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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There have been a great many animated films produced in the last 15 years. Many have been ordinary, but a surpringly large number have been good to wonderful. This article is an overview of these movies.
In the world of animation, once in a while see an animator or an animation studio going through a wonderful creative period. Over the last fifteen years, we have had three or four such hot patches. They do, I think, all owe a lot to the resurgence in animation that occurred due to the first of these, at Disney.
Until the late 1980s, Disney’s animation division had appeared to be in terminal decline. However, this somehow changed: Disney went through a stunning (but relatively brief) period of drawn animated musicals at the end of the 1980s and start of the 1990s, thanks to the wonderful musical work of Howard Ashman and Alan Menkin. In retrospect I think there were two great movies that came out of this, The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, but these changed animation forever. The two Disney movies that followed these (and which were as anticipated as they were because of them) were more financially successful, but I don’t think they were quite as good. Aladdin was an Ashman/Menkin movie, but the influence of Robin Williams made it a little uneven, in my opinion. And, very sadly, Howard Ashman was dying when he wrote the music, and it is not as finished and polished as on the earlier movies. The Disney movie that followed that was The Lion King, which had its music written by Elton John and Tim Rice, and although I think this movie is nicely made, it lacks the style of the earlier ones. After that, Disney’s drawn animation went into a steep decline, from which it has not recovered. (Just out of interest – the music and choreography of the first song – Going Through the Motions – of the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is deliberately intended to look like a number from an Ashman/Menkin musical).
Financially, these four movies were extraordinarily successful. Prior to these movies, animation was considered to be something of a niche business, but these movies changed that idea utterly. They grossed far more than anyone had believed possible. Still, though, the audience was mainly children, and this fact made them some of the most financially successful films ever made. This was because they were made after VHS video recorders were ubiquitous. VHS video was a rental business, as people generally only wanted to watch movies once. However, the exception to this was films aimed at children. Children would (and will) watch the same movies over and over, and therefore parents would actually buy VHS tapes for their children. At the time, the prices of such tapes were high, and stunning numbers of the tapes of these four animated movies were sold. (Low quality direct to video sequels were made of these films as well, and these raked in even more). The films had not cost all that much to make (animation was not an art held in high regard just prior to The Little Mermaid) and the levels of profitability were just amazing. (The profit on The Lion King is in the billions of dollars, on an investment of maybe $50 million). Even better, children’s films are hugely valuable things in studio archives, as a new generation of children comes along every few years. (The Ashman/Merkin films also were helped by the fact that they coincided with the arrival of the baby boom echo generation of children. Hollywood was too dumb to be actually aware of this, and didn’t actually figure it out until after the release of the horror film Scream in 1996, but that is a different story, although one well worth telling some other time).
Disney’s competitors saw all this, and felt that they wanted a part of this profit. → Continue reading: Waiting for Miyazaki, or Thoughts on the state of animated movies.
A couple of weeks ago, non-resident Samizdatista Alice Bachini pointed to this Telegraph piece in praise of supermarkets in general and the Tesco chain in particular, which explains that supermarkets help us to save time and money, make life easier (particularly for women), and provide a tremendous range of stuff much easier to buy at all sorts of odd hours if necessary, that Tesco provide a fine online service for people who want it, and that all round these are really good things and should be applauded. (Oddly enough, my fellow Samizdatista Jonathan Pearce wrote a similar piece between my starting and finishing this piece). Now this is a good article – it even takes a brief time out to denounce the Common Agricultural policy as evil – and on the whole I couldn’t agree more. However, there is one important issue that the author (Alice Thomson) missed. Midway through the article, she says the following
Supermarkets are always accused of sacrificing quality for quantity. Actually, because they buy in bulk and have a rapid turnover, it often means that their fruit is fresher than their competitors’. At Tesco yesterday, I counted six varieties of autumn apples, four from Britain.
