How to tell that a man's a gullible fool

I've said it before:  the only useful thing Trump has ever done is made it somewhat easier to understand how the rise of Hitler happened - he shows in a modern setting how (some) people love being told that they are victims (escalated, for self serving purposes, with invented and imagined tropes) and are happy to let any dork who aggressively preaches this message to them become their cult leader.  

CNN, by the way, provides a very lengthy list of the number of false claims made in the speech.

And in a similar vein, there was a column at Wapo reminding us of why Clinton was never prosecuted:

It’s been a long seven years, so let’s review the Clinton case, and tick through the critical differences. I have no brief for Clinton’s behavior in setting up a private, insecure email server to get around the State Department’s clunky, antiquated email system. It was sloppy, and Clinton made matters worse when she had her lawyers unilaterally erase 30,000 emails they deemed personal.

But: Clinton didn’t keep classified documents or transmit them on the server. Rather, the emails sent on the server referred to classified information; they did not, with the exception of three email chains that had a paragraph or two marked “(C),” for confidential — contain other flags that the material was classified.

If anything, there was “evidence of a conscious effort to avoid sending classified information by writing around the most sensitive material,” Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded in a June 2018 report on the Clinton investigation. And to the extent that classified information was discussed on the private system, investigators found, that was done with other government employees, for official purposes.

In addition, prosecutors did not find indications of any intent to obstruct in the Clinton lawyers’ deletion of the emails they decided were personal. They “concluded that there was no evidence that emails intentionally were deleted by former Secretary Clinton’s lawyers to conceal the presence of classified information on former Secretary Clinton’s server,” Horowitz reported.

FBI and Justice Department employees were unanimous in recommending against charges, the report said.

As then-FBI Director James B. Comey put it at the time, “no reasonable prosecutor” would bring such a case. “In looking back at our investigations into mishandling or removal of classified information, we cannot find a case that would support bringing criminal charges on these facts,” Comey said. “All the cases prosecuted involved some combination of: clearly intentional and willful mishandling of classified information; or vast quantities of materials exposed in such a way as to support an inference of intentional misconduct; or indications of disloyalty to the United States; or efforts to obstruct justice. We do not see those things here.”

But Republicans and their media lackeys have built an alternative fact imaginary universe in which they are the victims, and are determined to live in it.  

The rural health care problem

I've been hearing a few discussions recently on ABC radio about the seemingly never ending problem of getting enough health care workers to practice outside of capital cities and their adjacent areas.  This morning I heard that they can't get anything like the staffing they need even in Shepparton - a town only a couple of hours drive outside of Melbourne.  

One person suggested that the key used to be getting young doctors or nurses to work in remoter areas and hopefully they would find a spouse there - giving them an incentive to settle down in that town or region.   Sounds plausible, except it seems that younger folk are coupling at a slower rate than ever before.

Maybe we need media effort into this:  none of this "Farmer wants a Wife" malarky; more "Country Bumpkin wants a Doctor Spouse".   (Might you, I suppose the doctors might have to be persuaded at gun point to participate.)

One thing seems pretty clear:  increased money and allowances is not really at the heart of the problem.  It seems to be more about convenience, and a preference for living in places with a wide variety of things to do.   Hence, I have other suggestions:

a.    free drone air taxis for doctors and specialists who can't be bothered driving 2 or 3 hours for a day's work, but might put up with a fun 30 minute flight from their local park or footy field;

b.   government commandeering of penthouse apartments in prime holiday locations for free use by medical staff who work any more than 4 hours drive from a city or region with no medical staff shortages.  Sure, that might mean taking every penthouse apartment on the Gold Coast, for example, but times are tough;

c.   while we are talking the Gold Coast:  ban doctors and nurses doing cosmetic surgery.  OK, OK, I'm not totally against the free market - just that for every month they work in a cosmetic surgery practice, they have to work too weeks in a remote area dealing with real problems. 

d.   I suspect that relatively few doctors, or at least young doctors, are not Lefty inclined on most issues, and part of the problem may be that regional Australia remains the main hold out for conservative parties.  (Although, there is the Gold Coast and it's Florida-lite reputation too.)   Not sure how we solve that problem.  Even my  "reverse Pol Pot" policy might not help with that, if the handful of people left to manage the robot farms are still voting National and pining for an Australian version of Donald Trump.  Oh, that's right:  my plan was to have right to vote eliminated if you wanted to stay in the regional areas.  Well, there will be an exception made for medical staff.  Fair's fair.

