Then there were two

Had a very pleasant meeting last evening with a long term blog reader.  This is only the second reader (of the variety who only knows of me via the blog) I have ever met, and the first was maybe 9 years ago, so it doesn't happen often.   Mind you, with my scant hit rate, this still probably means I will have met all regular readers by the time I'm 80...if I haven't done so already.  :)

Nightwalkers of all kinds

Transvestite Vicar Ghost in Interwar England - Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

Beachcombing tells the tale of a night time cross dressing English vicar in the 1920's, and it is odd and somewhat amusing.

But before he gets into it, he notes:

First, it might be worth noting that there were many nightwalkers in
Victorian and Edwardian England who were often mistaken for ghosts. Some
were men or women who used the night to walk naked through familiar
countryside, and a rarer category were men who used the hours of night
to dress in their wife’s clothing.

Can't say that I've heard before of naked, pale night walkers of England as an explanation for some ghost sightings in Victorian England!  

Update:  I see that "nightwalker" had a much earlier meaning in England, as explained in this article from an interesting looking site.

Are Donald and Art even talking?

In April, Art Laffer was claiming:

“You know, [Trump] wants to cut tax rates, Poppy. He does not want to cut taxes. He wants to cut tax rates to bring economic growth back in. He wants to bring jobs back into the United States by having a corporate tax of 15 percent versus the highest tax in the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development]. And he’s completely right on that. And by the way, so is Ted Cruz completely right on that. Everyone else is missing this.”

Some other claims by laughing Art in that interview were, um, interesting:

Laffer then said that Trump would cut the national debt by using “asset sales.”
Adding, “You have all these properties, you have the post office, you have Camp Pendleton, which is worth $65 billion. There are all sorts of assets.”
Harlow interject, “Who are you going to sell it to?”
Laffer responded that “Southern California beachfront property is still going very nicely. You’ve got the oil reserves. You’ve got gold in Fort Knox. You’ve got all of these assets — it could probably bring down the national debt.

Again, Harlow interrupted, “I’m asking but who are you going to sell it to to eliminate $19 trillion in national debt?”
“Well, you couldn’t eliminate the whole 19 trillion with asset sales, but if you brought the budget back in, you got economic growth, you wouldn’t reduce it to zero, but you can make a huge hit. I mean the tax amnesty program by itself, Poppy, with a good tax plan could probably bring in $800 billion. I mean just past taxes being paid.”

Today, Trump is reported as saying this:

U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said on Sunday he was open to raising taxes on the rich, backing off his prior proposal to reduce taxes on all Americans and breaking with one of his party's core policies dating back to the 1990s."I am willing to pay more, and you know what, the wealthy are willing to pay more," Trump told ABC's "This Week."

From the rest of the report:

The billionaire real estate tycoon has said he would like to see an increase in the minimum wage, although he told NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday he would prefer to see states take the lead on that front instead of the federal government.
"I don't know how people make it on $7.25 an hour," Trump said of the current federal minimum wage. "I would like to see an increase of some magnitude. But I'd rather leave it to the states. Let the states decide."
Trump's call for higher taxes on the wealthy is a break with Republican presidential nominees who have staunchly opposed tax hikes for almost three decades. Tax hikes have been anathema to many in the party since former President George H.W. Bush infuriated fellow Republicans by abandoning a pledge not to raise taxes and agreeing to an increase in a 1990 budget deal.
Democrats, including presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, have pressed for increased taxes on the wealthiest Americans for years.
Trump released a tax proposal last September that included broad tax breaks for businesses and households. He proposed reducing the highest income tax rate to 25 percent from the current 39.6 percent rate.

He is evidently the "say anything" candidate. 

Oil sands and the fire

How bad will the fires in Fort McMurray hit the economy?

