Mark Zuckerberg: Inside Facebook

Decent in that I learned something about the various business models that I didn’t know. And the journalist talked about technical details of a subject I understand without being wrong, which is rare. And it wasn’t a hatchet job about the dangers and risks and general awfulness of Facebook and business in general.

In fact the criticism of Facebook was pretty weak. If I “like” a company on Facebook, it can pay to display adverts to my friends that say, “Rob Fisher likes [company]“. This could be construed as using me in an advert without my consent. Or maybe not. The documentary did not seem to have a strong opinion.

And there were academics interviewed who made arguments such as: by keeping in touch with more people, we are having fewer close friendships. Well, anyone can tell for themselves whether that is true, and whether it is a problem.

But the best bits were the bits explaining how Facebook makes money. This included a demonstration of the information available to someone creating an advert. The example was a product for brides, and showed how various filters could be applied (“female”, “engaged”, “interested in beauty”) to see how many people would see the advert. This looked powerful. But not as powerful as the use of Facebook to talk to customers. This segment concentrated on companies’ attempts to get people to leave comments on their pages so that the comments get shown to friends, thereby generating a kind of word-of-mouth advert.

It strikes me that the best way for a company to use Facebook is to let your employees have real conversations, like real people. The documentary didn’t really go there, unfortunately.

10 O’Clock Live

It has some good bits, and they are all David Mitchell. Lauren Laverne is completely pointless: on the rare occasions she says anything it is vapid. Jimmy Carr makes knob jokes, which is fine as far as it goes. Charlie Brooker goes for the obvious jokes of the George-Bush-is-stupid level, but fails to get close to any truth.

Even David Mitchell isn’t great all the way through, but he did have some truly good bits. The highlight was his 3 minute monologue which this week was about politicians presenting false dichotomies. It was a good point, he made it in a funny way, and he included the point that politicians are treating people as if they are stupid, which is a good meme to spread. This is what I am looking for in satire.

Mitchell also chaired a debate on AV between Sally Bercow and an ex-Tory-minister. He mostly did an excellent job of pointing out the logical fallacies of both debaters. He is not just witty; he is intelligent. But he did waste a good bit of time making fun of Sally’s inappropriate use of the word “literally”, which was sort of funny but, again, did not get us closer to any truth.

Another highlight was the interview with Stephen Dubner, a co-author of SuperFreakonomics. The interviewers Jimmy Carr and Lauren Laverne failed to say anything remotely intelligent, but it thankfully didn’t matter too much because they did at least let Dubner speak at length. He made some good (and downright subversive) points about the incentives of politicians. He suggested that they sign up for long term projects such as “improve education” and they get paid at the end of 5 or 10 years proportional to the results. The idea is to align success in politics with success at achieving goals, and he compared this to how businesses succeed and fail. Getting this kind of thinking into the mainstream — not necessarily agreeing with the specifics but just getting people to think about economics and game theory and how politics really works — is great stuff. Well done Dubner and Channel 4.

Lauren Laverne mostly looked confused, and could only point out that giving politicians more money would be unpopular. She completely missed the point and didn’t add anything.

The show is worth a look, but you might want to fast forward to the David Mitchell bits and the main interview, depending on who is being interviewed.

Update: Having slept on it, another angle occurs to me. A satire show full of clever people making clever points and getting to the nub of the problem just might not be as popular. Here we have Jimmy Carr making knob jokes for people who like that sort of thing, Charlie Brooker to draw in the right-on lefties — and the whole point of him is not to be insightful but to be right-on — and the token woman to attract people who might be less inclined to watch a show full of men. Even David Mitchell is not an obvious intellectual: he makes insightful points with a delivery that somewhat hides his cleverness.

So what you end up with is a popular show where the conversation is a bit like a chat with your mates down the pub, taking the mickey out of Berlusconi being old and ugly and Ed Milliband having disappeared, and they sneak in Stephen Dubner sneaking in the idea that politics can never work because the incentives are all wrong; a discussion about the false dichotomy of AV vs. FPTP; and David Mitchell’s monologue about politicians always presenting us with false dichotomies and… that’s a lot of novel and subversive ideas put in front of a popular audience. Next thing you know people might be wondering if voting between two or three near-identical political parties is a false choice.

