Quotulatiousness

January 23, 2012

Could OPEN address the real problems that SOPA/PIPA were supposed to fix?

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:57

Christina DesMarais has a summary of the bill introduced by Congressman Darrell Issa to replace SOPA:

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California) introduced H.R. 3782, the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act in the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday, the same day as an Internet protest when a number of high-profile websites such as Wikipedia went dark. Issa says the new bill delivers stronger intellectual property rights for American artists and innovators while protecting the openness of the Internet. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) has introduced the OPEN Act in the U.S. Senate.

OPEN would give oversight to the International Trade Commission (ITC) instead of the Justice Department, focuses on foreign-based websites, includes an appeals process, and would apply only to websites that “willfully” promote copyright violation. SOPA and PIPA, in contrast, would enable content owners to take down an entire website, even if just one page on it carried infringing content, and imposed sanctions after accusations — not requiring a conviction.

Raising the wreck of the earlier HMS Victory

Filed under: Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

The famous British warship HMS Victory preserved in Portsmouth was built to replace an earlier ship lost in a storm in 1744:

The remains of a 300-year-old warship are to be raised from the sea bed, according to reports.

The wreck of HMS Victory, a predecessor of Nelson’s famous flagship, was found near the Channel Islands in 2008.

The British warship, which went down in a storm in 1744 killing more than 1,000 sailors, could contain gold coins worth an estimated £500m.

The Sunday Times says the Maritime Heritage Foundation is set to manage the wreck’s raising.

It also reports that the charity will employ Odyssey Marine Exploration to carry out the recovery.

The American company found the ship four years ago, with the ship’s identity confirmed by a bronze cannon.

January 22, 2012

Transitioning from “shithole specialist” to ordinary journalist

Filed under: Humour, Media, Middle East — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:28

Everyone changes to some degree as they get older. Some get wiser, some just get older. Others, like P.J. O’Rourke, have to cope with wrenching career changes:

After the Iraq War I gave up on being what’s known in the trade as a “shithole specialist.” I was too old to be scared stiff and too stiff to sleep on the ground. I’d been writing about overseas troubles of one kind or another for 21 years, in 40-some countries, none of them the nice ones. I had a happy marriage and cute kids. There wasn’t much happy or cute about Iraq.

Michael Kelly, my boss at The Atlantic, and I had gone to cover the war, he as an “imbed” with the Third Infantry Division, I as a “unilateral.” We thought, once ground operations began, I’d have the same freedom to pester the locals that he and I had had during the Gulf War a dozen years before. The last time I saw Mike he said, “I’m going to be stuck with the 111th Latrine Cleaning Battalion while you’re driving your rental car through liberated Iraq, drinking Rumsfeld Beer and judging wet abeyya contests.” Instead I wound up trapped in Kuwait, bored and useless, and Mike went with the front line to Baghdad, where he was killed during the assault on the airport.

[. . .]

Apparently shorts and T-shirts are what one wears when one is having fun. I don’t seem to own any fun outfits. I travel in a coat and tie. This is useful in negotiating customs and visa formalities, police barricades, army checkpoints, and rebel roadblocks. “Halt!” say border patrols, policemen, soldiers, and guerrilla fighters in a variety of angry-sounding languages.

I say, “Observe that I am importantly wearing a jacket and tie.”

“We are courteously allowing you to proceed now,” they reply.

This doesn’t work worth a damn with the TSA.

Then there’s the problem of writing about travel fun, or fun of any kind. Nothing has greater potential to annoy a reader than a writer recounting what fun he’s had. Personally — and I’m sure I’m not alone in this — I have little tolerance for fun when other people are having it. It’s worse than pornography and almost as bad as watching the Food Channel. Yet in this manuscript I see that, as a writer, I’m annoying my reader self from the first chapter until the last sentence. I hope at least I’m being crabby about it. Writers of travelogues are most entertaining when — to the infinite amusement of readers — they have bad things happen to them. I’m afraid the best I can do here is have a bad attitude.

