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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Glenn Reynolds pointed out an interesting discussion over at Heretical Ideas: are Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics moral?
I started off writing a comment of my own but it rapidly grew to the point at which it really ‘wanted’ to be a Samizdata article in its own right. I feel I have some standing to speak on this topic because I actually have the creds. In short, Dr. Herbert Simon, the father of AI, was my grad school mentor and I’ve worked for the CMU Robotics Institute as a member of the research staff.
→ Continue reading: I, Puma Arm
I’ve been watching a series on BBC-2 called “The Seven Industrial Wonders of the World”. Tonight’s episode was the story of the Hoover Dam which was built during the ‘made in Washington DC’ depression era of the 1930’s. The Beeb did a mostly bang-up job and filled in much interesting detail on the harsh and dangerous condition the workers endured.
They showed the Bosses versus the Union. The organizer and everyone with him got fired and run off the job site. Many workers had serious health disabilities caused by working in improperly ventilated tunnels with gasoline powered machinery packed to the rafters. The company claimed illnesses were pneumonia when they were plainly caused by Carbon Monoxide poisoning.
One worker sued and claimed, among other things, sexual dysfunction. The nasty old bosses set a prostitute on him… and she later testified in court that his function was quite satisfactory!
The Beeb told us the heroic Union organizer was from the IWW or International Workers of the World. The Wobblies. They left out a ‘minor’ detail: the IWW was a Communist front organization. I happened to be quite aware of who they were because I gigged in a Pittsburgh South Side Bar called “Wobbly Joe’s” for many years. To those not familiar with the Pittsburgh that once was, the South Side was Steel Worker country. [Remind me to tell you the story about the night I got my tires slashed after beating a local in an impromptu drag race in my souped up MGB]
The Wobbly’s of the 1930’s were widely known to be Communists. This is no conspiracy theory. They were Reds, pure and simple. Just try a google on the terms: “IWW Communist”.
I know how Communists operate albiet (fortuneately!) not as well as some here at Samizdata who grew up under them. If this was the source of information on the Union strife at the Hoover Dam, then the information is likely as truthful as a Pravda editorial. That the BBC neglected to inform the viewing audience of this places a very big question mark on all the rest of their historical information about the working conditions and worker mistreatment.
I do not doubt things described in the documentary could be true, but I require a more trustworthy source than 1930’s Marxist-Leninists to convince me.
H. R. 3245, a bill to streamline the regulatory framework under which the new suborbital tourist business will operate, has been submitted to Congress by Dana Rohrabacher (R-Ca).
Dana has a somewhat libertarian background (or so I was told by a staffer of his from early days) but has become more a conservative Republican over the years. He still shares many ideals with us. He is also one of the few who actively support commercial space development. This is not to say it is opposed by many; most in Congress don’t particularly give a damn.
You can read the bill here, but this summarizes it nicely:
The Secretary of Transportation shall take appropriate efforts, including realignment of personnel and resources, to create a streamlined, cost-effective, and enabling regulatory framework for the United States commercial human spaceflight industry. The Secretary of Transportation shall clearly distinguish the Department’s regulation of air commerce from its regulation of commercial human spaceflight, and focus the Department’s regulation of commercial human spaceflight activities on protecting the safety of the general public, while allowing spaceflight participants who have been trained and meet license-specific standards to assume an informed level of risk. Not later than 6 months after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Transportation shall transmit to the Congress a report on the progress made in implementing this section.
If you are in the US, you may want to encourage your congresscritter to support it. The bill has inputs from many in the commercial space advocacy community, Among them are a number who actually run the small companies who will be most liberated by a simpler and clearer regulatory framework.
We might wish for a zero regulation policy, but that is not the world we are living in. Still, we can push legislation in the direction of clarity and minimalism.
China has successfully launched Taikonaut Yang Liwei into low Earth orbit (LEO).
Buzz Aldrin thinks the Chinese could launch a circumlunar flight in a few years using a modified Shenzhou.
I’ve been watching the slow moving Chinese program for a very long time. They are the tortoise to the American hare. They are not intent on spending the next four decades in LEO with the other two go-nowhere space-faring governments.
We must remember the hardware that put Buzz Aldrin on the moon is forty year old technology. The ‘computer’ in Apollo capsules couldn’t even match the calculation abilities of a cheap 21st century wristwatch. The lunar orbit rendezvous which created the need for Von Braun’s giant Saturn V was not the best way to go to the moon even then. It was merely the quickest, most brute force method. Future lunar visits, whether by governments or tourist flights, will use Earth orbit rendezvous – something which can be done with existing launch vehicles.
All else being equal, the next footprint on the moon will be Chinese. With a bit of good luck they may arrive before 2020. That would be just in time to see the last traces of the American footprints fading into the lunar soil after half a century of wild lunar day and night temperature swings.
Of course all else is not equal. The dawn of commercial space tourism in entrepreneur built spaceships is not far off.
I’d love to be among the lunar tourists waiting to congratulate the Chinese on their arrival.
There was a grain of seriousness to my second option for dealing with spammers. We can’t actually shoot spammers – however pleasant that might be – but we can expose them. The Blogosphere is a huge intelligence collection and dissemination service. There are agents (bloggers) everywhere. There are highly proficient engineers and scientists amongst us. How long could the whereabouts of a spammer remain secret with the the entire Blogosphere out to get them?
