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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I am currently watching the head of Equitable Life, the UK life insurer that made massive losses a few years ago, demanding that you and I, the UK taxpayer, put our hands in our pockets to compensate EL’s policyholders for their losses. They are complaining that mistakes taken by government caused many of the problems it suffered.
Leaving aside the ins and outs of the case, in general principle, I think it is outrageous that anyone claiming to be a senior manager of a commercial business like Equitable Life should have the brass neck to demand that governments, ie, taxpayers, should bail them out. Yes, some of the rule changes made by governments can harm a business – the tax changes on pensions by Gordon Brown in the late 1990s are a classic case in point. There may, as a result, be something to be said for demanding repayment of taxes wrongly levied on a company, for example. But why should a taxpayer, say, who has no likelihood of a decent private sector pension, be taxed to save the blushes of business executives on six-figure salaries or affluent policyholders who have lost a portion of their pensions? There seems to be no awareness of the perverse, and often regressive, redistribution of wealth that is entailed when these demands for compensation emerge.
It is true that Equitable Life has done quite a bit to honour some of its debts. However, asking the UK general public to put right the rest of the mess is a step too far. And there is another reason for objecting to such corporate welfare, since every time taxpayers foot the bill for another financial Snafu, it creates a fresh moral hazard, and encourages financially inept firms to imagine that if anything goes seriously wrong, the taxpayer will put everything right.
There’s no doubt that one of life’s pleasure’s is abuse, both dishing it out oneself and seeing it dished out by others. And here, and again in the comments attached to that posting, some excellent abuse is dished out, to one Thomas Disch, and to a chap who defends Disch. Disch has apparently just committed suicide. He was not so much a science fiction writer as an anti-science fiction writer. He wrote the kind of “science fiction” that was intended to put the world right off the real thing. Good riddance, says whoever it was who wrote the posting.
Jeff Read defends Disch thus:
Most literature is about people. That’s a topic that the Asperger’s-afflicted bulk of the hard SF audience has great difficulty with. And I don’t think you can truly write about people, especially modern people, without a certain anguish that comes from grasping or glimpsing the terror of the situation.
And with more in a similar vein. Eric S. Raymond (“esr”) responds with, among other bon mots, these ones:
This is the kind of self-indulgent, self-pitying crap I expect from English Lit majors in the throes of an excessively prolonged adolescence. The “especially modern people” is particularly silly, considering the conditions of pain, oppression, disease, and early death that almost all premodern humans endured. Aesthetes in air-conditioned rooms who’ve never had to worry about where their next meal is coming from have no fucking business talking about “the terror of the situation”.
The subject of “peak oil” then comes up. This catastrophe has arrived, says Read, “right on schedule”. Replies Raymond:
Another myth. M. King Hubbert originally predicted that United States oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970. Later “Peak Oil” models pushed back the date at least four times as it unaccountably failed to materialize.
In any case, the relevant economic issue is not when oil peaks but if and when when oil and its functional substititutes become too expensive to run an industrial civilization on. Given the rate at which entrepreneurs are making progress on synfuel from photosynthetic algae, I’m not at all worried. The remaining problems are just engineering.
As for copper and platinum – they’re not destroyed by use, you know. We can mine landfills and junkyards for them; in fact that’s better quality “ore” than we could find when we had to pull them out of nature. And when those run out, asteroid mining.
Which is all as maybe, but I particularly like this:
The trouble with doomsaying is that it leads to perversely bad prescriptions. We don’t need to slow down capitalism, we need to speed it up so it can innovate our way out of resource traps more quickly.
Had I been in a hurry, I could have just slapped that up as a SQOTD.
Read then alludes to some arguments against Raymondism, here. So, Raymond, did you read them?
I did. They’re staggeringly dumb, in large part because they assume that the problems they’re describing are things that government action can actually fix reliably. Reality would be better described as follows: there is no form of market failure so egregious that political failure can’t make it worse, and such failure is the normal outcome of politics.
In among that there’s another potential SQOTD, I think.
There are intelligent arguments against libertarianism, …
And so it goes on. I’ve lost the taste for this kind of argy-bargy-ing myself. But it still pleases me to see it being done. Later Raymond links to his essay entitled A Political History of SF, which I intend to read Real Soon Now. I also intend to add, Even Sooner, Eric Raymond’s Home Page to my personal sidebar, here. It should have been there years ago.
