An old question considered

I missed watching this video put out by Sabine Hossenfelder some months ago:

It deals with, although too briefly, the question of whether it is possible to consider the 4 dimensional spacetime universe as being embedded in a higher dimensional universe.   I mean, the idea of extra dimensional objects (or beings) being able to pass through our lowly 3 (spatial dimension) universe was very popular for a while in 20th century science fiction, but I don't think it ever got a mention much in real physics, and I never understood why.   (And yes, I know that string theory was about compacted extra dimensions, but that's different.)

She said (with no further explanation, and starting at about the 6 min 30 second mark) that yes, you could consider our universe to be embedded in higher dimensions and to be expanding into them, but it (generally) takes 10 dimensions to make this work, and as they are understood (or "constructed"?) to be non observable, it is not scientific to think they are real.

Well, now I need to know why it takes 10 dimensions... 

Update:   OK, so according to this explanation in AEON, the 10 dimensions that Sabine mentions is about the extra compacted dimensions that are relevant to string theory - but as I said before, I didn't think compacted dimensions were relevant to the idea of our universe being embedded in extra dimensions that it can expand into.    Anyhow, here is the explanation:

If moving into four dimensions helps to explain gravity, then might thinking in five dimensions have any scientific advantage? Why not give it a go? a young Polish mathematician named Theodor Kaluza asked in 1919, thinking that if Einstein had absorbed gravity into spacetime, then perhaps a further dimension might similarly account for the force of electromagnetism as an artifact of spacetime’s geometry. So Kaluza added another dimension to Einstein’s equations, and to his delight found that in five dimensions both forces fell out nicely as artifacts of the geometric model.

The mathematics fit like magic, but the problem in this case was that the additional dimension didn’t seem to correlate with any particular physical quality. In general relativity, the fourth dimension was time; in Kaluza’s theory, it wasn’t anything you could point to, see, or feel: it was just there in the mathematics. Even Einstein balked at such an ethereal innovation. What is it? he asked. Where is it?

In 1926, the Swedish physicist Oskar Klein answered this question in a way that reads like something straight out of Wonderland. Imagine, he said, you are an ant living on a long, very thin length of hose. You could run along the hose backward and forward without ever being aware of the tiny circle-dimension under your feet. Only your ant-physicists with their powerful ant-microscopes can see this tiny dimension. According to Klein, every point in our four-dimensional spacetime has a little extra circle of space like this that’s too tiny for us to see. Since it is many orders of magnitude smaller than an atom, it’s no wonder we’ve missed it so far. Only physicists with super-powerful particle accelerators can hope to see down to such a minuscule scale.

Once physicists got over their initial shock, they became enchanted by Klein’s idea, and during the 1940s the theory was elaborated in great mathematical detail and set into a quantum context. Unfortunately, the infinitesimal scale of the new dimension made it impossible to imagine how it could be experimentally verified...

It goes on to explain that the idea got revived in the 1960's to help explain the weak and strong nuclear forces:

Kaluza’s and Klein’s ideas bubbled back into awareness, and theorists gradually began to wonder if the two subatomic forces could also be described in terms of spacetime geometry.

It turns out that in order to encompass both of these two forces, we have to add another five dimensions to our mathematical description. There’s no a priori reason it should be five; and, again, none of these additional dimensions relates directly to our sensory experience. They are just there in the mathematics. So this gets us to the 10 dimensions of string theory. Here there are the four large-scale dimensions of spacetime (described by general relativity), plus an extra six ‘compact’ dimensions (one for electromagnetism and five for the nuclear forces), all curled up in some fiendishly complex, scrunched-up, geometric structure.

And there's more explanation that Witten came up with 11 dimensions:

There are many versions of string-theory equations describing 10-dimensional space, but in the 1990s the mathematician Edward Witten, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (Einstein’s old haunt), showed that things could be somewhat simplified if we took an 11-dimensional perspective. He called his new theory M-Theory, and enigmatically declined to say what the ‘M’ stood for. Usually it is said to be ‘membrane’, but ‘matrix’, ‘master’, ‘mystery’ and ‘monster’ have also been proposed.

So, what about the type of extra "large" dimensions that was the subject of Flatland and science fiction?   Well, it might be there, as AEON explains:

In 1999, Lisa Randall (the first woman to get tenure at Harvard as a theoretical physicist) and Raman Sundrum (an Indian-American particle theorist) proposed that there might be an additional dimension on the cosmological scale, the scale described by general relativity. According to their ‘brane’ theory – ‘brane’ being short for ‘membrane’ – what we normally call our Universe might be embedded in a vastly bigger five-dimensional space, a kind of super-universe. Within this super-space, ours might be just one of a whole array of co-existing universes, each a separate 4D bubble within a wider arena of 5D space.

OK, that's more like it.

Update:   I realised on the weekend (because Youtube pointed it out to me) that Sabine Hossenfelder had done earlier videos on the extra dimensions idea, explaining the stuff that appeared in the AEON article above.   I didn't previously realise that the idea of compacted extra dimension had been around for so long, with string theory really just reviving it.

A funny comment on DH Lawrence

I really have little interest in DH Lawrence, but that doesn't stop me from reading a short review of a new biography about him.   I found this bit amusing:

Wilson points out that having rejected traditional religion, Lawrence more or less designed his own, though his understanding of just what this meant never seemed entirely clear. “For all his claims to prophetic vision,” Wilson writes, “Lawrence had little idea what was going on in the room let alone in the world,” she observes.

The Dreher chronicles

I've never especially followed what Rod Dreher might be saying:  he's quite popular with people at Catallaxy, which is a good sign he is a wrong headed and probably offensive conservative.  But I had noticed that he had become one of the Right's fanboys of Hungary and Orban - and this marks him as "conservative willing to discard democracy if it means propping up his losing side in the culture wars" and therefore not worthy of serious consideration.  

