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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The Guardian reports:
Residents of Croydon, south London, have been told that the microchips being inserted into their new wheely bins may well be adapted so that the council can judge whether they are producing too much rubbish.
If the technology suggests that they are, errant residents may be visited by officials bearing advice on how they might “manage their rubbish more effectively”.
In the shorter term the microchips will be used to tell council officers how many of the borough’s 100,000 bins the refuse collectors have emptied and how many have been missed.
Andrew Pelling, the Conservative who represents the area on the London assembly has tagged the microchips the “spy in your bin”:
The Stasi or the KGB could never have dreamed of getting a spying device in every household.
If, for example, computer hackers broke in to the system, they could see sudden reductions in waste in specific households, suggesting the owners were on holiday and the house vacant.
But a spokesman for Croydon council said the fears were unjustified.
What we don’t want is people putting into their wheely bins tins and glass and paper and textiles, all of which could go into recycling bins. It is the way forward for waste management. We are not the only council thinking about it.
So, the council, does not want people to do something that it has imposed on them, such as recycling. Well, some people do not feel like doing it and they should have the choice. Just because the council/government/anybody considers that x is good, they have no right to impose that on others. This is social totalitarianism and the sad thing is that so few see it for what it is.
The House of Commons has passed the controversial ID card Bill by a vote of 224 to 64. It hopes to see the introduction of biometric identity cards and a central database of all UK citizens by 2010.
However, its primary sponsor, the Secretary of State for the Home Department, admitted that he expected the Bill to face stiff opposition in the House of Lords.
The system is expected to cost up to £5.5 billion to implement, and calls for a standalone biometric ID card to be issued alongside a biometric passport. It would become compulsory for everyone living in the UK, including children, by 2012.
The vote came on the same day that the US House of Representatives approved its own version of electronic ID card legislation in a 261-161 vote. The US’ Real ID Act would require states to issue driver’s licenses and other ID cards with physical security features such as a digital photograph and other basic data, using what the bill describes as machine-readable technology. That could include a magnetic strip or RFID tag. Tony Blair said:
The reason why this measure is supported not only by the Government but by the police and the security services is that people believe that, particularly when we have biometric passports and the biometric technology available, we can construct an identity card that gives us the best possible protection against crime and terrorism. I do not think it is wrong or a breach of anyone’s civil liberties to say that we should have an identity card. Most people carry some form of identification anyway. I think it is long overdue, and we should get on and do it.
There remains a very active opposition to ID cards however and both the Conservative and LibDems have refused to support the Bill. Questions over biometrics reliability are also likely to be wide debate as the Bill progresses through the Parliamentary process.
Off-the-record debate mixed with off-the-cuff publication is a recipe for disaster.
– Rebecca Blood on the decision to introduce a Davos weblog
During the last fortnight or so I have watched with fascination as the Eason Jordan story has unfolded. Here is a recent Instapundit posting about it.
Briefly, at a meeting in Davos on January 27th. Eason Jordan accused the US army of deliberately killing journalists. When challenged he retreated, but what exactly did he say, and how far did he retreat? A video exists, apparently, but has not yet been unveiled. For about a week, the Mainstream Media, hereinafter termed (as my QC Dad liked to put it) the MSM, ignored the story, while bloggers went to town with it.
Last Friday, Eason Jordan resigned from his job, as executive vice president and chief news executive of CNN. He did not accept any blame for his remarks, but said that he wanted to protect CNN from being “unfairly tarnished”.
At first, Eason Jordan and his colleagues probably hoped that this would be the end of the matter. Now that the lynch-bloggers had got their scalp, maybe they would stop their baying and yelling and go back to writing about God, guns, kittens, and suchlike. But the bloggers are not satisfied.
Eason Jordan himself is only the label for this story, he himself being only a part of it. The matter is absolutely not now closed, as the increasingly horrified MSM (mainstream media) are learning, to their severe discomfort. They have much more to learn yet. → Continue reading: Eason Jordan etc.
The Duel
John Lukacs
Ticknor & Fields, New York 1994
Five Days in London: May 1940
John Lukacs
Yale Univ. Press 1999
We buried Winston Churchill forty years ago. Sixty five years ago, come May, he faced, for us, the greatest crisis of our history. BBC’s Radio 4 commemorated his death with a fine, hour-long recall of his funeral and the crisis of 1940 with a gripping drama, Playing for Time – Three Days in May 1940. I do not know whether the author of the play, Robin Glendinning, owed anything to the books noticed here, but to me they seem to autheticate it. Another Radio 4 programme, Churchill’s Roar, very perceptively analysed the voice that spoke the words that still move us.
