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.

Only in India?

 I have posted about this topic before, but perhaps did not realise how high the number of deaths are from this peculiar problem:

At least 31 children in India killed by toxin in lychees 

At least 31 children have died in northern India in the past 10 days from a brain disease believed to be linked to a toxic substance found in lychee fruit, health officials have said.

The deaths were reported by two hospitals in Muzaffarpur in Bihar state, famed for it lush lychee orchards, officials said.

The children all showed symptoms of acute encephalitis syndrome (AES), senior health official Ashok Kumar Singh said, adding most had suffered a sudden loss of glucose in their blood.

The outbreaks of the disease have happened annually during summer months in Muzaffarpur and neighbouring districts since 1995, typically coinciding with the lychee season.

“The health department has already issued an advisory for people to take care of their children during the hot summer when day temperature is above 40 degrees,” Ashok Kumar Singh said.

Known locally as chamki bukhar, the disease claimed a record 150 lives in 2014.

In 2015, US researchers had said the brain disease could be linked to a toxic substance found in the exotic fruit.

 Given that we grow lots of lychees here up around the Bundaberg region, I am curious as to why this disease is apparently unknown of here, but only appears in India.

Where are the real eco-warriors when you need them?

It's still not clear that the Adani mine will actually go ahead, despite the last Queensland approval going through today; but if it does, how much trouble can one little blog writer get into by thinking out loud that lengthy rail lines through a sparsely populated region which are key to mine development probably make a pretty susceptible target for eco-terrorists?   Actually, "terrorism" is too strong - the aim would not be terrorising the public.  Just stopping an economic activity.   

I mean, silly radicals of the 60's and later used to have bogus ideas about communism or anarchy being a viable and desirable thing, and would act on it.  Now that today's younger folk have actually really good reason to be contemplating useful property destruction, of a kind that could easily be envisaged as being done without loss of life, they're probably all too pre-occupied in twitter fights, identity politics, and organising the next animal liberation farmer harassment instead of looking at rail maps and making more useful plans.

Young people of today.  I don't know....

East Asian gender wobbles

I've posted about this before, I think, but the NYT has another article on the popularity in China (in youth culture, at least), of de-masculinised males:

BEIJING — In late April, The Beijing News, a popular daily, ran a collection of profiles on Chinese millennials in celebration of the May Fourth youth holiday commemorating a 1919 student movement. Alongside a best-selling writer, an amateur architecture historian and a producer of popular science videos there was Cai Xukun, a 20-something male pop singer with such a huge following that a recent social media post of his was viewed more than 800 million times.

Mr. Cai belongs to the tribe of “little fresh meat,” a nickname, coined by fans, for young, delicate-featured, makeup-clad male entertainers. These well-groomed celebrities star in blockbuster movies, and advertise for cosmetic brands and top music charts. Their rise has been one of the biggest cultural trends of the past decade. Their image — antithetical to the patriarchal and stoic qualities traditionally associated with Chinese men — is changing the face of masculinity in China.

Innocent as they may seem, the little fresh meat have powerful critics. The state news agency Xinhua denounces what it calls “niangpao,” or “sissy pants,” culture as “pathological” and said in an editorial last September that its popularity is eroding social order. The Beijing newspaper’s decision to include Mr. Cai in its profiles apparently prompted the Communist Youth League to release its own list of young icons: patriotic athletes and scientists, whom it called the “true embodiment” of the spirit of Communist youth.

I find it somewhat amusing that in this respect, the ultra masculine world of the alt.right (not to mention that gender/sexuality worrying commenters at Catallaxy) has something in common with the Chinese Communist Youth League. 

I just find it odd, and peculiar how it has spread throughout East Asia, starting from Japan and Korea, but spreading into China.   Too much soy in the diet, or something.  :)

Safer scooters

I've been thinking about the number of injuries turning up everywhere from those electric hire scooters which I am tempted to try.  (See here, for example.)

Having watched people on them (and some videos of people going all wobbly on them - you can search Youtube yourself), I reckon that part of the problem is that they do seem to need more of a sense of balance than they should. 

Hence:   why not have a three wheel design?   They exist:

or this:

Surely these are better from a balance point of view?   Surely the additional cost of an extra wheel is worth a safety increase?

I'd be tempted to legislate this, if I were in charge.

He's so sorry

I watched Alan Jones on Anh Do's program last night, where he got to softest of receptions from the always affable Anh.  Jones revisited the Julia Gillard "her father died of shame" insult, and as this tweet notes:

It was a very non-apology apology.

What's worse was Jones giggling that he had encouraged Malcolm Fraser to run with one of the original scare campaign ads based not on the other's side actual policy, but an imaginary one which you want voters to fear might become their policy.  (And yes, everyone agrees that Labor used it in the case of "Mediscare" - but all sensible people thought these were ethically dubious at best, not something to giggle about.)

There was a discussion of him having had a heart attack in (as I now see via Googling) in 2017.  Honestly, why doesn't the guy give up his day job and travel more while he has the time?    He's politically obnoxious and full of himself and political discourse would only improve by his absence.

Americans get the health care they deserve?

Hey, it was only last week that I was speculating that Americans seem culturally inclined to want to avoid pain at all cost - hence opting for things like easy prescriptions to dangerous opioids, and epidurals for child birth over laughing gas.

Today I see that there's an article at The Atlantic that argues along similar lines - saying that maybe the American health system doesn't get the value for money that other nation's systems do because of American patients' expectations:

For years, the United States’ high health-care costs and poor outcomes have provoked hand-wringing, and rightly so: Every other high-income country in the world spends less than America does as a share of GDP, and surpasses us in most key health outcomes.

Recriminations tend to focus on how Americans pay for health care, and on our hospitals and physicians. Surely if we could just import Singapore’s or Switzerland’s health-care system to our nation, the logic goes, we’d get those countries’ lower costs and better results. Surely, some might add, a program like Medicare for All would help by discouraging high-cost, ineffective treatments.

But lost in these discussions is, well, us. We ought to consider the possibility that if we exported Americans to those other countries, their systems might end up with our costs and outcomes. That although Americans (rightly, in my opinion) love the idea of Medicare for All, they would rebel at its reality. In other words, we need to ask: Could the problem with the American health-care system lie not only with the American system but with American patients?

Another couple of paragraphs:

For example, one cost-reduction measure used around the world is to exclude an expensive treatment from health coverage if it hasn’t been solidly proved effective, or is only slightly more effective than cheaper alternatives. But when American insurance companies try this approach, they invariably run into a buzz saw of public outrage. “Any patient here would object to not getting the best possible treatment, even if the benefit is measured not in extra years of life but in months,” says Gilberto Lopes, the associate director for global oncology at the University of Miami’s cancer center. Lopes has also practiced in Singapore, where his very first patient shocked him by refusing the moderately expensive but effective treatment he prescribed for her cancer—a choice that turns out to be common among patients in Singapore, who like to pass the money in their government-mandated health-care savings accounts on to their children.

