Even Japan requires common sense

Japan is an incredibly safe feeling place to visit, but even so:

A self-employed man in his 40s was robbed of ¥40 million in cash during a daylight mugging in Tokyo’s busy Ginza district Friday afternoon.

According to the Metropolitan Police Department’s Tsukiji Police Station, the mugging, believed to involve three men, took place on Suzuran Street in Chuo Ward.

A man hit the victim in the back and kicked him in the stomach before grabbing his bag filled with ¥72 million in cash, police sources said. Some of the cash fell out during the attack.

 Proof, I suppose, that there is no where in the world where it is a good idea to walk down a street carrying $875,000 AUD in cash in a bag.

(Odd how the story does not address why the victim was carrying this money around.)

A dream with an obvious interpretation

I was watching 24 Hours in Emergency last night on SBS, due to a lack of anything else to watch.

As far as reality medical TV shows go, it seems reasonably well done, if (naturally), intrusive of privacy.  But I was interested mainly in the story of a guy who in hospital after falling 40 feet from a tree, onto concrete, but lived to tell the tale.

In talking about his life generally, he explained that his mother had died when he was young - I forget the age, but it might have been around  3-5, I think, because he indicated he didn't really understand what was going on when the police arrived and the rest of the family started crying.  She had been killed by a drunk driver when at a petrol station.  (He said she was standing in front of her own car, and the drunk driver's car rear ended the car and it ran her down.)

Anyway, the son (now in his 20's?) said that a year after his Mum died, he started having recurring nightmares in which a dump truck would unload on - or run over? - a flower, and he would wake up feeling really devastated.

That seems to me to be an unusually clear case of a dream which seems to validate either Freudian or Jungian dream analysis as meaningful.  

I don't mean that I am completely cynical of dream analysis as an exercise - but cases where the dream has such an obvious hidden meaning, and one where it would seem the mind is sort of protecting itself from a full imagining of what happened,  I would still think are a bit unusual.

A winner...it seems

Gee, the Samsung 8 is getting good reviews:

The Galaxy S8 and plus-sized S8+ are absolutely brilliant smartphones. They're not without their flaws, but in everything from industrial design to internal hardware to software refinement, Samsung has knocked this one out of the park.

And:  

Gimmicks aside this is the best android smartphone you can buy

And:  

From the moment I picked up the S8 – and its larger, 6.2-inch sibling the Galaxy S8+ – I realised it was even more special than I expected. This is a phone that feels innovative, a phone that I can’t help but recommend

I would be nervous about carrying around a $1200 device in my pocket continually - but I've never lost or broken a phone before.  Maybe in two years time, if they've dropped below $1,000...

Roots endorsed

I am eating a packet now.  Very nice, especially if you like parsnips (as all right thinking people do):

Currently 2 packets for $5 from Coles. 

(If only I was a paid "influencer"...)

Make them run in the countryside

A surprising finding when looking at the health effect of marathons (not on the silly participants, but others):

A study published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine finds that the death rate from heart attacks rises 15 percent on the day of marathons, largely because of delays caused by road closures.

The authors, led by Harvard Medical School’s Anupam Jena, analyzed the death rate for Medicare patients hospitalized for cardiac arrest and heart attacks on marathon days in 11 cities, compared to non-marathon days. For example, they looked at the Monday of the Boston marathon, compared with the death rate for the five previous and five following Mondays. Then, they compared it to the death rate in a nearby city that wasn’t affected by marathon-related road closures.

It turns out that for every 100 people who have a heart attack or cardiac arrest, an additional four people die if they happen to have it on the day of the marathon.

It took about four minutes longer to reach the hospital by ambulance on marathon days. But the study authors suspect the real reason for the heightened mortality is the delays patients encountered when they tried to drive themselves to the hospital—as about a quarter of them opted to do. In those cases, it can take 30-to-40 minutes longer to reach the hospital on a day with marathon road closures, Jena stimates.

Jena acknowledged that we don’t know, for a fact, that those people died because it took them too long to reach the hospital, but that explanation seems most likely.

