Dumb stuff on Twitter

Maybe I re-arrange these later...

At last, some cultured meat scepticism has arrived

I was ahead of the curve on this one.   This article up at the BCC shows that some scepticism has finally entered the commentary on the potential for lab grown meat:

Why cultivated meat is still so hard to find in restaurants

It's a good read.

I note that George Monbiot's promotion of microbial production of protein ("precision fermentation" of animal proteins) is not attracting all that much attention, yet.   Maybe the problem is a lack of good examples of products?  I see there is also some skepticism around the ability to scale it economically, but I strongly suspect that it is much more do-able than growing animal cells in expensive nutrient, and arranging them into something resembling meat. 

Reasons for suicides investigated

Yes, I would say this is worthwhile research:

Cory Russo, the chief death investigator in Utah, is used to asking strangers questions at the most excruciating moments of their lives. When she shows up at the scene of a suicide, a homicide or another type of unexpected death, her job is to interview the grievers about how the deceased had lived.

How old were they? What was their race? Did they have a job? Had they ever been hospitalized for psychiatric issues? How had they been feeling that morning?

Over the past couple of years, she has added new questions to the list: What was their sexual orientation? What was their gender identity?

Ms. Russo, who works in the Office of the Medical Examiner in Salt Lake City, is one of the relative few death investigators across the country who are routinely collecting such data, even though sexuality or gender identity can be relevant to the circumstances surrounding a person’s death....

Studies of L.G.B.T.Q. people show they have high rates of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts, factors that greatly increase the risk of suicide.

But because most death investigators do not collect data on sexuality or gender identity, no one knows how many gay and transgender people die by suicide each year in the United States. The information vacuum makes it difficult to tailor suicide prevention efforts to meet the needs of the people most at risk, and to measure how well the programs work, researchers said.

The report ends on this note, which I also think important, and wish gay and trans activists would take to heart:

It’s also important to acknowledge the unknowns, Dr. Staley said. Although studies have reported a high rate of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts among lesbian, gay and transgender people, that doesn’t necessarily mean a high rate of suicides. He noted that although women have a higher rate of suicide attempts than men do, men have a much higher rate of dying by suicide, partly because they have more access to guns.

And Dr. Staley, who is gay, cautioned against political narratives that “normalize suicide as part of the queer experience.”

“I would argue that if anything, this life experience sets us up to be resilient,” he said. “Our fate is not sealed. Our story is not written.”

 

 

Confirmed: biggest defamation case self-own since Oscar Wilde

I can't be the only person who has said that, about this:

Ben Roberts-Smith VC, Australia’s most decorated living soldier, has lost a defamation case in which he was accused of multiple murder of unarmed civilians in Afghanistan, a federal court judge has found.

The case only happened because of funding by Kerry Stokes, who seems to have more money than brains.   I don't think I had heard this before:

Roberts-Smith took out a loan from his employer, the media baron Kerry Stokes, to run the defamation action: if he loses, he has offered his Victoria Cross as collateral.

Is there any value at all left in a VC awarded to someone we are now free to call a murderer?  

Update:  Yes, Google shows me that Green Left made the Wilde comparison back in March 2022:

Roberts-Smith does not seem the kind of guy to relate to Oscar Wilde. That’s a shame, as he may have learned something about starting a libel case over public allegations that you’ve been doing the same sort of thing that a whole bunch of people are going to stand up in court and say you’ve been doing.

But now that I check, I said it in February 2022.  I bet there was someone who said it earlier, though.  

