Chinese property problems noted

This seems a good and detailed explanation of the developing crisis in China's property market by someone who seems to know that they are talking about:

The property sector in the Chinese economy has always been something of a puzzle. At its peak, it accounted for a quarter of the nation’s economic output, broadly measured. And it sees people in Beijing and Shanghai paying house prices similar to those in San Francisco and New York, despite having just a quarter the income of American buyers.

Now many believe that we are about to see a violent contraction of the property market in China. The government wants to intervene to curb speculation, and rein in what it calls the “three high” problem: high prices, high debt and high financialisation. The approach has been nothing short of dramatic. Financing for property developers has tanked. Earlier this year, property sales declined by as much as 20-30%, in-progress developments are not being completed and people have taken to the streets, banding together to stop mortgage payments on such projects in protest.

Many of China’s largest property developers are failing to repay their debts. Even the survivors are cash-strapped and in a liquidity crisis. The risk is that the property market crisis will drag the broader economy down with it, hitting suppliers, small- and medium-sized companies in construction, as well as household consumption. And dangerously, the banking system has at least a quarter of its assets in property.

But, fortunately, there is this:

Nor is a full-blown financial crisis likely. Major banks are state owned, and will not be allowed to fail. There are no complex, opaque chains of intermediation that characterise the western banking system. Foreign creditors to Chinese property developers will have to take a massive haircut, but the ripple effect on the international economy is likely to be limited. Foreign players have limited exposure to Chinese assets in general: today, less than 5% of Chinese equities and bonds are held by foreigners. This is unlike mortgage-backed securities, where the whole world was exposed leading up to the 2008 financial crisis.

And we don't want that

 

Odd residence noted

There was an article about Bryan Dawe, of Clarke and Dawe satire fame, in the Sydney Morning Herald last weekend, about how he fell for an online scam.

But the odd feature that struck me was this:

Dawe, who now lives in the Moroccan port city of Tangier, offered to forge an unlikely partnership with the Palestinian photographer and leverage his considerable public profile in Australia.

How did he end up living there??  His wiki entry sheds no light.  This ABC article says he went there after John Clarke died - still seems a really odd choice.

From the Onion

It does seem lately to be going better (for Ukraine) than many expected. 
 

Worrying tweets noted

 

In aquatic news of note

*  Alaskan snow crabs have been in steep and sudden decline:

The theories are many. The crabs moved into Russian waters. They are dead because predators got them. They are dead because they ate each other. The crabs scuttled off the continental shelf and scientists just didn’t see them. Alien abduction.

Okay, not that last one. But everyone agrees on one point: The disappearance of Alaska’s snow crabs probably is connected to climate change. Marine biologists and those in the fishing industry fear the precipitous and unexpected crash of this luxury seafood item is a harbinger, a warning about how quickly a fishery can be wiped out in this new, volatile world.

Gabriel Prout and his brothers Sterling and Ashlan were blindsided. Harvests of Alaskan king crab — the bigger, craggier species that was the star of the television show “Deadliest Catch” — have been on a slow decline for over a decade. But in 2018 and 2019, scientists had seemingly great news about Alaska’s snow crabs: Record numbers of juvenile crabs were zooming around the ocean bottom, suggesting a massive haul for subsequent fishing seasons.

Prout, 32, and his brothers bought out their father’s partner, becoming part owners of the 116-foot Silver Spray. They took out loans and bought $4 million in rights to harvest a huge number of crabs. It was a year that many young commercial fishers in the Bering Sea bought into the fishery, going from deckhands to owners. Everyone was convinced the 2021 snow crab season was going to be huge.

And then they weren’t there.

Scientists, despite earlier optimistic signs, found that snow crab stocks were down 90 percent. The season opened and the total allowable harvest went from 45 million pounds to 5.5 million pounds. Commercial fishers couldn’t even catch that quantity. 

*   Orcas have taken to nibbling boats.   

Killer whales are 'attacking' sailboats near Europe's coast. Scientists don't know why

 

To the North Pole by luxury icebreaker

I don't watch everything that the travel vlogging couple Kara and Nate put up on Youtube as they can be quite the drama queen act at times, when not being all too demonstratively affectionate to each other. 

