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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Do people remember all those years back, at the time of the financial crash of 2008, about how so many wrote and spoke about dangers of an over-concentrated banking system, “too big to fail”, moral hazards of bailouts, poor risk management, etc? I do. I cannot count the articles, conferences, talks, books and videos about all this, and the lessons that must be learned.
Well, here we go:
There is, however, a bigger and simpler problem that financial-stability supervisors have been growing concerned about: The over-reliance of banks and markets on a limited number of third parties for things like cloud-computing services, software and risk-modelling tools. The UK, for example, found that 65% of British financial firms used the same four cloud providers. And earlier this year, the International Monetary Fund dedicated a chapter of its annual Financial Stability Report to cyber risks, noting that the world’s biggest systemically important banks were growing increasingly reliant on common information-technology providers. The IMF found a greater overlap in major banks’ use of the same IT products and services than was the case for insurers or asset managers.
The comment is by Paul J Davies, a writer for Bloomberg ($). He is writing about the implications of the Microsoft/Crowdstrike outage that slammed banks, airlines, healthcare providers and others last Friday and through the weekend.
Besides the level of “fragile” reliance on a few systems, is the fact that this saga, in my mind, makes it even more dangerous to proceed with things such as digital identities (an idea of Tony Blair), central bank digital currencies, and the rest of it. I think I need to re-read the Nassim Taleb book, Antifragile.
I wanted to reflect on how Mr Trump’s running mate – JD Vance (he came out of business and he worked in venture capital) – can nevertheless hold often anti-market views. (See his praise for the anti-trust stance of the Biden administration.) At best, Mr Vance seems to be a sort of “small business” champion with a dislike of bigness for bigness’s sake, conflating size with lack of competition. (Anyone who can understand the “Austrian” insight that competition is a dynamic process through time, and appreciate what Joseph Schumpeter called the creative destruction of capitalism, can see the flaw in this sort of prejudice.)
The problem is not Big Business per se. The problem is when businessmen lobby Congress or whoever for favours, such as for tariffs, exemptions from rules applied to others, tax breaks, subsidies, appointments of their people into government for leverage, cheap loans from banks, etc. Anti-trust is absurd and ripe for arbitrary assaults on property and freedom of contract because one can be guilty of “anti-competitive” conduct regardless of whether one charges higher prices than a rival, the same price or a lower one. Without an objective measure, it is a wrecking ball. (Insider dealing suffers from the same problem.)
That’s the sort of issue where Mr Vance needs to focus his anger. But has he? Has he made these points? Has he, for example, pointed out that central bank QE and the holding of interest below the natural rate creates “zombie” corporations, reduces investment into productive enterprise and reduces productivity, and hence wage growth ? Has he understood, and denounced, how finagling interest rates by central banks and politicians has distorted the capital structure of the West, and done so down the centuries, with ruinous consequences? Does he realise that all this monetary madness calcifies business, protects big firms, encourages financial engineering over investment, etc?
If Mr Vance can answer my questions about QE, for instance, with a “yes”, I would like to see evidence of it. (Commenters: please do so!) Because there is a long and honourable tradition of radical politicians – and I mean real radicals, not just people who claim they are – doing this. In the 19th century, in the UK, liberals and progressive political activists such as Richard Cobden and John Bright denounced artificially cheap money, as well as mercantilism. They saw those who want to clip the coinage, and impose tariffs, as enemies of the Common Man. They supported gold-backed currencies. That’s radicalism.
Mr Vance could, if he wanted, reacquaint America with that tradition. He could point out how tariffs favour incumbent firms and hurt small and medium sized firms with higher costs. He could point to a large and corrupting lobbying system that calls for all this stuff.
To be fair to the Trump campaign, it appears that Trump is quite sound – if you believe Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz (both former Democrat voters) – who say that Trump is much saner and better on encouraging tech startups and the like than the Biden administration has been.
Ivory Coast and Ghana provide the bulk of the world’s cocoa crop. They’re getting richer, substantially so. Cocoa is a crop usually farmed by an old bloke and his machete, the plants spread through a few acres of forest. It’s labour intensive – which means that as the countries get richer they hit that servants/peasant problem. If it’s possible to make much more than being a cocoa farmer then why would people be cocoa farmers?
The answer, obviously, is as with everything else – mechanise it. Ah, but no one’s really worked out how to grow cocoa at scale, in the sort of plantations that are suitable for that sort of large scale mechanisation. As far as technology is concerned it’s still, really, a peasant crop. A peasant crop in places rapidly getting much richer.
