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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After arriving in Manhattan on the Boston train, I had just enough time to repack and get perhaps three hours of sleep before heading for the airport. My May 24th NY-Houston-Dallas flight was early enough that I was able to attend the latter half of the Space Venture Forum morning track.
I had loads of time to schmooze with potential customers, as well as listen to ‘the suits’ discuss venture funding, deal making, IPO’s and pitfalls. I am sure many here would have appreciated the slide which noted:
“Addiction” to Government Business Alone: Problems have emerged for companies that aimed solely at government markets and had substantial timing delays. Companies should avoid developing an “addiction” to government business since these companies will need cash for commercial development”
Glenn Reynolds also had a few things to say about how much real business has taken hold at the ISDC’s. It is definitely true. I went partially (and successfully) for business contacts for many years but this is the first year in which I represented a space venture. I may have been one of the persons quoted by Glenn and others and I spent one entire morning ‘under the lights’ as a talking head for someone’s documentary.
I particularly enjoyed the lunch, partially because I finally met Esther Dyson whom I have known ‘virtually’ for over a decade. She introduced the speaker, Tom Pickens, son of the capitalist hero T. Boone Pickens. Tom is a man who learned business from childhood. He has a protein crystal product which can only be produced in quantities on orbit and which is highly valuable for medicine. His demand projections are such that told everyone in the room he can fill whatever they can launch or return.
Tom Pickens says “You’ve got 24 months to get a seat at the table”.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Now I could go on about all of the marvelous speakers and news events of the conference, or talk about all of the meetings I ran or attended… but instead I will show some of the fun side of the first few days of the conference.
While I was chatting with some old friends, someone commented that our Executive Committee Chairman, Gary Barnhard, bears a striking resemblance to Dr. Gerard O’Neill, the inventor of the L5 Space Colony concept, who died around 15 years ago.
Gary Barnhard attempts to channel Dr. O’Neill.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Armadillo Aerospace brought ‘Pixel’, one of the Moon Lander Prize contenders, to the exhibit room. It was quite a center piece of a reception for rocket scientists and activists. It reminds you why you are here, even after quite a few bottles.
It is amazing how difficult it is to talk, hold your bottle and enjoy the nacho dip at the same time.
No we did not tap the fuel tanks when the cash bar closed.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Glenn Reynolds. Rand Simberg and I have known each other for over 20 years so of course we had to get together to discuss blogging and how to fix everything. We were also joined for awhile by Alan Boyle of MSNBC.
What do you mean, “we drank it all?”
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
I was surprised to see a native Texas gal I’d not seen in a few years. Turned out Kaz had been in London while with the USAF.
The world of rocket scientists has been improving steadily,
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
I caught Glenn Reynolds in mid post just before the Space Blogger summit at the conference.
The blogfather at work plotting world domination,
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
This brings me up to May 26th. I will try to post on the rest of ISDC 2007 tomorrow. If you can not wait, you will find hundreds of photos of the event in the archives.
The first leg of my journey began on May 17th with a Belfast to Manhattan direct flight. I had a one day layover before another early morning start for a train to Boston. This gig, the JPMorgan Technology ’07 Conference, was one of my big ones of the year. I worked as a backstage Tech on this investor conference from May 19th to the 23rd.
For those not in the heart of the tech game, these conferences are important events. Hundreds of millions exchange hands based on the information released by CEO’s and CFO’s and in back room wheeling and dealing. That’s why I get paid well to travel a long distance just to be a webcast editor. They cannot afford failure, and if things do go wrong they want people who are overskilled enough to not panic and to solve the problem.
Our glorious leader tried to foresee the unforseeable or at the very least make sure everyone knew what they had to do.
Behind the scenes: a pre-show Tech briefing.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
Despite all the prep and redundancy and effort… gremlins will have their day. Just as the lights came up during an early Monday morning session… the entire hotel blacked out. Lighting boards. Sound boards. Television cameras. The video mixing desk. Registration servers. Video projectors. Streaming servers… and of course the Editing stations of my demesne. All hell broke loose… but in less than 15 minutes the hotel power problem was found, circuits repatched and every team had their gear synced up and back on the air. That’s how the pro’s do it.
No expense is spared. Well, almost…anyone got a match? A spare nuclear power plant?
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
I did not get to see much of the show unless you count occasionally looking over my shoulder and watching it in reverse.
