Reflections on Margaret Thatcher

I haven't thought about Margaret Thatcher for a long time, and would have allowed her death to pass without comment. However, as everyone else is making such a fuss about it, I suppose I may as well slip in my own two cents' worth.

I was 25 years old and living in England when Margaret Thatcher came to power in the election of 1979, but I abstained in that election and in the following one in 1983, not being persuaded by any of the parties. By the time of the 1987 election, I'd left the country; so Margaret Thatcher was the last prime minister I experienced as a UK resident.

Wikipedia sums her up as follows: "Her political philosophy and economic policies emphasised deregulation (particularly of the financial sector), flexible labour markets, the privatisation of state-owned companies, and reducing the power and influence of trade unions."

As I agree now with all of these policies, and would probably have agreed with them then, it's rather odd that I didn't rush out and vote Conservative. However, I've never been in love with the Conservative Party, and perhaps what was on offer wasn't as clear then as it seems to commentators now in retrospect.

I believe quite simply in liberty, which is what you have when no-one is threatening to use force on you. I could never see Margaret Thatcher as a libertarian; she had some policies that were all very well, but she was too fond of getting her own way. I was offended, for instance, by the way she squelched local government. I believe in local autonomy, but she didn't.

The Community Charge (or poll tax) was introduced long after I left the country; from a distance, I viewed it with puzzlement. It seemed a curious political mistake and I wondered why she was so set on it. Perhaps, by then, she thought she could walk on water. Well, she couldn't; and I think it put an end to her career. I don't blame the Conservative Party for ousting her at that point; she seemed to have passed her sell-by date.

As far as I remember, I took little interest in her foreign policies, though they seem to have been partially successful. The Falklands War was pretty much an accident. Once Argentina had made the mistake of invading, to let it keep what it had rudely taken would have been humiliating and spineless, as a matter of principle; and yet in practice the Falklands were a small thing to fight a war over. It is a great pity that the world has no effective international law to settle such disputes once and for all.

Perhaps the great weakness of Margaret Thatcher, which still makes her own party rather embarrassed by her, is that she was so lacking in charm that she stirred up a large nest of furious enemies. The Economist comments that "Tony Blair won several elections by offering Thatcherism without the rough edges." It seems to me that being willing to antagonize people is not an asset in politics, in the long run. The most successful politicians are those who not only implement their policies but persuade people to like them.

What is the free market?

As a libertarian, in principle I'm keen on the free market, along with other forms of freedom. But this doesn't mean that I'm keen on the kind of economic system that we currently inhabit, or the results that it produces. As you may or may not have noticed, there is no such thing as a free market anywhere in the world: economic transactions are everywhere shaped, constrained, distorted by laws, regulations, taxes, tariffs, etc.

I don't mean to say that I'd abolish all laws, even if had the power. There is a such a thing as a 'bad freedom': for instance, the freedom to kill other people, which reduces their freedom to zero and thus depletes the total amount of freedom in society. Laws are necessary to constrain such behaviour, although it seems to me that the laws we have are too many and too complex.

It's common for opponents of free markets to point to the outcomes of our present system and blame "the free market" for them. The obvious reply is, "What free market?" There is no such thing in the world. We have markets constrained by law. If we want different outcomes, we can get different outcomes by changing the laws. And, indeed, I agree that the current system and its outcomes are not ideal and that some changes could be beneficial.

The basis of the free market is that someone grows apples and offers them for sale at a price; customers buy the apples if they want apples and find the price reasonable and competitive. Most people understand this system and accept it. The problem is that, these days, we have complications that people don't understand or accept so well. Such as the concept of the limited company, the concept of intellectual property, and the growth of financial transactions that enable people to make money by playing with money, without producing any goods themselves. These modern concepts are of course defined and shaped by laws, and I think these are the laws that should be considered for tweaking in order to produce outcomes that people like better. I don't think the present laws are really doing a good job; and of course they don't represent "the free market" in action, because no system constrained by laws is free.

Given that we have an unfree market anyway, and we are always likely to have, the question is in what ways should it be unfree? What minimal set of laws will permit a maximum feasible degree of freedom while being understandable and acceptable to ordinary people? I can't provide an answer to this question, but I think it's a question worth asking.

Why I'm not a vegetarian

First of all, I think we should probably all be vegetarians. The argument goes like this. Suppose that we're visited by aliens from outer space, who are significantly more intelligent and powerful than we are, and regard us as animals. They decide to start systematically farming, killing, and eating us. How could we regard them as wrong, or criticize their behaviour? It's merely what we've always done to others.

In practice, I think it's rather unlikely that aliens from outer space would find humans either tasty or nutritious, but it's possible, so we should take it into account.

So far, I haven't thought of any good answer to this argument, and I suspect that humanity will gradually turn vegetarian in the future. However, I list below an assortment of my personal excuses for not yet becoming a vegetarian myself.

