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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“Switzerland could be the first country to impose driving bans on e-cars in an emergency to ensure energy security. Several media report this unanimously and refer to a draft regulation on restrictions and bans on the use of electrical energy. Specifically, the paper says: “The private use of electric cars is only permitted for absolutely necessary journeys (e.g. professional practice, shopping, visiting the doctor, attending religious events, attending court appointments).” A stricter speed limit is also planned highways.”
– Der Spiegel, the German publication (via the ironically named US website, Hotair.)
A few weeks ago, California’s government warned that petrol (sorry, gasoline)-driven vehicles would be compulsory soon, while warning of blackouts.
It’s a clown show out there, but who feels like laughing?
For a sanity check, I recommend this book, Fossil Future, by Alex Epstein, to my friends, and occasionally to those I want to torment, in my adolescent fashion. Excellent book that gets to the philosophical guts of what is wrong and malevolent about much modern environmentalism.
I think the headline is self-explanatory. A new US report delivers what looks like a devastating verdict. (It was from a Republican committee; I am unclear what the Democrats might have said.) For me, the refusal of the Beijing regime to allow independent inspections and its bullying of anyone who raised questions, triggers my suspicions. Science writer Matt Ridley has come to the same conclusion, although he is far more qualified to write about it than someone like me. He co-authored a book on the topic.
It is not clear what, if anything, the West can now do other than the following:
Cease all funding of gain-of-function or similar experiments carried out in China. No Western individuals or organisations should be allowed to fund experiments of this nature in China. So it means people such as Dr Fauci would, under my rule, be treated as criminals for having any financial or other involvement with such research.
Where such experiments are conducted in places such as the US, they must be disclosed from the start, and subject to regular review and full reports given to the authorities, including media. There was a recent report that such work was being done in Boston, where the virus has a high fatality rate, although there has been pushback on this story here. Can someone explain to me what is the possible purpose of this? (If it is to defend against viruses, this should be made clear from the start.)
Restrict Chinese government/business (usually front organisations anyway) access to Western medical and scientific research as much as possible (I realise that in an online world, there are limits), particularly around technologies that can be weaponised.
Continue to demand answers about the sources of the pandemic, and make a willingness to be open about this a condition of more open relations going forward. Make it clear that unleashing a virus, even by accident, and doing nothing much to warn neighbours in good time or be open about investigating it, is a hostile act. I would like to hear the likes of Sunak, Biden, Macron, Scholz and the rest make these points, regularly. If not, they need to be asked why they aren’t raising it. And for good measure, the World Economic Forum head honcho Klaus Schwab needs to be regularly asked about this, and about whether any WEF members are funding such research. Let’s at least use the whole ESG agenda for some good and demand that no ESG-linked finance should touch gain-of-function research unless for a clearly-stated and checkable benefit, in full public view.
I don’t think sanctions are of much use here. Ironically, China’s zero-covid policy, which appears without end, is a form of self-harm that is more damaging than any amount of sanctions activity. President Xi has been re-elected by the Chinese Communist Party, and presumably hopes to be in post until he dies, or is too infirm to do the job. That is punishment enough for those who want to prop up this regime. It is, alas, miserable for the hundreds of millions of Chinese people who, through little fault of their own, live under this tyranny.
“You couldn’t force lockdowns without laptops, Zoom, Amazon deliveries, cloud computing, Slack, QR codes or Netflix. Without them, lockdowns would have lasted two, maybe three weeks tops before the utter destruction of the economy forced everyone back to the workplace. Instead, we took the Faucian bargain of technology-enabled yearlong lockdowns because it was doable. Silicon Valley’s tools became shackles.”
– Andy Kessler, WSJ ($). Tech is great, and these channels would be useful in any sense, but it is certainly true that for a segment of the population (such as those with media influence and in government), they made lockdowns far more “doable”. For a fan of tech such as me, that is an uncomfortable thought.
“Faucian bargain” – very droll.
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
– Blue Remembered Hills by A.E. Housman, from the collection A Shropshire Lad, published in 1896.
We do blue hills so much better in 2022:
“AI, machine learning, robotics and the power of computational science hold the potential to drive explosive economic growth and profoundly transform a diverse array of sectors, while providing humanity with countless technological improvements in medicine and healthcare, financial services, transportation, retail, agriculture, entertainment, energy, aviation, the automotive industry and many others. Indeed, these technologies are already deeply embedded in these and other industries and making a huge difference.”
“But that progress could be slowed and in many cases even halted if public policy is shaped by a precautionary-principle-based mindset that imposes heavy-handed regulation based on hypothetical worst-case scenarios. Unfortunately, the persistent dystopianism found in science fiction portrayals of AI and robotics conditions the ground for public policy debates, while also directing attention away from some of the more real and immediate issues surrounding these technologies.”
