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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Recently I have been reading gadget blogs a lot, and it would seem that I am not the only one who likes to do this. This week, all the gadget blogs,along with the rest of the world, have been screaming, in among their regular stuff about incomprehensible boxes: iPhone iPhone iPhone. Which is understandable. Either the iPhone is a truly remarkable thing, or the hype surrounding this unremarkable thing is all the more remarkable.
Now hats off to Apple and all that, especially for keeping it all so secret for so long, although, they do rather seem to have screwed up the calling it the iPhone side of things. But the iPhone, for all its various innovatory features, is just another mobile phone with some add-ons. It is the embodiment of the claim that mobile phones are destined to swallow up all the other mobile objects people like to travel around with, such as music machines and digital cameras (the camera is the only iPhone add-on that really gets my attention), but this notion has been rattling around for some years now. The iPhone looks like being a smash hit precisely because so many people already understand why they want one.
However, of all the things I have read about on the gadget blogs this week, this item was the one that I found the most striking. This, for me, has the look and feel of a life changer:
In a patent filing Google has revealed that it is looking into entering the physical advertising industry. The patent filing itself alludes to placing adverts on billboards, with the primary innovation being that they’re interactive and connected to the internet – what, you didn’t really believe that Google would go in for static ads did you? The system apparently works by only advertising products that are available and in stock within stores in the local area. Stores will be able to buy advertising on these local electronic billboards through a similar system to how AdSense currently works: by logging into a computer and buying them. One of the key positive developments – at least for busy consumers — is that once stock of the product has run out, the advertised project on display automatically switches onto the next one that’s in stock. This whole project relies greatly on there being adequate infrastructure for Google to make a return (which obviously isn’t a problem when it comes to the internet), so this patent is far from an assurance that you’ll be seeing “Ads by Goooooogle” reminding you to pick up some milk from your local 7-Eleven any time soon.
Now once again, this is something that the sort of people who saw this coming saw coming. But, to me, when adverts change moment by moment in a semi-intelligent way, perhaps even in response to their understanding of who is in the area that they are pointing at, then that will be a very different world to the one I have become used to. It will look different and it will feel different. → Continue reading: Billboards are about to become computer screens
Mickey Kaus breaks it down:
When Kuttner says “Japanese total labor costs are comparable, even with Detroit’s higher health insurance costs,” he is–as is so often the case–talking through his hat. Look at this chart. GM pays $31.35 an hour. Toyota pays $27 an hour. Not such a big difference. But–thanks in part to union work rules that prevent the thousands of little changes that boost productivity–it takes GM, on average, 34.3 hours to build a car, while it takes Toyota only 27.9 hours. ** Multiply those two numbers together and it comes out that GM spends 43% more on labor per car. And that’s before health care costs (where GM has a $1,300/vehicle disadvantage.
Of course, nothing convinces like an apples-to-apples comparison. And on that front, we find:
Is it really an accident that all the UAW-organized auto companies are in deep trouble while all the non-union Japanese “transplants” building cars in America are doing fine? Detroit’s designs are inferior for a reason, even when they’re well built. And that reason probably as more to do with the impediments to productivity imposed by the UAW–or, rather, by legalistic, Wagner-Act unionism–than with slick and unhip Detroit corporate “culture.”
(emphasis supplied)
In theory, I got no problem with unions – they could be nothing more than a free association engaged in bargaining with willing buyer for their services. The problem is, there are no unions that represent this ideal. Unions in the US are an artificial creation of the state, a relic of an earlier day when socialism was The Answer to society’s problems, and unions were seen and used as a vehicle for rolling back, reforming, and ultimately displacing free market capitalism.
It is no accident that, in the US at least, unions have been steadily losing ground for decades in industries that actually have to compete to survive. The only areas where unions are strong at all is in the government sector and, sadly, in the quasi-government sectors (such as healthcare).
While there is zero chance of any reform of the state apparatus supporting unions (which is probably a shame; there may well be a legitimate and beneficial role for non-corrupt, non-state-supported unions in some sectors, but we will never know), but I for one am glad to know that they are in broad decline, and that globalized markets mean there is little to no chance they will ever stage a resurgence in their current form. The fate of unions seem to be a rare example of civil society grinding down the state.
