You’re Doing it Right – Page 22

Embrace the Machines

Self-driving cars are advancing quickly, which has lead to a debate. Many people don’t like the idea of self-driving cars because they believe the potential for software glitches to lead to a catastrophic crash is too high. I, on the other hand, can’t wait to buy a self-driving car. Software glitches are always a possibility but the truth is we humans are far more prone to error when driving then current self-driving cars have been. That’s because our species as a problem with complacency. When we do a task successfully so many times we become less cautious and allow ourselves to be distracted more easily. This is why humans suck at watching security monitors all day. It’s also why adding some intelligence to our vehicles makes a lot of sense. Recently the European New Car Assessment Program (NCAP) did a study on self-braking cars and found that they reduced rear-end collisions significantly:

While we’re still some way off seeing full-blown, self-driving cars winding their way across continental Europe, a more modest autonomous technology has found approval with safety bods. Research conducted by the European road safety research organisation Euro NCAP concluded that having a car automatically slam on the brakes to avoid low-speed accidents leads to a 38 percent reduction in rear-end crashes.

As you’ll note software glitches didn’t lead to an increase in crashes. And while software glitches could lead to isolated failures that almost certainly won’t be enough to offset the benefits of such a highly reduce rear-end collision rate. This also shows that there are things machines are better at than us squishy humans. Repetitive tasks, such as driving, are one of them.

Machines are not only incapable of getting bored but they are also better at maintaining awareness. A computer can monitor a vast number of sensors simultaneously whereas us humans have five sense that are very restricted (for example, our vision only sees forward and our sense of touch requires physical contact). If you think you can maintain better awareness than a self-driving car equipped with cameras, radar, laser sensors, radio communication to other self-driving cars, and a slew of other sensors you are mistaken.

The debate over self-driving cars shouldn’t be whether software glitches will lead to isolated catastrophes. It should be over whether self-driving cars, as a whole, will increase overall vehicle safety. Since machines are better at almost every aspect of driving (road rage is the only exception I can think of) than we are the debate is pretty much settled. That’s not to say wanting a car you drive yourself because you prefer to drive a car yourself isn’t a valid reason to buy one. But the concerns about safety risks involve in self-driving cars has been put to rest.

The Future is Here

If there are any questions about my belief that technological advancements will save us before political actions this story should answer them:

Snuggly situated in an industrial section of Oakland, CA is Next Thing Co. a team of nine artists and engineers who are pursuing the dream of a lower cost single board computer. Today they’ve unveiled their progress on Kickstarter, offering a $9 development board called Chip.

The board is Open Hardware, runs a flavor of Debain Linux, and boasts a 1Ghz R8 ARM processor, 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of eMMC storage. It is more powerful than a Raspberry Pi B+ and equal to the BeagleBone Black in clock speed, RAM, and storage. Differentiating Chip from Beagle is its built-in WiFi, Bluetooth, and the ease in which it can be made portable, thanks to circuitry that handles battery operation.

$9 for a computer with a 1Ghz process, 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of storage? And it runs Linux? Sign me up! I never thought I’d live to see this day. My family’s first computer, and we came to the computer game fairly late, was a real piece of shit 3.11 machine and must have cost at least $2,000 or $3,000. Back then the idea that a computer would be available for $9 was inconceivable.

This is another example of the market providing real solutions to real problems. Is there any wonder why us market anarchists have more faith in it than politicians who seem incapable of identifying, let alone solving, real problems?

Agorism and Decentralized Power

One of the major news items this week was Elon Musk unveiling the Powerwall, a battery pack aimed at making renewable energy sources more useful. The idea isn’t a new one. People, especially those living in remote areas, have been making homemade energy storage mechanisms, usually out of car or marine batteries, charged by solar panels for some time now. What the Powerwall brings to the table is an affordable prepackaged solution that you can have professionally installed. Advocates of renewable energy have been cheering this announcement while detractors have been pointing out the return on investment:

But as of right now, the ROI still takes too long to reach break-even for people to view it as an economic benefit.

