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]
Someone tweeting under the name of “Lyndon Baines Johnson”, a supporter of Kamala Harris, explains how he would like a Harris administration to deal with technological innovators:
Lyndon Baines Johnson
@lyndonbajohnson
If Harris wins, fairly high on the agenda should be finding new federal contractors so that SpaceX and Starlink are shown the door. -OS
8:05 PM · Nov 3, 2024
For all his grievous faults, the actual LBJ would have known how to describe that proposal in a few choice words. He wanted the Apollo program to succeed.
As you might have guessed, the rocket concerned is small enough to almost spin out of control because of the weight of a slice of packaged cheese strapped to one of its legs. So perhaps Elon Musk need not lose sleep over his rivals, a group of students at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, just yet – however the headline from Interesting Engineering describing this as “Europe’s most important rocket test” was more justifiable than one might think at first sight.
They ate the cheese after its flight. It was “slightly warm, but still quite tasty.”
This example of socialist priorities comes from “economic justice campaigner” Richard J Murphy:
Richard Murphy
@RichardJMurphy
Tackling obesity and all its related issues via an injection, instead of dealing with the cause, would be like saying: “Don’t worry about smoking; just take this anti-cancer drug”.
12:47 PM · Oct 15, 2024
Scores of members of the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah, including fighters and medics,
Oh, the poor Hezbollah medics!
were seriously wounded on Tuesday when the pagers they use to communicate exploded, a security source told Reuters.
A Hezbollah official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the detonation of the pagers was the “biggest security breach” the group had been subjected to in nearly a year of war with Israel.
A Reuters journalist saw ambulances rushing through the southern suburbs of the capital, Beirut, amid widespread panic. People said explosions were taking place even 30 minutes after the initial blasts.
I feel that this development deserves to be commemorated in period style.
Edit: It is now being claimed that a ten year old girl, Fatima Jaafar Abdullah, was killed by one of the exploding pagers. If true (and despite Hezbollah, like Hamas, being inveterate liars who regularly fake the deaths of children, it might well be true that she was handling her Hezbollah father’s pager or something similar), that is tragic. But overall one of the things about this operation that fills me with admiration is that it must be one of the most precisely targeted military strikes in history. Targeted to the very hip pockets of individual terrorists. Oh, and it would have been nice if a few more of the people denouncing Israel for this had also denounced Hezbollah for firing rockets at Israel completely indiscriminately for years on end. Only a few weeks ago, twelve Israeli Druze children were “shredded to pieces” by a Hezbollah rocket while playing soccer.
I am convinced that wannabe “Twitter aka X” replacement “Threads” is mostly threads started by AI bots trained on the Guardian & NYT, replied to by a mix of other bots and assorted NPCs whose political philosophy came from a fortune cookie. Nothing will convince me otherwise 😀
Earlier this month, the Met Office claimed that climate change was causing a “dramatic increase in the frequency of temperature extremes and number of temperature records in the U.K.”. Given what we now know from recent freedom of information (FOI) revelations about the state of its ‘junk’ nationwide temperature measuring network, it is difficult to see how the Met Office can publish such a statement and keep a straight face.
[…]
It’s almost as if the Met Office is actively seeking higher readings to feed into its constant catastrophisation of weather in the interests of Net Zero promotion. Whatever the reason – incompetence or political messaging – serious science would appear to be the loser. As currently set up, the Met Office network is incapable of providing a realistic guide to natural air temperatures across the U.K. Using the data to help calculate global temperatures is equally problematic.
Householders are angered by the discovery they cannot remortgage or sell their homes after installing spray-foam insulation to cut energy use.
Jim Bunce thought he was doing the right thing for his purse and the planet: in 2022, as fuel costs soared, he and his wife decided to improve the energy efficiency of their house.
They discovered that the government had endorsed spray-foam insulation, a quick and unobtrusive technique by which liquid foam is spray-gunned into roof spaces and walls. Their loft was successfully treated at a cost of £2,800 and their gas bills duly fell.
Now, two years on, they have found that, by making their home more energy efficient, they have also made it unsaleable. “We are unable to borrow against it, or potentially to sell it, unless the foam is completely removed,” says Bunce.
I feel sorry for Mr and Mrs Bunce. My title was not intended to single them out as being unusually insulated from reality; until recently the great majority of the population would have assumed that taking up a scheme promoted by the government was a safe choice.
It isn’t. On the contrary, if a new type of technological product is being pushed by government in order to meet national policy targets, that means that it has not been through the filter of large numbers of people freely deciding to buy it and telling their family and friends that it benefited them as individuals.
My entire @facebook account has been deleted, seemingly (no reason given) because I tweeted that genetically male boxers such as Imane Khalif (XY undisputed) should not fight women in Olympics. Of course my opinion is open to civilised argument. But outright censorship?