Maybe someone is being really very clever here. Or maybe I am giving them far too much credit and I was right the first time.

But early on I suspected what Yudkowsky was up to. An early clue was a conversation in chapter 7 about Quidditch:

“So let me get this straight,” Harry said as it seemed that Ron’s explanation (with associated hand gestures) was winding down. “Catching the Snitch is worth one hundred and fifty points?”

“Yeah -”

“How many ten-point goals does one side usually score not counting the Snitch?”

“Um, maybe fifteen or twenty in professional games -”

“That’s just wrong. That violates every possible rule of game design. Look, the rest of this game sounds like it might make sense, sort of, for a sport I mean, but you’re basically saying that catching the Snitch overwhelms almost any ordinary point spread. The two Seekers are up there flying around looking for the Snitch and usually not interacting with anyone else, spotting the Snitch first is going to be mostly luck -”

“It’s not luck!” protested Ron. “You’ve got to keep your eyes moving in the right pattern -”

“That’s not interactive, there’s no back-and-forth with the other player and how much fun is it to watch someone incredibly good at moving their eyes? And then whichever Seeker gets lucky swoops in and grabs the Snitch and makes everyone else’s work moot. It’s like someone took a real game and grafted on this pointless extra position just so that you could be the Most Important Player without needing to really get involved or learn the rest of it. Who was the first Seeker, the King’s idiot son who wanted to play Quidditch but couldn’t understand the rules?” Actually, now that Harry thought about it, that seemed like a surprisingly good hypothesis. Put him on a broomstick and tell him to catch the shiny thing…

Ron’s face pulled into a scowl. “If you don’t like Quidditch, you don’t have to make fun of it!”

“If you can’t criticize, you can’t optimize. I’m suggesting how to improve the game. And it’s very simple. Get rid of the Snitch.”

In other words, Rowling’s game design is iffy, and Yudkowsky is calling her on it, via his Harry.

The same thing was blatantly going on in chapter 18, when Harry meets Snape. So much so , that I had to compare that scene with the equivalent in the original. Here’s the original Rowling scene, emphasis mine:

‘You are here to learn the subtle science and exact art of potion-making,’ he began. He spoke in barely more than a whisper, but they caught every word — like Professor McGonagall, Snape had the gift of keeping a class silent without effort. ‘As there is little foolish wand-waving here, many of you will hardly believe this is magic. I don’t expect you will really understand the beauty of the softly simmering cauldron with its shimmering fumes, the delicate power of liquids that creep through human veins, bewitching the mind, ensnaring the senses … I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death — if you aren’t as big a bunch of dunderheads as I usually have to teach.’

More silence followed this little speech. Harry and Ron exchanged looks with raised eyebrows. Hermione Granger was on the edge of her seat and looked desperate to start proving she wasn’t a dunderhead.

‘Potter!’ said Snape suddenly. ‘What would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?’

Powdered root of what to an infusion of what? Harry glanced at Ron, who looked as stumped as he was; Hermione’s hand had shot into the air.

‘I don’t know, sir,’ said Harry.

Snape’s lips curled into a sneer.

‘Tut, tut — fame clearly isn’t everything.’

The scene continues with Snape asking Harry more such questions, and him not knowing the answer. Now, here is Yudkowsky’s version of the same scene, into which I will interject:

“You are here,” Severus said in a quiet voice which the students at back strained to hear, “to learn the subtle science and exact art of potionmaking. As there is little foolish wand-waving here, many of you will hardly believe this is magic. I don’t expect you will really understand the beauty of the softly simmering cauldron with its shimmering fumes, the delicate power of liquids that creep through human veins,” this in a rather caressing, gloating tone, “bewitching the mind, ensnaring the senses,” this was just getting creepier and creepier. “I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death – if you aren’t as great a pack of fools as I usually have to teach.”

This is almost word for word, except that Yudkowsky is more realistic about the loudness of a whisper and points out how creepy Snape is, and thus hints at his unsuitability as a teacher, which later becomes the point.

Severus somehow seemed to notice the look of skepticism on Harry’s face, or at least his eyes suddenly jumped to where Harry was sitting.

“Potter!” snapped the Potions professor. “What would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?”