• If the aliens turn up, they'll observe that humanity in general farms, kills, and eats animals. I don't suppose they'll distinguish between one human and another. So going vegetarian at this point wouldn't do me any good.
• Having grown up in an omnivorous society, it's what I'm accustomed to, and it's the way society encourages me to live. Going against the grain of society is difficult in various ways.
• If there were no humans on the planet, animals would rarely be able to die peacefully in their sleep. I think the normal ways would be to die painfully at the teeth and claws of some other animal, to die of disease, or to die of starvation when unable to get enough food. By killing and eating animals, humans aren't really introducing anything new to the situation: animals eat each other and most of them die painfully, one way or another.
• On an ideal farm, animals may actually live better lives than in the wild. They're looked after, they get food and shelter in winter, their illnesses are treated, they're not usually attacked by carnivores, and in the end they're killed humanely. On a modern intensive farm, life probably isn't worth living, and they may die unpleasantly too; but that's the choice of the farmer. It can be done either way.
• I'd be happy if all farms were ideal farms, although meat would then be much more expensive and most people would eat it only occasionally (which would probably be good for them). If farmers mistreat animals, that's on their conscience. It's not on my conscience, because I neither do it myself, nor do I force them to do it. If I buy their products, I give them a tiny encouragement, but it's so tiny as to be negligible. Whether I buy meat or not is not going to make any difference to any farmer's decisions.
• In principle I should seek out ideal farms and buy only from them, but even if this is feasible it would involve considerable time, effort, and expense, and I have to balance it against the negligible practical effect that my efforts would have.
• These days my wife buys the food, anyway!

Microsoft Outlook annoyances

I've been obliged to use Microsoft Outlook for years because my job requires it, although I use Mozilla Thunderbird for my personal mail and much prefer it. So what's wrong with Outlook?

• It keeps offering to remember my password although, whenever I accept the invitation, it never remembers it. This is gross incompetence: remembering a password is hardly rocket science. Furthermore, there's no error message: I ask Outlook to remember the password, and it just prompts me for it again next time. This has happened consistently using different computers and different versions of Windows.
• When I tell Thunderbird to send a message, it sends the message immediately. When I tell Outlook to send a message, it does so when it feels like it, sometimes ten or fifteen minutes later. There seems no way of hurrying it up.
• When I write a message, it normally displays people's names in the destination fields without displaying their e-mail addresses. This makes it easy to send a message to the wrong address, if someone has several addresses or changes his/her address.
• Sometimes, when I try to do something, it tells me that I have no connection to Microsoft Exchange, even though the status message says that I do have a connection. I don't know in any case why it ever loses the connection: my Internet connection is always there and works well. Recently I wrote a message and spent half an hour waiting while Outlook tried and failed to connect to Microsoft Exchange. Then I gave up and sent the message with Thunderbird, which of course sent it immediately with no trouble.
• It takes a relatively long time to check for new messages after starting up: maybe about a minute.
• It quite often hangs up so badly that I have to use the Task Manager to kill the process.
• It saves messages in its own nasty format that only it can read. Most other e-mail programs save messages in a text file that can be read by any text editor if necessary.

I'm currently using Microsoft Office 2007. I haven't upgraded to the latest version because, from what I've heard, it's no better and may even be worse.

If I ever stop having to use Outlook for work, I'll uninstall it immediately with no regrets.

Banking: stuck in the 19th century

For a very long time I've had a Co-operative Bank Visa card which has been paid off for years by direct debit from a bank account. Recently I asked the Co-operative Bank people to change the direct debit to a different bank.

I was first surprised that it took them several months to perform this simple operation, for which I had to fill in a form that they sent me by snail mail (in the 21st century!).

I then discovered after the event (they didn't warn me) that during the operation they first delete the old bank details, then weeks later they add the new bank details, so in the interim they have no bank details on file, and the card doesn't get paid off. This they regard as my fault. "You could have sent a manual payment." Well, yes, I could, if I'd had any reason to think it was necessary.

The whole thing is so incredibly slow and incompetent. They've got the old bank details and the new bank details, why should it take them more than a minute or two to replace the former with the latter? And, even if they insist on moving in slow motion, why remove the old bank details before they're ready to put in the new bank details?

Annie get your gun

Quite a lot of people in the USA, and some in other countries, seem keen on the idea of carrying a gun for self-defence.

In principle, the idea that we should all have the means to defend ourselves is a good one. Unfortunately, a gun is inherently an offensive weapon that has no defensive capability. The only way of using it for defence is to “hit back first”, which is likely to work well only against an incompetent opponent; and tends to yield cases of innocent people being shot by mistake. A truly defensive weapon, such as Isaac Asimov's force shield, would be much better if available.

There are two situations in which you might consider carrying a gun (assuming that it's legal to do so).

• Violent crime is common in your area. In this case, a gun may be useful in some cases, although it will be either useless or worse than useless in other cases (someone holding a gun becomes a high-priority target for armed opponents). It should be up to you to decide whether carrying a gun improves your chances or not. However, my personal preference would be to try to move out of the violent-crime area and settle down somewhere more peaceful.
• Violent crime is uncommon in your area. In this case, a gun may be useful only in a low-probability event. If you decide to carry a gun, for consistency you should probably guard yourself against other low-probability events. For instance, you should wear a helmet in the street in case something falls on you; you should carry a lightning conductor in case of thunderstorms. You should ensure that your home has an air-raid shelter, and stock up with food and survival gear in case civilization collapses. If you live in the USA, you should move out, because the Yellowstone Supervolcano could blow at any time and devastate the country.

