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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The summer movie season in the US used to start on the Memorial Day holiday, and the box office statistics used by the major studios until recently reflected this fact. However, ever since Twister was a big hit when released two weeks before Memorial Day in 1996, the studios have started rolling out their big summer movies starting from two weeks before Memorial Day. A couple of years ago, the box office statistics compiled by AC Nielsen EDI were adjusted to reflect this fact.
However, this year the first big summer movie was released three weeks before Memorial Day. (This may be a one off thing. Memorial Day is late in the month this year. Or perhaps the summer movie season is now always going to start three weeks before EDI tweaked the definition of summer again to take this into account. Perhaps in a few years “summer” will be statistically redefined to start in February). That first move was Universal’s Van Helsing. That was now three weeks ago, and we can start to see the first few indications of what the summer would be like.
The story of last summer has been told. Hollywood released lots of sequels, lots of high concept movies based on comic books, old television series, video games and theme parks. With one or two exceptions grosses were down from the summer before. There was lots of speculation as to whether the advent of DVDs meant that people were less likely to go and see movies in the cinema, or whether it just meant the year’s movies weren’t very good. Certainly, though, people were and are watching lots of movies on DVDs, and Hollywood was making unexpectedly immense amounts of money due to this, which sort of made up for the decline in box office revenues. (Of course, when the DVD format was introduced in the first place a few years back, a number of Hollywood studios waited a couple of years before releasing any movies on the new format. Studio people were frightened that the high quality digital nature of the new format meant that releasing films this way would make them more vulnerable to piracy, and they could not see any upside, as obviously all that would happen is that people would rent movies on DVD the way they had on VHS until then, and giving people a high quality digital experience at home would not cause them to rent or buy more movies. Obviously. Hollywood always runs away from new technology like this, and has an amazing inability to see upside in it. But the upside almost always seems to come).
Hollywood went into last summer believing that sequels were going to gross substantially more money than did the original films they were sequels to, but it didn’t happen and they get their noses bloodied a little. It takes two years for the lessons of a bad summer to sink in to Hollywood, but none the less this summer has fewer sequels and the like scheduled than last summer did. The lesson they should probably have learned is that sequels to good films can gross more than sequels to bad films, but the trouble with Hollywood being run by corporate types rather than people who genuinely love movies is that they are sometimes slow to see things like that.
One other thing that has been happening this year is what is often called “day and date” international programming. Traditionally, films were released in the US first, and would be rolled out throughout the rest of the world over a period of months. This is now happening less and less for big movies. Films are being released on the same weekend in most major markets. There are two reasons for this. The first is that Hollywood as always is afraid of piracy. Certainly they are losing some money to pirates. Once upon a time I was frequently offered illicit CD and VCDs and VHS tapes when walking down the streets of Asian cities, but if I wanted them in developed countries they would be harder to find. These days I cannot walk down Oxford Street in London without encountering someone selling illicit DVDs of movies current in the US that have probably not been released in the UK yet. Releasing movies in large swathes of Europe and Asia on the same weekend as in the US certainly reduces the window in which this activity is profitable, and this is the main reason given for the fact that there are now simultaneous worldwide releases.
But in reality this is more of a symptom than the cause. → Continue reading: The Summer Movie Season gets going
Once upon a time, I read an article in the Financial Times, which used the slightly peculiar phrase “resigned voluntarily” about six times in the article. Essentially, some CEO had in fact actually decided to leave his job in order to spend more time with his family genuinely of his own accord, and this was such a remarkable thing that the FT felt the need to explain over and over that he had not “resigned” in the usual way (ie been sacked).
A case in point today. Piers Morgan, the editor of the Daily Mirror, ceased to be the editor of the Daily Mirror. The Sun reports that he “resigned” upon the photographs that the Mirror had published purporting to show abusive treatment of Iraqi prisoners by British soldiers being proved to be forged. The Mirror itself reports that Morgan “resigned”. The media section of the Guardian reports the truth: that Morgan refused to apologise in any way to anybody, and upon making this refusal clear to Trinity Mirror’s chief executive, Sly Bailey, he was escorted out of the building by security. Given the dreadful way in which the Queen’s Lancashire Regiment and the British army in general have been libeled in these circumstances, it would have been nice to have been there to cheer the security guards on yesterday. In any event, some of the Samizdatistas did get a certain amount of pleasure out of it later.
I particularly like the way the Mirror has the words “Newspaper of the Year” above the banner headline.
And as another observation, the Chairman and Director-General of the BBC and the editor of the Mirror have now all lost their jobs due to their organisations essentially lying in order to make their case of opposition to the Iraq war. It really is not impressive on their part.
A shame we can’t get the editor of the Guardian as well though.
