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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A followup posting by Michael Wells:
Two weeks after my previous post on North Korean defections, 25 defectors have stormed the Spanish embassy in Beijing and demanded asylum, threatening to commit suicide if they were sent back. China still doesn’t want to acknowledge defectors as refugees, but that position’s becoming harder to maintain as the situation becomes more visible. Pressure from South Korea and (one hopes) the US should help a lot.
I’ll be watching for soldiers defecting along the Chinese and Russian borders. The military is all that keeps Kim Jong Il’s regime in power. If they start going, it’s all over for the DPRK.
Kevin Marks has a rather different ‘take’ on the matter of reputation in the modern world. So is ‘Google envy’ the new snobbery, Kevin?
Neel Krishnaswami is taking a very centralised view of reputation that smells of a synoptic delusion to me. The real revolution in online reputation is happening from the ground up, with Google being the prime example.
Google ranks webpages on how many pages link to them. It then repeats this process, weighting the links from highly linked-to pages higher. In effect, some pages have a higher reputation than others through an emergent mechanism created by all those individual links.
One can argue whether this is elitist or democratic endlessly, but it is certainly based on a Hayekian spontaneous order.
For example, I posted Two Kinds of Order by John Marks on March 11th, and mentioned this to some colleagues who might be interested. I linked to it from a Weblog or two, and Doc Searls did too.
Today it is number 1 on a search for ‘two kinds of order’ out of over 2 million, and a search for John Marks shows it in the top ten, despite there being lots of other John Marks’s on the net.
Have I piggybacked on Doc’s reputation? Yes, but only because he thinks what I and my father wrote is worth reading. If his readers disagree, they’ll stop linking to him, and his reputation will go down.
Cory explains this in more detail, and how a centralised effort can never match this.
Neel Krishnaswami has some very interesting views in response to an article by Natalie Solent in Samizdata yesterday regarding the value, nature and possible future understanding of personal reputation:
I don’t think things will play out like this. Reputation is already extraordinarily important in determining whether you can get a bank loan or a credit card: it’s just that we call reputation a “credit rating”. Notice how this is different from the traditional notion of reputation: it’s highly specialized, with only the income and repayment habits of the person listed on it. It doesn’t matter whether one is a communist or libertarian, a Bible-thumping evangelical or an anal-fisting disco raver.
In the future, technology will enable people to create even more fine-grained ‘reputational’ judgements: the combination of computers and networking means that (in principle) one can look up every neighborhood someone has lived in and discover the price, or what magazines you have subscribed to since college, and which brands of shampoo you buy and when. This will increase economic efficiency, through the futuristic equivalent of targeted marketing, only the target niche is a niche of one consumer. These benefits won’t be captured by consumers, though because it enables firms to indulge in pricing behavior a bit closer to perfect price discrimination (eg, if you will only drink Coke and not Pepsi, then the price you pay for Coke might be increased — just for you!)
However, this is likely to be counterbalanced in two ways. First, ubiquitous networking means that price competition will get a lot fiercer. Second, people will also be able to use public-key cryptography to create multiple network identities, each of which has its own set of reputations associated with it. So you could create “sober citizen” and “wild-eyed radical” personas, independent of one another.
Two really good books on this subject are the collection Reputation: Studies in the Voluntary Elicitation of Good Conduct (Daniel B. Klein, ed) and Information Rules (by Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian). The first is really essential reading for any libertarian who wants to see how voluntarist organizations work and also how they don’t — it has a beautiful mix of theory and case studies.
Dr. Tim Evans has some interesting views regarding the reality of what many people ostensibly on the ‘left’ really think about healthcare
On 11 September 2001, Daniel Kruger, of the Centre for Policy Studies wrote a major feature article in the Daily Telegraph entitled Why half the members of trade unions have private health care. Kruger correctly pointed out whilst many members of the Trades Union Congress (T.U.C) continue to publicly attack Tony Blair’s efforts to establish an ever closer relationship between the National Health Service and British and French private hospitals, the trade union movement are themselves massively involved in a range of private healthcare schemes. Today, more than 3.5 million trade unionists have various forms of private health cover – which is more than half the T.U.C’s 6.8 million membership.
