Get it right chaps!

Guy Rundle provides some clarification for anglophiles today in Stars & Swipes. A few tidbits:

While Britain swapped its manufacturing sector for financial ''services'', and the US swapped production for consumption, Germany, Sweden and others used manufacturing as a base to develop high-tech industry, value-added by free higher education. The results are obvious - exports account for up to a third of national output for such countries, while Britain and the US run trade deficits that average 5 per cent of GDP.

Poverty rates in these parts of Europe range from 5 to 11 per cent, whereas they are north of 20 per cent in Britain and the US. Household savings rates are stable, at about 12 per cent, more than triple that of the Anglosphere, which is dependent on breakneck consumer spending to keep the wheels moving. Medical coverage is universal, affordable public housing is widespread, yet budgets are -balanced (save for Germany's, whose deficit is nevertheless a fifth the size of the US).

Now admittedly Ireland, Greece, Spain and Italy are likely to default, causing vast financial confusion. And admittedly the cheap money that caused this problem (by offering cheap loans to businesses that could not pay it back with or without interest) came from France and Germany with quite a lot of help from the US and Britain. But I don't see the US and Britain doing much to bail these countries out.

So ... instead of sucking up to China and Japan and attempting to emulate the US and Britain, wouldn't it make more sense to learn from Europe? Imagine: we could rebuild a manufacturing sector and, gasp, value add our enormous natural resources. We could try educating our population again, just like we said we would back at Federation and again when we were supposed to become the clever country. Since all the smart money is on things getting very difficult (what with all that climate change stuff), this may actually be a good idea!

However, do we have the cultural characteristics found in northern Europe? Characteristics based in the harsher climate? I remember driving through Sweden marvelling at how neat all the farms looked - how extremely well maintained and compared them to Oz farms where junk has been an art form.  The I realised that when you get ten feet of snow for several months of the year everything had better be well maintained because if something fails no one will be coming to fix it. But I reckon we have a case of the Southern Europe's here: it's a lovely day, crack another tube. Doesn't auger well. I suppose country Australians have the resilience born of drought and flood but city Ozzers are living in fantasy land.

FTA with Japan and China? FFS!

More sensible advice for Mr Abbott from Ian Porter at the Age Market Porkies. My favourite quotes are:

"Under a free trade agreement (FTA) with China, Australian companies would have to face competition from government-owned enterprises, with all that entails in terms of subsidies and the ability to operate at sub-economic prices for long periods, long enough to drive the opposition out of business." That's assuming we don't just sell everything in Australia to Japan and Chine outright.

"The lack of effective trade unions or company unions means that all Chinese goods are unfairly priced, because the labour that goes into them is unfairly priced." Perhaps Mr A believes this is how things should be in Oz?

"Trade unions are banned in China. Yes, there is an official "trade union" run by Beijing, but there are no freely organised, independent unions that are allowed to stand up against enterprises and agitate for a fair share of the earnings. That's why 14 Foxconn employees had to resort to suicide in 2010 to make their point about unfair wages and conditions. The company's profit margins were so huge that Foxconn - contract manufacturer for Apple, Dell, Sony and Nokia, among others - was magically able to offer a 66 per cent pay rise, although there were conditions attached." Makes you feel good to be a consumer, doesn't it?

"As for (Japan being) a pluralist democracy, it is true that the Liberal Democratic Party did lose office in 2009 after almost 54 continuous years in power." 'Twould make Menzies and Howard proud.

"... the Japanese government has been manipulating its currency for decades, just like the communists across the East China Sea, if not in the same heavy-handed way."

"Japan does have a market economy, but you will find it much easier to find a distributor and a retailer for your product if you are a Japanese manufacturer." Not racism (on the part of the author), simple fact borne out by years of disappointment - see the sad story of Australian rice.

Midday in Melbong

Just went to see Woody Allen's new movie Midnight in Paris with my lovely wife and duaghters and actually enjoyed it. Admittedly we were in a comfy Gold Class cinema with flunkies bringing us delectible food as the movie progressed. It's a tough life.

