A high suicide rate

Axios reports:

The suicide rate for Americans aged 15 to 24 years old — the older half of Generation Z — is the highest it's been since at least 1999, according to Centers for Disease Control data.

I was curious how this compared to Australian recent suicide rates for youth.   Turns out the American rate is very high, by the looks:

Against the Boris

Oh look:  a very anti-Boris Johnson opinion piece in, of all places, National Review:

As I explained a few weeks ago, the Conservative party is facing possible extinction; their complete failure to implement Brexit has lost them the majority of their voters. Many of Johnson’s supporters in Parliament are deeply skeptical of his character, but they are voting for him because they see him as the only way out of their crisis. This is the point made by Madeleine: Boris Johnson is not Jeremy Corbyn — if the Tories are to face a general election, they want a chance of surviving it.

But are they wrong to see him as a winner? In the long term, absolutely. Johnson is no longer the same man who twice won the London mayoral election. In those days, he was seen as a pro-immigration liberal conservative — the Tory for people who don’t vote Tory. Now, rightly or wrongly, he has become associated with a hostile brand of divisiveness — and it is Rory Stewart, as it happens, who has adopted the “outsider Tory” mantle. Johnson’s showman popularity among right-wing voters might be enough to win him the next election, but the average age of a Conservative voter has been increasing consistently for decades. People are forgetting that this is a party that has had one outright majority in 25 years. If it wants to survive, it needs to attract voters from the center ground.

For the party, then, there are no good outcomes. Either they opt for a candidate who will delay Brexit, thereby postponing an election but further weakening their immediate position, or they opt for an unpredictable renegade who, if tamed, might help them keep their parliamentary seats. I am writing this while listening to a fascinating discussion of the issue on the Talking Politics podcast (highly recommended to anyone with the slightest interest in British affairs). Here, the ever-insightful David Runciman asks his Cambridge colleagues the following: Is the fact that the Tory party is even contemplating making Boris Johnson its prime minister such an unusual thing that it’s a symptom of a party that’s already dying?

It’s an interesting question, and it pays a moment’s thought. Ask almost anybody who has worked closely with Johnson, and they speak of a Class A impostor — in the words of former Telegraph editor Max Hastings, a “gold medal egomaniac.” Any scarce praise usually refers to his ability to delegate — deference may suit a mayorship, but it will not suffice as prime minister. A deeply questionable personal life aside, Johnson’s career has been a collection of mishaps — one of which, during his time as foreign secretary, helped send a British citizen to prison. He is charming because of his Bertie Wooster-esque meandering mode of speech, but baseless bluster is not a characteristic that bodes well for a future as prime minister. He has never been a good performer in the House of Commons or in media interviews, and one daren’t imagine how his waffle will fare in Prime Minister’s Questions.

Jason, this is very consistent with my view of Johnson as stated in my recent comment in response to you, and I hadn't even found it at that time.   

Weird deal positions

As Slate notes, re the Trump administration and Iran:

The move comes as Iran has threatened to disregard uranium restrictions outlined in the 2015 nuclear deal that aimed at curbing Tehran’s nuclear ambitions in return for sanctions relief. After years of deriding the nuclear deal as “the worst deal in history,” President DonaldTrump withdrew the U.S. from what’s formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and reinstated sanctions on Iran. The Trump administration, already suffering from a serious credibility deficit with allies, is now in the awkward position of demanding that Tehran comply with an agreement the American president has not only derided but pulled out of! “Administration officials found themselves Monday grappling with whether to press the remaining parties to the deal, including Britain, France and Germany, to demand that Iran stay in compliance,” the Associated Press reports. “They must also consider if such a stance would essentially concede that the restrictions imposed during the Obama administration, while short of ideal, are better than none.”

Tariffs and long term pain

A pretty convincing sounding explanation at The Atlantic about how China is responding to Trump's tariff war in ways that may well result in long term harm to parts of the American economy. 

Ethics from the BBC

Not a bad essay at the BBC:

Deep Ethics:  the long term quest to decide right from wrong

Hot stuff for renewable energy storage

One energy storage idea is just to heat stuff up when you have enough spare power, and use the hot stuff to make steam for a turbine when the renewables are off line.