Because they have such huge buying power, they can also take a gamble on exotic produce. The old corner shops were great for a packet of cigarettes, but they’d never have sold fresh basil. Supermarkets have made us more rather than less adventurous.
The result is entirely true. Supermarkets today contain a great many more lines than was the case a couple of decades ago, particularly fresh foods. But she is wrong about the reason. The reason why supermarkets are able to provide so much better products is not about buying power. It is instead almost entirely about the benefits that have been obtained by supermarket chains developing complicated computer systems to handle their logistics.
I will return to this, but for now a digression into economics. → Continue reading: Why supermarkets are good, and what this has to do with the productivity paradox
The New York Times has an article today on the pros and cons of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) being attached to products in supply chains and in stores. A couple of highlights.
Tags with the technology known as radio frequency identification, or R.F.I.D., transmit a digital response when contacted by radio signals from scanning devices. Older versions of the technology have been around for decades, but now major manufacturers and retailers and the Defense Department are pushing to speed the development of a new version that could be read by scanners anywhere in the world, making it cheaper and more efficient to track the flow of goods from global suppliers to consumers.
The Defense Department expects to issue a statement in the next few days calling on suppliers to adopt the new version of the technology by 2005. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. made a similar announcement in July when it said it was requiring its top 100 suppliers to place tags with the new technology on cartons and pallets shipped to its stores by the end of 2004.
The Department of Defence. A government mandate for doing business with that part of the government. One doesn’t have to be cynical, here. There are obvious reasons why the DoD needs and wants this technology that have nothing to do with taking away people’s privacy. (It simply allows them to run their logistics better, and potentially to keep track of what is going on on a battlefield). However, these are not the sorts of people I expect to want to put protections in place that safeguard my privacy, either.
Ms. Albrecht and other critics say that companies and government agencies will be able to monitor what people read or where they assemble from radio tags embedded in their books or woven into clothing. Unlike bar codes, which cannot be scanned unless a laser has a direct line of sight to them, the radio tags can be read through walls, and multiple tags can be read in an instant.
“R.F.I.D. certainly has value in the supply chain and in inventory management,” said Beth Given, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego. But she added that “there are so many potential issues once it gets beyond the point of sale that consumer protections need to be written into law.”
And thus we once again hit the usual quandry. There are potential benefits, very real ones, in adopting these sorts of technologies. And yet the privacy and surveillance implications are such that if we adopt them we give up a lot of privacy and hand the information to governments and large organisations almost automatically. Once again, what needs to be said is that it is possible to design such technologies so that the benefits are there and the privacy violations are not, or at least so that the privacy violations are transparent and we are informed when they are happening. But to build such safeguards in, these issues have to be discussed at the very beginning, by which I mean right now. And on the whole it isn’t happening. Do I actually expect to see such safeguards put in place. Well, to tell the truth, no.
(Link via slashdot).
Like much of the rest of the blogosphere, many of the Samizdatistas have been waiting for months, weeks, even years for Neal Stephenson to finish writing Quicksilver, his prequel of sorts to Cryptonomicon. We were promised a romp through scientific and other society of the early 18th century, meeting Newton, Leibnitz, Benjamin Franklin, and other luminaries of the time, in a doorstop length tome full of other characters curiously connected to the 20th century characters of the earlier novel. And we waited, waited, and waited some more, as the publication date kept getting put back. It was getting almost as bad as waiting for Godot Vernor Vinge.
But now, hallelujah. The book is here. Eugene and Glenn are happy. We can all get down to some serious reading, and perhaps find out what is in Enoch Root’s cigar case. (I think it is actually fairly obvious, although perhaps it is less so to readers of the American editions of the Harry Potter books).
And that’s the problem. <expletive> American editions. The American edition of Quicksilver has been out since Tuesday. The British edition is not out until October 2. We have to wait another whole week.