The obvious solution is to ban city marathons.   Sure, run around in the countryside, if you must, but don't get in my way of the drive to hospital.

Against the "madman" theory

Trump’s ‘Madman Theory’ Isn’t Strategic Unpredictability. It’s Just Crazy.

Agreed.

Also, doesn't the Pence "glaring at the enemy with righteous resolve" tour of South Korea strike people as rather silly looking?  

Journalist catches up with me

Over at Vox, German Lopez writes at length about how the American opioid epidemic has changed his opinion on legalisation of drugs.   (He now thinks free market legalisation is a bad idea, basically because the opioid problem shows addiction to hard drugs is a problem that doesn't readily self regulate.  And it kills people, a lot.)

I was making pretty much the same observation back in 2014.

Better late than never, German.

She's back...

The rather odd Helen Dale is back in the paper, because she's publishing a second novel.

I note that, in the non judgemental piece by Latika Bourke  (who, by the way, seems to lead the most extraordinarily peripatetic existence for a journalist - I find it hard to believe her boss pays for so much travel, and wonder if she is independently wealthy)  Dale notes another short term venture of hers in the past:

Her second novel will appear under her real name and there will be no pretences about its origins. Kingdom of the Wicked came about while she was studying at Oxford funded by a scholarship won through the US-based Institute of Humane Studies. When Dale realised she had six months left and there would be no 100,000-word doctoral thesis in the pipeline, but rather a follow-up to her vexed literary debut, she returned the remaining funds.

"I made sure I wrote to them personally and apologised for what I'd done. They weren't hugely happy but I did at least give some money back," she said.

She does seem to have moved from job to job an unusually large number of times, if you ask me...

Update:  The Australian is running a lengthy, though apparently edited, extract from her introduction to the re-issue of her first book.  I must say, unless it's the editing that has done it, but I don't think it is well written at all.

I don't think she has any idea how she sounds when she talks about herself:  self aggrandisement seems always to be lurking so close to the surface.  Yet she has her followers on the libertarian Right - Sinclair Davidson seems especially smitten with her and her writing.  I find her tedious at the best of times...

Health spending charted

NPR has a short article up about international health spending per capita, and its relationship to good health outcomes.

In the chart at the link, you can hover over each dot to see the spending in each country.  Australia is in the grouping just to the right of Japan and the UK.   (I see that Singapore is in the same grouping, too, right beside Australia actually.)

Once again, it seems abundantly clear that the US system is a ridiculous outlier which wastes money for no great results to show for it.

Kind of encouraging

Experts excited by brain 'wonder-drug' 

No proper trials yet, but one of the drugs is already used for depression, meaning that trialling it for dementia can happen quickly.

Can I just say...

...I don't understand British politics.  The Conservatives didn't really want Brexit, did they? - or at least the PM didn't want it.   But when it narrowly lost, they tossed the towel in and are acting as if a not quite 2% majority decision (in a country with non compulsory voting) is an overwhelming clear endorsement of "leave".   Now with a new leader seemingly wanting to be styled Thatcher 2, it's off to an unnecessary election to (seemingly) just rub it into the face of Labour that they've got a useless leader at the moment.   (As to how and why he is so poorly regarded - I don't really know.)  And as for high profile Conservative Boris Johnson - I don't think he has risen above the poor expectations that most people had of him in the Foreign Secretary role. 

Amusingly, I see that one economist writing at The Conversation claims that the election is being held now out of concern for a worsening economic outlook for Britain, yet people in comments were quick to point out that he was only predicting 6 weeks ago that the Budget and economic outlook meant there would not be an early election. 

Anyway, the Wikipedia entry on it fills in a bit of detail - including the way the country has swung from one side to the other over the decades about whether it wanted to be in the EU, or not.

I find it hard to believe that all of the energy that needs to be devoted to replacing current arrangements is not going to be a waste of time and effort compared to simply staying in and trying to make bones of contention better. 