The real story of The King’s Speech

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Economics, History, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:13

I was going to just tack this on as an update to the last entry (as it’s the same author and a kinda-sorta similar topic), but it deserves to be in its own post. Colby Cosh on the historical reality behind the movie The King’s Speech:

I got the book The King’s Speech for Christmas and just finished it; in the very wide field of “slender material adapted into a thrilling hit movie, on whose strength it is then flogged”, it must be some kind of record-breaker. I enjoyed the book, as a reader with about a degree-and-a-half in European history and a keen interest in the pre-war period, but I do not have the creative imagination to have imagined it as fodder for Hollywood. The plain fact is that Lionel Logue scored his big breakthrough in treating the Duke of York (the future King George VI) very quickly, taking a matter of literally a few weeks in late 1926 to help him overcome his stammer and to raise his oratorical abilities to a standard of adequacy. After that time, Logue was consulted very occasionally, serving the King as a sort of good-luck totem on major occasions like the Coronation.

The men obviously got on well, and for decades His Majesty treated Logue with a touching solicitude. Logue’s life was otherwise uneventful. As even the most unschooled reader must have intuited, most of the stuff of the movie — the shouting match in the street, the poignant reconciliation, the surprise royal visit to Logue’s home — is a fairy tale.

But it’s a rare article by Colby that doesn’t include a juicy bit of economics:

It was only with the return of Australian soldiers from the First World War that Logue’s calling as an elocution teacher began to tilt, almost imperceptibly, toward the bailiwick of medicine. Like chiropractors of today, he was ostensibly able to assist some afflicted people for whom scientifically validated medical care cannot do much good. His looks, along with a bit of actor’s training, must have helped a great deal.

(Incidentally, after Logue climbed to the top of the new discipline with royal help, he shrewdly pulled the ladder up after himself, employing George VI in an effort to establish standards and licensing criteria he could never himself have met when he was starting out. Public-choice economists will find this a textbook example of how health cartels establish “restricted entry” barriers.)

“We don’t do kings”

Filed under: Africa, Government, Middle East, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:03

Colby Cosh suggests that the long aversion to monarchy on the part of US policymakers may be hindering their long-term plans around the world:

Monarchies in the Middle East and North Africa have been stable relative to their republican neighbours; the replacement of a monarchy with a republic rarely if ever makes the people better off; and the monarchies in the region tend to be more liberal economically, even if they don’t have particularly liberal political structures.

In the ci-devant monarchies of the Arab and Persian world, nostalgia for overthrown Western-friendly regimes of the past seems fairly common. When the Libyans got rid of Gadhafi last year, for instance, they promptly restored the old flag of the Kingdom of Libya (1951-69), and some of the anti-Gadhafi protesters carried portraits of the deposed late king, Idris. From the vantage point of Canada, constitutional monarchy looks like a pretty good solution to the inherent problems of governing ethnically divided or clan-dominated places. And in most of the chaotic MENA countries, including Libya, there exist legitimist claimants who could be used to bring about constitutional restorations.

The most natural locale for such an experiment would have been Afghanistan, where republican governments have made repeated use of the old monarchical institution of the loya jirga or grand council.

Paulo Coelho: Pirate my work!

Filed under: Books, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:48

Paulo Coelho finds himself on the opposite side of an issue from where he “should be”:

As an author, I should be defending ‘intellectual property’, but I’m not.

Pirates of the world, unite and pirate everything I’ve ever written!

The good old days, when each idea had an owner, are gone forever. First, because all anyone ever does is recycle the same four themes: a love story between two people, a love triangle, the struggle for power, and the story of a journey. Second, because all writers want what they write to be read, whether in a newspaper, blog, pamphlet, or on a wall.

The more often we hear a song on the radio, the keener we are to buy the CD. It’s the same with literature.

The more people ‘pirate’ a book, the better. If they like the beginning, they’ll buy the whole book the next day, because there’s nothing more tiring than reading long screeds of text on a computer screen.