Harry blinked. “Was that in Magical Drafts and Potions?” he said. “I just finished reading it, and I don’t remember anything which used wormwood -”

Hermione’s hand went up and Harry shot her a glare which caused her to raise her hand even higher.

“Tut, tut,” Severus said silkily. “Fame clearly isn’t everything.”

“Really?” Harry said. “But you just told us you’d teach us how to bottle fame. Say, how does that work, exactly? You drink it and turn into a celebrity?”

This is a very good point! Rowling lazily has Snape talking about bottling fame without thinking about what that might mean, then has him belittle the concept of fame just a few lines later. It’s sloppy, and Yudkowsky calls her on it via his Harry. It’s beautiful. And it continues:

“Let’s try again,” said Severus. “Potter, where would you look if I told you to find me a bezoar?”

“That’s not in the textbook either,” Harry said, “but in one Muggle book I read that a trichinobezoar is a mass of solidified hair found in a human stomach, and Muggles used to believe it would cure any poison -”

“Wrong,” Severus said. “A bezoar is found in the stomach of a goat, it is not made of hair, and it will cure most poisons but not all.”

“I didn’t say it would, I said that was what I read in one Muggle book -”

“No one here is interested in your pathetic Muggle books. Final try. What is the difference, Potter, between monksblood and wolfsbane?”

That did it.

“You know,” Harry said icily, “in one of my quite fascinating Muggle books, they describe a study in which people managed to make themselves look very smart by asking questions about random facts that only they knew. Apparently the onlookers only noticed that the askers knew and the answerers didn’t, and failed to adjust for the unfairness of the underlying game. So, Professor, can you tell me how many electrons are in the outermost orbital of a carbon atom?”

Which is awesome. Rowling’s Harry is a bit of a dunderhead. He just doesn’t know the answers. Yudkowsky’s Harry sees through Snape’s bullying.

In the Rowling version, Snape deducts points from Harry for being cheeky when he suggests that Hermione might know the answer. In the Yudkowsky version, he deducts ten points for Harry’s attempts at reasoning with him, and the situation escalates, with Harry ultimately threatening to leave the school unless Snape is fired for his bullying and abuse of students.

Without reading the rest of Rowling’s book I can’t be sure, but I have the feeling that Rowling has written Snape, at least in the first book, as an unsympathetic bully, and that her Harry just puts up with it. Perhaps her Snape is just a cartoon bad guy, and she hasn’t thought through the consequences. Whereas Yudkowsky knows exactly what the consequences of Snape’s actions should be and has his Harry explicitly treat him as he deserves to be treated.

In any case, Methods of Rationality is full of the right kinds of questions. Where Rowling briefly describes transfiguration, Yudkowsky thinks through the consequences: which are that if you turn a rock into a liquid and then drink it, it will kill you when it turns back into a rock.

And I’m not even half way through it, yet…

Incidentally, there’s a lot of stuff in Methods of Rationality about equality between adults and children. Yudkowsky’s Harry does not stand for situations in which children are treated as subordinates or children have to abide by different rules than adults. Again, I don’t know whether this is a dig at the way Rowling has written her story, or just a separate point Yudkowsky wants to make. There’s probably a more serious post I (or an education blogger) could make about that under the education category. Here’s a sample:

“This is not a request, Mr. Potter,” the Headmaster said. The full, entire force of the wizard’s gaze was turned on the boy. “This is your punishme-”

[...]

Harry’s visage grew even colder. “You mistake me, Headmaster, if you think that this is a joke. This is not a request. This is your punishment.”

“Mr. Potter -” Minerva said. She didn’t even know what she was going to say. She simply couldn’t let that go by.

Harry made a shushing gesture at her and continued to speak to Dumbledore. “And if that seems impolite to you,” Harry said, his voice now a little less hard, “it seemed no less impolite when you said it to me. You would not say such a thing to anyone who you considered a real human being instead of a subordinate child, and I will treat you with just the same courtesy as you treat me -”

It’s a critique of The Spirit Level: Why more equal societies almost always do better by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. They are epidemiologists who have made scatter graphs of various variables against inequality, each point plotted belonging to a country. Lines of best fit are made and the gradient of the line used to make such claims as, “average life expectancy is three or four years shorter in unequal societies”.

