Wow

This is sure a nice thing to say:

Ok, before I get blown out of the water too comprehensively, I must note that aj’s blog is a bit of a special case. There is just no way that I could write so fluently and fluidly as many words as he does each day. Well, maybe I could, if I found a dark, quiet room with running coffee and alcohol and made a rule that I couldn’t leave unless I’d written five thousand words. I’d have to quit my job, stop playing sport…

I’m also surprised by aj’s relatively strong command of political analysis. Anil, should you read this, would you do me a favour and read what he writes? I’d like to know if it’s complete waffle or whatever.

When I write about neo-con stuff, I should note that I’m (ab)using the term to mean “newly conservative”, since I’ve only been inclined in the small-government, capitalist, minimal state-assistance, etc viewpoint for a few months now. Almost everything I know about politics comes from the sources linked on the sidebar, and my own critical thought, neither of which are things you ought to be relying on too heavily, let alone exclusively.

Oh, I should also note that there’s no way I’m going to be updating this on a daily basis with any regularity.

Iraq, blahblahblah

A progress report on the investigation into weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Weve been very lucky. One set of these documents that we were happiest about - actually, the Iraqis had prepared them to be moved. They were put in two very large trailers outside the national monitoring directorate, and then something happened. They forgot to move them; the wheels were taken completely off the trailers. It was an Iraqi who pointed out to a group of Americans - I think those are the two trailers you want.

Also, here’s a link to some real intelligence failures, kindly saving me from having to make that argument.

Sly Cunning Bastards, addendum

Martin follows up to the previous entry, with an interesting question – is it ethical to lie to achieve a moral good, that is, (when) do the ends justify the means?

The only problem here is that it’s not apparent that anyone lied (ie, deliberately uttered things they knew were untrue, and that they knew would lead others to come to a conclusion that was known to be false); it’s merely alleged, and mostly by people who have a stated interest in attacking Mr Howard, Mr Bush, or Mr Blair. We have a fair degree of confidence that a number of the details were wrong, but it is far from immoral to merely be mistaken. I’m wrong quite frequently, and I don’t like it, but I’m not ashamed of it – saying wrong things and getting corrected is how you learn to be right.

And the other half of the problem is that while the details may have been wrong, the essence of the argument was entirely right. The only two acceptable options was to depose Hussein, or maintain heavy sanctions indefinitely. And while the stories of the sanctions killing babies have turned out to be fabricated propaganda (ie, actual lies, and rather revolting ones at that), leaving a dictator with the avowed desire to attack us who has a documented history of genocide and imperial ambitions in charge of a nation of twenty million is simply not a sane thing to do.

So what do you have? The various governments gave their best estimates of Iraq’s capabilities and intentions, which have turned out to not be particularly far off the truth – the weapons of mass destruction was overstated, the Al Qaeda connection appears to have been understated – and, probably more importantly, which no one was reasonably contradicting before the war (do you remember the arguments for the war? that inspections would successfully disarm Iraq?). They did the job that they believed was the best way of ensuring our continued security, and twenty million people no longer have to be worried about being abducted and tortured for sport. It’s difficult to find anything immoral that the coalition of the willing have done, in my opinion. It’s even hard to find things that have been done in a particularly suboptimal way: the initial intelligence gathering was obviously imperfect, and the diplomatic efforts were somewhat disappointing, but the real risks was in the effectiveness of the military attack (quagmire, vietnam, guerilla warfare, terrorist attacks, the Arab street rising up, gas attacks, etc) and that worked amazingly well, which demonstrates that in spite of the failures, both the initial intelligence (where should we bomb? who should we convince to defect?) and the diplomacy (do you mind if we base our troops here? would you assist us?) were effective anyway.

An interesting point is that the Hussein regime has exactly two things on which it can blame this war: its aggression, and its lack of transparency. If you know you have an enemy, and you don’t know what he is doing, you’re required to assume the worst – that he’s moving his troops and equipment to strike a crushing blow against you. Failing to cooperate fully with weapons inspectors really did make invasion necessary. (Rather than belabour the obvious, I’ll leave the rest of the explanation of this line of thought as an exercise for the interested reader)

Also interesting is the possibility that the Hussein regime had to simultaneously convince its Arab neighbours that it had weapons of mass destruction, and convince America that it didn’t, in both cases to deter possible attacks. Pity I’ve no idea where I read that argument.

(Martin also makes it impossible for me to fix the stupid inconsistent permalink I used for the last entry, dammit)

Sly, Cunning Bastards

Wow, everyone really must miss me. Ben Fowler’s hitting my hot buttons too!