By the way, the Green Left post contains this useful mega link paragraph about the ridiculous amount of harmful material that came out from this trial:

Some of the headlines since the court case began last year include: SAS soldier tells court Ben Roberts-Smith ordered shooting of detained Afghan man; Ben Roberts-Smith described alleged execution of Afghan teen as ‘beautiful thing’, court hears; Witness stands by claims Ben Roberts-Smith was instrumental in two Afghan executions; Ben Roberts-Smith shot Afghan captive in the back, SAS member tells defamation trial; SAS soldier cried describing Roberts-Smith kicking man off cliff, court told; Former soldier tells court Ben Roberts-Smith ordered mock execution during training; Ben Roberts-Smith used software to ‘scrub’ laptop but denies destroying evidence; SAS soldier tells Ben Roberts-Smith defamation trial war veteran threatened to shoot him in head; Superior officer tells court Ben Roberts-Smith threatened to ‘smash his face in’; Ben Roberts-Smith punched woman in face in Canberra hotel room, court told; Private investigator tells court he severed ties with Ben Roberts-Smith over alleged threatening letters; Soldiers believe events that earned Ben Roberts-Smith Victoria Cross may have been ‘falsified’, court hears.

Why do we put up with Airbnb in a time of chronic housing shortage?

I was speaking to some friends on the weekend who will going to Europe later this year, using Airbnb accommodation.   I said I would not do that, given the possibility of last minute cancellation, a recent uptick in complaints on social media about painful owners, and more generally, I've always had a bit of an objection in principal to the whole concept, at least in areas with a housing/long term rental shortage.   Sure, the company will promote it as being a way people who are asset rich but income poor can make money, although in many cases, they could also do it via long term rental.

I suppose I have less objection if it is a case of short term rental of part of a dual occupancy property - someone who has a granny flat in the back yard might be leery about the risk of getting a permanent tenant who is painful or annoying but difficult to get rid of under long term tenancy laws.   (And local councils don't always allow permanent tenancy of such accommodation anyway.)   But if you own a small apartment, or a house, in an area facing chronic long term rental shortages, keeping it for short term holiday rental is hurting your local community, and it's not as if you can't make money from long term rental.

So I went looking for how many Airbnb there are at the moment in Australia, and the numbers sound pretty high to me, even though they are way down on previous years.  This report is from July 2021:

Listing numbers in Sydney fell 43 per cent from an average of 33,955 in the first quarter of 2020 to 19,257 for the same period this year. They have since dropped to 12,728, by far their lowest point since at least 2018.

The situation is not much better in Melbourne with listings down from 30,126 to 19,354 in the 12 months to March 31 this year, a decline of 36 per cent. On Saturday, there were 14,569 active short-term rental properties in the city.

Interestingly, I see that in 2018, Airbnb had a report done to fend off complaints about its effect on the rental market. One of their points was that their numbers were too small to worry about:

 But the figures in the July 2021 article would indicate that those figures in 2018 were much lower than the figures achieved in 2020.   

I wonder what the figures are now, in the post Covid recovery?   I can't find them quickly.

I would suspect that they would have increased since July 2021, so lets assume there are a total of 30,000 in Sydney and Melbourne, roughly 15,000 each.  And how many rentals are vacant at the moment?  That's easy to find:

This chart is for Sydney, and indicates roughly 10,000 vacancies, giving a vacancy rate of about 1%.  this is a "tight" rental market.

Based on that, yes, adding even 10,000 Airbnb rental properties is going to double the vacancy rate - it would clearly make a substantial difference.

As this 2022 article at the ABC noted:

Across the world, major tourist destinations are moving to regulate short-stay rentals.

In Amsterdam, an entire home can only be rented out for a maximum of 30 nights per year.

While in New York, it is generally illegal to rent out an entire unit for less than 30 days. Although there are exceptions.

Meanwhile, Berlin allows you to lease out your primary residence, but it can be a bit harder to put a second home on the short-term market and you can only let a secondary residence out for a maximum of 90 days.

"Making the regulation is probably the easy part," Professor Phibbs said.

"Enforcing the regulation can be quite difficult. It's certainly resource-intensive. It sometimes involves quite long legal processes.

"It's important to have some kind of taxing regime where short-term rentals pay for the cost of that regulation through some sort of bed tax."

In Australia, New South Wales has 180-day caps in some areas, while Western Australia has been investigating a 60-day cap.