As a good libertarian myself, I believe it should be legal to carry a gun for your own defence, if you really think it's useful. However, in a peaceful country I wouldn't expect many people to think it useful. There may be a small minority who have some particular reason to fear attack.

Any innocent person who gets shot (or his next of kin) should be entitled to heavy compensation from the gun user or owner; even if the shooting is by accident or mistake. Gun owners, like car owners, should insure themselves so that they can pay up if required.

Beware of natural food

While recently rereading Reay Tannahill's awesomely informative Food in history, I came across the following paragraphs in Chapter 21, which I thought rather striking although not really surprising.

In view ... of the extravagant publicity given to artificial additives, this is perhaps the place for a reminder that quite a number of natural, healthy, real foods would not be on the market today if they were subjected to the kind of tests that have to be undergone by the additives of commerce.

Caffeine, the natural stimulant in coffee, is fatal to humans at a dose of about one-third of an ounce. Nutmeg is hallucinogenic. Two pounds of onions a day are enough to cause anaemia. Rhubarb and spinach contain oxalic acid, which builds kidney stones. Carotene, which puts the colour in egg yolks, sweet potatoes, mangoes and carrots, can result in jaundice. Cabbage in excess can help to cause goitre. Bran, promoted in the high-fibre diet thought to help prevent coronary and colon diseases, can in excess prevent absorption of iron and calcium. Red kidney beans, inadequately boiled, can be toxic. Watermelon seeds are claimed to damage the liver and kidneys. People have been poisoned by the solanin in green potatoes, the prussic acid in bitter almonds, the cynanide in lima beans.

Dynamic range in digital photography

In photography, dynamic range is the difference in brightness between the darkest and the brightest part of a scene. There are two problems with dynamic range: capturing it in the camera's sensor, and reproducing it on screen for people to see.

It's useful to distinguish between three levels of dynamic range.

• Low dynamic range: the scene can easily be captured in one exposure, saved as an image with 8 bits per colour, and reproduced on a good monitor without any loss of dynamic range. A photo of such a scene doesn't need any special treatment. However, tone-mapping can still be useful to "improve the lighting".
• Medium dynamic range: the scene can be captured in one exposure and saved in a camera raw file with 12 or 14 bits per colour; but reducing it to 8 bits per colour would clip the dynamic range. In this case you can save the raw file as several different files with different exposure corrections, and then combine them using tone-mapping or exposure fusion. These techniques compress the original dynamic range in different ways to give a result that looks pleasing.
• High dynamic range (HDR): the scene can't be captured in one exposure without clipping the dynamic range. In this case, you can take multiple exposures with different shutter speeds, and then combine the exposures using tone-mapping, in order to compress the original dynamic range in a pleasing way.

A problem with the use of multiple exposures for HDR photography is that there are often moving objects in the scene (people, cars, leaves, waves) that cause blurring or ghosting when the exposures are combined. Photomatix tone-mapping offers some degree of automatic correction for this problem, but Photomatix exposure fusion does not; so I wouldn't use exposure fusion for true HDR photos, because there are so many things in a scene that may move. Unless you take photos inside a building with no moving objects in sight.

Yes, you can use laborious manual methods to deal with ghosting in your HDR photos. If you want to spend that much time on each photo.

Most normal scenes have either low or medium dynamic range. Anyone who often takes photos of high-dynamic-range scenes is probably going out of his way to look for them. They might be scenes with bright sunshine and deep shadow (perhaps looking into the sun), or night scenes with bright artificial lighting.

Small white hunter

A memory fragment from my mother, early 1940s:

Hate to remember it now but on holidays in Wiltshire (aged around 9 to 11) I used to go out with my aunt Rhoda's husband Ted and shoot rabbits. Meat rations were stingy and my grandmother (she and Rhoda were staying in Wiltshire for the war) welcomed succulent rabbit to stew and feed us all.

She adds later:

... it's a good job my rabbit-shooting days were so long ago because, never mind it being illegal now, it was illegal then. We were trespassing on someone's land for starters and at my age I should never have been allowed to handle a gun, let alone use it. I don't know whether one needed a licence for a gun then but I'd bet my bottom dollar that Ted didn't have one.

I understand from Wikipedia that a gun licence has been required in the UK since 1870; originally anyone could have a licence who paid for one, but from 1920 it became necessary to get approval from the police.

A libertarian view of the British political parties

I'll keep this brief.

• The Labour Party is fundamentally opposed to liberty.
• The Conservative Party doesn't believe in liberty, or anything else.
• The Liberal Democrats should believe in liberty, but their policies fail to confirm this. A confused party.
• The Libertarian Party is the only one worth supporting, but it's very young and very small.

The least bad result of the election currently in progress might be a Con-LibDem coalition. Ideally, they might veto each other's sillier ideas. Though things seldom work out ideally in politics.