I'm not normally an Owen Wilson fan but having him channelling Woody was a better choice than Woody playing the romantic lead himself (those days have gone, if they were ever there). All the usual New York left wing pseudo intellectual jokes were there along with a fair amount of spoken French (which I do not speak) rather than Spanish (which I do not speak) as in Vicky Cristina Barcelona.  Is this a pattern? I don't think Woody will be heading to Germany or the real Russia (after what he did to Russian literature in Love and Death I doubt if Putin would let him in, or if he got in, out) so I suppose it will be Italy next (probably Venice - very romantic you know - it's Woody's shtick since his early, funny movies).

I've always been a fan of time travel stories so it was a delight to have a present day movie also containing (spoiler alert) Cole Porter, F Scott Fitzgerald, Dali, Picasso, Gertrude Stein (who would have punched Woody in the mouth) and many other luminaries. So bravo Woody - may you live long enough to get all that reprocessed reading out again in cinematic form.

This optimism thing

For years I have been called a pessimist - always focussing on the negative and discounting the positive. I claim to be a realist - weighing the available information and acting according to that assessment but most people say 'nah!'. Now it finally turns out that optimists are optimistic because their brains filter out 'negative' information: which I assume means information our pre-rational brain regards as unhelpful in the survival and reproduction biz. See: BBC News.

Dr Chris Chambers, neuroscientist from the University of Cardiff, said: "It's very cool, a very elegant piece of work and fascinating.
"For me, this work highlights something that is becoming increasingly apparent in neuroscience, that a major part of brain function in decision-making is the testing of predictions against reality - in essence all people are 'scientists'.
"And despite how sophisticated these neural networks are, it is illuminating to see how the brain sometimes comes up with wrong and overly optimistic answers despite the evidence."
Optimism seem to be good for your health. A study on nearly 100,000 women showed a lower risk of heart disease and lower death rate in optimists.
But as Dr Sharot points out: "The negative aspect is that we underestimate risks."

While this is very helpful in explaining quite a lot of human behaviour which seems totally irrational (because it is) this is all a bit of a worry as well.

While our ancestors were evolving, always looking on the bright side of life might have helped them get through some pretty awful situations, like high infant mortality and high death rate generally, seasonal starvation and so on. But the world is different now (at the moment): it was recently suggested that we are now in the Anthropocene - the period of earth's history where the behaviour of our species actually changes the processes on the earth. So what we do counts big time, especially for our descendants.

If what we do follows from what we can think (some options having been weeded out by our optimistic brain before we even get to consciously consider them), then we may well be missing some important options. This is especially so when we consider that the human brain evolved to maximise our chances to stay alive and successfully reproduce - not to handle complex systems that interact with billions of other humans and the rest of the living world (and the atmoshpere and hydrospher for that matter as well).

The obvious points to be made are that all those optimists out there may be seriously underestimating some pretty serious risks, like their diet, the effectiveness of their political processes and social organisations, and just how bad things could get with climate change. How bad could it get? Pretty bad. How hard is it to get people to see these unpleasant things? Very hard. How long does it take to change people's minds and their systems? Too long.

Also, while our brain may test predictions against reality (or at least our previous experience of reality somewhat conditioned by our pre-existing tendancy to optimism), scientists have their work peer reviewed. Now that's a scary thought. What if climate scientists are optimists?

Fat, fatter, fattest, fatist, fatista

As a person who thinks of himself as 'fat' (because I am seriously overweight and all the excess fat is the part I'd rather dispose of rather than say, muscle, organs or bones - insert 'lose 40 pounds of ugly fat joke here) I have a few thoughts on the matter. I was sent an email offering me, as a special incentive to purchase some financial training courses (reputable ones I should add), a free copy of the book Sweet Poison: Why Sugar Makes Us Fat ( http://sweetpoison.com.au/). I immediately put a note on my Facebook where I said: 

Sounds like me. Might even read this, but we shouldn't discount low GI diets because they can be bent by industry (low GI chocolate for fuck's sake (FFS)). Also, the purpose of low GI diets is to reduce the amount of sugar we eat, having already reduced the amount of fat we eat. Since many processed foods contain lots of sugars (and some are worse than others) we need to be careful what we eat. And many unprocessed foods have surprising GI ratings as well. As for evolutionary considerations - that's for the blog I think.

So here it is.

