RU OK, Jason?

Gee, Jason, you're sounding a little like a cross between Peter Thiel and Lyndon Larouche with tweets like this:

OK, you and Thiel are half right - there is a uselessness about a lot of new, internet based business ideas which are an extremely wasteful use of capital when there are serious problems - well, mainly one, big, long term, planet wide serious problem - to tackle.   Yeah, the problem that Thiel doesn't even think is really that big a deal. 

But space colonisation and fusion?   Both are so off in the outer limits of do-ability that the technological development to get them to a stage beyond mere experiment is a ridiculously big hurdle.  The only credible fast track path to Mars for decades yet is likely to be via one way death trips.  (Indeed, the trip itself may kill the astronauts, given the hardly resolved problem of adequate radiation shielding.)   Large scale space colonisation is going to have to be a low priority while energy and climate change are cranking up as serious challenges.   (And yeah, I doubt fusion is a useful avenue to pursue - it's the "flying car" of the energy world, with futurists and small start ups telling us for the last 50 or more years that it's always just around the corner of becoming practical.  I don't think anyone takes it seriously anymore as an energy solution.)

And what about this silly claim:

You're not even half right there - in that Isis and Al Qaeda were never plausible threats to Western civilisation.  

So panicking about "woke corporations" being a threat to western civilisation now are we?    I assume your concern is not too much to do with companies pushing around conservatives on gay or transgender rights in the US?   How's that a threat to civilisation, unless you think it has to be one in which toilets have to be strictly gendered and gays shouldn't marry?

So what is it?  That some groups are wanting to divest money from carbon based energy and mining?    What are you upset about with that?   That some people with capital are starting to believe scientists and take action when they governments that are not?    

Here's the thing:  I don't think you have never faced up to the fact that the biggest single movement behind preventing the largest economy in the world (and the Australia one too) from consistently  embracing a proper, capitalist friendly, response to climate change has been libertarianism/small government/small tax advocates.  If it weren't for them, fossil fuel divestment groups would have less to worry about.

To be fretting that "woke capital" is a threat to western civilisation is just silly wankery coming from reading too many conservative publications, and paying attention to eccentric IT billionaires.   

Or come here and justify it.

Only in India?

 I have posted about this topic before, but perhaps did not realise how high the number of deaths are from this peculiar problem:

At least 31 children in India killed by toxin in lychees 

At least 31 children have died in northern India in the past 10 days from a brain disease believed to be linked to a toxic substance found in lychee fruit, health officials have said.

The deaths were reported by two hospitals in Muzaffarpur in Bihar state, famed for it lush lychee orchards, officials said.

The children all showed symptoms of acute encephalitis syndrome (AES), senior health official Ashok Kumar Singh said, adding most had suffered a sudden loss of glucose in their blood.

The outbreaks of the disease have happened annually during summer months in Muzaffarpur and neighbouring districts since 1995, typically coinciding with the lychee season.

“The health department has already issued an advisory for people to take care of their children during the hot summer when day temperature is above 40 degrees,” Ashok Kumar Singh said.

Known locally as chamki bukhar, the disease claimed a record 150 lives in 2014.

In 2015, US researchers had said the brain disease could be linked to a toxic substance found in the exotic fruit.

 Given that we grow lots of lychees here up around the Bundaberg region, I am curious as to why this disease is apparently unknown of here, but only appears in India.

Where are the real eco-warriors when you need them?

It's still not clear that the Adani mine will actually go ahead, despite the last Queensland approval going through today; but if it does, how much trouble can one little blog writer get into by thinking out loud that lengthy rail lines through a sparsely populated region which are key to mine development probably make a pretty susceptible target for eco-terrorists?   Actually, "terrorism" is too strong - the aim would not be terrorising the public.  Just stopping an economic activity.   

I mean, silly radicals of the 60's and later used to have bogus ideas about communism or anarchy being a viable and desirable thing, and would act on it.  Now that today's younger folk have actually really good reason to be contemplating useful property destruction, of a kind that could easily be envisaged as being done without loss of life, they're probably all too pre-occupied in twitter fights, identity politics, and organising the next animal liberation farmer harassment instead of looking at rail maps and making more useful plans.

Young people of today.  I don't know....

