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Submarine coming through!

I'm in a holding pattern on the blog just now because I'm frantically busy with end-of-year work: publisher production departments like to clear their desks before the office shuts down for a fortnight, and they expect to come back to a full in-tray on January 4th, and of course authors don't have families or friends to socialize with, so why not share the joy of a tight deadline copy edit check with your loved ones this festive season?

That's not actually what I'm working on right now, but I am actually working way more than usual, and as a result I hope to have good news to share with you early in the new year.

As for the blog?

I ought to blog about either an update on my COVID19 forecast, or an update on my Brexit forecast, but those are basically boring and disgusting and demoralizing and would take precious brain cells away from bringing you the next book, so naaah. If you feel like updating me with your predictions for 2021 in the comments below, though, go right ahead.

Finally, I have one thought to leave you with. Apparently the Washington Post ran a write-in competition for the best summary of 2020, and the winner (a nine year old from the mid-west) came up with this totally accurate description: "2020 was like taking care to look both ways before you cross the road, and then being hit by a submarine."

Happy solstice!

1817 Comments

1:

"OK, boomer" is what you say after being hit by a submarine.

2:

Gotta feel sorry for that kid. Nine years old and he'll probably never do better than that.

3:

I cannot tell you how screwed we all are, here in Brexitland, without resorting to the phrase:

"We are so screwed, that surgeons were unable to recover the corkscrew"

That's us, here; and on the other side of the Atlantic, Covid-19 is within reach of every adult in the United States.

4:

Yeah Apart from the year I woke up in hospital, eventually lost more blood than I started with, & altered my behaviour to destroy my first marriage ... 2020 has been the long slow burning pits - is there any hope that 2021 will be any better? NO IDEA I'm still hoping for some sort of Brexshit "deal" - but I'm not holding my breath. Even worse, will DJT & his paid minions try something really, terminally stupid between now & 20th Jan 2021?

5:

will DJT & his paid minions try something really, terminally stupid between now & 20th Jan 2021?

Why would they change what they've been doing for four years? Of course they'll keep doing stupid things.

For your amusement, MacLean's (a Canadian news magazine) asked, "Where Might Donald Trump Run to Avoid Prison?". People have been considering that for a while but it's striking to see the question openly asked in the media.

6:

As one of the few posters that is gloomier than you are, I shall spare people my predictions - except that I expect Trump will continue to make the news, mainly as a defendent in civil suits and possibly a plaintiff in bankruptcy proceedings.

Ray Bradbury was once a 9 year old from the midwest.

8:

Re: 'MacLean's (a Canadian news magazine) asked, "Where Might Donald Trump Run to Avoid Prison?".'

Since his neighbors in Mar-A-Lago have already announced to the media that they've taken steps to stop DT making M-A-L his permanent home, my guess is: any English-speaking place where he can golf with other entitled twats, so Scotland is a possibility.

Or he could get on a boat and never come within 100 miles of any country that has an extradition treaty with the USA. As long has he could golf off the deck of the boat and catch his fave Faux news, he'd be fine. He could probably even hire a retired McDonald's short order cook to make his favorite meal [BigMac, TM].

Or, he could buy an island somewhere and declare it a sovereign state. NZ has a few small isles for sale at not bad prices (i.e., less than for same in the Caribbean).

9:

Why would they change what they've been doing for four years? Of course they'll keep doing stupid things.

Well, Greg Tingey asked about terminally stupid things. They are not there yet.

10:

SFR so Scotland is a possibility. Just WHAT are you smoking?

11:

...so Scotland is a possibility

If the Scots don't like you, you'll hear about it. [citation needed]

Living in Scotland would not sooth his vast and fragile ego. (Video interviews from Samantha Bee and Vice, as examples...) Besides, Scotland has an extradition treaty with the US.

TL/DR: Maclean's gives the obvious choices of Russia and Saudi Arabia but adds the UAR, on the grounds that Dubai is flashy, built on other people's money, and under the gilding a wasteland - so, totally on brand for The Donald.

12:

Well, Greg Tingey asked about terminally stupid things. They are not there yet.

Over 300,000 Americans might disagree with that.

OK, roughly half of them were probably Republicans and so died of a hoax not a virus, but that still leaves over 100,000 fatalities who might have chosen not to die to stroke someone's ego…

13:

That's a lot snarkier than MacLeans usually gets about right-wing politicians and businesspeople :-/

14:

To abuse the late Sir Pterry's legacy, it appears from where I sit that Brexit is so screwed up that it can slide sideways through a bent corkscrew without touching metal.

As for the US...pray for January 5th to be a double-win for democrats in the Georgia senate race. That will put McConnell out of power. Or better than prayer, donate and all that good stuff.

My prediction for January is that VP Renfield votes Biden in (in his role as head of the senate) then flees for Europe. Failing to get asylum in Poland, IQ.45 fires him, then tries to issue a self-pardon in his last days in office. Since that's illegal under common law going back to the time of kings, and since there's no provision for replacing a VP in the normal course of things, he leaves office without being pardoned for anything he did. Yes, I'll bet this is wrong in whole and in detail, but it's fun to contemplate such things.

15:

Aside from the tiny core of Kenneyites, Canadians in general have adjudged Trump tacky. Trump is loathed, even among Canadian mammonites. MacLeans has noticed.

16:

Scott Sanford @ 5: For your amusement, MacLean's (a Canadian news magazine) asked, "Where Might Donald Trump Run to Avoid Prison?".

That was an amusing article, yes. But I don't think much of their conclusion that he'll end up in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

For one thing, his wife and daughter would never want to go there. For another, the United Arab Emirates still "forcibly disappear" expats as well as their own citizens. And then, they torture them.

This is an amusing article in Wikipedia, if you think of Trump while reading it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_United_Arab_Emirates

So, I'm still betting on Zurich, in Switzerland, as the most likely place for him to flee.

17:

There are some grounds to believe that the mRNA vaccines are NOT sterilizing vaccines (which prevent infection or transmission), but functional vaccines, which prevent severe symptoms.

There's definite grounds to believe that functional vaccines increase the virculence of disease.

It takes (thereabouts of) sixty days for the mRNA vaccines to take full effect. We are already seeing what could be described as lamentable anti-infection practices; it is hard to imagine that vaccine rollout won't make those worse, and have those become worse prematurely in a context of vaccine effectiveness. (Even if the vaccine rollout manages to avoid being inappropriately sequenced on grounds other than risk everywhere.)

So I figure we'll be experiencing one of those "oops" moments in the vicinity of July of 2021.

(I will be getting the vaccine just the instant it's available to me. Absolutely the most risk-reducing single thing you can do for yourself. It's just not a systemically sufficient thing to be doing, and a lot of people seem to be rather lost on that point.)

18:

OK, roughly half of them were probably Republicans and so died of a hoax not a virus, but that still leaves over 100,000 fatalities who might have chosen not to die to stroke someone's ego… I have not seen a breakdown. FWIW, about 75 percent of US elected officials who are publicly known to have contracted a SARS-CoV-2 infection are Republicans. That's a 3-1 ratio.

19:

But I don't think much of their conclusion that he'll end up in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

You raise valid objections. You may also have thought this through better than Donald.

His wife and daughter certainly would not want to visit him in the UAR. But then, would they want to visit him anywhere else? Melania might be happy to return to New York while Donald flies off to another hemisphere.

As for the human rights problems... Donald is not a human for these purposes. Humans are, you know, those loud monkeys that run around yelling things and poking their smartphones. Donald is a wandering bundle of money that emits bullshit and bribes; Dubai will happily ignore the first and pocket the second. Only if the money runs out does he become a human again, at which point he's probably most profitable deported to whatever law enforcement group is willing to pay for him. The Wiki article says "expats involved in insulting Islam are liable for deportation," so there'd be plenty of excuses when they were finished vacuuming out his wallet.

I suspect he wouldn't go there to live, though he might frequently visit. He's already got business interests in Saudi Arabia so moving there is an easy sell for public perception. If he runs for Russia then the legend makes him Putin's puppet forever.

20:

So I figure we'll be experiencing one of those "oops" moments in the vicinity of July of 2021. I'm dreading this. Even if the vaccine is effectively sterilizing, mask and distancing discipline will suffer as people get sloppy, but before there is herd immunity, e.g. vaccinated people will start not wearing masks. And a market in false proof of vaccination documents will emerge and need to be stomped on.

Any grounds based on the clinical trials (or experiences earlier mRNA vaccines) to believe that the Pfizer and Moderna (and etc?) vaccines are not sterilizing but just protective?

21:

I predict that the US Space Force will unveil the new name for America's vaunted space warriors. And it will be...Guardians. This will, in turn, lead to mockery throughout the Interwebs and a million voices catcalling "I am Groot!" before falling suddenly. In disgust.

Oh wait, this already happened: https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/18/22189637/space-force-military-branch-official-name-guardians

And in other Space Farce Space Force news, the USSF commander said that the new service operates like a startup, although he left it unclear when they'll be seeking their next round of venture capital. Fortunately, his mantra is "Big is slow," so obviously the USSF is planning on being the perky underdogs in the US defense behemoth for the rest of their existence.

(/Facepalm)

22:

That is a surprisingly wise nine year old.

23:

Both trials (for the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines) used symptoms, rather than testing for infection, when evaluating the vaccine candidates. (This is likely because the test capacity to run forty thousand people through frequent testing could not be made available.) So we don't know that either mRNA vaccine is sterilising because this wasn't tested in the trials.

The expectation from the animal models and other indications is that upper respiratory tract sterilizing immunity won't be produced; https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31976-0/fulltext

(Lots of the surrounding disease characterization hasn't happened yet; it's only existed for about a year. It makes evaluating the vaccines more difficult because it increases the scope of doubt.)

The "non-sterilizing" expectation fits in with the way immunity builds over time with the vaccines, the way coronaviruses in general work, and the way the case-curve goes in the vaccinated arm of the vaccine trials; all suggestive that it's not a sterilizing vaccine.

So it's a really good idea to vaccinate people but it's NOT like smallpox where vaccination alone can extirpate the disease.

24:

Bill Arnold @ 20 : "Any grounds based on the clinical trials (or experiences earlier mRNA vaccines) to believe that the Pfizer and Moderna (and etc?) vaccines are not sterilizing but just protective?"

There are no earlier mRNA vaccines for humans. This is the first one.

25:

Graydon @ 23: "The expectation from the animal models and other indications is that upper respiratory tract sterilizing immunity won't be produced;"

Why not use intranasal vaccination then? See figure 2:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2798-3

26:

2020 was like taking care to look both ways before you cross the road, and then being hit by a submarine

When you put this in Google, this web site is the 2nd hit.

27:

midwest

Interesting how others view others.

While I guess Michigan is the midwest from a geography point of view, this Kentucky born boy thinks of it as the north or rust belt.

To me the midwest is centered where I was born and raised. Far western Kentucky where all the rivers merge. Well a lot of them merge.

28:

Dunno!

My suspicion is that the goal for the mRNA vaccines was to get them in use as soon as possible; they are (kinda perversely, given how novel they are) extremely low risk and pretty much any reduction in mortality and morbidity risk, especially for medical personnel, is worth doing.

(As it stands, some fraction of the people part of the medical infrastructure in the US and UK has been expended, and it's going to be extremely difficult to recover from that.)

So trial design would have had a nothing weird rule; we are not going to do anything that makes our results hard to interpret. Follow-on studies can consider alternative deliveries and other enhancements. Especially since anything that increases the dosage requirements is bad in 2021; it might be a splendid tradeoff between dose size and effectiveness in 2022 when the manufacturing has caught up. ("In the first year, nothing" is 2020; "in the second year, a trickle" is 2021; "all you want" is 2022. Hopefully modern techniques, blank cheques, and co-operation can improve that some.)

(If you want to put your cynical late-capitalism hat on, the mRNA vaccines MUST get to market first because the first sterilizing vaccine will remove them from the market. And the money side of Moderna and Pfizer certainly don't know there won't be one.)

29:

his fave Faux news

Boy are you behind on current events. He has been pissed at FN since election night. Now it's One America News and News Max. They aren't so much news sites and sites that tell people what they want to hear. Especially people who match what advertisers want to reach.

Think of them as comic books or the National Enquirer and it's cousins that inhabit the racks at grocery checkout lines in the US.

The biggest problem is the the people watching them think of them as "truth tellers" countering the fake news of other sources. Including Faux News.

30:

Over 300,000 Americans might disagree with that.

I see your point. I interpreted the word "terminally" along the lines of global thermonuclear war.

31:

My suspicion is that the goal for the mRNA vaccines was to get them in use as soon as possible; they are (kinda perversely, given how novel they are) extremely low risk and pretty much any reduction in mortality and morbidity risk, especially for medical personnel, is worth doing.

I think there's one bit missing from this consideration. The characteristics that make them low risk also made them really fast, because safety trials that they'd normally have to worry about (like the safety of the engineered virus carrying the spike protein) are irrelevant. I agree that they may not be optimal, but they were always expected to be the first salvo, assuming the technology worked at all. The real question going forward is what's going to be the best vaccine, and that's probably years from being settled.

The other part no one wants to deal with is that it's quite possible that Covid19 doesn't get eradicated, but rather becomes endemic in humans, with low-ish numbers of infections due to happenstance and regular updating of vaccines required to rein it in. That's not going to look like business as usual, 2019-style. That's going to be something else again.

32:

Here's a thing some of you may consider funny:

In Unicode, U+2020 is † (DAGGER). U+2021 is ‡ (DOUBLE DAGGER). And U+2022 is BULLET.

33:

But then 2024 is ONE DOT LEADER which can't be auspicious about any election.

34:

The other part no one wants to deal with is that it's quite possible that Covid19 doesn't get eradicated, but rather becomes endemic in humans

I'm not seeing how that can be avoided.

Aside from the animal reservoir risk -- cats, dogs, mustelids all known to be able to catch SARS-CoV-2; mustelids known to be able to transmit it back to humans -- extirpation would require getting the antivax situation resolved. With so many anglosphere politicians refusing to even consider making vaccination mandatory, that's not seeming likely.

Hard to see how the secondary effects -- widespread evictions in winter, poverty -- aren't going to be more lethal than the disease in the short term, too.

The Uncommon Cold is getting way too much like an historical plague for my peace of mind. It's getting out the scope of what can be scienced.

35:

Niala Schweitz has an Extradition Treaty with the USA ....

Graydon Using the on-line calculator/lookup table - I hope to be vaccinated by the end of January.

Heteromeles @ 31 Agree - I disagreed with EC about this, about 2 months back, but further considerations ( Like more evidence ) suggest that you & he are correct.

36:

Greg Tingey @ 35 : "Schweitz has an Extradition Treaty with the USA ..."

Yes, but as I have pointed out before the presence of a treaty does not automatically mean that a requested person is surrendered to the asking state.

To give the example of the United States and Canada, in a ten year period the United States requested 798 persons and Canada surrendered 552 persons.

https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/cj-jp/emla-eej/stat.html

37:

I imagine most countries that have abolished capital punishment do something similar, but certainly Australia will not extradite someone facing the death penalty. When it turned out a few years ago that the Australian Federal Police would often merrily co-operate with their counterparts in jurisdictions that did have capital punishment and arrange things so that suspects were arrested there, it was a huge deal and there's now a whole new layer of oversight that is supposed to stop it happening again (whether or not that works is another matter). And of course Australia seems to have no problem deporting people to places from which they were refugees, in many cases who very possibly face extrajudicial murder upon their return.

We do have a loud, persistent and at times disruptive ongoing community of protest over our treatment of refugees. But unless it is something like blocking a bridge, the majority of the population is largely unaware. See also Murdoch media monopoly.

38:

"My prediction for January is that VP Renfield votes Biden in (in his role as head of the senate) then flees for Europe. Failing to get asylum in Poland, IQ.45 fires him, then tries to issue a self-pardon in his last days in office. "

Trump can't fire Pence; he's the VP.

39:

Yeah. The sign in north London saying "Cambridge and the North" still summarises the main UK delusion (*) - OGH has posted on this. But I was following the US Census Bureau, though I agree about the "rust belt" (including from some of his writings).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwestern_United_States#Definitions

(*) That the north begins at Potter's Bar.

40:

Any grounds based on the clinical trials (or experiences earlier mRNA vaccines) to believe that the Pfizer and Moderna (and etc?) vaccines are not sterilizing but just protective?

Discussion of that here:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/once-you-get-the-covid-19-vaccine-can-you-still-infect-others/

Short answer: No. Insufficient data. Could be either.

41:

Trump can't fire Pence; he's the VP.

True. But he could freeze Pence out pretty thoroughly.

42:

Aside from the tiny core of Kenneyites, Canadians in general have adjudged Trump tacky. Trump is loathed, even among Canadian mammonites. MacLeans has noticed.

According to a recent poll (which I read in the Star but didn't bookmark) nearly 50% of Albertans support Trump over Biden.

And there was that springtime poll (in MacLeans) that had 48% of Conservatives preferring Trump to Trudeau as a Canadian leader (as opposed to 36% that preferred Trudeau).

43:

So I figure we'll be experiencing one of those "oops" moments in the vicinity of July of 2021.

I read somewhere (maybe the Star) that a University of Toronto epidemiologist was predicting a third wave when the vaccines began rolling out, but before a significant chunk of the population was immunized. His model included lockdown fatigue and misunderstanding how long after vaccination it takes to acquire immunity. (Apparently most people think that as soon as you get the shot you're protected from a disease, not understanding how vaccines work, so that was an easy factor to model.)

I can't locate the report now (I read it in October).

I'm assuming next summer is also a write-off for travel and catching up with people.

44:

Alberta, however, is Texas North: big hats, pickup trucks, and oil. It also has just 4.4 million of 38 million Canadians. Once the oil shale goes away (already happening) you can safely ignore them.

45:

I have not seen a breakdown.

Neither have I. I was just assuming that America seems roughly evenly split between Republican and Democrat (to a first approximation).

46:

Lessee... travel (in Ontario) in the summer of 2021?

It takes ~60 days for the mRNA vaccines to build to full immunity; you have to maintain infection control measures until then even when vaccinated.

Infection control measures are significantly rate-limiting for vaccine administration (been through this with the flu shot this year!) AND you have to come back, on time, for your second shot. After, by meany reports, your first shot took you out for a couple of days with flu-like symptoms.

Phase 3 -- general availab ility -- happens ... sometime. Reading between the lines, April or May if and only if there are no political issues, production bottlenecks, or logistics issues.

The mRNA COVID vaccines are not known to be sterilizing; for planning purposes, that means they're not, so they reduce your risk of a severe case (and thus dying) if you catch it. (That's what the trials tested. That's the one thing we know.) By inference/hope, these vaccines MAY reduce your risk of stroking out, etc. after you've been infected and recovered. (Huge area of insufficient knowledge there.) By prudence, they DO NOT reduce your risk of either catching COVID-19 nor of spreading the disease. (At least until we've got the data to do the big study to answer the "sterilizing or functional?" question.)

If the vaccines ARE sterilizing, we won't know until... this time next year? at the earliest? there needs to be a large population vaccinated and it needs to be studied. (Same with "does this reduce my post-COVID stroke risk?" dunno, try not to be in the dead column when the study gets done...)

So... Phase 3 starts in May, finishes... by July? Add sixty days; eye the vaccination rate figures with suspicion; be very unsure if the vaccine is sterilizing or not. If you're sensible, maintain full infection control measures until the studies have achieved a consensus, which almost can't be before 2022 sometime.

Note 1: Pfizer vaccine is rolling out to regional hospitals in Ontario only; explicitly can't move again once it's there. Building out the cold chain is a trick, because testing with a critical vaccine in short supply is an ethical quagmire, on the one hand, and takes novel hardware, which is a logistical challenge during lockdown, on the other.

Note 2: the will behind the Ontario rollout is Christine Elliot (the health minister), rather than Dougie (the premier), and our politics is not presently able to handle long term anything. Dougie is actively not making good decisions in "minimize the damage" terms, and will probably continue to do so. Especially as "the vaccine is available" turns into "and I can't get it" reporting.

47:

Would the swab+PCR test detect the virus in a functionally-vaccinated but still infectious person?

48:

Dougie is actively not making good decisions

That about sums it up. PCs are still making decisions based on business interests. (Look at the '413' highway due to start construction next year, for example.)

49:

Lessee... travel (in Ontario) in the summer of 2021?

Well, that, but I was hoping to head West to see my family. Can't really contemplate that until we're all vaccinated, as I can't see a way to self-isolate while getting there.

What I really want to do is the post-retirement trips I planned to Europe, as well as return to Iceland.

50:

It certainly ought to do so!

But, specifically in Ontario, testing capacity has not been built out (see above re Dougie actively making bad decisions) so a hypothetical capability doesn't help.

51:

What I really want to do is the post-retirement trips I planned to Europe

Yep. Sitting on 2+ weeks of certificates for nights at main line hotels mid to upper tiers. I wonder how many more times they will extend the expiration dates.

Plus about $15K in airlines miles and hotel points.

I'd like to use them while I can still walk without a cane.

52:

Brexit

Impossible to say - Boris is simply to unpredictable given his aversion to making difficult decisions, particularly where someone will be upset at him.

Trump and trying to stay as President

Over and done with, he may continue with his ineffective legal games and fund raising but he is out of office on January 20th. He thought he had bought and paid for the Supreme Court with his appointments, they told him to go away. But he no longer has any way to try and overturn the results now that the Electoral College has ruled - the one remaining sort-of option to challenge the election (Congress) looks unlikely now that Mitch has conceded, and I doubt Pence will do anything stupid (hence the talk of him going on a trip immediately afterword). Besides, while I can't be bothered researching it any challenge in Congress I have heard leads to Pelosi becoming President.

Melania & son

Depends on the pre-nup and any other legal agreements. My perception is she wasn't happy with Donald becoming President and forcing her to become First Lady - she married to become a NYC wife of a rich person, and he violated that. So as soon as she can she will become the next in line of ex-Trump wives.

Where Trump lives.

Depends on the deal/lack of deal. Despite those who want blood (rightly so) the reality is putting rich people on trial is usually more about publicly shaming them given the difficulties in getting convictions - and for Trump that is already done and half the public just don't care.

Thus I think the establishment in both parties would be quite happy to ignore any legal pursuits on the condition that he drops out of view (no more Twitter, etc.) and leaves the US. If that were to happen then somewhere like Switzerland could be an option. But I don't think Trump could agree to such a thing, but that in turn seriously limits his options.

As noted extradition doesn't mean it would happen - but the world (well, at least the nice places to live) hates Trump in a way the US public doesn't, and he has spent his time in office insulting most other world leaders (example, see his time at any of the G* meetings). So the question isn't whether a country has an extradition treaty (because they would use it), but whether they would allow him to stay in the first place. No government wants Trump living in their jurisdiction using Twitter and his PAC's as weapons, drawing the anger of the US government.

So that rules out most places for him - and I still say Putin wouldn't allow him in either (there is no upside). So perhaps some places in the middle east.

Covid

Come April/May, when the better weather returns to the northern hemisphere, all bets will be off.

After 9 months the strain in showing - people publicly and to pollsters still support the lockdowns/isolation, but the spread shows that as always actions speak louder than words. Whether it be forced into poor working conditions or an unwillingness to accept that they aren't special, people are still spreading Covid because they aren't distancing, wearing proper masks, and isolating as necessary.

After a "ruined" Christmas and New Years Eve, and another 3 months of this, regardless of how far the vaccine has rolled out and how effective/ineffective it may be people will say enough is enough and get on with their pre-Covid life.

So come Easter most families will again celebrate together, and with the nicer weather they will again flock to the beaches and parks - and politicians will happily cave in regardless of what any experts say because the hospitality industry will be screaming at them, and the people watching the government budget will warn they can borrow no further (even though false).

53:

Maybe the young man from the Midwest didn't read the signage near him. There was a bar in Chicago whose decor included a sign warning of a SUBMARINE CROSSING.

(They got it when the U-505 was moved into the Museum of Science and Industry.)

54:

"Neither have I. I was just assuming that America seems roughly evenly split between Republican and Democrat (to a first approximation)."

The US carries out massive voter suppression and gerrymandering; if it weren't for that, the US would be mostly blue.

55:

Re: ' ... mRNA COVID vaccines are not known to be sterilizing;'

Agree - that's what the virologists I've been watching are also saying. Plus, not enough data yet which is why some medicos/scientists are saying that the blinded trials need to continue beyond the vaccine roll-out. What they've not said - but what I think might happen: medical authorities will keep a very close eye on the first folks to receive the vaccine and compare results vs their unvaccinated counterparts on all key metrics.

Note: One potential downside to vaccines that only 'reduce disease' is that vaccinated people might get infected and not know it therefore spread the virus, i.e., increase in asymptomatic transmission. Bottom line: we have to be careful for the foreseeable future.

Hmm ... just saw a headline that BoJo mentioned there's a new COVID-19 variant circulating in the UK that's more contagious than the current one. (According to the TWiV virologists this shouldn't impact the 'effectiveness' of the present already approved vaccines - the current vaccines target more than part/area of the virus.)

I hope that with vaccines available, researchers (and gov'ts) start looking at the long-term health effects of this virus. No solid data yet but some anecdata suggest 5-10% of all people infected will suffer some fairly serious long term/chronic effects. Plus, these effects will vary across people in terms of organs affected.

Re: DT - Scotland

Well, he's got a golf course there already. Besides, although technically the Scots speak English, he's unlikely to understand what they're actually saying. Ditto, the two-finger 'salute'. Add to that they might sell him exclusive US rights to 'haggis burgers'. It's a win-win-win scenario.

56:

keep a very close eye on the first folks to receive the vaccine and compare results vs their unvaccinated counterparts on all key metric

Yes, that would make sense. Do PCR at both vaccinations and then follow-up PCR for the next months or whatever intervals might be recommended by epidemiologists. Might have to incentivize that last part by appeals to civic duty or even money.

57:

On Trump becoming an overseas fugitive from US justice, I note that US passports are revocable by the Secretary of State. (I suspect the POTUS can also do it unilaterally.)

Of course, residency and/or citizenship is purchasable in various places, so loss of US passport probably wouldn't be a problem for DJT.

58:

There was a good Photoshop done a couple years back, of a flooded street somewhere in the US with a submarine conning tower sailing merrily down the middle of the road.

Here's a picture of the lifting operation that put the submarine Akishio into place in the JMSDF museum's car park in Kure, south of Hiroshima. The Akishio weighs more than twice than the U-505 does.

https://i.redd.it/5v4qlw0l09x01.jpg

59:

mdive The real problem with BoZo is that he's like Charles I - completely, utterly untrustworthy. So as you suggest, he could go either way, for no reason whatsoever, other than his own ego ....

Which brings us to IQ45 If I were Biden, I would "simply" encourage all the various individual US states' who have "legal problems" with DJT to pursue those as vigorously as possible - "Nothing to do with us"

As you say - C-19 Basically how fast & how thoroughly can the developed world roll out working vaccines? I must admit the prospect of having both the Pfizer & "Oxford" (Zeneca) ones up, running & jabbing is about the only reasonable hope.

60:

Pfizer and Moderna combine to become Kellis-Amberlee.

The New Management invades our reality. They are welcomed.

Brexit is revoked. The UK remains in the EU. The rest of the EU members all leave in protest.

Disney releases Star Wars 10.

Let's see, what else?

61:

Re: 'US passports are revocable'

Ahem ... DT's been moving along the 'de-naturalization' continuum for some time now.

Anyways, if he moved away, lost his citizenship and tried to get it back, he'd flunk the requirements below unless he finally admitted that he's certifiably/medically nuts. My impression is that there's something like a 10 year wait to go before a citizenship judge. He might still have enough pull to wangle a much earlier hearing which might set off unpleasant protests and investigations into how this service is run.

1- must show good moral character

2- willingness to support and defend the U.S. and the Constitution.

3- able to read, write, speak, and understand English words in ordinary use (Cue Randy Rainbow's "Covfefe")

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UW2ZndKqcg

4- knowledge of the fundamentals of U.S. history and certain principles of U.S. government

5- oath of allegiance

He'd probably pass the $$$-related requirements.

62:

I'm not sure the timing of the vaccine rollout here in BC. I suspect that as a 'front line' health worker I'll be close to the frontish part of the line (though obviously behind ER and Geriatric care medicals and long-term care homes).

In practice I suspect it will be an orderly delivery through the first couple of tiers of priority, followed by lots of grumpy people wanting their shot right now, followed by a permanent campaign to beg/cajole/force the various antivax and skeptics to just get the damn shot already.

Given that I find myself regularly exposed to unhealthy people in my work, I am walking a tightrope that is increasingly unsteady - bring on the damn vaccine asap.

Of course, our provincial government announced a $4/hr pandemic top-up in pay for front line workers last year, ending on July 4th (for some reason). While we get regular updates of progress, that pay has yet to arrive. Given that it is a comparatively straightforward accounting process, this does not give me optimism for a vaccine rollout happening in a timely fashion.

63:

In other interesting news the Chang'e-5 Lunar sampling mission's return capsule was opened today and the sample container removed. The container has, apparently, about 1700g of sample material aboard. A good haul.

64:

I'd like to use them while I can still walk without a cane.

Quite. And as per Robert's comment...

Our once-in-a-lifetime trip to Europe was going to be the second half of 2020. Neither of us has travelled overseas: it's always been either money, responsibilities, or sometimes both and we're in our 50s now. This was the year when the stars lined up, or rather would have but for covid. At least distancing has meant not having to see the much of the very travelled friends who complain constantly about having to change their plans.

So anyway, that's indefinitely postponed, not cancelled. One day the world will settle down again, but we're not really expecting this to be possible again for at least 3 or 4 years. And I can't complain, having so many things to be grateful for at this point in history, not least of which is living in Queensland.

65:

The US carries out massive voter suppression and gerrymandering; if it weren't for that, the US would be mostly blue.

Sort of. You could argue that this is what has enabled the Republicans to drift so far to the right they are basically in a sort of Narnia for Nazis fairyland these days. The premise of a two-party system (and the USA has institutionalised this more than most places) is that both sides adapt to what is electable. So rather than every electorate turning blue, you'd have more moderate red competition for those electorates. But that sort of contest for the middle generally requires much higher turnout that is usual in the USA I guess. Also, getting there from here would be a bit like starting with an omelette and trying to rebuild the eggs. I mean we like to think of this as post-Nixon stuff, but really this sort of fix has been in since reconstruction, at least in the South, yeah?

66:

But that sort of contest for the middle generally requires much higher turnout that is usual in the USA I guess.

No, it is gerrymandering.

There are several States that would put more Democrats into the Congressional House if it wasn't for the gerrymandering, which goes to extremes to place as many Democrats into as few districts as possible.

See this article from 4 days ago about how the Republicans won where it mattered in November - in the State legislatures - and how for many states the support for a party doesn't reflect in the seats one. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/15/gerrymandering-republicans-map-charts-states

This gaming of the system means (per sentence in the Guardian article) that the Republicans could take the House in 2022.

But because they have so distorted the system, this means that the Republicans don't face the pressure to moderate their policies to gain votes.

So higher voter turnout won't reflect much in the number of seats.

And that is without getting into the problems of the Senate.

67:

Mike W @ 7: Except it's a near word for word repost of an old "Adulthood is" meme e.g from 4 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/4ta3o9/adulthood_is_like_looking_both_ways_before_you/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

Maybe the kid had a reddit account as a 5 y.o.?

68:

Graydon @ 15: Aside from the tiny core of Kenneyites, Canadians in general have adjudged Trump tacky. Trump is loathed, even among Canadian mammonites. MacLeans has noticed.

"Tacky" ... that's a really good word that should be used more often describing politicians.

69:

Re: 'front-line worker ... vaccine rollout happening in a timely fashion.'

Based on reports that many people who've received the vaccine report feeling under the weather anywhere from 24 to 48 hours after, I've been wondering whether front-line workers should be scheduled for their vaccine shots for the afternoon before whatever their days off happen to be. This probably sounds obvious but I haven't heard anyone mention it: organizations should take into account that some staff will not be physically/medically available for work. If orgs don't take this into account, they'll have staff calling in sick the next day and have to try to operate understaffed, shut down a department/service or quickly find substitute staff to fill in.

I'm guessing front-line workers are probably overworked/over-stressed already and unthinkingly dumping more work on them would only add to their stress. Further - I don't think it's a good idea that medical staff experiencing obvious vaccine reactions attend patients: if they're that sick, they're likelier to make a mistake/not notice something that they needed to notice. They'd also probably scare the crap out of/stress some patients.

70:

Rocketpjs @ 62: I'm not sure the timing of the vaccine rollout here in BC. I suspect that as a 'front line' health worker I'll be close to the frontish part of the line (though obviously behind ER and Geriatric care medicals and long-term care homes).

I'm expecting the VA will be ready to vaccinate me sometime in the March - June time-frame. Be fine with me if they get around to it earlier, but I'm not going to hold my breath waiting.

71:

So is the SolarWinds total screw up bringing fear and panic everywhere else? Surely the US isn't the only ones who got hit.

There are two variations of hit. At the first level someone (Russia is the the current leading candidate but see below) attached malware to the SolarWinds management tool software update. So it got installed all over everywhere. But at the next level so far it seems that the back door / payload was only used in a limited number of installations. Likely due to staffing of the bad guys. Walking around 100K networks in the US alone would take a small army of people.

And I can't imagine that this backdoor / malware was only distributed in the US. I'm guessing SolarWinds is sold overseas. Heck, I was going to look at using it for my clients. I guess being overworked the last few months was a good thing.

But hey, we don't have to worry.

Per a Tweet earlier today by fearless leader DJT "The Cyber Hack is far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality. I have been fully briefed and everything is well under control."

So the world is safe. Plus he blames China. Alone on those hills he seems to be standing.

Oh, yeah. Fox News actually has a story on their site that their consultants say the only option is "nuke and pave". No brown nosing there. Rare me thinks. Which may be why the "forever Trumpers" are moving to the really nonsense outlets for their "news".

72:

Chatting with my mother in Aotearoa yesterday, her reply to news of the covid cluster in Sydney was "oh, and my sister's birthday is coming up, you should come over for that because her cancer treatment isn't going well, she might not have another birthday". That whooshing sound is not an airplane, it's a clue passing dangerously close to a 75-ish year old woman.

I ordered a bunch of bread on Tuesday to be picked up at the market today. So I just took the train past the northern beaches where the cluster is. I'm guessing about 10% of passengers were doing the "mandatory mask" thing, fewer the further I got from the beaches. I saw one or two other masks in Gosford (north of the northern beaches) and maybe one passing through the local high street to get home.

The music gig featuring an infectious patron was unsurprisingly productive... https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/we-walked-into-a-cesspool-how-a-covid-19-outbreak-stormed-the-beaches-20201218-p56ory.html

73:

"Tacky" ... that's a really good word that should be used more often describing politicians.

Would apply so broadly as to loose all meaning.

74:

The US carries out massive voter suppression and gerrymandering; if it weren't for that, the US would be mostly blue.

Not so much. Maybe a few states would flip.

I've been gerrymandered for the 30 years I've lived in NC. The first 20 by D's. The next 8 by R's. Then the last 2 sort of not per court orders. We really are a 50/50 state. Well 40/40 + 20 no affiliation per registration rolls but anyway we tend to vote with 52/48 being a big win.

In 2010 we had 10Rs and 3Ds due to gerrymandering. But after all the lawsuits we got re-draw again.

