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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If you are an even occasional Samizdata reader I am sure you will find this interview with Milton and Rose Friedman of great interest. Their opinion on immigration, for example, is predictably libertarian:
Is immigration, I asked–especially illegal immigration–good for the economy, or bad? “It’s neither one nor the other,” Mr. Friedman replied. “But it’s good for freedom. In principle, you ought to have completely open immigration. But with the welfare state it’s really not possible to do that. . . . She’s an immigrant,” he added, pointing to his wife. “She came in just before World War I.” (Rose–smiling gently: “I was two years old.”) “If there were no welfare state,” he continued, “you could have open immigration, because everybody would be responsible for himself.” Was he suggesting that one can’t have immigration reform without welfare reform? “No, you can have immigration reform, but you can’t have open immigration without largely the elimination of welfare.
I would have loved to have been there to ask him about my ideas on immigration and the politics of the minimum wage.
Perhaps instead of ‘American Idol’ there is need for a new program on ‘American Wimps’. After reading this I practically broke out laughing:
Utility companies were still struggling to restore power. By Thursday evening, electricity had been restored to 160,000 customers in St. Louis, but new reports of outages kept coming in. The day’s high temperature was 97 degrees, but the humidity made it feel like 111.
The evacuated residents were taken to “cooling centers” after leaving their homes.
“We can’t overemphasize the danger of this heat,” Mayor Francis Slay said. “The longer the heat goes on and the power is out, the riskier it is.”
I just can not get the image out of my mind of long lines of Conestoga Wagons crawling across the prairie with A/C water dripping out the back; or of the ‘Little House on the Prairie’ with a rush of cool air from the built-in heat pump as you step through their door…
This is a bit of warm weather guys. Get real. A/C has only existed in the typical American home for a couple of decades. I grew up without it. I cannot even remember anyone in our town who had it.
We lived through days like this with little more than a comment to the neighbors over the back fence. We kids ran about playing baseball in humid 90 and 100F July days. Our parents made dinner in the unairconditioned kitchen and worked in the garden with little more than a sunhat.
Am I the only one who finds the above article… embarrassing?
Although I have lived in Belfast for a very long time, I have rarely written about it, primarily because of hate-mongering gits who turn any mention of Northern Ireland into an excuse for personal attack and pointless flaming. So… if you are one of them, go away. This article will bore you and any attempt to discuss politics will be deleted on sight.
Few of our readers have the slightest knowledge of Belfast outside of what is written over drinks in the Europa Hotel bar or from live media feeding frenzies where a handful of rioters get photographed, filmed and interviewed by a small army of bleeding-lede starved media mavens. This creates a distorted view of our town and has virtually no relationship to the daily lives of anyone who lives here. The ‘exciting’ Belfast is long gone. This is not to say we do not have some problems with hooligans, particularly around July 12th…
 Photo: Dale Amon, all rights reservedReporters at the Europa missed this one!
What the reporters do not bother to show you is that this is an incredibly beautiful place. When we get a perfect day like today, It is simply stunning. That is what this article is about. Nothing newsworthy. Nothing political. I simply went shopping, about a mile or two of walking on foot, and took a few photos to share with you. Since the small size allowable on the front page does not do the images justice, I have made them clickable for those who really want to get the full impact of the high resolution images.
Photo: Dale Amon, all rights reserved
The geography of Belfast is dominated by the Belfast Lough and the hills on either side.
 Photo: Dale Amon, all rights reservedThere are a fair few churches about.
 Photo: Dale Amon, all rights reservedEven a wee neighborhood shopping center looks nice in the summer sunlight.
 Photo: Dale Amon, all rights reserved There are parks and parklets everywhere.
 Photo: Dale Amon, all rights reservedThere is a bird sanctuary just the other side of this railway bridge.
 Photo: Dale Amon, all rights reserved
If you had any doubts about the location of these photos, the Hercules and Goliath cranes at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in the far distance beyond the bird blanketed tidal flats would dispel it.
If there is any point to this article other than a hot day diversion, it is that journalists are trained to see and report what is ugly and mean in life while bloggers are free to show what is fun and beautiful and good with nary a worry about getting sacked for it.
Now… where did I put those extra icecube trays?
Bob Bigelow has released his first baby picture.
The Genesis 1 space station test article is working so flawlessly the Bigelow crew is wandering about with glazed eyes or collapsing to recover from long weeks of sleep deprivation.
