Growth questionned

Gee, this might do in Jason's head.   A guy who techno-optimist Bill Gates apparently likes says economists just have to give up on the idea that economic growth has to keep happening.

An extract:

You debunk overly rosy projections by techno-optimists, who say we can solve all our problems with smarter computers, and economists, who promise endless capitalist growth. In many countries, the downside of material growth now seems greater than the upside, which leads to what you call “anthropogenic insults to ecosystems”. Is that a fair summary?
Yes, I think so. Without a biosphere in a good shape, there is no life on the planet. It’s very simple. That’s all you need to know. The economists will tell you we can decouple growth from material consumption, but that is total nonsense. The options are quite clear from the historical evidence. If you don’t manage decline, then you succumb to it and you are gone. The best hope is that you find some way to manage it. We are in a better position to do that now than we were 50 or 100 years ago, because our knowledge is much vaster. If we sit down, we can come up with something. It won’t be painless, but we can come up with ways to minimise that pain.

So we need to change our expectations of GDP growth?
Yes, the simple fact is that however you define happiness, we know – and we have known this for ages – that the amount of GDP is not going to improve your satisfaction with life, equanimity and sense of wellbeing. Look at Japan. They are pretty rich but they are among the unhappiest people on the planet. Then who is always in the top 10 of the happiest people? It is the Philippines, which is much poorer and smitten by typhoons, yet many times more happy than their neighbours in Japan. Once you reach a certain point, the benefits of GDP growth start to level off in terms of mortality, nutrition and education.

Is that point the golden mean? Is that what we should be aiming for rather than pushing until growth becomes malign, cancerous, obese and environmentally destructive?
Exactly. That would be nice. We could halve our energy and material consumption and this would put us back around the level of the 1960s. We could cut down without losing anything important. Life wasn’t horrible in 1960s or 70s Europe. People from Copenhagen would no longer be able to fly to Singapore for a three-day visit, but so what? Not much is going to happen to their lives. People don’t realise how much slack in the system we have.

 I'm not sure about this, but I do wonder about it at times.

PS:   What bothers me about techno-optimists who go on about nuclear is that they are too pessimistic about different ways of utilising increasing amounts of renewables wisely.  Too pessimistic about large and small scale storage; too insistent that unless you keep the ability to use energy in exactly the way we do now, it'll be some sort of crisis.   I mean, unexpected brown outs are inconvenient, but the way they carry on if even a single brown out happens in summer now due to generation issues is over the top.    This guy makes a lot of sense - we can probably readily adjust to energy conservation if we accept it as necessary; and not all countries need to use energy in exactly the same way we do.

Seeing a future whereby clean energy allows a similar, even if somewhat more modest, lifestyle to what we enjoy now is a form of techno-optimism;  decrying renewables as never being able to supply enough power for a modern industrial nation is a form of techno-pessimism, really.


 

No Biden corruption

Not getting as much airing as it should, in my opinion, is the fact that it is not true that the Biden acted corruptly in Ukraine.

The Intercept discusses it here.

And here is the Washington Post on it.  

Both articles are from May 2019.

Many people on Twitter are furious that the New York Times in particular is playing this for Trump just like they did Hillary's emails.   They are helping normalise Trumpian rumour mongering, even when there is plenty of evidence already that it is not true.

As has been written thousands of times, the problem is that a lot of journalism does not know how to respond to being played by a bullshitter like Trump.

Update:  Max Boot's column on this is good too.

Update 2:  and read this thread on Twitter.  

A brief Spotify note

It may just be the era the music is primarily from, but I really like the selection of songs in the Power Pop playlist on Spotify.  

More modern comedy I didn't like

Watched the 2012 movie version of 21 Jump Street last night.   (Another cheap hire on Google.  I must stop doing that.)  Can't say I cared for it. 

I didn't read much about it at the time, except that I knew it was pretty well reviewed going by Rotten Tomatoes.  I didn't care for the (more than I expected) amount of swearing, but I'm most surprised it didn't attract more commentary for being way, way too much like a homophobic teenage boy's idea of a screenplay.   I know the main characters were meant to be immature, but you can only claim to be ironically getting humour from immature straight characters talking about sex acts between men up to a certain point.    And it's disingenuous, because you know actual homophobes will find it particularly hilarious.

