So Rupert like monopolies? What a surprise...

I see that "extreme libertarian" Peter Thiel likes monopolies, and so does Rupert Murdoch. What a surprise.

Update:  for a bit more nuance on Thiel's views, here's an extract from a review of his book:

You see, Thiel is not interested in funding entrepreneurs trying to build a business that will beat the competition; competition, in fact, is precisely what he thinks every company should avoid. The true goal of every startup is to become a monopoly, a company so dominant in its technological arena that it can give investors enormous financial returns with cash to spare for the intensive R&D that can ensure its long-term viability. Google, Thiel points out, is a handy case study. The profits from dominating the Internet search business since the early 2000s have allowed it to diversify into cloud computing, mobile devices, and robotics. According to Thiel, this kind of market supremacy offers returns to more than just investors: companies that create de facto monopolies and use the profits to innovate, as Google has, are truly valuable to society. “Monopolies drive progress,” he writes, in his contrarian way. “The promise of years or even decades of monopoly profits provides a powerful incentive to innovate.”

His point is a good one—at least as a source for debate. Consider that today’s communications infrastructure is largely built upon innovations—the transistor, UNIX, digital signal transmission—that came out of AT&T, the U.S. phone monopoly for most of the 20th century. For contrary evidence, you might look to Microsoft, which has typified a powerful company’s use of bullying and market share to limit consumers’ choices without creating innovations of comparable magnitude. In any event, Thiel seems bothered by the fact that many economists focus on the dangers of monopolies without considering the potential benefits. In his cosmology, they’re simply mistaken. His faith in the ameliorative forces of the marketplace assures him that even a dominant company (such as Microsoft) will eventually be eclipsed by a younger and more creative company (such as Google). Capitalism, he promises us, has a habit of righting technological wrongs in time. ...

Thiel has been asking a huge question for a few years now: How can we avoid a dismal future of resource depletion, environmental degradation, mass unemployment, and technological stagnation? He thinks the answer is a new wave of startups that grow as large as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon but take on bigger problems, such as curing cancer or providing cheap, clean energy. He claims we aren’t making progress on such things now because we’ve grown less ambitious as a society.

As the review then goes to note, Thiel (and I would add, libertarians generally) have an unrealistic take on how research happens, and their disdain for government money going into research is against the evidence and is merely ideologically driven:

You wouldn’t know it from Thiel, but investing is most of all about providing the feedstock with which some of the larger companies—not to mention universities and government agencies like NASA or DARPA—work to solve difficult problems. Our ecosystem for innovation is no doubt imperfect, but it has an established logic and a proven success rate. Sometimes a good idea is seeded through government funding: a 1994 NSF grant led Stanford grad students Larry Page and Sergey Brin to found Google. In other cases, a startup’s ideas only really start to spread after the company gets swallowed by a larger one. The biotech companies that have been bought by pharmaceutical giants such as Pfizer and Novartis provide good examples. Startups that wisely resist getting bought up, such as Facebook or Google, usually don’t have much impact until they grow much larger (as Thiel acknowledges in his arguments for monopolies). Tesla—which took a $465 million government loan in its early days—manufactures 35,000 electric cars a year, making it interesting and successful. Producing 100,000 electric cars a year, as Tesla hopes it will by 2016, would make the company important and transformational.

The other thing about monopolies is that we only get to see Google as a "benevolent" monopoly for the future of the planet because of the attitudes held by its leadership, which does not dispute the need for action on the planet wide issue of CO2.  Can you imagine the difference if somehow Rupert was in charge of that company?

There's no doubt in my mind that because of its ideological views, libertarianism is the enemy of effective action on climate change.

How many Australians are now imagining the G20 meeting....

Update: I was curious as to how The Australian would report this. I see it's no big deal to them. Of course, can you imagine the reaction if it had been a Labor PM using such a term? We simply have not seen such an intensely anti-Labor media outlet since the time of Whitlam, except that in economic and good governance terms, the public then genuinely did have reason to be concerned. This time around, the Murdoch sentiment is irrational, fickle (see his changing attitude to climate science), and ideologically driven.

