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]
I am going to be in Israel from the 20th to the 28th of January. The plan is to be in Tel Aviv for two or three days from the 20th, then hopefully Jerusalem, Haifa, Nazareth, perhaps a little wine tourism in the Golan Heights, and Beersheba if I have time, which I may not. This will be my first trip and as always, there can be more visits. One of the purposes of a first trip to anywhere is to find out about the interesting things to do and see on subsequent visits.
The aim, as is the case with most of my travel, is to go, look round, and try to get some sense of the place. In Israel, the cultural and architectural magnificence of the place makes this particularly daunting. I am coming with the sense that Israel is one of the most egregiously missing places from my travels, but also with a certain amount of cultural baggage. I attended Anglican Sunday school as a child, of course, but was taught my biblical history in the sense that it felt that these were mythical places. That they were actually real took a more adult understanding.
Plus of course, there is the modern economy: every government in the world has seemingly released press releases stating how “We must create the Silicon Valley of (wherever)” (seemingly failing to understand that by government direction is not how you do it), but Israel seems to be virtually the only country in the world with a startup and tech economy scene that is actually worthy of such a description. My admiration for this is enormous, but my detailed knowledge of it is less than I would like it to be. If anyone wants to tell me more about this / show me how this has happened, I would be delighted to let them tell me and/or show me.
Several of my Jewish and Israeli friends have already offered me advice on what to see and do, of course, but further advice would be welcome, particularly from readers of this blog who may have some sense of my quirky sensibilities. Comments on this post are welcome, as is e-mail to michael.jennings at gmail.com. I promise to write about interesting things that I find on this blog.
It is surprisingly easy to get the sign wrong when reasoning about quantities. Consider this old riddle:
Three ladies go to a restaurant for a meal. They receive a bill for $30. They each put $10 on the table, which the waiter collects and takes to the till. The cashier informs the waiter that the bill should only have been for $25 and returns $5 to the waiter in $1 coins. On the way back to the table the waiter realizes that he cannot divide the coins equally between the ladies. As they didn’t know the total of the revised bill, he decides to put $2 in his own pocket and give each of the ladies $1.
Now that each lady has been given a dollar back, each of the ladies has paid $9. Three times 9 is 27. The waiter has $2 in his pocket. Two plus 27 is $29. The ladies originally handed over $30. Where is the missing dollar?
To get the missing $1 in the question we have done this arithmetic: 10 + 10 + 10 – 1 – 1 – 1 + 2 – 30 = -1
Positive numbers represent payments from the ladies to the restaurant, and negative numbers represent money received by the restaurant. The result should obviously always come out to zero. That +2 should be a -2. Okay, there is a 30 where there should be a 25 as well, but only because the +2 yielded an intermediate result of 29 which is close enough to 30 to cause confusion.
This getting the sign wrong is the same mistake that means Tim Worstall has to point out that jobs are a cost. The new widget factory will create 1000 jobs, we are told. If it produces 1000 widgets per year, that means we get one widget per man-year of time. The man-year of time is a cost. If we could somehow arrange for the widget factory to create only 100 jobs for the same output, we would have just as many widgets and 900 man-years left to spend on some other useful thing. We would be richer.
This mistake crops up in trivial ways all the time. My friend recently gave up full-time work to look after the children for various financial and logistical reasons. Think how the economy is losing out, she mused. Not only am I not producing widgets, I am not paying the nursery workers or buying train tickets for my commute. Well it is true that the widgets my friend used to make are no longer made, but the nursery workers do not count: the same amount of childcare is being done as was being done before. It is not correct to add the childcare previously done by the nursery worker to the childcare now done by my friend. At worst there is now an unemployed nursery worker who will go and do something else instead, but that is just a market optimising everyone’s activities to match the level of demand. The train tickets were just part of the cost of getting the widgets made.
Ah, train tickets. We are going to get a new high speed rail link between London and Birmingham. The government is going to ‘invest’ £32.7bn in order to reap up to £46.9bn of ‘economic benefits’. I wonder how many of these benefits have the wrong sign. Counted among the benefits are “hundreds of jobs”, but these are already included in the cost figure.
