ReasonTV
Published on 3 Nov 2017Local politicians clash as they try to lure Amazon’s new headquarters to their towns.
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Cities across the country want Amazon HQ2 and the 50,000 jobs promised to come with it. Some municipalities are offering big incentives. When New Jersey puts $7 billion in tax credits on the table, how can small-town mayors compete? By really screwing taxpayers.Written and performed by Austin Bragg and Andrew Heaton. Produced and edited by Bragg.
November 4, 2017
Desperate Mayors Compete for Amazon HQ2
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QotD: The ultimate Steve Jobs device
The iPad is the ultimate Steve Jobs device – so hypnotic that not only do people buy one without knowing what it’s good for, they keep feeling like they ought to use it even when they have better alternatives for everything it does. It’s a triumph of style over substance, cool over utility, form over actual function. The viral YouTube videos of cats and two-years-olds playing with it speak truth in their unsurpassable combination of draw-you-in cuteness with utter pointlessness. It’s the perfect lust object of postmodern consumerism, irresistibly attractive but empty – you know you’ve been played by the marketing and design but you don’t care because your complicity in the game is part of the point.
This has to be Steve Jobs’s last hurrah. I predict this not because he is aging and deathly ill, but because he can’t possibly top this. It is the ne plus ultra of where he has been going ever since the Mac in 1984, with his ever-more obsessive focus on the signifiers of product-design attractiveness. And it’s going to make Apple a huge crapload of money, no question.
[…]
Fast-forward this a couple years and I can see Apple in hell, committed to sexy overpriced products that nobody actually needs, undercut by Android from all directions, and subsisting on a decaying aura of pop-cultural cool. Because that’s what tends to happen when you put yourself in the fashion business and you’re past your peak; those who live by hipness get to die by it too.
Eric S. Raymond, “Apple, postmodern consumerism and the iPad”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-04-22.
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November 3, 2017
Don’t fall for the biodynamic woo in wine propaganda
I’m not a believer in the pseudo-mystical bullshit of biodynamic wine and I’m very strongly of the opinion that it’s 100% New Age marketing bafflegab to excuse jacking up the price of a mediocre-or-worse bottle of wine and to deflect criticism of faulty or inexpert winemaking. “Organic” wines are too often just adequate wines at a higher price point than their quality would otherwise justify. Michael Pinkus reports that he had to put up with a full-on biodynamic bullshit storm on a recent tasting in Italy:
While on a journalist junket […] I found myself at a beautiful modern winery where Daddy had obviously made a lot of euros and he wanted his offspring to have the best in their new endeavor … the winery was painfully modern and so were the levels of wines (earth, sky, air, etc) everything pointed to a winery that devotedly cared about the environment wherein it existed and did so with biodynamic winemaking techniques and practices – even the tour dripped of kale-eating and moccasin-wearing.
[…]
When it came time to taste the wines, we all sat at a long elaborate table, everything was set to impress. We started with a bottle of barely choke-downable sparkling wine … it was off-putting and oxidized, and that’s putting it mildly. I looked around the table but everybody seemed to be okay with what was in their glass. Next we tried both the whites and red from the various lines previously mentioned, with each wine seemingly worse than the next.
I turned to an older colleague and said, “Do you like any of these wines?” To which he went into an explanation about how the wines are not “typical” but laudable: “In competition these wines would not show well because they have something different about them – but once they are explained, to either the judges or eventually the consumer, these wines would show much better.”
My mind screamed “NO” while I nodded so as not to start a huge argument in front of the winemaker who had returned with yet another bottle … How in the world could this logic be true? In what world is this even right? Wine is good or it is bad and that decision is in the palate of the beholder (so to speak), but to make an argument that a wine needs a full dissertation before one can enjoy it is absurd to me and blatantly false. I’m not saying that some explanation doesn’t help in the understanding of a wine, but you should not need to fully explain a wine to make it palatable; and just because it’s bio-dynamic doesn’t automatically give the wine a pass or extra marks for trying to make the world a better place; bad wine is bad wine and no amount of explanation is going to make it better.
