Comments on: Guns, smoke, global warming and Microsoft

By: Lance Boyle

Lance Boyle — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 06:49:37 +0000

“…while I don’t warm to Bill Gates at a personal level, he’s certainly shown more interest in putting his wealth to good use than the average billionaire…” Shown more public display of interest in putting. The actual cost in terms of sacrifice to Gates personally, materially, of that charitable giving is precisely nil. And he gains substantially reputationally. Which dovetails neatly with the attendant question of why his Leviathan consorts with other wounded behemoths seeking reviction. PR says I. A painted face for the public appetite. Since Microsoft’s nucleus is third-party legal ownership, that may explain the fundamental horror caused by open-source. Gates’ MS bottlenecked the evolution, metered the flow, and created its bloated self out of an inevitable demand for what it owned. An open-source culture would have made that impossible. And yes to the idea that corporations generally subsume their masters. – I’m sympathetic to asg’s position that the toil of gamester engineering would go unrewarded in an open-source world. But then there’s all those solitaire games (the real ones, with cards). I’m thinking, what? Prisoners? Ladies-in-waiting? Medieval speed-freaks doing 4-day runs with home-made Tarot decks? Whatever the social context the point is they gained their makers little but recognition in an immediate local context. Today we know nothing of the inventors themselves. I’m not saying it’s equivalent, that computer games would have evolved as presently constituted in an open-source environment. But then language did, didn’t it? And football, both kinds? Music has been an essential human thing since we became human. It’s only been third-party-ownable for a hundred years. Open-source is a return to what we’ve been doing for virtually all our history. Sharing innovation. It refines things so much better – no artificial demand, no deceptive obsolescence. We might lose the competition-driven complexity and glamor of a lot of current entertainment modalities, but we’d gain unimaginable things. Unimaginable now, from this dungeon of commerciality. It must seem absurdly wasteful, to young bucks seeking the main chance – the idea that so much of human progress, virtually all of it until the rise of the guild halls, was done with no copyrights at all. Everything we use now came from the open-source pool. Everything you make your intellectual property with came from there.

By: Tim Lambert

Tim Lambert — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 05:28:26 +0000

asg, you don’t have to take my word for it. Just read the explanation in the report. Jim, “anti-self defence laws”? Seems like you have swallowed more of Malcolm’s cherry picking.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 04:47:34 +0000

Jim, I think it’s obvious ex ante that concealed carry laws ought not to have a measurable effect on crime stats. The change is simply too small to be detected (absent some exceptionally clever statistical method I can’t imagine). As regards begging the question, I’m not entirely satisfied with the post, but I clearly didn’t assume that Microsoft is evil. OTOH, I did assume that, at the very least, TCS, ADTi and IPA are routinely dishonest. I’m happy to back this up with chapter and verse if you want.

By: asg

asg — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 03:40:11 +0000

Tim, I’ll take your word for it. What was the nature of the change in the counting rules?

By: Tim Lambert

Tim Lambert — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 02:49:33 +0000

asg, the point of my post was to demonstrate how Malcolm cherry picked her statistics. I plotted gun (not handgun) robberies because that is what Malcolm mentioned. If you read the report, you will also find that the “other offences” numbers were affected by the change in the counting rules in 1998, while the robberies numbers were not.

By: Steve

Steve — Mon, 21 Jun 2004 16:23:23 +0000

Anyway, this was another of those Quiggin posts that assumes much of what it wants to prove, such as that Microsoft is somehow evil and that opposition to hounding it legally is part and parcel of opposition to open source software. Jim, you’re conflating two things. I can see every reason that Microsoft’s defenders in the antitrust case would tend to side with the libertarian/anti-regulation right; the only reasons I can see that Microsoft’s support in their anti-Linux campaign would come from the same people, honestly, are Microsoft’s attempts to portray Linux and the entire open source model as somehow Communistic (and not a market success) or Microsoft throwing money around to people who will churn out AdTI’s sort of dubious argument.

By: Jim Henley

Jim Henley — Mon, 21 Jun 2004 15:22:58 +0000

I’ve looked at Lambert’s data for both American and UK crime trends. You know what? Concealed carry makes no difference one way or the other. It neither increases nor decreases crime. Other factors completely swamp any effect gun ownership may have. Frex, in the British case, the elephant in the room is postwar demobilizations. So while concealed carry permits don’t decrease crime, neither does gun control. Since gun control represents a loss of liberty in its own right, with no measurable attendant benefit, there seems no reason to support it. And British anti-self defense laws visit measurable injustice on identifiable citizens (the ones with the temerity to save themselves from attackers). Anyway, this was another of those Quiggin posts that assumes much of what it wants to prove, such as that Microsoft is somehow evil and that opposition to hounding it legally is part and parcel of opposition to open source software.

By: asg

asg — Mon, 21 Jun 2004 13:23:07 +0000

Regarding Lambert’s site, while I generally think he is honest and performs a useful reality-checking service for people with my views, he’s not immune to a little cherry-picking himself. For example, in the graph he reproduces from the England/Wales Crime Statistics 2000 report, which shows that handgun robberies have increased since 1997 but not since the early 90s, he omits the other trendline in the report showing that all other handgun offenses (excluding robbery and criminal damage, which were separately graphed) were steady throughout the 90s, until the handgun ban in 1997 at which point they started a steady upward climb. He doesn’t mention this omission or the trend it suggests in his post. (See his post on Joyce Lee Malcolm’s 2002 article on English crime rates.) Now since he is a statistician and I am not, perhaps there are perfectly good statistical reasons why the “other offenses” trendline was irrelevant of which he is aware and I am not. But it would have been nice to know those reasons.