Also counted are ticket sales. Which makes sense if the ‘investment’ was really an investment. But invest here really means to steal from the British public £32.7bn so that they can then pay, say, £40bn for train tickets in exchange for £40bn worth of train travel. I make that -32.7 – 40 + 40 = -32.7. Where is the missing £32.7bn?
Now and again, when the subject of environmental alarmism comes up, someone – such as the likes of me – might wonder when, or whether, a mainstream, high-profile politician in an important country will get up and stick it to the Green lobby. For perhaps obvious economic reasons, given its vast natural resources, Canada seems to be the country where this is starting to seriously happen. Consider this report (Reuters):
On the eve of public hearings into a proposed oil pipeline from Alberta’s tar sands to the Pacific Coast, the Canadian government lashed out on Monday at what it said were foreign-funded radical groups opposing the project. The comments by Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver were another sign of the pressures mounting against Enbridge Inc’s proposed C$5.5 billion ($5.4 billion) Northern Gateway pipeline. Canada’s right-leaning Conservative government, which says the pipeline would help diversify energy exports away from the United States and more towards Asia, says activists are clogging up the regulatory process.
There’s more:
“Unfortunately, there are environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block this opportunity to diversify our trade,” Oliver said in a statement. “These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda … They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest.” Ottawa and the oil industry are particularly interested in Northern Gateway after Washington delayed a decision on approving TransCanada Corp’s Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport oil sands crude from Alberta to Texas.
Of course, it goes without saying that the UK government is a million miles from this sort of rhetoric, with the partial exception to how ministers sometimes try to push aside environmental concerns that are raised about various transport or other projects. In these cases, though, there are legitimate private property rights issues as stake (such as the use of compulsory purchase powers to make way for something like a high-speed rail link). And as for AGW alarmism in particular, there is yet no sign of a major political figure realising how many votes might be won in confronting this.
Unlike Dale Amon, one of this site’s editors, I am not much of a fan of Ron Paul, or at least, not a fan of some of the people who back and cheerlead for his campaign. I can respect, even admire, how he has been consistent in pointing to the folly of central bank financial manipulation, which is why his campaign against the Fed is something I admire. I can also appreciate how he has pushed some important libertarian ideas into the political culture. A lot of people whose views I respect say that he has done a tremendous amount of good. And they argue that yes, that whole business about the letters back in the late 80s and early 90s was poor and did not reflect well on his judgement – hardly a good thing in a potential POTUS – but hey, plenty of people make mistakes and Paul has disowned this stuff.
But one of the things about the Ron Paul campaign that has concerned me is his foreign policy stance. I am not complaining about his anti-interventionism. That’s entirely consistent with a libertarian point of view; it draws on the wisdom of realising that one intervention inevitably breeds another and and another and so on in endless, disastrous profusion. But where he seriously leaves me behind is when he starts to make excuses, or gives the impression of doing so, for lousy regimes and individuals. Case in point being a video arguing that there would be a parallel between how Americans might feel if foreign troops were based in say, Texas, and the situation regarding US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Tim Sandefur, a long-time critic of Ron Paul (he has called RP a “conman” and not a libertarian), has a ferocious article about the video, and in particular, brings up the issue of the American Civil War to highlight what he thinks is wrong with the video’s underlying premises and arguments.
“The video starts out by inviting us to sympathize with the Islamofascists, who, we are told, are led to military “resistance” against a foreign occupier—that is, the United States. Imagine that, say, the Chinese or the Russians maintained a military base in Texas, and that thousands of armed troops from such a nation were patrolling American streets. Wouldn’t that be awful? So surely we can understand why al Quaeda in Mesopotamia plants roadside bombs to kill American soldiers, no?”