Well, if we are desperate, actually we don’t. The Murder One specialist bookshop in Charing Cross Road had a few copies of the American edition for £20 when I was there this afternoon. However, they were going fast. And to tell the truth I don’t have time to read the book now, and the 27 hour plane trip to Australia I will be subjecting myself to in just over a month will likely be a perfect opportunity (plus, somehow, sitting on a 747-400 at 38000 feet while flying in and out of Tokyo seems a somehow approriate place for reading a Stephenson novel. Not quite as good as sitting reading Snow Crash for the first time in 1994 in an emergency hut on a mountain in Hokkaido while waiting out a tremendous rainstorm with lots of Japanese people with much higher tech looking trekking gear than I did but who were somehow just as wet, but still good).
For now I need to be doing other minor things like finding a job. (If anyone feels the need to employ a telecommunications/technology or possibly even media analyst who is also capable of doing just about any quantitative financial job if need be, plus many quantitative jobs in other fields, please let me know. I am presently in London but would be also interesting in working in the US if anyone was willing to sponsor a visa for me).
In any event, I can also save a few pounds by waiting for the British edition: Amazon is selling that for £11.89, which means, as a true overcaffeinated Virginia Postrel devotee, I can have The Substance of Style as well. Or, I could wait and buy a copy at Neal Stephenson’s signing at Forbidden Planet on October 21. (On the other hand, maybe not. I have met Stephenson on previous book tours, and in person he is exactly the classic introvert he says he is. Which means he is great to listen to at a reading, lecture, or Q&A session, but he is rather withdrawn if you try to talk to him one on one. But this is okay. He writes wonderful pooks. However, the signing in London is just a signing).
Or I could just go back to Murder One, buy the book, and then sit down and enjoy Stephenson’s wonderfully unique take on the Baroque period, and his lengthy and fascinating digressions, and his absurdly complicated puns, and his exquisitely nerdy in jokes.
I…….Must……Resist…….
Over at the White Rose, some of us have been lately discussing the consequences of future ubiquitous computing, and whether it spells the end for privacy.
However, ubiquitous computing does of course also have its upsides. Researchers at Trinity College Dublin have invented a smart couch. This couch is capable of recognising any of the people who regularly sit on it (by weight) and greeting people individually. Future versions of the couch will be able to control the room temperature in accordance with the preferences of the individual, turn the lights off automatically, automatically switch the television to show favourite programs, and order your preferred variety of take out food.
At least, I think it has its upsides.
(Link via slashdot).
The Galileo space probe yesterday concluded its mission by entering the Jovian atmosphere and disintegrating at 1957 hours GMT. During its 14 year mission, Galileo sent back more than 14000 images, and highlights of the mission involved watching a comet crash into Jupiter and finding evidence of large oceans under the ice of Jupiter’s moon Europa.
Galileo really tested the ingenuity of the people controlling the mission at JPL, who firstly had to figure out a way for the probe to reach Jupiter despite having to use a much less powerful rocket to launch it from the space shuttle than originally intended, and then later to find a way for it to complete its mission despite the failure of its high gain antenna, meaning that data could only be transmitted at a much lower rate than originally intended.
However, ways were found, and Galileo ended up being an utterly magnificent success. We criticise the present form of NASA a lot, usually with good reason, but this mission is one that was ultimately got right. To everyone connected with it, might I offer a hearty “well done”. I’ll miss watching the photos and data come in.
A couple of weeks ago I made a brief visit to Germany. As detailed on my personal blog, I at one point looked sadly across the river Oder, unhappy that I could not walk across the bridge into Poland, but unable to do so due to the requirement that people travelling on Australian passports (such as myself) require a visa to enter Poland. There is no good reason for preventing Australians from entering Poland without a visa – we don’t actually pose any kind of threat to their country – at least certainly not any more than Britons, Americans, or Frenchmen (all of who do not require visas), but none the less we are required to get them. Thus we enter the weird world of visa requirements, which has a lot to do with ridiculous bureaucracy, governments that are on the take, and wounded national pride, but very little to do with actual common sense and little to do with governments acting in ways that would most benefit their citizens. (I am here only discussing visa requirements for tourism and other short visits. The issues that come into play for longer and working visits are something I could write a book on, so I will ignore them for now).
