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 Basque separatist terrorist organisation Eta has announced a permenent ceasefire. If this is genuine and this holds, and Eta genuinely does stop killing people, then this is obviously good thing. One minor issue though.
The ceasefire will come into effect on Friday, the statement said.
Why the delay, precisely? Are they planning on blowing some people up tomorrow for old times’ sake? Do they have some semtex that they haven’t used that they don’t want to waste? Enquiring minds do want to know.
Fans of the great Stanley Kubrick satire, Dr Strangelove, will struggle to suppress a wry smile over this story:
Fluoride in drinking water – long controversial in the United States when it is deliberately added to strengthen teeth – can damage bones and teeth, and federal standards fail to guard against this, the National Academy of Sciences reported on Wednesday.
The vast majority of Americans – including those whose water supply has fluoride added — drink water that is well below the limit for fluoride levels set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
Maybe all that stuff about flouride in the water being a crazy Commie plot may not have been so nuts after all. On the other hand…
Last week, Umair Haque (bubblegeneration) predicted that Europe would prove to be the next innovation leader–not because of any forthcoming shift toward a culture of entrepreneurialism, but because the day is coming when content will be key, and Eurpoeans simply remain more, ah, cultured than Americans. This pronouncement that drew numerous responses (including my own) that ranged all the way from ‘Huh?’ to ‘Excuse me?’ Innovators in Silicon Valley like Chris Yeh took particular exception.
Since then, Haque has taken the debate on the relative values of financial vs. social capital further, yea, invoking the spectre of Wal-Mart:
Let me use an example to illustrate. The cost of Wal-Mart killing your local mom and pop bakery isn’t just terrible food, no more friendly chats, and unemployment. In fact, Wal-Mart offsets your loss in quality with scale economies, creating value.
Actually, the real economic loss is more subtle, and much more pernicious: we lose entire sets of people deeply committed to what they do, which is where real creativity ultimately flows from. We lose people with skin in the game, and replace them with workerbots. The guys at your local bakery were makers of tiny cultures, not just producers of goods. Which do you think will be more valuable in a world of Chinese/Indian/etc hypercompetition – scale economies, or creativity driven by passion and commitment?
The debate on Bubblegeneration is a significant (in that it’s particularly cogent) articulation of the Euro-centric argument for a managed economy – the twist being that the stated protectionist goal is the preservation of ‘culture’ not jobs per se.
But looking closely, Haque’s argument contains the seeds of its own undoing: in the world of hypercompetition he speaks of, it’s true that creativity driven by passion and commitment will dominate – which is exactly what entrepreneurs like Chris Heh and his rather cultured friends in Silicon Valley embody. The truth is that while the world may have fewer (and probably better) mom and pop bakeries moving forward, that level of creative energy is being re-invested in other more dynamic areas of human endeavor and achievement – i.e., the mom and pop software shop.
Rand Simberg has pointed out an excellent speech by Tony Blair about the global war we are fighting. Here is a short excerpt:
We can no more opt out of this struggle than we can opt out of the climate changing around us. Inaction, pushing the responsibility on to America, deluding ourselves that this terrorism is an isolated series of individual incidents rather than a global movement and would go away if only we were more sensitive to its pretensions; this too is a policy. It is just that; it is a policy that is profoundly, fundamentally wrong.
Well worth the read.
Different people have described the Metabolite patent, currently under review by the US Supreme Court, as being about protecting a fact, but if you could patent the fact of homocysteine’s correlation to B12 levels, then we’d all owe Metabolite licensing fees just for existing in a state of B12 homeostasis.
To play devil’s advocate, I read the patent as applying to the observation of the relationship. As such, it is a bit as if Galileo had filed on his observation that the earth orbited the sun. At the time, his view certainly met the USPTO’s criteria of originality, utility and non-obviousness.
There is a dangerously bumpkinesque notion afoot, which holds that patents obstruct progress. This is (pardon the pun), patently false. Why is it that the most vociferous critics of the patent system, the citizens of the web – people who can understand that markets are conversations – can not seem to grasp that patents are conversations, too? Patents protect the free flow of ideas within our business, academic and entrepreneurial cultures.
Before we blitely trash the Patent Office, let us be clear on the actual ethos of patent protection. The point of patents is not to protect the patent-holders; it is to allow the rest of us to read the patents, adding to our collective knowledge base. The protection provided is a carrot. Nothing more… → Continue reading: The non-obvious utility of patents
“The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom is courage”.
Pericles’ Funeral Oration (431 BC)
This quotation was always attached to emails many of us used to get from Dr. Chris R. Tame, Libertarian Alliance founder, who died earlier this week. I find it a highly appropriate quotation.
According to a statement by Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX:
“We had a great static fire today. Falcon was held down for almost three seconds of thrust (T+0.5s), part of which was under autonomous thrust vector control. All systems were green and no aborts were triggered.
Unless we discover something negative after a detailed data analysis, launch will happen on Thursday at 1p.m. California time.”
I feel like a kid waiting for Christmas Day…
Yesterday Wal-Mart announced plans to quintuple its workforce in China, adding 20 new stores to the 56 it already operates.
It is very libertarian chic to be pro-Wal-Mart these days, mostly for good reason. But while ‘big box’ retailers like Wal-Mart deserve credit for job creation and for the truly innovative supply-chain efficiencies they have created, the trouble is that discount retailers in the US have always functioned in an unhealthy state of symbiosis with government, often with huge leverage at the local level, where tax incentives can often overrule ‘the market.’ It’s pure back-door socialism of the most cynical kind–not evil, just kinda co-dependent. Which is why it’s so fascinating to think about what Wal-Mart will do in China.