If you like fruit in your wine then something with lots of minerality or over the top acidity will not appeal to you, that’s a taste profile – but poorly made, off-putting, faulty or oxidized wines don’t get an A for effort just because somebody lets a white sit on skins longer, bury a poop-filled rams horn in the ground at low tide (or whatever your bio-dynamic practice may be), or because you have a fountain that swirls water in ornate patterns from a 2000 year old cistern. Ultimately taste is king.
Why Does American Beer Taste Like Water?
The Good Stuff
Published on 29 Jun 2016Americans drink 51 Billion Pints of beer every single year. Despite the abundance of craft beers available, the most popular variety is the traditional light American Lager. But why do these mass produced beers taste so watery? And how did they get to be so popular in the first place?
Special Thanks To:
Ray Daniels, and the Cicerone Certification Program
https://www.cicerone.org/
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November 2, 2017
George Orwell had a lot of rejection slips for Animal Farm
But of those, this one from T.S. Eliot is perhaps the most representative:
(Click to see full-size)
H/T to Raj Balasubramanyam for the image.
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October 26, 2017
The “sacred” Supply Management system Canada is fighting to preserve
The way our politicians talk about the supply management system, you’d think it was one of the founding issues of Confederation. They’re almost literally willing to abandon the NAFTA talks to preserve this encrusted bit of crony capitalist market distortion that hurts most Canadians in the wallet, to keep domestic producers happy. Matthew Lau explains the system our government is willing to crash the entire economy to save:
The United States wants Canada to end supply management, which impedes agricultural imports – dairy, eggs, and poultry. Canada’s trade negotiators and politicians steadfastly refuse, and in their defense of the policy call up an astounding piece of logic: that the less Canadians have, the richer we are.
Canada’s Agriculture Minister insists that supply management is an “excellent system” and that “to deal with anything else is simply a non-starter.” Supporters on the left argue that the policy is necessary to protect domestic farmers from unfair competition from American farmers who receive government subsidies.
Conservatives have argued the same. Current Parliament Member and former International Trade Minister, Ed Fast argued in a recent essay that America simply wants access to the Canadian market “to deal with its own problem of overproduction, to the detriment of Canadian farmers.”
Here is what all proponents of supply management are arguing: If we allow the Americans to send us milk, then their problem of overproduction becomes our problem. Don’t you see how problematic it is, how much poorer we will become if we allow them to send to us the fruits of their overproduction, and at a low price to boot? Don’t you see how much richer we would be if we had less milk?
The less milk we have, the higher the price of milk, the more we can “ensure that producers receive a reasonable return,” as Ed Fast put it – and having ensured that producers receive a reasonable return, certainly we shall all be richer. What could be more reasonable than ensuring Canadian producers receive a reasonable return?
In case the lunacy isn’t quite clear, he also offers a suggestion for a new supply management system for Canadians to “enjoy”:
If we’re made richer by having less dairy, poultry, and eggs, then why stop there? Why not create scarcity in all the other sectors in order to boost the domestic economy? For instance, consider that Ontario’s manufacturing sector has lost several hundred thousand jobs in the past twelve years or so. So according to the supply management logic employed by politicians, how can we revive this industry?
By destroying automobiles of course. And then throw up a tariff to make the purchase of automobiles abroad prohibitively expensive, in order to make sure the Americans, as well as other foreign producers, can’t take “unfair advantage” by inflicting us with cheap automobiles to deal with their problems of overproduction.
The result of such a policy would be that the price of automobiles would rise, thus enabling domestic manufacturers to earn reasonable returns. Destroying automobiles and instituting a tariff would revive the automobile manufacturing industry in Ontario and create thousands of jobs. If the Liberal government thinks supply management is an “excellent policy” they’d probably think this automobile policy is a panacea.
Indeed, the logic, or rather illogic, of the automobile policy is only an amplification and expansion of supply management. Both rest on the idea that we are richer when we have less.