I have found an article at Vanity Fair that shared my take on this aspect.  (And OK, I did read this before I wrote the paragraph above):

As I hope you can intuit, I’m being ironically homophobic—as, to be very charitable, the filmmakers behind 21 Jump Street may also be. That would be an improvement over Don Draper–era jokes about limp-wristed hairdressers, I suppose, but irony can serve as a flimsy cover-up, too. It’s an easy hall pass to wave, like the way some people think saying “just kidding!” puts the burden of offense on anyone they’ve just insulted. You also have to calculate who’s laughing at a joke and why, who’s in on it and who’s left outside.

I also see that the sequel dwells more on this type of humour, and that before its release, Jonah Hill got into trouble by being caught yelling "Faggot" at some photographers bothering him.  He apologised, and said he was a gay rights activist from way back.   He may well be, but I think he's pretty dumb in that case.  From what I read, one of the characters in the sequel makes a speech about how you shouldn't use that sort of language about gays.   Which indicates real life irony as far as Hill is concerned.

As I say, why didn't this bother more reviewers?

Update:  just to show that I am not exactly squeemish about "penis" in comedy per se - I thought this recent bit on Conan was pretty funny:

I try to be charitable, but...

....Steve Kates just couldn't be more stupidly un-self aware if he tried. 

Here's the shorter version of what he's been writing for years "Why won't they engage in good faith dialogue, those moronic Lefties who want to kill everything good in the world and crush us under their totalitarian heal?  They need to dialogue, so as to learn how I understand both economics (buy my book) and the science of climate change perfectly, and they don't have a clue."

The point I was trying to make yesterday is that it is all very well to be speaking among ourselves on our side of the fence but useless if we cannot force these climate totalitarians to engage in a dialogue.....There is, of course, nothing that these ignoramuses say that we are unaware of. They, on the other hand, are unaware of every bit of the counter-arguments that have been made on our side. They are certainly unaware of the massive evidence proving that they are almost certainly wrong.

When a person is so clueless as to what the "massive evidence" actually says about climate change, and is always claiming evil ulterior motives on those who he does not agree with, why would anyone try to "dialogue" with him?   It's why no one bothers engaging on the topic on the science side at his Catallaxy outlet anymore.  They are, as with their contrarian scientist heros, nearly all old obnoxious cranks who'll be dead within 20 years anyway.  Unfortunately, we can't wait that long to get into serious CO2 reduction, though.

And it's fair enough that The Conversation won't let denialists engage in comments debate anymore.  It's pointless and just as bad as it would be to allow nutty anti-vaxers free rein on the site.

Jason, it must be a residual bit of your libertarian past that the Conversation policy annoys you - and citing Ian Plimer, for God's sake.  He has zero credibility on the topic; always has.  Freeman Dyson has next to no credibility on this topic - which is one well out of his field of expertise, too.

Stop being such a sucker for thinking people with high IQ and success in one field are worth paying attention to in fields outside of their expertise.  They very often aren't.

 

Saturday pics: West End

The Saturday West End markets are good for food:

There is also a great Greek deli nearby, with good olives, and catering size stuff:

Twenty ltrs of mayo, anyone?

And who would still be using Clive of India curry powder, let alone 3 kg of it:

It was the only curry powder of 1960s Australia, but I thought no one missed the bland yellow curried sausages, prawns and devilled eggs it made....

Why the Ukrainian matter matters

There's a good explanation by Fred Kaplan at Slate as to why the question of what Trump said to the Ukrainian President is a big deal:

Federal bribery statutes prohibit any U.S. official from expressing a “specific intent to give or receive something of value in exchange for an official act.” Courts have ruled that soliciting an attack on a political opponent constitutes asking for “something of value.”

He goes on to explain the complicated system for intelligence whistleblowing, and the clearly authoritarian way the Trump administration is seeking to circumvent it.

What an utter disgrace the Republicans are.

Seems unfair...