H/T to Cory Doctorow for the link.

Souhan: Perhaps Leslie Frazier is on the right track after all

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:57

The Vikings’ season is over, but the chatter carries on. Jim Souhan, however, looks at the surviving playoff contenders and draws an interesting conclusion:

An apology is required.

Yes, one may eventually be asked of Vikings coach Leslie Frazier for building a coaching staff filled with people who have either been demoted or have yet to prove they can succeed at their current jobs.

Today, though, let me be the one to offer the apology.

I’m sorry, Leslie, for questioning whether your vintage football philosophies could work in the modern world.

I’m sorry for questioning whether your vision of the bareknuckle 1985 Bears had skewed your perspective on the NFL in the Year of the Mayan Prophecy, when passes flew in NFL stadia like locusts in the Old Testament.

Whether your coaches and players will be good enough to win remains in doubt, but your philosophies will be on display all day Sunday, in the NFL’s conference championship games.

Three of the four remaining teams play black-and-white football in the age of 3D color. Sunday provides proof that Frazier’s vision of winning with a powerful running game and a stout defense doesn’t necessarily require that he undergo Lasik surgery.

January 21, 2012

The Birkenhead drill

Filed under: History, Italy — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:55

Mark Steyn’s latest column in the Orange County Register contrasts the behaviour of the crew of the Costa Concordia with that of the crew (and male passengers) of the RMS Titanic:

In the centenary year of the most famous of all maritime disasters, we would do well to consider honestly the tale of the Titanic. [. . .]

On the Titanic, the male passengers gave their lives for the women and would never have considered doing otherwise. On the Costa Concordia, in the words of a female passenger, “There were big men, crew members, pushing their way past us to get into the lifeboat.” After similar scenes on the MV Estonia a few years ago, Roger Kohen of the International Maritime Organization told Time magazine: “There is no law that says women and children first. That is something from the age of chivalry.”

If, by “the age of chivalry,” you mean our great-grandparents’ time.

In fact, “women and children first” can be dated very precisely. On Feb. 26, 1852, HMS Birkenhead was wrecked off the coast of Cape Town while transporting British troops to South Africa. There were, as on the Titanic, insufficient lifeboats. The women and children were escorted to the ship’s cutter. The men mustered on deck. They were ordered not to dive in the water lest they risk endangering the ladies and their young charges by swamping the boats. So they stood stiffly at their posts as the ship disappeared beneath the waves. As Kipling wrote:

    We’re most of us liars, we’re ‘arf of us thieves, an’ the rest of us rank as can be,
    But once in a while we can finish in style (which I ‘ope it won’t ‘appen to me).

Sixty years later, the men on the Titanic — liars and thieves, wealthy and powerful, poor and obscure — found themselves called upon to “finish in style,” and did so. They had barely an hour to kiss their wives goodbye, watch them clamber into the lifeboats, and sail off without them. They, too, ‘ope’d it wouldn’t ‘appen to them, but, when it did, the social norm of “women and children first” held up under pressure and across all classes.

Today there is no social norm, so it’s every man for himself — operative word “man,” although not many of the chaps on the Titanic would recognize those on the Costa Concordia as “men.”

A surprising admission in Conrad Black’s survey of the Muslim world

Filed under: Cancon, Middle East, Military, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:29

The surprise? The unexpectedly nice words for, of all people, former prime minister Jean Chrétien:

All this toing and froing begs the question of why the West has expended such time and resources in Afghanistan, where Pakistan is the chief backer of the main killer of NATO forces (the Haqqani faction), and the chief supplier of ammonium nitrate, the principal ingredient in anti-personnel bombs used against Western forces.

We all started into Afghanistan in 2001 in solidarity with the Americans after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The Americans largely decamped to Iraq after a year, became mired in the quicksand of nation-building, and then in the even deeper and more hopeless morass of trying to make something out of the gigantic, murderous cesspool of Pakistan. It is time this country recognized its debt to Jean Chrétien for taking a pass on the Iraq debacle — and I was one who disagreed with him at the time (though I then had no idea the U.S. would try to take over the governance of the country and try to turn it into Oklahoma).