Ben writes:

Australians here, amongst others might be aware that our beloved PM has recently gotten some flak over intelligence he and his conservative cronies used to gatecrash the war in Iraq.

The problem with this is that Ben’s not talking about the simplest and most valid justification for removing the Hussein regime from Iraq: humanitarian concerns. The stories now being reported about Iraqi prisons, or mass graves or genocide. I have no idea how anyone can seriously claim that the war in Iraq was unjustified given the results we’re unearthing.

And then there are the issues of intelligence failure. Why weren’t we horrified by the inhumane regime we were about to oust, irrespective of the threat to national security? The answer to that is easy – self censorship and propaganda pretending to be objective reporting by our major networks – see “The News We Kept To Ourselves”.

That’s not to say that what we got before the war was the best justification for war. It’s difficult to put someone else’s life on the line to make things better for a stranger; and that’s what going to war for humanitarian reasons means. Putting your own life on the line, sure. Putting soldiers’ lives on the line to defend their country, sure. Helping remove a vicious, murderous, tyrant from power over a country of some twenty million, without any loss of life on our own behalf? Priceless.

But it was the risk of weapons of mass destruction that Mr Howard used to justify the war, and Iraq’s potential terrorist links (either presently or in the future) that justified the risk to our soldiers. And since we’ve had freedom of movement in Iraq, we’ve found mobile labs whose only plausible purpose is apparently weapons development, buried instructions for building nuclear devices, and all sorts of interesting documents. In light of what we now know, is the claim that Iraq was likely to provide weapons of mass destruction to terrorists particularly implausible? Certainly there seems to be plenty of evidence to support such a claim, even if not enough to make it irrefutable.

Ben writes:

While I admit a decent measure of contempt for his politics, I’m in dumbstruck awe of his ability to survive and prosper despite having run out of any sort of moral or economic credibility years ago.

It’s interesting that steadfastly holding to his principles in spite of a great degree of criticism to involving Australia in a war that resulted in the liberation of more people than live in Australia, with minimal casualties on both sides of the equation, no refugee crisis, and that appears to be acting as a catalyst for good in the rest of the Middle East (you’ve heard of the protests in Iran right? and the removal of US troops from Saudi Arabia?), in response to all of that, Mr Howard has lost any sort of moral credibility. Meanwhile, in spite of weathering the dot-com burst, and worrying economic situations in the US and Europe and Asia, and managing to sustain economic growth and keep unemployment dropping, Mr Howard has also lost any sort of economic credibility.

Clearly Lady Luck must be an unabashed right-winger to continue smiling on us so, since our circumstances are obviously contrary to the skill and convictions of our parliamentary leaders.

Future Fortunes

Obviously concerned at my lack of new entries while I’m travelling, Martin’s posted an irresistable taunt. The issue at question is “Why do modern societies work so much?”

There are a few answers to this – one is simply an internalised desire to do work, ie, a work ethic. That’s a pretty trite line of thought though, and suffers the same flaws that hedonistic explanations usually do: it doesn’t explain why we find it pleasant, when we already know that different people find different things pleasurable; read up on S&M fetishes if you’re not convinced. Another is risk aversion – working less might make it hard for you to continue to exist, either because you can’t manage to eat, or because you’re going to be locked up. The former can mean either that you don’t have money to buy food, or that you live in a jungle and bigger, stronger people have already grabbed all the berries from your favourite shrub, or anything in between. In capitalist democracies the latter option is fairly rare though – it’s very rare that anyone will force you to work, although people might not be willing to give you food and board if you don’t.

An interesting perspective to look at is that of millionaires. Why does Bill Gates keep working? Why does Richard Branson bother creating new businesses in far off lands when he’s probably already got enough money to live a life of leisure for the rest of his life? It’s possible to simply argue that they’re insane, driven mad by capital acquisition, commerce and market control, but, again, that’s quite a cop-out. Why consider them insane, instead of the anarcho-Marxists rolling marbles under the hooves of Police horses?

A simpler explanation, that’s closer to home, is that they simply enjoy their work. If that explanation applies to people hacking on free software, there’s no reason it shouldn’t apply to exceptional entrepreneurs. Once you’re able to take holidays – like flying around the world in a hot air balloon – and spend weekends with your family, and are doing something you like and consider worthwhile and other people value for the rest of the week, what’s not to like? Why would you even want to work less?

The aspect that omits is why they continue doing it for money, rather than gratis. My current thesis for this is that money and profits serve as an excellent measure of how much you’re contributing to society, and in particular how much other people value what you’re offering or doing. If they don’t appreciate it, they’re not going to pay what it costs. If they do appreciate it, they’ll pay what it costs, and more. By contrast, if you do things for free, people will quite happily take your offering, say “Ooo, neat”, then throw it away; wasting your time, theirs, and possibly depriving the people who would’ve valued it much more.