In his article, Kruger points to a trade union web site that spills all the beans called Trade Unions and Not-For-Profit Private Healthcare. It makes for remarkable reading and exposes the hypocrisy of many trade union leaders when it comes to private healthcare. This site quite rightly points out that the history of British independent health and social care is deeply rooted in the not-for-profit traditions of the friendly societies, mutuals, co-operatives and charities from whence the trade unions originally came in the early part of the nineteenth century. Today, for instance, BUPA is a mutual, Nuffield Hospitals are a charity, and people like the Salvation Army, Methodist Care Homes and Jewish Care all provide high quality health and social care services on a not-for-profit basis. There are literally dozens of other organisations underlining this deeply libertarian tradition.
Today, 7 million people have private medical insurance. Another 7 million people have private health cash plans such as H.S.A. (Hospital Saving Association), health cash schemes – as separate from private medical insurance invariably offer cash towards a range of services that were once covered by the NHS. For example, dentistry, ophthalmology, physiotherapy, chiropody, maternity services, allergy testing, hospital in-patient stays, convalescence, home help, and in some cases the use of an ambulance.
Another 1.2 million people have private dental insurance, whilst more than 20 million people pay directly for private dentistry with no insurance at all. 1.4 million people now have critical illness and permanent health insurance whilst 8.5 million will go private in 2002 for complimentary medicines such as osteopathy and chiropractics. Millions of these people will be trade unionists.
Perhaps, as the political scientist Dr. Nigel Ashford pointed out in 1997, it is under the historic and voluntaristic rubrics of mutuality and co-operation that Tony Blair might just continue with his Plan to Privatise UK Health and Welfare(1)
Come to think of it, perhaps that is why Labour’s ministers are beginning to talk about giving the best “three star” NHS hospitals “Independent Foundation Hospital” status and are endlessly obsessing about giving them “earned autonomy”. Strange bedfellows – funny old world!
(1)= (link requires Adobe Acrobat Reader which can be downloaded for free)
Paul Staines writes in with a rational explanation about how the advocates of flat-earth economics want to ‘end poverty’ by taxing the very mechanisms of trade.
Tom Burroughes wrote on Samizdata on Wednesday:
“This morning a contact of mine called up to say he was attending an event discussing the so-called Tobin Tax, which is a levy on foreign exchange transactions named after the Nobel Prize Winning Laureate of 1981, James Tobin.”
Tom might admit its not so weird when you know that contact was myself, I took his advice and put on a pinstripe, garish shirt and clashing braces – if you are going to be an evil currency speculator, best look the part he said.
Bizarre gathering, left winger Shirley Williams was the keynote speaker, ‘anti-poverty’ campaigners, the Guardian’s economics editor and a couple of economists who have never worked outside academia made up the panel. If you plan to tax foreign exchange transactions best not to involve anybody who has actually done an FX trade in the planning I guess. Besides myself, amongst a sea of ‘anti-poverty’ campaigners the only dissident voice was a journalist from the Financial Times and a pretty young student thing from London School of Economics. The cherub from the LSE asked the entirely logical question “won’t this be a regressive tax on third world traders?”
For example I’m a gum farmer from Sudan, I sell my gum to Rowntrees Ltd. in the UK so they can make fruit pastilles. I want Sudanese dinars, Rowntrees pay pounds sterling, I sell the pounds for dollars (Tobin tax time), I sell the dollars for dinars (Tobin tax time). Minor currencies are always quoted against the dollar, so if you come from a small country you pay the tax twice – and this regressive tax helps the developing world?
