John Major talks a great deal of sense in this interview, the nonsense about the number of MPs aside which is a drop in the ocean of public spending. I only hope he is right about a sea change in the way this country is governed and a downsizing of the state.
Hex Wrench As a Weapon
I had to buy a hex wrench set the other day. The 3/8 inch one:
Look familiar? Looks a lot like a karambit. The karambit is a knife, of course, but master martial artist Kelly Wordern, the cunning bloke he is, came up with the 'travel wrench'. This is essentially a blunt karambit made of high impact polymer. The problem with the travel wrench is that, whilst it is disguised as a wrench tool, it is designed to be a weapon. Police may well be familiar with it, and even if they are not a quick Google search will reveal its true purpose. A Draper 3/8 inch allen key, however, was never intended to be used as a weapon so unless it can be proved you were carrying it as a weapon you're in the clear.
You can hold it either way up, and use the short 'flick' on the end as a strike enhancer (just throw a punch so that point of the flick connects). This will seriously ruin someone's day, and it will cut their face as well as cause impact damage. You can easily fracture a skull with this. Striking the throat would be a very serious move. You can hammerfist (or swipe, depending on which way up you are holding it) with the flat bottom of the flick or with the long end. Using the flick will give better retention (no way you can go forward on it) but the long end will concentrate the force better, and also cut/pierce better. You can also hold it in a saber grip with the long end pointing forward and stab with it. It can also be used very effectively to exploit pressure points and for pain compliance.
A very versatile and nasty little improvised weapon. Thought I'd share.
Cutting Out The Truth
In this article from 2008, the BBC claim that "Like other dangerous weapons, carrying a knife in New York City is illegal." Neither assertion is true. It is correct to say, as in most US cities, that a list of certain weapons are prohibited in public. However, not all 'dangerous weapons' are banned. Pepper spray, for instance, can be carried legally. New York City law specifically allows you to carry a knife so long as the blade is 4" in length or less.
How can the state get away with such shoddy journalism?
Blogger: Fucked Up
If you scroll down this page you will see that many of my posts are written in different fonts and sizes of text, often varying in both between paragraphs. You will also notice that, in some of them, the first paragraph is indented slightly. I have no idea why this is. Looking at the HTML of my posts, Blogger has been inserting vast tracts of unwanted code to what I write. The only solution seems to be to remove this code which is inserted before and after basically everything I do and therefore takes a long time to get rid of. I cannot be bothered to go back and remove it from all posts.
If anyone knows what the problem is, please leave a comment. I'm considering movie to Wordpress but it worries me that I'll lose all my ratings and links and it will mess with everyone's RSS feeds.
News Sharing
Good news and bad news. The good news is that, surprisingly, the 'Digital Britain' report did not recommend especially repressive action against file-sharing. It recommended only that ISPs be forced to send warnings to file sharers. Of course, government may well go further, who knows.
The bad news is that Virgin Media, who are the ISP I use when I am at my parent's house, and also the company I will be using in my new house next year, have stated that they will temporarily suspend the accounts of 'persistent file sharers'. Of course, as a private company I am, in principle, fine with them doing whatever the hell they like. It is their network, after all. However, they are only doing this because of the state enforcement of so-called 'intellectual property'. Virgin Media are making this move as payment in return for their new music deal with Universal. That music deal is only worth anything because government bans Virgin from copying the music that Universal publishes unless Universal gives them permission. In this way, intellectual property is self-perpetuation. Intellectual property owners use their misbegotten gains to pay to maintain their monopoly on ideas.
Sadly, outside of Sweden, there is little opposition to the tyranny of 'intellectual property' - a laughably ironic name. Even the (British) Libertarian Party state in their manifesto, and contrary to a wealth of libertarian thought, I might add:
Property rights are corporeal (your body), intellectual (your ideas, thoughts, beliefs), physical (possessions, land) and capital (your money or other financial assets).I think we need a strong right-to-copy group, a movement preferably, to fight back against these kinds of moves.
What's The Point?
A man named John Cornick has designed a knife, a variation of which has been released through British knife manufacturer Taylor's Eye Witness, billed as an 'anti-stab knife'. The BBC says the following:
He says a knife can never be totally safe, but the idea is it can't inflict a fatal wound. Nobody could just "grab one out of the kitchen drawer and kill someone".
