Not every idea from Japan is great...

In Japan, you can now get Coca-Cola pre-mixed with coffee

More Bitcoin skepticism shared

From Axios:

JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon slammed bitcoin Tuesday, calling the digital currency "a fraud," per CNBC. He said it's "worse than tulip bulbs” — a reference to the 17th century economic bubble.

"It won't end well. Someone is going to get killed," Dimon said at a Barclays banking conference. "Currencies have legal support. It will blow up."

Why it matters: Dimon has been pessimistic about bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in the past, and has argued that there will never be a currency "that gets around government controls." And Dimon isn't the only critic. Other analysts have argued that bitcoin is nothing more than a fad with no value, and have warned that the currency's current market success could create an economic bubble.

Odd lack of images

Is it just me, or has it seemed to everyone else too that video or photos of damage to the Florida Keys, which is reported in words to be pretty extensive, is oddly slow to appear in news from America?

Opioids and libertarians

Well, I've been saying since at least 2014 that surely the opioid (and related heroin) problem in the US is an indication that the libertarian idea of drug legalisation is fanciful and misguided, at best.  (I could use stronger words, but I'm feeling generous today.)

I see that one German Lopez at Vox has explained at length why he would now agree with me, in his article entitled:

I used to support legalizing all drugs. Then the opioid epidemic happened.

Maybe in 10 years time he'll change his mind about marijuana legalisation, too.   

Happy driving

I must admit, I hadn't thought of this aspect of driverless cars before (I had only thought of the icky problem of people having sex in driverless cabs):

I wonder if the problems of bad behaviour in driverless taxis will mean that driverless cars remain mainly a privately owned thing, in which case, if there is to be some emergency override, would it still remain an offence to be drunk while in the potential driver seat? 

Vegetarian and depressed

Not sure that too much should be made of this (the number of vegetarians involved seems not very high to me), but still:

Vegetarians are at higher risk of suffering depression compared to those who eat meat and consume a conventional balanced diet, according to a new study. 

A Bristol University study of almost 10,000 people from southwestern England discovered that vegetarians were almost twice as likely to develop depression because of vitamin and mineral deficiencies that can negatively impact their mental health.

The 350 committed vegetarians who participated in the study had a higher average depression score when compared to the meat eaters, according to the study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders.

Without meat, a vegetarian's diet tends to have less vitamin B12 consumption, as well as greater intake of nuts that contain omega-6 fatty acids, which have been linked with an increased risk of mental health problems.

In addition, roughly 50 percent of vegans and 7 percent of vegetarians have a vitamin B12 deficiency. Vitamin B12 can be found in red meat and plays an important role in affecting an individual's mood

What's this about nuts being linked with nuttiness, too?  That was something I don't think I have heard before, but yes, there are many links - like this one - about the Omega 3 and Omega 6 ratios and mental health.

On George Benard Shaw, Stalin, Russians

There's a good essay at the New York Times:  Why George Bernard Shaw had a crush on Stalin.

Here's a part:

In part, too, Shaw’s insistence on seeing the Soviet Union as the harbinger of the great socialist utopia can be explained by the disappointments of democracy. He had fought for decades to establish universal adult suffrage, especially for women and the working class. Like many radical intellectuals, he was dismayed to find that many of these new voters preferred king-and-country conservatism to the socialism they were supposed to support. Especially as the Great Depression took hold, parliaments and political parties seemed utterly ineffectual. Stalin’s apparent ability to move mountains and transform society with triumphant five-year plans offered an antidote to his impatience with the frustrations of democracy.

But underlying all of this, there was an even stronger impulse: the fantasy of Russia itself. Long before the Bolshevik Revolution gave the dream a very particular political content, Shaw was primed to expect a global spiritual resurrection that would begin in Russia. This hope was not as fanciful as it may now seem: In the late 19th century, when Shaw’s political and artistic consciousness was being formed, Russian music, drama and literature were at the leading edge of modern Western culture. As he later wrote to Maxim Gorky, “I myself am as strongly susceptible as anyone to the fascination of the Russian character as expressed by its art and personally by its artists.”....

Above all, Shaw was caught up in the great wave of enthusiasm for Tolstoy that broke over the English-speaking world in the mid-1880s when “War and Peace,” “Anna Karenina” and most of his other works appeared in translation. Shaw called Tolstoy “the master.” His own insistence on the didactic purpose of art and his forging of a sage-like persona are pure Tolstoy.