Most experts agree that American patients are frequently overtreated, especially with regard to expensive tests that aren’t strictly needed. The standard explanation for this is that doctors and hospitals promote these tests to keep their income high. This notion likely contains some truth. But another big factor is patient preference. A study out of Johns Hopkins’s medical school found doctors’ two most common explanations for overtreatment to be patient demand and fear of malpractice suits—another particularly American concern.

Go read the rest.

  

How's that heatwave going

Still hot in India in a very long pre-Monsoon heatwave:

Nearly two-thirds of India sizzled on Tuesday under a spell of a heatwave that is on course to becoming the longest ever as scalding temperatures killed four train passengers, drained water supplies, and drove thousands of tourists to hill stations already bursting at the seams.

Across large swathes of northern, central and peninsular India, the mercury breached the 45 degree mark, including in Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh, Churu and Bikaner in Rajasthan, Hisar and Bhiwani in Haryana, Patiala in Punjab, and Gwalior and Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh.

The Capital, which sweltered on its hottest June day in history on Monday (48 degrees Celsius) recorded as maximum temperature of 45.4 degrees Celcius at Palam in spite of a spell of light rain in the morning.

I see other news sites say that the death toll from the heatwave is 36:  but isn't it hard to believe that there are not more premature deaths than that in the poorest part of the community that has trouble accessing air conditioning?

Stay the course, Japan

An article at Japan Times argues that the country just has to get with the times, and stop discriminating against tattoos.   I didn't realise this aspect of how they came to be associated with criminality:

Why does Japan fear tattoos so much? According to “Modern Encyclopedia of the Yakuza” (2004), the government in 1720 decided to reduce the punishment on some criminal offenses. Criminals would no longer have their noses or ears removed. Instead, their crimes would be identified with tattoos on the skin, usually the arms.

So, it wasn't a voluntary thing, initially.

The article continues:

Tattoos were popular with gangsters before and after the war for a number of reasons. Symbolically speaking, however, the act of being tattooed once showed a resolve to sever ties with ordinary society and live in the underworld.

Still does, in my books!  OK, well, perhaps "live in the underworld" is a bit harsh, unless you mean the underworld where kitch rules.   (As usual, I make exceptions for genuine tribal tattooing for people genuinely from tribes.   And I don't mean the Bogan tribe.)   

Anyway, the argument is that modern Japanese crims aren't getting them anymore: 

According to a National Police Agency study in the early 1990s, 73 percent of all gang members had a tattoo. It’s likely this number has decreased since 1992, when the first anti-gang laws went into effect and gangsters began hiding their identities. Obviously, if you want to blend in and pass yourself off as an ordinary businessman, tattoos aren’t a plus.

The new generation of gang members doesn’t get tattoos. Criminals are increasingly declining to get tattoos, while the rest of the world is embracing them as body art. Does anyone think U.S. pop star Ariana Grande is a menace to society?

I've heard some of her music.  Yes.  Yes she is.  :)

A small but symbolic mass

From France 24:

The Notre-Dame cathedral will host its first mass this weekend since a fire ravaged the Paris landmark almost two months ago, the city’s diocese said Tuesday. 

The mass led by Archbishop of Paris Michel Aupetit will be celebrated on a very small scale late Saturday, the diocese said.

It will take place in a “side chapel with a restricted number of people, for obvious security reasons,” it said.

Just 20 people are expected to take part, including priests and canons from the cathedral.
The event will be broadcast live by a French television channel so that Christians from all over France can participate, the diocese added.

They take their architecture seriously in Indonesia

A headline on the Jakarta Post:

Actually, it looks pretty nice to me:

No passport future?

I meant to post about this a month or so ago - the story about how face recognition and other biometric databases are expected to lead to "no passport" processing through airports in the future.

Your treasured and travel-weary passport may soon become, like your first mobile phone, a relic of the past, if border agencies from the UK to Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and our own have anything to do with it. 

The race is on to create a system whereby travellers will no longer need to present their documents to either a border official or passport kiosk.

For the Australian traveller, this could mean the days of standing in line at our international airports will end.

The article does note that this whole system does carry the risk of extremely long delays if there is a hitch in the IT system.

In related news, in the USA today, we get this:

Licence plate images and photos of individuals who travelled in and out of the United States were taken in a malicious hack impacting U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), according to a report in the Washington Post. The agency learned last month about the breach, which took place thanks to a hack of an unnamed subcontractor.

CBP, which blamed the subcontractor for failing to follow security and privacy rules by transferring the agency’s photos to its own network, operates a database of visa and passport photos as part of a face recognition system and database used widely at American airports despite criticism for privacy and accuracy failures. The agency processes over 1 million travellers per day and is building up to use the face recognition system in at least 20 airports thanks to a Trump executive order.

I wonder about the point of such a hack...

Geoengineering the oceans

Nature has an article (a comment piece) about the dearth of serious research into various suggestions made over the years to use the oceans to counter global warming.   Its seems a lot of ideas are briefly floated but hardly anyone thinks about them very carefully.  

The article does mention a lot of unintended possible consequences of some ideas:

A lack of funding is not the main reason for the research gaps. Although there have been few funding programmes targeted at marine-geoengineering experiments and modelling so far, many basic tests are cheap and can be done in the lab — for instance, assessing whether impurities in mineral powders are toxic to marine life. And a range of negative-emissions technologies, such as enhanced weathering of rocks to increase ocean alkalinity, are already being funded in targeted research programmes, including one in the United Kingdom. Other streams of research, such as modelling, are under way in Germany, and a call for research proposals has been made in Japan. Private money is being invested in some marine approaches, such as a proposed pilot study of the impacts of iron fertilization on fisheries off Chile. However, that project has stalled, largely because of a lack of support from scientists (see Nature 545, 393–394; 2017).

Another problem is that many geoengineering proposals and analyses are found on transient websites, not in peer-reviewed journals. For example, only half of the web links to ideas, plans and documents cited in a detailed 2009 synthesis study of marine-geoengineering approaches⁴ still worked when we examined them in 2018. By contrast, academic and intergovernmental documents from that era are easy to find.

Again, the reasons for this are unclear, but could include inadequate funding, privacy concerns about disclosing details of the methods, and maintenance of proprietary rights over technologies. Some scientists worry that even starting geoengineering research or reporting results could lead to deployment of inadequately studied approaches⁵.