“One notices right away that this opening sentence demands that we ignore the differences between the American forces in Iraq or Afghanistan, and the forces of al Qaeda and its allies—or the relative characters of the nations or institutions on whose behalf they act. American troops, representing a democratic nation that liberated Iraq from the barbarism of Saddam Hussein and helped to institute the first-ever democratic governments there and in Afghanistan, are to be regarded as the moral equivalent of, say, the People’s Liberation Army patrolling the streets of Dallas. Of course, once one accepts this moral equivalence, one is prepared to accept anything.”
Then, several paras later, this is:
“The climax of this moral equivalency comes in the middle of the video, when we are explicitly invited to imagine ourselves joining with some Holy Army of Martyrdom to “defend our soil and our sovereignty” by fighting against this invading army—and to feel sorry for these freedom fighters who are (so sad) labeled by an unfeeling world as terrorists or insurgents. This absurdity mutates into a thinly veiled accusation that Americans are simply committing genocide. At this point, one loses any interest in watching further.”
“Soil and sovereignty” is a particularly interesting choice of phrase: note that even this video does not have the chutzpah to suggest that those who strap bombs to their chests or set IEDs by roadsides in the Middle East are doing so in defense of, say, justice, or individual rights. It is just a question of “soil and sovereignty.” Of course, “soil and sovereignty,” or “Blut und Boden,” has long been the favorite slogan of all fascists. What it really means is, “room to oppress with impunity.” It is the demand for the freedom to enslave. Failure to recognize this is what has so often led otherwise sensible and sensitive people to mistake despotic thuggery for wars of national liberation—often until it is too late, and the bell tolls for thee.”
A question, though, is that its defence of intervention into brutal regimes does beg the question of who gets to decide which regimes fail a test of decency and should therefore be dealt with? But it is a good article, and I recommend the whole of it. Here is the final paragraph:
“By ridiculing the notion of defending democracy and preserving the peace in the Middle East, by regarding the troops of a democratic coalition in a region pock-marked with totalitarian fascist states as equivalent to a communist military patrolling the towns of Texas, the video ignores the difference between justice and tyranny, between peace and desolation, between freedom and slavery. And one who chooses to blind himself to these differences has chosen to blind himself to everything of importance in the world.”
Exactly so. If one is serious about belief in expanding freedom, would one not, to take another example, want to do something about the guy down the street who is known to be torturing his wife and kids, even if his actions had no direct bearing on one’s own?
At the same time, this article, by constitutional scholar and classical liberal, Randy Barnett, is a thoughtful item about some of the possible contradictions and problems associated with issues of sovereignty, liberty, and war.
But the question remains: however powerful the sort of arguments that Sandefur presents – and they are very powerful – who gets to decide that it is okay to pull the trigger? That is what makes these debates so infernally difficult.
Author’s note: It seems that we have started Monday in full “let’s shoot at Cameron” mode today. Well, it is still the game shooting season.
The comments from UK prime minister David Cameron, saying it would be wrong to scrap the UK top income rate of 50 per cent on incomes of £150,000 a year or more (which when other changes are taken into account, means a marginal rate of more than 60 per cent), are typical of this regime. The government knows that the tax rate is well on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve, but this, remember, is a regime that cares with almost pathological zeal about the image it projects. The key is to show that those evil, high-earning bastards (like the sort of people who start businesses and run them) take their “fair” share of the current pain being inflicted in the name of deficit reduction.
The Tories played a high price for an inept general election campaign that required them to ally with the Liberal Democrats, a party full of people whose hostility to entrepreneurship and wealth creation is even more severe than it among parts of the Labour Party. And this hostility to high earners comes particularly ill from politicians, such as Mr Cameron, who have enjoyed the benefits of a rich inheritance rather than having to get their hands dirty by creating a business from scratch. Very ill, indeed.
As I commented on previously, David Cameron wants shareholders to vote on directors’ pay packages. Another problem with this occurs to me.
Right now I can value a company on its past performance and what I think its future performance will be, and part of this evaluation comes from my opinion of the decision-making abilities of the people in charge. If I know who they are, and am confident that they will hire the right people into the right positions, I might value the company more highly.
