Empires, indeed governments generally, tend to be good things at first and bad things the longer they last. First they improve society’s ability to flourish by providing central services and removing impediments to trade and specialisation; thus, even Genghis Khan’s Pax Mongolica lubricated Asia’s overland trade by exterminating brigands along the Silk Road, thus lowering the cost of oriental goods in European parlours. But then, as Peter Turchin argues following the lead of the medieval geographer Ibn Khaldun, governments gradually employ more and more ambitious elites who capture a greater and greater share of the society’s income by interfering more and more in people’s lives as they give themselves more and more rules to enforce, until they kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. There is a lesson for today. Economists are quick to speak of “market failure”, and rightly so, but a greater threat comes from “government failure”. Because it is a monopoly, government brings inefficiency and stagnation to most things it runs; government agencies pursue the inflation of their budgets rather than the service of the customers; pressure groups form an unholy alliance with agencies to extract more money from taxpayers for their members. Yet despite all this, most clever people still call for government to run more things and assume that if it did so, it would somehow be more perfect, more selfless, next time.
Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, p. 182
May 31, 2010
QotD: A lesson for today
May 30, 2010
QotD: The first great back-to-the-land experiment
. . . the plundering, the lack of invention, the barbarians and above all Diocletian’s red tape did for Rome in the end. As the empire disintegrated under this bureaucratic burden, at least in the west, money lending at interest stopped and coins ceased to circulate so freely. In the Dark Ages that followed, because free trade became impossible, cities shrank, markets atrophied, merchants disappeared, literacy declined and — crudely speaking — once Goth, Hun and Vandal plundering had run its course, everybody had to go back to being self-sufficient again. Europe de-urbanised. Even Rome and Constantinople fell to a fraction of their former populations. Trade with Egypt and India largely dried up, especially once the Arabs took control of Alexandria, so that not only did oriental imports such as papyrus, spices and silk cease to appear, but those export-oriented plantations in Campania became the plots of subsistence farmers instead. In that sense, the decline of the Roman Empire turned consumer traders back into subsistence peasants. The Dark Ages were a massive experiment in the back-to-the-land hippy lifestyle (without the trust fund): you ground your own corn, sheared your own sheep, cured your own leather and cut your own wood. Any pathetic surplus you generated was confiscated to support a monk, or maybe you could occasionally sell something to buy a metal tool off a part-time blacksmith. Otherwise, subsistence replaced specialization.
Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, p. 175
May 29, 2010
Random links
- Ceremony on the 70th anniversary of the Dunkirk operation.
- P.J. O’Rourke suggests a new way to make newspapers relevant: pre-obituaries.
- Federal Tories increase their lead over the Liberals. But don’t expect an election call: they’re back to the same margin that delivered a minority last election.
- That “crazy, hateful, fringe lunatic Ron Paul voted” to eliminate the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy in the US armed forces.
- Who’s afraid of cannabis? The Taliban.
May 28, 2010
Is it too late to cancel?
Chris Selley rounds up the (almost unanimous) pundits’ opinions about the billion-dollar-boondoggle-summit-set:
Is it too late to cancel the G8 and G20 summits?
The National Post‘s Don Martin for the win: “No amount of righteous government bluster about living in post-9/11 protection paranoia, last week’s bank firebombing in Ottawa or the precedent of hosting two back-to-back summits can explain how an $18-million security tab for the G20 in Pittsburgh last September, which involved 4,000 police, must balloon to a billion dollars in Toronto requiring 10,000 cops on the ground.” Yup. It’s outrageous, and the government seems very oddly . . . proud of it. We can hardly wait for the Auditor-General and Parliamentary Budget Officer to find out just where this money went. Especially in a climate where Canadians are thoroughly cheesed off about government spending in the first place, it’s not too much of a stretch to say this is the sort of issue that might bring down a government.
