Thursday, June 22, 2017

Back to McArdle

I see Megan McArdle's "let's not blame governments for the Grenfell fire - they were just acting as libertarians like them to act " column at Bloomberg has now reached nearly 2000 comments, with probably 95% of them ridiculing her.

As I noted in my previous post, it was pretty disingenuous of her to concentrate only on the issue of the cost of retrofitting fire sprinklers, when the more obvious problem was regulations regarding the cladding.   Does she really have to be reminded that if the cladding didn't burn, the entire building might not have gone up and the issue of sprinklers could have been much less important?

In any event, even her argument about sprinklers is looking shaky for two reasons:

a.   it is starting to look like the cost of retrofitting them is actually not as high as I would have guessed:
The British Automatic Fire Sprinkler Association (BAFSA), the trade body for the fire sprinkler industry, said retrofitting Grenfell Tower with sprinklers might have cost £200,000. This is the figure for installing a sprinkler system but does not include potential maintenance fees or costs associated with the wider redevelopment of a building.
And another Council has already decided to retrofit 25 high rise blocks at a cost of ten million pounds.

b.   McArdle's argument - that every dollar governments spend on sprinklers would divert it from other life preserving things like hospitals - conveniently, and in a very libertarian/small government way, ignores government's ability to raise extra money for worthwhile things by raising extra taxes.  Oh noes - we can't have that.

Now, this is not to deny that there might still be a legitimate argument to be had, by appropriate experts, about cost benefit analysis of retrofitting sprinklers to certain buildings.  

But clearly, McArdle's position was to start from a presumption not only that it's always best to leave it to the market to decide (a silly thing to be talking about when these residents did not have market power - and also, to the extent that you could say the market, in the sense of builders quoting for a job, came up with a disastrous result on the cladding in this case); but that you should never be too tough on government for making decisions on a cost benefit basis, even when there is no evidence around that cost benefit was considered in this case.   (And, that in fact, money saved on public housing and other Council functions was given back to the well off in the Council!)

 

Skeptic win?

Back in 2010, and again in 2014, I posted about the very interesting parapsychology experiments of Daryl Bem, and it's time to look at how the work is viewed now.

Not all that well, apparently.  Slate ran a lengthy article about it a couple of weeks ago, but I think this commentary on it (taking a quite sympathetic approach to Bem personally) is better reading.

The argument is that it was all a problem with statistical analysis, and that it really set off the reproducibility crisis in the whole field of experimental psychology.  

The lack of replication is, obviously, a concern; but I wish I understood statistics a bit better to understand some of the arguments that rage about their appropriate use.

Brisbane's wooden high rise

I posted about this plan to build a 52 m high wood office building in Brisbane recently, and now The Guardian has a lengthy report about it.  (Probably prompted by renewed interest in how easily buildings can burn.)

While I think it's a very interesting project, there's one issue I have my doubts about - the claim that this type of wood building is definitely healthier for the workers.   The reason - the wood product used is actually a cross laminated material - timber sheets glued together - and I am curious as to whether the glue used slowly leaks any chemical into the air over time.

I could well be being overly cautious here - but it just seems to me that its likely to emit some smell, at least early in its life.

Wednesday, June 21, 2017

When Presidents tweet

Several American sites are noting that Trump's tweet re North Korea:
While I greatly appreciate the efforts of President Xi & China to help with North Korea, it has not worked out. At least I know China tried!
 is dangerously ambiguous.  As New York Magazine writes:
But if Trump’s tweet is just mindless bluster, that hardly makes it less unnerving. In their joint military exercises, the United States and South Korea have rehearsed preemptive strikes against North Korea, ones designed to kill Kim Jong-un before he has a chance to press the proverbial button. Arms-control expert Jeffrey Lewis has warned that the implication of these exercises aren’t lost on Pyongyang: Kim knows “he has to go first, if he is to go at all.”

Just because savvy news consumers in the United States are comfortable assuming that Trump is merely talking trash doesn’t mean that North Korea is. In April, the president suggested that the day Beijing’s efforts to rein in Pyongyang failed would be the day that America took action against Kim Jong-un’s regime.

“Well if China is not going to solve North Korea, we will. That is all I am telling you,” Trump told the Financial Times.

