Construction problems in Australia

That was a pretty great Four Corners last night on the abrupt realisation in Australia that our apartment construction industry was in a huge mess.   Some takeaways:

*  How do libertarians and their "always de-regulate and privatise compliance checks" attitude live with themselves?   It seems pretty clear that a large part of the problem, if not the single largest part, is the looser regime that State governments allowed for certification, going back about 20 or more years ago.

* Of course, greedy developers play their part too.  What about this tweet after the show, which has a ring of truth about it:

* There was also the surprise of the guy from an engineer's association saying that, apart from in Queensland (yay), technically, anyone in the other States can call themselves an engineer.   I had heard someone saying this before, and recently mentioned it to someone who owns a family company that builds houses and the occasional apartment or townhouse block.  He thought that didn't sound right, but it apparently is.

* I was also speaking to a solicitor recently, who has been around a long time, and he wasn't aware that the compulsory insurance run by the Queensland Building and Construction Commission for house builders (and which gives cover for 6 1/2 years for structural faults) does not apply to buildings over 3 levels high.   Apparently, this is the case pretty much everywhere in Australia, but it seems a safe bet that for decades, people buying off the plan units have not been aware that they are much, much more certain insurance position if they build a house, or buy a new townhouse with only two levels, than if they buy even a 5th floor apartment.

* The show did indicate that some changes Queensland has made (to the QBCC inspection regime) are better than what exists in other States.  Again, yay for Queensland I suppose.

*  Going back to regulation - some Asian woman said something along the lines of "we thought Australia did regulation well, so we thought apartment buying was safe".   Yeah, well - shows what happens when you go too far into self regulation.   Libertarians and their desire to let the market sought it out (you know, dodgy builders will get a bad rep and that will solve the problem) has probably stuffed up the Australian market for off the plan for some years now.   Also - see Boeing and self certification in the USA.

*  The other big issue, not covered in the program, is the matter of insurers getting cold feet about cover for engineers and certifiers, not to mention builders themselves.  I am pretty sure that part of the issue for poor apartment owners can be fights between different insurers as to which is really responsible - I mean, the body corporate itself will have insurance for things like fire and storm damage, but if you have a big water ingress problem from the first storm after it is built, that insurer is likely going to be looking at blaming design, construction or certification, which brings in up to three other insurers to fight amongst themselves as to who was really at fault.   That is, assuming the builder has any insurance at all - as the show indicated, some will just organise their corporate finances such that they can easily close down the company that built it if it looks at risk of a multi million dollar claim.

* I am aware of one high rise apartment block in inner city Brisbane years ago that had some design fault or other, which meant that body corporate levies for something like a normal sized 2 bedroom unit there went up to around $10-$11,000 per annum.  (I think to fund the legal action against the builder/designer.)  As that sort of litigation can take years, it meant people who wanted out couldn't easily sell the apartment with those levies. 

* Why has this mainly been an issue for residential apartments?  I don't recall hearing of an office block with the same level of problems.  I guess residential apartments have a lot more plumbing and fiddly bits, but still.  It would seem something about the apartment building business is particularly rotten.

Vaping mystery

I would have thought that the pro-vaping lobby would have some misgivings about their position until doctors work out what is causing serious lung disease amongst vapers in the USA.

But I have noticed no sign of that in Australia.   I see that Terry Barnes, former Liberal health adviser, is still running a pro-vaping line in the interests of reducing smoking rates. 

I know he can claim some academic support - but I think it very likely that within a few years, it will be seen to have been misplaced. 

I am surprised that people cannot apply some common sense to this issue, and judge that it is unlikely to be a healthy thing to coat your lungs regularly with the liquid needed to deliver nicotine.  Less unhealthy than smoking?  Presumably so, but the key thing should be how much it helps smokers quit - and the research on that is still early.   Even if it helps more smokers quit, it would need to be a substantially higher number than other nicotine replacement methods in order to justify the health risks associated with vaping.  As to how much higher - that is just a judgement call, and for me, it is one the vaping industry is unlikely to pass, especially taking into account how many young users it attracts. It is not as if the industry wants only ex-smokers as users, after all.