As you can see from a picture of the ghastly things, this is utter nonsense:
To kill with this knife is as simple as slashing your victim. Bear in mind that the great majority of martial art and knife fighting experts will tell you that slashing is the more effective strategy as opposed to stabbing. At the very least, slitting the throat of your unarmed and possibly unsuspecting victim should be no problem. Also remember that every year people are stabbed to death with blunt screw drivers. Having a (partially) blunt tip does not prevent them being used to stab. Heck, even if we were to remove the entire blade from the knife we are still left with a rigid length of solid material which can be used to beat a person to death more easily than we might do with our fists.
Quite obviously, these knifes can have no bearing at all on premeditated crimes as criminals will simply avoid them. Even if these were the only knives legally available criminals have a number of options: use the black market to acquire illegal knives (as is hardly rare at the moment going on the 'scary table full of knives' pictures that the police put out, usually with a good percentage of the knives being of illegal types), grind down the tip or cut off the rounded portion to revert it back to a 'stabby' knife, or do what people do in prison and sharpen some other object such as a spoon into a shiv.
So the knife seems only applicable to 'heat of the moment' murders. As I have said, it is still quite capable of killing someone in such a situation. I'd be interested to know the percentage of stabbings which are of this type - I suspect it is low. For this knife to have an effect, it would require a very large proportion of the population to not only own this knife, but also own no other kind. How many people, when purchasing a product, consider whether how easy it would be to kill someone with it should they go off the rails? Of course, even if the knife were entirely useless for killing someone there is no shortage of lethal objects around the average home.
I wonder what you're supposed to do when the recipe says 'pierce the skin'... None the less, I have no doubt that within 20 years this type of knife will be the only legal kind in Britain.
Melik on Silver Linings
In one of the worst pieces of journalism I have ever seen, the BBC's James Melik asks if there is a silver lining to the economic crisis.
There have been allegations that consumerism prompted the rampant spending that has led to the current dire economic climate.
What rampant spending is that exactly? The rampant spending which is forcing firms to cut back production and lay off workers? The rampant spending that is driving highstreet stores into closing? Consumer spending did not cause this recession, it is a lack of consumer spending which is both a symptom and a continued cause of it.
That isn't what makes the article such a bad piece of journalism, however. Melik isn't just wrong on that point, he has no overriding point, no answer to his own question, and nothing to show us at all. He introduces a group called The Compact who agree not to buy new things and only recycle, trade, barter used things and so on. This group is not new to the recession, however, it has existed since at least 2006.
It is not especially relevant, but interesting to note that the founding member he talks to is a complete idiot:
Rather than going out and buying a book, she now walks around a store, makes a note of any title she wants, then goes to a library to borrow it.
....why not just go to the library?
He goes on to mention Freecycle, which was founded in 2003 and talks about 'freeganism', a lifestyle which started in the 1990s. The term 'chief household officer', an tenuous link at best to any kind of point he might be trying to make, has been around since at least the start of 2007. All of these originated before the recession, so how can he use them as evidence of changes in consumer attitudes? He might offer group membership figures over time, but he does no such thing.
He quotes a man named Martin Raymond who says that the recession is an opportunity for people to 'change their habits' and that we 'must not let that chance go by'. He does not say what those habits are or how they might change. He does say that:
People are now understanding they are going to have to depend on each other - employees are deciding to take a day off work without pay, or even a pay cut, to avoid their colleagues losing their jobs - that's kind of a new phenomenon," says Mr Wallis.
It is hardly a new phenomenon, but what is his point? After the recession, are people going to work for free when doing otherwise does not threaten their jobs? Will people cut their own pay when they could earn more at no cost? If so, why might this be a good thing? It does not seem like a great deal for workers, though I am sure big business will appreciate the change.
He wins no prizes for pointing out that in time of recession people are more willing to compare prices, barter and so on. It is well known that consumers face diminishing marginal utility. The second Mars Bar offers us less satisfaction than the first. When we are wealthy, an extra pound offers us little satisfaction, so incurring a small cost for a gain in leisure time (versus spending time shopping around for a better price) is acceptable. When we are less wealthy, the extra pound is worth a lot more to us, so we are more willing to trade leisure time in order to save it. He offers no evidence or explanation as to why, when we become wealthier again, we won't go back to the way we acted previously.