Even better, continued effort in capitalist society makes leisure time continually more enjoyable. A hundred years ago, there’s no way you could row across an ocean and consider it, while not risk-free, a fairly safe endeavour nevertheless. Lifts at ski resorts, and even skis themselves, have improved by orders of magnitude, making the sport safer, more comfortable and more exhilirating. There’s no way I could take a couple of weeks and visit Norway and England. There’s no way I could reliably and instantaneously chat with people back in Australia while doing so. Just a few years ago, there’s no way I could have left finding accommodation ‘til a couple of days before I left, then arranged it at around 3am localtime, and gotten an incredibly great deal, all without having any particular cause to worry that I’d be sleeping on the streets. I couldn’t arrive in Norway not speaking the language, not having any local currency, and not even knowing exactly where I was meant to be going, without having any worries at all about being able to rectify all that from the airport.

And it’s work that makes all this possible: me doing something valuable for other people who give me money, and me giving that money to other people who do various valuable things for me. If I work less, people are going to do less for me, because I can’t give them as much money; and if there’s no quantitive measure or reward for useful work, people aren’t going to be anywhere near as good at inventing useful new technologies and services.

Up until recently, I thought, mostly as an article of faith in improving technology, that the future we were heading to was a leisure society; everyone working three days a week and then having a huge weekend. Now, with a better appreciation for capitalism, I wonder what the hell I’d do on those weekends – I already spend plenty of free time hacking on free software; and there’s not much point to having four day weekends that you spend doing unpaid work, when you could do the same work all week and be paid for it. We’re working smarter, but no less hard; and in the meantime we’re playing much harder.

I find it truly amazing the agnosticism in which capitalism is held by many smart people. It’s easy to find smart people who’re completely religious, and who can differentiate their faith from science, and work out exactly where they draw their lines and what benefits they get from it. By contrast, many otherwise highly educated people either feel that capitalism is innately exploitative and has latent tendencies toward true evil, or at best a tool that can be used for good or for evil depending on who wields it. And yet simply by looking at recent history, the amount of evidence that capitalism is a force for pure, unadulterated good is simply astounding. The rich might be getting richer, but the poor in capitalist countries are astoundingly wealthy too. A few hundred years ago, malnourishment was an everyday risk; now we’re seriously worried about obesity. A hundred years ago, it was vastly difficult to travel far from your place of birth and difficult to work all that far from where you lived – daily commute distances of eight hours walk aren’t unreasonable now, and backpacking around Europe isn’t particularly difficult. A decade or two ago, computers and mobile phones were exclusively for businesses and the wealthy; now you can combine the two and sell it to teenagers.

Other interesting reading on that topic includes this Spectator article.

Martin writes that:

On the other hand, changing technology makes it hard to imagine what life will be like in 50 years. One might semi-seriously gamble on, say, sunbathing now in the hope that there will be a cure for melanoma in a decade. Perhaps people will blithely burn fossil fuels, assuming that some solution will turn up.

We have, for example, probably already solved the problem with the Ozone hole (see here, which was a problem that required fairly drastic changes across the entire planet, and was, at the time, quite worrying. We’re at the point where shrinking populations are more likely to be a concern in some areas than overpopulation. Smog has been massively reduced in major cities. We’ve done a fairly good job at stopping extinctions. We have enough food to feed everyone on the planet. We’re not bad at diverting disasters, but the only way we’re going to get any better at – and be able to cope with asteroid strikes, or nuclear waste disposal – it is continue working as hard as we have been on clever new ideas. If we can build a space elevator, we have a good chance at being able to dispose radioactive waste well away from populated areas, and potentially be able to do nifty things like asteroid mining. But it doesn’t make sense to build a space elevator until we can work out how to do it in a way that’s useful enough to justify its cost, that people value enough to justify the expense, that will make a profit.

A final thought: Martin also writes:

People do not generally have the choice of: “would I rather be a serf, or a nomad?”. They have the experience of being pushed off the map or enslaved by an expanding cultivation society.

How would you be a nomad in modern society? Would you walk from town to town along highways, baking in the sun or get soaked in the rain or freezing in the snow, begging for food at your destination, or hoping to find some food on the side of the road, or in trashcans? Or would you rather get in a plane and fly from city to city or even country to country, spending a few months or a year in each place working during the week and spending the weekend enjoying the sights and the culture, and earning enough money for your next flight into the unknown?