In our last election with court ordered and supported mostly by both sides districts we still wound up with 8Rs and 5Ds. And it would be mostly impossible to come up with a different result without the crazy gerrymandering the D's used to do where two towns were connected via miles of an Interstate highway median strip. Here the D's clump into a few metro areas and the R's are in the rural areas. And you just can't draw a map without crazy connections and come up with 13 competitive districts.

75:

Cross purposes: I wasn't saying that you could fix the problem with higher turnout. My point was that even if the gerrymandering were fixed, the low voter turnout, partly due to active suppression, would mean the problem didn't go away. Both need to be fixed for the "competitive middle" pattern to work.

76:

Charlie, just logging in to remind you (amongst all this crazyness) that you still didn't publish a crib sheet for The Labyrinth Index. You asked me to remind you about this on another thread, so I'm just complying, no pressure at all intended.

Keep up the good work (I think you are one of the greatest writers of our time, I often re-read your books even though I know it by memory because I just like your writing).

All the best greetings, bye.

77:

I suspect that as a 'front line' health worker I'll be close to the frontish part of the line

One hopes so. I suspect I'll be pretty close to the end of the line, unless they roll down age cohorts once they finish the essential/at risk folks. A lot of the public health advice we got in the spring used 70 as an 'age of concern', so while I'm four times more likely to suffer negative outcomes than someone in their 20s, I'm probably not old enough to get vaccinated ahead of the general rush.

And once that happens I suspect my location (Toronto) puts me at further behind than more thinly settled parts of Ontario, assuming I can extrapolate from the availability of flu vaccine. I cynically expect that vaccine distribution within Ontario will be allocated on a regional basis, not by population, so denser areas will have much longer waits.

Given that it is a comparatively straightforward accounting process, this does not give me optimism for a vaccine rollout happening in a timely fashion.

"Bonus pay" for public servants will never be a priority with voters, while vaccines for voters are both more visible and a priority for the voters. I'll bet you a Brickers cider* you get your vaccine before you get your bonus pay :-)

Their hopped cider is nice https://www.brickerscider.com

*Payable when I next make it back to Sechelt.

78:

Ahem ... DT's been moving along the 'de-naturalization' continuum for some time now.

No, DT, being a natural-born citizen, isn't subject to denaturalization, though the terminology is confusing. He can have his passport revoked unilaterally by the USG for any reason or none, but that doesn't affect citizenship. He could renounce his citizenship himself, or have it revoked if found guilty of treason, which does bring up the Russia thing. But treason is tough to prove.

https://www.usa.gov/renounce-lose-citizenship You might lose your U.S. citizenship in specific cases, including if you: Run for public office in a foreign country (under certain conditions) Enter military service in a foreign country (under certain conditions) Apply for citizenship in a foreign country with the intention of giving up U.S. citizenship Commit an act of treason against the United States
79:

https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1340409968818671616

To sum up -- antigenic drift (the process that requires new flu vaccines to be created and gets influenza viruses past your existing immune system defense from having had flu already) has been observed in SARS-CoV-2. Which implies that this will have to be tracked and vaccines updated as and when the disease starts to mutate enough to evade existing immunities.

80:

Re: 'Run for public office in a foreign country (under certain conditions)'

There are likelier scenarios but having him move to some remote island is the most peaceful all-around. Maybe one of his kids can talk him into buying one and making himself 'king/president for life' - appeal to his narcissism.

81:

I'm finding the "hit by a submarine" thing a bit perplexing.

Unless I've got the wrong end of the stick. It sounds like they're trying to say the events were unexpected. Even that they were very unexpected. Furthermore that the "look both ways" implies that responsible precautions were taken.

The beginning of the year was "Australia is all on fire" with a side dose of the Amazon and Siberia are also on fire.

Have there not been warnings shouted from the rooftops for about 130 years that this is going to happen? How is this a surprise?

The other "big news" was a plague that we all knew was coming soon. Very soon. And the defences against it were dismantled ahead of time in the full knowledge of what would (not could) happen. There was even a TED talk about it.

Nothing in 2020 was even slightly surprising. Even that neocon politics would be utterly incapable of rising to the challenge was certainly expected by anyone who had the slightest understanding.

About the only thing that surprised me was that the inadequate and incompetent response in Australia was as effective as it was. Which just goes to show that even the most stumbling shambolic effort would have been enough to beat this virus.

82:

How is this a surprise?

Because most of the population have been plugging their ears saying la-la-la-la-la-can't-hear-you, while those with money and power have been shouting "look, squirrel!".

I'm now seeing right-wing bloggers blaming scientists. It's obviously scientists' fault, because if they'd been convincing enough we could have solved these problems in time…

83:

I'll go out on a very short limb and wager* that Agent Orange ain't going anywhere after he loses the presidency.

What he's been doing is racking up a huge war chest of money both for his 2024 presidential campaign and for legal expenses, plus skimming money off of his campaign fund. His goal is apparently to become too wealthy* and/or too politically powerful to be prosecuted in the US. I think this is daft, but he's got a lot of right wing authoritarian followers conditioned to empty their wallets when he tweets, so he's going to be a hard nut to crack.** OTOH, every ambitious lawyer will want a piece of him.

This consistent with his strategies of doubling-down and flooding the zone with bullshit. But over a billion in money skimmed or collected under false pretenses just cries out for closer scrutiny, does it not?

e^ipi pounds (collectable at a special bank behind a certain door in Kensington) like Jeffrey Epstein. Or Phil Spector. Or google Viktour Bout. *https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_federal_politicians_convicted_of_crimes ***Anyone who thinks that tough nutting is a good defense really needs to look at videos of how nuts crack/are cracked.

84:

I think the only (minor) surprise was that Agent Orange couldn't even figure out how to use a 70-odd page, simple playbook to rally the CDC, NIH, and cruise to re-election as the hero who stopped the pandemic. I've got a copy of the play book, and it's literally fill in the blank: get these people together, ask them these questions, here's what to do with their responses. Doesn't get more cookbook than that.

Only a colossal, shambling incompetent could screw that up. And guess what...

To drop the sarcasm for a moment, if I wanted him hauled up on charges, this is the one he needs to answer for. He had multiple opportunities to do the right thing and/or fix things, and he deliberately threw away every single one, causing hundreds of thousands of people to die of his negligence. If a military officer can go to prison for less, why shouldn't he?

85:

TV coverage here just now, mostly about what's happening in NSW and the response of other states (declaring Greater Sydney a hotspot, closing borders to people from there, mandatory quarantine, yada yada), had a short segment on what's happening in the UK and mentioned that Scotland has closed its borders with the rest of the UK as part of its COVID response. Hope this isn't another nice hot cup of awful for OGH and others.

86:

I think you've hit the nail on the head.

It's still bewildering though.

87:

I may well get the vaccine before I get my 'hazard pay'. I'm fine with that, money is nice but not much use when dead.

I'll take you up on that cider, I've never tried it despite it being a half a mile from my parents' home. That being said I am apparently in a 'remote' community so won't be getting the Pfizer vaccine, according to a message from our local doctors I read yesterday. .

Which is utter bollocks riding a drunker manatee. I am 18 miles exactly from the largest city in the province. Many of my neighbours commute to that city, as does my wife on occasion. We can't walk there, but we are not by any stretch a 'remote' community.

Policy written by people in cities who see no reason to actually look at a map prior to making decisions.

88:

declaring Greater Sydney a hotspot, closing borders to people from there

Yep. I have a feeling my trip south in the new year is going to be a dud, even if we make it out of the city. Mate may have been right to text me on Wednesday and say "leave now!"... not that I could, I have stuff to do. But it was tempting. Nice remote holiday house, limited internet, no grid power or water...

89:

David L No "Solar Winds" is known to have had effects here - just that "they" ( Meaning GCHQ, probably ) are deliberately not saying a lot, whilst they have a burrow about. - - -That actually suggests that it is RU, rather than the PRC, of course!

later - not so much a few US states, but the population-rig on your Senate has got to go, surely?

SFR Like Boney on Elba, you mean? That didn't turn out too well, either, did it?

As for the general theme of: "Here's how to do $SpecificThing in troubled times" - well, we have our own bigmouthed repetitive liar screwing it up by the numbers, twice. I think we are going to crash out (now) as per Charlie's previous thread. NOT going to be fun. And, as per Rbt Prior @ 82 - the rightwingnutters will blame EVERYBODY except themselevs, but especially us "remoaners" & the "experts" How long they will be able to get away with that is a different question.

90:

That whooshing sound is not an airplane, it's a clue passing dangerously close to a 75-ish year old woman.

In related news: a friend of mine is currently dying in hospital (of an inoperable, aggressive brain tumour, not COVID19, although C19 might have delayed diagnosis/treatment). I haven't seen him since January-ish, although he lives less than a mile away. In a normal year we'd be heading round to his place for a big Newtonmass pot-luck feast, and again on New Year's Day.

I'm not saying you should infect your friends and family, but ... Zoom, Skype, Facetime, folks: don't leave it too long.

91:

You asked me to remind you about this on another thread, so I'm just complying, no pressure at all intended.

I can't take the time to do it right now because of the embargoed news alluded to in the OP -- I am really busy with work right now. Mugged by deadlines that didn't exist this time last month.

92:

I think the only (minor) surprise was that Agent Orange couldn't even figure out how to use a 70-odd page, simple playbook to rally the CDC, NIH, and cruise to re-election as the hero who stopped the pandemic.

But you forget: the playbook had Obama cooties! And everyone KNOWS that everything Obama did in his eight year term was fiendishly focussed on sabotaging his anointed successor, Donald J. Trump! So the playbook was either defective or full of cues to make TheDonald look bad! So it had to go! False playbook! Bad!

(Exit, shambling off-stage left, burbling incoherent racist nonsense.)

93:

Totally not unexpected news, that: and Scotland is generally handling things better than England in terms of per-capita deaths. It's still absolutely terrible by general EU standards, but the furlough and lockdown budgets are doled out by Westminster, i.e. the Johnson government, so Sturgeon has very limited maneuvering room and is mostly focussing on clear communication and keeping Scottish policy consistent rather than veering all over the map on a daily basis.

The real horror show is Northern Ireland, where Arlene Foster (the DUP first minister) used the sectarian veto to block a move to a tigher COVID19 tier in November, with the result that hospitals are now redlining (bed occupancy at 105%, patients treated in ambulances in car parks, etc).

And there's the ominous news about the new, more contagious strain from the south-east which apparently accounts for 60% of new cases in London this month.

The TLDR is that the UK has handled COVID19 consistently worse than the USA until recently, then the USA went totally nuts in mid-October and seems to be trying to max out fatalities, while the UK is flailing helplessly (see also: Boris Johnson and "leadership" in the same sentence) but at least wants to get it under control.

94:

Lets see, for my birthday so far I got Fukushima and a Global Pandemic.

I think 2021 will be something like Joe Biden starting a hot war with Iran or even Russia because the USA will become too frustrated over losing millions to Covid-19, declining competitiveness and influence, while at the same time losing the Cyber War (that the USA started when hacking the Iranian centifuges).

A distraction will be needed, and it will backfire as it always does.

95:

A distraction will be needed, and it will backfire as it always does.

Disagree.

There's so much shit lying around everywhere that the Biden admin will have their work cut out for the first six months just sweeping it off the sidewalks and into the streets.

And that's assuming the Democrat candidates take those two Georgia senate seats in the run-off. If they don't? Four years of gridlock ahoy!

96:

I am apparently in a 'remote' community so won't be getting the Pfizer vaccine, according to a message from our local doctors I read yesterday.

They -- the Canadian federal gov't -- bought a lot of Moderna doses, and those have a cold chain but it's not the difficult and fininicky cold chain the Pfizer vaccine needs. So in the Canadian tradition of cost minimization, we're not building the cold chain for Pfizer for anywhere that hasn't already got it (existing regional hospitals, and not all of those; they're not sure about Sudbury or Thunder Bay, for example), because we don't have to; everybody remote gets Moderna instead. (Note that it looks very much like the "and how do we get Pfizer does on to distribution points from the regional hospital?" is a hard question, and the "put the cold chain into every pharmacy" response is "not this year, not next year" sort of problem.)

So far as I know, the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are much of a muchness for protective effect; Moderna is available later but likely not later than there would be enough Pfizer doses, on the one hand, and at least in Ontario all the dates are squishy and if you're not in either long term care or working in a hospital you won't get vaccinated this year anyway.

The general schedule vagueness is (I hope) lack of certainty about supply and someone over in the communications department explaining very patiently that no hopeful statements can be permitted; it's a crisis, you have to be just-the-facts about a crisis. I really hope it's not actual uncertainty of supply or someone deciding they don't really have to vaccinate everybody, that's expensive.

97:

The cold chain infrastructure built out for the Pfizer vaccine will work for future mRNA vaccines which are going to be the Next Big Thing in medicine (Nobel Prizes all round!) after the current drama subsides. Having that cold-chain in place for COVID-19 is not an unnecessary expenditure in terms of money or resources.

Twice may be a coincidence but both mRNA vaccines developed to combat SARS-CoV-2 have shown very high efficacy rates whereas the more conventional Oxford/AstraZeneca adenovirus-based vaccine approach is lagging them by a significant (in the statistical sense) amount. I'd expect a big push to develop, say, an mRNA-based flu vaccine that could be effective for several years against a number of influenza strains rather than the existing a-shot-every-year based on guesswork as to which strain will spread widely in six months time. There are other diseases that might succumb to the mRNA approach too. The Holy Grail would be inoculations against the hundred or so rhinoviruses that result in the common cold.

I'd expect future mRNA vaccine engineering would reduce the cold-chain requirements gradually but the lipid membrane delivery system it uses is pretty fragile, temperature-wise.

98:

Re: ' ... someone deciding they don't really have to vaccinate everybody, that's expensive.'

My impression is that Canada put together a specialist panel (medicos, scientists & logistics) to figure out priorities to optimize distribution based on whatever then-known data. Also that they've had at least one dry run to verify that approach. The first two vaccines actually need at least three distinct passes:

(a) set-up equipment; (b) vaccine - 1st shot; (c) vaccine - 2nd shot.

Add to this that the vaccines are shipped in bulk - x number of doses per package - and they don't want to 'waste' any vaccine, therefore in some regions individuals in 'lower' risk groups will receive the vaccine ahead of higher risk individuals in other regions. (This is where some will scream 'Unfair'!)

I'm guessing (hoping) that analyses re: feedback on results (what worked/what didn't & why) will also be handled professionally. This is a first for everyone concerned therefore screw-ups because people didn't anticipate something including weather conditions (Canada's winters can get fierce) are likely to happen. Hopefully, they'll have a Plan B and even a Plan C. Meanwhile I also expect that Canadian version right-wingers (esp. Alberta-based PCs) will continue politicizing the virus because that strategy has been so effective in the US and UK.

I have family in both the US and Canada: search pulls up local headlines/articles from both whenever I check the news.

Greg:

DT was never 'able'.

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/napoleon-exiled-to-elba

'Although Napoleon developed a reputation for being power-hungry and insecure, he is also credited with enacting a series of important political and social reforms that had a lasting impact on European society, including judiciary systems, constitutions, voting rights for all men and the end of feudalism. Additionally, he supported education, science and literature. His Code Napoleon, which codified key freedoms gained during the French Revolution, such as religious tolerance, remains the foundation of French civil law.'

99:

That being said I am apparently in a 'remote' community so won't be getting the Pfizer vaccine, according to a message from our local doctors I read yesterday.

I was under the impression that "remote" in the context of the Pfizer vaccine meant 'longer and/or less reliable supply line than we like'. I wonder if someone decided that BC Ferries wasn't reliable enough for delivery?

Or maybe the hospitals on the Sunshine Coast can't deal with the storage requirements? I know the Sechelt hospital seems to regularly send patients to Vancouver by helicopter.

Guessing you're in/near Gibsons.

100:

The cold chain infrastructure built out for the Pfizer vaccine will work for future mRNA vaccines which are going to be the Next Big Thing in medicine (Nobel Prizes all round!) after the current drama subsides. Having that cold-chain in place for COVID-19 is not an unnecessary expenditure in terms of money or resources.

Remember you are talking about a country that had a SARS epidemic, and systematically dismantled all the measures put in place after that to deal with 'hypothetical' future pandemics.

Learning lessons about health care is not something Canadian governments are good at.

I think part of the problem is being so close to America. Even the worst Canadian government (Alberta, say) looks better in terms of health care than what we see south of the border, so the bar is set pretty low…

101:

SFReader @ 98

I have this memory of Napoleon and his troops bringing the Enlightenement to Spain:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleon#/media/File:El_Tres_de_Mayo,_by_Francisco_de_Goya,_from_Prado_thin_black_margin.jpg

102:

Alberta, however, is Texas North: big hats, pickup trucks, and oil. It also has just 4.4 million of 38 million Canadians. Once the oil shale goes away (already happening) you can safely ignore them.

Much like Trump and the Republicans, Alberta has infected the Canadian Conservative parties.

Nearly half of Canadian Conservatives would trust Trump more than Trudeau. Most Albertans are Conservative, but most Conservatives are not Albertan.

The current leader of the federal Conservative Party spends time giving lessons on "owning the libs" and how to say things that "piss off woke lefties". As opposed to, say, formulating and articulating policies that they would enact if in power.

103:

Graydon wrote: "It takes ~60 days for the mRNA vaccines to build to full immunity"

Can you provide a reference to support that statement? Makes sense, but I did a quick Google and didn't find anything. I'd like an authoritative reference before I spread that info to friends and family.

104:

Charlie @ 93 Not saying that our misgovernment have not screwed up, nor that they are anything other than incompetent ... but, even countries like Germany are in a real pickle, right now - more-or-less-complete lockdown until 10th January, IIRC. It's bad for everyone, just that ours is worse ( I think )

Nojay Having that cold-chain in place for COVID-19 is not an unnecessary expenditure in terms of money or resources. I / you / we know that, but fuckwit cheapskate grandstanding politicians, especially those concerned with "cutting taxes" don't or won't. Same as ( quoting a discussion on R4 yesterday ) "We have valued efficiency over resilience" - & it's back to Arthur Wellesly & rope harnesses, isn't it?

SFR NEVER FORGET that Boney the Corsican Tyrant ... re-introduced slavery which had been abolished in the revolution. I see that Niala has also remembered that this "Napoleon the Liberator" puff is lying bullshit.

105:

Followup for Graydon: Upon reflection, I wonder if you were referring to the Pfizer vaccine specifically. I know that requires a second vaccination after a few weeks have elapsed to acquire full effectiveness. The Moderna vaccine doesn't seem to require a second shot.

106:

The thing to remember about "cold chains" is that they've been a staple of molecular biology for decades. Every college or university that's doing molecular biology (or tech firm, for that matter) probably has at least one -80, and Fedex, UPS, or others are used to hauling stuff fast in dry ice to get it there. The challenge for the vaccine is scaling this supply chain up, not bringing it into being.

They're not shipping out liter vessels of frozen vaccine concentrate. Pfizer's shipping out their vaccine in doses of 0.3 ml concentrate (six doses per vial). These have to be thawed and mixed in the pharmacy with normal saline for administration, and then the mix is good for a couple of hours. So one logistical challenge is making sure that six patients are lined up to receive each mix so that none goes to waste. This is turning out to be a problem in ERs and ICUs, where the employees are too busy to take 30 minutes and go get vaccinated.* Yes, my wife's a pharmacist who's going to be dispensing it. Why do you ask?

Speaking of pharmacy-land, the hospital chain where my wife works invested in three -80 freezers earlier this year (one for every major hospital), then contracted with Pfizer to get doses for all their employees and probably some patients. This is one thing that's not in the news, but Pfizer's not selling all their vaccine production to Operation Warp Speed. There's apparently a fair amount that they're selling direct to hospitals who decided not to trust the government distribution system. I suspect that some of the chaos with Warp Speed, the OMG there's vaccine that they're not shipping, may well come down to the US Government not contracting for all of Pfizer's output (or Moderna's for that matter), so a bunch of it has been contracted out to other parties. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it is the kind of mess that a competent administration probably would have avoided.

Also, if you've seen articles (as in the LA Times) about celebrities nosing around and offering bribes to jump to the head of the vaccination line? Probably they could buy the vaccine direct from Pfizer and save on the bribery and corruption stuff. All they'd have to do is get their personal doctor up to speed and pay to get a vial or two of concentrate shipped direct to the doctor.

*There was some amusing gossip about an engineer on an ICU floor getting vaccinated ahead of some ER doctors. It's not clear quite what happened, but he may have been available when there was a spare dose, while the doctors were too busy to get the shot. Or something. The less amusing thing is that the hospital is filling up with covid19 patients, and along with the doctors and nurses, they also need the tech staff to repair equipment like ventilators. It may be that someone in hospital administration figured this out and put engineering along with housekeeping on the high priority list.

107:

Re: Napoleon - slavery

Haven't read anything about Napoleon since high school which wasn't that much anyway. Just looked up Nap & slavery and found the below: Yeah, he undid the 1794 anti-slavery legislation to appease 'businessmen'.

https://www.napoleon.org/en/history-of-the-two-empires/articles/bullet-point-9-napoleon-bring-back-slavery/

Re: Spain

Yeah, Spain was Napoleon's combination of VietNam (war atrocities, expensive military losses) and the UK's initial response via Chamberlain: 'If we get on Adolph's good side, things/we'll be okay'.

There's a lesson in here somewhere.

108:

The Moderna vaccine doesn't seem to require a second shot.

It apparently does, four weeks after the first rather than three.

The Pfizer-BioNTech is 0.3-millilitre dose of a white-ish coloured liquid. Two shots are given 21 days apart.

The Moderna dose is also “white to off-white” but is 0.5 -millilitres. Two shots are given 28 days apart.

https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2020/12/17/comparing-covid-19-vaccines-whats-the-difference-between-the-pfizer-and-the-moderna-dose.html

Interesting that the Moderna vaccine costs nearly twice what the Pfizer one does (and IIRC Moderna got significant funding to develop it, too).

https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/11/23/comparing-covid-vaccines-pfizer-vs-moderna-vs-astrazenecaoxford-15170

109:

Just looked up Nap & slavery and found the below: Yeah, he undid the 1794 anti-slavery legislation to appease 'businessmen'.

Book you might enjoy: The Black Count by Tom Reiss. Story of General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, father of Alexandre Dumas the author of The Three Musketeers and other swashbucklers.

Excellent read, deservedly won the Pulitzer in 2013.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Count:_Glory,_Revolution,_Betrayal,_and_the_Real_Count_of_Monte_Cristo

110:

Re: ' ... put engineering along with housekeeping on the high priority list.'

They probably realized this when they needed to figure out how to expand and maintain their ICU capacities.

Re: Celebrities & vaccine access

Saw a headline from a Canadian news source some days ago that because in Canada it's the Fed gov't that is purchasing the vaccines in bulk for the entire country: anyone receiving emails about jumping the queue/directly purchasing any COVID-19 vaccine should treat that as a scam. And they should also report such scams to the authorities. I'm guessing this is likely true for all countries with a universal healthcare system/centralized vac purchase/distribution. IOW: Watch for scary headlines of mystery deaths attributed to COVID-19 vaccines in Brazil and the US followed by anti-vaxxers screaming: It's the leftie scientists' fault!

111:

Re: ' ... put engineering along with housekeeping on the high priority list.'

They probably realized this when they needed to figure out how to expand and maintain their ICU capacities.

There were reports in the Press yesterday that an ICU in Turkey blew up, killing eight or nine people. There seems to have been a problem with their oxygen supply although how that resulted in an explosion I'm not sure.

Early on in the pandemic a couple of British hospitals ran into engineering problems with their ICU facilities where, it turned out, the oxygen feed system wasn't up to supplying all the beds with high-flowrate oxygen simultaneously. It hadn't been forseen that all bed occupants would be on supplementary oxygen so the piping, regulators etc. couldn't meet the demand. They can now. Thanks, Mz. ICU Engineer!

112:

I cynically expect that vaccine distribution within Ontario will be allocated on a regional basis, not by population, so denser areas will have much longer waits.

Conveniently rewarding voters who support the current government, and punishing the city he hates.

113:

Re: Napoleon & Dumas (The Black Count by Tom Reiss)

Thanks -- looks very interesting!

Checked the BBC radio site but couldn't locate their interviews with Reiss -- did find some related videos that I'm going to watch later today.

'Tom Reiss - The Black Count - Part 1'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjSXNlVlBek

114:

Getting access to a vaccine is the least of my worries. I have tested positive for Covid in late November even though being in lockdown and following all sensible precautions. That was the day before bookshops were to reopen and I was keen to go to WHSmith or Gibert and get OGH's latest. No such luck. After ten days of self-isolation (not easy) and having all my contacts (2) declared and tested (none of them positive), I have been tested again -negative- , so I got out to finally get my book-shopping done and could not find a copy of DLD in any store. Will I have to break a long-standing pledge and order it online? I'm still on a fence about that.

115:

gasdive:81 Unless I've got the wrong end of the stick. It sounds like they're trying to say the events were unexpected. Even that they were very unexpected. Furthermore that the "look both ways" implies that responsible precautions were taken.

If the message is the correct one, that all of this was predictable and could have been prepared for, then that means someone needs to be blamed.

And while there obviously is blame for Trump, the blame spreads around wide and far, and thus for many powerful people better to pretend otherwise.

Heteromeles:83 I'll go out on a very short limb and wager* that Agent Orange ain't going anywhere after he loses the presidency.

Yep, as I said before his options are limited unless he is willing to disappear, and there is no indication that is true.

In addition to the things you mentioned regarding his raised money, also to influence upcoming primaries over the next 4 years - which is why so many Republicans are remaining "loyal" to him - they are terrified of what he will do when they next need to primary.

Heteromeles:84 I think the only (minor) surprise was that Agent Orange couldn't even figure out how to use a 70-odd page, simple playbook to rally the CDC, NIH, and cruise to re-election as the hero who stopped the pandemic.

OGH mentioned the Obama problem, with has a lot of truth - but it is also a case of bad timing and surrounding yourself with yes-people.

Bad timing because it came within a year of the election - Trump has always measured himself as a businessman, and the result is as President he measured himself against Wall Street - it was too close to the election for him do even consider doing anything that would jeopardize Wall Street.

Had it happened in his first year, things may have been different, not least because one of his then influences (back when the White House had some more responsible people) could have spun a way for him to blame Obama for the pandemic - but by year 4 not a chance.

Damian:85 Scotland has closed its borders with the rest of the UK as part of its COVID response. Hope this isn't another nice hot cup of awful for OGH and others.

It's all about the new strain of Covid that spreads faster, which I suspect Scotland is hoping they can keep it out of Scotland given that they are restricted by Westminster on most other options (Wales apparently already has the new strain so no point in them closing their border).

Note also that the European mainland countries are also starting to stop travel from the UK as a result of this new strain.

fajensen:94 I think 2021 will be something like Joe Biden starting a hot war with Iran or even Russia because the USA will become too frustrated over losing millions to Covid-19, declining competitiveness and influence

Biden likely has only 2 years to try to get anything done - the Democrats losing at the State level means the Republicans are in charge for a lot of re-districting prior to 2022, and so a Republican controlled House is a possibility (if not likely given mid-terms often punish the party that holds the White House).

As such for 2021/2022 he doesn't have time to spend distracted on outside stuff unless something external happens that forces his hand.

Robert Prior:100 Remember you are talking about a country that had a SARS epidemic, and systematically dismantled all the measures put in place after that to deal with 'hypothetical' future pandemics.

Learning lessons about health care is not something Canadian governments are good at.

I think part of the problem is being so close to America.

Being close to the US is a major contributor - we face significant pressure to keep cutting taxes to "remain competitive" with companies across the border, and that pressure combined with the costs of running healthcare means a lot of other stuff gets squeezed - and even relatively small amounts of money become tempting after 10 years of nothing happening...

Robert Prior:102 Much like Trump and the Republicans, Alberta has infected the Canadian Conservative parties.

Alberta is a problem, but the proximity to the US is also a problem outside of Alberta.

The current leader of the federal Conservative Party spends time giving lessons on "owning the libs" and how to say things that "piss off woke lefties". As opposed to, say, formulating and articulating policies that they would enact if in power.

Canadians continually remain smug about the excesses of the Republican Party not crossing the border, yet it usually happens - just on a 5 or so year delay.

The current provincial leader in Ontario came to power on a very similar platform as the populists used in the US/UK, with a bunch of Trump elements including being beholden to the Ontario version of the religious right.

116:

There were reports in the Press yesterday that an ICU in Turkey blew up, killing eight or nine people. There seems to have been a problem with their oxygen supply although how that resulted in an explosion I'm not sure.

This news article indicates an oxygen cylinder exploded, causing a fire.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fire-in-turkish-icu-unit-treating-covid-19-patients-kills-9/

117:
  • Trump goes far enough in a coup attempt to be arrested, but fails due to ineptitude. Next 12 months are dominated by coverage of legal woes.
  • Upon observation of long-term covid effects, most students return to school early 2022.
  • Hard Brexit - lower political cost to blame EU and COVID than to lose negotiations.
  • New COVID round requiring new vaccine, mutation in USA.
  • First wave COVID dies out fairly quickly once population hits 40% vaccination, probably in June. (Because denser portion of country already had the virus.)
  • 118:

    Conveniently rewarding voters who support the current government, and punishing the city he hates.

    Why change a winning strategy?

    119:

    "4. New COVID round requiring new vaccine, mutation in USA."

    You're behind on your news, looks like the mutation already happened in ...

    TaDa! UK!

    https://khub.net/documents/135939561/338928724/SARS-CoV-2+variant+under+investigation%2C+meeting+minutes.pdf/962e866b-161f-2fd5-1030-32b6ab467896?t=1608470511452

    As for "requiring new vaccine", time will show, but probably not.

    120:

    Had it happened in his first year, things may have been different, not least because one of his then influences (back when the White House had some more responsible people) could have spun a way for him to blame Obama for the pandemic - but by year 4 not a chance.

    Well, at some point, there's this thing called leadership. In the case of Covid-19, what most competent leaders did around the world was: 1. There's this coronavirus coming out of China. 2. It's been expected, we know it's going to be bad. 3. Here's all the stuff we need to do to keep everyone safe. 4. Do it. 5. Charitably help the democratic strongholds (cities) that are the epicenters of the infection, while the rural voters watch.

    At this point, the democrats are both owned and screwed. Basic competence in a crisis is one of those things that wins elections, just as it almost certainly cost Trump this one.

    Full disclosure: one of the few republicans I've voted for was Gov. Schwarznegger. Reason was, when he was in LA, he lived a few miles from where I grew up, and I knew he'd been through a bunch of natural disasters because my family had been through the same ones. When his opponent was a developer's sock puppet who radiated entitlement to the job without sufficient qualifications (sort of like Newsom, but far worse), voting for the Gubernator was easy, and he turned out to be an okay governor once he shed the Republican idiology and got down to making things work.

    121:

    The Moderna vaccine doesn't seem to require a second shot.

    That would be news to the FDA.

    Note particularly Table 10. Subgroup Analyses of Vaccine Efficacy, COVID-19 14 Days After Dose 2.

    122:

    Robert Prior: Yes, Gibsons. There is only one hospital here, in Sechelt, but it was recently expanded and I'd be astonished if it didn't have cold storage capacity. The Sunshine Coast occupies a funny little blind spot in the eyes of most people, including government. Most seem to routinely assume we are on an/the island, and think no further. Normally I like this - small town life (unlocked doors) within spitting distance of the metropolis - but not this time.

    Re: Alberta. Like many places in Canada, Alberta has a long history of skewing riding boundaries such that an urban riding can have dramatically more actual people than rural ridings. Not coincidentally, the rural ridings skew right. Also not coincidentally, the Conservative party in its various guises has been in control of the province since inception, aside from a recent brief nightmare of competent governance which ended after 4 years. There is also the usual petro-state regulatory capture and blatant corruption that is to be expected in these cases.

    123:

    ~60 days to full immunity

    The FDA briefing doc for Pfizer; the FDA brief doc for Moderna.

    Pfizer Figure 2 is the "days after dose 1" efficacy curve; it's on page 30 of the briefing doc PDF. The last severe case in the vaccinated population is on day 63.

    Moderna Figure 2 is on page 28; it's not as large, nor quite as helpful. The interesting thing with Moderna is that they get to 95% confidence that it's 100% protective fourteen days after the second dose. (top of page 27.) That's day 42.

    (I am in NO WAY a specialist in this subject but it's hard to avoid the impression from these documents that you'd rather get the Moderna vaccine if you have a choice.)

    "Sixty days" is the long tail of the immunity build; both vaccines work by slow accumulation of immunity, and both are not especially well characterized because we've never done this before; first mRNA vaccines ever given to humans.

    I am not finding the specific sixty-day figure back out of the net; I recall it as someone with a virology background making cautious noises about how long you should suppose immunity is going to take, especially since the rate of immunity gain for older people isn't well-characterized. (Not specifically studied, but expected to be slower than the study averages, which went for as much breadth as they could cram into the relatively small-in-this-context study populations.)

    124:

    You have missed the target by a larger than average mile. History is rarely available in simple metaphor.

    Napoleon was a self-centered psychopath. He was also extremely able. The difference between Napoleon and Trump is in the ability. When his inability to accept his limitations, outweighed his ability to manage the fallout; the inevitable collapse came about.

    Few generals in the late 18c and early 19c came anywhere near his ability (to all Brits, of which I am one, Arthur Wellesley was second rate - he almost lost Waterloo - Blucher saved him despite himself). This ability plus his reputation meant that if Nap was in a battle put the fear of Dog into the opposition so he won battles (in the 19C) that he could have lost. When he relied on his own Generals, he hoped they were lucky (that's a paraphrase of his opinion)

    The UK used Spain to bleed Napoleon's limited capacity to raise forces- whether this was a conscious policy or not is debatable. The Russian campaign just exacerbated that problem for France.

    Napoleon had very few principles. Pragmatism was his General. The Code Napoleon, whilst very practical, gave him absolute power - he became unable to delegate (is that a definition of megalomania?).

    Great Britain controlled the sea from 1806 but needed to beat France on the Continent. Spain was their only real physical opportunity. The alternative was the use of wealth; which they had, but not in unlimited quantities.

    125:

    Permit me to recommend again Trevor Bedord's wall of graphs and links.

    Particularly, In new work, we show a human coronavirus evolves to escape neutralization by antibody immunity, Recent announcements have focused on spread of N501Y in the UK (https://twitter.com/CovidGenomicsUK/status/1338580111986204672) and independent emergence and spread of N501Y in South Africa (https://twitter.com/DrZweliMkhize/status/1339970259332325383)., and Independent emergence and spread of variants is suggestive of natural selection where in addition to N501Y we see for example S477N emerging independently in Europe (https://nextstrain.org/ncov/europe?c=gt-S_222,439,477) and in Australia (https://nextstrain.org/ncov/oceania?c=gt-S_222,477)

    Summary of the summary; SARS-CoV-2 is mutating; like any coronavirus, it looks like the reinfection time due to mutating around existing immunities is two to three years; the 2021 vaccines don't require update on available data; there's a whole lot of natural selection going on, and it's happening to the virus much quicker than it's happening to us. Expect revaccination (like flu) and to have to include genomic surveillance with vaccination records.

    My uneducated conclusion -- going to be a job of work to get rid of this stuff. On the plus side, figuring out how might make extirpating the common cold practical.