This was not just a matter of artistic influence. Russia became, for Shaw, a kind of alternate universe, an imaginative field in which grandiosities that he would otherwise have delighted in puncturing were given free rein. He would have made devastating fun of anyone writing about “the Irish soul,” or “the English soul,” but he was happy to write without irony of “the soul of the Russian people.” When Kropotkin’s daughter told him that “the Russians would give the world back its lost soul,” Shaw did not scoff.....

Shaw’s infatuation with Russia became a full-on love affair with a Soviet autocrat, whereas the Trump bromance with President Putin appears unconsummated. But they share a fatal attraction that both preceded and survived the Soviet Union: the allure of a faraway place where the great leader is obeyed because he embodies a people’s soul.

Apart from Right wing conservatives currently having an infatuation with Putin for all of the wrong reasons, I reckon its hard to see anyone in the West recovering a sense of admiration or sympathy for for "the Russian soul."     Maybe we need more exposure to nice Russians, but am I wrong to think they currently have the reputation of being amongst the least humorous or friendly people on the planet?    The Russian Orthodox Church looks equally dour - unlike the sense of enthusiastic engagement with life you get in the some of the Catholic Church's traditions in countries like Italy, Mexico, or (I imagine) the Philippines.   And while some countries have a reputation as happy drinkers (Ireland - I think), you can hardly say the same about the Russians, with their spectacular rate of alcoholism.  Speaking of which, this short history of alcoholism in Russia is pretty interesting.  I don't recall this:

In 1223, when the Russian army suffered a devastating defeat against the invading Mongols and Tartars, it was partly because they had charged onto the battlefield drunk, Brown wrote.

Ivan the Terrible established kabaks (establishments where spirits were produced and sold) in the 1540s, and in the 1640s they had become monopolies. In 1648, tavern revolts broke out across the country, by which time a third of the male population was in debt to the taverns. In the 1700s, Russian rulers began to profit from their subjects’ alcoholism, as Brown, who spent 10 years covering Russia for Forbes magazine, explained. “[Peter the Great] decreed that the wives of peasants should be whipped if they dared attempt to drag their imbibing husbands out of taverns before the men were ready to leave.”

Peter the Great was also, according to Brown, able to form a phalanx of unpaid workers by allowing those who had drunk themselves into debt to stay out of debtors prison by serving 25 years in the army. 

 Wow.

The sensible take on Ridley

There's been this odd libertarian optimist take on the recent American hurricanes along the lines of "look at how well America will recover from this - because it's rich.  Rich countries always recover from disaster well, much better than poor countries, where more people die too.  So the answer to climate change is - don't do anything that will make people less rich.  Nothing.  Don't touch a cent.  That means burn more coal and make more electricity.  We need to be as rich as possible."

See Matt Ridley's article that appeared in the Murdoch press internationally yesterday for an example of this argument, but I had seen raised last week elsewhere, too.

That this is a shallow, shallow take on the matter of climate change and all of the research on it seems very obvious to me, and it's curious how it is so often put by the already rich.   But sometimes the obvious still has to be stated for the thick of head out there.   I think a reasonable, simply worded, response is at And Then There's Physics, from which I quote:

There’s however, in my view, a bigger issue with Ridley’s argument. It essentially seems to be that we should mostly ignore climate change, just get richer, and that fossil fuels are mostly better than any alternative. The problem is that if we drive economic growth through burning more and more fossil fuels and pumping more and more CO₂ into the atmosphere, then the climate will continue to change and the impacts will get more and more severe.

If we were confident that economic growth would always outpace climate damages, then this might be a reasonable suggestion (although, maybe don’t suggest it right now to those who live on Caribbean islands). However, this is almost certainly not going to be the case. There is almost certainly a level of warming above which the impacts would be utterly catastrophic. We may not be able to define it precisely, but it is almost certainly within reach, either because we simply pump all the CO₂ we can into the atmosphere, or because our climate is sensitive enough that we get there even if we don’t emit as much CO₂ as we possibly could.

Given this, there must be an even lower level of warming at which cimate damages start outpacing economic growth. So, suggesting that we can just grow our way out of trouble simply seems wrong. If people don’t like the current policy then the solution (in my view) is not to argue that we should essentially ignore climate change and simply grow, but to argue for something like a carbon tax.