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October 23, 2017
Today I learned a new word: Pigmentocracy
In the Guardian, Afua Hirsch writes about the recent Nivea skin cream video to explain why the ad is so controversial:
“Now I have visibly fairer skin, making me feel younger,” declares the Nigerian actor Omowunmi Akinnifesi in an advert for a new face cream. The ad, for the global skincare brand Nivea, was only ever intended to reach a west African audience, but predictably – has Nivea heard of the internet? – it has been watched and shared millions of times around the world including in the UK, where most of us live in blissful ignorance of the fact that some of our most popular brands openly promote the idea in other markets that white is right.
Nivea says the ad was not intended to offend, but offence is not the point. The global market for skin lightening products, of which west Africa is a significant part, is worth $10bn (£7.6bn). Advertising has a long and unbroken history of promoting and normalising white beauty standards, and if Britain built its empire as a geopolitical and ideological project, the advertising industry commodified it. Soap brands such as Pears built a narrative that cast Africa as dark and its people as dirty, the solution to which – conveniently – was soap. Cleansing, lightening and civilising in one handy bar.
These days the marketing has become much more sophisticated. Ads speak of “toning” as code for whitening. Lancôme, which a few years ago got in trouble for using Emma Watson’s image to market its Blanc Expert line in Asia, emphasised that it does not lighten, but rather “evens skin tone, and provides a healthy-looking complexion … an essential part of Asian women’s beauty routines”.
[…]
Shadism, pigmentocracy – the idea of privilege accruing to lighter-skinned black people – and other hierarchies of beauty are a complex picture in which ads such as Nivea’s are only the obvious tip of an insidious iceberg. Celebrities with darker complexions, such as the Sudanese model Nyakim Gatwech – nicknamed Queen of the Dark – and actors such as Lupita Nyong’o, are so often discussed in the context of having achieved the seemingly impossible by being both dark and beautiful, that they become the exceptions that prove the rule.
It is often observed that light-skinned black women are more likely to become global superstars, the Beyoncé-Rihanna effect. They are, however, still black women and therefore not immune from the pressure to lighten – most recently by fans following a new Photoshopping trend of posting pictures of whitened versions of their faces and remarking upon the improvement.
In countries such as Ghana, the intended audience for the Nivea ad, and Nigeria – where an estimated 77% of women use skin-lightening products – the debate has so far, understandably, focused on health. The most toxic skin-lightening ingredients, still freely available, include ingredients such as hydroquinone, mercury and corticosteroid. It’s not unusual for these to be mixed with caustic agents ranging from automotive battery acid, washing power, toothpaste and cloth bleaching agents, with serious and irreversible health consequences.
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It’s legal to sell 2×4 lumber that’s not actually 2″ by 4″
Not only is it legal, that’s the way construction lumber has been marketed and sold for decades. A recent Illinois case against US DIY chain Menards was dismissed recently:
A federal judge has slammed the door on the Illinois lumber shoppers who sued Menards claiming it deceived them about the size of its 4x4s.
Saying no reasonable consumer would regard Menards’ descriptions of its lumber the way plaintiffs Michael Fuchs and Vladislav Krasilnikov said they did, the judge last week dismissed the would-be class action lawsuit against the Wisconsin-based home-improvement chain.
The decision by U.S. District Judge Edmond Chang throws out a case in which Menards was accused of deception because it marketed and labeled its 4x4s without specifying that the boards measure 3½ by 3 ½ inches.
So-called dimensional lumber — 2x4s, 4x4s, 2x6s and such — is commonly sold by names that do not specify the measurements of the pieces. The longstanding industry convention is recognized by the U.S. Department of Commerce, which distinguishes between the “nominal” designations for pieces of lumber and their actual size. The department says a 2×4, for example, can measure 1½ inches thick by 3½ inches wide.
The distinction between the name and the actual dimensions stems from the fact that lumber, when it is produced, typically is trimmed to smooth it after the initial rough cut, Chang said in his decision.
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October 22, 2017
IKEA’s strengths and weaknesses, from a consumer point of view
Paul Sellers posted an article on his woodworking blog, reacting to some British journalists praising IKEA’s “democratisation of design”:
Visually neat and relatively cheap at first glance, but they are basic and they resolve the need in a new and young family for storage. The pinnacle of three-dimensional cubism!