Why? Basically, it boils down to how much you pay per kWh put into the battery, which is then retrieved later. And if you don’t already have a big enough photovoltaic system to get off the grid, paying the estimated $0.30/kWh for electricity through the Powerwall may not make much sense. On average, grid prices for electricity in the US are about $0.12/kWh. Rooftop solar PV is estimated to reach grid parity in most places by 2016, but it’s not quite there yet.

The author of this statement makes a common economic mistake by assuming the only return one gains from an investment is monetary. Value is subjective and there are many advantages to a product such as the Powerwall other than saving money on the power bill. For agorists the biggest advantage may be decentralization.

Relying on a centralized power infrastructure has several downsides. First, if the complex centralized system goes down you have no power. This is becoming a bigger deal as we come to rely on our electrically powered appliances and devices more heavily. By having your own solar array and battery to storage energy for cloudy days and nights you can keep your gear running even if the centralized power grid goes down.

Second, and this is a big one for agorists, a centralized power system is more easy for a state to tax. One of the reasons states prefer big businesses over small ones is that they reduce the costs of enforcing a tax scheme. It’s easier for a state to keep tabs on a handful of large businesses than thousands of little ones. Since businesses act as tax collectors themselves by withholding payroll taxes for the state having a handful of large employers further reduces the state’s overhead. Power is the same. By having everybody hooked into a centralized system the state can collect power-related taxes easily by putting the power provider in charge of collecting. Even if the state declared a tax on power generated by personally owned solar panels it would be a nightmare to enforce. The more decentralized the power infrastructure is the more difficult it is for the state to use it as a tax collecting mechanism.

Third, and this is probably even more important for agorists, the state can more readily utilize a centralized power infrastructure to enforce its decrees. It’s possible for the state to utilized power usage to detect cannabis growers. With a centralized system it’s trivial to convince the power company to report large spikes in customer power usage by either offering a reward or through coercive means. Any prohibited activity that requires a large amount of power could be caught by monitoring the centralized power system. By relying on your own solar panels you can more readily conceal you power usage since you don’t have nosy power providers checking how much you’ve used every month.

By making solar power more accessible the Powerwall stands to be a good product for agorists because it allows one to further decouple themselves from the state. Because of that it stands to have a much quicker return on investment that most people are giving it credit for. I know the value of being able to further separate myself from the state is enormous, especially if the means of separating myself open up additional revenue sources that were otherwise too risky.

A New Nation is Born

While good patriotic Americans were getting their jingoism on and communists were deluding themselves into believing a world with completely economic equality is possible, a small group of people were declaring their independence. These people occupy a small 2.7 square mile plot of land on the border between Croatian and Serbia:

A group of Czechs and self-styled founding fathers of a “micro-nation” on the bank of the Danube River held their own version of Independence Day Friday, christening “Liberland” as a 2.7-square-mile country where taxes are optional and freedom reigns.

Vít Jedlička, a Czech libertarian politician who claims to have found a plot of land left unclaimed in the 1990s border settlement between Croatia and Serbia, told FoxNews.com dozens of would-be citizens traveled by boat to Liberland to toast its birth.

[…]

Jedlička, who is a member of the Conservative Party of Free Citizens in the Czech Republic, recently appointed himself president of the new free republic of Liberland, on the tiny patch of land that sits on the Croatian-Serbia Border. Jedlička claims international law allows his claim over the terra nullius—or literally “No Man’s Land.”

Libertarians are cheering this declaration while statists are scoffing. To libertarians the declaration of independence is just as legitimate as any other country’s declaration of independence. Meanwhile statists cannot comprehend the idea that a nation can exist unless it has the permission, err, recognition of other states.

I’m glad to see the people of Liberland declaring themselves independent of neighboring states. My only hope is that this trend will continue in the tiny 2.7 square mile nation. Hopefully a group of Liberland’s people will declare Jedlička’s presidency illegitimate and secede. From there I hope the secession continues until each individual living there no longer recognizes themselves as members of a nation but sovereign individuals.