Yet it is essential that investigations are solidly researched, openly discussed and made readily available, as demonstrated by the most-studied geoengineering approach, ocean iron fertilization. Much of the work drew from ocean biogeochemistry and has involved lab experiments, pilot studies in the Southern Ocean and modelling across ocean basins. All of this activity showed that the method will not work as anticipated⁶. Fertilizing 1,000 square kilometres of the upper ocean would increase the growth of phytoplankton but could have alarming side effects. For example, sinking algae could release methane, a greenhouse gas that is many times more potent than CO₂. 

It's clear that there is no simple idea that is an obvious panacea.

Psycho on the streets

This week's Four Corners story on the background to the Bourke Street "murders by car" case was very good.  Here's an article about how the show was put together.    (It has a link to the show itself too.)

Again, the sort of investigative TV journalism that we only see on the public broadcaster. 

A Prime problem

It's annoying to note that subscribing to Prime to watch Good Omens has revealed a technical problem that seems to affect many people - there is a well publicised issue, going back a couple of years, that people with Samsung smart TVs in particular find that using the Prime App leads to an audio sync problem.   The audio comes out slightly ahead of the video - meaning lips do not quite match the sounds by a continually noticeable half second or so.

It was much worse when watching Episode 1 of The Man in the High Castle, where there seemed to more close ups of talking faces in serious discussion.

From what I can gather, many think that it's a case of Amazon and Samsung blaming each other and no one ever coming up with a solution. 

The way around it, I found last night, is to use a laptop that can cast to a Chromecast via Chrome.   Annoyingly, the Prime Android app does not have a "cast" button built in - because Amazon does not get on with Google, either.

Casting from my mobile phone turned out to be a bit complicated (Chrome on Android seems to either always, or sometimes, not have a "cast" function built in, so I had to do screen mirroring which seemed to lead to something like standard definition video quality on the TV, not high definition.)  

Anyway, it worked fine when casting from my son's laptop, at high definition.

But this really seems a (admittedly, very First World) problem that shouldn't exist.  

The count continued

I've posted a few times over the years regarding the question of the number of people who count as "not straight".   I took a guess (based on certain polls and studies) that it was probably about 4 to 5%, and seemingly had that vindicated (at least for America) by a Gallup poll last year which gave the figure of 4.5%.

I see that at The Conversation today, there's an article looking at various Australian survey evidence which might give an answer for here, but also usefully discussing the complexity of the matter. 

I think that, while the surveys quoted seem to come in at a little under 4% for gay or bisexual, there is sufficient rubberiness that a 4 to 5% figure here may still be pretty accurate:

Less is known about change over the time in the number and share of Australians who are non-heterosexual. This is because most data collections only began asking about sexual orientation in recent years.

Estimates based on the 2001/2002 and 2012/2013 instalments of the Australian Study of Health and Relationships (each canvassing about 20,000 men and women age 16-59), suggest an increase in the prevalence of non-heterosexuality across different measures.

The share of men identifying as homosexual or bisexual went up from 2.5% to 3.2%. The share of women identifying as lesbian or bisexual also rose, from 2.2% to 3.8%. While the share of men expressing some same-sex sexual attraction increased slightly (6.8% and 7.4%), this increased more markedly for women (12.9% and 16%). Similarly, the prevalence of lifetime same-sex sexual experience increased for both sexes, with the increment being more pronounced among women (8.5% to 14.7%) than men (6% to 6.6%).

Or perhaps Australians are slightly less "queer" than Americans?  That would be hard to believe.  

Libertarians deserve to live in a police state

I'm rather sick of libertarians complaining about the policing and security law situation under the Coalition governments which they support because (basically) "but Labor wants more tax!".

Jason Soon and Sinclair Davidson both complain about the Federal police raids of last week and point to an IPA media release doing the same.  Chris Berg on Twitter tried to do a "well this is a result of both sides of politics co-operating to increase powers" excuse, even though (I think) there has been commentary that recent investigations have not had to rely on recent changes.   Jason complained about the newly elected NSW Liberal government now deploying drug sniffer dogs to Central station, to generically harass everyone going through their daily routine, not just people who go to known drug use venues (like doof doof music festivals.)

I agree with all of the complaints, but they're the ones determined to keep supporting the incredible secret state operations of Liberal/Coalition governments because they don't like Labor economic policies.

Look at the freaking awful record of the Liberals going back to 2004:

*  the diplomatically and morally scandalous government ordered bugging of East Timor for commercial benefit.  It's an outrageous use of our spy service against a near neighbour, and the Liberals just shrug it off.   And its ultra-outrageous that there is a prosecution for disclosing it.

* the "operational matters" veil of secrecy that descended on what our Navy and paramilitary "Border Force" was doing to turn back boats - they could have been torpedoing boats for all the public knew and it would have depended on a sailor leaking the information for anyone to know. 

* the whole "Border Force" re-branding to make it look and act more like a State paramilitary.

* the convenience of the AFP giving up an investigation when it's a leak that has pro-government benefit.

*  the preparedness to leave wannabe boat arrivals in permanent land locked island detention centres with a shrug of the shoulders as to their health.

* now the Home Affairs Secretary Mike Pezzullo - who I think has been a key figure all through the rise of what I call authoritarian-friendly behaviour over the course of the Coalition government - having the hide to ring up a Senator directly to complain that he doesn't like the way he spoke about him on the media.   Blind Freddy can see how wildly inappropriate this is for a "normal" government.

What's more, Sinclair Davidson runs a blog that is brimming with praise of the clearly authoritarian sympathetic Donald Trump (even if he doesn't personally care for him); and Jason Soon devotes most tweets to "oh, look at this ridiculous example of identity politics gone mad again."


Stop your whining, libertarians - you've made the call that you getting a tax cut and not wanting stronger climate change policy is more important than living in a secrecy loving, virtual police State.

Own it. 

PS:  and no, don't wave your hands about an imaginary "well, it would probably be just as bad under a Labor government" defence.  As I say above, the Coalition has form going back too far now for that argument to be credible.

PPS:  I see that Jason is citing Adam Creighton as "one of his gateways to post-libertarianism".    What's the right term for you at the moment then, Jason?  Transitioning?  

Against the Dutch method

The Atlantic has a good article looking at the Dutch experience with euthanasia and it's most troubling aspect - allowing it for psychiatric illness:

Until about 2010, the controversial practice of psychiatric euthanasia was rare, despite being permitted since the mid-1990s. Most Dutch psychiatrists—like most other doctors and the Dutch public—disapprove of psychiatric euthanasia. Still, there has been a steady increase, with 83 cases in 2017; the per-capita equivalent in the United States would be about 1,600 cases a year. Unlike euthanasia in general, psychiatric euthanasia is predominantly given to women. Most of these cases involve the End of Life Clinic, a network of facilities affiliated with the largest Dutch euthanasia-advocacy organization. These clinics routinely handle euthanasia requests refused by other doctors. (Noa Pothoven sought euthanasia there but was refused.)

