A response to responses to @DavidPogue’s response to those who think costs of gadget components are total costs

Readers who say that New York Times technology reviewer David Pogue is missing the point of gadget tear-downs when he rebuts the claims of those who miss the point about total costs of gadget production miss the point. Sure, some persons know that retail prices are not mere markups of component costs. But many do lack a good grasp of what it takes to make things, to run a company or to earn an honest profit, or what kind of policies would make it easier for capable firms to earn and hire. Some of these insight-deficient persons read New York Times articles. Some write New York Times editorials. Some are presidents of the United States.

It’s obvious that a computer tablet may sell only for a price way below average cost of production if few persons want it at “the market price” for more popular tablets, thus requiring its maker to slash prices to get rid of a warehouse stockpile–or if, as in the case of Amazon, the producer is selling a lot more than the gadget in isolation and therefore both expects and will accept a short-term loss in exchange for a longer-term gain. But contrary to what some readers of Pogue’s article imply, prices are not merely “set” by Values floating in the air. Prices are the results of complex interactions that include the costs that a producer confronts and that he expects to confront, his estimation of demand, broader economic conditions, whether there was an earthquake in Japan last week, and the values and purposes of both seller and buyer as they participate in a market or decide to refrain from participating in it. Nobody would “value” a typical car at thousands of dollars, or pay that much for one, if, as a result of technological advances and market processes, it were to become as cheap to produce a Chevy as to produce a pencil.

The unfortunate problems with “Atlas Shrugged, Part I”

Just tried to re-watch “Atlas Shrugged, Part I,” months after having seen it in the theater.

Despite some good elements unfairly ignored by critics, including decent acting (but hiccupy casting; why were Francisco d’Anconia and Hugh Akston so dully portrayed as such dull and scruffy nabobs of non-entityism, for instance?), the movie is a pretty weak adaptation of a powerful and challenging book. The project needed a great script and a great director, and, for various reasons, including the time crunch imposed by a belated decision to do the film independently, “Atlas Shrugged, Part I” lacked that script, lacked that director.

The movie-makers first of all had to solve the problems of adapting such a sweeping and intensely philosophical novel for cinematic consumption. The movie-makers did not solve these problems; like Atlases with trick knees, they would not or could not even begin to shoulder the job they had taken on — instead filming only a big-point sketch of Ayn Rand’s uniquely told story, a sketch that hints at its deeper themes without philosophically or artistically elaborating any single touched-upon bullet point. Other movies with less challenging themes are more thematically satisfying, because they do more than simply unspool a check list of what mattered in the original work. They are not so skittish about exploring what they’re about. Yet it’s certainly possible to do an epic and satisfying cinematic adaptation of an epic and satisfying novel; cf. Gone with the Wind and “Gone with the Wind.”

I would have preferred to see the adaptors take a chapter or two from early pages of Atlas Shrugged, imply or insinuate the relevant un-dramatized background the way effective storytelling can always do, and give that segment the subtle and intensive treatment that the narrower stretch of plot, in sufficiently capable hands, would have permitted. Perhaps the basic choices of the present movie, a selective recreation that does not understand very well how to select, would have been fine if only much better executed. But Rand’s intricate, dense and vivid tale of men of the mind who go on strike against the creed of self-sacrifice needed a consistently bold, grand, insightful adaptation. Intermittent adequacy isn’t enough.

Cables versus email: we are in the future

In Nicolas Darvas’s 1960 memoir How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market, the author details his complicated efforts as he traveled around the world on a dance tour to keep informed about daily changes in stock prices via cables from his broker and mailed editions of Barron’s that usually reached him four days after their weekly publication dates. Today, we take for granted the conveniences of email and the Internet, which can zap timely information to us almost the nanosecond it is available, to almost anywhere with infrastructure on the planet. We can’t teleport ourselves but we can teleport all updates and analyses. This seems mundane to us. We regard as intolerable any inescapable if fleeting glitches in the miraculous conveyances, which incarnate in sped-up and digitized form the channeled ingenuity and coordinations of market processes as such, and streamline those processes.

All the fake news that’s fit to fatuously print

The New York Times has a headline and blurb on its home page that goes a little bit like this:

Opening Day for Shoppers Shows Divide
By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

When stores open for Black Friday sales late Thursday night, budget-minded shoppers will be racing for bargains while the rich mostly will not be bothering to leave home.