Heinlein believed

...in an afterlife, so it would seem from a 1968 letter that Michael Prescott has posted.

I am not sure I am all that surprised - I would say he always showed interest in other dimensions (a bit like in the Flatland scenario), and alternative universes, and perhaps his afterlife interests were connected with that.   (In other words, a belief that if we understood science better we could work out where "Heaven" is.)

Portland is still there

Today I had read this very anti Ngo article at Jacobin: Portland's Andy Ngo is the Most Dangerous Grifter in America, then had a look at his twitter feed during the anticipated confrontation between out of town Right wing provocateurs and local Antifa, many of whom are unsavoury looking characters in their own way.

And yeah, I have to say, it is clear Ngo isn't a real journalist.  He was tweeting short clips (taken by others - I assume he did not turn up this time, which is no doubt a good idea in his own self interest), without context, and giving the uniformly worst possible interpretation against Antifa in all cases.  He's as much as a journalist as, say, John Pilger was when doing his completely one-sided takes.  In other words, just a biased commentator with a camera. 

Anyway, it seems there wasn't as much drama at Portland as people feared, even though there were arrests.  I did see on Twitter that one of the Right wing organisers of their intervention said it was a success because it got Trump's attention on Twitter.

Yeah, right.  A real sincere exercise in free speech.

Portland is still there, and Andy Ngo is still doing his part to encourage wingnuts into thinking the US is going to collapse because of Liberals, rather than because it has a narcissistic, dumb, wannabe authoritarian President with an enabling Party behind him.

Update:  the Daily Kos version of events during the day.  Because you would have no idea what was happening if you relied on Andy Ngo.

Fluffy donut

Am sitting beside this at the moment:

She had a bath this morning...

Milk under attack

On a busy Brisbane street this morning, the anti dairy folk are out:

This is a busy street, just outside the Ekka.   Which, I now realise, is almost certainly why they are here.  

I haven't been into the Ekka this year, or last year.  I wonder if the vegans have much of a presence yet?  Given the increase in vegan products I've been noticing in supermarkets (Coles brand smoke flavoured tofu, for example), there must be some vegan promotion in there.   

Now I'm imagining late night fights there between big-hatted cow cockies and tofu stall holders.

I must go next year and find out...

Limited truth in advertising

Just saw this flyer:

Checking Wikipedia, I find that this now comprises just one original member..the drummer.   Rather like Ringo going on tour and calling himself The Beatles, no?

Saturday photo

Colmslie Beach Reserve, Brisbane:

Finger workout

This one's for reader Tim, who is interested in all things German, I think:

German finger wrestling pulls a crowd in Bavaria

Competitors, who are matched in weight and age, sit opposite each other and pull on a small leather loop using just one finger.  The winner is the one who pulls his opponent across the table. As in other forms of wrestling, those taking part must put in lots of training. Squeezing tennis balls and lifting heavy weights with just one finger are both part of the routine. To emerge triumphant, technique and physical strength are important, as is a high pain threshold.

Fingerhakeln is traditional in Bavaria and in Austria. Its origins are unclear but it is believed to have started as a way of settling arguments.

I thought at first, if only Hitler had been prepared to settle disputes with a good fingerhakeln session.  But then I thought of poor old Roosevelt being flung across the table, and America going all Man in the High Castle.

Churchill, on the other hand, might have kept Britain safe that way.

The articles has lots of photos of men in traditional get up, pulling fingers.

Does it make cream too?

More on that company that wants to get fake milk made using milk protein from GM yeast:

After working at MassBiologics less than a year, Pandya quit in 2014 to found Perfect Day with another vegan biologist, Perumal Gandhi, also now 27. Their Berkeley, California, company has developed a technology to insert a DNA sequence into microflora like yeast that produces casein and whey proteins that are identical to those found in cow’s milk. Rather than create its own line of grocery store items, Perfect Day, which has raised $40 million from investors, is selling its proteins to large food manufacturers to turn into mayonnaise, protein bars, baby formula and cookies.

I don't really understand - do those proteins make cream?  Because milk only tastes good because of the cream.  (If you're going to drink skim milk, you may as well go with unsweetened almond milk.)   And the article does not involve any actual taste test of a milk product made this whey way.  (Ha ha).  