For the second time in two posts, I find myself saying, “Thank God for Elon Musk”. Professor Dawkins very much would not say this. That’s fine. Those interested can debate on Musk’s platform whether God exists or whether boxers with one X- and one Y-chromosome should fight boxers with two X-chromosomes. For now, until Commissioner Mark Rowley of the Metropolitan Police has Musk extradited.
Update: Dawkins’ Facebook page is back. Facebook says it was a technical problem.
I get the daily posts from the Law & Liberty blog, and this struck me as interesting, because of the preamble:
Dozens of start-ups now offer Artificial Intelligence tools to help businesses set market prices. Assuming unlimited computing power to run such models and comprehensive data sets to train them, can AI replicate the way human actors make decisions in the marketplace? Socialists have argued for more than a century that enlightened bureaucrats can set prices as well as the myriad of private actors in the marketplace. Ludwig von Mises offered a celebrated refutation of the socialist case. Does the vast computing power behind Large Language Models give new life to the socialist argument? The answer is no, but Mises’ argument needs to be updated and sharpened.
The author of the article, David P Goldman, goes on to explain the problem. As the article is free to access, I won’t reproduce other paragraphs here apart from the two final ones:
AI can’t replace the innovative creativity of entrepreneurs. On the contrary: AI itself is an innovation whose outcome is uncertain. Some applications (replacing human beings on corporate help desks, for example) may turn out to be trivial; others, for example devising new pharmaceuticals, may be revolutionary. Only in an imaginary world in which no innovation occurs could we envision an AI-driven marketplace.
Artificial Intelligence isn’t intelligence in the first place. It can replicate the lower-order functions of the human mind, the sorting and categorizing faculty, and perform such operations much faster than humans. But it cannot reproduce the higher-order functions of the mind—what Immanuel Kant called Vernunft (roughly, critical reason) as opposed to Verstand (usually translated as “understanding”). It can mine data from past experience, but it can’t stand at a distance from experience and ask, “What if we did things differently?” Freedom is the freedom to create, and that is what free societies must preserve.
This seems right to me. I think AI is going to produce marvels, but I don’t see it removing the need for boldness, risk-taking and ability that all great businessmen have to “look around corners”. To ome extent I am a techno-optimist, as the likes of Marc Andreessen, the US venture capitalist, is. But I am not, I hope, Panglossian, or the opposite of a perma-doomster, either.
It is also interesting to consider how governments, for example, might seize the idea that AI makes it possible to co-ordinate human activity in ways that eliminate all that pesky free market exchange and messy entrepreneurship. This line of thinking resembles the view of certain science fiction writers who tried to imagine a post-scarcity world. (Science fiction often contains lots of economics, as this article by Rick Liebling shows.) Eliminate the idea of scarcity, so the argument runs, and then the underlying foundation of economics – “the study of scarce resources that have alternative uses” – falls away. It is easy to see the utopian attractions if you like to mould humanity to your will. I mean, what could go wrong?
Eliminate scarcity, then who needs enforceable property rights and rules about “mine and thine”?
In a post-scarcity world, where will the sense of urgency come – the sense of adventure, that drives great businessmen to create and innovate to push back against such scarcity? (This is also the fear that some might have of universal basic income – creating a world of indolent trustafarians who, like a couch potato, suffer muscle loss and mental decline because they don’t have to work or struggle to build anything.)
Karl Marx dreamed of a post-scarcity world – that seems the logical end-point of his communist utopia, to the extent he fleshed it out at all. (The irony being that his ideas helped inspire some of the greatest Man-made famines and loss of life in recorded history, in part because of the failure to understand the importance of property, prices and incentives.)
I am sure that some of this post-scarcity thinking might be encouraged by AI. But then again, AI uses a lot of electricity, and even without the distractions of Net Zero (no laughing in the class, people), producing the power necessary for modern high-potency computing requires a lot of stuff. And mention of science fiction reminds me of the “There Ain’t No Such Thing As a Free Lunch” that came from Robert A Heinlein, and later taken up by Professor Milton Friedman.
The first piece is how pensions work, and what’s gone wrong with them. In our state pension (I’ll say a little about private schemes at the end), we don’t “save up for our retirement”. When we started the system after the war, we needed to pay retirees immediately. Pensions have therefore always been met each month out of taxes paid by workers that month. At any given moment, there is only a week or two of funds in the government’s “State Pension account”.
While that arrangement solved an immediate problem, it created an enormous structural problem. When the pension scheme was started, life expectancy was about 68. Now it’s about 82. And birth rates started falling in the 1960s, meaning that more and more pensioners incomes are being funded by fewer and fewer workers. The result is that the average person born in 1956 now takes out around £290,000 more in retirement income than she paid over her working life.
The plan for addressing that problem was to grow the economy each year by an amount sufficient to generate enough tax receipts to keep funding the expanding retirement bill. And for most of the 20th century, while we benefitted from a global hydrocarbon and nuclear energy system that for decades doubled in size every 7 years, that plan worked.
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.
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa
