Quotulatiousness

August 8, 2012

How British libel laws work (and why Jimmy Wales is wrong about them)

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:54

Tim Worstall explains that Jimmy Wales misunderstands what British libel laws really mean for publishers (and bloggers) in other countries:

The libel law of England and Wales is rather different from many other countries, yes. It’s a lot harder to defend against a charge there, damages are higher than in most other jurisdictions and so on. However, that isn’t the important point. What drags you into that jurisdiction is not where your servers are. Nor where the people who prepared the material, where it was uploaded nor where the company is located. What matters is where was the person reading it located?

Please note, this applies to us all. In all jurisdictions the result is the same. It applies to corporate websites, to blogs, to Wikipedia, to everyone. It is a generally accepted legal rule that publication of digital information takes place where it is read, not where it is “published”. The general logic is that at one point there is a copy on the server somewhere. Then, someone downloads it into a browser window in order to read it. At this time there are two copies, on in the browser, one on the server. This creation of a second copy is therefore publication. And that publication takes place in the jurisdiction of the reader, not anywhere else.

[. . .]

Thus Wikipedia not having servers in the UK, not being a UK corporation or charity, does not protect it from English libel laws. None of us are so protected from them, we are liable under them if as and when someone in England and Wales reads our pages.

[. . .]

But as I say, it is still true that jurisdiction on the internet depends upon where the reader is, not the producer or the servers. It’s not a happy thought that we’re now subject to 200 off legal jurisdictions every time we post something but it is true.

“In the real world, cleaning a driveway costs $15. In politics, it costs $175,000”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:17

In the National Post, Kelly McParland on the difference between real world costs and government costs:

In other words, the town is prevented by bureaucratic realities from doing the job at a reasonable price. A contractor can just show up with a snow blower and clear the drive. The town, however, would have to send two workers – one to run the plow and the other to stand around and watch act as a flagperson. They’d have to be paid the going rate of $47 an hour, plus benefits. And there’s the cost of the plow.

If Mr. Williams was to get his windrows cleared, everyone in Iroquois Falls would have to have their windrows cleared, which the town estimates would bump the price to about $175,000 a winter.

So, in the real world, cleaning a driveway costs $15. In politics, it costs $175,000.

That’s why we have deficits, dear readers. And why government costs so much. And why civil servants grow accustomed to treating ludicrous costs as normal expenditures. And why taxes are far higher than they need be.

Sometimes simulation isn’t close enough to reality

Filed under: History, Military, Technology, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:06

The military depends on accurate simulations to train troops, to develop new weapons, and to find ways to counteract military developments in potential enemy forces. It’s obvious that the quality of your simulation is very important, but sometimes the assumptions made in those simulations are quite at odds with the reality they’re supposed to be mimicking:

Increasingly, over the last half century, there has been a culture clash among weapons developers over how to test the new stuff. The problem revolves around the question of what is the most realistic reality. Put another way, how do you go about providing really accurate testing of what the new weapon will do when encountering a real opponent.

The problem is an ancient one, but let us keep the examples less than a century old. At the start of World War I in 1914 there were two types of artillery shells. One was high explosive. The other, more expensive to build and theoretically more effective, was shrapnel. This type was like a shotgun shell. It exploded in the air and sprayed the ground below with metal balls. Tests had shown that these balls would penetrate wood boards set up to represent troops. Because of the expense, less than half the shells used were shrapnel. The need for more artillery shells and the high cost of shrapnel shell led to it being largely replaced by the less effective high-explosive.

Later came a startling revelation. In the 1930s a group of American technicians were setting up some shrapnel shells for a test and one shell exploded prematurely, peppering some of the people with the “lethal” metal balls. They all survived. Further investigation revealed that human skin, muscle and bone were far more resistant to the metal balls than wood boards. World War I combat surgeons, when questioned, remembered that they had never seen a penetration wound caused by shrapnel balls. There has never been much official note made of this very humane weapon during, or after war.

The economy is booming in Parasite City, DC

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Gene Healy points out that while the rest of the US is still in the doldrums, there’s one bright spot: the one place that is booming, because it’s almost purely tax dollars feeding the growth.

Have you seen the latest jobs report? Major buzzkill: creeping unemployment, anemic growth, and the recovery’s totally stalled.

But not here: The District is booming! “Washington may have the healthiest economy of any major metropolitan area in the country,” says New York Times D.C. bureau chief David Leonhardt in Sunday’s Gray Lady. “You can actually see the prosperity”!

Yes we can! Construction cranes dominate the downtown skyline, and your average homeless guy can barely grab a stretch of sidewalk before yet another boutique store pops up to bounce his bedroll.

True, if you venture outside the Death Star’s orbit to visit the colonies for Thanksgiving or Christmas, you’ll see a lot of boarded-up storefronts. You might even feel a twinge of shame when Matt Drudge feeds you headlines like “D.C. Leads List of Most Shopaholic Cities in America.”

Whatever: Guilt is for losers! The main lesson the rest of the country should take from the capital’s prosperity is, per Leonhardt, that “education matters.”

D.C.’s “high-skill” economy boasts more college degrees than any other major metropolitan area in America. “If you wanted to imagine what the economy might look like if the country were much better educated,” Leonhardt writes, “you can look at Washington.”

Hey, you people out there in flyover country: We’re eating your lunch because we’re “smarter” than you! Hit the books, rubes: We built this!

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