(photo from PaulSellers.com)Yup! a couple of newspaper writers (maybe more, knowing British journalism) reported the same thing in a short space of time, both hailing IKEA as a ‘democratising’ force revolutionising people’s perspectives on furniture design. Both articles were interesting in the way some articles can be, you know, not contributing much to society really, but time filling on a lazy Sunday. What actually struck me most between their somewhat opposing points of views was the unifying thread in their use of the terms “democratisation of design” and “democratising design and the theme of creating affordable, non-fusty furniture for the masses.” As far as I have seen through the years it is not so much IKEA’s ability to design but more their ability to produce zero- or minimalist-design products that seem less to be concepts of style, shape or form but mostly the selling of square-edged, styleless, plank-type items in the form of very, very plain boxes. Yes, I do understand the needs of young families for low cost storage and first year students to furnish their rooms, but democratisers of design!
Unpretentious though their lines are, you can hardly say they are designs so much as meagre assemblies and of course assemblies you generally have to take care in the way they are used because the selling points are their lightweight cheapness, transportability, dismantle-ability and simple (or complex) self-assembly products. You might be better to strike out into similar fashion statements rejecting the classics of old and adopt an equally classless line of unimagination by using old scaffold planks for dining tables and benches or, say, a shipping pallet coffee table on commercial galvanised swivel casters.
Elizabeth and I used to enjoy visiting a furniture store up in Peterborough, but about a year or so back, they stopped carrying the kind of furniture we liked and started stocking exactly the sort of stuff Paul is talking about. Industrial chic is all very well, but these pieces looked like they’d been thrown together at the last possible second as a student project for a college design course: the industrial fittings were cobbled together as crudely and as shoddily as possible, with no eye to either aesthetics or sturdiness. They were literally props that might appear in the background of a Victorian or Edwardian shop floor scene in an off-, off-, off-Broadway kind of production.
I’m far from a curmudgeon on the topic of home decor and furniture, but the pieces in that store were expensive crap. You can do the industrial chic look, or more modern variations using cast-offs from all sorts of places. My friend Brendan, in his first couple of apartments, had no spare cash at all so he scrounged up pretty much all of his furniture from around town. He had the weirdest collection of decades-old store signs, former display cabinets from different eras, and I don’t know what else, but he has a great eye for design, so no matter how eclectic it all was, he managed to make it look appealing and (somehow) integrated. That was clearly the ideal for the owners of the Peterborough furniture store, but they missed the mark by a very large amount.
I never liked lazy, press-release type journalism (as we are used to in British woodworking magazines) because it can be the same as lazy design work; both lacking any true imagination. But the two authors, each celebrating IKEA’s birth for opposite and then too the same reasons, seemed more focussed on this issue of IKEA somehow ‘democratising’ something rather than considering what could be in essence more a diktat. I question whether IKEA makes products that people actually want or makes people want what they make by virtue of cheapness and driving out competition, but then what do I know? I know this though, IKEA only sells what it wants you to buy, sells stuff so cheap that no one else can compete, and devalues the market by forcing down prices to a level that promotes mainly quite dumbed down designs. I don’t ever recall much in IKEA’s selling centres that I would describe as at all imaginative. People buy there because it’s cheap. To zone in on the reporting world, on Beeb 4 a day later a reporter interviewed some head of IKEA UK and allowed way too much waffling claptrap boasting IKEA’s products were now no longer going into the landfill after a short lifespan as the reporter suggested, which is of course absolutely true, but onto the secondhand market, which IKEA wants to include in its ‘widening circle of circulation’.
[…]
On the one hand Rhiannon Cosslett article in the Guardian describes IKEA accurately as the “symbol of impermanence”, but she also follows the same track as India Knight in stating that this IKEA is enabling people to shed their ties with “snobbery regarding middle-class home decoration”. The woman reporting in the Times, India Knight, describes the pretension of owning a semi (duplex, USA) and adding furniture that emulates the chintz (a word used in the two articles) of the rich and famed owners living in UK mansions past as a kind of mindless hypocrisy. I agree to some degree, but then there are those millions of others who follow the IKEA trending in equally mindless ways buying into its philosophies purely on the basis that it’s IKEA, as though IKEA holds the keys to concepts of good design. This, in my mind at least, shows how lacking we can become in discerning just what a good design is. I might liken IKEA designs to all the nations County Councils use of standardised street and buildings signage. Yes, they work effectively, but only because they have a created dull and unimaginative examples that stand out because of dullness. The main difference here of course is that for safety reasons the County Councils have a get out clause. I have yet to walk through an IKEA store without thinking (smelling too) MDF, pressed fibreboard, resins and plastic but how is it even possible that any company could put so much effort into creating so much artificiality.
