A funny Creighton column

Adam Creighton has decided that the big tech companies (Google, Facebook etc) companies have too much power.  He's particularly concerned that they have drained traditional news media of advertising money (true), so much so that he's willing to contemplate direct government subsidy of the news.  

Well, you might think, isn't that what we get with the ABC?   No, that's not enough:

Publicly funded media organisations can’t do as good a job. Private media companies have a powerful incentive to dig out bad news, even if it upsets governments, because it sells.

Huh? I thought Adam's paper has been complaining about the ABC "digging out bad news" (when it is about a Coalition government in power, anyway) for decades, which kinda proves public broadcasters don't have to be in the "selling" business to be interested in "bad news".

Creighton appears in The Australian - a paper for which the content over the course of a year is about 95% pure ideologically driven right wing opinion to 1% investigative journalism.  (And some of the latter is just true crime stuff - hardly matters of national political consequence.)    If he would actually come out and note that about Rupert's pet paper - as well as make some kind of observation about the heightened propaganda machine that is the money making machine known as Fox News - he might have a skerrick of credibility.

How much "investigative journalism" does Fox News engage in so as to be bring in the big money, Adam?   You know the answer - nil.   Your boss has monetised ludicrously biased spin as the way a "news" network can thrive, and you have the hide to argue that private media is better at investigative journalism.

His column goes on to complain that the big tech companies real danger is to democracy - because of the way their search filters sought out the news.   It doesn't take too much to read between the lines that his problem is that he thinks that filtering has a "left wing" bias he doesn't like - Right wingers have been complaining about search engines conspiring against them for years now.   (Because they have trouble understanding that, with the awful "we don't care about the evidence" path the Right has taken over the last 30 years, facts now have a clear Left wing bias.)

Nor does he not mention the true and clear danger from IT companies, which is via the spread of deliberate misinformation and lies (masquerading as news), sometimes via foreign governments interested in seeding political disunity, via social media.   

As usual, Adam's a just a silly lightweight who attacks all the wrong targets. 

He's dumbing you down, Jason.  

More anti Boris

A pretty savage, and somewhat amusing, attack on Boris Johnson by his old boss, Max Hastings.  I liked this line:

Like many showy personalities, he is of weak character. I recently suggested to a radio audience that he supposes himself to be Winston Churchill, while in reality being closer to Alan Partridge.

and this:

Johnson would not recognise truth, whether about his private or political life, if confronted by it in an identity parade. In a commonplace book the other day, I came across an observation made in 1750 by a contemporary savant, Bishop Berkeley: “It is impossible that a man who is false to his friends and neighbours should be true to the public.” Almost the only people who think Johnson a nice guy are those who do not know him.

More Libra scepticism

At The Conversation.

Rugby culture wars

I'm pretty amused at the Right wing culture war outrage about GoFundMe deciding after a few days that it doesn't want to be the conduit for wingnutty people with too much money to fund the legal fees for a guy who has been earning millions for running around a football field.

They now want Folau to sue GoFundMe! 

As with donations to the IPA, this latest story is another example of how wingnutty people are very easily parted from their money.   They don't care how much money the donee may already have, if they think they are getting to be part of a great and glorious culture war it's a case of "shut up and take my money".   

Update:  here's Mark Latham getting uptight -

This from the man who was wandering around Western Sydney with a microphone in 2017 fretting about Muslim views on hitting women, Sharia law and wearing the burqa.    

Maybe Boris is in trouble?

I opined yesterday that Boris Johnson was probably still assured of the Prime Minister job because he is like Trump - the focus of culture war hopes that overcome any consideration of character and past performance.

But I see on Twitter this morning that lots of people are calling out his comments about how Brexit could proceed was based on a fundamental error/lie;  he is also being called a liar about his past association with Steve Bannon; and now the Mirror is running a story that his argument with his girlfriend was because he actually wants to get back with his estranged wife.(!)

It's hard to know which of those, if any, might turn out to be more important.   But it seems his path to the leadership might be more in doubt than I expected.

A bridge made of grass

If you want to see a photo essay about this:

Every year the last remaining Inca rope bridge still in use is cast down and a new one erected across the Apurimac river in the Cusco region of Peru. 