Sounds like B Ark material to me....

Despite watching a lot of Youtube content on the big TV, I've never watched much of the Youtube star Mr Beast (nor that PewDiePie) - from what little I have seen, their content or personality did not strike me as engaging.   I suspect nearly all of their audience would be under 30, and my general impression is that there is something, shall we say, youthfully shallow?, about both these guys.   Maybe I'm being mean, or just old?  

Anyhoo, I'm writing about someone I'm not interested in because of the lengthy article about Mr Beast at the NYT, talking about why some people have taken to promoting positive dislike and distrust of him, despite much of his channel being about random acts of altruism.   I'll gift the article here.

A few things leaping out at me about it:

a.    how incredibly bad is the American health care system if a poor family can't get their kid a cataract operation without the intervention of charity?  

b.    the explanation of how Mr Beast built a Youtube empire is a bit of a worry:

For most of his teenage years, “I woke up, I studied YouTube, I studied videos, I studied filmmaking, I went to bed and that was my life,” Donaldson once told Bloomberg. “I hardly had any friends because I was so obsessed with YouTube,” he said on “The Joe Rogan Experience” last year. After high school, he hooked up with a gang of similarly obsessed “lunatics” and planned out a program of study. He and his friends “did nothing but just hyperstudy what makes a good video, what makes a good thumbnail, what’s good pacing, how to go viral,” he told Rogan. “We’d do things like take a thousand thumbnails and see if there’s correlation to the brightness of the thumbnail to how many views it got. Videos that got over 10 million views, how often do they cut the camera angles? Things like that.”

 You know what I think of when I read that? - "Straight to the B Ark with you, young man!"   

c.    the article makes a point that is probably is at the core of the older person's reaction to him:

I’ll admit that I agree with some of those critics, at least to the extent that I think it would be nice if a person with Donaldson’s platform and resources (and evident desire to help people) cast a closer eye on structural problems with the American health care system and on the everyday injustices visited on disabled people. But I can also see how this kind of criticism misunderstands what the MrBeast channel is and how it works. Having kicked his flywheel into action, Donaldson from here can only really keep it spinning. Any deviation might threaten the perpetual motion of his growth machine. (Imagine being 12 years old: Do you want to watch an explainer on private-equity roll-ups of primary-care practices?)

Yep:  he may be doing good charitable work (while making many, many millions himself), but it's a bit fiddling around the edges of what really does the most people good.  

 

Robot church

The article linked in the tweet makes it clear that this was a bit of a novelty act, not a serious attempt at a permanent AI led church:

HUNDREDS OF GERMAN Protestants attended a church service in Bavaria that was generated almost entirely by artificial intelligence.

The ChatGPT chatbot led more than 300 people through 40 minutes of prayer, music, sermons and blessings.

“Dear friends, it is an honour for me to stand here and preach to you as the first artificial intelligence at this year’s convention of Protestants in Germany,” the avatar said with an expressionless face and monotonous voice.

The service — including the sermon, prayers and music — was created by ChatGPT and Jonas Simmerlein, a theologian and philosopher from the University of Vienna.

“I conceived this service — but actually I rather accompanied it, because I would say about 98% comes from the machine,” the 29-year-old scholar told The Associated Press....

The reviews were not overwhelmingly good:

The entire service was “led” by four different avatars on the screen, two young women, and two young men.

At times, the AI-generated avatar inadvertently drew laughter when it used platitudes and told the churchgoers with a deadpan expression that in order “to keep our faith, we must pray and go to church regularly”.

Some people enthusiastically videotaped the event with their mobile phones, while others looked on more critically and refused to speak along loudly during The Lord’s Prayer.

Heiderose Schmidt, a 54-year-old who works in IT, said she was excited and curious when the service started but found it increasingly off-putting as it went along.

“There was no heart and no soul,” she said. “The avatars showed no emotions at all, had no body language and were talking so fast and monotonously that it was very hard for me to concentrate on what they said.”

“But maybe it is different for the younger generation who grew up with all of this,” Schmidt added.