Nope, not plywood, faux ply ‘engineered hollow core particle board.’
(Photo from PaulSellers.com)
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October 7, 2017
Why We Should Privatize the Postal Service
ReasonTV
Published on 6 Oct 2017What’s the best way to make the Post Office faster and cheaper? Pull the government’s tendrils out of it and let it loose in the private sector.
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October 6, 2017
Regulation and the unregulated sharing economy
This particular article talks about the situation in Australia, although it’s quite similar here in Canada:
Living in Australia sometimes feels like living in a bureaucrats’ version of a spaghetti western. The heroes are the brave and all-knowing public servants, while the villains are the naughty people who are too foolish to realise that government knows best.
Politicians and bureaucrats alike want to regulate first, ask questions later. It seems barely a week passes without someone trumpeting the expansion of the nanny state. And with each new crackdown, ban or tax, our freedom gets that little bit smaller.
Whereas once the government would at least go through the motions of citing things like market failure, all it takes now is for a politician to want to look tough or be seen ‘doing something’. So it is with the proposed regulation of short-term accommodation platforms like Airbnb and Stayz.
Sharing our home with someone is as old as time. Who has not stayed with a family member or friend, or the friend of a friend? The difference these days is that it is much easier. Technology allows us to stay in someone’s home nearly anywhere in the world.
The immense popularity of these platforms is simply staggering. Globally, Airbnb has just passed four million listings, more than the rooms of the top five hotel brands worldwide. Australia is particularly fertile ground for the company, with almost one in five adults having an account. The company claims Airbnb is the “most penetrated market in the world”.
For government, the platforms are confronting. With no red tape or government involvement, travellers are protected, bad apples ejected and quality maintained via hosts and guests providing reviews of each other using sophisticated technology and a trusted online marketplace. Airbnb says that, on average, a host could have a new reservation every day for over 27 years before experiencing a single bad incident. A track record like that would be the envy of any pub, hotel, motel or caravan park in the country.
The so-called sharing economy challenges the idea that people need red tape, regulations or government to keep them safe from harm. But that does not stop some from trying. Currently, the NSW Government is toying with a grab bag of Big Brother and nanny-state policies ranging from new taxes and caps, to licences, planning approval and complete bans.
No modern government has ever seen a healthy, flourishing market without feeling the need to insert itself into the process, usually justified by the need to “protect” consumers.
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Are Branded Drugs Better? – Earth Lab
BBC Earth Lab
Published on 22 Jun 2017When you’ve got a cold and need some medicine, do you ever wonder if there’s a difference between branded and non-branded drugs? Greg Foot explains the world of pharmaceuticals, backed up with some stonking examples and unexpected findings!
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October 2, 2017
Is it becoming time to let the NFL’s “chips fall where they may”?
The modern NFL as we know it enjoys a legal privilege through an act of Congress, allowing the league to negotiate TV rights as a single organization and sharing the revenue equally among all the constituent teams. In City Journal, Steven Malanga recounts the history of how that privilege was granted:
Many sports fans know that Major League Baseball has a unique exemption from the nation’s antitrust laws, thanks to a 1922 Supreme Court decision, which perplexingly ruled that baseball teams do not engage in interstate commerce. Less well understood, however, is that the National Football League retains its own federal exemption through legislation that has allowed the league’s teams to cooperate on television contracts — a gift from Washington that has been crucial to the development of the modern NFL. Over the years, the exemption has proved controversial, though bipartisan calls to revoke or narrow it have never gained much traction. The exemption deserves a fresh look with the players’ extreme politicization of the league, in which they have been aided and abetted by the owners, who have allowed and even taken part in unprecedented partisan posturing — broadcast to the nation via Congress-approved TV deals.
