Posted in Environmentalism

The environmental Kuznets Curve is alive and well

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The winter air in Tehran is often foul but for six days last week it was hardly breathable. A dense and poisonous chemical smog made up of traffic and factory fumes, mixed with construction dust, burning vegetation and waste has shrouded buildings, choked pedestrians, forced schools and universities to close, and filled the hospitals.

Anyone who could flee the Iranian mega-city of 15 million people has done so, but, say the authorities, in the past two weeks more than 400 people have died as a direct result of the pollution, known as the Asian “brown cloud”.

Tehran is far from alone. A combination of atmospheric conditions, geography and the start of the winter heating season regularly traps urban air pollution from October to February across a great swath of Asia. But this year has seen some of the worst smog episodes in nearly 20 years despite cities trying to reduce traffic and factory emissions.

Poor places are clean because no one has any shit (other than literal shit) to make the place dirty. Places getting rich are filthy. For people spend that getting richer on basics like food, clothing etc. Then rich places get clean as people spend some of that new richness on having a clean place not enveloped in shit.

All well known, it’s the environmental Kuznets Curve.

The only interesting question is when do people think they’re rich enough to start cleaning all that shit up? One estimate I’ve seen is about $8,000 GDP per capita. It’s only one estimate – but it means that China will be cleaner going into the future, Iran, Indonesia still have some way to go.

Posted in Health Care

I simply don’t believe this happens

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A teacher at a school for orphans and troubled teenagers in Ukraine is accused of plotting to sell a 13-year-old pupil to organ harvesters.

No, I believe that a sting operation caught someone willing to conspire to sell. But I don’t believe that the actual buying, by actual organ traffickers, happens:

The grim and lucrative trade in organ trafficking exploits the world’s most destitute people, earning criminals up to $1.2 billion in illegal profits every year and leading to an estimated 10,000 black-market transplants each year.

Last year, more than a dozen countries, including Britain, signed the first ever international treaty to combat the horrific business, prohibiting the donor or a third party to make money from organ transplants and granting victims the right to compensation.

I do believe that people are paid for organs. Which is, in the current parlance, trafficking. But grabbing some random kid, killing them and extracting the organs? I simply cannot see it actually happening. No, not because people wouldn’t do it if it worked, but because it won’t work because:

Tissue typing.

Criminals, money, organ transplants, yes, can see all that happening. Kidnapping and murder of random people for it? Nope.

Posted in Politics

No, no, it wasn’t

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The college was designed to serve as something of an escape hatch, allowing for a candidate considered unsuitable for office to be denied the presidency.

It was designed, as with the different constituencies and numbers for the House and Senate, to ensure that political power was geographically dispersed in a geographically dispersed society.

Posted in Art

These people are fucking nuts

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So, black bird plays Russian countess in something snipped out of Tolstoy:

Back when you were first cast in Natasha, you tweeted that you were so excited to do the show and that a black woman could be cast as a Russian countess. What’s important to you about helping to open those doors of diversity?

Denée Benton

It’s powerful to take down the boundaries that separate us and remind everybody that we’re all human and we all have the ability to tell the human story.

I’m fine with that.

But imagine the outrage if a white actor were to black up to portray a black. Or a cis het male were to portray some trans…..in fact, didn’t we just have that protest, that trans actors should be playing trans characters?

Posted in Newspaper Watch

Bob Cesca can fuck off quite frankly

By Comments:35 Comments

Call it a “Fact Summit.”

The idea is to gather a team of writers, strategists, thinkers, editors and other experts from both sides — reasonable, rational minds from a pool of conservative, moderate and liberal players — who are all on the same side of the truth divide. Lock them in a room to collectively build a database of trusted firsthand news sources: publications online and off, independent agencies, opinion sources, television and radio networks, newspapers and so forth that have displayed significant attention to the highest level of accuracy and journalistic integrity possible with the goal of pushing back against the rising flood of fake news and propaganda sites.

This will, of course, all be entirely unbiased. Ho Yus.

Enter the Fact Summit.

The Fact Summit wouldn’t be a censorship body, nor would it actively engage in fact-checking activities. Its goal would be to act as a set of informal gate-keepers, determining which institutions are worthy of citation, linking, reading and supporting, while also calling out the fakers and deceivers. The multi-partisan nature of the panel will add legitimacy to the findings and will encourage consumers on the right and left to take the results more seriously.

Ho Yus. Completely and absolutely impartial and bipartisan:

For example, a hyper-partisan aggregator might publish a story about horrendously rising health insurance premium rates, while leaving out details about the historical steepness of past, pre-Obamacare rate hikes.