Anyway, I am curious as to whether this can be a success.   Isn't raising yeast in gigantic bio-reactors pretty efficient,  and economical?      

Good grief

WSJ reports:

The idea of the U.S. purchasing Greenland has captured the former real-estate developer’s imagination, according to people familiar with the discussions, who said Mr. Trump has, with varying degrees of seriousness, repeatedly expressed interest in buying the ice-covered autonomous Danish territory between the North Atlantic and Arctic oceans.

In meetings, at dinners and in passing conversations, Mr. Trump has asked advisers whether the U.S. can acquire Greenland, listened with interest when they discuss its abundant resources and geopolitical importance and, according to two of the people, has asked his White House counsel to look into the idea.

Some of his advisers have supported the concept, saying it was a good economic play, two of the people said, while others dismissed it as a fleeting fascination that will never come to fruition. It is also unclear how the U.S. would go about acquiring Greenland even if the effort were serious.

Maybe Peter Thiel told him it was a good idea?   He's nutty enough to think it might make a good future Libertarian Land.  I have no idea why Trump himself would come up with the thought...

Yay for science thwarting vegans

Have I mentioned before that I'm pretty dismayed how veganism has seemingly completely trumped vegetarianism in the alt. normal diet marketplace of ideas?    I mean, really:  the idea of giving up cheese, or eggs, is a huge ask for many people, me included.   And besides, I would be pretty sure that it is much, much easier to get a load of essential vitamins from your food if you include dairy, eggs, and the occasional not-very-sentient source of protein.   (Say, prawns and oysters - I am never going to worry too much about upsetting their farmed friends by taking them out of the sea.)  

But I can see why vegans argue about not wanting to support the egg industry, which involves killing huge numbers of day old rooster chicks.   (Why they wouldn't eat ones from their own backyard, though - that seems way too purist to me.)

So I am happy to read about the big effort to find a way to deal with the problem, by not even allowing the rooster eggs to hatch:

Modern laying hens have been bred to produce huge numbers of eggs, but their brothers are useless. They don't put on weight fast enough to be raised for meat. So hatchery workers—specialized "sexers"—sort day-old chicks by hand, squeezing open their anal vents for a sign of their sex. Females are sold to farms. Males—roughly 7 billion per year worldwide, according to industry estimates—are fed into a shredder or gassed.

Sorting males from females before chicks hatch at 21 days wouldn't just avoid the massacre. Hatcheries would no longer need to employ sexers, they wouldn't waste space and energy incubating male eggs, and they could sell those eggs as a raw material for animal feed producers, the cosmetics industry, or vaccine manufacturers. The United Egg Producers, a U.S. cooperative, says it wants to be cull-free by 2020, and the German government has said it will outlaw the practice. "Everyone wants the same thing, and the right piece of technology could solve this right now," says Timothy Kurt, scientific program director at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR) in Washington, D.C.

Look at how hi-tech one method of achieving this is:

One contender is the technology behind the respeggt eggs, which sorts them based on sex hormones. Funding from governments and industry has prompted an abundance of other ideas—from laser spectroscopy to MRI scans to genetic engineering. And next month, FFAR will announce seed funding for six finalists—selected from 21 entries from 10 countries—for an Egg-Tech Prize competing for up to $6 million for a workable method.

Almuth Einspanier, a veterinary endocrinologist at Leipzig University in Germany, and her colleagues laid the groundwork for the respeggt brand. They found that by day 9 of development, female embryos produce a hormone called estrone sulfate that can be detected reliably in fluid that builds up in the egg—"essentially the embryo's pee," Einspanier says. The German grocery chain Rewe and HatchTech, a Dutch hatchery equipment supplier, founded Seleggt, a spin-off based in Cologne, Germany, to market the technique. The company built a robot that fires a laser to open a hole in the shell much smaller than a pinhead. It sucks out a minuscule drop of the fluid and adds it to a solution that turns blue in the presence of the female hormone. Female eggs go to the incubator and male eggs are sent off to be frozen and processed into powder for animal feed.

Next thing we need work on - how to make milk other than from an udder.  What happened to this artificial cow's milk that is made from GM yeast?   Deserves another post, probably.

