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Waiting for stagflation

Krugman wrote about the "stagflation myth" as favoured by conservative economists in June 2009:

Ever since Reagan, conservatives have been using the evils of stagflation to denounce liberal economic policies. Yet mainstream economics — even at Chicago — has never made that connection.

Stagflation was a term coined by Paul Samuelson to describe the combination of high inflation and high unemployment. The era of stagflation in America began in 1974 and ended in the early 80s. Why did it happen?

Well, the textbooks basically invoke two factors. One was a series of “adverse supply shocks”, mainly the huge runup in the price of oil. The other was excessively expansionary monetary policy, especially in 1972-3, which allowed expectations of inflation to become entrenched. (Ken Rogoff — a Republican, by the way — attributes that expansion to the desire of Arthur Burns to see Richard Nixon reelected.)

The appearance of stagflation was a win for conservative economics, but it was conservative monetary economics that was partly vindicated: Milton Friedman’s assertion that there is no long-run tradeoff between inflation and unemployment turned out to be correct, and is now part of the standard canon.

But where is the Great Society in all this? Nowhere. The claim that stagflation proved the badness of liberal ideas is pure propaganda, which not even conservative economists believe.

Two years later, anti-Keynesian and all round hater of taxes and government spending Sinclair Davidson gave "stagflation" for Australia a run on The Bolt Report and The Drum:

It is the consequence of pursuing Keynesian economic policy. It should come as no surprise that the return of Keynesianism during and after the Global Financial Crisis could see the return of stagflation.

In 2007 Kevin Rudd argued, 'this reckless spending must stop'. He was quite right then, he would be even more correct today. The Australian economy is in trouble – according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the first quarter of 2011 experienced negative growth. Second quarter figures will be published in early September. This week the ABS reported that inflation is well above the Reserve Bank's two to three per cent inflation target.

Normally an inflation result like that would see an increase in official interest rates. After all the previous inflation figures were also on the high side. But the economy is very sluggish at the moment. A second consecutive quarter of negative growth would mean that the economy is officially in a recession.

 So what has happened to inflation since then?:

 Hmm.  Looks like inflation is under tight control.  

When asked today, about 20 months after his stagflation warning, we get this, in Catallaxy:

How is your stagflation call going anyway, Sinc?

Going well. The economy is stagnant, unemployment rising, cost of living amongst the highest in the world. Interest rates almost back at the depths of the GFC. The Americans are yet to unravel their QE. I don’t why you’re so happy – it brings me no joy.

So in the absence of actual inflation, you can just substitute "high cost of living"?  

 

What's also interesting is the anti-Keynesian spin put on it.    Yet when I Google on the topic of stagflation, I find that there has been a sudden recent burst of stagflation warnings from the UK:

Indeed, Britain has suffered persistently from higher inflation than any other advanced economy since the financial crisis struck. Unlike in the US and the eurozone, where inflation has remained broadly on track, inflation has been above the BoE’s 2 per cent target since the end of 2009, rising as high as 5.2 per cent in the autumn of 2011.     

So the country which gone much further down the anti-Keynesian "austerity" path than the US is the one facing potential "stagflation".

Looks like a theoretical "fail" too, then; not just a practical one.

A long article on why austerity doesn't work

The Austerity Delusion | Foreign Affairs

Haven't had time to read it all yet, but this section is at the core, I think:

Austerity is a seductive idea because of the simplicity of its core claim -- that you can’t cure debt with more debt. This is true as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. Three less obvious factors undermine the simple argument that countries in the red need to stop spending. The first factor is distributional, since the effects of austerity are felt differently across different levels of society. Those at the bottom of the income distribution lose proportionately more than those at the top, because they rely far more on government services and have little wealth with which to cushion the blows. The 400 richest Americans own more assets than the poorest 150 million; the bottom 15 percent, some 46 million people, live in households earning less than $22,050 per year. Trying to get the lower end of the income distribution to pay the price of austerity through cuts in public spending is both cruel and mathematically difficult. Those who can pay won’t, while those who can’t pay are being asked to do so.