    126:

    Nojay Oxygen increases combution rates ( Shall we say? ) Also do not EVER allow a pure O2-flow to touch grease, especially around screw-fittings, like you get on Oxy-cylinders - this is guaranteed to start a serious fire. From there to an explosion is an easy step, again especially if you have an undetected Oxygen leak. You only need untrained staff, of people who won't/can't listen & you've got a problem .... Oh, yes, mdive has more on that.

    stimer If you are in the UK, you should be able to order from "Transreal" bookshop in Edinburgh. ( I use their services )

    mdive unless he is willing to disappear, - very difficult, anyway. Up until 12.00hrs, 20/01/2021, he has the "Presdiential" Secret Service guard, so he can't go anywhere & after then he has the samller permanent ex-presidentail Secret Service guard. He's go to get away from, or suborn them, hasn't he? The latter is the one to worry about, of course - see below, incidentally.

    Erwin: Quote from the "indy: Donald Trump has reportedly discussed the option of bringing in the military in an effort to rewrite the election result – with senior officials said to have voiced opposition to the plan – as the president searches for options as he refuses to accept his loss. Michael Flynn, whom Mr Trump recently pardoned for lying to the FBI, apparently suggested the president could impose martial law and use the military to re-run the vote. Meanwhile, lawyer Sidney Powell, who was booted from his campaign's legal team after pushing unfounded conspiracy theories, has been touted as a potential new special counsel investigating allegations of voter fraud Could he, really try this? Is he desperate & stupid enough?

    Talking of desperate & apparently stupid, though BoZo is actually "too clever" - what are our prospects for next year, or even next week? Sorry - don't understand your #3 - do you mean BoZo will go for crash-Brexit & then blame the EU & the virus, or blame virus & scrape a deal of some sort, thus "winning" negotiations?

    127:

    Graydon, thanks for the details of the response times. Either the local news media didn't mention the second dose for the Moderna vaccine, or I outright missed it. Your suggestion of 60 days makes sense given the data you provided. Thanks for the sources!

    128:

    SlightlyFoxed @ 124

    I know of only one general who was consistently superior to Napoleon, each time he met him on a field of battle. Well, nearly each time, since he was an epileptic.

    When Archduke Charles of Austria (1771-1847) directed his troops against Napoleon he would always win, when he was in good health. When he was indisposed by his epilepsy, Austria would lose.

    129:

    "My uneducated conclusion -- going to be a job of work to get rid of this stuff."

    Chances are pretty good that we never will get rid of it.

    But in around a decade it will most likely have been downgraded to just yet another causative agent of what we dismissively call "the common cold".

    130:

    after then he has the samller permanent ex-presidentail Secret Service guard. He's go to get away from, or suborn them, hasn't he?

    By disappear, I mean from public - the Tweets and rallies and other public appearances.

    As long as he insists on remaining public (and the associated attempt to influence both the Republican Party and the US government) no other country will want the hassle of him being within their borders

    As for as the secret service is concerned, they aren't his prison guards - if he wants to leave the country that can't stop him once he is the ex-President (and the ability while President is "untested" I would guess).

    (on second thought, could Boris be that exception and welcome him?)

    Could he, really try this? Is he desperate & stupid enough?

    Irrelevant.

    In order to attempt a coup, you need more than just a President and a handful of stupid followers.

    The problem for Trump, to I assume his dismay, is that he is finding out that the various parts of the US government (judges, military, etc.) are not loyal to him but instead to the US and it's laws.

    So it is possible he is having these thoughts, and possible that he has attracted a handful of people who have escaped reality and are promoting the ideas to him. But at the end of the day all it is going to amount to is a bunch of news stories with click-bait headlines, while potentially furthering his personal feelings of grievance.

    131:

    By disappear, I mean from public - the Tweets

    I am rather hoping that as soon as Biden becomes president Twitter downgrades Trump's account to a normal one, which means applying all the sanctions he's escaped because as a public figure he's been given more latitude.

    132:

    But in around a decade it will most likely have been downgraded to just yet another causative agent of what we dismissively call "the common cold".

    That would imply that everybody who is not genetically fortunate with respect to SARS-CoV-2 infection is dead.

    I do hope that it not the case!

    133:

    I'm not saying you should infect your friends and family, but ... Zoom, Skype, Facetime, folks: don't leave it too long.

    Very much so. I've been using zoom despite my reservations, and whatever the google video thing is, and skype. And I had another facebook account attacked by "please provide a copy of your ID" gremlins so that's off the table again. I get the impression that no phone = automatically flagged as suspicious. Sadly I have friends who are the internet = facebook so without that account I can't talk to them. I mean, technically I could ring them but in practice they either don't answer or "reply" via facebook to say "WTF?"

    It was amsuing to find myself in the 'kids corner" of the UK family group call, me and the nephews looking bored while the dults blithered away happily. But it made the various parental units happy and that's what counts.

    134:

    Chances are pretty good that we never will get rid of it. But in around a decade it will most likely have been downgraded to just yet another causative agent of what we dismissively call "the common cold".

    I agree with the first, but not necessarily the second.

    While yes, it's entirely possible that a new mutation will outcompete the old ones and be less lethal, the problem with Covid19 is that it's already at 50% asymptomatic. To put it in gaming terms, it's a d20. If you roll above a 10, nothing happens. If you roll 5-10, it's a bad cold. If you roll below a 5 you're screwed, and if you roll a 1 you die or are (semi)permanently disabled depending on things like quality of care and comorbities. The problem is that, since it spreads pretty well asymptomatically, it's hard to keep it from spreading to the 1-5% who it will take down.

    The other thing to contemplate is that it might not be so bad to have Covid19 circulating and have to get a new immunization every 2-3 years. The reason for this grim optimism is that before 2020, when they studied coronviruses, there were over 100 that could infect people and about 20 (IIRC) that looked potentially dangerous. SARS-CoV-2 was not on that list.

    So if we were smart, we'd maintain the infrastructure of Covid19 testing, tracking, treating, and prevention, It's easier to piggyback the response to a new coronavirus on the drill everybody already knows.

    Unfortunately, we're not smart. Rather worse, restructuring society to avoid those delicious superspreader festivals and events probably isn't going to happen. That is, unless Covid19 lingers and remains deadly, forcing people to adapt after burying a random loved one or friend. People sometimes do the right thing when all other options are exhausted, so having this damned virus riding us like a night hag might inadvertently keep us safer from something truly dangerous, like a coronavirus that's as contagious as measles and as deadly as Covid19.

    135:

    Rather worse, restructuring society to avoid those delicious superspreader festivals and events probably isn't going to happen

    I'm kind of hoping that it will be enough that reinfection is occasionally possible and that when you get reinfected you roll that dice again. Right now I have too many friends saying "We've already had it, we're fine". The scary thing is that some of them include elderly parents in "we".

    My bet at this stage is that we're going to see ongoing mutation with re-vaccination, and fairly soon we're going to see airlines flatly refuse anyone who does not have the current set of vaccinations. This will be another boost to private aircraft, but I fear it's not going to lead to border laws following the airlines. Mostly because I think the outcry would be problematic for democratic countries (so Australia will be closed but Aotearoa open... Australia is always good for deprivation of liberty in the name of border security). I suspect that a lot of countries that do close their borders will have semi-official exemptions available to the likes of Tim Cruise and Elon Musk.

    Also, it would be hilarious if Bill Gates refused to take the vaccine because of the microchip in it. That might be enough to kill off some of the more insane conspiracy theorists... but it would likely just inflame the whole process so it would be a bad idea. But funny for the first few hours.

    136:

    I am rather hoping that as soon as Biden becomes president Twitter downgrades Trump's account to a normal one, which means applying all the sanctions he's escaped because as a public figure he's been given more latitude.

    It would be nice, but I think if you are Twitter you are in a difficult position.

    As long as there is a possibility that Trump runs and wins again in 2024 I would guess any decisions regarding his account will allow for the possibility of retaliation from him in the White House again.

    137:

    Twitter has already said that Trump's account will loose all of it's privileges come noon Jan 20, 2021

    138:

    As long as there is a possibility that Trump runs and wins again in 2024 I would guess any decisions regarding his account will allow for the possibility of retaliation from him in the White House again.

    That would be appropriately chickenshit. The problem is that they didn't give Biden special privilege after he won. My guess is that they're going to establish a policy that the sitting POTUS is semi-immune, but no one else is.

    The other thing to remember is that IQ.45 rules through fear, so one way to forestall a 2024 reckoning is...to follow policy and treat his account like any other when he's not president. He can foam all he wants, but if he gets banned regularly for foaming, he gets banned regularly for foaming.

    139:

    Twitter has already said that Trump's account will loose all of it's privileges come noon Jan 20, 2021 Suggest an over/under on how long (or how many tweets) it takes him (well, his account) to violate the rules and get banned?

    140:

    What is your unit of measure?

    Days, hours, minutes, or nanoseconds?

    141:

    2. Upon observation of long-term covid effects, most students return to school early 2022.

    Fall (Autumn) 2021 is workable regardless, enough people should be vaccinated at that point.

    But the underlying problem is that (so far at least) schooling at home is no where near effective enough to condemn the current kids to losing a year of schooling.

    So they will try to get kids back into school at some point sooner rather than later.

    4. New COVID round requiring new vaccine, mutation in USA.

    As noted, already sort of happened though the belief so far is the current vaccines will also deal with it.

    But at some point we will get a mutation somewhere that will require a new vaccine.

    For that matter, time will tell how long the current vaccine remains effective and if/what frequency we need to do new rounds of vaccination.

    5. First wave COVID dies out fairly quickly once population hits 40% vaccination, probably in June. (Because denser portion of country already had the virus.)

    Can't be bothered to look, but the last time I read anything the percentage of the population that have already had Covid remains low, so the denser portion of countries already having had the virus is false (in terms of immunity).

    So making Covid a minor (from community spread perspective) issue is going to take far more than 40% vaccination.

    142:

    So making Covid a minor (from community spread perspective) issue is going to take far more than 40% vaccination.

    It's at least in the literature that functional vaccines increase the virulence of the pathogen they immunise against.

    (Yes, that literature is about chickens; still, it's an argument from selection, no reason it won't apply to us.)

    The reasonable planning scenario is that enough vaccination with a functional vaccine produces a variant where the vaccination ceases to be effective AND where the variant is more severe. You can get around this, but you get around it by using strict infection control until the disease is extirpated.

    (A new, more virulent strain might be a communications opportunity, who knows.)

    Comes down to the original problem, immediately apparent back in February; you can get the disease under control, or you can do a mammonism. It's an either-or choice. Singapore -- anyone who wants to argue that Singapore isn't capitalist will need footnotes with footnotes and a detailed missive from God -- managed this fine. Most of the Anglosphere has not, and even in New Zealand you got mammonite deathfuckers demanding the pile of corpses in preference to any reduction in insecurity from a source other than personal wealth.

    Mammonism is not merely a death cult, but one inconsistent with a functioning public sphere. You'd think COVID-19 would be making that obvious, but apparently not yet in a sufficiently focused way.

    143:

    Twitter has already said that Trump's account will loose all of it's privileges come noon Jan 20, 2021

    I hope your right, but I remain skeptical given the poor track record of all the social media companies in dealing with objectionable stuff that drives page views, and hence revenue.

    144:

    Note also that the European mainland countries are also starting to stop travel from the UK as a result of this new strain.

    According to this: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55385768

    UK is quickly being isolated as far as things from the UK to the mainland. Of course one way doesn't work very long.

    Freight is being allowed through but I wonder if they are thinking of shutting that down also?

    146:

    Just guessing, but I'd expect a vaccine to select for increased contagiousness, not necessary virulence. It's a matter of finding suitable hosts when the pool declines, so that favors viruses that travel faster and further. Now yes, this might mean increased virulence, since pouring virus particles out appropriate orifices is one way to try to increase contagion. Equally, it could favor asymptomatic spread, where no one gets vaccinated because it only damages a few people. We'll see.

    The thing to remember is that with viruses, it's a random walk across a complex adaptive surface that's intermediated by the genes the virus has, the ability of its hosts to be infected or to be resistant, and the environment. While I don't think we can map that entire surface, it's quite possible that some possibilities (for example, increased contagion without increased virulence) may be impossible for some viruses, while they may be easy for others.

    147:

    For the next 48 hours.

    Not quite "until further notice" just yet.

    148:

    The same new strain as the one in the UK has been found in 2 other countries: Denmark and South Africa.

    But only Israel seems to be taking measures against these two other countries too.

    149:

    Interestingly, the Murdoch TV in Australia is reporting this as "Christmas rush causes traffic jams" (I'm paraphrasing, but that's the gist of it)

    150:

    ... voting for the Gubernator was easy, and he turned out to be an okay governor once he shed the Republican idiology and got down to making things work.

    This, as I understand it, is what has made him persona non grata to the hard right.

    Much like any new leader, he got into office and tried stuff; some worked great, some worked okay, and some totally failed. For the last, he then had a choice between trying something else or doubling down on slogans and ideology, yelling a lot, and blaming scapegoats. The angry shouting people on talk radio are already committed to the latter, yet he tried the former. Fixing problems is much less exciting than blaming someone the lumpenproletariat already hates.

    151:

    Given the consistency with which this strain is evolving, the odds of it not already existing in the US aren't the best. It may simply not have been detected there yet.

    I so wish more people had had to understand natural selection in order to graduate from high school.

    152:

    Anyone want to chime in with suggestions for a beginner level fixed wing camera platform? Have discussed with friends and decided that more flight time, less noise is worth the "I flew an RC glider a few times 30 years ago" learning curve. Will be hitting the AU forums but I suspect some of you can point me right at a useful dummies guide rather than me having to grind through 200 spam versions first.

    153:

    This is a well-done piece, worth a read. Questions remain, but it has some useful details (bold mine): Mutant coronavirus in the United Kingdom sets off alarms but its importance remains unclear (sciencemag, Kai KupferschmidtDec. 20, 2020) They’re also wondering how it evolved so fast. B.1.1.7 has acquired 17 mutations all at once, a feat never seen before. “There's now a frantic push to try and characterize some of these mutations in the lab,” says Andrew Rambaut, a molecular evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh. ... But scientists have never seen the virus acquire more than a dozen mutations seemingly at once. They think it happened during a long infection of a single patient that allowed SARS-CoV-2 to go through an extended period of fast evolution, with multiple variants competing for advantage. One reason to be concerned, Rambaut says, is that among the 17 are eight mutations in the gene that encodes the spike protein on the viral surface, two of which are particularly worrisome. One, called N501Y, has previously been shown to increase how tightly the protein binds to the ACE2 receptor, its entry point into human cells. The other, named 69-70del, leads to the loss of two amino acids in the spike protein and has been found in viruses that eluded the immune response in some immunocompromised patients.

    154:

    For the next 48 hours.

    Not quite "until further notice" just yet.

    My understanding is all of the EU countries have put in 48 hour suspensions of travel which is just to allow time for the EU to meet and come up with an EU wide policy.

    So I would think there should be an expectation that it could be extended unless some sort of testing/isolation routine can be implemented (or they discover the new variant is already wide spread).

    155:

    More SolarWinds news. There was (at least) a second backdoor, (probably) done and (more probably? language unclear) used by a different actor, according to a Microsoft team's analysis/speculation (that I had not even fully skimmed). Now Trump and his army of conspiracy narrative generators (and their allies) will probably attempt a story blaming both Russia and China. This second backdoor seems less elaborate though just as effective, and could quite plausibly have been done by a non-state actor. Wild. (via @thegrugq, again.) Analyzing Solorigate, the compromised DLL file that started a sophisticated cyberattack, and how Microsoft Defender helps protect customers (December 18, 2020, Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team) Additional malware discovered In an interesting turn of events, the investigation of the whole SolarWinds compromise led to the discovery of an additional malware that also affects the SolarWinds Orion product but has been determined to be likely unrelated to this compromise and used by a different threat actor. The malware consists of a small persistence backdoor in the form of a DLL file named AppWeblogoimagehandler.ashx.b6031896.dll, which is programmed to allow remote code execution through SolarWinds web application server when installed in the folder “inetpub\SolarWinds\bin\”.

    156:

    COVID-19 mutations -

    If people are afraid of viruses mutating, they should stop feeding them more humans!

    This coronavirus is a molecular assemblage with built-in automated self-assembly mechanisms along with a built-in an 'auto-correct' feature that actually helps reduce its overall transcription error (rate of mutation). It doesn't mutate nearly as fast as some other viruses, but it does and will continue to mutate for as long as it's got access to components (starting with the ACE2 in your body).

    The more people that get infected, the greater the likelihood of a mutations/variants appearing - it's simple arithmetic not abstruse math.

    Yeah - I'm being repetitive but gotta keep trying ...

    As per usual - anyone with actual sci background in this field: feel free to correct, amend, add to, etc.

    157:

    Moz, I don’t do FPV flight nor even aero photography so I can’t offer anything directly - but I would urge you to try two things: A) rczone.com almost certainly the biggest RC related site out there with forums for pretty much anything. B) get a decent flight simulator for your chosen computer- advice on that choice can be found on the aforementioned site. You’ll probably come up with a mid-size foamy at a guess though maybe a nice 2-3m e-glider would suit your tastes.

    My old (late) mate Jef Raskin got the US Forest Service people set up with a contemporary model/radio/camera system for use in surveying remote areas a bit more effectively sometime around the mid-90s. I think he’d be amazed how the availability and cost of such things has changed since then.

    158:

    thanks.

    I know some folks using solar drones for long-ish range fish chasing but those are way out of my range, technically and financially. They seem to lose them fairly regularly too. A quick scan of banggood suggests there's a lot of fpv stuff under $200 so I can kind of afford to buy a cheapy to learn with then something decent if I decide to keep at it. It's the "proper" ones where people are shipping 2-3kg of powered glider to neptune every year that scares me. Albeit their cameras and uplinks are where a lot of the money goes, and I'm definitely not in the $10k camera market.

    159:

    Neptune the sea god!

    (Have been trying to figure out what the planet had to do with it since I read that post.)

    160:

    Neptune is a keen photographer but doesn't like buying his own cameras.

    162:

    Now Trump and his army of conspiracy narrative generators (and their allies) will probably attempt a story blaming both Russia and China.

    I don't think that's possible within their psychology. Since "the liberals" accused Donald Trump of getting help from Russia during the election, and made other accusations about Russia, it's not acceptable to criticize Russia. Anyone who does blame Russia for anything is working for "the left" and can't be trusted.

    China, sure, China can be blamed for anything, with no facts required.

    To quote Saturday Night Live: Kate McKinnon as Clinton: “He says climate change is a hoax invented by China.” Alec Baldwin as Trump: “It’s pronounced ‘Jina’.”

    163:

    That's what I thought - until I realized that the vaccines were not expected to finish testing for children until ~10/21, though some sources incline earlier.

    Except, with nigh complete disregard of safety precautions, the Dakotas are, afaik, ahead of schedule for herd immunity by 6/21. Assuming half, roughly, of the population ignores safety precautions and catches the virus, then getting to herd immunity at 40% seems doable.

    164:

    Bit free with his kisses, though. And doesn't even ask.

    165:

    I think the Oringator is there. He's really terrified, knowing that, starting with NY, they are going to put him in jail.

    AND, while they're working on it in court, they're going to freeze all his grifted money, since a lot of that is illegal out the wazoo.

    Reports yesterday or Fri are that he's considering bringing back the wacko woman lawyer, and she's pushing things that, according to a headline I read, had Giuliani shaking in fear.

    I'll also note that the Secretary of the Army and the Chief general? posted things saying explicitly that it was not for the military to interfere in a US election, which was an in-your-face to Trumpolini that they will refuse an illegal order, that being their right and duty.

    166:

    Scotland? Nope. They're already looking to make an official order to the Orange Organization to explain where money is coming from.

    Actually, the one that strikes me as possible is Macao.

    Or... Abkhazia or South Ossetia. They may be recognized by Russia. They are "states with limited or no recognition" (see the wikipedia article). I'm well aware of them, because I needed several for a story I wrote a month or two ago... oddly enough, where someone with zillions of dollars might run, to escape a follow-on-to-the-UN who wanted to tax them into the middle class (you know, millionaires from trillionaires)....

    167:

    Sorry, you're far, far too insular. You should get out more. I guarantee that folks in Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan consider themselves midwesterners.

    And being from PA, I really dislike "rust belt", given our iron and steel built the US. How about "the unionized north and northeast who the union-hating right wing ultrawealthy broke by moving their industries, first to the non-union South, then out-of-country"?

    168:

    Right.The VP has very few duties.

    169:

    Nope. The real issue is that rural areas have a lot more representation than urban ones. In the beginning, it was to keep the rural majority from being ridden over roughshod by the cities. But given that 83% of us now live in urban areas, the folks of Montana have more representation than I do - more Reps per population (due to Congress, scores of years ago, having limited the size of the House). And they've got the same number of Senators I do... and their population is about that of Baltimore city.

    170:

    He's trying one more appeal to the Supreme Court, to overturn PA. Unfortunately, with 306 votes in the Electoral College, he still loses, even if they did (which they won't).

    Melania: as I said 3 years ago: she signed up to be the trophy wife of a billionaire, not in the miniscule bubble of First Lady. I'm more than surprised that her lawyers haven't found an out yet for a divorce.

    171:

    RE: Trump. Yes, he's spiraling, but...

    You notice it's all about his bullshit again? Bannon even had a term for this: flooding the zone with bullshit.

    Focus on Solarwind, or try to sort out what's going on with Warp Speed and whether the vaccines roll out as needed. Or on the Republicans, who are precisely what the aspiring author needs to use as models for updated orcs, thralls, and bad guy toadies.

    But don't help him flood the zone. That's just a distraction. As always.

    Dude's screwed come 1/20, and we just need to help melt a proper-sized hole in his ego to watch him glibber and meep in distress.*

    *Apologies to the ghouls out there, actually, for that comparison. It was uncultured of me.

    172:

    IQ45: the feds will go after him. They have to - esp. the crap he's pulled the last few months of trying to disestablish the election and its results.

    The list of other things.... A future GOP President could pardon him, but he'd be in fed, if not state, forever.

    173:

    Yes! And almost nobody's being interested.

    Hell, in less than a month, we got rubble from an asteroid, and from the Moon.

    Oh, I know, it's because the US didn't do it....

    I don't care if China or Russia buys PanAm and sets up a shuttle to the Wheel....

    174:

    "Have there not been warnings shouted from the rooftops for about 130 years that this is going to happen?"

    Er, no. 40 years, maybe, if you're pushing it. I know people like to claim much earlier beginnings, but when I was at school the climate worry was that we were overdue for the glaciers to come back; just possibly, increasing CO2 levels might save us from that, but we'd be very lucky if it made enough difference, and realistically our best chance was that "overdue" meant "it will be some time in the next ten thousand years or so" so we could hope that none of us nor our proximate descendants would be alive to see it happen. That is, as long as we managed to avoid accelerating the process by inducing a nuclear winter.

    "Nothing in 2020 was even slightly surprising."

    Trump losing the election was. Both in terms of it actually happening, and in terms of it being a good thing, against the trend of several years where everything that happened was a bigger pile of shit than the last thing. What is surprising is that it doesn't seem to have cheered anyone up all that much.

    Apart from that, though, I do agree with the basic proposition, that the "submarine" image really does not fit. It was overall a shit year and there was no reason to have expected it to be otherwise.

    175:

    Herd immunity cannot be achieved without vaccination.

    It's a term of art from veterinary science; the point of "herd immunity" is to determine how much you need to vaccinate. (If you're trying to catch ALL the free-range ungulates, you have a much worse job than if you only need to catch four-fifths.)

    Really; not even with smallpox, where you could only get it once. SARS-CoV-2 is a coronavirus; you probably don't stay immune more than about three years, even if you had a severe case.

    176:

    Oh I get out plenty. Relations that started in Detroit and some who went back. I guess it still sticks in my craw that they acted surprised that we wore shoes on other than Sunday morning.

    I spend 7 years in Pittsburgh in the 80s.

    Rust belt it is.

    I was back in Pittsburgh a few years ago for 3 days visiting old haunts with my wife. It is so sad. While there is a big new vibrant feel to the tech areas there is a huge amount of, well, rust and total decay. Go drive around Braddock some day and tell me how the vibrant shopping area of the 50s is now. Just don't do it after dark. Or just go watch the HBO (I think) documentary. And I didn't just drop by. I worked in an office literally just over the hill for 7 years. And I watched them dismantle the J&L mill the time while I was there. Or at least the part on the east side of the river. They west side was bull dozed after I left. It is now a Yuppie paradise.

    Yes steel mills build the US of the 40s, 50s, and into the 60s. But then they messed it up. Totally. Management and labor.

    177:

    double sigh

    The only time I've been off-continent is when my ex, stepson, and I went to the UK in '14 for Worldcon, and touristing. Drove through Llanberis Pass, by Snowdon. Walked a little in Llanberis, but not a fraction of what I wanted.

    The next year, I had one knee partially replaced, and the year after, '16, I had the other one partially replaced.

    I would loved to have climbed Snowdon.

    178:

    @45: I was just assuming that America seems roughly evenly split between Republican and Democrat (to a first approximation).

    That's about right from what I remember of obsessively reading election news reports. More to the point, and from what I remember (haven't found a citation yet), the Democrats and Republicans each claim a bit under 40% of the electorate, with 20+% claiming either a minor party (Libertarian, Green) or no party affiliation.

    That 20% is what wins elections. The problem is that these aren't all high-minded folks that won't follow any herd. They are, in many cases, just completely indifferent to politics. It's really hard to capture their attention, and nearly impossible to determine in advance whether or how they'll vote.

    The 2020 election was remarkable for voter turnout - approximately 150 million voted, about 2/3 of the voting age public. The (abysmal) normal voting turnout in a Presidential election hovers around 50%; off-year elections are regularly closer to 40%. To quote Thomas Jefferson, "[t]he goverment you elect is the one you deserve."

    179:

    Not quite all over everywhere. For example, I know that one or two parts of the NIH weren't affected.

    180:

    Oh, I know, it's because the US didn't do it....

    Ah, yes we did. It just hasn't made it back yet.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSIRIS-REx#Sample_acquisition

    181:

    Not four - two, though. Not all Senators are up for re-election on the same year, so some every two years. Congress, on the other hand, most of it.

    182:

    For Boris, better to crash out and blame problems on coronavirus than get the terms on offer. For EU, same. So,no real motivation for a deal.

    183:

    Re GOP and primaries... y'know, the big thing will be that those not utterly invested in Trumpolini will see the vaccines rolling out, in a reasonable order, under Biden.

    Metro areas, esp, will REALLY REMEMBER that right now, there are headlines that metro areas are not getting the vaccines they're supposed to be getting - and we're talking MILLIONS of doses.

    There will, however, as IQ 45 starts losing the legal battles and heads towards jail and real bankruptcy, I predict a huge civil war within the party as to who runs it. Given that Q, and apparently others, are saying they're going to destroy the GOP, that will get really, really ugly next year, while the Idiot's fighting jail and losing most of his money (or having it frozen).

    184:

    When I took first year geology during the first Reagan administration my lab TA was a geophysics PhD student whose thesis involved "Ok, say Freeman Dyson is right and human activity raises the temperature of the planet by 3 C" modelling; more trying to figure out if it was possible to model this than what we'd call modelling today.

    Predictions for Ontario included "too wet to grow rice" and suggestions about getting started on a bullrush cultivar right away. (You can eat bullrush roots. You have to be meaningfully hungry and know what you're doing, but you can eat them. Presumably some selective breeding could improve the utility of doing so.)

    The "CO2 is a greenhouse gas" has been around since the late 19th; as public consciousness, it didn't get anywhere what with the fear of nuclear annihilation. But people with a professional concern did know from at least the 70s in a "the back of this envelope is scaring me, I suggest some research" way; the 80s petrocorp predictions have been remarkably accurate. There are arguments for natural gas in the 70s that used "less CO2" as part of the reason to prefer it to oil distillates, come to that.

    185:

    Heteromeles @171: But don't help him flood the zone. That's just a distraction. As always.

    Fully agree. I've seen a number of editorials to that point recently, aimed both at the public and within the press. Just. Stop. Paying. Attention. To. Him.

    If the mainstream (real) media stop parroting his babbling, and most of us just get on with trying to survive a pandemic and rescuing the folks imperiled by it, we'll have plenty to do without listening to the rantings of a deranged narcissist EX-president.

    Plus, you know, we've a few other concerns, like keeping most of the surface of the Earth habitable for humans and other mammals, not turning the oceans to fuming acid baths, keeping the 1% from owning EVERYTHING, frustrating the ambitions of the Middle Kingdom, and dealing with the machinations of a certain ex-KGB agent.

    All so Charlie can keep writing in peace.

    186:

    The issue has never come up, but I would assume that an ex-President could refuse or release Secret Service assigned to him. I'd expect him to want his buddies that he had to let go the first year he was in office.

    187:

    Bill Gates - I've already seen a pic on facepalm of Gates in a comfy chair reading "Microchipping Soccer Moms for Dummies".

    188:

    whitroth @187: Only if the microchips run Windows.

    189:

    Right, but the last month, and two probes.....

    190:

    when I was at school the climate worry was that we were overdue for the glaciers to come back; just possibly, increasing CO2 levels might save us from that,

    That was never a scientific consensus. I recall it being seen as a fossil scam by some of my elders in the 1970's, and definitely by the 1980's it marked you as a shill.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling

    191:

    @Dave P: going for the swing voters is the traditional strategy, but with the low participation rates the other is to rouse your parties' base and discourage the other sides' base. It worked in 2016 enough to become well-known though there were definitely shades of it in previous US elections.

    192:

    whitroth @186: A number of the Secret Service agents protecting ex-Presidents have become quite close to their charges, and vice versa. George H. W. Bush was noted for his rapport with his detail.

    Just imagine what a shit detail guarding El Cheeto Grand is going to be. You'd either have to be a True Believer, or have really screwed up, to be handed that assignment.

    193:

    Missed this from a couple of days ago. It's a really above-and-beyond typo, perhaps Freudian. Lin Wood Signs Georgia Lawsuit ‘Under Plenty of Perjury’ (Colin Kalmbacher, Dec 19th, 2020) Attorney L. Lin Wood filed a pro se lawsuit in Georgia federal court on Friday with an apparent typo that raised legal eyebrows online. Just before his signature block on the final page of the lawsuit is the following verification section [emphasis added]:

    Pursuant to 28 U.S.C. §1746, I declare and verify under plenty of perjury that the facts contained in the foregoing Verified Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief are true and correct.

    Lin Wood is a nutter Trump supporter on Trump's election challenge legal team; without burning too many brain cells, this appear to be a complaint about the use of "unreliable and comprised Dominion voting machines" and something in the US Constitution - “the United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.”. A serious long game by whoever named the Republican Party in the 19th Century. :-) (Dominion machines make a paper ballot printout that voters can verify, I've read, and these can and were recounted with no substantive changes to the numbers.)

    The actual document (pdf)

    194:

    "If you feel like updating me with your predictions for 2021 in the comments below, though, go right ahead."

    How likely do they have to be? I've got one or two good ones.

    The north of Scotland decides it wants Canada back. Iceland is not happy.

    Trump buys the Falklands for a retreat, but on arrival he finds the Argentinians have got there first. He runs away from them, falls into a bog, and is eaten by a family of penguins, using knives and forks and wearing napkins round their necks.

    Cthulhu rises, but forgets to stop rising, and ends up in space, where the vacuum causes him to explode, initiating a Kessler cascade. All subsequent attempts at launching space vehicles result in the spaceship being transformed into a squid.

    The upper Danube is captured by the Rhine, as a result of snowmelt finally flushing out an obstruction restricting the underground watercourse. It is black and slimy, about 2 kilometres long, with far too many eyeballs and an assortment of sucker mouths with poisonous teeth.

    Another new plague arises. It can only reproduce in cells with the melanin-deficiency mutation, and causes people to develop brow ridges, prognathous jawlines, body hair, and prehensile feet. A vaccine is rapidly developed, based on retroviral gene therapy to reverse the mutation; areas like the southern US suffer a secondary plague of exploding heads.

    Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords are globally declared to be the only acceptable basis for a system of government. The results are, on average, no better or worse than any other arrangement, but there is less argument about it.

    Peter Jackson is eaten by a Balrog.

    195:

    Yeah, probable gilding of lilies there, but by 1912 it had hit the popular press.

    "COAL CONSUMPTION AFFECTING CLIMATE.

    The furnaces of the world are now burning about 2,000,000,000 tons of coal a year. When this is. burned, uniting with oxygen, it adds about 7,000,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere yearly. This tends to make the air a more effective blanket for the earth and to raise its temperature. The effect may be considerable in a few centuries."

    https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/rodney-and-otamatea-times-waitemata-and-kaipara-gazette/1912/8/14/7

    Half way down the third column.

    They didn't really understand exponential growth of consumption. It would have been several centuries if they'd kept emissions at 1912 levels.

    It's 55 years since President Johnson warned Congress.

    “This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through radioactive materials and a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.”

    196:

    The 1912 article is a partial reprint (shameless plagiarism?) of a slightly earlier Popular Mechanics article that is appallingly racist, even by the standards of the era (ie, at the same time Australian police were conducting massacres), that I won't link to.

    197:

    I was actually taught that we were approaching the end of an interglacial period, as estimated from the periodicity of previous glaciations, albeit with some uncertainty because they weren't perfectly regular and nobody really knew what caused the actual flip into glaciation. Human activity didn't come into it, being on much too small a scale to affect anything as massive as the whole planet; the notion that CO2 might avert it was presented as being theoretically possible since it was a factor that pushed the other way, but not something you could tie your hopes to, and certainly not as a defence of fossil fuels, which were going to run out soon anyway and we needed to get seriously into nuclear power, energy efficiency, and the odd bit of renewable where it was practical although it mostly wasn't on any kind of scale.

    198:

    Predictions for 2021.

    For the first few weeks people will write the date incorrectly.

    Rupert Murdoch will die, to the sound of much rejoicing. Whoever claims control after the short war in the ensuing power vacuum will be even more swivel eyed crazy. There will be a bunch of rash decisions that will eventually collapse the Murdoch evil empire but not before the entire world (including the scientific publishing industry) is completely unshackled from reality.

    Civil war in the USA (obviously). Probably started by whoever gets control of the Murdoch empire.

    Brexit doesn't turn out to be as bad as expected because thousands of unsung logistics experts work 80 hour weeks for months.

    The BJ claims credit for Brexit success.

    Someone starts a rumour that electric vehicles cause cancer or cooties. The zombie Murdoch press takes it up as a cause and EV drivers are pulled from their cars and hacked to death to much applause from the onlookers and press. Several people are "tragically" electrocuted while vandalising DC fast chargers.

    Things, important things, will happen in Africa. No one in the west will hear anything about it.

    Some large chunk of ice falls into the sea and the sea level rises 10cm overnight. No one believes this has happened. Even the people standing in their flooded homes will deny that it happened.

    Elon Musk will offer to carry telescopes to space for free.

    199:

    he 1912 article is a partial reprint (shameless plagiarism?) of a slightly earlier Popular Mechanics article that is appallingly racist, even by the standards of the era (ie, at the same time Australian police were conducting massacres), that I won't link to.

    OK. How about the year and issue number?

    201:

    I got utterly hooked on science fiction when was around 11 years old and discovered Analog magazine. This would have been around 64/65. The cover story was a 4 part serial about first contact. It sucked me in. Totally. And was utterly racist. And I recognized it. But still I was hooked on sci fi.

    202:

    I was actually taught that we were approaching the end of an interglacial period,

    We were; we are. I can't remember if 1890-1900 or 1880-1890 was the coldest decade in the historical record, but, yeah, the Holocene was probably toast no matter what.

