July 03, 2009
July 02, 2009
Link round-up
Various links of potential interest:
- Salamander Discovery Could Lead to Human Limb Regeneration
- Maybe this time it's different: Sustainable Biofuel, Canadian edition
- The Minnesota Vikings rank 89th of 122 in ESPN's "Ultimate Standings". Toronto's hockey team? 120th.
- Obama's Top Five Health Care Lies
- 200 year old ciphered message to Thomas Jefferson successfully decoded
- The 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest Winners
July 01, 2009
Al Stewart - the making of Sparks of Ancient Light
With the recent turmoil in Iran, the song "Shah of Shahs" has a very interesting resonance.
Business confidence, defined
Robert Higgs includes a lengthy excerpt from a 1939 book by Raymond Moley called After Seven Years. Moley was a close adviser to President Roosevelt, but became disillusioned during the early part of Roosevelt's first term. This excerpt is an excellent summary of how destructive to normal business uncertainty can be, specifically the kind of uncertainty inflicted by politicians.
Confidence consists, on the one side, of belief in the prospect of profits and, on the other, in the willingness to take risks, to venture money. In Harry Scherman’s brilliant essay on economic life, The Promises Men Live By, the term is, by implication, defined much as Gladstone defined credit. "Credit," Gladstone said, "is suspicion asleep." In that sense, confidence is the existence of that mutual faith and good will which encourage enterprises to expand and take risks, which encourage individual savings to flow into investments. And in an age of increasing governmental interposition in industrial operations and in the processes of capital accumulation and investment, the maintenance of confidence presupposes both a general understanding of the direction in which legislative and administrative changes tend and a general belief in government’s sympathetic desire to encourage the development of those investment opportunities whose successful exploitation is a sine qua non for a rising standard of living.
This, Roosevelt refused to recognize. In fact, the term "confidence" became, as time went on, the most irritating of all symbols to him. He had the habit of repelling the suggestion that he was impairing confidence by answering that he was restoring the confidence the public had lost in business leadership. No one could deny that, to a degree, this was true, The shortsightedness, selfishness, and downright dishonesty of some business leaders had seriously damaged confidence. Roosevelt's assurances that he intended to cleanse and rehabilitate our economic system did act as a restorative.
But beyond that, what had been done? For one thing, the confusion of the administration's utility, shipping, railroad, and housing policies had discouraged the small individual investor. For another, the administration's taxes on corporate surpluses and capital gains, suggesting, as they did, the belief that a recovery based upon capital investment is unsound, discouraged the expansion of producers' capital equipment. For another, the administration's occasional suggestions that perhaps there was no hope for the reemployment of people except by a share-the-work program struck at a basic assumption in the enterpriser’s philosophy. For another, the administration's failure to see the narrow margin of profit on which business success rests — a failure expressed in an emphasis upon prices while the effects of increases in operating costs were overlooked — laid a heavy hand upon business prospects. For another, the calling of names in political speeches and the vague, veiled threats of punitive action all tore the fragile texture of credit and confidence upon which the very existence of business depends.
The eternal problem of language obtruded itself at this point. To the businessman words have fairly exact descriptive meanings. The blithe announcement by a New Deal subordinate that perhaps we have a productive capacity in excess of our capacity to consume and that perhaps new fields for the employment of capital and labor no longer exist will terrify the businessman. To the politician, such an extravagant use of language is important only in terms of its appeal to the prejudices and preconceptions of a swirling, changeable, indeterminate audience. To the businessman two and two make four; to the politician two and two make four only if the public can be made to believe it. If the public decides to add it up to three, the politician adjusts his adding machine. In the businessman's literal cosmos, green results from mixing yellow and blue. The politician is concerned with the light in which the mixture is to be seen, the condition of the eyes of those who look.
Mutual misunderstanding and mutual ill will were, of course, unavoidable in the circumstances, and the ultimate result was a wholly needless contraction of business [in 1937-38] — a contraction whose essential nature was so little understood that it was denounced in high governmental quarters as a "strike of capital" and explained as a deliberate attempt by business to "sabotage" recovery.
I've argued in the recent past that the worst thing governments can do at this point in a period of economic upheaval is to introduce additional political uncertainty.
