Big smoke in Singapore

Singapore closes schools and slams Indonesia over its hazardous-level smoke haze response - ABC News 

Singapore, as well as neighbouring Malaysia, has been cloaked in
smoke blown-in from tinder-dry Sumatra island for about three weeks —
the worst such episode since mid-2013 in a crisis that grips the region
annually during the burning-off season.

The closure of primary and
secondary schools, as well as government-run kindergartens, is
unprecedented, the Straits Times said as the air quality index hovered
above 300.

Makes one feel a bit pessimistic about CO2 reduction when parts of the world can't even their act together over visible pollution.

Not much love for Peta or Tone

When both Barry Cassidy and Janet Albrechtsen agree that Peta Credlin was a massive failure as a PM's  Chief of Staff, I don't think any reasonable person can think otherwise.

Janet's not even showing much love for Abbott in this paragraph:

To be sure, history will record Abbott as the master of his own tragic demise. As prime minister, he bears the responsibility for failures over the first budget, the poor sales pitch, the broken promises, the failure to court independents in the Senate, the search for excuses rather than for a way forward, the belated dumping of the Medicare co-payment and the paid parental leave scheme, the crazy knighthood, and the wrongheaded reaction to Bronwyn Bishop’s greedy use of taxpayer money. And more.

Is she still Michael Kroger's partner?   I don't recall what he used to think of Abbott.

Honestly, apart from the likes of the nutty Steve Kates, and frustrated commentators who have lost their perceived control of the party (Bolt, Jones, Hadley), the amount of sympathy being shown for Abbott is remarkably small.   This must feel pretty humiliating.  (And no, I am not inviting sympathy even for that.) 

First World tragedy played out for all to see

Why I'm ditching my Android phone and going back to iPhone (for now)

To my friends who said I was making a mistake by switching to Android —
Nick, Cory, Brent, James, Chris, Jordan, and just about every single
other friend I have, all of whom seem to have iPhones — I'm sorry. You
were right. I hate being known as "green text message guy"; I want to be
blue iMessage man. Can we still be friends?

I feel like smacking him across the face with my Samsung TabS for being so annoyingly First World, Apple Fanboy, whiny.  Except it might hurt my tablet.

That's all it takes?

Stampede caused by breakdown in pilgrims’ flow | GulfNews.com

“As we were walking towards Al Jamarat, the flow suddenly stopped with
an apparent reason,” Mohammad, a pilgrim, told Sabq. “A few minutes
later, a large group of people came from the back and pushed us, causing
the stampede. Women started to cry and several old people fell on the
ground. Only the intervention of the security and medical authorities
saved us from a bigger tragedy,” said Mohammad who was still being
treated for his injuries.

Um, I don't get why a "stop in the flow" is enough to cause a "stampede".   The ones who push from behind may cause some concern among those who cannot move forward, but why do they keep pushing if it's achieving nothing?   I think there must be some strange laws of crowd behaviour I don't understand here.

Update:  this explanation at the ABC suggests it might be more of a case of a "crowd crush" than a "stampede".  Which would make a bit more sense.   Still, it seems a bit odd to me that crowds, when not worried about escaping from a danger, simply can't stop when it's obvious no one is moving...

Update 2:  some more detailed discussion of how crowd crushes happen is at Wired.

PJ is not impressed

P.J. O’Rourke on why Trump will collapse, Ann Coulter’s a fraud, and how National Lampoon created modern comedy - Salon.com

I think it fair to say that, as a sort of libertarian-lite, PJ O"Rourke has been unhappy with the fuddy-duddy, old man establishment Republicans for a long time; but it appears he thinks even less of the current state of the party, as reflected in its Presidential candidates.  Fair enough.

Retirement home for sweary oldies

We all know that when cranky middle-aged to old white men* (many of them single, unsurprisingly) get too sweary and over the top for Andrew Bolt's threads they go on to find a home at Catallaxy; and if it's one thing that irks them, it's all this blather about domestic violence and women.   Here's the obvious solution to the problem:

Because domestic violence never happened before the 1970's, I guess. (My late Mum, who was nearly strangled by her first husband, might have had something to say about that.)

