The animating underclass

I haven't seen much of the content of the Youtube channel Asian Boss - but a lot of it does seem interesting.

I watched this one in full, and was really surprised at the terrible pay and conditions for the (I assume) thousands of animators upon which so much Japanese TV (and movie) content depends:

Big day for an Emperor

From the Japan Times:

Clad in a dark orange robe only worn by emperors on special occasions, Emperor Naruhito will proclaim his enthronement Tuesday at the Imperial Palace, offering a speech atop a canopied throne followed by banzai cheers from guests.

The 59-year-old monarch — who ascended the throne on May 1 following the abdication of his father, Emperor Emeritus Akihito, the previous day — will formally announce his enthronement from an elevated dais within the palace in Tokyo. The event will be attended by some 2,000 guests from Japan and about 180 countries and international organizations.

The Sokuirei Seiden no Gi enthronement ceremony at the Seiden State Hall will start at 1 p.m. in the Pine Chamber (Matsu no Ma) state room, with the emperor ascending to the 6.5-meter-high canopied takamikura throne. Empress Masako will be seated on the adjacent michōdai throne during the ceremony.

Hope we get to see it on TV.

The exact form of the ritual is still a little controversial:

The Imperial House Law only states that an enthronement ceremony is held when an imperial succession takes place, and does not detail how to stage the rite. The previous rite, held in November 1990 for Emperor Akihito, followed the example of the enthronement ceremony of his father, Emperor Hirohito, posthumously known as Emperor Showa. That was based on Tokyokurei, a 1909 order on the formalities of the ceremony. The directive was abolished after World War II.

The government has decided to follow precedent despite criticism that doing so contravenes the postwar constitutional separation of state and religion, as well as the sovereignty of the people, by having the emperor proclaim his enthronement from a high place as the prime minister stands below.

About Chile

Will Wilkinson has a thread about Chile on Twitter that is worth reading.  It starts with this:

Whip it

Yesterday, after making pumpkin scones for (possibly?) the first time*, I whipped some cream by hand - definitely for the first time.

It was not so hard.  Sure, I wasn't sure if it was working at all, but then you get that satisfying sudden transition from thick liquid to stuff so thick it's standing up by itself.   I only needed a small amount, so a small metal bowl and medium sized whisk did it fine. 

Given that this woman had trouble whipping, I'm pleased it worked for me first time.


* Not entirely sure they are worth the effort - it seems a common complaint, derived from the uncertain water content in mashed pumpkin, that recipes make for too sticky a dough to which a lot more flour has to be added.  That happened to me, too; but then again, I did add more pumpkin than called for in the recipe I was sort of following.

Automation and Yang

I missed this rather good article at Slate last week that criticises Andrew Yang's automation unemployment apocalypse views as lazy and not well justified when you look at all studies on the topic.

Did Japanese parents tell their kids this as a campfire story?

The catastrophic Johnson

Well, I did enjoy this Nick Cohen column on Boris Johnson, who reached a "new deal" Brexit by doing a complete turnaround on key one point within a fortnight.  He paints a picture of him in the following context:

In his classic study On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, Norman Dixon analysed British generals who had led their men to pointless deaths from Crimea to Arnhem. How familiar his diagnosis feels. Dixon identified “overweening ambition dedicated to one goal – self-advancement” as a persistent fault; and that sounds familiar. Catastrophic men equated “war with sport”, he continued, and one thinks of Theresa May’s warning in 2016 that “politics isn’t a game.”

She surely had Johnson in mind. For him, it is a game and winning is all. Last year, he told the Democratic Unionist party that a border in the Irish Sea “would be damaging to the fabric of the union”. He jutted out what passes for his jaw and with a Churchillian boom thundered: “I have to tell you that no British Conservative government could or should sign up to any such arrangement.”

Last week, he signed up to “such an arrangement” because betraying his allies wins him the game of politics. Dixon noticed “an underestimation, sometimes bordering on the arrogant, of the enemy”. And one thinks of Dominic Cummings, so lost in his deluded machismo that he told EU countries that they “will go to the bottom of the queue” if they dared challenge the mighty Britain. A mere fortnight later, Johnson capitulated to Brussels so thoroughly the EU will no longer has to worry about the Irish border and can adopt the toughest of stances when and if trade negotiations begin.

No one should be surprised. It is an essential part of the catastrophic character that catastrophists do not learn from their mistakes or realise they are making them.