The World’s Debt to Britain
To put it no higher, the world is fortunate that, for a whole year, from June 1940 to June 1941, Britain had a government that did not capitulate to or compromise with Hitler. The situation during that year looked barely a stalemate. The Axis Powers now completely dominated Europe. Italy was an ally, Spain was friendly and the USSR no threat (the only person Stalin ever trusted was Hitler). Germany had absorbed Austria and occupied Czechoslovakia in 1938, then in less than a year’s war had overrun and partitioned Poland, occupied Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and Luxemburg, and completed her conquest of Western Europe by knocking out France. The Balkans represented no problem.
Although it may have been the result of miscalculation and misfortune that for a year Britain “stood alone”, it turned out to be the right thing to do. And more than calculation stood behind the decision: it felt the right thing to do. But what could Britain hope for? The Dominions (except for Southern Ireland, still officially one of them, whose government played its ignoble role, excused by its history, until the very end) were loyal and contributed men and arms. The United States was sympathetic but strongly isolationist: to win the Presidential Election in 1940, Roosevelt felt he had to promise to keep out of the war. There was little Britain could do but protect herself and trounce Hitler’s jackal-ally Italy in Ethiopia, Somaliland and North Africa – and hope that Hitler would make some mistake.
The Inevitable Parallel: Napoleon and Hitler
The parallel between Britain’s struggle against Napoleon and that against Hitler hardly needs to be drawn, but if there is any lesson in history, surely it is here. Napoleon retains his high reputation, gained from victory in a dozen battles; Hitler never commanded in the field, yet subjugated Europe more thoroughly. Both underestimated Britain in both her power and persistence, Hitler the more excusably. Napoleon abandoned the attempt to invade, and did not in person try to eject Britain from Spain and Portugal; in combination, a fatal error. Hitler postponed his invasion attempt, half-hoping the fruit would drop into his hand, also a fatal error. → Continue reading: Finest Hour, Last Gasp – or both?
Sarah, after her first day (as an intern?) at the Fairtrade Foundation:
I don’t suppose trade can ever be fair. Someone always has to lose. It’s just they lose less with fair trade than with the regular variety.
Milton Friedman:
Adam Smith’s key insight was that both parties to an exchange can benefit and that, so long as cooperation is strictly voluntary, no exchange can take place unless both parties do benefit.
Back in 1958 J. K. Galbraith’s The Affluent Society was published. The main thesis of this book was that the reason that goverment services were no good was that not enough money was spent on them, hence there was “private affluence and public squalor”.
The thesis was clearly false even when it was first published, as government spending on such things as education was at an all time record high in 1958 – both in the United States and in all other nations.
However, since 1958 the thesis has been shown to be utter nonsense. As government spending on such things as education has exploded in the United States (and in many other nations) and the standards of such things as government education have declined.
Of course one can attack the above as resting on empiricism, and I would accept that economics should not be based on empiricism (I accept the “Austrian School” view that economics is based on the logic of human action). However, J.K. Galbraith always claimed to be a supporter of empiricism – and so as the years went by (with rising government spending and falling standards in the “public services”) he should have admitted that his theory is false and he has never admitted that his theory is false.
Now J.K. Galbraith seems to have changed his name and come to live in London. In an article in thursday’s “Evening Standard” Simon Jenkins claimed that the reason that “public services” were no good in London was because not enough money was spent on them.
Simon Jenkins (previously known for his support of the London “dome” and other money wasting absurdities), thus ignored both the logical arguments against government spending and the experience of the last several decades of rising government spending and falling standards.
Instead Jenkins declared that everyone should believe him because “I am no socialist” and because he was willing to pay more money to local government himself.
Of course nothing stops this man giving government (local or national) more money now, if he wishes to do this he can – but what has that got to do with other people being forced to give government more money?
As for “I am no socialist” – well “so what?” How is this an argument? Even J.K. Galbraith came out with better stuff than this (perhaps, if they are the same man, age is taking its toll – after all I believe that Galbraith was born in 1908).
The article also made other odd claims. For example there was a claim that the government headed by Mr Blair had not increased taxes – which it has, including taxes on wealthy people (Simon Jenkins was very keen that taxes on the wealthy be increased – he seemed to be unaware that very high taxes on high earners reduce revenue over time).
The article also claimed that a “Nordic” system of collecting income taxes on a national level and then dishing it out to local governments would improve “local democracy”.
This is odd on two levels. Firstly because this is rather like what already happens in Britain – income tax is set by the national government, but much local government spending is paid for by grants from national government (there is endless argument about how fair these grants are, for example with claims that Conservative party controlled councils are discriminated against by the Labour party government, but such arguments need not concern us here).