I’ve heard several statists point out that this declaration won’t last because the neighboring states; who, in their opinion, are the rightful owners of that little chunk of land; will reclaim it. Perhaps that will happen. Yet there’s a chance that their declaration will be considered so ludicrous that neither Croatia or Serbia will acknowledge the declaration as something that needs to be dealt with. That is similar to the story of Emperor Norton. Because of his perceived insanity the federal government never challenged his declaration of being emperor yet the money he issued was accepted at local establishments and his declarations were often adhered to, which made him just as much of an emperor as any other.

Liberland, in the same way, could become an independent nation by function if not recognition. If, for instance, taxes remain voluntary due to Croatia and Serbia simply not bothering to enforce tax laws on that chunk of land then it would functionally be an independent land much in the same way Neutral Moresnet was independent of its surrounding powers.

Liberland will be fun to follow. Even if it doesn’t manage to maintain its independence it could be fun watching Croatia and Serbia bicker about who really owns the land.

A Brilliant Use of Freedom of Information Act Requests

There’s little doubt that children tend to be far more creative than adults. For example, while us stuffy adults are using the Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) requests (and their equivalent in foreign countries) to obtained heavily censored reports about the government’s misdeeds one brilliant child decided to use them for something more practical:

A German schoolboy has taken exam preparation to ingenious new levels by making a freedom of information request to see the questions in his forthcoming Abitur tests, the equivalent of A-levels in the UK.

Simon Schräder, 17, from Münster, used the internet platform fragdenstaat.de (“ask the state”), to ask the education ministry of North Rhine-Westphalia for “the tasks of the centrally-made Abitur examinations in the senior classes of high school in the current school year”. He was specifically invoking his state’s freedom of information law.

Schräder set the ministry the legally allowed one-month deadline – falling on 21 April – to comply, though his first exam is on 16 April.

Since schools are generally part of the state I believe FoIA requests and their foreign equivalents should force the state to hand over test questions. Test questions cannot be claimed to impact national security since they’re made public to every student taking the test during the time of the test. There’s no real way to claim handing over test questions could impact anything a current administration is doing or planning to do. The only excuse the state could come up with for not handing over such information is to admit the truth about freedom of information laws, which is that they exist to give the people the illusion that they can hold the state accountable. As soon as freedom of information laws inconvenience the state they are either ignored entirely or the material is surrendered only after being heavily redacted.

A Good Use of Religious Freedom Laws

When you heard the phrase “religious freedom laws” your mind probably jumps to thoughts of business owners discriminating against patrons based on their sexual orientation. That has been the primary motivation of the politicians who passed these laws and the angle being covered by the press. But these laws can also be used for good. Let’s take the state’s war against the homeless as an example. One woman has cited a religious freedom law in response to the state trying to stop her from feeding the homeless:

Joan Cheever of San Antonio has been serving meals to the city’s homeless for 10 years. But last week, police officers handed her a ticket with a potential fine of $2,000. Despite having a food permit for the food truck she cooks out of, which she calls the Chow Train, she was cited for transporting and serving it from a different vehicle.

But that hasn’t stopped her from continuing to hand out three-course meals to the homeless. On Friday, she went back to Maverick Park with 50 supporters to hand out food, and this time she wasn’t ticketed. Cheever has argued that she has a right to feed the homeless under Texas’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act because she considers it exercising her religious beliefs.

Christianity teaches compassion for the poor and afflicted so it’s not extent to claim feeding the homeless is a protected act under religious freedom laws. Now the question becomes whether the state will find and act that goes against its interest a lawful act of religious freedom.

Metal and Antistatism

Anarchism and metal are like fish and water. Metal has a long history of counterculture and antistatism. In fact in many areas of the world metal is illegal but bands exist anyways (proving once again that laws can’t control behavior). Vice recently did an interview with members of Al-Namrood. Al-Namrood, for those who are unfamiliar with Middle Eastern metal, is a Saudi Arabian black metal band. They’re worth nothing not only for their music but also for the fact that they stand the real chance of being executed for playing their music:

Black metal bands have never been keen on religion. However, in parts of the world where religion can actually be oppressive, bands inspired by Bathory and Mayhem and Burzum are few and far between.

