I've discovered Ian Fletcher !

A beautifully clear exposition of the theories of absolute and comparitive advantage, and his own observations on the limitations and likely consequences of naively using the latter as a guide to economic policy: The Theory of Comparative Advantage and Why It’s Wrong.

Advertising's unintended side effects

Targetted advertising must surely be responsible for a lot of unintended guffaws nowadays. As I avidly read a CS Monitor article about mass sackings of Shiites by the Sunni minority government in Bahrain, in the context of the continuing unrest there, I notice that the right hand side of the page is full of adverts for ... cheap holidays in Bahrain! Special offers, apparently. I bet they've got a lot of those.

More BBC doublethink

A link in the BBC's newsfeed catches my eye: Free book scheme handed 50% cut, with the teaser "A charity that gives free books to children is told of a 50% cut in funding, two months after fears over its future sparked a political 'U-turn' row". (Note that the actual headline, when you get there, is somewhat less informative.)

It's hard to fault it as an example of systematic double thinking: a charity (nice people, good) has its funding cut (less to spend, bad). So simple! And yet so wrong.

Charities collect voluntary donations and then disburse them. To the extent that this 'charity' is funded by government, to that extent it is acting not as a charity, but as a spending agency of the government. It's now "giving" away not money that has been freely given, but money that has been extracted by force, or the threat of force, and that's not good.

Even worse than the moral point though, is the way government funding, even when it's done as "matching", exerts a chronically corrupting influence on the charities that receive it. Their managements start to work closely with the Home Office, they produce position papers to illustrate how their intentions align with government objectives, people go on secondment in both directions; instead of writing their budget to match their expected income, they start to produce "requirements" budgets that, naturally, show enormous deficits... Eventually, the lure of money results in the charity becoming an extension of whatever department funds them: instead of government funds supplementing private charity, private funds end up supplementing government spending.

Government already allows tax breaks for private charitable contributions. If it wants to encourage charities even more, it could simply allow tax breaks at more than 100% of the tax payable. The curernt system of co-opting favoured charities for subsidy and control is deceitful and corrupt, and should be discontinued.

Libya

Quite apart from what one thinks of Gaddaffi and his regime, it's interesting to see how his elite are breaking away from him by ones and twos and little groups. There's clearly some signalling going on (in perhaps a rather more general sense than discussed in the link). As each person signs off and makes a public announcement, they signal to others that it's alright to do the same. At some point this will reach a critical mass, and then it will all be over.

Requiescat in pace

Marek Rybinski, priest and martyr.

The importance of Chrome OS to Google

People say the strangest things. For example, I read almost continuously that industry analysts are questioning the need for another Google OS after Android: that the tablet and handheld are the way of the future, and that the [cloud|net][book|top]/whatever is yesterday's format, ready for burial in the graveyard of corporate computing along with Windows.

Yawn.

Do these people really write 1,000-page market reports on their iPhones? Or do they spend most of their time gallivanting about from one conference to another, occasionally firing off one-line "strategy" emails to their researchers and imagining that, like themselves, nobody really needs a keyboard?

Well that's that off my chest. In what follows, I'll simply assume that no one is stupid enough to imagine that the keyboard-inclusive form factor is dead, at least not for production / work rather than for some consumption / leisure uses.

So let's agree that Chrome OS has at least a future in the cloudtop niche. Why is that important to Google, and what to make of the comment that Android and Chrome OS may, over time, grow together?

I think I found the key in a throwaway sentence in Google revives ‘network computer’ with dual-OS assault on MS by one "Wireless Watch" on The Register:

Set-up, log-in and user interface are the same on all Chrome devices because everything is synced in the browser.

The problem with Android, everyone agrees, is that the platform is dreadfully fragmented, both on a hardware level and more importantly for identity and familiarity, on a software / presentation level. Whatever the proposed importance of Chrome OS for Google in the past, its current, and likely growing, importance is that it will put all things Google front and centre of the user experience.

Yes, it's open source. So yes, although the Google-approved home page is likely to live somewhere on Google's servers (and they'd be mad not to make a special home page optimised for Chrome OS users), evil manufacturers are likely to work out how to substitute their own start page, all cluttered up with locally-installed apps touting their partners' wares. But unlike with Android, the user will be able to leave behind all that bought-and-paid-for "enrichment" guff with the click of a bookmark. And what's the betting that any Chrome OS hardware will come with access to a better-than-free version of Google Apps? Perhaps not quite up to enterprise level, but definitely better than the free version.

So if the importance of the OS is that it will emphasise the Google brand, what about the comment that Android and Chrome OS may grow together? Well, we are all rather more sophisticated nowadays with the notion of an OS's user interface being separate from the guts of the OS itself: anyone who's experimented with Gnome and KDE on Linux will be familiar with that idea. I don't know if the OS foundations of Chrome OS and Android are the same or not [it's now on my to-do list to find out], but considering that they will share many of the same constraints with regard to power management and security (and perhaps, in the future, automatic updating — what a rude awakening for the current crop of Android customisers that would be!) then it might not be stretching things too far to see Android and Chrome OS as simply alternate usaer interfaces on a deeper OS stack.

Pictures of the Socialistic Future

Reading 'Pictures of the Socialistic Future' by Eugen Richter, originally published in 1893. Imagines a future Germany under socialism and extrapolates its conditions and actions based on the proclaimed policies of the socialists of his day.

Richter was a libertarian in the "Manchester liberal" tradition, in a Germany where totalitarian socialism was rapidly gaining intellectual traction. He gets quite a lot of things eerily right -- his socialist dystopia looks just like East Germany around 1960, complete with border guards shooting anybody trying to get away.

Read it for free here.

"Made me hate socialism all over again" -- Jeffrey Tucker, of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.