The fact that the American president is an emotionally volatile reality star — who publishes his foreign-policy musings directly to the internet — has always been dangerous. In the context of a military standoff with a nuclear-weapons state, it may prove fatally so.
They are right - and you would have to be completely foolish (as Trump supporters are) not to see the impropriety and danger in this idiot President tweeting to the world.

A happy Hollywood story

Here's a long interview with all-grown-up (and rather plumper and hairier) actor Haley Joel Osment.   As the interview makes clear, he had really good experiences in making a couple of very high profile movies as a child - and it sounds like sensible parents were an enormous part of that.

Of course, the fact that he worked with Spielberg on AI - a movie Osment and the interviewer both love (I think it is very under rated) - makes me particularly interested in him.

Many more micro satellites on the way (and mobile phone talk)

Foreign Correspondent moved away from its normal political/social emphasis last night to look at the growing industry of micro satellites, and it was pretty fascinating.

I liked the way the guy from Planet explained how the origin of the idea was just to put mobile phone technology into space:  he emphasised the technological marvel that the commonplace mobile phone is these days, just as I like to do.

I am itching to buy a new mobile phone at the moment, and I am contemplated being unfaithful to Samsung.   (I may need to visit the confessional.)   The Moto G5 Plus seems to have everything I want in a mobile phone - except, I admit, the wonders of a beautiful Samsung AMOLED screen.

To get all that I want, ideally, I would buy a $650 Samsung A5.   But for $250 less, the Moto one has NFC - needed for using your phone to make paywave payment (an odd exception from Samsung J5 and J7, which cost the same or more as the G5 Plus), and a gyro sensor (which I understand is important if you want to use it to live in a VR world - and also not in the equivalent priced Samsung models.)   But the A5 does have a gorgeous looking screen, and is quite waterproof.     (Note that I have ever dropped a phone in the toilet - yet.)

Bizarrely, I have noticed that the cheap Samsung J range has this weird thing where some of the cheaper models have an AMOLED screen, and even my two year old cheapo J1 has NFC;  but the top end of the J range (J5 and J7) don't have either of these.  Hence Samsung are still making things rather confusing with the features in their model range.

How to make money from drugs

Hey Jason, if you don't like this story in the Atlantic, I'd be very surprised: How Two Common Medications Became One $455 Million Specialty Pill.

Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Horse fat? (Actually, a potato post)

Some unexpected information in The Guardian about Belgian chips (my bold):
Whether eaten with mayonnaise or taken au naturel, the Belgian chip is up there with chocolate, beer and the national football team in the nation’s psyche. No public square is complete without a frietkot, or chip stand, where sellers swear by double frying bintje potatoes in beef or horse fat to achieve the ideal combination of a succulent centre and crispy exterior.
I don't much like horses:  I'd just as soon they stayed out of any chips I might be eating, as well.  If ever I get to Belgium, that is.

Speaking of potatoes, I recently made nice sautéed potato with fennel seeds thrown in.  (Boil cubed potato first, for only about 3-5 minutes, then sauté in non stick frying pan with a fairly small amount of olive oil, with fennel seeds and salt, 'til crisp outside. Delicious.  And not a horse to be seen.)

And finally:  after some resistance from my wife,  who doubted I would use it, I acquired a potato ricer a few months ago, for use in making mashed potato.  One of these things:


While I wouldn't go so far as to claim that it has changed my life (I do, after all, only mash potatoes about once a month), I have to say that using a ricer gives extremely pleasing results.   Even before this, I made the best mash in the house;  now the quality is uniformly great - so much so that I sometimes worry that it's so smooth that it seems manufactured.  I still love it.

Why repeating lies makes them seem true

Vox talks about the "illusory truth effect", which surely has become something dangerous in the world of social media and other forms of echo chamber:
Psychological science consistently finds when a lie gets repeated, it’s slightly more likely to be misremembered as truth. It’s called the “illusory truth effect.” It’s a tendency the whole news media — as well as consumers of news — should be wary of. And it’s a reason not to give notorious bullshitters such a substantial spotlight. Especially bullshitters whose lies hurt others and whose lies have a track record for virality....

The illusory truth effect has been studied for decades — the first citations date back to the 1970s. Typically, experimenters in these studies ask participants to rate a series of trivia statements as true or false. Hours, weeks, or even months later, the experimenters bring the participants back again for a quiz. 

On that second visit, some of the statements are new, some are repeats. And it’s here that the effect shows itself: Participants are reliably more likely to rate statements they’ve seen before as being true — regardless as to whether they are or not. 

