Acceptance
The BBC-
Whether you regard Google’s market share as impressive or disappointing, compared to its dominance elsewhere, there is little doubt it is not a household name in China in the same way that it is abroad.
But Hu Li, a student in Beijing, told the BBC he admired what he called the company’s “heroic” decision to offer an unfiltered service, and hailed the announcement to pull out if it could not reach its objective.
Some people even laid flowers outside the company’s Beijing headquarters, in the hi-tech Haidian district, as a mark of respect.
The WSJ-
For years, Western companies have accepted that business is done a certain way in China—agreeing to government interference that wouldn’t be tolerated elsewhere, from stifling free speech to setting up Communist Party cells. And over the past generation, outside political leaders have drawn a similar conclusion, choosing to play down human rights in the hopes of effecting change.
[...]
The Google syndrome caps growing complaints by foreign businesses over a deteriorating business environment. Both the European Chamber and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in China have issued reports sharply critical of China’s business environment. During the 1980s and ’90s, foreign businesses were assiduously courted by China’s leaders and responded by bringing to China technology, training and international best practices.
In recent years, however, foreign businesses have complained that the official line has shifted. Younger bureaucrats are more nationalistic and skeptical of the value of letting in foreign companies, Mr. Wuttke says. Last year, for example, foreign executives said bidding practices for wind energy were rigged to exclude foreign companies.
and-
A senior Microsoft Corp. executive said that “Google would do disservice to Chinese people” by leaving China because Google censors its Chinese search results less aggressively than Chinese local competitor Baidu and other Chinese portal companies. A pullout by Google would strip Chinese Internet users of a good alternative, the executive said.
and-
“It’s a tragedy if Google pulls out of China,” said Xu Hao, a junior studying Japanese at Tongji University in Shanghai. Wu Zhiwei, a sophomore studying philosophy at Fudan University in Shanghai, said “a lot of people are very angry at government censorship,” and also said he understands that it contradicts Google’s philosophies on free-Internet use.
[...]
Internet users continued to comment on the news, however. Some worried their Google e-mail accounts would be deleted, and others expressed concern that Chinese authorities would further tighten its Internet controls. “Our postings on the Internet are deleted by [other] Web sites, or when we upload pictures showing bad things on the street, they are deleted … I don’t know what to do without Google,” Ms. Xu said.
—
While Google’s threat is interesting, one can’t help but think about the double standards being used to assess China-
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who said Google’s allegations “raise very serious concerns and questions.” “We look to the Chinese government for an explanation,” Mrs. Clinton said on a visit to Hawaii. “The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy.”
US telecom companies and banks allow the US government to snoop over its citizens (“legal” hacking), foreign banks sold out their clients on account of “tax evasion,” and how can one forget the fit the Indian government threw over BlackBerry (and, from the past, the shenanigans of George Fernandes).
China is uncomfortable when it comes to Tibet, “human rights” and ten other subjects, and other countries have their own list. Hypocrisy.
Google’s statement.
Assisted suicide, crazy Britain etc
All countries are crazy to some extent. But the British, they have elevated craziness to an art-form. This-
As a piece of legal grotesquerie, the attempted arrest of the former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has its funny side. The biggest joke lies in the role of the UN. It was the UN Human Rights Council that endorsed the report by the retired South African judge Richard Goldstone on the Gaza conflict, in which Israel as well as Hamas was accused of war crimes.
The fun lies in the membership of this august body, and guardian of all our rights. Currently those empowered to sit in judgment on the Israeli democracy include Cuba, China, Russia, Kirghizstan, Djibouti and Qatar. In a non-democracy, of course, Ms Livni would have had no bother; with no elections to dislodge her she would still be a minister, and so exempt from arrest. There must be a lesson there.
[...]
How well I remember sitting through finger-wagging lecturettes on how to achieve a truly ethical foreign policy, given to our Foreign Secretary in private meetings in the interstices of UN debates by drug-running South American prime ministers or presidents, bribe-grabbing Arab princelings, or the Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, the twist in whose lips, an English tabloid was disrespectful enough to suggest, had come about through an incurable addiction to lying.
Under our pristine, ultra-democratic system (any politically motivated Joe can apply for an arrest warrant under the International Criminal Court Act, 2001) and indulgent lawyers, Britain is a soft touch for propagandistic exercises like the one we have seen. And whatever the real reason that Tzipi Livni didn’t in the end come, the ruse most certainly succeeded.
