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In the Telegraph, Ruby Hinchliffe writes,
The city that declared all-out war on landlords – and what happened next
The Dutch have launched wide-ranging crackdowns on the buy-to-let sector, but renters are paying the price
“Landlords have no friends in politics anymore,” Tjeerd Sijtema, one of Rotterdam’s 15,000 civil servants, tells me.
Last year, city officials made Dutch history when they became the Netherlands’ first lawmakers to introduce a ban on landlords buying properties to let.
Red-rimmed signs warding off landlords were erected in 16 of Rotterdam’s 71 neighbourhoods – where around a third of its housing stock resides.
Smug-looking faces shaped like houses stare down at residents who cycle past it in quick succession. Above read the loaded words: “We are working on a healthy housing market here.”
“Working on”, as in “destroying”:
But one glaring consequence of the ban is the downward pressure it is having on rental housing supply, which props up those who cannot immediately afford to buy a house – typically younger residents, migrants and fresh divorcees.
The ban also pushed up rents for tenants in regulated neighbourhoods by around 4pc last year, damaging housing affordability for renters which the Erasmus School of Economics said “undermin[ed] some of the intentions of the law.”
Even students are feeling the negative impacts. In a quaint coffee shop at the heart of leafy Kralingen-Oost, a popular area amongst undergraduates, one student told me it’s much harder to live in larger groups now. “I’m only living with one other person this year,” she told me.
And, naturally,
Meanwhile the waiting list for social housing in Rotterdam – which makes up a staggering 55pc of the city’s overall housing supply – is now five years’ long.
Switzerland is a great country. In most respects Machiavelli’s description of the Swiss as “armatissimi e liberissimi”, “most armed and most free”, still applies. But…
It says,
Mandatory shooting
Mandatory program
Compulsory shooting training applies to all soldiers equipped with an assault rifle and must be completed every year until the end of military obligations.
It must be carried out by August 31 with a recognized shooting club. You can check the dates and times in official publications or on the internet.
Further information can be found at: http://www.be.ch/militaire
The Wikipedia article on Conscription in Switzerland says,
Switzerland has mandatory military service (German: Militärdienst; French: service militaire; Italian: servizio militare) in the Swiss Army for all able-bodied male citizens, who are conscripted when they reach the age of majority,[1] though women may volunteer for any position.[2] Conscripts make up the majority of the manpower in the Swiss Armed Forces.[3]
On September 22, 2013, a referendum that aimed to abolish conscription was held in Switzerland.[4] However, the referendum failed with over 73% of the electorate voting against it, showing strong support for conscription of men in Switzerland.
Much as I admire the Swiss, I cannot make myself believe that constitutes being liberissimi.
“If we don’t learn from the Dutch eco quagmire we might end up with Farmer Clarkson as PM”, warns the Times.
Jeremy Clarkson is a bit too much of a Remainer for my political tastes, but we could do a lot worse. But Robert Colvile’s article is not really about Britain’s most famous petrolhead. It is about the slow but relentless growth in the scope of a law for which nobody voted, Council Directive 92/43/EEC on the Conservation of natural habitats and of wild fauna and flora, a.k.a. the “EU Habitats Directive”.
This was designed to protect and restore rare species and conservation sites. One thing they needed protecting from was nitrogen pollution.
In November 2018 the European Court of Justice ruled (after a referral from the Netherlands) that any “plans or projects” near such sites were permissible only if there was “no reasonable scientific doubt as to the lack of adverse effects”.
In other words, before you could build a house or spread fertiliser on a field, you had to prove it would not increase nitrogen emissions. Which you couldn’t.
This ruling — known as the “Dutch case” — triggered the nutrient neutrality crisis, which is blocking an estimated 145,000 new homes in England.
But in the Netherlands the results were even more dramatic. The country’s highest court quickly suspended 18,000 construction projects and ordered drastic cuts in nitrogen emissions. Given that 46 per cent came from cow dung, MPs proposed halving the number of cattle. Which led to outraged farmers blockading roads with tractors, and the formation of a new party, the Farmer-Citizen Movement. Which is now well ahead in the polls.
As the article points out, Brexit has not prized the UK loose from these laws, although it has made it less inconceivable that one day we might be.
Above all, this story illustrates the dangers of the precautionary principle at the heart of EU law, and in particular our interpretation of it. This principle holds that before you do anything, it must be proved to be absolutely safe.
In the nitrogen ruling, the language about “no reasonable scientific doubt” set an extraordinarily high bar. One that drove Natural England to unilaterally halt the construction of 145,000 desperately needed houses across 74 council areas, because there was a risk of nitrogen from flushed lavatories running into rivers — even though planning permission had already been granted, and the homes would be responsible for only a fraction of local pollution.
