Big Mac economics

The Economist publishes its Big Mac index again.

I note that Iceland, Norway, Denmark and Switzerland all have greatly over-priced Big Macs. Indonesia and Thailand are some of the cheapest around. Why does cold weather make
hamburgers more expensive?

In Japan, even the underworld is polite

I am not sure that you would see this degree of co-operation in, say, the Mafia:

The nation's two largest underworld syndicates reached a truce Thursday following recent shootings that sparked fears of a full-scale turf war and prompted police to raid one of the groups believed involved in the violence.

Kobe-based Yamaguchi-gumi and Tokyo-based Sumiyoshi-kai separately reported to the Metropolitan Police Department on Thursday afternoon that they made peace in the wake of Monday's gunning down of a senior Sumiyoshi-kai member, MPD officials said.

Investigators hope the recent violence -- believed part of a turf war between the two crime syndicates -- will halt with Thursday's truce, but said they will continue to monitor the mob's activities.

Nice of them to keep everyone informed.

From another part of the Japan Times, there is an article about the number of Yakuza the police know about:

Full-time yakuza numbered 41,500, while part-timers or semiregular members -- those not directly affiliated with the mob -- increased slightly to 43,200. In 1991, there were an estimated 63,800 full-time mobsters, and some 27,200 part-timers.

In reality, yakuza are appearing to detach themselves from full-time mob activity by engaging in business, political or social activities in a bid to camouflage their underworld affiliation, the NPA said.

This yakuza system is difficult to understand from the Western point of view. It seems extremely well tracked by the police, which makes it sound semi-tolerated. I should go looking around the internet for some background information...

Edwards doomed

Huffington Post is linking to a story that says John Edwards has not sacked Marcotte & McEwen.

If they survive, Edwards is dead in the water, as far as Presidential aspirations go.

By the way, few seem to have noticed this column in Huffington Post that came out shortly after Michelle Malkin had the hide to point out how offensive Marcotte & McEwen had been in their blogs. Here's an extract from the HP column:

The basic story is that uber-moronic Right-tards such as Michelle Malkin, whose IQ has been in an internment camp for the better part of her life, thinks it's really bad that Amanda said words like "fuck" on her blog.

(As if Malkin's criticism was about the use of one word.)

How much sense does it make to answer criticism of immature, intemperate and offensive expression of political views by making your own immature, offensive and intemperate attack?

Now for a discouraging Iraq story

From The Times, a Sunni doctor tells about why he left the country.

But then again, the deputy Health Minister is arrested for supporting murder.

There seems a chance of improvement, at least.

Some slight optimism

There's an interesting IHT report about how things have improved in Sadr City in Baghdad. What's most important, perhaps, is the indication that the Mahdi Army seems more co-operative than before:

Sadr officials — seemingly determined to bleach clean the Mahdi image — said that the militia's members would disarm temporarily during the Baghdad security plan. Even if Sunnis attacked, even if American and Iraqi troops arrested Mahdi commanders, they said, the militia would not fight.

"Whatever the provocation, with the surge against us or anything else, we will not kidnap anyone or take revenge by ourselves," said Daraji, the Sadr City mayor, who has been negotiating with American and Iraqi government officials over the role of the militia. "We will leave everything to the government."

Of course, if things go back to shooting Americans after the security crackdown, little will have been achieved. And, as the article points out, Sunni areas are being left without services, which presumably encourages Sunni insurgency.

Ah well, I still take some slight encouragement from the story.

First reaction: not enough toilets

Airbus took 200 journalists on a spin in the new super-gigantic A380.

From the IHT report:

The novelty began at the gate, which offered upper- and lower-deck access to the plane. Emirates, the largest customer for the A380, plans to put premium and economy-class seats on separate decks — as on an ocean liner — allowing people to board from their VIP lounges.

I can see a new version of Titanic in this. Except I guess I would generally feel safer on the lower deck this time (unless they had to evacuate the aircraft.)

But the crucial thing about long distance flight is the number of toilets:

Packed full of seats, the A380 can seat up 840 people. Airbus used this plane for evacuation drills last year, and it said all 840 were able to pile out in 78 seconds. It is not clear what would happen if they needed to use the toilet simultaneously.

Speaking of toilets, there were 15 on this A380, including one in the first-class cabin that has a window above the commode. Except for the view, its cramped confines did not invite loitering.

Let's see, that is about one toilet for 56 people. Maybe even worse on the "economy" level. Can that be enough for a 840 person configuration?

