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Over the last month or so the Guardian has been running a series about the NHS. Here is a typical piece: That was the NHS: stories of hope, kindness and the human spirit. Fair enough. But “the human spirit” is a god with many faces, and this, too, was the NHS: February 14th, 2016 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
February 13th, 2016 | 56 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Guardian is not where I would expect to find a rave review of Top Gear.
Sounds great! Of course, with Clarkson and co. off to Amazon Prime, everyone is a bit worried whether the new line-up will be any good.
Well that’s a relief, then. February 12th, 2016 | 35 comments - (Comments are closed)
Today, we have heard the toll of the bell for the print edition of the Independent, a new-ish British newspaper founded in 1986 to fill the perceived gap between the sanctimonious Left-wing priggishness of the Guardian and the then-brash Times with, well, what appeared to be more sanctimonious Left-wing priggishness. Although it was mindful of the need to remain in profit to be independent, that rigour has meant that it has now decided to go online only from 26th March 2016, having been as Independent as any newspaper owned by a charitable former KGB officer. Its mini-Me version, the i newspaper, a thinned-down version, is being sold off, stc. What use is a Lefty rag if you can’t even wipe anything with it*? A sigh of relief at competitors, or an unwelcome reminder that the end of the tunnel is the mountain (of debt)? *Newspaper is great for making car windows really clear after a wash. February 12th, 2016 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
“It turns out Lenin was wrong. Debauching the currency is actually the best way to destroy the socialist, not the capitalist, system.” – Matt O’Brien, from the Washington Post. (The fact that such a comment can be made in a liberal-leaning publication such as the Post is interesting in itself.) Via Business Insider. He is talking about the disaster that is Venezuela. February 12th, 2016 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Yes, you hear constant denunciations of institutions, parties, leaders, donors, lobbyists, influence peddlers. But the starting point of the bipartisan critique is the social, economic and geopolitical wreckage all around us. Bernie Sanders is careful never to blame Obama directly, but his description of the America Obama leaves behind is devastating — a wasteland of stagnant wages, rising inequality, a sinking middle class, young people crushed by debt, the American Dream dying. Take away the Brooklyn accent and the Larry David mannerisms and you would have thought you were listening to a Republican candidate. After all, who’s been in charge for the last seven years?” Of course, for a certain type, criticising Barack Obama for presiding over the messes of the past few years is unthinkable. He was going to make the sea-level drop, remember. And anyway, what happened was all the fault of Dubya, or “bankers”, or the Chinese. All this leads me to link to an excellent essay by Gene Healy of the CATO Institute, penned a few years’ ago, called The Cult of the Presidency. The office of President matters far too much than it should for the sanity of Americans, or indeed other parts of the world. It could and should matter a lot less. The very term “in charge” ought to be questioned: we should not treat a country as big and complex as the US, full of people with different aims and ends, as a single corporation under a CEO who is, allegedly, “in charge”. February 12th, 2016 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
As a key element in the samizdata-world interface has left London for a while, it is possible that there may be delays in unsmiting people whose comments get moderated by the samizdata SmiteBot. Why? I am out of London in a strange place where taxi drivers have five phones powered by a cigarette lighter…  …the art is interesting and often very irreverent towards cultural icons and authority figures…  …oh, and William Gibson, please call your office…  February 11th, 2016 | 20 comments - (Comments are closed)
Seriously guys, did the 1st of April come early this year? Boy oh boy, and I thought UK politics was messed up. I was considering tagging this under “humour”, but there is nothing funny about large numbers of people taking Donald “Peron” Trump and Bernard “Chavez” Sanders seriously. February 10th, 2016 | 108 comments - (Comments are closed)
…for the striking London black cab drivers whose hard won skills have been rendered obsolete by Uber and Addison Lee, just as we should remember with pity the thousands of drivers of hansom cabs whose hard-won skills with horses were rendered obsolete by the coming of the internal combustion engine. I am not being flippant or sarcastic. To lose one’s accustomed livelihood to new technology is a tough spot to be in, and there will be many reading this, some of them highly paid at present, who should look at Trevor Merralls’ situation and tremble. But that pity should not extend to offering to keep Mr Merralls forever in the style to which he has become accustomed simply because he was born working class, or to stifling the opportunity for self-employment that Uber offers to its drivers (also working class), or to depriving Londoners who could not afford black cabs of the ability to take a cab at a reasonable price at any time day or night, and which will, as one of the Guardian commenters put it, “actually go to exotic destinations like Lewisham”. February 9th, 2016 | 32 comments - (Comments are closed)
I have been meaning to link to the excellent blog Oilfield Expat ever since I found it mentioned in a comment here a few weeks ago. There is so much goodness. You can start with its author’s comment on low oil prices below. I particularly enjoyed this piece of prose, which I find a useful retort to doom-mongers. It is important because people need to realise that we have it good in order to understand why we have it good, lest they throw it all away, the risks of which the article it is taken from is partly about.
The blog is robust and straightforward. On concerns about population: “it isn’t condoms that the poor need to start having smaller families, it is 1) increased wealth and 2) reliable, cheap electricity”. On “those jumped-up tossers in places like Aberdeen”: “A cruise past the offices of the oil and gas companies, the engineering companies, and service providers would show the car parks full of Audis, BMWs, Mercedes, Porsches, Jags, and Bentleys, enabled by soaring wages and full employment of those who work in the oil industry. And now they need a bailout? Fuck them.” On architects: “Fordham is your run-of-the-mill statist, authoritarian rent-seeker who has amassed a veritable fortune of taxpayers’ cash by preaching to governments from the environmental pulpit (naturally, his grubby mitts can be found all over the London Olympic 2012 facilities). The world would have been better off if he’d stayed in his spare bedroom the past 50 years.” On the Hubbert curve: “In other words, the curve is subject to change at any point due to unlimited external factors and therefore utterly useless save for an object over which academics can while away the hours pontificating.” There is technical insight into how to invest in oil in the face of low prices. There is discussion of how well-run Netflix seems to be. There is good, old fashioned Fisking. I am not even having to drill deep for this quality. It is lying about on the surface in plain sight. February 9th, 2016 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
The continuing plunge in the price of oil from $115 a barrel in mid-2014 to $30 today is really, really good news. I know just about every economic commentator says otherwise, predicting bankruptcies, stock market crashes, deflation, political turmoil and a return to gas guzzling. But that is because they are mostly paid to see the world from the point of view of producers, not consumers. – Matt Ridley. February 8th, 2016 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Times reports:
Good. This incestuous relationship between the government and what were once charities has corrupted both. February 7th, 2016 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
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