Lead poisoning revisited

Look, we've all read about the sorry history of lead poisoning, but this lengthy BBC magazine article still manages to contain some stories I didn't know about concerning the various ways it has sickened people.   (The wine poisoning aspects I had either forgotten or didn't know much about.) http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29568505 

Potential weird physics refuted

Old textbook knowledge reconfirmed: Decay rates of radioactive substances are constant

I'm pretty sure I must have noted here before a study which indicated that radioactive decay was weirdly connected to the seasons.  Appears it was a measurement problem, which is a bit of an anticlimax, as so many weird physics suggestions turn out to be.

Why?

Google straps Street View camera on a camel to map Liwa Desert | SBS News

Eating crustaceans considered

They don't seem to appear in the frozen section of all Woolworths, but several months ago, my wife and I independently noticed that at one we visited they were selling boxes of frozen, raw scampi.   (We both tend to look at the seafood section of the supermarket when we are in a new one.)  

These interesting crustaceans come from somewhere in the North Atlantic, and we don't have anything very similar in Australian waters.   I am very fond of Moreton Bay bugs, which have a lot more meat in the tail, but they are so ridiculously expensive I pretty rarely eat them.

In fact, Australia has a pretty limited range of affordable crustaceans.  Sure, farmed prawns are now very reliable in terms of taste and often quite affordable.   But our blue swimmer crabs, the type most often available, tend to be somewhat watery and weak flavoured.  Mud crabs have a better flavour and can be nice, but tend to be expensive and I've never tried to cook one at home.   They tend to be an occasional treat from an Asian restaurant.    The lobsters from Tasmania we saw on holiday there can be enormous and (from little we ate of them) tasty, but again, they are really expensive.

So, I quite like eating crustaceans from other parts of the world, and when on holiday.   It's been a long time since I had one, but I remember being impressed with the gigantic prawn like thing served in Singapore.   When in Japan, it is definitely worth eating their crabs.  My wife believes that crabs from colder water are always tastier, and I think the Australian experience with blue swimmers backs that up.   I see that some supermarkets here now sell sections of the huge spiky crabs from somewhere cold - I've never tried them, as I am generally not so keen on defrosted, cooked, crustaceans.    (I'll take defrosted raw prawns though; they seem to do OK in the process.)

So, what about the scampi?    We had some in a soup some months ago, and they seemed OK, but their flavour was not all that obvious.

This weekend, we split some down the middle and grilled them, before serving them on a paella.    Well, this went quite well - it seemed quite clear that the meat (what little of it there is in each tail) was distinctly sweet and flavoursome.  The claws contain some meat but are very hard to get into.   Still, they were a pleasant surprise.

Only a week ago, I had been watching some SBS cooking show (Ottolenghi's Mediterranean Island Feasts) when he was on Mallorca (aka Majorca) and eating a local, very expensive, species of prawn which was famous for its sweetness (and also for being very red straight out of the sea.)   I thought it odd that a prawn should be "sweet", but this seemed definitely to be the character of the scampi meat too.

So, what about scampi generally?    I see via that authoritative source, the Daily Mail, that deep fried nuggets of what is called scampi have become a popular British pub food, after they were introduced as a way of dealing with (what appears to be) the unwanted catch when they were trawling for white fish.   However, the cheapest versions of pub scampi are apparently like our "crab sticks"  (who on earth actually buys those?) - a small amount of the actual crustacean with heaps of "extender" added.

Scampi thus seems to have followed the reverse culinary trajectory of oysters in Britain:  the latter went from being food for the working class until they were all dredged up (the English seem to have long been keen on fishing methods which scour the sea bed) to something for more exclusive tastes;  scampi have become a food that apparently is still only eaten on special occasions in Spain and Portugal but is mere "pub food" in England. 

Anyway, they were nice, and now I know more about them...