Figures show that people are buying less, and also buying products which have a certain integrity about them in terms of sourcing.
The first point is fairly obvious in a recession! The second may be true... He offers no data, and neither do I, but I would not be at all surprised if the growth in 'ethical' goods (fair trade, organic, green etc) had slowed or even reversed in recent months. Even if it has continued to grow at a steady rate, again, its roots lie before the recession.
Interestingly, after just talking about how consumers are supposedly buying more local, organic goods and caring about their quality and source and such like, he says:
The desire to spend, and spend conspicuously, seems to have taken a back seat for the moment.
These seem to be contradictory claims. People are supposedly less keen on spending, but more keen on buying more expensive goods i.e. spending.
The case made for changes in consumer habits beyond the plainly obvious due to the recession is almost non-existent. There is no attempt made to examine whether these changes, if they even exist, might hold after the recovery. Exactly what these changes are is obscure; he constructs a tattered ensemble of disparate, narrow and vague examples and there is no attempt to discuss why such changes might be a good thing.
Mixed Up
This BBC article talks about government efforts to target so-called 'binge drinking':
Areas of England blighted by summer binge drinking are to receive extra government money to tackle the problem.
As it turns out, it is not binge drinking that is being targeted:
A total of £1.4m has been made available for 69 towns and boroughs to help provide tougher enforcement and support for teenagers who drink.It is in fact 'under age' drinking. Why are the two conflated?
Both police and youth services say under-age drinking and anti-social behaviour often worsen during the school summer holidays.
In Defence of Footballers' Salaries
I was reading a blog post elsewhere regarding the news that footballer Cristiano Ronaldo has been bought from Manchester United by Real Madrid for £80 million ($130 million). It was said that this was "crazy," and that there must be better things this money could have been spent on. Commenters called it obscene and said the money should be given to charity.
It is to these people that I would wholeheartedly recommend The Price of Everything, a didactic (not to mention romantic) novel by GMU economist Russel Roberts. In the words of Tyler Cowen: "the best attempt to teach economics through fiction that the world has seen to date."
Let's try economics 101. First, I should dispel a kind of myth that people have that wages are determined by the level of skill a person possesses. This is similar to the incorrect assumption that prices are dependent upon how much it costs to make something. Neither is true.
Price is a function of supply and demand. There is only one Cristiano Ronaldo, so supply is very low. Of course, there is only one of you and I, but we are hardly as unique. You and I have jobs that could be filled by other people with relative ease. In other words, there is a relatively high level of competition for our jobs. This competition competes down our wages. If you or I refuse to work for £11 an hour and demand £12, there will probably be someone who will happily take our place for £11. Ronaldo has very few competitors. There are other high level footballers, but probably only a very small handful who are as desirable as he. And of course, desirability from the point of view of the club isn't just about skill. He could be a terrible footballer, but if he attracted massive crowds and huge TV audiences he might be worth it. So, supply is low.
Supply is also perfectly inelastic i.e. totally unresponsive to changes in demand - that means that no matter how much demand for Cristiano Ronaldos changes, there will never be more than the current supply level of one. Usually, when demand rises for a good there will be an initial increase in price as more people 'bid' for what is, in the short term, a fixed stock of the good. For instance, if people suddenly went off rice and demanded twice as much pasta, there is only so much pasta in the world so the price would skyrocket. In the long term, however, firms will be incentivized by the higher price to invest in production of pasta. Resources will flow out of rice production and into pasta production. The supply of pasta will increase, and the price will fall back again. With Ronaldo, there is no such fall back. When demand for Ronaldos increases, nobody can make more of him so the price goes up and stays up.
Supply and demand meet at a point of equilibrium. This is the 'market clearing' level where, if price was set any higher, there would be unsold units (Ronaldo would be unemployed), and, if it were set any lower, there would be people willing to pay but unable to buy because stocks had run out (Ronaldo would have two clubs offering him the asking fee with nothing to choose between the two).