Although he may have been right in hindsight, he was right for the wrong reason. Prime minister Chrétien “volunteered” Canadian military support in Afghanistan to ensure that we could not be expected to help in Iraq (because in the parlous state of the Canadian Forces, it was impossible for us to support more than one overseas campaign). The Canadian troops did magnificent work in Afghanistan, and certainly raised Canada’s stock with our allies, but we were there — politically — to avoid being in Iraq.

Robert Johnson: How to save Economics

Filed under: Economics, Education, History, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:10

Writing in Time, Robert Johnson has a few recommendations to rescue the field of economics from its current state:

First, economists should resist overstating what they actually know. The quest for certainty, as philosopher John Dewey called it in 1929, is a dangerous temptress. In anxious times like the present, experts can gain great favor in society by offering a false resolution of uncertainty. Of course when the falseness is later unmasked as snake oil, the heroic reputation of the expert is shattered. But that tends to happen only after the damage is done.

Second, economists have to recognize the shortcomings of high-powered mathematical models, which are not substitutes for vigilant observation. Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow saw this danger years ago when he exclaimed, “The math takes on a life of its own because the mathematics pushed toward a tendency to prove theories of mathematical, rather than scientific, interest.”

[. . .]

The third remedy for repairing economics is to reintroduce context. More research on economic history and evidence-based studies are needed to understand the economy and overcome the mechanistic bare-bones models the students at Harvard objected to being taught.

[. . .]

Fourth, we must acknowledge the intimate, inseparable relationship between politics and economics. Modern debates about who caused the financial crisis — ­government or the private financial sector — are almost ­nonsensical. We are living in an era of money politics and large powerful interests that influence the laws and regulations and their enforcement. In order to catalyze the evolution of economics, research teams would benefit from multidisciplinary interaction with politics, psychology, anthropology, sociology and history.

H/T to Tim Harford for the link.

Those aren’t rules of economics. These are rules of economics!

Filed under: Economics, Gaming, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:07

The D&D rules of economics:

These are the Rules of Fantasy Economics:

Rule 1: Everyone has roughly the exact same amount of money and/or property as everyone else of his or her respective experience-point total. Except at character creation, obviously, where some people totally get the shaft, which sucks … but “being poor” and “staying poor” are two very different things.

Only about 99.9% of all people — specifically those who lack the initiative to spend every dollar they own on studded leather and a knife and to abandon their families for the open road on a mad, bloodthirsty whim — ever really STAY poor.

[. . .]

Rule 2: Money cannot make more money. Investing in businesses is a fool’s bargain: stores burn down, castles crumble, merchants and/or bandits will constantly steal your shit, and you will never, ever make a dime. Ever.

It is far wiser to invest in non-depreciable items like swords, hats and magic boots. Likewise, the things that you need to do your job (boats, armor, weapons, rope and horses, for example) do not depreciate at all and may be used forever unless somehow completely destroyed.

Rule 3: All currencies of all countries are worth almost exactly the same amount — and all currencies of all countries are evenly divisible into platinum, gold, silver and copper pieces by factors of exactly ten. No other non-magical objects have any real value, including land.

The exceptions to this rule are gems, which are randomly & subjectively priced (and therefore effectively useless as trade goods) and ‘art objects’, presumably meaning paintings and such, the value of which are objectively determined, fixed and unchangeable, making them a lot like personal checks.

January 20, 2012

This week in Guild Wars 2

Filed under: Gaming — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:52

This week’s column on news, commentary, podcasts and videos from the Guild Wars 2 world is now up at GuildMag.com.