Alcohol-producing gut bacteria could cause liver damage even in people who don't drink

Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is the build-up of fat in the liver due to factors other than alcohol. It affects about a quarter of the adult population globally, but its cause remains unknown. Now, researchers have linked NAFLD to gut bacteria that produce a large amount of alcohol in the body, finding these bacteria in over 60% of non-alcoholic fatty liver patients. Their findings, publishing September 19 in the journal Cell Metabolism, could help develop a screening method for early diagnosis and treatment of non-alcoholic fatty liver.

"We were surprised that bacteria can produce so much alcohol," says lead author Jing Yuan at Capital Institute of Pediatrics. "When the body is overloaded and can't break down the alcohol produced by these bacteria, you can develop fatty liver disease even if you don't drink."

I guess the ultimate irony would be if drinking alcohol killed some of these unhealthy alcohol making bacteria.

A science fiction film to look forward to?

I tend to be dubious of the merits of Brad Pitt as an actor - he has a touch of the Matthew McConaughey's about him, in that I can't fully explain why I react against him the way I do - but this Ad Astra film is getting a lot of positive reviews, so I think I should see it.  Quality science fiction in films deserves support.  (Except if it involves Matthew McConaughey, and has such an awful screenplay as Interstellar.)

(I don't dislike all Pitt movies, by the way;  but there is something about him that causes me to resist crediting him as a likeable actor.) 

Yet more flash floods

Big flash floods in Texas, I see.   

Seems that some areas are having record breaking periods of intense rainfall, but the details are not yet 100% clear.

Certainly seems to be a dramatic event, consistent with increased intensity of rain and associated flash flooding being the one of the clearest recurring (and expensive) disasters that everyone is coming to accept as being from climate change.

Interesting comments on vaping

Once more, I head to my preferred UK medical journal, The Sun, (ha ha) because it runs interesting sceptical comments about vaping from UK's retiring Chief Medical Officer:

In an interview this month with Civil Service World, Professor Davies asked: “Is this a ticking time bomb? Will they turn out to have long term consequences?”

Public Health England published a report in 2015 suggesting that vaping could be 95 per cent less harmful than normal cigarettes.

The report stated: “There is no evidence that e-cigarettes (EC) are undermining the long-term decline in cigarette smoking among adults and youth, and may in fact be contributing to it."

Professor Davies conceded evidence has accumulated to suggest that e-cigarettes may help as a smoking cessation tool, but did not believe the evidence is 'hard' yet.

She added: "Meanwhile they're not regulated. So when you buy them, you don't know that you're getting what it says on the packet.

"I do - and will continue to - worry, because we don't know what the effects are of long-term use, or about the effect on people who may be upping their nicotine addiction by using them as well as smoking."

She added: “What you have to remember is that evidence is a social construct. So there’s hard evidence, from randomised control trials and meta-analysis. But then there’s other evidence.

"Policy based just on hard evidence leaves out all sorts of things that haven’t been tested but which maybe should be tried.

“The other thing, which is always difficult to explain to the public and to non-scientists, is that science kind of flip flops a bit to get to a final answer."

Not sure about that "unregulated" comment - I thought Public Health England says they are heavily regulated there? - but the Professor's comments about "science kind of flip flops a bit to get to a final answer" reminds me very much of how the views of marijuana and the risk of psychosis developed over 20 or 30 years.

China has pork reserves?

Is it just me, or does anyone else find the idea of a Strategic Pork Reserve kinda funny?:

China to tap pork reserves as swine fever hits industry

China is set to release pork supplies from its central reserves as it moves to tackle soaring prices and shortages caused by an outbreak of swine fever. A state-backed body will auction 10,000 tonnes of frozen pork from its strategic reserves on Thursday.

I suppose Australian democracy could be in trouble if there was a sausage shortage before an election, so I think the National Party needs to fly a National Snag Reserve.   

Cancel culture

As explained by the Washington Post, "cancel culture" is in large part a result of the nature of social media:

Stand-up comedy, just like other art forms, has traditionally enjoyed an unspoken pact with the audience: Comedians can say pretty much whatever they want, and people in the crowd can feel however they want about the jokes. In live comedy, the power dynamics tend to favor the comedian who has the stage, spotlight and microphone. If a couple of people in the audience are deeply offended, the comic may never know about it.