East Asian gender wobbles

I've posted about this before, I think, but the NYT has another article on the popularity in China (in youth culture, at least), of de-masculinised males:

BEIJING — In late April, The Beijing News, a popular daily, ran a collection of profiles on Chinese millennials in celebration of the May Fourth youth holiday commemorating a 1919 student movement. Alongside a best-selling writer, an amateur architecture historian and a producer of popular science videos there was Cai Xukun, a 20-something male pop singer with such a huge following that a recent social media post of his was viewed more than 800 million times.

Mr. Cai belongs to the tribe of “little fresh meat,” a nickname, coined by fans, for young, delicate-featured, makeup-clad male entertainers. These well-groomed celebrities star in blockbuster movies, and advertise for cosmetic brands and top music charts. Their rise has been one of the biggest cultural trends of the past decade. Their image — antithetical to the patriarchal and stoic qualities traditionally associated with Chinese men — is changing the face of masculinity in China.

Innocent as they may seem, the little fresh meat have powerful critics. The state news agency Xinhua denounces what it calls “niangpao,” or “sissy pants,” culture as “pathological” and said in an editorial last September that its popularity is eroding social order. The Beijing newspaper’s decision to include Mr. Cai in its profiles apparently prompted the Communist Youth League to release its own list of young icons: patriotic athletes and scientists, whom it called the “true embodiment” of the spirit of Communist youth.

I find it somewhat amusing that in this respect, the ultra masculine world of the alt.right (not to mention that gender/sexuality worrying commenters at Catallaxy) has something in common with the Chinese Communist Youth League. 

I just find it odd, and peculiar how it has spread throughout East Asia, starting from Japan and Korea, but spreading into China.   Too much soy in the diet, or something.  :)

Safer scooters

I've been thinking about the number of injuries turning up everywhere from those electric hire scooters which I am tempted to try.  (See here, for example.)

Having watched people on them (and some videos of people going all wobbly on them - you can search Youtube yourself), I reckon that part of the problem is that they do seem to need more of a sense of balance than they should. 

Hence:   why not have a three wheel design?   They exist:

or this:

Surely these are better from a balance point of view?   Surely the additional cost of an extra wheel is worth a safety increase?

I'd be tempted to legislate this, if I were in charge.

He's so sorry

I watched Alan Jones on Anh Do's program last night, where he got to softest of receptions from the always affable Anh.  Jones revisited the Julia Gillard "her father died of shame" insult, and as this tweet notes:

It was a very non-apology apology.

What's worse was Jones giggling that he had encouraged Malcolm Fraser to run with one of the original scare campaign ads based not on the other's side actual policy, but an imaginary one which you want voters to fear might become their policy.  (And yes, everyone agrees that Labor used it in the case of "Mediscare" - but all sensible people thought these were ethically dubious at best, not something to giggle about.)

There was a discussion of him having had a heart attack in (as I now see via Googling) in 2017.  Honestly, why doesn't the guy give up his day job and travel more while he has the time?    He's politically obnoxious and full of himself and political discourse would only improve by his absence.

Americans get the health care they deserve?

Hey, it was only last week that I was speculating that Americans seem culturally inclined to want to avoid pain at all cost - hence opting for things like easy prescriptions to dangerous opioids, and epidurals for child birth over laughing gas.

Today I see that there's an article at The Atlantic that argues along similar lines - saying that maybe the American health system doesn't get the value for money that other nation's systems do because of American patients' expectations:

For years, the United States’ high health-care costs and poor outcomes have provoked hand-wringing, and rightly so: Every other high-income country in the world spends less than America does as a share of GDP, and surpasses us in most key health outcomes.

Recriminations tend to focus on how Americans pay for health care, and on our hospitals and physicians. Surely if we could just import Singapore’s or Switzerland’s health-care system to our nation, the logic goes, we’d get those countries’ lower costs and better results. Surely, some might add, a program like Medicare for All would help by discouraging high-cost, ineffective treatments.

But lost in these discussions is, well, us. We ought to consider the possibility that if we exported Americans to those other countries, their systems might end up with our costs and outcomes. That although Americans (rightly, in my opinion) love the idea of Medicare for All, they would rebel at its reality. In other words, we need to ask: Could the problem with the American health-care system lie not only with the American system but with American patients?