Meanwhile, Hobart is hoping to become the first capital city to place a cap on the number of short stays.

Professor Phibbs is pretty scathing:

Professor Phibbs said the number of Airbnbs in the city equated to about 9 per cent of the total rental market. 

That is much higher than in any other capital city in Australia.

And Hobart's rental vacancy rate is just 0.3 per cent — the lowest for any capital city.

During the pandemic, the balance has shifted.

"When housing stock went from short-term rental back to the long-term rental market, in places like Hobart we saw a sharp reduction in rents," he said.

Professor Phibbs estimated that during COVID, rents in Hobart dropped by about 9 per cent. 

Another study in Sydney by William Thackway and Christopher Pettit found rent prices in the most active Airbnb neighbourhoods dropped by up to 7 per cent.

While not all of this can be attributed to Airbnb, Professor Phibbs said the evidence was clear: You cannot have an unregulated short-term accommodation industry and a healthy long-term rental market. 

"Those two things just can't co-exist," he said.

"We need some sort of regulation to limit the spread of short-term rentals so we can enable the long-term rental market to provide homes for so many households that are looking for them at the moment."

Yep, Airbnb and its ilk is a real problem, and I reckon every capital city in Australia (or even local areas with long term rental shortage) should be attacking it every way they can.

Oh, and here's an article co-authored by Professor Phipps on The Conversation from March 2023 which I hadn't read before, making many good points.  People should be paying more attention, I reckon.

Anyway, I'm kind of glad my innate dislike of Airbnb can be actually justified with hard figures.

I suppose I should admit, I can think of 2 occasions over the last 20 years I have stayed at short term holiday rental of houses in Australia, through Stayz or some now defunct site.  But the last time was probably 6 years ago, in what would count as a semi-country area holiday home.  It's not as if Airbnb invented holiday homes:  they just made short term rental in urban areas too easy. 

Is there some hidden motive for such hyperbole that I can't see?

Leading experts warn of a risk of extinction from AI

Please, continue to put me in the "not at all convinced" column.

I mean, this is one of the dangers listed in the BBC report on the warning:

Enfeeblement, where humans become dependent on AI "similar to the scenario portrayed in the film Wall-E"

 [Insert roll eyes emoji]

Sichuan pepper primer

I  noted last week that I cooked with Sichuan (or Szechuan) pepper for the first time, and I liked the result.

I didn't mention, though, that there was an issue with the pepper being gritty, which I assumed was the result of my not having ground the roasted pepper hard enough.

However, on further investigation, apparently you're supposed to remove the hard inner seed completely, as it will never be ground far enough to not feel "gritty" in the cooking.  Despite initial appearances, these are not similar to peppercorns in any way, and you only use the (pretty light weight) outer shell, even though this seems like a pretty fiddly job when you have a packet of whole Sichuan pepper.   

Learn something new every day.  

Completely normal behaviour for a sex assault victim

Tara Reade, a former Senate staffer who in 2020 accused Joe Biden of sexual assault, said on Tuesday she had defected to Russia.

“I’m still kind of in a daze a bit but I feel very good,” Reade told Sputnik, a Russian press outlet supportive of President Vladimir Putin, while sitting with Maria Butina, a convicted Russian agent jailed in the US but now a member of parliament in Russia.

From The Guardian.

 

A good time not to be in Hanoi

In the news: 

Vietnam is turning off street lights and manufacturers are switching operations to off-peak hours to keep the national power system running amid record temperatures in some areas that have caused a surge in demand.

As weather officials warn the heatwave could run into June, several cities have cut back on public lighting and government offices have been urged to cut power use by a tenth after state utility EVN said the national grid faced strain in coming weeks.

"It's so harsh and hot outside that people have to wear protective clothing to cool down and not get burned," said Hanoi resident Tran Van Hung, 67.

Temperatures this week are expected to range between 26 degrees Celsius and 38 degrees Celsius, weather officials say.