An obvious question arises: How can any physician be sure that any patient with a serious psychiatric disorder, much less an 18-year-old, meets the legal criteria for euthanasia? The short answer is that the law gives considerable weight to their professional judgment.

Compared with cases involving cancer or other terminal illnesses, the application of the eligibility criteria in psychiatric euthanasia depends much more on doctors’ opinions. Psychiatric diagnosis is not based on an objective laboratory or imaging test; generally, it is a more subjective assessment based on standard criteria agreed on by professionals in the field. Some doctors reach conclusions with which other doctors might reasonably disagree. Indeed, an otherwise healthy Dutch woman was euthanized 12 months after her husband’s death for “prolonged grief disorder”—a diagnosis listed in the International Classification of Diseases but not in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders used by psychiatrists and psychologists around the world.

Psychiatric disorders can indeed be chronic, but their prognosis is difficult to predict for a variety of reasons. There is a paucity of relevant, large longitudinal studies. Patients may get better or worse due to psychosocial factors beyond the control of mental-health providers. Also affecting prognoses is the varying quality and availability of mental-health care—which, even in wealthy countries, patients with significant symptoms may not receive. Noa Pothoven and her family had criticized the dearth of care options available in their country for patients like her. Indeed, more than one in five Dutch patients receiving psychiatric euthanasia have not previously been hospitalized; a significant minority with personality disorders did not receive psychotherapy, the staple of treatment for such conditions. When treatments are available, doctors in the Netherlands have the discretion to judge that there are “no alternatives” if patients refuse treatment.

It's very surprising that the Dutch people are not (as far as I know) agitating for a change to this practice.  

Sheridan and faith

I had missed that Greg Sheridan has been making a bit of a splash with his religious writings, until I read this article in The Catholic Herald.   Oddly:

Although a practising Catholic, Sheridan is married to Jasbir Kaur “Jessie” Sheridan, who practises the Sikh religion along with their three sons.

Even more odd is choosing this description for his political views:

A conservative, Sheridan describes himself as politically “bisexual” (or, if you prefer, ambidextrous). That is, he leans neither to the Labor nor the Liberal party. His position is summarised by former prime minister, John Howard, who has said: “Last time I checked, God voted neither Labor nor Liberal; he certainly didn’t vote Green.”

I'd like to know when the "bisexual" Sheridan last voted Labor!

But generally speaking, I have usually found him relatively un-offensive for someone who writes in The Australian.  

Probably not a hell hound

Good Good Omens

I've signed up for a free one month on Amazon Prime just to watch the series based on the much loved book Good Omens.

I saw the first episode last night, and was not disappointed. I've only read the book once, so I had forgotten how clever the whole premise was - an angel and demon who have spent so much time on Earth they have both "gone native", and don't want to see it end with a "too soon" Apocalypse.

It's cheerful, clever and amusing, and looks like it had a generous production budget.  Let's hope the quality keeps up throughout the 6 episodes...

More on the current state of capitalism

Axios had an article a couple of days ago that seems to not have attracted as much attention as it deserves:

A truly bizarre trend is having an impact on the economy — wealthy people and corporations have so much money they literally don't know what to do with it.

Why it matters: At a time when growing income inequality is fueling voter discontent and underpinning an array of social movements, the top 1% of earners and big companies are holding record levels of unused cash.

The big picture: U.S. companies raked in a record $2.3 trillion in corporate profits last year, while the country's total wealth increased by $6 trillion to $98.2 trillion (40% of which went to those with wealth over $100,000).

So, where is all the money going? The IMF notes large companies around the world are overwhelmingly and uniformly choosing not to reinvest much of it into their businesses. They're hoarding it in cash and buying back stock.

"There are only 2 things that money can do — sit on a balance sheet unused, where it's just earned income earning an interest rate of zero," ICI chief economist Sean Collins points out. "Or it makes sense to release it to share buybacks or dividends."

• Companies could pay their workers more, but "that would be terrible for the stock market," says Neil Shearing, chief economist at Capital Economics — half-jokingly.
• Companies made a record $1.1 trillion in stock buybacks in 2018 and are on track to surpass that number this year. But they still have record cash holdings of close to $3 trillion.

 And more:

But even that hasn't been enough to account for all the new money. The top 1% of U.S. households are holding a record $303.9 billion of cash, a quantum leap from the under $15 billion they held just before the financial crisis.

How we got here:

• The Fed's quantitative easing program pushed the cost of borrowing money to next to nothing for nearly a decade, allowing companies to splurge on debt for mergers and acquisitions and to boost revenue.
• At the same time, globalization allowed them to reduce labor costs, meaning that gains effectively were returned as profit and used by public companies to boost stock prices.

Between the lines: These factors, combined with legislative policies that have consistently favored business owners over workers, eroded unions and reduced employees ability to demand higher wages.

Lots of people on Twitter are saying that if this is a surprise to anyone, they need to remember Marx.    Lots of GIFS of guillotines are involved too - rather unhelpfully allowing the wingnut right to get hysterical that "Socialists!" really want another run at violent Marxist revolution.   (Actually, they just want wingnuts to stop being idiots who count their money and hug their guns at night.)

But I am of  the view that libertarian (sorry, "classical liberal") economists have nothing useful to say about this situation at all.    They love the idea of accumulation of money so much that they never see any reason to stop or slow anyone or anything - no matter how rich - from accumulating more.   

The very convincing Stiglitz

Joseph Stiglitz has a very lengthy piece at the TLS, reviewing three books on capitalism but with a lot of his own commentary.

It's a great read.   Wasn't Judith Sloan sneeringly rude to him when he was out in Australia last?   When she can write as well and as convincingly as him, rather than being an overpaid free market shill for a billionaire's loss making vanity paper, I'll reconsider their respective merits.

Some extracts I liked:

By now it is clear that something is fundamentally wrong with modern capitalism. The 2008 global financial crisis showed that the system as currently constructed is neither efficient nor stable. If a slew of data hasn’t already convinced us that during forty years of slow economic growth in advanced economies the benefits overwhelmingly went to the top 1 per cent – or 0.1 per cent – the anti-establishment votes in the United States and United Kingdom certainly should. The mainstream economists, central bank governors and “centrist” Blairite and Clintonite politicians who set us on and maintained this dismal course and confidently pronounced that globalization and financial-market liberalization would bring sustained growth and financial benefits for all, have been soundly discredited.