Another couple of paragraphs:

For example, one cost-reduction measure used around the world is to exclude an expensive treatment from health coverage if it hasn’t been solidly proved effective, or is only slightly more effective than cheaper alternatives. But when American insurance companies try this approach, they invariably run into a buzz saw of public outrage. “Any patient here would object to not getting the best possible treatment, even if the benefit is measured not in extra years of life but in months,” says Gilberto Lopes, the associate director for global oncology at the University of Miami’s cancer center. Lopes has also practiced in Singapore, where his very first patient shocked him by refusing the moderately expensive but effective treatment he prescribed for her cancer—a choice that turns out to be common among patients in Singapore, who like to pass the money in their government-mandated health-care savings accounts on to their children.

Most experts agree that American patients are frequently overtreated, especially with regard to expensive tests that aren’t strictly needed. The standard explanation for this is that doctors and hospitals promote these tests to keep their income high. This notion likely contains some truth. But another big factor is patient preference. A study out of Johns Hopkins’s medical school found doctors’ two most common explanations for overtreatment to be patient demand and fear of malpractice suits—another particularly American concern.

Go read the rest.

  

How's that heatwave going

Still hot in India in a very long pre-Monsoon heatwave:

Nearly two-thirds of India sizzled on Tuesday under a spell of a heatwave that is on course to becoming the longest ever as scalding temperatures killed four train passengers, drained water supplies, and drove thousands of tourists to hill stations already bursting at the seams.

Across large swathes of northern, central and peninsular India, the mercury breached the 45 degree mark, including in Jhansi in Uttar Pradesh, Churu and Bikaner in Rajasthan, Hisar and Bhiwani in Haryana, Patiala in Punjab, and Gwalior and Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh.

The Capital, which sweltered on its hottest June day in history on Monday (48 degrees Celsius) recorded as maximum temperature of 45.4 degrees Celcius at Palam in spite of a spell of light rain in the morning.

I see other news sites say that the death toll from the heatwave is 36:  but isn't it hard to believe that there are not more premature deaths than that in the poorest part of the community that has trouble accessing air conditioning?

Stay the course, Japan

An article at Japan Times argues that the country just has to get with the times, and stop discriminating against tattoos.   I didn't realise this aspect of how they came to be associated with criminality:

Why does Japan fear tattoos so much? According to “Modern Encyclopedia of the Yakuza” (2004), the government in 1720 decided to reduce the punishment on some criminal offenses. Criminals would no longer have their noses or ears removed. Instead, their crimes would be identified with tattoos on the skin, usually the arms.

So, it wasn't a voluntary thing, initially.

The article continues:

Tattoos were popular with gangsters before and after the war for a number of reasons. Symbolically speaking, however, the act of being tattooed once showed a resolve to sever ties with ordinary society and live in the underworld.

Still does, in my books!  OK, well, perhaps "live in the underworld" is a bit harsh, unless you mean the underworld where kitch rules.   (As usual, I make exceptions for genuine tribal tattooing for people genuinely from tribes.   And I don't mean the Bogan tribe.)   

Anyway, the argument is that modern Japanese crims aren't getting them anymore: 

According to a National Police Agency study in the early 1990s, 73 percent of all gang members had a tattoo. It’s likely this number has decreased since 1992, when the first anti-gang laws went into effect and gangsters began hiding their identities. Obviously, if you want to blend in and pass yourself off as an ordinary businessman, tattoos aren’t a plus.

The new generation of gang members doesn’t get tattoos. Criminals are increasingly declining to get tattoos, while the rest of the world is embracing them as body art. Does anyone think U.S. pop star Ariana Grande is a menace to society?

I've heard some of her music.  Yes.  Yes she is.  :)

A small but symbolic mass

From France 24:

The Notre-Dame cathedral will host its first mass this weekend since a fire ravaged the Paris landmark almost two months ago, the city’s diocese said Tuesday. 

The mass led by Archbishop of Paris Michel Aupetit will be celebrated on a very small scale late Saturday, the diocese said.

It will take place in a “side chapel with a restricted number of people, for obvious security reasons,” it said.

Just 20 people are expected to take part, including priests and canons from the cathedral.
The event will be broadcast live by a French television channel so that Christians from all over France can participate, the diocese added.

They take their architecture seriously in Indonesia

A headline on the Jakarta Post:

Actually, it looks pretty nice to me:

No passport future?

I meant to post about this a month or so ago - the story about how face recognition and other biometric databases are expected to lead to "no passport" processing through airports in the future.

Your treasured and travel-weary passport may soon become, like your first mobile phone, a relic of the past, if border agencies from the UK to Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and our own have anything to do with it. 

The race is on to create a system whereby travellers will no longer need to present their documents to either a border official or passport kiosk.