However, I can't resist noting the well deserved ridicule he has received on Twitter and elsewhere for his lack of a self filter when discussing circumcision.   It's also hard to believe he couldn't see the reaction he would get.  Is he just dumb, or did he run with "let's just see how much Twitter chatter I can provoke"?

Update:   One of the ideas of Dreher's that is lately often mentioned favourably at Catallaxy is his "Benedict Option":

There was a time when Christian thinkers like Dreher, who writes for The American Conservative, might have prepared to fight for cultural and political control. Dreher, however, sees this as futile. “Could it be that the best way to fight the flood is to … stop fighting the flood?” he asks. “Rather than wasting energy and resources fighting unwinnable political battles, we should instead work on building communities, institutions, and networks of resistance that can outwit, outlast, and eventually overcome the occupation.” This strategic withdrawal from public life is what he calls the Benedict option.

I find it a pretty laughable idea, but here's Melbourne's sometime depression sufferer Arky speculating on the same thing, more or less:

Human’s require each other for economic, social and procreation reasons. In order to enjoy all the benefits of human society you have to move in proximity to other people. However, as these times of raving covidity prove that more and more of our fellow humans are complete douche nozzles of the lowest order, the question sneaks into our consciousness: Is it really worth hanging around with these complete penises?

If in order to work you need an, at this point, open ended series of jabs with weird concoctions; if schooling means sending your child to a progressive indoctrination centre where they might also require an open ended series of those weird concoction stabs for zero net benefit to themselves; when socializing means being harangued by cultists; if being entertained requires also to be lectured; if indeed, the entire structure of the society you live within is riddled with that which you find repugnant; is the warmth worth the pain anymore?

Mind you, here he is in comments in a different thread:

I have said in other places that it feels mean to criticise a guy who writes posts explaining that he has suffered depression, but he now spends all his time catastrophising about how Australian government response to COVID has all been about e-vil control over the population, and despairing that people were not rebelling against it.  He is, of course, against COVID vaccination.  

I am sorry, but I have little sympathy for a person, whether prone to depression or not, if he does not have enough sense to contemplate that he might be the one who is wrong and being led up the garden path by bad faith, blind culture war warriors.   He also sounds like he has serious anger issues.

Anyway - my message to all the Benedict Option fans at Catallaxy (and libertarians anywhere longing to set up their new utopia in the middle of no-where):  please, go ahead and do it.  You're a danger to the rest of us.
 

 

Record dangerous rainfall, again

At Axios:

Northwestern Italy has been hit by record rainfall from a complex of thunderstorms, triggering flooding and mudslides, per AP.

By the numbers: 29.2 inches of rain fell in 12 hours on Monday in Rossiglione, Genoa province, just south of Milan. That's a new, all-time European record, meteorologists noted Tuesday.

 

Backup to GPS

I forgot to post about this when I saw it recently.   Given my view that satellite based global positioning is  an incredible thing that is greatly under-appreciated,  I just thought this was interesting:

SpaceX's Starlink satellites may be used for navigation and global positioning in addition to their core function of broadband Internet, a new research study suggests.

Engineering researchers external to SpaceX found a way to use the Starlink constellation signals for navigation similar to the capabilities provided by global positioning satellites (GPS), which are used in the United States and several other countries. The study represents the first time Starlink was used for navigation by researchers outside of SpaceX, the team members stated.

Researchers triangulated the signals from six Starlink satellites to fix upon a location on Earth with less than 27 feet (eight meters) of accuracy, the team reported in a statement. That's pretty comparable to the typical GPS capabilities of a smartphone, which typically pinpoints your spot on Earth to within 16 feet (4.9 m), depending on the conditions....

Kassas noted that Starlink's accuracy, using this methodology, will increase as more satellites in the fleet fly to orbit. SpaceX has about 1,700 working satellites today, the team stated, but the company hopes to launch more than 40,000 into orbit. (Recent launches have been delayed due to a liquid oxygen shortage induced by higher medical needs during the COVID-19 pandemic.)

The researchers suggested this method of using Starlink navigation could supplement traditional GPS navigation, the latter of which has vulnerabilities. Since GPS has been around for a generation (more than 30 years) and has a well-known signal, it is easy to use on smartphones or vehicles — but also more "vulnerable to attacks", the team stated.

 

Economists, big coins, and the theory of money

I'm just thinking out loud here, so don't shoot me anyone who has studied economics and thinks I don't know what I'm talking about:   it seems to me a serious problem for the field of economic theory if economists cannot agree on the effects of something as big as the Trillion Dollar Coin gambit if it were actually used in the USA. 

Here's a Washington Post article about it, explaining some points succinctly:

What’s the downside to the $1 trillion coin?

Experts are not entirely sure, mostly because the idea is entirely theoretical.

A major concern for economists is hyperinflation. Minting the $1 trillion coin would be like creating money out of thin air. When all that new money poofs into existence, the other currency in circulation becomes less valuable. That could hurt consumers, who are already dealing with price inflation.

Then there’s the question of what a $1 trillion coin would mean for U.S. monetary and fiscal policy. Monetary policy means making decisions about the money in the economy. That’s mostly left up to the Federal Reserve, which is somewhat insulated from political tinkering. Fiscal policy means making decisions about what the government spends money on. That’s an entirely political process left up to Congress and the president.

The $1 trillion coin would completely mix the two. It would have the president use monetary policy (creating new money) to solve a fiscal problem (the government is running out of borrowing capacity). Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said Tuesday that such a move “compromises the independence of the Fed.”....

“This is equivalent — the platinum coin is equivalent to asking the Federal Reserve to print money to cover deficits that Congress is unwilling to cover by issuing debt. It compromises the independence of the Fed, conflating monetary and fiscal policy,” she said. “And instead of showing that Congress and the administration can be trusted to pay the country’s bills, it really does the opposite.”

On the inflation side, we get these competing views:

 And this end one might have a point:

Is that at the heart of this, really?   That economics still has no good theory of what creates money and how it "works"?   I had a post about an article that argued this in 2019 - but I think Noah Smith, whose opinion seems pretty well informed, was not impressed. 