I did like this comment following:

 I am also reminded of Futurama:

Noted on the weekend

Ha!

Thought these tweets were funny:

 

Here's the breaking story, as noted in the Washington Post.

I wonder:  at what point are leadership level Republicans going to come out and say - "Look, Trumpists:  it's just not realistic to think a Presidential candidate with these trials hanging over their head has any chance of successful election."

Still with the odd political re-alignment with UFOs

I noted this back in February 2021, but I still find it remarkable how it's mainly the Right which is now showing gullibility on UFO matters.   It's all of a piece with the MAGA Right becoming generally paranoid about the "Deep State", and swallowing whole conspiracies about Big Science on climate change and COVID, when back in the 60's, 70's and (possibly?) 80's, anti-establishment paranoia was mainly a thing of the Left.    

Anyhow, now on Twitter publicity is being give to a curious, month old case of a Las Vegas family appearing to have been scared by (what they thought was) large, bug eyed aliens appearing in their backyard (after a meteor or something appeared in the sky.)

Lots and lots of scepticism is deserved, and being expressed, about the lack of photos or video by the family of what was spooking them in the yard.   But even more than that, the police arrive, go in the backyard, and apparently say nothing else significant about what was there, and what was on their bodycam.  

But the son put up another video from his bedroom, summarising what happened.  Can't find a link to it now.

Why wouldn't there be journalists crawling over glass to get an interview with the parents?   Why wouldn't the family be open to showing others the ring on the ground that the son claims as evidence that something landed there?   Why aren't there more videos of the apparent bright meteor type light over Las Vegas that night??

None of this makes any sense whatsoever.  

That's what makes it sort of intriguing - although chances are, of course, that it will turn out to be a whole set of mis-perceptions running riot within fervid imaginations.   [I'm kind of leaning against outright fraud - because it would be unusual for all four family members to participate in it.  If it was fraud, it would more likely be from just one or two, who managed to draw their parents into panicking without seeing anything.]

Shouldn't this be a bigger story in the American media?

On Tucker Carlson's little rinky dink home made media show, which Right wing types are falling over themselves to call the end of mainstream media (due to dubious view counts), he apparently said this:

 This was widely noted on Twitter, and certainly in some foreign press, such as The Independent:

Tucker Carlson calls Ukraine’s Jewish leader ‘rat-like’ as he launches new Twitter show with pro-Kremlin rant

And Haaretz:

Tucker Carlson Trafficks in Antisemitic Tropes About Ukraine's Zelenskyy on Twitter Show Debut

But when it comes to the New York Times, you have to get 7 paragraphs in to get to this, which seemingly takes the attitude "meh, this is just what he does":

Carlson also called Volodymyr Zelensky, the Jewish president of Ukraine, “a persecutor of Christians” and described him as “shifty, dead-eyed” and “sweaty and ratlike.” For years, Carlson laundered far-right fringe rhetoric and bigotry on Fox, and there is no sign that, in the anything-goes regime of Elon Musk’s Twitter, the laundry is shutting down.

And the Washington Post?  They seem to have at least 3 pieces on the Twitter show, none of them saying anything in detail about the obvious "let's dogwhistle to anti-Semites" aspect.  (Actually, I reckon it's more than a dog whistle - there is no other way to interpret it.)  All we seem to get is this:

Carlson picked up some of his usual conspiracy-theory-tinged topics and sympathies to the Russian government in the video, calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “sweaty and ratlike” and suggesting without evidence that Ukraine was responsible for the destruction of a major dam on its territory. He also accused mainstream media outlets of suppressing a claim from a former military officer that the U.S. government has secret knowledge of alien spacecraft.

To its credit, another piece at WAPO did point this out:

“Any fair person would conclude that the Ukrainians probably blew [the dam] up, just as you would assume they blew up Nord Stream, the Russian natural gas pipeline, last fall,” Carlson said. “And in fact, Ukrainians did do that, as we now know.”

Carlson quickly moved on, and for good reason: Despite now saying Ukraine blew up Nord Stream, he spent months on his Fox News show saying something very different. Without any real evidence, he repeatedly claimed it was the United States who blew up Nord Stream.

Anyway, I find it odd that the mainstream American media is not blasting him more directly about this.  