On March 19 1995, the Aum Shinrikyo cult released the nerve gas Sarin on five trains of the Tokyo underground. Until 2001, I rated this the most frightening news story of the previous ten years. Why? Because until then the most severe weapons that had been used by terrorists had been conventional explosives. The expression “Weapon of Mass Destruction” is overused, but as the word is usually definted, this fit the bill. As it happened, due to a combination of inexperience in deployment and concern for the safety of the people actually deploying the weapons – the concentration of sarin in the containers was apparently substantially lower than Aum Shinrikyo had considered using – the Tokyo attack only killed 12 people, although a great many more were injured or otherwise affected by the attack.
But it was extremely close. Had a few fairly minor details been different, thousands would have died. As it happened, Aum Shinrikyo had one chance only to cause carnage of this kind. They were the kind of organisation that it was relatively easy for the Japanese authorities to round up and eliminate, and the Japanese authorities did indeed do this. But what they demonstrated is that a few skilled chemists with the sorts of resources that can be moderately easily bought on the open market in a developed country can produce extremely deadly chemical weapons.
It is now 2004, and such weapons have not been used again by terrorists. (In fact, I don’t think they have been used in warfare since then either. To be truthful, they are not terribly useful in achieving military objectives unless your military objectives include killing large numbers of civilians. Saddam Hussein in the 1980s seems to be the last person who was into using them in a big way. While on that, I hope Mr Hussein is enjoying his cell in Qatar or wherever it is). Since then, we have had far too many terrorist attacks using conventional explosives, and one attack in which terrorists attempted to see if the sorts of fantasies that exist in Tom Clancy novels and James Bond movies will work in real life. (The answer was clearly yes, once. I can’t imagine that September 11 type attack will work again, however). What we have learned since then is that there are terrorists out there who wish to kill westerners in large numbers, and who have operatives who are willing (or even eager) to die while delivering the weapons. Given that, an attack such as the one in Tokyo seems a fairly obvious way to achieve such objectives. So why hasn’t it happened? I find it impossible to believe that Al Qaeda would not attempt such an attack if it could. The only explanation must be that they do not have such weapons?
Why not? Demonstrations that something is possible are usually followed by somebody else trying it. So why not here?
→ Continue reading: The puzzle of why terrorists do not have weapons of mass destruction
I spent a couple of hours at Tokyo Narita airport yesterday morning, changing planes on the way back from Sydney to London. Like many geeks people, I like to check frequently to check my e-mail / check the news / see if anyone has insulted me in the Samizdata comments section, so I wandered around the terminal looking for an internet terminal on which to do so. Narita is well served with such terminals, so I was quickly satisfied.
What is interesting here is that there are internet terminals provided by two separate companies here. The ones on the left are provided by a local ISP, and users are charged ¥100 (about £0.50) for ten minutes of use. The ones to the right are provided by Intel, and are free to use. The photograph illustrates that the usage patterns are indeed what would be predicted by the laws of economics.
It is actually quite common now to find free internet terminals for use in airport terminals, particularly in airside transit lounges where passengers may spend a few hours between flights. This is a relatively simple and cheap amenity for airports to provide to their customers, so they do. Often though, the airport does not even need to provide it: some technology company will set it up for free, in the belief that the sorts of people changing planes at major airports are the sorts of people they want to advertise their services to. As well as free internet terminals provided by Intel, I have also seen free internet terminals provided by Yahoo at Tokyo airport. (I have seen free internet terminals provided by Samsung at Sydney airport which never seem to be working – probably not a good way for the company to advertise itself). The good thing at Tokyo is that they seem to be willing to allow competition between various organisations that want to set up such terminals, and they apparently don’t have to be free.
Which when you think about it makes a certain amount of sense. If you provide a good for less than the market price, access to the good will normally end up being regulated by queues and quotas (ie willingness to wait, and restrictions on the amount of the good you consume, regardless of how much you want) rather than by ability or willingness to pay for it. (The public health systems of the world, which are full of people waiting endlessly for medical care, are prime illustrations of this). In busy periods, queues are likely to form for the free terminals, and at that point people who really need to access the internet quickly are still likely to be able to do so if they are willing to spend money. And such people can then use the terminals for as long as they like, whereas time restrictions are normally placed on free terminals. (From this we can also conclude that the health system of Australia, in which people who are willing to pay more can jump the queues of the public system and have their healthcare done privately, is better than the situation in Canada, where private provision of healthcare is essentially illegal).
In practice though, I doubt the providers of the for pay terminals at Narita are making much money, simply because the provision of free terminals there is so good. Putting them behind security restricts their use to passengers, and therefore demand cannot grow in the way it does for many free goods. They may get some use at busy times, but I suspect not much. However, in certain other airports (for instance Singapore) where there are free terminals but not many of them, for pay terminals could (and do) also get a lot of use.