While we would have all heard of that as being an advantage of solar thermal plants which use molten salts, there are simpler materials that can be used for heat storage.  Surprisingly, Siemens has just opened one in Germany that uses volcanic rock:

Spanish renewable energy giant and offshore wind energy leader Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy last week inaugurated operations of its electrothermal energy storage system which can store up to 130 megawatt-hours of electricity for a week in volcanic rock....

The newly-opened electric thermal energy storage system is billed by Siemens Gamesa as “The Future Energy Solution” and as costing “significantly” less than classic energy storage solutions. Specifically, according to the company, even at the gigawatt-hour (GWh) pilot scale, ETES “would be highly competitive compared to other available storage technologies.”

The heat storage facility consists of around 1,000 tonnes of volcanic rock which is used as the storage medium. The rock is fed with electrical energy which is then converted into hot air by means of a resistance heater and a blower that, in turn, heats the rock to 750°C/1382 °F. When demand requires the stored energy, ETES uses a steam turbine to re-electrify the stored energy and feeds it back into the grid.

In the comments to that article, someone points out that an Australian company has just started using hot molten silicon!:

1414 Degrees is pleased to report progress with the GAS-TESS implementation at the Glenelg Wastewater Treatment Plant.

The full suite of ten biogas burners are commissioned and performing above expectations. The silicon storage reached operating temperature and the turbine started generating electricity on Saturday 25th May. It is supplying hot water from the turbine exhaust to the treatment plant, augmenting the continuous hot water supply from the biogas burners exhaust. Electricity is being delivered to our load bank pending SA Water completing the approval processes to connect to the National Electricity Market.

An innovative energy storage system from South Australia?   I hope it works...

Something to be happy about

How's that for a Tuesday night dinner? 

Thanks to my wife and Costco...

A little bit "Macron Youth"?

Not entirely sure about this idea:

Nearly two decades after France phased out conscription for men, some 2,000 teenagers on Sunday began a pilot programme for a new national civic service, a pet project of French President Emmanuel Macron.

For a fortnight, the 15- and 16-year-olds will leave home for training in first aid and other basic skills, followed later by another two weeks of volunteering.

Macron caused surprise on the campaign trail in 2017 by promising to introduce a month-long compulsory national service, saying he wanted to give girls and boys "a direct experience of military life".

The proposal got a cool response from the army, which baulked at the prospect of having to put millions of teens through their paces, prompting the government to come back with proposals for a compulsory civic service instead.

Some 2,000 youngsters, including 50 disabled teens, were chosen out of 4,000 volunteers for the first part of the trial, which started Sunday at boarding schools, holiday villages and university campuses around the country.

The group includes high school students, drop-outs, apprentices and vocational school trainees.

Each volunteer will leave home for another region for the two weeks, during which time they will be required to wear navy uniforms and sing the "Marseillaise", France's national anthem, every morning.

Described as an "integration phase", teens will be taught first aid, map reading, emergency response for different scenarios and other skills.

It'll probably end up in some form of under-age sex scandal, and that will be the end of it.   The uniform is a bit, um, naff? too:

Things to be unhappy about

*  Economic malaise in Australia:   I'm sure some people voted for the Coalition out of concern that reforms by Labor would drive down confidence in at least the real estate market.   It seems pretty clear, however, that the Coalition win had hardly brought signs of improved confidence to any market.  I bet retail is still flat as a tack, and what worse nightmare could any Sydney real estate who specialises in high rise apartments endure than the dramatic cracking appearing in two buildings in under 6 months?    (In fact, it will be interesting to see how that affects all "off the plan" sales in every capital city.   I wonder if it even has an effect on the country's reputation for tertiary education - it's not exactly the best advertisement for engineering expertise.)  

I'm not entirely sure anyone really has a good grip on why there is, more or less, an air of impending doom on our economy.  Greg Jericho does a lot of graphing, but it doesn't explain why things seem stuck on "not getting any better". 

Does everyone sense we are in some sort of transition, and to what, no one knows?   The economy can only bear so many new burger chains and craft beer outlets, I guess, and maybe people are sensing that we're reaching saturation level with them.