And as for Elon Musk, this tweet sums it up pretty well:

Elon Musk hosts Russian asset

 

It's all in the eyes

I watched a video about the remarkable technological improvements in VR that are built into the Apple Vision Pro.   It does sound impressive - but I still have my doubts that this type of technology will ever be as widespread as Apple (or Meta) hopes.

Why?  Because I strongly suspect this is never going to be good for the eyes.   

I could be wrong about this, as now that I look it up, one short study done with a basic VR headset for 40 minute sessions in 2017 didn't come up with evidence that it would cause myopia - but it acknowledges that more study needs to be done.  

The problem is not only the risk of increasing myopia, especially in young people, but also the fact that once you need reading glasses, you have to get lens done that will allow you to use the VR headset clearly.  This is already a bit of an issue with me with using the cheapo phone headsets - because my eyes are different, although I could read clearly from one eye, the brain was still working overtime to deal with VR.   (It might be better now that I have had both eyes done for cataracts, and with the lens to allow for reading, rather than distance, without glasses; but one eye still is not quite as clear as the other.  It's fine for reading in bed, and even using my laptop, but with VR and the incredibly close distance the screen is to the eyes, I dunno...) 

Even apart from the issue of getting perfectly clear vision, I still doubt that using them for protracted periods, like all day at work, will ever not come without eyestrain.

I can imagine something like Google Glass being able to be used all day, as you are swapping all the time between near vision, and real distance vision (not the simulation of distance vision that Vision Pro will provide.)   (And also, glasses are just more comfortable in the way something bound to the face  like a ski mask isn't.)

So, I really have strong doubts about this...    

Update:  you can read a sceptical take on them by a journalist who tried them for half an hour, here.

As he says:

Over dinner, I talked to my wife about the Vision Pro. The Apple goggles, I said, looked and felt better than the competing headsets. But I wasn’t sure that mattered.

Other headsets from Meta and Sony PlayStation were much cheaper and already quite powerful and entertaining, especially for playing video games. But whenever we had guests over for dinner and they tried the goggles on, they lost interest after less than half an hour because the experience was exhausting and they felt socially disconnected from the group.

Would it matter if they could twist the dial on the front of the headset to see into the real world while wearing it? I suspect it would still feel isolating, because they would probably be the only person in a room wearing one.

Which is the bigger story today?

1.  The Institute of Family Studies confirms that, yeah, young people like to say they are bi.   But, funnily enough, they still prefer to have straight sex:

 

The term "lesbian until graduation" has been a joke for a very long time (I remember the first time I heard it was Libbi Gorr on one of her shows);  I think it is just more embraced than ever now...

2.   Some dude who used to have security clearance says the US, and other countries, have proof of exotic craft via at least recovered materials (and captured craft?).  But, it's just what he's been told.  He's never seen it.

I have two words for anybody getting too excited by this:  Michael Flynn.   By which I mean - of course being in the military with a high security clearance is no guarantee of not talking nonsense.

I find it all very hard to believe, in this digital world where leaks of documents and photos and video has become easier than ever.

Coward considered

There's a biographical article about Noel Coward up at the BBC.   I knew little of his background, and did not realise how incredibly successful he became at a young age, after having an early nervous breakdown that kept him out of World War 1:

From the age of 14, he had some sort of relationship with 36-year-old artist, Philip Streatfeild – possibly sexual – before Streatfeild died of trench fever in World War One. Coward's other close friend, John Ekins, also died in the war. In 1918, at the age of 18, Coward had a nervous breakdown in an army training camp before seeing any action, and was hospitalised for six weeks.  

"Coward is of the generation that came out of the First World War and the global pandemic of the Spanish Flu, and thought that the future was deeply bleak, with another war on the horizon," says Soden. 

How to deal with this bleakness? Sing and dance and laugh through it. Make-believe had always been Coward's escape: he'd been acting professionally from the age of 10, and even as a teenager was churning out plays and songs and novels. Boundless ambition was matched by determined graft. 