Porcine Platitudes

David Jericho, thinking about movies. Let’s hope he can keep his composure as he rejoins the blogosphere.

Linux.Conf.Au 2004 -- Coming Soon!

Introducing the travelblog! Episode One: Adelaide, Excuse One: Linux.Conf.Au organising meeting.

The trip was to help pass on any tricks and tips to this year’s organising committee, and make sure that everything’s rosy and nothing’s pear-shaped. Mmm. Pears. So I arrived Friday evening. Brrr. Cold. Southern states just have a different sort of cold, one where words like “brisk” and “nippy” have a real meaning. Got picked up by Dan Shearer, and dropped off at the City Park Motel. A little later Tony Breeds-Taurima and Mark Tearle (from the Perth organisers) showed up after being entertained for the afternoon by the Adelaide folks. We chatted for a bit, and headed out to find bars.

After skipping a yuppie bar, and overcoming our dismay at walking into a pub with no beer (and far, far too much wine), we found an excellent venue that would (a) let us in (although not “upstairs”) and (b) serve us beer. For bonus points, it managed (c) live music, and (d) an attractive mix of sketch comedy and reality television presented live for our enjoyment just out the window.

What the room looked like shortly after we arrived	What the room looked like shortly before we left

The beer wasn’t great. There might be a reason that Adelaide’s known for its wine. Saturday woke up gray and chill, and loomed ominously above us as we headed out for breakfast. Remembering this is the city of churches, we kept our eyes open and our tithes to ourselves.

Breakfast, and coffee ensued. We met up with the Adelaide folks, who joined us in the imbibification. Pia, president of Linux Australia which backs the conference, but not an ex-organiser of any l.c.a, arrived to join us, having had an unaccompanied trip due to unexpected somnolescence on Anand Kumria’s behalf (treasurer of Linux Australia, and one of the Sydney organisers). We took our leave of the coffee shop, and were guided to a secure area on the 6th floor of a building in an undisclosed location. We unpacked laptops, and began discussions. Rusty Russell, who organised CALU, the forefather of all l.c.a’s in Melbourne in ‘99, arrived, and Anand showed up shortly after, letting discussions begin in earnest.

So, for the rest of the morning, we talked about stuff.

Eventually, we stopped talking about stuff, and headed off for lunch, in weather wet and miserable enough you’d think we were in Melbourne.

The tour of the venue followed. It’s a pretty sweet location: the University of Adelaide is literally just a block down from the city mall. Accommodation, restaurants, nightlife, and everything is a within spitting distance. Of course, everything in Adelaides’s within spitting distance from the heavens, as we were continually reminded throughout the tour.

We came in from Pultney Street, across North Terrace. The first building we were meant to be shown, but unfortunately weren’t due to some screw up or other was Elder Hall, which is where the keynotes will hopefully be held. After that, we wondered down towards the university club, then back up to the Napier building, which is where most of the conference will probably be held, and we were fortunate enough to get a look at the lecture halls in here. Two of them hold around 150 people, the third holds a few more. More wet trudging ensued, as we had a quick wander down towards the river, past the Union hall (where the refecs are, if walking across a road into the mall is too much hassle), and back. Just across North Terrace, on Pultney Street, and smack-bang between the university and the mall is The Mansions, which will probably be the speaker accommodation. All very pretty and convenient.

We returned to the dry warmth of indoors and continued talking about stuff ‘til five, then knocked off and went out. Drinks, dinner and shiatsu massage chairs followed. Some time later, so did sleep.

A beautiful surprise woke us on Sunday – blue sky! Naturally, we made the best of this by spending most of it indoors, eating yummy bbq lunch put on by Geoffrey and Lindy. And that was about it. A few Virgin Blue boarding calls later and the interstate visitors were sent back whence they came.

Without stealing the Adelaide guys’ thunder by going into much detail about any of the “stuff”, it’s abundantly clear that the conference is going places. And going places that you’d like to visit, at that. By any measure it’s improving significantly every year – number of attendees keeps rising, interest by business and sponsors, and the amount of stuff actually happening, and Adelaide already shows every signing of extending that trend. Many of the difficulties we faced in running the conference in Brisbane (is anyone going to come? what features should we keep, and which should we change?) seem to have been solved, leading to new, grander difficulties (how should the miniconfs and the main conference be balanced? are we going to be able to cope with the number of people who’d like to go?), which is an absolutely excellent state to be in. Even with the increased size of the conference they’re planning, the Adelaide organisers seem to be much more organised than we were in Brisbane at a similar point in time, which is also a very positive indicator.

Basically, keep watching the Linux.conf.au website; there’s a whole bunch of surprises they’re yet to extract from their sleeves.