The Q'eswachaka bridge is woven by hand and has been in place for at least 600 years. Once part of the network that linked the most important cities and towns of the Inca empire, it was declared a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 2013.

you can hop over to the BBC.  

Libra scepticism

Axios reckons that everyone may be in a panic (or being prematurely enthusiastic - like the troika of RMIT blockchain conference attendees) about Libra for nothing - because it's likely to never get off the ground.

The reasons they give do sound pretty convincing. 

The ridiculous bag wars

It's a culture war thing for the likes of Adam Creighton that the ban on single use plastic bags in supermarkets is a waste of time.   So he's thrilled today to be able to link to an article in The Australian with the headline "Economy falls through our shopping bags", noting that the paper got its hands on some FOI material about companies complaining to Treasury about this:

However, a slew of companies also complained to the government’s chief economic department about the effect that banning plastic bags was having on slowing activity in the $320 billion retail sector.

“Several firms suggested that the introduction of a ban on plastic bags meant customers reduced their consumption to an amount that they could instead carry, and delayed purchases of heavier groceries,” notes the report, sent from Treasury economist Angelia Grant to Josh Frydenberg and his assistant ministers on April 2.

Contacts also warned Treasury that the poor showing in the retail sector would likely see “continued subdued inflation, with grocery deflation only partly offset by higher power prices”.

To the paper's credit, it does go on (after the sensationalist, tabloid headline) to quote an economist expressing scepticism about these businesses' claim.  Adam seems not to have read past the headline.  Or to have any sensible scepticism.

Brexit, and Boris

I actually read a piece by Helen Dale about the English political turmoil over Brexit and thought it sounded a plausible enough analysis.   Yet it left me with two thoughts:

a.  for a (now) "card carrying Conservative" who supports Brexit, this is not the first time I have read her commenting about Brexit, and it seems to me that she has always spent very little time on explaining why it will be for the good of the country:  even in this column she says people should treat as exaggerated any forecasts of how bad a "no deal" Brexit will be from Treasury or the Bank of England, but then goes on to list the punishing tariffs that can be expected under it anyway.  It seems that she wants it to be taken very much as a matter of faith that things will be better - eventually.  Instead, she just wants to talk about how terribly messy the politics of it all have become.

b.  she does not mention the lack of preferential voting in the UK as being part of the problem.   This has seemed to me to be an increasingly likely cause of the Parliamentary mess now that the country has 3 key parties in play - although I guess no one can have any idea without very detailed research as to exactly what difference to numbers in Parliament it might make if adopted.   But it makes sense to expect that a system in which local members who most in their electorate don't want to win can still win is a problem, no?

As for the Boris Johnson apparent ascendancy to the Prime Ministership - I think it's clear that he resembles Trump in that he is the beneficiary of a culture war inspired cult of personality that will let him slide past things which would sink any "normal" politician - such as the bizarre matter of getting his girlfriend upset enough that the police were called.  The neighbour who rang the police has had to deny that being a Remainer was his motivation for the call - and one can be certain that the internet's Wingnut flying monkey unit has descended on him and his girlfriend.   The fact that Johnson refuses to talk about what went on in the flat indicates something obviously problematic did.   But the gullible and dumb Right, as with Trump, prefers to believe conspiracy.

As to his suitability for the top job generally, The Guardian has assembled an impressive list of people who have worked with/known him for some time and who all highly critical of his character.   Also, Mary Beard has written about Johnson, who joined her for a charity debate a few years, in a way which also sounds quite accurate - that his problem is:

...a persistent pattern of misrepresentation, of cutting corners for argumentative advantage, and of disguising untruth or partial truth under a fog of enthusiasm and unthinking optimism.

 I expect no good to come out of his leadership. 

The likely truth about the Trump spin on calling off an attack

As Allahpundit at Hot Air explains, no one sensible believes that the Pentagon does not tell the President the number of anticipated casualties for a missile attack on foreign soil until after it is authorised.  And Trump himself has changed the story already, saying the attack had not yet been launched when it was called off, but still claims he was the one who had to ask about casualties, and his "military team" had to go find out to inform him.

Allahpundit, a conservative Trump skeptic, nonetheless flies the kite on a theory that maybe Trump deliberately wanted Iran to think that he was the only person in his administration concerned to not attack the country unnecessarily, so they ought to trust him in negotiations.  