When you’re hearing something for the second or third time, your brain becomes faster to respond to it. “And your brain misattributes that fluency as a signal for it being true,” says Lisa Fazio, a psychologist who studies learning and memory at Vanderbilt University. The more you hear something, the more “you’ll have this gut-level feeling that maybe it’s true.” 

Most of the time this mental heuristic — a thinking shortcut — helps us. We don’t need to wrack our brains every time we hear “the Earth is round” to decide it’s true or not. Most of the things we hear repeated over and over again are, indeed, true. 

But falsehoods can hijack this mental tic as well.

Hating regulations because they're regulations

I know that it is actually probably more complicated than it may first appear - the matter of what claddings are allowed to be used on high rise buildings.   I say this because I was reading the CSIRO's guide on the matter, produced in 2016, which can be found via this page.

Nonetheless, I find it difficult to not marvel at the stupidity of the libertarian response to the Grenfell fire, with people like Stoat (who is on the right side of climate change, but otherwise likes to take contrarian positions on various things) saying things like:
But buildings *are* very heavily regulated. They are not “deregulated”. This can just as easily be seen as a failure of the “regulate everything and all will be well” approach
And he cites Tim Worstall:
So, layer upon layer of intrusive regulation and government made this happen.
The solution is more layers of intrusive government and regulation. That’ll work, won’t it?
As someone says in response to Worstall:
I don’t know, but what do you suggest as an alternative? Fewer fire regulations? No fire regulations?
And someone back at Stoats writes:
Timmy’s argument is ludicrous: the Graun describes how the designers and builders failed to comply with the building regulation requirement that “the external envelope of a building should not provide a medium for fire spread”, and other factors contributed to the death toll. Timmy jumps to:
“So, layer upon layer of intrusive regulation and government made this happen.”
False as the regulations are not “layer upon layer”, they have repeatedly been revised, tested, and reexamined in relation to experience, as well as getting watered down by dogma against regulation.
Ludicrous as, by Timmy’s argument, regulations against murder make murders happen.
The other ludicrous line that some on the Right are running is that the building was only clad in flammable cladding because of Green/climate change regulations for insulation.    (Some have been trying to bring EU regulation into it too - which hardly makes any sense if it is true that Germany does not allow the use of this material on its buildings.) 

This was pretty quickly extensively fact checked and found to be the misleading furphy that one might expect it to be.  It seems that the Right has become so stupid as to not even want to admit that insulation on buildings is an inherently good thing for, you know, making a residence more comfortable to live in.   (The link notes how the Grenfell tower had windows that for safety reasons could not be opened far - making it hot in summer.  And I assume that any residence in London benefits from insulation in winter.) 

This is a case where common sense makes sense:   this is a problem of inadequate/poorly designed/poorly enforced regulation.   It's nonsense to take a line that it's due to over regulation.



Bad reasons for eating animals

I was watching the 7.30 report on dog meat being eaten in Bali (a relatively recent cultural innovation, apparently), and I annoyed to see one old Balinese guy say he eats it because it keeps you healthy, especially in winter.

What is the name for the belief that eating particular animals is particularly good for you, in certain ways?   Most notoriously, it pervades Chinese medicine, and other Asian cultures, but I suppose it hangs around in lots of other continent's native cultures too:  the idea, in a generic sense, that eating a particularly strong or fierce animal (or a particular organ of it) will pass on some of its character to the eater.

It kind of drives me nuts:  a quasi spiritual idea that has been responsible for the endangerment of so many species for completely spurious reasons.  (Or is it a case of a placebo effect meaning it actually does help people?  But even if it is, can't they move onto using sugar pills instead of God knows what animal's penis, or heart, or whatever?)

I know people aren't evil for eating dogs, although my personal fondness for them means, of course, that I wish people wouldn't.  And, I know, they aren't endangered and never will be.   But if the motivation is simply because they are supposed to be particularly healthy for you - that just annoys me in particular.

Monday, June 19, 2017

Another 50 year anniversary: You Only Live Twice

Every time I see a Space X rocket landing vertically, I'm reminded of You Only Live Twice - the first Bond film I saw as a child , at a drive in, and it remains a Bond favourite to this day.