June 30, 2009
Examples of how to "fix" things
By way of a quick link from The Agitator, the wonderful world of "There, I Fixed It:
June 29, 2009
QotD: Expanding online copyright rules
I'm with Jeff Jarvis: Good God. The scary thing here is not necessarily that we will see some new federal law requiring that the L.A. Times give expressed written consent every time I link to one of its pieces, but rather that some damn fool freedom-reducing scheme like this is likely to be introduced at the federal level in the not-too-distant future, given the economic and political clout of these very large, very troubled, and very connected organizations. And the fact that a respected judge is so breezy about jigging the nation's laws to prop up a single struggling industry reminds us afresh how ingrained is the bias toward seeing the government as a cost-and consquence-free solution to anything perceived as a problem.
Matt Welch, "Richard Posner: Expand Copyright Protections to Save Newspapers!", Hit and Run, 2009-06-26
The illustrated "Snitchtown"
Emma Byrne has taken a 2007 essay by Cory Doctorow and illustrated it with photos of some of the disturbingly large number of CCTV installations in Britain today. Download the PDF here.
"Snitchtown: the photo essay" is a book of photographs of a (very small) subset of the 4.2 million CCTV in Britain. These have been put together with Cory Doctorow's essay on ubiquitous CCTV coverage, "Snitchtown" as part of the SoFoBoMo event, in which photographers work to put together a solo project in book form in one month.
I was inspired by some of the things that Cory said at an Open Rights Group debate. Not least of these was the fact that his daughter's pocket money was tied, in part, to her spotting the CCTV cameras on the way to school. This sounded so damned transgressive, and I realised how much we've been trained to pay no attention to the cameras that record our daily lives (I counted 21 on my exit from the tube station this evening alone.)
Cory's response: "This is, I believe, my absolute favorite CC adaptation of my work to date; in that it's the first adaptation that I prefer to my original. Great work, Emma! "
June 28, 2009
June 27, 2009
Tweeting California
Gerard Vanderleun sent this tweet last night, which ideally captures the destiny of California:
"The salvation of Calif. will be partition. The south gets Hollywood and Tiajuana. The North: All the water and marijuana."
Update: Bonus USA twitterage from Ghost of a Flea:
"My American cousins: Congratulations on cap-and-trade. You are now to the left of Canada."
"WAY to the left of Canada.
June 26, 2009
Movie review of the year
It's not a movie I was ever likely to see, so it took a really amazing review to catch my attention:
Critical consensus on Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen is overwhelmingly negative. But the critics are wrong. Michael Bay used a squillion dollars and a hundred supercomputers' worth of CG for a brilliant art movie about the illusory nature of plot.
Oh, and I would warn you that there'll be spoilers in this review — except that, really, since I still have no idea what actually happened in this movie, I'm not sure how much I can spoil it.
[. . .]
Transformers: ROTF has mostly gotten pretty hideous reviews, but that's because people don't understand that this isn't a movie, in the conventional sense. It's an assault on the senses, a barrage of crazy imagery. Imagine that you went back in time to the late 1960s and found Terry Gilliam, fresh from doing his weird low-fi collage/animations for Monty Python. You proceeded to inject Gilliam with so many steroids his penis shrank to the size of a hair follicle, and you smushed a dozen tabs of LSD under his tongue. And then you gave him the GDP of a few sub-Saharan countries. Gilliam might have made a movie not unlike this one.
[. . .]
Where was I? Oh yes. So LaBoeuf, who's actually a fine actor, is the stand-in for the male viewers' greatest fears about themselves. No matter how great a loser they might be, they can't be as losery a loser as Sam Witwicky. And yet, Sam has awesome giant robots stomping around telling him he's the most important awesome person ever. And he has the hottest girlfriend in the universe, Megan Fox, for whom banality is a huge aphrodisiac. The more pathetic Sam gets, the more Fox's lips pout and her nipples point, like little Irish setters.
To make matters more awesome for the insecure males in the audience, Sam actually tosses aside his giant robot fanclub and his walking-pinup girlfriend, so he can have a normal life. Of course, this only leads to other robots and hawt chicks (who turn out to be robots too) throwing themselves at him and telling him how important he is. In the end, everybody learns to appreciate Sam just a bit more than they already did, and a booming voice tells him he's earned the "matrix of leadership" through his courage and stuff.
