|
|||||
|
The dependably readable William Sjostrom takes an article in the Daily Telegraph decrying the fact British students are in debt and turns it on its head:
Why indeed? August 19th, 2004 | 39 comments - (Comments are closed)
 August 18th, 2004 | 6 comments - (Comments are closed)
Samizdatista Jackie Danicki spotted an interesting fact that well known writer and commentator Theodore Dalrymple is now a contributor to the Social Affairs Unit blog, publishing under his real name, Dr Anthony Daniels. The SAU has scored quite a coup by getting such an excellent contributor signed up. The blogosphere continues its march into the mainstream. August 18th, 2004 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
Over on the Adam Smith Institute blog, there is another article on why outsourcing ends up actually creates job in the country doing the outsourcing. The author makes the obvious statement that:
Quite! This seems an emotive subject for those who fear their jobs will end up in India but as the comments on this blog have demonstrated when we have discussed outsourcing in the past, it is hard to make a convincing argument that outsourcing is anything other than a positive thing for an advanced western economy. August 18th, 2004 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
The other day the Daily Mail, a British tabloid newspaper written for the statist right prejudices of ‘Indignant of Tunbridge Well’, called for certain video games to be banned. This resulted is a rather splendid riposte by Benet Simon in The Spectator called Ban this evil rag!’:
Indeed… my comments were amongst those they deleted from the thread on the Daily Mail forum entitled Discuss: Should violent video games be banned?. And now that it has turned into an embarrassing fiasco for them given the overwhelming response to the contrary, they seem to have since deleted the entire thread. It seems that ‘Indignant of Tunbridge Wells’ is a gamer too. * = ‘Gib’ being an expression used by computer gamers for blowing a person into bloody chunks. August 18th, 2004 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
1. verb. Short for presidential blogging (as in the president or CXO of a company) which bypasses the entire PR apparatus, as well as the traditionally blah forms of published speech by CXOs. Think of it as “Do It Yourself PR” for the people best positioned to make hay with it. (Coined by Doc Searls) Usage: “Schwartz and Cuban are playing the plogging game” 2. verb. Project blogging (qv Plog). August 18th, 2004 | Comments are closed
1. noun & verb. A project blog. A blog set up to chronicle a particular (business) project. 2. noun. On-line bookseller Amazon.com has experimented with offering its customers ‘personalised weblogs’ that they call ‘plogs’. Although they have trademarked the name, it is already in use with other meanings and the Amazon usage is unlikely to gain lasting traction. August 18th, 2004 | Comments are closed
While we are sleepwalking into a surveillance society, the Norwich Union is egging us on… They are trialling a system of in-car monitoring (a black box by any other name) that records details of the vehicle’s journey. Where it went, how fast it travelled etc.
Each month or quarter, the motorist will receive a document similar to their mobile phone bill advising them of their journey details. Pay as you go insurance – sounds innocuous enough. During the BBC piece it was suggested that the monthly or quarterly bill may provide advice for improving the cost effectiveness of one’s driving (from an insurance point of view) by providing alternatives to the routes taken. Even more worrying, perhaps is the quote from the Norwich Union director of the pay-as-you-drive scheme, Robert Ledger:
Sleepwalking indeed… According to the BBC’s Breakfast programme, there is no clear indication yet about how the data will be stored, used and accessed – will the Norwich Union sell it? Will the police or other agencies have access to it? So far these are unanswered questions. One motorist volunteer thinks this will give her control over her insurance costs. For a low mileage user, this may be so. For the rest of us? It is always worth remembering that insurance companies are not charities – they are investing in this because they see a revenue opportunity. Oh, how simple it all could be – analysing a driver’s record and declaring his insurance void due to, say driving several hours without a break or breaking the speed limit – or, just hiking the premium. Personally, I prefer to control my insurance costs by playing them off against each other come renewal time. August 18th, 2004 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
This article from the Washington Post, on the application of the little known Data Quality Act to hobble the regulatory leviathan, is full of unintentional insights. The Data Quality Act is, well, let the Post tell it, and let the insights begin!
The first insight is, of course, the clonking great pro-government, pro-regulation bias that the Post brings to this story. Note the disparaging terms applied to this piece of legislation, which has a genesis and a pedigree that is totally ordinary – most legislation is the product of interested parties, and most finds its way onto the books via massive omnibus bills that no one reads. However, these routine facts of Washington life are given ominous prominence only when the media outlet is opposed to whatever was done. The rest of the story is riddled with similar bias – in the Post’s world, regulation is always good, always to protect the people, never fails a cost-benefit test, always supported by the preponderance of the scientific evidence, etc. The next set of unintentional insights comes to us when the relatively innocuous purpose of the Act collides with the prerogatives of the regulatory state.
First, of course, note who the Post asks for their opinion. Of equal interest is the rather revealing admission that, in the past, regulation was apparently handed down on the basis of information that was, how to put this, of less than adequate quality. Declining to regulate because the data isn’t there is, of course, a Bad Thing. These final comments surely need no elaboration.