In terms of immigration the world can normally be divided into two groups of countries: rich and poor. “Rich” consists of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the EU and other countries in Europe that either could have joined the EU but haven’t (ie Iceland, Norway, and Switzerland) or are too small to do so (Andorra, Monaco, San Marino, Liechtenstein, etc), Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan. “Poor” is everyone else. (There are a few countries in Asia, South America and Eastern Europe (for instance Malaysia, Chile, and Hungary) that have almost but not quite made it into “rich”, and heaven knows how you categorise South Africa).
If you come from a poor country, you generally need a visa to visit any other country, although sometimes exceptions are made for countries adjacent to where you live. If people are going backwards and forwards over a border all day long, bureaucratic obstacles become truly idiotic, and are sometimes removed. (Sometimes they are not. However, in the case I was dealing with – Poles visiting Germany – they have been removed). Generally, though, rich countries want to check out visitors from poor countries before they come. That’s tough. Travelling on a poor country passport is a nuisance.
On the other hand, if you have a passport from a “rich” country there is generally no good reason to stop you from travelling anywhere. Nobody actually wants to check you out. But, sometimes the government of the country you visit will require a visa of you anyway. There are two reasons for this. National pride, and simple extortion. → Continue reading: The weird and idiotic world of national visa requirements
I want to be plain about this. The overthrow of Saddam Hussein was justified whether or not there was reluctance to authorize it. … No one could say it is wrong to overthrow a homicidal maniac. The Security Council sat on its hands for 10 years.
Don’t believe those who say they aren’t there just because we haven’t found them. Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Iraq certainly did have weapons of mass destruction. Trust me. I held some in my own hands.
— Former UN weapons inspector Richard Butler, via Glenn, to whom Samizdata remains loyal.
This Associated Press article discusses how the US Department of Justice has been using its increased powers granted under the Patriot Act just after September 11. Suffice to say that the DOJ and state prosecutors managed to get many items that had nothing to do with terrorism but which had been on its wish list for years into the bill, and it is now being used to tap phones, seize assets, and intrude on people’s liberties in ways that weren’t possible before.
Civil liberties and legal defense groups are bothered by the string of cases, and say the government soon will be routinely using harsh anti-terrorism laws against run-of-the-mill lawbreakers.
“Within six months of passing the Patriot Act, the Justice Department was conducting seminars on how to stretch the new wiretapping provisions to extend them beyond terror cases,” said Dan Dodson, a spokesman for the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys. “They say they want the Patriot Act to fight terrorism, then, within six months, they are teaching their people how to use it on ordinary citizens.”
This is just what we need.
The European Space Agency (ESA) is funding Irish provider of location technology products Mapflow to undertake a feasibility study to look into the possibility of implementing a pan-European road tolling system. The research aims to establish whether satellite technology can be used to calculate the cost of motoring.
A plan exists to complement this activity with a real demonstration of the virtual tolling concept in the greater area of Lisbon. Also under ESA funding, the project is being conducted by the Portuguese company Skysoft in close cooperation with the Portuguese motorway authority. The demonstration is planned for the end of 2004.
In April this year the European Commission published a proposal that all vehicles should pay road tolls electronically, with full implementation foreseen for 2010. Under the proposal, all vehicles will carry a ‘black box’, which will be tracked by satellites relaying information on the distance travelled by the vehicle, the class of road travelled and the time at which the journey was made.
…
Germany recently received EU approval to implement a new tolling system for goods vehicles. The system – currently being tested – uses the US-operated Global Positioning System (GPS). The government hopes to raise 650 million euros a year through the new charges.
Satellite-assisted tolling would make use of Galileo, Europe’s planned satellite navigation system. Galileo is a joint initiative between the European Commission and ESA to develop a global navigation system, scheduled to be operational by 2008.