My view of the show.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
The hours are long but there are perks working a job like this. For one, I get a very nice free room, and these things are not held in one star squats. As you can see, I had a lovely view of the harbour. I also had a panorama of the Charles River and the Boston skyline.
To top it off, the team is one of the best I have ever worked with. ‘The craic is mighty’ as one might hear in Belfast.
Some perks come with the job: a view of Boston Harbour from my room.
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
On the last day I rushed to finish my Editing tasks in time to strike my gear and flag a taxi to the railway station. I had a flight out of JFK to catch at 0500 and I left Boston only twelve hours earlier. The train takes a very scenic coastal route. I highly recommend the Boston to New York train for that and as a way to not go through the indignities of airport security.
There are a lot of boats on the New England coast…
Photo: copyright Dale Amon, All Rights Reserved
At the moment I am sitting at the house of a Physicist and Venture capitalist friend in Connecticut in between jobs north of DC and a trip out to Laramie to push ahead on my latest venture. That is why I have had some time for posting again. These last few weeks on the road have been mad but have had some fun times as well, so I will perhaps do a few travel posts while I have the chance.
If you get the impression that Samidatistas are world travellers… I wonder whatever gave you that idea? 😉
I have come up with yet another in a long line of ‘Modest Proposals’ for solving world problems, this time for successful suicide bombers.
When someone is prepared to kill themselves because their religious belief assures them of an eternal party or an eternal peace or large numbers of subservient soon to be non-virgins, there is not a great deal that can be done to sway them from their evil course… or so one would think.
I propose hitting below the belt.
What is important to these folk? What do they want? Why do they do what they do?
They want everyone to be believers of their one true faith.
What else is important to them?
Family.
My modest proposal is a very biblical one. When a terrorist succeeds in not only blowing themselves up but in also killing innocent civilians we should round up their family, nuclear or extended as is appropriate to the culture; men, woman, children and elderly;and give them a very simple choice:
Convert to the religion represented by the majority of the innocents killed… or die.
This strikes at the heart of the belief system of these murdering swine. The message would be that success is a failure worse than their worst nightmare. How many Hamas would want their daughter converting to Judaism and then marrying a doctor? Or even worse… a lawyer!
Thus Sunni wouldst become Shia; Shia wouldst become Sunni; Palestinians would become Jews… and for that matter if any Christian committed a similar heinous act, the same would apply to them.
Fair is fair.
I just ran across the apocalyptic biblical quote:
And in those days shall men seek death and not find it and shall desire to die and death shall flea from them – Revelations 9:6
In a sudden heavenly flash of deep preternatural understanding and prognostication the true meaning of this ancient prophecy suffused my being.
We are going to capture all the suicide bombers and lock them up for life! I also inferred from it that we will soon have the nanotechnology necessary to extend life to lengths most find unimaginable. This will allow us to lock up these self-portable munitions for even longer.
The newly minted high-school graduate daughter of a co-worker is on walkabout in Europe and due to a train strike in Italy is about to end up at Gatwick in the wee hours. Her father is trying to find some place for her to stay.
Any suggestions on places she could find a room at perhaps 3am in London are welcome. Any of our Samizdata staff awake over there still?
I have been watching as the assortment of bad, worse and sickening candidates continues to grow in this premature election campaign. Amongst them are candidates (or at least a candiidate) who would make me vote for the other party: John McCain. There are candidates I find a little less bad on one issue or another. There are my own party contenders who cannot win, will not get much national coverage and will have an anti-war stance I do not support.
But finally, from out of the blue of the Texas sky comes: RON PAUL!
Ron is no stranger to me. I worked with his 1988 campaign manager a bit and wrote some policy papers for his Libertarian campaign. I also introduced him to a crowd at an ISDC (International Space Development Conference) in Denver after giving him a briefing on the audience. I found him thoroughly likable both politically and personally.
True, Ron carries the same anti-war stance as others, but I could ignore that in someone who may actually make a difference. Unlike my party’s candidate he will be unignorable. He could conceivably pull off a Republican nomination. If that were to happen it might cause multiple suicides amongst the kinder, gentler crowd… but no one would miss them anyway.
If he were to win the election, admittedly a very long shot, Statism’s monopoly hold on our political system would be irreparably damaged.