The second factor is compositional; everybody cannot cut their way to growth at the same time. To put this in the European context, although it makes sense for any one state to reduce its debt, if all states in the currency union, which are one another’s major trading partners, cut their spending simultaneously, the result can only be a contraction of the regional economy as a whole. Proponents of austerity are blind to this danger because they get the relationship between saving and spending backward. They think that public frugality will eventually promote private spending. But someone has to spend for someone else to save, or else the saver will have no income to hold on to. Similarly, for a country to benefit from a reduction in its domestic wages, thus becoming more competitive on costs, there must be another country willing to spend its money on what the first country produces. If all states try to cut or save at once, as is the case in the eurozone today, then no one is left to do the necessary spending to drive growth.

The third factor is logical; the notion that slashing government spending boosts investor confidence does not stand up to scrutiny. As the economist Paul Krugman and others have argued, this claim assumes that consumers anticipate and incorporate all government policy changes into their lifetime budget calculations. When the government signals that it plans to cut its expenditures dramatically, the argument goes, consumers realize that their future tax burdens will decrease. This leads them to spend more today than they would have done without the cuts, thereby ending the recession despite the collapse of the economy going on all around them. The assumption that this behavior will actually be exhibited by financially illiterate, real-world consumers who are terrified of losing their jobs in the midst of a policy-induced recession is heroic at best and foolish at worst.

Austerity, then, is a dangerous idea, because it ignores the externalities it generates, the impact of one person’s choices on another’s, and the low probability that people will actually behave in the way that the theory requires. To understand why such a threadbare set of ideas became the Western world’s default stance on how to get out of a recession, we need to consult a few Englishmen, two Scots, and three Austrians.

Gatsby considered

Gatsby may be great, but F Scott Fitzgerald is greater | Books | guardian.co.uk

Someone writing in The Guardian is a big fan of The Great Gatsby (re-reads it every year) and notes that the Luhrmann film coming out about it may well be disappointing.  (Let's hope so - Luhrmann's lurid style never seems to get quite the uniform rubbishing it deserves.)

As for the book, which I read some years ago:  it struck me as adequate but pretty light weight.  I caught a bit of the Robert Redford Gatsby movie on TV recently, and it seemed that it did the opposite of usual cinema compression of a novel:  it was very long for a book that was very short.  

But anyway, The Guardian writer gives a potted history of the trouble life of Fitzgerald, and I don't think I knew  this:

When he died in Hollywood in 1940, Fitzgerald was almost completely forgotten. His funeral was attended by just 30 people, including his editor Maxwell Perkins. Sales of his books had virtually dried up. His publishers, Scribners, still had unsold stock from the first printing of Gatsby. He had lived the American dream, and it had turned into a waking nightmare.

Given that (as I recall) Gatsby ends with the funeral of the title character attended by virtually no one, that's a bit of an unfortunate "life imitating art" episode.

Colebatch puts revenue and spending in perspective

Before we tackle the budget, let's clarify a few points

In the last eight years of the Howard government, cash revenues averaged 25.4 per cent of GDP while spending was 24.2 per cent. Result? Budget surpluses averaging 1.2 per cent of GDP.

In 2012-13, revenue will be roughly 23.2 per cent of GDP. Underlying spending, after adjusting for last year's budget fiddles (which shifted $9 billion of spending into 2011-12), will be roughly 24.5 per cent of GDP.

You do the sums. Which is the bigger problem: revenue or spending?

The gap was meant to close in 2012-13. Revenue was forecast to swell 11.8 per cent, mostly from company tax and the mining tax, while spending, thanks to the fiddles and ''efficiency dividends'', was meant to shrink 2 per cent. It hasn't worked out like that.

Spending in the eight months to February was up 1.8 per cent year on year, but Finance Minister Penny Wong insists it will end up on target. But revenue has risen only 4.5 per cent year on year. For the three months to February, tax revenue was 0.5 per cent less than it was a year earlier.

Why? We've been told again and again, but some don't want to hear. Mining companies, which have been doing well, have been quite legitimately reducing tax by writing off the record $285 billion they invested here over the past decade. And the mining tax was so poorly designed that it has raised virtually nothing, and might not for years.

Apart from the banks, the rest of the economy has not done well, mainly due to the overvalued dollar, so it's not paying that much tax. Company tax was meant to reap an extra $6 billion this year, but in the first eight months, its take rose just $381 million, less than 1 per cent.

But the government spends too much, you say. Well, all of us can think of areas where we think it should cut spending. Equally, we can all think of areas where it should spend more. The International Monetary Fund estimates that, excluding east Asian countries where welfare is left to the family, Australia already has the second lowest spending of any Western country, behind only Switzerland.