 

 

Yep, no change

So how's the Murdoch greenwashing announcement going?:

I do have to say, though, regarding the European and Chinese energy shortages:   I have never really understood how cold climate countries can show that they are really serious about zero carbon emissions (without nuclear) until they come up with the plan for dealing with their freezing winters with renewable energy.   I mean, years ago, I was saying that it seemed odd for a cloudy winter country like Germany to be putting too much reliance on home solar.   Sure, it might work well enough for half the year, but be of pretty limited utility for the part of the year where energy is really needed just to keep warm.

As I too am still not keen on nuclear, I suspect that, apart from extra wind power (which does not always work in winters), the only path forward for these countries to be a combination of long distance transmission of solar power (turn a few arid countries in North Africa into giant solar farms with cables running into Europe - it's not like they're doing anything very useful with the land anyway), plus utility scale storage.  I think - just a hunch - that flow batteries may be the way to go there - maybe some in the African countries itself, and some in Europe.

As for Australia - we can do the same, but on smaller scale, since not that much of the country gets that cold.   Still, we have the natural advantage of a northern part of the country enjoying dry, sunny winters,  which could supply winter power to the colder, cloudy winter parts of the country.   And, to a degree, vice versa in summer.

I think there is also much greater scope in Australia for domestic scale batteries - really, I don't see why the government just doesn't mandate home scale storage in all new house builds.  Economy of scale, you know.

Yes, we need to talk about..nurses

Nurses - (mostly) lovely people, doing a job that we all deeply appreciate when we need their services, and in many cases working under trying conditions: but gee it's disturbing how many of them are nonetheless capable of holding deeply unscientific views even on matters of medicine.  

I think this has always been the case - certainly I remember from my 20's (when for a time I used to socialise with nurses who I met through work and our communal living arrangements) that they could come out with some wacky stuff at times.  I have seen more than one doctor with a somewhat strained relationship with nurses too, for pretty much the same reason.

So I know that we can usually get by with ignoring some dubious beliefs they may express (and God knows we also need to ignore males in certain professions [*cough* engineers] when they get particularly prone to idiosyncratic and unwarranted certainty about matters outside of their expertise), but my toleration level for nurses who are against COVID vaccine mandates is non-existant.

Sack them, sack them, sack them.   

And I find it really outrageous that there are opportunistic Right wing aligned "workers associations", masquerading as "unions", which are trying to make political mileage out of pandering to them:

A set of “fake unions” with links to current and former Liberal and National party figures are capitalising on anti-vaccination fears to recruit doctors, teachers and nurses and exploit dissent within the labour movement about mandatory vaccinations.

Queensland-based Red Union claims nurses from Victoria and NSW are flocking to join its associations, which it says are adding more than 200 members a day amid fears of vaccination orders. In NSW, Liberal Party member John Larter is setting up three workers’ associations to compete with established unions for allied health, policing and paramedics.

Not much more to say about this, as no one is going to convince me I am wrong.   But I do note this, from the Onion, as a particularly wry take on it:

 

Facebook too big to fail?

Kevin Kruse tweeted:

and got a lot of pushback in comments that people use it for business, finding homes for animals in urgent need of shelter, and otherwise socially isolated people use for keeping in contact.   And lots say "of course I only use it responsibly."

I find this a bit irritating - it sort of suggests that people were highly unconnected socially before the internet.   Maybe some were - but of course, it is very likely that there was more personal contact back in the day, too.    

I think people really need to have less of a "too big to fail" [or, more accurately, "too big to be forced to change the way it operates] attitude towards Facebook - there are ways of alternative online networking that maybe have a modest degree of greater inconvenience, but we're not talking re-inventing the wheel totally here.

All of this is on back of the 60 Minutes whistleblower story about Facebook.  This Gizmodo summary is good:

9 Horrifying Facts From the Facebook Whistleblower's New 60 Minutes Interview

The first one seems pretty big to me:

Haugen explained to 60 Minutes how Facebook’s algorithm chooses content that’s likely to make users angry because that causes the most engagement. And user engagement is what Facebook turns into ad dollars.

“Its own research is showing that content that is hateful, that is divisive, that is polarizing, it’s easier to inspire people to anger than it is to other emotions,” Haugen told 60 Minutes.

“Facebook has realized that if they change the algorithm to be safer, people will spend less time on the site, they’ll click on less ads, they’ll make less money,” Haugen continued.

Now, of course, years and years of reading Catallaxy and its later spawn has shown me that any online community can spend most of its time on re-posting to each other stuff that is designed to re-enforce anger, so its not as if Facebook stopping that aspect is going to kill all problems with the net.

But gee, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.  

As for the site being down suddenly earlier today, I laughed at this suggestion:

 

 

 

Transparent oceans?

This had crossed my mind recently when thinking about Australia and nuclear submarines:  it's a little surprising that they haven't worked out ways to see further into the oceans yet, at least deep enough to detect submarines.   I mean, they do all this sophisticated stuff to look inside buildings with cosmic muons now.   Is there any chance of that being usefully used in the oceans?

Anyway, a report in the Guardian says that, yeah, to a large extent (although it is very short on details) the oceans may be "transparent" to submarines by mid century.

The Australian National University’s National Security College report Transparent Oceans? found that transparency is “likely or “very likely” by the 2050s, a decade after Australia’s new fleet of nuclear-powered subs is due to enter service.

A multidisciplinary team looked at new sensor technology, underwater communications and the possibility of tripwires at choke points. They also examined new ways to detect chemical, biological, acoustic and infra-red signatures, finding that even with improvements in stealth submarines will become visible.

I haven't got time to look at that link yet, but maybe later.

A very important video about fusion (and it's not good news for energy techno optimists)

It's pretty amazing that we all had to wait for this very clear explanation of how the fusion research community loves to have the public confused (or actually misled) about where they hope to get to with the fantastically expensive ITER project.