To tackle the problem, Hanoi has shortened the duration of public lighting by an hour each day, while halving illumination on some major roads and in public parks.

"If people all save energy, all will have enough electricity to use, but if not, there will be a partial electrical overload that will put the power grid at risk," said Luong Minh Quan, an electrician with EVN in Hanoi.

Last week Vietnam called for electrical devices to be turned off when not in use, and for air-conditioning to be kept above 26 degrees Celsius.

I have to say, the second half of February was a pretty good time, weather wise, to be in Hanoi.  March might be even better, if going to the seaside areas especially.  But clearly, May is too late.

 

On buying a new refrigerator

Last weekend was pretty irritating:  our main refrigerator died, after lingering with what seemed to be decreasing cooling for quite a while.  Turns out it wasn't just our terrible habit of loading up the thing with half used jars of pastes, pickles, jams and condiments of one type or another, only to throw them out a few years after their expiry date.   I'm not joking:  I found a large jar of home made, souped up soy sauce my wife had labelled in 2012!  Maybe refrigerated soy sauce with plums in it lasts for more than a decade, but I did have approval to throw it out.

Anyway, looking for a new refrigerator, I have realised that the general design of them seems to have gotten deeper as the years go on.   Already, the deceased fridge stuck out past the cabinetry it is beside; the new one is going to have 10 cm more protrusion.  (Maybe it will come down to 5 cm, as we have left about a 10cm gap between the back of the current one and the wall, as you are supposed to do.  I suspect that gap can be smaller without disaster, though.)

The other thing of interest is how many refrigerators come from China, and although they make some reasonable looking ones, I figure that these days, if you are buying any product for which you might want a spare part in even 5 or 10 years time, it feels a risk to be relying on having access to stuff from China in that period.  I mean, I still don't care if I have a Chinese built phone - no one expects spare parts for them - but cars and whitegoods - you don't throw them out and just get a new one lightly.    

Or is this why China might think it can invade Taiwan without long term consequence:  it makes 90 million refrigerators a year, although I don't know how many of those are exported.   "You can't keep your trade bans on us forever - you have millions of fridges needing spare parts, and people hate replacing fridges unless they really have to!"  

But I'll be OK - the one I intend buying was built in Vietnam.   

Don't say I didn't warn you.

 

Seems to still be relevant

I finally watched the remake of All Quiet on the Western Front on Netflix on the weekend. 

I hadn't read any reviews, except I assumed that it must be OK to have had a Best Picture nomination.   

I would rate it pretty highly, with some reservations which I see were shared with some critics, mainly to do with it having too light a touch on character development.   The one we (eventually) get to feel closest to is not even the main character, and for the first 30 minutes, I wasn't even sure that the distant feeling given to characterisation was going to put me off the movie completely.  

But it does improve in that regard, and the obscene pointlessness of the war is well made by the end.   

It's depressing to think that, more than 100 years later, we can see watch aggression borne of militaristic nationalism causing pointless destruction in Ukraine:  

 

Week end thoughts

*  The late Tina Turner:  pop music not being all that important to me, it's not like she was a performer I would ever have bothered seeing, and I rate her songs as being in the "inoffensive to sometimes catchy" range.   But, she seems to have been a genuinely nice person, and I have to agree - the Rugby League marketing campaign featuring her and her songs was, like, probably the best campaign of its kind we will ever see in a lifetime?  (And again, it's not as if Rugby League is important to me, even though I may watch about 3 games a year - it's just that the quality and likeability of that campaign was undeniable.)

* There seems to be an awful lot of gullible promotion of alleged evidence of UFO's lately.  That Mick West manages to debunk most with relative ease, but there is still some kind of mystery going on, especially at sea, I reckon.