Considering the devastation wrought by misguided financial policies over the past decade in particular, one might reasonably have expected a revolution in the economics profession akin to the Keynesian one in the aftermath of the Great Depression. But we tend to forget that, back in the 1930s, as the economy sank ever deeper into depression, many economists in the US and UK stuck to laissez-faire. Markets would correct themselves, they said; no need to meddle. And even after John Maynard Keynes brilliantly articulated what was wrong, and how government actions could set things right, a great number of economists did not want to follow his prescriptions, out of ideological fear of excessive government intervention. So it is no surprise, really, that the economics profession’s response to the 2008 crisis has been slow and halting.

And then this:

Our current economic system is often referred to as capitalism, a term – as Fred L. Block points out in Capitalism: The future of an illusion – that the left once used pejoratively and the right now champions as if it’s an unchanging and noble framework that delivers miraculous, never-ending growth from which everyone benefits, or would if only government didn’t interfere. But all the underlying premisses of this blanket term are wrong: no economy, and certainly no modern economy, has a private sector that functions in a vacuum. The government is right there alongside it, enacting rules and regulations, enforcing trading standards, backing up the banking system and stabilizing the market economy. Capitalism isn’t one, rigid system. It’s ever changing. And the promises made by its most reductive advocates – that deregulation, privatization and globalization will bring wellbeing to most citizens in all countries – have proven to be horribly wrong. (Globalization, to its credit, has contributed to the enormous decrease in global poverty: the successes in East Asia, in particular in China, where some 740 million have been moved out of poverty, wouldn’t have been possible without it. Still, mismanaged and inequitable globalization, with large agriculture subsidies for corporate farms in the advanced countries, has hurt the poorest of the poor: rural workers in the least developed countries.)

Two other crises accompany the crisis in our economy. The first is a crisis in our democracy, for the two are inseparable. It is through our political system that the rules of the economy are set, and when the outcomes of those rules are unacceptable – as in the 2008 crisis – the consequences must be addressed, and addressed through radical change. And those kinds of changes have to be made through the political system – otherwise, matters will only get worse, especially when a third interconnecting crisis is taken into consideration: the environment. Unfortunately, none of these books faces up to our system’s failure to address the existential question of the moment: climate change.

But read the whole thing...

Bunch of weirdos

No one seems to have too firm a grip on what may come of the George Pell appeal.   In one of the more unusual bits of media to come out of it, I saw Leigh Sales and David Marr on 7.30 last night discussing the matter of whether the Appeal Court covered in detail the issue of whether a fully vestment-ed Pell could plausibly get his penis out to commit the offence - and David Marr assured us that the judges had all agreed the vestments did not present a insurmountable restraint on such an act. 

That doesn't sound so great for the appeal prospects, but on the other hand, it seems the Crown's barrister didn't perform well on his submissions, perhaps because he was sick?   (He had to be asked to speak louder, more than one, apparently; and is reported to have stumbled in his answers to judges.)

But anyway, the bunch of ageing culture warrior Conservatives, when they are not comparing disastrous illnesses at Sinclair Davidson's cyber-home for the old and obnoxious, are dead keen on a Pell victory, and then a return to Rome to lead the church to some weird imaginary triumph.   Look at this comment:

Bunch of weirdos. 

A new (to me) crime reduction theory

Pretty interesting suggestion:

Lena Edlund, a Columbia University economist,  and Cecilia Machado, of the Getulio Vargas Foundation, lay out the data in a new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper. They estimate that the diffusion of phones could explain 19 to 29 percent of the decline in homicides seen from 1990 to 2000.

“The cellphones changed how drugs were dealt,” Edlund told me. In the ’80s, turf-based drug sales generated violence as gangs attacked and defended territory, and also allowed those who controlled the block to keep profits high.

The cellphone broke the link, the paper claims, between turf and selling drugs. “It’s not that people don’t sell or do drugs anymore,” Edlund explained to me, “but the relationship between that and violence is different.”

The rest of the article goes on to note how this is just one of many theories about the crime reduction in that period:

The University of New Haven criminologist Maria Tcherni-Buzzeo published a review of the contending theories in 2018 that found no fewer than 24 different explanations for why crime began a multi-decade decline in the early 1990s, through economic times good and bad, in different countries and cities, under draconian policing regimes and more progressive ones.

Go read the whole article, at The Atlantic.

David Roberts vents

David Roberts has an angry (but, I think, pretty accurate) twitter thread reaction to the apparent outbreak of hostilities between the Conservative religious culture warrior arm of the American Right and the libertarian-ish arm (now rebranded as "classical liberal", because they realised "libertarian" is too associated with nerds with such atrocious taste they can stomach Ayn Rand novels) which is not so keen on Donald Trump.

The hostilities are detailed in this article at Vox:  David French vs. Sohrab Ahmari and the battle dividing conservatives, explained

David's reaction culminates in this:

The topic of the inherent conflict between these two arms of the Right, and the ridiculous and harmful alliance they managed to forge on climate change science, is the defining story of the last 50 or so years of American politics.  

Fake meat boom?

Axios reports that fake meat (or at least, fake burger meat) is proving to be so popular that the manufacturers are having trouble meeting demand:

The fake-meat boom is real, propelling startups to incredible heights while creating shortages of its own.

The big picture: The fake-meat market could be 10x its current size by 2029, Barclays analysts estimated in May.

• "In fact, we believe that there is a bigger market opportunity for plant-based (and maybe even lab-based) protein than perhaps was argued for electric vehicles ten years ago."

Why it matters: The stock market in particular is treating Beyond Meat like a superstar, with its stock price up 4x from last month's IPO. But the companies must prove they can handle the demand.

• "Last summer, locations of A&W Food Services of Canada Inc. were sold out of Beyond Meat’s burger for weeks," the WSJ notes.
• "This spring, restaurants including American WildBurger locations around Chicago have run short of Impossible’s burgers. ... Craft & Crew Hospitality in Minneapolis hasn’t received scheduled shipments of Impossible burgers for weeks from a local distributor."
• Both Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have ramped up production to meet demand.

Cool.

Not to my taste, part 2

The Guardian has a lengthy article with the headline:

Winx's brother among Australian racehorses killed for meat in South Korea 

Seems family connections don't count for much in South Korea, then.  

In the past five years Australia has exported 158 racehorses to South Korea, mostly two-year-olds purchased in the Magic Millions sales for the purpose of racing or breeding. Analysis of a single year, 2014, shows that of 58 horses exported, 12 were confirmed to have been slaughtered and a further 11 were also likely to have been used in the meat trade.

That sounds odd.  Were these horses found to be duds one way or another, or do South Koreans like paying big dollars for well bred horse meat?

Anyway, as much as I don't care for horses as an animal, I find something more gruesome in the imagination about their slaughter for meat than the slaughter of smaller animals.  Maybe it's the idea of how much blood would be involved, or something.  

I haven't ever (knowingly) eaten horse meat, but I would decline if offered.