But the Internet changed this relationship. The audience can do more than heckle a live performance; they can talk back, at length, and get a lot of people to listen.

I have also noticed some people on Twitter pointing out that people so upset with it tend to only think of the attacks run by those on the Left, not about those run by the wingnuts of the Right:

(I see someone in the thread says Chapelle mentioned Kaepernick in his special.  I wonder how briefly?)

Go Will

Everyone's favourite former Libertarian should be Will Wilkinson, who has a great column in the New York Times noting how the Right wing response to a mere proposal of an assault weapon buy back by a guy wildly unlikely to become President (to threaten violence against the police and civil war against the State) is the illiberal and undemocratic scream of an ageing minority fearful of losing control because of democracy:

Nearly every Republican policy priority lacks majority support. New restrictions on abortion are unpopular. Slashing legal immigration levels is unpopular. The president’s single major legislative achievement, tax cuts for corporations and high earners, is unpopular. 

Public support for enhanced background checks stands at an astonishing 90 percent, and 60 percent (and more) support a ban on assault weapon sales. Yet Republican legislatures block modest, popular gun control measures at every turn. The security of the minority’s self-ascribed right to make the rules has become their platform’s major plank, because unpopular rules don’t stand a chance without it. Float a rule that threatens their grip on power, no matter how popular, and it’s “my AR is waiting for you, Robert Francis.”

They’ll tell you their thinly veiled threats are really about defending their constitutional rights. Don’t believe it. The conservative Supreme Court majority’s 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller found an individual right to own guns for self-protection, but no civilian needs a weapon capable of shooting 26 people in 32 seconds to ward off burglars. The Second Amendment doesn’t grant the right to own one any more than it grants the right to own a surface-to-air missile.  

They’ll tell you their foreboding “predictions” of lethal resistance are really about preserving the means to protect the republic against an overweening, rights-stomping state. Don’t believe that, either. It’s really about the imagined peril of a multicultural majority running the show. Many countries that do more to protect their citizens against gun violence are more, not less, free than we are. According to the libertarian Cato Institute, 16 countries enjoy a higher level of overall freedom than the United States, and most of them ban or severely restrict ownership of assault weapons. The freedom to have your head blown off in an Applebee’s, to flee in terror from the bang of a backfiring engine, might not be freedom at all.

I’m not too proud to admit that in my misspent libertarian youth, I embraced the idea that a well-armed populace is a bulwark against tyranny. I imagined us a vast Switzerland, hived with rifles to defend our inviolable rights against … Michael Dukakis? What I slowly came to see is that freedom is inseparable from political disagreement and that holding to a trove of weapons as your last line of defense in a losing debate makes normal ideological opposition look like nascent tyranny and readies you to suppress it.

So it’s no surprise that the most authoritarian American president in living memory, elected by a paltry minority, is not threatened in the least by citizen militias bristling with military firepower. He knows they’re on his side.

Democrats don’t want to grind the rights of Republicans underfoot. They want to feel safe and think it should be harder for unhinged lunatics to turn Walmarts into abattoirs. But when minority-rule radicals hear determined talk of mandatory assault rifle buybacks, they start to feel surrounded. They hear the hammers clicking back, imagine themselves in the majority’s cross hairs.

That’s why they’re unmoved by the mounting heap of slaughtered innocents, by schoolkids missing recess to rehearse being hunted. It’s a sacrifice they’re willing to let other Americans make, because they think democracy’s coming for their power, and they’re right.

Put them in the military..or something

I watched last night's Foreign Correspondent on the issue of illicit drug testing at European music festivals, and it was a pretty good way to get me feeling old and cranky with youff of today.

Actually, the editorial line taken by the show was more moderate and balanced than I expected, especially given that it was done by someone from JJJ who has reported on music festival drug deaths for a few years.  Yes, while it generally did paint the testing services in a positive light, they did balance it with at least one guy who ran tests acknowledging that those who have concerns that it virtually endorses illicit drug use do have a point.