“A case of bureaucracy gone wild,” is Jeffrey Simpson‘s uncontroversial verdict in The Globe and Mail, “or planning gone crazy, of fear sinking itself into every official’s and security person’s heart.” Imagine what we could have bought with that $1-billion! A bunch more Canada Research Chairs, or a whack of “clean-energy projects,” or assistance for “cultural groups” — so sleepy — or, hey, now we’re talking, a massive injection of cash for infrastructure on aboriginal reserves. Or, as Simpson says, “whatever.” Almost literally anything would be better. We’d arguably be better off flushing the $1-billion down the john.
For those of you looking forward to suffering through the event, here’s the official map of the restricted area around the Metro Convention Centre:
The best advice — unless you’re hoping for a run-in with the police — is to avoid Toronto for that weekend (plus a few days in either direction).
The copyright issue in Canadian law
I’ve always understood that under Canadian copyright law, as long as you bought the original CD, you were allowed to rip the tracks to play on iPods and other MP3 players. I was wrong — that sort of thing breaks Canadian copyright law:
Industry Minister Tony Clement has an admission to make: He built his impressive music library on his iPod in part by breaking Canada’s copyright law.
Mr. Clement, stickhandling the copyright file for the Conservative government along with Heritage Minister James Moore, is poised to introduce new copyright legislation within days. But until the law is updated to permit Canadians to transfer music onto MP3 players from CDs they have purchased, Mr. Clement stands on the wrong side of Canada’s copyright law.
“Well you see, you know I think I have to admit it probably runs afoul of the current law because the current law does not allow you to shift formats. So the fact of the matter is I have compact discs that I’ve transferred, I have compact discs from my children or my wife that I’ve transferred onto my iPod. None of that is allowable under the current regime,” Mr. Clement, a music buff who also legally purchases songs from iTunes to build a digital database that now stands at 10,452 songs.
If the guy in charge of the relevant ministry admits that he’s breaking the law, are the media providers going to slap him with a lawsuit, claiming their traditional multi-millions per track in damages? If not, why not?
Update: Amusingly, the first piece of spam that someone attempted to post on this article said “The compilation of all content on this site is the exclusive property of WaySpa and protected by Canadian and international copyright laws.” So I guess now we know who to blame . . .
May 27, 2010
The absurdity of spending $1 Billion for G20 meeting security
Hard to disagree with anything Rex Murphy says here:
Summits are useless, expensive and potentially dangerous anachronisms.
Let’s take the G20 summit, which will be held June 26-27 in Toronto. No one from the general public will be meeting with the world leaders — summits are not for mingling. So why are the leaders gathering in the middle of Canada’s most populous city when the very idea of interacting with any of the city’s population is absolutely impossible?
Once inside the summit venue the leaders — and their insanely bloated retinues — will be almost antiseptically sealed off from every other bit of Toronto. It’s all fortified meeting rooms and security-proofed hotels for them. Effectively, they will come to Toronto, stay behind a shield of impassable security and talk to leaders they’ve already met. It makes zero sense.
If you’re of a Toronto-centric, anti-Stephen Harper mindset (that would be most Toronto voters), you might attribute it to Harper recreating the famous pacification policy of Henry II: imposing the costs of supporting the royal court by visiting the powerful nobles (that is, the victim can’t refuse the honour of hosting the King, and then has no money or time to plot or scheme against same).
Update: Kelly McParland makes another good point:
Hard as it is to fathom, the Conservatives appear to have successfully created a bigger waste of money than the Liberal gun registry. It took a long time — they’ve had 15 years to study how the Liberals went about wasting so much money on an agency that costs a lot and doesn’t work — but they’ve managed.
In doing so, they’ve disqualified themselves from ever complaining again about money-wasting Liberal schemes, or the gun registry itself for that matter. If Tories can blow a billion forcing everyone in Toronto to find somewhere else to spend the weekend of June 26-27, Liberals can force farmers to get shotgun licences.
