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]
Teachers hate legislation. The Association of Teachers and Lecturers is a British teaching union. In 2010 its then president Lesley Ward said:
What was being debated in the 1970s is pretty similar to what is being debated four decades later. I am onto my 15th secretary of state for education and my 29th minister for education. I have lived through, endured, survived, call it what you like, 54 pieces of education legislation since I started teaching. One more and it would be one for each year of my life.
Clearly she wants to get the government out of education and her life. “Trust us and leave us to do our job,” she concludes. Good for her!
A motion at the [ATL] conference called on ministers to introduce “stringent legislation” to counter the “negative effects some computer games are having on the very young”.
I imagine that most teachers have no difficulty holding both of these views. Most people would like government to leave them alone and stop other people from annoying them.
The other day at a Starbucks in a motorway services I was served by a young man who was, frankly, a bit useless. He couldn’t do anything without help from another member of staff who looked somewhat exasperated. I found myself speculating about whether he was worth £5 an hour.
Tim Worstall has for a long time been writing about the connection between the minimum wage and youth unemployment.
The British government obviously understands it, but won’t get rid of the minimum wage. Instead, starting today, if you employ fewer than 50 people you can apply for a £2,275 wage incentive in return for employing a young person.
In an amusing side-note, the Department for Work and Pensions, whose idea this is, seems slightly worried about age discrimination legislation. The big game of Nomic is getting increasingly self-contradictory.
This is the truth of the Wizengamot: Many are nobles, many are wealthy magnates of business, a few came by their status in other ways. Some of them are stupid. Most are shrewd in the realms of business and politics, but their shrewdness is circumscribed. Almost none have walked the path of a powerful wizard. They have not read through ancient books, scrutinized old scrolls, searching for truths too powerful to walk openly and disguised in conundrums, hunting for true magic among a hundred fantastic fairy tales. When they are not looking at a contract of debt, they abandon what shrewdness they possess and relax with some comfortable nonsense. […] They know […] that a powerful wizard must learn to distinguish the truth among a hundred plausible lies. But it has not occurred to them that they might do the same.
– Eliezer Yudkowsky, in chapter 81 of the brilliant fan-fiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, on how those who wield political power are too caught up in their power games to take the time to obtain real knowlege. (For “powerful wizard” I read engineer, hacker, scientist, mathematician, Austrian economist, Samizdatista, etc.)
In the post below, Michael Jennings writes, “Capital has been far too cheap, and much investment has gone to all kinds of stupid places where it cannot generate a genuine economic return.”
But politicians have not got it into their stupid heads, hence credit easing, a scheme in which the government guarantees loans to small businesses so that they can get an interest rate discount.
The Treasury is not forcing the banks to take greater risks when lending to businesses. So there is no reason to assume that the total volume of lending to small businesses will increase much as a result of the scheme.
Apart, that is, from the reason that the interest rates are lower, so there will be more demand for the loans. And the risk to the banks is lowered, so they can make riskier loans without increasing the risk to themselves.
So lots of businesses will borrow money and it will increase GDP and the government will look good, but, as usual, the money would have been spent more usefully had it been left in private hands.
Why is it that other infrastructure – for example water – is funded by private sector capital through privately owned, independently regulated, utilities… but roads in Britain call on the public finances for funding?
It might work, too, if roads really were private, with no subsidies to road owning companies and no government meddling in their operations, though I would be surprised if it works like that. The article suggests that this thinking is motivated by tight government finances. I rather like the idea of the government being forced to privatise everything because it has run out of money.
The president of the Automobile Association is not impressed:
In the water industry we saw big companies make big profits initially, at the same time as water and sewage costs went up by 42% and 36%.
Big profits are not a problem in themselves. But why would end user costs go up after privatisation if private companies are so efficient and competitive? It could be that before water privatisation the real costs were hidden inside other taxes, or it could be that water privatisation, much like rail privatisation, was anything but.
Charlie Stross writes great science fiction and a blog which usually leaves me wondering how I can enjoy so much the novels of a man with whom I agree so little. In a recent post he linked to an article by UCSD associate professor of physics Tom Murphy to explain why space colonisation will not happen. Since the site is called “Do the Math” I was expecting some numerical analysis of space colonisation. Instead the article contains lots of reasons why space travel is hard and slow and requires lots of energy and is not likely to be done much more by NASA, but nothing that suggests it violates the laws of physics.