Noting changes in spending and revenue as a percentage of GDP puts the figures in a perspective that propagandist economists for the Coalition who infest The Australian and News Ltd (and spend their days at Catallaxy) would rather not talk about.  For them, it's all "but revenue has increased!" 

[Catallaxy has, incidentally, been just about completely taken over by conservative Catholics or wannabe Catholics who want to condemn abortion all day; complain about Labor politicians who are pro-choice (let's not fret about Liberal ones who are too - or Tony Abbott adopting the "legal, safe and rare" formula); and worry about how the Catholic Church is being persecuted on the sex abuse issue.    Oh, and Islamists - they are very, very worried about Islam.     Strangely, Sinclair Davidson seems to very sympathetic to anti-abortion calls himself - he has never objected to one particularly neurotic visitor linking continually to his own anti-abortion posters featuring graphic photos of aborted foetuses.  Davidson also complained about the sex abuse enquiry that has just started, and one poster made (and never retracted, despite his being shown how bizarrely wrong he was) the  ludicrous claim that more Labor politicians had been to jail for child sex abuse than Catholic clergy.   It's like the Tea Party (Traditionalist Catholic sub-branch) of Australia.   A weird place.]  

Show way past its peak gets Slate column

Doctor Who "Journey to the Centre of the Tardis" recap. - Slate Magazine

Isn't it odd.  Now that Dr Who is way, way past its prime (I have been seriously underwhelmed with it in the latest series,)  Slate has started giving it the Dexter treatment.  That is, started giving a show which doesn't deserve it a discussion column after every single episode.

Last night's episode, which should have been full of fun with the interior of the Tardis being exposed for the first time, was the typical shambles of late.   The problems are:

a.  Everything can be solved with time travel, so there is no tension.

b. There is an endlessly malleable explanation of time travel used in the series.

The show needs to be put out to pasture again for 5 years, until better stories can be conceived.

Talking about Antarctica

A white and inexpressibly horrid land | TLS

I learnt some things from the above review of a handful of new books about Antarctica.  The number of people who visit during summer, for example:

...every (southern) summer sees more than 30,000 visitors arrive, swelling the resident population of some 5,000 scientists and support staff, though in winter that number drops to just over 1,000, many of whom apparently regard themselves as the luckiest people on earth. 

The charms of penguins:

Gabrielle Walker recalls that she began her time on the ice determined to resist these “clichés of Antarctica”, distrusting the way their cuteness is used to reduce the continent’s alien vastness to a manageable human scale. She would write about them only “because there was interesting science to tell. That was all”. Her vow did not last long, however, and the day an Adélie penguin played statues with her – “each time I turned it was motionless. Each time I walked, it walked with me” – was the day she finally lost her battle with the anthropomorphic impulse.

 and the "Antarctic stare":

One of those lucky ones was Gavin Francis, who spent a year working as the base-camp doctor at a remote British research station on Antarctica’s Caird Coast. Empire Antarctica is his record of that year, an intense and lyrical portrait of the slowly changing polar seasons, at the heart of which lies the cold monotony of the lightless southern winter. At first, as the sun gradually dipped below the horizon, Francis felt he was adjusting well to the coming of the polar night. But by the end of the second month, he writes, the frozen darkness had lost any beauty it once held: “it became a pause, a limbo, a drawn breath between history and the future”. His colleagues on the isolated station grew listless and forgetful, while tempers frayed, owing as much to the lack of privacy as the lack of natural light. Some even developed the notorious “Antarctic stare”, brought on by months of isolation, as though zombified by the pitiless dark. 

On a related note, my handful of long time readers (hello?) may recall that I very much enjoyed the account of the Mawson expedition that is a large part of Heather Rossiter’s biography of Herbert Dyce Murphy.   (Heather actually commented here too about my post about the book.  It's good to be noticed by authors.)   The expedition came to mind again when listening to a Radio National show on Anzac Day last Thursday.

I think Heather may have mentioned it in her book, but one of the unfortunate crew who had to winter over for the second time when Mawson turned up hours too late to catch the boat was killed soon thereafter at Gallipoli.