The Japan Times points out that it's the 50th anniversary of the movie, and has a lengthy account of Fleming's interest in Japan, which centred around the exploits of an Australian reporter, Richard Hughes, who was (apparently) transmogrified in the novel into one "Dikko" Henderson.  The story goes like this:
After less than a year in Tokyo, Hughes, sensing the imminence of war with Japan and keen to alert Australia and America to the danger, packed his own notebooks full of sensitive information and headed back to Australia at the beginning of 1941.

When the war ended, Hughes returned to live in Japan, now under American Occupation, and became manager of No. 1 Shimbun Alley, a rowdy foreign correspondents’ club situated next to the residential wing of the Soviet Embassy. The club was the meeting ground of reporters, former soldiers and spies, many of whom conducted illicit liaisons in its bedrooms.

The Cold War deepened in 1948 over the Berlin Airlift. Hughes was dismissed as manager of the club and swore never to return to it. At the same time, he started working as a foreign correspondent for London’s Sunday Times, under its foreign manager Ian Fleming, who had played a distinguished role in British naval intelligence during World War II and presided over many crucial covert operations.
Hughes now created his own intelligence network by founding the Baritsu Chapter, supposedly the Asian section of the Baker Street Irregulars, a Sherlock Holmes appreciation society first founded in the U.S. in 1934. “Baritsu” is the name given to a fictional form of martial art that Holmes is described as using to defeat his arch-nemesis, Moriarty, while wrestling with him at the Reichenbach Falls.
Hughes went on to become a double agent, fooling the KGB, and (much later) took Fleming on a boozey research tour of  Japan for the novel.

Worth reading in full...  


Would you buy a Nimble Dragon?

There seems to be some renewed effort from the nuclear power industry generally to push small, modular nuclear reactors.   I say this based on an interview I heard on Radio National one recent morning with what sounded like a PR person for the industry out to sell the idea.   Actual product ready to sell, though, is still not around, despite years of talking about this potential industry.

But I see in the Japan Times that the Chinese may now be trying to develop this as a market:
China is betting on new, small-scale nuclear reactor designs that could be used in isolated regions, on ships and even aircraft as part of an ambitious plan to wrest control of the global nuclear market.

Within weeks, state-owned China National Nuclear Corp. (CNNC) is set to launch a small modular reactor (SMR) dubbed the “Nimble Dragon” with a pilot plant on the island province of Hainan, according to company officials.

Unlike new large scale reactors that cost upward of $10 billion per unit and need large safety zones, SMRs create less toxic waste and can be built in a single factory.

A little bigger than a bus and able to be transported by truck, SMRs could eventually cost less than one-tenth the price of conventional reactors, developers predict.
Sure they make great mobile phones, but not entirely sure (to put it mildly) that they have the runs on the board re environmental responsibility to trust a nuclear reactor shipped out from there.

Strop it

I was at Target recently, hanging around the (mainly women's) toiletries while my daughter looked  for a possible gift for a friend, and noticed that on a "discount" shelf they had a cheap version of one of the razor blade sharpening products that I had occasionally noticed at The Razor Shop; but at $20 or $30, I hadn't ever bought one.

The Blade Buddy only cost $5, so I bought it out of curiosity.

The operative part is just a slab of rubber or silicon, I'm not sure which, with some ridged sections, and all you do is rub the razor blade upwards on it (with a bit of shaving cream for lubrication) about 15 to 20 times before shaving.  It doesn't take long.

The packaging says it works by "re-aligning" the blades, or some such, which sounds very improbable, so it was with low expectations that I started using it.

But, I have to say, I think it is working.   I did start with a new blade cartridge (a cheap 4 - or is it 5?- blade razor that Coles and Woolworths both sell), but after a week, I have the distinct impression that it feels sharper than if I hadn't used the Buddy device.

Mind you, I have been able to get about 3 to 4 weeks out of one of these cartridges anyway, so maybe it is an illusion.  But I don't think so.

When I google the topic, I see that there is actually a lot of material out there saying that these razor cleaning devices do work just by cleaning the blade, in a very similar way to the old "stropping" of a blade on a leather strap.   Makes sense.

In fact, there is also material out on the web about just using old denim to "strop" a cartridge razor.  And one guy - whose video I haven't properly watched - claims to have gotten 3 years out of one cartridge(!).  Maybe there's black magic involved...

