A few minor Oscar observations

*  Jimmy Kimmel was likeable enough as a host.  I'm not sure why they let TV hosts put their same segments from their TV show on the Oscars, though.

*  Meryl Streep seems to have plateaued in the ageing process.  I think she has looked the same for the last 15 years.  Nicole Kidman, on the other hand, seems to be going backwards in age.  Much "work" involved, I suspect.

*  Shirley McLaine, to her credit, seems to spend little or no money on face work;  she's 82 and still pretty funny, if somewhat loopy.

*  Steven Spielberg not spotted in the audience, for once.  :(

 

Corporate tax cuts aren't magic

Found via Axios, Stephen Roach with an argument against the Trumpian take on corporations and tax:

Corporate tax cuts are coming in the United States. While this push pre-dates last November’s presidential election, President Donald Trump’s Make-America-Great-Again mantra has sealed the deal. Beleaguered US businesses, goes the argument, are being squeezed by confiscatory taxes and onerous regulations – strangling corporate earnings and putting unrelenting pressure on capital spending, job creation, and productivity, while sapping America’s competitive vitality. Apparently, the time has come to give businesses a break.

But this argument raises an obvious question: If the problem is so simple, why hasn’t this fix already been tried? The answer is surprising. 

For starters, it is a real stretch to bemoan the state of corporate earnings in the US. Commerce Department statistics show that after-tax corporate profits (technically, after-tax profits from current production, adjusted for inventory and depreciation-accounting distortions) stood at a solid 9.7% of national income in the third quarter of 2016.

While that is down from the 11% peak hit in 2012 – owing to tepid economic growth, which typically puts pressure on profit margins – it hardly attests to a chronic earnings problem. Far from anemic, the current GDP share of after-tax profits is well above the post-1980 average of 7.6%.

Trends in corporate taxes, which stood at just 3.5% of national income in the third quarter of 2016, support a similar verdict. Yes, the figure is higher than the post-2000 level of 3% (which represents the lowest 15-year average tax burden for corporate America since the 2.9% reading in the mid-1990s); but it is well below the 5.2% average share recorded during the boom years of the post-World War II era, from 1950 to 1969. In other words, while there may be reason to criticize the structure and complexities of the US corporate tax burden, there is little to suggest that overall corporate taxes are excessive. 

Conversely, the share of national income going to labor has been declining. In the third quarter of 2016, worker compensation – wages, salaries, fringe benefits, and other so-called supplements such as social security, pension contributions, and medical benefits – stood at 62.6% of national income. While that represents a bit of a rebound from the 61.2% low recorded in the 2012-2014 period, it is two percentage points below the post-1980 average of 64.6%. In other words, the pendulum of economic returns has swung decisively away from labor toward owners of capital – not exactly a compelling argument in favor of relief for purportedly hard-pressed American businesses.

Update:  and on the Australian scene, Greg Jericho sums up the Grattan Institute's report that lowering the corporate tax rate is going to hurt the budget bottom line significantly, with any expected benefits taking too long to arrive to avoid that.  

Sounds quite plausible to me.  

More than neurons

Ed Yong has stopped writing his blog, but here he is at The Atlantic, with a good article about some neuroscientists getting sick of the approach of other neuroscientists.  A sample:

John Krakaeur, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, has been asked to BRAIN Initiative meetings before, and describes it like “Maleficent being invited to Sleeping Beauty’s birthday.” That’s because he and four like-minded friends have become increasingly disenchanted by their colleagues’ obsession with their toys. And in a new paper that’s part philosophical treatise and part shot across the bow, they argue that this technological fetish is leading the field astray. “People think technology + big data + machine learning = science,” says Krakauer. “And it’s not.”

He and his fellow curmudgeons argue that brains are special because of the behavior they create—everything from a predator’s pounce to a baby’s cry. But the study of such behavior is being de-prioritized, or studied “almost as an afterthought.” Instead, neuroscientists have been focusing on using their new tools to study individual neurons, or networks of neurons. According to Krakauer, the unspoken assumption is that if we collect enough data about the parts, the workings of the whole will become clear. If we fully understand the molecules that dance across a synapse, or the electrical pulses that zoom along a neuron, or the web of connections formed by many neurons, we will eventually solve the mysteries of learning, memory, emotion, and more. “The fallacy is that more of the same kind of work in the infinitely postponed future will transform into knowing why that mother’s crying or why I’m feeling this way,” says Krakauer. And, as he and his colleagues argue, it will not.That’s because behavior is an emergent property—it arises from large groups of neurons working together, and isn’t apparent from studying any single one.