But, when they do a special trip, such as on a ship to Antarctica a year or two ago, they do it pretty well and the videos are interesting and quite fun to watch.

They are currently doing a tourist trip to the North Pole, and on a recently launched icebreaker ship that is not what you normally envisage for that type of vessel.  It's a luxury icebreaker, French owned, it seems.

Here's there first video of the trip, giving a tour of the ship:

 

Travel on any ship this nice looking (and with an in-cabin mini bar that is free and refurbished every day) could not be cheap. (I assume they are getting it for free for the publicity value?) But I decided to look it up anyway, and yes,a 15 night cruise to the North Pole and back (starting with flight from Paris) will cost about AUD$55,000!!

Still, looks very impressive.   Perhaps it gives the feeling of tempting fate, Titanic style, though:  an engineer on the ship in the video said that if a certain heat pump stops working while at the North Pole, the entire ship would be down to about minus 25 degrees freezing within a hour or two so.    Brrr...

Good politics, for his country

I was looking at Youtube last night and saw that a National Day speech by Singaporean PM Lee was being live broadcast, so I started watching it, expecting some dry content about economic development, but instead the part I happened to join it at was the announcement about decriminalising male to male sex.  

I don't know how the audience in the auditorium were chosen, but I think it fair to say that the response was not exactly enthusiastic.  It was kind of funny to watch.

Anyway, PM Lee, playing what I think is smart politics for his country, immediately then swung into saying that while he believed most Singaporeans would support this bit of late modernity, they wanted traditional marriage protected, and the government wasn't going to risk a liberalising court in future find that the constitution meant the government had to recognise same sex marriage.  The answer:  they will amend the constitution to enshrine a definition of marriage as heterosexual.   This part of the speech gained more approval from the audience.

I guess that, in future, there might still be scope for government recognition of gay relationships for some purposes.   But it will be a long time before Singapore comes close to following the Western path towards full recognition of gay marriage.   Given the cultural mix there, with a mix of three  that are all highly orientated towards conservative views about family, recognising gay marriages as the equivalent of heterosexual ones would (I suspect) be a problem for the Indians and Muslim element in particular.  (I think there might be an argument for Chinese to be more malleable of the topic - at least given the example of Taiwan*.)      

Still, I do admire PM Lee, and all Singaporean politicians, for the calm and reasoned way they put arguments, and always seeking a path of national unity and security.   

 

*  Oh, but look at this article, indicating that legalisation in Taiwan has actually not been followed by improved public perceptions of gay marriage.   The reaction to legalisation is very dependent on the local culture, I guess:

...in the United States, public approval of same-sex marriage improved after its legalization. Similar trends have occurred in European countries where same-sex marriage is legal. However, as seen in South Africa, which legalized same-sex marriage in 2006, and Ecuador, which legalized same-sex marriage in 2019, public opinion does not always improve after legalization. One survey in Taiwan found that 93 percent of respondents felt their lives had not been impacted by the legalization, but when asked about the impact on Taiwanese society as a whole, only 50.1 percent indicated no effect, while 11.9 percent said the overall social impact was positive, and 28.4 percent said it was negative. 

 

Huh

Another very late review

Finally caught up with The Talented Mr Ripley on Netflix last night.  I was just married when this came out, and there was soon a baby on the way, so I had other things on my mind.

I thought it good but not great.   A large part of the problem is that I routinely don't care for Matt Damon's acting.  He doesn't put me off quite to the same degree that Matthew McConaughey does, but I would be very happy if he would just retire so I don't have to keep on wondering why I never find him convincing.

Anyway, on reflection, the story is a bit odd for the complete lack of a sympathetic male character.  (OK, maybe there is one, but even he appears pretty dumb by the end and doesn't survive.)  I think that the 3 key male actors all seemed a bit too, um, trying too hard?   Or perhaps that is more the problem I found with Jude Law and Philip Seymour Hoffman's performances:  Damon's acting was more controlled, but still not super convincing.   