* "Summer" movies.   Well, it's far from the first holiday movie season for everyone to be complaining about the number of unwarranted sequels - but this one seems to be full of underwhelming entries.   I was thinking of seeing Men in Black International, but if a trailer can't come up with much in the way of funny bits in what is meant to be a comedy, I am inclined to believe the lukewarm reviews are right.   

*  The Trump administration:  who has confidence that it won't stumble into/deliberately provoke an unnecessary and dangerous war with Iran?   Who (with a brain) thinks the trade war tactics are good for America, let alone the globe?   How's that government deficit going?   It's a slow moving policy disaster.

* Boris Johnson as PM of Britain:   the English equivalent of Trump in many ways, showing how terrible Right wing politics has become around much of the world.   And they have a uniquely bad example of Left wing politics in that country too.   That country, if not the whole globe, seems to be suffering some kind of bad alignment of the stars at the moment.   When will it pass?

A quantum argument against uploading your mind

I have only skimmed through this paper on arXiv, and don't have any idea about its plausibility, but it's interesting at least.  Here's the abstract:

Killing Science Fiction: Why Conscious States Cannot Be Copied or Repeated

Several philosophical problems arising from the physics of consciousness, including identity, duplication, teleportation, simulation, self-location, and the Boltzmann Brain problem, hinge on one of the most deeply held but unnecessary convictions of physicalism: the assumption that brain states and their corresponding conscious states can in principle be copied. In this paper I will argue against this assumption by attempting to prove the Unique History Theorem, which states, essentially, that conscious correlations to underlying quantum mechanical measurement events must increase with time and that every conscious state uniquely determines its history from an earlier conscious state. By assuming only that consciousness arises from an underlying physical state, I will argue that the physical evolution from a first physical state giving rise to a conscious state to a second physical state giving rise to a later conscious state is unique. Among the consequences of this theorem are that: consciousness is not algorithmic and a conscious state cannot be uploaded to or simulated by a digital computer; a conscious state cannot be copied by duplicating a brain or any other physical state; and a conscious state cannot be repeated or created de novo. These conclusions shed light on the physical nature of consciousness by rendering moot a variety of seemingly paradoxical philosophy and science fiction problems.

How's that Indian heatwave going?

Some rains have arrived, but the death toll (such that is known - again I have extreme doubts about accurate numbers on this) has risen.   What's more, it was a pretty bad scene in some areas, apparently:

Tens of thousands of people in drought-affected villages in north India have left their homes because they do not have any drinking water either for themselves or for their cattle.

Even in the state of Jammu and Kashmir in the Himalayas, where many Indians go to escape the summer heat, the temperature has reached 39C.

The rush to the higher ground resulted in huge traffic jams at the weekend that snaked around the mountains. People had to sleep in their cars because towns such as Shimla and Nainital – known as hill stations from the days of the British Raj – had no spare hotel rooms.

“It was unbelievable. The hills were alive and heaving with cars and SUVs and a journey that should take one hour took five,” said Sumith Verma, a Nainital resident.

About two-thirds of the country has been affected by the blistering heat, which looks set to become the longest heatwave the country has ever experienced.

But hey, Rowan Dean's wearing a funny tie; rich retirees travel the world and see shrinking glaciers (one of the clearest markers of global climate change) and say "natural variation";  and Al Gore made some incorrect predictions.   [Just my routine go at the incredible non-seriousness of everyone associated with Catallaxy.]

Tighter regulation

Is there a bit of a pushback against the way legalisation of marijuana is happening in the US? 

An opinion piece in the NYT argues it should not be sold to those under 25 on health grounds - a suggestion likely to not go over well in colleges across the nation.

The Washington Post reports that the high potency of marijuana products sold in Colorado is causing problems, as well as where it can be sold:

The critics also insist that more must be done to maintain tight regulation of the industry. That’s not been the case so far, they argue, with dispensaries opening near high schools in Seattle and with retail and medical pot shops in Denver outnumbering Starbucks and McDonald’s locations combined. 

Americans are rather naive, it seems to me, when it comes to the matter of  how regulation affects society.

