Cool club

Australian life expectancy jumps to new highs | Australia news | The Guardian

Australians born now are expected to live longer than ever before.
Life expectancy for females at birth rose from 84.3 in 2013 to 84.4 last
year, while for males it jumped from 80.1 to 80.3, according to new
figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

There are only six other countries in the world where both men and
women have a life expectancy over 80 years, Beidar Cho from the ABS said
in a statement on Thursday.

Those countries are Japan, Italy, Switzerland, Iceland, Israel and Sweden.

“Australia has a higher life expectancy, at both the male and female
level, than many similar countries to ours such as New Zealand, the UK
and the US,” she said.

An alert

Although they have attractive packaging, and are from Canada, which I like to think has clean waters and nice fish, I do not care for Brunswick brand sardines at all.  (Too large, too smelly, needs salt.) 

That is all....

Busy

Update:  no reader has asked, but I tell you anyway:  created by putting a photo of a flower I had taken through some kaleidoscopic filter on an Android app, the name of which I currently forget.   I think the result is pleasingly psychedelic.

Still nuts

The fourth Republican presidential debate, explained - Vox

Amongst the other criticisms of this woeful bunch of Republican wannabe Presidents is this:

Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump have thus far all released
tax plans that are detailed enough to be assessed in terms of their
impact on Americans of different income levels. The plans all differ
slightly from one another, but they all have the same basic shape — huge
gains for the top one percent that dwarf what anyone else will get.

But the debate revealed that these are actually the
responsible, sober-minded plans in the field. Ben Carson continues to
insist that the government could be funded with a 15 percent flat tax — a
number that would yield a laughably inadequate level of revenue. Ted
Cruz and Rand Paul are all pitching plans centered around the
introduction of a Value Added Tax, a move that would likely raise
taxes for lower-income Americans (especially retirees) in order to
finance staggeringly large tax cuts for the wealthy. Carly Fiorina,
meanwhile, keeps insisting that she can deliver a three-page tax code
but can't quite seem to say what will be on the pages.

And Cruz wants to return to the gold standard.

Julia and the Old Gray Lady

Being Dishonest About Ugliness - The New York Times

How did Julia Baird get a gig doing opinion pieces for the New York Times?  At the risk of sounding bitchy, on the Drum she always seemed a pleasant enough person, but really rather dull as a host.  And this piece in the paper shares those qualities. 

The real lesson

...from this incident is probably more "it's likely to be counterproductive to use a public figure pretty widely regarded as a ****head (and a pretty aggro one at that especially when it comes to people he disagrees with on guns*) as your support person at an employer's disciplinary hearing."

Having said that, I would say it's a near certainty that the employee will win at the Fair Work Commission (which, incidentally, I didn't think libertarians had a lot of time for.)

*  Yes, we have a Senator who has said he agreed with the sentiment that John Howard "deserved to be shot" for his gun laws.

The Carson explanation

She's hardly my favourite writer, but I reckon Amanda Marcotte is right about Ben Carson:

His exaggerated tales of sin and redemption sound bizarre to most Americans, but they are par for the course in the evangelical circles that Carson is trying to win over...

Hammering messy real world experiences into trite fables about sin and redemption is standard operating procedure in conservative Christian circles. So is the exaggeration. Tales of your behavior before you were saved are embellished for maximum drama. What’s important is not the literal truth, but reinforcing fundamentalist notions that the world outside of the Jesus bubble is a depraved hellhole.

Take, for instance, Christine O’Donnell, the 2010 Republican candidate for Senate from Delaware. During her campaign, tape surfaced of her claiming she had been to a “Satanic altar” with “blood” on it during her days when she supposedly “dabbled into witchcraft”. The story was obvious nonsense and she tried to downplay its significance without coming right out and admitting what was likely true, which is that she had taken some silly incident from her youth and reformed it into a tale of Satanism and depravity with which to impress her fellow Christians.

