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August 2010

What a wonderful argument

Rick Steiner, a former University of Alaska marine biologist, suggested that the White House had been too eager to try to put the oil spill behind it, with Democrats in Congress facing tough election fights in November.

\”It seems that there was a rush to declare this done, and there were obvious political objectives there,\” he said. \”Even if there is not a drop of oil out there, and it had truly magically vanished, it would still be an environmental disaster caused by the toxic shock of the release of 5m barrels of oil.\”

Despite there being little to no effect it\’s still and environmental disaster because we prodded Gaia.

On the rain forests

Yes, I think we know how this one goes:

Climate change and illegal logging could wipe out rainforest wildlife by 2100
Most of the plants and animals found in rainforests today could die out by the end of the century because of climate change and illegal logging, according to a new study

The qualifier of \”logging\” will quickly get dropped and the meme that climate change will wipe out the rain forests will spread.

What would be interesting would be to find out what the report itself actually says about the impact of each different cause but it\’s paywalled unfortunately.

Daniel Nepstad, an ecologist at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, said only a cut in greenhouse gases can save the world’s wildlife.

\”This study is the strongest evidence yet that the world\’s natural ecosystems will undergo profound changes — including severe alterations in their species composition — through the combined influence of climate change and land use,\” he said.

“Conservation of the world\’s biota, as we know it, will depend upon rapid, steep declines in greenhouse gas emissions.\”

Oh look, it\’s happening already. And Nepstead was one of those behind the dodgy bits in Amazongate as well.

The drugalyser

Colour me sceptical:

It hopes the so-called “drugalyser” will make it easier to catch and prosecute offenders and help reduce accidents. The drug testers will be able to screen for an array of illegal substances, including cocaine and ecstasy.

A positive result would mean that police would no longer have to wait for permission from a doctor before a blood test could be taken to be used as evidence in court.

No, not about the desirability of such a test. People spaced out on drugs are as bad as those drunk, dangerous to other road users and thus righteously to be prosecuted.

No, rather, it\’s the technology that worries. Here\’s the detection times that such oral based testing has:

Detection in saliva tests begins almost immediately upon use of the following substances, and lasts for approximately the following times:

NOTE: Saliva tests are highly sensitive and detection times can vary considerably based on the cutoffs used.

So, the presence of such drugs, or their metabolytes, in such a sample does not in fact show being under the influence of said drugs. For someone is not driving (or any other way) impaired two days after taking smack, nor several days after taking meth etc.

And yes, poppy seed pastries can indeed give a false positive for opiates.

The test are good for checking whether someone has been taking drugs. They\’re not good for checking whether someone was actually under their influence at the time of driving.

As I\’ve been saying

Welfare tenants stay put in the same house for a very long time. Over twenty years, they will enjoy the benefit of subsidised rent worth £65,000 at Net Present Value.

It simply isn\’t true that the poor have no assets.

The average inhabitant of a council house has an asset worth £65,000….the council tenancy itself.

We were told by the Hills Report that the 90th percentile had £850,000 in assets and the 10th percentile £8,000.

Outrageously untrue, a simple bare faced lie.

For we\’ve all got a very valuable financial asset: the welfare state.

I guess we have to conclude that some politicians really are irredeemably dim

\”We know manufacturing produces good jobs, high-paying jobs,\” House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) said this week as Democrats released a report showcasing small gains in manufacturing since Obama took office.

Err, no we don\’t actually.

We know that jobs with high labour productivity produce high pay.

We also know that certain manufacturing processes have high labour productivity.

Just as we also know that certain service processes have high labour productivity.

We also know that certain manufacturing processes have low labour productivity: textiles being an obvious example. Just as we also know that certain service sector processes have low labour productivity: burger slinging perhaps.

What produces the high pay is the high productivity, not whether that productivity is in manufacturing or services.

Just as an example, does anyone think that bringing the Bangladeshi Nike factories to the US is going to result in high paying jobs in the US? Or moving Foxxconn\’s 800,000 assembly jobs currently paying $300 a month to the US will?

Yes, quite.

On the value of speculation in food markets

Via, this.

Since the mid-2000s, as market economics expanded in the North, food prices tended to shoot up during the lean season of April~May every year. After potato and barley harvests in late June, prices again rise until September, when food prices tend to drop in anticipation of fall grain harvests. Because of this trend, most market traders spend November and December concentrating on buying up food stocks, and they then actively sell their food stores after April. Government authorities have also been known to stockpile food at the end of a year in order to resell after April at considerably higher prices. This regular fluctuation of prices also leads most North Koreans to stockpile all the food they can in December and January.