For the Australian traveller, this could mean the days of standing in line at our international airports will end.

The article does note that this whole system does carry the risk of extremely long delays if there is a hitch in the IT system.

In related news, in the USA today, we get this:

Licence plate images and photos of individuals who travelled in and out of the United States were taken in a malicious hack impacting U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), according to a report in the Washington Post. The agency learned last month about the breach, which took place thanks to a hack of an unnamed subcontractor.

CBP, which blamed the subcontractor for failing to follow security and privacy rules by transferring the agency’s photos to its own network, operates a database of visa and passport photos as part of a face recognition system and database used widely at American airports despite criticism for privacy and accuracy failures. The agency processes over 1 million travellers per day and is building up to use the face recognition system in at least 20 airports thanks to a Trump executive order.

I wonder about the point of such a hack...

Geoengineering the oceans

Nature has an article (a comment piece) about the dearth of serious research into various suggestions made over the years to use the oceans to counter global warming.   Its seems a lot of ideas are briefly floated but hardly anyone thinks about them very carefully.  

The article does mention a lot of unintended possible consequences of some ideas:

A lack of funding is not the main reason for the research gaps. Although there have been few funding programmes targeted at marine-geoengineering experiments and modelling so far, many basic tests are cheap and can be done in the lab — for instance, assessing whether impurities in mineral powders are toxic to marine life. And a range of negative-emissions technologies, such as enhanced weathering of rocks to increase ocean alkalinity, are already being funded in targeted research programmes, including one in the United Kingdom. Other streams of research, such as modelling, are under way in Germany, and a call for research proposals has been made in Japan. Private money is being invested in some marine approaches, such as a proposed pilot study of the impacts of iron fertilization on fisheries off Chile. However, that project has stalled, largely because of a lack of support from scientists (see Nature 545, 393–394; 2017).

Another problem is that many geoengineering proposals and analyses are found on transient websites, not in peer-reviewed journals. For example, only half of the web links to ideas, plans and documents cited in a detailed 2009 synthesis study of marine-geoengineering approaches⁴ still worked when we examined them in 2018. By contrast, academic and intergovernmental documents from that era are easy to find.

Again, the reasons for this are unclear, but could include inadequate funding, privacy concerns about disclosing details of the methods, and maintenance of proprietary rights over technologies. Some scientists worry that even starting geoengineering research or reporting results could lead to deployment of inadequately studied approaches⁵.

Yet it is essential that investigations are solidly researched, openly discussed and made readily available, as demonstrated by the most-studied geoengineering approach, ocean iron fertilization. Much of the work drew from ocean biogeochemistry and has involved lab experiments, pilot studies in the Southern Ocean and modelling across ocean basins. All of this activity showed that the method will not work as anticipated⁶. Fertilizing 1,000 square kilometres of the upper ocean would increase the growth of phytoplankton but could have alarming side effects. For example, sinking algae could release methane, a greenhouse gas that is many times more potent than CO₂. 

It's clear that there is no simple idea that is an obvious panacea.

Psycho on the streets

This week's Four Corners story on the background to the Bourke Street "murders by car" case was very good.  Here's an article about how the show was put together.    (It has a link to the show itself too.)

Again, the sort of investigative TV journalism that we only see on the public broadcaster. 

A Prime problem

It's annoying to note that subscribing to Prime to watch Good Omens has revealed a technical problem that seems to affect many people - there is a well publicised issue, going back a couple of years, that people with Samsung smart TVs in particular find that using the Prime App leads to an audio sync problem.   The audio comes out slightly ahead of the video - meaning lips do not quite match the sounds by a continually noticeable half second or so.

It was much worse when watching Episode 1 of The Man in the High Castle, where there seemed to more close ups of talking faces in serious discussion.

From what I can gather, many think that it's a case of Amazon and Samsung blaming each other and no one ever coming up with a solution. 

The way around it, I found last night, is to use a laptop that can cast to a Chromecast via Chrome.   Annoyingly, the Prime Android app does not have a "cast" button built in - because Amazon does not get on with Google, either.

Casting from my mobile phone turned out to be a bit complicated (Chrome on Android seems to either always, or sometimes, not have a "cast" function built in, so I had to do screen mirroring which seemed to lead to something like standard definition video quality on the TV, not high definition.)  

Anyway, it worked fine when casting from my son's laptop, at high definition.

But this really seems a (admittedly, very First World) problem that shouldn't exist.