Turnbull and risk

I see from his twitter feed that PM Turnbull caught a Sydney ferry to work this morning.  He also said the other day that his Federal Police minders are OK with his continuing to take public transport.

Viewed from a distance, it's fantastic egalitarian PR for a wealthy Prime Minister to be seen to be using public transport, but I'm not entirely sure that I would be happy to be on a bus when he and his security detail gets on board.   I would feel a bit concerned that I've just become a potential collateral target.

But it's pretty remarkable that we live in a country where this is not thought of as absolute nuts by our security services, or the media.   Or maybe they do, but Turnbull is pushing on regardless? 

Hot weather coming

This summer's El Nino looks set to bring more heatwaves to Australia's north and east

The article notes that the relationship between El Nino and heat waves is a bit complicated, but for Western Queensland, already in serious drought (in fact, my impression is that after the 2011/12 floods the rain just stopped like a tap turned off,) this looks like it could be a very bad summer.

About Pope Francis

I expected his spoken English to be better.

That is all.

Yet another "renewables and batteries are looking good" story

From Science, a report about a Harvard team that has come up with a cheaper, safer, set of chemicals to use in a "flow battery" which could have domestic application for storing roof top solar power.   The big question - whether it will end up cheaper to run than Tesla's lithium home storage - is not answered, and it sounds like the system could take up more space, but still:

The Harvard team realized that a possible bromine replacement was a charge-carrying molecule called ferrocyanide, which sounds dangerous but is actually used as a food additive. Ferrocyanide, however, dissolves in alkaline solutions, not acidic ones. So Aziz and his colleagues tweaked the chemical structure of their quinone—ripping off a couple of sulfur groups and replacing them with pairs of hydrogen and oxygen atoms—in the end converting the compound into one that readily dissolves in an alkaline solution.

The scheme worked, and as the researchers report today in Science, the battery readily stores power with only components that are cheap, abundant, and nontoxic.

For now, Aziz notes the alkaline quinone battery stores only about two-thirds of the energy per volume as the previous acid-based version. But because it doesn’t require expensive materials to deal with bromine, it’s likely to be far cheaper to produce and friendlier to use. “This is chemistry I’d be happy to put in my basement,” Aziz says. And that may not be far off. A flow battery using the new quinones and ferrocyanide would likely only have to be the size of a couple of hot water tanks to store the energy produced by a conventional home rooftop solar array.

Moonquakes

I knew there were moonquakes, and that they had left seismographs there during the Apollo missions.   But I didn't know some of the details in this neat article:

The first thing to know about moonquakes is this: They last forever. While most earthquakes are over in under a minute, moonquakes can last for an afternoon. In the 1970s, at least one 5.5-magnitude moonquake shook the lunar surface at full force for more than 10 minutes straight, then tapered off gradually over the course of several hours.

“The moon was ringing like a bell,” Clive Neal, a geological sciences professor at Notre Dame, told NASA about the Apollo-era lunar seismic data he and his colleagues examined. A strong moonquake would be enough to devastate a hypothetical human settlement—breaching a moon base’s seal and causing a catastrophic loss of oxygen—which is part of why scientists became interested in studying the phenomenon in the first place.

You don't have to be nutty about Obama - just completely hyperbolic is fine

The National Review's Kevin Williamson suggests that some conservatives may be going over the top in their complaints about this Pope, but look at how he talks about Obama (my emphasis):

Joe Scarborough has been castigated by conservatives for affirming his belief that President Obama, for all his flaws, is a man who loves his country. Barack Obama is a failed president, a practitioner of a deeply destructive, distorted, self-interested, and vanity-driven brand of politics, and every instinct he exhibits tends toward detriment, privation, and chaos. But the fever-swamp version of his presidency — that he is a foreigner, a closet Islamist, a man singularly bent upon the destruction of the United States of America — is wrong. President Obama is himself certainly no exemplar of treating political disagreements with charity of spirit — he is quite the opposite — but his failings need not be our failings.