If shareholders make decisions I have the problem that the performance of the company depends on who the shareholders are, and I do not know who the other shareholders are.
In the specific case where shareholders can vote on directors’ pay, if we assume that the highest pay attracts the best performing directors, then the best performing companies will end up being the ones with the least left-wing shareholders.
Government can’t tell people what they should be paid but…
His excuse for meddling is that there has been a “market failure”, as indicated by a Guardian article that says that FTSE 100 directors’ pay increased by 49% last year. And that is not right. People just will not stand for this sort of thing. What about the shareholders? The board should be forced to let them vote on pay and termination packages, he thinks, otherwise it is just crony capitalism and stealing from shareholders.
It is perfectly obvious that all of this is factored in to the share price already, and perfectly obvious that there are no principles on display here. From Cameron’s Tory party we get the same envy politics as from the other parties. But I repeat Perry.
I link a lot to the sayings and doings of Steve Baker MP (that being the last time I mentioned him here), so this time I will be brief, and only say that I like the phrase “new money being loaned into existence”. The piece this phrase appears in is entitled Could this be a second crisis of state socialism? If you are already saying to yourself something along the lines of: “yes I rather think it could be”, you will, you will be unamazed to learn, find yourself in agreement with Mr Baker.
One of the things I notice about technological change is that it is, so to speak, quite abrupt but not completely abrupt. In historical terms, the arrival of, say, the printing press, was a huge upheaval, changing one reality to a completely different one. But on closer inspection, something like printing turns out to be a series of disruptions, including disruptions yet to come, rather than just one. And if you actually live through one of these disruptions, you typically experience it as something far more gradual and complicated than, say, a mere once-in-a-lifetime explosion.
Consider that old stager of our time, the “paperless office”, and in my personal case, its more chaotic younger sibling, the paperless home.
I have spent quite a lot of time during the last few weeks de-cluttering my home, and that has involved chucking out much paper. A particular clutch of paper that I am about to chuck out is a book. But it is not a book exactly. It is a pile of photocopied A4 pages. It is a big and cumbersome copy of a book, a copy of a copy. But it is a copy of an interesting book, one I would still like to own and consult. So, what am I replacing this biggish pile of paper with, which enables me still to read the same words? Answer: an actual book. Now that the internet enables me to buy an obscure book for coffee-and-a-sandwich money, but does not yet offer me an e-version of the same book, the logical thing to do is to buy yet more paper. In the long run, as Amazon knows better than anyone or anything else on earth, paper for reading will soon (in big historical time) be superfluous. In the meantime, Amazon circulates, hither and thither, still, a veritable mega-cyclone of … paper. For quite a few years, that was the only thing it did.
I am purchasing my new and smaller copy of this book from Oxfam, an enterprise I have no love for, and only have dealings with for private gain on my part, never purely because Oxfam itself benefits. The internet has opened up a whole new semi-business, in the form of people who can’t be doing with selling their own (often presumably inherited) piles of books on the internet, instead dumping these book onto charities, and charities then selling them for what they can get on the internet. (I sometimes suspect that the impact of Oxfam upon British society is far more profound and helpful than anything it does for places like Africa.) Again with the complication. Paper is not being chucked into a skip. It is, thanks to the internet, being rescued from the skip. Temporarily.
This is, as I say, the kind of process that does not show up in the big, broad brush history books, but it is typical of the complicated way that new technology works its complicated magic.
Another example of something similar that I recently learned of (and mentioned in passing in this earlier posting here, also about the complexity of technological change) is how the arrival of the railways caused a greatly increased demand for horses, to transport people to and from railway stations. In the long run, mechanised transport doomed the horse to becoming a mere leisure item. In the short run, it caused many more horses to be used.
I enjoyed this thoughtful article in the Telegraph by Ronald Stewart-Brown on the ramifications of Britain’s leaving the EU. He seems to think it wouldn’t be too bad because an acceptable trade agreement would be fairly easy to come by. As he says:
We could negotiate at least as good access to other EU services markets as we have at present. We would no longer need to contribute towards the excessive levels of trade-distorting agricultural subsidy other EU member states dish out under the Common Agricultural Policy.