In the long run choccies are going to get very much more expensive unless someone does work out that mechanised farming method. For the joyous and lovely reason that people are getting too rich to want to live like peasants any more.
– Tim Worstall
We rarely comment on current affairs here, but the V-P has made an address to the Nation.
So we are in for a hot summer.
You might be wondering, where does all this come from, can we blame those French thinkers? Is Foucault to blame? No, not really.
It’s the American University that has whipped up this dish, and it all really started to take shape and form in the early nineties, so about 40 years ago. The second generation “thinkers” then were building on Neo-Marxist and Post-Modern ideas sourced from the 60s and 70s, but those ideas would not have had the influence they have today without a second and third generation of thinkers and professors in American Universities that have ended up influencing a generation that has then gone out into the world and redesigned that world along those ideas. We are all paying the price today.
The right way to think about the American University as a generator and propagator of these ideas is the way that you already think about The Madras as a potentially indoctrinating breeding ground for Islamic Extremism.
There is no easy way to say this but Yale, Stanford Harvard and a long list of other “prestigious” universities have become (or at the most generous “include”) Madrassas of dangerous indoctrination pumping out brainwashed graduates that are disconnected from what is true and disconnected from reality…they have “their” reality, “their” truth.
Remember, what comes out of the American Madrassa gets exported to the rest of the world, with Australia (America-Lite) being a primary importer.
– Unbekoming
. . . knowing about Joe Biden’s condition and not being able to say anything.
“I spent 6 HOURS tidying up a hedge overhanging a pavement near my home – I wanted to help but was branded a ‘criminal’”, the Sun reports.
A MAN has been branded a “criminal” after spending six hours tidying up an overhanging hedge to help locals.
Adam Myers, 22, thought he was carrying out a simple act of kindness when he chopped back grass verges on a stretch of 40mph road in the sleepy village of Broughton Moor, Cumbria.
The young lad, who has autism, jumped at the chance to fix-up the area after residents expressed concern online about walkers’ safety.
Around 10 minutes after the the chaotic bushes were strimmed and the weeds were ripped up, local cops received reports of “criminal damage”.
Adam had shared before and after pictures of his work on Facebook before being hit with backlash from the parish council.
A member of the community group commented on Adam’s post telling him he had broken the law and carried out an act of criminal damage.
The report of the incident in the Sun, quoted above, refers to a “member of the community group” reporting Adam Myers for criminal damage. However other accounts, such as the Telegraph‘s, say that the person who reported Mr Myers for criminal damage was actually a member of the parish council.
That would explain the sequel to this tale. According to the Telegraph link above,
An entire parish council has resigned after a man was reported to the police for criminal damage for clearing a roadside pavement of weeds, stinging nettles and brambles.
All seven members of the Broughton Moor parish council near Cockermouth, Cumbria, have quit following a backlash to news that Adam Myers, 22, who has autism, was reported for strimming grass verges and hedges near his home in the village.
They did not leave without a last petulant gesture:
In a statement posted on the parish council website said “As of June 20, and following an orchestrated campaign of bullying and abuse, both online and in person, against the members of the parish council and the clerk, Broughton Moor no longer has a parish council.
“All future plans for improvements for the village have been cancelled and the community centre has been closed.
If the reactions from citizens of Broughton Moor quoted by the Telegraph are typical, the now former councillors in question will not be missed. But to be fair to them – I always try to be fair to parish councillors, because the ones I know do a vast amount of work for either a tiny allowance or no money at all – there is a potential reason to object to individuals cutting hedges. The Sun may have missed that the person threatening to dob Adam Myers in was a parish councillor, but their account did include a little panel on “the rules” for cutting hedges, which said,
Under Section 1 of the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, it’s an offence to intentionally damage or destroy a wild bird’s nest while it is being built or in use.
It does not say that was the reason the parish councillor or councillors objected to Adam Myers trimming roadside hedges himself; it just says that it could have been. But for that defence to work, it would have to be the case that the council lovingly inspected every hedge for birds’ nests before trimming them. Now, I have not had much chance to observe how the local councils in the vicinity of Cockermouth go about trimming hedges – though I know of a Samizdata reader who has – but I know how they do it in Essex. When the council gets round to it, which is not often, they send a vehicle equipped with a robot arm tipped by three spinning bladed wheels, whose passage instantly reduces any projecting branches of the hedge to dust. Any eggs or baby birds slumbering in their little home also get the scythed chariot treatment. The point is that someone such as Adam Myers – or such as I, since, dear readers, inspired by his example I have gone forth and done some hedgecrime myself – who laboriously snips the hedge branch by branch is infinitely more likely to see and avoid a nest than the man driving Boudicca’s chariot while wearing council-mandated goggles and ear-muffs.