Not to my taste

NPR notes that there is another series of Black Mirror coming out.

I've only watched two episodes, including the movie length Bandersnatch, and I find I can't really warm to its bleakness.  (Even my son, who has watched more, doesn't seem to hold it in very high regard.)  

I have enjoyed Twilight Zone in its couple of incarnations, as well as the old Outer Limits, neither of which could be described as full of cheery optimism, but I find Black Mirror's modern version of worrying about where we're going unappealing.   Not entirely sure why.  Maybe because I find concerns about AI and computer technology generally overblown?   (Except for the problem of social media and misinformation - which is greatly underestimated.)

Heat deaths noted

I noted earlier in the week the extremely high temperatures in parts of India.  It's still continuing.

Pakistan has had them too - and it's hard to imagine in these countries how the poorest people survive.

In some pretty tragic news, even being in a hospital in Pakistan might not save you:

Dubai: In an incident which shocked the nation, at least five infants died of heat and suffocation after the air-conditioning units broke down at the intensive care unit in a hospital in Sahiwal, Pakistan.

Silence

I seem to be having an unusually long stretch without any comment from anyone , even Homer, despite posts on various (what I think are) interesting topics.

What's wrong, my extremely small readership?

A milestone reached (with some unpleasant associated news)

Yesterday was our 20th wedding anniversary.   My wife and I will eat out at the weekend, but last night we ate big at home and drank French champagne (which again made me note how I don't get any more enjoyment from them compared to the much cheaper Australian version).  Anyway, it was very pleasant.   We both consider ourselves lucky to have had children, making a start at it late in life, and having a boy and girl, both basically healthy and without significant drama in their lives, is something to be thankful for.

In the related unpleasant news, on Monday I learned that the priest who married us is now facing a historic sex abuse charge.   That's sad, whether it turns into a conviction or not.

Good to know I don't have to...

...become a vegan for climate change, according to Michael Mann:

Though many of these actions are worth taking, and colleagues and friends of ours are focused on them in good faith, a fixation on voluntary action alone takes the pressure off of the push for governmental policies to hold corporate polluters accountable. In fact, one recent study suggests that the emphasis on smaller personal actions can actually undermine support for the substantive climate policies needed.

This new obsession with personal action, though promoted by many with the best of intentions, plays into the hands of polluting interests by distracting us from the systemic changes that are needed.

There is no way to avert the climate crisis without keeping most of our coal, oil and gas in the ground, plain and simple. Because much of the carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for centuries, our choices in the next few years are crucial, and they will determine the lives our grandchildren and their grandchildren. We need corporate action, not virtue signaling. 

Massive changes to our national energy grid, a moratorium on new fossil fuel infrastructure and a carbon fee and dividend (that steeply ramps up) are just some examples of visionary policies that could make a difference. And right now, the "Green New Deal," support it or not, has encouraged a much needed, long overdue societal conversation about these and other options for averting climate catastrophe. 

But we need more than the left wing of the Democratic Party on board. We need a national plan of action that will include everyone.

Martin Wolf on China, Trump, trade

Interesting stuff at the Financial Times by Martin Wolf.  Highlights:

The disappearance of the Soviet Union left a big hole. The “war on terror” was an inadequate replacement. But China ticks all boxes. For the US, it can be the ideological, military and economic enemy many need. Here at last is a worthwhile opponent. That was the main conclusion I drew from this year’s Bilderberg meetings.

Across-the-board rivalry with China is becoming an organising principle of US economic, foreign and security policies. Whether it is Donald Trump’s organising principle is less important. The US president has the gut instincts of a nationalist and protectionist. Others provide both framework and details. The aim is US domination. The means is control over China, or separation from China.

Anybody who believes a rules-based multilateral order, our globalised economy, or even harmonious international relations, are likely to survive this conflict is deluded. The astonishing white paper on the trade conflict, published on Sunday by China, is proof. The — to me, depressing — fact is that on many points Chinese positions are right. The US focus on bilateral imbalances is economically illiterate. The view that theft of intellectual property has caused huge damage to the US is questionable. The proposition that China has grossly violated its commitments under its 2001 accession agreement to the World Trade Organization is hugely exaggerated.

And this:

This is the most important geopolitical development of our era. Not least, it will increasingly force everybody else to take sides or fight hard for neutrality. But it is not only important. It is dangerous. It risks turning a manageable, albeit vexed, relationship into all-embracing conflict, for no good reason.

China’s ideology is not a threat to liberal democracy in the way the Soviet Union’s was. Rightwing demagogues are far more dangerous. An effort to halt China’s economic and technological rise is almost certain to fail. Worse, it will foment deep hostility in the Chinese people. In the long run, the demands of an increasingly prosperous and well-educated people for control over their lives might still win out. But that is far less likely if China’s natural rise is threatened. Moreover, the rise of China is not an important cause of western malaise. That reflects far more the indifference and incompetence of domestic elites. What is seen as theft of intellectual property reflects, in large part, the inevitable attempt of a rising economy to master the technologies of the day. Above all, an attempt to preserve the domination of 4 per cent of humanity over the rest is illegitimate. 

Not such a dumb question

Just stumbled across something that removed some uncertainty I had since a teenager - I remember a fellow (female) student at high school mocking me about my admission that I was technically uncertain as to what constituted a eunuch of old.   What I meant was I was not sure if they were completely deprived of all genitalia, or simply testicles and scrotum.   (In fact, even the scrotal question was unclear, when I later read that the unfortunate boys destined to be European castrati simply had their testicles crushed by hand after soaking in some herbal mix with a hopefully anaesthetic effect.) 

It's something I don't think I have ever bothered looking up since then, but I stumbled across an article today from the Wellcome collection The castration effect, and it notes as follows:

Early Assyrian and Chinese civilisations transposed this knowledge to humans: boys born in poverty would be castrated and sent to work under the yoke of the state in the imperial household. (In China, both penis and testicles were removed – these ‘three treasures’ were pickled in a jar, brought out for special occasions, and buried with the eunuch.)

Well, I wonder on what special occasion a eunuch would bring out his pickled genitalia.  Birthdays, perhaps?    Anyway, it would seem the method used all depended on the time and place.

Someone (apparently a historian) at Reddit gives more detail:

Anyway, here’s Eunuchry 101. There are two basic types of eunuchs in history, “clean-cut” (no penis or testicles) or just a removal of the testes. A simple removal of the testes is historically the most common sort. There’s a third type where the penis was removed but the testicles left, but it’s only referenced in a few places for Islamic eunuchs and seems to have been a very limited thing, and there’s really no reason to do it like this other than punishment.