I am actually in favour of charging for road use on a per kilometre basis. Inevitably this means using electronic tolling devices of some sort (and from a traffic management point of view this is desirable, as people do not have to stop to pay tolls, and also it is possible to manage congestion better by being able to vary tolls depending on time of day and traffic conditions). Equally inevitably this has privacy consequences.
However, having a top down approach in which a centralised EU agency moniters the movement of every car in Europe strikes me as terrifying. (Also, the further you remove the charging scheme from the people who are building and operating the roads, the less it becomes a charge for road use and the more it becomes a simple tax, too. A Europe wide charging scheme is about the worst way of doing it I can think of. What is much more desirable is a bottom up approach in which the individual owners of the roads implement their own systems, and from which they negotiate technology compatibility and a clearing house for sharing charges between themselves. Governments may still get their hands on the data, but a situation where it starts out in the private sectory and possibly works its way up is far better than a situation where everything starts in the hands of the EU and then works its way down.
This trial is perhaps partly a consequence of the fact that the EU has decided that Europe will build “Galileo”: its own alternative to the American GPS system. Having decided this, it needs to find uses for it. And if you are the EU, tracking Europeans at all times is the sort of thing that comes to mind.
(Link via slashdot)
Crossposted from Transport Blog
When the Olympic games were held in Sydney in 2000, a number of public viewing areas were set up in public spaces throughout the city. Giant video screens were erected, and large crowds gathered to watch sports events and enjoy the atmosphere.
Like in Britain, liquor licensing laws in Australia are quite strict in that if you enter a bar and buy an alcoholic drink, you must consume it on the premises of the bar. Although you have bought it, you are not permitted to walk off with it. During the games, a few portable bars were actually set up in the public spaces with the video screens. However, in order to comply with local liquor laws, certain relatively small areas of the public spaces were designated as alcohol drinking areas and barriers were erected to cordon people in these areas off from everybody else. On top of this, people in these areas were only sold drinks in cans or plastic cups. (These enclosures were quickly nicknamed “playpens”, on the basis that drinkers were being treated like small children). The dangers of broken glass were considered sufficiently great that people were not allowed to buy drinks in glasses or glass bottles. This was all very paternalistic, in the way that alcohol licensing laws in the English speaking world often are.
This past weekend, I happened to be in Germany. When I visited the Kurfürstendamm, the main shopping street of what once was West Berlin, I discovered that some kind of event was happening, declaring itself to be the “Global City 2003” festival. Now any city that is sufficiently insecure that it feels the need to declare itself to be a “global city” or a “world city” actually isn’t one. There are plenty of interesting and enjoyable things to do in Berlin (including some of the most magnificent museums of cultural treasures anywhere) but when it comes down to it the city is not London, Tokyo, or New York. And the “Global City” festival was not all that global. There was a ferris wheel and a few other rides. A catwalk had been set up in the middle of the street and there were some fashion shows. A stage had been set up and there was some live music. There were stalls selling souvenirs of various kinds.
However, the most important thing was clearly eating and drinking, and this was done in a very German way. → Continue reading: The benefits of beer glass ownership
My name is Salam Pax and I am addicted to blogs. Some people watch daytime soaps, I follow blogs. I follow the hyperlinks on the blogs I read. I travel through the web guided by bloggers. I get wrapped up in the plots narrated by them. I was reading so many blogs I had to assign weekdays for each bunch, plus the ones I was reading daily. It is slightly voyeuristic, especially those really personal blogs: day-to-day, mundane stuff which is actually fascinating; glimpses of lives so different, and so much amazing writing. No politics, just people’s lives. How they deal with pain or grief, how they share their happy moments with anybody who cares to read.
— Salam Pax, summarising how quite a lot of us actually feel, writing in the Guardian. Actually, go read the whole thing. The descriptions of how the Ba’athists attempted to censor the internet and how people got around it that follow are quite interesting.
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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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