Oh–my–God. Omigod. So…the bargain hunters will be hunting for bargains Friday, and those not hunting for bargains will not be hunting for bargains? Or is it that all the budget-minded people are continuing to be budget-minded and all the not-budget-minded people are continuing to not be budget-minded? Or is it that all–or most–or just some but a lot–of the budget-minded people will race for the bargains?

Since there are many ways to group people into two more-or-less mutually exclusive sets, the world is full of “divides.” The members of one half of a divide don’t necessarily take up arms against members of the other half or even necessarily sulk about their respective statuses as they enact their different divide-specific roles. Of course, some persons do resent others who fare better than themselves economically, regardless of merits and causes; and some persons do look down on others who fare worse than themselves economically, regardless of merits and causes. This is why Marx and similar conceptually constipated agitators are able to write their unintelligible tripe and get people to listen to them, including many lower-tier intellectuals also eager to foster counterproductive social resentments.

That some persons are better off than others is never per se “news.” Nevertheless, whenever the persons who are better off do something that the persons less well off would be unlikely to do, perhaps ride in limos or lear jets, it seems that there’s ample warrant for some reporter to yamble about the arrival of yet another moldy tranche of proof of The Great Divide.

But is it true? Are the bargain-hunters really not taking limos to the 99-cent stores? Let’s investigate this….

Oh geez, I almost forgot. This is Thanksgiving, so let us give thanks. Thank you, New York Times, for nothing.

Contra Sam Adams’s uber-alliancing, pretending the commies aren’t attacking won’t make them go away

Would the original Sam Adams have bought the “let’s-be-gaze-averting-friends-with-our-enemies” approach to fighting for freedom against those who would destroy it? At the Sam Adams Alliance blog, we learn:

The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) crowd and the tea party movement really have a lot in common. They might not realize this yet—the most “respected” and “responsible” political observers certainly do not—but they are really allies.

Both groups are responding, in their different ways, to the same problems. They not might agree totally on the solutions, but if they only gave each other half a chance, they could work together. And if they did, there’s no telling what effect they might have on American politics.

This kind of blog post unnecessarily downplays or glosses over the rabidly something-for-nothing, socialistic and anti-capitalist mentality of much of the squat-on-Wall-Street movement, features that have been well documented. Of course, many involved are simply ignorant or confused. That has always been true of anti-capitalist movements.

Yes, activists who value freedom, capitalism and profit-making, on the one hand, and activists who want to destroy these, on the other, may have much in common. They’re human beings. They may adopt some of the same message-spreading techniques (although one side seems a lot more prone to window-smashing, setting up indefinite residency in property than does not belong to them and which they are not renting, and other manifestations of contempt for property rights and other human beings). Many on both sides may oppose bailouts of large firms. Many on both sides may like coffee, iPads, sex. Etc.

But it does a disservice to the cause of freedom to treat real and stark differences in ideology, temperament and goals as if they were subsidiary matters or readily resolvable with a little stress on commonalities and communication. Capitalists can’t win battles against adamant socialists and looters by pretending that the war against capitalism, economic success and individual rights is not being waged, that we’re really all on the “same” side…and so why don’t we all get along? Defenders of freedom, capitalism and civilization can’t “work together” with those bent on destroying these. Certainly ad hoc, temporary and narrow cooperation with certain political adversaries is possible on specific political questions where there happens to be agreement (bailouts, draft, drug legalization, perhaps) and where such cooperation does not imply a relinquishing of fundamental principles. But no such ad-hoc alliances should be allowed to blur the reality of the fundamental clash, what Sowell called the “conflict of visions”; the conflict between the basic values that are at stake. You can’t “work with” someone toward goals that are the opposite of the goals of the person with whom you would supposedly be working.

In a society with any classical liberal heritage, in the interests of the destroyers of civilization to hide their true goals, both from foes and from ignorant collaborators. It’s not in the interests of the defenders of civilization, not even for the sake of a superficial comity. We can persuade some of the more open-minded denizens of the left to come over to the side of freedom, but not by disguising the depth of our disagreements with them.

Grab “Omelet: A Tragedy of Bill Shake-a-speare” NOW and be one of the first to sing it in the shower

From the new Kindle ebook, “Omelet: A Tragedy of Bill Shake-a-speare” http://amzn.to/vDJugV:

CLINTONIUS: Omelet, thou seemeth still sad about your father’s loss, and yet it’s been lo these many couple months: approaching two. What’s the problemmo, son? The man is dead, and dross. ‘Tis still water under brackish bridge. Let it lay, pray.