On the small matters as well as the large, political incompetents mirror military incompetents. Generals who display “a love of bull, smartness, precision and strict preservation of the military pecking order” are prone to lead regiments to disaster, Dixon wrote. Remember Jacob Rees-Mogg’s semi-literate instruction to his civil servants that they must address untitled men as “esq” when the practice is archaic. Or his insistence that they never use “hopefully” in his presence: even though the adverb has stood in for “I hope” for centuries and no serious linguist has the smallest problem with it.

There seems to be a feeling about that, despite this current (apparent) delay, Parliament will sooner or later pass this deal, in large part because they are utterly sick of having to deal with it as a problem.  We'll see.

Some interesting comments on economics here

From The Guardian:

World economy is sleepwalking into a new financial crisis, warns Mervyn King

Past crashes spawned new thinking and reform but nothing has changed since 2008 banking meltdown, says former Bank of England boss

Kidneys for sale

Today on CNA, I learned about poor Filipinos selling their kidneys through social media (the report fingers Facebook, which says it's against their rules, but they don't know what's going on til someone tells them.)



Interestingly, it seems the story has sparked some racism comments on Youtube:

Is that sarcasm at perceived Singaporean racism?  Or actual racism?

And what about this comment?:

One other thing about watching CNA - I know that Singapore doesn't work like your normal, messy democracies, but when you see government ministers talking on CNA, my goodness they seem so, so reasonable and smart and sensible compared to 90% of the politicians in most Western nations.

Saturday jacarandas

A nice line of blooming jacaranda trees at St Lucia:

Not even scientifically accurate

I meant to give a Muntz-ian "ha ha" when I noticed this story a week or so ago, but forgot.

Turns out Interstellar, which I consider awful, is not so scientifically accurate after all.

Could a habitable planet orbit a supermassive black hole? 

Short answer: almost certainly not.

And I don't even like horses

7.30's story last night on the thoroughbred racehorse business and it's pretence that it really takes care to avoid having failed, even relatively young, horses ground up into greyhound mince, was a gruesome expose of a sham industry that was really hard to watch.

The treatment of the horses at the abattoir at Caboolture was awful, and the attitude of the men who worked there woeful.   If any man has to make a living that way, I have no respect for them unless they have some at least some empathy for the animal.   There was zero on display last night.

But the whole show reinforced my prejudices against the whole racing enterprise - the alleged sport of kings that has expanded on the back of (mostly) saps with a gambling problem, as well as those who occasionally like to play dress ups and get conspicuously drunk while ignoring the inherent cruelty of breeding far too many horses and disposing of them as soon as they are too expensive to care for.

 

Apartment design considered.

I've realised something about typical apartment design in Australia, and what I dislike about it.

I really don't like the way so many have the entry door opening directly into the big, open kitchen/living room space.   It's too intrusive and direct an entry into a space which should have more privacy when viewed from the front door.   Moreover, it removes the idea of a transition space from the outside to the inside that feels important and natural in Japanese living spaces, and actually makes practical sense too.

So, I reckon no apartment entry door should open with a clear line of sight right into the living area.  I like the idea of having to turn a corner after entering an apartment to be able to see the (hopefully) impressive living area.   Even if it's not a solid wall that the door opens towards, a screening of some type should be used.   This might mean that an entry door light just inside is often needed, but that should be no big deal.

The other thing I dislike about apartment design in Australia is the way that bedrooms will so often open directly into the main living area.   There is a need for hallways to separate bedroom entries from living areas. 

I also think we don't use different floor levels enough to provide a sense of separation between different areas.   Or beds that fold up into walls.  Why can't we have those in Australia?  

As you were.

Update:  examples -

This is OK:

This is good:

This is fine:

This is everything I dislike in an apartment layout:

If you like wasabi flavour punching you in the mouth and nasal passages...

...you'll like these Doritos, which are really surprisingly strong on the flavour front:

I like it, but you can only eat so many at one sitting.

Extreme weather and climate, noted

Below is the start of a good thread on Twitter about climate change and extreme weather.

He goes on further down to talk about floods and drought, and the inherent complexity in judging overall trends in them, as well the matter of increasing hurricane strength (also quite complicated on a global scale.)

Very balanced, and it should be remembered, we are only at 1 degree average global change.  Double or triple that, and where do you think we'll be?