It was sort of funny, though, that it featured a recent English festival at which the organisation which had previously done the free on site testing pulled back their involvement this year to only giving drug counselling.   (There was one fake looking scene where a couple said "yeah, we'll still go get counselling at least", and afterwards the dissolute woman said she had learnt for the first time that she should not mix alcohol with her ketamine taking - seriously?  I thought.   She looked a very experienced user.)   Yet no one at the end of the festival had been too badly endangered by their drug use anyway.   Kind of makes you wonder about the efficacy of the testing part of it, then.

But the worst thing about it was the "so this is what decadent youth of today think is having a good time?   Standing in a field in the sun, drinking and using illicit drugs to dance stupidly for three days straight?"   The people on screen, especially the English youth, playing up to the camera, all looked so distinctly uninspiring to my "I must be getting old" eyes.   Sure, I guess most of them actually hold down jobs, but I just have trouble handling the idea that people want to be off their face for so long at these events.

I mean, at least people at Woodstock had something they felt they were legitimately rebelling against - and the free love bits were just all part and parcel of wanting the world to change to something non-violent and less materialist.

Today's music festival scene, on the other hand, just looks like so much self indulgent hedonism that has emerged from youth having too much money, spare time and no interest in changing the world at all - it's given them an ugly tattoo or ten and enough cheap drugs, as well as a free ambulance tent if they have taken too much unknown substance and have started hallucinating, after all.

In my parent's day, the response was all "they should do some national service, that would straighten them out."    I'm still not at the stage of wanting that - although I am getting awfully close!

PS:  I am not at all sure why, but I find (for want of a better description) young yobbo behaviour when done with an English accent particularly annoying.    Is it the sense that it is a sadly fallen culture, compared to the stoicism of only (say) 80 years ago?

Unbelievable, and good

I've watched the first two episodes of the well reviewed Netflix true crime series Unbelievable - and it is really good.

This review in The Guardian is accurate, I think.   I like the way it describes the second episode as being better than mere "competence porn" - because, yes, you cannot help but feel that the first two episodes are virtually written to be police training films.  (The first episode is the grating, but quite distressingly plausible, example of everything detectives could possibly do wrong in questioning a rape victim; the second episode shows a virtually perfect example of how it should be done.)

But look, the acting is really good, so far, and it is not sensationalist despite the weirdness of the crimes.

Well worth watching.

A scandal to come?

Heh.  I see that Helen Dale, who vapes to get her nicotine hit, has re-tweeted a tweet of reassurance from Public Health England that they are not backing down from their (unusually strong) support of vaping:

No situation?   I'm not at all sure that there are any cases of young people developing life threatening lung problems within a year of smoking, are there?  


I'm sure I have commented on this before:   England's health authorities seem to have been completely persuaded unusually quickly that vaping is a pretty good thing, at least for smokers.   They don't seem to have any of the concerns of the equivalent US bodies, which have always been much more dubious.  True, there may be regulatory differences that account for some of this - such as tighter regulation in the UK of vaping liquids, and far fewer English youth getting hooked on nicotine this way.  But I still have my strong suspicions about something being not quite right about how strongly PHE has decided to endorse this nicotine delivery method.

It has a whiff of - something: perhaps money buying influence, and/or one or two key strong personalities within a health bureaucracy deciding a line and pushing it onto others.

There are hints of academic resistance - earlier this year, before the current spate of problems in the US, there was this headline in The Sun (OK, I know, not my preferred journal of health news): 

A LEADING scientist has accused health bosses of purposely "ignoring" the dangers of vaping.

Professor Martin McKee from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine says that he has "serious concerns" about the safety of e-cigs.

 And a couple of doctors writing to the BMJ in 2018 expressed similar scepticism about the PHE endorsement:

We understand that such conflict, existing as it does among tobacco experts, reflects a wider uncertainty surrounding the long term health risks of e-cigarettes. That PHE, whose purpose is “to protect and improve the nation’s health,”5 should sanction e-cigarette use citing an embryonic and inconclusive evidence base, is astonishing.

There was a whole article  in an American journal looking at how the American and English appraisals of vaping could come to such different conclusions:   The E-Cigarette Debate - What Counts as Evidence.

I reckon that all it will take for the UK media to leap into strenuous criticism of the PHE approach will be one or two British youth developing the sort of serious lung issues we have seen in the US.  The tabloids, which love that sort of story, will give it plenty of coverage.