Edward Frederick Robert Bage was an engineer.  Here's a photo of him with a particularly large pipe which presumably helped him get through two Antarctic winters.  Poor old (actually, he was much younger than he looked) Bage was killed following orders of dubious merit.  Googling around, this article in The Australian seems to be the script of the radio show:

BAGE returned to full-time soldiering, and five months later the Great War began. He joined the Australian Imperial Force, and was appointed deputy commander of an engineers company. Soon afterwards he announced his engagement to Dorothy Scantlebury, a university student.

He left Australia with the first contingent, trained his company's sappers in Egypt, and landed with them under fire at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915. They rated him highly. "Besides being a good officer, Captain Bage was a fine fellow in every way," declared Tom Prince in a memoir of his war service. Another sapper, Jim Campbell, a 27-year-old carpenter, described Bage as "an excellent officer".

The engineers were given a series of urgent tasks during the chaotic first few days at Anzac. They widened roads, made bombs, strengthened trenches, carted ammunition, constructed loopholes and excavated emplacements for the artillery.

Bage spent the morning of May 7 surveying the terrain near Lone Pine. As it happened, the commander of the First Australian Infantry Division, Major-General W.T. Bridges, was appraising his tactical options in a nearby trench. He had just decided on his preferred course of action when Bage materialised along the trench. War historian C.E.W. Bean wrote that Bridges cried: "Here's the man!" When Bage found out why he was the man, he became concerned.

Bridges wanted the infantry to occupy a forward post, and wanted a reliable officer from the engineers to mark out the position beforehand as soon as possible. He wanted Bage to venture out in front of the AIF front line for 150m, and then bang in some marker pegs - this in broad daylight and in view of the Turks. Bage respectfully pointed out that the best chance of tackling such a risky undertaking successfully would be to do it at night. But Bridges was adamant that it had to be done that afternoon.

As a loyal and capable officer, Bage accepted that an order was an order. He resigned himself to his probable fate, and arranged for the dispersal of his belongings.

Bage did his utmost to carry out the task, which "could hardly have been more perilous", as Bean confirmed. Bage was hammering in a marker peg when he was killed by a fusillade of fire from Turkish riflemen and at least five machine-guns.

After his years at Antarctica, Bage was well known and widely admired. The way his life was imperilled so cavalierly by Bridges filled those on the spot with repugnance. It was "madness - he is a great loss to us", Campbell wrote. Indeed, what happened to Bage on May 7, 1915, confirms that Australian soldiers died not only as a result of incompetent decisions by British commanders; Australian commanders were also flagrantly culpable at times.

 Sad, hey?

Family photo

Winnie the Pooh author AA Milne was first world war propagandist | Books | The Guardian

I don't recall seeing a photo of AA Milne before, and this surely can't be his best:

That's his son in the picture.  (And the top of a bear - which would be interesting to see.) 

I trust AA did not always look vaguely sinister.

A major problem with nuclear

IAEA: Japan nuke cleanup may take more than 40 years - AJW by The Asahi Shimbun

When you read stuff like this, you have to wonder whether the fantastic, extraordinary cost of dealing with major nuclear accidents is adequately factored into economic studies on the nuclear industry:

A U.N. nuclear watchdog team said Japan may need longer than the projected 40 years to decommission its tsunami-crippled nuclear plant and urged its operator to improve plant stability.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency team, Juan Carlos Lentijo, said April 22 that damage at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant is so complex that it is impossible to predict how long the cleanup may last.

"As for the duration of the decommissioning project, this is something that you can define in your plans. But in my view, it will be nearly impossible to ensure the time for decommissioning such a complex facility in less than 30-40 years as it is currently established in the roadmap," Lentijo said.

The government and plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. have predicted the cleanup would take up to 40 years. They still have to develop technology and equipment that can operate under fatally high radiation levels to locate and remove melted fuel. The reactors must be kept cool and the plant must stay safe and stable, and those efforts to ensure safety could slow the process down.

Safer living via technology

The future of the car: Clean, safe and it drives itself | The Economist

To be honest, I hadn't really thought of the wider implications of self driving cars before:

Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, predicts that driverless cars will be ready for sale to customers within five years. That may be optimistic, but the prototypes that Google already uses to ferry its staff (and a recent visitor from The Economist) along Californian freeways are impressive. Google is seeking to offer the world a driverless car built from scratch, but it is more likely to evolve, and be accepted by drivers, in stages.

