Tag: Agora! Anarchy! Action!

National Day of Civic Hacking

The state has decided to declare June 1st and 2nd as National Day of Civic Hacking:

This summer, on June 1-2, 2013, citizens in cities across the Nation will join together to improve their communities and governments as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking.

Civic Hacking Day is an opportunity for software developers, technologists, and entrepreneurs to unleash their can-do American spirit by collaboratively harnessing publicly-released data and code to create innovative solutions for problems that affect Americans. While civic hacking communities have long worked to improve our country and the world, this summer will mark the first time local developers from across the Nation unite around the shared mission of addressing and solving challenges relevant to OUR blocks, OUR neighborhoods, OUR cities, OUR states, and OUR country.

I’m probably going to surprise you but this is actually an idea I can get behind. Hackers have the means of greatly improving our communities by developing new mechanisms to help individuals bypass the state’s watchful eye. Hidden services, such as Silk Road (if you’re on Tor you can access the site via this link), allow individuals to conduct business without having to concern themselves with taxes, regulations, and laws. If somebody needs some electrical work they could use a hidden service to find people in their community with experience in electrical work and hire them (under the table of course). The same could be done for any good or service, you would be surprised to discover the number of skilled individuals living in your community.

In keeping with the spirit of the day such hidden services can also help improve governments by depriving them of resources and therefore making them either scale back operations (wouldn’t it be nice if your local police department didn’t have a Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team standing by to squash any potential dissidence) or increase their rate of expropriation, which would push more people to use state avoiding hidden services. Overall I think National Day of Civic Hacking could be a boon for everybody.

I encourage hackers to spend National Day of Civic Hacking working on projects that help their local communities avoid the tyranny of the state. Even if you don’t have the knowledge to create hidden services you can help the cause by running a Tor relay on your computer. Donating a portion of your bandwidth to help dissidents in your local community and around the world is certainly a good cause.

Governor Dayton Looking to Increase Taxes in Minnesota

Stop me if you’ve heard this story before. A state spent more money than it expropriated from the people living within its claimed borders. Eventually the state realized it was deeply in debt and had no way to sustain its expenditures at its current rate of expropriation. Faced with a decision, to reduce spending or increase expropriation, the state decided to increase expropriation. Yeah, it’s a story as old as states themselves but like many great stories it continues to be relevant today. Governor Dayton has decided that the best way to get Minnesota out of debt is to increase the state’s rate of expropriation:

He would also increase the cigarette tax by 94 cents a pack, primarily as a way to discourage smoking.

Smokers have been a victim of constantly increasing state expropriation. Through its propaganda machine the state has made smokers into pariahs who receive little or no support from non-smokers. Due to their pariah status smokers make excellent tax victims since nobody is going to come to their defense when the state says the cost of their cigarettes will be increasing.

Dayton, who campaigned in 2010 calling for the state to “tax the rich,” would create a new tax rate of 9.85 percent, to be paid on taxable income above $250,000 for joint filers and above $150,000 for single filers. That would net about $1 billion from 53,000 returns and give the state one of the top five top rates in the country.

Are you a successful entrepreneur? If Dayton gets what he wants, and he most likely will, you will be punished for providing your community with the goods and services they desire. The “rich” (which is an arbitrary term), like smokers, have been a victim of constantly increasing state expropriation. Like it did with smokers, the state has used its propaganda machine to create a rift between the “rich” and everybody else. Few people are willing to stand against increased income taxes so long as it only applies to the “rich” (which is defined by most people as anybody who makes $1 more than they do).

For the first time, Minnesotans would pay sales tax on clothing — items above $100 — and on services like haircuts, auto repairs and legal fees.

Minnesota is an inhospitable wasteland for several months out of the year. During our winters an individual needs to dress in layers. One of those layers, the winter coat, usually costs more than $100. Boots, another article of clothing necessary for withstanding winter temperatures for any length of time, also generally cost more than $100. A sales tax on clothing costing more than $100 is really a tax on survival in this state. I guess it serves us Minnesotans right, living in this climate is rather idiotic and should be punished harshly.

Now that you know what the game is let me tell you how to avoid the game. Start doing all your shopping online. Amazon offers everything you need to survive Minnesota winters and doesn’t collect sales tax. Smokers can buy cigarettes online (I’m not a smoker so I don’t know if that’s a good site, it’s merely an option I came across) and avoid paying individual state sales taxes. These sales tax increases don’t concern them since I do most of my shopping online anyways.

