(a) that Fox’s core viewers are factually worse-informed than people who follow other sources, and even those who don’t follow news at all, and (b) that the mode of perpetual outrage that is Fox’s goal and effect has become a serious problem for the Republican party, in that it pushes its candidates to sound always-outraged themselves.
In the first major study to be carried out in Envihab, the challenge will be to lie in bed for 60 days in a row to study the effects of long duration spaceflight. The experiment starts this summer and the medical team is currently in the process of selecting 12 participants....Then, for more fun, they'll be put in a centrifuge:
“To cheat gravity, we tilt the subjects head-down by six degrees,” says Limper. “This is very important, so that the head is below the rest of the body.”
Stuck at this peculiar angle, the volunteers will also be expected to eat a nutritionally controlled diet and go to the toilet using bedpans and urine bottles. They will be monitored 24 hours a day on close-circuit TV and even be transferred to special water-proof tilted beds to take a shower.
Future studies will also employ a device located at the heart of Envihab: a human centrifuge. Contained within a large white (windowless) cylinder, it consists of four arms, around three metres long, arranged in a cross about a central axis. One of the arms is fitted with a bed, so doctors can spin volunteers to simulate varying accelerations.I hope the participants are paid well...
It is deliberately smaller than most human centrifuges. “We think this is more or less the size we could implement on a space station,” says Limper.
The picture is complicated even more when considering issues where the benefits are deferred – such as taking action on climate change.
Cost-benefit calculations typically deal with this by using “discount rates”. Typically, humans are not good at deferred gratification; we would much rather have $100 today than next year, so discount rates place a lower value on returns the further they are in the future.
This approach is contentious, particularly in environmental economics, where the benefits of our investments accrue to future generations rather than ourselves. Do we have the ethical right to discount the value of the lives and livelihoods of future generations against our own shorter-term financial benefit?
In climate economics, the time horizons are so long that even a relatively low discount rate can generate apparently absurd conclusions. More generally, any discount rate can be interpreted as a preference for intergenerational inequality: it systematically values the welfare of future generations at a lower level than our own.But someone in comments disputes the take on "utility" in the article, saying this:
Your explanation of utility is not quite right and quite unfair to poor old Jeremy Bentham. Given diminishing marginal utility of income, a concept devised by Bentham, an investment that generates a smaller financial return but accrues to a poor person rather than a rich person could easily be considered superior in terms of utility. It seems to me your criticism of Lomborg is precisely that he doesn't assess investments in term of utility.Regardless of that, another comment in the thread perhaps make a more general point that sounds about right:
Based on 2014-15 data, each 1 per cent extra on the GST would raise about $5.4 billion (increasing to $6.4 billion in 2017-18), meaning a hike in the GST rate from the current 10 per cent to, say, 15 per cent would add more than $25 billion per year to government revenue, escalating to more than $30 billion per annum within three years - if nothing else changed.I really wish Labor would reconsider their position on this, but as I say, politics is a difficult game.
For those hoping for an end to the drought, multi-year rainfall deficits in California are now so huge that even a very wet year likely wouldn’t erase them. What’s more, heavy El Niño rainstorms frequently come to California via tropical atmospheric river events,So remember that for later in the year when Andrew Bolt claims that climatologists were wrong about the California drought.
also known as the Pineapple Express. While those rains can help fill dwindling reservoirs, they’re often too warm to produce significant snowpack in the mountains—which is crucial for agricultural needs during the following summer.
As well as asking people to accept these rosy assumptions, the budget
also requires impressive mental gymnastics to reconcile this year’s
budget with last year’s rhetoric.
Last year the government said everyone should contribute to the task
of budget repair through a range of unpopular budget measures. One year
later and many of those measures have either been abandoned (GP
co-payments, pension indexation and six-month waiting periods for
Newstart allowance) or are unlikely to pass the Senate (changes to
Family Tax Benefits and higher education reforms). Some groups –
particularly small business – are simply winners.
Last year Tony Abbott was the “infrastructure Prime Minister”. In
this year’s budget, Commonwealth spending on transport infrastructure
falls from 0.5% of GDP in 2015-16 to 0.3% in 2018-19. The largest
addition to infrastructure spending is for the Northern Australia
Infrastructure Facility, which will only cost .02% of GDP per year, and
even that relies on the government finding commercial partners yet to be
identified.
Last year, a “gold standard” paid parental scheme was a “signature
policy”. This year, parental leave payments are in effect being cut for
those who already receive them from their employer.
Last year, we were told that government was too large and spending
was too high. This budget proposes four years in which Commonwealth
spending will be a greater proportion of GDP than all but the two years
of financial crisis under the Rudd-Gillard governments.
Last year we were told this government would fix the budget through
spending reductions, not higher taxes. This year, budget repair is
supposed to result primarily from the tax take increasing by 1.7% of GDP
in four years.
But the greatest cognitive dissonance comes from the government’s fundamental approach to budget repair. While doing nothing was not an option in the face of the “debt and deficit disaster” a year ago, the government has done precisely that. This budget recognises that 2014-15 will be much worse than forecast in last year’s budget. It is probably sensible to slow the pace of budgetary repair in the face of a weakening economy. However, if the recovery forecast for 2016-2018 is as strong as the budget forecasts, then there needs to be substantially more budget repair in these later years. Australia cannot afford otherwise.
Bjorn Borg's talent is game theory. He will play the two sides of the narrative to create confusion. Once you understand his end game, you are trapped neither by your own narrative of climate change being a left right issue, nor by Lomborg's manipulation of the narrative. He is a double dog whistler that sets both sides barking at each other
This is what is important:
1. He is selling to Abbott and co. the promise of confusion around climate policy through the emphasis on other areas.
2. He is selling the opposite to the media so that he can present a misinterpretation of his stance and extend the attention he receives.
3. Everything he has contributed and continues to contribute is of a lower quality than the research and academic standards that are on offer. The government can find better people to ask better questions and get better answers with less money. But it chooses confusion.
Once you understand Game theory, his trickery becomes transparent, and even slightly hamfisted application of it to create the simple goal of confusion and inaction.
Currently completing a Graduate Diploma of Energy and the Environment (Climate Science and Global Warming) at Perth’s Murdoch University.which I always thought was kind of odd coming from someone willing to get paid by Australia's pre-eminent "think tank" devoted to convincing people that climate change either isn't real, isn't caused by humans if it is real, might be real but won't harm us - in fact it's probably a good thing, and if it is real and is dangerous, well it's too late to do anything about it, or if it isn't too late the only way to deal with it is to go for growth so you have plenty of money to aircondition every house on the planet (oh, and growth means reducing taxes.) At the IPA, every single road leads to lowering taxes and reducing regulation.