– Adam Thierer
Wind and solar energy are inherently inefficient ways of generating electricity. They are low density, which means they require vast amounts of capital to produce and transmit the same amount of electricity as traditional power stations. Plus, they are intermittent, so investment and staffing of parallel generating capacity are needed to keep the lights on. Wind and solar might reduce emissions of carbon dioxide – much depends on the parallel capacity running in the background – but this is not cost free. Growing crops to turn into biofuels is also highly inefficient, as is shipping wood pellets across the Atlantic to exploit a carbon accounting loophole that zero-rates their emissions. None of these things boosts productivity and raises living standards. All of them stunt the economy’s growth potential.
– Rupert Darwall
Reported a few minutes ago by the Times of India: Breaking News Live: Sri Lanka President Gotabaya Rajapaksa flees as protesters storm residence
The mob breaking into his palace does not necessarily mean that a president becomes an ex-president. But that’s the way to bet. Other leaders might like to note how this came about:
What a difference a year makes: the green dream dies in Sri Lanka
UPDATE: Some reports say that (now almost certainly ex-) president Rajapaksa has been seen at Colombo airport. Meanwhile, fancy a dip in the presidential pool?
Politico on Twitter said,
Clarence Thomas claimed in a dissenting opinion that Covid vaccines are derived from the cells of “aborted children.”
No Covid vaccines in the U.S. contain the cells of aborted fetuses.
2,061 Retweets. 1,537 Quote Tweets. 5,676 Likes. Dozens of sneering replies.
And two egregious falsehoods in one tweet.
As Egon Alter (@AlterEgon75) put it in their reply,
This is a gross mischaracterization of Thomas’ words.
HE is not making the claim, the plaintiffs in the case are.
And he said they object because aborted fetus cells were used in the development of the vaccine, which your reporting verifies, not that the vaccine contains them.
UPDATE:
You can see a screenshot of Justice Thomas’s exact words in this tweet from AGHamilton29. Thomas said,
They object on religious grounds to all available COVID-19 vaccines because they were developed using cell lines derived from aborted children.
Firstly, note that he is paraphrasing the opinion of the petitioners, not giving his own opinion. Secondly, note that the petitioners themselves did not claim that the vaccines were made from aborted foetuses, they claim that foetal cells were used in the development process, which they were. As one would expect from a judge, Thomas has noted this crucial distinction.
Again via the estimable AGHamilton29, I see that it was not just Politico spreading this false story.
Axios: Clarence Thomas suggests COVID vaccines are made with “aborted children”
NBC News: Justice Thomas cites debunked claim that Covid vaccines are made with cells from ‘aborted children’
Of course, once the fake news seed is sown, it sprouts up everywhere.
The Daily Mail: Clarence Thomas cites debunked claim that Covid vaccines are created with cells of ‘aborted children’ in dissent on SCOTUS decision upholding New York state’s vaccine mandate for healthcare workers
The Independent: Clarence Thomas wrongly suggests ‘aborted children’ cells are used in Covid vaccines
SECOND UPDATE: The Politico tweet has now been disappeared, and the story to which it linked corrected. It is now mostly accurate and completely pointless, a breathless account of a Supreme Court judge doing a normal part of his job.
“Top Biden aide prods big tech to crack down on climate change misinformation”, Axios reports.
Gina McCarthy, President Biden’s top domestic climate adviser, said tech companies should do more to prevent the spread of inaccurate information about climate change and clean energy.
Driving the news: “The tech companies have to stop allowing specific individuals over and over again to spread disinformation,” she told Axios’ Alexi McCammond at a virtual event that aired Thursday.
“We need the tech companies to really jump in,” McCarthy said.
Who is “we”?
And what the [fossil fuel] industry is now doing is seeding, basically, doubt about the costs associated with that and whether they work or not.”
Expressing doubt about the cost of a proposed government measure, and whether it will actually work as promised? How dare they! Such dangerous speculation cannot be allowed.
Hat tip: Iain Murray.
I thought that after most of a lifetime reading science fiction and alternate history I knew all the ways Hitler could have won World War II if just one little thing had turned out differently, but I had never heard of this one:
Onthisday.com for May 12th included this entry:
1941 Konrad Zuse presents the Z3, the world’s first working programmable, fully automatic computer, in Berlin
W-w-what? Straight to Wikipedia I went. Here is the entry for the Z3:
The Z3 was completed in Berlin in 1941. It was not considered vital, so it was never put into everyday operation. Based on the work of the German aerodynamics engineer Hans Georg Küssner (known for the Küssner effect), a “Program to Compute a Complex Matrix”[b] was written and used to solve wing flutter problems. Zuse asked the German government for funding to replace the relays with fully electronic switches, but funding was denied during World War II since such development was deemed “not war-important”.
The original Z3 was destroyed on 21 December 1943 during an Allied bombardment of Berlin.