The apparently obvious weakness in shopping online is the threat of a national sales tax. Fortunately that’s a minor problem. Sites like Alibaba allow individuals in other parts of the world to sell to other individuals in other parts of the world. If the United States enacted a national sales tax that would merely mean you would have to buy products from other countries. At one time buying from overseas sources would have been difficult due to shipping but international shipping has becomes so streamlined that it involves, at most, a slight increase in delivery time. My laptop, a MacBook Pro, was shipped directly from Shanghai, China free of charge in four or five (I don’t remember exactly) days.

The Internet is the greatest tool for those wanting to avoid state tyranny. It connects every part of the world with every other part of the world. International borders and, by extension, states have been rendered less and less relevant.

That’s it for Today

Instead of preparing blog posts I’ve been spending a lot of my free time learning how to setup Tor hidden services. So far I’ve managed to setup a server with functioning Secure Shell (SSH), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) servers. The HTTP and IRC servers have functioning Secure Socket Layer (SSL) security using self-signed certifications (since getting a certificate signed by an established authority defeats the purpose of a hidden anonymous server). So far I can’t guarantee that my server is properly hidden since I’ve focused primarily on getting services running, not security.

The more the states of the world clamp down on the Internet the more anonymity protocol such as Tor will be necessary, especailly for those advocating radial ideas such as agorism. I think it would be wise for everybody to familiarize themselves with Tor because you never know how far the state’s censorship practices will extend.

A Different Way of Doing Business

As an agorist I’m always interesting in learning how other cultures do business. I came across a very interesting article that discusses how Somali immigrants in Minneapolis have overcome many of the issues that traditional American entrepreneurs suffer. It’s pretty insightful and I think agorists and those looking to start “legitimate” businesses could learn a thing or two:

One marked difference between Somali immigrants and other Minnesota business owners is their devout adherence to the beliefs and practices of Islam. A recent survey, conducted out of the University of Minnesota, titled Achieving Success in Business: A Comparison of Somali and American-Born Entrepreneurs in Minneapolis, found that 98.9% of Somalis described their religious beliefs as ‘extremely important’ whereas only 48.9% of non-migrants surveyed expressed this level of commitment to their faith and 15.6% reported their religious beliefs to be ‘not important at all’.

Many Muslims, Somalis included, believe that Islam strongly discourages or even strictly prohibits the use of credit or accepting loans that include the payment of interest. Obviously, this belief has a significant impact on how Somalis must go about funding their businesses.

Luckily for Somalis, Minnesota has the highest number of immigrants as a result of second-migration than any other state and is home to several organizations and nonprofits that work to provide loans and ways of financing that are sensitive to those of varying cultural backgrounds. Thus, Somalis have the opportunity to start businesses without having to worry about large loan and interest payments haunting them years into the future.

One of the biggest hurdles prospective business owners face is acquiring the capital needed to get a business idea off of the ground. Traditional banks generally charge a great deal of interest but such practices are not allowed under the teachings of Islam so many of the Somali immigrants in this country have found an alternative, which is very reminiscent of mutual banking systems often advocated by mutualists. A mutual bank works differently from traditional banks in the United States. The idea is to lend money to prospective business owners and charge just enough interest to cover overhead. In effect it grants potential business owners a method of acquiring capital without suffering years of crushing debt.

Somalis aren’t the only ones who can benefit from mutual banking, prospective agorists could stand to benefit greatly from agorist mutual banks. Most agorists that I’ve talked to have plans to start small businesses but even small businesses require investment capital. Investment capital, especially for those looking to establish businesses seen as illegitimate by much of society, is difficult to come by this day and age of high unemployment Agorists also, unlike “legitimate” prospective entrepreneurs, don’t have the option of seeking a small business loan from traditional banks. This is where agorists could practice a form of mutual aid by pooling their available resources for the purpose of assisting fellow agorists wanting to start new businesses. Consider how well such a system has worked for Somali immigrants who often come to this country with no money or credit.

Living your entire life in one country and under one culture has negative side-effects, the biggest of which may be a lack of creativity. People who grow up living a certain way often get trapped into thinking that that way is the only way that works. When you look at other cultures you learn that isn’t the fact though. Every culture has managed to get by using various different methods. Because of this it’s valuable to look at how other cultures do things and consider adopting ideas that work well.

Obama Announced Gun Control Plan

I won’t spend a great deal of time on this since you’ve likely already heard about Obama’s annoucement:

Mr Obama called for a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines and wider background checks on gun buyers.

The Democratic president also signed 23 executive-order measures, which do not require congressional approval.

Mr Obama said gun-control reforms could not wait any longer, after last month’s school massacre in Connecticut.

“While there is no law or set of laws that can prevent every senseless act of violence completely, no piece of legislation that will prevent every tragedy, every act of evil,” he said, “if there’s even one thing we can do to reduce this violence, if there’s even one life that can be saved, then we’ve got an obligation to try.”