"He's spat out into the 1920s with this hole at the centre of his life which only fame and success can adequately fill," says Soden. "It's as if there can never be too much of it." And soon, there really was silly amounts. By 25, Coward was "more famous than the prime minister," says Soden, with four plays on in London in June 1925. He stormed the US, opening three plays on Broadway by the end of the year: The Vortex, Hay Fever, and Easy Virtue – the latter featuring another woman frank about her enjoyment of sex, and stifled by the disapproving and hypocritical upper-classes. 

By 1926, 3,000 productions of Coward's plays had been staged worldwide, and his annual income was estimated to be at least £50,000 (£15 million today). He had become the highest paid writer in the world, but the relentless schedule soon took its toll. In autumn 1926, Coward found himself unable to stop crying during a performance and collapsed in his dressing room afterwards.

While wary of offering posthumous diagnoses, Soden tentatively suggests that Coward may have had bipolar disorder. What is clear is that his life was marked by periods of "astonishingly manic activity, rehearsing nine to five, a show an evening, partying till 2am… and then he crumbles." 

He then did try to help the war effort in World War 2:

He ended up with several [war jobs]: spying for an underground new secret service, running a propaganda department in France, attempting to stealthily influence important Americans to support Britain and enter the war, even holding meetings in President Roosevelt's bedroom. 

It may have been his greatest role – all that mask wearing proving excellent practice for going undercover. The fact that no-one took him seriously was his "best qualification for being a spy," says Soden. But Coward was, arguably, too convincing: the press disparaged him for apparently jollying about in America while everyone else suffered, while his international playboy status was frequently seen as a liability by politicians. Both reactions deeply hurt Coward; war service was one area of life where he desperately wanted to be taken seriously.

So, he was certainly in the Bright Young Thing crowd in the 1920's.  Did Evelyn Waugh ever meet him, I wonder?   Ah - yes, he did:

He had lunch with Noel Coward (‘He has a simple, friendly nature. No brains’)

Ha.  

By the way, this article gives more (autobiographical) detail of Coward's near entry into the military in 1918.   It was not a simple case of "nervous breakdown" - and it was also at the very tail end of the war.    

More potted biography of Coward's war time efforts can be found in this article at The Guardian.  Surprisingly, there is an Australian connection, too, despite it being somewhat hard to fathom that a somewhat camp-ish demeanour would go over well in that era here:

He was immediately sent to Bletchley and seconded to D section, but was swiftly moved to Paris as head of the bureau of propaganda, a job that seemed to entail nothing more strenuous than dining with the beau monde. All this was viewed in Britain with understandable mystification; there were questions in the Commons about the usefulness of his activities. He persuaded Stuart to send him to the US, where, astonishingly, he had two meetings with Roosevelt. What appeared to be his triumphal progress through America caused a huge furore in England. He was seconded to British War Relief, but by now the US press was attacking him too, not least because of his first world war record.

He then went to Australia, where he received a gratifyingly ecstatic response; but was told that his wartime mission was suspended. This command can only have come from the highest level. His return to London was greeted by a hostile press, which seemed all of a piece with the requisitioning of his magnificent country house, Goldenhurst, and the bombing of his London home. He moved to the Savoy Hotel; there he found other similarly dispossessed chums such as Margot Asquith. The blitz was in full swing; he was now right at the centre of the British people's experience of war, though of course, in a very Noël Coward sort of way. Supping at the Savoy on a Saturday night in April 1941, he noted: "Had a few drinks. Pretty bad blitz, but not as bad as Wednesday. A couple of bombs fell very near during dinner. Wall bulged a bit and door blew in. Orchestra went on playing, no one stopped eating or talking. Blitz continued. Carroll Gibbons played the piano, I sang, so did Judy Campbell and a couple of drunken Scots Canadians. On the whole a strange and very amusing evening. People's behaviour absolutely magnificent. Much better than gallant. Wish the whole of America could really see and understand it. Thankful to God that I came back. Would not have missed this experience for anything."

 And finally, I guess a summary of his extremely active and often scandalous gay love/sex life is in order, and which outlet is better at that than the Daily Mail?   

Update:  Oh look!  The State Library of Queensland has a post about Coward's visit to Brisbane at the start of WW2.

I suppose I was being a bit facetious when I said above that it is hard imagining him being popular with Australian "diggers" given his camp reputation - the article seemingly confirms he was mobbed by women, and I do recall an anecdote in which he said he never wanted to "come out" because he had convinced so many middle aged women that he was worthy of being their heartthrob.   