A far more likely explanation:  because two of his prime advisers - Hannity and Carlson on Fox News - are in disagreement about going to war with Iran, Trump doesn't know what he should do.   Erring for once on the side of caution, his narcissism goes for the only way to explain his indecision and reversal - he's the nice guy who thinks the loss of life would be disproportionate.  (He must have been awake for that part of his briefing at least - it's not a word one expects is normally in his vocabulary.   Or perhaps more likely, he's changed his mind and asked his minders how he was going to best spin this.)

PS:  any brownie points which hard or soft supporters of Trump outside of American might be contemplating giving him for not following the advice of Bolton and the hawks in his circle should surely be tempered by the fact that Trump himself started the current problem with Iran by foolishly abandoning the nuclear deal that Obama had reached with the country.  As noted at this opinion piece in the Washington Post, something close to the same deal is the only obvious peaceful way forward.

Modi the yogi

I seem to have missed that Indian PM Modi is very much into yoga.  (In fact, I wasn't sure how conservative Hindu folk viewed it - I thought they might have seen it as too modern with its current, slightly new-agey feel - but it must get the tick of approval from them if Modi is into it.)

There's a video clip at CNA about International Yoga Day in India, featuring some shots of Modi engaging in yoga in real life, and via avatar (!).   He's been tweeted out animated videos of himself teaching yoga positions from earlier this year.  I'll come back and embed an example later...

Update:  as promised -

What were they thinking?

Haven't been over to James Lileks site for ages - got a bit bored with reading about his mundane life, so I concentrate more on recording my own mundanities. 

But he does collect some funny pop culture stuff, and this photo of  a recipe card from (I would guess) the 1970's had me laughing:

Lilek's commentary: 

The crew of the Nostromo set down on LV-426 in response to an automated distress beacon. They'd heard about the creatures, and the horrible way they sprang from their coccoons. What they didn't realized that over time they had evolved, and we now capable of sophisticated, coordinated dance routines.

 He has some good comic covers too:

Heh.

Mapping the world by 3 words

I don't catch QI all that much since Stephen Fry left, but it can be OK in moderate doses.

The episode shown this week on the ABC I watched in full, and found it quite enjoyable.   This is how I learnt about What3Words, which I see has been around for about 6 years, but until now escaped my attention.

The Wikipedia entry explains:

what3words is a geocoding system for the communication of locations with a resolution of three metres. What3words encodes geographic coordinates into three dictionary words; the encoding is permanently fixed. For example, the omphalos of Delphi, believed by the ancient Greeks to be the center of the world, was located at "spooky.solemn.huggers". what3words differs from most other location encoding systems in that it displays three words rather than long strings of numbers or letters.

What3words has a website, apps for iOS and Android, and an API that enables bidirectional conversion between what3words address and latitude/longitude coordinates. As the system relies on a fixed algorithm rather than a large database of every location on earth, it works on devices with limited storage and no Internet connection.

According to the company its revenue comes from charging businesses for high-volume use of the API that converts between 3 words and coordinates; services for other users are free of charge.^[1]

The "about" section of the business's website (I haven't downloaded the app - even though I can see many thrilling but potentially baffling conversation starters by telling new people I've just met the 3 word location in which we are standing) explains more:

3 word addresses are intentionally randomised and unrelated to the squares around them. To avoid confusion, similar sounding addresses are also placed as far from each other as possible. The app will account for spelling errors and other typing mistakes and make suggestions, based on 3 word addresses nearby.

I, like Sandi Toksvig, find this whole thing oddly intriguing.   Yet when I tried to pass on the excitement to my teenage kids over dinner last, my son said he could describe the conversation in 3 words: "This is boring".   This made his sister declare that the first joke he had ever made that she found funny.

Hence, via nerd-dom, I brought my children closer together.  

I am now going to download the app.

Update:  Cool - one grid close to my house's front door has "robots" in the 3 words, and in such a way that the two preceding words can be taken as describing them.     Using the voice search function though is a bit silly.  Because the phrases are randomised, if the phone hears the phrase slightly wrong, it will throw up locations all around the planet.  It does give a choice of three possible versions of what it thinks it heard.   Easier to type it in, though.

So that's why imported canned Italian tomatoes are so cheap?