OMELET: Easier done than said. (For thee.)

QUEEN GERTIE: Why buggest thou it so?! O Omelet, Omelet, Omelet, wherefore grievest thou, O Omelet? It’s no uncommon thing, this dying. We all kick the bucket at some sprung time, shucking off this mortal coil to thus denatured go bouncing ga-boing-boing, ga-boingetty-boing-boing into eternity, a slappy slinky slung. ‘Tis common.

OMELET: Aye, most common. Common common common. A common spring, like unto the wound-up winter of my discontent.

QUEEN GERTIE: Then if such commonality it be, why seemeth it particular with thee?

OMELET: Seemeth? Seemeth, say thee? But my lady, a seeming is but seeming, not what’s so. A seeming is what appearance outward show, whilst underneath, something else mays’t grow. Say…I seem to be this, but I’m actually that. I seem to be Chris, but I’m actually Pat. That’s seeming for you. And if all the world’s a seeming, some artifice perceptual—why then our goose is cooked, an’ all knowing ineffectual. Let me seem what I am, and all that I am, an’ there an end. As for the outward force of calm, the inward whirl, the regal outward state, yet inward churl; that’s not me, but such as others be. Yea, the flood of tears, the dullish gaze, the twitching leers, the pukish phase—could all be faked and gussied up for show, zealous mourning on the rocks, as we’d well to know. But my grief is real, and mine own, no trapping suit of woe. I respect not seem, nor any seam do sew.

QUEEN GERTIE: All right then, you are particular. Particular indeed!

CLINTONIUS: He’s particular particular.

QUEEN GERTIE: If scrambled eggs could talk, an Omelet would they be!

CLINTONIUS: Of ham and cheese. [Aside.] I’ll say this for him. ‘Tis a dish with a sprig o’ holly on ‘t. [To Omelet.] We laud thee thy sincere lament, which sure we be is sure well meant. That’s your bent, most heaven-sent. But…now, relent. For t’allow eaternal vent to so rageous ‘plent is to the gods impious, to this crown anent annoying. It’s sweet, the way you burble for your daddy. No, really. Touching. We loved him too. I was his brother. Message: I care. I knew him longer than you did. But you must know your father lost a father, who had lost his, and that one too, and so before him, and that one also, and his one prior, and so ad infinitum, the lot entire. Mourning is good: yes. Gnashing of teeth is fine. For a while. Granted. All right. But that while is up. Stop crying. It’s getting cloying. Be a man. Your father is dead. So are many other men. It happens. We laugh. We cry. We live. We die. I don’t know why. Accept it. Try. Defy, and you but offend God, nature (the grass, the trees, the rocks, the bees, the flies), the regulations of our state, thy own seeming better self. Forsooth, each very quark and fiber of the universe, its each jiggling protean proton, doth cry instantient out, “This must be so!” Ah, eh? All weakening, decay, disintegration, corpuscular inanition, the last ragged pointless wretched gasp, the rigor mortis—verily conspire to deport us. And so an end. Why then contend it? Buck up, Puck. Get a grip, Chip. You’ll reign some day, and a raining reign reaps but wet hay.
Now, as for your request to journey out of town for school, we beseech thee not, such being most retro-reverse to our desire. Stay here and observe events unwind, like some unthreading spool, instead. That’d be better.

* * *
Wait, that’s not all! The above passage is only an excerpt! There’s more! Act now to download a free sample of “Omelet” to your Kindle or Kindle app; or just buy it for the outrageously $3.49-ish price of only $3.49.

Encyclopedia Britannica’s iPad app is fabulous, and subscribing is only $2 a month

It occurred to me today, so long as I again have access to the web version of Encyclopedia Britannica, to check whether Britannica has an app for the iPad–and lo and behold, it does. It was just recently introduced.

The app is a speed demon on iPad 2. I suffer a weak wi-fi connection when I’m upstairs, so the app might take a minute or two to churn through the Britannica database when searching for an article like “Middle Ages.” The search results list the main article and mentions of the search term in other articles. But once the results are listed, touching “Middle Ages” brings up the article lickety-split. Investigating hyper-linked terms within the article is also super-fast. After clicking on an intra-link and reading the other article, which is retrieved very quickly, one can then very quickly return to the original article by touching the BACK button that is standard in many iPad apps.