I like physicists. They do real science that gets answers from proper observations. So I was a bit disappointed by the space article and went in search of goodness. There must be some good insight that a physicist like Murphy can offer.
He analyses the growth of energy consumption. Since 1650, total energy usage of the United States has increased by about a factor of 10 every 100 years. If energy production continues to accelerate at this rate, we’ll heat the atmosphere to 100C in 450 years. Murphy is not saying this will happen, he is saying that there is a limit to how much energy we will want to produce. So far so good. But how much energy can a person use? Why does it matter?
Once we appreciate that physical growth must one day cease (or reverse), we can come to realize that all economic growth must similarly end. This last point may be hard to swallow, given our ability to innovate, improve efficiency, etc. But this topic will be put off for another post.
So this is to be a Limits To Growth argument. In this other post Murphy talks a lot about the limits to how energy efficient things can be. He is right that it will always take a certain amount of energy to heat food, for example, and that there are processes that can not be improved beyond physical limits. But he seems unable to imagine economic growth without growing use of energy. Doing the same task with half the energy, something that is a routine advance in computing technology, is economic growth. Murphy admits this, but gets hung up on the fact that these other things can not improve. This is a problem, because
As long as these physically-bounded activities comprise a finite portion of our portfolio, no amount of gadget refinement will allow indefinite economic growth. If it did, eventually economic activity would be wholly dominated by us “servicing” each other, and not the physical “stuff.”
To which I say: what is wrong with that? Here is what Murphy thinks is wrong with that, and here we get to what may be his fundamental error:
The important result is that trying to maintain a growth economy in a world of tapering raw energy growth (perhaps accompanied by leveling population) and diminishing gains from efficiency improvements would require the “other” category of activity to eventually dominate the economy. This would mean that an increasingly small fraction of economic activity would depend heavily on energy, so that food production, manufacturing, transportation, etc. would be relegated to economic insignificance. Activities like selling and buying existing houses, financial transactions, innovations (including new ways to move money around), fashion, and psychotherapy will be effectively all that’s left. Consequently, the price of food, energy, and manufacturing would drop to negligible levels relative to the fluffy stuff. And is this realistic—that a vital resource at its physical limit gets arbitrarily cheap? Bizarre.
This scenario has many problems. For instance, if food production shrinks to 1% of our economy, while staying at a comparable absolute scale as it is today (we must eat, after all), then food is effectively very cheap relative to the paychecks that let us enjoy the fruits of the broader economy. This would mean that farmers’ wages would sink far lower than they are today relative to other members of society, so they could not enjoy the innovations and improvements the rest of us can pay for.
The first paragraph simply lacks imagination, but the second one is almost unforgivable. Food production has already gone from being nearly 100% of the economy to a much smaller proportion of it. Are farmers poorer as a result? Of course not. There are fewer of them and each one produces food for more people. This is how food has got cheaper in the first place. A human body needs 100 Watts to work. We could completely automate food production using some multiple of 100 Watts per person which is only a small proportion of each person’s energy budget, and there is your almost free food. With this kind of material abundance economic activity can be completely intellectual, no problem at all.
Can growth continue forever after that? It is possible that we will hit some limit of how much computation, and therefore intellectual activity, can be done with the available energy. Ray Kurzweil has tried to calculate the physical limits of computation and his answers are in units of how many entire civilisations can be simulated per second. So the limits are quite high.
This is Murphy’s other error. He writes, “I am unsettled by my growing concerns about the viability of our future”. In response to these concerns he proposes abandoning growth, not having kids and not eating meat. But he has gone the wrong way. He calculates that there are limits and is afraid of attempting to reach them. If you flip the argument around, what physics tells us is just how much wealth is possible. I have already described how material abundance can be had for very little energy. There is plenty of energy for a much larger population to live a much longer life with no material concerns and as much entertainment and intellectual stimulation as a person could want. Perhaps Murphy knows this, and it is the source of his cognitive dissonance when he writes, “such worrying is not consistent with who I am.”