Watch it all - I think that it's actually a Right wing politician in America could legitimately call a scientific scandal, were it not for the time they spend on imaginary scandals:

While we're in a tearing up contracts mood, maybe just go Japanese?

Seems pretty obvious to me that we are not going to build our own nuclear submarines in Australia:

Australia's switch to nuclear-powered submarines is prompting a government push for the fleet to be built faster, possibly at the expense of local industry content, to make up for time lost under the now-scrapped French deal. 

I mean, why bother if you are never going to build your own reactors - and I am pretty sure we are not going to go to the trouble of doing that.

The whole complexity of the Australian submarine deal was trying to do it in a way to keep shipbuilding jobs here.   But submarine building is surely such a specialised thing, why bother trying to keep expertise here when you only need it for a small fleet?  

I am therefore dubious about the whole US/UK nuclear sub deal.   

Why not work with another country, closer to us, sharing our own regional interests, and just let them build us some convention subs that are quieter than nuclear anyway?

Hence - it pains me to say it, but Tony Abbott might have had the right instinct on something for once - why not go for the Japanese building us a fleet, but not the Soryu class, their latest design instead?: 

Like the last two boats of the Soryu class, the Taigei will be equipped with lithium-ion batteries as a power source. Japan has conducted extensive research into the use of lithium-ion batteries onboard submarines since the early 2000s, and says they require less maintenance and are capable of longer endurance at high speeds while submerged, compared to lead-acid batteries.

Japan is the only known country to have operational submarines using lithium-ion batteries.

I like the idea of something as ubiquitous as lithium ion batteries powering a submarine; although I trust they have figured out the issue with them occasionally bursting into flame.   But it is pretty rare in mobile phones, isn't it?

And look, they're even politically correct:

The Taigei subs also have another important new feature: all-gender bathrooms. Japan is following the U.S. Navy’s lead in integrating women into the submarine force, and Taigei will have bathrooms for both men and women. The issue isn’t just gender equality, but also the country’s declining population, which is creating a smaller pool of potential recruits. Opening subs to women effectively doubles the number of people that could serve in the Maritime Self Defense Force.

It's pretty incredible, really:  countries may want plenty of submarines, but have trouble finding people willing to work in them.

And what about the cost?   

Japan has plans for two more Taigei-class submarines, and has asked for $654.1 million for one more boat in the Defense Ministry’s latest budget request.  

Assuming that is US dollars, sounds like the cost of one is roughly $1 billion AUD?  

But we were planning on spending $90 billion on French submarines?   

Gee -  how many people does building subs here employ?  Some government paper says:

The naval shipbuilding plan indicated that construction of the Future Submarine Program (FSP) is expected to sustain around 1,100 Australian jobs in direct build and around 1,700 Australian jobs through the supply chain.

So, tops, 3,000 or so people?

You could pay them a tax free income of $100,000 per year for $300 million per annum.    Times a 20 year project - $6 billion.

Plus, say, 10 Japanese subs at about $1 billion each - grand total of $16 billion?

I have just saved the government $74 billion...

 

Things I didn't know about the potato

In a free to read article from The Economist's 1843 magazine:

Scientists reckon that potatoes originated in the Peruvian Andes. It was probably from here that the first ones were ferried back to Europe in the 16th century by Spanish conquistadores.

Europeans at first treated potatoes as a botanical curiosity, and mostly used them to feed livestock. Over time, however, they became a staple in many countries. But the Peruvian strains of potatoes were used to a consistent 12 hours of equatorial sunlight – they’re now known as “short-day potatoes” – and fared poorly in the longer but weaker summer sun of higher latitudes in Europe. Nevertheless, Europeans became so hooked on spuds that when an epidemic of potato blight hit crops in the mid-19th century, it caused the “great famine” in Ireland and beyond.

 After the famine, most farmers in Europe switched to the “long-day” species native to Chiloé. It is these Chilean varieties that, through decades of micro-evolution and selective breeding, developed into the common spuds we now see in our supermarkets. Most potatoes these days are grown in Europe and Asia: China, India and Russia are the three top producers. The citizens of Belarus, Ukraine and Latvia are the most voracious consumers, eating around 500g of potatoes a day each, or two large spuds. Yet more than 90% of modern potato varieties cultivated across the world today can be traced back to Chiloé.

It explains at the start of the article:

Off the coast of northern Patagonia, some 1,220km south of the capital of Chile, lies an island shaped like a peanut. The patchwork farms and wood-shingled churches of Chiloé lie below moody skies that often unleash horizontal raindrops amid howling winds. Get enough drizzle in your eyes to blur out the volcanoes in the distance, and you’d swear the radiant green hills belonged not in South America, but half a world away in Ireland. And just like Ireland, the staple crop on Chiloé is the potato.

Seems odd that I don't recall reading about this Very Important Island before.   

Here it is:

 

 

 

This is what "threat to democracy" looks like

From a Washington Post piece:

We know from the Bob Woodward and Robert Costa book “Peril” that the country came closer to a stolen presidential election than was previously reported. President Donald Trump’s lawyer John Eastman advised Vice President Mike Pence that he would be justified in single-handedly accepting some fake alternative slates of electors for states that Joe Biden won — on the grounds of supposed fraud in various states — and simply declare Trump the winner of the election. Pence would have done so on Jan. 6, when he sat in his ceremonial role as president of the Senate. Pence supposedly seriously considered the possibility, only to reject it upon getting sounder legal advice.

These machinations involving Pence came on top of at least 30 direct Trump contacts with election officials, elected officials and others to cajole Republican state legislatures to send in those alternative slates of electors. (None did, but Eastman’s plan pretended that they had.)

We dodged a bullet last time, and things are much worse now. Election officials have been leaving their jobs as they face threats of violence and harassment, and some of the people who will replace them have bought into the “big lie” that the 2020 election was stolen. Those are the people who will be in charge of counting the votes in some places next election. Simply put, we face a serious risk that election results will not reflect the will of the people in 2024 or some other future American presidential election.

