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]
I can’t afford what is likely tens of thousand to go through all the legal and technical hoops over a prolonged period of time
The author of this article is correct. There’s no way to safely run a web page with user interaction in the UK.
Addendum added by the editorial pantheon:
The official samizdata position to this is… they can go fuck themselves. It is unlikely we are important enough to attract official attention but if we do, samizdata has lawyers plus the actual site is hosted in USA.
So for the avoidance of doubt… the laughably misnamed Online Safety Act will be completely ignored.
We will continue to remove/reject comments we personally find offensive (or just inane/pointless) but under no circumstances will we remove a comment we do not find offensive just because someone else might.
In this episode, we discuss pressing economic and political issues such as the challenges of government debt, inflation, and the often overlooked consequences of central bank policies. With a focus on the impact of taxation and government spending on individual freedoms and economic productivity,. We also discuss the structural inefficiencies in politics and examine the growing disconnect between politicians and economic realities.
Here is an information-dense video with far more than the usual talking points on Ukraine. It is not just about what is going on. It is useful understanding that helps with how to reason about what is going on.
Topics covered include:
Manpower and production;
training on Western weapon systems;
survivability of tanks;
effects of long range weapons;
possible trajectories of the war over the next year or so;
the USA’s self-interest in the war.
It provides good context for the usual talk of things like F16 deployments and map changes.
He says a lot of good things of the sort that have been said on this blog: socialism causes economic failure and costs lives; the individual is more important than the state; it is better if everything not forbidden is permitted than if everything not permitted is forbidden; politicians are not God; fiscal deficit is bad.
I hope that he means it, and that he can do it, and that he is not undermined by the civil service, or by whatever Argentina has in the way of a “deep state”. It would be good to see Argentina getting wealthy again. It would be bad if there are further disasters and they can be conveniently blamed, by those with bad ideas, on these good ideas that Milei is talking about.
There is undoubtedly a revolution going on in computing capability. I remember the first time I opened up ChatGPT and asked it to write me a poem, and then realised: this is something I am not used to computers being able to do.
Computers can now respond to natural language with natural language. Let that sink in.
This is not just hype. This is a new tool completely unlike any tool we already had.
These new tools are likely to change forever the way certain types of work are done. It is important to not be left behind: AI might not take your job, but people using AI might. If you can, it is worthwhile taking the time to figure out how to use it to your advantage. Thanks to the natural language capability, it has become easier: what was previously done by meticulously gathering data sets and annotating, pre-processing and cleaning them, has been done for you with these enormous pre-trained models. What previously required learning an API and some programming can now be done by having a conversation with a chat bot.
It is not just language models, there are image, video, speech and music generation tools, too. I have mostly been playing with ChatGPT (the £20 per month service that gets you access to the GPT-4 model that is much better than 3.5), so that is mostly what I will talk about here, but it is not the only thing. “Mixed mode” is something that is around the corner, too: the combination of these models to handle natural language, visual and audio information at the same time, interchangably.
There is much potential, but there is much that is immediately useful. Right now, what can we do?
Vlad Vexler noticed that nearly everyone online was certain that Putin sent a body double to Mariupol rather than visiting himself. Then he ran a poll, which revealed that most people weren’t quite so sure, and actually more people thought it was more likely that Putin did go himself.
The point being that it is very hard to tell from the shouting and hollering in, say, social media commentary, what proportion of people really agree with a thing.
That institution might underestimate how much of the general population are actually not on board with these projects. It could happen because some of the leading newspapers, most of the universities, much of the discourse in the social media forums normalise something that might in fact have only persuaded a section of the population. It could be even some kind of elite, some kind of educated elite or some kind of urban elite or whatever. But that institution, let’s say the BBC, might go on as though actually 80% of the population are persuaded and it’s only 12% that are sort of not quite there because they’re irrational or because they are backward or don’t see things that way. But they’re a minority anyway. The problem isn’t whether these social justice projects are right or wrong; the problem is you’re assuming an act of persuasion has happened that hasn’t happened. […]
It’s so toxic to broadcast to the country and pretend that the 20% represents the 80%.
It can work the other way, too. In Vexler’s example, if the BBC writes an article and 7000 comments complain about it and only 1000 comments agree with it, it might become scared of shifting tides of culture, that the majority are against them, and they might start to take defensive measures; to treat as normal a minority opinion.
Vexler argues that these kinds of misjudgements cause political shifts and are dangerous for democracy. Even on a small scale I think it is unhelpful to go around thinking that Twitter, for example, reveals very much about what people are, in general, thinking.
You are almost certainly wrong, one way or another, about how many people agree with you*.
*Unless you are libertarian. Then the answer is 11
I have updated the Brian Micklethwait Archive with a recording of an interview kindly given to me by Mal McDermott.
On 25th January 2020 Mal interviewed Brian on the subject of the history of the libertarian movement in Britain.
The interview of course contains much insight into libertarianism in London. From Brian finding a copy of The Machinery of Freedom in a bookshop in Staines, to the Alternative Bookshop and the Libertarian Alliance, to Samizdata and Libertarian Home.
Being a conversation with Brian, there is much digression. Discussed are the USSR, the NHS, the importance of being understood, the influence of getting people to give talks, the left wing pivoting from the working class to the environment, the creation of wealth, optimism and the freedom of children. There is much Micklethwaitian wisdom to enjoy.
On the left, once you’re persuaded, you’re also persuaded of a political model for how to do it … we must elect a socialist government or topple the government and replace it with a socialist regime, and then we will make everyone socialist. … By its nature it’s a highly cooperative enterprise … A perfectly reasonable reaction to becoming a libertarian is to do what I’ve done for the last fifteen years … which is to write lots of blog postings about kittens. Because I like it. … One of my reactions to believing in freedom is that I’m free to go off and do that.
We have about the highest level of taxation we have had in the UK since the 1970s. In the 2021-2022 tax year tax receipts were 30.3% of GDP. In 2009-2010 they were 25% of GDP which was the lowest level in the last 20 years and occurred under a Labour government.
The recently proposed tax changes are: cancel an increase in corporation tax; reverse a recent (unpopular with the left) 1.25% increase in national insurance contributions; cut basic rate of income tax by 1%; change stamp duty nil band from 125,000 to 250,000 (the average house price is 281,000); remove the 45% additional rate of income tax (paid by 629,000 people earning more than £150,000, to the tune of about £1.5bn (thanks to KJP for the correction)).
Such changes are welcome to me, but do not appear to be particularly radical.
Most commentators seem to be aghast at the very concept of tax cuts. Few commentators are talking about spending. Are these tax cuts really so big and costly, or is it that nobody believes that a smaller state can lead to economic growth, instead believing that government tax and spending is a zero sum game, and that anything other than a steady increase in tax and spending is terrifying?
One big problem of Brexit is that it’s created a big category error in everyone’s thinking. Problems are categorised as being caused by Brexit instead of by trade regulation.
Nobody notices the EU could just choose not to restrict food imports from the UK. Or vice versa. French people’s inability to buy British meringues is unseen.
Because we use egg, there was a real problem with ‘do we need to get a vet in to certify the egg?’ and we were being pushed from pillar to post from [the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs] and the Department for Trade and it was so difficult to understand.
Is there really any need to check food at the border? Might one not reasonably assume that British food legally sold in Britain is safe? Stopping diseases at borders might be somewhat useful but this is something that can be activated after the detection of a specific problem, just as it presumably is within the EU.
The real reason for these regulations is to make work for regulators.
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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