As sensors and assisted-driving software demonstrate their ability to cut accidents, regulators will move to make them compulsory for all new cars. Insurers are already pressing motorists to accept black boxes that measure how carefully they drive: these will provide a mass of data which is likely to show that putting the car on autopilot is often safer than driving it. Computers never drive drunk or while texting.

If and when cars go completely driverless—for those who want this—the benefits will be enormous. Google gave a taste by putting a blind man in a prototype and filming him being driven off to buy takeaway tacos. Huge numbers of elderly and disabled people could regain their personal mobility. The young will not have to pay crippling motor insurance, because their reckless hands and feet will no longer touch the wheel or the accelerator. The colossal toll of deaths and injuries from road accidents—1.2m killed a year worldwide, and 2m hospital visits a year in America alone—should tumble down, along with the costs to health systems and insurers.

Impressive.

They can talk under water

LED devices let divers talk underwater | SmartPlanet

I'm a little surprised this has only been invented now.   My science fiction mind also is thinking that such a system might be the basis for secure communications between space-suited spies.  (Heinlein just had people in spacesuits putting their helmets together, and I have always been curious as to whether that works well, or if you have to shout.)  Anyway, back to the invention:

A Japanese firm claims it has developed the “world’s first” communication device that allows divers to “talk” to each other by using LED technology to convert voices into light signals.

The Okinwa-based firm, Marine Comms Ryukyu, has created the “i-MAJUN system,” which combines a light-emitting diode (LED) flashlight with a diving mask that is able to convert a diver’s voice into LED signals that blink. When a diver wishes to talk to another underwater, the diver says their message — and then once converted into LED signals, the data is transmitted to the other diver. Signals are then converted back into speech and played back through speakers embedded in the diving mask.

Local Anzac Day

The local Anzac Day service is very well attended, in a memorial park garden that is kept in very nice condition.  It's almost too small for the day, though:

 

My father didn't participate in Anzac Day parades, perhaps because he served in the British Navy and felt he didn't have adequate Australian connection. My mother felt more interested in the parade itself, having served in the air force in Townsville. She's in a low care facility now, and I should visit her later today. I hope they put the march on TV for her.

High temperaure solar

Collaboration aims to harness the energy of 2,000 suns

An interesting idea:

Based on a study by the European Solar Thermal Electricity Association and Greenpeace International it would take only two percent of the Sahara Desert's land area to supply the world's electricity needs. Unfortunately, current solar technologies on the market today are too expensive and slow to produce, require rare Earth minerals and lack the efficiency to make such massive installations practical.

The prototype HCPVT system uses a large parabolic dish, made from a multitude of mirror facets, which is attached to a tracking system that determines the best angle based on the position of the sun. Once aligned, the sun's rays reflect off the mirror onto several microchannel-liquid cooled receivers with triple junction photovoltaic chips—each 1x1 centimeter chip can convert 200-250 watts, on average, over a typical eight hour day in a sunny region.

The entire receiver combines hundreds of chips and provides 25 kilowatts of electrical power. The photovoltaic chips are mounted on microstructured layers that pipe liquid coolants within a few tens of micrometers off the chip to absorb the heat and draw it away 10 times more effective than with passive air cooling.

The coolant maintains the chips almost at the same temperature for a solar concentration of 2,000 times and can keep them at safe temperatures up to a solar concentration of 5,000 times. The direct cooling solution with very small pumping power is inspired by the hierarchical branched blood supply system of the human body and has been already tested by IBM scientists in high performance computers, including Aquasar.

A deserved cynicism

Video: American culture now generating entire movie franchises about Thor � Hot Air

There is precious little worth linking to from Hot Air lately, but this short post lamenting the extent to which superhero movies have taken over Hollywood is fine.

I remain completely unmoved by Iron Man (I've watched bits and pieces of No1 and 2 on TV - I lose interest within about 15 minutes).  Now No 3 has received good initial reviews in England.  I doubt this is enough to get me over the 15 minute barrier when I see it on TV in 2 years time.

I forgot to mention that this was another pleasure of Oblivion:  it was adult science fiction that was OK for older kids (one discrete bit of female nudity and no blood splattering violence) that had nothing to do with superheros.

We need more films like that.

Bomb building made easy (and America the not so bright?)

I've always regretted the fireworks ban in Australia:  one week a year of experiments and fun with small fireworks seemed to me worth the public risk of a finger lost here or there.