Carson’s claim that he was a violent youth who renounced his sinful ways after praying has to be understood in this light. In Christian circles, the literal truth of such stories doesn’t matter nearly as much as their usefulness in spreading the word that Jesus is the cure for all your problems. A story about Jesus’s ability to save you from murder is just more memorable than, say, a tale of renouncing your habit of shoplifting.

A quote from a Gruen

I thought Nicholas' comment at his blog (arising out of that somewhat controversial paper about poor white Americans dying faster) was good:

Education is good, looking after those at the bottom of the ladder is good. Of course the left’s tendency to valorise ‘victims’ can go too far. I think it does and it’s a growing problem (#TriggerAlert you may not agree and this may trigger anxiety, depression and flashbacks to traumatic events in your childhood when you discovered you weren’t the only person in the world). But ethically it seems like so much less a crime than the right’s demonisation of those at the bottom and their valorisation of those at the top. Perhaps it’s also a practical mistake.

Yes, that last bit is about the ugly, poisonous influence of libertarian thought on the American Right that you see frequently at the Australian Tea Party blog Catallaxy.   I don't think the Right in America and Australia used to be like that.

More on the Lomborg deception

And Then There's Physics has his take on the Lomborg deceptive counsel of despair. 

I repeat my formula for Bill and Labor

I think it would be a trap for Labor to oppose any increase in the GST.   It also seems doubtful that they can do enough to increase revenue quickly enough (yes, Australia needs to both increase revenue and be more careful in spending) via superannuation tax concessions and welfare related changes (welfare restrictions not being Labor's strong point, exactly.)

I therefore repeat my common sense call:   compromise with a GST increase to 12.5% - it's sounds much better than 15% - and look at increasing its scope modestly.  Don't go overboard in compensation for the poor.   Also make changes to superannuation concessions.  Make changes to the negative gearing rules that ease in over a few years, don't try to do it in one big bang.

You might even get away with a modest carbon tax replacing Direct Action, but that is riskier, 'cos folks are too, too easily confused on this.  On the other hand, Labor has plenty of ammunition from Turnbull's own mouth as to how Direct Action can't work in the long run, and it is a hit to the budget bottom line.   (The problem is, of course, that just as Labor is too easily motivated to make a scare campaign of any GST increase, the Coalition is too easily motivated to do the same for any carbon pricing scheme.)

Electric powered death from the skies

Israel Is Already Selling Kamikaze Micro-Drones That Will Change Modern Warfare

I must go looking for a video of them in action.  Will add later if I find one...

Update:  here it is, the advertising blurb for this very futuristic weapon:



Update:  sorry, the video seems to have gone private since posting it here.   Maybe the company (or Israel) doesn't like the world to see how it operates?

And (some) people defend Lomborg

Indefensible Lomborg Analysis Misleads On Paris Climate Pledges, Ignores China | ThinkProgress

Pretty damning critique of Lomborgian analysis which was (as I guessed as soon as I saw Andrew Bolt promote it) simply designed to convince the gullible that the Paris conference is useless.

Fun physics

There's an essay on arXiv (Living in a Superposition) that is about a fun thought experiment.  Here's the abstract:

This essay considers a model quantum universe consisting of a very large box containing a screen with two slits and an observer (us) that can pass though the slits. We apply the modern quantum mechanics of closed systems to calculate the probabilities for alternative histories of how we move through the universe and what we see. After passing through the screen with the slits, the quantum state of the universe is a superposition of classically distinguishable histories. We are then living in a superposition. Some frequently asked questions about such situations are answered using this model. The model's relationship to more realistic quantum cosmologies is briefly discussed. 

Good question

What happened to passenger hovercraft? - BBC News

I did take the hovercraft service across the English channel in about 1986.   The article explains why they never caught on as widely as 1960's futurists may have expected.

The columnist with the common touch

I wonder what inspired Bolt to start telling us how well he has traveled?  I would have thought his occasional opera and art appreciation posts were distancing enough for most of his readership, but expanding it to "let's talk about the great places I have stayed" seems to be pushing it somewhat.