It was a pretty standard affair. You can read about the 23 executive orders here but most of them appear to be variations of enforcing laws that are already on the books. Some of them were somewhat humorous considering the Fast and Furious fiasco:

4. Direct the Attorney General to review categories of individuals prohibited from having a gun to make sure dangerous people are not slipping through the cracks.

I’m guessing the executive order only means dangerous people who are not employed by a Mexican drug cartel.

9. Issue a Presidential Memorandum to require federal law enforcement to trace guns recovered in criminal investigations.

This one surprised me. Weren’t traces of guns recovered in criminal investigations what lead to the Fast and Furious scandal coming to light? You would think the state would be smart enough to avoid advocating policies that have backfired in the past.

10. Release a DOJ report analyzing information on lost and stolen guns and make it widely available to law enforcement.

Does this mean the Department of Justice will notify domestic law enforcement agents when guns are “lost” in areas of Mexico known to be heavily populated with drug cartel members?

The last order I found rather funny was:

18. Provide incentives for schools to hire school resource officers.

I thought the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) proposal was considered bat shit crazy by everybody proposing gun control. I wonder what they have to say now that Mr. Obama has signed an order implementing the plan.

If a ban on semi-automatic rifles, standard capacity magazines, or both makes it into law I’ll take comfort in knowing it will ring in a new era of agorist business. Instead of relying on centralized firearm and firearm accessory manufacturers we will have independent individuals building and selling those goods. The sale of those items will not contribute to the state through the taxation policies that currently lead “legitimate” firearm and firearm accessory manufacturers to line the state’s coffers.

Checkmate

So somebody went and designed a magazine that can be created using a 3D printer. Not only did they design such a magazine but they tested it and it worked very well. This demonstrates the futility of a magazine ban. Combining a box with a spring isn’t exactly rocket science, in fact boxes and springs have been used by humanity for centuries.

I still think the best defense against any firearm-related prohibition is to take a page from alcohol prohibition and the prohibition of some drugs. During the era of alcohol prohibition people were still able to get alcohol. From bootleggers to people making bathtub gin there was no way to enforce the prohibition. Even if you wanted to spend a night on the town you had options in the form of speakeasies, which were secret locations where individuals wanting to socialized over drinks could go. The current prohibition on some drugs has proven to be similarly futile. Those wanting to buy verboten drugs can generally do so easily. We must do the same with firearms. By making firearms and related accessories so prevalent we can render any prohibition irrelevant. The prevalent availability of cannabis has not only rendered the prohibition almost entirely meaningless but it has also allowed advocates of cannabis legalization to point to example after example of people using the plant to no ill effect. Advocates of gun rights have done a similar job with firearms. By making firearms so prevalent in society we’ve prevented many individuals from believing prominent gun ownership is dangerous to society. In the case of a prohibition we would have to step up production to ensure firearms become even more widely available.

Know When to Grow

As an agorist I advocate separating one’s self from the state as much as possible. One of the easiest ways to reduce your attachment to the state is to produce your own taxable goods. Every taxable good you’re able to produce is a good that isn’t taxed by the state and therefore doesn’t contribute to the state’s coffers. Several states collect sales tax on groceries so it would be beneficial for people living in those states to produce their own food (and it’s still a good idea for people outside of those states to produce their own food as it reduces your grocery bill and makes you less dependent on grocery stores). To that end I would like to mention the website SproutRobot. Many people, including myself, are not very knowledgable when it comes to agriculture. SproutRobot can tell you what crops can be produced in your area as well as when you should plant them and how to plant them (it also includes instructions for both gardens and boxes that are useful for those living in apartments).

For the Record

Buck Yeager has a habit of saying really stupid stuff. Apparently challenging anybody who called him a coward due a duel wasn’t enough, he decided to go on YouTube and threaten civil war if new gun control laws are passed.

I’ve heard a few people in the gun rights community either voice their concern about new gun control laws sparking civil war or claiming they would spark a civil war themselves if new gun control laws are passed. For the record I just want it know that if a civil war breaks out in this country I’m going to be hearing about it from a different country. I’ll probably pick somewhere tropical since I’m getting sick and tied of dealing with winter here in Minnesota.

I am not a patriot, I have no loyalty to this country, I’m not even a fan of the Constitution. My loyalties lie with my friends and family who I plan to take with me if things turn violent. Civil wars have a nasty habit of leading to new, usually more tyrannical, states and I’m not going to help bring in a new age of tyranny.