The oddest line in the article is perhaps this:

The following day (21 November 1940) was also extremely busy for Coward . He was due to visit a Brisbane abattoir in the morning, however he decided to cancel this in favour of rehearsing for his afternoon concert. Coward politely told The Telegraph newspaper that "It was not because he particularly disliked abattoirs. He had seen lots of them in his time".

Where not to be gay

Axios ran an article about a Gallup poll which asked people in all sort of countries whether they thought their city or area was a "good" place for gay people to live.

While it pointed out that the general trend (compared to 10 years ago) was up - in fact, way up in places like India, Nepal and Vietnam (and even Poland!) - I'm more interested in the places where people say they're the pits for gay and lesbian.

Of course, we all know many African countries are very bad this way, but there are some other notably unfriendly to gay places: 

Gay People to Live in 2021

Is the city or area where you live a good place or not a good place to live for gay or lesbian people?

Malawi	3	95
Senegal	3	91
Armenia	4	81
Kazakhstan	4	66
Kyrgyzstan	6	73
Ghana	7	86
Kosovo	7	80
Zambia	7	82
Burkina Faso	8	83
Indonesia	8	88
Georgia	9	65
Nigeria	9	83
Tunisia	9	73

Wow, Indonesia really sticks out amongst the local areas.  

Still, the results are sometimes a bit puzzling:   I would not have expected these:

In 25 countries -- including China (47%), Greece (49%), Israel (45%) and Kenya (24%) -- perceptions of communities being good places for gay people to live grew by 10 or more percentage points from 2011 to 2021; still, less than half in these countries say their area is a good place.

I wouldn't have expected China to be that high, but would have guessed Greece and Israel's results to be higher.

Australia ranks at 86%, by the way.   Pretty much identical with Canada and New Zealand.  USA is at 80%, and given the state of politics there, it makes sense that they would rank lower.

Anyway, somewhat interesting...

 

Dumb stuff on Twitter

Maybe I re-arrange these later...

At last, some cultured meat scepticism has arrived

I was ahead of the curve on this one.   This article up at the BCC shows that some scepticism has finally entered the commentary on the potential for lab grown meat:

Why cultivated meat is still so hard to find in restaurants

It's a good read.

I note that George Monbiot's promotion of microbial production of protein ("precision fermentation" of animal proteins) is not attracting all that much attention, yet.   Maybe the problem is a lack of good examples of products?  I see there is also some skepticism around the ability to scale it economically, but I strongly suspect that it is much more do-able than growing animal cells in expensive nutrient, and arranging them into something resembling meat. 

Reasons for suicides investigated

Yes, I would say this is worthwhile research:

Cory Russo, the chief death investigator in Utah, is used to asking strangers questions at the most excruciating moments of their lives. When she shows up at the scene of a suicide, a homicide or another type of unexpected death, her job is to interview the grievers about how the deceased had lived.

How old were they? What was their race? Did they have a job? Had they ever been hospitalized for psychiatric issues? How had they been feeling that morning?

Over the past couple of years, she has added new questions to the list: What was their sexual orientation? What was their gender identity?

Ms. Russo, who works in the Office of the Medical Examiner in Salt Lake City, is one of the relative few death investigators across the country who are routinely collecting such data, even though sexuality or gender identity can be relevant to the circumstances surrounding a person’s death....

Studies of L.G.B.T.Q. people show they have high rates of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts, factors that greatly increase the risk of suicide.

But because most death investigators do not collect data on sexuality or gender identity, no one knows how many gay and transgender people die by suicide each year in the United States. The information vacuum makes it difficult to tailor suicide prevention efforts to meet the needs of the people most at risk, and to measure how well the programs work, researchers said.

The report ends on this note, which I also think important, and wish gay and trans activists would take to heart:

It’s also important to acknowledge the unknowns, Dr. Staley said. Although studies have reported a high rate of suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts among lesbian, gay and transgender people, that doesn’t necessarily mean a high rate of suicides. He noted that although women have a higher rate of suicide attempts than men do, men have a much higher rate of dying by suicide, partly because they have more access to guns.

And Dr. Staley, who is gay, cautioned against political narratives that “normalize suicide as part of the queer experience.”