Remember that by 'demand' we do not mean 'how much people want something'. We mean how many units of the good consumers (as a whole) are willing to purchase at a given price level. Imagine we have 10 Greubel and Forsey wristwatches. If we set the price at £1,000 each demand might be at 1 million units. The result would be a shortage of Greubel and Forsey wristwatches; specifically, a shortage of 9,999,990 watches. There would be a queue outside the door of 1 million people waving £1,000 cheques at us, but only the first 10 (essentially randomly selected) would get their watches.
This is an inefficient and undesirable situation. Firstly, the allocation of the watches is made in a random fashion, we cannot differentiate between who wants the watches most. If we raise the price then the people who don't want the watches a great deal will lose interest and we will be left with the people who most want the watches. It is right to point out at this moment that this method of allocation does not work perfectly in terms of allocating resources to those who most want them if we think of this is as the strength of feeling one has. We are talking about effective demand i.e. 'want' backed up by economic power (usually money). Do not be under the illusion, however, that this excludes all but the rich from scarce resources. Of course, all goods are scarce and yet ordinary people get by just fine and have plenty of resources. We do not go without bread or plasma screen TVs because the rich hog it all. This allocation usually does not even exclude ordinary people from very high priced goods if they want the good enough. An ordinary person who deeply wants a Greubel and Forsey more than anything else in the world can indeed save up and buy one - essentially outbidding a much wealthier individual who will make do with something a bit cheaper.
Of course, it does bias the wants of the rich over the wants of the poor. It is always easier for a rich person to buy a Greubel and Forsey than a poor person. Why should it be this way? Because if goods are allocated in a constant state of shortage, with prices too low, income and wealth will have no meaning. We would all have an equal chance of getting a Greubel and Forsey randomly allocated to us through queuing. That would mean there would be no incentive to earn more, which would mean that instead of a very smart, skilled person becoming a doctor or a lawyer or a movie director or a computer programmer, they might instead work in a video store. They might be a brilliant doctor and a terrible chef, yet open a restaurant - it doesn't matter to them that they won't get many customers because getting many as opposed to few would afford them only useless wealth.
More over, firms would have no incentive to produce more or less of things. If Greubel and Forsey can only sell their watches for £1,000, and consumer demand happened to double because of a shift in fashion and taste towards complicated mechanical wristwatches, there would now be 2 million people waving £1,000 cheques at the door. Greubel and Forsey would still only make 10 watches, however. If price is allowed to adjust freely with demand, on the other hand, a doubling in demand will signal to Greubel and Forsey to make more watches because they can make more money. If Greubel and Forsey set their price at £194,000 (as they do in reality for a Tourbillon 24 Secondes) then they would make several tens of units each year, and there would be no queues. They would find that if they raised their price to £195,000 they would not sell all of their watches. If they lowered their price to £193,000 they would find themselves with someone waving a cheque at them but with no watch left to sell him. This high revenue then allows Greubel and Forsey to invest and make more and better wristwatches that would not be possible if they only sold 10 for £1,000
So, to link this back to Ronaldo - why is it good for Real Madrid to buy him for £80 million? Ronaldo is a producer of wealth. He makes money for the team he works for. The £80 million is not a waste, Real Madrid believe (and are probably right) that Ronaldo will make them in excess of £80 million by playing for them. He will make them money, and, correspondingly, make money for their advertisers and those that advertise at the stadiums in which they play. He will make money for the construction companies that build the stadiums, for the hotdog sellers, for the football magazines, newspapers, television companies and dozens of others. Most of all, he produces utility (satisfaction) for you and I who sit at home or on the terraces and enjoy watching him play. We are the ones who, because of that demand to watch him, pay for cable subscriptions, buy products from adverts, eat hot dogs, buy football magazines and all those other things.
Why not pay him less, then? Why not have Real Madrid pay him just £40 million? Well, they could not have done that. Manchester United would have kept him for themselves or sold him to someone else who bid higher. It took £80 million for Real Madrid to outbid everyone else who might want to employ Ronaldo. If the salary of footballers was capped at £40 million Ronaldo would simply choose randomly between the competing clubs hoping to employ him. Real Madrid can make at least £80 million from him, but he might choose to stay at Manchester United who can only make, say, £60 million from him. >£20 million of potential wealth would be prevented from ever coming into existence.