Straight out of Adam Smith that is.

The speculation, the stocking and hoarding, help to reduce the variability in prices.

Isn\’t it interesting to see that even in a socialist hell hole like North Korea the basic economic verities still apply?

So now they\’re arguing against social and geographical mobility?

What a weird argument. The usual complaint is that the country doesn\’t have enough social mobility.

I\’m not blind to the awful, stomach-churning stress of living alongside tenants who believe in the right to do what they like and be protected from eviction. But transience is the enemy of community. A well-functioning community, in which people know each other and are used to getting together to solve problems, can contain the disruption caused by antisocial householders and prevent isolated incidents from turning into sustained campaigns.

Estates with high levels of social problems are the ones with the highest turnover of tenancies: they are situated in the areas of worst-quality housing, with the poorest reputations, and with the worst amenities. People are housed in them because they are desperate: they quickly realise it\’s not a good place to live and they move to better housing as soon as circumstances allow.

So we shouldn\’t have social or geographical mobility in order to make council estates better?

Recast this is the \”know thy place, peasant\” argument and it\’s as unappealing coming from Lynsey Hanley as it is  from Sir Jonthan Porritt Bt, CBE, when he tells us that we should all be peasants in the fields again.

With an Old Etonian Baronet telling us what to do of course.

As I\’ve been known to say

It\’s something that really bugs me about the British left:

So there is a value to industrial action that is innate to the process, regardless of the outcome: it keeps the vocabulary, the mechanics and the muscle of conflict alive. These are things we\’re going to have more and more use for.

They can be so concerned about the process that little is left to consider the outcome. Here it\’s that strikes never seem to achieve very much but as long as they keep alive the the process of conflict they\’re great.

In other areas it\’s that markets create winners and losers….ignoring the way in which they make everyone better off over time. Or that capitalism is exploitation, which we shouldn\’t have, again ignoring what happens over time.

And it gets more important than that as well. The claim is that we should be am modern social democracy, more like the Nordics. But no one seems willing to go and look at what the Nordics are, extremely, classically, liberal economies with lots of redistribution on top. But no one on the left here argues for that classical liberalism for that\’s not the desired process…failing to see that you can only actually have the huge redistribution and continued economic growth if you have the classical liberalism underneath to provide the wealth to be redistributed.

I could go on with examples (workers should have greater employment rights to reduce the ability of companies to make them unemployed….yet in aggregate we see that strong employment rights increase unemployment….) but you get the point.

You probably got it first time I whined about it. The British left does much too much whining about the process of doing things and pays far too little attention to the actual methods of reaching the goals they claim to desire.

On a theme you see mentioned around here

Wives who claim their husbands should help out more around the house because women work a \”double shift\” at the office and in the home are misguided, according to research.

If both paid work and unpaid duties such as housework, care and voluntary work are taken into account, husbands actually contribute more than their fair share to the household, experts found.

You need to add paid, market, work and unpaid, household, work together in order to get the true amount of work being done. And it\’s around 8 hours a day for both men and women on average.

And that number has been trending downwards for generations.

There is no \”ever longer working hours\” and women do not work longer hours than men.

Two myths destroyed for the price of one if you like.

Not sure you know

US District Court Chief Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco defied the state\’s supreme court and a narrow majority of its voters by ruling that homosexuals and lesbians have a right in the federal constitution to marry on an equal basis with heterosexuals.

Whether or not gay marriage should be allowed is very different indeed from whether there is any constitutional right to it.

And given that the US federal constitution leaves marriage as something for the States to deal with, and given that said constitution has absolutely nothing at all to say about Teh Gays, I\’m really not all that sure that there is a federal cosntitutional right to gay marriage.

This isn\’t that difficult you know?

A group of 40 American billionaires have pledged at least half their fortunes to charity as part of a campaign by the financier Warren Buffett and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

Isn\’t that just lovely?

Mr Buffett has promised to donate more than 99 per cent of his estimated $47 billion (£30 billion) fortune and is giving most of it in annual instalments to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The important word there is \”most\”.

For while Mr. Buffett has indeed made a very large indeed donation to that Gates Foundation, he\’s also made a very large one indeed (although not quite so large) to a more traditional family foundation. Some $6.7 billion if memory serves me correctly.

And why does this matter? Well, it helps to explain the first part, all these billionaires willing to donate to charity. For such family foundations allow the cash to be put into them tax free. And then the cash can be invested attracting no tax on any returns to it over the generations. Subject only to paying out 5% of assets (I think I\’ve got that right) each year in charitable works. Such 5% can be made up of paying family members to administer the trust…..