Europe's a lovely looking place (that, unfortunately, I have not actually seen much of in person), but it does somewhat tarnish its reputation for being more progressive (and therefore nicer) than the deplorable infected governments of the United States when you read articles like this one about the "slave labour" picking tomatoes in Italy.   (Remember though that Spain also has a terrible reputation for exploiting immigrant labour in vegetable growing.  I posted about Simon Reeve revealing episode 4 of his Mediterranean series about that topic not so long ago.)

Mind you, Australia's treatment of backpackers in rural areas is also often a disgrace - but at least they are free to give up and return home.  

Would Trump be told if UFOs were alien in some sense?

While I'm not sure that there would ever be any strong reason for any US government agency to not want the public to know the Truth about UFO's (in the sense of them being of non human origin), you would have to suspect that any such agency would not want Trump told if they thought it best be kept from the public, for the time being at least.

This speculation is brought about by news of some Senators getting a Pentagon briefing about the Navy UFO cases, and Trump in his recent interview responding that he doesn't "particularly" believe in UFOs. 

The transparent motivations of libertarians, and why private currencies are a bad idea

Ha!   I reckon it's perfectly clear that the enthusiastic reception to the Facebook currency (and future alternative private currencies) given by the RMIT libertarian set of Potts, Davidson and Berg in the AFR this morning (which can be read via the ever ridiculous Catallaxy) is explained by their thinking that it will give them the form of government they want - small, tax starved and with limited spending power.

As such, they spend next to no time talking about the obvious problems of private currency - instead they see both dollar signs in front of their eyes (Australia should enthusiastically try to become a base for future private currencies, they argue) and the thrill that governments will be crushed if they try to step in the way of the inevitable, glorious, future of having less control over an economy.   Take this line, for example:

Governments that pursue irresponsible fiscal policies will see even greater capital flight.

As usual, then, libertarians are best ignored as ideologically driven money lovers always prepared to downplay the common good if it steps in the way of anyone - especially the already rich - making more money.  Their worst sin, of course, for which they should never be forgiven:  address global warming?  -  no, that might mean a new form of tax, so they would rather run a disinformation campaign to cripple united Western political action for 30 years while their mining friends add to their billions.  

As for why private currencies are a problem that should not be welcomed, the New York Times has a good article today:   

Launching a Global Currency Is a Bold, Bad Move for Facebook 

It lists four problems with the idea:  the first, that there is doubt it will be set up with all of the safeguards for misuse of a currency that governments and banks spend much money and time on establishing:

Banks pay attention to details, complying with regulations to prevent money-laundering, terrorist financing, tax avoidance and counterfeiting. Recreating such a complex system is not a project that an institution with the level of privacy and technical problems like Facebook should be leading. (Or worse, failing to recreate such safeguards could facilitate money-laundering, terrorist financing, tax avoidance and counterfeiting.)

Second, the US (at least?) stops banks from getting into other commerce areas in order to prevent exploiting commercial information against customer interests.  Can any Facebook associated enterprise be trusted not to do that?

The third:  if as successful as Zuckerberg hopes, it may be yet another financial entity that is "too big to fail" on a global scale.

And last, I'll just quote this one:

Enabling an open flow of money across all borders is a political choice best made by governments. And openness isn’t always good. For instance, most nations, especially the United States, use economic sanctions to bar individuals, countries or companies from using our financial system in ways that harm our interests. Sanctions enforcement flows through the banking system — if you can’t bank in dollars, you can’t use dollars. With the success of a private parallel currency, government sanctions could lose their bite. Should Facebook and a supermajority of venture capitalists and tech executives really be deciding whether North Korean sanctions can succeed? Of course not.

A permissionless currency system based on a consensus of large private actors across open protocols sounds nice, but it’s not democracy. Today, American bank regulators and central bankers are hired and fired by publicly elected leaders. Libra payments regulators would be hired and fired by a self-selected council of corporations. There are ways to characterize such a system, but democratic is not one of them.

 

Another dinner to be happy about

Sort of an Italian soup with meatballs and pasta.  Very tasty.

[Maybe it tasted better than it looks - that's some parmesan cheese on top.  But it did taste very good.]