    On the other hand, Freeman Dyson, pre-emeritus, got interested in the question in the 1970s and at that time could make a pretty straightforward calculation for how much warming went with how much CO2.

    I still find it interesting that the 80s oil company predictions were so accurate -- they didn't have better computers, though I suppose they might have had much better core samples -- and that "you know, Milankovitch cycles are a tiny effect, we should assume high sensitivity" didn't happen. People had to spend a couple decades hammering the question of sensitivity into a condition of nigh-certainty.

    It really does look like some narrowly defined short-term self interest managed to shape a lot of the general access to knowledge on this subject.

    203:

    80s oil company predictions were so accurate -- they didn't have better computers, though I suppose they might have had much better core samples

    And echo maps. A friend knows an oil company seismologist who after working with the 3D maps they have generated over the year totally gave up on Young Earth Creationism. You just don't have river valleys and plains under 5 miles of rock and a 10K year old earth. He would talk about them with friends but it was all proprietary so he couldn't make them public.

    204:

    Dunno about frustrating the Middle Kingdom. My impression is that the CCP is mostly focused on making China prosperous enough to stay in power when the incoming geriatric boom occasioned by the one child policy hits. If anything, their investment history in the Third World is considerably more benign than, say, the US. Same with their approach to climate change. If anything, I want them to succeed, as a billion Chinese people stuck on a coal economy will be problematic.

    Now, there is a real worry about what happens when the dollar stops being a reserve currency and smart people stop wanting to immigrate to the US. Bereft of young technicals and taking a maybe 15% economic from losing reserve status, there may be some instability from the US on the way down. But, I suspect China will avoid a war with the US, owing to nukes, and simply carry on.

    I do think people are underestimating lond COVID - risking heart issues would be enough for me to keep kids home an extra year. Combined with the extra lead time for testing in adolescents, meh, I just wanted to share my personal upcoming headache.

    205:

    Niala If the new C-19 strain is "out" in Denmark, then it WILL spread across the rest of Europe ...

    Graydon Yesssss .... I wonder how well the Cretinist idiots' propaganda agin "Evil-lution" will hold up after this? Given that their lies are even plainer to see?

    whitroth Ooooh, yes please? The Scottish lawyers are instituting an "Unexplained Wealth Order" against IQ45? You could sell popcorn for that one.

    Pigeon Wrong "Peter" P Theil is eaten by a Balrog

    AND, of course, today IS The Solstice & it's piddling with rain ...... Won't be able to see the Grand Conjunction, meh.

    206:

    "I still find it interesting that the 80s oil company predictions were so accurate -- they didn't have better computers"

    If you mean better than now, then no. But they had absolutely the best money could buy at the time.

    207:

    The popular articles in the early 20th Century about global warming were based on the work of Svante Arrhenius, who basically invented the field of physical chemistry. In 1896 he figured out that CO2 was what we now call a greenhouse gas, and that each doubling of CO2 would cause a constant increase in temperature. He also made the first rough estimate of the temperature sensitivity as part of an investigation into whether this might explain ice ages (his estimate was high by a factor of about 3). This led to the Popular Mechanics article in 1912 (things happened slower back then), which noted that even at the level of emissions in those days CO2 concentration would double in around 200 years.

    [[ html link fixed - mod ]]

    208:

    Ahh dammit. Write out 100 times "I will always click Preview. I will always click Preview..."

    209:

    Chinese history over the next few decades is going to be interesting to watch from a safe distance.

    The trouble with autocratic regimes, no matter how competent and well-intentioned they start, is that over time the elite who allocate resources start to allocate an increasing share to themselves. Part of these resources are educational and status opportunities for their offspring; the "red princes" get the best education and are then parachuted into plum jobs regardless of ability.

    In consequence the elite lose understanding of the society they are ruling; the people change, but the ruling elite does not. The stratification and hypocrisy become more visible. The ruling elite respond by trying to prevent change. They also become resistant to innovation because every innovation threatens someone, and everyone has a veto on change.

    Thus the system becomes top-heavy, sclerotic and inflexible. Eventually there is a crisis of legitimacy in which the proletariat revolt in a way that the elite are unable to respond to, and the system is replaced by something else.

    The one thing that democracy has going for it is that this inevitable crisis of legitimacy occurs in a system which is designed to handle it; people vote for a modified system which fixes whatever was wrong with the previous system, without the need for violent revolution.

    (The above is cribbed from Fukuyama's "The End of History".)

    I'm less pessimistic than Fukuyama about the future. In particular I don't see liberal democracy as being the end state; I'm quite sure that something better will come along. However that something is likely to be as unimaginable to us as our modern liberal democracy would have been to a 16th century Leveller. However I suspect that open source software (and knowledge more generally) might be something to do with it. In the knowledge economy, proprietary knowledge does not seem to be stable.

    210:

    Predictions for the next year.

  • Brexit is a slow-motion train crash. All sorts of unexpected shortages in critical industries crop up due to problems with trade in obscure commodities and products. The chemical industry is particularly prone to this, but it won't be the only one. The government is overloaded, trying to handle both the national vaccination programme and the reinvention an entire regulatory apparatus that was previously done by the EU. Emergency deregulation becomes the order of the day because there isn't time to do anything else. The EU has similar problems but on a smaller scale.

  • Consumer products start to vanish from the shops, seemingly at random. E.g. you suddenly can't buy drinks in boxes because the plastic liner that stops the box going soggy requires some additive made by some company that can't get a vital ingredient because the only company that makes it is on the other side of the Channel, and its no longer considered "approved".

  • Emergency deregulation leads to a series of what would in other circumstances be considered major scandals; babies and children poisoned, ecological disasters, that kind of thing.

  • Boris gets kicked out of the PM job. Sunak gets bought in as a safe pair of hands. Sunak resolves the crisis by basically agreeing to all EU demands in exchange for a free trade deal. The upshot is that we take on board all EU regulations indefinitely, but have no say in them.

  • Meanwhile Scotland holds an unofficial independence referendum. The result is 75% in favour. Sunak tries to ignore this, but eventually has to concede. Scotland then votes to rejoin the EU.

  • Wales holds a referendum in which it also votes to leave the UK and join the EU.

  • Yorkshire holds a referendum....

  • Greater London holds a referendum in which it votes to leave the UK and become an independent city state, a-la Singapore.

  • The rump of England votes to rejoin the EU.

  • The Queen abdicates. Prince Charles mumbles something. Prince William declares that he doesn't want to be King, and certainly wouldn't wish the job on his eldest child.

  • 211:

    Selective but not entirely wrong. The queues were growing as everyone and their haulage contractor is trying to get as much as possible across the Channel before the end of the month, they're now at a complete standstill. "Get ready for Brexit" says the government adverts, "HOW?!?!?" is th universal reply.

    212:

    The Secret Service detail is another factor in possible destinations for the orange one. The UK has only reluctantly allowed them to go armed since Reagan visited and rumour has it the police firearms units instructions run along the lines of "First sign of trouble, take out the bodyguards".

    213:

    Elon Musk will offer to carry telescopes to space for free.

    That one wouldn't actually surprise me. Bolt a few Starlink frames together keeping the control systems, engine and solar panel from one of them and you could fit a respectable sized telescope in the volume.

    214:

    Thanks for that. The only good description I had found previously was in German. Just to be cheerful, it is possible that COVID may be worse in 2021 than 2020. May you live in interesting times!

    215:

    Yes, you can, and we used to with the 'childhood diseases', with things like measles parties; the point is that what 'herd immunity' really means is that a sporadic infection will die out and not become an epidemic, and that can be done by deliberately infecting people under conditions they will almost certainly develop lifetime immunity without serious problems. However, for reasons that have been very poorly explained to the masses, it is very unlikely that any form of 'herd immunity' is achievable for this virus.

    216:

    I started with basically the same question not long ago and haven't really answered it satisfactorily yet.

    I ended up focusing on learning to fly first. My experience is that flying something "over there" is very different to flying something you are sitting in, even virtually. So I have started with software. There's a flight sim specifically for RC flight called Real Flight, a name that strikes me as recursively ironic but there you go. It comes either as software only, or with a USB controller that physically resembles the Spektrum branded transmitters. It's really part of the Horizon Hobby/Spektrum ecosystem.

    There's a school of thought that goes you learn the most from crashing, so you should just jump in with an actual plane, crash early and crash often. This means that there are many beginner packs with ready-to-fly (RTF) pusher-prop models made for hand launching and belly landings. The competing school of thought is that you should learn on the sim first: you can crash as often and as spectacularly as you like then without spending money on things that end up broken (and high speed crashes really can obliterate planes). The sim is kinda reasonable fun and after a few weeks, I still haven't gone and got a physical model. Maybe in the new year: my first plane is likely to be some sort of trainer. The models I have in mind are both E-flite: the 1.5m wingspan Apprentice STS or the 1.2m Mini Apprentice S (E-flite is a Horizon Hobby brand and so part of the aforementioned ecosystem).

    As far as cameras go, there's a difference between FPV flying, where the emphasis is on low latency, and using cameras for photography and videography. They are not mutually exclusive and can be combined. If you google "site:au FPV" you mostly get resellers (worth wading through and making sense of the product listings) but also some forums (and a page from CASA that's probably worth reading). There are digital FPV cameras (really single-board computers that have cameras on board too) that can record HD to SD card. There are also planes with multiple designed-in camera mounting points: e.g. see the E-flite Opterra. I got quite excited about the possibilities that model seems to open, but there are some regulatory downers that might make it a bit limited. I've sort of put off getting deeper into that till I've learned to fly, and spent some time flying (line of sight) with a local club.

    There are competing radio control protocols, transmitters are basically the UI computer (most have screens for displaying telemetry and programming), some run an open platform or open source OSes while others are semi-closed ecosystems (like the Horizon Hobby ecosystem). There is automatic stabilisation technology in the receivers that is of particular interest for photography/videography (google "as3x" and "aura 8"). I'm mentally comparing this with the 5-axis in-body image stabilisation available on mirrorless cameras, but I think you would consider it as providing a stable platform that would then hand over to the image stabilisation in a modern Go Pro or similar camera. The RC people say it makes small planes fly like larger planes - something my experience in the sim backs up. Smaller planes are harder to control in higher winds, as3x helps a lot with that. The receivers that do as3x also have a thing called SAFE, which is worth reading about separately (I find I turn it off in the sim, but I can see how it would be helpful in the real).

    Strangely important, even though it might sound a bit trivial, is that you need to decide whether you want to fly Mode 1 (left stick is elevator and rudder, right stick is throttle and ailerons) or Mode 2 (left stick is throttle and rudder, right stick is elevator and ailerons). Usually the stick that controls the elevator is sprung so it self-centres when you take your thumb off, while the stick that controls the throttle does not. Some transmitters can be converted between modes reasonably easily, but some cannot. It seems to be mostly the mid range that can be converted, and I guess that makes some sense. Mode 1 is the norm in the UK, Australia and NZ, while Mode 2 is the norm everywhere else. It seems that you can't tell which you'll be more comfortable with until you've tried each for long enough to get good at it.

    The regulatory environment is important to check out. The rules in Australia are changing, and licensing and registration is being phased in over the next couple of years. There's also a federal-state-local layering situation to consider: there are places that would be fine as far as CASA is concerned but are not allowed by the LGA. So I can talk to Brisbane, which I know, but it'll be different depending on your local council. Brisbane parks allow anything up to 500g flying weight (which is the threshold for requiring registration and a licence from CASA), but they have a gazette of authorised "drone launching areas" where the limit is 1kg.

    There is a separate regime for clubs: local clubs must be institutional members of one of the handful of CASA-registed national clubs. But then you get access to the club's flyings area, with more liberal weight restrictions (2kg is common but it can be higher). The national clubs also give members a form of 3rd party liability insurance, though often the benefit of the club is that it's not open to the public. National parks have their own rules and you'd need to check the parks and wildlife service responsible for the one you're interested in. In general flying over people, vehicles and roads is prohibited (30m distance, taken from the plane's ground track).

    So I've probably not answered your question adequately, I've just tried to explain where I've gone from starting with more or less the same question. I haven't found a how-to guide for "fixed wing photography/videography". It does seem like drones have most of the mindshare for that (there are some great looking ones). The FPV world includes fixed wing and drones. Starting with FPV might work out for you, depending on what you want to use cameras for. That most likely means reading through the FPV forums and chatting with people there. I have seen YouTube posts by people who've stuck small cameras on the aforementioned belly-landing pusher-prop models, so a lot of things are possible. You could check the YouTube channel from a group in the US called Flite Test, they do see interesting things (including build-from-scratch).

    217:

    GW & Paul on Arrhenius:
    GW was already noted by the famous ecologist Rachel Carson. I have a copy of her The Edge of the Sea ( 1955 ) & she specifically mentions the gradual rising of temperatures, then.

    Regarding sclerotic systems: That's a perfect description of Austria-Hungary - the irony is that Prince/Archduke Franz Ferdinand was a reformer - he wanted to bring others inside .... And, of course, Democracy only works if it actually works & isn't subject to special-interest & regulatory capture, as has has almost happened in the USA ( The next 8 years will tell ) & here ( The next 4 years will tell )

    Paul 1: Euratom is the one to watch, there - I suspect the EU Medicines Agency will get a free pass in current circs. Next up could be Europol. 3: Hadn't thought of that one - good pick. Except we can expect a slow-burn-to-fizzle-to-bury. [ As with "Grenfell" ] 4: Probably - though the ERG fuckheads will go (even more) bonkers 10. NOT EVER. She might - will, in fact, continue handing over parts to Chas & William. Oh & I suspect London might be second, not fourth!

    EC Yes - it's a "coronavirus" ( Surprise! ) - as is the Common Cold, oops.

    218:

    More countries join the new virus club. In addition to Denmark and South Africa the WSJ now reports the Netherlands and Belgium as being hosts to the new COVID-19 strain.

    It's a bit further down in their article on the UK:

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-k-lockdowns-prompt-travel-bans-to-block-new-covid-19-strain-11608469676

    219:

    Democracy only works if it actually works & isn't subject to special-interest & regulatory capture

    True, but take a look at the USA in the Gilded Age.

    Massive new industries created billionaires, with large sections of the economy effectively captured by them. They then translated this into control of the government. Things reached crisis point with the Great Depression, and the result was a democratic revolution in the form of the New Deal in the USA and the Welfare State in the UK.

    In the UK of course the cycle then repeated during the 1960s, with the government co-opting the unions to create a new ruling elite, leading to a sclerotic and inflexible economy in the 1970s, which was then broken up by the Thatcher revolution of the 1980s. Now of course the cycle is repeating yet again, and I anticipate that at some point in the next decade or two we will see a new New Deal in the USA and a revitalisation of the Welfare State, probably involving some kind of Universal Basic Income, in the UK. (And probably similarly in other countries too).

    220:

    That's quite an article, and thanks for the link.

    Remarkable Weather of 1911 The Effect of the Combustion of Coal on the Climate -- What Scientists Predict for the Future By Francis Molena Popular Mechanics March 1912 Pages 339-342

    221:

    I saw De Santis in Florida deciding that one dose would be enough, in order to stretch supplies. Perhaps that's what gave you that impression.

    (That's my sister's local paper, which is worrying. On the other hand we've just gone from Tier 2 to a newly invented Tier 4 so she's probably worrying about me. At least I finally got a 'flu jab yesterday morning.)

    222:

    You are dead right - I just couldn't remember which Austrian it was.

    223:

    I wonder if Macron isn't using the Covid mutant strain as an excuse to put pressure on the British negociators.

    This 48-hour-or-more blockage of lorry traffic just before Christmas seems to be designed to cause food shortages at a moment when they would have maximum visibility. It would make a great "This is what no-deal Brexit will be like, sure you don't want to budge?" publicity.

    224:

    Paul Provided - ( In the USA ) that the rethuglicans don't suceed in really, actually limiting the franchise, as they are determined to do - it seems - which can only end very badly indeed.

    Nemonowan Indeed But, as noted it's bolting-the-stable-door time, given that "new variant" is known to be "out & about" in Belgium & Denmark

    I note that the v sensible idea of continuing negotiations has been rubbished by Giant Schnapps, presumably on orders from BoZo

    225:

    My first reaction to the news was that brexit had come early.

    226:

    Re:' ... if Macron isn't using the Covid mutant strain as an excuse '

    Nope - other non-EU countries have also announced they don't want any travelers from the UK. I wonder if/how this will apply to the super-rich who've been globe trotting on their personal jets.

    228:

    Graydon noted: "Herd immunity cannot be achieved without vaccination."

    Yes, but only if you revise that as "achieved ethically". If enough people die, then by definition, only resistant individuals survive. At some point, the odds of transmission from the remaining infected individuals drop low enough that people are still dying, but at low rates. But it's important to remember that herd immunity is a population-level phenomenon, and doesn't mean that a given individual will necessarily survive. Trump and Bojo seem focused on "weed out the weak" rather than the ethical approach.

    More info on "one dose": I think I probably got my impression that the Moderna vaccine required only one dose from posts like this one: https://twitter.com/findingpneumo/status/1339556859473227778

    That is, if you can get 90% immunity with the first dose, you can focus on ensuring that everyone gets a first dose before worrying about providing a second dose to improve their odds. It makes sense from an epidemiological perspective (i.e., reduce the overall rate of spread NOW, by 90%). But front-line personnel should be rewarded for their sacrifices by giving them priority for second doses. If we lose enough doctors and nurses and their support staff, things will get even uglier, and fast.

    229:

    Earlier today I wrote: I don't see liberal democracy as being the end state; I'm quite sure that something better will come along.

    Of course, this is exactly the right place to ask what that something better will look like; a bunch of smart knowledgeable (or at least, well-read) people who seem to have little emotional attachment to the current system and are used to thinking out of the box.

    Will it be fully automated luxury communism, like Star Trek and The Culture? Or will it be something else?

    Two hundred years ago most people worked on or around the land. One hundred years ago most people in "the West" worked in factories. Today most of them work in offices doing stuff that would have looked ridiculously unproductive just a century ago. Where will most people be spending their productive hours in another century, and what will "productive" look like?

    How will resources be allocated? Will there be money? What will it look like and how will it be controlled? Who gets it, and how do they get it?

    How will the big decisions be taken? Will there be a government? What will government look like? Will the nation state still be a significant concept in world affairs? What about super-national assemblages like the EU?

    I don't much care what the future lacks as long as it isn't food and shelter, so "no billionaires" is a boring answer. I want to know how it works. I always do. Whenever I visit a stately home I don't much care about the suits of armour and massive paintings of the third duke's wife, I want to know how below-stairs operated, which things were done in-house and which were outsourced, and what the cash-flow looked like.

    230:

    those not utterly invested in Trumpolini will see the vaccines rolling out, in a reasonable order, under Biden

    I'm on several Republican mailing lists*. The vaccines were apparently created in America by Operation Warp Speed, which was set up by the far-sighted President Trump to save America and American Free Enterprise from the threat of Chinese Communism and Antifa.

    Given this, and the reaction of Fox viewers when Fox posted retractions to false claims made on their programs, I suspect that a considerable proportion of your compatriots are "utterly invested in Trumpolini".

    *Apparently at least one Robert Prior in America is a right-winger, and he keeps giving my email address when subscribing to stuff, so I see what the Republicans are telling their supporters (and potential supporters).

    231:

    It makes sense from an epidemiological perspective (i.e., reduce the overall rate of spread NOW, by 90%).

    The available mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 are not known to reduce spread.

    That's the difference between a sterilising vaccine -- you don't get the disease, and you can't infect others with the disease -- and a functional vaccine -- you will not become severely ill with the disease.

    Neither vaccine was tested for anything other than "prevents severe symptoms". We don't know if you can still spread the disease or if you are still at risk of long-term organ damage as has been observed in asymptomatic cases. Prudent planning presumes "yes" to both questions.

    232:

    Not a submarine but still. https://www.npr.org/2020/12/21/948715787/hawaiis-kilauea-volcano-erupts-on-big-island

    Anyone see that ridiculous movie "2012"?

    233:

    Graydon noted: "The available mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 are not known to reduce spread."

    Fair enough. It seems likely that vaccination will reduce the spread, on the logic that less-severe symptoms means a lower viral load due to the immune system's response and thus less virus to spread. But as you note, there's no data yet to support that hypothesis.

    234:

    The reason the second wave of 1917 Spanish Flu was so lethal is that the military had inadvertently selected for virulence. Minor cases stayed put, while severe cases were shipped off to field hospitals where they infected lots of others.

    This time round we have been doing the opposite. Moderate and severe cases get isolated, while minor sniffles or asymptomatic cases carry on more or less as usual.

    Of course there is also strong pressure for contagiousness, just like always. We're probably making that even stronger by keeping the R number s close to 1.

    So the emergence of a more contagious strain is unsurprising. Logically, it should also be less virulent.

    235:

    If enough people die, then by definition, only resistant individuals survive. At some point, the odds of transmission from the remaining infected individuals drop low enough that people are still dying, but at low rates.

    That's not herd immunity. (I invite you to try to get "stock is still dying, just not very much" past your local set of agricultural regulations.)

    "Herd immunity" is "hasn't got the disease, it's not circulating, it is locally extirpated because it's got nowhere to live".

    Actual capitalists act like Singapore; what you're describing is mammonite corpse-fucker fantasies of infinite free labour; not even slavery, outright zero-cost. Workers are fed and housed by magic, it has no meaning if they get sick, you never have to pay them, and any money they happen to have they must give you.

    The political leadership of the US and UK and most of Canada are determined to act like that's true, no matter how many people die, because the alternative is to admit their god is a false god, and they're not going to do that.

    236:

    It seems likely that vaccination will reduce the spread, on the logic that less-severe symptoms means a lower viral load due to the immune system's response and thus less virus to spread.

    We've known for months that SARS-CoV-2 has a (variably effective) immune system bypass, that only about fifty percent of cases are symptomatic at all, and that peak viral shedding occurs prior to onset of symptoms even in symptomatic cases. Absence of symptoms is correlated with spread in COVID-19.

    All we know about either vaccine is that it prevents severe symptoms thereabouts of nineteen times out of twenty.

    So no, it's not likely vaccination will by itself reduce spread. We've got no basis to suppose that happens at all. Everyone would like that to happen, but that's not even close to being the same thing.

    237:

    Nope - other non-EU countries have also announced they don't want any travelers from the UK. I wonder if/how this will apply to the super-rich who've been globe trotting on their personal jets.

    Canada's 72 hour ban applies to all flights, commercial or private https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-flights-uk-coronavirus-1.5849598

    238:

    That's what I thought - until I realized that the vaccines were not expected to finish testing for children until ~10/21, though some sources incline earlier.

    Vaccines for children, while important, are of lesser concern.

    It is a matter of balancing risks, and even today in most cases the balance is such that going to school is the lesser of evils - not just the education, but the social interaction and the reduced risk of physical harm.

    (and of course the necessity as child care)

    Except, with nigh complete disregard of safety precautions, the Dakotas are, afaik, ahead of schedule for herd immunity by 6/21.

    Nowhere close.

    While the State level governments (well, at least the notorious South Dakota Governor) are missing in action as things got bad news reports indicate that the county/city level governments stepped up.

    So if one Google's "south dakota covid graph" we can see that daily new cases peaked on November 12th and have been declining since then - so with the trends in the right direction they aren't going to hit herd immunity, or even 50%.

    (the data Google is using comes from the NY Times) (could also be worth someone investigating - coincidence or ? - both states starting to see drops after the election, when perhaps purity to Trump became less important?)

    239:

    A volcano is erupting for the first time since the year before last?

    That's really rather minor by this year's standard.

    240:

    whitroth:172

    IQ45: the feds will go after him. They have to - esp. the crap he's pulled the last few months of trying to disestablish the election and its results.

    In an ideal world, yes.

    But we aren't in an ideal world, and what is provable in court vs what we think will be a key consideration. As will a reluctance by many Democrats to create a new culture of going after the person leaving office for what many in the US will view as personal grievances (given that a substantial portion believe Trump).

    The idea of falsely prosecuting and jailing opponents is already popular with the Trump/Republican base - there will be caution about turning that into a potential reality.

    whitroth:173 I don't care if China or Russia buys PanAm and sets up a shuttle to the Wheel....

    It will be China, as the US is forcing them by the policy of excluding them from participating in the multi-nation space projects - plus they have the stable government to ensure long term projects happen combined with the willingness to spend money.

    The only thing stopping China is if the rumoured house of cards collapses.

    whitroth:183 Re GOP and primaries... y'know, the big thing will be that those not utterly invested in Trumpolini will see the vaccines rolling out, in a reasonable order, under Biden.

    Except at this point much of the Republican base is Trump supporting, just as in the past they went Tea Party.

    And even those not dedicated to Trump will have a high number who believe in the conspiracies - and thus all the vaccines rolling out will prove to them is that the hidden liberal deep state was deliberately sabotaging the vaccine roll out to make Trump look bad.

    I predict a huge civil war within the party as to who runs it. Given that Q, and apparently others, are saying they're going to destroy the GOP, that will get really, really ugly next year,

    It would be nice if it happened, but I suspect it will be harder than a bunch of noisy people online expect - particularly given that the current members of the Republican Party have clearly demonstrated they are willing to be flexible to accommodate the crazies as long as they can get re-elected and give the true masters their tax breaks and/or prevent the Democrats from improving things.

    241:

    This one is the one that obliterated 700 homes 2 years ago.

    Basically it is in the middle of where a lot of rich folk decided to live in paradise. Of course their help is stuck there also.

    Not quite the same as a volcano in Manchester, UK. But in the direction of Vesuvius going off again.

    242:

    The regulatory environment is important to check out.

    Second this, strongly.

    In Canada the sRPAS regulations cover both quadcopters (drones) and model aircraft. There's a couple of carve-outs for RC models at sanctioned club fields, but generally the rules apply to all small remotely-piloted aircraft equally.

    A quick look at Australian regulations seems to indicate that the presence of a camera makes a difference in where you are allowed to fly(which isn't the case in Canada), with non-camera aircraft allowed in more locations. They also seem to show that you must maintain line-of-sight at all times (also true in Canada, and we have a hard limit of 500m away*).

    *Which applies even if you are part eagle and can see your aircraft well enough to control it at several km range, as claimed by a number of YouTubers.

    243:

    I wonder if/how this will apply to the super-rich who've been globe trotting on their personal jets.

    Why would it apply to them? Laws are for the little people…

    244:

    Relatively speaking, I'd argue that the USA is showing more signs of instability than China. I'd agree that China will have issues, but guess that they are several generations off.

    @mdive

    Maybe. But the rather high incidence of cardiac issues in adult patients is concerning. A reasonable point is that we vaccinate for several known diseases with lower known risk profiles to children. I'd argue that we don't know the long-term effects of covid on children yet. (The Spanish flu had some real long term issues.). The ridiculously early studies indicating that kids weren't infectious have since proven to be...somewhere between inaccurate and misleading. The studies on cardiac issues and brain damage in children don't seem to exist yet. Perhaps this is because demonstrating a negative is hard to publish, perhaps my waking googlefu sucks. (I would love to be contradicted here.). But, one reasonable rule is that any study conclusion that people would want to believe should viewed very skeptically. Many people (business, children's advocates, parents) would love for the risk/harm balance to be in favor of sending children to school. It might be, but I am not sure that it is. For children with unvaccinated parents, I'm fairly certain it is not.

    245:

    But front-line personnel should be rewarded for their sacrifices by giving them priority

    And Republican politicians. Don't forget them.

    https://uproxx.com/viral/marco-rubio-republicans-pandemic-vaccine-twitter-reactions/

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2020/12/18/disgraced-former-alabama-gov-robert-bentley-gets-covid-vaccine-before-many-frontline-workers/?sh=2c212d57f091

    I rather like Takai's response to Rubio:

    There are very, very few instances of known allergic reactions to the Covid-19 vaccine, but Marco Rubio has always thought of himself as one in a million so there’s still hope.

    246:

    Re: '... new culture of going after the person leaving office for what many in the US will view as personal grievances (given that a substantial portion believe Trump).'

    However, if the authorities do not go after the person leaving office for what an even larger segment of the population believes are prosecutable offenses this will send the message to everyone that politicians have a free pass to do anything without fear of consequences.

    The legal system is our sword of Damocles - we need to see it in action.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damocles

    247:

    if you are still at risk of long-term organ damage as has been observed in asymptomatic cases

    Which is one of my minor nightmares. Suppose even asymptomatic infections increase risk of strokes etc. By the time we figure it out Covid is firmly endemic and most people have had it (with symptoms controlled by vaccines and/or other treatments). So long-term life expectancy goes down from increased strokes etc.

    248:

    Graydon noted: "Herd immunity" is "hasn't got the disease, it's not circulating, it is locally extirpated because it's got nowhere to live".

    Maybe in the veterinary context, but in the human context and other contexts, it's defined as follows: "Herd immunity... is a form of indirect protection from infectious disease that occurs when a sufficient percentage of a population has become immune to an infection, whether through vaccination or previous infections, thereby reducing the likelihood of infection for individuals who lack immunity." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity)

    That's the definition I learned in my human medical microbiology course and in two subsequent plant pathology cources (though with a different name).

    In terms of whether vaccines are likely to reduce spread, or not, we'll have to agree to disagree until we have data. My knowledge of disease spread (see above) is that spread occurs when the combination of infection probabilty and the dose of inoculum exceeds a certain threshold. That is, highly infectious pathogens require a lower dose to infect, whereas low-infectious organisms require a higher dose. If a vaccine reduces the organism's ability to infect (because the immune system clobbers the pathogen first) or reduces replication of the pathogen (so that fewer propagules are available to infect), it will also reduce the spread. We'll see how that works for covid-19.

    249:

    Robert Prior raised the problem of whether politicians should be prioritized for vaccination.

    It's an interesting issue because elected representatives set a nation's course, while senior bureaucrats are (in practice) the ones who actually keep the country running by implementing that course.

    If all the politicians died, how well would the country keep running? At one extreme, it would run like a chicken with its head cut off: the basic organ systems keep running, so the chicken can survive for a surprisingly long time (https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34198390). At the other extreme, the beheaded nation quickly collapses into chaos because nobody is providing overall direction. I expect the former result is more likely than the latter, but it's not an experiment I'm eager to try.

    250:

    The political leadership of the US and UK and most of Canada are determined to act like that's true, no matter how many people die,

    Interestingly Ontario is (rather late) apparently going to lockdown the entire province starting Christmas Eve (2 weeks for the northern part with low population/low numbers, 4 weeks for the southern portion).

    251:

    A reasonable point is that we vaccinate for several known diseases with lower known risk profiles to children.

    And we will eventually vaccinate for Covid as well, but we don't roll out mass vaccination with testing first to make sure the vaccine doesn't behave differently in kids - and for obvious reasons all the initial development and testing was for adults as they can provide consent to be guinea pigs on an entirely new untested treatment.

    I'd argue that we don't know the long-term effects of covid on children yet.

    Not an argument - at about a year into this we simply don't know the long-term effects on anyone of Covid.

    Many people (business, children's advocates, parents) would love for the risk/harm balance to be in favor of sending children to school. It might be, but I am not sure that it is. For children with unvaccinated parents, I'm fairly certain it is not.

    The Province of Ontario publishes the numbers of Covid in Ontario schools.

    Background - Covid is in community spread in the populous parts of Ontario with the largest urban areas (Toronto/Peel) having been in lockdown for 4 weeks already, last week several other areas were placed in lockdown, and news reports overnight indicate that the Premiere will announced today that the entire province will be put into lockdown effective Christmas Eve.

    Yet despite that only 20% of the schools are reporting an active Covid case among students/staff - and a quick scroll through the school level numbers shows that only 5 schools are reporting cases in the double digits (18, 12, 12, 12, 10) and all other schools are in the single digits of cases.

    https://www.ontario.ca/page/covid-19-cases-schools-and-child-care-centres

    Now obviously there are limitations to the data - any student showing no symptoms is unlikely to be tested - but the indications are that schools are not the problem from a Covid perspective (in fact, one of the Mayors (Brampton) has stated that the spread is happening in business/industry).

    While valid data saying otherwise would have me reconsider, so far it appears that schools are not the danger that public perception would make them out to be - that the precautions taken are working and that the kids are wearing their masks.

    252:

    Re: Kids going to school. It is an impossible attempt to balance between risk of infection, loss of education, capacity for parents to continue working and paying bills, and risk of mental health issues for kids.

    I can say with 100% certainty that both of my school aged kids were in a significant depression by the end of June this year, after being locked down for months. I was particularly worried about the 10 year old, who was in a spiral of misery from which he hasn't yet recovered. This is a real thing and has to be included in the calculations.

    Kids are home from school now, I strongly expect the normally 2 week holiday break to be extended to at least 3 weeks past Xmas. I also expect youth sports to be shut down, which will be devastating to both of them, particularly the eldest.

    Re: Legal accountability after being in office. The solution is to make damn sure your Justice department is morally unquestionable, wholly independent and not subject to political interference. Also give it the power and time to prosecute complex crimes. And then don't commit any crimes yourself.

    Much 'white collar' crime goes unpunished because it is complex, difficult and costly to investigate, and difficult to prove. Making financial crime actually easier to investigate, and providing the budget and capacity to undergo such investigations, is a really good idea that is unlikely to ever happen.

    253:

    Why are you surprised about the accuracy of the calculations? Svante Arrhenius, in 1896, published "On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground" (https://balticeye.org/globalassets/blogg/michelle/arrhenius_1896.pdf), and he got pretty close to right with a paper and pencil. It's not a hard calculation, if you're talking about the relationship between the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere and how much the atmosphere's temperature increases. Arrhenius' basic equation is at the heart of all climate models.

    Thing is, this equation relates a the temperature of a volume of air to how much incoming energy is warms that air as opposed to passing through it. Getting that last number required grinding through a bunch of spectroscopic measurements, which is what Arrhenius did with some new-at-the-time data.*

    Where you need a supercomputer is when you want to turn global energy capture into local temperatures, because that's effing hard, especially when clouds come into the picture. But the basic global average temperature over time is fairly easy. I was doing those calculations as an undergrad in the late 80s.

    So far as the history of dealing with climate change, until Al Gore, most people (including me) thought that technological progress would solve the problem with gas giving way to hydrogen. What wasn't visible was how much effort the petroleum industry was putting into sowing doubt and disinformation on the issue, and we're still grappling with their political reach globally. Probably some of the old-timers here remember the the common viewpoint that "Technology is the big problem. once it's solved, the political issues can get handwaved away," when I started commenting here. Now, we put the political problems on par with the technological ones and wonder if either can be solved in time. That's progress, I guess.

    *Arrhenius was using measurements of the spectra of moonlight. The reason for this apparent silliness is that researchers wanted to find out what the Moon was made of, and there was this new spectroscopic data coming in, with absorption and emission bands and all of that. But to use sunlight reflected off the lunar surface, they first had to subtract out the effect of earth's air selectively absorbing some wavelengths of light. Arrhenius was more interested in figuring out how changes in [CO2}atm might have caused ice ages, so he ground through the spectral data, pulled out the CO2 energy input, and came up with the relationship factor between how much CO2 is in the air and how global temperatures rise or fall. And he pretty much nailed it.