Perhaps there will then be a proper and thorough political or journalistic investigation as to how the PHE came to its conclusions, and I would not be at all surprised if there is an element of scandal to be discovered.

Let's see.  I've made my prediction:  will I be vindicated?

Italians and their pets

I thought England would still be the European country most besotted with dogs, but according to this diary entry at the Catholic Herald, Italians now prefer pooches to bambini:

A growing number of Italians are now opting for pets rather than children. Back in 2014, Pope Francis was already sufficiently worried about this new trend, and warned Italians to keep their devotion for their children rather than pets. It looks like no one was listening. The passeggiata, the traditional evening walk which used to be a chance to show off babies in prams and toddlers on their new tricycles, is now given over to strutting dog owners, and pooches nestling like a baby in a kangaroo pouch.

The land that was once synonymous with a large brood now has one of the lowest birthrates in the world (1.35), but boasts a one-to-one ratio of pets per person – more than any other European country. Italians spent more than €2 billion (£1.8 billion, $2.2 billion) on pet food in 2017, and more than €72 million (£65 million, $80 million) on “accessories” in the same year. When I say “accessories”, I mean rhinestone-studded collars and sheepskin-lined miniature four-poster beds.

The African divide

Reversing the usual formula for Western people talking about how their family and friends took their "hey I'm gay" news, Time magazine notes this about the coming out of a famous gospel singer from Rwanda:

...the reaction he has received, from family and friends to strangers, has been mostly “horrible,” underscoring the intolerance faced by LGBT people in many parts of Africa.

The articles goes on to note that although Rwanda does not make gay sexual activity a crime, it is far from socially accepted:

Some of Nabonibo’s best friends who spoke to the AP said they were too embarrassed even to talk about him. They requested anonymity for their own privacy. “This is crazy. I don’t understand why he thinks this is normal,” said one friend, shaking his head.

Another friend, a man who attends the same church as Nabonibo, said he was in a state of “agony” since the rest of his family knows he used to hang out with Nabonibo. Now he has blocked Nabonibo from all phone contact, saying he wants to “keep safe.”

There has been a similar reaction on social media, with many Rwandans questioning Nabonibo’s intentions and others condemning him. One wondered on Twitter: “How can a gospel singer be gay?”

The article also notes that in many countries on that continent, legislation is in reverse from the Western, liberalising trend:

In 2017, Chad enacted legislation criminalizing same-sex relations for the first time in the country’s history. In May, a court in Kenya ruled against overturning a colonial-era law criminalizing homosexual acts between consenting adults. Activists there who had challenged the law in court said they faced discrimination and threats to their dignity.

And in neighboring Uganda, a government minister in charge of ethics is threatening to introduce another version of an anti-gay law passed in 2014, and subsequently voided by the country’s constitutional court, that provided for jail terms of up to life for those convicted of engaging in gay sex. The original version of that bill, first introduced in 2009, had included the death penalty for what it called aggravated acts of homosexuality.

It's pretty remarkable, really:  living in the West, it is easy to imagine that everyone around the globe is moving in same liberalising direction on such matters.

It also points to the huge problem it may be if the Catholic Church hopes to increasingly provide conservative African priests to Western parishes.   It's going to go over like a lead balloon.

Adam has thoughts

What's going on with Adam Creighton?   Is he hanging up his soft libertarian, capitalism-is-great-and-let's-leave-it-alone credentials for good with today's column "Maybe it is time we accepted greed was never good"?

He's never impressed me, as many posts here over the years will attest, so I'm not going to be one to welcome him into the centrist, capitalism-needs-good-regulation-as-all-reasonable-people-have-known-since-about-1850 fold.  He'll probably have another change of heart next week, anyway.

And didn't he write a whinge about our immigration program last week, that it was letting in too  many unskilled?

As with Jason, it seems, soft libertarian types are now lost and wandering around listening to anyone from Pauline Hanson via her acolyte Mark Latham (who, I see, has re-joined Twitter because he couldn't bear to be around without annoying people) to "I'm just being reasonable, having articles both anti immigration and anti urgent climate change action" Lehmann.

Sad.