To be added to the international "everything in Australia wants to kill you" files

An elderly couple have been badly injured trying to break up a fight between their dog and a goanna in north Queensland.

The 72-year-old man underwent surgery after being bitten by the goanna while his wife was treated for her injuries at the Proserpine Hospital.

The couple's dog was killed during the attack.

I have to admit, that is an unusual and somewhat disturbing story, even for Australia.

No surprise

Of course, climate change deniers are thrilled;  but honestly, I don't think anyone sensible should ever have held high hopes that this was a useful energy idea:

World’s first solar road fails to meet expectations 

Roads need constant maintenance and get covered in dirt - they are about the last place I would expect it to make sense to lay thousands of solar cells.

Overcompensating

The reporting about the attractive young woman killed in Sydney by a nut a couple of days seemed odd to me from the start.    I mean, no one thinks a sex worker deserves death, but most people (surely including the parents of such a good looking and apparently smart young woman) would feel it is shame, at least to some degree, that she did that to make money.   Certainly I do - I'm one of the few people who strenuously objected to Pretty Women being a de facto glamorisation of prostitution at the time it came out. 

But the reporting on this woman seemed to be overcompensating from the start to promote her as a fantastic person, loved by all, who travelled the world and just happened to make a living via prostitution (sorry, sex work.)   And the print reporting has been full of warnings from some sex worker advocate telling people that she deserved to be able to work safely and without fear (duh) and people shouldn't look down on her because of how she made a legitimate living, etc etc.

It all seemed very much a case of the media trying to pre-empt anything less than fulsome praise for the women in every respect of her life - as if mere sympathy was not going to be enough.

As I say, I found it distinctly odd.  

What??

Comment moderation off

Graeme - nothing about Jews.  No sweary insults.  Or back into moderation we go.

About that nuclear powered missile

That recent explosion in Russia is believed to have been caused by work on a nuclear powered missile:

The explosion happened on a military missile test range and was carried out by engineers from Russia’s Federal Nuclear Center, under the state atomic agency Rosatom. 

Putin has touted the missile as having almost “unlimited” range and it is a centerpiece of a new generation of nuclear weapons that he has been saber-rattling at the West in an attempt to look tough at home and force the U.S. to negotiate with him on arms control abroad. 

The missile is believed to be a ramjet, which propels itself by sucking air in, heating it and pushing it out behind it. To heat the air constantly, the missile would carry essentially a miniature nuclear reactor. Outside experts though are skleptical that Russia is close to getting the missile operational. The U.S. tried to develop similar missiles in the 1960s but abandoned the idea as impracticable.

I haven't even posted about this proposed weapon before, because it always sounded so unnecessary, expensive and impractical.   (I'm not engineer, but sometimes you hear an idea and think "if that was possible, and useful, it would have been done by now.")

Everyone has probably heard of US military investigations into nuclear powered aircraft during the Cold War.   [That Wikipedia article I just linked to says there was also a proposal for nuclear powered airships too (!).]   The thing is, what could really have changed about nuclear fission reactors to now make them attractive for a cruise missile?  Is it just that you don't have to worry about shielding a human crew from radiation in a missile? 

And I thought the point of normal cruise missiles was that they could skim so low that they were really hard to detect and track, although I guess airborne radar from above, particularly over the ocean, must have a chance.

Anyway, as I say, no expert here, but I wonder if Putin is the victim of believing some crank engineer/scientist's pet project that more sensible people in the field overseas think is impractical and a waste of time.

Back to Les Miserables

This:

is the very nice, comfortable and acoustically great theatre at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music, where my wife and I saw them putting on the ever popular Les Miserables today. 

I see it's been 6 years since I wrote my extensive post on the show (and Victor Hugo), after seeing it in for the first time in its movie version.  (I'll pat myself on the back - it's great reminding myself sometimes of what I found out in previous research on a topic.)

After that, I saw the show live at QPAC, and noted that I found it more moving in parts than the movie.

Well, increasing familiarity seems to be making it worse for me, as now I feel on the verge of tears every (I don't know) 10 minutes of this show. One song*, particularly well sung, did cause tears, but I think it was manfully hidden from knowledge of everyone in the theatre, wife included.

