Wow! Great excerpt from an interview in a German magazine with a Kenyan economist. He basically begs the West to stop sending aid and screwing up the local economy and just allow Africa to grow up as normal.
I’m from South Africa originally and this strikes a chord with me – SA rarely gets aid as it’s pretty rich compared with the rest of Africa, but there are many poor people there and the spirit of entrepreneurship I see amongst them makes me feel the country would do just fine without any help. I’m a great believer in the future of Africa and have money in some business down there (telecoms and other services businesses are huge).

Marc Andressen recent posted his list of the top 10 science fiction novelists of the ’00s — so far. Impressively it lines up very well with what I’ve been reading and enjoying. I disagree on a few points (Accelerando wasn’t one of my favourites and I never finished it though the concept was cute). Just for this Marc’s been added to my google reader feeds and I’ll read his stuff every day.

Ross McKitrick has a really fascinating proposal about carbon taxes over at www.canada.com. He proposes that we

make the carbon tax dependent on the volume of warming we see.
I’m one of the climate sceptics and this tax works for me. The proposal is that climate change models all agree that man made global warming will result in an warming of the troposphere. If the warming is not man made or doesn’t happen, the troposphere won’t heat up.
So the proposed carbon tax is 20 times the increase in troposphere temperature (in US$ times by degrees Celsius). That put’s it at about $4.50 a carbon ton today rising to $24 a carbon ton in pretty short order if global warming is real.
It’s neat – everyone wins as the tax is low to start but will rise rapidly if global warming alarmists turn out to be right. If they’re wrong, the tax stays low or goes away which you can hardly argue with.
My prediction is that this won’t fly with the alarmists but will be supported by the sceptics – in my head the sceptics of global warming are worried about the facts and our reaction to them in a rational sense. Alarmists are more concerned with the moral issue of man altering the environment – if we showed that warming is unrelated to carbon emissions and the extra carbon protects us from skin cancer, the alarmist would still want cuts as they’re mostly against mankind changing things in general.

News last night on the radio which brought a smille to my face. No-one in the House of Lords has picked up a bill from the commons which would have exempted parliment from the freedom of information act.
A bit a background – about 3 years ago the labour government in the UK passed a freedom of information acct which allowed access to government information except under a set of defined circumstances. Naturally, this has been resisted by all and sundry under the excuse that “It’s too expensive”, “The requests are all trivial”, “That’s too secret” etc. Despite this it’s been a generally good thing.
Being the government, they couldn’t let something useful carry on working – terrified that the publiuc would be able to request access to their expenses (requests have shown that eco-chancellor Gordon Brown flies to scotland about once a week instead of taking the train as he’s trying to force all of us to do) MPs concocted a story that letters from the public to them could be exposed and this woudl stifle people’s expression (love the way they always look out for us). This information is covered by legislation detailing data protection and confidentiality but no, only a blanket exception to the FoI act for MPs would do.
They duly voted themselves an exception, passed it to the House of Lords (something like the Senate in the USA) for ratification and they promptly ignored the whole thing. Literally — they didn’t even put it up for debate. MPs are understandably apopleptic – about the poor letter writers of course.
This brings to the surface a deep conflict in me about the House of Lords. It’s an unelected body – if you get a title you get in and can vote and the title is hereditary – your sons or daughters will be able to vote when you’re gone. This is about the most undeocratic thing I can think of and it makes me pretty annoyed.
Except that everytime it comes to a crucial issue, the unelected, unrepresentative, immunue from public opinion House of Lords does the right thing and stands up to the increasingly strident and rights trampling government. They tried to stop the fix hunting ban, hold up all kinds of legislation and now this triumph.
In some sense the House is the ultimate expression of campaign finance laws – they are essentially unbribeable since they’ll never be challenged in an election and many of them are rich and wouldn’t be bribed except for the kinds of money that would be easy to trace. I don’t think these people are smarter or better than the average person, they just don’t have their own interests quite so seriously compromised by the need for money.
I predict this gets forced through parliment by foul means.