I use both a PC and a Mac (OS X 10.3.4) and I was wondering… is there any way to make the Mac not use that ghastly bugfest called Safari as the default browser?
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August 12th, 2004 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I have just returned back to London from a business trip to Edinburgh, now in the full swing of its major arts festival, when thousands of theatrical, comic and music acts strut their stuff. I was up in that fine city on more prosaic financial matters and although the weather was fairly dire for August – it rained all the time – I had an enjoyable trip and learned a lot more about the city. First off, Edinburgh remains a serious financial centre. Quite a few traditionally London-based investment managers and financiers have happily turned their backs on the costs, noise and hassles of life in London in favour of Edinburgh. From the point of view of ‘quality of life’, the city has a lot to commend it. Commuting to work is much easier than in London, just for starters. In the course of interviewing a CEO of a large investment firm, however, I was startled to be told that the top employer in the city is the local council. That’s right. The biggest source of jobs in the place is not a big fund manager, bank, IT firm or some other business, but the local municipality. Therein lies the problem of modern Scotland, as far as I can see. Socialism has alas taken a deep hold of its public political culture at least as far as I can tell. The land of Adam Smith and David Hume seems to have forgotten some of the virtues of small government and red-blooded capitalism, as this article over at the blog Freedom and Whiskey makes clear I truly hope this changes in the future. And if it ever does, then other financial capitals of Europe could be in for some very tough competition indeed. Edinburgh could become a very pleasant and exciting place to work and is certainly becoming much easier to reach, as developments to its airport go forward. Well, that’s all from me for a while. Off on holiday. See you later. August 12th, 2004 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Discussing nationalised healthcare with those of a leftist frame of mind, it occurs to me that one is put at a disadvantage in attempting to demonstrate the merits of a private healthcare system if one restricts the options to a public health system versus private health system. This tends to conflate the separate benefits a private system would provide. Nationalised healthcare systems are wasteful and ruinously expensive but there are actually two separate phenomena contributing to this.
One is further disadvantaged by conflating nationalised health with redistributionism per se. Thus, if the matter for discussion is simply nationalised health versus private, one must not only convince the sceptic of the benefits of the market but also to abandon a, perhaps cherished, redistributionist outlook. Yet, it is not necessary to do so if these issues are separated. In agreeing to set aside the issue of redistribution in the first place it ought to be possible to agree with the leftist interlocutor that the government does a lousy job of running the health system. An ardent supporter of cradle to grave healthcare, if intellectually honest, may be persuaded to concede that, so long as the government still pays for it, healthcare would be better provided by the private sector. If this step is accepted, such an intellectually honest leftist might also note the role of incentives when healthcare is provided on a no-cost basis. In an alternative system, an individual might be provided with health vouchers or subsidised insurance, perhaps a no claims bonus might apply or a policy excess. In such a system, the government still picks up the tab but there is at least some incentive for the user to modify his consumption. By separating the issues it may be possible to reach wider agreement on privatising health than would be possible with the issues lumped together. It is probably worth adopting such an incrementalist approach in lieu of the ‘greedy’ approach of the absolutist. For most of the issues which concern libertarians, a step in the right direction is not only useful in getting closer to one’s goal, it may also offer a noticeable improvement in its own right. August 12th, 2004 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
Jackie: “Do you ever make cakes for people?” (Overheard at the Big Blog Company ‘open day seminar’ held this evening Samizdata.net HQ) August 11th, 2004 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
Having recently completed Edward O. Wilson’s flawed tome on updating the Enlightenment: “Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge“, I was struck by the passages that he wrote on colour perception. To summarise Wilson’s description, there appear to be four basic units of colour if a wide range of languages are compared: red, yellow, green and blue. However, these units are either incorporated or discarded within the range of human languages. Human cultures are so diverse that the range of colours or shades within languages stretches from two to eleven. The science of colour perception has now settled upon a consensus that endeavours to construct “a model of the evolution of color terminology systems that attempts to derive the typology and evolutionary trajectories of basic color term systems from facts of color appearance“, as declared by Paul Kay, a distinguished scholar in this field. This school is opposed by the empiricists who follow Piaget’s argument that colour perceptions are learned as part of the environmental stimuli and by the culturalists, who argue that all colour representations are culturally constructed. Both the empiricists and the culturalists reject any role for biology in the formation of colour representations. One of the most famous and controversial examples of a culture where colour perceptions were limited to two terms was the Dani tribe of New Guinea. They had two terms for what they saw: mola (white) and mili (black), although further study demonstrated that they were able to perceive the full range of colours despite the lack of colour terms in their language. Current experiments conclude that perceptions of colour are not as naturally determined as biological determinists have argued and that perceptions can be altered through linguistic categories, though not to an extent that would justify the conclusions of the empiricists or the culturalists. At the opposite end of the range is the English language. Wilson concludes that English has eleven terms to describe colour, although others have only identified eight: red, blue, green, pink, purple, orange, yellow and brown. In addition, the Russians have an additional blue hue. Yet, as an Englishman, the question arises how additional colour perceptions in language may influence the culture. As a foundation, one could argue that a language which supports more complex partitions of colour perception may predispose the speakers towards a greater use of simile, description and metaphor: that it aids language, and possibly music, as well as the visual arts. This is a mere speculation. Yet this aspect of the English language, with its panoply of colour perceptions, must have enriched rather than disabled our culture and its impact appears to be unknown. August 11th, 2004 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
The British Conservative Party has today announced that it would (if elected to office) cut 4,000 of the 5,000 civil servants in Department of Trade and Industry and would not expand other government departments to take up these posts – i.e. this would be a real cut (although the cut would take several years to bring into effect). Of course there is no point in having a Department of Trade and Industry at all (the nickname for the DTI… ‘Death To Industry’… about sums up the department), but this annoucement should still be welcomed. The Conservatives might rat on the promise if elected – but at least the promise has been made. August 11th, 2004 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
Terry L. Heaton has a sound article on the realities of TV and internet as the news medium. The dynamics of local news reporting and news breaking have changed and the broadcast industry is in a situation where the first-mover can have the real advantage.