“I would argue that if anything, this life experience sets us up to be resilient,” he said. “Our fate is not sealed. Our story is not written.”

 

 

Confirmed: biggest defamation case self-own since Oscar Wilde

I can't be the only person who has said that, about this:

Ben Roberts-Smith VC, Australia’s most decorated living soldier, has lost a defamation case in which he was accused of multiple murder of unarmed civilians in Afghanistan, a federal court judge has found.

The case only happened because of funding by Kerry Stokes, who seems to have more money than brains.   I don't think I had heard this before:

Roberts-Smith took out a loan from his employer, the media baron Kerry Stokes, to run the defamation action: if he loses, he has offered his Victoria Cross as collateral.

Is there any value at all left in a VC awarded to someone we are now free to call a murderer?  

Update:  Yes, Google shows me that Green Left made the Wilde comparison back in March 2022:

Roberts-Smith does not seem the kind of guy to relate to Oscar Wilde. That’s a shame, as he may have learned something about starting a libel case over public allegations that you’ve been doing the same sort of thing that a whole bunch of people are going to stand up in court and say you’ve been doing.

But now that I check, I said it in February 2022.  I bet there was someone who said it earlier, though.  

By the way, the Green Left post contains this useful mega link paragraph about the ridiculous amount of harmful material that came out from this trial:

Some of the headlines since the court case began last year include: SAS soldier tells court Ben Roberts-Smith ordered shooting of detained Afghan man; Ben Roberts-Smith described alleged execution of Afghan teen as ‘beautiful thing’, court hears; Witness stands by claims Ben Roberts-Smith was instrumental in two Afghan executions; Ben Roberts-Smith shot Afghan captive in the back, SAS member tells defamation trial; SAS soldier cried describing Roberts-Smith kicking man off cliff, court told; Former soldier tells court Ben Roberts-Smith ordered mock execution during training; Ben Roberts-Smith used software to ‘scrub’ laptop but denies destroying evidence; SAS soldier tells Ben Roberts-Smith defamation trial war veteran threatened to shoot him in head; Superior officer tells court Ben Roberts-Smith threatened to ‘smash his face in’; Ben Roberts-Smith punched woman in face in Canberra hotel room, court told; Private investigator tells court he severed ties with Ben Roberts-Smith over alleged threatening letters; Soldiers believe events that earned Ben Roberts-Smith Victoria Cross may have been ‘falsified’, court hears.

Why do we put up with Airbnb in a time of chronic housing shortage?

I was speaking to some friends on the weekend who will going to Europe later this year, using Airbnb accommodation.   I said I would not do that, given the possibility of last minute cancellation, a recent uptick in complaints on social media about painful owners, and more generally, I've always had a bit of an objection in principal to the whole concept, at least in areas with a housing/long term rental shortage.   Sure, the company will promote it as being a way people who are asset rich but income poor can make money, although in many cases, they could also do it via long term rental.

I suppose I have less objection if it is a case of short term rental of part of a dual occupancy property - someone who has a granny flat in the back yard might be leery about the risk of getting a permanent tenant who is painful or annoying but difficult to get rid of under long term tenancy laws.   (And local councils don't always allow permanent tenancy of such accommodation anyway.)   But if you own a small apartment, or a house, in an area facing chronic long term rental shortages, keeping it for short term holiday rental is hurting your local community, and it's not as if you can't make money from long term rental.

So I went looking for how many Airbnb there are at the moment in Australia, and the numbers sound pretty high to me, even though they are way down on previous years.  This report is from July 2021:

Listing numbers in Sydney fell 43 per cent from an average of 33,955 in the first quarter of 2020 to 19,257 for the same period this year. They have since dropped to 12,728, by far their lowest point since at least 2018.

The situation is not much better in Melbourne with listings down from 30,126 to 19,354 in the 12 months to March 31 this year, a decline of 36 per cent. On Saturday, there were 14,569 active short-term rental properties in the city.

Interestingly, I see that in 2018, Airbnb had a report done to fend off complaints about its effect on the rental market. One of their points was that their numbers were too small to worry about:

 But the figures in the July 2021 article would indicate that those figures in 2018 were much lower than the figures achieved in 2020.   