Bill shock is what happens when you go abroad, let your phone download some emails, then return home to an enormous bill. It has happened to me and at least one other frequently traveling samizdatista. The BBC is reporting that the European Parliament’s Industry, Telecommunications, Research, and Energy Committee has just voted to cap the price of mobile data in order to prevent bill shock.
Which does not quite make sense. The problem of bill shock is not that the bill is too high, though it is surprising and arguably silly that the price of a gigabyte can vary by a factor of 1000 or more depending on where you are, but you are told the price in advance. The problem is that the bill is unexpected. If phone companies are guilty of something, it is that they make it difficult or impossible to detect that you are running up an enormous bill before it is too late.
A simple solution would be to use SMS to warn customers what is happening or to allow them to set a limit after which data stops working. And although the BBC article does not say so, this is exactly what was regulated in July 2010. This bit of regulation regulates a sensible solution to a real problem, even it it is not sensible that regulation was used to achieve it.
The rest of it, the arbitrary caps on prices of this and that, is just price fixing.
One minute Kim Dotcom is running a successful file sharing website, renovating his mansion, driving his luxury cars and sailing on a superyacht surrounded by topless girls. The next, his birthday party is being raided by New Zealand police with helicopters and automatic rifles. Living in New Zealand, hosting his website in Hong Kong, and running the site as a file storage service similar in many ways to DropBox or Microsoft’s SkyDrive did not help him.
The New Zealand police simply did the FBI’s bidding. The indictment states that, due to various workings of MegaUpload such as the way users could get paid for hosting popular files and unpopular files would get deleted, it is not just a file storage service like DropBox. This is not unreasonable.
But it is, perhaps, surprising that the assertions of the FBI are enough to remove a well known web site from the Internet. It turns out they can already do that, even the day after the anti-SOPA protests during which everyone complained that the government would be able to take down websites if this scary new bill passed.
I’m not necessarily arguing that Dotcom and PirateBay are good guys, although their copying of bits of information is arguably peaceful while states’ reactions are violent.
But there is a trend here I don’t like. There was a time when you could host your web site in the right jurisdiction and it would not be touched. Now governments are learning how to apply various laws to remove them. Forcing ISPs to block access makes life less pleasant for ISPs, and it is likely to be somewhat effective. I expect more websites to disappear, and I expect this to become more commonplace. Eventually it will be normal and no longer newsworthy.
As this is the anniversary of the day that the Blaine Act ended prohibition in the US, I feel that we are morally obliged to have a beer to commemorate.
– my colleague, in response to an email I sent around at work asking whether we should make the customary Friday lunchtime trip to the pub.
Whatever the tax rate, there will be some businesses that will fail, but that would survive if the tax rate was slightly lower. Football clubs are no exception. Rangers has gone into administration because it can not pay its tax bill.
Mr Clark said: “HMRC have been working closely with the club in recent months to achieve a solution to the club’s difficulties. However, this has not been possible due to ongoing losses and increased tax liabilities that cannot be sustained.”
On the radio I heard all this explained, and the member of the public interviewed for opinion blamed it on the high wages of the footballers. Sometimes people can not see what is right in front of their faces. I imagine this will be blamed on everything but excessive taxation. In any case, Tim Worstall explains that footballers’ wages are high because clubs can charge high admissions prices, not the other way around.
R is a programming language for statistical analysis and visualisation that I’m taking an interest in for a work project. It’s another open source tool that makes us richer. One way it does that is by being used by Steve McIntyre to plot climate data and replicate (or not) the hockey team’s research.
While researching R, I found R-bloggers, and in particular a post about the use of an R-generated image in Facebook’s IPO filing. The image was originally created a couple of years ago by Facebook intern Paul Butler.
But when Paul switched from plotting every friend pair to instead plotting every city pair with a great-circle line whose transparency was determined by the number of friend-pairs in those cities, something beautiful emerges: a clear image of the world, with friendship bonds flowing between the continents
The Anglosphere should be discernable in the image, or at least the original data. Lines from Britain to the USA do look brighter than those from Europe. Many of the lines obscure each other, unfortunately. A 3D version might help.
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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