The BBC, anticipating the upcoming school holidays in the UK – lasting several weeks – has a news item up about the soaring cost of providing facilities for children to give them something to do. The story does not address the crucial question of why the cost is soaring. Is it increased regulation of child-care staff, or what? But beyond that, there clearly is a problem here, particularly for youngsters who are entering their teens and quickly find themselves getting bored after the first flush of pleasure of having free time wears off. When I was a kid, I was incredibly lucky to be brought up in a part of the world where I could help my parents run our family farm. At the age of 13 or 14 I was allowed to drive some of the farm machinery during the annual harvest. Under current UK health and safety regulations, all this would be made illegal, I suspect. I was paid an actual weekly wage based on the hours I worked on the farm. I remember thinking how cool that was. Many of my mates at school had summer jobs of various kinds, played some sports, went biking up to the coast, etc.
It seems to me that in part of the discussion about what “should be done” about feral kids armed with knives, there ought to be a recognition that one of the main problems that young people face in and outside school is boredom. And that can be cured, possibly, by working. We have to overcome our strange squeamishness over the employment of minors in actual jobs. I think that the rules and regulatory burdens should be relaxed so that apprenticeships become much easier for an employer to provide. I think some, if not all, of the young tearaways who are so worrying policymakers might actually feel proud of having a job, of earning money, of being able to brag about this to their lazier friends.
And please, dear commenters, do not tell me that all this is optimistic pie-in-the-sky speculation. We have a significant problem in the UK of young people who are a, being forced to stay in school well beyond the age at which they wish and can learn anything, and b, denied the opportunity to work, and c, becoming attracted to the fake charms of gangs and violence. By rejecting our horror of teen-labour, we might help to fix some of these problems.
There is sometimes quite a lot in common between the world of professional sports and the investment and wealth management industries. When a talented individual leaves a bank or a football team, it can cause a lot of news and chatter in the industry, prompting fans or clients to change their bank or fret over whether their club has a shot at winning games. I have worked in the financial sector long enough to know that there is also a similar sort of pecking order with banking and sports: there are “league tables” of fund managers, for example. Getting a top ranking as a fund manager with an investment record for beating the S&P 500 can be like the equivalent of winning the Player of the Year award, scoring the most goals in a season, etc.
Which nicely brings me to the subject of a certain Mr Cristiano Ronaldo, the Manchester United forward who has made a very public, and much criticised, effort to leave for the warmer climes of Real Madrid, the famous Spanish team that has won the European Cup (now the European Champions League trophy), more times than any other club: 9 times. He is blessed with wondrous dribbling skills, is brave, fast, good with both feet, can head the ball, can float around the front of the pitch and has the ability to turn a game in a flash. He scored a hatfull of goals last season, and is undoubtedly one of the best players in the world.
He is also very well paid for his efforts. No argument from me on that: he is in a free market for talent and I do not begrude him a penny of his wages. But – and this is a rather big but – he has four years left to run on his contract at Old Trafford. Naturally, his manager, Sir Alex Ferguson, is very unhappy at the prospect of losing him, although a monstrous transfer fee would ease the pain and enable the club to buy in some new players. United has not been exactly a saint either in nabbing players from rivals before their contracts fall due.
But the recent comments that Ronaldo’s contract amounts to a form of slavery is stretching the use of language to breaking point, contrary to what Mick Hume, a self-described “red” both in political and sporting terms, says. If a person signs a contract to work for a bank or football team for a minimum of say, four years, he must serve that contract out, unless there was any clear proof that he signed under conditions of duress. A footballer who signs terms with a club binding him into a four-year contract is not selling himself into slavery. It is not as if Mr Ronaldo was kidnapped, frogmarched into the club and forced to play. It is not even as though he was starving, and so desperate for a job that he was prepared to do anything to get a job. Marxists of old like Mr Hume used to argue that workers, who had no reserves of cash to live off, were “coerced” into signing work contracts and hence exploited, an argument that might have just about held water in the early 19th century when thousands of people were living on the edge of starvation, but hardly applies now.
With bankers, it is quite common for executives to sign contracts stipulating that if they give notice to leave, they have to serve out at least six months “gardening leave” and a further period of not soliciting new clients before they can start at a new job. This sounds harsh, but banks have to protect their interests, since if there is an exodus of talent from Bank A to Bank B, the latter bank can grab some of the clients of the former bank who wish to stick with their old managers. For all I know, the same sort of things can apply in other industries.
