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PC Woody is a friend of mine who blogged about training to become a police officer but had to delete the blog when her superior officers found out. Well, now she’s not a police officer any more, and has reposted all the old posts about police training, and promises to post more about her experiences in the police in future. I’m sure there will be lots of non-police related commentary, too. The new blog is called Insomnia.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Links at 10:49 PM EST
This is almost too good to be true (via News.YC).
A religious state, Pakistan, identifies a content provider, YouTube, as the source of blasphemous, seditious content and orders, King Canute style, that the Internet tides be stopped. A zealous ISP ignorantly decides the best way to comply with the decree is to re-route all of YouTube’s IP addresses to whatever site they thought was more appropriate. The first repercussion was that YouTube disappeared from the Internet for almost an hour. I suspect the second repercussion was that Pakistan’s Internet access crawled to a halt as all of a sudden they were handling IP requests for one of the busiest sites in the world. As of this writing YouTube has announced more granular routes so that at least in the US they supercede the routes announced by PieNet. The rest of the world is still struggling. So, while working on a fix that will filter out the spurious route announcements, PCCW has found it necessary to shut down Pakistan’s Internet access. The leadership of Pakistan just created a massive Denial of Service on their own country.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Civil Liberties, News at 8:46 AM EST
A recruitment advert for the Royal Air Force shows metallic objects being sucked magnetically into the sky where the form the shape of a fighter jet. Screws, spanners, valves, bottles, all go to make up the aeroplane. The message is that there are lots of different careers to be had in the air force.
It reminded me of the famous economics essay, I, Pencil, which is about how many people it takes to make a pencil. The message there is that it would take one person many years to make a pencil because of all the different specialities that would have to be learned. Division of labour makes pencils cheap.
It also reminded me of Brendan Halfweeg’s suggestion for a notice he’d like to see displayed in Pret a Manger instead of the one they actually display which boasts how they don’t air freight food:
A Kenyan farmer, an American aircraft engineer, a Nigerian oil worker, a Scottish fisherman, an English truck driver and a Polish food technician are just some of the people who helped us deliver to you fresh, wholesome food that you can’t beat in price or quality. Frankly we’re amazed, we hope you are too.
The argument here is that you can’t simultaneously complain about “food miles” and third world poverty.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Enviro-Mentalism, Introspection at 12:04 PM EST
CountingCats wrote:
If we are going to discuss quotations of political commentators, and given that P.J. O’Rourke is a political commentator, may I suggest that the following is one of the most sensible comments ever made by a member of that species-
“Name me, if you can, a better feeling than the one you get when you’re half a bottle of Chivas in the bag with a gram of coke up your nose and a teenage lovely pulling off her tube top in the next seat over while you’re going a hundred miles an hour down a suburban side street. You’d have to watch the entire Mexican air force crash-land in a liquid petroleum gas storage facility to match this kind of thrill. If you ever have much more fun than that, you’ll die of pure sensory overload”
Now that is political commentary, and a first class statement about relative value.
Nick M replied:
Everyone knows that quote. Unfortunately there are people who are positively priapic about doing 28 in a thirty zone in a Prius whilst entirely clean and sober and with a woman they like because of her “ethical credentials”. I have spent enough time in assorted Universities to know. I once knew a pure mathematician who took a shine to a girl purely because she’d spent most of the last month in a treehouse in British Columbia protesting something or other.
She cooed over a very small aubergine and asked if she could hold it before it went into a vegetarian repast that my pure math flat-mate was making. Needless to say he didn’t get into her knickers but two days into the relationship he did pronounce to the flat (I almost terminally lost control of my respiratory system on hearing this) that she was, “The most important woman I’ve ever met”.
All this in a discussion about Adam Smith. Here, Jonathan Pearce concisely explains what’s wrong with the Labour Theory of Value, in response to a suggestion that some things have an intrinsic, non-monetary value:
So long as anything can be bought and sold, including web access, for instance, it will have a price. The argument about intrinsic value is somewhat beside the point; we can always claim that X or Y is valuable to us but we don’t want to pay for it. But ultimately, that is all that we have to go on in explaining why prices of things in a free and unfettered market are as they are.
The trouble with the labour theory - at least in its crude, Marxian form — is that it gave no guide as to whether a person should spend more or less labour/other resources on making say, cars rather than producing bread or software. The only way to do that is through the marginal shifts in demand for these things, that are revealed through the preferences of consumers, suppliers and investors. From this vantage point, whether something has “intrinsic” value or not is entirely irrelevant to the issue at hand.
Samizdata — irreverence and intellectual discussion in one place.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Links at 11:38 AM EST
Amazon’s eBook reader looks very interesting indeed. I wonder when it will come to the UK.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Geekism at 9:54 AM EST
What astonishes me about this document is that at no point in the sequence of events that led to its creation, from the first inkling of an idea in the first politician’s mind that taxing people to import and export stuff might be a good idea, to the idea that different items might be so taxed differently depending on what type of item they are, to the bureaucrat who idly put screws in a different category to bolts, to the customs official who disagreed with his colleague about whether this thing here is a screw or a bolt, to their boss who referred the problem to his boss, to the committee that held the meeting about what to do about the problem of distinguishing screws from bolts, to the middle-manager who wrote “TODO: get Bob to work on Bolts doc” in his notebook, to Bob who typed the first outline and draft, to the junior researcher who phoned around hardware stores and looked on Wikipedia trying to find out if there was a standard way to distinguish bolts from screws, to the senior researcher who compiled the information from the standards bodies, to the illustrator who carefully produced the line drawings, to the editor and proofreader and typesetter, to the overseers of checks and balances and working practices and publication guidelines and equality and grammar and spelling, to the techie who typed the command to upload the document onto the website, AT NO POINT did any of these people involved directly or peripherally in this document’s creation STOP and say, “WHY THE FUCK am I bothering with this pointless shit? Has my life really come to this? I should quit this pathetic and counter-productive job and go and pack bags at Walmart because, frankly, it would make the world a better place.”
Why anyone wouldn’t rather chop off their own head with a blunt hatchet than engage in trade with the United States and be forced to deal with these complete clowns is beyond me. That phrases like “new and creative programs Customs has undertaken” and “benefits to the trade community” can appear in documents written by these people without the universe imploding from the pure logical contradiction involved is a plain fluke of the laws of mathematics.
The sheer waste of human life on display here makes me want to weep.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Authorised Theft, Introspection at 5:25 PM EST
Somalia hasn’t had a proper government since 1991. It should be a proving ground for anarcho-capitalism. It has its problems. But guess what, Somalia’s problems are largely caused by governments. Here’s why.
I’ve written about Somalia before.
Posted by Rob Fisher as Civil Liberties at 10:19 AM EST