In Lieu of Jails, Alternatives to Incarceration

In our society, and in most societies that suffer under a state, the use of prisons as a form of punishment is very popular. When I discuss anarchism people often want to know who will run the jails or, if there were no jails, how could evildoers being punished. Historically when societies privately developed legal systems (that is to say legal systems that were developed outside of state decrees) they tended to focus on two qualities: efficiency and reparations. Bruce L. Benson wrote an excellent book titled The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State that covers the history of legal systems. At one time a majority of legal systems were privately developed, not state created. Instead of focusing on enforcing the state’s decrees, as legal systems do today, historical legal systems, such as the lex mercatoria, focused on preventing behavior that was detrimental to the community and correcting aftermath of such behavior. Laws were developed against murder, assault, property damage, thievery, and other crimes that involve an aggressor and a victim. Another notable feature of historical legal systems is the lack of incarceration.

Incarceration is an extremely inefficient and ineffective method of dealing with criminals and crime. Consider the results of imprisonment. The victim of a crime gets no reparation from the act of incarcerating his aggressor other than the fulfillment of the human desire for petty revenge. In fact incarceration can prevent an individual from working, which prevents them from obtaining income, which in turns deprives them of ability to pay reparations to their victim. Another undesirable requirement for prisons is the expense. Prisons must be developed in such a manner that escape is extremely difficult (and ideally impossible). Constructing a facility that is difficult to escape from isn’t cheap since every possible method of escape must be made impossible. On top of the costs involved in constructing a prison one must also staff it with full-time guards. If prisoners are left to their own devises they will most likely begin acting on a plan to achieve escape. Therefore prisons don’t fulfill the desired goals of historical legal systems.

How could a society without prisons hope to prevent individuals from aggressing against one another and compensate the victims of aggression? Instead of relying on the threat of incarceration societies relied on the threat of outlawry. Today the label outlaw generally means a fugitive from justice but the historical definition of the word literally meant outside of the law, specifically outside of the protect of the law. When somebody proved to be a danger to society, whether through repeated crimes, refusal to pay reparation to victims, or perpetrating extremely heinous crimes, an individual was labeled an outlaw. Once labeled an outlaw an individual no longer had the protection offered by the law meaning any action taken against them by another was entirely legal. Stealing from or killing an outlaw would not lead to charges of theft or murder. Such a threat obviously would encourage cooperation with the legal system or vacating of the area, which would remove the threat from the community.

Another aspect of the outlaw label was the general unwillingness of the community to interact with individuals labeled as such. Think about all the things you enjoy that require the cooperation of members of your community. Getting served at a restaurant, buying food at a grocery store, buying clothing at a clothing store, getting your vehicle repaired, renting a place to live, etc. all require another person to cooperate with you. If nobody in the community is willing to interact with you your only real option is subsistance, which is a miserable condition to live under.

Even if any individual hasn’t been labeled an outlaw but is generally disliked by the community that individual may find themselves fending almost entirely for themselves. People often talk about public shaming as an effective punishment but it is only effective if individuals in the community are also unwilling to cooperate with the person being shamed. If members of a community are willing to publicly shame a wrongdoer and revoke their cooperation until the wrongdoer has made proper reparations then an incentive exists for abiding by the established legal system. Once again this is historically how privately developed legal systems operated.

The legal system we live under today isn’t efficient and doesn’t focus on compensating victims. In fact the way our legal system works today is by punishing every member of society for the actions of criminals. Part of the taxes expropriated by the state go to the construction and maintenance of prisons. In addition to that tax money is also used to clothe and feed prisoners, pay prison guards to watch over prisoners, pay police officers to gather up suspected wrongdoers, and pay courts to rule whether or not a suspect should be imprisoned at society’s expense. It really is the worst of all worlds.

Opposing the Claim that Expensive Research Won’t Occur Without Intellectual Property

One of the issues many branches of libertarianism disagree on is intellectual property. Some branches of libertarianism, such as constitutional libertarianism, believe that intellectual property is just while others branches of libertarianism, such as anarchism, oppose the idea of intellectual property. Even anarcho-capitalists can’t agree entirely on the topic. Murray Rothbard believed certain forms of intellectual property, specifically copyrights, were valid if they took shape in the form of contractual agreements between a producer and a consumer. Objectivism is another school that generally advocates of very strong intellectual property rights.

I belong to the school that oppose intellectual property in all forms. It is my belief that enforcing property rights can only be justified in the case of scarce resources. If a resource is infinitely reproducible one has no justifiable claim to use force to protect it. Ideas by their very nature are infinite resources. Consider the difference between an idea and an apple. An apple is a scarce resource in as much as it can only be enjoyed by a fixed number of people. Once an apple has been consumed it is gone forever. Ideas are not scarce resources as they can be enjoyed by an infinite number of people. If I have an idea and tell you that idea I do not lose that idea, instead we both have that idea.