*  This certainly belongs in the "funny because it's true" category:

*  And although this is very old, in light of another Fast and Furious silly movie being released, this is also very amusing:

* Here's an idle thought:  back in 1982, in ET, a kid wore big headphones while riding his bicycle and I think audiences were meant to, and did, take it as a geeky, not cool, look.    Fast forward 40 years, and  adults now walk around with headphones anywhere: in the supermarket, on the bus, etc; and no one - except me perhaps - seems to thinks it's a bad look.    Discrete earphones I can handle, but headphones just look too anti-social to me.  A "don't bother me, I'm in my own world" kinda vibe.

 

 

If you wrote a character doing this in a comedy movie, critics would say it's too unrealistic

 

What? Something multivitamins are good for?

It seems that research on the benefit of taking supplementary vitamins (at least if you are a person with a reasonable diet and no obvious cause to have deficiencies) are pretty rarely positive, so it is a surprise to read this in the Washington Post:

A daily multivitamin — an inexpensive, over-the-counter nutritional supplement — may help slow memory loss in people ages 60 and older, a large nationwide clinical trial suggests.

The research, a collaboration between scientists at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Columbia University, appeared in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition on Wednesday.

It was the second such multivitamin clinical study within the COcoa Supplement and Multivitamin Outcomes Study (COSMOS) — a larger body of research examining the health effects of certain dietary supplements — to reach the same conclusion.

The most recent study found that those taking multivitamins showed an estimated 3.1 fewer years of memory loss compared with a control group who took a placebo. Put another way, the multivitamin group was an estimated 3.1 years “younger” in terms of their memory function than the placebo group.

The full report is here.

 

Another problematic take

Former Pink Floyd member Roger Waters did a concert in Germany a few days ago, which featured this:

Roger Waters projected Anne Frank’s name at recent concerts to draw comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany, leading Germany’s Orthodox rabbinical association to call for a ban on Waters’ performances in the country.

Observers told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that Waters, the former Pink Floyd frontman known as a leader in the boycott Israel movement, has lumped Anne Frank together with Palestinian Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in on-screen projections at concerts on his current tour. Abu Akleh was killed on an assignment in the West Bank last year.

The screen at Waters concerts also frequently shows a pig-shaped balloon emblazoned with the logo of an Israeli armaments firm. He reportedly at times dons an SS uniform and symbolically shoots a machine gun into the crowd.

But - he's been doing this for years, as it would seem this report is from 2013:

Former Pink Floyd rocker Roger Waters is one musician who isn’t afraid to voice his opinion on Israel.

Waters performed July 20 in Belgium wearing a black leather jacket with a red and white arm band, similar to that of a Nazi uniform, while pretending to fire a machine gun. The concert also featured a giant pig balloon floating above stage with the Star of David stamped all over it.

Waters has openly urged other performers to boycott Israel and has compared Israel’s occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the South African apartheid. The Anti-Defamation League said that Waters has a long history using  these symbols in his concerts, according to the Jerusalem Post.

Not caring for the band, I had missed this recent story:

Polly Samson, the wife of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour and a lyricist on the band’s two most recent albums, has spoken out against former bandleader Roger Waters on Twitter, describing him as an antisemite and a “Putin apologist”.

“Sadly [Waters] you are antisemitic to your rotten core,” she wrote. “Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac. Enough of your nonsense.”...

 Samson’s tweet is seemingly in reference to an interview Waters did with the Berliner Zeitung newspaper earlier this month, reposted in translation on Waters’ website, in which he wonders if “Putin [is] a bigger gangster than Joe Biden and all those in charge of American politics since World War II”, and says that Putin “governs carefully, making decisions on the grounds of a consensus in the Russian Federation government.”

In the interview, Waters also said that “Israel Lobby activists” were trying to have his concerts in Germany cancelled, and that “the Israelis are committing genocide. Just like Great Britain did during our colonial period … We believed ourselves to be inherently superior to the indigenous people, just as the Israelis do in Palestine.” He also expresses his continued support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, and that he would still play in Moscow, “given that Moscow does not run an apartheid state based on the genocide of the indigenous inhabitants.”