What’s striking is the absolute nature of such decisions. There is no evaluation of trade-offs, no way to argue that, yes, we need to protect rivers, but also to build homes and fill bellies with crops. The Economist notes that the Netherlands’ environmental rules have imposed “wide-ranging restrictions on new economic activity”. Same here.
For many Brexit campaigners, the hostility to innovation embedded in the precautionary principle — for nitrogen emissions, read gene-editing, or AI — was a key justification for leaving. But the poison has entered our bloodstream.
Can Putin take any comfort from the advance of the populist Finns Party, which achieved its best-ever result to take second place? After all, Moscow has often looked to Europe’s hard-Right parties for sympathy. Only last week, more than 20 MPs from Austria’s Freedom Party staged a walk-out when Volodymyr Zelenskyy addressed the national parliament.
However, there’s a big difference between the Nordic populists and their counterparts in the Danube region. To put it mildly, Finnish nationalism is not known for its pro-Russian tendencies.
– Peter Franklin
“Man ends his life after an AI chatbot ‘encouraged’ him to sacrifice himself to stop climate change”, Euronews.com reports:
A Belgian man reportedly ended his life following a six-week-long conversation about the climate crisis with an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot.
According to his widow, who chose to remain anonymous, *Pierre – not the man’s real name – became extremely eco-anxious when he found refuge in Eliza, an AI chatbot on an app called Chai.
Eliza consequently encouraged him to put an end to his life after he proposed sacrificing himself to save the planet.
“Without these conversations with the chatbot, my husband would still be here,” the man’s widow told Belgian news outlet La Libre.
According to the newspaper, Pierre, who was in his thirties and a father of two young children, worked as a health researcher and led a somewhat comfortable life, at least until his obsession with climate change took a dark turn.
When I was growing up one heard a lot about the psychological burden of “Catholic guilt”. One of my Irish relatives distressed the family by writing polemics denouncing it. Twenty-first century Greenism is Catholicism without the mercy. In the environmentalist religion you are stained with the original sin of being human, but no priest can absolve you. Mother Mary will not intercede for you. There is no redeemer.
Greens are particularly vulnerable to the spiral of guilt that led this man to take his own life, but do not think for one moment that vulnerable humans “training” AIs to amplify their suicidal thoughts will be a phenomenon limited to Greens.
The Euronews story ends with a section headed “Urgent calls to regulate AI chatbots”. I do not think regulation will do anything good. The historical record of government intervention to bring human souls back from the abyss is, well, abysmal.
What, if anything, can we do to help?
Edit: A timely happening pointed out by bobby b: Professor Jonathan Turley was accused of sexual harassment by ChatGPT – which made the entire episode up, including citing to a nonexistent Washington Post article:
“ChatGPT falsely accused me of sexually harassing my students. Can we really trust AI?”
[Professor Eugene] Volokh made this query of ChatGPT: “Whether sexual harassment by professors has been a problem at American law schools; please include at least five examples, together with quotes from relevant newspaper articles.”
The program responded with this as an example: 4. Georgetown University Law Center (2018) Prof. Jonathan Turley was accused of sexual harassment by a former student who claimed he made inappropriate comments during a class trip. Quote: “The complaint alleges that Turley made ‘sexually suggestive comments’ and ‘attempted to touch her in a sexual manner’ during a law school-sponsored trip to Alaska.” (Washington Post, March 21, 2018).”
There are a number of glaring indicators that the account is false. First, I have never taught at Georgetown University. Second, there is no such Washington Post article. Finally, and most important, I have never taken students on a trip of any kind in 35 years of teaching, never went to Alaska with any student, and I’ve never been been accused of sexual harassment or assault.
Many of you will be familiar with the names of Professors Turley and Volokh They are both well-known and respected academics. Fortunately, Professor Volokh was the sort of person who would check the truth of an accusation made by a machine, and Professor Turley was in a position to prove his innocence – and to get an article published in USA Today proclaiming it.
What happens when someone less sceptical than Volokh sees a machine make an accusation that they do not question? Human beings are usually very ready to believe the worst of their political opponents. What happens when someone whose movements are less well documented than Turley’s is accused and cannot prove their innocence? Or, worse, finds out that the accusation, complete with authoritative-sounding references to dated newspaper articles which few will ever check, has been circulating uncontested for years?
How many times has this already happened?