The module unwound and inflated to its full 8 foot diameter, the solar panels are delivering power and they are receiving more telemetry data than they can handle.
 Photo: Bigelow Aerospace
Back in 2004 I put a clothespin on my nose and endorsed the Republicans over the Democrats. This was primarily because with a hot phase of a war against our sworn enemies in progress, the thought of Kerry in the White House just scared the hell out of me.
Several years on, as the Republicans continue to erode civil liberties and dig their snouts into the porker trough as deeply as any of the Democrats ever did, I am beginning to pray for enough of a Democratic success this fall to at the very least deadlock the government. The following, which I have just received from Downsize DC was the last straw:
The politicians want YOU to be a snitch
HR 1528 has already passed through one committee and appears likely to pass through another. This bill, if passed, will force you to inform on your neighbors if you have any knowledge of drug related activity. We’re not making this up. First it was illegal to deal drugs, then use them, and then to be caught with them. Now, Congressman James Sensenbrenner wants to send you to prison if you don’t inform on your neighbors! “Informing on neighbors” has always been a key feature of past totalitarian regimes. Is this really what we want for America? Click here to send your message to Congress opposing this law.
It is time to throw the bums out. The problem is, we already know their replacements are bums who are just as bad. The best we can say is a new bum is less experienced than an old bum and less capable of causing trouble for a few years.
I really wish we could get a few more libertarians into the asylum to jam a spanner into the works of government.
The air attack on the Beirut airport in Lebanon has put me in an unusual position: I must condemn Israel’s act as one of egotistical stupidity of the highest order. it is in no one’s interest to push a newly liberated and tentatively democratic Lebanon back into the throes of barbarism and chaos from whence it so recently came. I cannot help but imagine this attack has solidified even the most open minded of the Lebanonese population into a common distaste of their southern neighbor. Should this cause violence amongst factions with Lebanon to flare again, it will be an open invitation for Syria to once more crush Lebanon under its dictatorial tank treads.
Their action is about as negative to American and British strategic interests as it is possible to get. I am certain they are getting exceedingly harsh and less than diplomatic words behind the scenes words from Condileeza Rice and from Tony Blair’s envoys as well.
The damage this has done to Israel’s cause is almost inestimable.
You have lost an awful lot of friends guys. Actions have consequences.
Remember not so long ago?
Bob Bigelow’s one third scale inflatable space station is in orbit after a launch from Russia. This is the first of several unmanned test articles which will lead to a full scale station by 2015. Even so, at 8 feet in diameter and 14 feet in length when inflated, this habitat is not exactly small.
You can read a bit more about it at CNN. I would also recommend checking space.com and the other usual suspects for more detailed accounts, something I am about to do myself.
Mr Phelps:
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to explore an ultra-secret North Korean missile launch facility located several kilometers inland from a section of due south facing coastline not far from the Chinese border. There is a small town about 1-2km south of the pad, directly under the most probable launch trajectory. A mad ruler is thought to be building nuclear capable ICBM’s at this site. We do not believe their technological level makes them capable of success at the task at present, so we recommend you do not use the town as a base of operations.
Find the various facilities and report back to us. Should you be captured or your computer be eaten by starving North Korean peasants, Samizdata will disavow all knowledge of your existence.
Your targets may be found near N40°51’17” E129°39’58” via http://maps.google.co.uk/ at the 50 meter per 2.5 centimeter scale.
Good luck and good hunting.
Anyone with the slightest knowledge of economics is aware what a scam a ‘minimum wage’ is. When an artificial bottom placed on hourly rates is raised ,there are only two rational responses an employer can make: fire anyone whose value is now less than their cost; or raise prices to cover the added cost of doing business.
The raising of prices following a minimum wage hike sends ripples through the economy, like those of a handful a pebbles tossed into a farm pond. At some point everything damps out and the steady state returns. No new value has been created by the higher wages so the end result is roughly enough inflation to wipe out the change.
This analysis misses a detail however. The economy does not respond instantaneously. There is a time lag during which recipients have more purchasing power. They will pay for it later of course: TANSTAAFL. But from the viewpoint of a politician if the gain can be timed to properly coincide with something of value to them, say an election, it is a win. The pain comes later and memories are shorter than the interval betwixt elections.
I realized this morning there is a way in which politicians can hide much of the pain indefinitely: illegal immigration. Think it through. Raise the minimum wage in an environment where there is cheap, willing labour, undocumented and outside the system. What is the rational employer response? Raise wages for legal employees and export the costs to the undocumented workers. Illegal immigrants are not voters so this is a win-win situation to both the ruling class and those who keep them there. The voters get a higher real wage and living standard because the inflationary cost has been shifted. The pain has been exported outside the political game.