The Spirit Level Delusion also takes on other anti-consumerist classics, such as Affluenza, The Selfish Capitalist and Happiness.

The first six chapters take on the key claims in The Spirit Level. Alternative scatter graphs are plotted, showing that quite often it depends on exactly which year’s data is used or which countries are included and excluded. In other words, the theory is not very robust.

In other cases, more is going on. Chapter two takes on the claim that unequal countries have a higher level of mental disorders. It turns out that the rates of disorder are not significantly different in between countries anyway. And the secondary claim, made by Oliver James in Affluenza, that mental health deteriorated over the years as inequality increased in rich countries is made to look silly when Snowdon points out that this is largely due to vast changes in psychiatry during the 70s and 80s. DSM-III and IV were published, hefty tomes listing symptoms against disorders. The idea was to standardise diagnosis. But lots of questionable research was done in which people were plucked at random out of the population and asked questions like “has there ever been two weeks or more when you lost interest in most things like work, hobbies, or things you usually liked to do”. These studies oddly enough were able to show that 25% of the population suffered from some mental disorder. It’s enough to make one question the existence of mental illness, but according to Snowdon, James just assumes it’s all to do with Regean and Thatcher.

In chapter five, the claim that infant mortality is higher in unequal nations is challenged by pointing out that in rich countries infant mortality is entirely due to complications at the time of birth. The differences are again tiny; add a few poor countries to the scatter graph and they disappear entirely. What differences there are between rich countries are explained by such things as the USA’s tendency to have more premature babies, itself largely caused by differences in medical practice.

A similar pattern emerges in chapter 6. The Spirit Level Delusion argues that people in more equal countries are more civic minded. They give more of their GDP to poor countries and recycle more. But hang on, aren’t these things government policy more than individual choice? Yes, Wilkinson and Pickett have proved that governments who redistribute wealth more also donate more foreign aid.

Chapter 7 is one of the most fun chapters; it takes on the anti-consumerist movement in general, going all the way back to Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, published in 1958. He argued that we were rich enough already; and that all growth was now fuelled by over-production that could only be consumed by convincing people they needed things they did not through advertising.

For Wilkinson and Pickett, it is crucial that the reader becomes convinced that the only consequence of economic growth in the West is a rampant and futile consumerism. If people only spend to compete for status, the products themselves have no intrinsic value and it will be no loss, therefore, if economic growth is brought to a halt and people can buy fewer of them.

Wilkinson and Pickett see themselves standing at the end of an era, beyond which the old ways cannot produce further gains. The fact that Galbraith said much the same thing half a century earlier should give us pause for thought. In 1958, Galbraith cited vacuum cleaners, televisions and wall-to-wall carpets as the unnecessary wants of an affluent society. While none of these are any more essential for survival today than they were fifty years ago, it would take a brave politician today to tell the electorate that they would be happier without them.

[...]

The belief that if something is not essential, it cannot be useful, makes a Calvinist virtue of having only the bare necessities. In doing so, it sets capitalism an impossibly high benchmark. Unless a product keeps body and soul together, or produces lasting happiness, it is deemed frivolous, even decadent. The people, meanwhile, are encouraged to set their horizons low. They need little more than food on the table and a roof over their head. So long as everyone has the essentials, no one will suffer materially. So long as no one has much more than the essentials, no one will suffer from the psychosocial traumas of inequality, greed and anxiety.

Good grief, what a dismal view of the world. Snowdon goes on to point out that in fact consumers do not shop endlessly in the vain belief that it is the only way to be happy: this is merely a conceit of condescending and out of touch elitists — for that is what the anti-consumerists really are. Neal Lawson describes how he is woken by his Blackberry, rises from his Habitat bed, steps on to his John Lewis carpet and wraps himself in his White Company towel. Says Snowdon, “what are supposed to be endearing admissions of weakness sound more like the hypocrisy of champagne socialists.” Futhermore, “occasional sneering references to cheap flights for the masses (thereby forcing people like Lawson to travel to increasingly remote destinations to avoid them) betray this implicit snobbery.”