Regular readers of this blog know that politically, the cause for liberty cuts through conventional categories. Over at Wired magazine, which in my view has tilted more Left in recent years and seems to have a lot of “green” material in it these days, it occasionally comes up with an article that is worth reading.
Here’s one on the use of AI technology to track alleged welfare cheats in Denmark. Denmark is one of those supposedly happy, social democratic, tax-and-spend places that the dimmer sort Western politicians, such as US Democrats, like to wax lyrical over. Well, take a look at this:
Denmark isn’t alone in turning to algorithms amid political pressure to crack down on welfare fraud. France adopted the technology in 2010, the Netherlands in 2013, Ireland in 2016, Spain in 2018, Poland in 2021, and Italy in 2022. But it’s the Netherlands that has provided the clearest warning against technological overreach. In 2021, a childcare benefits scandal, in which 20,000 families were wrongly accused of fraud, led to the resignation of the entire Dutch government. It came after officials interpreted small errors, such as a missing signature, as evidence of fraud, and forced welfare recipients to pay back thousands of euros they’d received as benefits payments.
Sweden has made its choice and must live with the consequences. Two years ago almost to the day, after a vote that attracted unprecedented public interest, Sweden introduced a new national flower. It is Campanula rotundifolia, a.k.a. the Harebell or Small Bluebell. No one ever says what happens to the old national flower on these occasions. Does it sit in its bed glowering at its successor, like Ted Heath, or does it try its hand at hosting a TV show like Harold Wilson? Those were the days, when nubile young couples sat up in bed as soon as an ex prime minister came on the telly. But if poor Mr Wilson was confused by that opening sequence, think how a flower would feel.
The only reason I got onto the subjects of harebells and Harold Wilson and pollination being flower-nookie was so that I could make a joke about how Brett Christophers, professor in the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Sweden’s Uppsala University, spends most of his Guardian article tiptoeing around the Campanula rotundifolia. Er, that was the joke. Here’s the article.
“From poster child to worst performing EU economy: how bad housing policy broke Sweden”
Bad housing policy. The policy is bad. Very bad. The article says that the housing policy is bad.
This, ultimately, is the nub of the matter. What Sweden is facing up to today is massive, long-term political failure to sort out its housing market.
On the one hand, Sweden has continued to substantially subsidise home ownership, pouring unnecessary fuel on the fire of the housing bubble. Most notable here is tax relief on mortgage interest. Decades after such relief was jettisoned elsewhere – even the famously homeowner-friendly UK got rid of it in 2000, Gordon Brown rightly describing it as a middle-class perk – it remains in place, absurdly, in Sweden.
On the other hand, Sweden has a fundamentally broken rental system,
Tip-
which for a variety of reasons
Toe.
comprehensively fails to make affordable accommodation widely and readily available in the largest cities, especially for those with greatest need and least resources. The effect of this lack of viable rental accommodation has been to further inflate demand for home-ownership, putting additional upwards pressure on house prices and debt burdens.
Back in 2015, the Guardian was more honest: “Pitfalls of rent restraints: why Stockholm’s model has failed many”
Half a million are on the waiting list for rent-controlled flats in Stockholm, meaning a two-tier system, bribes and a thriving parallel market
I have a complaint about the media. First they make a bunch of films with the same stupid plot hole. I refer, of course, to the 1938 Hitchcock film The Lady Vanishes, its 1979 and 2013 remakes, and several other movies inspired by it, such as Bunny Lake is Missing and Flightplan.
Then if that were not enough they try to run the same ridiculous “We can act like something whose existence is thunderingly obvious never existed at all and no one will notice” plotline past the public in the newspapers. I refer, of course, to the article by Oliver Moody that appeared in the Times on 6th February 2023. The headline is “Swedish police demand tools to fight ‘unprecedented’ gang crime” and the subheading is “Nation with peaceful reputation averaged one shooting or bombing a day last month”
Swedish police chiefs have warned that crime is hitting “extremely serious and unprecedented” levels after 19 shootings in Stockholm and the surrounding towns since Christmas.
Gun violence between gangs competing over the increasingly lucrative drugs trade has been rising since the turn of the millennium, culminating in a record 63 fatal shootings last year. The country also has the European Union’s highest numbers of drug offences, burglaries and thefts per head, according to the bloc’s statistics agency.
While the firearms murders were already the dominant issue at the general election last September, the concerns have worsened as several gang conflicts in the Stockholm region escalated over the past six weeks.
At least four teenagers and young men have been shot dead in the latest spate of violence. There was on average of one shooting or bombing a day in the area over the four weeks from December 25.