You know, when I was a kid, we didn’t have any of this sort of thing.

The app is very slick in exploiting the iPad platform. And of course the mammoth and venerable content is there. Two bucks a month is a great price for anyone who even occasionally wishes to peruse the lengthy and scholarly articles. (The best deal I could get for access to the web version a few years back was $5 a month.) Wikipedia has its uses for quick-and-dirty research, especially when it covers topics that Britannica does not. But Wikipedia has a chronically unfinished quality and is hampered by editorial politics and a sometimes debilitating insistence on “neutrality” (rather than objectivity); and it’s the luck of the draw whether a Wikipedia article is clear, well-written and informative or opaque and slovenly.

Britannica articles are, let us say, better vetted. Continuing access to the content via the iPad app is not free (the app itself is free), but two bucks a month is as close to free as it’s ever going to get. Certainly, that’s a better deal for most students and auto-didacts than print volumes that cost hundreds of bucks, cannot be regularly updated over the cyber waves, and cannot fit very comfortably into a backpack.

You can watch TV during the collapse of Western civilization

If you compare the very best television shows of today to the very best television shows of thirty or forty years ago, there’s no comparison. The old best shows are crud compared to very best shows available today. One reason, at least, is the rise of cable: the evasion of boneheaded Puritan censorship it has permitted and the pressure of competition it has brought to bear. The basic possibilities of story and character didn’t need to evolve; literature and even movies were old by the 1970s and 1980s, with many brilliant classics to emulate. But that heritage was rarely fully exploited. It was thought that all TV needed was a formula and a few likeable and charismatic characters that people would enjoy seeing again next week.

The shows that made an impression on me as a kid were stuff like “Star Trek,” in reruns; “The Avengers,” in reruns (Emma Peel seasons especially); “The Brady Bunch,” “Six Million Dollar Man,” “Hawaii Five-O,” “Mission Impossible”; later, “Dallas” (with a story arc continuing from episode to episode, but in meandering and endless soap-opera fashion). Not all of that once-compulsively watchable fare is unwatchable now, but it’s all pretty thin. “The Prisoner,” to a lesser extent early “Columbo,” and maybe a few others I don’t know about tried harder.

Production values have advanced, but above all the scripts have advanced. Was there anything way back when as compelling as “Lost,” “24,” “Mad Men,” “Breaking Bad,” or the rebooted “Battlestar Galactica” (surely not the original “Battlestar Galactica”)? I’m not gainsaying the allure of megawatt star power, just saying the crowd-hypnotizing stars of those days would have much better stuff to work with if they could have been stars today.

Hence, even if Obama and his ilk succeed in destroying the economy and plunging America and the world into a new Dark Age, all is not lost. And that’s really the moral for today. So long as we can hold on to our digital TVs and keep a remnant of the interwebs running, and keep enough dry goods in hidden storage units to last a decade or so, we who survive will enjoy access to a fairly large backlog of truly fine and entertaining television, large enough to sporadically distract us from our despair as our once great civilization sputters, careens, clanks and hiccups into oblivion. Problem solved.

Do you consent to whatever just by walking around?

I wrote this post in response to one written by my brother Alan over at his The Answer Is Liberty blog. Alan was responding to a commentary in the New York Times about the validity of the concept of natural rights, which I looked at only after drafting my comments below.

The idea of “consent” to government or governance is often a muddled one. For instance, just what is a person consenting to by declining to resist someone seeking to conquer him? He may merely be submitting to sufficiently effective force. He and his compatriots resisted the invaders as well as he could, let’s say, but now the Romans have prevailed. So he lays down his arms. That’s surrender, not consent (except not to fight); declining to oppose, not accepting the legitimacy of the conquerors’ rule. Likewise, crossing the street or mailing a letter does not imply consent to government-run roads or government-run postal delivery.

Commenters on democracy often misinterpret participation in it. They claim that casting a vote constitutes a consent to the democratic process or even “consent,” in some contorted respect, to whatever the voter’s preferred candidate may do. Anarchists and authoritarians alike are often eager to promote this reading.

