Adam Creighton spinning faster than a wind turbine

Adam Creighton says today:



A couple of questions for Mr Creighton - no where in the article can I see an explanation of where the losses come from. I would have thought a steady process of erecting turbines and building other renewable energy plants, as well as adapting the network to be able to cope with it, would generate quite a few jobs. But I guess the report works out some way that it won't be a net employment benefit - it would just be good if you would tell us how that works.

Secondly - isn't the proper response, even if the job loss figure is plausible and not a beat up  - "what, only 6,000 jobs for a very sizeable increase in renewable energy? That's a fantastic deal".

The Coalition is said to be cutting 16,500 jobs in the space of 3 years. No Right wing economist is claiming that this is going to be a dire crush on the national economy, are they? So why then are you pretending that 6,000 jobs up to 2030 is a drama?  There are presently about 11,500,000 people working in this country.  Who knows what the figure will be by 2030, but at the moment 6,000 is about .05% of the work force.  

Lenore rips into Tony on climate change

Tony Abbott is no action man on climate change | World news | theguardian.com

This summary last week by Lenore Taylor explaining how Abbott is not serious about substantial action on climate change was very good.

And since then, we have a story in Fairfax today that Greg Hunt got rolled, in a big way, on spending on solar.

I don't know how Hunt lives with himself, really.  Supposedly devoted to emissions trading schemes, he was forced to reject them just so that Abbott could differentiate himself from Labor, and now can't even get good funding for solar up.

Edge reviewed, and back to the 60's

So, I'm sure everyone's waiting to hear what I thought about Edge of Tomorrow?  Hello....?

Anyhoo, saw it yesterday, and yes it's a good, solid science fiction-y treat.  Cruise is fine, so is Emily Blunt, and the film looks a million bucks.  (Actually, about 178 million bucks, apparently.)   It is actually good to see that a movie involving extensive battlefield violence can do it without showing much at all in the way of blood or gore. 

But I have two reservations - it does involve one very  improbable fall that doesn't kill our hero; and the very end was a little too, I don't know, not quite clever enough?   In fact, from a time bending point of view, I'm not at all sure that the story makes that much sense if one examines the ideas carefully, but it doesn't really matter.  The pace keeps you from pondering it anyway. 

Cruise's last science fiction film, the (I think) under-rated Oblivion was, for me, actually a little bit more enjoyable.  (Virtually no one is going to agree on that, but it did have more originality going for it.)   But once again, Tom deserves to be rewarded for working in pretty intelligent and well made science fiction as often as he does.

Apart from the thematic similarity to both Groundhog Day and Source Code, and the somewhat Starship Troopers feel of the exosketons and the way they drop from the sky, the one connection I haven't seen anyone make is to Captain Scarlet.  Yes, the Gerry Anderson show from the 60's in which our "indestructible" puppet hero got killed near the end of virtually every episode.  This always seemed to me to be a silly and somewhat depressing set up for a kid's show, but I watched it anyway.   It seems nearly every episode may be on Youtube, as well as the awful looking later CGI attempt to revive it, which seemed to be based on the bizarre idea that computer generated puppet like characters would go over better than actual puppets.

Here's an episode for your edification.  If you do nothing else, you should go to the end credits, involving many scenes of our hero being killed, but over a very groovy song:



And from the somewhat ridiculous to the extremely silly, it was while looking at Captain S on Youtube that I found a link to something called Solarnauts, an atrocious looking British pilot that was never made into a full series.   It stars one familiar face - a young Derek Fowlds who later was famous for "Yes Minister".

The model work is spectacularly bad, and as for a British concept of what the well dressed lady astronaut of the future will wear, try this:

I sense that all actors involved were seriously happy that the show was never picked up.   Anyway, here it is:


  

Update:  by an odd coincidence, I read today that the actor who provided the voice of Captain Scarlet has died.  

Rugby union explained

Continuing my series "Pretty obvious things from a disinterested observer's point of view about various codes of sport (and why can't anyone else see these?)".

A game of union was on TV last night, and once again I just could not shake the old verdict I made years ago:   this sport looks exactly like a group of 4 year old boys playing rugby league.  

True, the ball did not stay out of sight under a group of boys blokes for as long as I have noticed in some previous (rare) viewings, but it's still a silly looking game.

That is all.

An interesting suggestion

The Lack of Major Wars May Be Hurting Economic Growth - NYTimes.com

Tyler Cowen writes:

Counterintuitive though it may sound, the greater peacefulness of the
world may make the attainment of higher rates of economic growth less
urgent and thus less likely. This view does not claim that fighting wars
improves economies, as of course the actual conflict brings death and
destruction. The claim is also distinct from the Keynesian argument that
preparing for war lifts government spending and puts people to work.
Rather, the very possibility of war focuses the attention of governments
on getting some basic decisions right — whether investing in science or
simply liberalizing the economy. Such focus ends up improving a
nation’s longer-run prospects.

Here's the last few paragraphs:

There is a more optimistic read to all this than may first appear. Arguably
the contemporary world is trading some growth in material living
standards for peace — a relative paucity of war deaths and injuries,
even with a kind of associated laziness.

We can prefer higher rates of economic growth and progress, even while
recognizing that recent G.D.P. figures do not adequately measure all of
the gains we have been enjoying. In addition to more peace, we also have
a cleaner environment (along most but not all dimensions), more leisure
time and a higher degree of social tolerance for minorities and
formerly persecuted groups. Our more peaceful and — yes — more
slacker-oriented world is in fact better than our economic measures
acknowledge.

