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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Long time readers may have noticed that I vanish from time to time. A week or two here; three months there and with rarely an explanation. Perhaps I owe you one and in particular to those who have been tossing the occasional virtual egg because I’ve not updated a certain graph.
I make my living as a freelance consultant, mostly on Linux based systems with which I have worked for nearly a decade. I do security checking, networking, administration, systems programming in whatever language people want. I sometimes do user applications. I design, purchase, and build racks of servers from components for special projects. I write system documentation and specifications. I do engineering design and analysis for complex systems and products. I take on pretty much anything ‘high end’ that has enough money and a long enough time line to soak up the learning curve. I rarely do the same thing twice.
When times are really bad, I have been known to pull out the Martin guitar and ring the local bar-owners and booking agents.
Sometimes, like this last spring, I spend months on the road. Other times, like the last two weeks, I telework. In either case “Have Laptop, Will Travel” is an appropriate motto for me. Perhaps a few of you know the original version of that line… but I’m not allowed to have one of those in the UK!
When work comes I have bills paid and my head down; when there are bad times… tuna and spaghetti do become boring. The other side of that tuppence is that I have loads of time to blog when I have no money; and barely time to read what others have written on my own blog when I’ve a contract on.
The last two weeks I’ve had a job on. The booking came quite in the nick of time, but I’ll not go into the gory details of life on the edge. Consequently I’ve not been much heard from lately, and for the last week not at all.
What I do for a living is a very stark example of why borders are dead. These last two weeks I have been part of a subcontractor crew on a JP Morgan business conference in Boston. We did live webcasts of the financial reports of CEO’s and CFO’s of a large number of JP Morgan ‘associated’ companies – Google’s CEO was among them – to fulfill SEC public disclosure requirements.
I sat here in my flat in Newtonabbey, on the outskirts of Belfast and worked with a team in the US. On the days of the setup and run, the crew was spread out over three locations in Manhattan, the hotel in Boston… and my flat in Northern Ireland.
Physical location has little meaning when you meet and work in cyberspace. Borders are a joke: they have been erased by the scouring terrabytes of global connectivity. I can be and work anywhere I want on this planet, any time I wish and noone can stop or question me.
True… no one in advanced societies is trying at present but even if they did they would have a very low chance of success. An attempt to control such international working would be an economic disaster in any case. If some State tried and succeeded the result would be a brain drain of massive proportions: “Would the last computer scientist over the border please turn off the data pipe?”
That is the deadly threat people like me hold over the State. I have distributed employment. I live where I like, not where I must. I am mobile. Screw with ‘me’ and you lose ‘me’. I use scare quotes because I am just one data point, one representative of a rapidly growing class of people whose day to day life is in cyberspace.
We are the future and we are killing the entire concept on which the State is based.
In the comment section of David Carr‘s article here on Samizdata.net called Government Property, one of the commenters, Tim Haas, suggested the inimitable Dissident Frogman should come up with a suitable graphic… and indeed he has!
click for larger image
After a worrying hiatus lasting no less than eight days, Natalie Solent is back blogging:
Whew. I’m sorry that a combination of circumstances has kept me away from the computer for several days. Would you like to hear about the pump on our boiler, our header tank and the partial collapse of our garage roof? No, thought not.
Oh but we would, we would. Natalie doesn’t have comments, but if she did they would already be piling up: tell us, tell us, what happened with the pump, what’s a header tank and what went wrong with it?, etc. When did the misfortunes of others suddenly become an unfit subject for public entertainment? It sounds like terrific stuff, and Natalie should itemise every horror she endured.
I still smile to myself about the day when I first blundered into this my-misery-equals-other-people’s-happiness thing. I had a job in the building trade as a sort of very junior sub-lieutenant, and on a particularly gruesome day matters culminated in me being chased back into my sordid, dirty and leaky little caravan in the pouring rain by a big Irishman waving a trowel. He had built a slightly crooked wall during all that rain, and I had helpfully explained this to him, in between keeping up with the cricket scores in the bloody caravan. Plus there had been all kinds of confusions over some tunnelling that had been going on, and there was a hell of a muddle with the concrete, and I did some laying out of foundations for some houses that still worries me when I think about it. It had not been a good day. Basically I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, and I just wanted to go home and sleep.
But just to put the tin lid on my day of misery, I had to go to some damned party that same evening. (This was before I had discovered that the thing to do about parties you don’t want to got to is not go.) Misery. All the people there would presumably have had brilliant days and would be yacking away about how well they’d done, and all I’d have to talk about would be my insane bloody job in the insane bloody building trade, and insane Irish people with trowels and concrete-related fuck-ups and hideously misplaced suburban houses.
I entered the party, dreading it, and immediately the questions started. Who are you? What do you do? How was your day? I had just about had it at that moment, and I thought to hell with this, they’ve asked, now they’re going to be told. And of course within about a minute I was the life and soul of the party. I soon got the joke of it all myself and started exaggerating and inventing, using fuck-ups from other days, and fuck-ups I’d only heard about from other building trade idiots, and combining different fuck-ups into the same fuck-up. All those posh stockbrokers and lawyers who had spent their entire day achieving only the exact results they wanted never got a look-in.
So tell us Natalie. The collapse of the garage roof sounds especially entertaining, even if it was, alas, only partial.
With apologies to Bob Dylan… A welcome new addition to the blogopshere is David Smith, the economics editor for The Sunday Times. More and more well known journalists are seeing blogging as a useful adjunct to their work. Blogging is here to stay, ladies and gents.
David’s latest blog article is entitled How high is the next peak in base rates?… and he started off with an article with somewhat broader appeal called George Bush’s scorched-earth economics policy. The EconomicsUK Blog promises to be a regular stop for economists, policy wonks and politicos!
Welcome to the blogosphere, David!
I must be the last person in the blogosphere to have spotted this. Some guy seems to have been fired by Microsoft for posting a photo of a bunch of Macintosh G5 computers being delivered to some nameless warehouse in Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters.
It seems a tad capricious… unless of course there is more to this than meets the eye. Much as I dislike Microsoft, we have only one side of the story here so I feel no great need to follow the herd in leaping to this bloke’s defence.
For me the interesting thing is the way a personal problem of less than earth shaking import can flash around the world and get the blogosphere clucking… I guess it was a slow week for interesting world events to write about and anyway, who can resist the chance to bash the Evil Micro$oft?
Here’s our first week’s archives. As da boss said back then, “Post away and remember… let’s NOT be safe out there!”
Adriana & I recently returned from a two week business/fun trip to the USA which took us to initially to New Jersey for a couple days…
Samizdatista Walter Uhlman demonstrates conclusively that things are… bigger… in America

Adriana thought she should practice a little before venturing out
And thence to Los Angeles, where we lurked in the stygian cigar fog that is Brian Linse‘s rather nice home in the Hollywood Hills. We also ventured from there into the equally pungent Cigar Club The Grand Havana Room in Beverly Hills, as this proved to be the perpetual hang-out of our illustrious host. Therein amongst its Armani’ed and Prada’ed denizens, we encountered the splendid actor Robert Davi, who had some, interesting, things to say to us which I cannot repeat 
Welcome to Los Angeles! Your papers, please Your papers, please Your papers, please Your papers, please Your papers, please Your papers, please your papers, please
→ Continue reading: Odyssey across America
I’ve just killed off another comment spamming attack against Samizdata. It was clearly automated so I expect many of the rest of you are getting hit as well. The methodology is an attempt at subtlety… but it ignores the fact that a blog is actively monitored.
I suggest you all immediately ban the ip if you haven’t done so already: 80.58.11.45.
The attacker hits comments sections of old articles; the comment itself is trivial and innocuous. “nice website” “interesting post” and the like. They payload is the URL field.
This looks like a google-bash for hire scheme to me.
There was a grain of seriousness to my second option for dealing with spammers. We can’t actually shoot spammers – however pleasant that might be – but we can expose them. The Blogosphere is a huge intelligence collection and dissemination service. There are agents (bloggers) everywhere. There are highly proficient engineers and scientists amongst us. How long could the whereabouts of a spammer remain secret with the the entire Blogosphere out to get them?
With personal contact details in hand there are simple, legal means of retaliation. We could make their life hell and do so without violating the libertarian ethos.
Small expressions of annoyance have little import if taken singly… but what happens when 10,000 people ring the spammer at home and say: “Please stop”? Or 10 people a day ring the doorbell and say the same? Or 100,000 each send one email to the home email address of the spammer? Or 1,000,000 bring a class action suit against the spammer for one pound each plus court costs?
It is not as if this hasn’t happened before. James Taranto (Opinion Journal) recently published the phone numbers of people and organizations involved in telephone soliciting. He caused them no end of grief. Six years ago the fax phone number for the London Metropolitan Police was published after they threatened a brutal and heavy handed censorship of internet news groups. They ran out of fax paper rather quickly and more importantly, ISP’s were neither raided nor shut down. (I will admit to a personal interest in the event as I was the Tech Director of the first ISP in Northern Ireland at the time).
Don’t get me wrong. I am not claiming this would wipe out spam. It raises the cost of doing business. That is enough because it means less spam.
It seems quite a few blogs got hit by a massive porn spam in the last few days. There is a good summary and links at Winds of Change
We were hit pretty solidly by it at Samizdata. Brian Micklethwaite reports he deleted a large number of them.
I’ve an idea for a technical solution if anyone at MT is listening. It would be to have a settable time threshold on comments. Commenting on an article would be closed after a specified number of days. All the Lolita posts I saw went to articles that were 3 months old. This tells me the spammers want to bolster their search engine ratings by getting lots of links in lots of different places. Otherwise we’d have seen the posts go to new articles. You don’t get many eyeballs on 3 month old news archives.
It would not be terribly onerous to remove spam from the current twenty or so ‘active’ articles. We are already are moderating those.
There is another more satisfying solution though. Given the number of libertarian and fellow travelers blogging about the world, someone should find the address of the spammers and pay a visit. A Glock has a certain, je ne c’est quoi, especially when displayed at close range to one’s nose.
It makes the words “Please stop” seem an eminently reasonable request.
 Dale ponders where to place the next round Photo: Dale Amon, all rights reserved
Last night until late, high up in the Hollywood Hills, a veritable multiplicity of LA Bloggers swarmed into Casa Bad Dude…
Bill Whittle & Rand Simberg… Jets and Rockets

Cathy & Cecile

Matt Welch & Martin Devon

Rand Simberg & Mickey Kaus

Kate Sullivan & Emmanuelle Richard
Martin Devon, Ann Salisbury, Kevin Drum & the pseudonymous Armed Liberal
I finally got to meet Rand Simberg face to face
Sara & Moxie, who contrary to some scurrilous rumours, is most certainly not deformed!

This being Casa Bad Dude, the air was thick with cigar smoke
Update: The morning after the night before…
Brian Linse recovers slowly from last night’s festivities
Two members of the illustrious Samizdata Editorial Pantheon are going to be in the USA… myself and Adriana, on a mixture of indolent tourism and ardent capitalist business. We will be in Los Angeles from 10th -16th October and then in the New York/New Jersey area between 17th – 21st October before returning to London.
We would love to meet up with US bloggers and so we are organising blogger bashes, one which is already arranged in LA on Saturday 11th October… and one in NYC on Friday 17th October.
Please let us know if you would like to join us so we can get an idea regarding numbers.
That inimitable gentleman Brian Linse, Samizdata.net’s favourite pet pinko, will be hosting the West Coast blogger bash so numbers may be limited.
The splendiferous Jane Galt is heading up the where-and-when of the one in The Big Apple.
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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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