The article goes on to argue for steps which should be taken to protect future elections from such risk, but you can go read that at the paper.

 

Same as it ever was...

But it's still depressingly bad political games.

We're dealing with idiots, Part 2

I think this is Gab, a long time resident at Catallaxy:

Am I being too mean?  Is this idiocy, or just culture war tortured logic that is flabergasting to witness?

I'm sticking with idiocy.   Oh ok:  "Why not both?"

 

Combining solar power and agriculture - actually happening?

Back in 2015 I noted that I had been wondering for some time why you couldn't combine massive solar farms and grazing and agriculture - just by setting up the panels on higher steel framework.   Some crops might even do better in the middle of summer with a bit of shade - who knows?  A lot of cows and sheep would appreciate it, too.

It would seem from this video (a few months old now) that the idea is still being researched:

 

Seems kind of obvious to me that it's a good idea in those parts of Australia which you want to retain good quality land for agricultural purposes.

Now I wonder when anyone will listen to my oft repeated suggestion that Wivenhoe Dam near Brisbane should be at least a third covered in floating solar panels?

Liberal Mormons on the rise?

An article at the Washington Post:  The Rise of the Liberal Latter-Day Saints seems interesting, but I haven't read it word for word yet.

I sometimes wonder why I have a generally sympathetic attitude towards this invented religion.   I think it's because I also find appeal in the Asiatic reverence for ancestors, and the idea that their care and interest in their living descendants extends indefinitely.   Mormonism is like a syncretic combination of that with Christianity, I guess.  

Sure, in mainstream Christianity, perhaps especially in Catholicism, you can also have the belief that the souls of parents or relatives are watching over you; but it's not as intense as it could be.

I trust our domestic terrorist experts in Canberra have placed New Catallaxy on watch

Last night, two or three of the blokey blokes who comment at Dover Beach's (appalling "conservative" Catholic) reincarnation of Catallaxy were talking about having big arguments with their wives because they (the wives) had decided to get COVID vaccinated after all.  How tragic for them [/sarc]. Of course, they don't recognise that what their spouses doing so is only likely to aid their own health future.  As I say, we're dealing with idiots.

Then this morning, local Queensland nutjob, truck driver and pub musician has come over all sympathetic to "whatever it takes", including assassination, presumably: 

He's been expecting the end of the West for years now, even before COVID, but it having come from China has given him all the push he needed into mulling and promoting political violence.

The comment got 4 likes, by the way.

China and crypto

A succinct explanation at Axios of China banning crypto and the likely future of the technology.

I agree with the sentiment at the end - there is no way China, or other nations, are going to let private currencies make too much of an inroad.   Nor should they.

We're dealing with idiots

Hope it's not faked though.

Some commentary on the Arizona "audit"

I've been looking around for articles debunking the "we haven't proved fraud but this might be fraud" style claims of the Arizona election audit:

Arizona ‘audit’: A multitude of unsubstantiated claims and no proof of fraud

 Five takeaways from Arizona's audit results

Trump pretends Arizona election audit findings didn't completely embarrass him 

And in this one:

The goal was to substantiate a new consensus Republican belief that Democrats cannot win elections legitimately, and that any victory they notch must be somehow tainted. It is not a coincidence that the places where audits have focused are those, like Maricopa County, or Harris County, Texas, or Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, with high levels of minority voters, who can be disparaged—mostly implicitly, but occasionally more directly—as illegitimate participants in the polity. Trump has been the foremost proponent of the theory, but he’s been joined by eager sycophants, demagogues, and conspiracists.

 

Meatballs noted

We had 500 g of very nice looking beef mince, and I wanted to do something different.  Not sure why, but I don't think I have ever made my own Italian style (or more accurately, American Italian, I think) meatballs and spaghetti before. 

I followed roughly this recipe, except I used milk to soak the bread, and then following an idea from another online recipe, added about 100g of frozen (de-thawed and squeezed dry) spinach to add something other than protein to them.   (Also lots of parsley.)  

And for the sauce - used a 700ml bottle of Coles branded passata with basil in it.  It was surprisingly nice all by itself (and at $1.95 a bottle, made me wonder why we don't just use it all the time for pasta sauce.)   Fried an onion and some garlic and then put the passata in, and half a cup of water.  And the browned meatballs.   And chilli flakes, as per the recipe.  But didn't worry about other herbs - it was flavourful enough.  All worked out well indeed.   

Given their soft texture (which is what you really want), it does mean that imitation meat meatballs should do a good job too.  I have had some vegan type meatballs at Ikea, actually, and they weren't bad.  I should look up some recipes for vegetarian meatballs.

He won't fit through a standard door soon if that hat gets any bigger

True, that...

I also recommend his review of a book about China's problems...

https://davidfrum.com/article/china-s-trapped-transition

The answer to a labelling problem - more labelling!

So my twitter feed yesterday had some tweets about BiVisibilityDay, which I gather is something relatively new and a reaction to bisexual people getting annoyed at people saying "no, you're just gay (or straight) in denial.  You can't be trusted".

It feels like the intensity of interest in labelling of sexualities (and now, genders) is never going to level out.   I think the reason people can legitimately find it irritating is because it seems to be (for want of a better way of putting it) a passive aggressive way to be narcissistic.  "Call me by the gender I know I am";  "I'm pansexual, and that's subtly different from bisexual" etc.  And in all cases "this is really important to me.  This is who I am." 

So the problem I have with the bisexual pride lobby is that (it seems to me) the disrespect issues arise from an excessive social interest in labelling this one aspect of life, but they try to solve it by creating another type of label.   Why not, instead, attack the way people think about the importance of labelling desire?   

As I have written before, it seems (if you can trust some modern historians) that older societies had a more pragmatic, and less narcissistic, attitude:  one in which sex (and to a degree, relationships) was/were something people did, rather than being thought of as the key to who they are. 

