The US Department of Justice is taking a keen interest in this email.
Reading it, one can see why.
HT to John Paczkowski at All Things Digital.
Crises of capitalism
Austerity = insanity
Einstein defined insanity as repeatedly doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome. I was reminded of this when reading Paul Krugman’s piece in the New York Review of Books.
The turn to austerity after 2010, however, was so drastic, particularly in European debtor nations, that the usual cautions lose most of their force. Greece imposed spending cuts and tax increases amounting to 15 percent of GDP; Ireland and Portugal rang in with around 6 percent; and unlike the half-hearted efforts at stimulus, these cuts were sustained and indeed intensified year after year. So how did austerity actually work?
The answer is that the results were disastrous—just about as one would have predicted from textbook macroeconomics. Figure 2, for example, shows what happened to a selection of European nations (each represented by a diamond-shaped symbol). The horizontal axis shows austerity measures—spending cuts and tax increases—as a share of GDP, as estimated by the International Monetary Fund. The vertical axis shows the actual percentage change in real GDP. As you can see, the countries forced into severe austerity experienced very severe downturns, and the downturns were more or less proportional to the degree of austerity.
There have been some attempts to explain away these results, notably at the European Commission. But the IMF, looking hard at the data, has not only concluded that austerity has had major adverse economic effects, it has issued what amounts to a mea culpa for having underestimated these adverse effects.
It’s patently obvious that the current policy of ‘austerity’ isn’t working, and yet our governments are hell-bent on continuing with it. Madness on stilts.
Imperial afterglow
The fault-line that runs through the Tory party over membership of the EU has opened up again in a most entertaining way. Cameron seems as helpless in dealing with his Europhobes as poor old John Major was in his day. I’ve often wondered why the issue is so toxic for members of Britain’s governing elites. The only explanation I can think of is imperial afterglow. Whole-hearted membership of the EU means accepting that Britain is just another country — like France, Germany or — Sacre Bleu! — Greece or Portugal! And that’s too unpalatable for a country that once had an empire on which the sun apparently never set. The same afterglow is what is currently driving the government to insist that Britain needs to spend £20 billion-plus on a new nuclear deterrent.
It’s pathetic, but it’s happening: authentic folie de grandeur. And at the taxpayers’ expense, naturally.
Our latest resident
A pair of housemartins have built an exquisite nest on our vine.
3D printing and bigger bangs
This morning’s Observer column.
Although there are already some very sophisticated applications of 3D printing in industry (in aircraft manufacture, for example), most of the stuff produced by 3D printing in the public domain looks pretty naff to the layperson’s eye. The Texas gun, for example, looks naive and unsophisticated when compared to, say, a Walther PPK. One can just imagine James Bond’s incredulous sneer if Q were to offer it to him.
But for those who have followed the work of Harvard scholar Clayton Christensen over the years, the sheer crudity of the printed object is what rings bells because it evokes the possibility of disruptive change…
LATER: It turns out that the Feds are onto it:
On Thursday, Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson received a letter from the State Department Office of Defense Trade Controls Compliance demanding that he take down the online blueprints for the 3D-printable “Liberator” handgun that his group released Monday, along with nine other 3D-printable firearms components hosted on the group’s website Defcad.org. The government says it wants to review the files for compliance with arms export control laws known as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, or ITAR. By uploading the weapons files to the Internet and allowing them to be downloaded abroad, the letter implies Wilson’s high-tech gun group may have violated those export controls.
“Until the Department provides Defense Distributed with final [commodity jurisdiction] determinations, Defense Distributed should treat the above technical data as ITAR-controlled,” reads the letter, referring to a list of ten CAD files hosted on Defcad that include the 3D-printable gun, silencers, sights and other pieces. “This means that all data should be removed from public acces immediately. Defense Distributed should review the remainder of the data made public on its website to determine whether any other data may be similarly controlled and proceed according to ITAR requirements.”
Lilac time
The (im)morality of conspicuous consumption
Sharp essay by Peter Singer.
When Radosław Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister, went to Ukraine for talks last month, his Ukrainian counterparts reportedly laughed at him because he was wearing a Japanese quartz watch that cost only $165. A Ukrainian newspaper reported on the preferences of Ukrainian ministers, several of whom have watches that cost more than $30,000. Even a Communist member of Ukraine’s parliament, the Rada, was shown wearing a watch that retails for more than $6,000.
The laughter should have gone in the opposite direction. Wouldn’t you laugh (maybe in private, to avoid being impolite) at someone who pays more than 200 times as much as you do, and ends up with an inferior* product?
That is what the Ukrainians have done.
He goes on to make the point that
We can adapt that judgment to the man or woman who wears a $30,000 watch or buys similar luxury goods, like a $12,000 handbag. Essentially, such a person is saying; “I am either extraordinarily ignorant, or just plain selfish. If I were not ignorant, I would know that children are dying from diarrhea or malaria, because they lack safe drinking water, or mosquito nets, and obviously what I have spent on this watch or handbag would have been enough to help several of them survive; but I care so little about them that I would rather spend my money on something that I wear for ostentation alone.”
Spot on.
* Oh and by “inferior” he means that these expensive bling watches are functionally worse than standard quartz devices.
The colour purple
The virtues of engineering
Standing on a railway platform and a high-speed express train comes through. 250 tons of steel hurtles along at 125 mph, safely and predictably. And I’m thinking: this is the kind of unimaginable feat that good engineering makes possible. But when my friend Tim Minshall was thinking about this the only mention of “engineering” he could find in connection with railways were notices of travel delays “due to engineering work”. The result: an entire country which associates engineering only with trouble.