How cool is this? A MIG-21 available on eBay!
Although it is not all that expensive, sadly I really do not have anywhere to put it.
Well, I have just spent a very agreeable and maybe even an informative hour, watching P. J. O’Rourke telling me about the history of California’s state governors, on BBC4 television. Hyram Johnson, Brown, Reagan, Brown Junior, Gray Davis, Schwarzenegger – they have been a quite interesting lot, whatever you think of them. I say maybe informative, because you never really know how much of the story is really sinking in when you watch television. But, it felt informative. I certainly never felt as if my intelligence was being insulted.
O’Rourke neither concealed nor overdid his own conservative/libertarian leanings. He was the Republican Party Reptile of old, but now, he said, in connection with how Ronald Reagan ran political rings around the hippies (underestimating Reagan’s political savvy and seriousness was a habit that started early – that was made very clear), that he now entirely understands anti-youth policies. The story O’Rourke told was not so much of big versus small government, but of oscillations between somewhat simplistic outsider promises to clean things up, and a safe but grubby pair of hands to sort out the resulting confusions, followed by more promises to clean up the grubbiness, and so on indefinitely.
Two things have somewhat distressed me about O’Rourke’s career in recent years. First, despite several attempts over the years, he has never made much of an impact on British TV, unless you count his recent British Airways adverts. → Continue reading: P. J. O’Rourke does British television – very well
“And having looked to Government for bread, on the very first scarcity they will turn and bite the hand that fed them.”
Edmund Burke, the 18th Century politician who has been described by historian and journalist Paul Johnson as the “greatest Irishman who ever lived”.
At long last the secretive space venture of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has gone public. The video of the test hop is very informative to the rocket afficionado. Note what you do not see: rocket ‘bells’ and flames. The lack of expander nozzles and the large number of small engine ports in the bottom are strongly indicative of an aerospike engine; the lack of flame means they are probably running a high efficiency cryogenic engine using LOX/LH.
These features, plus the shape of the vessel have a long commercial space history. The prototype of this design was Gary Hudsen’s ‘Phoenix’ of the 1980’s. In the early 1990’s, Bill Gaubatz of McDonell Douglas actually built something much like it, but without the aerospike. Bill used the easily available RL-10 LOX/LH engine for his ‘boilerplate’ test ship. (Some months ago I posted a picture of the remains of this test vehicle).
I have been waiting a long time for someone to actually try this configuration. Some say it cannot be made to fly single stage to orbit; others swear vehemently that it can. Noone, however, disagrees that it can do a fine suborbital job or that it is a much more effective general purpose space vehicle than anything with wings.
It is good that Perry has supplied us Samizdatistas with a category called How very odd! to describe our oddest postings, because how else would you describe the calculation that England are now, still, the second best test match cricket side in the world?
On the other hand, England really are that bad at one day cricket.
The satirical Songun blog has dug up a North Korean propaganda movie shot in the 1980s that is worth a look. Songun has made Always Working Together For The People available on YouTube, split into seven segments (parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7). Combined, there Is about an hour of video. I am a little weird – I watched it all.
However, I find this sort of thing quite fascinating; lots of interesting tidbits to be found. For example, part three sees Kim Jong-il being exhorted for easing all the Great Leader’s concerns about the people’s welfare (a common theme), in this instance in the field of “traffic problem”. What bloody traffic problem?? There Is nary a car to be seen motoring down the wide boulevards and highways shown. (Fair enough, those ridiculously broad motorways were designed to serve more than one purpose.) In part four, the two Kims are seen pouring over an architectural mock-up of Pyongyang in a manner most reminiscent of those Speer/Hitler snaps showing them admiring a model of the Berlin they were going to create after they won the war. Hopefully, the latter day town planners meet a similar fate as their similarly megalomaniacal forebears.