Interesting report in Macleans notes this:

There is also the risk no one wants to talk about just yet: the possibility that a return
to business-as-usual in Fort Mac may simply not be in the cards. Allan Dwyer, an assistant professor of finance at Calgary’s Mount Royal University, says the wildfire is merely the latest wound to be inflicted on the oil sands and its future—and therefore Fort McMurray’s as well.
In addition to a depressed global outlook for oil prices, the current list of headwinds facing the industry include the  fractious political debate over building more pipelines, mounting concerns about the impact on climate change and recently elected provincial and federal governments that promise economic diversification. “A few years ago, when oil was trading around US$110 a barrel, there would be no doubt about it being an all-hands-on-deck approach to rebuilding and getting people back to work,” Dwyer says. “Now it could be a different response.”

Dwyer also wonders how many homeless oil sands workers will be eager to return to Fort McMurray and rebuild given the doom and gloom that hangs over the sector. “There’s been a growing sense, as the global oil prices has gone down and stayed down, that the oil sands is
somewhat of a sunset industry—that it’s yesterday’s aggressive style of producing hydrocarbons,” Dwyer says. “This only adds to that creeping negative sentiment.”

 

A very cool video

Sky Magic Live at Mt.Fuji : Drone Ballet Show by MicroAd, Inc. from Sky Magic on Vimeo.

Nietzsche and his mum

From a review of new book about Nietzsche (and the reviewer, incidentally, in other parts of the review, is no anti-Nietzsche critic):

In fact, Nietzsche spent a good deal of his early years composing just such books. He completed his first memoir when he was just 13, and wrote another five over the next decade. They weren’t written to record his academic achievements (negligible), much less his prowess on field or track (non-existent), but, rather, according to Blue, as a ‘mirror’ in which, abstracted from history and environment, his ‘latent self’ would come into focus. ‘Autobiography’ was what Nietzsche wrote ‘in order to see who he was’.

On the evidence adduced here, what he was was a mummy’s boy. As late as her son’s undergraduate days, Franziska Nietzsche was still lecturing him on what coat and trousers to wear in the rain. And whenever a more metaphysical storm broke, mum was always Nietzsche’s first port of call. Even when he was called away from his studies for military service, he was granted a dispensation that posted him in his hometown — and allowed him not only to live at home with Mum, but to lunch and dine with her every day of the week. Blue, who seems to have read everything ever published on Nietzsche (and translated much new material hitherto available only in the German), doesn’t mention Joachim Köhler’s Zarathustra’s Secret: The Interior Life of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nonetheless, he does an awful lot to endorse Köhler’s suggestion that Nietzsche was a repressed homosexual.

Well, he was at the very least, rather eccentric from an early age.

More on Trump not winning

Donald Trump just threatened to cause an unprecedented global financial crisis - Vox

Scott Adams presumably thinks that things like this don't hurt the path of a "master persuader" to the Presidency.  Well, I have just checked on his blog, and all he seems to think Trump needs to do is this:

To be fair, Trump scares the pants off of about one-third of the public.
So “risky” will hit home for those voters. The problem for team Clinton
is that Trump has complete control of his persona. All he needs to do
is act less risky for a few months to prove his campaign persona was all for effect. That process is well underway.

I am completely unconvinced.  I think Adams himself is just a showman, milking this for all its worth.

Company tax cuts, again

I see Bernard Keane and Crikey are continuing the case against company tax cuts leading to increased investment.

Interesting.

Not so much furious as incredulous

That was my reaction at watching Fury Road last night.

Look, post apocalypse movies are not generally my thing; nor are movies based on car crashes and violence.  (Chases are OK, of course, but the Mad Max movies - I gather, as this is the first I have watched - are all about the revving engines and the grinding sound of metal upon metal, often with human flesh squished between it.)

So, it's not as if I was ever destined to like it.  But really, the utter, utter ridiculousness and perverse lack of thrills I was experiencing did mean I kept watching it.  It doesn't reach the "so bad it's good" level, although I strongly suspect that there must have been a substantial part of the cinema audience like me - incredulous at the inanity of what they were watching. Seeing it after knowing it was strongly reviewed, nominated for and had won several Oscars, and made a reasonable amount of money at the box office, only added to the incredulity level.

Let me be specific about a few points:

*  I did not consider it well directed at all.  Good action directing lets you know who (or what) is where in a scene; this quality seemed to me to be distinctly lacking in most of the action sequences.  How Miller got nominated for a directing Oscar indicates something quite worrying about the current crop of Hollywood directors: they don't know good action direction when they see it. 