Renewable energy: the ethanol scam writ even larger

Filed under: Economics, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:24

Patrick J. Michaels looks at what he calls the “Great Renewable Energy Scam” and shows what happened with the ethanol fuel program which preceded the current programs:

… here in the U.S. there are some 30 different statewide “renewable portfolio standards” (RPSs) that also mandate pricey power, usually under the guise of fighting dreaded global warming.

RPSs command that a certain percentage of electricity has to come from wind, solar, geothermal, or biomass. Given that this power generally costs a lot more than what comes from a modern coal or gas plant, your local utility passes the cost on in the form of higher bills, which the various state utility commissions are only too happy to approve in the name of saving the planet.

[. . .]

One needs to look no further than ethanol as a motor fuel, mandated by the feds. Sold as “renewable” and reducing pernicious carbon dioxide emissions, it actually produces more in its life cycle than simply burning an equivalent amount of gasoline. It also — unconscionably — consumes 40% of U.S. corn production, and we are the by far the world’s largest producer of this important basic food.

The popular revulsion against ethanol has succeeded in cutting its massive federal subsidy, of $0.54 per gallon, which ran out on Dec. 31. But that doesn’t stop the federal mandate. Last year it was for roughly 14 billion gallons from corn and it will be nearly 15 billion in 2012. By 2022, up to 20 billion gallons will be required — all from corn — unless there is a breakthrough in so-called “cellulosic” ethanol, which, no matter how much money the government throws at it, hasn’t happened. Indeed, the largest cellulosic plant, Range Fuels, in Camilla, Ga., just went bankrupt. The loss to American taxpayers appears to be about $120 million, or about 25% of a Solyndra.

[. . .]

Having seen the ethanol debacle, will the states put solar and wind in their rightful (small) niches by repealing the RPSs? Increasing utility bills with renewable mandates is politically dangerous, and there is less and less political will to subsidize and otherwise prop up energy sources and technologies that cost too much.

Paul Wells on the shady characters behind “Ethical Oil”

Filed under: Cancon, China, Economics, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:09

He pretty much blows the lid off this conspiracy to sell Canadian oil to unaware, easily duped foreigners who don’t realize how evil the conspirators are:

In hindsight, Stephen Harper’s new fight against the world’s oil sands detractors was a long time coming. Last November in Vancouver, the Prime Minister gave a local television interview in which he warned that “significant American interests” would be “trying to line up against the Northern Gateway project,” Enbridge’s proposed $3.5-billion double pipeline from near Edmonton to a new port at Kitimat, B.C.

“They’ll funnel money through environmental groups and others in order to try to slow it down,” Harper told his hosts. “But, as I say, we’ll make sure that the best interests of Canada are protected.”

In early November, U.S. President Barack Obama announced he was putting off final approval of TransCanada’s $7-billion Keystone XL pipeline until after this November’s presidential election. Harper has long viewed Obama as an unsteady ally. Now he’d had enough. “I’m sorry, the damage has been done,” he told CTV before Christmas. “And we’re going to make sure we diversify our energy exports.”

Calculating the real benefits of international trade

Filed under: Cancon, Economics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:12

Kevin Carmichael has an article in the Globe and Mail Economy Lab on the attempts to determine the actual benefits a country derives from international trade:

Currency traders love the monthly import and export data, which provide an excellent guide of how much demand exists for dollars, euros, yen, francs and the like.

But for anyone seeking a more precise understanding of the dynamics of international trade, the data compiled by customs agents are about as about as relevant to a modern economy as carbon paper.

The reason: supply chains. Virtually nothing is produced entirely within a single border anymore. Companies outsource everything from components to packaging. That means a good can cross a border several times on its way to becoming a final product. Each time, it’s value increases. That value is what the customs agent enters in his or her computer. But that inflates the actual contribution of that good to a country’s economy.

It is relatively early days, but some economists are trying to develop a more useful measure of international trade. Among them is the Conference Board of Canada, which Thursday released the first of three reports based on what it calls “value-added trade.” The report should be required reading in Ottawa. Its conclusions challenge much of what we think we know about the nature of Canada’s economy.

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