazingly primitive the understanding of economics is which prevails amongst the media and political elites in the USA (though no worse than elsewhere I might add).
The same troglodyte notions that lead people to think that cheaper foreign steel being imported into the USA is a bad thing (which is just another way of saying that manufacturing cheaper cars, homes and ships in the USA are a bad thing), lead the same people to in effect say that allowing Americans to purchase cheaper computer programs and requiring them to pay more for call center services is also a bad thing.
President Bush went on the defensive Thursday on the issue of outsourcing after a firestorm erupted over an aide’s contention that free flow of jobs, including the migration of services to India, benefited the US economy in the long run.
Although the aide, White House economic adviser Greg Mankiw, was merely echoing what was stated in Bush’s economic report to Congress, Washington’s political class came down on him like a ton of bricks.
Lawmakers from both parties, including Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert, demanded he be fired. The criticism forced Mankiw, a Harvard economist, to clarify that he did not mean to support or praise loss shifting of US jobs overseas.
Sure, if your IT or helpdesk job as just been outsourced to Bombay, it might seem like A Bad Thing for you personally… but then that is just as true if your job in New Jersey has just been taken by someone in Biloxi, Mississippi because your company has just relocated to where costs (and taxes) are cheaper… the overall effect is that companies, and outsourcable functions of companies, will go wherever it makes sense for them to go… and so they should!
However notion that India has such a comparative advantage just because they have produced a reasonable pool of IT and call centre people who will work for far less than their counterparts in California does rather miss the obvious fact that India is far from suitable for all or even most IT or call centre jobs. Troubleshooting a network in Texas is rather hard to do from New Delhi and to think people in Asia will have such a deep understanding of American (or British or European) cultural mores that all help desks and call centres will end up there is rather bizarre. Companies who out-source unsuitable jobs will end up being punished by the market if their quality falls below the point which lower costs can offset such a fall, and some jobs are very quality sensitive indeed.
It should be screamingly obvious that stopping people in India (and elsewhere) from exploiting their competitive advantages does not only hurt them, it hurts everyone who is a customer for those products. Rather than engaging in unbecoming grovelling, George ‘Steel & Lumber Tariff’ Bush should redeem himself by responding to the Troglodyte faction by pugnaciously asking them “So, what exactly did the American consumer do to you to make you hate them so much, guys?”
If a company is not free to run their business and the location of the people who make it work, to best suit the company’s interests, who pays in the end? The company’s customers do, of course. And that means you.
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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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