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The Anglosphere

There\’s a simple answer to this:

That raises a painful question. If Australians, Indians, Canadians, and even Americans can recognise the Anglosphere as a new factor in world politics, why is it something from which the Brits themselves shy?

It\’s that Brits themselves don\’t shy from dealing with the Anglosphere. As the very article itself points out, what creates the thing itself is that we all engage with it. However, the political classes are hesitant to even admit that it exists. There\’s been a 50 year "campaign" (not the right word, I don\’t mean to imply that everyone involved is consciously working towards this aim, rather that it\’s a general assumption) to detach the UK from that Anglosphere, from those cultural links, and attatch the country to Europe.

The stupidity of the aim itself becomes clear if we consider trade. The idea of barrier free trade across the continent is a good one. The larger a free trade area, the more specialisation there will be and thus the greater the wealth created. Unfortunately, at the same time we were told that we must raise barriers to our trade with the wider world, that Anglosphere. Again, the thought that places geographically close to each other should trade with each other is a reasonable one. But the decision to raise the barriers to long distance trade was signed up to only 6 months after the invention of container shipping: something which completely changed the economics of such long and short distance trade. As long as you\’re on the network (Brad Delong\’s done an excellent review on this) geographic distance now means very little: Bristol to Brindisi costs about the same as Bristol to Brisbane.

So the political move to more local trade began just as the very concept of "local" with respect to trade became moot.

Politicians are like Generals, always ready to fight the last war. Which is, of course, why we shouldn\’t allow them to plan the future for us.

Joy! Joy

More bansturbation!

Motorists could be banned from smoking behind the wheel of their own cars while driving them as part of their job, it has emerged.

Isn\’t that wonderful? Your car, with no one else in it, becomes another place where you may not smoke. It gets better too:

Prof Richard West, the Government\’s leading smoking adviser, has called for a complete ban on smoking at the wheel.

He said: "It may seem draconian but the Government should legislate."

Not even the fig leaf about passive smoking is there. Just, I\’m agin it so it should be banned.

Now, where did the wife put that festive length of hempen rope she bought to lower my blood pressure….

Iain Dale\’s Sex Life

The last thing I do before my head hits the pillow is check email or approve blog comments. You might think that\’s sad, but there you go. And it takes me approximately one minute to fall asleep.

Exciting, isn\’t it?

Shock, Horror!

The latest entry has the results of a ComRes Poll, which shows that 44% of MPs now favour Fixed Term Parliaments. Sadly only 25% of Tory MPs have seen the light. Meanwhile 41% of Labour MPs and 88% of LibDems are on the side of the righteous.

44% of parasites want to know how long they\’ll keep their job for.

Excellent News!

Teachers are leaving the profession in increasing numbers, with a quarter of a million no longer working in schools, according to figures published by the Conservatives yesterday.

w00t w00t!

So we\’re training too many teachers, which means we get to close down a few of the teacher training colleges!

Great, anyone got a list?

Errm, OK, Zoe

This is female sexuality packaged up as a product geared to generate profit: capitalism with tits, basically.

In a society where sex and sexuality are still oriented from a sexist, capitalist perspective, it\’s almost normal then for women to place value on how they are viewed by men, simultaneously objectifying and undermining their own sexuality in the process, as Ariel Levy highlighted.

This viewpoint is now practically ubiquitous: many women\’s attitudes around sex stem from the profit-driven perspective and they see and describe their own sexual desire as just an adjunct to the male experience – just like that young woman at the party.

What\’s the answer to this? How can we teach young women to place value on their own pleasure and their own experience? How can we teach young men that mutual respect and appreciation, not to mention mutual consent, are the pre-requisites to good sex? How can we ensure that sex is seen as something healthy and positive and fun, and not just a means to make money or a way for women to win male validation?

I believe we need to challenge the old-fashioned views of male and female sexuality where sex is something to be obtained by men, from women; we need to reject the sexist and offensive imagery in porn and replace it with a more progressive view of sexuality; we need to oppose the commodification of sexuality and refuse to buy into it; and most importantly we need to properly educate young people about sex and relationships so that they learn the value of each other, as well as the pleasure they can share.

My only question here is how? I\’m rather of the impression that the current state of affairs (sorry!) is a result of the last attempt to replace the prevailing ethos with a more progressive view of sexuality.

Gasp!