I am willing to take my risks on enemy forces using a weak foreign policy to attack us here because the policies of a President Paul would so liberate Americans and the American economy that we would be accelerating away from the unfree world at a rate they could not possibly match.
Ron would make us freer than we have been since Abe Lincoln mucked things up for limited government. Increased individual liberty would translate into wealth and national strength. There will never be a perfect candidate for me, but at least in Ron Paul I see an overall set of policies that does not make me want to lose my lunch.
Go here to find out how to support him.
Just a brief note… You can probably find stories from Rand and Glenn who are also here in Dallas at the 26th International Space Development Conference. Alan Boyle from MSNBC is with us and Jeff Foust is acting as the cat-herder.
I am traveling via AMTRAK to Boston today [Actually yesterday: I did not get a network connection until this morning]. Given the hassles of airline travel I have grown to prefer it. Additionally there is the accessibility of an AC outlet for my laptop and enough space in front of me to actually use it.
When I picked up my ticket though, I noticed a display running through a whole long list of new rules and regulations. It seems the powers that be are not satisfied with wrecking the flight travel experience: they want to ruin train travel as well.
The people who think up these rules are really more in tune with the needs of a totalitarian regime than a society of sovereign individuals. One has to ask what problem are they really solving? As I had a forty five minutes wait whilst waiting for my gate announcement to go up on the schedule board., I did some mental arithmetic
What if we took train security back to what it was when America was still a free country, perhaps back in the fifties before the do-gooders gained any real power? What would be the likely result?
Assume we get a few Jihadi’s loose in the US and they manage to blow up three trains a year. Given the numbers from the UK and other places in Europe, these sorts of things usually kill 100 or fewer people. That translates to a 300 in 300,000,000 chance per US citizen per year: a 1 in a million chance. Given modern medicine and a bit of rounding up to 100 years lifespan, that would be 1 in ten thousand per person total or .01% chance of that being the mode of your death, rather than cancer or heart disease.
One has to ask whether this kind of risk level is worth what we are giving up for it. What do we get in return? We get treated like criminals, assumed guilty, herded through transport facilities like cattle into pens, with our civil liberties violated right and left. I would much rather they took all the security folk from here and shipped them over *THERE*.
As a thought experiment, imagine an insanely aggressive strain of Africanized bees shows up in your town. How will you deal with it? Will you run all over the town killing bees in ones and two’s? Will you try to make every place in town bee-proof and pass regulations requiring people seal their homes and businesses?
I know what I would do. I would track down the nest and wipe them out at source.
It is that time of year again, when a young (or perhaps not so young) spacers thoughts turn to thoughts of the International Space Development Conference (ISDC). This year it is in Dallas – Fort Worth at the Intercontinental Hotel, over the Memorial Day weekend. In total it will run from Thursday May 24th to Monday May 28th although the core events are Friday through Sunday.
You can find out much more at the web site. This is going to be a great event. Many of the principals of the new commercial space revolution will be there so it is a great place to network if for you “Happiness is the Earth in my rear view mirror”.
I will be heading there immediately after I finish my webcast edit job on a big JP Morgan Technology business conference in Boston.
I am sure many of you have heard Carla Howell’s song “How Could I Live Without Filing Taxes”. Well, now she has a music video!
As I prepare my itinerary for my next long chain of consultancy visits, my best customer (the one I do webcast editing for) has just purchased my ticket for the transatlantic leg. Now I suspect someone at Continental Airlines has a bit of a Libertarian or small government or at the very least a ‘do not blame us’ bent because the statement actually breaks out how each ‘involved government’ is stealing my money:
Equivalent Airfare:……………………….565.00
U.K. Air Passenger Duty: ……………….79.60
U.K . Passenger Service Charge:……..25.90
U.S. Customs User Fee:…………………..5.50
U.S. Immigration User Fee:………………7.00
U.S. APHIS User Fee:………………………5.00
U.S. Passenger Facility Charge:…………4.50
U.S. Federal Transportation Tax:……..30.20
U.S. Security Service Fee: ……………….2.50
Per Person Total: ……………………….725.20
I must admit it is much worse than I had thought. At times like these I remember the words of a southern gent I once worked with on a project at CSC: “Back where I come from, servicing was what a bull did to a cow.”
After reading the above, I am feeling very well ‘serviced’ by the UK and US governments.
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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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