Oscars for movies barely seen

Given the odd backlash against La La Land, and the hosting by Jimmy Kimmel, I was curious to watch the Oscars this year.  (I think we have last year's show recorded on a hard drive, but I haven't watched it.)

Now that I know the results in the "sorry about that mistake, La La fans" climax, I have to make the observation, as many others no doubt will too, that the Best Picture Oscar for years now seems to go to critical favourites which have next to no appeal to a wide audience.

Moonlight might be fine film, but how much appeal can an episodic  film about an American black man coming to terms with being gay and living in crime affected Miami hold for a wider audience?  I see that the movie has made $22 million in the US - that's good for an arthouse flick, but it's not a lot of tickets.

Seems to me that the last, broadly popular, movie that won Best Picture was The King's Speech in 2010.  (In 2012, Argo did a respectable enough $136 million in the US, but only made $96 million overseas.  King's Speech made $414 million globally.)

Shockingly, I see that the 2009 winner, The Hurt Locker, made only $17 million in the US.  That's tiny.  Even The Artiste from 2011, which I would have guessed was the biggest Best Picture Box Office bomb, made $45 million in the US and $133 million globally. 

Getting an Oscar might be nice, but producers must surely prefer the cash of an actually popular movie...

Depressing stories for a Monday

*  Bill Paxton's unexpected death:  seems that his likeability on screen was matched in his personal life. 

*  Slate has a lengthy article on horrendous, ethics free, medical experiments by US doctors in Guartemala post World War 2. 

*   Did you notice the story from a couple of weeks back that ocean oxygen levels are dropping, due to warming oceans?  No, well, it's all in accordance with predictions, apparently, and is another reason that techno optimists who think everything will be OK if we just make everyone rich enough to get enough airconditioning are wrong. 

Past influences

The Trump presidency is too depressing to watch everything on TV about him, but the one hour doco Meet the Trumps on SBS earlier this week was pretty good.  It's still up on SBS on Demand, I think.

It wasn't overly detailed, but just hit some of the key points of his life.  (One thing I haven't heard, though, is why he is a teetotaller.  Sure, his brother died an alcoholic, but it seems rare to find such an extrovert refraining from even alcohol.)

Anyway, the main thing I wanted to comment on was his early career dealing with Roy Cohn, the infamously unpopular lawyer who I actually didn't know much about until I watched that "Angels in America" play on TV some years ago.  (We all have gaps in our knowledge.)

I'm not sure who it was on Meet the Trumps who was denouncing Cohn, but he had met him and could not stress enough what an absolutely appalling, dislikeable man he found him to be.  Which I thought was interesting - the portrait of him in Angels seems not to have been overblown at all.

Anyway, here's an article in The Guardian about Cohn being a (sort of) mentor to Trump.

Witches -V- Trump

So, a bunch of witches are planning on a Trump attack.   Instructions to join in are available on line.

Well, as much as I'd like it to work, it has been tried before.  I didn't realise Life magazine ran a story on it in 1941, though. 

True, the attempted supernatural attacks didn't cause Hitler to curl up and die.  But he was pretty sick for most of the war.    Even if the witches can only cause Trump to have chronic farting, like Hitler, I think it's worth a go...

Happy anniversary, movable type

A businessman intent on making money in a world dominated by the Catholic Church, Johannes Gutenberg created, instead, a revolution – and sowed the seeds for many more.

February 23, 1455 has been cited as the date Mr. Gutenberg began to print the first edition of his eponymous Bible. The idea for the printing blocks came from Asia, where the Chinese had invented a printing technique almost a millennium before. His ink was a concoction that blended traditional ink with oil, helping it flow and transfer from printing blocks to paper. The press itself, meanwhile, was the type of screw press familiar to farmers across the continent, more commonly used for pressing olives or grapes.

To this motley assortment of preexisting ideas, Gutenberg added an important innovation: movable type, the first in the Western world. He drew on the skills he had acquired growing up in a family of skilled craftsmen to produce letter molds from a metal alloy. The molds were durable, and could withstand hundreds of printings. Arranging and rearranging these letters in a type tray, he produced pages from the Bible and began to run off copies, far faster than previous scribes or publishers could do by hand or using full-page blocks of type.