    As others have noted, he also predicted global warming at the very end of the paper. But since he had no clue how much fossil fuel was available or how fast growth in consumption would happen, he figured it would be a problem in a few thousand years. I'd also point out that he was far from the first or last to worry about what would happen when all the coal and petroleum was burned. In the 19th Century, there were complaints about killjoys worrying endlessly about the problem, and fervent hopes that they would just shut up. That attitude might have been a bit of a mistake, looking back.

    254:

    However, if the authorities do not go after the person leaving office for what an even larger segment of the population believes are prosecutable offenses this will send the message to everyone that politicians have a free pass to do anything without fear of consequences.

    For the record, I think (despite the danger that no conviction would result) that Trump should be pursued for all the various things he did in office - on the assumption that they actually were illegal - to (as noted) set an example to those that follow.

    But the problem is prosecuting and getting convictions in these type of cases is very difficult - it's easy to say with a wave of hands that X is guilty of Y, it's another thing entirely to prove it in a court of law. So I can see the people at the Justice Department taking a look at the case, weighing the evidence they have available, and declining to prosecute.

    And, as always, it is easy from the sidelines to say damn the side effects and prosecute - it is going to be another thing entirely when you personally can in the future be subject to retaliatory prosecution when you leave office.

    255:

    Interesting opinon piece in the Guardian about the problem facing American progressives

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2020/dec/19/progressives-us-democrats-power-new-deal

    256:

    "So far as the history of dealing with climate change, until Al Gore, most people (including me) thought that technological progress would solve the problem with gas giving way to hydrogen."

    Oh, come off it! I didn't know Anyone With Clue who thought that, though I agree that most people are as thick as two short planks - however, I doubt very much that most people put any thought into the matter in the first place. Even today, the solutions to the technological problems to widespread use of hydrogen rely on handwavium, at best, and arguably even unobtanium. There were and are damn good technical reasons that lithium ion batteries have wiped that off most medium-term predictions.

    I agree that the problems are at least as much political as technical, and about the culpability of the oil industry, but the idea of hydrogen being a viable replacement for natural gas (let alone oil) always was close to fantasy.

    257:

    It's not even true in the veterinary context, though it may be believed to be. There will always be susceptible individuals (e.g. ones that have not lived long enough to be immunised), for many diseases (definitely including COVID) there will always be the risk of infection from outside, and what I said in #215 applies.

    258:

    I wouldn't mind if a lovely, if strange, woman lying in a pond gave me a sword.

    On the other hand, perhaps having Peter Jackson and Peter Theil eaten by a balrog would give the balrog indigestion, leading it to climb the Empire State building, where we can bring in the jets.

    Oh, and the balrog should definitely have grabbed the Orange on, in only underwear, and drag him up there....

    259:

    Interesting timing. I paged forward a few pages... and discovered that the magazine seemed to approve of the new technique of high-pressure hoses used to keep strikers from the mills....

    260:

    The maps were pretty good back then. Honestly.

    Let me note that one of my favorite jobs was working for a tiny software co (as in, 9 of us, including 3 part timers, and the owner's wife, who was the business agent) that wrote geophysical interpretation software (it was called Mira, and ran on special hardware - a PC with a Motorola co-processing card). Real popular in colleges (over 200 of them).

    The cores were something like a sample analyzed ever 10'. For multi-thousand foot wells. And this was 88-89.

    261:

    I have to admit to being somewhat surprised at all this. I mean, model railroads started working on computerization of the running of them in the nineties, I think (hobbyist) and for years now, you can buy such as COTS.

    I'd think that someone would be selling an app that flew a drone or whatever automatically, and all you had to do was steer, accelerate/slow, or land.

    262:

    Sorry, in the Guilded Age they were millionaires. By the time of the Great Depression, well, using mark's economic indicators, the dollar then was worth about $40 now.

    For example, a breakfast special (two eggs, toast, potatoes and coffee) was $0.10; now, if you're lucky, it's $4.00 or more.

    263:

    "that only about fifty percent of cases are symptomatic at all"

    Where are you getting that number?

    The biggest studies I've seen indicate the actually asymptomatic number is 20% or so.

    264:

    I should contact my late ex's brother, and suggest he file charges against DeSantis for criminal negligence, and, oh, yes, practicing medicine without a license.

    265:

    What I've been wondering, ever since Sid Maier's Civilization came out, when you're going to have to succeed at, say, three games, before you can run for office.

    Then, when are they going to start using real simulations to make policy? From there, we get to that gets done automatically, and they're constantly running. The AIs will help....

    266:

    No. And I just looked it up.... Er, NO!

    So, a solar flare and an planetary alignment does it for us? That would make good ol' Terra an "unstable planet".

    At which point I remember Dark Star.

    267:

    Re: '... the problem is prosecuting and getting convictions in these type of cases is very difficult'

    Agree -- such as a repeat of his impeachment hearings: evidence that the Justice Department, FBI, etc. might not be legally allowed to air in public because of national security leaving taxes, 'charities' and other financial activities open to scrutiny.

    This also means that the 'national security' angle needs to be addressed otherwise crooked pols will increasingly use it as a defense/shield. I'm not sure if there's an operational definition of determining unacceptable level of risk for 'national security': could be anywhere from 'other countries will think your POTUS is a dick' through 'imminent nuclear Armageddon'.

    268:
  • No. Everyone's seen the result of not going after Nixon. And a LOT of people are talking, including to the media. Note that there's at least one, if not more, Congressmen who's saying use a law from during the Civil War to NOT SEAT the 126 GOP Cogresscritters-elect.
  • There will be sit-ins in offices to get the DoJ after them... and if they don't, then the whole concept of the rule of law is completely a joke, and the Dems know it.

  • The vaccine roll-out: I disagree. All of the GOP voters who voted against the Hairball will lead the way, and most folks, even two years from now, if Biden's team gets the rollout organized, that's all most folks will remember.
  • 269:

    That would screen out idiots like BoJo or Trump, but not competent criminals and/or servants of the ultra rich like Nixon or McConnel. I’m not sure improving the competence of the enemy is a net win.

    270:

    No, no volcano in Manchester. It's an Elvish invasion in Leeds.

    271:

    Re: Asymptomatic COVID-19 incidence

    Varies very widely across studies. Difficult to nail this down because most countries do not test the population at large.

    https://www.dovepress.com/three-quarters-of-people-with-sars-cov-2-infection-are-asymptomatic-an-peer-reviewed-article-CLEP

    Author info:

    Irene Petersen,1,2 Andrew Phillips3

    1Research Department of Primary Care and Population Health, University College London, London, UK; 2Department of Clinical Epidemiology, Aarhus University Hospital, Aarhus, Denmark; 3Institute for Global Health, University College London, London, UK

    272:

    "The beheaded nation collapses into chaos". So, the US, the last almost four years?

    273:

    Well, I was thinking in terms of current dollars. But since you mention it, Wikipedia says John D. Rockefeller's wealth was in excess of a billion dollars when he died.

    274:

    "I wouldn't mind if a lovely, if strange, woman lying in a pond gave me a sword."

    I would, because I would know that it came with a responsibility to sort out the mess the country is in!

    275:

    Although it would be deeply satisfying to see Trump et al. convicted of crimes against humanity, that's unlikely to happen. Criminal negligence causing death is more likely to succeed, but it's still going to be messy and long.

    I'm holding out the most hope that they'll be taken down the same way Al Capone was (https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/al-capone): based on his many crimes against the tax system. In the case of the Trump gang, probably complemented by a long series of fraud investigations and insider trading prosecutions. I'd be very happy to see his assets frozen while the cases wend their way through the courts and to see dear Donald and his cronies spend the rest of their natural lives in court, paying Rudy Giuliana $20K per day with money they don't have.

    276:

    Erwin @ 244: Relatively speaking, I'd argue that the USA is showing more signs of instability than China.

    And I do see your point. I've written previously here (starting at #1204) about my concerns for the US second civil war, although I will say that others here with more expertise were able to damp them down a good bit, at least for the short term (briefly, the National Guard is NOT going to get involved in shooting demonstrators ever again). Also we've now seen what the idiots with guns are really capable of, and it was pretty underwhelming. They talk big, they wave their guns around, some of the real hotheads might even dare to shoot a protester/rioter or two, but that's it. Organised insurrection they are not. One of the big disadvantages of believing conspiracy theories is that it makes every shadow look like the enemy, which makes coordinated and effective military action impossible.

    OTOH I remember the fall of the Berlin Wall. The USSR looked like it was here for the long term, until one day it wasn't. American politics is only becoming more tribal over time. Will American voters be able to stop the slide into lunacy? I do hope so.

    Meanwhile China doesn't have any such option. They are on the road to having their aristocracy overthrown by the middle class. The only question is how long, and I think its more like one generation than several.

    277:

    There's an immense amount of corruption, from forcing US military air crews to drive what, 175 mi to stay at his resort? Having the Secret Service pay full price to stay at M-A-L? Skimming money from his campaigns? Nepotism? Misuse of authority?

    278:

    Geoff Hart Ask the Belgians? - later re. IQ45 - yes. Also, does not immediately require the Feds - NY state can jail him, quite effectively for quite some time ( I hope )

    Rocketjps How people vary! I also expect youth sports to be shut down, which will be devastating to both of them, particularly the eldest. If that had happened to me, whilst I was at school, I'd be cheering from the rooftops .... No "Justice Department", anywhere, anywhen is not subject to some political interference, I'm afraid.

    Heteromeles I partially disagree, the technical problems may be difficult, but are ultimately sovable, the political ones, not so much, certainly not given the arseholes currenly in charge, anywhere, it seems. Oh yes, your last - time to revive the famous Otto Frisch paper: "On the feasibility of Coal-Driven Power Stations", perhaps??

    whitroth use a law from during the Civil War to NOT SEAT the 126 GOP Cogresscritters-elect. Do tell, sounds fascinating!

    Paul Although the USSR basically collapsed under its' own weight, it still required a trigger - once that happened, the fall was rapid. I've commented recently as to how the power of the Black Crows in Ireland was utterly broken in 6 years, whilst the USSR went in 3-&-a-half. The triggers being the death of Savita Halvannapar & the explosion at Chernobyl, respectively. China? 30-60 years, probably - but as always it will get a lot worse first - so the only surviving Uighurs will be outside China, for instance.

    279:

    The people who wrote the title and summary are guilty of deliberately misleading hype verging on bullshit. Nothing, not even information, is teleported, except in largely unpopular quantum models.

    https://journals.aps.org/prxquantum/abstract/10.1103/PRXQuantum.1.020317

    What I should be interested to read about is whether anything changes in their setup when the measurements are done within 70 microseconds of each other, which is technically trivial.

    280:

    Sorry, Greg, but I didn't grok "ask the Belgians". Details?

    281:

    1. No. Everyone's seen the result of not going after Nixon.

    Which inherently assumes Nixon would have been convicted, not a given in cases like that.

    And a LOT of people are talking, including to the media.

    Four years ago a lot of people were talking, including to the media, about the Democrats running a child prostitution ring through a Pizza place.

    Talk, and the amount of it, is meaningless.

    Note that there's at least one, if not more, Congressmen who's saying use a law from during the Civil War to NOT SEAT the 126 GOP Cogresscritters-elect.

    Which merely proves the Republicans don't have an exclusivity on idiots.

    The idiot in question has asked Pelosi to not sit them on the basis of section 3 of the 14th amendment - which says insurrection or rebellion against the US disqualify a person from office.

    No one is going to consider supporting a request for the court to rule on a matter to be an act of insurrection or rebellion.

    There will be sit-ins in offices to get the DoJ after them...

    Perhaps...

    282:

    use a law from during the Civil War to NOT SEAT the 126 GOP Cogresscritters-elect. Do tell, sounds fascinating!

    See my post 281 - not interesting at all unless you are interested in seeing a Democrat congress critter make a fool of himself.

    Although the USSR basically collapsed under its' own weight, it still required a trigger - once that happened, the fall was rapid. I've commented recently as to how the power of the Black Crows in Ireland was utterly broken in 6 years, whilst the USSR went in 3-&-a-half. The triggers being the death of Savita Halvannapar & the explosion at Chernobyl

    I'd argue the USSR trigger was the refusal to use force against the East Germans, and then a continued refusal to use force as it spread.

    Once it became apparent to the oppressed that there would be no repercussions for rebelling the restraints were removed from decades of oppression.

    283:

    Here's the language. IMO, the argument, while ludicrous[1], is arguably less ludicrous than the Texas filing was. Also, it's an independent loud statement that large numbers of people outside the right wing media bubble feel that the Republican behavior in support of overturning the election is sedition at the least, in support of potential insurrection. And yeah, I've been loosely tracking the rhetoric on the right and there are calls for political assassinations, insurrection, and civil war by popular fringe figures in support of overturning the election and giving Donald J. Trump another 4 (4+!!!) years as president. https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiv Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

    [1] There is a decision, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powell_v._McCormack (1969), which seems to require that all new members be seated. This is why the argument is said to be ludicrous. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/395/486 - it appears to mention the 14th amendment as not relevant to the case. (I didn't read the whole thing though.)

    284:

    mdive @282: I'd argue the USSR trigger was the refusal to use force against the East Germans, and then a continued refusal to use force as it spread.

    I've been reading Fiona Hill's (remember her) fascinating book Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, which analyzes Mr. Putin's mindset and his rise to power. Although somewhat dated (copyright 2012), it gives a lot of insight into his point of view, and how he got where he is.

    I mention this because she goes into detail on his journey from KGB rezident to politician, going into detail on his time as a deputy mayor of Leningrad (now again St. Petersburg), after being stationed in East Germany in the late 1980s. She points out that changes in the USSR occurred before those in East Germany, causing Putin to lack understanding of the political environment when he rotated back to the motherland. The collapse of the USSR started within, not due to the splintering of the Warsaw Pact, according to her reading.

    285:

    Robert Prior raised the problem of whether politicians should be prioritized for vaccination.

    In the case of Rubio and Graham, I see it more as two chaps who have insisted the boat is not sinking and there is not a hole in the hull, who refused to do any kind of disaster preparedness, who actively encouraged people to wedge open the watertight bulkhead doors, suddenly grabbing a flotation device intended for the crewmembers who are trying to rescue people trapped in the hull.

    If I can offer a very scrambled metaphor.

    286:

    I'd argue the USSR trigger was the refusal to use force against the East Germans, and then a continued refusal to use force as it spread.

    No: there was a prior cause, in the form of West German financial institutions' reluctance to extend further forex loans to the USSR. The USSR was primarily a resource extraction and exporting economy even then: severe crop failures for several consecutive years in the 1980s meant that they had to use hard currency to buy grain to keep their -- and satellite state -- population(s) fed. Saudi Arabia played a big part by opening the oil stop cocks and pumping crude, which depressed the price of their oil/gas exports. (We also have a background of the Iran/Iraq war and the Tanker War earlier in the decade, which put prices up: as the war ended, both Iran and Iraq were also pumping gas to repair the damage.) When the soft money ran out, the USSR had a choice: feed their own people, or feed the satellite states. They settled for the former and cut East Germany, Poland, Romania, Hungary et al loose rather than deal with simultaneous starvation-fuelled uprisings in six or ate satellite states (which would have been disastrous for them).

    TLDR is the collapse was triggered by external macroeconomic factors driven by the Middle East and the price of grain, and the refusal to suppress the East German public was down to "if we start, where does it end?" The 1991 coup and subsequent dissolution of the USSR was not exactly peaceful but it was a lot less violent than things might otherwise have been.

    Of course, the idiot neoconservatives in the USA decided to declare victory and treat Russia as if it had lost a war, thereby paving the way for (a) disaster capitalism/profiteering, (b) the rise of an oligarchy, and (c) the national politics of (justified) resentment.

    287:

    only 20% of the schools are reporting an active Covid case among students/staff

    Asymptomatic people are unlikely to be tested, and children are likely to be asymptomatic. As a recently retired teacher I'm aware of how many parents lie in order to have free daycare, and definitely aware of how many public health guidelines are being regularly broken in TDSB schools. I've colleagues who almost certainly had Covid but didn't get tested because (contrary to what Ford claims) tests aren't available to everyone.

    one of the Mayors (Brampton) has stated that the spread is happening in business/industry

    Not to mention private gatherings.

    288:

    Charlie Stross @ 286

    So, the Collapse of the USSR had nothing to do with the relative potency of the arsenals of the USA and the USSR?

    289:

    If only the hard-liners in the Politiburo hadn't ousted Krushchev, the rest of the century might have been very different....

    Stop them, give the elder Mayor Daley of Chicago a fatal heart attack in '67.... Hell, give Macnamara a set of balls, and have him tell LBJ that we couldn't win in 'Nam under any acceptable conditions before he committed half a million men to 'Nam in '65....

    290:

    Robert Prior noted: "In the case of Rubio and Graham, I see it more as two chaps who have insisted the boat is not sinking and there is not a hole in the hull, who refused to do any kind of disaster preparedness, who actively encouraged people to wedge open the watertight bulkhead doors, suddenly grabbing a flotation device intended for the crewmembers who are trying to rescue people trapped in the hull."

    Yes, but. Given that there seems to be an asshole gene* that protects people like Trump and Bojo and their enablers against covid-19, and given that we don't want to risk a situation in which their opponents are dying and leaving the reins in the hands of the Trumpists... well, it's hard to escape the conclusion that the politicians should be given fairly high priority. There's also the fact that showing them taking the vaccination will persuade many of their followers to do the same, which is huge when it comes to public health. The polls I've seen suggest that enough people are unwilling to be vaccinated that we might not achieve herd immunity (based on my definition rather than Graydon's).

    *No, I'm not serious about that. A few prominent Republican assholes have also died from the virus.

    I've said (in anger, not seriousness) that people who refuse to wear masks should be allowed that behavior, on the condition that they agree to be added to a database of "shall receive no treatment if they get infected and are willing to be jailed if they can be shown to have infected someone else" (i.e., put your money where your mouth is). But (i) that's more unethical than I'm prepared to be in practice, even if I could persuade myself that it's just, and (ii) it's pretty much impossible to enforce. Doctors tend to hold themselves to a high ethical standard.

    291:

    On the fall of the USSR, I understood that the USA had agreed to provide loans, but only on condition that force was not used to keep the satellite states under the Kremlin's thumb. So the Kremlin had to choose between bread riots in Moscow and watching a second Prague Spring unfold.

    However my main point in mentioning it was not the details of the collapse, it was that nobody saw it coming.

    292:

    While the Toronto observations are promising, as a parent of school-age children, an assertion that children are infected at low incidence and don't contribute significantly to spread is the sort of extraordinary claim that would require extraordinary evidence...

    Or, put another way, I've spent enough days doused in snot to be very wary when my kids catch something. And seen the youngest licking enough stuff

    For our kidlings, if anything, they are doing better. Albeit, some of the teachers are struggling quite visibly. Virtual learning is clearly a new skillset.

    293:

    Geoff Hart Belgium without a government TWICE - for HOW LONG? All true ...

    Niala Not a lot, no .. Though the USA was spending the USSR into the ground - a trick we had pulled at least twice on the French & were pulling well-ahead on Imperial Germany in 1914 - they thought they could win a land war, before the food ran out ... wrong.

    294:

    The Belgian system for choosing governments is prone to delivering indeterminate results, so they end up without a government while they try and sort things out. Fairly recently, it took them so long to work something out that they spent something like a year and a half with no government. Which didn't seem to be any kind of problem at all; the chicken's body kept on happily running around still leaving eggs in the right places until they finally made a new head for it.

    I think we would do well to take on board some lessons from Continental political methods, such as emulating the Belgians, and having a government composed of lots of different parties all with a similar-ish number of seats. It seems to me that a lot of the shittiness of Britain arises because most of the time we do not actually need a government, but nevertheless we always have one, and when there is nothing very important for it to do, rather than going home and putting its feet up, it makes up shit to occupy itself with instead. And pretty much has its own way in enacting it. I would distinctly prefer it if we had a government that spent most of the time arguing with itself and achieving nothing, unless some situation arose that was actually important enough to need dealing with. (If a thing fails to concentrate people's minds enough that they mostly stop arguing and manage to agree on something to do, it probably isn't important enough to need anything done.)

    295:

    Thanks. Will grind through it. If you feel like emailing me I own the net.nz domain of my username :)

    It surprises me that I can get a simulator-compatible transmitter for much less than the cost of the simulated transmitter. FlySky i6X is ~$100, and it all just clips together for ~$200... https://www.instructables.com/FlySky-FS-i6X-Setup-With-a-RC-Simulator/

    The regulatory environment is important to check out.

    Yes. That and covid are making me pretty cautious because it's hard for me to get to a club flying area carrying a big box, and I'm not sure I'd want to right now. This is one area where quadcopters have a real advantage - for under $500 you can get a folding kit that packs into a small briefcase and meets the 250g limit for casual flying. Counterintuitively it's harder to find a fixed wing model that meets those requirements :)

    296:

    No. A good part, IMO, was Raygun's whole SDI. It was unworkable, but terrified the Soviets... and the US had a super-titanium-uranium-platinum credit card, while the USSR had only a regular credit card. Given that the USSR had publicly stated that they would never use first strike, they felt they had to try to defeat it... and that massive expenditure helped drive them to the collapse.

    297:

    https://www.thelancet.com/cms/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)32651-9/attachment/6c6bb98b-d68b-4323-a441-4d3be05e3c98/mmc1.pdf

    which goes along with

    https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)32651-9/fulltext

    Hardly anyone is testing everybody. When broad testing takes place, there are a lot of asymptomatic cases. They're probably less infectious, but they're certainly not non infectious.

    298:

    Thanks for reading it so I didn't have to.

    Just that one article was making my dull foreign brain hurt.

    299:

    Quite. They may well not develop symptoms, but I don't see any reason to believe they don't pick it up and run around shedding virus while their immune system is still mobilising.

    And I would expect them to be more effective than adults at distributing it. I dread going into a shop when I have mistimed my visit and the schools are kicking out. They run around expending energy and making a noise, breathing heavily to support the activity and spraying aerosols about; they go round in flocks instead of individually; and by ordinary habit they are sticky and unhygienic and basically don't care anyway.

    And their shopping behaviour is incredibly inefficient; five or ten of them all hanging round the counter in a haze of infective miasma, picking things up and asking the shopkeeper how much they are and putting them down again over multiple iterations before they eventually decide to buy something. For this reason one of my most favoured shops at this time is one where the owners basically view all kids as thieves, and have been doing so for long enough that most of them have at least partly realised they're not welcome.

    300:

    Thanks for the explanations of the Belgian situation. Not sure how well it relates to the American model, though. The Belgians are a civilized people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterix_in_Belgium), particularly when it comes to their customs for frying potatoes. G

    301:

    Interestingly Ontario is (rather late) apparently going to lockdown the entire province starting Christmas Eve (2 weeks for the northern part with low population/low numbers, 4 weeks for the southern portion).

    Which is depressing, because it's more damage maximisation.

    So far as I know, the figures that lockdown decision has been based on haven't been released, but the point of this stuff is (probably) Dougie trying to get people to shut up with the criticism rather than actually solving the problem, which requires a combination of spending plus eviction freezes, rent freezes, etc., so people can stay home and still eat, on the one hand, and setting a quantifiable target for something related to COVID-19, not a date. Only if they set a quantified target it makes it obvious they didn't build out testing capacity and if they actually provide economic support it makes them apostate mammonites. And they've got an absolute majority in the legislature for the next year and a half. (Next election due on or before 2022-06-02.)

    302:

    Graydon @ 301 : "Ontario is (rather late) apparently going to lockdown the entire province"

    It's called a lockdown but it doesn't look like they're going to shut down the roads to Manitoba in the West and to Quebec in the East.

    303:

    Well, I suppose I'd be willing - does the sword come with a horse?

    304:

    Well, I know several people who saw it coming - they were (practical) economists.

    305:

    If all the politicians died, how well would the country keep running?

    You could take a look at Belgium - the country is all the time without an elected government. iirc the records so far are 550 days or so in 2010/2011 and close to 500 days in 2019/2020.

    The outgoing prime minister is still responsible for the daily business but cannot introduce bigger changes (like a new government budget, the finances are simply carried forward from the last regular budget). In the event of a politician mass extinction a senior bureaucrat should be able to fill the role - no political decisions needed, just more of the same.

    It seems to be working for the Belgians, but I'm not convinced that one should model all societies accordingly :)

    306:

    woops, Greg already covered Belgium as example.

    307:

    So far as I know, the figures that lockdown decision has been based on haven't been released, but the point of this stuff is (probably) Dougie trying to get people to shut up with the criticism rather than actually solving the problem,

    As of this morning(*) Ontario had 265 Covid patients in ICU, compared to 264 at the worst of the initial Covid wave in the Spring, with forecasts of 300 Covid patients in ICU in 10 days.

    Given the way Covid works, that means if nothing done the Covid ICU numbers in January start to get dangerous.

    And note to everyone in Ontario - hidden in the reporting is that retail that remains open will drop to 25% customer occupancy from the current 50% in lockdown areas - so possibility of outdoor lineups at food stores again.

    308:

    You could take a look at Belgium - the country is all the time without an elected government

    The UK also did pretty well without an elected government for centuries. Sometimes I think the Conservative Party's secret plan is to restore the monarchy by convincing everyone that nothing could be worse than democracy.

    Meanwhile I quite like the situation in Anglonesia - we have all the pomp and ceremony we can handle but none of the upkeep. Store your glorious ruler overseas and bring them in for special occasions. Admittedly some of our elected governments are better than others... but none quite to dedicated to the cause of showing us that democracy can't work by their own actions.

    309:

    And I would expect them to be more effective than adults at distributing it. I dread going into a shop when I have mistimed my visit and the schools are kicking out. They run around expending energy and making a noise, breathing heavily to support the activity and spraying aerosols about; they go round in flocks instead of individually; and by ordinary habit they are sticky and unhygienic and basically don't care anyway.

    Ironically enough (and admittedly only one person's observation where I am), the kids are taking mask wearing and everything else far more seriously than the adults - including wearing their masks to/from school while walking on the sidewalks. And no running around or other games inside retailers since Covid started.

    310:

    people who refuse to wear masks should be allowed that behavior, on the condition that they agree to be added to a database of "shall receive no treatment if they get infected and are willing to be jailed if they can be shown to have infected someone else"

    At least one member of Germany's Ethics Council agrees with you…

    "Whoever wants to refuse the vaccination outright, he should, please also always carry a document with the inscription: 'I don't want to be vaccinated!'" Wolfram Henn, a human geneticist, told Bild on Saturday. "I want to leave the protection against the disease to others! I want, if I get sick, to leave my intensive care bed and ventilator to others."

    311:

    Though you would certainly mind being handed the responsibility you could actually do some good. If you were in the position to wield supreme executive power just 'cause some watery tart threw a sword at you, you would be exempt from the usual rules for rulers. CGPGrey covered it in an excellent youtube video "rules for rulers", but the gist of it is, we can all see how things could be fixed (see recent discussion about how "politics" is more important than technology for fixing this shit) and as candidates, the politicians seem to know what to do, but once in power they never do. Because rules. And the rules are, you have to please the people who put you in power. The people who put you there could do so because the current system has favoured them, and put them in power. Change things too much and you'll hurt your supporters, lose their support and be deposed.

    Random allocation of power, by watery tarts distributing swords, or name from hat, would circumvent that problem. (ignoring the Murdoch effect for a moment)

    312:

    given that we don't want to risk a situation in which their opponents are dying and leaving the reins in the hands of the Trumpists... well, it's hard to escape the conclusion that the politicians should be given fairly high priority

    What about requiring a public declaration that Covid is real, and serious, before they get to jump the line ahead of front line medical workers?

    Because if it's a fake crisis and not that serious a disease, surely they'd be OK waiting to get their own vaccinations and let someone more at risk go first?

    313:

    There's been pushback about "why is this whole-province?" from regional medical officers of health; there's the (quite reasonable) point that without secure food and housing, people simply won't stay home, they'll go to work; there's the further point that large industrial sites seem to be major causes of COVID transmission and these are not getting the prevention attention they ought to get; and there's the whole date thing and the whole "one time" thing. If the motivator is the number of ICU cases, what ICU case indicator lifts the lockdown?

    I would really like more, more vigorous, and above all effective COVID-19 countermeasures; which at seventh and last means giving people enough money so they can stay home securely. (And may then justly be required so to do.)

    I want every Canadian province compared to Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea in terms of COVID response, not the US, too, while I'm wishing for things. (But not a pony; ponies are a lot of upkeep.)

    314:

    Oh I wonder who's submarine it is going to be in the news.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-astrazeneca-russia-idUSKBN28L0YQ shrugs indefinitely

    to whitroth @296: and the US had a super-titanium-uranium-platinum credit card, while the USSR had only a regular credit card Which they obviously didn't have, because none of that titanium shine was ever authentic, it was Chinese plastic coated with empty political statements. As if you'd forget that things like laser satellites and orbital planes really did fly and had to be repurposed after the tensions have vanished in thin air. Unsurprisingly, US military still think this will work again, considering the SpaceX entire PR output, but they are wrong.

    To all people still wracking their brains about "fall of USSR" 30 years after the fact, they miss the point that there was never really one solid reason. I can briefly summarize the real reasons in one sentence, but it hardly helps: it was all about market competition, and if USSR would just use a bit more flexible approach to modernize economy, they would ended up at the China's situation. (One might sink that there isn't enough people to pull something similar but they forget that USSR had the population at least twice of modern Russia they know).

    I personally attribute most of the trouble to Corn Buffoon (Khrushchev) application of cronyism and party management that finally bore their fruit a generation later. Hard to believe that was the time in 80s that many movies did push the concept of almost-eternal Cold War coming to an end with united humanity or rereading old books of that time. Post-war American exceptionalism has made this line of history a dead end (if only briefly).

    Also modern journalist "history" completely forgets that the USSR did not go down in flames like most of the other empires, to the much disappointment of worst haters of it. It did not provoke widespread civil unrest, nuclear mismanagement, mass extinction and spreading chaos everywhere. They have no awareness of amount of precaution that was taken to prevent the chaos and what methods were used, and what have been happening in Eastern Europe when these precaution failed (or rather been used for opposite purpose).

    I wonder what world do these people live in here right now, where a country should have long gone off the map, vanished from recordings, and it's history forgotten between pages, but they still have that insatiable itch that something has gone wrong and their dream world of cheap fan fiction really doesn't match the reality. They can very much find out that not only their fringe awareness is failing but that their closes and most familiar things are no longer reliable. That is what "being inflexible" means. 12 years ago when I learned enough language to read foreign press I would ask myself "how could they not see the signs", but now I got all the answers. It's been 12 years, after all.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXRtNwUju5g https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-18/u-s-to-blacklist-smic-and-dozens-more-china-firms-reuters-says You still think it's just a mistake? You really believe that undoing your Agent Orange will undo the damage? Well, there was a time I though it's going to make difference, and this time ended very recently.

    315:

    Re: Ontario - Ford - Lockdown

    I think that having OHA and OMA both saying a lockdown was necessary finally got through to Ford.

    https://toronto.citynews.ca/2020/12/17/oha-covid19-lockdown-infection-rates/

    'The Ontario Medical Association has also called for a lockdown of the entire GTHA until after the New Year while also calling on the premier to extend the winter school break.'

    The GTA (Greater Toronto Area) makes up about 47% of the entire Ontario population. If you add in commuting neighboring regions (Peel, Durham, York, etc.) it's at least 65%. Also, I think that the number of hospital beds esp. ICU and specialties/research strongly skew toward the GTA. So having this region going into a hard lockdown is a response to both population and most-likely-to-be-needed medical resource availability pressures.

    316:

    The UK also did pretty well without an elected government for centuries

    Touche, you got me there :)

    we have all the pomp and ceremony we can handle but none of the upkeep

    Dunno, stuff like flag waving, military parades et al feel alien to me. Probably a combination of my world view, upbringing and result of Germany's post-war reordering by the Allies.

    317:

    Albeit, some of the teachers are struggling quite visibly. Virtual learning is clearly a new skillset.

    It is indeed. Virtually all teachers are effectively first-year teachers again. Experienced ones know what to do but not how to do it remotely. Doesn't help that (in Ontario at least) management directives and procedures keep changing every week.

    (Administration at my old school decided to change virtual school platforms in the middle of the school year, because "people prefer a different one". No discussion or consultation with staff as a whole; my guess is that a few people complained a lot and administration did what they wanted to shut them up. But it means teachers and students need to learn to navigate a whole new online platform, in addition to trying to actually teach/learn their subjects.)

    318:

    Graydon pushback about "why is this whole-province?" Happens here - because of "Administrative boundaries" the island of Arran is clumped in with Clydeside. The inhabitants were well-pissed-off with restrictions telling them all their pubs had to close, because ... when there had ( at that point ) zero cases on the island.

    319:

    And note to everyone in Ontario - hidden in the reporting is that retail that remains open will drop to 25% customer occupancy from the current 50% in lockdown areas - so possibility of outdoor lineups at food stores again.

    My local Loblaws had a lineup this morning when I went. I assumed that that was partly because we're now into school holidays when many parents also take holidays, so adults have more time in the middle of the day to go shopping. Very different crowd than last Monday.

    Maybe Loblaws has started the restrictions early, or maybe lineups will get really long next week.

    I think I'll go shopping with two lists next week — my normal list, and a supplemental one to buy if lines are so long that I only want to go every fortnight (or less frequently).

    320:

    However my main point in mentioning it was not the details of the collapse, it was that nobody saw it coming.

    To phrase Charlie's and some others responses a bit differently.

    The USSR was propping up East Europe with money. When the money ran out the USSR fell. And they were not disclosing their balance sheets as things got rough. I suspect they just didn't know what to do for various reasons below. So they keep on driving the train down the tracks till the tracks ran out.

    • I read a bit after the fall a clue was that the USSR quit selling gold just before the fall.

    • Modern communications (compared to the 40s, 50s, 60s,) meant that the folks in the USSR interior could tell they were getting a much worse deal than those in E. Germany and surrounding.

    • Chernobyl convinced Gorbachev there was no way to "fix" the problems. They were too baked in.

    322:

    The outgoing prime minister is still responsible for the daily business but cannot introduce bigger changes (like a new government budget, the finances are simply carried forward from the last regular budget).

    Here in the US we already have a variation of that. At the federal level Congress keeps passing "continuing resolutions" instead of budgets/appropriations. This weekend we had a 2 day one. I wonder if that's a record for how short they can be.

    Here in North Carolina we just went through (in the end of it) no budget being approved so by law we get all the old numbers and programs carried forward. Which makes 2020 a really odd duck. We have a legislature of R's and a D governor. But not enough R's to override a D veto. So ...

    323:

    There's been pushback about "why is this whole-province?" from regional medical officers of health

    Part of the reasoning for that is probably (based on what I've heard) that they expect people to travel to see family for Christmas, lockdown and rules be damned, and so having 14 days of reducing contacts after many (likely) spreader events is a reasonable precaution.

    One point for non-Canadians: it's called a lockdown, but it's nowhere near as severe as Australians or Europeans would expect. No police stop you to see if you are too far from home, no curfews, many shops and businesses still open, etc.

    As I've noted before, when Toronto/Peel locked down and York Region was still a red zone traffic in York Region malls tripled — people were willing to drive an extra half an hour to go somewhere they were allowed to shop. Now York Region is in lockdown Durham shops are busier than ever. The problem with 'precision lockdowns' is that they are very easy to circumvent, and Canadians right now seem to be very willing to circumvent them.

    A small outbreak in Pembroke was traced to a visitor from a lockdown region:

    Acting Medical Officer of Health Doctor Robert Cushman says this was another travel-related situation where a visitor had come from a grey area currently in lockdown.