War on Want reckon that $250 bn a year can be raised by taxing currency speculation at a mere 0.1%. Sounds like a cheap tax with great rewards. Lots of talk about how $1 trillion a day passes across the FX markets daily. You know how it is, I buy a $1m you sell ¥130m, I buy £1m you sell $1.6m next thing you know, by days end we’ve consummated $1bn in trade. And hopefully I’m up $10,000. Did you notice how the big numbers and the profits are very different? Banks also have their profits taxed by the way. I pointed out that if you add up the profits of all the investment banks this year, it probably doesn’t even make $10bn. Its been a tough year. So where will this $250bn come from? Stand up row ensues, I don’t care about the poor being the conclusion. They were, genuinely, quite shocked to realise the sums couldn’t add up by a factor of 2500%. So much for ending world poverty next year.
Have you ever played poker for hours and ended up with the same money you started out with? Well these jokers think that we’d still play cards if the croupier stole a chip every deal. Obviously we’d play at a casino that didn’t steal our chips, say the Bahamas, Zürich or cyberspace, but I suspect Chancellor Gordon Brown will continue to be the croupier for a free market City of London, home to nearly half the world’s FX deals, he won’t start stealing the chips any time soon.
Patrick Crozier has some interesting remarks about ‘Labour women’
This article in the Telegraph got me thinking.
First of all there is Mrs Kinnock’s use of the term “real women”. It sounded far too much to my ears like “all women”, or the “only women of any worth”. The truth is that some women go out to work and others stay at home. Is that really such a terrible idea to bear?
Maybe it is. Maybe, to dyed in the wool feminists like Glenys Kinnock, the idea of total sex equality shines so bright that any woman who chooses what we might describe as a “traditional” role is in some way a traitor to her sex. Perhaps, Mrs Kinnock understands only too well that to many women home and family are far more important than boring old work. Thus they have to be forced into the workforce by economics or, as in this case, ridicule.
It is the economics that frighten me. If I ever marry or have children I want my wife to stay at home – at least for the first few years – just as my mother did with me. I believe that (usually) a mother’s love brings huge benefits to child rearing – benefits for which a child minder or a creche is no substitute. I want that choice. But I can’t have it. In London it is virtually impossible for one person on one salary to buy a house (certainly not in the careers that I am considering). Thus we are more or less forced (apologies for the quasi-Marxist terminology) to set up two income households. And hence stay-at-home mums are rapidly becoming a thing of the past.
The answer is to build (or at least allow to be built) more houses, semis and apartment blocks. Same demand, more supply, lower prices. But that is more or less impossible in London – the State decrees it. And that is a whole other issue.
When he is Irish of course! Well according to Democratic Representatives in US Congress this seems to be the case.
Rep. Carolyn McCarthy of New York seems to have allied herself with the Provisional Irish Republican Army (P-IRA). She attempted, with some of her Democratic colleagues, to push through legislation in praise of dead P-IRA terrorists. In this amazing act of stupidity, these Democrats are trying to use the American House of Representatives to further their support for the P-IRA. This group of people obviously do not share most Americans new found distaste for terrorism of any kind. This disgusting legislative act should be widely reported to all who will listen.
Oh yes, and one more point, Ms. McCarthy is a staunch anti-gun zealot.
Surely this is not the best message to send to the US’s staunch ally, Britain. Reports on this in the British press will not make it easy for Blair to convince his reluctant back-benchers to stay quiet, when and if the US/UK coalition goes after Iraq.
Either the Democrats need to do some house cleaning/reprimanding or else anyone who loathes terrorism should campaign to make sure all those Democrats who supported this bill are defeated at the next opportunity.
Lagwolf
The danger of the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA)
By Paul G. Allen
Before anyone remarks about this being Off Topic for the various mailing lists I’ve sent this to, please think about the effects this could have to Linux. In addition, even though many of you may not be US citizens, the recent happenings with international laws against cybercrime, copy protection and the like could make this US law relevant to you as well, not to mention the impact to your company should you not be able to do business in the US because of such a law. Therefore, it really is on topic, and the time to think about and act on such things is before they are written in stone, not after.