*  The film was supposed to be one that used little CGI.  Yeah, sure.   I'm not sure how many bodies I saw face plant into sand at about 80kph - it seemed at least a few dozen - but every time one did, of course it was obvious CGI was involved.   It reminded me a bit of the publicity about the much maligned Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which also claimed low CGI in its action sequences, but clearly there was plenty.  (Not that I minded much.  Unlike Road, it was a movie with a plot, after all.)

*  Of what little dialogue there was, I still had trouble understanding some of it, both audibly and narratively.   Was I alone in that?

*  What an embarrassing enterprise for adults to be involved in making; Miller in particular.  As someone writes at IMDB (where there is a bit of a backlash underway in user reviews, it seems):

 So what is this film's targeted demographic? I'm not sure. I can imagine that if you are a 13-year old boy, really into cars/trucks/slipknot, pretty redneck, and probably a little slow, this movie may seem pretty cool. I mean it does have ridiculous cars/trucks outfitted with lots of weapons, spikes, flame-exhausts, (breast-milk?) and guys playing "cool" guitar riffs for no apparent reason. There's also lots of explosions and fighting. And scantily clad women. And tornadoes. And skulls.

Exactly.  I said something more particular to my son as we watched it:  it's like it was written by a 13 year old boy - one who has grown up with aging heavy metal parents, still into Iron Maiden, who took him to every demolition derby and monster truck show in town since he was a toddler.  That Miller made the first couple of Mad Max films when he was a relatively young man is one thing; that he should want to wallow in this world with ever greater improbable visuals, scale and scenarios I have difficulty interpreting other than as an embarrassing sign of immaturity at heart.

*  The one thing I found vaguely interesting:  there was one, not very major, character who I suspect bore a deliberate physical resemblance to Philip Adams.  Adams famously loathed Mad Max, and wrote scathingly of it as violence porn.  (I suspect his reaction was actually a bit overblown, but that it still bore some truth.)   I am curious whether I am right about this being a deliberate joke on Adams on Miller's part. 


In any event, I see now that the movie was not quite the box office smash that its critical reputation suggests.  In the US it made a respectable but far from outstanding $153 million, and $378 million world wide.  

As I'm guessing that 1/4 to 1/3 of the audience actually didn't think highly of the film, I think I can fairly call it not that big a success after all.  Good.

Cheaper for youngsters

So, something interesting happens to weed after it’s legal - The Washington Post

In case you don't want to click - it becomes cheaper.

As the article says:

Falling pot prices create winners and losers. Because state taxes are
based on a percentage of the sales price, declining prices mean each
sale puts less money in the public purse. On the other hand,
bargain-basement prices undercut the black market, bringing the public
reduced law enforcement costs, both in terms of tax dollars spent on
jail and the damage done to individuals who are arrested.

For consumers who enjoy pot occasionally while suffering no adverse effects
from it, low prices will be a welcome but minor benefit; precisely
because they consume modest amounts, the price declines are only a
modest win. On the downside, young people tend to be price-sensitive
consumers, and their use of inexpensive pot may rise over time, as might
that of problematic marijuana users.

Of course, I choose to emphasise the downside...

Never too much when it comes to Nazis...

First, there's a review of a book about the diary of a key Nazi figure who I can't say I recall hearing about before.  (No explanation about the name, though.)  Anyway, worth reading the review.

And from Literary Review, an anecdote about Hitler being funny:

Was Hitler ever – intentionally – funny? The answer, surprisingly enough, is yes. After hosting Mussolini in Berlin in September 1937, the Führer helped his entourage let off steam by mounting a full-scale parody of the Duce: ‘His chin thrust forward, his legs spread and his right hand jammed on his hip, Hitler bellowed Italian or Italian-sounding words like giovinezza, patria, victoria, macaroni, belleza, bel canto and basta.’ For a dictator who only spoke German, the act exceeded Hitler’s ordinary range and the court architect, Albert Speer, noted that the laughter was more than polite: the performance ‘was indeed very funny’. 