    Doctor Cushman is again reminding everyone that this year it is imperative that the holidays be spent at home with members of your immediate household as non-essential travel must be suspended.

    https://www.renfrewtoday.ca/2020/12/20/covid-19-outbreak-declared-at-pembroke-dental-office/

    324:

    Here in the US we already have a variation of that. At the federal level Congress keeps passing "continuing resolutions" instead of budgets/appropriations. This weekend we had a 2 day one. I wonder if that's a record for how short they can be.

    I get the impression that Belgium hasn't had governmental shutdowns like the US does, though. And wouldn't have. From the outside it seems crazy that your country expects the civil service to keep working without pay while politicians argue.

    325:

    Graydon:313 whole "one time" thing. If the motivator is the number of ICU cases, what ICU case indicator lifts the lockdown?

    They essentially are looking to stop the upward curve of ICU admissions, though what exactly that would be is left unsaid.

    I would really like more, more vigorous, and above all effective COVID-19 countermeasures; which at seventh and last means giving people enough money so they can stay home securely. (And may then justly be required so to do.)

    I agree the Ford government is handling it poorly, mainly for ideological reasons - but it is what it is, there is lots of blame to go around.

    SFReader:315 I think that having OHA and OMA both saying a lockdown was necessary finally got through to Ford.

    Given that I believe at least 2 hospitals have had to move patients to other hospitals for Covid reasons, the system has been giving out warning signs for a while now.

    The GTA (Greater Toronto Area) makes up about 47% of the entire Ontario population. If you add in commuting neighboring regions (Peel, Durham, York, etc.) it's at least 65%.

    Not quite. The GTA is the City of Toronto + Durham, Halton, Peel, and York Regions for a combined 6.4 million or 47% (2016) of Ontario's population. Add in Hamilton and you get another 700,000 or so.

    Robert Prior:323 The problem with 'precision lockdowns' is that they are very easy to circumvent, and Canadians right now seem to be very willing to circumvent them.

    Yep. While some of this is the government's fault (for not dealing with the industrial & other businesses - Amazon(*) - that are causing a lot of the spread and providing financial support and legal support for people to avoid these situations) the people who are ignoring the advice are also a big problem.

    But also not unique to Ontario - see the crowds of people fleeing London over the weekend when it was going to Tier 4

    326:

    I've been looking at Radiomaster and Jumper, both of which do OpenTX and multi protocol, and also do the sim controller thing out of the box. They avoid the ecosystem lock-in, though it does also seem the Spektrum gear is very popular among the fixed wingers locally here. I had been considering just going with a Spektrum transmitter, but the pricing for what you get is radically divergent from the rest of the market (Horizon/Spektrum are sort of positioning themselves to be the Apple of RC).

    I misremembered and mixed up 500g (which is the limit for Brisbane parks that are not designated drone launch areas) and 250g (which is the upcoming CASA registration threshold). There are UMX models that fit in the 250g flying weight, but it's problematic getting a camera on board (see wing loading and the effects of increasing it by >20%). I think that the smaller the plane, the less stable in moderate wind, and this would affect image quality anyway. I'm contemplating getting a grip on what rigmarole (and cost) is required to get a permit to go up to 2kg outside club areas (see also: e-Flite Opterra). It certainly involves getting a "drone licence". But I'm seeing that as further down the road pending learning to fly reliably first.

    In addition to the regulatory environment for flying things, it seems there's also some issue with FPV signals running afoul of changing ACMA rules for spectrum use, and possibly some popular systems are no longer street legal in Aus. I'm not clear on the details and the boundary to that. Doesn't affect just using a GoPro and doing 4K video of the entire flight, something that ought to yield reasonable stills, especially using a camera with image stabilisation mounted on a medium plane with AS3X (or equivalent stabilisation).

    327:

    nowhere near as severe as Australians or Europeans would expect

    The NSW lockdown is nowhere near as severe as you would expect.

    Northern beaches resident allegedly drove three hours despite lockdown: A northern beaches man allegedly travelled more than three hours to the Ulladulla Leisure Centre, despite a strict lockdown preventing residents from leaving the area.

    https://www.shoalhaven.nsw.gov.au/Council/News/Breach-of-Public-Health-Incident-at-Ulladulla-Leisure-Centre-21-December-2020

    "Our" politicians are still in discussions with Rupert Murdoch to decide how serious a lockdown they're allowed and whether it can be enforced.

    There's a great comparison shot going around of a "Dictator Dan's Disaster" front page compared to the same outlet's "It's for your own good" during the NSW lockdown. The article below is a handy reminder that when a couple of white middle-class people cause an outbreak somehow they're not "enemies of the state" in the same way that younger brown people are.

    https://www.theguardian.com/media/commentisfree/2020/jul/31/abc-drawn-into-row-over-naming-brisbane-women-accused-of-covid-19-quarantine-deception

    328:

    Meanwhile Does anyone believe any of this? Or is it more hype?

    Quantum Teleportation - way too far out of my knowledge to judge.

    But following links from the Independent story gets this(*) story on Vice that says it is researchers at Caltech, Fermilab, AT&T, Harvard, University of Calgary and JPL - so it doesn't appear that it would be something made up.

    The paper(*) has been published in PRX Quantum, which is published by the American Physical Society.

    And the story itself isn't the Quantum Teleportation, but rather the increase in distance - Vice article states University of Calgary achieved 6km in 2016, this consortium has now pushed that to 22km.

    So I would expect/hope that if this was a hoax the 2016 achievement would have been exposed as such by now.

    ** - https://journals.aps.org/prxquantum/abstract/10.1103/PRXQuantum.1.020317

    329:

    Elderly Cynic was uncomplimentary about that paper (title) at #279 I haven't done a search; maybe it's a current term of the art in some circles, but the title looks like (shameless) bait for publicists for sure. (Seen a similar press release happen before, elsewhere.)

    330:

    Yeah, it's the price that makes me balk. I'm probably going to buy a transmitter with what seems like a plausible receiver and set it up for simulation and see how I go. I might end up the a surfboard mount on the back of the bike to carry wings with, because the nearest place I can get away with flying is ~5km away (https://www.google.com.au/maps/@-33.9440248,151.0423707,1231m/data=!3m1!1e3 based on seeing someone else there the other day).

    331:

    Oh dear.

    Mr. Anonymous Russian,

    Do pay attention to those denizens of a fully collapsing empire (formerly the British Empire) on whose blog you're bloviating.

    They're your view of a future Russia. The good parallel is between the UK in the 1950s and Russia in the 1990s. Who lost their empire better? Do you know yet?

    To be completely fair, this is America's future too. And China's. And India's. No large empire survives intact for all that long, propaganda notwithstanding.

    So watch and learn as the wheels turn, and be glad it's been as easy as it has been for you so far.

    332:

    What I've been wondering, ever since Sid Maier's Civilization came out, when you're going to have to succeed at, say, three games, before you can run for office.

    Well, yeah... I remember one game of Civ IV, where I got the tech to see where the oil deposits were, but didn't exactly need them yet. There were none in my country, but a couple in a neighbouring one. I tried to negotiate for that oil, but had no success.

    The solution? Obviously a pre-emptive war to gain that oil. When it wasn't needed I was an important player, but at some point without oil the wars become all but impossible. I did win that game.

    I'm not sure that's a thing I would like politicians to learn from the game. The real world is more nuanced, and not everybody is vying to be the top dog anyway, and at least that game doesn't simulate that very well.

    333:

    "Why don't you teach the bomb philosophy?"

    334:

    They should be not-seated on the basis that they have declared their own elections to be fraudulent. And if someone asks why, they answer is "Merrick Garland. Go home."

    336:

    https://www.markpack.org.uk/38813/zhou-enlai-mao-tse-tung-impact-of-french-revolution/

    In this case, it's definitely true - I am saying it :-) Time will tell whether the Russian Federation lasts longer after the end of the USSR than the UK does after the end of the British Empire.

    As you say, we are watching it unfold for the USA as we post. China and India are not comparable, at least at present.

    sleepingroutine is perfectly correct that there were other paths that could have been taken and, if Khrushchev had been more far-sighted and effectively dictatorial, one of them might have been taken.

    337:

    Yes. If anyone manages to either (a) transfer information over entanglement or (b) tunnel something over macro distances, it would be difficulty to over-hype. But extending the entanglement distance and reliability is something that gets reported twice a year.

    338:

    Not quite the same as a volcano in Manchester, UK. But in the direction of Vesuvius going off again.
    What an odd thing to say. There are about 600,000 people who would need to be evacuated from the red zone around Vesuvius if it looked like going off. The population of Manchester is about 550,000.

    If all of Greater Manchester were affected that's 2.8 million. But then again the estimation of the people needed to be evacuated if Vesuvius goes bad carefully ignores the 3 million people in Naples.

    339:

    If all the politicians died, how well would the country keep running?
    See Belgium for a worked example. The politicians didn't die but they have repeatedly been able to form a government, thus leaving the ship of state with no defined course.

    How did it work? Mostly well, with a few minor exceptions like "accidentally" losing large parts of their nuclear electricity generation capacity.

    340:

    There is also a huge difference between Hawaii and Italy even ignoring population. The volcanoes in the latter often go boom, and those in the former don't.

    341:

    The volcanoes in the latter often go boom, and those in the former don't.

    Basaltic vs andesitic/rhyolitic lavas. Basaltic lavas flow, the others tend to resist pressure, allowing it to build up until boom.

    342:

    If all of Greater Manchester were affected that's 2.8 million.

    A volcano in Greater Manchester would also trash Liverpool (34 miles away, centre to centre) and Bradford (40 miles, centre to centre): Leeds is only another 10 miles past Bradford (they merge at the edges). In fact, within 50 miles of the centre of Manchester you've got most of the M62 corridor, one of the four major population centres of the British isles (along with London, Birmingham/Midlands, and the Scottish Central Belt).

    The big Vesuvius eruption of 79AD spewed ash up to 30km into the stratosphere and produced pyroclastic flows that travelled 20km. A Vesuvius-equivalent event in Manchester today ... Bradford might survive, being on the far side of the Pennines, but it's mostly downhill to Liverpool. Not a great prognosis!

    343:

    Wouldn't it be more efficient if we just put the volcano in Leeds?

    344:

    Robert Prior: "What about requiring a public declaration that Covid is real, and serious, before they get to jump the line ahead of front line medical workers? Because if it's a fake crisis and not that serious a disease, surely they'd be OK waiting to get their own vaccinations and let someone more at risk go first?"

    That and wearing a mask and telling their constituents to do it too, yes. It passes my "put your money where your mouth is" test, but not the "is it sufficiently ethical that doctors would accept it" test. Where would you set the line: Do you deny medical care to downhill skiers? Scuba divers? People who fell trees for a living? Fishermen? People who join the infantry? (All activities with a relatively high serious injury or mortality rate.) It becomes kinda subjective.

    I agree that based on evidence to date, senior bureaucrats would probably do a better job of running the country than most of the pols and pretty much all of the Trump appointees. If correct, a mass extinction event at the congressman/senator level would improve overall governance, but you'd never get the electorate to accept that situation. And I'd say that losing AOC, Ilhan Omar, Elizabeth Warren, Ayanna Pressley, Cori Bush, and many others would be unacceptable collateral damage. These folk are the bright hope for the future.

    345:

    Re: '... people were willing to drive an extra half an hour to go somewhere they were allowed to shop.'

    Yeah - when I saw the headline about how upset the Ottawa mayor was my immediate reaction was: sure, there's absolutely no record of any Ottawan ever hopping into the car to pick up wine/beer* at a Gatineau/Hull 'dep' (depanneur). Quebec imposed its lockdown earlier so I'm guessing Ottawa area stores saw an uptick in sales from Hull area shoppers/residents who probably commute to Ottawa for work.

    • Last time I was in Ottawa, you could only buy wine at 'The Beer Store' or LCBO whereas you could pick up beer and wine at any Hull convenience (dep) or grocery store a few minutes' drive away. (Cheaper, too.)
    346:

    mdive noted: "Quantum Teleportation - way too far out of my knowledge to judge."

    Ditto, but with one quibble: it's not teleportation. Whatever the denotation of the word (the strict etymological meaning), connotation (how words are actually used) outweighs denotation when it comes to clear communication. The connotation of teleportation is a transfer of mass. The quantum teleportation being described is a transfer of information, not mass. So it conflicts with the prevailing word usage, and that leads to confusion. (If I had a couple days, I could dig through my Stephen Jay Gould collection to find examples from the master.)

    I've been substantive editing of peer-review journal manuscripts for 30+ years, and have gradually come to the opinion that scientists shouldn't be allowed to name things without adult supervision. (Note: First, that's a joke, not a definitive statement. Second, like all generalizations, it's unfair to the many who do name things with exquisite caution to ensure clarity.) Still... adult supervision required.

    347:

    Re: 'Where would you set the line: ...'

    Insurers set the line on this all the time - no problematic ethics, just plain old $$$. It's 'interesting' that none of them have taken a public stance on this - at least I haven't seen anything yet in the media.

    348:

    SFReader: Agreed in principle, but relying on insurance math kinda fails the ethic test, don't you think?

    349:

    Re: ' ... relying on insurance math kinda fails the ethic test,'

    When you have a $$$-driven culture, having insurers say 'Because you've had a COVID-19 infection, your premiums will now and ever after be 200% higher' would help drive home the message that this is serious sh*t.

    IMO, not much difference between 'culture' and 'ethos'.

    350:

    There are UMX models that fit in the 250g flying weight, but it's problematic getting a camera on board

    Double-check regulations for aircraft with cameras. At least one Australian city I checked out (Brisbane, I think, but not certain about that) required permits to fly a sRPAS with a camera. This was an entirely separate restriction from the weight limit (250g).

    The new European regulations are also a lot more restrictive for sRPAS with cameras than without. I'm not certain whether that's because of privacy concerns* or a belief** that sRPAS pilots are likely to fly out of visual range when they have a camera to use to control the aircraft.

    *Which IMHO are overblown in this case. In a society with near-ubiquitous cameras on smartphones, the presence of a flying cell phone is way more noticeable than someone with their eyes seemingly glued to their screen.

    **Possibly true. Some really public idiots on YouTube make a point of posting illegal (and potentially dangerous) flights that they wouldn't be doing if they didn't have a video camera on board (because the video is the whole point of the flight).

    351:

    Re: COVID-19 & ethics (aka 'religion' for many)

    Religion is another face of ethos. Probably because I'm not religious, I hadn't considered how religion (apart from the foaming at the mouth fundie varieties) might factor into this pandemic.

    Turns out that strict Muslims and Jews whose dietary laws forbid pork were concerned (i.e., would refuse) about any vaccine that used any pork-derived products. This reduces competition for some of the vaccine options - for now - unless long-term/post-vac results show huge benefits - maybe.

    Meanwhile, RCs - and possibly some other Xian groups - fixated on another aspect of vaccine development/production.

    https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/vatican-ok-to-get-virus-vaccines-using-abortion-cell-lines-1.5239911

    Haven't seen (looked for) what aspect Buddhists and Hindus find 'ethically' problematic - maybe someone here knows?

    The above 5 religions account for a huge chunk of the planet's population's first formal encounter with 'ethics'.

    352:

    SFReader @ 345 : "* Last time I was in Ottawa, you could only buy wine at 'The Beer Store' or LCBO whereas you could pick up beer and wine at any Hull convenience (dep) or grocery store a few minutes' drive away. (Cheaper, too.)"

    You realize, of course, that in that short phrase you have crossed a bridge over the Ottawa river (La rivière des Outaouais) and gone from the province of Ontario to the province of Québec (while staying within Canada's National Capital Region) and thus from a place in Canada where the OHIP card rules medical encounters to a place where another card (La carte d'assurance maladie du Québec) rules medical encounters.

    In doing so you went from one medical data system to another. And they are very different data systems.

    So, if we can't collect data on you if you had an accident after crossing that bridge even though Ontario and Québec are the two biggest provinces in Canada (in area, population, and size of software industry) and you're in the nation's capital, how can ANYONE expect us to get straight numbers on COVID-19 events from all the provinces put together in order to compare them with the COVID-19 events in Singapore, Viet Nam, Denmark or elsewhere.

    This is a comment on data problems and not on getting cheap wine in Québec and cheap gas in Ontario.

    353:

    It passes my "put your money where your mouth is" test, but not the "is it sufficiently ethical that doctors would accept it" test.

    We're discussing an American politician. A country where denying life-saving medical treatment to not-rich people is considered ethical by the very politicians we are discussing. A country where even non-profit hospitals increasingly starve patient care to pay ever-increasing executive salaries.

    Possibly your ethical doctor could view it as triage. More lives will be saved by giving the limited vaccine to front-line workers than an actively-obstructive denialist politician, so go with saving more lives. Greatest good for the greatest number and all that.

    354:

    "The quantum teleportation being described is a transfer of information, not mass."

    As I said, that is exactly what it isn't. At MOST, it could be described as the transfer of entropy, but it isn't really any kind of transfer at all.

    355:

    I've lived in Leeds, Bradford and Liverpool.

    I just found the casual writing off of Naples as being less of a big thing than Manchester a bit odd.

    356:

    Re: 'how can ANYONE expect us to get straight numbers on COVID-19 events'

    Exactly! - There's no way the Ottawa mayor can know esp. since the infection stats only identify where the infected person resides not where they got infected. (Contact-tracing data might help identify 'downstream effect' risks associated with such policies assuming such data are ever published.)

    This scenario is also common in the most densely populated areas of the US East Coast: people commute between States on a daily basis so if one State locks down its bars, partyers hop over to a neighboring State.

    357:

    to Heteromeles @331: They're your view of a future Russia. The good parallel is between the UK in the 1950s and Russia in the 1990s. Who lost their empire better? Do you know yet?

    I have to make sure I didn't read that wrong, I though at first about the times of Revolution. Did UK also consider the rest of the colonized world their freeloaders who don't do anything useful and has to be decoupled from economy to get it healthier? Because that is exactly what happened between 1988 and 1991 in USSR, where everybody vehemently stated that to become independent is to become self-sustained and have better. Arguably, it wasn't the only point of view in the same time, but it also appeared to be most popular one.

    I mean, probably it is useful to exchange experience for greater chances of survival. So far, hardline nationalists got what they wanted and they still remain in power by a good margin, despite relentless assault of globalism and their own failures. "They would be better off without any government at all" just doesn't stick with these people.

    So watch and learn as the wheels turn, and be glad it's been as easy as it has been for you so far. The moral impact wasn't quite the same as physical one. People can survive famine, war and epidemic, but hardly they can survive a crash of all hopes for the future.

    358:

    The Naples/Manchester thing is on a similar scale ... until you take into account the cluster of major cities around Manchester. IIRC Naples is prietty big and there are many towns in its vicinity but not cities in the half-million-to-million population range, which Liverpool and Leeds/Bradford are.

    359:

    Did UK also consider the rest of the colonized world their freeloaders who don't do anything useful and has to be decoupled from economy to get it healthier?

    That's actually a pretty good fit for the attitude of the south-east of England towards Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and Northern England since roughly 1979 (Thatcher).

    That's one of the major reasons why I suspect the UK will disintegrate over the next decade: the Conservatives (who have been the institutional ruling party for the past century) have bought votes by prioritizing narrow regional interests for decades, and in the process have shrunk their idea of the UK from "hub of a global empire" to "Great Britain and trade interests" to "England (and satellites)" towards a tiny corner of England (the stockbroker belt) ...

    360:

    volcano in Manchester vs Vesuvius

    My point was that a volcano in the Manchester area would be a bit of strange geological surprise. Unlike the Naples area.

    361:

    Yeah, the UK's volcanically active history is about 200My in the past. But that's not the point ...

    362:

    The SCROTUS will likely keep lawyers employed for the remainder of his life without the Federal DOJ lifting a finger, he's also not getting any younger, or eating right and to borrow from Samuel Clemens, his funeral will be nearly as entertaining as his hanging.

    363:

    I think the Hebrides are rather younger than 200 My, but I agree, that's not the point.

    The interesting thing about the Naples area isn't just Vesuvius and Lake Avernus, it's that the whole place is part of one rather larger volcano, the Campi Flegrei. That's one hell of a plot device, should anyone want to trigger it.

    The other oddity of the Campi Flegrei is the Pozzolanic ash it produced, which turns out to be just perfect for making high quality concrete and cement. Which is why the Romans were so good at building with these two.

    Getting back to the original post on Kilauea, I have to somewhat disagree with the characterization of rich people getting burned, having been out there in 2018. Yes, a coastal high-end neighborhood did get repaved, and some really good tidepools I spent hours swimming in are no more, sadly.

    Thing is, most of those homeowners downstream from Kilauea are not particularly wealthy. The even nastier thing is that have 10-20 meters of lava on your land does not mean you no longer own the land, so you're stuck paying property taxes on it. As a result, when we hiked in to 8 km to see the lava flowing into the ocean (this was pre-eruption, so it was just Halemaumau doing its old drainage), we hiked on a pounded basalt dirt road, across a barren lava field, where people were making dirt roads out of the lava, building shacks and small houses on top of the lava (no services, remember, so they had cisterns, solar panels, and septic systems on top of the rock), and even planting trees like coconuts to bring the flow back to life. It was a fascinating place, and a reminder that a good chunk of Hawai'i is actually a pretty hard place to live. It is on the same latitude as Dubai, after all, and where there's a rain shadow, there's desert. Kilauea's not in a rain shadow, but the new flows are pretty hot and barren nonetheless. Fun place to visit.

    364:

    "Fun place to visit."

    Yes, and Ive read that the Hawaian islands are the only tropical places in the world where there is not a single poisonous animal, on land.

    365:

    I am tremendously offended by the post I am responding to.

    It is immensely egotistical, arrogant, and ignorant. It utterly ignores the close-to-famine conditions that on-and-off hit the FSSR for what, 10-15 years? The utter destruction the collapse created, and the massive suffering, along with the local criminals, and the Western vulture capitalists stealing everything they could get their hands on (and if it wasn't nailed down).

    AFAIK, the UK had NOTHING WHATSOEVER like that.

    sleepingroutine deserves an apology.

    366:

    Troutwaxer LOVE IT: They should be not-seated on the basis that they have declared their own elections to be fraudulent. I wonder if it would fly?

    Geoff Hart @ 348 The Insurance people have been "backing" global warming for some time in their setting of rates ...

    Charlie ~ 359 Not even wrong ... but, BUT It is a good fit for a very narrow section of tories - who, incidentally also want to trash London, because London is "Cosmopolitan" & they are anything but that. Some people here use the word "Englandshire" - I don't like it, but it has a ring of truth - I've met people living less than 10 miles outside the M25 who have exactly that mind-set.

    367:

    That's "Teach the bomb Phenomenology", a very specific subset of philosophy, that was obviously imprinted on the script writer.....

    368:

    You wrote, "scientists shouldn't be allowed to name things without adult supervision."

    Next you're going to tell me that no one should be allowed to make up an acronym first, and decide what it means after. And you're going to say they can't be drinking or smoking while doing it.

    369:

    I wasn't worried about the particulars. But now I'm tempted to set up a situation in a story where "Never teach the bomb about philosophy" is excellent advice, similar to Giles telling Xander that he shouldn't speak Latin in front of the books.

    370:

    [Canadian COVID numbers questionable]

    The thing that particularly bothers me is that this is obvious.

    The death rate isn't likely correct but it's not plausibly an under-count. So there should be at least a hundred known sick-with-COVID people per dead-from-COVID person. And you look at the published stats and there's about sixty, and then you go, wait, there should have been a hundred cases per dead person, three and four weeks ago, only if the rate is totally flat and we know it's not flat because the ICU occupancy rate sure isn't flat.

    Aha! but these numbers make sense if the region has mostly had cases in long-term care homes, where the COVID mortality rate is significantly higher than 1%.

    Until you start trying to figure out how the disease gets into the long term care facilities, yeah.

    It feels like we've somehow sent the entire provincial government to a remedial math course with a death penalty, only it's not them dying.

    371:

    whitroth observed: "Next you're going to tell me that no one should be allowed to make up an acronym first, and decide what it means after. And you're going to say they can't be drinking or smoking while doing it."

    Indeed, they should not. If I ran the world, there'd be a short, sharp lesson for some folk. kidding

    372:

    My understanding is that the conditions weren't as bad as you paint, although they were pretty bad. Nonetheless, if I overstepped, I do apologize, especially if he asks.

    The point stands, though: being the citizen of an imperium that is falling apart, while sniping at at someone else in the same situation in another imperium, is bad form. Most of us are in that boat, in some part of the cycle (yes, including Canada and Australia)

    There's little utility to me lording it over someone from Russia because of American "prowess" in the 1990s. I know how overstretched we are. Ditto lording it over the UK because of the stupidity of Brexit, or the UK lording it over the US for the stupidity of Trump and our two party system. Ditto Putin, Balsonaro, etc. We're all infected with the same illness, and we're just lucky that the plutocrats above us haven't yet been so had their greed so unleashed that they've made the world uninhabitable.

    373:

    For more background on the RC angle, this question on Skeptics Stack Exchange has more details and links.

    https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/48635/are-or-were-aborted-human-fetal-cells-used-in-vaccine-production/48643#48643

    374:

    At least the new exclusion zone around Mt Ruapehu's crater lake (central North Is NZ, just south of the big lake formed by an eruption 26,500 years ago) doesn't reach as far as the popular path over the adjacent mountain, or ski facilities that are open over summer. There were issues with ash fall on the nearby small city and farmland in the mid-1990s. https://www.stuff.co.nz/science/123784314/mt-ruapehu-what-volcanic-unrest-and-the-increased-alert-level-means

    375:

    Errolwi Cough NZ's largest city has a merely "dormant" volcano Mt Rangitoto in the middle of its' main harbour!

    376:

    You are no fun....

    377:

    I personally attribute most of the trouble to Corn Buffoon (Khrushchev) application of cronyism and party management that finally bore their fruit a generation later.

    Back in the day when I was more inclined to have an opinion about such things, I said that it wasn't Khrushchev but Brezhnev who had the last chance to save the USSR. And flubbed it, probably didn't even realize where things were going.

    Would you care to compare and contrast Х и Б?

    378:

    About the plutocrats... an odd thing happened, that I just read about today: psychotic extremist ancient televangelist Pat Robertson has said that the Hairball 'lives in an alternate reality'.

    If he's saying it... as I said, an odd thing may have happened: the Owners may have looked and seen reality, and drew back. They many not want the US to go to dictatorship, because that would mean violence from both sides (let's see just how IED-proof your limo is, or if my home-made GTA missile works as you take off), and realized that at some point, one side or the other will get them.

    379:

    Not Brisbane, which (like the federal aviation authority, CASA) doesn't really distinguish between traditional RC flight and camera drones. In a way that's the issue: new rules for dealing with the latter are rolling up the former in their scope. It's different if your camera usage is commercial, in which case you need a permit from the city council (and also some sort of accreditation or licence from CASA).

    Here's Brisbane's rules, FWIW:

    https://www.brisbane.qld.gov.au/things-to-see-and-do/council-venues-and-precincts/parks/using-council-parks/launching-drones-from-council-parks

    In Aus, where a local council doesn't explicitly regulate drones, the (sometimes relatively liberal) CASA rules are the only limits that apply. It looks like the Georges River council which manages the park in Sydney* Moz linked above falls in this category. That currently means there are no registration, permit or accreditation requirements for anything up to 2kg for recreational purposes, but that is changing over the next 2 years: by this time in 2022 all remote aircraft over 250g must be registered and even recreational users of these require a recreational accreditation certificate.

    • Brisbane is unusual in Australia in that it is mostly within a single local government area (LGA) and in general LGAs in Queensland are large, with significant amalgamations in 1924 and 2008. Sydney and Melbourne, in contrast, are made up of dozens of LGAs, many of them geographically small.
    380:

    It's not in the harbour, it's outside! (Just) My mate the geo-physicist noted that Rangitoto was atypical activity for the Auckland Volcanic Field. A last hurrah, or the start of a new phase? Hang on, scratch that last bit, earlier evidence re-interpreted in 2018 to suggest that this isn't the case! Isn't science wonderful! There is a programme to assess volcanic risk in Auckland. Helps answer questions like 'How many days warning are we likely to get of a lava flow cutting the inter-regional electricity connection (note singular) north out of the city". https://www.devora.org.nz/

    381:

    We're all infected with the same illness

    Yes, I like (or rather, don't like) to think that we started the ball rolling with Tony Abbott, but really there are many balls, it's a multidimensional vortex of awful.

    382:

    If he's saying it... as I said, an odd thing may have happened: the Owners may have looked and seen reality, and drew back. They many not want the US to go to dictatorship, because that would mean violence from both sides (let's see just how IED-proof your limo is, or if my home-made GTA missile works as you take off), and realized that at some point, one side or the other will get them.

    Well, yesterday I was reading a thought piece from some American Enterprise Institute dude that the Republican party has abandoned principles for Trumpism because they're so weak.

    My response is that this was incorrect. It's not that they've been seduced away from the sovereign principles enshrined in the AEI, it's that their principles are failing, and Trump is the demonstration. At the heart of good Republicanism (said without sarcasm) is the idea that their ideology would make for a better world. This also happened with communism, and (neo)liberalism and progressivism* are little better. But ideas about the rich being better, trickle down economics working, less regulation leading to better outcomes, all have failed miserably. Worse, they've proved as easy for authoritarian capture as the communist experiment was in the 1920s.

    So what do you do when your ideology has failed? If you're principled, you change your ideology and/or leave, but what about the people you leave behind, who are unprincipled or unwilling to change? That's where the Republicans are now, in my ignorant opinion.

    Fortunately (?), a number of them, faced with the possibility of their own imminent death through a fatally botched response to Covid19, are in the process of realizing that sometimes it's better to let go than to go down with.

    *Economic progress solves all problems? Pull the other one.

    383:

    Wouldn't it be more efficient if we just put the volcano in Leeds?

    Didn't he already do that?

    384:

    In Aus, where a local council doesn't explicitly regulate drones, the (sometimes relatively liberal) CASA rules are the only limits that apply

    Yep, my local council has a page that says "see CASA" https://www.cbcity.nsw.gov.au/resident/reporting-local-issues/drone-use

    Whereas Georges River Council don't mention them. The local paper reports that a grumpy citizen was told that they'd only had one complaint (which could well be code for "have you considered filing a complaint") and CASA rules apply. https://www.theleader.com.au/story/4686742/scarborough-park-user-slams-drone-use/

    In this case the park is a decent size area of rough grass with not a lot happening 90% of the time. There's also no houses nearby, it's mostly industrial. Downside is there's a lot of mangroves on the river side so retrieving a misdirected model could be ugly (mangroves are notorious for transitioning between firm if wet mud and deep soft mud between one step and the next). It's more convenient to get to than any of the official club fields, so I'll probably use it until someone comes and chases me away.

    385:

    whitroth @365: AFAIK, the UK had NOTHING WHATSOEVER like that.

    Vulture capitalism as the root of a problem has taken a lot from all of us, if I gather it right. And if it takes apart the UK in coming years, I only merely see it as karmic retribution.

    sleepingroutine deserves an apology.

    I did take it o more personal level - I don't need an apology for what happened to me and my family, it is all on our shoulders. Same goes for the rest of the country - what happened, happened. I am, however, also a patriotic person as of today, and I would seek an apology from those who orchestrated today's situation.

    https://spacenews.com/meet-dmitry-rogozin-the-new-roscosmos-chief/ Not only did they severe the last chance to cooperation in space between two largest powers, they are also gloating about sanctioning "loud hawk" for being too loud for their liking. I think it is fair to say that we have had enough and it is time to consider our options. First step - consider to knock ISS down from orbit since this rusting piece of metal has no solid foundation for existence, not anymore.

    Allen Thomson @377: Back in the day when I was more inclined to have an opinion about such things, I said that it wasn't Khrushchev but Brezhnev who had the last chance to save the USSR. And flubbed it, probably didn't even realize where things were going.

    Having the last chance to save something isn't quite the same as causing the situation in the first place. Brezhnev's epoch have created most of what we have been reliant on for last half-century. Though many people consider "stability" as a major synonym for "backwardness", let them have it, just because most of them can't tell the difference between first derivative and the second. On my part, for the record, the notorious Lysenko and his obsolete views weren't ousted for the trouble he caused until 10 years later, so you can catch my drift.

    386:

    the idea that their ideology would make for a better world

    The general difficulty appears to be supposing you don't have to argue about what "better world" means, and how you could tell. The argument can be resolved by the names of axioms.

    387:

    Re: RC - embryo research

    Thanks! - Unfortunately one of the security apps put up a big 'do not enter' flag for what looked to be the most relevant link. However a search did pull the below. Not RC, just a summary of the current AMA position on this. I'm guessing that given the internationalism of the bio/medical research community, most countries' medical associations have a similar set of guidelines.

    https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/ethics/research-using-human-fetal-tissue

    388:

    I’m less optimistic than you. I think he’s just outlived his usefulness.

    389:

    most of them can't tell the difference between first derivative and the second.

    Well said. I'm going to steal that phrase.

    Heading up isn't the same as curving down.

    390:

    So what do you do when your ideology has failed? If you're principled, you change your ideology and/or leave, but what about the people you leave behind, who are unprincipled or unwilling to change?

    Based on what I watch happen in the US Evangelical community, most folks double, triple, or quadruple down.

    Young Earth Creationism (YEC) has always been around in many fundamental circles. But it was only in the last 20 years as the internet, better science educations prior to college, and other things that believers got forced to choose. Most went with those "facts" are bogus or a part of a world wide scientific conspiracy against "our" faith. Of which Ken Han is the apostle of the movement. At least in the US and some other English speaking places.

    I've speculated in other places that this situation / mindset set up the current anti-vaxer, covid-19 is fake, mask can't stop a virus, etc... At least in the Evangelical and US MEANS FREEDOM communities.

    391:

    I just thought it would be important to check that you knew the rules for your location before buying an aircraft. It would suck to buy a model you couldn't fly locally.

    392:

    Er, no. The rocks in Lewis are the oldest in the British Isles, and the last volvanic ones are about 1,400 million years old!

    393:

    Regrettably true, but it did NOT start with Thatcher! The deliberate impoverishment of Cornwall for the benefit of the south-east (mainly London) goes back as far as I can remember (the 1960s).

    394:

    As far as I am concerned, Russians are welcome to snipe at the UK - it's not as if our local attempts have had any effect. People from the USA less so, because a lot of our woes have been deliberately inflicted to benefit the USA. Note that I am NOT saying 'by the USA', though some have been, because most of them have been by nominally UK citizens.

    395:

    a lot of our woes have been deliberately inflicted to benefit the USA

    Oh, the "special relationship".

    Its like Britannia clinging to Uncle Sam's arm while he's talking to someone else, and she's saying "Uncle Sam. Uncle Sam. I'm still special, aren't I? Aren't I?". And he says "Yes, of course you are. Now shut up and leave me in peace."

    In Washington D.C. $5 and a special relationship will get you a cappuccino.

    396:

    The other question, not answered that I've seen, is, "what are you trying to do?"

    Is it something specific that a one time renting a doors off helicopter for an hour would solve? Would you be better off buying high resolution satellite images?

    Is it art, in which case the restriction of flying out of a park has you stymied?

    Sometimes what looks initially like a nail, that sparks a hunt for the right hammer, turns out on closer inspection to be a screw.