And in the case of healthcare, where demand is capable of growing completely out of hand if you eliminate price sensitivity completely, private provision that people pay for directly is the only way that anyone will end up with reasonable access to healthcare. Given that (unlike with free internet terminals) people are paying for the public health system out of their own taxes in the first place, the argument for eliminating most public health care and having proper price sensitivity from the start is pretty strong.
“Money was never ever a motivation whatsoever in the decision that I’ve made . . . anyone who knows me knows that I wouldn’t make any decision based on money.”
— Australian swimmer Craig Stevens, explaining that the reason he elected not to swim the 400m freestyle at the Athens Olympics (to make way for world record holder Ian Thorpe, who failed to qualify after accidentally false starting at the trials) had nothing whatsoever to do with the $130,000 he was paid by the television station that will broadcast the games in Australia for an “interview” in which he revealed his decision.
The state of New South Wales, Australia (which contains the city of Sydney) is in some ways irritating. If anything, the state government is even worse than the government of the United Kingdom in attempting to over-regulate every aspect of its citizens lives. Carrying weapons of any kind is completely illegal. (I like to carry a Swiss Army Knife, and technically doing even that is contrary to the law). If you want to go into a supermarket and buy a bottle of wine, or a newspaper, or anything but the mildest of medicines, there are laws preventing you from doing so. (Liquor stores, newsagents, and pharmacies are all granted local monopolies). And heaven forbid if you want to go to a quite cozy bar for a drink. But there are some compensations, as fellow Samizdatista Scott Wickstein and I discovered yesterday evening.
Scott and I ventured to what is now named “Telstra Stadium”, which was the main stadium for the 2000 Sydney Olympics, which is now sponsored by a telephone company. (More than 50% of the shares of said telephone company belong to the Australian federal government, but I digress….). It was a beautiful evening, and after a beer or two in a nearby bar, we headed for the stadium.
 The game was an Australian rules football game between the Sydney Swans and the Melbourne Demons. The atmosphere inside the ground was extraordinarily pleasant. Unlike in certain sports I could mention, the home and away supporters were not segregated from each other, and the atmosphere was enormously pleasant, however fanatical were the Melbourne supporters. (And boy, are the Melburnians fanatical). With 18 players on each side, seven umpires, and certain strange figures called “runners”, who carry messages from the coaches to the players while the game is going on there are as many as 45 people on the field at once.
The game is lightning fast, and completely incomprehensible to foreigners. While many Australians think that Aussie rules football is a matter of life and death, in global terms the game is incredibly insignificant. Both teams could probably be bought for what Roman Abramovich spent to bring Damien Duff to the Chelsea Football Club in London.
As it happened my team, the Swans, ended up losing. But there are some compensations. Sydney people are enormously proud of their lifestyle, which involves going to the beach a lot, eating fine food, relaxing, and simply enjoying what life has to offer. And that applies at football matches as much as anywhere else.
And however many millions Mr Abramovich has spent, I seriously doubt that there is a bar where Chelsea supporters can enjoy oysters together after the game, as there is in Sydney. And even if there is (ha), they are certainly not this reasonably priced. And even if they are that, I am sure they are not freshly shucked.
A good many of the Australian bloggerati (including Scott Wickstein and myself) attended a fine blogger bash in Melbourne over the weekend. A splendid evening was had by all, and photos have been put up in various other places, but there was just one additional thing I have to share with the world.
This is Tim Blair.
Notice the glass of the pale coloured yellowy stuff in his hand. Tim spent the whole evening drinking chardonnay. He made some feeble excuse about how is is trying to reclaim chardonnay for capitalism, but I was not entirely convinced about his protestations. He did, after all drink a lot of chardonnay. In fact he couldn’t stop.
Could the whole Right Wing Death Beast thing be an act, when Tim has such an extreme characteristic of the enemy? I am fearful.
This editorial by Electronic security expert Bruce Schneier that was published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune does a pretty good job of demolishing the case against compulsory ID cards. The case is a pretty familiar one to readers of this site, but the main points are there: it’s not about the card itself, it is about the people who use it and check for it. And the question really is does the card help or hinder them in improving security, and does it help or hinder them if they wish to break the rules themselves, and in any event, knowing someone’s identity doesn generally greatly help in knowing their intentions.
In fact, everything I’ve learned about security over the last 20 years tells me that once it is put in place, a national ID card program will actually make us less secure.
My argument may not be obvious, but it’s not hard to follow, either. It centers around the notion that security must be evaluated not based on how it works, but on how it fails.
It doesn’t really matter how well an ID card works when used by the hundreds of millions of honest people that would carry it. What matters is how the system might fail when used by someone intent on subverting that system: how it fails naturally, how it can be made to fail, and how failures might be exploited.