In chapter eight Snowdon describes how the anti-consumerists propose we will achieve the transition to zero-growth and high equality. Even higher and more progressive taxes are at the sane end of the spectrum. Rationing, usually in the form of carbon rationing, is suggested. Snowdon notes how what once was seen as an unfortunate side-effect of post-war rationing, deprivation, is now marketed as a feature: the deprivation will make us happier. At the other end of the spectrum we have James Oliver in Affluenza having the government value every house in the country and then “knock a nought off”. The chapter finishes with a scatter graph of equality vs. tax as a percentage of GDP. You can imagine what it looks like.

The final chapter summarizes the problems with The Spirit Level. I learned about a whole new kind of bias, immortal time bias (popes live longer than artists because you have to be old to be the pope), and a whole new fallacy, the ecological fallacy. This is really the main problem with The Spirit Level. You simply can’t separate out all the variables when comparing statistics from different countries. To demonstrate, Snowdon shows a scatter graph that proves recycling causes suicide.

Incidentally, Wilkinson and Pickett concede that suicide rates are higher in more equal countries. In chapter 3 Snowdon describes their strange theory that this is because people kill themselves rather than killing others. In chapter 4 he shows that there is no relationship between suicide and murder. In the final chapter he quips, while discussing the strange correlations that can be found, “it is conceivable, for instance, that socialist policies are a factor in lowering aspirations and increasing the suicide rate.” This sounds rather plausible. But we must be careful not to play into their hands: it is better to make the case that growth, by making the poor richer, is an end in itself. Snowdon makes this case many times, arguing for instance that when we notice the first class passengers disembarking the flight looking refreshed and the economy class passengers looking tired, the solution is certainly not to abolish first class in the hope that it will make the economy class passengers feel better about their discomfort.

Ultimately, ecological epidemiology tells us that Asian countries have low crime rates; Scandinavians are more trusting than Europeans and Americans are fat, and on evidence like this Wilkinson and Pickett would have us destroy the economy.

The Spirit Level Delusion is a great manual for fighting back against the demands for equality over all else. One thing it doesn’t do is attack the way inequality is measured. I still hold that however much more money the top 20% earn than the bottom 20%, in developed countries the bottom 20% still drive around in cars and go on foreign holidays. I think that in reality growth makes people more equal, even as “income inequality” increases. Nonetheless, Snowdon’s careful dismantling of the Spirit Level statistics on their own terms is helpful. And I think his arguments in general will be very useful in the years ahead. I don’t imagine for a minute that the Tories are immune to talk of equality — their “social justice” sounds like the same sort of thing.

SF: …he’s got very severe problems, and we know who to thank, don’t we?
RT: Huh?
SF: You know, his parents. The state requires you to take a written test to drive a car, but any moron can become a parent and just destroy a child’s life.

It’s funny, I keep having the same thought myself. That I am allowed to raise a child. It shouldn’t be allowed! I’m amazed it is allowed, given everything else that is controlled by governments.

And then in a bookshop the other day I noticed a book by psychologist Oliver James called They F*** You Up: How to Survive Family Life. The premise is that nurture is far more important than nature and how you’re raised determines your character. One page I read was about how parents can affect whether you grow up to have a “punitive conscience”, which means liking rules and respecting authority.

Then I skipped to the end, where Oliver makes “some practical suggestions” that he believes “should be seriously considered by governments”.

The first is that since studies of mental illness show that affluence is less of a factor than quality of childcare, “it is extraordinary that economic growth is the principal plank of all mainstream political parties.” If only that were the case! “It should be replaced by a raft of policies designed to improve the quality of early childhood experience, such as paid leave for parents who wish to care for their children when they are small, and good quality nursery care or subsidies for paid babysitters for parents who want to work.” Actually I think we are most of the way there. But, ugh!

The next suggestion: “The obsession with economic performance indicators should be replaced with much greater measurement of the effect of government policy on our mental health.” That sounds better. The government drives me mad! But here we have a psychologist asking for the government to pay more attention to psychology. It’s not very imaginative.

The next suggestion is somewhat imaginative. “All children should undergo an emotional audit during their sixteenth year.” Whether they want it or not. It’s for their own good. “The grotesque overemphasis on exam performance should be replaced by a version of cognitive anallytic therapy (CAT), in which every child is helped to evaluate the impact of of his or her upbringing on his or her psychology.” And then presumably de-programmed by the state into a perfect citizen. It’s terrifying.