I suppose journalist and traders tend towards being overweight because they tend to sit still in front of computers much of the time, so this was a good offer. When visiting the site and reading an extract I found something of a parallel life, though I am pleased not to have six children including twins rather having only three. Anyway, there was discussion of the Darwinian explanation for some of our bodily behaviour and it occurred to me for the very first time that I have been suckered, again. I am not a bad, self indulgent slob apparently: I  have a highly efficient body that does what it was adapted to do some tens of thousands of years ago when we were all hunter gatherers. All you skinnys out there: clearly you are mutants and come the inevitable ecological reckoning, I know who is going to starve. Sorry, years of suffering fatist prejudice came to the surface there, please ignore. So what do I mean?

Let's talk about fruit - we all know that it's good for you and that it's seasonal. While we were evolving we didn't have international transport of food or refrigeration. You ate the fruit when it was available. You ate as much as you could because you knew winter was coming (or at least your body knew and wasn't fussed by that newfangled self awareness that was wasting resources in your brain).  Your brain knew you would be starving for a while later on and the only thing that would get you through to the next spring would be if you could convert as much of that food as possible into fat. So some of our ancestors did. The ones who didn't didn't make it and neither did their kids. That's how natural selection works. Pretty grim really - not a good bed time story but one the kids have to learn at some stage unless they come from a place where the government feels they can legislate against reality (see US southern states in particular and possibly the Australian Liberal Party).

Now we have agriculture, transport, refrigeration and other forms of food storage so the selection pressure of winter (or monsoon - hello Thailand - or drought - hello Africa - or other periods when food would be unavailable) has receded. Good-oh. It's just that our brain and body is extremely conservative (in a good way) so it keeps urging us to eat more and convert that to fat for the bad times it just knows are just around the next bend. Not only that, we now have a super abundance of food. And not only good food, really terrible food as well. So we keep eating and we get fat because the selection pressure doesn't force our bodies to use the fat. But if we stop eating our bodies think the bad times have arrived and will only use as little fat as possible to try to keep us alive and meanwhile make us absolutely bloody ravenous and steps up the old fat conversion of any food we do happen to eat.

So we try to reduce what we eat, select what we eat more carefully and take lots of exercise (ho, ho - when you are carrying 40+ kg of extra fat exercise is a form of torture). As explained in the video below (which is truly excellent and worth investing the time on - I know it's long) even when we as a society decided to go fat free, we kept gaining weight! This was mainly because of the use of various sugars in processed food (Danger Will Robinson!) but also because we have just too damn much good food (at the moment).

Sugar: The Bitter Truth

So in conclusion, not only have I been suckered by the food industry, I've been suckered by my own brain! The only good news is, so I'm told, that once you significantly reduce sugars in your diet (along with bad fats and high GI foods) your body stabilises and adjusts its tastes so that you are no longer addicted to sugar, find exercise possible, lose weight and get on with whatever the non rational part of your brain tells you to do (reproduce and seek high status). O joy.

Prog trawling

I've been trawling for prog this weekend and discovered a number of items including a video of Tony Kaye & Billy Sherwood during their Japan Tour 2011 Live From THE BOTTOM LINE NAGOYA - the whole concert here. I'm quite pleased with finding that.

 Also, Sherwood has another band called Circa with Tony Kaye and originally Alan White on drums (of course) and they have released three albums. Circa has a Youtube channel with samples of their stuff including parts of a 40 minute Yes retrospective - bits from every period of Yes's 40 year history including some less common music from Tormato as well as the new stuff. I also found that Sherwood is up to his fifth solo album (clearly I haven't been paying attention). The Youtube retrospective is to be found in its entirety on the Circa Live DVD (available on their website nowhere near you). Some of the Live music is available for download from the evil Apple iTunes people.

Then I discovered there is a live CD of the Yes album Union on amazon.co.uk.While I know many people think it appalling, I quite like bits of it. Also I regard it fondly because I remember coming across it in a huge Mall totally unexpectedly and it relieved my feeling that prog was dead.

And then I discovered there is something odd going on with Steve Hackett and Camino records and I have missed three CDs: Live Rails, Out of the Tunnel's Mouth with a bonus CD and the most recent Beyond the Shrouded Horizon a double CD. I am almost but not quite progged out.

Glass Hammer has a new CD coming out: Cor Cordium with the same crew as the last one. I may have to have a little rest now.