That’s presumably because it’s a lot easier to be in an anti-Christian metal band in the US, than in an anti-Islamic metal band in Saudi Arabia. In America, your obstacles extend to overhearing your mom tell a friend you’re just “going through a phase.” In Saudi Arabia, you face social ostracism and the possibility of imprisonment or death.

With that in mind, you’ve got to give it to Saudi Arabia’s only black metal band, Al-Namrood, whose lyrics include all sorts of things that could get them executed. I got in touch with guitarist and bassist Mephisto for a chat.

It’s an interesting interview. Al-Namrood is one of those bands that I look up to for its willingness to give a giant middle finger to the state. It also gives me hope because even the oppressive Saudi government can’t find the members of Al-Namrood. If an oppressive regime such as Saudi Arabia can’t find a single band that sells physical merchandise then there’s hope for all of us agorists.

Rand Paul’s Worst Nightmare

A lot of libertarians who went through the Republican nomination process in a futile attempt to get Ron Paul nominated have been pointing out Rand’s chances are basically nil. But the nomination process isn’t the only thing that may stop Rand’s campaign in its tracks. He has a wily competitor for president and that competitor has a secret weapon:

Vermin is also known for using his fairy dust to turn democratic presidential candidate Randall Terry gay back in 2012. Odds are good Rand is aware of this tactic, and that may be his motivation to keep Vermin away. In an interview this afternoon, Vermin acknowledged it’s possible that Rand fears being turned gay, and would not comment on whether he has any fairy dust in his possession, calling that a “closely held secret.” Rand better hope Vermin isn’t holding any fairy dust. He can’t afford to go gay, as he’ll lose his base of conservative homophobic anti-gay marriage supporters and thereby any shot at winning the primary.

Being turned gay by Vermin Supreme (and let’s be honest, almost any man would turn gay for Vermin Supreme) would not only end Rand’s presidential run but his political career. There are two things that will ensure the Republican Party base won’t support you: being gay or Muslim.

With that said it’s nice to see Vermin Supreme entering the race once again. He’s the only presidential candidate I’m willing to endorse. Although I’m wary of his dental reeducation camps his promises of zombie power and free ponies are needed if this nation is to rise to glory. I doubt any other candidate stands a chance against him and am willing to call it now: Vermin Supreme will be the next president of the United States (so long as Emperor Norton allows it, of course).

Professional Upbraiding

I’m interested in getting a Beretta M9. Specially I’m interested in the new M9A3. As I was searching for information on if or when the pistol would be made available for sale to non-military personnel I came across what may be the most professional way to tell somebody to shut up and fuck off that I’ve ever witnessed:

Zing! As I’ve explained before, I carry a .45. However I don’t do so because of some delusion that the .45 is somehow superior to 9mm. I just happen to like .45 and realize that I will almost certainly never be in a situation where what determines whether or not I survive is the caliber of my handgun.

Finally, A Gun Control Group That Makes Sense

Gun control groups usually claim they want to reduce violent crime but then turn around and try to take firearms primarily from peaceful people. But there is finally a group that is targeting a major sources of violence in this country, the New York Police Department (NYPD):

An anti-police activist group calling itself “Disarm NYPD” is aiming to strip officers of their firearms and boot them from certain neighborhoods entirely.

Disarm NYPD writes on its website that its aim is “combatting police violence through direct action in NYC and beyond.”

Instead of cops, the group wants to form what they call “conflict resolution bodies” made up of residents, attempting to make the police force obsolete.

OK, Disarm NYPD isn’t actually a gun control group but if it manages to get the NYPD disbanded it would disarm some of the most violent gang members int he country. Not only do members of the NYPD gang have a history of violence but they are go unpunished in most cases because, well, they’re an officially recognized and endorsed gang by the city government.