Finally, he makes a plea for some taxpayers’ money for him and his buddies. “The government should commission a large-scale study of a representative sample of the population, following them from before birth to death, to provide a better understanding of the effect of early childhood experiences on adult traits.” And what might the government do with the results? What happens, for instance, when governments commission a big study into climate? Climate change becomes the biggest problem known to man and our lives must be micromanaged to control it, that’s what.

I’d take the IPCC over Oliver James’ government psychology commission any day. What a scary, scary man.

We’ve already had the movie. It’s called “Avatar”, one of the all-time success stories of the movie industry. It’s got a great plot, loveable heroes, subtle villians and graphics that made me cringe (I’ve got a THING about heights, you need to understand)… but it is also an evil work of propaganda catering to the Green agenda. It depicts a world that may actually be sentient (Gaia, anyone? James Lovelock?) with an indigeneous, sentient species that not only lives in harmony with nature but regards their prey as brothers who should be prayed for and thanked after killing them (the noble American Indian… see Dances with Wolves or Last of the Mohicans) and who are being dispossesed by evil capitalist, technologically advanced, militaristict humans who are destroying their own world and the Pandora Garden of Eden as well. The hero receives redemption by discarding his humanity.

All that is true enough. But I went to see the film anyway. Yes, it’s an appalling allegory in which we’re expected to believe that evil capitalists will kill nice aliens to make a quick buck. There are too many films in which the capitalists are bad guys; not enough in which the government are. Yes, the aliens are in harmony with nature and energy and hug trees.

But it’s science fiction, and plenty of this stuff makes science fiction sense. The aliens are not religiously making up nonsense about spirits and vague energy, the trees really do form a neural network, the planet really is sentient and really can store the memories of ancestors. That’s quite a good science fiction idea for a blockbuster movie. And there are some more, such as the avatars themselves, the aliens’ ability to connect their brains to flying dragon-like creatures and go for a ride, and the transfer of minds between bodies — something I’d quite like people to get used to the idea of in my lifetime…

It’s great to see an alien world brought to life in high definition 3D. The 3D is more than a gimmick, here. In one scene near the start our hero wakes up in a long chamber in freefall. We are treated to the disorienting way that there is no fixed up and down in zero gravity — it depends on your perspective. The aliens are 12 feet tall. In scenes from their perspective, humans look like dwarfs. In scenes from the humans’ perspective, aliens look like giants. The spaceships and giant earth-moving vehicles look cool. The mech suits look even better than they did in Aliens. All the machinery has a believable logic to it.

I did struggle with the floating mountains. Low density coral with pockets of helium inside, perhaps?

If you can supress the urge to make everything into a metaphor, there is a lot of enjoyment to be had from this film. Go and see it in 3D while you can.

Update: Michael Jennings sends me a link to an even better defense of Avatar. David R. Henderson argues that it is a defense of capitalism and property rights, and an attack on eminent domain.

It’s an intriguing concept, great science fiction, and a pretty slick movie with Bruce Willis and explosions and stunts.

There are a few things wrong with it. The first thing that struck me was that if you had the technology to connect your brain up with a surrogate android, you don’t really need the android. You could connect your brain to a simulation instead. Much less messy and more possibilities that way. But it would have been a different movie.

The next thing that bothered me was that the surrogates themselves were somewhat boring. Sure, they looked like eternally youthful beautiful people, and one ugly fat guy went around using a pretty female surrogate, but where were the fantastical creatures and surrogates with four arms or wheels or wings? Why the restriction on one surrogate per person? I suppose you can only fit so many ideas into one movie.

The real problem with the movie was the conciet that either *everyone* has to use surrogates or *no-one*. So we have the Bruce Willis character who yearns to spend time in his real body but can’t because it’s not really socially acceptable. And we have the anti-surrogate movement who might well be sympathetic if it weren’t for the fact that they want to force everyone else into their way of life, too.