The centre cannot hold, and that\’s the good news in the United States these days. Quietly, doggedly, cities, regions, counties and states have refused to march to the Bush administration\’s drum when it comes to climate change, the environment and the war. Some of the recent changes are so sweeping that they will probably drag the nation along with them – notably efforts by Vermont, Massachusetts and California to set higher vehicle emissions standards and generally treat climate change as an environmental problem that can be addressed by regulation. The Bush administration has notoriously dragged its feet on doing anything about climate change, and it will now be dragged along by the states, themselves prodded forward by citizens.

The US is a federal state! Amazing finding, innit?

w00t, w00t!

A drug that reverses severe liver damage could be used to treat disease in heavy drinkers who find it impossible to give up alcohol. Scientists developed the drug after discovering a way to prevent the formation of excessive scar tissue caused by cirrhosis, hepatitis and other medical conditions.

To their surprise the drug not only slowed progression of the disease but also reversed damage to the organ.

Decent present for the New Year, ain\’t it?

Such a Pity

A girl of five who had half her brain removed has taken her first steps.

The careers that are closed to her. She\’s still vastly over qualified to be a politician for example.

Unintended Consequences

There\’s a reason this is happening:

The Chinese town of Guiyu is the graveyard of Christmas past.

It is where presents – game consoles, laptops, mobile phones – come to die.

It is also where they are reborn. In this giant scrap-yard, so dangerously polluted that its children are being clinically poisoned, the electronic objects of desire, a million tons of them a year, are broken apart, melted down, and washed in acid to be recycled into a new flood of imports for Christmas future.

Money, of course.

But no, it\’s not the gross capitalist exploitation of the workers sort of stuff at all. Rather, it\’s the environmental regulations imposed here in Europe that are causing it. A pile of electronics contains a number of valuable metals: copper, lead, tin and gold just to start with. There are a couple of ways to extract it: the hand method these Chinese are using (which allows you to extract the working chips as well) or you can have a highly mechanised operation. Essentially, you chop everything up into fine powder and then separate the metals as if it were an ore.

You can also be more sophisticated, there\’s a plant in Cheshire that recycles the solder for example, by exploiting a certain property of gold and solder. At 280 oC or so, they form a eutectic alloy (ie, the gold dissolves into the solder) so you can run the boards through a bath of the solder you have previously melted, and you get all the solder and the gold off the board. The chips then fall off and you have the copper and the board itself, which you can separate by chopping and flotation tanks. The fibres can be made into excellent insulation, the metals all recycled.

Now all of these methods are roughly comparable in cost….some cost more to do but you get more value from the recyclables, so the nett outcomes are comparable.

Except….except….most electronics waste streams also include monitors. The electronic parts can be treated the same way (there\’s also  nice plug of tungsten in there as well). But the glass on  CRT or TV is 25% lead oxide. There\’s no sensible (ie economic) method of recycling this. The logical thing is to recycle all the rest and stick the glass into landfill. But, of course, you\’re not allowed to stick lead into landfill, are you?

Which is something of a pity, for while metallic lead, or lead oxide, would indeed be dangerous to those in the future, lead tied up in glass is not. Glass is, in fact, one of the most stable materials known to man. The lead does not leach out into the groundwater. Not even acids extract it (which is why we use glass carboys to transport acids of course).

But the environmentalists see "lead" and insist that it cannot be landfilled, it must be treated as poisonous and thus disposed of in a very expensive manner. This then means that the more sophisticated, mechanical, recycling methods do not make economic sense to do here in Europe. Thus the trade to China where people are, as the article points out, killing themselves and their children in doing said recycling.

Wondrous, isn\’t it? By insisting on too much recycling, the rules make certain that not enough is done, by insisting that there should be no landfill, no lead entering the environment, they make sure that more lead does enter it.

Well done, eh?

 

Excellent News!

Isn\’t it?

Children as young as five are routinely being used to quarry stone for the booming British patio and garden landscaping market, one of Britain\’s leading stone importers has warned.

Chris Harrop, a director of Marshall\’s Plc, said that large sections of the gardening industry were turning a blind eye to the use of child labour in the sandstone quarries of Rajasthan, western India, in order to maximise profits.

Only about a third of the 200,000 tons of patio stone imported into the UK from India each year was sourced ethically, Mr Harrop said, with the rest often being produced in atrocious conditions.

Jobs, incomes, good things to have, eh? Sadly, that\’s not the way this bloke is thinking (quite apart from the fact that he imports "ethical" stone and faces price competition from those who don\’t). But it is the way he ought to think. Paul Krugman:

When the movement gets what it wants, the effects are often startlingly malign. For example, could anything be worse than having children work in sweatshops? Alas, yes. In 1993, child workers in Bangladesh were found to be producing clothing for Wal-Mart, and Senator Tom Harkin proposed legislation banning imports from countries employing underage workers. The direct result was that Bangladeshi textile factories stopped employing children. But did the children go back to school? Did they return to happy homes? Not according to Oxfam, which found that the displaced child workers ended up in even worse jobs, or on the streets — and that a significant number were forced into prostitution.