Fuck off Matey

Likewise, without experts to act as fact-sherpas for news consumers, most readers are simply wandering aimlessly through their news feeds, sharing whatever conforms to their personal politics, rather than what’s vetted for accuracy and integrity.

The problem is whose accuracy, isn’t it?

So, yes, fuck off matey. Right off, along with the horse you rode in on.

Posted in Ragging on Ritchie

Where to start, where to start, eh?

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Geoff Tily of the TUC spoke at what looked to be an important event at the LSE last night to launch a new book called The Econocracy, which I could not attend. In his notes for the event on the TUC blog he suggests that:

Academia blocks progress in economic thought

and concludes:

The so-called golden age after the war was not the result of chance: it was the result of a collective exercise of reason and political will. It is a grotesque parody to suggest it was only made possible by war. We should surely proceed on the basis that a second golden age is within our grasp.

I agree with both ideas. The solution is obvious: we have to shatter the stranglehold of falsehood that is sold as if it is economics by almost every university department that bears that name.

Which university department of political economy should we start with d’ye think?

Posted in Newspaper Watch

Ignorant twattery – but then it is the Mail

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Hard-pressed taxpayers have been told they must foot the £369 million bill for repairs to Buckingham Palace, but the Queen is keeping a tight hold on the purse strings when it comes to her own outgoings.

The Royal Household is advertising for an experienced, qualified gardener who will be paid £17,000 per year — which works out at £8.72 an hour for a standard 37-and-a-half-hour week.
However, the successful applicant will, in fact, be paid less than £17,000 because they will be obliged to live in, the cost for which will be docked from their salary.

Sigh.

Living rent free beside St James’ Park will mean you’re on less than living wage will it?

Posted in Economics

This first para explains it all

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Childcare workers are underpaid because we’re women. We are the working poor
Margaret Carey
Women are exploited because of our capacity to put others’ needs ahead of our own. We are underpaid because we care – and we’re angry

So that’s the description from the subeditors. The first para reads:

I first began working in the childcare sector in 1990. As a recent graduate with a degree in visual arts, it was the obvious career path to become a cook in a long day care centre for toddlers! It was a non-profit community-based service and resonated with my values and beliefs.

Getting a job that resonates with your values and beliefs is pay luvvie. And perhaps the degree and career choice could have been more closely aligned?

When I began to have children of my own, the position became untenable. Around the birth of my first child I discovered a couple of things that really unsettled me.

First, as a spouse, I was not considered by society as an individual at all. I was without independence and completely financially reliant on my partner. I had never been without the ability to earn some money, and the feeling that I was now individually penniless was a humiliating discovery. To be clear, it was a feeling of my own doing as my partner had no qualms about being the breadwinner and did not in any way play a guilt trip on me but I profoundly felt as if I had been robbed of something.

Err, yes, the family is the primary economic unit among us humans. Not unusual among viviparous mammals either.

Posted in Newspaper Watch

Trump is going to drive the media wild with anger

By Comments:44 Comments

So, Donald Trump has announced the first few bits of the plan.

Trump’s Day One – US Out Of The TPP Which Means It’s Dead, There’s No Point To It

OK. But here’s what’s really fun about it. He is continuing to entirely sidestep the mainstream media. They’re used to all trooping into the White House press room (I know, Trump doesn’t have access to that yet) and being the very special two or three hundred people who get to ask the President and or the press officer (puleeeze, yes, Milo!) intricate and tricky questions which they can then spin to the rubes and hicks out in Flyover Country.

That why you go to journalism grad school, to get the White House press pass to show how important you are to the continuing function of the Republic and democracy.

And here’s the bastard just sticking up the video on YouTube and speaking direct to said hicks and rubes. What the fucking fuck? What does he think we guardians in the fourth estate are for, hunh, hunh?

They’re going to go totally ape shit on him for the next 8 years.

Posted in Politics

Not going to happen of course

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US Presidential-elect Donald Trump Monday said UKIP leader, Nigel Farage “would do a great job” as Great Britain’s ambassador to The United States. “Many people would like to see Nigel Farage represent Great Britain as their Ambassador to the United States. He would do a great job,” tweeted Trump.

Ambassadorships in the US system are political appointments. It’s only small and not nice places which are lucky enough to get a career man posted. The fun places get the used car salesman who bundled some political donations for the winning President.

The British system is almost all career postings. There’s the occasional political one but they’re rare.