Judging inequality

Tim Worstall has an interesting article on judging the morality of income inequality, especially when it comes to globalisation. His conclusion:

Leaving all other matters aside, we expect globalization to produce a rise in income inequality in the United States (and the other industrialized societies). We also expect it to raise incomes in the poor countries and thus reduce global income inequality. That does indeed seem to be what is actually happening.

Whether this is a good or a bad thing to be happening is another matter entirely, that depends upon our own moral senses....

....in this particular instance I find that my own answer is quite simple. Those poor who are getting richer in other countries are not moving from one level of luxury to a slightly higher one. They are moving from destitution, from not knowing where the next meal is coming from, to something close to a middle class income. They are doing this in their hundreds of millions, across the globe, and that has to be a good thing.

Note that he hasn't mentioned the issue of income mobility in the United States too, which is relevant to the morality argument too.

For all your camel milking needs...

go to Israel! Yes, even when it comes to camel milking systems (who knew there was a market for it?) Israel seems to lead the way in the Middle East. (The article notes that a company in Dubai bought a 48 camel milking system "largely manufactured" in Israel from an Israeli company. Israel and Dubai do not have diplomatic relations.)

Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia, the ban on Israeli goods continues:

RIYADH, 4 January 2007 — Director General of Saudi Customs Saleh Al-Barak reiterated that the Saudi regulations do not permit the import of goods manufactured in Israel.

“The official regulation followed by every customs house at the Kingdom’s border crosspoints is a total ban on any goods of Israeli origin,” Al-Watan Arabic newspaper quoted Saleh Al-Barak as saying yesterday.

Anyone found breaking the regulation would be treated as a smuggler of contraband goods to the Kingdom and fined accordingly and the seized goods destroyed, the director general said.

Says something about the Middle East, doesn't it?

What happens when it rains?

Also in the Guardian, Katherine Hamnett gets very, very excited about concentrated solar power as a source of clean energy. (Just like the trial power station the Australian Federal government is helping to fund.)

Problem is, as far as I can see, the article says nothing about what happens if a protracted cloudy period covers the power stations. Still, if environmentalists don't go nuts about tens of square kilometres of desert being covered by mirrors, I guess it could help, provided you don't lose much of the benefit in the process of getting the electricity the hundreds of miles to where it is needed.

At least if you use solar power to do the direct electrolysis of water into hydrogen, you have something you can store to generate power later. Someone's looked at that, I assume?

Monbiot right

George Monbiot does have his weird obsessions (aircraft and CO2 for one), but he is sensible enough to get upset about loopy 9/11 conspiracies. Of course, for full enjoyment you should then read the comments of people who think George will "regret the day" he rubbished the idea.

On military commissions

There's a really good article at Frontpage providing background and history on the reasons for using military commissions for terrorist trials in the USA.

Sperm for the taking

Slate summaries a recent bizarre case of making babies from a dead man:

With court approval, Israeli parents are using their dead son's sperm to inseminate a woman he never knew. It appears to be the first explicit legal authorization to make a baby using a corpse and a stranger. Argument from the dead man's mother: "He would always talk about how he wanted to get married and have children." After he died, "His eyes he told me that it wasn't too late, and that there was still something to take from him. … Then I realized it was his sperm."

That last line is both funny and creepy.

Actually, the Chicago Tribune version of the story (linked to by Slate) gives some even weirder detail. After her son's death:

A year went by, and the bereaved mother saw her son in a dream. "He said, `What about my children? Why aren't you doing anything about it?'" Cohen said. "I woke up shaking and told my husband that we have to do something."

This has a quasi-biblical feel about it. A new form of virgin birth for a child heralded in a dream.

Completely indefensible action by the parents and court, in my opinion.

Bad astronaut?

A female astronaut seems to have gone nuts over a relationship issue:

A NASA astronaut is charged with attacking her rival for another astronaut's attention early Monday at Orlando International Airport, the Orlando Sentinel has learned.

Lisa Marie Nowak drove from Texas to meet the 1 a.m. flight of a younger woman who had also been seeing the male astronaut Nowak pined for, according to Orlando police.

It's all trenchcoats, stalking and other fun stuff. Lucky this is sorted out on the ground and not the shuttle!

Walking bags of microbes

If you have any latent phobic about what is on your skin, perhaps it is better you don't know this:

In research published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Blaser and his colleagues took swabs from the forearms of six healthy people to study the bacterial populations in human skin -- our largest organ.

"We identify about 182 species," Blaser said in an interview. "And based on those numbers, we estimate there are probably at least 250 species in the skin."...

The researchers noted that microbes in the body actually outnumber human cells 10-to-1.