I could just be succumbing to the tendency of older men to cry more easily, although that's not exactly an idea I welcome.  I was thinking often during the show of the Hong Kong residents singing Do You Hear the People Sing as a protest song over recent weeks, and was very much hoping I would not come out of the theatre to hear news of major military against them.   Maybe these thoughts kept me more emotional than normal.

In any event, as you imagine, a show put on by enthusiastic young music students should be pretty high quality, and it was.  Tickets were about half the cost of the cheapest seats in a professional show too.  I must watch out in future for what other musicals they put on each year.

Update:  don't think I previously linked to this blog summary of the real life events the second half of the musical is based around. 

* not that anyone's asking, it was Bring Him Home in the second half. 

Why compromise on abortion makes sense

Religions are free to develop their own views on the matter of abortion, and their members make their own decisions whether to follow or ignore their Church's teaching.  (It being widely known that many churchgoing women still opt for abortion.)  And personally, I have long adopted what might be called a precautionary approach to the matter:  this is a difficult topic, and I don't know where precise lines should be drawn in any objective sense, but I share most people's moral intuition that a late term abortion of a likely viable and healthy baby is a very serious matter and should have some exceptional justification if it is to happen at all, but a newly conceived embryo warrants a different set of moral concerns.   (As I will argue below, conservative anti-abortionists will say that they are above any line drawing, but by their actions and advocacy, they really aren't.)    My approach is that if there are moral ambiguities to taking an action, people should usually err on the side of not doing it. Hence, in a broad sense, I would say that I am more against abortion than for it.  

But what about the question of how governments should view it, in light of the mixed views held by different voters?   The abortion debate in the US is hotter than ever, with a renewed push for the overturning of the clear compromise position of Roe v Wade, despite it having maintained pretty popular survey support.   In Australia, we have had, for no very clear reason, a burst of recent State legislative activity to decriminalise abortion, but which in effect is changing nothing of the practice of abortion which has been in place for many decades.   (Conservatives who are in a rage about it seem to think legislators need to pointlessly keep prohibitions which everyone knows are virtually never used.)

Here's a pragmatic suggestion:   if both extremes of an issue have a problem with maintaining consistency, doesn't that make it obvious that a compromise between the two is the more justifiable outcome if you're trying to work out a legal framework?     And there are inconsistencies.

First:  on the pro-Life side - as many have noted, if they serious about every embryo being treated with the same value as a fully formed human, they should be calling fertility clinics which routinely dispose of unwanted, viable embryos as detention and execution centres for human life.

They don't.   Quite a few opinion pieces have made this point - here at the New Republic for one.
And if you put it in a utilitarian context of the trolley problem, who seriously would argue that it is would be better to switch the track to save the potential lives of (say) a hundred frozen embryos (of which, treated properly, a large proportion could be brought to term in families that would welcome them), over that of even one elderly woman past the prime of her life?

This article about the new Alabama law with a specific exemption for IVF embryos notes that pro-Life politicians are simply pragmatic on this:

The fertility industry didn’t support the Alabama bill, nor did it lobby for an exemption, says Sean Tipton, spokesman for the Birmingham-based American Society for Reproductive Medicine. It didn’t need to, he says: Politicians recognized that the popularity of fertility treatments was preventing anti-abortion laws from passing.

The pro-Choice side say, with justification, this:

Abortion-rights advocates call the exemption both outrageous and cynical. “When I heard Chambliss say it was for embryos in the woman’s uterus, it really highlighted what this is really about,” says Barbara Ann Luttrell, spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood Southeast. “It’s not about the embryo.”

Most people intuit that an embryo, by virtue of its form, does not warrant the same legal status as a more fully formed foetus or new borne baby.   While it has the potential to become a fully functioning  human, and warrants a different ethical attitude towards it than other human tissue for that reason, it goes against most persons intuition to treat it the same as a fully fledged human.

The reluctance of the pro-Life movement to press for equal treatment for all embryos shows they recognise this sentiment and know they will not easily convince people they are wrong.  Hence they will live with the inconsistency in their law making.