Some Krugman techno optimism tweets of note

Nuts in the country

Nothing's creepier than stories of rural nuts who would exploit backpackers, sexually or otherwise, as per some of the stories told in this ABC article.

Maybe it's just the results of the recent Federal election annoying me, these stories are certainly helping feed my current biases against anyone who lives more than (let's say) 150 km from a capital city.

A strange story of Hollywood inspiration

According to a book reviewed at Nature, the 1998 movie Enemy of the State inspired research to implement new, powerful surveillance technology:

it was ..an inspiration, even a blueprint, for one of the most powerful surveillance technologies ever created. So contends technology writer and researcher Arthur Holland Michel in his compelling book Eyes in the Sky. He notes that a researcher (unnamed) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California who saw the movie at its debut decided to “explore — theoretically, at first — how emerging digital-imaging technology could be affixed to a satellite” to craft something like Big Daddy, despite the “nightmare scenario” it unleashes in the film. Holland Michel repeatedly notes this contradiction between military scientists’ good intentions and a technology based on a dystopian Hollywood plot.

He traces the development of that technology, called wide-area motion imagery (WAMI, pronounced ‘whammy’), by the US military from 2001. A camera on steroids, WAMI can capture images of large areas, in some cases an entire city. The technology got its big break after 2003, in the chaotic period following the US-led invasion of Iraq, where home-made bombs — improvised explosive devices (IEDs) — became the leading killer of US and coalition troops. Defence officials began to call for a Manhattan Project to spot and tackle the devices.

In 2006, the cinematically inspired research was picked up by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is tasked with US military innovation (D. Kaiser Nature 543, 176–177; 2017). DARPA funded the building of an aircraft-mounted camera with a capacity of almost two billion pixels. The Air Force had dubbed the project Gorgon Stare, after the monsters of penetrating gaze from classical Greek mythology, whose horrifying appearance turned observers to stone. (DARPA called its programme Argus, after another mythical creature: a giant with 100 eyes.)

Some books use blockbuster action films to demonstrate — or exaggerate — a technology’s terrifying potential. Here, Enemy of the State shows up repeatedly because it is integral to the development of Gorgon Stare. Researchers play clips from it in their briefings; they compare their technology to Big Daddy (although their camera is so far only on aircraft, not a satellite). At one point, incredibly, they consult the company responsible for the movie’s aerial filming. (It set me wondering — which government lab out there is currently building the Death Star from Stars Wars?)

Further to my fusion power scepticism

First, I have to admit that there is a degree of techno-optimism regarding fusion power, such that it has managed to get an extra-ordinary amount of money devoted to fusion research.   The long delayed ITER project being built in France being the prime example:

Take ITER, an enormous superconducting fusion reactor currently under construction in France. When the international collaboration began in 2005, it was billed as a $US5 billion ($7 billion), 10 year project. After years of setbacks, that price tag has risen to roughly $US40 billion ($55 billion) Optimistically, the facility will now be completed by 2030.

And some MIT associated folk have been making claims which are extremely hard to believe:

Bob Mumgaard, CEO of the private company Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which has attracted $50 million in support of this effort from the Italian energy company Eni, said: “The aspiration is to have a working power plant in time to combat climate change. We think we have the science, speed and scale to put carbon-free fusion power on the grid in 15 years.”

Notice that?  Private money being put into the project - of course there is every incentive to exaggerate how quickly progress can be made.  In the same link, a British scientist comments:

Prof Wilson was also cautious about the timeframe, saying that while the project was exciting he couldn’t see how it would achieve its goal of putting energy on the grid within 15 years.

However, achieving and magnetically containing a power generating plasma is one thing;  building it within something intended to be a long lived, safe, electricity generating facility is a different thing, and one of great complexity.  I think you only need to read the abstract of this article (from this year) to note that they are really just talking now about how they are going to try to address the various engineering problems in a timely enough fashion to allow the presumed breakthroughs to be turned into something useful.