For clean-cut eunuchs there was basically only one method, cutting it all off in one go which I described for the Ottoman black eunuchs in that link, and here’s the Chinese version from G. C. Stent who is probably our most reliable Western reporter:

The interested reader can go to that link and read in detail the gruesome clean cut method used by the Chinese.   I wonder how many didn't survive it...

Christians against Modi

The Catholic Herald has quite a strongly worded piece saying that Christians in India are dismayed that Modi won the Indian election (and so convincingly).  The problem - his Hindutva support base:

The outcome of the elections is not good news for the country’s Christians. Although Christians comprise only 2.3 per cent of India’s population, they are known for running excellent schools and well-maintained hospitals. Anti-Christian sentiment is not a new phenomenon. Nevertheless, the situation has grown worse since the current ruling party’s rise to power in 2014.

In general, there are three primary means of exclusion under which religious minorities suffer in India today: social hostility, laws curbing religious freedom, and caste discrimination.

In a report published in 2018, the US based Pew research centre gave India the highest score for “social hostility” towards religious minorities, including Christians. This intolerance appears to be growing. The faith-based legal organization ADF India and the United Christian Forum run a helpline for victims of persecution. In the first quarter of 2019, there were more than 80 reported cases of mob violence against Christians. This means one violent attack almost every day, targeting priests, pastors, families, and whole church communities.

The aggression against minorities has been fuelled by the propaganda of the so-called Hindutva movement in the run-up to the elections. This movement seeks to purge India of everything non-Hindu and ultimately to build a Hindu nation with the BJP as its political arm. Needless to say, Christianity fits poorly into this nationalist concept.

Meanwhile, the Indian state of Uttarakhand introduced a new law last year ironically called the “Religious Freedom Act”. The BJP-led state is the 10th in India to introduce a so-called anti-conversion law. It is designed to prevent people from converting to religions other than Hinduism. One has to register with the authorities long in advance before being granted permission to accept another faith.

In the more radical versions of such laws, priests who want to baptise an adult and accept him into the Catholic Church also need to register.

Yes, it is worse than I realised....

The duck who was actually a imperialist capitalist running dog

Well, quite an entertaining explanation at The New Yorker about a book written in Chile (pre-Pinochet) that pointed out the capitalist faults of one Donald Duck.  The first paragraph:

In Santiago, Chile, in the early nineteen-seventies, the writer Ariel Dorfman served as a cultural adviser to the Chilean President, Salvador Allende. There was revolutionary fervor in the air, and Dorfman, as he wrote in his 1998 memoir, “Heading South, Looking North,” “felt the giddiness of those few great moments in your existence when you know that everything is possible.” He produced everything from poems and policy reports to children’s comics and radio jingles, “letting Spanish flow out of me as if I were a river.” His most enduring work from these years is a volume titled “How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic,” co-authored with the Belgian sociologist Armand Mattelart. Among North American audiences, Disney was most famous for its films and theme parks, but, abroad, Disney comics had a robust readership, and legions of freelance artists tailored them—or rewrote them—to international tastes. In Chile, Donald Duck was by far the most popular Disney character. But Dorfman and Mattelart argued that Donald was a conservative mouthpiece, dampening the revolutionary spirit, fostering complacency, and softening the sins of colonialism. What kind of a role model was he, this eunuch duck, who sought only fame and fortune, who ignored the plight of the working class, who accepted endless suffering as his lot? “Reading Disney,” they wrote, “is like having one’s own exploited condition rammed with honey down one’s throat.”

Post-Pinochet, the book became targeted for burning:

“How to Read Donald Duck,” published in 1971, was an instant best-seller in Chile. But, in 1973, Augusto Pinochet seized power from Allende, in a violent military coup; under Pinochet’s rule, the book was banned, as an emblem of a fallen way of thought. Donald and Mickey Mouse became champions of the counter-revolution. One official pasted their faces on the walls of his office, where, under his predecessor, socialist slogans had once hung. Dorfman watched on TV as soldiers cast his book into a bonfire; the Navy confiscated some ten thousand copies and dumped them into the bay of Valparaíso. A motorist tried to plow him down in the street, shouting “Viva el Pato Donald!” Families of protesters swarmed his home, deploring his attack on their innocence while, less than innocently, they hurled rocks through the windows. In the fifties, Dorfman’s family had fled to Chile to escape an America gripped by McCarthyism; now he would return to the U.S. an exile from Chile. He wouldn’t go back for nearly two decades.

How odd.

Krugman on tariff history

An interesting column by Krugman comparing Trump's reckless use of tariffs as punishment to what went on in America post World War 1:

It is, I believe, pretty widely known that America turned its back on the world after World War I: refusing to join the League of Nations, slamming the doors shut on most immigration (fortunately a few years after my grandparents got here).

What’s less known, I suspect, is that America also took a sharply protectionist turn long before the infamous 1930 Smoot Hawley Act. In early 1921, Congress enacted the Emergency Tariff Act, soon followed by the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922. These actions more than doubled average tariffs on dutiable imports. Like Trump, the advocates of these tariffs claimed that they would bring prosperity to all Americans.

They didn’t. There was indeed a manufacturing boom, driven not by tariffs but by new products like affordable cars and new technologies like the assembly line. Farmers, however, spent the 1920s suffering from low prices for their products and high prices for farm equipment, leading to a surge in foreclosures.

Part of the problem was that U.S. tariffs were met with retaliation; even before the Depression struck, the world was engaged in a gradually escalating trade war. Making things even worse, U.S. tariffs put our World War I allies in an impossible position: We expected them to repay their huge war debts, but our tariffs made it impossible for them to earn the dollars they needed to make those payments.

And the trade war/debt nexus created a climate of international distrust and bitterness that contributed to the economic and political crises of the 1930s. This experience had a profound effect on U.S. policy after World War II, which was based on the view that free trade and peace went hand in hand.

So am I saying that Trump is repeating the policy errors America made a century ago? No. This time it’s much worse.

After all, while Warren Harding wasn’t a very good president, he didn’t routinely abrogate international agreements in a fit of pique. While America in the 1920s failed to help build international institutions, it didn’t do a Trump and actively try to undermine them. And while U.S. leaders between the wars may have turned a blind eye to the rise of racist dictatorships, they generally didn’t praise those dictatorships and compare them favorably to democratic regimes.

There are, however, enough parallels between U.S. tariff policy in the 1920s and Trumpism today for us to have a pretty good picture of what happens when politicians think that tariffs are “beautiful.” And it’s ugly.

Heat news

*  Heatwave in India, waiting for the monsoon to arrive:

* Heat, not drought, will cause crop losses in America in future:

Climate change-induced heat stress will play a larger role than drought stress in reducing the yields of several major U.S. crops later this century, according to Cornell University researchers who weighed in on a high-stakes debate between crop experts and scientists.