The first problem is the card itself. No matter how unforgeable we make it, it will be forged. And even worse, people will get legitimate cards in fraudulent names.
Two of the 9/11 terrorists had valid Virginia driver’s licenses in fake names. And even if we could guarantee that everyone who issued national ID cards couldn’t be bribed, initial cardholder identity would be determined by other identity documents … all of which would be easier to forge.
Not that there would ever be such thing as a single ID card. Currently about 20 percent of all identity documents are lost per year. An entirely separate security system would have to be developed for people who lost their card, a system that itself is capable of abuse.
Additionally, any ID system involves people… people who regularly make mistakes. We all have stories of bartenders falling for obviously fake IDs, or sloppy ID checks at airports and government buildings. It’s not simply a matter of training; checking IDs is a mind-numbingly boring task, one that is guaranteed to have failures. Biometrics such as thumbprints show some promise here, but bring with them their own set of exploitable failure modes.
But the main problem with any ID system is that it requires the existence of a database. In this case it would have to be an immense database of private and sensitive information on every American — one widely and instantaneously accessible from airline check-in stations, police cars, schools, and so on.
The security risks are enormous.
→ Continue reading: Bruce Schneier on why ID cards will not make us safer
This story from The Register gives a fairly ludicrous story of overreach from some German police. Seeing a young man in a railway station using an Apple iBook plugged into a power outlet belonging to Deutsche Bahn, they came to the conclusion that the laptop must have been stolen and arrested him. Upon discovering that the iBook was not stolen, rather than apologising and letting him go (and maybe leaving themselves open to a lawsuit), they charged him with “voltage rustling”, that is with stealing electricity worth €0.002 from the owners of the railway station. (Actually I would think that “current rustling” or even “power rustling” would better describe that actual physics of it, but that might be just me).
Eventually (and hopefully inevitably) sanity prevailed and the charges were dropped and the man released. All I can say is that however much respect I have for the property rights of German railway companies, and even if he is a “Greenpeace activist”, I have great sympathy for him.
Although battery technology is far better than it was a decade ago, as more and more things go wireless, portable batteries are more and more the weak link in our modern electronic world. And for a certain type of individual (that includes me) keeping an eye out for accessible power sockets is just something you do. If you are the sort of person who spends most of your time at home, at work, or commuting between the two places, you are not likely to be terribly familiar with this problem, but if you are instead the sort of person who travels a lot, or is constantly on the road (or, sadly, who does not presently have a job and likes to work in coffee houses) then this rapidly becomes one of the major problems of modern life. With laptop batteries still running down in only a few hours, accessible power outlets are like clean public toilets in New York City: you take advantage of them when you can. Topping up your laptop batteries when you have the opportunity is just something you do.
If you are not away from home, the key time period is really the time between when you leave the house in the morning and when you come home in the evening. → Continue reading: The new wild west of voltage rustling.
The Australian is a national broadsheet newspaper published by Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd, and in terms of quality and direction is fairly similar to the British Times. I suppose. Like any paper it makes the odd mistake, and has to publish a correction. On Tuesday it published the following.
A story headlined ‘Syria seeks our help to woo US’ in Saturday’s Weekend Australian misquoted National Party senator Sandy Macdonald. The quote stated: “Syria is a country that has been a bastard state for nearly 40 years” but should have read “Syria is a country that has been a Baathist state for nearly 40 years.” The Australian regrets any embarrassment caused by the error.
Personally I think that if anyone is embarrassed by this, there is absolutely no need for regret whatsoever. But that may be just me.
(Thanks to crikey.com.au for pointing this out).
Paul Ehrlich had written in The Population Bomb (1968) that it was “a fantasy” that India would “ever” feed itself. By 1974 India was self-sufficient in the production of all cereals.
–Gregg Easterbrook, in a 1997 profile of Green Revolution hero Norman Borlaug in the Atlantic Monthly. (Go read the whole article. It’s good).
(Link via Instapundit).
This morning I caught a train from south London into Waterloo, as I often do. There was a significantly larger police presence at Waterloo station than I am used to. It was not intended to be large enough to cause anyone to panic, but it there were certainly more police there than there were last week. Some of the police were carrying handguns. (Police in Great Britain are not normally armed). I then walked over one of the Hungerford footbridges that connect Waterloo and the South Bank Centre with Charing Cross Station on the other side of the Thames. Walking across the footbridge were two policement, one of who was carrying a sub-machine gun. (One normally only sees such things at airports, or outside the US embassy, or somewhere like that). At Charing Cross over the river there was again a more substantial police presence than I am used to, and again quite a few of the police were armed.
This was all actually clearly intended to be pretty low key, but I could feel the unmistakeable sense that the police and security forces are nervous at the moment. After the events in Spain last week, they should be. I am nervous. But seeing this kind of response on the streets is certainly something that makes me feel closer to it.
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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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