Posted in Newspaper Watch

Introducing the American press

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Across America, high school seniors ponder life under Trump

The high school class of 2017 will be the first to graduate with Donald Trump as president of the United States. We reached out to seniors across the country to gauge their mood and ask how they feel about the president-elect and about their future under his leadership. Here are their edited responses:

That’s the Washington Post for goodness sake.

My own experience of the US newspapers was that they are all, without exception, incredibly boring.

Posted in Ragging on Ritchie

Wondrous

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Let’s instead think of reasons why such a move is really bad for the UK.

First, it increases social tension. Why should big business have a tax rate less than the basic rate of income tax? Where is the logic in that? Of course people will be aggrieved.

Second inequality will rise. Dividends are assumed to have had basic rate tax paid in them at source. That is, in effect, assumed to be settled by corporation tax but this will now be lower than the income tax rate. The effect will be that investment income will be even more lowly taxed, and it already enjoys much lower rates than income from work. And since dividends are very largely enjoyed by the better off (and yes, most pensioners are better off) this will automatically increase inequality.

Third, there will be an increase in tax avoidance. Small business will have every incentive to incorporate to avoid tax. Unless the cuts will not apply to them this will be a straight gift to the tax avoidance industry. It’s hard to think of anything more bizarre.

It’s the combination of para 2 and 3 which just works so well. Because in para 3 he sees that it’s really the individuals who pay the tax – this must be so if different individuals pay different tax rates. But in para 2 he’s wibbling about the incidence being upon the company.

And 4 isn’t bad either. Tax avoidance is only people using the law in a manner that a reasonable legislator could not have foreseen. And if even the Spudmonster can foresee it then it can’t be tax avoidance, can it?

Posted in Newspaper Watch

Err, no, really, just no

By Comments:27 Comments

For example, imagine a private consortium building a toll road for $1 billion. Under the Trump plan, the consortium might borrow $800 billion while putting up $200 million in equity — but it would get a tax credit of 82 percent of that sum, so that its actual outlays would only be $36 million. And any future revenue from tolls would go to the people who put up that $36 million.

That’s both the New York Times and also Paul Krugman.

And it’s not just the billion bit either. WTF does he mean future toll revenues go to the capital owners? Operating costs first, debt second, only the rump of revenue goes to capital.

Has he let his wife write this one?

Posted in The Blogger Himself

Oooh, hmm

By Comments:16 Comments

From Matt Ridley:

After all, the purpose of all work is consumption, as Adam Smith nearly said. The economist Tim Worstall puts it this way: “There will continue to be jobs for humans as long as there are unsatisfied human wants and desires. Once all of those are satisfied then jobs don’t matter, do they?”

Will have to tell him that I’m not an economist……

Posted in The English

So the ghastly little oiks need protecting from their betters, do they?

By Comments:41 Comments

Working class students at an Oxford University college are to get a ‘class liberation officer’ to protect them from bullying and patronising comments.
Last week students at St Hilda’s College voted to create the new post, backing a motion that said working class students suffered from ‘microaggressions and classism at university’ and needed more support.

Posted in Politics

So when your electoral tactic is to call them ignorant hicks and you lose the election….

By Comments:79 Comments

Your best tactic is to respond to that electoral loss by calling them all ignorant hicks?

The same people who wear shirts that read “fuck your feelings” and rail against “political correctness” seem to believe that there should be no social consequences for their vote. I keep hearing calls for empathy and healing, civility and polite discourse. As if supporting a man who would fill his administration with white nationalists and misogynists is something to simply agree to disagree on.

Absolutely not. You don’t get to vote for a person who brags about sexual assault and expect that the women in your life will just shrug their shoulders. You don’t get to play the victim when people unfriend you on Facebook, as if being disliked for supporting a bigot is somehow worse than the suffering that marginalized people will endure under Trump. And you certainly do not get to enjoy a performance by people of color and those in the LGBT community without remark or protest when you enact policies and stoke hatred that put those very people’s lives in danger.

Being socially ostracized for supporting Trump is not an infringement of your rights, it’s a reasonable response by those of us who are disgusted, anxious, and afraid. I was recently accused by a writer of “vote shaming” – but there’s nothing wrong with being made to feel ashamed for doing something shameful.

Honey, they disagree with you about the world, that’s all.

Whether it’s Pence at a play or your Trump-voting uncle at Thanksgiving, there are people right now who should be made to feel uncomfortable. In a time when there is so much to protest, so much work to do, the booing is necessary – shame on us if we ever stop.