    397:

    EC Wrong London was royally shafted, twice, during the period 1970-1985, but the recovery was swift. Hint: Thatcher hated us. Cornwall was written off at about 1947, I think - though 1966 was the real date it all happened ( Closure of Exeter-Plymouth via Okehampton & Tavistock ) Karmic retribution that's at least 4 generations late - isn't. It's just more shit.

    398:

    Meanwhile good news for the future! (Quote) As in the Roaring 20s, which followed the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, society will revert to an era of indulgence, with Dr Christakis predicting that there will be a surge in “sexual licentiousness" as well as a “reverse of religiosity.” Sounds good to me!

    399:

    "their principles are failing, and Trump is the demonstration" It's not even quite this. I can't understand why you'd rather be an oligarch in Putin's Russia than Obama's (Biden's) America. Sure there is a (low) risk of some wealth being redistributed. But no one is going to storm your bus-jet and imprison you for funding the wrong candidate. I don't get why all the oligarch-money isn't going to save the republic (and Biden is Save-the-Republic right now

    400:

    So, bring back the late sixties and early seventies, and let everyone suddenly realize that they don't have to answer the pollsters the way they think they're supposed to, and tell them "ain't religious".

    And the percentage shoots over 60%, and the Christian Satanists heads explode.

    401:

    The immediate prompt was looking at an aerial photo from the 1970s and going "I wonder what that looks like now", but it fed into an ongoing interest. I tend to have a pile of stuff I'd quite like to do in the back of my mind, and I like to mull over various options over a year or two before I actually commit to anything. I've been watching the drone market for a while, I bought a $50 mini quadcopter a few years ago and played with that until I got sick of it (then put it out on the front gate with a note saying "free, working" and it wasn't there the next day). Back when I was a kid I flew RC gliders a bit but the IC motors were primitive and unreliable so I bought an electric offroader but they're boring. My school friend who was into that stuff kept building things and now owns an actual human-carrying glider... I'm not going there :)

    Much thinking has led me to think that my eventual goal is a ~1.5m flying wing with FPV and at least one downward-facing camera. But I will almost certainly change that view as I get experience with the hobby. http://moz.geek.nz/mozbike/ documents a vaguely similar process taking me from "I want to try a recumbent" to... gee, recumbents take up a lot of space in the shed". I kind of want to avoid spending a lot of time writing code to make it all go, but I'm aware that is inevitable even just at the "python script to automate the tool chain for my exact setup", if not the "import 3 video files, time sync and stitch them to get one, software-stabilised stereoscopic 8k video".

    I'm aware that I have a shed full of similar projects and a bad record when it comes to accepting that I'm over a given thing and selling it... OTOH I also have a bad record of selling stuff then wanting it back two years later. My TIG welder especially. Which is one of those "once a year, for two hours" tools but not having it means that two hours becomes 20 hours if I can do the task at all (I ended up paying a CNC shop earlier in the year, $150 for a bit of heat treated aluminium as a bracket that holds 3 things in place in the shed... bah!).

    402:

    Um... that was the whole point of the joke.

    403:

    I can't understand why you'd rather be an oligarch in Putin's Russia than Obama's (Biden's) America.

    A lot of oligarchs, particularly the ones who inherited their wealth as opposed to making it from scratch, literally never think of anything bad happening to them. Not "cannot imagine", more like "never occurs". For their entire life nothing bad ever happened to them, so the thought of it simply never enters their minds.

    When deciding which policy to back, they might consider factors such as their personal chances of catching Covid-19, but not their personal chances of going to jail, let alone being shot. Such things simply do not occur in their world.

    I am not saying such worldview is realistic, nor that it is universal among oligarchs, but it is fairly common. Indeed, DJT exemplifies it.

    404:

    I wanted to say thanks to the commentariat for the thread about drone/RC piloting.
    I do have a specific use for one: I want to look for (and count) bittern with it. And water rails, and snipe, and other animals in reed beds. It's really hard to look through a reed bed horizontally; vertically, not so much. (If the thing is a disturbance, I'd have to abandon the idea.)

    It will all have to wait till I have some spare income, but I'm doing the thinking now :)

    405:

    In case it's not obvious, the cost difference between traditional gear and the cheap stuff is huge. You can get a ready-to-fly fixed wing kit with everything bar the camera for ~$US200 from banggood/aliexpress/ebay, or you can pay more than that for one of multiple bits. It is likely worth buying the $200 version just to see if that works for you before going down the $1000+ path... quadcopters not so much because they're basically China-only until you get into commercial ones so it's model X from china for $200, or from a local supplier for $500... in OZ at least the latter comes with a warranty and perhaps most usefully a guarantee that it's legal ("or your money back").

    406:

    David L @ 74:

    The US carries out massive voter suppression and gerrymandering; if it weren't for that, the US would be mostly blue.

    Not so much. Maybe a few states would flip.

    I've been gerrymandered for the 30 years I've lived in NC. The first 20 by D's. The next 8 by R's. Then the last 2 sort of not per court orders. We really are a 50/50 state. Well 40/40 + 20 no affiliation per registration rolls but anyway we tend to vote with 52/48 being a big win.

    I've been gerrymandered for the 30 years I've lived in NC. The first 20 by D's. The next 8 by R's. Then the last 2 sort of not per court orders. We really are a 50/50 state. Well 40/40 + 20 no affiliation per registration rolls but anyway we tend to vote with 52/48 being a big win.

    In 2010 we had 10Rs and 3Ds due to gerrymandering. But after all the lawsuits we got re-draw again.

    In our last election with court ordered and supported mostly by both sides districts we still wound up with 8Rs and 5Ds. And it would be mostly impossible to come up with a different result without the crazy gerrymandering the D's used to do where two towns were connected via miles of an Interstate highway median strip. Here the D's clump into a few metro areas and the R's are in the rural areas. And you just can't draw a map without crazy connections and come up with 13 competitive districts

    The gerrymandering wasn't quite as blatent before Nixon's "Southern Strategy". I used to work for a guy who sued North Carolina over redistricting every 10 years like clockwork, back when the North Carolina Republican Party was only him, Jesse Helms and two other guys who worked in Helm's office in Raleigh. When it's only one party it's hard to gerrymander to keep your own party from winning an election.

    That "two towns ... connected via miles of an Interstate highway median strip" 12th district didn't really have anything to do with PARTISAN Gerrymandering. It was drawn following the 1990 Census in response to a DoJ order under Voting Rights Act Preclearance to create two "majority minority" (African American) districts.

    The other "majority minority" district was North Carolina's 1st District. Basically, after the 1991 DoJ order, North Carolina's first & last districts were "gerrymandered" to be "majority minority" (ensuring North Carolina will have at least 2 African American representatives) and have remained that way even after North Carolina gained a 13th seat in the House, although now - since the Republicans drove African Americans out and into the Democratic party the 1st & 12th are primarily gerrymandered for partisan purposes.

    1Three guesses who the Attorney General was when the DoJ ghettoized North Carolina's black voters, and if you didn't guess Bill Barr (yeah THAT Bill Barr), try again.

    407:

    Thanks. That prunes a huge tree of suggestions that I was thinking about that were quite useless. So even if I now have not much to add, I'm not going to add a lot of noise (particularly useful, the "I don't want a human carrying glider").

    408:

    Robert Prior @ 77:

    I suspect that as a 'front line' health worker I'll be close to the frontish part of the line

    One hopes so. I suspect I'll be pretty close to the end of the line, unless they roll down age cohorts once they finish the essential/at risk folks. A lot of the public health advice we got in the spring used 70 as an 'age of concern', so while I'm four times more likely to suffer negative outcomes than someone in their 20s, I'm probably not old enough to get vaccinated ahead of the general rush.

    I had a telephone appointment with Radiation Oncology at the Durham VA today; semi-annual follow-up to see how my prostate cancer is progressing. The good news is it's NOT. My PSA was 0.02 (or maybe it was 0.002? - anyway very, VERY low, indicating I have no active cancer cells).

    The Nurse Practitioner I usually see (who I talked to on the telephone) told me the Durham VA got it's first batch of the Pfizer vaccine on Monday and that the medical staff & high risk in-patients in the long term care (nursing home) wards were being vaccinated this week.

    She said the next tier would go to 75+ Y.O. veterans in higher risk categories.

    Third tier should start phasing out to the outpatient clinics & I should be hearing from them to schedule my vaccination in the late January or February time frame, so my prior estimate of when I'll get it looks to be pretty accurate.

    409:

    I do have a specific use for one: I want to look for (and count) bittern with it.

    How skittish are bittern?

    Quadcopters are noisy. Recreational models have wide-angle cameras, so getting in close enough to see a bittern might mean you are low enough to disturb them.

    I watched the "Making Of" segment to Our Planet and it looked like they were using a DJI Inspire 2 for a lot of their aerial sequences. It has a much better camera (several options available) that you'll find on a consumer model but is also quite expensive.

    410:

    Just get Leonard of Quirm to do it. For example, what we are talking about here is quite obviously a Transferring-Not-Quite-Sure-What-But-Quite-Probably-Nothing-At-All-Over-44km-Using-Quantum Device.

    411:

    Allen Thomson @ 78:

    Ahem ... DT's been moving along the 'de-naturalization' continuum for some time now.

    No, DT, being a natural-born citizen, isn't subject to denaturalization, though the terminology is confusing. He can have his passport revoked unilaterally by the USG for any reason or none, but that doesn't affect citizenship. He could renounce his citizenship himself, or have it revoked if found guilty of treason, which does bring up the Russia thing. But treason is tough to prove.

    Well, they'll never get him on the "levying War" clause 'cause the chicken-shit wouldn't ever serve, but I expect there might be a fair amount of evidence out there relating to the "adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort" clause. Seems like people kind of slough over that, but AFAIK, most of the actual convictions for Treason that have been upheld have been under that latter clause.

    412:

    How skittish are bittern? Quadcopters are noisy.

    That's why the discussion has only mentioned quadcopters to rule them out.

    413:

    Sure there is a (low) risk of some wealth being redistributed. But no one is going to storm your bus-jet and imprison you for funding the wrong candidate. I don't get why all the oligarch-money isn't going to save the republic (and Biden is Save-the-Republic right now

    In addition to the already mentioned "it won't happen to me" group, there is also the group who don't care because if things get that bad they plan to leave - hence the purchases of property in the Caribbean, New Zealand, etc.

    Many of them assume that when their mining of money out of the country hits the tipping point they will simply board their private jet and fly to safety.

    414:

    The bittern's standard method is to sit still and look like a bunch of reeds until you're almost on top of it.

    Camera lenses can be changed. There seem to be two or three basic "standards" for very small Chinese cameras. The not-quite-the-smallest ones you can buy alternative lenses of different focal length on ebay without too much problem. The very tiny ones that are about 5mm square you have to look at customer reviews and see which devices have got some nipple complaining that it's not a wide angle lens, because the text of the listing is usually wrong, then get the whole device and swap the lenses over, but we're talking about less than a tenner for a camera plus battery, CPU, SD card holder and case, so they're more or less disposable. (I've dismantled several of them to use the guts in other projects and managed to break most of them in the process without upsetting myself too much.)

    Some of those are things like a 25mm cube that weighs next to nothing and can record for half an hour or so, so you could stick them onto an existing aircraft and use them as they are. Trouble is they are all desperate to claim 30fps capability but the CPU (which IIRC is an 8051oid plus hardware encoder) isn't quite up to it, so they bodge it by duplicating frames, which is shit. I don't know if the ones you actually get with aircraft have the same problem, but I wouldn't be surprised if the guts are the same, so it's worth checking out.

    415:

    You might want to consider balloon-based or even kite-based cameras rather than quadcopters for that sort of task. A reasonably-sized helium balloon will lift a 200-gram package of camera, transmitter and batteries while tethered by a light line a couple of hundred metres above your area of investigation without noise, licencing and constant recovery and replacement of battery packs for multiple flights.

    416:

    Many of them assume that when their mining of money out of the country hits the tipping point they will simply board their private jet and fly to safety.

    With the kind of tipping points we've been discussing they better make sure that either THEY or a group of close friend own/control the airport being used.

    417:

    It would suck to buy a model you couldn't fly locally.

    Oh, it definitely would, and thank you :). I wondered where you'd got the impression and think I uncovered it (the "filming for commercial purposes" thing). It's interesting comparing how things are going in different places, because new rules coming in all over the world for camera drones seem to be rolling up other forms of flying object too.

    418:

    <deadpan> Joke? </deadpan>

    Oh look, a squirrel!

    419:

    so getting in close enough to see a bittern might mean you are low enough to disturb them.

    And risk getting... bitten.

    Good lord, another squirrel! Where are they all coming from?

    420:

    Heteromeles @ 84: I think the only (minor) surprise was that Agent Orange couldn't even figure out how to use a 70-odd page, simple playbook to rally the CDC, NIH, and cruise to re-election as the hero who stopped the pandemic. I've got a copy of the play book, and it's literally fill in the blank: get these people together, ask them these questions, here's what to do with their responses. Doesn't get more cookbook than that.

    Only a colossal, shambling incompetent could screw that up. And guess what...

    He didn't have that "playbook" when Covid 19 came around. His highest priority when he assumed office in 2017 was to trash anything Obama had accomplished in the previous two terms. They burned the "playbook" and fired all the players in 2017.

    To drop the sarcasm for a moment, if I wanted him hauled up on charges, this is the one he needs to answer for. He had multiple opportunities to do the right thing and/or fix things, and he deliberately threw away every single one, causing hundreds of thousands of people to die of his negligence. If a military officer can go to prison for less, why shouldn't he?

    Those would be Federal charges & there's nigh on certainty he's going to pardon himself before he's kicked out of the White House on January 20, so there won't be any Federal charges.

    If he's going to be held to account, it's going to have to be done by State or Local prosecutors or with civil suits from identifiable victims of his direct actions - women he's assaulted or investors & consumers he's swindled.

    Possibly someone could bring a civil class action against Trump in the Federal Courts for "honest services fraud", but in all likelihood, if it wasn't rejected by the District Court, or one of the Circuit Courts, the SCOTUS would reject it out of hand.

    421:

    There's a whole genre of "scope cams" that have quite long lenses on them. This issue is stabilising the long lens, but that's not insurmountable going by various RC forum posts talking about using them. If nothing else those can be a source of longer lenses for any action cam with a compatible mount (something makes me think that there are both 12mm metric fine and 1/2" x 120tpi left hand Whitworth 67° options 🤪)

    https://shop.runcam.com/runcam-scope-cam/

    (note that a 30mm lens on an 8mm sensor is equivalent to 140mm on a 35mm sensor... but you would need to check the actual diagonal of your actual sensor as well as the thread size on the lens mount)

    422:

    Just a note. I am really far behind reading & responding. It's going to take me a while to catch up, but I just had to take some time off to do some work here around the house and none of it could be done sitting here at the computer.

    OTOH, I do have heat again and clean underwear & socks, so it was time well spent.

    423:

    That's a good idea. Lots of birds get freaked out by something with wings flying over them.

    I just tried to get prices for helium and hydrogen. BOC wouldn't tell me how much hydrogen is. Apparently I have to buy it first, then they'll tell me. Its a "restricted product" according to Ben on the chat line. Helium was 602.17 plus GST for a G size. Plus 75c/d cylinder rental.

    424:

    Helium you might be better off paying the 'party supplies" markup, or at least getting a price from them to see what your worst case numbers are. When we looked a few years ago it ended up being cheaper because we could hire for the one day we actually wanted it.

    FWIW I've found larger kites tend to freak a lot of birds out, the noise as much as anything else. We used to loft disposable cameras with RC servos to trigger them and a few times we struggled with birds (we were trying to take aerial photos of landscape features back before using a quadcopter to survey climbing routes was a thing)

    425:

    Charlie Stross @ 95:

    A distraction will be needed, and it will backfire as it always does.

    Disagree.

    There's so much shit lying around everywhere that the Biden admin will have their work cut out for the first six months just sweeping it off the sidewalks and into the streets.

    And that's assuming the Democrat candidates take those two Georgia senate seats in the run-off. If they don't? Four years of gridlock ahoy!

    It's not so much that the U.S. went nuts in October as the Republicans began to see the writing on the wall and started doing everything they could to hamstring a potential Biden administration and have continued post election to do everything they can to destroy the institutions of government the incoming administration will need to rescue the country.

    And I ran across another interesting thought about the U.S. Senate today - whether he's majority leader or minority leader, after January 20, 2021 Moscow Mitch is going to have a NEW BOSS, Kamala Harris!

    426:

    Geoff Hart @ 103:

    Graydon wrote: "It takes ~60 days for the mRNA vaccines to build to full immunity"

    Can you provide a reference to support that statement? Makes sense, but I did a quick Google and didn't find anything. I'd like an authoritative reference before I spread that info to friends and family.

    When I talked to the Nurse Practitioner at the VA today, she told me that if I get the Pfizer vaccine, I'll get the second shot three weeks later, but if I get the Moderna vaccine the second shot will come 4 weeks later. Don't know how that fits in to the ~60 days, but it might be information you can use.

    427:

    Graydon @ 175: Herd immunity cannot be achieved without vaccination.

    Sure it can. It just takes longer and more people have to get sick and die (or actually get sick & survive). How do you think Europe got over the Black Death? They didn't have vaccines for that ... back then.

    It's a term of art from veterinary science; the point of "herd immunity" is to determine how much you need to vaccinate. (If you're trying to catch ALL the free-range ungulates, you have a much worse job than if you only need to catch four-fifths.)

    Really; not even with smallpox, where you could only get it once. SARS-CoV-2 is a coronavirus; you probably don't stay immune more than about three years, even if you had a severe case.

    Smallpox was declared eradicated by the WHO in 1980. But before we went to Iraq, my entire brigade got a smallpox vaccination in mid-December 2003, or another smallpox vaccination if we were old enough to have received the vaccine as children. I had the vaccination some time before September 1955 when I entered the first grade. It was mandatory before you could start U.S. public schools.

    Fucked up my Christmas leave because I was not allowed to see my family because I had a nephew and a brand new niece (less than 6 months old) and the Army instructed us we could have no contact with anyone who had not been vaccinated for two weeks after our vaccination. Spent a week at home alone while the whole rest of the world partied.

    428:

    Paul @ 209: Chinese history over the next few decades is going to be interesting to watch from a safe distance.

    Maybe, if you can find anywhere on earth that IS a "safe distance"

    429:

    mdlve @ 254:

    However, if the authorities do not go after the person leaving office for what an even larger segment of the population believes are prosecutable offenses this will send the message to everyone that politicians have a free pass to do anything without fear of consequences.

    For the record, I think (despite the danger that no conviction would result) that Trump should be pursued for all the various things he did in office - on the assumption that they actually were illegal - to (as noted) set an example to those that follow.

    But the problem is prosecuting and getting convictions in these type of cases is very difficult - it's easy to say with a wave of hands that X is guilty of Y, it's another thing entirely to prove it in a court of law. So I can see the people at the Justice Department taking a look at the case, weighing the evidence they have available, and declining to prosecute.

    And, as always, it is easy from the sidelines to say damn the side effects and prosecute - it is going to be another thing entirely when you personally can in the future be subject to retaliatory prosecution when you leave office.

    Y'all are still missing the most important factor.

    Trumpolini is almost certainly going to issue himself a Presidential Pardon to road-block any Federal prosecution of crimes he committed either before or while he was in office.

    While I expect a self pardon to be challenged in the courts, I also expect it will rapidly make it to the Supreme Court of the U.S., and that they will sustain it (most likely in one of those Per curiam "shadow docket" decisions Roberts is so fond of).

    If he's going to be prosecuted, it's going to have to come from State and/or Local prosecutors, with perhaps a slim chance the Feds could go after him for Federal crimes he commits AFTER he leaves office subsequent to his self pardon.

    430:

    Elderly Cynic @ 274:

    "I wouldn't mind if a lovely, if strange, woman lying in a pond gave me a sword."

    I would, because I would know that it came with a responsibility to sort out the mess the country is in!

    Well ... if THEY would let me USE the sword ... responsibly of course ... I would make short work of a goodly number of the causes of that mess.

    431:

    Niala @ 288: Charlie Stross @ 286

    So, the Collapse of the USSR had nothing to do with the relative potency of the arsenals of the USA and the USSR?

    Perhaps a little as the cost of maintaining the relative potency of those arsenals bankrupted the economy.

    432:

    If a xenogynospathodonatist loans you one of her swords without the proper scabbard, it's a sucker deal. These days the scabbard's probably more useful than the cutlery.

    433:

    after our vaccination. Spent a week at home alone while the whole rest of the world partied.

    Think of it as practice for later?

    434:

    While I expect a self pardon to be challenged in the courts, I also expect it will rapidly make it to the Supreme Court of the U.S., and that they will sustain it (most likely in one of those Per curiam "shadow docket" decisions Roberts is so fond of).

    Actually, per a talking-head law professor, this is dubious. His reasoning is that the right of pardon antedates American law by quite a ways. It's part of English common law, and is one of the basic rights of kings. That said, kings are never allowed to pardon themselves, because that would place them above the law.

    This is probably the bigger argument. After all, if the Supreme Court rules that a President can pardon themselves for any action undertaken, even one that violates the Constitution, we'll be living in a monarchy, not a constitutional republic. That would be the end of their power as a court, and I don't think they're that stupid.

    The bigger problem is that they'd hand this power to Biden, not to Trump, unless they nullify the election, which they won't.

    Trump's best shot is to resign the day of Biden's inauguration, have Pence be President for an hour or three, and pardon Trump of everything. That would be legal, but then again, Pence would be on sacrificing his political career for Trump, and it's not clear he's that much of a Renfield. He could knife Trump's political career by simply failing to pardon him in time, let Trump take the falls, and campaign for president in 2024 as the hero who saved the Republic or some such.

    Regardless, you're quite correct that Trump's going to be spending an inordinate amount of time in the state of New York after he leaves office. Conceivably, a bunch of states and municipalities could try him separately for criminal negligence, based on how many people died in their district due to his handling of the coronavirus.

    And regardless

    435:

    Actually, I'm not sure what to call this form of government:

    I think it's something like a xenogynospathothaumodanocracy. But it could be a gynoxenospathothaumodanocracy.

    While it's not commonly practiced today, analogous systems were implemented fairly widely (and with indifferent success) by the intelligence agencies of the great powers. They didn't loan magic swords, though.

    436:

    How do you think Europe got over the Black Death? They didn't have vaccines for that ... back then.

    So far as I know, we don't today, either, though we to have effective antibiotic treatments for it if it is recognised in time. (Avoid ground squirrels in the US West. I believe some areas in Mongolia, too.)

    By the standard chronology, plague arrives in Europe in 1347; the last major European outbreak is in 1720, in Marseilles. That's 370 years. Call it eleven generations. That's not herd immunity; that's a selective filter. (and indeed that selective filter is detectable today in genetic analysis).

    Given the anecdata about strokes, given the "welp, that's another set of shredded organs" "no transplants from people who've had COVID" policy mutterings, and given the ~10% prompt mortality rate in the absence of a modern hospital, I would say that COVID-19 looks like a selection event disease. Lots of novel diseases are, after all, and it's certainly giving the impression that it can affect your reproductive fitness.

    437:

    Avoid ground squirrels in the US West.

    We call them Gophers.

    438:

    I will point out that, while I'm quite aware of the risk around ground squirrels, I know people who have had them on the property for decades without dying of black death. They can be infected, but they aren't all infected.

    439:

    I think you meant to point that at Graydon.

    But yes. It is my understanding the biggest problem with Gophers is horses and cattle stepping into a Gopher hole and breaking a leg.

    440:

    Lots of birds get freaked out by something with wings flying over them.

    It depends on the shape. Hawks have their wings near the front, while geese have their wings nearer the back. So if you can create a drone with wings near the back (maybe with a canard for stabilisation?) then its going to be a lot less disturbing to waterfowl.

    (Ancient "A" level biology suddenly bears fruit)

    441:

    AFAIK, the UK had NOTHING WHATSOEVER like that.

    Not yet.

    I note that Tesco (the largest supermarket chain in the UK) just announced they'd extend rationing to rice, eggs, toilet paper, and a few other staples in the next day or two -- this is part of their Brexit and COVID19 planning. Meanwhile consumers have been told to expect shortages of lettuce, broccoli, and citrus fruits over the next days.

    And we haven't even hit the Brexit transition deadline yet: next year is going to be bumpy over here.

    442:

    if the Supreme Court rules that a President can pardon themselves for any action undertaken, even one that violates the Constitution, we'll be living in a monarchy, not a constitutional republic.

    Well, there's opportunity for much finer hair splitting than that. What you're really talking about there is Rule of Law (as opposed to Rule of Man), something that monarchies can (and do!) have just as well as republics. The common (but not absolute, and there are various opinions as you might imagine) consensus is that the last British monarch for whom the version of monarchy you describe pertained was Charles I, and a funny thing happened to him... The term that encompasses what you're looking for is "absolute monarchy", but there's more hair splitting in the category of "necessary but insufficient" and "sufficient but not necessary" conditions.

    Arguably Rome ambled on as a republic in form as well as name for a generation or so from the Marius/Sulla era to the First Triumvirate. Of course it's messy, Caesar was Marius' nephew and the sharp escalation of political violence, or rather the rise of violence against political enemies as a tool for politicians to achieve their goals, was the major Marian innovation. There are parallels, but the alarms they ring as less urgent, speaking to a future event. That's not to say there isn't reason for alarm, of course, far from it.

    443:

    Wow. I had no idea! Thanks. That's really interesting.

    444:
    So if you can create a drone with wings near the back (maybe with a canard for stabilisation?)

    Waterfowl aren't going to be freaked out by a flying thing impaling a duck?

    445:

    To be fair, Hawke/Goose Effect sounds like it ought to be a reference to a former Australian Prime Minister...

    446:

    A bit of googling turned up this:

    https://www.flugmodellbau-kirch.de/Zusatz-Artikel-FMT.htm

    Its in German, and it looks like an enthusiast's experiment, but it does suggest that such a thing would be possible.

    447:

    I can assure you that there was a LOT more to it than that, both before and during the Thatcher years, and there is strong evidence that such suppression was deliberate and indirect evidence that it was for the benefit of the London area.

    448:

    This is really interesting. Oddly enough, there are FPV drones shaped ike the "goose" profile. There are quite odd looking things like this:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeoOnuMQOiQ

    But there is also a sort of continuum between "flying wing" and "deltoid jet fighter" shapes, where there is a bit of fuselage forward of the wing. There's also the "twin boom" style of thing familiar from wartime P38s, but where the diminutive tailplane is supported by two narrow spars, and therefore might be ignored by birds, or at least, not trigger the "hawk" response.

    449:

    EC ( 447 ) As a lifelong Londoner, I disagree - we got thoroughly crapped-on. ( Abolition of the GLC, anyone? The attempted & nearly-successful demolition of "London Transport"? )

    450:

    You have absolutely NO conception of how thoroughly Cornwall was deliberately kept poor so that holidays and second homes there could be kept cheap. I will give you just two examples of many:

    Even in the 1970s, it was impossible to make a telephone call out of most of Cornwall to ANYWHERE else outside working hours - no, the operator could NOT connect me, because there was no mechanism to do so. And, even in working hours, all such calls had to be made through the operator, and I remember when they had to be booked in advance, often for the next day. How the hell could a company operate from there? At a similar time, I knew companies who moved from other parts of England to London, because it was CHEAPER - due to the punitive pricing of telephone calls from elsewhere.

    When there was a requirement to stop emitting raw sewage to sea, Thatcher required that the permanent residents of the poorest area in England (yes, Cornwall) pay the ENTIRETY of the cost, refused to subsidise any of the cost, and explicitly FORBADE any kind of visitor, caravan park or second home tax, despite the demonstrable fact that the problem was caused almost entirely by the summer emmet influx, which TRIPLED the population of the county.

    No, you privileged sods in London have NO idea what it is to be throughly crapped on.

    451:

    there might be a fair amount of evidence out there relating to the "adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort" clause

    You could be right -- it certainly appears there's something about Russia that terrifies Trump and "Aid and Comfort" is a plausible candidate for what that might be. Whether Russia could or should be considered an Enemy for legal purposes is a thorny question best left up to lawyers and the courts.

    452:

    "In addition to the already mentioned "it won't happen to me" group, there is also the group who don't care because if things get that bad they plan to leave - hence the purchases of property in the Caribbean, New Zealand, etc."

    Remember that these people, almost by definition, are people for Whom the Rules Do Not Apply.

    They've all gotten away with more than enough stuff to get all of us here life sentences.

    They'll believe in consequences when they feel them for the first time.

    453:

    Barry @ 452

    Sooner or later one of those who think rules do not apply to them get too greedy, and they end up in jail.

    Look at what happened to Conrad Black, or the Right Honourable Lord Black of Crossharbour, member of the House of Lords of the United Kingdom since 2002.

    He was careless, and he ended up in a jail, in the U.S. :

    File:Conrad Black mug shot.jpg

    Trump pardoned him in 1919, but the story isn't over yet.

    454:

    Greg & Elderly Cynic - Cornwall vs London

    I think it's fair to say your both right and wrong.

    The point (I think) that it getting lost in the argument is that London != those who benefited from impoverishing the south-west.

    Rather, it was a subset of London - the well off "respectable" bankers and the mid-level and up employees of the financial institutions - who benefited from the deliberate attempts at making the south-west (and likely other parts of the UK) poor to create affordable second homes.

    But that isn't the same as saying London, because the vast majority of people living in London did not benefit - because they were too poor to be able to afford a second home.

    And for that majority in London, the actions taken against London were just as bad as the actions taken against Cornwall and others - because the goal was to not just make Cornwall nice for the rich bankers, but also London.

    455:

    "This is probably the bigger argument. After all, if the Supreme Court rules that a President can pardon themselves for any action undertaken, even one that violates the Constitution, we'll be living in a monarchy, not a constitutional republic. That would be the end of their power as a court, and I don't think they're that stupid. "

    Note that Biden won't abuse this much, since Democrats simply don't do that.

    What might factor in SCOTUS' calculations is that everything that Trump has done is now normalized for the next GOP president.

    Trump has demonstrated what a GOP president can get away with, politically and legally, with no important consequences for him. The next GOP president will work from that, and almost everybody in the GOP Congress will support him, as well as 100% of the (non-fired) executive branch appointed officials.

    456:

    "Sooner or later one of those who think rules do not apply to them get too greedy, and they end up in jail."

    'Sooner or later' is incorrect here, IMHO. It's 'occasionally', or 'rare bad luck'.

    457:

    Look at what happened to Conrad Black, or the Right Honourable Lord Black of Crossharbour, member of the House of Lords of the United Kingdom since 2002.

    In a way though he is a good/bad example - his punishments were very minor, short lasting, and he stepped back into his old life as if nothing had happened.

    458:

    Camera lenses can be changed.

    Quadcopters rely on a gimbal to stabilize the camera, and those are finicky and require careful balancing. I've been looking at getting filters for my Mavic 2, and even a simple filter requires a counterbalance.

    459:

    While I expect a self pardon to be challenged in the courts, I also expect it will rapidly make it to the Supreme Court of the U.S., and that they will sustain it (most likely in one of those Per curiam "shadow docket" decisions Roberts is so fond of).

    Pre-election I think many could have been persuaded of this - many/most fell into the line of thinking that Trump had bought and paid for his own personal Supreme Court, combined with the Republican stacking of other levels of the judiciary.

    But post-election I'm not so sure about that. The judges, many of them appointed by either by a previous Republican government or Trump, have been very dismissive of Trump efforts to steal the election - up to and including the Supreme Courts refusal to even pretend to look at the various attempts.

    So I would agree, the Supreme Court will look at if Trump attempts it and I would currently lean towards the Supreme Court saying no to his attempt at being above the law.

    460:

    I wondered where you'd got the impression and think I uncovered it (the "filming for commercial purposes" thing).

    No, it was definitely just "drone with a camera" without anything about the purpose. City regulations, not CASA. Said city only had two parks you could fly.

    Not important, as long as it's not your city.

    461:

    mdlve @ 457: "his punishments were very minor, short lasting, and he stepped back into his old life as if nothing had happened."

    I don't think so. He was in jail for years and he had to sell nearly all his homes around the world in order to pay the courts and his lawyers.

    462:

    (Avoid ground squirrels in the US West. I believe some areas in Mongolia, too.)

    Marmots carry it.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/15/teenage-boy-dies-plague-mongolia-after-eating-marmot

    463:

    Speaking of balloon based, how about tying one with a string to a quad-copter? With careful flying (always towing the balloon, not pushing it in front) it can be positioned upwind of the area you want to photograph, then glide silently over without scaring the birds.

    Though that seems somewhat hackish; the idea naturally leads to blimps / Zeppelins. I remember that at work we had a toy RC mylar party balloon with a two fan drive underneath, which people would fly through the office.

    Online searching reveals they do exist, see eblimp.com. 3m to 12m long! And there's that Spektrum radio system again. Lots of camera options, and you can drop things too.

    464:

    mdive I think you may be correct.

    ( NOT ) Getting away with it ... Let's also remember Johnathan Aitken - went to jail ....

    465:

    JP aeronautics has a better design, which is a carbon fiber truss, with two propellers in the center (electric in this case) and a weather balloon on each end. The propellers provide lateral propulsion, while the balloons provide lift. Of course, he's using this as a test body around 100,000 feet, but he didn't patent the design to my knowledge, so there's no reason not to (after checking) try building one.

    Well, except that balloons are a tradeoff. Unless there's a propeller or something daft like the original aereon involved (see the 1638 discussions), they're basically static with respect to the body of air they're in, not to the ground. While balloonists get clever about rising and dropping to catch different bodies of air moving in different directions, they only hold station in still air.

    If you want to use a balloon for photography, the old-school and still relevant solution is to use a tethered balloon, or a tethered kite-balloon to loft your camera platform.

    466:

    Read what I posted more carefully. The benefit for the poorer Londoners was the availability of cheap holidays, and it was and is the mass migration of emmets that overloaded the infrastructure (not just the sewage system, either). I don't know what the current distribution is but, back then, it was primarily from London.

    I accept your point that it was done by and primarily for the well-off subset of the south-east, who also made the profit from the caravan parks etc., but the majority of London benefitted from the policy.

    467:

    I'm with you on this one. The Roberts Supreme Court has definitely been about preserving its power, credibility, and relevance, which means that it has to be seen as promoting the rule of law and some notion of justice, not being conservative patsies.

    But the problem, again, is that if Trump gets away with a self-pardon, Biden or Harris also has that power, so they can abolish the Constitution and pardon themselves. Trump can't pardon his way back into office unless he stages a coup. And support for that coup seems to be pitiful. Worse, with Trump beating the drums about a rigged election and a bunch of republicans saying they believe him, if the court gives Biden the ability to self-pardon, they all look like secret democratic operatives and their credibility goes into the toilet. Which is something that Roberts does not want.

    My hope is that Trump's actually angry at Pence, and this is not just more bullshit reality show playacting...If so, he won't resign to let Pence pardon him, but he may try to self-pardon. Unfortunately, his strategy if he doesn't self-pardon is to screw things up really badly in the hope that the Biden administration will have to spend all their time fixing it and not come after him, as happened with Obama and the Bush II administration. I suspect that's a vain hope, but there's certainly evidence that he's trying this gambit.

    468:

    Re. "self-pardoning": Seems unlikely to survive SCOTUS. I'm not a fan of most of their members, but they've already rejected Trump initiatives that they considered to be a threat to the rule of law or just ill-considered*. I won't claim that they'll always do the right thing, but preliminary evidence for their independence is better than I'd feared. (I've had much guilty pleasure suggesting to furious GOPpers that perhaps next time they should stack the court with Democrat judges.)