Of course!

Andrew Sullivan’s Blind Spot | City Journal

The subheading from this article:

Is America “ripe for tyranny?” Blame Barack Obama.

The nutty American Right isn't big on self awareness...

Adams is wrong

I see that Jason Soon has tweeted to a WAPO article giving publicity to the Scott Adams argument that Trump will win "in a landslide" because he's a "master persuader."


I doubt very much that JS actually agrees with Adams, but I have been meaning to note since I first read that Adams was running this line that he is a very eccentric character who is way overconfident in his understanding of humans.  (I posted years ago about his mysterious loss of voice, which he overcame.  He is very big on hypnosis, which is not exactly a practice to dismiss, but not one to tie your credibility to, either.)  

In the meantime, I see there is much laughter on the internet today about this tweet from Trump:

I can't see anyone disputing that it's real, so, yeah, what a "master persuader".  /sarc

My complaint about young(er) people

I see on Twitter and around the place that younger than me, lefty sort of people find the ABC's iView comedy "The Katering Show" hilarious.   Having watched a few episodes, I can see the potential - it's a funny concept, and while not exactly the original short form food/cooking porn parody (see England's rather funnier Posh Nosh from 13 years ago) the women are pretty funny actors.

But seriously, too much of the humour is from the cheap and simple device of a sudden outbreak of swearing, usually as part of a sudden outbreak of "honesty".

It doesn't appear in a natural context, either.   It's way too obvious.

The humour in Posh Nosh was more subtle and naturalistic and better for it.

Young people who find this technique hilarious - you're wrong and encouraging lazy comedy writing.   [Because I say so.]

Stable bugs

Our personal skin microbiome is surprisingly stable

I guess I am not surprised.  It probably explains why unfortunate people who have a skin biome which results in really strong body odour (or, on the other hand, the lack of it) are stuck that way unless they make a very major attempt to change it.

Bill on the rise

I don't normally pay attention to the Budget Reply, but the status of this one as effectively the first major election campaign speech meant it was worth watching.

And I'm glad I did.  Shorten clearly did well, sounding confident and reasonable and, well, rather like a Prime Minister.   I don't actually agree with all of his policy positions, but he is sounding good....

Is the true situation "nobody knows"?

Adam Creighton has another one of his peculiar columns up where the headline position doesn't seem all that well supported by the details.  It says in the opening paragraph that Treasury has "hit back" at claims a tax cut for companies will hurt Australia, but the details of the analysis don't sound all that convincing.

For example:

Labelling it a “tax on foreign capital”, the analysis said a company tax cut to 25 per cent would increase employment in the long run by 0.1 per cent, equivalent to about 12,000 jobs, and boost real wages 1.1 per cent.

0.1% is supposed to be impressive??

Creighton then goes on to note one dissenter:

Janine Dixon, a researcher at Victoria University, last month challenged the orthodox view, finding gross domestic product and workers’ wages would rise but not by enough to make up for the transfer of government revenue to foreigners, which could no longer be spent on public services.

“The right indicator of national benefit is the impact of a company tax rate cut on national income and that’s clearly negative,” she said.

Of course, there is the fact that Ken Henry was a supporter of a company tax cut to 25% to make us "more competitive with Asia."   On the other hand, the US doesn't exactly seem crippled by its corporate tax rate, although no doubt there is the argument that big corporations find motivation for their off shore tax shenanigans in the relatively high tax rate.

I reckon the truth is that no body really knows how good an idea it really is.

Climate change and Canadian fires

Did climate change contribute to the Fort McMurray fire?

It's a short article, but some surprising figures in there for the increase in the area of Canada burnt in bushfires over recent decades.

Agreed

Donald Trump isn’t going to be president.: Donald Trump begins the general election with a huge deficit in head-to-head polls, deep unpopularity, and major demographic headwinds. Unless he wins unprecedented shares of black and Latino voters, or, barring any improvement with nonwhite voters, unless he wins unprecedented shares of white voters, he loses. And he has to do this while running as the most unpopular nominee in 30 years of polling. He has to do it while running against a Democratic Party operating at full strength, with popular surrogates (including a former president) crisscrossing the country against his campaign. He has to do it with a divided Republican Party. He has to do it while somehow tempering his deep-seated misogyny and racism. All this, again, in a growing economy with a well-liked president—solid conditions for a Democratic candidate.