It seems to me that the only way such terms can be likened to slavery is if there is some clear form of coercion involved in signing the contract, and some clear sign of violence or threats being employed to sustain such contracts. I see not examples in the case of the Portugese footballer.
Say what you like about our embattled UK prime minister, but he does at least have good taste in a place to relax on holiday: the Suffolk seaside town of Southwold. I am not sure if the locals will be thrilled at all the security types who will inevitably swarm all over the area, though.
Southwold is a charming, small place. It is the home of Adnams, the brewery of excellent beer. Now, my recommendation to Mr Brown and his family, in a spirit of generosity, is to pack the complete works of Ludwig von Mises in his luggage, visit the local pubs and go for some nice coastal walks. As a result of all this exercise, reading and drinking, he will return to Downing Street a wiser and better man.
Sizewell B nuclear power station is down the coast. You can actually see its massive dome from Southwold beach. I rather like it.
One word of caution to Mr Brown’s entourage: a lot of Suffolk folk have guns.
Lasers for shooting down mortars bombs and missiles… sounds great and has potential to change battlefield quite fundamentally… if it actually works in practice out in the messy real world. Remember Patriot? Much cheered at the time but it turned out to be a wildly expensive but only occasionally effective weapon system designed to shoot down rather cheap and only occasionally effective Scuds.
I suppose it all comes down to it is this another a vastly costly to operate system designed to shoot down various cheap-as-chips weapon systems? I suppose time will tell because potentially this is revolutionary as battlefield lasers could eventually mean the end of a great many forms of indirect weapons. Potentially.
I do love Guido:
Knife crime is the media scare of the moment and on Sunday Jacqui Smith spun Sky News that “something would be done”. The knife carrying and stabbing classes would be taken to hospital A&Es to confront the results of their crimes.
See the snag? Sounds tough and progressive to triangulating wonks. Sounds more like adding insult to injury when you are lying on a trolley bleeding, hoping you won’t catch MRSA – “Here’s Wayne, he is very sorry he stabbed you”. Doctors and the opposition went ballistic. By lunchtime today the plan was dropped.
The official line here is that They’re As Bad As Each Other, but I actually think that the Cameron regime, as and when it materialises, might show real glimmerings of adequacy, at any rate compared to this lot. I realise that much of my optimism is based on believing David Cameron to be a liar, and not as bad as he says he will be about such things as the environment (which I am basically opposed to), and taxes (ditto), and EUrope (ditto again). But I think it is reasonable to hope for the best, as well as to fear that he might be telling the truth. Except re EUrope, about which I assume Cameron to be lying only in hinting that he might do a teensy bit of good.
Meanwhile, it says a great deal about the terminal state of this present government that they are now making such particular fools of themselves in the one solitary area that they used until a year or two ago to excel at, namely manipulating the contents of the newspapers and the television. They have taxed and regulated the British economy into stagnation and presided over the relentless decline of all public services except weather forecasts and cricket commentaries, and this process of degradation began, or rather continued, as soon as they were voted in in 1997. But they used at least to be able to boss the newspapers. Not any more.
John Redwood MP has a blog, which is very party political as is only to be expected of a party politician, but I find him quite good. Not so long ago he had a posting entitled Legislation – just a longer press release?
You sense that everyone in and around the government has now come to similar conclusions themselves, about themselves. It is being said that what is keeping Mr Brown in his job is that they are all far too busy abandoning ship to care who the captain is. Although, maybe they are being too pessimistic about how badly they will do. Presumably their extreme pessimism comes from reading the newspapers every day.
There was coffee. Life would go on.
– William Gibson. The Winter Market.
In truth, the anthology Burning Chrome contains some very fine short stories. I tend to think that it is a shame that Gibson gave up publishing stories pretty much immediately after he published his first novel, however iconic that novel might have been.