Nevertheless, it seems clear that there is good reason to believe you can get very substantial extensions to the "normal" life of razor cartridges.    And to be honest, I don't mind the procedure:  it makes shaving more feel more, well, ritualised.  (You have to remember that I enjoy using shaving soap and a brush, too.)

Given the ridiculous cost of brand name, multi-blade cartridges, I am very surprised that this is not better known.   Certainly, I had never thought of it before - I just assumed that cartridge blades were so thin that they developed pits and holes that you couldn't do much about it.

It would seem I was mistaken. I will revisit the topic in a month or two's time...

Update:   more on using denim jeans to strop a razor cartridge.  The guy claims to be using the same cartridge for 8 months at the time he wrote that...

Ridiculous performance art

I suppose there will always be eccentrics, and/or the disturbed, who will want to create performance art involving blood and gore.   

What I find a bit more disturbing is that they can find a paying audience. 


Bruni on the state of political discourse

Bruni's column ("I'm OK - you're pure evil") about the coarsening of political discourse in the US, and in particular the dangerous role of social media in the process (something of a favourite theme of mine) is pretty good:
Over the past decade in particular, the internet and social media have changed the game. They speed people to like-minded warriors and give them the impression of broader company or sturdier validation than really exist. The fervor of those in the anti-vaccine movement exemplifies this. So did the stamina of Americans who insisted that Barack Obama was born abroad — and who were egged on by Donald Trump.

Admirers of a responsible politician or righteous cause coalesce quickly, but the same goes for followers of a hatemonger or crackpot. One good articulation of this came from David Simas, who was Obama’s political director, in a New Yorker article by David Remnick that deconstructed the 2016 election.

What people find on the web “creates a whole new permission structure, a sense of social affirmation for what was once unthinkable,” Simas told Remnick. Obama, in his own comments to Remnick, picked up that thread, saying, “An explanation of climate change from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers’ payroll.”

“The capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal — that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate,” Obama added. Suspicion blossoms into certainty. Pique flowers into fury.
Writing about last week's shooter of the Repbulican Congressman:
His life online reflected the goosing, goading, amplifying power of social media and the eminence of outrage in public debate. As Michael Gerson noted in The Washington Post after the shooting, today’s partisans “have made anger into an industry — using it to run up the number of listeners, viewers and hits.” Mocking and savaging political opponents have been “not only normalized but monetized,” Gerson added, and he stated the obvious, which needed stating nonetheless: “If words can inspire, then they can also incite or debase.”

Sunday, June 18, 2017

Left wing violence revisited

Good article at NPR:  

FACT CHECK: Is Left-Wing Violence Rising?

Some extracts:
The idea that some on the far left are openly condoning violence is a red flag for extremist group monitors.
"This is a dangerous game; people are going to die. No one's died yet, but it's just a matter of time," says J.J. McNabb, an expert on political extremism at George Washington University.

McNabb says white supremacists and neo-Nazis are widely condemned — and deservedly — for their violent tendencies. But she says the Antifa shouldn't get a pass on their violence just because they oppose white supremacists....

Still, their numbers are tiny in relation to the mainstream political left. And, say experts, it's misleading for right-wing groups to suggest that the Antifa are more violent than right-wing extremists.

"The far left is very active in the United States, but it hasn't been particularly violent for some time," says Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League's Center on Extremism.
He says the numbers between the groups don't compare.

"In the past 10 years when you look at murders committed by domestic extremists in the United States of all types, right-wing extremists are responsible for about 74 percent of those murders," Pitcavage says.

You have to go back to the 1970s to find the last big cycle of far-left extremism in the U.S. Both Pitcavage and McNabb say we have been in a predominantly far-right extremist cycle since the 1990s — the abortion clinic bombings and Oklahoma City, for example. And, more recently, racially motivated attacks such as the one at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, the mass shooting at a black church in Charleston, S.C., and last month's stabbings on a commuter train in Portland.

Saturday, June 17, 2017

Megan, Megan, Megan...

Just at a time when millions of people in Britain, Australia and other countries have been watching TV and saying "What?? Governments haven't been bothered to regulate whether developers can wrap a 30 or 40 story apartment building with stuff that can burn intensely and wildly out of control far beyond the reach of any firefighting service?!",  along comes Megan McArdle to write an article with the lines:
When it comes to many regulations, it is best to leave such calculations of benefit and cost to the market, rather than the government. People can make their own assessments of the risks, and the price they’re willing to pay to allay them, rather than substituting the judgment of some politician or bureaucrat who will not receive the benefit or pay the cost.
Opportunistically,  she also concentrates on just one safety matter relevant to the Grenfell fire - the decision not to try to retrofit a sprinkler system.