According to NFL mythology, the league’s success is the result of the vision of its mid-1950s and 1960s leadership, including the marketing savvy of former commissioner Pete Rozelle. But the real cornerstone of the NFL’s rise was successful Washington lobbying by league leadership, after a court ruled in 1961 that NFL teams could not negotiate broadcasting rights as a group, because such power would violate antitrust laws against monopolization. Rozelle got a New York congressman, Emanuel Cellar, who chaired the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Anti-Trust and Monopoly, to introduce what’s become known as the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961, which provided limited antitrust exemption, allowing teams to pool their efforts for the sake of negotiating TV deals. When President Kennedy signed the legislation, it permitted a $4.65 million broadcast deal that the NFL had crafted with CBS for the rights to televise football games. The price of broadcasting packages quickly accelerated, especially after the merger of the NFL and the old AFL, and the antitrust exemption allowed for such singular NFL successes as Monday Night Football, introduced in 1970.
Though the act also applies to professional baseball, hockey, and basketball teams, its significance to the NFL came to outweigh the benefits to other leagues, because pro football—with many fewer games per season—exclusively and collectively sells all its TV rights through monopoly pooling, then distributes the revenues to teams equally. Without this exemption, each team would have to negotiate its television contracts individually, which would be fine for powerful teams like the Dallas Cowboys that could probably arrange to have all their games broadcast nationally, but less advantageous for weak teams such as the Cleveland Browns, which might struggle even for local coverage.
[…] The majority of companies in America would not, and do not, allow demonstrations at work by individual employees on political issues unrelated to their employment — just the sort of demonstrations begun last year by former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, and carried on through this weekend by more than 200 players. That the owners have tolerated and lately even encouraged such protests over an issue — charges of police brutality — that divides many Americans is a business risk that they seem willing to take. But the league’s use of its platform — created by its federal antitrust exemption — to broadcast its message across the country is more than a simple business matter. It represents an improper use of resources made available to the NFL by special federal legislation. It’s past time to revoke the Sports Broadcasting Act — and let the “chips fall where they may.”
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September 29, 2017
Blockchain primer – blockchain as a ledger
At Catallaxy Files, Sinclair Davidson provides some background knowledge of blockchain technology as a modern evolution of the simple ledger:
The blockchain is a digital, decentralised, distributed ledger.
Most explanations for the importance of the blockchain start with Bitcoin and the history of money. But money is just the first use case of the blockchain. And it is unlikely to be the most important.
It might seem strange that a ledger — a dull and practical document associated mainly with accounting — would be described as a revolutionary technology. But the blockchain matters because ledgers matter.
Ledgers all the way down
Ledgers are everywhere. Ledgers do more than just record accounting transactions. A ledger consists simply of data structured by rules. Any time we need a consensus about facts, we use a ledger. Ledgers record the facts underpinning the modern economy.
Ledgers confirm ownership. Property title registers map who owns what and whether their land is subject to any caveats or encumbrances. Hernando de Soto has documented how the poor suffer when they own property that has not been confirmed in a ledger. The firm is a ledger, as a network of ownership, employment and production relationships with a single purpose. A club is a ledger, structuring who benefits and who does not.
Ledgers confirm identity. Businesses have identities recorded on government ledgers to track their existence and their status under tax law. The register of Births Deaths and Marriages records the existence of individuals at key moments, and uses that information to confirm identities when those individuals are interacting with the world.
Ledgers confirm status. Citizenship is a ledger, recording who has the rights and is subject to obligations due to national membership. The electoral roll is a ledger, allowing (and, in Australia, obliging) those who are on that roll a vote. Employment is a ledger, giving those employed a contractual claim on payment in return for work.
Ledgers confirm authority. Ledgers identify who can validly sit in parliament, who can access what bank account, who can work with children, who can enter restricted areas.
At their most fundamental level, ledgers map economic and social relationships.
Agreement about the facts and when they change — that is, a consensus about what is in the ledger, and a trust that the ledger is accurate — is one of the fundamental bases of market capitalism.
[…]
The evolution of the ledger
For all its importance, ledger technology has been mostly unchanged … until now.