But in the US, where everything from polyester slacks to fireworks are bigger, it appears that the public can readily buy firework kits which provide in one easy hit all the explosives you need for a deadly bomb:

 Where They May Have Gotten the Materials: Wall Street Journal: "Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder brother suspected in the Boston Marathon bombings, bought two large pyrotechnic devices in February from a New Hampshire branch of a national fireworks chain, according to executives at the chain's parent company. William Weimer, a vice president of Phantom Fireworks, said the elder Mr. Tsarnaev on Feb. 6 purchased two "Lock and Load" reloadable mortar kits at the company's Seabrook, N.H. store, just over the border from Massachusetts. Each kit contains a tube and 24 shells, he said. Mr. Tsarnaev paid cash for the kits, which cost $199.99 apiece. It wasn't clear if the powder from these fireworks was used in the bombings. ... One federal law-enforcement official briefed on the probe said the government's working theory was that the powder used in the bombs could have come from high-powered fireworks. The official said there were other possible sources for similar powder and investigators hadn't drawn any firm conclusions."

Before now, didn't sales of things like that to the public strike anyone in the US as dangerous?

While I'm on that theme, and sorry to kick a country while its down and all, but events last week didn't exactly paint America as a country that has a good grip on common sense:

*   why allow a fertilizer plant using famously dangerous chemicals so close to a nursing home and residential area?   (I've heard some commentary in Australia over the last few years praising some American States as having affordable housing because of very relaxed town planning laws.  I think Texas is amongst them.   I'm not sure that this accident can be said to be due to planning decisions, but it's certainly an illustration of the value of planning that keeps industrial plants at a significant distance from residential.)

*   by what insanity is a tightening of background checks from gun shows sales controversial?   Sure, it won't have stopped recent killings, because they show that legal gun owners can be too stupid to realise the danger of keeping guns at home in a house with a disturbed relative.   But seriously, as I have argued elsewhere, can you imagine if in Australia there were gun shows in Western Sydney where anyone could rock up and walk out with a gun without a background check?  We would, rightly, think that insane, as would about 95% of the rest of the world.

*  there was something else, but it will come to me later.

Amusing myself

If you have seen the movie, and know Australian politics from a couple of years ago, it might be deemed slightly amusing:

Fairfax, once we could rely on you

Huge deficits loom

Who's running Fairfax these days?   Formerly able to be relied on to put the best possible spin on matters for Labor, at least on most topics, they seem to be increasing joining News Ltd with the worst possible headlines for articles.  Such as the above.

Anyhow, the actual body of the story is kind of interesting, more for the point as to how governments can (or cannot) save money:

The Grattan Institute says that while notionally on track to surplus at the moment, the combined total of state and Commonwealth budget deficits could reach 4 per cent of gross domestic product by 2023, which is about $60 billion in today's dollars and would be about $100 billion in 10 years' time.

"Initiatives such as the national disability insurance scheme, the education reforms, direct action on climate change and parental leave are only a small part of it," Grattan Institute chief executive John Daley said.

"The big driver, costing $30 billion, is extra spending on health. Contrary to popular belief, the extra spending isn't being driven by ageing. It's that compared to 10 years ago today's 60-year-olds see the doctor more often, have more tests, face more operations and take more drugs. We are getting something out of the extra spending: more people are staying alive. But the question is - who is going to pay for it?"

The institute also believes welfare spending will have to climb because the present Newstart unemployment allowance is unsustainably low. It says company tax revenue, mining and carbon tax revenue and general tax takings will slide as a proportion of the economy as the price of exports slips.

"The problem is the attractive solutions won't buy that much money," Mr Daley said. "Cutting middle-class welfare won't be enough …''

''Even if you axed the baby bonus, the Schoolkids Bonus and parts of family tax benefit B that go to high earners you'd only make $4 billion.

"Eliminating government waste won't help much either. Axing the Commonwealth departments of Education and Health might save the wages of 5000 public servants, but that's only around half a billion.''

The Grattan Institute says the gap can only be closed by higher taxes, meaning that the days of "painless" budget fixes are over.

"The places to look are company tax and company tax concessions, income tax and goods and services tax,'' Mr Daley said. ''The old idea you can introduce a change with no losers, at least none earning less than $100,000, won't work. Everyone will have to share the pain.''

Looks like the future

Japan's 1st hydrogen refueling station for general public opens in Kanagawa

Good old Japan.   They're developing fuel cell vehicles to use the hydrogen.   Good to see them tacking new technology.