Religion and coping

From The Economist:

RELIGION IS THE sigh of the oppressed creature…it is the opium of the people.” So wrote Karl Marx in 1844. The idea—not unique to Marx—was that by promising rewards in the next life, religion helps the poor bear their lot in this one.

A paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Jana Berkessel of the University of Mannheim, in Germany, and her colleagues takes a statistical look at the claim. Ms Berkessel's curiosity was piqued by a counter-intuitive finding in development economics. Researchers know that low socioeconomic status correlates with poor mental health. The assumption was once that, as places became richer, this effect would weaken. Being poor in a rich country was presumed better than being poor in a poor one.

But that has turned out not to be true. Abundant evidence suggests the relationship between status and mental health is stronger, not weaker, in rich countries than in poor ones. Ms Berkessel, who studies the psychological effects of religion, noticed that economic development is also inversely correlated with religiosity—the richer a country, the more godless it tends to be. Perhaps that was driving the change?

To check, she and her colleagues analysed three surveys covering 3.3m people in 156 countries. This set of data reproduced the finding that economic development amplifies the link between mental health and status. It also supported the idea that religiosity could attenuate that effect. Among rich countries, for instance, those with higher levels of self-reported religious belief had a weaker relationship between status and mental health.....

The upshot is that religion seems to protect people from at least some of the unpleasant effects of poverty. Exactly how is less clear. One hypothesis is that religious doctrine is directly protective. After all, many of the world’s biggest religions have a sceptical attitude to wealth. Alongside the well-known biblical verses about camels, needles and a rich person’s chance of entering the pearly gates, the researchers point out that the Bhagavad-Gita, a Hindu holy book, says “The demoniac person thinks: So much wealth do I have today, and I will gain more.” Similar sentiments can be found in the Koran and in some Buddhist texts. If God teaches that the wealthy are spiritually corrupt, or will get their comeuppance on Judgment Day, then poverty may seem less of a burden.

But there are other possibilities. Ms Berkessel points out that organised religion offers a social-support network which might help attenuate the effects of low status, whether or not its members really believe everything their holy texts say about wealth. Her next research project, she says, will look at exactly this point.

 

 

The main thing I know is that no one knows enough

Gee, I have been saying this ever since the COVID pandemic started:  the global patterns of COVID infection, illness, death and recovery (and the waves of these we have seen) always indicated that an enormous number of unknown or unclear factors must be going on.   Add to that the speed with which research has had to be done to develop and assess vaccines and treatments - it's been a real scientific and policy makers nightmare.

To bolster my assessment, German Lopez talks about the Florida surge, and how, in many respects, it was hard to understand:

... Florida’s example complicates any story of recent Covid-19 surges that focuses solely on reopenings and vaccinations. Something else seems to be going on, and experts aren’t totally sure what. “There are things that, to be honest, we don’t fully understand,” Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told me.

We don’t know everything about why Covid-19 cases rise, and we don’t know everything about why they fall, either. David Leonhardt and Ashley Wu at the New York Times recently demonstrated that the coronavirus appears to follow two-month cycles in its rises and falls.

Yet, experts told them, it isn’t clear why. “We still are really in the cave ages in terms of understanding how viruses emerge, how they spread, how they start and stop, why they do what they do,” Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, said.

Experts point to some possible factors that contribute to trends in Covid-19 — widely discussed ones like vaccination and precautions, but also less covered issues like the weather, geographic concentration, and luck. But they acknowledge that there could be something going on that we just don’t know of or understand yet.

Figuring out all of this is crucial: It could be the difference between enabling and preventing not just the continued spread of Covid-19 but perhaps the next pandemic, too.

What's a government meant to do with such uncertainties, which make it incredibly easy for any policy mix they come up to be attacked?   

I'm not saying that governments are above criticism for policies - and certainly Right wing governments who take nonsensical attitudes towards punishing people who want to self protect are being idiotic - but my attitude towards criticism of government policies that are too strict remains slanted towards being sympathetic for the terrible difficulty they have in trying to work out what is effective and appropriate.  

Racist Right watch

Tucker Carlson Blows Up Murdoch’s White Supremacy Denial on Air

Chait is correct.

People are fickle

Sure, the manner of the Afghanistan withdrawal was not a great look.   But the vaccine mandate provisions still hold majority support, I think.

Yet Gallup shows up a big drop in the approval rating of Joe Biden to a Trumpian level of 43%.  Interestingly, the biggest drop amongst Independents - but then again, given the state of politics at the moment, no one really expects any movement at all from Republicans, do they?   And don't Republicans who like to pretend they are free thinkers register Independent - I think I remember Bill O'Reilly used to say he was one.

Anyway, even Presidents who are seen retrospectively as popular and successful can have periods of low approval.

As far as I am concerned, nothing Biden has done warrants this.  

Reactionary Right watch

Currency Lad, as clueless about the laws of armed conflict (and, I might add, morality) as ever:

 He and fellow conservative Catholic dover beach also think this:

 

Uhuh.   

And the race nationalism basis of the Right is on display at another new Catallaxy:

Can't we start negotiating with the USA for allowing an immigration swap of Redneck Australians for illegal Mexicans, or something?  I know which I would prefer to be around...

How the Polynesians spread

A new genetic study helps confirm the way the Polynesians spread through the Pacific:

The analysis suggests canoes set sail from the shores of Samoa—more than 2000 kilometers north of New Zealand—around 800 CE. The explorers arrived first on Rarotonga, the largest island in a chain now called the Cook Islands. Successive explorers moved in all directions, island hopping over the course of centuries and eventually reaching all the way to Rapa Nui, 6500 kilometers from Samoa and 3700 kilometers off the coast of Chile, by 1210 C.E.