Which brings me to the final heroic act by the Bruce Willis character — and this is a bit of a spoiler — who when presented with the opportunity to destroy all the surrogates at the push of a button selfishly pushes the button because he thinks it would help his wife. It’s an act of gross vandalism, but afterwards is a heart-warming scene in which all the people disconnect from their computers, go outside and see the light. The underlying message is: using too much technology makes us inhuman. Never mind the fact that it might be mostly useful, or fun. Never mind that Bruce Willis has destroyed the surrogates of infirm and disabled people who really need them, along with destroying the toys of people who want them and bought and paid for them.

I think this kind of technology would be great. Sign me up.

• The most convincing CGI mixed with live-action I’ve seen; the lighting and textures looked just right.
• For a kids’ film, not too much cringeworthy slapstick. The visual gags tended to be physics jokes, like what happens when two guinea pigs are running inside a tyre and the fat one trips.
• The inevitable sappy moral lesson is at least: “you can achieve things through learning and don’t need to be genetically superior”. This is better than “animals are people too”, “profit is evil” or “save the planet”.
• There are some pretty cool and believable gadgets and gizmos. the motorised hamster wheel vehicle has heads up displays including a live feed from a camera mounted on a fly, all used to good effect.
• There is a very funny line in homage to Die Hard, just for the grown-ups.
• The heroes solve problems with ingenuity rather than luck. In fact there were surprisingly few “I can’t believe that” moments, given the subject matter. An example is the use of a radio controlled car and its controller as transport.
• The plot is quite intelligent and there is a nice twist.
• I saw it in 3D, which I’d recommend as it’s quite subtly done. There are some very cool tracking shots.

The frigate doesn’t have much autonomy. It has to radio naval command in London to get permission to board. That permission isn’t granted so the dhow is sent on its way.

If I was out in my boat and guys turned up with machine guns and started asking me questions I wouldn’t be too impressed. The marines say if they find weapons that means they’ve found pirates. Maybe, but what about weapons for self defence?

I like the way Ross Kemp talks. He’s no-nonsense and doesn’t over dramatise things.

One sailor says, “I’ve got a family to feed but I don’t go around pointing guns at people… Well… I do.”

A merchant ship has radioed the frigate complaing that speed boats are chasing it. This is more like it. A helicopter is sent out to investigate. It’s a Merlin with two marines on board who can shoot out the doors. An American ship in the area has also dispatched a
helicopter. Who will get there first? The merchant ship has reported that the speedboats have run away. The American helicopter gets there first and says there is no more threat.

Ross Kemp laments that the gulf is large, making pirates hard to get to in time. At a briefing, an officer explains that pirates have started operating from motherships, allowing them to loiter at sea and operate farther from shore. It’s believed that they are supported by clans on shore who provide logistical support: they seem more organised than just bands of opportunists.

News comes in that a ship called Saldhana has been pirated. There has been no distress call but it has suddenly changed course. On the radio, the Soldhana captain says he and his 22 crew are being held hostage. Out goes the helicopter, but the pirates say to stay away, and the Frigate captain says he can’t just go and board out of fear for the safety of the crew.

The helicopter is sent back. The helicopter crew is “fucking pissed off”. Saldhana sails right past the frigate, which can do nothing.

It seems as if the Navy can only act if they catch the pirates red handed. No wonder they have to go out hassling fishing boats. I’m not sure a Navy frigate can be very effective.

Private armed security boats to escort merchant ships would be a better solution. I wonder why this does not happen more than it does.

A skiff is found floating nearby with a snapped rope – it must have belonged to the pirates and broken away from the Saldhana. It contains lots of fuel, an RPG, cash, clothes, food and some Arsenal merchandise. The Navy uses it for target practice. The minigun is pretty impressive.

Next week, Ross goes to interview pirates in Nigeria.

I think if you get to your 50s and you still haven’t figured out that roads improve people’s lives, well, there’s something a little pathetic about it.

She went on to complain that people should be less ambitious; there’s far too much emphasis on success, that it was okay to just be and do nothing. Fair enough, if that’s what you want. Then she added, “I’m not talking about benefit cheats, god bless them, we need you.” So not really making much sense then. Trying too hard to be cool, perhaps.

On the first count, the look was about right, although TNG is indeed looking a bit dated. And the actor who played spock must be very good because although in Heroes Sylar is terrifying, I did not have any problem seeing Spock as Spock.