Canada’s positive experience of US Prohibition
I knew that individual Canadians did well out of supplying booze to thirsty Americans during the period of Prohibition, but I didn’t realize how well:
. . . Prohibition — perhaps the maddest of mad American dreams [NR: in a dead heat with the current War on Drugs, I think] — did pretty well by our nation from 1920 to 1933. As American writer Daniel Okrent points out in his fine social history of the era, Last Call, the rivers of Canadian booze that flowed south enriched not only the Bronfman liquor empire, but our federal government. Canadians did make and smuggle illegal liquor, evading both Canadian taxes and American law, but we also made millions of litres of the legal, taxed stuff, the ultimate destination of which was of no concern to Ottawa. The amount of alcohol subject to excise tax — most of which went south one way or another — went from 36,000 litres in 1920 to five million 10 years later, and the excise tax on it rose to a fifth of federal revenue, twice as much as income tax.
Few in Canada had the slightest inclination to aid the American government in cracking down on alcohol use. When a U.S. Coast Guard cutter in pursuit of a Lake Erie rum-runner ran aground near Port Colborne, Ont., locals looted the vessel, then filled its engines with sand. About the only Canadians Okrent could unearth who thought the Dominion should help Uncle Sam seal his border were those making a fortune selling alcohol to American visitors. One way or another, most Canadians agreed with the smug satisfaction of CNR president Sir Henry Thornton, whose railway was growing fat off liquor tourism: “The dryer the U.S. is,” opined Sir Henry, “the better it will be for us.”
If there was an upside to what was known — at first, without a trace of irony — as “The Noble Experiment” in the U.S. itself, Okrent is hard-pressed to find it. America had always been awash in alcohol. (Johnny Appleseed’s fruit was inedible, but Americans still embraced his trees — virtually every homestead kept a barrel of hard cider by the door for visitors.) During the sodden 19th century, adult Americans downed 27 litres of pure alcohol each annually. That kind of demand wasn’t going to disappear no matter what the law said.
And yet the lesson has been forgotten. When drug prohibition finally comes to an end, historians will have a field day drawing the obvious comparison between the War on Drugs and the “Noble Experiment”. The theses practically write themselves . . .
QotD: This isn’t what we mean by “the invisible hand”
Another Example of Your LCBO Hard at Work, Screwing You . . . If you’re feeling a pained sensation in your rear end, like a sandpaper wrapped glove entering your rectum, don’t worry fellow wine drinkers, that’s just the hand of the LCBO doing what they do best — sticking it to you. The LCBO has decided to take advantage of yet another potential money saving opportunity and has turned it into a money grab at your wallet. A recent article in the Toronto Star (“HST will lower tax on booze, but the price is going up ” – May 13, 2010) uncovered that the LCBO, instead of passing the HST savings on to you, which would have lowered the tax on booze from 12% to 8%, has decided to raise the price all in the name of “social responsibility”. Oh happy day, thank you LCBO for keeping me on the straight and narrow while lighting my pockets and lining yours in the process. Oh thank you — thank you.
Michael Pinkus, Ontario Wine Review, 2010-05-27
May 26, 2010
The pandemic juggernaut of doom . . . that failed to materialize
Lorne Gunter has a good wrap-up of the bone-headed approach of public health officals in Canada to the Swine H1N1 flu “pandemic”:
Good on ordinary Torontonians. Despite all the H1N1/swine flu hype this past winter, just 28.2% of that city’s residents bothered to get vaccinated against the “pandemic;” that’s less than the 35% who usually get shots each year against the seasonal flu.
Even Toronto health care workers couldn’t be stampeded into getting the shots. Only 60% of them bothered.
[. . .]
Even from the start, the World Health Organization and other experts where told this strain of flu was weak and easily defeated. Infection rates never came remotely close to forecasts and death tolls were thankfully much, much lower than for typical seasonal infections.