Everything's a critic

I was ripping an Enya CD when another program popped up to try and play it. The program whirred for a while and then announced 'No music found'. Not only is everyone a critic, now everything's a critic! 

 And now the technical writer annotated draft version of the same joke.

I was using Windows Media Player to rip my (legal) copy of Enya's The Memory of Trees onto my now venerable son derived PC (the PC is now venerable not my son, although there may be a small tribe somewhere in cyber space that venerates him for reasons I'd best not know) when the pre-installed Acer media player Acer Arcade Deluxe (ALWAYS beware of anything with the word 'Deluxe' in its name - it indicates a desire to make people believe the product is superior without the ability to make it so ['Make it so Number One.' How degrading is that naval terminology anyway, especially if you happen to be the Second Officer? And if that's how the third most important person is referred to, what must really be happening to the cabin boy? Arrrrr Jim lad. Sorry.] popped up to also try and play the CD. Naturally there was a resource conflict and much hanging of programs, whirring and such while I tried to terminate Arcade Reflux (with extreme prejudice) with no success. Eventually the message 'No music found' displayed on Arcade Deluxe's output panel. Not only is everyone a critic, now everything's a critic! But I still couldn't close Arcade Deluxe even using Task Manager until I manually closed all the individual processes which were using over 100M of memory to do absolutely nothing! I must delink this from autoplay, it's getting on my nerves. LOL. And another thing ...

Band names

I bought some CDs from Concert Live recently.

These fine souls record live gigs and have CDs of the performance ready for sale at the end of the performance. Apart from being a pretty cool use of technology you can choose between various performances and for people in the Antipodes like me get as close as possible to hearing bands live who are never going to tour here. We are So Far Away. Anyway they had an inserted ad for a mob called www.plastichead.com who sell 'official' rock merchandise.

Despite the .com PlasticHead is also in the UK so everything costs too much (damn those strong currencies) but I thought I'd go there and have a look. Little did I realise it was all a cover for Satanicness of the most heinous kind. Not really - they just flog lots of Satan rock it seems. But what I did discover was that band names have definitely moved on from the GOD (Good Old Days). Names like Anthrax are still there but there is a move towards the necrotic and offensive. Some new favourites: Skeletonwitch (not so much), Septic Flesh, Havok, Altar of Plagues and Discharge (which even my twenty year old son who savours all things offensive finds a bit off). But wait there is more: you can go to an A - Z of names which link to whatever they have to flog (which seems like a lot). Must go, I've just found a DVD of Emerson, Lake & Palmer's 40 year Anniversary concert (someone stop me).

Sweet, sweet Sarah. Wherefore dost thou goest?

Damn. Sarah Palin's not running for US President. NY Times.

Now some people may be singing Hallelujah and dancing for joy but think about it: Sarah has done the world a big service by exposing just how totally insane some Republicans are, most importantly to other Republicans (everyone else already knew). But by not running for POTUS (President Of The United States - ask the Secret Service - They Sure DO Like Acronyms) she will not be providing the biggest possible service - splitting the Republican vote and getting even the most apathetic non voters out to avoid the unthinkable (again - they may not have forgotten Bush/Cheney 1 & 2). Still, she's planning on being highly 'visible' so she may still have those effects though perhaps without the spine chilling frisson of horror that accompanies the idea of her becoming POTUS.

Wondering what it is about politicians of a religious bent that is so scary,  I think it is their certainty of the rightness of their decisions that I find most concerning. Certainty is really hard to come by in science and in the real world generally but if you happen to believe something hard enough, in the minds of these people somehow that supposedly gives you licence to make life or death decisions for other people.

And the ability to discount rational argument when presented by a sinner is handy too - logic is no longer independent.

Also, their belief in life after death gives them a 'Get Out Of Jail Free' card in their thinking. Basically: The Lord wouldn't really let us down but if we have to die BUT we (the saved) are at least bound for the light eternal (let's not worry about the sinners because they made their choice to renounce The Way)'. This sort of thinking really really shouldn't be there when making decisions for both the sinners and the saved because it allows for serious consideration of very extreme actions (let's bomb the Russkis).

But the really scary ones are the ones who are deeply religious but don't make a big deal of it. Until they are elected. So maybe I should be thanking Tony Abbott for his efforts a la Sarah Palin?