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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If you have just purchased your trip to Space Station Alpha from Space Adventures for $20M and still have money burning a hole in your pocket, you can now take a walk in space for a mere $15M extra.
According to Astronaut Tom Jones:
During a 90-minute EVA, which is the time it takes the ISS to make one complete orbit around Earth, a spacewalker would experience orbital sunrise and sunset, Jones said.
“That 90 minutes is like gold to a real spacewalkers,” Jones said. “I got a total of five or 10 minutes of doing that in my 19 hours in terms of just unstructured time, so it’s literally that precious an experience.”
Now if my next venture works out and makes me a billionaire…
You simply have to look at this if you are into unaffordable jet aircraft!
Although I have had some doubts about the financial case for the A380, it is none the less awfully impressive when you see it from up close.
(Farnborough 2006 was splendid. More later).
You simply have to watch this if you are into affordable jet aircraft!
One way or the other, we will see the private flying transport before the end of this century. Materials and information technology advances have brought the idea to the edge of viability and this venture between Bell and an Israeli company might just be enough to push it over the edge.
On Monday at the Farnborough International Airshow, Bell Helicopter announced that it will team with an Israeli company to develop a futuristic aircraft that would allow soldiers and police far greater mobility in cities.
The X-Hawk, as envisioned by Bell, could hold a pilot and up to 11 troops. It could navigate congested urban areas by flying above narrow streets and between closely spaced buildings.
Propelled by two jet turbine engines that would drive pusher propellers and downward-thrust lift fans, similar to those on the short-takeoff-vertical-landing version of the F-35 Lightning II, the X-Hawk could operate in spaces far more confined than a helicopter can.
If they do not do it, someone else will. There are multiple ‘flying car’ projects out there and someday someone will cross the threshold into commercial viability.
Ed:Thank reader Steven Peterson for pointing us to this article
If you are an even occasional Samizdata reader I am sure you will find this interview with Milton and Rose Friedman of great interest. Their opinion on immigration, for example, is predictably libertarian:
Is immigration, I asked–especially illegal immigration–good for the economy, or bad? “It’s neither one nor the other,” Mr. Friedman replied. “But it’s good for freedom. In principle, you ought to have completely open immigration. But with the welfare state it’s really not possible to do that. . . . She’s an immigrant,” he added, pointing to his wife. “She came in just before World War I.” (Rose–smiling gently: “I was two years old.”) “If there were no welfare state,” he continued, “you could have open immigration, because everybody would be responsible for himself.” Was he suggesting that one can’t have immigration reform without welfare reform? “No, you can have immigration reform, but you can’t have open immigration without largely the elimination of welfare.
I would have loved to have been there to ask him about my ideas on immigration and the politics of the minimum wage.
Israel is killing a lot more people in Lebanon targeting Hezbollah position which are located intentionally within populated towns and villages, than Hezbollah are killing in Israel targetting literally anyone with their random rocket attacks fired blindly into towns and cities… but Hezbollah’s poor ‘score’ is not for lack of trying.
At the start of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, although not unsympathetic to Israel’s security needs, I was very concerned that this conflict not escalate into something which was a war between Israel and Lebanon per se. My view was that as the factions that opposed Hezbollah had been trying to undermine that organisation by getting Syrian forces out, it would be a tragedy if Israel’s military action undermined the pro-modernist forces within Lebanon.
And yet after reading and listening to the remarks of commentator after commentator speaking for various Lebanese factions, I now seriously question if there was ever a realistic chance of these people achieving a disarmed Hezbollah within Lebanon. It appears that views like those of Ahmed Al-Jarallah do not have much currency in Lebanon (and I urge the commentariat to link to Lebanese sources which suggest otherwise), which means if Israel was just going to wait for political development across the border to eventually neutralise the clear and present threat of Hezbollah, they would have had a very long wait indeed.
In short, I find myself inescapably drawn to the notion that not only is the Israeli action warranted, I now think there is no good reason the IDF should avoid attacking targets of strategic value to Hezbollah which are located in non-Hezbollah areas. Moreover, I would urge them to follow the logic of that position and start striking targets in Syria and (above all) in Iran in order to impose a cost on those governments for their actions in enabling Hezbollah.
Much as I support the idea of a modernist secular Lebanon, perhaps that is simply not within the power of non-Islamists in Lebanon to deliver until military realities have altered the political realities. In short, if the other factions within Lebanon do not want Israel to completely demolish the national infrastructure that Hezbollah also uses, they need to realise that they, as well as Israel, need to declare war on Hezbollah. As long as ports, roads and airfields in Lebanon can be used by Hezbollah, neutrality is simply not an option for anyone.
The delicate balance of power within the Cedar nation became untenable the moment Hezbollah in effect declared war in Israel on behalf of all of Lebanon and as a result, either Hezbollah is expelled from the government, declared a criminal organisation and confronted militarily by Lebanon’s army… or Lebanon (and not just Hezbollah) is indeed at war with Israel and must accept the consequences. There are no other realistic alternatives.
Quite a lot really. Whilst Haaretz is not usually my first choice of Israeli newspapers, there is a very interesting article called simply What will happen next that interviews some interesting people and makes some fascinating observations.
Incredibly, Nasrallah is making the same mistakes as Nasser. By puffing himself up, he isn’t deterring Israel; at this point, he’s only making himself and his movement a bigger and more legitimate target. Hezbollah has become a prisoner of its own myth, which is that at any moment it can go one-on-one against Israel – and win. It can’t, and now is the best opportunity to prove it – to Lebanese Shiites, to all Lebanese and to the rest of the Arab-Muslim world
Interesting stuff and well worth a read.