Ledgers appear at the dawn of written communication. Ledgers and writing developed simultaneously in the Ancient Near East to record production, trade, and debt. Clay tablets baked with cuneiform script detailed units of rations, taxes, workers and so forth. The first international ‘community’ was arranged through a structured network of alliances that functioned a lot like a distributed ledger.
A fragment of a late Babylonian cuneiform ledger, held by the British Museum, 58278
The first major change to ledgers appeared in the fourteenth century with the invention of double entry bookkeeping. By recording both debits and credits, double entry bookkeeping conserved data across multiple (distributed) ledgers, and allowed for the reconciliation of information between ledgers.
The nineteenth century saw the next advance in ledger technology with the rise of large corporate firms and large bureaucracies. These centralised ledgers enabled dramatic increases in organisational size and scope, but relied entirely on trust in the centralised institutions.
In the late twentieth century ledgers moved from analog to digital ledgers. For example, in the 1970s the Australian passport ledger was digitised and centralised. A database allows for more complex distribution, calculation, analysis and tracking. A database is computable and searchable.
But a database still relies on trust; a digitised ledger is only as reliable as the organisation that maintains it (and the individuals they employ). It is this problem that the blockchain solves. The blockchain is a distributed ledgers that does not rely on a trusted central authority to maintain and validate the ledger.
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September 26, 2017
When virtue signalling is more important than tens of thousands of jobs
In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill slams the (mostly left-leaning) critics of Uber for their blatant two-faced attitudes:
The satire writes itself these days. For the past 16 months, ever since voters said No to the EU, the supposed liberal set has been signalling its virtue over migrant workers. These Remainer types have filled newspaper columns and dinner-party chatter with sad talk about foreigners losing the right to travel to and work in Britain. Yet now these same people have chortled as London mayor Sadiq Khan and his pen-pushers at Transport for London (TfL) have refused to renew Uber’s licence in the capital. Which means 30,000 people will lose work. Many of them migrants. They cry over migrant workers one day, and laugh as they lose their livelihoods the next.
Anyone would think their overriding concern is less with migrants’ right to work than with their own insatiable need to engage in political posturing. And right now, when it’s trendy to be anti-capitalist, to sneer at Silicon Valley fat-cats who make apps that employ people in far from ideal conditions, the posture that guarantees one’s spot in liberal circles is to be Uberphobic. Sticking it to Uber, making a spectacle of one’s haughty disdain for the vagaries of life in 21st-century capitalist society, takes precedence over concern for workers themselves. Welcome to 2017, where it’s cool to be anti-capitalist but not pro-worker.[…]
One of the ugliest sentiments behind Uberphobia is the idea that this service is a threat to the public, especially women. Darkly, the new left is at one with the anti-migrant hard right on this question: both have cheered Uber’s licence loss on the basis that women of London must be protected from unregulated drivers. Let’s get this into perspective. Last year it was revealed that between February 2015 and February 2016 there were 32 allegations of sexual assault against Uber drivers in London. There were a total of 154 allegations against all taxi and car firms, meaning Uber made up a minority of complaints. What’s more, there are millions of Uber journeys in London every year, so the chances of assault are minuscule. It’s the same in the US. There was scandal when it was revealed that Uber had received complaints from women who said they had been raped by drivers. It received five complaints between 2012 and 2015, which means 0.0000009% of car journeys involved an alleged act of rape. Uber is very safe indeed.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, from both leftish feminists and the hard right, the panic about Uber is driven partly by fear of unregulated foreign men driving around our cities. The state must regulate, they say — and they mean it must regulate both business and foreigners, both fat cats and untrustworthy outsiders, both moneymen and migrants. Cheering as migrant workers lose their work and being complicit in the depiction of migrant drivers as a rapacious threat: sections of the liberal-left have really exposed their prejudices through their posturing against Uber. The tragedy of Uberphobia is that it confirms that even anti-capitalism is now virtue-signalling. It is no longer a serious call to improve working people’s lives; it is just the fleeting thrill of shouting ‘Down with Uber!’ without ever letting the issue of its drivers’ livelihoods cross your pristine, virtuous mind.
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