That is why footballers' large salaries are a good thing. Wealth is not a zero sum game, a fixed pie to be shared out. It is not a choice between paying Ronaldo and giving that money to charity; it is a choice between having that wealth or not at all.
Private Memorial
Well apparently a crazy guy in a part of the United States that has a total gun ban for normal people (and correspondingly the highest murder rate) has walked into the Holocaust Memorial Museum and tried to shoot the place up. Luckily, good men with guns were there to stop him. Cops? Nope. Private security guards. Funny how the cops only turned up after it was all over.
Why I Didn't Vote
Voting is irrational.Perhaps, I should qualify that: voting is irrational on the grounds that most people claim to be motivated by. It's a fact that has puzzled economists for many years: why do people bother to vote when it is so obviously pointless?Voting is not free - nothing is, after all. Voting costs you time which could be used for leisure or for working. It costs you the effort of going to the polling booth, it costs you from the wear on your shoes and clothes, from any petrol you might use to drive there. It even costs you in the time and effort you spend thinking about who to vote for, and perhaps financially from buying newspapers and the like. It costs you in that you have to put your name on the electoral roll.A rational individual will only consume a good (voting is a good) up to the point where the cost from consuming one extra unit of the good (the cost of voting once) equals the benefits gained from consuming one extra unit of the good (the benefit of voting once). So how do the costs and benefits stack up?I will take the European Union elections as an example. In my area, in 2004, about 1.5 million people voted in the EU elections. The smallest gap between parties who got an MEP (and between the lowest party that got a candidate and the highest that did not) was about 60,000. Now, working out the actual probabilities in proportional representation systems is a fucking nightmare (very simple in Westminster elections), so I'll approximate it in the following way. If we just take the two closest parties vying for an MEP, and assume that to be the election. We assume the majority of the preferred party can range from 0 to the observed majority, which in this case is 60,000. Equally, if they lose, their vote will vary from -1 to -60,000 (we assume they win on a tie for simplicity). So the probability that your vote would have decided the election of an MEP is about 120,000 to 1. Not good odds. In reality, if I were to work this out exactly, the chances would be much slimmer. This is just an approximation to illustrate how even under the best circumstances voting is ineffectual.Let's count the time taken to go and vote as the only cost involved, and assume it takes 15 minutes. The average hourly wage in the UK is about £11, so the cost of voting, just based on the time it takes to do it, is about £2.75. That means that, for your vote to be rational, you would have to value deciding the election of an MEP at about £330,000. That is to say that if I gave you £330,000 and said "You can either spend this however you like, or give it back to me and I'll let you decide who becomes this MEP," you would pick the latter.Of course, your vote can only possibly decide the election of a single MEP, out of several in your area. That MEP then goes on to become one of 785 in the European Parliament. So, your 120,000 to 1 chance of deciding who becomes MEP is filtered through the chance that the election of that MEP will actually make any difference to the votes in the European Parliament. Looking at the 22 most recent votes in the European Parliament, the smallest majority by which a vote was passed or rejected was 267 (I can't be bothered to average them all out). So, even if this were the typical majority, your MEP only has a 534 to 1 chance of deciding the outcome. And that doesn't take into account that the candidate who would have won had you not voted, or voted differently, might have voted the same way. Ignoring that possibility, that means your vote has a chance of deciding a vote in the European Parliament in the region of 156 million to 1. And of course, there is no guarantee that your MEP will vote how you want him to, so you might actually influence the vote oppositely to how you would prefer, or have no effect if he or she abstains.On top of that, you have to consider the probability of the vote in parliament, assuming it goes the way you would like, because of your vote, actually influencing the real world in the way you wish. You might, for instance, vote for a candidate because you want them to vote (as you believe they will) for the European Parliament to pass a law creating some kind of system or organisation for managing or controlling immigration. However, there is a very real chance that this law might be implemented badly and have no effect, or even produce unexpected/unintended consequences and have a negative effect as you see it (assuming you are right in thinking it should have a good effect, and the probability of you being right in what you think is best is another thing I will not include).Even ignoring that, for voting to be rational you would have to value the (expected) real world effects of your desired MEP deciding