A while back I suggested that the the high price of gold may be a harbinger of rising inflation, and that even though some people suggest that gold prices are a fogeyish obsession of a few “gold bugs”, the price movement of this golden metal can still offer an early indicator of trouble.
I think I can say a mild “I told you so”. After having been off the radar for years, due to a variety of factors, inflation is rearing its head again. To an extent, of course, the cost of living has been rising in Britain a lot more than official statistics suggest because of the way in which Britain’s finance minister, Gordon Brown, has stripped out things like housing price movements and taxes to make the figures look better. (In all fairness to Brown, his Tory predecessors were no better in this respect). Anatole Kaletsky has a good article here warning that the mighty U.S. Federal Reserve is in danger of letting the inflation genie out of the bottle. A further rise in rates, he says, may be needed, possibly raising the risk of a recession. He may be right. The Fed’s key lending rate is 5.25 percent and has risen 17 times since its low-point around the time of 9/11.
It is a bit rich, though, for an unashamed neo-Keynesian like Kaletsky to bash the Fed for failing to be tough enough, and for not acting sooner, on rates. Kaletsky has not been shy of bashing the European Central Bank for its supposedly restrictive approach on interest rates. The problem of course is that no central bank chief, even if he or she has the wisdom of Solomon, can anticipate perfectly the right course for interest rates. If such a central bank makes an error, that mistake can be enormously costly in terms of jobs, livelihoods, even the loss of homes (I recall a now-departed commenter, called Euan Gray, dismiss such concerns with a sort of “let the experts sort it out” approach of his.)
The perils of central bankers getting the economic signals wrong explains why some classical liberal economists remain fond of F.A. Hayek’s argument for a return to a sort of commodity-backed, competitive currency system. Yes, such a system would have its problems and banks might go bust from time to time. But although such a banking system would have its crises, they would be relatively small compared to the risk of an entire economic region getting into trouble on account of a mistake by a central bank chief and his economists. The bigger and more powerful the central bank, the bigger the potential cockups. That remains for me a great attraction of Hayek’s idea: mistakes will get made, but those mistakes will be dispersed and people will have options to flee a delinquently-run currency.
Omar Bakri Mohammed, the Islamic preacher thrown out of Britain for inciting Muslims to violence and calling for the Islamisation of the UK (quote: “The life of an unbeliever has no value, it has no sanctity”), wants the Royal Navy to evacuate him from the fighting in Lebanon. So he hates the UK but wants it to come to his rescue?
The Jews have a good expression expression for this: chutzpah
Tom Coates, who used to work for the BBC and is now at Yahoo, really lays into Ashley Highfield, the supposed visionary leader of the Beeb’s new media efforts. Euan Semple, the BBC’s former head of knowledge management, agrees with Tom’s assessment. An excerpt:
If Ashley Highfield really is leading one of the most powerful and forward-thinking organisations in new media in the UK, then where are all these infrastructural products and strategy initiatives today? And if these products are caught up in process, then where are the products and platfoms from the years previous that should be finally maturing? It’s difficult to see anything of significance emerging from the part of the organisation directly under Highfield’s control. It’s all words!
…[T]he truth is that for the most part – with a bunch of limited exceptions – these changes just don’t seem to be really happening. The industry should be more furious about the lack of progress at the organisation than the speed of it, because in the meantime their actual competitors – the people that the BBC seems to think it’s a peer with but which it couldn’t catch-up with without moving all of its budget into New Media stuff and going properly international – get larger and faster and more vigorous and more exciting.
Let us not forget that Highfield gets his funding whether he delivers or not, as the BBC is financed under threat of violence to anyone who wishes to own a TV in the UK. That is the plain, ugly truth of the matter, no matter how much Tom may like to think that the BBC is a ‘valuable organisation’. I guess I would want to believe that, too, if my salary had come from working people who faced prison sentences if they did not pay up.
Indeed, as Tom notes, Highfield’s miserable failures have resulted in him being rewarded with a much larger role within the BBC. He will be managing up to 4,000 people, according to the Guardian. Please, tell me again why we need this ‘valuable organisation’.
Perhaps instead of ‘American Idol’ there is need for a new program on ‘American Wimps’. After reading this I practically broke out laughing:
Utility companies were still struggling to restore power. By Thursday evening, electricity had been restored to 160,000 customers in St. Louis, but new reports of outages kept coming in. The day’s high temperature was 97 degrees, but the humidity made it feel like 111.
The evacuated residents were taken to “cooling centers” after leaving their homes.
“We can’t overemphasize the danger of this heat,” Mayor Francis Slay said. “The longer the heat goes on and the power is out, the riskier it is.”
I just can not get the image out of my mind of long lines of Conestoga Wagons crawling across the prairie with A/C water dripping out the back; or of the ‘Little House on the Prairie’ with a rush of cool air from the built-in heat pump as you step through their door…
This is a bit of warm weather guys. Get real. A/C has only existed in the typical American home for a couple of decades. I grew up without it. I cannot even remember anyone in our town who had it.
We lived through days like this with little more than a comment to the neighbors over the back fence. We kids ran about playing baseball in humid 90 and 100F July days. Our parents made dinner in the unairconditioned kitchen and worked in the garden with little more than a sunhat.
Am I the only one who finds the above article… embarrassing?
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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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