Donald Trump has to become a radically different person to win.

Donald Trump isn’t going to win.

Budget reaction

M'eh.*

A bit more detail:

*  is the Murdoch press in the can for full on support for a Coalition win in July, or what?

*  a significant danger for the Coalition in the election campaign should be the deferral of a decision on university fee deregulation and HECS support.   But will that get swamped by the "big picture"?

*  the IPA and small government types are not going to be impressed with this budget, but seriously, how many of them would really manage to vote without at least preferences going to the Coalition?  (Bolt has already put the boot into it to a surprising degree - but he tends to take his economics talking points straight from the IPA.  I would bet a pile of money that he will not, however, endorse a vote for Shorten.) 

*  the danger - the big, big danger - for Labor will be things like that downwards revised estimate for revenue from tobacco taxes.   People are too easily convinced that Labor is too optimistic on revenue to justify its spending.  

*  listening to Richard de Natale on Radio National this morning - he's really the best Greens leader we've ever had.   Sounds extremely reasonable.

*  why did aged care have to take such a hit?  Have we got too many nursing homes now?

*  politically, it's not great; but on the other hand, it looks fantastic compared to the dire first attempt by Abbott.

Update:   hey, hell is about to freeze over:  I will now quote Judith Sloan as making a useful contribution in economic commentary:

Why should we believe this when none of the other budget projections have come to pass? We are expected to believe that nominal GDP growth, the key driver of revenue, will jump from 2¼ per cent this financial year to 4¼ per cent next year and 5 per cent per annum thereafter. Note that nominal GDP grew by only 1.6 per cent in 2014-15.

The reasoning behind this optimism is Treasury’s view that the economic output gap (the difference between actual and potential output) must eventually narrow. However, any significant hiccup in the world economy or China means the assumptions on ­nominal GDP growth are out the window.

And just take a look at what is expected to happen to revenue. Next financial year, general government revenue is expected to come in at 24.2 per cent of GDP. By the end of the forward estimates, revenue will be bringing in 25.9 per cent of GDP.

In historical terms, this would be an extraordinary outcome. In the period since 1996-97, there have been only two years when revenue as a percentage of GDP exceeded 25.9 per cent, in 2000-01 and 2005-06. Now many of us would agree that we live in extraordinary times, just not the sort of extraordinary times that would generate the surge in government revenue assumed in the budget.

And there are a number of breathtaking assumptions. Capital gains tax revenue is expected to go from $13.4bn this year to $17.5bn in 2019-20. And superannuation taxes will rise from $6.6bn this year to $10.9bn at the end of the forward estimates, an increase of 65 per cent.

Even taking into account the changes to the taxation of superannuation contained in the budget — a series of measures that will no doubt induce anger among the ­Coalition’s base and negate the Treasurer’s pledge to spare current retirees — the increase in superannuation taxes looks implausible. There is a long history of appalling forecasting of super­annuation taxation receipts on the part of Treasury.

In other words, it is quite on the cards that the Budget will suffer the same fate as those under Swan - based on cheery Treasury forecasts which don't sound all that likely, and will have to be revised downwards.

Update 2:  Peter Martin really praises the good bits of the budget.

Yeah, I agree up to a point.   The bigger issue, and one for which I blame both sides of politics, is that a moderate increase in GST (I was arguing for 2.5%)  would have given a substantial, and pretty much dead certain, boost in revenue.  Instead, we get changes which are of uncertain revenue impact over many years.   Both sides aren't really being serious about revenue measures.   And the Coalition is especially profligate when it comes to defence.  There has also been no serious discussion about the Coalition's climate change spend - when a modest carbon tax would make much more sense.



*  I see the "correct" spelling is "meh", but I always have the urge to put in an apostrophe.  I can't see why both can't be right.