Which is why Joe Kennedy left his money to a series of family trusts, the Hewletts, Packards, Fords, Rockefellers and so on.

Leaving the money to a \”charity\” is in fact the American way of making sure that a) no tax is paid on it and b) that the heirs cannot piss away the capital.

So, given that the traditional Amercian manner of making sure you keep the money in the family is to give it to a charity the news that 40 billionaires have been presuaded to leave their money to charity really isn\’t all that surprising. Nor is it really something that might have taken a great deal of persuasion to bring about.

Jim Glass has a great piece on this somewhere in his archives.

Update: It\’s The Guardian that manages to raise this important point:

Pablo Eisenberg, a senior fellow at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute, at Georgetown University, Washington DC, said ultra-wealthy donors tend to give money to higher education, arts and established healthcare causes, with relatively little going to poverty reduction, disability causes or to disadvantaged ethnic minority communities. Billionaires generally gave away funds through tax advantageous foundations.

\”These mega-foundations, which are effectively family enterprises with no accountability, are going to dictate public policy priorities for this country,\” said Eisenberg. \”I\’m not sure that tax receipts haven\’t done a better job, over time, of meeting the needs of our neediest people, than philanthropists.\”

Not that I agree with Eisenberg either but he at least is hinting at the point I\’m making.

Worthless, entirely worthless

Tony Benn launches a \”fight the cuts\” open letter.

Not worth taking seriously at all.

Neither Sunny Hundal nor R Murphy are on the list of signatories so clearly it\’s not important at all.

(More seriously the bunch of raving Trots who did sign it gives us a decent enough list of those up against the wall when the Revolution comes. Serwotka, Lucas, Crowe, Lyndsey German for goodness sake, Salma Yaqoob, …..not really a joke either, as the revolution does always eat its own)

Senator Richard G Lugar

Since the recession began in late 2007, the use of federal free and reduced-price school lunches has increased by 13.7 percent. Twenty-one million children — roughly two-thirds of the students eating school lunches — benefit from the program.

For many of these children, school lunches represent the bulk of the nutrition they receive during the day, and it is imperative that there are no gaps in providing these meals.

OK.

Nearly one-third of our children are either overweight or obese, which is telling evidence of greater social problems. Indeed, it’s become a national security issue — 27 percent of 17- to 24-year-olds weigh too much to enlist in the military, according to a recent study by a group of retired generals and admirals. This cannot continue.

So you\’re going to stop feeding them so much then?

Of course not, don\’t be silly. He wants to expand the program, not contract it.

Oh Lordy

We\’re in serious trouble when the leader writers of the \”newspaper of record\” manage to get such simple things wrong:

It has been disturbing to hear and read the vitriol and outright bigotry surrounding the building of a mosque two blocks from the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. So it was inspiring when New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission voted 9 to 0 on Tuesday to reaffirm one of the basic tenets of democracy: religious tolerance.

Religious tolerance has precisely the square root of fuck all to do with democracy.

It\’s to do with liberty.

And liberty and democracy are very much not the same thing: Jim Crow existed in a democracy and Hong Kong had no democracy but an awfully large amount of liberty.

Ooooh, dearie me Paul

I don\’t really think you want to say that:

Secondly, the Tory vision of Big Society is based on bare ideological assertion. Voluntary groups are staffed by volunteers, who are by definition amateurs. Take away the centralised finances allowing these volunteers to organise and how will volunteer amateurs be able to provide anything, lacking as they will the finances required for service-provision? The fantasy that services provided by trained professionals can be replaced with spontaneous volunteer groups, and without significant falls in quality or reliability, reflects right-wing preferences for a smaller state not serious policy-making.

So mutuals won\’t work because what do the customers know about management? So, bang goes the idea of having the Building Societies back. Co-ops won\’t work because what on earth do the workers know about the upper reaches of managment? Look forward to John Lewis filing for bankruptcy next Tuesday arvo.

And of course the Friendly Societies, those mutuals, burial clubs, insurance companies, pension, unemployment benefit thingies, they never existed because of course free people in a free society never can managed to get together for their own mutual benefit.

No, you see, they always and everywhere require the professionals from the State to come and show them how it\’s done, don\’t they?

As indeed does every private sector company that has ever existed. Absolutely none of them have at all been founded by amateurs who just got together and started doing stuff. Bill Gates and Paul Allen, James Dyson, Edison and FA Woolworth, all government trained and subsidised experts before they even started.

Sweet Jeebus, damn near every organisation, club, company and and drinking hole in our entire society was started by some amateur volunteer just trying things out for size.