Megan, Megan, Megan:  this is such a extraordinarily tone deaf time to be talking the benefits of  letting markets (and residents) decide relative levels of safety because (so your argument goes) everyone makes safety trade offs (such as living further out in a city and taking the risk of dying in a car crash while commuting), I cannot believe the editor at Bloomberg let you publish it. 

She does make the following concession:
Grenfell Tower, of course, was public housing, which changes the calculation somewhat. 
Yes!   Because it wasn't a case of market choice at all for those residents. 

But even then,  she tries to make anti-regulation hay while the building is still smouldering:
And yet, even there, trade-offs have to be made. The government spends money on a great number of things, many of which save lives. Every dollar it spends on installing sprinkler systems cannot be spent on the health service, or national defense, or pollution control. Would more lives be saved by those measures or by sprinkler systems in public housing? It’s hard to say.
Look, there is time to make a statement of the bleeding obvious - not all government funded enterprises can be made perfectly safe if the cost of doing so is going to be astronomically high - and there is a time to instead make another bleedingly obvious one:   it is a bad idea for governments to leave it up to builders to decide whether to make high rise apartment buildings flammable, especially when the additional cost to use non flammable material is small.  


Just as I wrote a couple of weeks ago that you could expect anyone in the media to be pilloried if  their first reaction to a major Islamic terrorist attack (like Manchester's) was be to start comparing it with furniture accidents fatalities,  Megan deserves all the criticism she will undoubtedly get for making the wrong argument at the wrong time.

Update:  some example of Twitter reaction:




Friday, June 16, 2017

Poor New Zealand

Well, I didn't know this:
A new report by Unicef contains a shocking statistic - New Zealand has by far the highest youth suicide rate in the developed world.
A shock but no surprise - it's not the first time the country tops that table.
The Unicef report found New Zealand's youth suicide rate - teenagers between 15 and 19 - to be the highest of a long list of 41 OECD and EU countries.
The rate of 15.6 suicides per 100,000 people is twice as high as the US rate and almost five times that of Britain.
I suppose it is not a great surprise to read that the rates are particularly high amongst young Maori and Pacific Islander males - it ties in with what happens in the Australian aboriginal population.

I also learned something new and surprising about the Australian suicide rate at this site:
Suicide rates in Australia peaked in 1963 (17.5 per 100,000), declining to 11.3 per 100,000 in 1984, and climbing back to 14.6 in 1997. Rates have been lower than this since that year. The age-standardised suicide rate for persons in 2015 was 12.7 per 100,000. 
Why was 1963 a peak year for suicide?   Certainly puts nostalgia for the Golden Age of Menzies into a bit of perspective...

Some media observations

*  why do people care so much about what Mia Freedman and her "what women talk about" website Mammamia say or do?    I gather she's an "oversharer", as (it seems to me) a lot of women now tend to be.  I also take it that she unintentionally upset an obese guest but many people (mainly women) don't see it that way.   Big deal.

*  I think that Benjamin Law often writes well  in his Weekend Magazine gig for the Fairfax press, but I have tried a couple of times watching his (more or less) autobiographical family comedy/drama-ish show The Family Law, and can't say that I'm impressed.   Much of the humour is based on his oversharing/embarrassing mother, and is often somewhat scatological (something of Law's special field of interest, apparently) but it really seems to me that the jokes and writing are strained, despite a cast that is doing their best with the material.   I feel I have to say it, again:  I don't think the material produced by Australia's gay writer/comedians is all that funny, but they do seem to have the orientation that makes funding their shows a whole lot easier at SBS or the ABC than it really deserves.   (Come on, Josh Thomas fans, attack me again for not liking Please Like Me.)    I wanted to like Law's show - it's even made in Queensland, a rarity for Australian TV, and I'm sympathetic to Asian family comedy - but I just don't find it worth watching. 

*  I see that Pirates 5 has already made $600,000,000:  maybe will top $700 million?   (The last one made more than a billion dollars, believe it or not.  I think this one will come in well under, but still nothing to be sneezed at.)    I wonder if a No 6 will be on the way.