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]
And here is where Britain’s particular brand of suicidal virtue-signalling becomes lethal. The Liberal West, and Britain most zealously, has spent fifteen years chasing Net Zero with the fervour of a medieval flagellant. We’ve shuttered coal, dithered on nuclear, blanketed the countryside with unreliable windmills, and now face the grim prospect of energy rationing. The National Grid’s own forecasts admit that data centres alone could consume 7-10% of UK electricity by 2030, and that’s before the real AI boom hits. Microsoft, Google, and the rest are already scrambling for power purchase agreements that dwarf entire cities. Yet our political class still preens about “green leadership” while quietly preparing the public for blackouts and sky-high bills.
The gamble on electric cars has turned into a catastrophe and it will be many years before the industry recovers.
With less than four years remaining until the original target date for banning the sale of all new petrol and diesel cars, the giants of the industry were meant to be riding a boom in sales of battery-powered vehicles by now.
Sleek new models would be rolling off the production lines, new battery plants would be creating hundreds of thousands of jobs, while the billions poured into investment would be the catalyst for reindustrialising both Europe and the United States.
“We’re going to need 70,000 skilled people just to make batteries across this country,” announced Boris Johnson, the former prime minister, back in 2021. He promised unlimited government support for British EV production.
Over in France, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, was pouring billions into making his country a force in battery and EV production.
So we are starting to see the results of all that investment, right? Sales are booming, profits are rising and new jobs are being created? Well, not exactly.
The article goes on to mention EV-related losses and potential losses incurred by Stellantis, General Motors, Ford, Porsche and even Tesla.
Antonio Filosa, the chief executive of Stellantis, conceded that the company had overestimated “the pace of the energy transition that distanced us from many car buyers’ real-world needs, means and desires”.
It is a painful admission but one that is at least honest. One point is surely clear. We are not hearing very much about how the transition to EVs would lead to an industrial renaissance any more.
There have been two major problems. First, EVs may only be a niche product.
Drivers are worried about the range, it is far from clear they are better for the environment once the impact of all the raw materials in the manufacturing process is taken into account, the charging infrastructure is not in place and we don’t generate the electricity to power them all at a price cheap enough to make EVs cost-effective.
Next, where there is a market, the new breed of Chinese brands led by BYD is walking away with it.
But fear not, our forward-thinking and tech-savvy government is on the case. Er…
Even worse, under the direction of Ed Miliband, the fanatical Energy Secretary, Britain is pressing on blindly with the 2030 target for phasing out sales of new petrol cars even as the rest of the world recognises that it is complete madness.
In January, the government’s Gambling Commission introduced yet another set of restrictions on gambling advertisements to stop people being enticed into making wagers they cannot afford. In most cases, I’m all for people – and industries – taking responsibility for their own choices, including the choice to gamble. But given that the government’s view is that gambling promotions that are too tempting should be banned, maybe it should refer itself to its own commission. In fact, the pressure placed on auto makers to switch to electric by both this and previous governments went well beyond high-pressure advertising and into coercion.
Preston Stewart has some interesting reportage about Russia being abruptly cut off from Starlink.
Whilst this is fascinating from a technical and military point of view, it also brings into focus the sheer power of one man for good or ill… Elon Musk.
Away from the perma-misery of politics, wars, regulatory nonsense and so on, I came across this article on the Substack of the Rational Optimist Society (with a name like that, it is not a place to go for the doom-scrollers):
“Housing is arguably the most broken industry in the world, with tough competition from healthcare and education. It’s a gigantic market that affects us all,” writes Stephen McBride.
He argues that firms such as Cuby Technologies are doing for housing what shipping containers did for transportation and global trade, with massively positive effects.
Cuby’s product is the Mobile Micro-Factory (MMFTM). It’s a standardized, portable factory that turns homebuilding into a predictable manufacturing process. I can see that acronym MMF, in this context, getting the same visibility as SMR for “small modular reactors”, and tapping into the same idea of using economies of scale, mass customisation and fiendishly clever computer tech to produce lots of useful, not eye-wateringly expensive things for our homes, power generators, whatever. And I can see, in time, how this fits with still-developing tech such as 3-D printing (which has been around a while). It will of course give some folk the vapours, such as those in the construction trades, much as happened with other disruptive changes. But if, for example, ageing and other forces squeeze labour market supply of people in such trades, then business models such as the MMF one, able to churn out homes, will have a lot of appeal. Plus new jobs can be created around design and all the associated, value-add opportunities that can arise.
One aspect of all this is that if it lives up to the billing, the precision with which homes are built will be very high.
Also, there is an appeal, is there not, for the likes of Elon Musk in figuring out how to efficiently produce things for spacefaring and the settlement of Mars. I can bet he is following all this closely.
Final thought – for places that have suffered a devastating loss of housing (such as Southern California exactly a year ago because of the fires), being able to produce attractive homes at scale for people seems to have a lot of appeal. And, er, that’s where the horrible politics comes in. To date, only a fraction of the number of houses lost have been replaced. That is a shameful state of affairs, and one for which the local politicians deserve to pay a high price.
This holiday, unwrap the power of one: USB-C for all.
Yes, not just phones, tablets, and laptops. In three years, every charger will be under the same tree.