Personally, I wouldn’t be too sure about that – I think we could be in for a fair amount of vindictiveness. But that’s by the by. My real question is whether we need or, indeed, should want trade agreements at all. After all, if we can’t sell to them, how will they be able to sell to us?
This video makes for hilarious – if frustrating – viewing. Leading Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum ludicrously posits that left-wingers in America are massive advocates for too much freedom…and cites this as a problem.
[L]eave it to far-right, fundamentally religious Christians to come full circle, meeting up with commies—in true East meets West fashion—to declare that America is not really about the pursuit of happiness, and that freedom really means freedom to be responsible and subservient to the values dictated to you by on high (or Santorum, his Congregation and extended brethren).
If Santorum and his ilk keep forcing me to agree with left-wingers – in this case, that Santorum is pure evil – it is going to be a very, very long election year.
Dymaxicon doesn’t accept ‘submissions’. I’m not a particularly submissive person, and I have always resented that writers were always cast in a submissive role… no one should ever be in the position of accepting or rejecting.
So says California-based Samizdatista Hillary Johnson about Dymaxicon, the new model publishing company she set up as an imprint of Agile Learning Labs. Yes, a software development coaching firm is its own publisher – and is putting titles on the market that cover everything from gardening to scrum (the geeky kind, not the rugby kind). Free from the politics and restraints of traditional publishers, Johnson is highly selective about the titles Dymaxicon puts out, and her gamut-running taste leads to releases such as a graphic novel telling the true story of two teenagers on a killing spree in the 1950s:
The model is simple: No one makes money unless the books sell, and Dymaxicon does a straight 50/50 split with authors. The publisher earns its half by editing the work, formatting it for a range of electronic reading devices and apps, marketing the work (including creative, easily shareable book trailers), and making sure the entire distribution process runs smoothly. Titles are available both in electronic form and, for more money, as hard copies.
So what kind of results are Johnson and her authors getting with this approach?
Nancy Rommelmann, another friend of Samizdata, has released one novel and one essay with Dymaxicon. The Bad Mother quickly became a cult favorite novel, and was downloaded more than 1,000 times within hours of Dymaxicon launching a promotional giveaway (you can still get it for free as I type). Her essay on growing up as a rebellious teen in 1970s Brooklyn, The Queens of Montague Street, hit number seven – and is still climbing – on Amazon’s bestseller list of biographies and memoirs of journalists, topping titles by Bill O’Reilly, Anderson Cooper, and Barbara Walters, among many other celebrities. It was also named the number one long-form read of the week by top online outlet Longreads, with dozens of other blogs lauding the work as well worth the 99 cent price.
David Swinson, a former police detective, film producer and music promoter who released his first novel for Dymaxicon after a career of working with the likes of Nick Cave, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Social Distortion, saw his book A Detailed Man rise to the number one spot on Amazon’s list of bestselling noir titles. The murder mystery also hit Amazon’s Top 100 overall list of Kindle bestsellers.
The fact is, you can publish your writing on Amazon if you have 99 cents. (If you are an Amazon Prime member, it is free.) Yes, blogging has enabled anyone to publish their thoughts without cost for years now, but putting your writing into a digestible format and capitalizing on Amazon’s distribution platform is kind of a big deal. Just because it is not difficult to do does not mean it is easy to do well – which is where a publisher like Dymaxicon comes in. This new model means that revenue-sucking intermediaries like agents can be bypassed completely, as can dealing with traditional publishing houses (if one was ever lucky enough to get that far in the first place). As Johnson says:
The way literature gets produced in our world seems positively medieval. Not to mention anti-creative. Publishers are gate-keepers, deciding who gets to be heard, and the process of putting a book out is glacially slow, linear, and hierarchical.
Not anymore, though. So if you have always fancied yourself a novelist in the making, or think the series of email rants you send friends might make for compelling content to read as a collection, consider making an author of yourself. All you have to lose is the expired excuse that it is hard to get published.
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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