The point is that third-world countries aren\’t poor because their export workers earn low wages; it\’s the other way around. Because the countries are poor, even what look to us like bad jobs at bad wages are almost always much better than the alternatives.

So, buy ethical stone and force children into prostitution. Good idea, eh?

Charitable PR

Not a lot going on really, so why not print the PR release from a charity?

The credit crunch is driving more and more middle-class children to shoplift expensive gifts denied them by their parents, a charity has warned.

Now there\’s a reason to lower interest rates, eh?

He estimates that up to half the youngsters whose cases CCAS deals with are from "affluent but fractured backgrounds" – often as a result of divorce and separation. Young people tell counsellors they steal because of the boredom and "the buzz".

Ermm, so it\’s not the interest rates or the credit crunch then? Pretty good when your own press release belies your own point, isn\’t it?

And a Merry Christmas One and All!

Yes, I know, that\’s tomorrow. But read this.

Solar PV at less than $1 per Watt. Panels at less than $2 per Watt.

Plus a variation of Li batteries that provides 10 times the storage.

That\’s cheaper than electricity from coal for the capital costs. Plus, of course, no fuel costs, nor CO2 while running.

They\’re actually shipping such cells, started last week.

Of course, the climate change opera ain\’t over until the fat lady sings, but this sounds like some pretty decent arpeggios as she prepares to do so.

As Lomborg said, at some point solar will be cheaper than fossil, then we\’ll all switch, won\’t we?

What a Merry Christmas!

Planners and Targets!

Glorious Tractor Production is up again Comrades!

Targets intended to cut long waits in hospital Accident and Emergency units have cost the NHS in England £2 billion over the past five years, an assessment of healthcare information has concluded.

The extra costs come from patients who are in danger of having to wait more than four hours in A&E – the target limit – and are admitted to hospital “just in case”. Many are later discharged the same day, suggesting they had no real need to be admitted, with today – Christmas Eve – having the highest proportion of patients sent out on the day of admission.

Primary care trusts have to pay as much as £1,000 per admission, compared with about £100 for a patient treated in A&E. So the costs of admitting a patient – even for less than a day – are large.

Data collected by the CHKS Group, an independent provider of healthcare information, suggest that over the past five years, about two million extra patients were admitted to hospital through A&E units in England.

The way they\’ve collected the statistics across the different nations of the UK seems to show that they\’re correct. My, how lucky we are to have such sensible people attempting to direct, in detail, 1.3 million people from the centre!

Small Point

Yes, yes, the Fair Tax proposal is silly in the extreme (just, for example, think of the posibilities of fraud, carousel type stuff perhaps, with a sales tax of 30-40% to be paid in one hit at the point of retail….) but this is a little illogical:

Without doubt it would increase inequality in a country that is already as dangerously skewed as it was in the Gilded Age of the 1920s. Averaged across the 1920s, the richest 10% of Americans grabbed 43.6% of total income (excluding capital gains), and the richest 1% a whopping 17.3%. In 2005 the comparable figures were 44.3% and 17.4%. The richest Americans already have a much greater slice of the pie than they have had for several generations and are doing very nicely indeed under a graduated tax rate (complete with Bush\’s tax cuts). A flat tax would destroy the system that seeks to redistribute some of the country\’s finite wealth amongst its people in the form of schools, roads and other public goods. And before the whining begins, this isn\’t a cry of class warfare, it\’s economic common sense. Even if you reject arguments around fairness and moral obligations to those less fortunate, by and large economies with more equality are more prosperous and the countries more stable.

Hmm, prosperity and stability coming from equality. The author has just proved that the US is unequal (actually, the inequality by market incomes, which is what he\’s using, is about the same as that of Sweden. A Gini of .48 to one of .46. Sweden\’s taxation system does a great deal more to alter that distribution than the US system does. Oh, and the UK market income distribution is even more skewed at .51. These figures are from a recent Smeeding paper drawing on the Luxembourg Income Study.) : the US is also the most prosperous nation on earth (leaving aside micro-states) and at 220 years or so and rising with the same constitution (the longest in the world for a written one I think?) also the most stable.

So I think that contention about the link between equality, prosperity and stability can be put to one side, don\’t you think?