Many people support intellectual property for, what they believe to be, pragmatic reasons. One of the most common arguments I hear in favor of intellectual property involves the cost of developing new technologies. Advocates of intellectual property will claim that producers won’t risk the large expense involved in developing new technologies if they aren’t guaranteed some kind of exclusive period to recoup their costs. This argument is most often made in regards to intellectual property laws regarding medical technologies. If these advocates are correct pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t invest the resources necessary to develop new drugs without the monopoly guarantees patents offer. This argument is historically unprecedented.

Intellectual property is a fairly modern concept. If advocates of intellectual property were correct, if producers were entirely unwilling to invest resources to develop new technologies without the temporary monopoly granted by intellectual property laws, then the human race would never have developed the wheel. In fact many technologies we take for granted today were developed at a time when intellectual property laws didn’t exist. When I point this out advocates of intellectual property are quick to claim that such an argument is invalid because modern technologies, such as new pharmaceuticals, require many more resources to develop. Such refutations are the result of historical ignorance.

Students of viking history have likely heard of Ulfberht. Ulfberht was the name inscribe on many high quality viking age swords and is believed to be the name of the blacksmith who created them. Today one would believe that producing a sword is a rather simple affair, which is true. Back in the viking age producing a sword was a difficult task that required a great deal of time. There is a good video created by Google engineer Niels Provos that demonstrates how viking swords were created:

The primary difference between Provos’s method and the methods used during the viking age is that the blacksmiths of the viking age didn’t have access to powered tools. Instead of a power hammer blacksmiths of the viking age had to rely on manually operated hammers. What took Provos a few days to complete would have taken a viking age blacksmith far more time, even with several people under his employ. Producing swords was an extremely time and energy consuming affair. But Ulfberht’s swords weren’t merely swords, they were superior swords. Most swords of the era were made from an inferior steel:

Medieval blacksmiths in Europe didn’t make slag-free steel, because their fires weren’t hot enough to fully liquefy the iron. In modern times, metals are melted at temperatures over 3,000 degrees. This separates out the slag and allows more carbon to be mixed in evenly. But in the Viking era, carbon could only be introduced incidentally, mainly through the coal in the fire, and the only way to remove the slag from the metal was to try to hammer out the impurities with each strike.

Of the thousands of European swords from the Middle Ages that have been found, all were thought to have been made from this inferior steel, until Williams analyzed the Ulfberht.

One of the things that set the Ulfberht apart from other swords of the day was the use of superior metal, steel:

Produced only from about 800 to 1,000 A.D., this Viking sword was made from a pure steel, not seen again in Europe for nearly 1,000 years.

This high-tech weapon of its time was inscribed with the mysterious word “Ulfberht.” Carried by only a few elite warriors, the Ulfberht represented the perfect marriage of form and function in the chaos that was a Viking battle.

Medieval Europe did not have the ability to produce steel. The steel used to produce Ulfberht’s swords came from many thousands of miles away:

But the genuine ones were made from ingots of crucible steel, which the Vikings brought back from furnaces thousands of miles away in modern Afghanistan and Iran. The tests at Teddington proved the genuine Ulfberht swords had a phenomenally high carbon content, three times that of the fakes, and half again that of modern carbon steel.

Today it seems inconceivable that creating a sword could compare to creating new pharmaceuticals. With our modern technology creating swords is fairly trivial and the task has been mostly automated. Back in the viking age creating a sword was a difficult task that could only be performed by individuals with a great deal of knowledge and skill. The secret of Ulfberht’s swords lied in the material, which had to be imported from thousands of miles away. That metal, also created in a time when intellectual property laws didn’t exist, would have been expensive and likely difficult to work with. Shaping crucible steel into a sword would have required a great deal of time and specialized knowledge in working with that particular steel. Combining the expense of importing the steel, the time needed to gain the necessary knowledge to work with the steel, and the time and physical labor required to shape the raw steel into a sword lead to a product that only the wealthiest warriors could afford.

Writing off historical technological progresses as easily achieved when compared to modern technological progresses show a lack of historical knowledge. Crafting a better sword required a massive investment, one that was undertaken in spite of intellectual property laws not existing. When an advocate of intellectual property claims that technological advancements wouldn’t occur without intellectual property laws you can kindly inform them of their error by pointing out historical events that contradict their claims. If they claim that those historical events are irrelevant because modern technological advancements require far more resources than historical technological advancements did you can kindly inform them of their error by explaining the processes required to achieve those historical technological advancements.