There is much more to be said about Ridley's argument, including the implausibility of thinking that the only thing holding back poor countries (or countries with lots of poor people) from becoming rich overnight is a lack of coal powered electricity, but that will do for now.

A bit of exaggeration

I don't look at Boing Boing very often anymore, and I was rather surprised to find this heading for a post there over the weekend:

Australia's housing bubble is built on a deadly, about-to-burst credit bubble

Deadly??

Even the explanation in the post sounded, shall we say, a tad inaccurate in the current circumstances?:

If you buy a house in Australia -- where housing prices are out of control, even by global standards -- you can wait a couple months for the house's book value to go up, and then borrow against that "unrealised capital gain" to buy another house...and then you can do it again.

 This is how so many speculators in the Australian property market have come to own several homes whose rental income can't pay the mortgage, but who are still able to borrow on those unprofitable properties to buy more unprofitable properties.

We have some problems, but I didn't think this explanation sounds at all accurate.... 

A not very complimentary take on "comic book films"

At the TLS, a look at superhero films and why they are looking more homogenised. 

I sometimes feel guilty for dissing Marvel, when I can go and quite enjoy the ones that are funnier or more off beat than their average stuff.   (As it happens, this morning, for some reason, I had Blitzkrieg Bop as used Spiderman Homecoming going through my head while shaving.  But yeah, I am completely uninterested in stuff like The Avengers.) 

Maybe it wasn't worth posting, as the points made are pretty obvious...

Standing with Barnaby

Barnaby Joyce was on Radio National this morning talking about various things, including the same sex marriage survey thingee.  I actually share his view:   I am not convinced that politicians participating in the debate is actually all that helpful to whichever side they are arguing for.   Joyce has a pragmatic view that its a social issue on which not that many people are open to changing their minds, and the very nature of the issue makes it more likely that people can be easily put off by the tone of those who are trying to convince them.  

Barnaby sounds like me - finding both sides on this pretty irritating:   the "yes" side with its attitude that they are so obviously right they can't comprehend why anyone reasonable would disagree, a view which is as ahistorical as it is possible to be;  the "no" side too easily wants to portray the nuclear heterosexual family in some sort of Norman Rockwell glow which is not very realistic in its own way, as well as often displaying a lack of appreciation about how bad things used to be homosexuals.     (There are other aspects of how both sides argue that get up my nose, but I won't bother running through them now.)


Joyce just quietly says he will vote no, because he just thinks that the way things are has served society well, and I actually agree that this is about just as much as the "no" voting politician need say.   Similarly, a modest acknowledgement of the "yes" vote that marriage is something that some gay relationships want to participate in, and not encouraging a victimhood mentality if they don't get it, would be appreciated.  

But I would not be surprised if the perverse outcome of more debate about it is less participation, not more. 

Maybe there's a reason I don't read Stephen King

King's presumably not a bad author as such, given how many people have followed his career closely over decades.  (Then again, no one should accuse Dan Brown of being decent author based on number of readers.  I've tried reading both of them, but not for many pages.  I didn't care for the style of either, although I think Brown may be in a category of awfulness all of his own.)

But regarding King, that I had never heard before of the controversy about a very strange part of his  novel It, currently being discussed because of the new movie which I would probably watch on Netflix, but not pay money for at the cinema.

It (ha, a pun) makes me glad I never tried to read the book, because It (ha) sounds very, very silly.

Magnetic brain fiddling to control cocaine addiction

Here's the summary, from Science:

Among the major addictions, cocaine is the only one without a therapy approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It is a wicked habit to kick without help, as some 1 million people who are dependent on the drug in the United States can attest. A noninvasive method now being tested in clinical trials by a small cadre of researchers may at last offer help. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), applied by running electric current through a coil held near the scalp, is thought to tweak the out-of-whack brain circuits that define cocaine addiction. TMS is already approved for treating depression. But the researchers testing TMS today in people addicted to cocaine are aiming to strengthen impulse control and to restore to normality a reward circuit that is abnormally active when users are presented with cues like photos of cocaine. Although the therapy has been used in an uncontrolled setting on hundreds of cocaine users in Italy, the trials now underway will provide the first rigorous, blinded tests of whether it works.

Seems you can view the whole article, too.