My path to creative riches ruined by advancing science

Study: Frozen poop pills may make fecal transplants simpler and safer - LA Times

Curses!  My proposed television series based on time travelling, fecal transplanting doctors (the scene involving Hitler plays particularly well in my mind) has already, probably, been made redundant by medical science.

It's been reported that taking the healthy poop by way of oral frozen capsule might work just as well as the tube in the butt method.

My path to riches is foiled again...

 

Galaxy song 2014

I'm glad I am not a big enough Monty Python fan to have paid to see their London farewell show livecast at the cinema  (I think they did that here?) seeing it turned up on SBS a couple of weeks ago.

I just watched most of it online.  Some dubious sketch choices early on, I thought, and I have to say that in the current world of porn at the touch of a keyboard, the main theme of Gilliam animations (riffs on dirty old men wanting to see nudity in any form) is well beyond redundant.  (He did have a weird imagination though.) 

But the highlight for me was the cameo at the end of the Galaxy song.  Most amusing:

Would be good if the Korean problem was suddenly resolved

The Koreas: Till Kimdom come | The Economist


Hmmm.  Young Kim hasn't been seen for more than a month, and while he's gone, 3 powerbrokers turn up to shake hands with South Korea?  Seems a potentially good sign?

Capitalism and legalisation

Colorado pot shops reaching out to marijuana novices | CPR

The stupidest heritage move ever?

Northbourne redevelopment in doubt after public housing registered by Heritage Council - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)


The biggest, most embarrassing, eyesore in Canberra has a provisional heritage listing?   This is such a ridiculous idea, I think the offices the Heritage Council work from will need a listing to prevent people from burning them down.

Now that's a trailer

I was recently dissing Nolan fanboys for their excitement over the mundane trailer for Interstellar.

Now this is a teaser trailer that really gives a thrill:


As Brad Bird is the director, I am really looking forward to this.

A pulsing mystery

Pulsar as bright as 10 million suns baffles astronomers

He probably doesn't know that it's mental health week on the ABC

My oh my.  Is it just me, or does Sinclair Davidson seem to be skirting close to sounding paranoid when he writes today about Media Watch?:

The thing is this: Media Watch – part of a government agency – exists to monitor and intimidate the private media. That is their sole function and they do it well. I suppose we should welcome the fact that in Australia the government does this in plain sight – many other countries would have a division within the secret police undertaking these functions.

Media Watch is part of the state apparatus that keeps tabs on journalists and journalism and so undermines the ability of the fourth estate to expose government misbehaviour and creeping statism. With some, very few, honourable exceptions within Fairfax, News Corp Australia is the only media organisation holding government to account and that is why Media Watch focusses on them.

And he writes this in a column in which it is acknowledged that Media Watch has criticised the government's national security legislation?  (I also see that the show has added a highlight to its website to note that Leyonhjelm did vote against the legislation.)

As it happens, I am sympathetic to the criticism of the potential effect of the legislation on journalists.  But the trouble with the IPA and Davidson being effective critics of it is that they were so over the top about the free speech consequences of both s18C of the Race Discrimination Act, and the Finkelstein report on beefing up media self regulation,  that they now sound like the Think Tank That Cries Wolf with respect to legislation that has actual serious free speech implications.  


As for the title of this post, I don't know if he is being entirely serious or not, but Davidson has for a long time claimed that he barely watches ABC, certainly not for its political journalism, and seems to get most of his political TV news from Sky News.   I've always found this a very surprising claim by someone who (presumably) wants to be taken seriously by politicians, as I expect few of them would deny that the ABC political coverage is detailed and serious, and if you want to be well informed, you don't ignore it.

Update:  if SD's complaint is that Media Watch has only criticised the Act now, after it has been legislated,  can he also please explain why he isn't outraged that one of Murdoch's strongest supporters of everything Abbott (especially his security and defence actions), Greg Sheridan, has only today come out with a column attacking the legislation?  

Peak "Mistress"

You may have noticed I have been a bit busy for much posting this last few days.