Yet on its face, all that a vote implies consent-wise is a preference for one candidate over others, and a preference for casting a vote to staying home. Going to the polls suggests the voter’s acceptance of the value of voting under current circumstances. More information about what a person agrees to, consents to, endorses or is super-enthusiastic about requires an interview, which may reveal consent but may not. (On the other hand, we’re sometimes told that if you don’t vote [don't "consent"] you can’t complain…the abstention is glossectomizing, somehow. Either that, or the very fact that you object to participating in an exercise of democracy proves that you oughtn’t or mayn’t object to the consequences of the participation of others; you may object only to malefaction-yielding processes that you do abet, or something. One implication of this view is that ideas and suasion are trivial means of nurturing a free society in comparison to politician-empowerment, in addition to being immoral means if unattended by politician-empowerment. I’ve never heard iterators of the claim add, as a corollary, “And if you don’t complain, you can’t vote.”)

If a reasonably limited government does emerge in a society, it is thanks to the active work of some in spreading the ideas and values of a free society and in fostering the institutions and customs required to sustain a free society. Many others do not actively “consent” to the framework but only passively benefit from it—decline to seek to undermine the constituents of a free society. I would say that a person consents to being a peaceful and productive person by being such a person, just as a person consents to being a robber by robbing whether directly or by enlisting government as heavily weaponized agent.

The idea of a “social contract” is a loose and sometimes misleading metaphor for the process of free-society-building and its variegated social manifestations. We don’t need the myth of a universally-consented-to social contract to define a clear conception of rights or characterize the protection and wide respect for the rights of others in a free society. The contracts sustaining a free or somewhat free society are many, not one, and are continually being signed and/or agreed to anew. Those are what one identifiably consents to; and, if one thinks about, one may also self-consciously consent to the principles of the free society and limited government that all these separate acts of consent both depend upon and reinforce.

It is not a very far cry from being peaceful and productive to consenting to the kind of governance appropriate for preserving rights and freedom. But that consent is not a foregone conclusion. The peacefulness and productivity of a principled anarchist living in a free society is no conclusive evidence that he consents to limited government. He may nevertheless cooperate with that government to the extent of not attempting to overthrow it, and also cooperate with and respect the rights of other peaceful citizens in the society. All we need from him is respect for rights, not consent to every means employed to defend rights.

Thug-rulers would love it if everyone consented to the notion that merely remaining within the borders of a country implies consent to their rule in its every baleful aspect. Qadafi/Gadaffi/Kadaphee seemed to rely on this assumption quite desperately as his power eroded to try to con himself and the world that his countrymen weren’t really trying to topple him. Consent may be implicit, but, as Alan suggests, it can’t be only implicit (or only theoretically imputed), without detectable foundation. Inferring what a person specifically consents to must be based on facts, which include an individual’s actual values and actions, not just an elastic theory or mythology of politics and society.

Instapundit’s concern about possibility that Amazon could become a “choke point” is misplaced

“That’s a good point,” Instapundit Glenn Reynolds says in response to a reader’s concern that Amazon’s new publishing venture might be the first step in gobbling up major book-publishing. “I like Amazon, but if they become a chokepoint that would be bad. Right now their platform is very open to self-publishers and others, but if that were to change it would be a bad thing. There would probably be antitrust issues, too.”

I think that this concern is not warranted (except for the possibility of fedgov’s intervening, which it can do any time, for no good reason, against any super-successful company). What happens if Amazon stops being open to self-publishers, for example? Suddenly Barnes & Noble or some company we haven’t heard of yet has a chance to make a killing.

But Amazon gets a cut of the revenue of each copy of an author’s self-published ebook that it sells through its web site. Amazon’s marginal costs for set up and delivery are very low now that its system has been set up. I don’t see what Amazon would gain by shutting down a big source of revenue that will only grow bigger as more authors try out epublishing.

Part of the reason big legacy publishers are having trouble is that they’re not adapting, at least not quickly enough (or honestly enough, if the complaints of many authors about the current state of the book-publishing world are to be credited). The Apples and Amazons “adapt” by creating the technology and avenues that everybody else has to adapt to. If the great innovators become staid dinosaurs, their lapses only make things easier for the next upstart innovators.

The reader to whom Reynolds is responding wonders “when all the publishers are gone, who will publish the books critical of Amazon?” This concern is worse than overblown. It’s nonsensical–even impossible, unless fedgov ordains another USPS monopoly (United States Publishing Service). But fedgov can’t even make the postal monopoly stick any more.