Netflix reviews

There's a lot of viewing of Netflix going on in my new-to-Netflix household at the moment.  To update the one or two people (maybe I am being optimistic) who think my media reviews are worth reading:

Stranger Things (cont.):   nearly at the end of the first series, and I have to upgrade my opinion of it.  Something clicked in episode 5 about how much I was finding the acting of everyone involved very convincing and likeable.  The four child leads are really good, but the teenagers and all of the adults - they're just great too.  The Spielbergian mash up aspect of the scenario has stopped bothering me as I have realised that I just like being in the show's universe anyway.

I fear that there is a big danger that series 2 will disappoint - in fact, I think it quite possibly might follow a Twin Peaks spiral.   (Truth be told, I don't really recall anything about series 2 - I think I may have not watched it based on bad reviews coming out of the US.)   But let's hope not.

Norsemen:   who knew Norwegians could be this funny?   Have only watched the first episode, but there is a lot to like about its mocking of Norse cultural extremes.   It's a bit Monty Python and the Holy Grail (although more witty than absurdist); a bit Blackadder; even a bit The Office (according to someone on Reddit - I still have never watched either incarnation of that show despite its reputation.)   It can be gross and violent, but really, the writing is very amusing and unexpectedly good.  (Sorry, but I just didn't imagine the teeth chattering climate of Norway as an environment for producing good comedy.)

The show is made by Norwegians and shot in both English and Norwegian, and hasn't even been on Netflix in the US for long.   I strongly suspect it will develop a cult following.

The Babadook:    I knew this low budget Australian film, which I am not sure even got an Australian cinema release, was surprisingly well received by many American reviewers.  So, despite my quite intense, but readily justified, dislike of my own nation's cinema efforts, I gave it a go.

Let's just say, the reputation of Australian cinema remains for this viewer lower than a wombat's burrow.  (Go on, make up your own witticism, then.)

The movie exemplifies a couple of things that I have always disliked about Australian cinema:

* the low budget emptiness:  cheaply made movies in Australia somehow, more than low budget features from anywhere else on the planet, always manage to make the settings seem empty, lifeless and underpopulated.  Sure, you'll occasionally see some extras in this film, but it still manages to make everywhere look unrealistic due to a lack of, I don't know, normal people in the background doing normal things?  It's almost like a perverse special talent of Australian film makers:  do they never try to film secretly in a natural setting so that, for example, you actually do see streets or buildings with more than a handful of people in them?


* some arch, almost campy, acting.  Most of the supporting actors don't do well, in my opinion, and fall into some stereotypical (for Australian cinema) close to camp acting that doesn't ring true.  In this case, I point the finger at the Childrens Services couple, the police officers, the boss at the aged care home, the sister's friends.  But even the female lead, who has to carry the film, increasing struggles with the material, and becomes unconvincing in what is meant to be the scary climax.  As for the boy - he really is too irritating to be sympathetic for the first half of the movie, and his conversion to being the sensible one in the house for the second half doesn't make much sense.  (Nor does his precocious mechanical talent - no attempt to explain where that comes from at all.)

Which leads to my biggest complaint - the story just doesn't make psychological sense. It's presumably meant to work like a version of The Shining (one made with on a credit card budget in a friend's big old house,) in that it has deliberate ambiguity as to what is going on - just madness and mental health issues, or something supernatural, or a combination of both.   But at least in Kubrick's film there was some information of trouble in the father's past - alcoholism, domestic violence, perhaps a less than successful career - which you could see that, either through generic madness or a supernatural evil, were the seeds of his turning on his family.  In this film. there's nothing like that at all.

[Spoilers if you continue].   There is nothing to indicate the mother had a troubled relationship with the dead father - quite the opposite in fact.   And nothing to indicate why the father (if the babadook is him in some guise) would want to threaten the son who he never met.    If, as many reviewers say, the supernatural creature is a metaphor for grief,  I just don't see why grief would manifest in psychotic hatred for the son.  Sure, he was annoying at the start, but not so annoying that Mum would want him dead instead of getting him into counselling.   At one stage, I thought that the script was setting up for a split personality scenario, with the mother herself being the author of the book that is frightening her.  (She tells her sisters friends that she was a writer who had done some work for children.)   But that possibility goes no where - there are no further hints along this line - and if it was the old dissociative personality under stress situation, it doesn't really fit in with the possession by the babadook scene in the bedroom.