Well, good. While it is interesting to speculate on how the development of the computer might have been different, it sounds like the Lord guided the bomb-aimer’s hand on that occasion.
Anyone know, how close did they come?
April 2021:
“Sri Lanka will become first country to be free of chemical fertilizer”, the Sri Lankan news website News First reported:
COLOMBO (News 1st); President Gotabhaya Rajapaksa has stated that he will take up the challenge in making Sri Lanka the first country in the world to eliminate the use of chemical fertilizers without reversing any of the steps that have been taken.
The absence of any country in the world that has eliminated the use of chemical fertilizers is not an obstacle to achieving the goal, President Rajapaksa noted.
The President urged all to unite to educate the farmer and create a healthy generation at a discussion held at the Presidential Secretariat on Thursday (29) to raise awareness on the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides and the ban on such imports.
“The government must guarantee the right of the people to a non-toxic diet to produce a healthy and productive citizen,” said the President.
April 2022:
“How Sri Lanka’s shift to organic farming left it in the manure,” reports the Times:
What turned Sri Lanka’s economic situation from difficult to catastrophic was the decision by the Rajapaksa government to implement a nationwide ban on synthetic fertiliser. It was made not at the behest of neoliberal economists doing the bidding of global capital, but rather on the advice of environmentalists in the name of sustainable agriculture.
[…]
But that strategy backfired in spectacular fashion. Domestic rice production fell by 14 per cent from 2021 to 2022, forcing the nation, long self-sufficient in rice production, to import hundreds of millions of dollars of rice and more than eroding all of the savings from ceasing fertiliser imports. On top of that, the ban decimated tea production, leading to a $425 million economic loss to the industry in its first six months of implementation. Tea, one of the nation’s primary crops, is a key source of its total export income, making a bad foreign exchange situation far worse.
With the Digital Markets Act, the EU wants to make competition between tech giants more fair. What could possibly go wrong?
In his weekly podcast, Linus Sebastian gushes about all the wonderful things it will bring: ensuring interoperability of instant messaging services (so you can more easily abandon Apple devices even if all your friends have them and use iMessage); the ability to use alternative app stores (which is what Epic games was hoping for so it could sell Fortnite VBucks to iPhone users without paying Apple); the right to uninstall pre-loaded apps (aka bloatware); no self-preferencing (e.g. putting your own products at the top of search results); more rules about combining personal data without consent; no more requiring developers to use certain services to get their apps onto app stores, making it easier to, for example, use alternative payment processors; allow app developers fair access to supplementary functionalities of smartphones (for example access to NFC for third party apps on iPhones).
“This is just such an obvious list of things that no consumer should oppose,” says Linus. And he is right. All these things would be very convenient.
But Linus does not consider the means by which these things are being attempted. One wonders what minor inconveniences he would not resort to legislation to solve. The non-aggression principle does not occur to him. Never mind the motivations of the people behind it or the time-proven tendency for all state regulation to have unintended consequences.
At 18:48 he responds to a commenter. “BFire just outed themselves as someone who doesn’t get it. ‘More government control. You’d think Canadians would have learned.’ No! This is a government body stepping in to reduce corporate control. Everything here is about loosening an iron fist. How is it not clear? This is one of those things: I just don’t get it. How can you oppose being allowed to remove crap you don’t want from your devices?”
Linus has fallen into a semantic muddle. No-one is being allowed to do anything. People are being forbidden from doing things. The answer is easy: if you want to be allowed to remove crap you do not want from your devices, simply buy devices that do not take that control away from you. The beauty of this is that it does not require any violence!
Linus must know on some level that violence is involved. His next sentence: “Companies being forced to make their products inter-operable. How can you oppose pro-consumer legislation?”
Perhaps one might oppose it because it is legislation which means that force is used. You might also oppose it because it may not lead to the utopian world its proponents imagine. Alec Muffet tweets that enforced interoperability will weaken end-to-end encryption of messages (and he goes into much more detail in a recent essay). There is a consequence that might not actually be unintended by the state actors behind this legislation and that might well harm the very consumers they claim to help.
The whole thing is also obviously unnecessary. In the video there is some discussion of Google search results becoming a bit rubbish lately since many more of the top results are just adverts. Luke Lafreniere (the chap on the right who works with Linus) talks about using Duck Duck Go to get better results, not just for privacy. So there is a free market solution to these problems that is already working.
At 29:39 Luke straight up announces that he would consider not buying Pixel phones if other phones allowed him to remove all the crapware. He seems completely unaware that the problem of crapware is already solved: simply buy devices that do not have crapware.
But for all the practical considerations, there is an easy way to counter all of this from first principles. Violence is bad, and the ends do not justify the means. You just need to have the semantic discipline to see through such constructs as “pro-consumer legislation”.
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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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