Because less waste, smarter choices, mean more for everyone, all year long.
https://link.europa.eu/QDMFTh
This is an excerpt from a scholarly article about the history of Islam:
By the beginning of the fourth century of the hijra (about A.D. 900), however, the point had been reached when scholars of all schools felt that all essential questions had been thoroughly discussed and finally settled, and a consensus gradually established itself to the effect that from that time onwards no one might be deemed to have the necessary qualifications for independent reasoning in law, and that all future activity would have to be confined to the explanation, application, and, at the most, interpretation of the doctrine as it had been laid down once and for all. This ‘closing of the door of ijtihad‘, as it was called, amounted to the demand for taklid, a term which had originally denoted the kind of reference to Companions of the Prophet that had been customary in the ancient schools of law, and which now came to mean the unquestioning acceptance of the doctrines of established schools and authorities.
If you think that the ability of the European Commission to recognise when something has reached a point where no improvement is possible is good enough to allow it to safely close the door of ijtihad on charger cable design, consider the evident fact that none of the multiple people in the Berlaymont building over whose desks the draft of that tweet must have passed knew enough history to veto that title.
Police could be given access to Britain’s passport database to catch criminals under an expansion of facial recognition technology that could be deployed in every city, town and village.
Labour is proposing that police be allowed to compare photos of crime suspects from CCTV, doorbells and dashcams against facial images on government databases, including the passports of 45 million Britons, and immigration records.
The plans are part of a Home Office consultation launched on Thursday to establish a legal framework for all police forces to use facial recognition technology to catch wanted criminals and crime suspects.
As a commenter on the UK Politics subreddit called Eldritch_Lemonade observes,
Oh look, it’s taken 3 months to go from rolling out 10 vans with facial recognition to be used in specific and targeted ways to every town in the country scanning your face constantly
That Home Office “news story” with the title “Live Facial Recognition technology to catch high-harm offenders” to which Eldritch_Lemonade linked was issued on 13 August 2025. Naughty Eldritch was exaggerating with the “three months”; it’s nearer four. A whole three months and three weeks ago the Home Office reassured us that…
The new vans will operate according to strict rules, which ensure they are only deployed when there is specific intelligence. The College of Policing has clear guidance on how the technology should be used.
These vehicles enable law enforcement to target and locate wanted criminals and suspects for the most serious crimes including sex offences, violent assaults, homicide and serious and organised crime. Forces already using LFR have used it to arrest rape, domestic abuse, knife crime and robbery suspects as well as sex offenders breaching their conditions. The technology has also been used to maintain safety at big public events.
Existing safeguards require checks only to be done against police watchlists of wanted criminals, suspects and those subject to bail or court order conditions like sex offenders. Watchlists are bespoke to every deployment, with officers following strict guidance from the College of Policing guidance when composing a list.
“Nuclear has re-entered the chat because it’s the only energy source that can deliver enough clean, safe, round-the-clock electricity to feed AI. Nuclear is to AI what oil was to the Industrial Age. It’s the fuel for a new era of exponential progress.”
Public support for digital IDs has collapsed after Keir Starmer announced plans for their introduction, in what has been described as a symptom of the prime minister’s “reverse Midas touch”.
Net support for digital ID cards fell from 35% in the early summer to -14% at the weekend after Starmer’s announcement, according to polling by More in Common.
The findings suggest that the proposal has suffered considerably from its association with an unpopular government. In June, 53% of voters surveyed said they were in favour of digital ID cards for all Britons, while 19% were opposed.
The prime minister believes it would help crack down on illegal working and modernise the state, according to senior figures in government.
The practicalities of the scheme will be subject to a consultation, which will also look at how to make it work for those without a smartphone or passport.
The previous Labour government’s attempt to introduce ID cards was ultimately blocked by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition.
But earlier this month, Sir Keir said he thought the debate had “moved on” since then, adding: “We all carry a lot more digital ID now than we did 20 years ago”.
“We all carry a lot more digital ID now than we did 20 years ago.” So we do, and that means we all have available a variety of independent digital means to prove our identity that are not subject to the danger of putting all our eggs in one government-made basket. Twenty years ago – well, 22 years ago to be precise – I made a post called “A law-abiding person has nothing to hide?” in which I listed some situations in which a law-abiding person could indeed be harmed by having their identity known by local or national government, or by whoever hacks into the government database, or by whoever gets their mate in the police to do a search for them. Has the passage of two decades made any of those scenarios, or the other scenarios suggested in the comments to the post, cease to apply?
The Danish presidency of the EU is currently working to gain support for the CSA regulation, which will open a backdoor to all Europeans’ phones in an attempt to trap and track down criminals who share sexual abuse material with children.
If the CSA regulation is voted through, police and judicial authorities will be able to access encrypted communication services such as WhatsApp and Signal – and thus the private communications of many millions of Europeans.
A leaked document from the European Council states that this will be done through client-side scanning . The technology works by scanning images, video and text on the user’s device before sending and encrypting them, including with the help of AI.
[…]
The CSA regulation was taken off the agenda of the EU Council of Ministers in June 2024 due to the risk of mass surveillance of EU citizens and a concern that the law could represent a setback for freedoms.
But two months later, the Minister of Justice [Peter Hummelgaard] stated to TV 2 that “we need to break with the completely erroneous perception that it is every man’s right to freedom to communicate on encrypted messaging services, which are used to facilitate many different serious forms of crime”.
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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