Into Oblivion

We went and saw Oblivion yesterday:  the new Tom Cruise science fiction film that is just starting this weekend in the US.

It's a good, solid science fiction movie that looks great and contains some pretty cool plot twists. 

What I liked about it most is how it makes more sense in its details as it goes along.  For example, even just visually, early on you might be thinking "that's the coolest looking post apocalyptic apartment I have ever seen"  or "they didn't spend much time worrying about the look of the aliens", but these stylistic things end up making sense.

In fact, with its somewhat incongruously cool and distinctive style in the domestic setting, it reminded me a bit of Gattaca, where the future was very neat and immaculate business dress, even if you were getting on board a rocket. 

Sure the film has derivative elements, but I didn't think jarringly so, and my son and wife liked it too.

I haven't read many reviews, but I think Kenneth Turan in the LA Times puts it well:

This Tom Cruise vehicle is a throwback to the days when on-screen science fiction was about speculative ideas rather than selling toys to tots — think of it as the most expensive episode of "The Twilight Zone" ever made....

More adventurous than your typical Hollywood tent pole, "Oblivion" makes you remember why science fiction movies pulled you in way back when and didn't let you go.

Some articles on mistaken identity in the Boston bombings

Some people think that the social media rush to try to ID the bombers was useful, or harmless.

They should consider what it was like to be misidentified.

What's more, I don't think it has been established yet than any of the crowdsourcing amateur detective players did actually get the right suspects.  They certainly were not at the top of the list.

While you probably couldn't say that the geeky participants at Reddit were predominantly of one political stripe (in fact, being younger, you would have to suspect they probably leaned left), but outside of those sites, it seems clear that it was the right wing press and right wingnut-o-sphere that promoted the alleged identifications with gusto.  Especially if the suspect was one of those swarthy types.   

Here's what follows:

The same week that the New York Post first falsely reported the Boston bombing suspect was  a Saudi national then falsely put a Moroccan-American track runner on its cover, it accurately reported on Friday an attack on an innocent Bangladeshi man living in the Bronx who some "idiots" mistook for an Arab. Abdullah Faruque, a South Asian network engineer, was at an Applebees on Monday night when he was accosted by a group of three or four men, reports the Post, after they asked if he was an Arab. It wasn't until he got home, his shoulder dislocated, that he found out about the bombing at the Boston Marathon. “I saw the news, and then it hits me: That’s why I got jumped,” he told the Post.

It's possible for this sort of baseless revenge to happen, with or without the Post's help. But it's worth wonderng where these men— and the one who assaulted a Muslim doctor in Boston, and the ones who vandalized the future site of a Boston mosque—got the idea for taking out revenge on a "dark skinned male"  in the wake of the bombing.

The right wingnut-o-sphere has also been pretty creative in trying to save face:  the Saudi student in hospital went from being a prime suspect under police guard, to an innocent man, to a man about to be deported for terrorist connections anyway.   A clear denial from Washington was countered by an anonymous "Congressional source" who spoke to the Blaze that "a file had been opened" and he really, really was going to be deported.  (I suspect that only a nutty right wing source would talk to The Blaze - which appears to have a particular fondness for Glenn Beck, who is going berzerkoid on the issue.)   This has set off the wingnut conspiracy theorist (see comments following The Blaze story).

Meanwhile, given that the actual bombers are Muslim, and it is looking likely that they are inspired by radical Islam, the right wing blogosphere is already bleating at huge volume at anyone who dared speculate on it being another version of Timothy McVeigh. 

Never mind that domestic anti-government extremism was indeed behind the biggest ever domestic terrorism incident outside of 9-11.

And never mind that, at The Blaze, following the story about the Saudi student, we have a typical example of wingnut rhetoric about civil war that has become extremely common, especially since gun control became an issue:

Yeah, according to the Right wing nutters, there is no legitimacy at all in journalists wondering if the bombing could be from their political side of the fence.   They don't recognize their own paranoia.

And finally, at Slate, Farhad Manjoo is swearing off participating in Tweeting on such events.  

A good idea, I think.

Update:  As another article in Slate says:

After a week in which Reddit’s r/findbostonbombers page rocketed to prominence—and controversy—as a hub for crowd-sourced criminal investigations, the FBI’s two main suspects are dead or in custody. And Reddit had nothing to do with it.