Green finance success?

I take it from this report that the Gillard established Clean Energy Finance Corporation might be sold into private hands means that it has been a success:

Private investment funds are circling Australia's Clean Energy Finance Corporation hoping for a sale of the $10 billion government-owned organisation, as its head flags a major shift in how taxpayer funds are used to support the booming industry.

In an interview that will spark debate over whether the fund should be privatised like its counterpart in Britain, CEFC chief executive Ian Learmonth said he would shift his focus to strengthening the grid's reliability because banks had become more comfortable financing large-scale wind and solar projects....

The CEFC was established under the Gillard government in 2012 to spur investment in the sector while it introduced a carbon pricing scheme. Touting Australia's clean-energy credentials to Pacific leaders, Prime Minister Scott Morrison last week called it "the world's most successful green bank"....

Mr Learmonth said as the utility solar and wind-power renewables market had matured, more private capital had flowed in. The CEFC earned $350 million last year from maturing loans, which have been written on a commercial basis allowing for a transfer to private entities if required.

I bet that Liberals were not predicting a success when it was established.  

Composer more modern than I knew

Last night I learned (because my daughter was doing an assignment on him) that Richard Strauss (not Johann) lived from 1864 to 1949;  I didn't realise he was a 20th century figure.   

And this weekend, I get to listen to his An Alpine Symphony, a "tone poem" which my daughter actually likes.   (She plays a lot of different composers in her youth orchestra, but seems to not care much for a lot of the pieces selected.  She has a particular dislike of Mozart, for some reason.)

I also didn't realise that the 2001: A Space Odyssey piece from Also sprach Zarathustra was just the opening fanfare to a piece that goes 30 minutes.

There is much I do not know...

Twin beds more common than I knew?

Someone in England has written "A Cultural History of Twin Beds", which indicates that they were not that uncommon in the earlier part of the 20th century.   Here are the highlights:

Her key findings reveal that twin beds:

• Were initially adopted as a health precaution in the late nineteenth century to stop couples passing on germs through exhaled breath.
• Were seen, by the 1920s, as a desirable, modern and fashionable choice, particularly among the middle classes.
• Featured as integral elements of the architectural and design visions of avant-garde Modernists such as Le Corbusier, Peter Behrens and Wells Coates.
• Were (in the early decades of the 20th century) indicative of forward-thinking married couples, balancing nocturnal 'togetherness' with a continuing commitment to separateness and autonomy.
• Never entirely replaced double beds in the households of middle-class couples but, by the 1930s and 1940s, were sufficiently commonplace to be unremarkable.
• Enjoyed a century-long moment of prominence in British society and, as such, are invaluable indicators of social customs and cultural values relating to health, modernity and marriage.

The backlash against twin beds as indicative of a distant or failing marriage partnership intensified in the 1950s and by the late 1960s few married couples saw them as a desirable choice for the bedroom.

Innovation in Malaysia

Noted at CNA:

One Condoms has introduced the limited-edition “super sensitive” rendang-flavoured condoms to commemorate Malaysia’s upcoming independence day on Aug 31.

This is the fourth release in the company’s quirky Malaysian series, which began in 2016 and includes flavours such as nasi lemak, teh tarik and durians.

According to the Malay Mail, the condoms will only be available on the market for a limited period. The site quoted a statement released by One Condoms manufacturer Karex that the idea behind the local flavours is to break the stigma and get people comfortable to talk about sex.

“The end game is simple — pleasurable sex in a safe holistic way which is the ultimate objective of our iconic Malaysian series, now proudly in our fourth year.”

I perceive certain practical issues with the whole flavoured condom thing - especially if it is on the spicy side.   But the readers can contemplate that without my assistance.

Yeah, sure

Once again, there is no conservative hyperbole too far for Sinclair Davidson's Catallaxy blog - which seems to escape attention for things like action under the Racial Discrimination Act, defamation or (I wonder?) contempt of court only because people think ratbags are not worth pursuing.   Real clever strategy, Sinclair [sarcasm]:  let the entire blog be a joke so that conservatives can say anything offensive and you can shrug your shoulders.

The latest example, by a "guest post/rant" by the Pell obsessed uber-conservative Catholic CL, in a lengthy diatribe against an ABC journalist, is this comment about the need for the High Court to fix the Pell conviction:

If ever there was a case in need of High Court correction, this is it. The future of the Commonwealth depends on it.

Um, yeah.  I'd like to hear how. 

And this:

....a second jury of dupable vigilantes eager to convict the self-same but, by then, notorious George Pell and an appeals court which this morning raised preposterous hearsay to the level of DNA and CCTV.

Hearsay?   I don't think this scintillating dissector of judicial wrongs even knows the first thing about the legal terminology.

Isn't it also simply offensive to describe the jury - any jury - that way?

Mind you, this is the same character who has been outright claiming for months since Pell's conviction that the accuser is an outright liar and fabricator.    While I have no problem with people doubting that a conviction is reasonable, common decency alone would suggest that someone who  have no direct experience of hearing a witness (or knowledge of a jury) should not start publicly attacking their character and motivation simply because the outcome was not what they thought it should be. 