As my post heading suggests - the Right in America has been completely hyperbolic and over the top in its assessment of Obama over his presidency, and now they have the hide to complain about those who have followed the hyperbole into crazy land, and support Trump.

They only have themselves to blame...

Peta considered

There are two detailed commentary pieces by female journalists out today about Peta Credlin.

The first, by Michelle Grattan, seems to me to be by far the best.   It's a straight forward dismissal of  Credlin's self serving claim that her power wielding in the PM's office was only a problem for others because she was a woman.   No, says Michelle, the way in which she alienated MPs would have caused exactly the same resentment regardless of her gender, and she has to take a substantial part of the blame for her boss losing his job.

Over at The Guardian, Katherine Murphy takes a more feminist analysis, waffling on somewhat about power as wielded by women.  Some of the paragraphs are a bit over the top:

The tall willowy woman was always conspicuous, wagging a disapproving finger, growling like a combatant in the advisers’ box, standing a full head higher than the men.

That disconcerting height, always looming, regally. Shoulders back. Vaguely horsey, absurdly healthy, meticulous, glamorous, glowing – millinery and heels. No stooping. Certainly no shirking.

As someone says in the comment thread:

Thank you, Mills And Boon.

And many others in the thread note that this strangely sympathetic (for a Guardian writer) take on a right wing warrior overlooks the fact that she was working for Abbott when he was making some distinctly sexist comments about Gillard.  (Of course, it might be that she didn't like all of her boss's quips, but the way she would get involved in making derogatory comments at Labor while sitting in an advisers box in Parliament makes me think otherwise.)

I think the fair assessment is just that she was, like her boss, an opportunistic political warrior who still doesn't understand her own inadequacies.

Renewables and the grid

Energy: Reimagine fuel cells : Nature News & Comment

Here's a good, detailed explanation of the different approaches to maintaining grid stability when you have large amounts of power coming from intermittent renewable sources, such as solar cells. Of the three solutions: gas turbines, batteries and fuel cells, the writer argues the potential for a new type of fuel cell.

My impression, once again, is that the overall mood is one of much greater optimism for renewables than there was a few years ago. 

Tax reform suggestions

Hmm.  Much intrigue, and quite a bit of unhappiness from industry groups that have spent money on making submissions, in the news this morning that PM Turnbull seems to have scrapped the Tax White paper process.

As the SMH notes, this is not the first time Turnbull has entered the tax debate with big ideas of his own.

Could this be a sign of Turnbull "I know best" hubris has re-emerged?  Could it herald a breath of reasonable fresh air around tax?   I like Turnbull, but I suspect it may play out as more the former than the latter.

Anyway, I think I once posted what I thought was some pretty obvious ways to raise more tax which ought to be sell-able to the Australian public:

1.  a modest increase in the GST rate to 12.5%.   This is low enough to not really be noticed, but I'm pretty sure it still raises quite a lot.  As for its expansion - I would be inclined to leave it off fresh food, but wonder whether a reduced rate could be added to education services - say 5%?  OK, that would be a hard sell to Liberal constituents, but it might be something Labor could live with;

2.  superannuation tax concessions at the high end wound back harder;

3.  a staged reduction in negative gearing.  Not too staged.  And didn't I suggest once that it be time limited, to like for the first 5 years?   Increased turnaround in investment property sales would be good for stamp duty revenue too, as well as placing properties back on the market for potential owner/occupiers.   Someone needs to point out to me the downside, as there almost certainly would be one.  

Of course, we should have a carbon tax of some description too, but I don't think even Turnbull is up for that.

Update:    How quickly I forget.  Didn't I also once suggest the obvious solution to our revenue problems - a 300% GST on tattoos and piercings?   The budget will be fixed in no time at all....

The complicated evolution of American public housing

Public Housing Can Work - The Atlantic

Here's an article that handily summarises the history of public housing in the US.  (Makes me feel rather old to read about Lyndon B Johnson promoting public housing in 1937.  I recall - vaguely - his coming to Brisbane in 1966.)

A watery apocalypse for Tokyo?

I didn't even realise, until I saw a special (and fascinating) report on Catalyst last year that parts of Tokyo were at high risk of flooding, and huge engineering projects underground have been built to protect the city.