The trouble, I think, was that so many public health officials have predicted so many pandemics for so long — SARS, bird flu, swine flu — that they simply got caught up in their own warnings and projections. They wouldn’t listen to contrary evidence.
The relevant public health authorities would have served the public interest (and their own credibility for the future) if they’d been much more forthcoming as the early stages of the pandemic showed H1N1 not to be the second coming of the Black Death. Instead, they doubled-down and raised the propaganda bar even higher.
October 27, 2009: Given that regular seasonal flu causes thousands of deaths annually, you’d think it would be good statistical discipline to count the cases of H1N1 separately, both the gauge the severity of the disease and to chart the effectiveness of the vaccination program. Lumping seasonal flu and “flu-like symptoms” together with H1N1 seems a big step backward from normal public health practice.
This would have been a good opportunity for de-escalating the panic mongering (and perhaps even attempting to rein-in the media, who were equally to blame for the tone of the information getting to the public). They chose, instead, to actively hide the fact that H1N1 cases were running below the level of ordinary seasonal flu cases (total H1N1 deaths: approximately 18,000 — typical annual death toll from seasonal flu: 250,000-500,000).
The biggest problem isn’t that they over-reacted this time, it’s that it has reduced their credibility the next time they start issuing health warnings. And that’s a bad thing. Unless they pull the same stunt next time, too. In which case, we may start hearing talk about setting up competing organizations to do the job the current entities appear to have given up on.
Evolutionarily speaking, everything old is new again
An idea that seemed fairly common in the 1960s and 70s appears to be regaining credibility:
When two drunken men fight over a woman, alcohol and stupidity may not be the only things at work. Sadly, evolution may have shaped men to behave this way. Almost all of the traits considered to be masculine — big muscles, facial hair, square jaws, deep voices and a propensity to violence — evolved, it now seems, specifically for their usefulness in fighting off or intimidating other men, allowing the winner to get the girl.
That, at least, is the contention of David Puts, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University, in an upcoming paper in Evolution and Human Behavior. Dr Puts is looking at how sexual selection gave rise to certain human traits. A trait is sexually selected if it evolved specifically to enhance mating success. They come in two main forms: weapons, such as an elk’s horns are used to fight off competitors; and ornaments, like a peacock’s tail, which are used to advertise genetic fitness to attract the opposite sex.
Researchers have tended to consider human sexual selection through the lens of the female’s choice of her mate. But human males look a lot more like animals designed to battle with one another for access to females, says Dr Puts. On average, men have 40% more fat-free mass than women, which is similar to the difference in gorillas, a species in which males unquestionably compete with other males for exclusive sexual access to females. In species whose males do not fight for access to females, males are generally the same size as, or smaller than, females.
QotD: Facebook privacy follies
All 1,472 employees of Facebook, Inc. reportedly burst out in uncontrollable laughter Wednesday following Albuquerque resident Jason Herrick’s attempts to protect his personal information from exploitation on the social-networking site. “Look, he’s clicking ‘Friends Only’ for his e-mail address. Like that’s going to make a difference!” howled infrastructure manager Evan Hollingsworth, tears streaming down his face, to several of his doubled-over coworkers. “Oh, sure, by all means, Jason, ‘delete’ that photo. Man, this is so rich.”
“Entire Facebook Staff Laughs As Man Tightens Privacy Settings”, The Onion, 2010-05-26
French and German troops play catch-up
Strategy Page looks at recent changes in the role of French and German troops in Afghanistan:
Since France and Germany loosened up their ROE (Rules of Engagement) in the last year, and allowed their troops to more readily engage Taliban gunmen, there has been a lot more combat for them. Before the ROE change, the Taliban generally ignored the German and French troops, knowing that these foreigners would not interfere with Taliban terrorism operations, and would not even fire unless the Taliban fired on the foreign troops first. But now that the French and Germans can go after any Taliban they spot (or suspect they’ve spotted), the Taliban have become much more aggressive against the French and Germans.