Also, do I need to bother pointing out that this week's floods in Japan came after record rainfall intensity?   

Nature reviews capitalism

A somewhat interesting review of three books on economics:

In Defense of Open Society George Soros PublicAffairs (2019)
Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World Branko Milanovic Belknap (2019)
Measuring What Counts: The Global Movement for Well-Being Joseph E. Stiglitz, Jean-Paul Fitoussi and Martine Durand The New Press (2019)

is at Nature.com.

Update:  dear readers, I know that Graeme (see comments below) holds deeply to both economic anti-Semitism (for which there is a pretty good article at Wikipedia) and whatever one might call his "Jews are ruthless covert killers playing the West and Islamists for schmucks" anti-Semitism.    I usually delete his comments which are clearly in the later category, but sometimes leave those in the former category since they don't, at least, involve allegations of murder.   But I am well aware that two aspects feed off each other, and am sorely tempted to try to start deleting any and all references to Jewish matters by him.  It's a tiresome job.   Can more visitors in comments please just start telling him he is an idiot about Jews, again?   The silence he gets (and the sometimes support of Jason on economics) is, I fear, giving him a false sense that this is a "safe" place where readers maybe don't think he is a completely offensive nutjob about Jews.   

Thank you.

News from the North

North Korea, that is.

France24 informs us:

Aides to Kim Jong Un are convinced the North Korean leader plans "a great operation", state media said on Wednesday in a report that included lavish descriptions and images of the leader riding a white horse up North Korea’s most sacred mountain.

That sounds a worry.  Here's the photo they released:

I dunno, Kim's face doesn't look to me like he's exactly enjoying the experience.  Nor is the horse, in all likelihood, give the (sort of) Regal Tubbiness on his back.

Still, I can just imagine Trump seeing this image and being jealous that he doesn't have a stead on which to at least try to look like a noble warrior king. 

Various

As you can probably tell, I'm a bit busy this week.   Here's some stuff I've noticed but not given individual posts to:

*  turns out that nutty Trump economics adviser Peter Navarro has done a Trump, so to speak: invented an imaginary friend (actually himself) to give support to his positions.  Some of his co-authors did not know.   How embarrassing.

*  I've not been able to see Ad Astra, but oddly, I have had two diametrically opposed opinions of the film from two different couples.  My chances of liking it seem to be getting lower, though.

*  Who is this Bruce Mountain who argues the Snowy 2 project is a dud project?   Sorry, but I am a little suspicious of someone I haven't heard of before coming out as an expert and then dissing a renewable project that other experts seem to think is worthwhile.

*  Saudi Arabia has paid Instagram "influencers" to go there and say how marvellous the place is (in preparation of opening the country up to tourism.)  This reminds me of an old rule of thumb (actually, I must add it to my Rules for Life):  do not holiday in any country where looking the wrong way at someone can get you arrested for witchcraft (or possibly, homosexuality).

*  STDs still on the rise in America.  Most sadly:

Among newborns, syphilis cases increased 40 percent to more than 1,300 cases.

Also, look where those cases mainly come from:

The 40 percent increase in congenital syphilis cases continues a dangerous trend seen in recent years. Although most states reported at least one case of congenital syphilis, five states – Texas, California, Florida, Arizona, and Louisiana – accounted for 70 percent of cases in the U.S.

That seems an odd mix, no?

Seems to me that the USA is strangely bad at not getting on top of that particular problem.

Now they complain about the violence...

I get that it's at least poor taste for wingnut Trumpers to use the Kingsman ultra violent church scene to show Trump killing "fake news";  but I think that people who find this clip offensive for its violence should have been calling it out for such in the original movie.

But no, the largely liberal leaning world of movie criticism pretty much was silent about it.

I see someone on the internet agrees.  

About the monocle

An interesting history of the monocle is to be found at The Atlantic.

 Count me as somewhat amused to read the sentence about its populariser:

The monocle followed. It was fixed in the eye socket and held in place hands-free, wedged behind the loose skin around the eye thanks to the orbicularis oculi, the muscle that closes the eyelid. Its advent is usually associated with Philipp von Stosch, an 18th-century German baron, who in his time was better known for writing the definitive work on carved gemstones and living an active, open life as a homosexual. Notwithstanding, popularizing the monocle became his lasting legacy. By the end of the century, it was in use all over German-speaking countries. It jumped to London around the turn of the 19th century, where it took hold among the aristocracy.