The seems to have narrowed down the timeline considerably:

Archaeologists already had hints of how this great exploration took place. Studying the styles of stone tools and carvings, as well as languages, of the people on the various islands had suggested the original ancestors traced back to Samoa and that the expansion ended halfway across the ocean in Rapa Nui, or Easter Island. But they disagreed on whether it happened in a few centuries, beginning around 900 C.E., or started much earlier and lasted 1 millennium or more.

What's this about Native American ancestry?:

And because the genetic evidence allowed the researchers to reconstruct the order in which the islands were settled, they could spot connections between islands that might not seem intuitive based on the geography. For example, they argue that three island cultures known for carving massive stone statues—Rapa Nui, Raivavae, and the North and South Marquesas—shared a common founder population in the Tuamotu Islands, even though they are thousands of kilometers apart and geographically closer to other parts of the Pacific.

Those three islands also hold the earliest genetic traces of Native American ancestry among Polynesians. That suggests ancient Polynesians first contacted the Americas around 1100 C.E., when the seafarers were beginning their last, and longest, expeditions. “That’s something no one could have predicted through archaeology or oral history,” Moreno Estrada says.

Oh, here's another article explaining that part:

Researchers, published in Nature, sampled genes of modern peoples living across the Pacific and along the South American coast and the results suggest that voyages between eastern Polynesia and the Americas happened around the year 1200, resulting in a mixture of those populations in the remote South Marquesas archipelago. It remains a mystery whether Polynesians, Native Americans, or both peoples undertook the long journeys that would have led them together. The findings could mean that South Americans, hailing from what’s now coastal Ecuador or Columbia, ventured to East Polynesia. Alternatively, Polynesians could have arrived in the Marquesas alone having already mixed with those South American people—but only if they’d first sailed to the American continent to meet them.

Alexander Ioannidis, who studies genomics and population genetics at Stanford University, co-authored the new study in Nature. “The genes show that the Native Americans who contributed came from the coastal regions of Ecuador and Columbia,” he says. “What they can’t show, and we don’t know, is where exactly it first took place—on a Polynesian island or the coast of the Americas.”

 So, some Native Americans might have made it to, say, Rapa Nui, kon tiki style.  I thought that had been discredited - but it was more the idea that all of Polynesia came from the East, rather than the West.  

Some interesting reading

An Ezra Klein tweet led me to this review of a monograph about democracy.   Some extracts:

A central principle of the new Biden Administration is the idea that for democracy to survive our globe’s cascading crises and a shifting geopolitical landscape, marked by the rise of China, democracies need to do something quite fundamental: They must deliver for their citizens. Democracies can justify themselves if they can effectively master the multiplying calamities sweeping the globe such as climate change and the COVID epidemic.

In this new monograph, a follow up to his influential 2016 book What is Populism?, Princeton political theorist Jan-Werner Müller probes the potential of such justifications for democracy and finds them important but insufficient. The problem, Müller notes, is that, in democracies, economic growth rates will inevitably falter from time to time. Autocracies may sometimes prove superior at problem-solving, even if only in the short run, delivering peace, health, and stability to their citizens.

If this is so, can democracy still be justified beyond this purely instrumental rationale? Put differently: Why should we value democracy on its own terms?

This book represents an effort to answer these questions. Müller builds on a long line of theorizing on what are sometimes called the “intrinsic,” as opposed to the “instrumental,” qualities of liberal democracy vis-à-vis authoritarianism. Instrumental justifications for democracy emphasize its immediate policy and material benefits for society while intrinsic justifications highlight the values and principles that make it self-justifying. Müller focuses on the latter but does so with an important twist. His focus is post-Trumpian America, Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey. Rather than weighing the political virtues of the West against Chinese or Singaporean authoritarian models, Müller’s starting point instead is to distinguish what he calls “real democracy” from Trump, Orban & co.’s variants of “fake” democracy. We see here that Trump’s turns of phrase haunt even the most distinguished of political theorists.

Müller’s debate-shaping 2016 book told us what defines “fake democrats,” and this book’s first chapter elaborates this thesis. What ties together the cast of characters—Orbán, Bolsonaro, Erdogan, Trump, Narendra Modi, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, and Benjamin Netanyahu—is that they are all politicians who claim they, and only they, represent the “real people” or the “silent majority.” This basic claim to a “moral monopoly” of the people is pernicious for democracy, Müller powerfully reminds us, because the political opposition can be easily cast as illegitimate and its supporters, even more dangerously, as not part of the “real people.” 

Sounds all very astute.  But I guess I shouldn't cut and paste too much.  But here's another key paragraph: 

The common thread—what we might term the “Müller Insight”—that runs from What is Populism? through to this book is the notion that in a healthy democracy, no group or individual ought to claim to speak exclusively on behalf of “the people.” If politicians or parties do this before an election, they are, in Müller’s view, populists who threaten to poison a democracy. If they do this after an election (the focus of this book), the damage can be even more extensive: A populist who claims to be the only authentic representative of the people also inevitably believes he can lose only if a political system is “corrupt and rotten.” If a populist faces his own demise, he is tempted to demolish the entire system.

The review notes that Muller talks a lot about the key role the internet, and the ease with which it allows politicians (and wannabe demagogues) to communicate directly to their followers, spreading disinformation and partisan lies.   That this has played an incredibly important role in the parties of the Right is obvious.

There is more at the review worth reading.  All good stuff.

Macro woes

I liked Noah Smith's latest free substack piece on macroeconomic theory.   Not that I have any great understanding of economics, but I still get the feeling that we a living through a theoretical crisis within the field that is not widely recognised yet, probably because economists don't like to admit their academic endeavour is built on sand.   

That's my working hypothesis, anyway...

 

China woes

It seems that there is not too much concern that China's property market woes and the collapse of Evergrande can provoke an international financial crisis.  Hope they're right.  

Here's another article's summary:

Many are concerned that losses would force bondholders to sell other investments or shed riskier assets to raise cash, hurting markets that may seem unrelated. The catchphrase being thrown about is “contagion,” with many worried about tightly connected global markets.

Not all analysts agree. Analysts at Barclays called such speculation “far off base” while acknowledging the probable spillover effects with economic implications.