Second:  on the pro-choice side, the reaction against the conservative attempts to ban abortion has lead to calls for women to be forthright in praising abortion as a normal and good thing.   Rather than even conceding that they should be rare, as with the old Clinton-ian formulation, they argue that there should be no apologies for having one.  They are usually "empowering".  See the Shout Your Abortion site for examples of this genre.

The inconsistency I have lately been thinking about is the comparison with the increasingly powerful animal rights lobby.   Public concern about the treatment of farm animals, and the associated uptake of veganism, is taking off in a surprisingly sudden way.   While climate change concern is part of the motivation, I would be pretty confident that social media promotion of scenes of animal suffering has also had a very large effect.

I am not immune from concerns about animal treatment, and nor are all empathetic humans, even if it doesn't stop us from eating meat or using animal products.

But the point here is that if a vegan won't eat eggs because the egg industry kills healthy young rooster chicks by putting them through a grinder, how could they not have concerns about a healthy, viable fetus being at risk of death because the mother made a late decision that she does not want the baby?     A well developed and healthy fetus is undoubtedly living, as is a chick.  Why is it a moral concern as to the premature death of one, at the will of humans who deem it unwanted, but not the other?

When you look at protesting young, pro-choice women, surely it would be a good bet that it would contain a disproportionate number of dedicated vegans motivated by wanting to reduce animal suffering, and not cause the premature death of any creature for human benefit.  Surely there is an inconsistency if you think a woman's choice is unquestionable when it comes to late term abortion, but not if it is about whether she should eat an egg for breakfast?

To my mind, the inconsistencies show that neither extreme should be treated as having a fair take on the matter, and legislators should not follow either extreme.

This is what makes the compromise position argued in Roe V Wade such a popular approach.  A reminder:

The Court resolved this balancing test by tying state regulation of abortion to the three trimesters of pregnancy: during the first trimester, governments could not prohibit abortions at all; during the second trimester, governments could require reasonable health regulations; during the third trimester, abortions could be prohibited entirely so long as the laws contained exceptions for cases when they were necessary to save the life or health of the mother.[6 

The matter of how Australia implement a sense of compromise is an interesting issue of itself:   obviously, requiring more doctors to be involved in approving a late term abortion has an element of that.  There was an argument appearing in The Conversation today that there should be no gestational limits on abortion, and the argument was put more convincingly than I expected.   As is often the case with abortion, it would seem the practice tends to override the letter of the law:  

There is no evidence that legal restrictions on second and third trimester abortions reduce the number of abortions that occur later in pregnancy. In fact, based on the most recent statistics, the proportion of abortions performed after 20 weeks in Canada, which has no gestational cut off, is half that in Queensland, which has a 22 week cut off (0.66% compared with 1.34%).   

But overall, I am not convinced that it should be left unregulated.

I can see some conservative arguing that my whole position relies too much on moral intuition, which can be so flexible as to be unreliable.   Indeed, death of unwanted new born babies by exposure was apparently a not uncommon practice in some places:  it is a bit hard to know, though, how their moral intuitions felt about it at the time.

The problem for conservative reasoning about abortion is that it seems to not align with common women's intuition about at least early pregnancy - I know my Catholic mother was annoyed to have fallen pregnant (again - she had 7 children) with me, and said she took hot baths that she hoped might end it early.  My eldest sister laughed at the story when it was told - and I was a bit taken aback at the time.  (I still don't think it's the best idea to tell your kid that you had really hoped for miscarriage at first!)  My sister in her life had fallen pregnant unexpectedly while single while living overseas - I know for a fact that she had the option for legal abortion but she didn't take it. 

But I later reflected on how this showed that many (probably most) women, even from a Catholic background, do not automatically feel any maternal connection with an unexpected embyro attached to their uterus.   Perhaps especially after having all the children they expected to have? 

And I have to say, I find effort to argue against that common women's intuition feels like one of those cases where men (in particular) philosophise themselves into positions against common sense - Kant going on about masturbation being worse than suicide, for example.

So no, I think this is an area of human experience where human, particularly women's, intuition has to be given attention, and moral intuition is a reasonable approach.   And as I say, this should lead to a compromise position in terms of public policy, regardless of how you would feel about your own decision.