Quote of the day

Chávez, in other words, is very close to the climactic moment when he will announce that he is a poached egg and that he requires a very large piece of buttered toast so that he can lie down and take a soothing nap.

Hitch.

No, this is not a dig at Ritchie, this is to praise Ritchie!

From the depths of the Google Cache and well timed screen shots being taken.

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Right, so in the comments there was then:

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Now the reason this is a congratulation to R. Murphy is that we can now see that he is in fact able to correct errors.

OK, delete them rather than utter a \”whoopsie\” but that is an improvement still.

So, nominations for any other errors that should be corrected?

My God, the lying bastards…..

Did you know that renewables only get a piffling $50 billion a year in subsidies while those bastards over in hte fossil fuel industry get ten times as much?

The report concludes that in 2009 governments provided subsidies worth between $43bn (£27bn) and $46bn to renewable energy and biofuel industries, including support provided through feed-in tariffs, renewable energy credits, tax credits, cash grants and other direct subsidies.

In contrast, estimates from the International Energy Agency (IEA) released in June showed that $557bn was spent by governments during 2008 to subsidise the fossil fuel industry.

Now no, that\’s not the lie. That\’s the true part.

And yes, of course those subsidies to fossil fuels should be done away with. And yes it would have a wonderful effect on CO2 emissions. But that\’s not the reason to do it of course. And it\’s also not where the lie is.

The lie is here:

However, the report will further increase pressure on G20 countries to make good on their recent pledge to phase out fossil fuel subsidies – a move that the IEA believes could single-handedly slash global carbon emissions by up to seven per cent.

No, the IEA says no such damn fool thing.

Because what the lying bastards have done is equated two very different indeed sets of subsidies.

The renewables subsidies are largely the US, Germany and a bit from China (the UK\’s aren\’t really up and running in volume as yet but they will be soon).

When looking at the way they\’ve reported the figures we are expected to conclude that it\’s these same governments which are providing the fossil fuel subsidies that the IEA is complaining about, yes? But not, that\’s not what is happening at all:

Iran was identified as having the highest subsidies at about $101bn, or approximately a third of the country\’s annual budget. \”Chronic under-pricing of domestic energy in Iran has resulted in enormous subsidies and a major burden on the economy that is forcing reliance on imports of refined products,\” the study concluded. \”Steep economic, political and social hurdles will need to be overcome if Iran is to realise lasting reform.\”

I can\’t find the full IEA report but I have found the slides used to illustrate it. Here.

Last page. Who are the subsidisers? In order, Iran,  Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, China, Egypt, Venezuela, Mexico, Indonesia, Argentina, Iraq, Uzbekistan, UAE and so on….

Absolutely none of the advanced industrialised countries are providing sufficient subsidy to even make the list. Only 8 of the G-20 do ….and none of the rich ones.

So, you see what they\’ve done? They\’ve compared what poor countries do to subsidise fossil fuels with what rich countries do to subsidise renewables….and yet left us with the impression that it\’s all rich countries doing both.

Think for a moment: they\’re comparing $50 billion with $550 billion, as if it is therefore obvious that we (the US, UK etc) should therefore both reduce fossil sibsidies and increase renewables. But what on earth does Iran subsidising petrol have to do with how much the UK or Germany should subsidise solar PV?

Quite, nothing.

Now I\’m all in favour of those fossil subsidies being entirely done away with but not for climate change reasons. Rather, WTF is a poor place like Iran doing giving $100 billion to car drivers?

Or, if you prefer, sure, get rid of those subsidies but don\’t think that they\’ve got anything at all to do with us here in the rich world at all.

Hurrah, hurrah!

David Cameron announces plan to end lifetime council tenancies

Council homes for life to be replaced by tenancies lasting as little as five years based on need and income

Damn right.

That at one point in your life you are in need of aid in getting housing is a perfectly good justification for you to be given aid in housing at one time in your life.

Just as not being able to afford food is a good reason for the rest of us to chip in and give you money for food.

However, that you at one point in your life need money for food is not a good reason for the rest of us to subsidise your food for life. Nor is being in need of housing at one point a good reason for the rest of us to subsidise your housing for life.

Time limits on council housing, yup, bring it on!

The homeless charity Shelter said tonight: \”We do not believe the big question in housing policy is security of tenure for new tenants. The prime minister has sidestepped the fundamental cause of our housing crisis – the desperate lack of affordable housing supply.\”

That shortage of course in part being caused by hundreds of thousands of people who no longer need housing subsidy still getting it.

Twats.