And here comes the new, in the local newsrooms resisted medium:
Yes, news is a conversation. With those who are in the middle of it and those who are affected by it and those who have opinions on it. There have also been changes on the receiving end – the user (formerly known as consumer) is in charge.
The major media outlets have already adopted internet strategies that do not wait for the news hour. That is how it was possible for a group blog such as the Command Post to scour the breaking news from most of them and provide a useful one-stop information source about the Iraq conflict. It also starkly highlighted the different biases in the major media reporting that were embedded deeper than their reporters with the troops in Iraq. The local news are closer to home and such inherent biases may be more obvious. So let them scoop the big media and each other beyond the box of the 6 o’clock news… via Doc Searls August 11th, 2004 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
– from the The Daily Courant of March 11, 1702. The Courant was probably the world’s first daily newspaper. Bloggers might not like the next bit:
August 11th, 2004 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Racial profiling may be too controversial too touch but just wait until somebody suggests species profiling:
An agitated domestic cat is a truly frightening thing. It could have been armed with a machine-gun or a bomb. Who knows what it could have done? Maybe it intended to overpower the crew, take over the plane and crash it into a building? Nobody would be able to stop it!! Terror in the skies!!!
It was wielding a box-cutter and screaming ‘death to the Yankee imperialist dogs’. This is a tragically inevitable result of the constant human meddling in the domestic affairs of cats. August 11th, 2004 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
There have been grumblings from the commentariat in recent posts, questioning my libertarian bona fides because I think it is a good thing that journalists are treated like ordinary citizens, a bad thing that a former government grandee thinks he can break the law with impunity, a good thing that my government is at least trying to perform its most basic function – protecting me against those who trying to kill me and mine, and so forth. I regard these positions as being pretty straightforward applications of a common-sense practical libertarianism, one that has no truck with either pacifism or anarchy, but it occurred to me that I hadn’t really laid out my basic principles. Government is the wrong tool for nearly every job. At a minimum, civil society does a better job of creating and distributing wealth, and of regulating conduct that does not involve force or fraud. The regulatory state and the redistributionist state are both largely illegitimate and ineffective in achieving their stated goals. Taxation is distinguishable from theft and extortion only through an attenuated theory of ‘consent’ that posits that your vote for the guy who lost somehow means you consented to a bunch of people you never even had te chance to vote for agreeing among themselves to take your money. Low taxes good, high taxes bad. → Continue reading: Back to basics August 10th, 2004 | 64 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have always regardless the Olympics with indifference at best (I am not a great sports fan) but clearly the people organising the games in Athens are completely demented.
These people would be funny if they were not so self-important. And from a PR point of view: message to the folks sponsoring the Olympic… rule number one is do not piss off your prospective customers. Morons. And whilst on the subject of sporting madness, what I cannot understand is why the furore over well known lothario Sven-Goran Eriksson’s love life? So he has some hanky panky with a kiss-and-tell money grubber who happens to be female employee of the Football Association… so what? The guy is the coach of the England football team: he is in the sports business which means reasonable expectations of probity are surely somewhere between rock stars in hotel rooms and sailors on shore leave. If there is any scandal here it is that Sven’s standards seem to be slipping: at the risk of being ungallant, ‘beauty’ Faria Alam is not quite of the same ‘calibre’ as Italian lawyer Nancy Dell’Olio or Ulrika Jonnson. links via AdRants and the Big Blog Company August 10th, 2004 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
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