 August 17th, 2004 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
New Scientist has an article looking at the US$312 million surveillance system installed for the 2004 Olympics in Athens. The eyes and ears consist of 1,000 high-res and infrared videocameras peppering the city. Cell and landline telephone calls are being recorded, converted into text, and “scanned for phrases that could be linked to terrorist activity.” The software’s developers say it speaks Greek, English, Arabic, Farsi, and other major languages.
via Boing Boing August 17th, 2004 | One comment - (Comments are closed)
One of the interesting but un-noticed thing about world affairs is that, for all the wealth that traffic in oil is able to generate, the nations that produce it are not high up on the list of nice places to be. Not many people consider Saudi Arabia, Iran, Nigeria, or Russia to be desirable places to go for a holiday, never mind live. In an odd twist to the old folks tale that ‘money won’t make you happy’, it is pretty clear that oil wealth is not particularly useful in solving the problems of a nation. Nancy Birdsall and Arvind Subramanian did notice it however and wrote a 5,000 word essay on the subject, with Iraq in mind, for Foreign Affairs magazine (preview here) What they noted was that oil wealth tends to corrupt the state, and since it has an easy stream of revenue at its disposal, it does not have to work so hard at gouging its citizens. So it also has no incentive to promote property rights as a way of creating wealth. And those that control the state, control the wealth. Therefore, you get the distressing sight of the President of Chad spending the first instalment of his country’s oil wealth on a new Presidential jet for example. More recently, in Russia we see President Putin using state power to attack the oil-enriched oligarchs. And Nigeria seems to have been actively impoverished by its oil wealth, as the ‘Pirates in Power’ have skimmed $100 billion over the years. Oil wealth is not particularly healthy for democracies, either. How to escape the curse? Merely privatising the oil sector does not work very well in states where the concept of ‘property rights’ is a shaky one at best (see Russia). Another attempt has been to create special ‘oil funds’ with constitutional restrictions on the way the money is used. This has been used in many different places. But again, the strength of the rule of law is the decisive thing. Chad had a ‘oil fund’ but the President still got his airplane. Birdsall and Subramanian instead advocate the novel idea of distributing the oil wealth directly to the citizens. This means that every citizen of the nation gets an annual cheque from the oil company. For Iraq, this idea has many wonderful features. In the first place, Iraqi citizens get a real stake in their government, and will be not inclined to support Islamist or separatist groups who wish to smash the state for their own nefarious purposes. Secondly, all Iraqis get the same cut. A struggling farmer, a Mad Mullah, or an educated doctor- each of them get the same thing. No complaints about the system getting rorted in favour of one ethnic group or another. And best of all, ordinary Iraqis will get prosperous at the expense of the government. There will not be rivers of gold for a class of local ‘social planners’ to waste, and the government will have to work hard to sell the need for tax increases to fund their operations. This means that citizens can look the state in the eye. And tell it where to get off, too. August 17th, 2004 | 28 comments - (Comments are closed)
In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage “We should recognize the issue of communism and Soviet espionage has become an antiquarian backwater. After all, the Cold War is over.” With these words, a typical leftish US historian, Ellen Schrecker, recommends that a whole sector of an historical era should be ignored and work on it effectively closed down. “It is time to move on,” remarks another academic, using the modern terminology that neither denies nor accepts responsibility, but leaves a mess behind for someone else to clear up. Now historians are, by definition, paddlers up backwaters, investigators of things that are “over” and move in, not move on when invited to examine data never before available. When World War Two ended historians started, not stopped, writing about it, just as an unending stream of books about Napoleon has continued in the nearly two centuries since he was bundled off to St Helena. The idea that, just as enormous quantities of material from Soviet and other archives are being released, work on them should be called off is so ludicrous that it could only have been suggested by those who feel the foundations of their beliefs and attitudes crumbling beneath their feet. However, though public apathy is what they would like, the hard facts, and writers such as Haynes and Klehr, have forced some response. According to the authors of In Denial, the two examples quoted are not isolated oddities, but characteristic of the mindset of a large, perhaps predominant section of US academic historians. Certainly those they cite, or otherwise mention, whom I list at the end of this review, make up a considerable body. They also must include at least the majority of the editors of The American Historical Review and The Journal of American History which rarely publish articles critical of Communism, or have done for the past 25 years at least. Yet these two must be distinguished from Radical History Review which avowedly “rejects conventional notions of scholarly neutrality and objectivity’ (p. 44)”. The Encyclopedia of the American Left omits such matters as the large subsidies the Soviet Union transmitted to the American Communists, specifically for subversion (pp 70-72), the evidence that Alger Hiss spied for the Soviet Union (p. 106), indeed that American Communists had anything to do with espionage, even after opened Soviet files had massively documented the fact that this was so. After all, if something is in print in an accepted reference work, as the Encyclopedia is, it becomes history – an interesting example of history being written by the losers, for a change. Why, though, did the editors of the “highly prestigious”, 24 volume American National Biography for its entry on the Rosenberg spies commission a Communist academic who then, not surprisingly, brushed aside recent confirmatory evidence of their guilt as “discredited” (p. 104)? → Continue reading: Admit nothing, explain nothing and apologize for nothing August 17th, 2004 | 19 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. |
|||||