There were only a few problems, and while I enjoyed the movie, listing its problems is part of the fun. Scotty didn’t work well for me because he just seemed like Simon Pegg with a funny accent. The plot gets sillier the more you think about it, so it’s best not to. The astronomy is all wrong, or at least distances and travel times aren’t conveyed properly. Space should be made to seem ****HUUUGE****, and yet the Enterprise and even shuttles zip around from planet to planet no problem. Black holes and supernovae don’t seem quite right, either.

I came away feeling like the way in which the franchise was “rebooted” was a bit of a cheap cheat, but having read Eric Raymond’s review I can see why it was done and that it was necessary. So hopefully we will get a whole new series of movies. A TV series would be best but I don’t expect one.

By the way, some more discussion of Star Trek economics and politics over at Counting Cats and in the Samizdata comments, including one by pa annoyed which says a lot of what I was trying (badly) to say last time I wrote about it. I think I have a good post about economics of high technology in me and it might appear here soon…

Hawley himself has an amazing, smooth voice. His songs are old fashioned, miserable and uplifting.

Oh well, I am not cut out for writing music reviews. Just read the NME one, or better yet buy the album.

Anyway, I’ve long been convinced that what is termed “inequality”, that some people are richer than others, is not a bad thing per se. The argument I’ve heard before comes from Norberg, who points out that if everyone gets twice as rich inequality doubles. Hayek makes a different kind of argument.

If today in the United States or Western Europe the relatively poor can have a car or a refrigerator, an airplane trip or a radio, at the cost of a reasonable part of their income, this was made possible because in the past others with larger incomes were able to spend on what was then a luxury. The path of advance is greatly eased by the fact that it has been trodden before. It is because scouts have found the goal that the road can be built for the less lucky or less energetic. What today may seem extravagance or even waste, because it is enjoyed by the few and even undreamed of by the masses, is payment for the experimentation with a style of living that will eventually become available to all.

This seems obvious especially if you think about consumer electronics. I have a high definition television, a Playstation 3 and a HD-DVD player. They were expensive, (and one of them will soon be obsolete because I have also helped pay for one of the necessary mistakes that all this experimentation leads to) but not as expensive as they were. They will get cheaper and more people will have them, just as they can now buy a DVD player from Asda for £20 while I bought one for £200 soon after they first became available.

Hayek goes further: “There is no way of making generally accessible new and still expensive ways of living except by their being initially practiced by some.”

Indeed, if manufacturers had to wait until *everyone* could afford a HDTV before selling them to anyone, they would never have been developed in the first place. The same applies to central heating and expensive medical treatments.

Hayek goes further still: “There can be little doubt that the prospect of the poorer, ‘undeveloped’ countries reaching the present level of the West is very much better that it would have been, had the West not pulled so far ahead.”

This link between inequality and progress means that if government tries to achieve equality through wealth redistribution, progress will slow because there will be no rich people to sell new and expensive things to. This is important because…

…most of the gains of the few do, in the course of time, become available to the rest. Indeed, all our hopes for the reduction of present misery and poverty rest on this expectation. If we abandoned progress, we should also have to abandon all those social improvements that we now hope for. All the desired advances in education and health, the realization of our wish that at least the large proportion of the people should reach the goals for which they are striving, depend on the continuance of progress. We only have to remember that to prevent progress at the top would soon prevent it all the way down, in order to see that this result is really the last thing we want.

But no. The good guys are good; the bad guys are bad; the story is moving and exciting. The protagonist is flawed but his mistakes are punished and he redeems himself. Little good guys defend themselves from big bad guys with superior weapons: “Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but there are three of us and two of you.” “Perhaps you haven’t noticed, but I am the one with the slingshot.”

The protagonist’s father is is a real hero — in one scene foolishly so. He is the film’s moral reference point, making a speech that contrasts the Mullahs’ idea of sin (drinking) with his own (all sins derive from theft). Where there could be moral relativism there is moral judgement. The film continues to portray him as a hero even when it has the opportunity to go all post-modern about what an inadequate father he was (not that he was). The Taliban are portrayed as the medieval bastards that they are. There is nothing not to like in this film, it is excellent. I may even read the book.