Statist politicians cannot do anything about illegal immigration because if they stop it, the deferred inflation will cause prices to rise enough to erase the excess income of their constituents. Employers will have to either drop low end jobs or else raise prices to support them. Voters will not be happy and it is well known the wallet is a bigger determinate of election outcomes than just about anything else. So, QED, illegal immigration is now a structural requirement of the centralized Western bureaucratic state.
A second force drives the need for cheap labour: the demographic transition in modern societies leads to a lowering of birthrates and a consequent labour shortage. Some places, like Japan, are looking to solve this with robots: the real deal kind. Less closed societies are covering the short fall with immigration of both legal and illegal varieties.
There is simply no practical way out of the situation in the short run and politics is all about delaying pain in hopes it will either go away or happen after you are gone.
I ran across a fascinating historical footnote in the May issue of Sky and Telescope I feel should be much more widely known.
The builder of the Rock Abrasion Tool (RAT) on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers was a small Manhattan company named Honeybee Robotics. The company offices are just a few blocks from the World Trade Center site, so it hardly bears saying the engineers were deeply affected by the events of 9/11.
They paid their respects in an unusual and touching way. With assistance of the Mayor’s office they acquired bits of mangled aluminium debris from the site. The engineers pounded and formed them into cable shielding parts.
Those bits of the World Trade Center have now been roving Mars for two years.
The JPMorgan ‘Technology06’ show for which I was webcast editor in San Francisco finally finished up Wednesday afternoon. After the loadout, or most of it, I and four of the other techs from the show caught the red eye flight back to New York. I dumped clothes into a drawer and crashed for several hours. Despite the work schedule of the last month, I only slept a few hours… the day was just too nice to miss. Call it New York City Spring. A lovely temperature, just a nice humidity, deep blue skies and a lot of smiling faces.
After a bite to eat, some catch up on my work log and a few business calls, I decided to take myself out to a movie in Times Square. Yes, I finally get around to the title line. It was the ‘The Da Vinci Code’.
The biggest question I have after watching the movie is: “What the hell is all the fuss about???” This is a decently enough done adventure/conspiracy story, typical summer fare, not intended to be great literature or win Oscars. It is just fun. Given the infantile sensitivities of our politically correct, ‘do not dare hurt anyone’s feelings lest they cry’ era, they stuck in a bit of unnecessary dialogue to make really, really sure no one would feel slighted. Perry has already spoken of what the real Opus Dei is; and in the movie they are not the bad guys either. The bad guys are a secret inner circle which just happens to have some members there. A sort of ‘Catholic Illuminati’ as it were. Yet it is a real ‘Opus Dei’ believer who in the end saves our heroes through his belief in truth and justice.
As to the premise Mary Magdalene had a child by Jesus and she was spirited off to France and secret organizations have warred in the shadows over this for some two thousand years… I ask, if people are so terribly upset about this story, then what of the various Indiana Jones movies? Or any of a hundred novels and movies I have read or seen which use biblical history as a kick-off point for a roaring good yarn?
My conclusion is the people making noise about this movie need to get themselves unwound a bit.
Now a question. Skip the Magdalene story. Prove to me through historical, documented facts of known and cross checked authenticity and provenance that Jesus Christ never knocked up any of his adoring fans. Prove to me that prophet never got himself laid. Not once. Given two thousand years and eighty to a hundred generations, virtually all of humanity could have a bit of JC’s bloodline.
I have been travelling and swamped with work since the space development conference in Los Angeles – so much so I have not even had time to post articles I have already written. From LA I went to NY and on to DC where I spent a week trying to working on a new product for an Internet Service Provider. Then I returned to Manhattan for one day: a day which by chance coincided with the opening of ‘The Da Vinci Code’ in Times Square.
I just had to go.
I went down in late afternoon after prepping for my next trip (I am as I write this at the gate for a San Francisco flight). Unfortunately, it was already sold out until near midnight.
 Photo: Dale Amon all rights reserved
Near the theatre there were a handful of religious picketers. This included some little old ladies handing out flyers but the biggest group appeared to be a Catholic one.
 Photo: Dale Amon all rights reserved
Evidently God was not quite on their side as a gust of wind knocked their large steel framed sign over, nearly hitting some passing pedestrians, not long after I took the photo.
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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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