Secondly, is it not odd to think that the above helps “local democracy”? Surely if one believed in “local democracy” the income tax should be set by local councils? Of course taxpayers (apart from Simon Jenkins) would tend to leave high government spending areas over time – and such councils would go bankrupt, but this would at least be “democratic”.
The tax eaters of London would get to democratically drive out the taxpayers (both individuals and companies) if that is what they wished to do (and the voting stats were on their side), and they would get to democratically starve.
However, central government dishing out subsidies is hardly a matter of ‘local democracy’.
From the BBC today:
Protesters have marched in London in support of the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement on emissions coming into force on Wednesday.
Police said about 500 people had marched to the United States embassy, carrying flags of the 136 countries that have ratified the treaty.
Mark Holland has a laugh at the BBC for taking this unmighty throng so seriously, and has a particular chortle about something called the Campaign Against Climate Change.
And, from the BBC last Thursday:
Several people were hurt in the crush as thousands flocked to the midnight opening of Ikea’s newest store.
The store in Edmonton, north London, stayed open for just 30 minutes because of safety fears and five people had to be taken to hospital for treatment.
The company blamed the chaos, in the early hours of Thursday, on “an unforeseen volume of customers”.
I think this contrast well illustrates the relative pulling power of shopping for bargains compared to political demonstrating, and shows that Western Civilisation will not necessarily be collapsing under the weight of its idiocy any time soon.
The BBC report continues:
Tottenham MP David Lammy said Ikea should have known offering cheap prices in a deprived area would cause a rush.
Indeed. What evil capitalist swine these Ikeans are! – offering furniture to poor people so cheaply that they can actually afford it and turn up in their thousands wanting to buy it.
A few weeks ago, I attended one of the talks that are hosted in London by Brian Micklethwait on the last Friday of every month. The speaker was fellow Samizdatista Alex Singleton, and was essentially on the subject of why globalisation is good (and was incidentally about Alex’s new think tank devoted to this very issue).
In the discussion after the talk, one thing that came up was the benefits of global economies of scale and global competition in manufacturing, retailing and the supply chains in between. A point made was that although it is certainly the case that prices on many goods (clothes and electronics being the examples brought up) have dropped due to retailers being able to easily shop throughout the whole world for products to sell, we do not really yet see customers buying goods directly from foreign retailers. Internet commerce is becoming large, but mostly it is domestic in nature.
However, something happened to me this week that made me think that perhaps more international commerce is happening than we realise, and that a lot of it is happening under the radar.
My present mobile phone is a Motorola v500, which is a lovely phone. (Motorola has always had great engineering. Five years ago they were losing badly to Nokia, who had inferior engineering but better industrial design and better user interfaces, but in recent times they have caught up in both regards). However, it has a small external antenna, which is removable and screws into the phone. As it happened, the thread on the antenna became damaged, and I needed a new antenna.
I went into the Carphone Warehouse store from which I had bought the phone, and they were sympathetic but not very helpful. They were more interested in selling new phones and high mark up accessories than tiny replacement antennas. (They suggested that I visit their repair centre in a different part of London or check the Motorola website). I went to a couple of other mobile phone shops with similar results. Checking the Motorola website led to similar results.
So what to do. Well, I checked on ebay, found that there were plenty of people selling replacement antennas for my phone, put in a bid, and purchased an antenna, online, for £2.77 including postage. Although an antenna probably costs 5 cents to make, I suspect that if I had gone to a “repair centre”, I would have been charged considerably more than £2.70 for a new one, and the other advantage of buying on ebay is that the new one would arrive in the mail in a couple of days.
Just as I was logging out of ebay, I noticed something else, which was “Location of Seller: Singapore”. So it turned out that it was easier and cheaper for me to obtain a new antenna from some guy in Singapore than from a local retailer in London.
Thinking about it some more, I suspect that a lot of this is typical. If you set up a “shop”, then there are still restrictions on where you can obtain goods from and who you can sell to. The producers of branded goods still try very hard to make sure that retailers only sell goods that have been bought from the “authorised distributor” of their brand in a particular country, and that they only sell to people in the same market. In a world where every buyer is also potentially a seller, and where goods can be sold on to people elsewhere in the world, though, this is hard to enforce. And what we do have now are large, trusted companies that act as brokers of goods of all kind. Ebay is the classic example, but as I have discussed before, more and more of Amazon’s business is of this kind too, acting as a broker for third party sellers. I haven’t seen any statistics in the percentage of this kind of trade that is cross border, but I suspect it is growing. (I also buy large numbers of DVDs from the US and Canada through third party sellers via Amazon).