But, while you miss me, I trust you haven't missed this startlingly clear computer generated head:



This reminds me very much of Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", in which the revolution's "leader" is a talking head generated by the moon colony's gigantic computer, which still has to stop doing other things to concentrate on the graphics.

Isn't it weird the unexpected ways technology evolves?    Just as with Heinlein's use of slide rules on spaceships, the idea that you would have an advanced lunar colony run by a computer which has gained consciousness but can barely cope with realistic graphics illustrates what a tough job it is for science fiction to be correct in the details.   (And another great example of anachronistic technology being used alongside futuristic stuff we are miles away from realising: the way the characters in Mote in God's Eye are using what we now take as routine - tablet like devices connected by wireless to the ship's mainframe - when they are on an interstellar planet.  Mind you, Pournelle has also been keen in his other science fiction on implants which allow direct communication with a computer, but as far as I know, there is still no idea at all about how you would do the neural connections for that to work. Well, OK, I guess cochlear implants give us some idea, but I still wonder whether this is a science fiction idea too far to ever be practical.)

Karen Armstrong on religion and war

Religion does not poison everything - everything poisons religion  - The Spectator

A sympathetic review here of Karen Armstrong's latest book "Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence."

Climate sensitivity and what it means in practice

RealClimate: Climate response estimates from Lewis & Curry

The significance of a lowering of the transient climate response (which is what the recent paper from Nic Lewis and Judith Curry suggests) gets a run in this post at Real Climate, which are deals with criticisms of the choices Lewis and Curry made in their paper.

These seem to be the crucial paragraphs:

The median estimate of the TCR from Lewis and Curry (1.3K) is towards the lower end of the IPCC likelyrange and lower than the CMIP5 median value of around 1.8K. A simple
way to understand the importance of the exact TCR value for mitigation policy is via its impact on the cumulative carbon budget to avoid crossing a 2K threshold of global surface temperature warming. Using the Allen and Stocker relationship between TCR and TCRE (the transient climate response to cumulative emissions) we can scale the remaining carbon budget to reflect different values for the TCR. Taking the IPCC CO₂-only carbon budget of 1000 GtC (based on the CMIP5 median TCR of 1.8K) to have a better than 2 in 3 chance of restricting CO₂-induced warming to beneath 2K, means that emissions would have to fall on average at 2.4%/year from today onwards. If instead, we take the Lewis and Curry median estimate (1.3K), emissions would have to fall at 1.2%/year. If TCR is at the 5^th percentile or 95^th percentiles of the Lewis and Curry range, then emissions would need to fall at 0.6%/year and 7.1%/year respectively.

Non-CO₂ emissions also contribute to peak warming. The RCP scenarios have a non-CO₂ contribution to the 2K peak warming threshold of around 0.5K [IPCC AR5 WG1 – Summary
for Policymakers]. Therefore, to limit total warming to 2K, the CO₂-induced contribution to peak warming is restricted to around 1.5K. This restricts the remaining carbon budget further, meaning that emissions would have to fall at 4.5%/year assuming a TCR of 1.8K or 1.9%/year
taking TCR to be equal to the Lewis & Curry median estimate of 1.3K (assuming no mitigation of non-CO₂ emissions).

While of some scientific interest, the impact for real-world mitigation policy of the range of conceivable values for the TCR is small (see also this discussion in Sci. Am.). For targets like the 2 K guide-rail, a TCR on the lower end of the Lewis and Curry and IPCC ranges might
just be the difference between a achievable rate of emissions reduction and an impossible one…

 The take home points (which climate change lukewarmenists do not want to know) seem to be this:

1.      the lower sensitivity estimates that some recent studies suggest do not mean you can burn carbon and have no risk of breaching the nominal 2 degree limit;

2.      the lower estimates make achieving a "safe" limit significantly more do-able, but effort to achieve it is still necessary.