* Record breaking heat in parts of American this last Memorial Day weekend:

The South was sweating through Memorial Day with temperatures hotter than an average summer day.

The region has been under a heat dome since Friday. That's when high pressure aloft acts like a lid trapping the heat below, setting the stage for potentially life-threatening conditions.

Some locations, such as Columbia, South Carolina and Augusta, Georgia, broke triple-digit temperature records Monday.

Conscience and evolution

A book review at Nature starts:

What is our conscience, and where does it come from? In her highly readable Conscience, the philosopher Patricia Churchland argues that “we would have no moral stance on anything unless we were social”.

That we have a conscience at all relates to how evolution has shaped our neurobiology for social living. Thus, we judge what is right or wrong using feelings that urge us in a general direction and judgement that shapes these urges into actions. Such judgement typically reflects “some standard of a group to which the individual feels attached”. This idea of conscience as a neurobiological capacity for internalizing social norms contrasts with strictly philosophical accounts of how and why we tell right from wrong.

It seems she is very even handed in her criticisms of moral philosophers, hating both Kant:

She eviscerates moral philosophers who believe that moral rules can be utterly divorced from biology and find a foundation based on reasoning alone. She points out that the assumption that morality is not properly philosophically grounded unless it is universal is itself merely a rebuttable stipulation. She notes that decades of attempts to define universal rules have not succeeded. And finally, she shows that most moral dilemmas are just that: dilemmas in which it is impossible to satisfy all the constraints, and which put ostensibly universal principles into conflict with each other.

but she's no fan of utilitarianism too:

Neither does she have much use for utilitarians, with their simple calculus of adding up the greatest good for the greatest number. She rightly points out that living in a utilitarian society would be unsatisfying for most people, because we are not partial to all members of our society equally. We prefer our own groups, our own friends, our own families. For most people, as she argues, “love for one’s family members is a colossal neurobiological and psychological fact that mere ideology cannot wish away”. She concludes that utilitarianism is irresolvably at odds with how our brains function, given that we evolved to care more deeply about people we know than about those whom we do not.

Could be a good read...

My harsh but fair assessment of the Federal election results

I see that the final seat tally is 77 Coalition, 68 Labor and 6 others (1 of which is Green).

That's a net gain to the Coalition of ONE seat since the last election.

What a trouncing, hey? 

Unusual tactics

The Sydney Morning Herald claims:

An explicit sex video allegedly involving a NSW player has been leaked as part of a plot to sabotage the Blues on the eve of the State of Origin series.

If there's 90 minutes of such material around, their use in lieu of the match broadcast might even drawn in big Victorian viewing numbers for a change. 

Einstein in the tropics

Yesterday I learned, via a documentary on Channel News Asia about Singaporean history, that Einstein had briefly stopped off there in 1922, on his way to Japan.   He met with prominent Singaporean Jews (there were about 623 there at the time - more than I would have expected) to ask for donations for the creation of a Hebrew University.   He was already famous at this time, but got his Nobel prize a week after the visit.

Here's a photo of his reception with his wealthy hosts:

 Looking at the photo, the thing that immediately strikes me is how overdressed everyone seems to be for the tropical heat and humidity of Singapore, pre-airconditioning.   Europeans in the tropics in those days were made of sturdy stuff...

Pig guilt

I saw on the ABC last week that some Chinese pig farms have taken to burying hundreds/thousands of pigs alive as a culling method to try to prevent the spread of African swine flu.  

Googling the topic, I see that video has also circulated late last year apparently showing pigs in a pit (live, the video says, although they don't move much) being set alight.  

As a person lately feeling twinges of guilt over eating mammals, this is not helping.

He's very strange

As with Trump, Duterte (the globe's other nutty, democratically elected but authoritarian inclined national leader) says so many oddball or  offensive things that they are barely registering with the public anymore.

Hence, I have not noticed much attention given to this: 

THE PRESIDENT of the Philippines told a crowd in Japan he used to be gay but was cured by 'beautiful women' – before inviting four women on stage to kiss him.

President Rodrigo Duterte, 74, began his speech on Thursday by telling the crowd his critic Senator Antonio Trillanes IV was 'similar' to him because they were both gay.

But, he said, he had actually been 'cured' by beautiful women and 'became a man again' when he married his first wife Elizabeth Zimmerman, according to CNN Philippines.

I guess that, like Trump, bragging about his sexual history with women is very important to him.  He just throws in additional details of a sex life we really don't need to know about.

100 ongoing jobs?

Apparently, a Senator last week said Adani would have 100 ongoing jobs (after the construction phase, which will provide all of 1,500 jobs.)

Read about the extremely rubbery Adani figures at this post.

Electromagnetic pulse and the Right

Slate notes that the possibility of an EMP attack on America (by a nuclear weapon or two being let of high above the country) has become a long standing obsession of the Right in particular, and asks why.

I hadn't realised the apparent partisanship of this concern before, but they make a good case.

In any event, as the article does admit, preparatory action to harden electrical networks against it are a good idea, given that it may help with unexpected things like another Carrington event from the Sun.

Tornadoes, hurricanes and climate change

The USA seems to be having a lot of problematic weather lately - floods and tornadoes mainly.

Roy Spencer has been going for years about how people are wrong to think that climate change is making tornadoes worse - he talks about the wind shear component that should decrease as the atmosphere warms.   And I see that he has another go this year at pooh-poohing the idea that this year's high number is due to climate change (at Fox News, of course.) 

But mainstream climate scientists think the story is more complicated, and suspect that climate change is having some effect on tornadoes - although they admit this is a very difficult thing to study given their nature.

Here's a balanced article about it:   Is climate change fuelling tornadoes?   Some climate scientists are quoted, and the conclusions are:

Many of them pointed out that it can be tough to detect tornado trends because comprehensive records only go back a few decades and there's a lot of variability in tornado activity year to year. But they said some shifts are starting to show: while tornado intensity doesn't appear to have changed, there are more days with multiple tornadoes now, and there may be a shift in which regions are especially prone to tornadoes.

Even if future storms in a higher temperature don't spawn more tornadoes, there will likely be more damaging severe storms anyway:

 More broadly, Brooks said, researchers are looking at severe storm development, because even without tornadoes, giant thunderstorms can produce damaging hail and destructive winds. There's a robust signal that global warming will make the atmosphere more likely to spawn such storms.

 And the wandering jet stream is not off the hook, too:

Prolonged tornado outbreaks also could potentially be linked with global warming through a jet stream pattern that is becoming more frequent and that keeps extreme weather patterns locked in place, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research scientist Stefan Rahmstorf suggested on Twitter. 

Speaking of wind shear, I also see a recent paper on research indicating climate change may lead to more rapidly intensifying hurricanes (as well as wetter ones.)