legislation the way you would like at around £429 million. That is, assuming you are risk neutral. In reality, a majority of individuals are biased against risk so the value would need to be adjusted upward for most people.I think it's fair to say that most people do not have such a value system - and those who do not will tend to be wealthier which means the cost of voting is greater (the more you earn, the costlier your time spent not working e.g. voting).So, the vast majority of people are not voting because they want their candidate to win, or their policies to be implemented, or to prevent another candidate from winning. Rather, there must be some intrinsic value in voting. People must gain satisfaction from the act of voting, independent of the (essentially insignificant) real world (potential) benefits. Either that, or they are indeed acting irrationally and are simply not thinking - that is to say that every five years millions of people are duped into spontaneously wasting their time.To the title question then: why don't I vote? One reason is that there is no one I would like to elect. I have almost no preference for any particular candidate over another, so being able to pick which one wins is worth approximately nothing. More over, I simply don't garner the intrinsic benefits that others do. If voting makes you feel good because you are taking part, or exercising your democratic right - that's fine. Not me though.There are a couple of 'intrinsic' motivations that don't make much sense. One is the idea that one should vote because people fought/died for our right to vote. For a start, neither of the World Wars were fought so that British people could vote, and certainly not in European elections which didn't even exist. World War One was fought to protect Belgian neutrality, and World War Two was fought to protect Polish neutrality - and Poland wasn't even a democracy. I admit I don't know a great deal about the suffragettes but as far as I am aware only one died - and that was an accident.More to the point, though, people dying or fighting for something quite clearly doesn't make it one's duty to do it. Many German soldiers died for Nazism, and many North Koreans and Vietnamese and others for communism, but this does not make it a good thing to practice Nazism or communism.Then there is "I like making a difference," which is, as we have seen, not really true. And lastly "What if everyone thought like that [didn't vote]?" The answer isn't clear and is quite interesting to ponder, but none the less irrelevant since not voting yourself does not quantifiably lead others to not vote. Back to me though. I do not support the current system or substance of government in this country. Indeed, I utterly oppose it. I couldn't rightly say that my voting would materially legitimise the system - as with voting, a single abstention will have no effect. However, to me it would be contrary to my convictions, to my principles, to vote and internally legitimise the system I oppose. So, not only are there no benefits and material costs, there are internal costs too.I don't vote because it makes me worse, not better off.Note: If I were using the maximum possible majority, I would need to assume a uniform probability distribution which would make the odds slightly better than I would describe because, in reality, majorities tend to cluster near the center. This shouldn't matter though, as I used the observed majority in place of the maximum.
A Word on Machineguns
As a keen opponent of government, it's quite natural that I have an interest in private military ventures (as I've touched on with my cunning plans for the fate of a certain South Pacific island...). This is, some would say, the most basic and most legitimate function of the state (at least in terms of defence).
I'd like to talk about the machinegun, though. I don't think many people know that the first use of a machinegun in war was not by a national army, but by private individuals. Hiram Maxim donated one to the Emin Pasha Expedition, which was a private venture of 400 men, deep into Africa. Why did they go? Well, largely for the money - it was funded by a Scottish businessman. But also just for the hell of it; some of the officers actually paid to get a spot on the excursion, so fierce was competition.
A few years later, the first military unit to officially adopt the weapon was the Singapore Defence Corps. Again, this was a private organisation, not a government one. The Maxim guns were paid for by local businesses and donations from abroad.
They were again used by Cecil Rhodes' men, in the First Matabele War, before they were first used by the British Army itself. Then, in the Second Matabele War, the settlers (the British Army being absent) used their privately owned Maxim guns to defend their laager at Bulawayo.
Then of course there was their use in the mid-twentieth century by the Haganah and other Jewish paramilitary groups in Mandatory Palestine (when that country became Israel these paramilitary groups became the government Israeli Defence Force or were outlawed, but prior to that they were private).
I'm sure there are other instances, but those are plenty of other examples of private machinegun use in war (and I'd be interested to hear of them) but those are some I can think of.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