Their minds filled with selective TV imagery of the Gaza conflict, the reaction of many a fair-minded Brit to the idea of seizing a former Israeli minister will be: “Why not? They’re trying the Serbs, aren’t they? And it’s the UN, isn’t it?”
and this-
A businessman who fought off knife-wielding thugs after his family were threatened has been jailed for 30 months.
The case prompted renewed debate over the level of force that house-holders can use against raiders.
Munir Hussain, chairman of the Asian Business Council, was praised by a judge for his “courage” in defending his wife and three children from an attack — but then jailed for the violence of his response. One of his attackers was spared a jail sentence.
The incident occurred when the Hussain family returned from their mosque during Ramadan to find three intruders wearing balaclavas in their home. Hussain was told that he would be killed. His family’s hands were tied behind their backs and they were forced to crawl from room to room. Hussain, 53, made an escape after throwing a coffee table and enlisted his brother Tokeer, 35, in chasing the offenders…
Walid Salem, one of the intruders, suffered a permanent brain injury after he was struck with a cricket bat so hard that it broke into three pieces.
Did the dacoit deserve to have his head bashed in? Probably not. But once you attack someone and issue death threats making it a “your life or mine” case, you shouldn’t expect the victim to serve you tea when the tables are turned. This isn’t a case of some kid stealing trinkets or a hungry man stealing bread, but a home invasion involving death threats and assault. Though the judge is right-
“If persons were permitted to take the law into their own hands and inflict their own instant and violent punishment on an apprehended offender rather than letting justice take its course, then the rule of law and our system of criminal justice, which are the hallmarks of a civilised society, would collapse.”
he should have considered that the beating was part of a single event, not calculated revenge. Such judgments, and varied judgments at that, can lead to a chilling effect on self-defense.
—
I don’t know when the SC will come to its senses on the question of “right to life.” In the Shanbaug case, it asks the lawyer-
“Do you mean right to life includes right to die?”
Of course it does! But the lawyer, probably apprehensive about the case based on previous “pro-life” decisions says-
“She is going through a torture of a life. Is this human rights? Should the medical authorities not be activated to do something? This is not a case to be left aside and forgotten. The apex court must lay down some guidelines.”
and-
“Is not keeping the woman in this persistent vegetative state by force-feeding violative of her right to live with dignity guaranteed by Article 21 (right to life) of the Constitution?”
There is only one thing the court should worry about in “right to die” cases: that the request, whether current or left as part of a living will, is genuine and that murder (for whatever reason) is not being disguised as suicide. The right to life is all encompassing—absolute.
What needs to be done in cases where no such wish exists but the person is in a vegetative state is an open question, and even though ET writes that-
the woman … does not want to live any more. Doctors have told her there is no chance of any improvement in her state. So she, through her ‘next friend’ … decided to move the SC with a plea to “direct KEM Hospital not to force-feed her.”
I don’t see how a brain-dead person could make such a request (there are conflicting reports on the same). Which suggests that this really isn’t a “right to die” case but a “put her out of her misery” one. Without a request from the person in question, this is an ethical dilemma and one cannot simply side with “human rights activists” making a “humans rights” case. If it is the latter, the SC should concentrate on that aspect of the case and not walk down a blind alley. If it is the former, the answer should be a resounding yes. That might be expecting too much from it, but miracles do happen.
e-wrongs
I read a similar article in the NYT today, but this one in the WSJ (via the Mises blog) on e-publishing rights is very interesting-
Random House has sent a letter to literary agents claiming the digital rights to books it published before the emergence of a thriving electronic-book marketplace.
In the letter, dated Dec. 11, Markus Dohle, CEO of the Bertelsmann AG publishing arm, writes that the “vast majority of our backlist contracts grant us the exclusive right to publish books in electronic formats.” Mr. Dohle writes that many of the older agreements “often give the exclusive right to publish ‘in book form’ or ‘in any and all editions.’ “
He argues that, much as the understanding of publishing rights has evolved to include various forms of hardcovers and paperbacks, so too does it now include digital rights, since “the product is used and experienced in the same manner, serves the same function, and satisfies the same fundamental urge to discover stories, ideas and information through the process of reading.”
[...]
“Someone would have to have a lot at stake to be willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to go up against Random House in court,” [Curtis] said. “I don’t know whether anybody will feel they want those rights so badly they are willing to spend like that to prosecute a claim right up to what could be the Supreme Court.”