By: Old Ranger

Old Ranger — Mon, 21 Jun 2004 04:15:23 +0000

Guns may well have saved lives 200 years ago, when the planet was not overcrowded with humans and when parents stayed home with their children and taught them gun safety. Microsoft and Wal-Mart were probably beneficial until they reached behemoth status. Most people who believe that clap-trap don’t know an unpaired electron from Hillary Clinton, they are just ignorant. How do those who don’t believe in global warming explain the disappearance of Mt. Kilimanjaro’s snow cap? There is a time and place for everything, and Microsoft’s place is on the ash heap. Those who believe that the experts know best need to examine the State Department’s terrorism report.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Mon, 21 Jun 2004 02:34:08 +0000

I’ve amended the post slightly to clarify that the correlation between the first set of opinions and support for Microsoft is evident among thinktanks – as various commentators have said, it’s not true for bloggers in general. john doe, I suggest you visit Tim Lambert’s site and check your stats on British crime – the results you cite sound to me as if they come from John Lott.

By: John Doe

John Doe — Mon, 21 Jun 2004 02:08:28 +0000

On smoke: I thought second hand smoke was shown to raise lung cancer risk by about 17% (admittedly extremely slight compared to smoking itself)? On guns: violent crime has risen dramatically in Britain after anti-gun and anti-self-defense legislation was recently enacted.

By: asg

asg — Mon, 21 Jun 2004 01:57:27 +0000

I’m actually kind of glad my earlier comment got wiped out as I posted it in a bit of pique. Focusing on the open-source issue, I am not at all opposed to open source as a method, but I am opposed to it as an ideology, just because software engineering techniques make for poor ideology. In my subfield (computer games), it is commonplace to run across open source ideologues who feel that the only reason new, original, cutting-edge games are not made according to open source is ignorance on the part of developers like me, and perhaps some Microsoft conspiracy. I remember attending a career presentation given by a well-known independent studio (this was when I was still a student, before I got into the industry). The venue was the CS department at the University of Maryland. After the presentation, the two guys who came from the studio were relentlessly grilled by the graduate students about why they didn’t use this or that open-source graphics library, and why the only possible reason for their not simultaneously developing their latest game for Linux release was that they were obviously on Gates’ payroll (this despite the fact that the PC release was with another publisher, a Microsoft competitor). I pointed out during the discussion that when game developers are trying to figure out the target market for their games, it is often difficult to justify spending millions of dollars of development money targeting an audience that is ideologically opposed to paying for software. The open-source advocates confidently proclaimed this a “myth”. In other words, I have much more of a problem with the advocates of open source than with open source itself. They are often anti-business, which of course I am not, and suffer from the “if you have a hammer then every problem looks like a nail” mentality (just because open source has worked well for operating systems does not mean it will work well for games or edutainment or any other software product where art and content are paramount).

By: Brett Bellmore

Brett Bellmore — Mon, 21 Jun 2004 01:37:17 +0000

“If more guns in the hands of an educated populace worked, I would expect to see the NRA working on low-cost or subsidized handguns, free education programs and shooting practice, and expedited carry permits.” We work on keeping the government from BANNING low cost handguns. We’re responsible for most of the firearms training in the country. And we’ve been successfully fighting to expand non-discretionary issue of carry permits. So I guess guns in the hands of an educated populace DO work, huh?

By: tc

tc — Mon, 21 Jun 2004 00:29:55 +0000

Which bloggers are against open source? I know about the AdTI and TCS, but given the disproportionate numbers of techno-libertarian types online, I would think that plenty of gun-loving global-warming-skeptic right-wing types would have no problem with it.

By: paul

paul — Mon, 21 Jun 2004 00:20:11 +0000

On the Microsoft sympathizer argument, as I commented in an earlier version of this disappeared post, someone noticed that the AdTI had retracted and re-published their article: the newer version was very different. The “Open Source is e-e-e-e-e-vil” argument was pushed much harder, though with no more solid a foundation. http://www.idealcorp.com/About/PressCenter/000088 And at the risk of replying to a comment that also disappeared, the idea that more guns make for a safer society makes me wonder how Australasia, the EU, and Canada manage to do it with fewer guns: could it be that a more civil society with a greater respect for the law and one’s fellow citizens is more effective? (And as an aside, this would seem to knock the idea of a genetic propensity for crime—one of the theories behind transporting convicts to Botany Bay—on its head). If more guns in the hands of an educated populace worked, I would expect to see the NRA working on low-cost or subsidized handguns, free education programs and shooting practice, and expedited carry permits. The Left is often accused of defending communism, claiming it would work if it were done properly, though I have never heard anyone say that: perhaps some municipality will arm its citizens and see what happens. You go first . . . . NB. I know Kennesaw, Georgia, requires every household to have a gun but the law is not enforced: that’s not the same as requiring people to carry them.