In the bigger picture, I also note that Sinclair and his nutty crew spend much of their time rubbishing the low ratings and national importance of the ABC in order to argue for its defunding, but when it comes to Pell, the story switches to writing as if every juror has obviously been watching and reading the ABC's spin on the matter.

But put on the "I just run a clown show in my spare time" defence, Sinclair, and it'll be OK. 

 

Religious, cow related, lynchings in India

I've posted on the topic before, but this article at NPR seems a good summary of the situation in India, with Hindu nationalism, and its belief in sacred status of cows, leading to lynchings against (mainly) Muslims.  Some highlights:

Since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party won power in India five years ago, lynchings of the country's minorities have surged. In February, Human Rights Watch reported at least 44 such murders between May 2015 and December 2018. Hundreds more people have been injured in religiously motivated attacks.

Most of the victims are Muslims, members of the country's largest religious minority. They comprise about 15% of India's 1.3 billion people. Other victims include lower-caste Hindus and Christians.

Most of the attackers are devout Hindu men, known as "cow vigilantes," who take it upon themselves to enforce beef bans. Some of them claim ties to the BJP. Last year, a BJP minister met with a group of men convicted of a lynching and draped them in flower garlands.

....

Article 15 of India's constitution prohibits discrimination based on religion. Human rights groups are lobbying for the creation of a specific hate crimes law, but none exists in India yet.

....

Before he died, Khan was able to describe his attackers to police. Six men were arrested. Charges against them were dropped, then reinstated, and the case remained in limbo for two years — until last week, when a court acquitted all of them, citing lack of evidence.

Instead, Khan was charged posthumously with cow smuggling. Police say he didn't have a permit to transport cows across state lines. Khan's two sons, who were with him that day, await trial — and if convicted, face the possibility of up to five years in prison.

"It's like they are trying to erase us — erase all of my people," Jaibuna says in the muddy courtyard of their family farm.

....

Some Indian analysts say the situation in India is comparable to the post-Civil War period in the United States, when many white people looked on as black people were lynched.

"The similarities with the American lynchings of the late 19th century are striking," says Prabhir Vishnu Poruthiyil, a business professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay who has studied corporate India's lack of response to hate crimes.

"Most of the upper-middle class that populate[s] the corporate classes, they're also upper-caste Hindus," Poruthiyil explains. "Even if they don't agree with the lynching itself, they might be OK with the idea of stopping cow slaughter. It's a slippery slope."

As a child in Mumbai, Ayyub survived Hindu-Muslim riots in 1992 and 1993, which killed several hundred people. But she says what's happening now feels worse, because it's not a "spur of the moment" outpouring of anger. There are very specific targets.

"Now lynchings are organized on social media," Ayyub says. "People send messages to each other, saying, 'Hey, this household has beef in their fridge, let's go attack them."

More about high rise building insurance

I noted earlier this week that people (including me) were generally unaware that the compulsory insurance against structural defects that is taken out by builders constructing houses did not apply to strata structures over 3 levels high.  

I see some history of this is in an article at the ABC, which also indicates that high rise apartments are very profitable for developers (at least, if they can sell them all):

Prior to 2002, this insurance was a mandatory feature of all domestic building contracts.
HIH Insurance Limited, a major provider of Home Warranty Insurance, was placed into administration in March 2001 and left the insurance market.

In 2002, in response to a failure from other insurers to fill the gap left by HIH, State Governments agreed to exempt builders from providing this type of insurance in buildings above three stories.

For high-rise builders, who don't need to qualify for this insurance and also had the incentive of rising land prices, speculative apartment developments started to look like attractive investments as they didn't need to qualify for this kind of insurance.

Take the now infamous Opal Tower.

Publicly available documents put the cost of this development at around $215 million. If all 392 apartments were sold at their advertised price of between $800,000 and $2.5 million each, the developers have potential to make a profit on this project of around $165 million dollars, or a 77 per cent return on their investment.

Or take the Prima Pearl skyscraper in Melbourne.

The builder was paid $230 million, to build 680 "designer" apartments. Labour and materials worth $338,000 was used per home and each sold for an average cost of $1,000,000.

Quite the tidy profit for its developer. Shame about the creaking.

He really, really wanted to buy Greenland.

It is truly a presidency impossible to parody.

President Trump responded to Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen‘s message to the United States that Greenland is not for sale by tweeting Tuesday evening that he's postponing their scheduled meeting. A White House spokesman later clarified that the president's entire trip to Denmark had been canceled, per AP.

Economic genius and cult member Steve Kates was fully on board.  Of course.

The Pell decision

Sinclair Davidson's Sheltered Home for Obnoxious Old Conservatives is, of course, going off about the Victorian Appeal Court upholding George Pell's conviction by a 2 to 1 majority.  