The women, on the other hand, are likeable enough, and there's no denying Gwyneth Paltrow in her day had a charming screen presence.   But the one who stood out for me was Cate Blanchett - she was 30 when this movie came out and probably at the peak of her attractiveness, and does rich elegance so, so well.   It's a pity her role doesn't get more screen time.

I had a read on Reddit about it afterwards, and find it hard to believe some people were still saying after viewing it "was Tom Ripley meant to be gay or bisexual"?   Well, duh, it's an unavoidable conclusion from the movie.  However, I see from an online article that the book highlights more than the movie does a conflicted sexuality, and in fact an aversion to sex:

Tom’s aversion to all things sexual is central to his characterisation in the novel. He feels secure in his friendship with Cleo because ‘she never wanted or expected him to make a pass at her’, and dismisses Dickie kissing Marge as ‘cheap, obvious, easy’.

At the same time, Tom’s adoration of Dickie is painted in clearly romantic terms; he is drawn to Dickie’s ‘handsome’ looks and ‘the proud way he [carries] himself’, and fantasises about killing his girlfriend Marge for ‘interfering’ with ‘the bond between them’. In a moment of vulnerability with Peter towards the end of the novel, he briefly wonders whether ‘the same thing that had happened with Dickie could happen with Peter’. Tom’s asexuality and the fact that he is romantically attracted to men are given equal weight in the novel, but adaptations of the novel exaggerate the latter and ignore the former entirely.

So, he might not be cinema's first bisexual (or repressed gay?) psychopathic murderer and liar, but it's first asexual one who none the less feels romantic attraction (and is repulsed by it).  Interesting concept.  In retrospect, I can see how that is reflected to some degree in the film (there is never an indication that he gets physical with anyone, on or off screen), but it could have been made clearer and perhaps made for a more interesting explanation of his psychological problems.

I also see that the character went on to appear in another 4(!) novels.   So there was quite a following for this anti-hero.  Personally, I'm glad there have no more movies about him.   I'm not a fan of the bad guy winning.  

Update:  I did think during the movie about how it had themes very common in Hitchcock films, and see today that Patricia Highsmith, about whom I could recall little apart from knowing she had lesbian relationships, wrote Strangers on a Train.   This New Yorker article about her is pretty interesting.

Oh, so I can blame English royalty

As this BBC article explains, tattooing is pretty much normalised in most of the West now, and there is a push to get it recognised as a worthy artform, but you still can't convince me that 95% of what I see on "sleeves", legs, faces or backs of necks isn't trashy art. 

I don't think I knew this before:

"Western tattooing has been a commodity-based art form for only about 140 years," he explains, suggesting that one of the key drivers behind its commercialisation in the UK was King George V, who got a "desirable" tattoo of a dragon on his arm during a trip to Japan as a teenager in 1881.

Is it just me, or is there genuinely a lot of flash flooding happening around the entire globe now?

Of course, Google via Youtube is pushing a lot of this content to me lately, and maybe it's not above global averages:  but I suspect something genuinely novel is going on at the moment.  

Flash flooding stories are coming from all over the place:   Death Valley,  Afghanistan, France, China.   And that's only the past few days.  A couple of weeks ago it was Kentucky.   

It could all be confirmation bias, but sometimes I reckon the lay person can notice genuinely unusual sudden trends (or flips to a "new normal") that scientists do later confirm.

Update:   how convenient!  Just after I posted this, I see very credible climate scientist Andrew Dessler has a twitter thread on non-linearity in climate change, which is the sophisticated way of explaining what I am worrying about.

And, I might add, surely this has always been reason to doubt the credibility of economic forecasts on the long term effects of climate change - a topic I have posted about many, many times over the years.

Sand in the eyes

For what it's worth, I tried the first episode of The Sandman on Netflix and found it rather tedious and unengaging.

This type of fantasy is really not my thing.  I'm feeling happy that I've (mostly) avoided Neil Gaiman in written form.   The only thing I've read that had anything to do with him was the co-authored Good Omens, which everyone likes, but I presume the humour and light tone of it came from Terry Pratchett.

I have my doubts too

 Anyway, I'm betting on Trump is not going to be the GOP candidate.   He's in too much trouble...

Something we knew, but in more depressing detail now...