“But a true ‘Lehman moment’ is a crisis of a very different magnitude” and Chinese authorities would need to make a series of policy mistakes in response to the crisis for this to be of the Lehman level, they added.

SocGen economists said investors seem to be “differentiating between safe and risky borrowers,” which at the moment would limit the spillover to the wider financial market. On the whole, the sector’s investment-grade index also remained largely stable, they added.

They agreed largely that China’s situation is “very different” as the property sector’s links to the financial system are “not on the same scale” and noted that the capital markets are not the primary means of funding. The message is that as long as the regulators step in, the situation is manageable.

“The lesson from Lehman was that moral hazard needs to take a back seat to systemic risk,” Barclays analysts wrote.

Update:  a very unspecific explainer in Washington Post notes this:

Another concern is credit markets. Evergrande has done so much borrowing, and so many lenders are at risk of getting burned, would its potential default have a ripple effect for other borrowers? On both of these questions, experts say, it’s still too soon to tell.

But troubling signs already are emerging: Remember, hundreds of millions of Chinese homeowners who could see their property values drop, meaning there’s a good chance they’ll rein in spending. Global consumer markets — on everything from clothes to electronics to food — rely on the prolific buying power of the Chinese middle class. If China is poised to spend much less on consumer goods, there will be economic ramifications around the world.

That bit in italics:  is that right?   I didn't really realise it was so significant on a global scale, seeing I always think of China as more the country getting rich by making stuff the West wants (and therefore driven by our consumers' demands, not their's) 

Update 2:   I have been waiting for a while for a review article about the incredible and sudden degree of Chinese government intervention into industry and society, and how it very much feels a bit like a Cultural Revolution (Lite, perhaps.)

I think this is the article I was looking for, from a couple of weeks ago in the Washington Post:

Xi Jinping’s crackdown on everything is remaking Chinese society

It starts:

The orders have been sudden, dramatic and often baffling. Last week, “American Idol”-style competitions and shows featuring men deemed too effeminate were banned by Chinese authorities. Days earlier, one of China’s wealthiest actresses, Zhao Wei, had her movies, television series and news mentions scrubbed from the Internet as if she had never existed.

Over the summer, China’s multibillion-dollar private education industry was decimated overnight by a ban on for-profit tutoring, while new regulations wiped more than $1 trillion from Chinese tech stocks since a peak in February. As China’s tech moguls compete to donate more to President Xi Jinping’s campaign against inequality, “Xi Jinping Thought” is taught in elementary schools, and foreign games and apps like Animal Crossing and Duolingo have been pulled from stores.

A dizzying regulatory crackdown unleashed by China’s government has spared almost no sector over the past few months. This sprawling “rectification” campaign — with such disparate targets as ride-hailing services, insurance, education and even the amount of time children can spend playing video games — is redrawing the boundaries of business and society in China as Xi prepares to take on a controversial third term in 2022.

 And further down:

The scope and velocity of the society-wide rectification has some worried China may be at the beginning of the kind of cultural and ideological upheaval that has brought the country to a standstill before.

Last week, an essay by a retired newspaper editor and blogger described the changes as a response to threats from the United States. “What these events tell us is that a monumental change is taking place in China, and that the economic, financial, cultural, and political spheres are undergoing a profound transformation — or, one could say, a profound revolution,” wrote Li Guangman.

The essay, picked up by China’s state media outlets, prompted comparisons with a 1965 article that launched China’s chaotic decade-long Cultural Revolution, and left even some in the party establishment worried.

Hu Xijin, the outspoken editor of the state-run Global Times, criticized the article as misleading and an “extreme interpretation” of the recent rush of regulatory orders that could trigger “confusion and panic.”  

Differences over the article may be a sign of deeper dispute within the party, according to Yawei Liu, a senior adviser focusing on China at the Carter Center in Atlanta, who wrote that such disagreement indicates “raging debate inside the CCP on the merits of reform and opening up, on where China is today . . . and about what kind of nation China wants to become.”

Update 3:   oh, another good piece in the Washington Post has dropped:

Anyone who has visited China over the past several decades has heard anguished stories from Chinese friends about the results of Mao Zedong’s social engineering in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. China spent 40 years recovering from those disasters to become a great, modern nation.

So, I can almost hear the gasps inside China, from the generation that lived through the nightmare years, as President Xi Jinping has moved down a Maoist path this year toward tighter state control of the economy — including “self-criticism” sessions for Chinese business and political leaders whose crime, it seems, was being too successful.

Xi’s leftward turn represents a major change in the management of the Chinese economy, in the view of a half-dozen experts I’ve consulted over the past week. It has the idealistic goal of “common prosperity” and a fairer distribution of China’s new wealth. But Xi will drive these changes using the ruthless instrument of an authoritarian, one-party state — and you can already see the purges and figurative “dunce caps” for those he views as obstacles.

How much is driven by Xi's own inflated views of himself?  Maybe a lot?:

Xi is a cunning and ruthlessly successful politician; since taking power in 2013, he has purged a generation of leaders in the Communist Party, the military, and the intelligence and security services to gain absolute control. His hubris is that, like Mao, he now seeks to become a man-God, whose thoughts are holy writ.

Xi’s unabated hunger for power is evident in his drive for a third term as party leader. That would break the two-term rule that has prevailed in China’s modern history and provided the checks and balances of group leadership. “China had solved the major problem of a one-party state — succession. Now they are un-solving it,” argues a former top-level U.S. national security official.

 

 

 

Funny earthquake tweet

 Gawd, some people are quick witted with the witty tweets:

 Update:  this also made me laugh:

Better than certain countries talking rank hypocrisy about human rights, I guess?

In what might a sign of the Apocalypse:

K-pop stars BTS dip into global diplomacy at UN gathering

I looked at the first couple of minutes of their talk, and I gotta say, they certainly "de-androgenised" their appearance for this event:

That is all...