So, all in all, it looks to me as if the ex-members of Broughton Moor Parish Council were annoyed at this young man for showing them up.
Today, however, free speech and politics are under concerted assault in the liberal democracies of the West. The public-private consortia directing that campaign—what has been called the Censorship Industrial Complex—was the topic of a conference at the end of June in London.
[…]
The war against free speech is being fought with treaties and official agreements with wording as broad as a shotgun’s blast. One of many examples is the OAS’s 2013 Inter-American Convention Against All Forms of Discrimination and Intolerance. Article 1 of the Convention includes in its definition of intolerance “disrespect, rejection, or contempt . . . [for the] opinions” of others, while Article 4 states that the “duties of the [35 signatory] states” include “ [to] prevent, eliminate, prohibit, and punish, in accordance with their constitutional norms . . . all acts and manifestations of discrimination and intolerance.” But what is “disrespect”? What constitutes “rejection” of an opinion? Is, say, discussion of the connection between Islam and violence punishable intolerance? There are no clear answers to these questions, because the censors never define their terms. The vagueness deliberately encourages self-censorship by communicating an implicit warning: caveat loquens, let the speaker beware.
– Jacob Howland
If we had fewer false assumptions, because we were able to connect discrete pieces of information up with their intellectual hinterlands and explain to ourselves coherently why they are likely to be true, the world would become much less “interesting “in this sense — you can’t be surprised by what you already know — but it would become more fascinating in quite another.
But perhaps a would-be technocrat like [Rory] Stewart doesn’t want you to do too much of that sort of thing — you might end up seeing through the soundbites. For all that he frequently says he wants a more intelligent kind of government, in practice he often seems uneasy with treating audiences as intellectual equals.
– Kathleen Stock
Over eight in 10 of the 113 temperature measuring stations opened in the last 30 years by the U.K. Met Office have been deliberately or carelessly sited in junk Class 4 and 5 locations where unnatural heating errors of 2°C and 5°C respectively are possible. This shock revelation, obtained by a recent Freedom of Information request, must cast serious doubt on the ability of the Met Office to provide a true measurement of the U.K. air temperature, a statistic that is the bedrock of support for Net Zero. Over time, increasing urban encroachment has corrupted almost the entire network of 384 stations with 77.9% of the stations rated Class 4 and 5, but it beggars belief that new stations are being sited in such locations.
– Chris Morrison
I used to quip that the only thing I believe on the BBC is the weather reports. Even that is no longer true.
The Telegraph reports that “Doctors should talk to patients about climate change, say health leaders”:
A new green toolkit produced by the Royal College of Physicians tells its members they are “uniquely placed” to raise the issue in consultations and that they should “repeat it often”.
The guidance, which is can be found on the royal college’s website, also tells doctors to work from home on non-clinical shifts and offer remote consultations “where clinically appropriate” to cut emissions from commuting.
They should remain alert to “eco-distress”, depression or anxiety a patient may be suffering because of the changing climate, the document adds.
Critics branded the guidance, which is 11 pages long, “virtue signalling” and warned it could lead to diagnoses being missed.
The comment most recommended by Telegraph readers is this:
Mark Smith
Utterly utterly mad. When guidance like this is issued you know the current system is beyond repair. When patient get 10minutes with a GP, there’s little time to get a proper diagnosis and 5 of those minutes will be to receive a sermon. While the NHS is falling to bits we get this.
closely followed by this:
Andrew Bunting
Speaking as a doctor I find this diabolical.
Who has time on their hands to come up with such tosh?
“I’m not entirely sure what loving one’s body might mean, beyond the obvious off-colour jokes. But apparently, it’s something that one is supposed to proclaim as an accomplishment, a credential of progressivism. I have, however, noted that it tends to be announced by people whose declared triumph in this matter is not altogether convincing, and whose basis for doing so is generally much slimmer than they are.”
– David Thompson. As a take-down of nonsense, this article is brutal.
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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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