Living in a largely peaceful world with 2 percent G.D.P. growth has some big advantages that you don’t get with 4 percent growth and many more war
deaths. Economic stasis may not feel very impressive, but it’s something
our ancestors never quite managed to pull off. The real questions are
whether we can do any better, and whether the recent prevalence of peace
is a mere temporary bubble just waiting to be burst.

 Spotting a large, alien spaceship in the outer parts of the solar system, heading towards Earth, may give a good replacement sense of purpose.

Soccer explained

It has a very low scoring rate, making it a boring game to watch.

That billions of people can still nonetheless get excited about it tells us something about humans, but I don't know what.

That is all.

Ratgrets, I've had a few...

Been forgetting to post about this rather intriguing study that indicates rats suffer from regret. 

That is all.

A man who thinks like me

Could the demand for affordable housing be solved by going back to tents? - Architecture - Arts and Entertainment - The Independent

In a Culture Show special, Tents: The Beginning of Architecture, to be broadcast next week on BBC2, Tom Dyckhoff wonders whether tents could be a solution to today's housing crisis. The
presenter seems to think that tents – or at least more comfortable, more modern, and bigger versions – might be an option if we can't build enough flats and houses. Maybe one of architecture's oldest forms could have a life past festival season?

Cool.   My vision of a yurt led economic recovery of Australia might be shared by someone else...
 

ISIS explained

Interesting article from December on the rise of this ISIS group of fanatics currently trying to take over Iraq. 

In record heat news...

Anger rises as India swelters under record heatwave | Reuters

Swathes of north India are sweltering under the longest heatwave on record, triggering
widespread breakdowns in the supply of electricity and increasingly angry protests over the government's failure to provide people with basic services.

The power crisis and heatwave, which some activists say has caused dozens of deaths, is one of the first major challenges for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was elected
three weeks ago partly on promises to provide reliable electricity supplies.

In Delhi, where temperatures have hit 45 Celsius (113 Fahrenheit) for six days straight, residents marched through the streets in protests organised by opposition parties on Thursday. In the north of the city, people enraged by night-long outages clashed with police and torched a bus, media reported.

I would be surprised if it has only caused "dozens" of deaths.  It's hard to imagine a worse urban environment to be in during a 45 degree heatwave...

Update:  reported yesterday from beautiful downtown Doha:

In the coming days, the Qatar Meteorology Department has forecast that temperatures across the country will reach highs between 44C (111F) and 49C (120F) by noontime, the highest the nation has seen during the month of June in almost 52 years.

The rising temperatures have been attributed to the “deepening of the Indian Monsoon” over the Gulf coast.  In a statement, the MET said that 49C weather during this month is relatively unusual.

Honestly, why does anyone live in that part of the world?

Agreed

An adviser to Pope Francis says Catholicism is incompatible with libertarianism. He's right. - The Week

Libertarianism and Catholicism are not compatible, and the weird thing is that it seems to be only very conservative Catholics who think it is. 

Where is it?

Gee, Andrew Bolt seems late with his daily post about how ABC News isn't identical to The Australian's news and is thereby totally out of control. 

Can someone please explain this to me?

Well this is weird:   Adam Creighton has written a column in which he sounds pretty convinced by Piketty's book, which is probably causing several Right wing economists to wonder whether he's suffered a recent bump on the head. 

But in the very last paragraph, he says:

The deeper question is whether all this matters. Inequality in all countries has been falling. Also, Marx’s premise — falling real wages — was being refuted at the very time he was writing Das Kapital in the 1860s.

Wasn't the point of Piketty's work that there is strong evidence of rising inequality in the West, at least?  And that the Financial Times efforts to claim he had made serious mistakes had pretty much fallen on its face? 

Colorado Govenor recognises the danger, at least

In a Washington Post report, the Colorado (Democrat) Govenor with one of those peculiarly American names (Hickenlooper) at least sounds alert to the danger of the legalisation experiment:

Hickenlooper’s office has been monitoring marijuana usage through public polls. He said Tuesday there has been no noticeable spike in marijuana use by adults; most of those purchasing marijuana for recreational purposes were buying weed illegally before Jan. 1. What concerns him most, he said, is that those polls show evolving attitudes about marijuana among kids.

“Our biggest fear with marijuana, without question, is that it’s going to get in the hands of kids. Most of our polling doesn’t seem like there’s a big spike of adults using it. Most of the people that are using recreational marijuana were using it before. But when you look at kids and whether they think they’re going to smoke marijuana in the near future versus the old days, they seem to think it’s a lot less dangerous,” Hickenlooper said.

How's that Iraq going?

Mosul’s collapse is Nouri al-Maliki’s fault: Iraq’s prime minister failed to rule inclusively.

This seems like a straight forward explanation of what's going on in Iraq at the moment.  These  paragraphs at the end sum up the bigger picture:

The countries in the region have to form indigenous alliances to stave off these radical threats. The United States can help, but there is no way any American politician
is sending back tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of troops: They didn’t compel or convince Maliki to adopt a smart policy before, and they wouldn’t be able to do so now.

But this could be yet another sign of a breakdown in the entire Middle East. The war in Syria, which can be seen as a proxy war between the region’s Sunnis and Shiites, is now expanding into Iraq. The violence will intensify, and the neighboring countries will be flooded with refugees (half a million have already fled Mosul), with few resources to house or feed them.

Depending on what happens in the next few weeks, or maybe even days, we may be witnessing the beginning of either a new political order in the region or a drastic surge in the geostrategic swamp and humanitarian disaster that have all too palpably come to define it.

Of course, for some on the Right it's All Obama's Fault.  (I see that John McCain is even taking that line, and I used to think he was a more reasonable Republican.)  But then again, for Tea Party types, if they nick themselves shaving in the morning, I'm sure they curse Obama's name.