This propaganda piece is clearly a past effort to position Kim Jong-il as Crown Prince by welding him on to his father’s cult of personality. His leadership abilities are constantly lauded and he is portrayed as an indispensable part of Kim Il-sung’s revolution. The succession issue is explicitly mentioned at the end of segment six. Still, in spite of all the adulation, it is difficult not to laugh at the rather miserable figure Kim Jong-il cuts throughout the programme. Part 5 shows Kim Jong-il and daddy making a trip to the Dear Leader’s fabled birthplace, Mount Paektu. The glowing exaltations to the younger Kim pair most incongruously with his stature and bearing – unless ‘mountain spirit’ is a North Korean euphemism for ‘ample paunch’. Really, how can you not laugh at the spectacle of this malignant little gnome. As was said last week – and in great anticipation of a repeat performance – sic semper tyrannis.
The message is simple: get out now.
Chavez is calling for ‘Socialism or Death’ and that in fact means ‘Socialism and Death’. As it appears a majority actually supports him, not much will be gained by putting a bullet between this man’s eyes as clearly the problem lies deeper than the life of a single tyrant (though that is not to say that shooting tyrants is ever a bad idea).
If you are have property, sell it if you can, but get the hell out. If you are creative and intelligent, there is a whole world out there in which to rebuild your life. There may come a time in the future when you can come back, either to help pick up the wreckage of the totalitarian experiment voted for by a kleptomaniac majority, or to woo back your nation at bayonet point, but for now, for God’s sake get out with what you can as soon as you can.
And if you are a shareholder in a multi-national company… feeling a little stupid now, eh? At least try and do the decent thing and torch as much infrastructure you own tonight to leave as little to sustain the parasites who are about to nationalise your operations in Venezuela.
I am not mad myself, but I rule over mad, impious and arrogant folk. It is for this reason that I play the madman myself and pretend to be possessed by demons in order to frighten them and prevent them from harming the Muslims.
– Askiya Dawud (1549-83), emperor of Songhai, quoted in I.M. Lewis, Islam in Tropical Africa. No doubt he would also have fitted right in as a fictional mid-20th-century character in John Brunner’s The Squares of the City or a real late-20th-century emotional tyrant in Faking It.
I would like to draw your attention to what’s happened to The Times’s Law section in the noughties. Once upon a time this was a lively mini-newspaper on a Tuesday, aimed at lawyers, with two or three substantial comment pieces, news, Law Reports and lots of job ads. Now it is a single sheet of newsprint, and found buried inside a growing section entitled Public Agenda.
From an advertisement in last week’s Economist:
Devolution Trust for Community Empowerment (DTCE), a Pakistan based non-governmental organisation funded by a consortium of donors through UNDP, is plannning to undertake a social audit in 110 districts across the country compatible with baseline social audit established in 2001/02 and first annual follow-up application undertaken in 2004/05. The objective of the exercise is to obtain policy feedback on citizens’ views and experience in relation to key public services sectors like health, education, water and sanitation, police, access to justice and engagement in local governance arrangements. The study design should consider the comparison overtime [sic] with the baseline and follow-up applicaions in citizens’ views, use and experience of public services under the devolved local government system in Pakistan with a strong element of institutionalization of the social audit process.
Meanwhile, working the other way round, a flyer reaches me from De Havilland information services [no relation] for a conference on “Embedding the Third Sector in Public Services”:
Third Sector public service delivery is a new, effective and exciting avenue to further revolutionise and modernise service provision as we know it. However, this is no longer an innovation, it is a reality and public money already funds multiple public services through third sector organisations. It is acknowledged that the opportunities, expertise and fresh, grass-roots approach the third sector brings will bring improvement and better value to public services.
Major efforts to reinforce this through building an infrastructure and action planning to rationalize and embed this are underway in te Third Sector Review, recently conducted by the Office of the Third Sector. The final report is due in March [and?] will culminate in summarising the sector’s contribution and propose how this will work in a better, stronger, more resilient infrastructure.
[all sic]
The Office of the Third Sector is very pleased with what has happened to the role of charities, and will be colonising more of British civil society presently..
“Metaphors furnish clues to transformation, but they are not the powers that resist or engender such new realities,” a literary theorist once wrote.
It is fair to say not many Englishmen live in the more remote parts of Russia. Thus when someone gets an e-mail from an Englishman called Tim Newman, living in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, who is an oil business professional discussing the Royal Dutch Shell’s operations, and there is a Tim Newman working for Shell in that part of the world, it will be one and the same person, right?
Nope.
Take a look at this for a real life comedy of errors.
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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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