In case you haven’t heard, the SSSCA is before the Senate Commerce Committee, with a hearing earlier today (for the story and several links, including a draft of the bill). The SSSCA, if passed, would basically require that all interactive digital devices, including your PC, have copy protection built in. This protection would not allow digital media from being viewed, copied, transferred, or downloaded if the device is not authorized to do so. The bill also makes it a crime to circumvent the protection, including manufacturing or trafficking in anything that does not include the protection or that would circumvent it.
Even if there is no SSSCA, the entertainment industry as well as the IT industry both agree: we must have copy protection of some kind. While I do not disagree that many movies, songs, and other media are distributed illegally without their owners consent, and that copyright owners need some sort of protection, this is not the way to fight the problem, and doing so can, and probably will, have drastic and far reaching consequences for not only the IT industry, but the entertainment industry and the consumer as well.
Many of us have become increasingly involved with, and dependent upon, Free Software (as in GNU GPL or similar), especially the Linux operating system. This type of software is distributed with the source code, allowing anyone to modify it as they choose and need. Linux has become popular to the point that many companies, especially those that provide some kind of service on or for the Internet, rely upon it heavily. Because of the free nature of Linux, and other Free Software, it is extremely difficult to place actual numbers on how many systems are out there employing such software. Some of you, like me, can approximate the number of such systems in your own company or realm of knowledge. So how does this relate to the SSSCA?
As any programmer worth his/her salt will attest, given the resources, anything that can be programmed into a computer can be programmed out, or worked around. In the case of copy protection such as the SSSCA would require, the resources needed for circumventing it is simply the source code for the operating system of the computer, and/or other source code for applications used on the computer (such as one of the many free video/audio layers available). Now given the wording of the SSSCA, along with the DMCA and other supporting laws, it stands to reason that such Free Software would suddenly become a target for legislation. Such legislation logically may require such software to be judged illegal. Such a decision may have serious consequences to the IT industry as well as the entertainment industry and the consumer as well. Little may the consumer or entertainment industry know, but much of the technology they rely upon today is provided at low cost by Free Software. Take that software away, and suddenly doing business costs a lot more, and eventually the consumer just will not be willing to pay for it.
Now aside from the consequences to Free Software, what about the consequences to those who do not use such software. Imagine that home movie you shot last weekend on vacation. Now you wish to send that home movie to a relative, friend, whoever, over the Internet, or place it on your web site for all to download. Well, with many of the protection technologies suggested, this would not be possible, or would be extremely difficult. Some of these technologies require digital watermarks to be placed in the media, for one example. CD burners, digital cameras, etc. can not make these watermarks. The copy protection works by checking for such a watermark, and if it does not exist, the system either will not allow the media to be played, or will not allow it to be transmitted over the Internet as the case may be. So much for sending your cousin your latest home movie, or allowing your whole family to see it from your web site. An additional problem is all current media, including CDs and DVDs, you may currently legally own would not work on proposed new CD and DVD players with copy protection hardware. You would not be able to copy CDs, tapes, or anything else that you legally own in order to exercise your right to fair use, so as to listen to that CD on the cassette deck in your car.
I could go on, but I think this is long enough and has given some food for thought. Besides, I have work to do. Election time is near, so think about what that person you are voting for represents. Think about actually writing a letter to a congressman or other legislator, to a magazine (I actually had one published once, so its not beyond the realms of possibility), newpaper, etc. Many people have the attitude that they can do nothing and make no difference. Well, I say to them they are right, because there are so many people with that attitude, that none of them do anything and they make no difference in doing so. The ones that make the difference, are the ones taking a stance, and the ones taking the stance are the ones that are causing these ridiculous laws to be passed. Guess who those people are?…
Welcome to The United Corporations of America.
[Paul has been circulating this article among the various Open Source mailing lists and we at Samizdata felt it so important we’ve gotten his more than willing permission to reprint it in its’ entirety. What is happening should be of concern to all Libertarians and open source folk as well as civil liberties advocates of all stripes. The media industry is up to nothing less than buying congress so they may seize control of a resource (the Internet) they could not otherwise conquer. If they wished to build their own infrastructure from scratch, using their own money, we would have no complaints. That is not even remotely a picture of what they are attempting.