I wonder what the figures are now, in the post Covid recovery?   I can't find them quickly.

I would suspect that they would have increased since July 2021, so lets assume there are a total of 30,000 in Sydney and Melbourne, roughly 15,000 each.  And how many rentals are vacant at the moment?  That's easy to find:

This chart is for Sydney, and indicates roughly 10,000 vacancies, giving a vacancy rate of about 1%.  this is a "tight" rental market.

Based on that, yes, adding even 10,000 Airbnb rental properties is going to double the vacancy rate - it would clearly make a substantial difference.

As this 2022 article at the ABC noted:

Across the world, major tourist destinations are moving to regulate short-stay rentals.

In Amsterdam, an entire home can only be rented out for a maximum of 30 nights per year.

While in New York, it is generally illegal to rent out an entire unit for less than 30 days. Although there are exceptions.

Meanwhile, Berlin allows you to lease out your primary residence, but it can be a bit harder to put a second home on the short-term market and you can only let a secondary residence out for a maximum of 90 days.

"Making the regulation is probably the easy part," Professor Phibbs said.

"Enforcing the regulation can be quite difficult. It's certainly resource-intensive. It sometimes involves quite long legal processes.

"It's important to have some kind of taxing regime where short-term rentals pay for the cost of that regulation through some sort of bed tax."

In Australia, New South Wales has 180-day caps in some areas, while Western Australia has been investigating a 60-day cap.

Meanwhile, Hobart is hoping to become the first capital city to place a cap on the number of short stays.

Professor Phibbs is pretty scathing:

Professor Phibbs said the number of Airbnbs in the city equated to about 9 per cent of the total rental market. 

That is much higher than in any other capital city in Australia.

And Hobart's rental vacancy rate is just 0.3 per cent — the lowest for any capital city.

During the pandemic, the balance has shifted.

"When housing stock went from short-term rental back to the long-term rental market, in places like Hobart we saw a sharp reduction in rents," he said.

Professor Phibbs estimated that during COVID, rents in Hobart dropped by about 9 per cent. 

Another study in Sydney by William Thackway and Christopher Pettit found rent prices in the most active Airbnb neighbourhoods dropped by up to 7 per cent.

While not all of this can be attributed to Airbnb, Professor Phibbs said the evidence was clear: You cannot have an unregulated short-term accommodation industry and a healthy long-term rental market. 

"Those two things just can't co-exist," he said.

"We need some sort of regulation to limit the spread of short-term rentals so we can enable the long-term rental market to provide homes for so many households that are looking for them at the moment."

Yep, Airbnb and its ilk is a real problem, and I reckon every capital city in Australia (or even local areas with long term rental shortage) should be attacking it every way they can.

Oh, and here's an article co-authored by Professor Phipps on The Conversation from March 2023 which I hadn't read before, making many good points.  People should be paying more attention, I reckon.

Anyway, I'm kind of glad my innate dislike of Airbnb can be actually justified with hard figures.

I suppose I should admit, I can think of 2 occasions over the last 20 years I have stayed at short term holiday rental of houses in Australia, through Stayz or some now defunct site.  But the last time was probably 6 years ago, in what would count as a semi-country area holiday home.  It's not as if Airbnb invented holiday homes:  they just made short term rental in urban areas too easy. 

Is there some hidden motive for such hyperbole that I can't see?

Leading experts warn of a risk of extinction from AI

Please, continue to put me in the "not at all convinced" column.

I mean, this is one of the dangers listed in the BBC report on the warning:

Enfeeblement, where humans become dependent on AI "similar to the scenario portrayed in the film Wall-E"

 [Insert roll eyes emoji]

Sichuan pepper primer

I  noted last week that I cooked with Sichuan (or Szechuan) pepper for the first time, and I liked the result.

I didn't mention, though, that there was an issue with the pepper being gritty, which I assumed was the result of my not having ground the roasted pepper hard enough.

However, on further investigation, apparently you're supposed to remove the hard inner seed completely, as it will never be ground far enough to not feel "gritty" in the cooking.  Despite initial appearances, these are not similar to peppercorns in any way, and you only use the (pretty light weight) outer shell, even though this seems like a pretty fiddly job when you have a packet of whole Sichuan pepper.   

Learn something new every day.