With personal contact details in hand there are simple, legal means of retaliation. We could make their life hell and do so without violating the libertarian ethos.
Small expressions of annoyance have little import if taken singly… but what happens when 10,000 people ring the spammer at home and say: “Please stop”? Or 10 people a day ring the doorbell and say the same? Or 100,000 each send one email to the home email address of the spammer? Or 1,000,000 bring a class action suit against the spammer for one pound each plus court costs?
It is not as if this hasn’t happened before. James Taranto (Opinion Journal) recently published the phone numbers of people and organizations involved in telephone soliciting. He caused them no end of grief. Six years ago the fax phone number for the London Metropolitan Police was published after they threatened a brutal and heavy handed censorship of internet news groups. They ran out of fax paper rather quickly and more importantly, ISP’s were neither raided nor shut down. (I will admit to a personal interest in the event as I was the Tech Director of the first ISP in Northern Ireland at the time).
Don’t get me wrong. I am not claiming this would wipe out spam. It raises the cost of doing business. That is enough because it means less spam.
It seems quite a few blogs got hit by a massive porn spam in the last few days. There is a good summary and links at Winds of Change
We were hit pretty solidly by it at Samizdata. Brian Micklethwaite reports he deleted a large number of them.
I’ve an idea for a technical solution if anyone at MT is listening. It would be to have a settable time threshold on comments. Commenting on an article would be closed after a specified number of days. All the Lolita posts I saw went to articles that were 3 months old. This tells me the spammers want to bolster their search engine ratings by getting lots of links in lots of different places. Otherwise we’d have seen the posts go to new articles. You don’t get many eyeballs on 3 month old news archives.
It would not be terribly onerous to remove spam from the current twenty or so ‘active’ articles. We are already are moderating those.
There is another more satisfying solution though. Given the number of libertarian and fellow travelers blogging about the world, someone should find the address of the spammers and pay a visit. A Glock has a certain, je ne c’est quoi, especially when displayed at close range to one’s nose.
It makes the words “Please stop” seem an eminently reasonable request.
Dale ponders where to place the next round
Photo: Dale Amon, all rights reserved
Radley Balko has an article in Fox News today on a subject near and dear to my heart. Senator Fritz Hollings is at long last ending his dismal career.
This is the same Senator who in 1986 attempted a media grand stand play over the graves of the seven Challenger Astronauts. He is the luddite who can not deal with the modern world of technology and information and who wants us to return to a post-WWII world of backbreaking labour. He is the Senator who wants to make the internet safe for Disney and the RIAA.
For decades he has been the best Senator money can buy. I’m sure someone will miss him, but it certainly will not be me.
Here is an idea all libertarians can agree with: removing marriage law and regulation from the State.
My only disagreement is they do not go far enough. The State has no place in matters of faith or of love. It is up to individuals to make their own decisions on such matters and self-regulate within the framework of their choice, whether it be church or private marriage registry.
It is nice, just for once, to see a wronged minority calling for a solution requiring less government intervention. The ‘solution’ of problems created by government by demanding more government is sadly the rule, rather than the exception.
It is over. Arnold basically has kicked in the teeth of the opposition with a margin of nearly a million votes over his nearest competitor, former Hispanic secessionist Cruz Bustamante.
Through the use of our secret Illuminati time communication technology (Codename Peabody), the Samizdata Editorial staff prepared deep cover for its two covert agents in California well ahead of time.
With a libertarian intelligence matter of such extreme importance facing us – regime change in one of the largest economies on this planet – we have unstintingly sent two of our finest undercover agents: Perry “007” deHavilland and Adriana “Lara Croft” Cronin to look into the matter.
They have left these shores and are expected to remain ‘in theatre’ for several weeks. We hope they will uncover details of the new governor’s purported Weapons of Mass Employment (WME’s).
Good luck and good hunting!
Agent 007 practices laying down protective covering fire…
…while Agent Lara handles team self-extraction from maddened hordes of LA socialists
I was given the names and details by an unnamed high Samizdata administration official who will remain unnamed but should of course be the target of a lengthy Blogosphere investigation so long as it is damaging to the administration and no one dares ask me any questions.
About a week ago one of our readers, known only to me as “Pierre55”, suggested I might find this french language article interesting. I did and I think others will also. It is worth the effort even if your french language skills date to barely passed courses from your teen years like mine.
There are some very interesting statistics which compare Baghdad, Johannesburg and Washington…
Glenn Reynolds has an interesting article with links on violent crime. US murder rates have continued to drop over the last ten years and are now at the lowest seen since the 1960’s.
Meanwhile, as we have seen in the last week, murder in the UK has been skyrocketing. One of the linked articles also reports something many of us have predicted. If cheap guns cannot be bought, they will be manufactured.
It turns out that is exactly what is happening in the UK. It is not as if gunsmithing were a high technology endeavour. Is there anyone out there who truly believes hand-made items manufactured in 16th century London workshops cannot be built to much higher standards in a 21st Century London garage?
Where there is a customer, there’s a way.
PS: An interesting thought struck me whilst off in the shower… we may be on the verge of a new generation of experimental and creative armourers here in the UK.
Many thanks to Glenn Reynolds for pointing out this Reuters story. It seems Polish force have found some brand spanking new 2003 dated French Roland missiles in an Iraqi arms dump.
It just goes to show: where there’s a customer, there’s a way.
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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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