We agree wholeheartedly with law school professor Glenn Reynolds position. The media industry is ripe for a RICO. This is far more real than the so called Enron “scandal”. Enron failed to buy support. The market took its course and they are gone. The media industry is apparently much better at the bribery game and have a number of congressmen (Hollings and Stevens in particular) actively on their payroll. – Ed]
The best of humanity often emerges amidst the very worst
Michael Wells writes in with a fascinating story from Korea.
They have their own Arc de Triomphe, which is just like the one in Paris, only taller. They have a brewery that they bought in Britain and meticulously reassembled. A dead man is their eternal president. The EU sends them footballs. And every February, under threat of imprisonment, they celebrate the birthday of a small pudgy man in a jumpsuit. Natural wonders inevitably follow.
North Korea‘s psychedelic Stalinism has proved extremely durable, surviving even mass starvation and the country’s well-deserved status as planetary pariah. But there are signs that the regime may finally be losing its grip.
President Bush’s recent visit has overshadowed an amazing story. A man called Yoo Tae Jun escaped from North Korea in 1998 with his 3-year-old son. In 2000 he went back in for his wife! He was captured and imprisoned, but escaped again, turning up in South Korea on February 9. The Korea Times reported that he rode on top of trains and disguised himself as a soldier in order to escape. Think of it. Consider what it would take to escape from a place like North Korea, then imagine going back in and doing it all over again. Now contrast this amazing level of courage and resourcefulness with Robert Fisk’s thank-you-sir-may-I-have-another response to barbarism. Fisk would take his few morsels of food and thank the Dear Leader for his mercy. Yoo Tae Jun is the Anti-Fisk.
But Yoo Tae Jun is by no means the only defector. According to a recent AP story, defections from North Korea have nearly doubled every year since 1998, and there may be thousands more defectors in China. 74 defectors have arrived in the south so far this year. Pyongyang has increased the military presence along the northern border, but trying to feed them will be a major strain. The situation is beginning to look like Eastern Europe in 1989, when a trickle of defectors quickly became a flood. If China isn’t stopping them, North Korea could crumble pretty quickly.
The residue from that regime will be a sickening mess, but if there are more people like Yoo Tae Jun north of the DMZ, they’ll come through it.
Several readers have written in on the subject of the term ‘liberal’ and the following e-mails from Evan McElravy and Joe Clibbens also make good points
Evan McElravy writes:
It’s worth noting that the positive connotations of our ideology are so overwhelming that not only have the left stolen “liberal” from us, they are now working on “libertarian” too. Noam Chomsky, notoriously, refers to himself as a “libertarian socialist” and I was just the other day reading an article claiming much the same ground for Rosa Luxembourg, on the basis that she opposed Bolshevik centralism. The independent bookstore Book People in Austin, TX, where I just returned from, has their political books organized roughly by orientation. In the conservative shelf is Pat Buchanan along with David Boaz’s The Libertarian Reader, and a few other books of theirs and ours muddled together, while the “Liberal/Libertarian” shelf is home to Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, and Ralph Nader, as well as those more mainstream liberal writers you’d expect. On the other hand, the magazine section had more copies of Reason than anywhere I’d ever been, prominently displayed, and outnumbering widely The Nation and the National Review. So I’ll give them some credit, even if their history section was decidedly pedestrian.
Joe Clibbens writes:
I could not agree with you more in this campaign, and I myself have for years used the ‘liberal’ label, albeit with the necessary addition of ‘classical’ in certain company, whenever possible and never use it to refer to social democrats, but I am writing to suggest you expand it to other hijacked terminology.
The term progressive has its roots firmly in liberalism, while socialism has always been reactionary and luddite. Every time I hear a socialist referred to as ‘progressive’ I go all bug-eyed, they are in fact the very antithesis of its true meaning.
Of course ‘leftist’, traditionally speaking, would also denote minimal government, and the socialist bludgeoning of the left-right paradigm is the very reason it no longer makes any sense.