"Our microbes are actually, in essence, a part of our body," Blaser said.

Super-intelligent emotionless artificial intelligences of the future should not know this information: they may consider killing humans as nothing more than microbe pest control.

A late weekend video

Last weekend I missed posting a Youtube. Turns out there's plenty of David Byrne stuff there. This song comes from his early solo period, with its heavy South American influence. I had never seen a clip for it before. (Actually, it's not visually all that interesting, but the music makes me very feel very happy.)

Busy

This promises to be a busy month for me at work. I'm seriously thinking about a blogging hiatus, unless of course an insanely generous reader relieves the financial reasons I really need to concentrate on work. (Ha!)

Anyway, we'll see how we go. Blogging at night might still be OK, but even so it is far too easy for me to be distracted by looking at the web all day for interesting articles to post about.

For example, here's a few things of interest that I see right now:

* Newsweek says China might want to go to the Moon to mine it for Helium 3. Seems to me it would be a good idea if you knew fusion reactors using it would actually work. (Maybe there is a bit of chicken or egg problem here, though.) Also, this line in the article caught my eye:

If significant deposits are found, China's engineers still need to design the world's first lunar mining machines and send them up—while the rest of us shrink in horror at the thought of strip mines on the moon.

Hey don't mark me up as one of the horrified. What exactly is the problem here? It's a sterile, pre-cratered landscape with no obvious inhabitants to upset by having the view from their condo ruined. Does lunar dirt have an inherent right to lie unmoved except by the next meteor?

* Legal battles over movie deals get a lot of coverage in the LA Times, being the industry town that it is. The latest is about "Sahara", which did look expensive on the screen, and was (I thought) very well directed for an action film. Unfortunately, it also starred Matthew McConaughey, a male lead who for some reason I have always found irritating.

Anyway, a reclusive multi-billionaire lost $110 million on the film and isn't happy. The story is of moderate interest.

* Paul Sheehan must be running the risk of getting death threats himself (or maybe he already has?) with articles about Islam in Europe like this one.

Half a story

Popular press reporting of global warming issues continues to irritate. The big news this morning: recent sea level rises are higher than the 2001 prediction. From the SMH:

SEA levels are rising faster than the International Panel on Climate Change predicted, showing computer models have tended to underestimate the problem.

Since 1993 sea levels have climbed at a rate of 3.3 millimetres a year, compared with the panel's best estimate for this period of less than 2 millimetres a year.

The only hint of uncertainty in the report is on the pessimistic side. (A CSIRO scientist is quoted as saying that the contribution of melting ice sheets is still not properly quantified.)

However, in their report on the same story in Nature is this:

Rahmstorf and his colleagues calculate that sea-level rise over the past 20 years has been 25% faster than for any other 20-year period for more than a century. But they accept that this could be due simply to natural variations over decadal timescales. "Sea-level rise has been tracking along the uppermost limit for 16 years now, but it could still be decadal variability, so we don't predict that this will continue," Rahmstorf says.

Another study published last month² suggests that sea-level rises during the twentieth century were indeed very variable. According to calculations by Simon Holgate of the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory in Liverpool, UK, sea levels rose by an average of more than 2 millimetres per year in the first half of the century, but by less than 1.5 millimetres per year on average in the latter half.

The uncertainty could cut both ways, then.

In any event, those who worry about Tuvalu have to remember that the ocean was still rising at 2mm per year in the first half of the 20th century. (In fact, note how the rate dropped in the second half.) Now it is rising at 3 mm per annum. Tuvalu was never a long term proposition even without global warming.

One other point: the SMH article says this:

In a separate study in the same journal, Helen McGregor, of the University of Wollongong, has found global warming has already changed ocean currents in a way that could have a serious impact on fisheries.

Her team's research off the north-west coast of Africa shows it has led to an increase in a phenomenon called ocean upwelling, in which deep, cold water, usually rich in nutrients, moves upwards to replace warmer surface water.

"Our research suggests that upwelling will continue to intensify with future greenhouse warming, potentially impacting the sensitive ecosystems and fisheries in these regions," Dr McGregor said.

Again, note the emphasis on pessimism. Yet only a few days before, we had this story:

The world's oceans are already in a warming trend that could alter fish stocks, perhaps damaging coral reefs that are vital nurseries for tropical species while boosting northern stocks of cod or herring...

In a sign of how higher temperatures might help some fish stocks, a period of warmer waters in the 1920s allowed cod to spawn off Greenland and let a new stock break away from Icelandic waters. In the cooler 1960s, cod were unable to reproduce off Greenland and the stock collapsed.