In Science magazine:

A nuclear war would disrupt the global climate so badly that billions of people could starve to death, according to what experts are calling the most expansive modeling to date of so-called nuclear winter. Although the exact effects remain uncertain, the findings underscore the dangers of nuclear war and offer vital insights about how to prepare for other global disasters, researchers say....

Scientists have long known massive explosions can throw enough dust, ash, and soot into the air to affect the global climate. In 1815, Mount Tambora in what’s now Indonesia unleashed the largest known volcanic eruption in history. In the following months, its ash rose and spread worldwide, blocking enough sunlight to produce “the year without a summer”—a cold spell in 1816 that resulted in massive crop failures and famine across the globe.

For decades, scientists have warned a similar catastrophe could follow a nuclear war, as fires ignited by hundreds or thousands of nuclear explosions would release millions of tons of soot, blocking sunlight and inducing global environmental effects. Worries about climate effects of nuclear warfare emerged soon after World War II, and studies took off during the Cold War.

Over the past decade, two pioneers of nuclear winter studies, Alan Robock and Brian Toon, have assembled a cross-disciplinary team of scientists to take the calculations further. They turned to the same climate models that underlie global warming studies—but used the models to simulate global cooling instead. “Now, we have the computational capacity to simulate these kinds of things in a sophisticated way,” says Jonas Jägermeyr, a climate change scientist, crop modeler, and team member at NASA and Columbia University.

So, how bad could it be?  Pretty bad! 

A few years after a nuclear war between the United States, its allies, and Russia, the global average calories produced would drop by about 90%—leaving an estimated 5 billion dead from the famine, the researchers report. A worst-case war between India and Pakistan could drop calorie production to 50% and cause 2 billion deaths. The team tried to simulate the impact of food-saving emergency strategies, such as converting livestock feed and household waste to food. But in the larger war scenarios, those efforts did little to save lives.

Baum urges caution in interpreting the estimates. Although the climate models are “excellent,” he says, there’s too much uncertainty in how humanity would react to such a global catastrophe to get an accurate read on the death toll. Still, the study “makes a very worthy contribution” to envisioning these scenarios, he adds.

It's interesting that some people are putting effort into envisaging how emergency food production might work, though:

The nightmarish prospects have already inspired others to look for ways to fight the hypothetical famine. David Denkenberger, who co-founded the nonprofit Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters, is exploring ideas including scaling up “resilient foods” such as seaweed, repurposing paper factories to produce sugar, converting natural gas into protein with bacteria, and relocating crops to account for an altered climate. He and his research associate Morgan Rivers think those approaches could dramatically increase the amount of food available to humans. “Even if [a substitute] doesn’t taste as good as sweet corn, it’s better than starving,” he says.

I don't know - maybe Soylent Green would actually happen in these circumstances?  All very unpleasant to contemplate.

 

 

 

Amusing tweet of the day

I don't know:  I'm pretty sure Morrison has managed to firmly take the title from Abbott for weirdest Prime Ministerial behaviour since Federation.

There are many, many jokes swirling around on Twitter about this, and I might add more later.

I reckon the GG should go in embarrassment too.
 

Stars get closer than I realised

Phil Plait writes that the evidence suggests some stars have cruised near our sun at surprisingly close distances, and will do so again:

A few years ago, research using Gaia data indicated that the last such close encounter was about 70,000 years ago, when the star WISE J072003.20-084651.2 — also called Scholz’s Star, after the discoverer — passed just 0.8 light-years from the Sun.

But that was then. Every few years the folks with Gaia release updated data from the mission, with newer numbers. This generally improves the accuracy of the motion measurements, because the longer you look at a star the more it moves and the easier that motion is to see. The third such data release occurred in 2022, and a team of astronomers used it to review the data on Scholz’s Star [link to paper].

Things changed with the revised numbers. They found the encounter occurred more like 80,000 years ago, and the distance was more like 1.08 light-years, with a small uncertainty of just 0.026 light-years.

But there's more:

The astronomers then asked, has there been another star that passed even closer with a high degree of statistical confidence?

The answer is yes! They found that the star UCAC4 237-008148 also once swung past the Sun. In this case it passed us at 0.844 ± 0.02 light years about 1.158 million years ago. Even within the uncertainty that’s closer than Scholz’s Star, breaking the record.

