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.
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One of Obama’s apparatchiks has said that Britain’s membership of the EU was in the American interest.
Two responses spring to mind.
The first was… So what? This remark was obviously aimed the the dismal British government but furthering ‘the American interest’ should be very low on the list of priorities of any government that is not located in Washington DC. So even if it was true (and frankly nothing could be further from the truth), this should be of trivial import to anyone in the Sceptred Isles.
The second was… ok, so how much are you willing to pay for that “US interest”? If the US interest is served by continued British membership of the sclerotic EU, then perhaps the hapless US taxpayer should get shafted for, oh, lets say 50% of the cost?
“If you think that Westminster exists in a bubble, you should try Brussels. For the 18th successive year, the auditors have failed to approve the EU’s accounts. Meanwhile, the EU wants much more money.”
– Roger Bootle. He is writing in the Daily Telegraph, but given that the DT now imposes a paywall on non-UK readers, I am not going to bother with the link.
A year ago today I posted Discussion Point XXXVI
What will happen to the Euro? I am not asking “what should happen”, but what will happen. Take this opportunity to put your predictions on the internet, and later be hailed as a true prophet or derided as a false one.
Come, take your bows, or your lumps, and predict anew. The fat lady has not yet sung.
…out of my cold, dead hands. I am always using the tech industry as an example of how wonderful things can be when largely unregulated by governments. But of course it is not really true.
There are currently seven specifications for graphics cards – G1, G2, G3, G4, G5, G6 and G7. Graphics cards of the G7 classification have a bandwidth of 128 GB/s (GigaByte per Second) and more, without an upper limit today. The category depends on the performance – in this case measured in memory bandwidth. These GPU categories are also paired with a certain level of energy efficiency. If a graphics card doesn’t live up to the standard set by the EC it can be removed from all markets within the EU. The rules will now be constricted, which threatens next generation graphics cards.
Blah, blah, blah, etc. The thing to realise is that the EC is taking an arbitrary measurement (memory bandwidth), making arbitrary categories, and then applying energy consumption limits to the categories. But innovation does not work that way. Specialised graphics processing hardware might choose any number of other trade-offs than memory bandwidth to achieve other goals. What will happen now is that human effort will be spent on maximising performance within constraints set by bureaucrats.
Hat-tip to the libertarian sub-Reddit.
Update: The source article has been updated (thanks to Sigivald for noticing). It seems graphics cards with a high enough memory bandwidth are now said to be exempt from the regulations. But this is in itself a restriction and regulations only ever get more restrictive.
On July 1 next year, Croatia becomes the 28th member of the European Union, and under the terms of the Treaty of Maastricht this new, proud sovereign state – not yet two decades old – must accept the entire corpus of EU law; and she must place her neck in the noose of the single currency. Unlike Britain or Denmark, the Croats have no opt-out. They are now legally obliged to give up the kuna for the euro, and I say, don’t do it, folks. It is not only a mistake. To submit to the euro would be a stunning refusal to learn the grim lessons of recent Balkan history
– Boris Johnson.
Blimey, I can hardly believe I just quoted Mr. Toad. But whilst I share BJ’s sentiments on this, knowing Croatia reasonably well, I suspect there was less opposition to this than one might have expected due to the indigenous Croatian political class being such a dismal collection of pond scum and turds who floated to the top. I think the average Croatian could not see how shifting power away from these wankers could possibly make things worse. And of course they are entirely wrong on that score, as they will eventually discover.
The EU is a Seventies solution to a Fifties problem
– Nigel Farage
I just read this piece by Jeff Carter about how Germany is doing all the productive work for the entire EU. This bit in particular:
If I am the Germans I feel like the weightlifter on the bench press that just had a couple of manhole covers added to the bar. How can you have a European Union, when only one country in Europe is productive? Socialism is like that. They direct and regulate, you produce.
Which made me say to myself the phrase “Germany shrugs”. Which I then googled, and I got to this by Andrew Lawford:
Some time ago, I read an interesting article that outlined the fact that a Greek exit from the Euro would compound its problems in that it would have a new currency that would devalue markedly against the Euro, but would have all its debt still denominated in Euro. Obviously the situation would be resolved either by passing a law that redenominated all Greek debt into the new currency, or simply by defaulting on the payments of Euro debt. The end result for investors would be much the same.
The interesting thing to consider, though, is if Germany were to quit the Euro. The rule that applies to Greece would presumably apply to Germany too: a new currency would be introduced, but the nation’s debt would still be denominated in Euro. In this case, however, the new currency would presumably appreciate massively against the Euro, thus reducing Germany’s debt burden as measured in its new currency. This begs the question: would Germany redenominate all its Euro debt into its new currency? Certainly this is what investors expect as they push bund yields to record lows during the current “flight to quality”, but upon what basis can such a redenomination be expected?
And he ends by saying:
The Germans may simply shrug.
I am surprised that “Germany shrugs” (most of the google hits had an “off” bolted on to the end followed by whatever it was that Germany was shrugging off) is not a more common phrase. It certainly will be, Real Soon Now. Trouble is, the whole world, including us here, have been wondering for ages when “Germany”, by which I mean the people of Germany rather than their EU District Commissioner rulers, will finally demand that their leaders stop leading them into an economic morass and put their economic interests first.
I’m now inclined to think that I got it right at the end of this, where I said that the EU will only collapse when it has entirely run out of all its money and all its power, and all of it will then collapse.
America currently has the worst political class in its history. But if Europe doesn’t, it’s only because of how very bad it’s been in the past.
– Instapundit
I received this via e-mail and thought it was too good not to share…
Bliss.
[Greek government policy is] known as ‘drinking your way back to sobriety’.
The deficit spending the Greek government wants to do is almost-entirely suppressive or neutral to GDP – it is spending by government, for government, on government. The population is shrinking, their internal revenue picture is already dreadful and only getting worse (because they have the worst ratio of producers to consumers of tax funding in the civilized world, and getting worser) and the only way any government of Greece can survive and keep the mayhem in the streets down to acceptable levels is to restore the drunken-sailor approach to public spending that got them into trouble in the first place. This means 14 monthly pension checks a year, retirement at 50 for workers in hazardous trades like hairdressing, and all the other 1,001 ways they managed to bankrupt themselves already.
– Serial commenter llamas
Who do you hope wins the election in Greece today?
As a starting point for discussion, I thought the headline of this Guardian article “A Syriza victory will mark the beginning of the end of Greece’s tragedy” might well turn out to be true if Syriza do win, albeit not in the way the left wing authors expect.
Could Brussels have been taken over by saboteurs, a secret army of eurosceptic infiltrators and spies masquerading as officials?
I only ask because it now almost seems as if Spain’s bailout was deliberately designed not merely to fail but to inflict maximum damage on the Spanish economy and the entire Eurozone. Rarely have I seen such incompetence.
– Allister Heath
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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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