Like joining the Communist Party? In 2004, Wal-Mart agreed under pressure to allow its Chinese stores to ‘unionize’–the only Union in China being the Communist Party. Okay, I’ll give them that one, as it seems hard to avoid. But where is it all headed? I can see this whole Wal-Mart in China thing going a couple of ways:
In the ‘Hell’ scenario, Wal-Mart, which grew up suckling on the (relatively) vestigial socialist glands of the United States will absolutely flourish in China, due to abundant access to the unpasteurized milk of communist kindness. In this version of the story, communism, coupled with the superior economic and organizational model brought to bear by Wal-Mart, actually experiences a revival and renaissance, Wal-Mart providing the missing link – a viable economic model – and the Chinese government providing the regulatory breeding ground for a thousand years of centrally-planned, iron-fisted, prosperity in which the retail ethic of ‘choice’ ineluctably replaces the value of ‘freedom’. This is the scenario in which it will be necessary for the crew of the Starship Enterprise to travel back through time to Earth in the 1950s to kill Sam Walton while he’s still a fresh-faced young bootstrapper.
In the ‘Heaven’ scenario, Wal-Mart and the Chinese manage to civilize each other without symbiosis, resulting in the kind of benign, socialized capitalism Schumpeter dreamed of in his dotage – a world where everyone is so prosperous that capitalism naturally comes to admit socialized services because things like food shelter and healthcare are of such marginal relative cost that, like water and power, that they flow as easily from the Mongolian Steppes as do the milk and honey and human kindness. Did I mention that in Heaven, Wal-Mart’s goods are delivered faster than ever by a fleet of highly compensated, well-insured flying pigs?
A third scenario? Wal-Mart fails to ‘get’ the Chinese market, the Chinese fail to ‘get’ Wal-Mart, and neither time travel nor genetic engineering become necessary after all.
That is the conclusion of research published today by Mischa Balen. Over a billion people worldwide do not have access to safe drinking water, and 2.6 billion people have no sanitation facilities. More than two million people die each year from diarrhoea, and over six million people are blind as a result of trachoma, a disease strongly related to lack of face washing. In Sub Saharan Africa, 42% of the population lacks access to decent water. This state of affairs, he finds, is caused by state failure in water systems.
What can be done? Where the private sector has been called in, it has prevented wars and conflict by creating a system of property rights and acting as an incentive to conserve; increased access to clean water; increased the treatment of sewage, thereby lowering infant mortality; cut politicisation from the supply of water; promoted sustainable development by reducing wastage.
That is great. Unfortunately, ideological opponents of markets are campaigning heavily against the private sector. They choose, he says, “not to compare private provision in reality with state provision in reality, but private provision in reality with a mythical, utopian state provision which does not exist in the real world.” No change there, then.
Chris Tame, founder and president of the Libertarian Alliance has just passed away in a London clinic.
I enclose the final email I sent him last week.
Dear Comrade,
I just wanted to tell you that I am very grateful for the help you’ve
given me and the opportunities you’ve put my way over the years,
especially as I have not always met your hopes. You put opportunities
my way when many would not have done, and I shall always remember
that.
At FOREST, I remember you asking me to do filing for you, a task for
which I was very unsuited (especially as you are the most organized
person I’ve ever met).
At Lambeth, I really enjoyed working with you, and in particular I
recall the Monday after you’d cleared out the stock room and all our
desks. It was refreshing to find a draw full of the supplies I needed.
I thought then that you could definitiely have been a British Julie
Morgernstern!
I also enjoyed the fun of coming up with headlines for press releases
in Lambeth: as libertarians we were of course completely unfazed by
evidence of the ineptitude of local government.
I bumped into Ivor Fishburne last week and told him about your
illness. He asked me to pass on his best wishes and concern.
Your achievements will be remembered, with the web and new
technologies your influences will I’m sure be ever greater. The
cataloguing and writings will never perish.
One of my proudest moments was in the Mozart House in Bratislava in
August 1991, in the actual room where Mozart gave a performance aged
5. I read out your “Taxation is Theft” LA pamphlet to a room full of
politicians…. and years later, the Slovak government brought in a
flat tax. Some of the people who did this heard my speech and your arguments.
Yours in the struggle for freedom.
Antoine
Recently I had the pleasure of watching a Zulu choir perform the South African national anthem. Even though mostly incomprehensible to me, it was incredibly moving – perfectly combining the men’s deep basses and baritones with the higher ranges of the female vocalists. The South Africans are lucky to have such an inspiring anthem, although the version linked here is not the best rendition around.
The Russian anthem is also particularly stirring, if you can overlook the Soviet connection regarding the tune. I didn’t much care for the Chinese national song the first time I heard it, but it grew on me. The lyrics of the Star Spangled Banner are poetically pleasing, if a little thematically blood spattered in the lesser known verses.
As for the not-so-good anthems, I think Australia’s is down there. Tedious lyrics, boring tune. Britain’s is somewhat lacking, too; as a symbol of the nation, an anthem should do more than just beseech God to look out for the monarch. Granted, the monarch is a symbol of the nation too, but it is arguably an outdated, practically irrelevant symbol. I am sure there are far more miserable anthems than those two – give us your worst!
UPDATE: I do not mean to gloat, but oh dear.
“If there is a businessman who has gone out of his mind and supports the left, I think he must have a lot of skeletons in his cupboard and a lot of things to ask forgiveness for.”
– Silvio Berlusconi quoted in the Financial Times (via Open Europe‘s email list).
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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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