One, if “the product is used and experienced in the same manner, serves the same function, and satisfies the same fundamental urge to discover stories, ideas and information through the process of reading,” meaning its the same thing, then it surely means that when I buy any book, or music, I can convert it, or get it converted, to any format that serves the same purpose—from paper to ebook to audio book, or from one music format to another without having to pay “format shifting” fees. One wonders how when it comes to publishers, “its all the same thing” but when it comes to consumers, you have to pay for each ear and eye.
Two, the way the law works in modern times, being right isn’t enough. Most people won’t go to court because the process is simply to expensive compared to the outcome—”someone would have to have a lot at stake to be willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to go up against Random House in court.” So, anyone who is against a market in law should consider the fact that something like that already exists while people continue to believe that injustice is rare commodity.
Jeff Tucker writes at the Mises blog-
[S]o if you wrote a book twenty years ago, you do not enjoy the legal right to blog so much as a chapter of your own work, much less reuse it or publish it with some other publisher. Yes, your own work, words of the infinitely reproducible sort are “owned” by a private monopoly even without contract. This is quite simply a violation of human rights, and authors have every reason to be outraged at the claim. This IP stuff gives capitalism a very bad name.
Add the millions of orphaned, or out-of-print works, and works whose copyright status is unclear, which means you risk getting sued if you try to clean them up and distribute them electronically, to this and you have one big IP mess. I recently came across a work which can only be described as monumental, spent a couple of hours going through the applicable US copyright laws and LOC records and came to a conclusion that its probably out of copyright in the US. But the same work won’t enter into the public domain in India till after I am dead. Given that the only ungated electronic version of the same is available on the servers of a legitimate (Indian) organization, and that accessing it from within India is technically illegal, while the publisher (an established UK house) publishing it somehow manages to do it by printing a notice of good faith, we have an absolutely wonderful situation. (Hell, even distributing Rand’s out-of-copyright (in the US) Anthem is technically illegal because of India’s life + 60 statute. One can only assume that ARI isn’t interesting in suing.)
This is the destruction of the Library of Alexandria redux. Strangely, if you don’t want to break any copyright laws, Afghanistan is the place to be. They (according to the Wikipedia) don’t have one.
Samuelson
From the NYT obituary (via Cafe Hayek) of one of the greatest statist economists of the twentieth century-
Mr. Samuelson attracted a brilliant roster of economists to teach or study at the university, among them…Paul Krugman…Joseph E. Stiglitz.
Mr. Samuelson wrote one of the most widely used college textbooks in the history of American education. The book, “Economics,” first published in 1948, was the nation’s best-selling textbook for nearly 30 years….
“I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws — or crafts its advanced treatises — if I can write its economics textbooks,” Mr. Samuelson said.
His textbook taught college students how to think about economics….
The textbook introduced generations of students to the revolutionary ideas of John Maynard Keynes… No student would ever again rest comfortably with the 19th-century nostrum that private markets would cure unemployment without need of government intervention.
[...]
Mr. Samuelson also formulated a theory of public goods — that is, goods that can be provided effectively only through collective, or government, action….Public goods, he concluded, cannot be sold in private markets because individuals have no incentive to pay for them voluntarily.
[...]
…President Herbert Hoover, he noted, had never referred to Keynes other than as “the Marxist Keynes.”
“I never quite understood that venom, Mr. Samuelson said.
[...]
Mr. Samuelson said he had never regarded Keynesianism as a religion, and he criticized some of his liberal colleagues for seeming to do so, earning himself, late in life, the label l’enfant terrible, emeritus. The experience of nations in the second half of the century, he said, had diminished his optimism about the ability of government to perform miracles.
If government gets too big, and too great a portion of the nation’s income passes through it, he said, government becomes inefficient and unresponsive to the human needs “we do-gooders extol,” and thus risks infringing on freedoms.
But, he said, no serious political or economic thinker would reject the fundamental Keynesian idea that a benevolent democratic government must do what it can to avert economic trouble in areas the free markets cannot. Neither government alone nor the markets alone, he said, could serve the public welfare without help from the other.
“Benevolent democratic government.” And then there was the tooth fairy.
Shouldn’t be news to anyone sympathetic to the Austrians, or anyone who’s read him, but this is what the late great Samuelson said about the Soviet Union, right before it collapsed-
The Soviet Union is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, the socialist command economy can function and even thrive.
One of his critics (he has been attacked both from the left and the right, which is the mark of a pragmatist), Mark Skousen, writes-
Samuelson spent whole chapters in serious discussion of the socialist economics of the Soviet Union and China, while writing little or nothing on the success stories of West Germany, Japan, the East Asian Tigers or Chile…. He had numerous sections on ‘market failure,’ while offering little on ‘government failure.’ He criticized laissez-faire, favored progressive taxation and endorsed the pay as you go Social Security program.