This led to the Germans and French discovering that they were not really equipped or trained to deal with the Taliban. The Americans, British, Canadians, Dutch and Australians made it all look so easy. But it isn’t, so now the French and Germans are hustling new equipment (especially armored vehicles, UAVs and sensors like night sights and thermals) to their troops in Afghanistan. But another shortcoming was training, and that was solved by borrowing training manuals (and some trainers) from their combat experienced allies, and starting to train troops back home, before sending them to Afghanistan. This meant having MRAPs back home, as well as realistic training exercises to get the troops ready.
More on the Michael Bryant case
It’s rather surprising how strongly this Globe and Mail editorial expresses the paper’s approval of the decision not to press charges against former Ontario attorney-general Michael Bryant:
Everyone deserves justice, even a former Ontario attorney-general driving an expensive car who finds himself in an altercation with a cyclist in which the cyclist is killed. Irrespective of whatever wealth, power or connections Michael Bryant may have, he was an Everyman. Anyone might find himself in his place one day, reacting in fear and panic to a wild, unexpected aggressor, and subject afterward to police charges and condemnation by the community. When criminal charges were dropped against him yesterday, it was a good day for justice.
Much of what was publicly believed about Michael Bryant’s fatal encounter on Aug. 31, 2009, with Darcy Sheppard turns out to have been false. He did not swerve across a street and ram Mr. Sheppard into a light post or tree or mailbox. He was not speeding along at 60 to 100 kilometres an hour.
Nor were any of the terrible events that night emblematic of the problems that car drivers and cyclists have sharing the road. Mr. Sheppard was simply a man out of control. Given that he paid for his actions with his life, it may seem an unnecessary further blow that he now be publicly judged. But it is necessary, because another man, Michael Bryant, was facing up to life in prison if convicted of criminal negligence causing death. He, not Mr. Sheppard, had the power of the state lined up against him. And everything that happened proceeded inexorably as a result of Mr. Sheppard’s own actions.
Other than the initial flurry of interest in the case immediately following the incident, I didn’t follow the details. This is an excellent example of media coverage severely biased against the defendant: what little I thought I knew about the case made it seem to be an open-and-shut case of vehicular manslaughter. As the Globe editorial points out, very little of what I “knew” about the case (from the media) turns out to have been true.
May 25, 2010
Charges against Michael Bryant unexpectedly dropped
Just in from National Post:
All criminal charges have been withdrawn against former Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant.
Special prosecutor Richard Peck made the surprise announcement in a Toronto courtroom Tuesday morning.
Mr. Bryant was charged after an altercation with a cyclist in downtown Toronto last summer; the cyclist, Darcy Allan Sheppard, died in hospital afterwards.
If the speculation went wild after a former backbench federal Conservative MP got off with a (relative) slap on the wrist, it’ll pale in comparison to the outrage this development is likely to provoke.
The dangers of writing near-future SF
Charles Stross gets sandbagged by the unforeseen:
Back in mid-2008 I mentioned that what I thought was a futuristic-circa-2023 technology for the next novel was too damn close. Slightly more recently, in Living through interesting times, I mentioned that it was becoming near-as-dammit impossible to write near-future SF; I was sore because Bernie Madoff had stolen the plot of my next novel.
Well, I picked myself up, dusted myself down, re-framed the novel in question, and I’m currently about 80% of the way through writing it when it all happened again. First of all, Lothian and Borders Police actually established a recognizable-as-the-embryonic-form version of the unit that one of my protagonists, circa 2023, manages. (Only I got the staffing level and departmental mission statement slightly off-whack …) Next, there’s just been another revolution in Kyrgyzstan (a country which, for reasons I’m not going to discuss here, plays a significant role in “Rule 34”).
But the worst thing? I’ve been sandbagged by an unanticipated event.
Of course, it’s quite understandable — after all these years, who knew there even was a “libertarian arm of the Conservative party” to mess up Charlie’s plot of the near-future?