[I would also have thought that cold water upwellings rich in nutrients would be good for plankton growth, which is a major CO2 sink. It has long been suggested that Ocean Thermal Power Generation would have this as a side benefit.]

So lets get it right people: oceans have been warming and cooling even before current global warming. It had already had major effects on fish populations a century ago. It will continue to affect fish, with some winners and some losers. (Everyone used to bemoan the loss of cod fisheries. Now that global warming may help them, the tragedy will be fewer tropical fish. )

What bugs me most about this is that it is teaching pessimism to our children. Apart from what children read for themselves in the press, there will be lot of school teachers who pass this on, as they often don't show much inclination towards independent thought. (Sorry, they do a hard job, but you know that is true.)

Wait for the wave of pessimism when the entire IPCC report comes out.

UPDATE: just to be clear, I do take CO2 levels seriously, as explained in a few posts last year. It is just that I don't see any benefit in promoting pessimism as the response to the issue. The attitude I want is optimism that effective action can be taken, and an acknowledgement that things were never static and perfect in the global environment anyway. (Just ask the dinosaurs and the Australian megafauna, the latter increasingly looking like an example of very early technology causing havoc. As for aborigines "living in harmony with the land for 50,000 years": well yeah, after they changed the landscape entirely by fire and hunting.)

When natural is not good

Quite a surprising story in New Scientist should have parents who are into essential oils looking carefully at the products they use on their kids:

Three young boys grew breast tissue after exposure to lotions and shampoos containing lavender or tea tree oil, researchers say.

It is not uncommon for boys to develop breast tissue during puberty or just after, but the boys affected by the plant oils were aged four, seven and 10.

The natural oils may be “gender-bending” chemicals mimicking effects of the female hormone, oestrogen, the findings suggest. The boys were otherwise normal, and lost the breast tissue within months of discontinuing use of the products.

Bone digs Cohen

Pamela Bone gives her support to the views of Nick Cohen, which I have previously recommended reading.

One point I may have missed making in my previous post is this one taken up by Bone in her final paragraphs:

The Left used to be about the future and improving the lot of mankind. The problem for it today, as Cohen points out, is that it has got most of what it wanted. Although there is still a way to go, the Left of a century ago would see the prosperity of today's workers, the equal opportunity laws, the intellectual freedoms, as a paradise. It is harder today to see yourself as a victim of a pernicious system.

So the Left now is about resistance to material progress, to globalisation, and most of all to American power. There is plenty to criticise about Western lifestyles. Still, it should be obvious to all but the most blinkered that the system the US wants to impose on the Middle East is far better than the system the Islamists want to impose on us. Democracy is at least self-correcting. I hope the wearers of the "George Bush, World's No.1 terrorist" T-shirts, never have to find that out.

Affluenza attacked

Tim Blair and many others have looked at Oliver James and his book on "affluenza", but here's another good criticism of it by David Finkelstein at The Times. An extract:

The central contention of Affluenza is, oddly, contained in an appendix. Here it is posited that there is “a strong and statistically significant linear Pearson correlation between the prevalence of any emotional distress and income inequality”. In other words, in countries where there is high inequality, there appear to be high levels of emotional distress. James uses this statistical relationship to go further than other “happiness” theorists. Where they argue that greater prosperity has not produced greater levels of happiness, he argues that what he calls “selfish capitalism” has produced inequality and, through it, mental illness.

The whole book rests on this.

Finkelstein mentions two possible alternative explanations:

Let me provide an alternative, much less comfortable, explanation of increased rates of mental illness in developed countries — social mobility. In his compelling book The Scent of Dried Roses, Tim Lott tries to make sense of his own encounters with mental illness, including his suicidal depression. He concludes that the disappearance of the English lower middle class from which he came and his own rise (he is now a justly successful novelist, then already well on his way) made him feel disorientated. He lost a sense of who he was, a sense of his story.

I find this very convincing. But its implications are disturbing. It suggests that the best way for James to reduce Affluenza would be for everyone to know their place. With fewer aspirations and ambitions people might be more content. I don’t think he, or the other happiness theorists for that matter, are far away from this view. James is already pretty scathing about the consequences of the drive towards female equality. And if he is right that China and Nigeria are happier (or at least have less emotional distress), presumably they would be better off staying as they are.

And here’s another explanation — not selfish capitalism but secular liberalism. Aren’t the decline of the nuclear family, the questioning of bourgeois values and doubts about the existence of God more likely causes of emotional discomfort than James’s ridiculous choice of policies on the regulation of the electricity industry?