I’ll note that today, UCAC4 237-008148 is about 318 light-years away — a million years is a long time for it to move off — and Scholz’s Star is only 22 light years distant. 

The astronomers also looked at a third star, HD 7977, about 246 light-years from us now. They found that about 2.77 million years ago it gave us the incredibly close shave of just 0.49 light-years! That’s definitely violating our personal space.

 And if humanity can manage to last another million years, it sounds like it won't be too much of a stretch to hop over to this one:

So those are stars that zipped by us in the past. What about the future? The astronomers in this new work didn’t look into that, but with the new Gaia data I imagine that will be done soon. As of now, using older and less-accurate data from the Hipparcos satellite, the next star to come close is Gliese 710, a red dwarf that will slide past us at a hair-raising 0.163 light-years about 1.3 million years from now. I’d love to see how this might change with the new Gaia data.

As Plait writes, the problems of close encounters of these types is the danger of them disturbing the Oort cloud enough to send a lot of comets into the inner solar system.

All very interesting. 

The Republican walk back has started, but has a long way to go

Several lawmakers pushed back on Sunday against Republican criticism of the FBI’s court-authorized seizure of documents from former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, with even some in the GOP warning that the violent rhetoric was “dangerous” and “absurd.”

Still, many Republicans continued to defend the former president, casting doubt on whether the FBI search of Trump’s Florida home earlier this week was justified — and whether the documents seized were actually top secret.

That's from the Washington Post (free link here.) 

As usual, I found Allahpundit at Hot Air has a decent take on the matter (the "he" here is, obviously, Trump):

If he truly wanted to turn down the political heat in America, I can think of a few things he might have done differently.

1. He could have returned all of the documents the first time the National Archives asked for them back.

2. He could have returned them later when the DOJ subpoenaed them.

3. Having failed to return them, he could have kept the search of Mar-a-Lago a secret. Remember, it wasn’t the feds who announced it. Trump announced it on Truth Social because he recognized that the incident would benefit him politically. The FBI even carried out the search dressed in civilian clothing so as not to alert bystanders as to what was happening. Trump alerted the country because he wanted to raise “the heat.”

4. He could now call on his followers to chill out before one of them kills someone, as nearly happened a few days ago in Cincinnati.

5. He could, at the very, very least, refrain from further inflaming the situation:...

Of course, the best way to have turned down the heat would have been to not remove classified material from the White House in the first place, thereby risking this sort of standoff over recovering the documents.

 

Weekend update

*   This remains the coldest Brisbane winter I can remember for years.   Pity the rest of the world is burning up (literally, in the case of Europe.)

*   I didn't realise before how much blood pressure jumps around.   I've been taking it three times a day, and have learnt the benefit of doing two readings within a few minutes.   Overall, it would seem my recently concerning BP is dropping down, presumably as a result of the modest increase in physical activity and/or the addition of flaxseed (and natto) to the diet.   I've not really started with walking every day yet, but I get the feeling it will be properly licked if I can get to doing that.   Somewhat warmer mornings will help.  

*  Flaxseed, especially ground flaxseed, really gums up your morning cereal or porridge, if you add a couple of tablespoons to it.   It has no great effect on taste, though, which is good. 

*  I didn't realise that the immediate effect of alcohol can be to decrease blood pressure.  Because it raises heart rate, I would have guessed the opposite.   So I guess one way to permanently decrease BP is to always be under the influence of 2 glasses of wine.  (Just kidding.)

 

That's interesting

As Ben on Urban Rescue Ranch would say:  "Well, well, well, well, well."   (It really is worth watching his eccentric act.)

I had wondering about the long term Fox strategy on the question of support for Trump as victim of the "raid".  They have clearly been edging away from him, but they felt they had to rush in to offer support again because, I don't know, it's what their audience would want, or something.

But clearly, a "higher up" (one of the Murdochs probably) has decided that someone on the network has to run a line that will give it plausible deniability on the question of how much they toed the Trump line if it turns out really bad for the Yellow One.  And Doocy drew the short straw:

As