In comments I made in a previous post, I noted that one retired plasma scientist had written articles sceptical that fusion would ever be a viable source for electricity generation.   His name is Daniel Jassby, and he had two articles in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on the topic.  (I strongly recommend people read the second of those, linked at "articles", about the ITER project.)  Of course, other scientists who have worked in the field dispute his pessimism, but even when doing so, they have to admit the nature of the problems:

Fusion neutrons will surely damage the internal components closest to the plasma. In the first fusion pilot plants, materials in the regions with the highest neutron flux would need to be replaced every 6-to-12 months of full-power operation. There are options for new nano-structured materials that are more neutron-resistant. These can be developed and qualified for fusion application using computer simulations and small-scale tests, as well as tests in the pilot plants themselves and in follow-on fusion power sources, as was done for fission. Fusion will have nuclear waste, but the lifetime of this waste will be measured in decades, not millennia. Fusion neutrons can in principle be used to breed fuel for weapons. But because no breeding materials should be present in a fusion power plant, this will be much more straightforward to detect and deter, as compared with fission reactors where the production of large quantities of weapons-usable material is intrinsic to the process. 

There was another retired atomic scientist, William Parkins, who appeared in Science magazine in 2006 expressing engineering scepticism about it ever being viable.  His views were immediately disputed by others in the field, notably in this Nature commentary, claiming that the issues raised by him had already been considered and dismissed in the 1990's. But the counterargument claims that the cost of replacing parts in fusion reactors has already been factored in, and this:

 Ward says that current estimates of the cost of fusion electricity are between 5 and 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. The US Department of Energy predicts that US electricity will average just under 10 cents per kilowatt-hour this year. "I think fusion could compete with coal today in Europe," says Ward, because of the economic costs produced by emissions regulations.

 Excuse me, but given the engineering problems yet to be solved for real fusion generation, I am extremely sceptical of forecasts from the 1990's of the possible cost of fusion power.

This is what's at the heart of my scepticism - put enough money into fusion and the scientific problems of how the plasma can be contained and power harnessed might be solved.  But from an engineering cost point of view, there is a lot of reason to doubt it will ever be a cost effective source of power.

Seems to me that anyone who has witnessed the huge underestimates of cost for other projects involving more in the way of new engineering than new science (like for each new fighter jet program in the US) should also be sceptical of the claims about the cost of fusion power.   And the difference is that defence projects develop their own momentum, with huge corporations having great political influence and able to sell upgrades in defence capability as essential.   The world of electricity generation doesn't have that same dynamic, so it is a bit harder to imagine them getting the unlimited government support in cost overruns that defence related corporations enjoy.

Crazy Rich Chinese Singaporeans

So, Crazy Rich Asians has unexpectedly turned up on Netflix and I have finally caught up with it.

I quite enjoyed it, finding it particularly fun recognising nearly all of the locations due to the recent trip to Singapore.   (Well, it is a small place, my wife observed.)   Sure, it seems almost like a co-production of a government tourist board, but everywhere in the film - interiors and exteriors - looks gorgeous.  I was wondering, though,  how they managed to get some filming done in outdoor locations before the actors started breaking out in sweat - it gives no sense of the crushing humidity.

The story is serviceable (if somewhat improbable) in a rom-com way, and the two leads are likeable.  In fact, it would have to be one of few successful rom-coms of the last 15 to 20 years:  everyone agrees that Hollywood has pretty much forgotten how to make them without throwing in a bit of raunch and not especially charming male leads.  On that last point, as quite a few noted when the movie came out, CRA is especially interested in rehabilitating the screen image of Asian men as not just sidekicks but handsome leads.  (It's too obvious about it, but I suppose there are decades of gratuitous shower scenes of female actors to balance up against.)

Anyway, Channel News Asia last Christmas had a lot of "year in review" talk about the success of the movie, and gave the impression that it went over very well there.   But Googling the topic, I see that some didn't care for the near invisibility of other races in the movie, given the melting pot that is the city state.   Vox ran a particularly serious complaint about how it "gets Singapore wrong", but it seems the "it's only a movie" crowd won the day, and fair enough I say.   

Two last points:  really, who thought the dress that the female lead (Rachel) wore to the wedding was a good look on her?  I mean, there is even a mean joke in the movie about her breast size, so why wear a dress that seemed to emphasise that?