Last night I attended a flat warming party, given by fellow Samizdatista and newly certified Brit, Michael Jennings, and very enjoyable it was. Just the right mixture of nice people I know well (such as Johnathan Pearce and his Missis, and I rather think I may have met the legend that is Thaddeus Tremayne), nice people I know a bit, and nice people I didn’t know at all. And while there I found myself trying to think of good party questions, to replace the often excruciating “And what do you do?” that can cause such tedium and such embarrassment. And rather to my surprise, I overheard myself asking a rather good party question, namely: Have you ever been near to death? The good thing about this question is that brushes with the Angel of Death are fairly random, and that quiet little bod in the corner is almost as likely as the grand and confident ones stage centre to have a good yarn to tell. Granted, if you have a very grand job which involves clearing up minefields in war zones, you’ll probably trump anyone who is merely talking about being missed by speeding bus by half an inch, but despite that tendency, this question, together with the answers it elicits, does take us all out of our everyday preoccupations and make us see the world, and the people in it (e.g. the strangers you meet at parties), a bit differently, just as nearly being dead itself does. Which is what parties are partly for, aren’t they?
Someone asked, by way of clarification, whether I meant that thing where you feel you are moving towards a very bright light. No, not necessarily. That’s a great story, of course, if you have one like that. But any terrifying or dramatic circumstance that could have killed you, and preferably which you knew at the time could have killed you, is a good answer. Having to tightrope-walk across a burning beam a hundred feet above the ground, being violently attacked or robbed, missing a plane flight when the plane you missed subsequently crashed, getting your toe stuck at the bottom of a swimming pool and thinking that this was about to be your last swim and your last anything, that kind of thing. Bright lights are strictly optional.
The best answer I heard last night was from a guy (one of the ones I’d never met before) who was doing some sketching or painting or whatever in Jordan, and was accused by some knife-wielding locals of being a spy. They held the knife to his throat. Luckily a third party convinced them that he was harmless, but for a few moments there … you get the picture.
My best near death experience was when I was a very small boy and I fell out of a second story window at my grandmother’s house. I landed on a small strip of lawn, right next to some very spikey railings. All I remember was waking up afterwards, so it missed that element of pure terror (“I really thought this was It” etc. etc.) that the best near death stories have, but like I say, that’s my best shot. An A&E doctor recently started choking me, while looking down by throat with a small, flat little wooden poker like you used to get with icecream, and I briefly experienced what death by asphyxiation must feel like. But I howled at her to stop which she did, and I never really thought I would die, so that hardly counts at all. My point being that this is not an excuse to tell my own personal right-out-of-the-stadium story along these lines, because I have no such story.
But maybe you do have such a story. This evening it occurred to me that this question would also be a good way of starting a Samizdata comment thread, and in a way that might take us away from our usual stamping grounds, of politics (appallingness of), space rockets and flashy airplanes and cars (splendidness of), and such like.
So, what near death experiences have you had?
Glenn Reynolds links to a video interview of numerous Louisiana citizens whose property was stolen by the police and sometimes destroyed. It was a time when that property was most needed.
Just because you have a badge does not mean you are not a criminal. The New Orleans police are storm troopers in my book and cowardly ones to boot. What else can you call heavily armed men who beat up an old lady and steal her revolver?
Now that some people have recovered their stolen property, it is perhaps time to severely punish these warriors without a clue. Criminal prosecution could be possible in a few cases. As to the rest, perhaps there are grounds for a class action suit for cost plus and triple damages against the city. At the very least, these ‘officers’ should be told to their face that their actions were illegal, unconstitutional and not even close to being American.
They really need to be taught a lesson about who runs things in a free country. The fellow at the end of the video said it succinctly. It is not our country any more.
It is damn well time we took it back.
Liberty is always dangerous – but it’s the safest thing we have.
– Bob Geldof That is pretty good; but liberty is not a thing. It might be better to say it is the safest choice we have.
Flicking through the television sports channels yesterday morning, I came across the Red Bull air race series, with the latest heat run out of Detroit. Fantastic. In terms of sheer skill and eye-popping adrenalin entertainment, this race takes a lot of beating. It makes Formula 1 motor racing, for example, look positively tame, even though I have no doubt that the actual skills involved have a fair amount in common. For a start, the pilots will sometimes pull a G-force of up to 8 or 9 times, which is the sort of thing you associate with astronauts or jet fighter pilots, for which there is a need to wear a pressue suit to stop blacking out.
The race series is continuing in London soon. I am going to find out if I can get my hands on any tickets. It could be difficult.
Apologies if there is no link here – I am having a problem with this function today. A quick Google will bring it up: check out the great photos.
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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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