He died broke, though.  Link.

Nuttier than I thought

I think Steve Bannon sounds nuttier than ever in his "WE WERE VICTORIOUS AND YOU BE WILL CRUSHED UNDER OUR HEEL" (I think that's a fair summary) comments at CPAC.

Yes, makes me so confident to see someone like him with the ear of the President of the USA.

I did find this video amusing, though.

Down Mexico way

What?:

Paul Ryan tours the US-Mexico border on horseback

I was hoping there was a photo of him on a rise, looking down at the huddled masses, as that headline, for some reason, immediately reminded me of this:

and made me wonder who else may be making the trip:   

Penalty rates

Can I regain some "cred" to my "conservative leaning" claim at the top of the blog by noting that I think the Fair Work Commission's decision to reduce Sunday penalty rates is overdue and justified?  In fact, I think they should have gone a bit further, especially with casuals.

Of course, it won't affect a great many small businesses that dealt with the excessive penalty rates by just ignoring them.   Maybe I can even make a bit of a Laffer-like argument here, and note that the result might mean a net improvement for hospitality workers as a whole, if it encourages businesses to actually pay to the award.  But that could be being too optimistic.

Message to Jason

I know it's an edited version of a paper, but no, it's a rambling article that I would call far from "excellent".

I personally find Allan a very grating character - and certainly I don't understand why he continues to work in a sector he seems to find appalling.  I am sure I could find him more convincing if he actually left the Australian university sector and wrote his criticisms from outside of it.  Preferably from another country, since he seems to rate them much more highly.

That said - yes, his criticisms of the number of law schools and graduates pumped out by them, and the way they study now, sound all entirely valid.

His generic criticism about how and what they are taught, however - I very much doubt he is someone I should pay attention to in that regard. 

The path to how we got to the strange and dubious changes to tertiary education generally in Australia seems to me to be complicated and leave plenty of room for criticism of both Left and Right for each being a bit conned in their own way by a self serving education sector.   But given the recent debacle of the private vocational education players, I have a bit of trouble with listening to critiques from the Right on anything to do with education.

Get a grip

With more analysis of why New South Wales was barely coping with electricity demand during one of the days of its recent, really remarkable, heatwave in the news, I feel the need to make one observation:

Get a grip, people:  the risk of losing power for an hour or two a year in a modern city is not the end of civilisation.

Going back  a few decades in Queensland, at least, before concern about how our electricity was generated was even on the radar, summertime blackouts in my part of Brisbane (all of 7 or 8 km from the inner city) were hardly that unusual.   Storms at that time seemed much more likely to cause very widespread blackouts than they are now, and I seem to recall people considered it an inconvenience but not a crisis. 

Now, you get a city with a "brownout" of an hour, again really due to the weather and the high demands it causes, and everyone acts as if it is a crisis.

Sure, it's good to work on fixing the problem that causes it:  continual supply is ideal and (like improvements to Queensland's transmission infrastructure) are worth working towards.

But let's not go overboard with how bad the current situation is...

A weirdly dysfunctional presidency

It's been obvious since he won the election, particularly, that Trump is an emotionally needy man-child who craves approval.  But this story at Politico, which indicates that his inner circle fully understands this, and will then go out and feed stories to the Right wing bubble media so that they will turn up on their boss's cable TV viewing and make him happier, really indicates something that sounds truly unique and strange in modern democracy.

To be fair, the story does also confirm that he reads the New York Times daily (waiting, waiting, for the hint of approval, I guess);  but it is also obvious that it simply upsets him and leads to his "fake news" attacks.

Speaking of fake news, as this Washington Post article noted last week, the key to the success of such attacks with his base is that they live in a Right wing media bubble, where Fox News is the key source of news for an extraordinary high number of them.   The role of the Right wing internet "news" outlets is also no doubt important.

This is why Rupert Murdoch has been key to the dumbing down and intense polarisation of American (and to a significant extent, Australian) politics.   

Not a good idea to try

Hey, I missed this article in The Atlantic in January:

What Happens If You Stick Your Head in a Particle Accelerator?

Interestingly, we have a good idea that it's not going to be good for your health - a Soviet scientist did get his head accidentally zapped by a proton beam of very high strength in 1978, and although it didn't kill him, he was painlessly injured.    

