Rob's Blog

This is good.

I’m particularly impressed with the high quality of camera-work and editing on display here. I found it using something called Google Reader Play, which is a slideshow of interesting movies and videos, and a good way to waste a Friday afternoon.

The people who made the video are called Britanick and they have made many more.

This quality of production is available to anyone.

Eric Raymond has a good post about the cause of rising unemployment in the USA. He describes two of his unemployed friends as “marginally employable” for various reasons, including:

He’s black, which makes him a EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] lawsuit risk — and if you don’t know how much that hurts his chances, you haven’t been anywhere near a small or medium-sized business in the last 30 years.

And all the interesting things happen at the margins:

These are the people who go to the wall when the cost of employing someone gets too high. We’ve spent the last seventy years increasing the hidden overhead and downside risks associated with hiring a worker — which meant the minimum revenue-per-employee threshold below which hiring doesn’t make sense has crept up and up and up, gradually. This effect was partly masked by credit and asset bubbles, but those have now popped. Increasingly it’s not just the classic hard-core unemployables (alcoholics, criminal deviants, crazies) that can’t pull enough weight to justify a paycheck; it’s the marginal ones, the mediocre, and the mildly dysfunctional.

Meanwhile, Tim Worstall has noticed that the cost of employing women is about to increase in Europe. Some women’s “rights” committee has voted to let women have lots more paid maternity leave.

Increase the (potential) cost to employers of hiring women of child bearing age and you’ll both reduce the number they’re willing to hire and the wages they’re willing to offer them.

Once you understand that costs drive behaviour, and that tiny changes in costs cause big changes in behaviour at the margins, all this becomes pretty obvious.

Update: Jonathan Pearce comments on the same Eric Raymond article.

Big Media announces a Big Party announcing its Big Slogans. I heard about this from my wife who was listening to the radio, just as I was watching Brian Micklethwait talking about how Big Parties like to use slogans instead of ideas (about 2m20s in). He also talks about how the Internet might make small parties more successful, because they don’t need Big Media any more.

Last night I was invited to a Skeptics in the Pub debate about whether political blogging has any effect. I couldn’t go, but my friend who went sent me a couple of links about it.

Mark Reckons review of the event; some video and audio.

Guido was there and said this, which I think is true and important:

Paul Staines started by saying that there are about 3,000 people who run the UK (politicians, financial people and the media) and about half of them regularly read his blog. They are the people he is trying to reach although his primary purpose in writing it is to amuse himself.

(This fits in with what someone, possibly Perry de Havilland, told me when I complained that no-one I know reads blogs: it doesn’t matter because you only have to influence the influential people.)

Apart from that there was some talk about whether the comparitive roles of bloggers and professional journalists when it comes to investigative journalism. I think it’s pretty clear that blogs increasingly lead on the stories and the MSM follows. It’s not clear whether the MSM is needed to influence those 3,000 people.

Read about my previous encounter with Skeptics in the Pub when they discussed global warming with Fred Singer.

Ah, the good old days, when Ronald Reagan would warn of the dangers of socialised medicine.

Meanwhile, in the present, my taxes pay for propaganda aimed at getting the whole of Europe to have homogeneous anti-smoking laws.

And don’t miss Ian B’s essay explaining the motives of those who would label our food. This is a good enough reason for me (actually, consequences aren’t necessary for me to reject compulsion, but still):

Now we may also note that once calorie counted menus are obligatory, a lot of spontaneity goes out the window. No more can the chef just whip up a special du jour. It isn’t officially calorie counted, is it? The restaurant can’t modify a dish to the individual customer’s requirements either, for the same reason. As with all state regulation, the diversity and colour of life is drained away, replaced with grim standardisation.

But IanB traces the roots and motivations of the food labellists including the origins of junk food and binge drinking, and predicts the same path for food that tobacco suffered.

I’m watching Who Do You Think You Are from last night, in which Chris Moyles is learning about his ancestors. He has just learnt that his great great grandmother came from a rural shanty town in Ireland that was all but wiped out by famine. She had 15 children of which 10 died, mostly from diarrhoea.

His grandmother lived in a house in the slums in Dublin with several other families crammed in. A historian explains that there would usually be one family per room. A map shows where the outhouses are — there is one per five houses which would have been shared by about 70 people. One in five children died before their first birthday.

Moyles’ great grandmother was admitted to a workhouse infirmary with TB, and died at 33.

I think we can safely say that economic equality has increased since then. Technology has made this possible.

who do you think you are? (uk):season 7 episode 2

The other day I wrote about how Richard Murphy misunderstands libertarians. Now he has moderated his comments so you can see what everyone had to say about it. Many types of defense are made. Some people seem confused; this one made me chuckle:

I have total sympathy with your stance on the libertarians, although I do derive a lot of amusement from surfing their kneejerk, hackneyed comments. They are, for the most part, fifth-rate hacks with a half-read copy of “The Road to Serfdom” in one hand and The Economist in the other. Even when you get someone like Alistair who makes the effort to make a post longer than one paragraph, there’s still precious little content or analysis in it.

You should set up a page somewhere on this site where you post the worst excesses just for kicks.

What I can’t understand, really, is why these guys are contributing to the discussion in such large numbers. Do they really think they’re going to convince anybody from any other portion of the political spectrum – that their worldview is the way forward?

Perhaps the concept of not initiating violence is too simple for some; they are suspicious of anything that does not involve incomprehensible waffle.

Richard himself responds with, among other points, this:

Those of us who think rights do on occasion need to be curtailed in pursuit of optimal freedom for all (for total freedom cannot be created – as any thinking person knows) will be happy to see those who incite hatred – as libertarians do of those who cannot, for any reason, provide for themselves a reasonable standard of living at any point in time – being banned from promoting their cause which can only lead to the undermining of society.

I asked how arguing that a smaller state would be beneficial to the poor is anything like inciting hatred of the poor.

Richard Murphy has another post that presumably is analysis worthy of the commenter I quoted above, in which he argues that government spending reduces borrowing.

But a country can cut borrowing by keeping people in work – by spending in fact to avoid the massive social risk of unemployment and by spending to keep up tax revenues – and the growth it creates does, what is more, actually pay for the borrowing – so spending cuts borrowing, not increases it.

I thought Bastiat would not approve, and commented:

I would argue that if the government spends less, the money stays in private hands where it can be spent privately instead. Why am I wrong?

But I was misunderstood again. A commenter responded:

It is quite possible to leave all the money in private hands, but by doing so, the actual wealth of the country is reduced and all this extra money is worth that much less.

So it would seem that private hands are incapable of creating wealth, only the government can do that.

I did respond but Richard Murphy moderates every comment, making discussion difficult.