I would have thought that anyone, on the Left or the Right, would be wise* to be cautious about this whole affair.   It seems clear that the witness must have been pretty convincing in his evidence; but also everyone knows juries have made mistakes and (obviously) different lawyers and judges can disagree about whether there is a clear enough mistake to overturn the decision. 

In short, the judicial system is imperfect, but it is what it is and there is no way of being absolutely certain here as to whether its findings accord perfectly with what really happened.  

If, by some extraordinary circumstance, it later became perfectly clear that the convictions were wrong (I think the only likelihood of that would be a confession of the victim that he invented it), it's not going to be the biggest injustice in the nation's history.   Pell will serve about the same time in jail as Lindy Chamberlain, and I think the lack of evidence and outright carelessness of the investigation and expert witnesses and prosecution collectively in that case would still stand as a worse case of injustice.  


*  That excludes the dumb, culture war blinded people of Catallaxy, naturally.

Bigger than the Pell verdict

It actually is, on Twitter, at the moment:

Many of the despairing thread comments and memes cursing Sony are funny.  I like this one, which I have seen before:

But I see on other threads that some are saying that Disney was being too greedy in the cut it wanted.  Also, that they still might reach a deal yet.

Worrying times indeed.   :)

Get Happy

Another Netflix recommendation - and this one is new and really good.

Happy Jail - a short documentary series about the jail on Cebu, in the Philippines, which became famous for the dancing prisoners a decade or so ago.

The jail - which is actually a remand jail, apparently, but people (of both sexes, and quite a few gays) can be there for many years at a time - still thrives on dancing, and is bizarrely now run by an ex-convict who is friends with the new local governor.  (He didn't start the dancing stuff - that was by a previous prison boss who spends much time rubbishing the new regime.)

It doesn't dwell on the dancing per se - although, given that they practice virtually continuously, there are lots of shots of that.   What makes is so fascinating is the way the whole place runs:  the facilities are appallingly crowded and ramshackle, and the prison is to an extraordinary extent sort of self managed.  I doubt there will ever be another documentary where the prisoners seem so happy to be being filmed.

It's extremely well made, and at half an hour per episode, doesn't wear out its welcome.

It continually makes me feel how oddball the Philippines is - fervently religious, full of terrible poverty, in-fighting, corruption, drugs; and people who really like to sing and dance through it all.  It manages to make the place look both attractive and repulsive at the same time.

Highly recommended.

In which I get to talk about syphilis again

It's been a while since I've re-visited the topic of syphilis (recent visitors can see how fascinating I find the topic by searching the blog in the sidebar), but a book review in Nature gives me an excuse to marvel at its historic devastation again.   The book is How the Brain Lost its Mind: Sex, Hysteria, and the Riddle of Mental Illness.   Sounds fun.  

Here are some extracts from the review, looking more at the syphilis side:

In the nineteenth century, neurosyphilis was one of the most ubiquitous and fatal forms of degenerative mental illness known to psychiatry. Termed general paralysis of the insane, it was widely supposed by early practitioners to be caused by bad heredity, ‘weak character’ or moral turpitude. That changed in 1913, when Japanese bacteriologist Hideyo Noguchi, working at Rockefeller University in New York City, found traces of Treponema pallidum — the spiral-shaped bacterium responsible for syphilis — in the brains of deceased people with general paralysis. At the time, as many as one-third of patients in mental hospitals had symptoms that could now be clearly traced back to syphilis (A. M. Brandt Science 239, 375–380; 1988).

(I had remarked in an earlier post that it seems surprising that it took so long for medicine to confirm syphilis led to madness.)  Back to the general effects on psychiatry after this:

...the discovery that general paralysis was a symptom of a sexually transmitted disease galvanized subsequent generations of psychiatrists. They embarked on a quest, still largely unfulfilled, to find biological foundations for other mental disorders, especially grave conditions such as schizophrenia. Only later would it become clear, as the authors point out, that neurosyphilis is “an unsuitable model for anything clearly unrelated to infection or inflammation in the frontal and temporal lobe regions”....

The age of Freud was also the age of syphilis. Freud, and psychoanalysis more generally, focused on suppressed sexual fantasies and traumas because, for patients then, the shameful and terrifying spectre of syphilis hung over every sexual encounter like “the sword of Damocles” ....

The history of neurosyphilis bequeathed a tendency to indulge in excessive reductionism. That of hysteria encouraged a tendency to indulge in excessive psychologism. And both psychiatry and neurology were left the poorer. As the authors argue, the majority of patients seen by practitioners in both fields are afflicted with what they call “in-between states” — forms of distress informed by both biology and biography. The book is in this sense a plea for neurology and psychiatry to repair ruptures, join forces and do justice to the experiences of their patients.

Just a joke? [insert nervous laugh]

Fake Chinese police cars spotted in Perth and Adelaide amid pro-Hong Kong rallies

Authorities are investigating after fake Chinese police cars were spotted in Adelaide and Perth amid pro-Hong Kong demonstrations across Australia, but the owner of one of the cars has told police it was a "joke".

Some joke...

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?