No one trusts Zuckerberg*

He is such a weird looking and acting man, it's no wonder there is a lot of instant antagonism to Zuckerberg setting up his own Facebook currency.   This article at The Conversation is a big ramble, but the woman writing it (gee, I wonder what her sexuality is) really dislikes Facebook quite intensely, by the sounds.

I even saw on IPA Twitter Chris Berg talking about it, saying something about governments should be fearing this big time.  So not only do Sinclair Davidson and Berg now seemingly make a large part of their living by talking about blockchain at RMIT, even the IPA wants to talk about it?   Is the IPA running out of topics to cover?   I take this as a sign that certain funding from certain sources might have dried up.  Did Gina get upset that Alan Moran was sacked?   Have the tobacco funders moved on?  Because the topics up at the IPA website are very generic now, it seems to me.   (Too much red tape, etc.)

Anyway, where libertarians stand on cryptocurrency and companies getting more powerful seems a bit of a mess to me at the moment.   On the one hand, I think they are drawn to the idea of government losing control of money because that will affect taxation and that means small government, something they hold as a matter of faith as being a Good Thing.   On the other hand, they don't like it when companies are "woke" on any issue, because, I don't know, that interferes with them making money?   In other words, one part of them thinks it would be cool if companies displaced government; the other part of them resents it when companies, even at this early stage of potential government displacement, start flexing their muscle.  

I trust Sinclair Davidson will be along to explain it all any hour now...

* except libertarians.  See my post above.

A high suicide rate

Axios reports:

The suicide rate for Americans aged 15 to 24 years old — the older half of Generation Z — is the highest it's been since at least 1999, according to Centers for Disease Control data.

I was curious how this compared to Australian recent suicide rates for youth.   Turns out the American rate is very high, by the looks:

Against the Boris

Oh look:  a very anti-Boris Johnson opinion piece in, of all places, National Review:

As I explained a few weeks ago, the Conservative party is facing possible extinction; their complete failure to implement Brexit has lost them the majority of their voters. Many of Johnson’s supporters in Parliament are deeply skeptical of his character, but they are voting for him because they see him as the only way out of their crisis. This is the point made by Madeleine: Boris Johnson is not Jeremy Corbyn — if the Tories are to face a general election, they want a chance of surviving it.

But are they wrong to see him as a winner? In the long term, absolutely. Johnson is no longer the same man who twice won the London mayoral election. In those days, he was seen as a pro-immigration liberal conservative — the Tory for people who don’t vote Tory. Now, rightly or wrongly, he has become associated with a hostile brand of divisiveness — and it is Rory Stewart, as it happens, who has adopted the “outsider Tory” mantle. Johnson’s showman popularity among right-wing voters might be enough to win him the next election, but the average age of a Conservative voter has been increasing consistently for decades. People are forgetting that this is a party that has had one outright majority in 25 years. If it wants to survive, it needs to attract voters from the center ground.

For the party, then, there are no good outcomes. Either they opt for a candidate who will delay Brexit, thereby postponing an election but further weakening their immediate position, or they opt for an unpredictable renegade who, if tamed, might help them keep their parliamentary seats. I am writing this while listening to a fascinating discussion of the issue on the Talking Politics podcast (highly recommended to anyone with the slightest interest in British affairs). Here, the ever-insightful David Runciman asks his Cambridge colleagues the following: Is the fact that the Tory party is even contemplating making Boris Johnson its prime minister such an unusual thing that it’s a symptom of a party that’s already dying?

It’s an interesting question, and it pays a moment’s thought. Ask almost anybody who has worked closely with Johnson, and they speak of a Class A impostor — in the words of former Telegraph editor Max Hastings, a “gold medal egomaniac.” Any scarce praise usually refers to his ability to delegate — deference may suit a mayorship, but it will not suffice as prime minister. A deeply questionable personal life aside, Johnson’s career has been a collection of mishaps — one of which, during his time as foreign secretary, helped send a British citizen to prison. He is charming because of his Bertie Wooster-esque meandering mode of speech, but baseless bluster is not a characteristic that bodes well for a future as prime minister. He has never been a good performer in the House of Commons or in media interviews, and one daren’t imagine how his waffle will fare in Prime Minister’s Questions.

Jason, this is very consistent with my view of Johnson as stated in my recent comment in response to you, and I hadn't even found it at that time.