Well, the recent floods just north of the city have led to some dire warnings about how much worse things will be when the same amount of rainfall hits closer to the metropolis.  It sounds very serious indeed:

With the effects of global warming becoming increasingly obvious, the climatic conditions that triggered torrential rain in Ibaraki and Tochigi prefectures two weeks ago is no longer a rarity, and the odds are “100 percent” that similar downpours will hit Tokyo, says Nobuyuki Tsuchiya, a civil engineering expert and author of the 2014 book “Shuto Suibotsu” (“The Capital Submerged”)....

“It so happened that the rain zone moved (northeast) after striking Tokyo and stayed over the Kinugawa River. But think what a disaster it may have been if the band of rain had moved about 50 km westward and struck the Tone and Arakawa rivers instead....

The rupture of the Tone and Arakawa rivers would cause “far more severe devastation” than that of the Kinugawa deluge, he said.

With the Arakawa, for example, boasting one of the densest populations in its surrounding areas of any river in Japan, extensive flooding would lead to unprecedented fatalities and an economic catastrophe that would send shock waves around the world, Tsuchiya said.

Well, this guy has a book to sell, but it is  not as if he is alone:

Indeed, a 2010 government report released by a panel of outside disaster-prevention experts calculated several possible death tolls in the event that the Tone and Arakawa rivers rupture. The deadliest scenario was if the Tone River broke its banks near the cities of Koga and Bando in western Ibaraki, in which case the death toll could rise to as many as 6,300, the report said.

Tsuchiya said, however, that Tokyo should brace for an even more apocalyptic scenario, noting the amount of rain that entered the Kinugawa River was far larger than that anticipated by the report.

“If Tokyo is struck by the same level of downpours that hit the Kinugawa, I’d say the damage would be far more disastrous.”

It therefore seems that if an earthquake doesn't kill thousands there in the coming years, floods probably will....

A "doctor caused epidemic"

It's always interesting to look at how and why particular drug abuse problems start, and the resurgence of heroin in midwest America gets this explanation in The Economist:

The heroin epidemic in the Midwest is closely linked to the rampant opiate epidemic. As doctors prescribed opioid painkillers such as OxyContin more and more liberally, their abuse grew. Sales of prescription opioid painkillers have increased 300% since 1999, according to the federal Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), even though the amount of pain Americans report to their physicians has not changed.

 Three-quarters of heroin addicts used to take prescription drugs and switched to heroin, which is cheaper and more easily available on the black market. A gram of pure heroin costs less than half what it did in the 1980s, in real terms. “This is a doctor-caused epidemic,” says Tom Frieden, boss of the CDC. In states with higher prescription rate of opioid painkillers, such as Michigan, Ohio and Indiana, the number of heroin addicts is higher too.

In depressed areas in the Rust Belt, where poverty and unemployment rates shot up as factories shut down and jobs disappeared, the drug epidemic is ravaging once-idyllic communities. Indiana had a brutal wake-up call earlier this year when Austin, a small rural community just off the interstate between Indianapolis and Louisville, was the epicentre of the largest outbreak of HIV infections ever seen in the state. Nearly 200 people were infected in a population of just 4,200 because addicts injecting Opana, a prescription painkiller that delivers a potent high, shared needles, which is the fastest way for an infection to spread. “We have never documented anything like it,” says Mr Frieden.

The importance of Chinese box office, again

China Box Office: Tom Cruise's 'Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation' Crosses $100M - Forbes

That's in 10 days of release.  In America, it is approaching $200 million but slowing down.

An earlier prediction I posted said some think it might reach $250 million in China.

One might say that it pays to panda to the Chinese market.  (Ha.)

About time

Doctor Who exterminated by X Factor in 10-year low for season opener | Media | The Guardian

I had been wondering whether the now completely unwatchable Dr Who would be suffering in the ratings, and it appears it certainly is.    As I have been saying for at least a couple of years now, it needs to be rested for a decade or so, and then revived (if at all) under a completely new team. 

And the Guardian can stop being Dr Who Nerd Central, too.