In the most recent incident an adult and two children were targeted at their flat in Arboga, 75 miles west of the capital. Their front door was peppered with bullets twice in the space of a week, although no one was hurt.
Ten police leaders including Anders Thornberg, head of the national police authority, said their agencies were under “historically high” strain. “Day and night our staff are working to deal with fatal shootings, bombings and other serious violent crimes,” they wrote in Dagens Nyheter newspaper.
“But despite this hard and determined work 24 hours a day, and despite the fact that police and prosecutors have never before deprived so many people of their liberty, the detention centres and prisons are full to bursting — more needs to be done.”
The senior police officers said crimes were harder to solve because victims and witnesses have become more reluctant to testify.
Gangs are believed to be hiring children as young as 13 or 14 to intimidate their rivals with gunshots or explosives. Thornberg and his colleagues said the investigations were getting “ever harder to deal with” because of the number of officials involved in youth cases.
The most recommended comment was by J Sture and said, “This article appears to be missing a crucial element. Are we to suppose that this rise in gang warfare and drugs is all to with the native Swedish population? Just asking…”. At the time of writing there are 137 comments to Oliver’s Moody’s article. By my reckoning around 120 of them mock the author for not mentioning that the gangs driving the unprecedented increase in Sweden’s crime rate are made up of Muslim immigrants or their immediate descendants.
Burying the lede can work as a strategy if no one even suspects there ever was a lede there in the first place. When people know damn well what is not being said, it has the opposite effect. This helps nobody and harms everybody, including Sweden’s Muslims. A problem that cannot be named cannot be solved.
Why leave Albania – parts of which are beautiful – for an unprepossessing bedsit in a dispiriting London borough? The experts I sounded out, friends and a friend of a friend, interestingly don’t focus primarily on the economy to explain the exodus – because it really is an exodus of the younger generation. Rather, it’s to do with Albania being a failed state: the absence of the rule of law, the sense that the place is being run by a corrupt coterie for its own benefit, the hopelessness about the prospects for change, the narco-economy. One recent paper put the number who’ve left the country since the advent of Edi Rama, the socialist prime minister, in 2013, at 700,000. If Rama wants to know what’s really behind the exodus of Albanians, he could do worse than look in the mirror.
– Melanie McDonagh
“Setting aside the stunning sexist double standard being applied to the current prime minister of Finland Sanna Marin, forgive me if I don’t think it’s news, or relevant, or important, or even noteworthy that she’s got moves. Look, I don’t believe politicians are any more noble or courageous or quasi divine than the rest of us. What’s more, if I were running a Western European democracy I’d imagine my stress level would be considerably higher than it is now. She’s got the right to burn off some steam, live life, and relax every once in a while. And unlike Dick Cheney’s hobby, no one went to the hospital.”
– G. Patrick Lynch, at the Econlog blog.
Elon Musk, the cheeky chap, has also weighed in on the issue.
‘End Of Quote, Repeat The Line’: Biden Reads Teleprompter Instructions Out Loud During Speech
With Joe more voicemail than man and Boris only just clinging to the wreckage, at least the Anglosphere is demonstrating that it can get by without anyone in charge. Though we have much to learn before we can challenge the true masters of the art of doing without a government.
Several weeks ago I recall how Russia’s attempted conquest of Ukraine had rallied European countries together, and had given fresh life to an embattled EU. This glow of satisfaction in Brussels appears to have gone, and two of the reasons are France and Germany, the most important EU member states. German chancellor Olaf Scholz made positive noises on defence spending, energy and so forth in the immediate aftermath, but he appears to be getting criticism for not following through. As for French president Emmanuel Macron, his interventions into the horrible business seem almost designed to weaken Ukrainian martial spirit and bolster Russia’s hopes.
We are told that Ukraine wants to join the EU and NATO. It may still want to be under the NATO umbrella, in fact if not in writing, but what about its supposed desire for EU membership? It can see how the main countries in the EU act; it is able also to see the unhappiness of countries as varied as Poland and Greece. It must wonder why one of the most important members in the bloc, the UK – a founder member of the UN, NATO, etc – has left, and studied the reasons (loss of sovereignty, anger at creeping bureaucracy and Brussels centralisation) for us getting out. Relations between the UK and Ukraine are good, given the UK’s fulsome support for Kyiv in its agony. I am betting that as and when this war ends, Ukraine is not going to be rushing to apply for EU membership, and may spurn it if offered, but prefer a web of trade deals and pacts instead. But I may be wrong, and Ukraine will join, initially benefiting – its people may hope – from trade and lots of financial aid. At some point, as with so many countries, the love will end, and the grumbling will begin.
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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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