Quite sadly, there is also another obstacle to the growth in this kind of cross border commerce. If you send something through the mail, it is subject to cross border bureaucratic interference in the terms of customs duties and local taxes. (In the case of importing most goods into Britain, the issue is the payment of VAT). If you receive a package and HM Customs and Excise decides to charge you VAT on it, then rather than receiving the goods through the mail, you receive a card explaining the situation. You then have to visit the local post office, and pay the VAT plus an “administration charge” before receiving your goods. The inconvenience and the administration charge can between them make it no longer worth your while to buy from overseas in the first place, which is irritating. Ultimatelly it isn’t so much the tax as the inconvenience that goes with it.
But of course there is a loophole. The VAT is waived if the total value of the goods is less than £18. This regulation was presumably brought in some time in the past to avoid the inconvenience of having to charge tax on every small gift sent throught the mail, but it has now grown into being an examption widely used by customers of internet commerce. You learn not to order multiple DVDs in the same package but to order them one at a time. The additional postage costs are often as much or greater than the tax would be, but this way you avoid the bureaucracy. This doesn’t precisely improve the economic efficiency of the whole process, but the exemption is great enough to allow a large global economy to exist in goods under about £18, whereas there are substantial restrictions on trade in goods of higher value. None the less, some stores have set up specifically in order to take advantage of this tax advantage (Amazon Jersey for instance).
One would hope that someday this exemption would be so widely used that it will lead governments to remove the taxes in resignation, but this is sadly much too hopeful. More likely are attempts to charge taxes on all goods, however small, and much more government intrusion into commerce. And it is the intrusion and bureaucracy that is likely to really be economically destructive, even more so than the taxes themselves.
One of the more depressing discoveries I made from my first year or two of education blogging (Brian’s Education Blog still not working sorry blah blah) was the inexorable spread of cheating in Britain’s schools and colleges. The BBC reported yesterday that a diktat has just been emitted by a committee you will probably not have heard of until now, called JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), saying that this must stop and here is how blah blah:
A rise in the number of students in the UK, including undergraduates from overseas, is likely to mean increased plagiarism, a report has said.
Colleges and universities are being sent guidelines written by experts in the higher education technology organisation, Jisc.
The authors say: “student plagiarism in the UK is common and is probably becoming more so”.
JISC makes much of the presence of foreign students in large numbers, but presumably phrases this more delicately than the BBC’s report does, in its first paragraph above, with verbiage more like the following:
A “holistic” approach is needed which establishes “underlying cultures and beliefs”, “placing academic issues at the centre of the discussions”.
When you are saying that foreigners are cheats, words like “holistic” come in very handy, I should imagine.
However, another reasons why academic cheating is on the up-and-up is diktats from national committees, demanding that British schools (where most British students are still incubated despite all those dodgy foreigners) must do better and better, and get better and better marks, and better and better exam results. This is the process I call sovietisation, and the rot afflicts everyone in the entire education system, up to and including the Secretary of State him (now her) self. Simply, the politicians want the educational numbers to look better than they are, and they cheat.
Time was when the teaching profession was pretty much left to its own devices by London, but those days are long gone. And time was when, if you cheated, you had to make sure your teacher did not catch you at it. Nowadays, your teacher is liable to be the one helping you to cheat, so you can get through your exams, and he can tell London that he is doing a good job. And London will believe it, because London wants to believe it. I think the Soviet vibe here is clear enough. Steel production figures anyone?
Sending out yet another instruction saying that you jolly well must not cheat has a distinctly Gorbachevian air. It amounts to begging that our top-down command-and-control education system must please, please, not behave like what it is. There will be quotas, but no quota fiddling. Dream on.
See in particular, this posting, where I noted how continuous assessment encourages cheating, because it involves asking teachers themselves to tell the higher-ups how well they, the teachers (and the higher-ups), are doing. Exams at least get someone else to say how well things are going, and are more likely to be honest. Although of course the politicians put pressure on those to dumb them down too.
David Gillies responded to that posting of mine, with a comment which I copied over to Samizdata. Gillies noted, you may recall, that there is another reason why foreigners equals cheating. Foreigners equals money, and British colleges do not want to lose it by telling said foreigners that they have done badly in their exams. There is a lot of this about just now, and the less corrupt educational exporters must now be very afraid.
Perhaps there will now be yet another Initiative, demanding that each school and college must set in motion an Anti-Cheating Plan. The more obedient ones will comply, as best they can.