Secondly, I see a line that I didn't get has an explanation in a review:

You also know that it is in fact Singapore on the screen when you hear “ku ku jiao” — the crude Singlish phrase for penis — being chanted repeatedly.

Presumably, I'm not the only one who didn't know that.

Update:  I just decided to check how much money it made.  It took $238,500,000 internationally, which seems not as much as I expected, given the publicity it got; but then again, I don't know what rom coms of the last decade have made.   Still, with a budget of $30 million, it was definitely a money maker.

The poor Tokyo neighbourhood

An interesting article in The Guardian about a Tokyo neighbourhood long known for being one for itinerant male workers, many of whom are now ageing and still live there in cheap hostels.

Pezzullo discussed

That Mike Pezzullo was in the news earlier this week, for taking offence at what a couple of Senators had to say about his attitude towards scrutiny, and I have been curious to know more about him.   I think Bernard Keane doesn't like him much, or at all, but lots of people have been talking about the respect he has from both sides of politics (he has worked with both Labor and Liberal governments.)

Interestingly, I was just listening to Hamish Macdonald on Radio National having a lengthy discussion with John Blaxland from the ANU about Pezzullo.

Blaxland's background is exactly in the same areas as Pezzullo and one would assume they would know each other.  Blaxland seemed to me to bending over backwards to smother anything he said as even the mildest criticism for Pezzullo's behaviour this week with praise for Pezzullo's abilities, and even his personality.   I wonder if other ABC listeners have some cynicism about this.

I don't care how smart, well read, and how personable-in-person-but-intimidating-when-he-needs-to-be a top public servant may be:  if his area of responsibility has taken on a more secretive and authoritarian air (suiting the government in power, particularly under Abbott) he shouldn't be above criticism.

PS:  one thing I should give Pezzullo credit for, though, is that I think Blaxland said he believes in climate change as a coming important regional issue with security implications.   How does a public servant like that live with having numbskull climate change denier politicians as his boss then, I wonder.

RU OK, Jason?

Gee, Jason, you're sounding a little like a cross between Peter Thiel and Lyndon Larouche with tweets like this:

OK, you and Thiel are half right - there is a uselessness about a lot of new, internet based business ideas which are an extremely wasteful use of capital when there are serious problems - well, mainly one, big, long term, planet wide serious problem - to tackle.   Yeah, the problem that Thiel doesn't even think is really that big a deal. 

But space colonisation and fusion?   Both are so off in the outer limits of do-ability that the technological development to get them to a stage beyond mere experiment is a ridiculously big hurdle.  The only credible fast track path to Mars for decades yet is likely to be via one way death trips.  (Indeed, the trip itself may kill the astronauts, given the hardly resolved problem of adequate radiation shielding.)   Large scale space colonisation is going to have to be a low priority while energy and climate change are cranking up as serious challenges.   (And yeah, I doubt fusion is a useful avenue to pursue - it's the "flying car" of the energy world, with futurists and small start ups telling us for the last 50 or more years that it's always just around the corner of becoming practical.  I don't think anyone takes it seriously anymore as an energy solution.)

And what about this silly claim:

You're not even half right there - in that Isis and Al Qaeda were never plausible threats to Western civilisation.  

So panicking about "woke corporations" being a threat to western civilisation now are we?    I assume your concern is not too much to do with companies pushing around conservatives on gay or transgender rights in the US?   How's that a threat to civilisation, unless you think it has to be one in which toilets have to be strictly gendered and gays shouldn't marry?

So what is it?  That some groups are wanting to divest money from carbon based energy and mining?    What are you upset about with that?   That some people with capital are starting to believe scientists and take action when they governments that are not?    

Here's the thing:  I don't think you have never faced up to the fact that the biggest single movement behind preventing the largest economy in the world (and the Australia one too) from consistently  embracing a proper, capitalist friendly, response to climate change has been libertarianism/small government/small tax advocates.  If it weren't for them, fossil fuel divestment groups would have less to worry about.

To be fretting that "woke capital" is a threat to western civilisation is just silly wankery coming from reading too many conservative publications, and paying attention to eccentric IT billionaires.   

Or come here and justify it.