The American conservative brand has a bit of a PR problem

What with Bill O'Reilly and Roger Ailes gone from Fox News in circumstances which sound like, if you saw it in a movie, you would find hard to believe (and along those lines, let's not forget Sean Hannity pointing a gun at a co-host), and a President who cheated on a wife and thought barging into women's dressing rooms was fun, it does seem as if American conservatives have a real image problem.   But do they care?   Probably not - culture wars, you know, means you can excuse anything as long as it is not the other side.

Update:   Good grief - look at this story - O'Reilly's replacement couldn't be bothered apologising to a spokeswoman for an appallingly sexist attitude shown by his brother in an email accidentally sent to her.

Back to normal

I noted a rare moment of agreement with a position taken by one S Davidson the other day.

Of course it wouldn't last.  The Last Blog in the World You Would Want to Consult on Issues of Racism (or economics, or climate change, or renewable energy) has its owner, one Sinclair Davidson, and most of the commenters, making the completely hyperbolic claim that the ALP is racist for questioning whether a black Kenyan Senator was technically eligible to take the seat vacated by her party mate.

Does he (and his team of decrepit minions) have any evidence at all to back up race as a motivation?   Of course not.  It's just a silly game being hypocritically played by people who dislike it when Lefties call them homophobic for arguing against gay marriage, for example.   And by a economist with apparent  cluelessness about "ape" being able to be used as a racist taunt.

 

A bit of over-reach

I'm referring to the headline:

Mark Zuckerberg just signed the death warrant for the smartphone

Having read the article, put me in the "not convinced" column.

(For one thing, the "screen door effect" when you try on VR googles seems not the easiest thing to overcome.  Certainly, I expect it's going to be quite a while still before watching a TV show via a VR device is going to be as clear as watching it on, say,  a 60 inch Ultra High Definition TV a few meters in front of you.  Or, I could be completely wrong...)

Not a case of "Always look on the bright side.."

This BBC article How Western Civilisation Could Collapse is not bad, I think.

This section is of particular interest:

According to Joseph Tainter, a professor of environment and society at Utah State University and author of The Collapse of Complex Societies, one of the most important lessons from Rome’s fall is that complexity has a cost. As stated in the laws of thermodynamics, it takes energy to maintain any system in a complex, ordered state – and human society is no exception. By the 3rd Century, Rome was increasingly adding new things – an army double the size, a cavalry, subdivided provinces that each needed their own bureaucracies, courts and defences – just to maintain its status quo and keep from sliding backwards. Eventually, it could no longer afford to prop up those heightened complexities. It was fiscal weakness, not war, that did the Empire in.

So far, modern Western societies have largely been able to postpone similar precipitators of collapse through fossil fuels and industrial technologies – think hydraulic fracturing coming along in 2008, just in time to offset soaring oil prices. Tainter suspects this will not always be the case, however. “Imagine the costs if we have to build a seawall around Manhattan, just to protect against storms and rising tides,” he says. Eventually, investment in complexity as a problem-solving strategy reaches a point of diminishing returns, leading to fiscal weakness and vulnerability to collapse. That is, he says “unless we find a way to pay for the complexity, as our ancestors did when they increasingly ran societies on fossil fuels.”

Also paralleling Rome, Homer-Dixon predicts that Western societies’ collapse will be preceded by a retraction of people and resources back to their core homelands. As poorer nations continue to disintegrate amid conflicts and natural disasters, enormous waves of migrants will stream out of failing regions, seeking refuge in more stable states. Western societies will respond with restrictions and even bans on immigration; multi-billion dollar walls and border-patrolling drones and troops; heightened security on who and what gets in; and more authoritarian, populist styles of governing. “It’s almost an immunological attempt by countries to sustain a periphery and push pressure back,” Homer-Dixon says.

Meanwhile, a widening gap between rich and poor within those already vulnerable Western nations will push society toward further instability from the inside. “By 2050, the US and UK will have evolved into two-class societies where a small elite lives a good life and there is declining well-being for the majority,” Randers says. “What will collapse is equity.”