If it is meant to be taken as a supernatural cause, there is no hint as to why it is in the house - no hint of past violence there, for example.  Again, Kubrick gave enough (with the son's apparent psychic ability, the talk of past murders, not to mention the famous last shot) to give some reasons as to why there might be supernatural presences in the hotel.  In this movie, we have a boy who is having nightmares and worries about monsters under the bed - but we see nothing of what he is seeing. 

The final sequence of this movie continues the ambiguity but in an oddball, unsatisfying way.  Sure, use it as a metaphor for the Mum successfully taming but never banishing entirely rampant grief/psychosis, but how does feeding it work into that metaphor?   I don't think it does.  And if it is meant to indicate a real supernatural being of some kind - as I said before, where it came from remains completely opaque.

So - contrary to what a slew of American reviewers seem to think, I thought the story was a complete unconvincing mess from a psychological perspective.  It's not that I expect things always have to made clear in such a film (I love the discussion The Shining generates), but the film has to have enough in it to make possible interpretations plausible.  That's where this one fails utterly, if you ask me.

It's also, in my opinion, not even very scary.  My son watched it with me, and he is easier scared by ghost stories than me, but he also was underwhelmed.

So, no chance of me changing my mind about Australian cinema based on this.  No surprises of any variety, actually.

Some big damage

One of the best sets of photos I have seen of the damage already caused by Hurricane Irma is here at The Atlantic.   You don't often see cars, trucks and containers so tossed around by hurricanes.   It does look like tornado level damage, but over a huge area.

A tad stupid

Sinclair Davidson thinks that it's "a tad hypocritical" of Bill Clinton to defend DACA when it was under his administration that Elian Gonzalez was forcibly removed from his uncle (who thought he should stay in Florida) so that he could be given to his father (who thought he should return with him to Cuba?)

What was, essentially, a custody dispute is not by any stretch of the imagination in the same category as what DACA is about.

To correct my post title:  the comparison is not just "a tad stupid", it's completely stupid.  

Positive things I have heard recently

*  was told by someone who saw it himself that, yesterday morning, a dugong was happily feeding just off the rock wall at Manly (Brisbane) yacht harbour.   Some other guy there, apparently an old timer who has lived and fished in the area for many years, said he has never seen one, or at least, one so close to shore.   [I knew that there were dugong in the southern part of Moreton Bay - in fact, this website from 2009 says there are about 1,000.  But they are are not a common sight so close to shore, obviously.  It augurs well for a healthy local sea environment, I presume, so it pleases me.] 

*  was speaking recently to a surgeon in the Queensland public health system.  Asked how our public system here was going - pretty well, he said.  In fact, he said if people need a major operation, he thinks the equipment and staffing of Queensland public hospitals is such that he considers it is a better choice than going private.  

These were both nice things to hear.

I like airports...

Slate has several articles up about American airports and how bad most of them have become.   One article is entitled:  How the airport came to embody our national psychosis. 

While I appreciate that airports servicing New York, for example, may have their problems due simply to the huge numbers they need to provide for in sometimes hemmed in locations, I think Australian airports are doing pretty well, actually.

I like airports.  I like hospitals (well, new ones) too.   I guess I like all places where people are busy achieving remarkable things in buildings that look clean and modern.

I was in Sydney domestic for the first time in many years recently.   It was a lot better than I remembered.  Pretty great food selection now.  A very large number of recharging facilities on the long tables in the food court.   Security did not take long, even on a Sunday evening, with lots of people travelling home.

As with health care, where we manage to get better results with less money, maybe we just do some things better than the Americans...

 

Ethics question of the day

Is it wrong to wish that Hurricane Irma destroy Trump's cheesy looking Mar-a-Lago resort?

(I hope Disneyworld is OK; and Cape Canaveral too.  The rest of Florida - well, 49.02% of it - deserves at least a mild smiting because of their last electoral college vote.)

The Right in schism

Want to read a Republican hardliner's view on DACA?  Try Michelle Makin, who used to be bigger in the world of wingnutty online commentary than she is now.  Her stone hearted nonsense entitled There is no such thing as a 'deserving DREAMer'  encourages her base to blame immigration for everything from undereducated white guys not being to find a job to crime and murder.   The odd thing is that Trump himself used the same demeaning arguments during his rallies against illegal immigrants generally, yet it seems that even he and 66% of his supporters think the kids of illegal immigrants should be allowed to stay - in other words, that DREAMers do deserve something.

It's an incredible, messed up Party, that's for sure.