Burka-ed again. (Oh alright, it's the niqab this time)

The Guardian has had some lively comment to its Comment is Free piece by a woman of unspecified age and domocile (British, perhaps, even though she refers to the controversy in Australia, and presumably fairly young) who decided to start wearing the niqab, and talks up the quasi-feminist aspect of it.  The trouble is, she finds it liberating in pretty much the same "up yours" manner as do people who wear obviously offensive T shirt slogans:

I feel liberated by the fact that I choose what you see. We pass judgement on how a person looks before we know them. When you deal with me, you deal with my mind, my personality, my emotions and what I have to offer as a person – and that’s it.

Yes, and a personality that sounds pretty much stuck in the mindset of the teenager:

I don’t want to be controlled and told what I can and can not wear: that is oppression.

Anyhoo, I doubt anyone serious in Australia is going to try on a street ban on the burka or niqab. 

But as someone in comments says in response to her "you can't judge me" attitude:

 If you think wearing the now niqab stops you being judged based on your looks you're deluded.

The Bogan that was nearly in Star Wars

Readers may have noticed that I rarely use the word "bogan,"  even though I did a couple of posts back when referring to Senator Lambie.  (Seriously, resistance to class-ist forms of insult sometimes just has to crumble in response to overwhelming provocation.)

In any event, this last weekend I learnt something that is hilarious from an Australian point of view.  There's a very lengthy article at Salon about the early drafts of the very first Star Wars movie, and from this we learn something very important:

Their still very human leader is General Darth Vader, still just Sith Knight Valorum’s righthand man. Deak—one of the sons of the Starkiller—makes short work of the Stormtroopers. Deak, a Jedi, uses a blaster, while the Stormtroopers wield laser swords. Vader defeats Deak because he is “strong with the Bogan”—Lucas’s initial name for the Dark Side of the Force.

It gets even more explanation a bit further in:

After a dinner of “thanta sauce” and “bum-bum extract,” Luke embarks on a long-winded, jargon-filled explanation to his younger brothers about the Force of Others. Originally discovered by a holy man called the Skywalker, the Force is divided into the good half, “Ashla,” and the “paraforce,” called the Bogan. To prevent people with “less strength” from discovering the Bogan, the Skywalker only taught it to his children, who passed it on to theirs. And there you have it: as conceived for the first time, the Force was an exclusive, aristocratic cult.

Even better, there's some actual script extract, and I defy any Australian to read this and not laugh (my bold, incidentally):

As they start blasting their way out, Han is overcome by a mysterious attack of depression:

HAN: It’s no use. We’re lost.
LUKE: No, no, there’s a debris chute. It’s the Bogan force making you feel that way. Don’t give up hope. Fight it!
HAN: It’s no use, it’s no use.
LUKE: Well, we’re going anyway. Think of good things. Drive the Bogan from your mind.

It’s astonishing how much the word “Bogan” crops up in this draft: thirty-one times in total, versus ten mentions for the light-side Ashla Force. It’s not hard to picture the depressed writer whiling away the long hours at his door desks, trying to drive the Bogan from his mind.

Maybe Lucas got it right in this part:

 On the ship, it turns out Deak is badly injured. Threepio can’t do anything for him: “These are spiritual wounds,” he explains. “The Bogan arts often run contrary to the ways of science and logic.”

 Another draft and the Bogan started to fade:

 The Ashlan Force is gone in the new draft, but Lucas clung to the name of the evil Bogan force, eager to have us understand it. “Like Bogan weather or Bogan times,” Luke says when he learns about it from Ben Kenobi. “I thought that was just a saying.” The Bogan only crops up eight times in this draft, however.

 Now, to be fair, it would appear from this site that the use of the word in Australia only was becoming common from about the mid 1980's.  Wikipedia suggests it started in the late 70's, and Lucas was apparently writing his very first draft in about 1973.

I suppose it's even possible that the use of Bogan in the actual Star Wars movie may have prevented the rise of the Australian use of the insult.   If the multiverse is true, this is probably the case in an alternative reality.

Still, this reads as extremely amusing in our local universe...

Gratuitous insult time