Others will say that they have done this, but their Anti-Cheating Plan will only be observable when the inspectors come calling.
They will, that is to say, cheat.
Leon Trotsky’s views on the role of arts were well known. He argued that art in all its forms existed to convey political messages to the masses and that any other use of the arts was bourgeois nonsense. The idea that it was acceptable for the arts exist to express the personal views of some artist or to simply ‘entertain’ in a non-political sense (not that anything is really non-political to a statist) was just preposterous to Trotsky. Thus if the state wished to advocate or depreciate something, it was the role of the arts to assist with that process. A modern day example of this would be, say, the relentless demonization of smoking.
Which brings us to the views of the Orwellian sounding Centre for Tobacco Control. This group of lobbyists is infuriated that their calls for smoking to be censored by the British Board of Film Classification (who were once simply known as the Film Censors) has been rejected.
The board’s cautious mention of smoking for the first time falls far short of demands that smoking scenes, particularly in any film likely to be seen by children, should be banned in Britain and consigned to the cutting room floor. Professor Gerard Hastings, director of cancer research at the UK’s Centre for Tobacco Control, said: “If the BBFC doesn’t accept its moral responsibility, it might as well pack up and go home.”
And so we discover that this lobby thinks is the ‘moral responsibility’ of the state to impose standards on entertainment to make them more in accordance with the wishes of our technocratic betters (them, of course). Not only do they wish to make it as difficult as possible for you to make your own non-coerced choices as to what stresses and chemicals you expose your body to, they wish to prevent you seeing images which do not conform to the message they wish to indoctrinate you with. I would be curious to know if Professor Hastings also supports forcing people to take favoured chemicals?
I am just back from supper with Perry, Adriana and co., and now just about, before sleep overtakes me, have time to report – and to expand upon the fact – that before I left I had another drool over Adriana’s portable computer, with its look-at-it-from-everywhere screen. This time, instructed to feel how light it is, I picked the thing up, and did so with considerable ease.
Earlier in the day, I chanced upon this item of techno-news about something called FOLEDs. FOLEDs are even better than OLEDs. OLEDs are Organic Light Emitting Diodes, and FOLEDs are Flexible Organic Light Emitting Diodes. In English, what this appears to mean is … well, put it like this. When I bought my digital camera recently there was a film of transparent plastic to protect the camera’s little screen which shows what the picture is going to look like or does look like. What all these acronyms appear to mean is that in a few years time, that thin film of plastic will be the screen.
Over the last couple of decades, mobile computing and communications have changed the way we act – and interact. Notebook PCs, PDAs and cellular phones make it easy to carry information with us whenever and wherever we go. Yet, despite enormous advances in form and functionality, today’s devices can still prove clunky and challenging to carry on planes, trains and automobiles.
However, if researchers have their way, we will soon be able to bend the rules of physics. Flexible Organic Light-Emitting Diode (FOLED) technology could pave the way for notebook computers with roll-up screens, toys that show vivid images on their surfaces, even clothing with displays woven into the fabric. “Within the next decade, flexible displays will open up all sorts of possibilities,” states Mark Thompson, a professor of chemistry at the University of Southern California. “It will change the way we access information and entertainment.”
Manufactured from transparent plastic films or other ultra-lightweight materials filled with special polymers, these devices could lead to less expensive and far more convenient consumer electronics. Already, researchers have developed prototype roll-up displays, and more basic Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED) technology has been built into display screens of a handful of cameras, DVD players and mobile phones. “It is only a matter of time before OLED becomes a predominant display technology,” says Steve Van Slyke, a research fellow at Eastman Kodak Co. and one of the inventors of the technology in the early 1980s.
What makes active-matrix OLED technology so appealing is that it provides a few more vivid image than LCDs and other displays; offers a viewing angle as high as 160 degrees without backlighting; and requires far less power than today’s mainstream display technologies. The latter is particularly appealing for those using battery-powered devices, such as notebook computers. “Any incremental gain in battery life is a significant issue,” Thompson points out.
And so on. I am not sure how long this piece will stay up on the www, so I have quoted it at some length.
When all this comes to pass, Adriana’s portable computer will then seem like my very first portable computer, which was called an Osborne, and was only portable in the sense that your holiday luggage is portable (if it is), or that my mum’s ancient sewing machine is portable.
And how about clothes that change colour and pattern like a movie?
I realise that there will be more to the good life in the future than better gadgets, and that better gadgets might coincide with worse life, but better gadgets are still very, very nice, and I am impressed. Not even the fact that the EU has backed it can suppress my interest in and enthusiasm for this technology.
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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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