Message to monty

Telling you nothing new, but the CL approach to history follows some simple, immutable, rules:

a.  no Labor (or in America, Democrat) politician ever did anything great, ever.  Or, if pressed, deserves credit for anything great.
b.  the Catholic Church was the greatest, most heroic, institute for the advancement of humanity, ever;
c.  all figures in history have to pass the purity test of their attitude to abortion and contraception before anything positive can be said about them.    

When markets don't work as you want

A good article looking at the complexities of the Australian electricity system and why it is having trouble coping with the necessary change to clean energy.

No, it only sounds like an autocrat who fearmongers about, and scapegoats, ethnic groups for shoring up his appeal to his gullible base

Trump administration seeks to prevent ‘panic’ over new immigration enforcement policies

From the report:

Kelly’s new DHS policies considerably broaden the pool of those who are prioritized for deportations, including undocumented immigrants who have been charged with crimes but not convicted, those who commit acts that constitute a “chargeable criminal offense,” and those who an immigration officer concludes pose “a risk to public safety or national security.”

The Trump administration “is using the specter of crime to create fear . . . in the American community about immigrants in order to create an opening to advance the indiscriminate persecution of immigrants,” said Clarissa Martínez-de-Castro, deputy vice president at the National Council of La Raza. “This administration is saying, ‘Now, everybody is going to be a priority,’ and the devil may care.”

But don't panic!: 

“We do not need a sense of panic in the communities,” a DHS official said in a conference call with reporters to formally release the memos to the public.

“We do not have the personnel, time or resources to go into communities and round up people and do all kinds of mass throwing folks on buses. That’s entirely a figment of folks’ imagination,” said the official, who was joined on the call by two others, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to answer questions. “This is not intended to produce mass roundups, mass deportations.”
 

That Milo matter

I'd already criticised Bolt's judgement for playing footsie with the obnoxious internet character Milo Yiannopoulos just because he criticises the Left, so Andrew doesn't really get much credit for having dropped him now.   And Tim Blair, a frequent Milo promoter, is conveniently away at the moment, so the fate of his former endorsements is yet to be seen.  

I watched bits and pieces of (one of the) interviews that got MY into trouble, and there's no doubt from it that, despite protestations made now (designed to try to save his lucrative book deal, presumably), he expressed no great moral concern about pederasty with consent, given the way he was talking about his enthusiastic participation in it as a 14 year old, and his reluctance to criticise the man (a priest, even) he claims it was with.  His statement today that he was the victim of the priest is just completely at odds with how he conducted himself in the interview, where he was happy to paint himself as the knowing instigator of enjoyable sexual encounters as a precocious young (gay) teenager.   He explained this as part of his then rebelliousness, but expressed no shame or regret.   

He may genuinely despise paedophiles, for all I know, and he's hardly the first* gay man** to make the distinction between paedophilia and pederasty, and grant some sympathy to the latter.  But I would bet he's the first openly gay man making money on the American wingnut media circuit to muse along those lines and not realise it was going to go over like a lead balloon.

I said before his writing seemed like that of an intellectual lightweight;  the abrupt (possible?) ending of his career this way helps confirm he's a bit short on the smarts.  

So, no great loss to society that he's lost his book deal, and (I would hope) a job at Breitbart.

About time he got a real job, preferably one completely out of the public eye.  It's not good for his soul.*** 

* As Gerard Henderson likes to go on and on about, pederasts were seeking understanding, if not sympathy, via public appearances back in the 1970's in the media, including - gasp! - the ABC

** I was tempted to say "public intellectual", but that would be extremely generous, if not sarcastic

*** Which, evidently, he believes in, given that he claims at heart to still be a Catholic

Update:   I see from a Spectator piece on this that Jason Soon linked to, this comment about the people on the Right who are still supporting Milo despite his pederasty comments:

Those people – and I think they’re a tiny minority – are either childishly innocent or hopelessly stupid. There’s no kinder way to say it. Either way, their opinion doesn’t matter. 

Can you guess which choice I go for?   [Lots of support for MY still in the Catallaxy threads.]

Conspiracy time

I can't be bothered checking right now, but I presume that the wingnut conspiracy Right must have claimed within minutes of its announcement that the Russian UN Ambassador's sudden death was at the hands of the Deep State trying to oust Trump, or at least start a war with Russia, or something?