Still, all’s fair in love and propaganda, but it’s time we started fighting back.
Up the Revolution!
[Ed: I have always preferred ‘Up the Evolution!’ myself, for rational libertarians are nothing if not radical evolutionaries]
Rob Smith writes in with an view of the stupidity that transcends mere national borders.
David Carr preaches to a deaf, dumb and blind audience when he presents the gospel truth about the necessity of private gun ownership in a free and peaceful country. As an American, I have witnessed countless assaults on my Second Amendment Constitutional rights by anti-gun fanatics who are totally convinced that guns themselves are evil. No logical argument, no perfect example and no amount of evidence will ever dissuade these people from believing that they are saintly and correct. They hate guns, they fear guns and that’s all they need to know.
What is happening now in Great Britain happened in Chicago, Washington, DC, and every other American city that banned gun ownership by private citizens. Murder rates doubled. Burglaries skyrocketed. Crime ran rampant. But the people who banned the guns don’t see that their actions caused the problem. No, they attack the problem they created by demanding more gun laws.
I reside in the great state of Georgia, where the town of Kennesaw made national news in 1982 by passing a law requiring every head of household to own a firearm. (Okay– a lot of that was a political stunt pulled by the mayor after Morton Grove, Illinois made national headlines by banning private handgun ownership. Morton Grove didn’t see an increase in crime, but 80% of the people in Morton Grove didn’t turn in their guns, either.) When they heard that Kennesaw was about to REQUIRE gun ownership, news reporters and anti-gun hand-wringers immediately left Morton Grove and descended on Kennesaw, where they all predicted a New Dodge City, with shoot-outs on the streets and gutters running red with blood if the law passed.
It passed. From 1981 to 1985, violent crime dropped 71% in Kennesaw. Burglaries dropped 65%. Between 1981 and 1993, the population of Kennesaw doubled and burglaries dropped 16%. Nobody reports the success of the law because the results run contrary to “conventional wisdom” about how private citizens behave when they own guns and how criminals react to that fact.
I have heard that the definition of a fool is someone who repeats a mistake, hoping for a different result the next time. Anti-gun fanatics are fools. The deaf dumb and blind never learn.
Rob Smith
Dale Amon, from Belfast, reports on the daft new regulation to limit decibels to 83db. Are the EU mad? Who is really going to enforce this? I can imagine the first time some little dweeb from the EU directorate goes into a death metal gig in Sweden. The venue is full of leathered, iron spiked and generally cranky death-metal fans. Is the EU bloke going to ask these nutters to turn down their music, and expect to live? Just look through the pages of Brave Words and Bloody Knuckles or Terrorizer to find examples of death metal types. Never mind the fact that most death metal fans I meet are huge, well built hard men who look like they could be vikings. Is it a co-incidence that extreme/death/doom/speed metal is very popular in Scandinavia and Germany? I don’t think so. Sorry to tell you Dale but punk rockers are wimps compared to these guys.
May I suggest we send Chris Patten to Wacken or maybe the Inferno festival? Someone needs to convince him to announce from the stage at about 10pm what his intentions are. “Excuse me fellow Europeans, I am here to inform you that this venue must turn down the music to an EU-approved 83db. The EU is only concerned for your hearing and well-being.”
Well good thing about this new db rule, it will turn anyone who likes loud and heavy music against the EU in an instant. What I would love to see is an army of leather clad insensed metal-heads decending on Brussels for a huge protest.
Oh yes and Dale, there have been several songs written about the EU. One, whose name I forget, mentions the great line: “another doomed utopian ideal…” You are also mistakened if you think all musicians are socialists. The loud-mouthed ones might be, but there are many a band whose lyrics speak to a libertarian mind-set (especially in the heavy metal/hard rock genres). Of course, I know of major bands who are Tory voting, all of whom think their being ‘outed’ would hurt/kill their careers.
Lagwolf
Rockers Outraged At Regulation (R.O.A.R.) arise against fascist EU state!
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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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