Unfortunately, he’s not the first and surely won’t be the last…statist.
Skousen also quotes conservative economist Wallich who despite arguing that, in Skousen’s words, “freedom leads to lower economic growth, greater income inequality, and less competition” concluded-
The ultimate value of a free economy is not production, but freedom, and freedom comes not as a profit, but at a cost.
Freedom.
A lot of CO2
A highly educated (why? because he believes in AGW, that’s why) columnist writes in The Sunday Times (not of India) about his experience dealing with “bubbas” of the British variety-
Whoever leaked that clutch of Climategate emails last month must be laughing his socks off. For he has unleashed upon the rest of us the phenomenon of the born-again climate sceptic, the kind of man (always a man, almost invariably wearing a tweed jacket) who now materialises beside me at parties and confides that he has been having second thoughts about climate change.
My first instinct is always to humour him. I say I would be absolutely overjoyed if in a few years’ time we were to find out that Richard Lindzen, the most distinguished sceptic among the academic meteorologists, has turned out to be right and that the early 21st century got itself into a hysterical panic on the basis of trends based on highly uncertain computer predictions. But, I add, there are reasonable odds that he is wrong. My follow-up question is this: “Do you know that climate change is not the only reason to be uneasy about carbon emissions?”
On each occasion I am met by a look of puzzlement, followed by a perplexed nod, and I realise the person in question hasn’t a clue what I am talking about. He hasn’t heard of the acidification of the sea, a phenomenon quite separate from global warming but just as alarming. The reason, I suspect, is that it does not rate a line in the bestselling sceptical books on global warming by Christopher Booker or Nigel Lawson — which seem to be all that my tweedy friends have read on the subject.
Ocean acidification has been quite scandalously left out of the reckoning in the past few weeks. I am not for a moment belittling the science behind man-made global warming. This still seems to me solid, despite the shenanigans at the University of East Anglia. That levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are rising is not disputed. We have known since the 19th century that carbon dioxide was a crucial greenhouse gas. Venus has a lot of it and is hot as hell. Mars has almost none and is cold as ice.
Okay, “bubba” is flabbergasted on hearing about acidification, and that’s a big word, plus an f-word. So he says—”me is surprised!”. And highly-educated-columnist knows that Venus is hot because it has “a lot” of carbon dioxide whereas Mars is freezing because it has “almost none.” Plus he will probably be willing to bet his AGW belief plus the use of the royal (and authoritative) “We have known…” on that statement of fact.
Okay, what does NASA have to say on the subject. Venus-
Atmospheric composition (near surface, by volume):
Major:
96.5% Carbon Dioxide (CO2),
3.5% Nitrogen (N2)Minor (ppm):
Sulfur Dioxide (SO2) – 150;
Argon (Ar) – 70;
Water (H2O) – 20;
Carbon Monoxide (CO) – 17;
Helium (He) – 12;
Neon (Ne) – 7
and…Mars-
Atmospheric composition (by volume):
Major:
Carbon Dioxide (CO2) – 95.32%;
Nitrogen (N2) – 2.7%
Argon (Ar) – 1.6%;
Oxygen (O2) – 0.13%;
Carbon Monoxide (CO) – 0.08%Minor (ppm):
Water (H2O) – 210;
Nitrogen Oxide (NO) – 100;
Neon (Ne) – 2.5;
Hydrogen-Deuterium-Oxygen (HDO) – 0.85;
Krypton (Kr) – 0.3;
Xenon (Xe) – 0.08
Assuming these figures are comparable, me not being a planet-ologist (astronomer, astrophysicist, astro-something), I would say (from some ultralight readings on the subject) that the distance from the sun and the thickness of the atmosphere might be more relevant when dealing with the temperatures of planets, especially ones where humans aren’t driving 4×4s.
He goes on about how acidification is even more serious a threat as compared to AGW, and maybe it is. But will these people, and I have been reading comments from them filled with such vitriol (highly-educated-columnist seems positively benign in comparison) that one would hardly expect that they were written by humans, stop being so full of themselves and stop behaving as if there’s nothing wrong with what happened at CRU over the last decade and a half? If you want to play politics, do it. Don’t call it science. “Reparations” and “climate debt” are not part of the vocabulary of science (not that all warmists use that terminology). Policy prescriptions do not emanate from science. And just in case someone missed it, the last time a country was forced to pay reparations, the “beneficiaries” got screwed. Politics is a deadly game.