    A related issue is whether you can pardon yourself if you haven't actually been convicted of anything. My uneducated guess is "no", and that the Dems are waiting for Trump and Pence to leave office so that they can try him for federal crimes without interference from the GOP. But I'd be just as happy to see him spend the rest of his (un)natural life in court, trying to fend off state and municipal cases.

    469:

    A related issue is whether you can pardon yourself if you haven't actually been convicted of anything. My uneducated guess is "no", and that the Dems are waiting for Trump and Pence to leave office so that they can try him for federal crimes without interference from the GOP. But I'd be just as happy to see him spend the rest of his (un)natural life in court, trying to fend off state and municipal cases.

    I'd change that slightly. My guess is that Biden and the dems want to rebuild the justice department as an independently functioning entity, then turn Trump over to their tender mercies. Ditto the IRS, which has been fighting Trump for years over stuff. Ditto the FBI, to investigate evidence for treason or foreign influence, to either bring charges or clear him.

    The point for the dems is that justice, to be just, has to be about the rule of law, not about owning the reptards and MAGAts the way Trump owns the Libs.

    Unfortunately, this is obvious enough that Trump's been working to trash all these departments for years.

    That said, Trump's going to be ping-ponging through a rather large number of courts for the rest of his life, and his estate is going to be in litigation until it no longer exists, I suspect. And since I think he's burned his bridges with Deutsche Bank, he desperately needs to keep raising and misusing campaign funds to stay solvent. Which itself might lead to criminal prosecution....

    470:

    I don't think so. He was in jail for years and he had to sell nearly all his homes around the world in order to pay the courts and his lawyers.

    He served 3 years, in minimum security in sunny Florida.

    Despite no longer being a citizen (who renounced his Canadian citizenship to become a citizen of the UK for his peerage), he (a convicted fellon) was allowed to return to Canada after release.

    While his fortune may have been dented, he was still by any means wealthy and promptly returned to his well paid job(s) writing opinion pieces.

    None of that would apply to most people convicted, most of whom couldn't afford the lawyers to fight the legal battles who could, and thus reduced his 6.5 year sentence to effectively 3. And most people don't get to return to nice, well paying, jobs after being released from prison.

    So yes, his punishments were minor.

    471:

    EC but the majority of London benefitted from the policy. No, not remotely. I was living here at the time & it wasn't funny.

    Meanwhile, what's the betting on a skinny / minimum "deal" of some sort? It depends on which news source you are looking at .... But I actually think the complete fuck-up-by-the-numbers @ Dover & elsewhere has finally penetrated to BoZo, perhaps.

    472:

    Heteromeles @469: My guess is that Biden and the dems want to rebuild the justice department as an independently functioning entity, then turn Trump over to their tender mercies.

    President-Elect Biden has made a very vocal point of restoring the independence of the Justice Department; whether or how they prosecute El Cheeto Grande will be left to the professionals.

    Re: the Supreme Court and Trump appointees - once you've got that lifetime appointment, much of the influence of the person who appointed you goes away. SCOTUS has definitely been tilted conservative, but it's not always going to be obvious which way the justices are going to vote on a particular case. Chief Justice Roberts seems to be making quite an effort to maintain whatever reputation for fairness the court retains, with strategic opinions that don't toe the conservative line.

    473:

    The thing about Boris is that even if he somehow gets possessed on Christmas Eve by the ghosts of Charlemagne, Napoleon, and the Lord Woolton, the ghosts having received the Word to get Brexit fixed for the salvation of the English, there isn't time. Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson has been strapped to the sled and gravity has him now. It's got the whole island. It's quite possible he's only just now noticed that he doesn't know anything about the bottom of this hill.

    The core political principle behind the UK's Brexit coalition is that the UK does not have to follow the rules. ("Britannia waives the rules", as though it were 1890.) That is not a position with any factual support, but adherence to it has increased as various deadlines approached, not diminished. There isn't time to do anything about that; the Brexit coalition has held. They're not giving up now.

    The other point is that once things grind to a halt they don't restart readily. Order is important, and the order is unknown. It's not even especially discoverable, and from other examples it takes scale-of-years to create an equivalent set of logistics chains. There's going to be considerable upheaval before this could be politically recognised, and such political recognition is not guaranteed.

    474:

    And not a real surprise to anyone aware of how viruses work, but there is another new strain of Covid out of South Africa,

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/covid-variant-uk-south-africa-coronavirus-update-b1778225.html

    475:

    Not sure why I got linked to, but thanks. I'll in turn link to Derek Lowe's latest: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/12/22/the-new-mutations

    Also, he mentioned nextstrain.org, which isn't limited to Covid19. However, if virology or phylogeny is your thing, you can follow the viral news with less intermediation by journalists here.

    476:

    On judges appointed by Trump:

    Most, if not all the judges appointed by Trump were actually chosen by the Federalist Society, which is a club of lawyers and judges who are on the Right of US politics. From Wikipedia:

    The organization, whose ideals include "checking federal power, protecting individual liberty and interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning", plays a central role in networking and mentoring young conservative lawyers.

    These people may have taken advantage of Trump, but they are not his supporters. In fact they generally despise him. Trump may have assumed (like much of the rest of the world) that the judges he appointed would feel beholden to him, but that was a mistake.

    477:

    Graydon We're going to find out - very soon, I think. Trouble is ... even with "a deal" - it's still going to be a shit-sandwich & the ERG headbangers will be shouting on & ON & ON for the next 4 years, anyway ....

    478:

    Congrats, and good luck on the vaccine soon.

    479:

    Perhaps, but I'm wondering about his incitement to commit violence against the legally-elected government (i.e. Michigan) would qualify as "levying war".

    480:

    Steampunk dirigible! Battery-powered electic motor, all fitting brass....

    481:

    Well, of course. I understand what you're looking at (and I was absolutely serious about mailing you food if necessary).

    I'll note that lettuce? I almost never buy fruits and vegetables out of season, or try not to.

    482:

    "Something about Russia"? You mean, besides a lot of kompromat and allllllll the money laundering evidence?

    483:

    Of course, Biden, who may not run for re-election, has little to lose... and if the GOP tries to block everything, he can use Trumpolini's playbook... and you want to see how fast the GOP goes bipartisan on House Democrats' laws and regulations clarifying what a President can and cannot do?

    484:

    And spending all of his remaining money on lawyers.

    485:

    The US tests for "true threat" are extremely narrow; it's very very difficult to make any kind of speech legally actionable.

    If it's "did give orders..." rather than speech, it runs into Presidential immunity; you have to impeach for that, the courts won't touch it.

    So there might be a "knowingly covered for a foreign actor who interfered with elections to the extent of changing the reported vote totals" case, somewhere, but in general I doubt it.

    486:

    Very thin electroplated brass, I hope!

    The mass limits on those things are instructive; you need a lot of blimp to lift a kilo.

    487:

    "Brittania waives the rules" - great line.

    488:

    Heteromeles @ 434:

    While I expect a self pardon to be challenged in the courts, I also expect it will rapidly make it to the Supreme Court of the U.S., and that they will sustain it (most likely in one of those Per curiam "shadow docket" decisions Roberts is so fond of).

    Actually, per a talking-head law professor, this is dubious. His reasoning is that the right of pardon antedates American law by quite a ways. It's part of English common law, and is one of the basic rights of kings. That said, kings are never allowed to pardon themselves, because that would place them above the law.

    This is probably the bigger argument. After all, if the Supreme Court rules that a President can pardon themselves for any action undertaken, even one that violates the Constitution, we'll be living in a monarchy, not a constitutional republic. That would be the end of their power as a court, and I don't think they're that stupid.

    The bigger problem is that they'd hand this power to Biden, not to Trump, unless they nullify the election, which they won't.

    Just because it's stupid and violates the Constitution doesn't mean they won't do it anyway.

    The "hand this power to Biden" argument is a non-starter. Give me an example (even a hypothetical example) where Biden would abuse this "power".

    Trump's best shot is to resign the day of Biden's inauguration, have Pence be President for an hour or three, and pardon Trump of everything. That would be legal, but then again, Pence would be on sacrificing his political career for Trump, and it's not clear he's that much of a Renfield. He could knife Trump's political career by simply failing to pardon him in time, let Trump take the falls, and campaign for president in 2024 as the hero who saved the Republic or some such.

    I read a good article in The Atlantic with an interview of Michael Cohen, Trumpolini's former fixer personal lawyer.

    Cohen contends that Trump's real goal is the subscription Cable TV network Trumpolini will likely launch after he is out of office ($4.99/month x 20 million die-hard Trumpanistas = ~$1.2 Trillion per year). If he resigns & lets Pence pardon him, that makes him a LOSER!

    A loser ain't gonna get those 20 million subscribers @ $4.99/month. It really IS all about the money! And Trumpolini is going to need a lot of money after he's out of office.

    Regardless, you're quite correct that Trump's going to be spending an inordinate amount of time in the state of New York after he leaves office. Conceivably, a bunch of states and municipalities could try him separately for criminal negligence, based on how many people died in their district due to his handling of the coronavirus.

    Cohen had another interesting idea about Trumpolini's use of the pardon power

    Basically, two thing drive him in this regard:
    1. What's in it for Trumpolini? - Trump isn't going to pardon anyone unless he sees a way in which he will personally benefit from it.
    2. When someone accepts a pardon, their 5th Amendment right against self incrimination becomes moot. - Trumpolini won't pardon anyone who could then be compelled to testify to acts which could in turn incriminate Trumpolini himself (i.e. the boys & "Javanka").

    Cohen might be wrong, but I don't think he is. Take a look at who Trumpolini has already pardoned and who he has not pardoned; who he only commuted sentences for (i.e. they still retain their 5th Amendment right against self incrimination and by extension can't implicate Trumpolini).

    PS: Evidence of voter fraud in Pennsylvania has finally turned up.

    489:

    They can do what I'm planning to do for my steam locos on my model train layout, when I get it running: I've been saving the cotton from pill bottles... so a smokestack with apparent smoke!

    490:

    Heh, heh. He's pardoned Flynn, Pappadopolis, and several others.

    491:

    For one, some of his tweets do go over the line.

    For another... er, he was impeached.

    492:

    He could renounce his citizenship himself....

    You cannot renounce US citizenship without the permission of the US government. Not having your taxes up to date is one of the reasons they refuse permission.

    493:

    David L @ 437:

    Avoid ground squirrels in the US West.

    We call them Gophers.

    Two distinct species:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_squirrel

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher

    And in the western U.S. the more likely vectors are mice & rats.

    494:

    JBS @ 488

    I wonder if he disguised hiself as her.

    495:

    Unfortunately, his strategy if he doesn't self-pardon is to screw things up really badly in the hope that the Biden administration will have to spend all their time fixing it and not come after him, as happened with Obama and the Bush II administration.

    In Obama's case, as I recall, it was a choice not to pursue Bush II, not a lack of time.

    496:

    mdlve @ 459:

    While I expect a self pardon to be challenged in the courts, I also expect it will rapidly make it to the Supreme Court of the U.S., and that they will sustain it (most likely in one of those Per curiam "shadow docket" decisions Roberts is so fond of).

    Pre-election I think many could have been persuaded of this - many/most fell into the line of thinking that Trump had bought and paid for his own personal Supreme Court, combined with the Republican stacking of other levels of the judiciary.

    So I would agree, the Supreme Court will look at if Trump attempts it and I would currently lean towards the Supreme Court saying no to his attempt at being above the law.

    Most of the courts rejection of Trumpolini's post election claims fall under the rubric "You gotta give me something I can work with!"

    In many cases, Trumpolini's lawyers were so incompetent they couldn't even state a claim that could be adjudicated, while the relief requested was orders of magnitude disproportionate to the supposed infraction - e.g. a few counties in western Pennsylvania did not allow voters to rectify flawed mail-in ballots (non-partisan, because they didn't allow Democrats OR Republicans to do so), so the requested relief was to throw out ALL of the mail-in ballots in Philadelphia ... ???

    Don't confuse rejection of obviously garbage litigation with a non-partisan respect for the rule of law.

    497:

    whitroth @ 479: Perhaps, but I'm wondering about his incitement to commit violence against the legally-elected government (i.e. Michigan) would qualify as "levying war".

    No, on two technical points ("he's getting off on a technicality")
    1. He'd have to be physically present when shots were fired. Ex parte Bollman, 8 U.S. (4 Cranch) 75 (1807)

    "To constitute a levying of war, there must be an assemblage of persons for the purpose of effecting by force a treasonable purpose. Enlistments of men to serve against government is not sufficient."

    2. Michigan is only one state, not the United States.

    It's sedition; it's insurrection and it's even stochastic terrorism, but it's not "levying War against" the United States.

    498:

    whitroth @ 482: "Something about Russia"? You mean, besides a *lot* of kompromat and allllllll the money laundering evidence?

    Oh yes, the mythical "pee tape". How much leverage do you think that provides after "grab 'em by the pussy".

    And since most of the "money laundering evidence" points back to Putin surrogates, that's not much of a threat. I don't think Putin is stupid enough to throw himself under the bus, just to spite Trumpolini.

    No, it's the Trump Tower Moscow. It's always been about the Trump Tower Moscow. Trump is stupid enough he thinks Russia is going to reward him with a pony on Christmas real soon now.

    He doesn't understand his value to Putin is rapidly diminishing and will reach ZERO on Jan 20, 2021.

    499:

    JBS wondered: "Oh yes, the mythical "pee tape". How much leverage do you think that provides after "grab 'em by the pussy".

    If it exists, it might provide significant leverage. One thing Trump hates more than anything else is seeming weak. If the tape is sufficiently damning...

    500:

    whitroth @ 490: Heh, heh. He's pardoned Flynn, Pappadopolis, and several others.

    Indeed he has. And while I don't see what's in it for him, I don't doubt HE does.

    I do see that none of them likely has anything they could now be forced to testify about that would implicate Trumpolini. And note that he has NOT pardoned Roger Stone or Paul Manafort.

    501:

    Read what I posted more carefully. The benefit for the poorer Londoners was the availability of cheap holidays, and it was and is the mass migration of emmets that overloaded the infrastructure (not just the sewage system, either). I don't know what the current distribution is but, back then, it was primarily from London.

    The problem with that is you then have to ignore not just the people on holiday from the rest of the UK, but also all the other holiday destinations pre-cheap flights - essentially anything coastal in England and Wales (and perhaps Scotland) that didn't benefit from a deep water port.

    And the fact that this use a holiday destination went on for 100+ years - if WW2 hadn't interfered the GWR was going to upgrade small town Paignton's station from 2 platforms to 5 (some minor work actually started). If you look at the old timetables and Devon & Cornwall were getting trains from all over the western part of England (and barely Scotland) on Summer Saturdays, and what looked like a London conspiracy was merely population bias.

    No, the ongoing problem Devon, Cornwall and all the other seaside resorts had(*) was their location was poor for anything else. The industrial age not only left the small farm villages behind, but also any part of the country with poor logistics.

    And while it is a sample size of one, when my parents moved us to England in the mid-80s when they bought a 19 room B&B in south Devon the inherited customer base was everywhere but London, and the result was any advertising my parents did was more in the Manchester/Birmingham area of the UK - certainly not London.

    • Actually, the other problem Devon and Cornwall have is that they reliably vote Conservative, so Labour ignores them and the Conservatives take them for granted.
    502:

    Niala @ 494: JBS @ 488

    I wonder if he disguised hiself as her.

    According to what I've read about the story so far, he made on-line requests for mail in ballots in his deceased mother's name & deceased mother-in-law's name. He mailed in the ballot he obtained in his mother's name. I haven't seen whether he voted by mail or in person when casting his own ballot.

    503:

    "JBS wondered: "Oh yes, the mythical "pee tape". How much leverage do you think that provides after "grab 'em by the pussy".

    If it exists, it might provide significant leverage. One thing Trump hates more than anything else is seeming weak. If the tape is sufficiently damning..."

    Remember, video of doing somethign. The 'p*ssy grab' video was of Trump talking about something.

    Imagine seeing a video of a naked Trump having two women urinating on him, or even of him simply having something approximating sex with them.

    And that's not mentioning the undoubtedly detailed financial files which Russian intelligence has on him.

    504:

    And yes, I'm evil; you can bill me for the brain bleach.

    505:

    He doesn't understand his value to Putin is rapidly diminishing and will reach ZERO on Jan 20, 2021.

    I am not sure. It feels as if Russia's foreign policy is in large parts based on wreaking havoc* - when no one can form stable relationships with each other the influence sphere of the Russian state is mostly safe. It could be worthwhile to support Trump's plan to become US president again in 2024 and financing all the legal actions until then: The GOP will be in turmoil (I see funny trench warfare between Trump supporters and more "classical" politicians interested in transatlantic relations and other international treaties) - could be a cheap way to lock up Washington for a few more years.

    ) I believe Moscow was as surprised as everyone else that Trump actually won. Even *more chaos. Great, wasn't it?

    506:

    Cornwall was written off at about 1947, I think - though 1966 was the real date it all happened ( Closure of Exeter-Plymouth via Okehampton & Tavistock )

    The former SR/LSWR line closure really had nothing to do with Cornwall - the branches off the withered arm would have been closed even if the Exeter-Plymouth section had been kept as the car and lorry simply killed off the railway in those remote areas.

    At the end of the day the real reason the line was closed was because it simply didn't have enough traffic to justify the required subsidies - then as now it ran through a proverbial wilderness with a lack of local population and expensive costs of maintenance.

    507:

    You cannot renounce US citizenship without the permission of the US government. Not having your taxes up to date is one of the reasons they refuse permission.

    The IRS says it won't accept renunciation of citizenship without DoS certification, but the relevant law only says you need to do the renunciation before a consular officer in a manner approved by the DoS. I have no idea how that plays out in practice.

    https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/expatriation-tax

    https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1481

    508:

    Geoff Hart @ 499: JBS wondered:

    "Oh yes, the mythical "pee tape". How much leverage do you think that provides after "grab 'em by the pussy".

    If it exists, it might provide significant leverage. One thing Trump hates more than anything else is seeming weak. If the tape is sufficiently damning...

    Everything I know about it suggests Trumpolini wouldn't see it as making him seem weak. It's not damning at all given Trumpolini's misogyny.

    According to "sources" the tape only shows Trumpolini sitting in a chair in a Moscow hotel room - the room the Obamas stayed in when then President Obama visited Moscow in July 2009 - watching two Russian prostitutes piss on the bed the Obamas slept in.

    At most, he'd sue for royalties and begin hawking copies of the tape on the Home Shopping Channel.

    509:

    renke_ @ 505:

    He doesn't understand his value to Putin is rapidly diminishing and will reach ZERO on Jan 20, 2021.

    I am not sure. It feels as if Russia's foreign policy is in large parts based on wreaking havoc* - when no one can form stable relationships with each other the influence sphere of the Russian state is mostly safe. It could be worthwhile to support Trump's plan to become US president again in 2024 and financing all the legal actions until then: The GOP will be in turmoil (I see funny trench warfare between Trump supporters and more "classical" politicians interested in transatlantic relations and other international treaties) - could be a cheap way to lock up Washington for a few more years.

    ) I believe Moscow was as surprised as everyone else that Trump actually won. Even *more chaos. Great, wasn't it?

    Yeah, there is that. But I still don't think he's getting a pony for Christmas or the right to put his name on a hotel in Moscow.

    At best (best for Trumpolini), his utility to Putin goes back to what it was before he became a candidate in 2015; a useful idiot (conduit) for money laundering in the U.S. for Putin's cronies.

    510:

    The IRS says it won't accept renunciation of citizenship without DoS certification

    This:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_Loss_of_Nationality

    The Certificate of Loss of Nationality of the United States (CLN) is form DS-4083 of the Bureau of Consular Affairs of the United States Department of State which is completed by a consular official of the United States documenting relinquishment of United States nationality. The form is prescribed by the Secretary of State under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952.

    A CLN is used only to document a loss of U.S. nationality and it does not affect the loss of U.S. nationality itself. However some provisions of U.S. regulations require a CLN be issued in order to recognize a person as a non-U.S. national even if as a matter of law that person is already provably not a U.S. national.

    511:

    Anyone who believes anything involving sex, kink, cruelty, humiliation, even outright rape or torture, will have the least effect or impression on the shoggoth cultists -- that ships sailed in 2016 and sunk to the bottom of the political sea.

    A day or so ago there was a long report in the Washington Post about covid-19 infections and death on a small Chesapeake Island off Virginia. The people are separated from rhe mainland; tourists in the summer, but when covid hit here last March, they were isolated and knew it had nothing to do with them. No masking, no Distance. Trips to the mainland continued as usual for mail and supplies and goods.

    Inevitably this winter somehow mysteriously through no body or anything it arrived. So many are sick; many have died including their only medical person.

    Yet, even today, now that they're masking up and it seems the condition is improving, they still believe covid is either a hoax or a terrorist act on the USA by China. In the meantime, people need to rally around shoggoth. It's not his fault, he's doing the best he can, he's gotten no credit, and -- we will support him whatever it takes. "As far as I'm concerned," declared a (white) female shoggoth worshipper, "Trump can do no wrong. I'll be there for him til death."

    512:

    The issue of 'accidental Americans' seems to be hitting some poor Europeans hard. Born in America, left when still babies, and now can't get access to European banks because European banks are unwilling to deal with American tax laws. (Among other things, they are being required to provide things they don't have, like social security numbers.)

    Renouncing American citizenship isn't simple, and it costs over $2000

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/aug/25/british-citizens-born-in-us-risk-having-uk-bank-accounts-frozen

    https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2020/11/dutch-mps-call-for-action-on-accidential-american-bank-accounts/

    513:

    At best (best for Trumpolini), his utility to Putin goes back to what it was before he became a candidate in 2015; a useful idiot (conduit) for money laundering in the U.S. for Putin's cronies.

    The problem with that is everyone is now very interested in his financial dealings, which generally works against the money laundering usefulness.

    On the other hand, if he does indeed create/buy his own "news" network he could continue to be very useful in both influencing the Republican Party as well as creating dissent and mayhem in the US population.

    514:

    And note that he has NOT pardoned Roger Stone or Paul Manafort. Yes. In particular, the Roger Stone clemancy is a clear signal that he(RS) has information that could severely damage D.J. Trump (and others, probably). He's lucky that he continues to live; he's messed with multiple other parties as well. All allegedly, though he brags a lot.

    515:

    Well, there's opportunity for much finer hair splitting than that. What you're really talking about there is Rule of Law (as opposed to Rule of Man), something that monarchies can (and do!) have just as well as republics. The common (but not absolute, and there are various opinions as you might imagine) consensus is that the last British monarch for whom the version of monarchy you describe pertained was Charles I, and a funny thing happened to him...

    His hair got split very finely?

    516:

    His hair got split very finely?

    All the way down through the follicle and a bit further besides.

    517:

    It was the finest hair. It cascaded down his shoulders like ...

    ... a bowling ball wearing a wig.

    518:

    Ah, snap! 🥳

    519:

    Heh, yours is better anyway :)

    520:

    It beats watching the NSW live updates and apparently a pile of covidiots are fleeing the area and trying to get into Queensland (presumably as refugees?)

    https://www.smh.com.au/national/coronavirus-updates-live-sydney-restrictions-eased-for-three-day-christmas-window-as-northern-beaches-split-in-two-20201224-p56px2.html

    Queensland border permit causing 90-minute delays as 347 people turned away By Lucy Stone

    Nearly 350 people have been refused entry into Queensland since the hard road border checkpoints at the NSW border were reintroduced two days ago.

    At the road border, 159 vehicles have been turned away, containing 347 people. More than 379,000 border pass applications have also been made since the border pass system was reintroduced following the Sydney outbreak and Greater Sydney being declared a hotspot.

    Although apparently some Queenslanders are doing their bit:

    Gold Coast Chief Superintendent Mark Wheeler said many people driving through the Gold Coast were also unintentionally entering New South Wales by taking the wrong exit southbound on the M1, forcing them to join the lengthy queues attempting to enter Queensland. He said "hundreds" of vehicles had taken the wrong exit, and urged people driving south to take exit 95 to avoid accidentally crossing the border.

    521:

    I know this is somewhat late (and glib) but as an Australian I have to say the idea of British politicians leaving their own citizens isolated on an island at the end of the Earth without sufficient resources to feed themselves is somewhat familiar.

    523:

    Re: '... as if Russia's foreign policy is in large parts based on wreaking havoc* - when no one can form stable relationships with each other the influence sphere of the Russian state is mostly safe.'

    Yeah - 'Confusion to the enemy!' Apparently this quote is often attributed to George Washington. Best strategy when you have limited resources.

    Problem is: it doesn't look as though Russia's economy (hence influence) benefited from DT's reign of confusion. This begs the question: Why pursue a losing strategy? Unless lack of confusion would have resulted in an even steeper and deeper economic fall - meh, unlikely because the whole planet got caught in a pandemic even as DT kept escalating the confusion.

    http://www.worldstopexports.com/russias-top-10-exports/

    Economic lessons learned ...

    Although China's economy took a huge hit in early 2020 when Xi locked down Wuhan, looks like it was probably the most sensible decision - medically and economically. Maybe someone should point this out to BoJo.

    'Based on IMF data for 194 countries, only 16 countries will grow at 1% or more. The growth rates of 11 nations will hover between zero and 1%, but an astonishing 167 nations will see a contraction in GDP growth.

    Out of the sixteen economies in the trillion-dollar club, only China’s GDP is projected to grow in 2020.'

    https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/the-five-fastest-growing-economies-in-the-world-2020-10-16

    524:

    Trump pardoning himself would have the salutary effect (from his POV) of creating massive legal drama and keeping the attention on HIM. I'm sure he expects to live forever, but really he just needs to run out the clock on accountability for a few more years at most.

    One potentially fun option for Putin would be to dump all the evidence into the public sphere at some opportune time. So much verified and verifiable proof of lawlessness by Trump and so many others that it becomes a total chaotic mess.

    If they make it messy enough most people will just tune it out eventually. Hopefully the various justice departments will not, and accountability will happen.

    Re: RC flying. Have you looked at home build options? One entry level option is the Towel. Buildable for a song and relatively easy to fix and modify.

    525:

    Re: 'Trump pardoning ...'

    The UN isn't happy about this ...

    https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/rights-office-criticizes-trump-pardons-contractors-74881470

    'U.N. human rights office spokeswoman Marta Hurtado said in a statement released in Geneva. “Pardoning them contributes to impunity and has the effect of emboldening others to commit such crimes in the future.”'

    526:

    It is my understanding the biggest problem with Gophers is horses and cattle stepping into a Gopher hole and breaking a leg.

    Oh, well. I was thinking of prairie dogs, not gophers. And the bit about horses breaking legs apparently is apocryphal.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prairie_dog

    527:

    Problem is: it doesn't look as though Russia's economy (hence influence) benefited from DT's reign of confusion. This begs the question: Why pursue a losing strategy?

    You assume that Putin really cares about the Russia. I'm thinking he and the others at the top see running the country as a way to money and power for them. If Russia drops back a bit but they all move forward, they are happy.

    528:

    Robert Prior @ 512: The issue of 'accidental Americans' seems to be hitting some poor Europeans hard. Born in America, left when still babies, and now can't get access to European banks because European banks are unwilling to deal with American tax laws. (Among other things, they are being required to provide things they don't have, like social security numbers.)

    Renouncing American citizenship isn't simple, and it costs over $2000

    https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/aug/25/british-citizens-born-in-us-risk-having-uk-bank-accounts-frozen

    https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2020/11/dutch-mps-call-for-action-on-accidential-american-bank-accounts/

    That's pretty fucked up.

    Although ...

    If they were born in the United States and their parents were not diplomats, i.e. "born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof", they do have American Citizenship by the 14th Amendment.

    They should be able to get a social security number if they need to provide one.

    It might be a bit of hassle obtaining their U.S. birth certificate, but BY LAW, the state where they were born has to provide it and if they take it to any U.S. Consulate, the Consulate has to process it to issue a social security number.

    But what's really fucked up is that if your parents are American citizens and you are born on "foreign shores", you are still a natural born U.S. Citizen. I would think advanced countries like the UK or members of the EU would have similarly advanced laws regarding citizenship.

    You're going to tell me they are not as enlightened in that area of basic human rights as the U.S.?

    Isn't Bozo a U.K. citizen (or subject) even though he was born in New York City? Did he have to get a Social Security number before he could become Prime Minister?

    It does appear to be easier for dual citizens to choose one and renounce the other.

    529:

    Bill Arnold @ 522: Well that was quick. :-)
    Trump pardons former campaign chairman Manafort, associate Roger Stone (December 23, 2020, Steve Holland)

    Those might come back to haunt him.

    530:

    One entry level option is the Towel. Buildable for a song and relatively easy to fix and modify.

    Thanks for that, looks like a useful start to building my own. I'm inclined to start with a manufactured trainer so I can rule out most of the stupid mistakes I'm likely to make and get something that I can fly quickly. Basically trying to avoid getting too big a pile of gear and left-over materials if it turns out I really don't like the hobby.

    But I expect to end up making stuff mostly from scratch, with proper airfoils and likely simulation runs beforehand to get the exact characteristics I want. But since I don't quite know what those are yet... a cheap kit and some flying seems like the easy option.

    531:

    You assume that Putin really cares about the Russia. I'm thinking he and the others at the top see running the country as a way to money and power for them. If Russia drops back a bit but they all move forward, they are happy.

    Actually I think Putin cares about Russia rather more than Trump cares about the US, on the evidence of things like reported 'Rona deaths per one million people. Does Putin care more about Russia than Biden cares about the US? Got me.

    Anyway, if you want to know what Putin got out of Trump? Four years of Not Hillary Clinton. That's probably worth a cyberwar in itself, at least from Putin's view. It's also four years of the US Treasury Department and its international allies not tracking down certain curiously entangled offshore bank accounts and making the connections between that money and any politician vaporize. And probably the last four years saved Russia from the real nightmare of being surrounded by neo-liberal American-style democracies and finding fewer customers for its oil exports.

    532:

    For those that are interested: the FlySky FS-i6 came with a USB cable and after a little filing the plug on that went into the back of the controller, I updated the firmware and it was detected by the ClearView flight sim and works fine. So ~$AU90, three days for delivery and now I have a model flight sim controller (that would also remote control a model, if I had a model).

    533:

    JBS And note that he has NOT pardoned Roger Stone or Paul Manafort. Oops ....

    mdive And Corwall voted solidly to "Leave" & are now complaining that the (EU) money is running out - imagine how sympathetic to that I am!

    Foxessa That is disturbingly like those still supporting Adolf in April 1945, isn't it? ( Yeah, Godwin, but ... )

    Rbt Prior The Boss knows about this - she's had to guide some of her firm's clients through this process, as they turn their backs on IQ45's USA for ever. Not easy at all, from what I understand.

    I think we neeed a blasphemous laugh - prods the political wankers as well, of course.

    534:

    Renouncing American citizenship isn't simple, and it costs over $2000. Last I checked it was $4000.

    535:

    Isn't Bozo a U.K. citizen (or subject) even though he was born in New York City? Did he have to get a Social Security number before he could become Prime Minister?

    I recall reading that he managed to renounce his US citizenship. I've often wondered if the tax authorities in the US made sure he'd paid capital gains on all his property transactions here and whether he'd filed his foreign bank account reports every year. Penalty for not filing can be 50% of the account value.

    536:

    JBS @ 528: " I would think advanced countries like the UK or members of the EU would have similarly advanced laws regarding citizenship. You're going to tell me they are not as enlightened in that area of basic human rights as the U.S.?"

    Canada isn't quite a member of the EU yet, but it does have a law that makes a baby born abroad a Canadian citizen, as long as one of the two parents is a Canadian citizen. You have to get a birth certificate from Canadian authorities though.

    https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/canadian-citizenship/proof-citizenship/eligibility.html#outside-canada

    537:

    It's a reference to a humorous book by Douglas and Le Cocq, but that is almost forgotten, and it has been extensively used since.

    538:

    Oh, nuts! You are talking as much nonsense as Greg Tingey. By 1980, the process was essentially complete and the emmet population was entirely different - I was talking about the 1950s and 1960s. I both lived there briefly, had a lot of relatives there until the 1970s, and still have some. To remind Greg and you (or tell you, if you are much younger), back then most of people went to holiday camps, cars were MUCH less widely used outside the south-east than they were even in 1980, and what I said in #466 is correct.

    The (last 70 years) issue is that Cornwall was cut off from the post-war reconstruction, especially as far as communications went. Yes, a lot of reconstruction stopped at Exeter, but a pretty fair number went on to Plymouth. While the other remote areas of the UK also suffered badly (e.g. the Highlands), they DID get some of the resources aimed at bolstering their economies.

    And, NO, it was not that train line closure that was the railway's kiss of death - it was the closure of the 'milk train', meaning that flower growers (and some food growers) could no longer reach Covent Garden in time for the market. Several of my relatives were in that business, and I spent a fair amount of time picking and packing flowers. So, ONE train, not a railway line, killing what was an important part of the Cornish economy.

    539:

    But what's really fucked up is that if your parents are American citizens and you are born on "foreign shores", you are still a natural born U.S. Citizen. I would think advanced countries like the UK or members of the EU would have similarly advanced laws regarding citizenship.

    The problem is that different national legal systems have different definitions of what basic building-blocks for interaction with other nations -- such as sovereignty and citizenship -- even are.

    In general there are two types of definition of citizenship: citizenship based on descent/ethnicity, vs. citizenship based on "were you born in this geographical region: y/n". But then we get into "can you renounce your citizenship" (USA: yes, for a fee; Turkey: no, never, it's a birthright thing), and "is dual/multiple citizenship possible" (Germany: nope, if you want German citizenship you must renounce any previous; Turkey/UK/USA: sure, have at it). This leads to paradoxes.

    For example, Germany has a large Turkish expat worker population, most of whom were born in Germany. So they should be German citizens ... but because Turkey doesn't let them renounce Turkish nationality, they're ineligible for a German passport. (At least, they were until a few years ago: AIUI this anomaly finally got fixed at the German end by adding a rider that your renunciation of foreign nationality didn't have to be accepted by the nation in question to be valid in Germany.)

    Again: legal codes, sovereignty. Does sovereignty arise from the will of the people (France, USA) or from some abstraction of monarchy (the UK, lots of other places)? Note that when British constitutional lawyers talk about "the Crown" they aren't referring to a piece of jewellery, or the head that wears it: they're referring to an abstract set of powers that exist independently but are exercised procedurally by a person, whose identity changes (Governor-General of a Crown Colony, the Monarch of the United Kingdom, etc) and which underpins the authority of laws passed by parliament (which is itself sovereign in its lawmaking abilities). The British Crown is a bit like the Papacy, and Papal Infallability: it's not actually a physical thing but it has authority as long as everyone agrees it does. (See also Donald Trump denying the validity of constitutionally-conducted elections. They're valid even if he refuses to admit it because he's not an absolute monarch and can't pass laws by shouting on twitter, and neither is the British monarchy -- it's constitutionally restricted.)

    Things can get weirder, too. US courts assert worldwide jurisdiction -- in places where there are other governments who might get very irate if told they're not independently sovereign by the State Department -- in some matters. Germany asserts that German laws apply to the behaviour of German citizens worldwide, and the UK to some extent agrees: a German citizen who commits a murder overseas can in principle be tried for murder in Germany (the UK passed laws providing for similar prosecutions of paedophile sex tourists -- going overseas with intent to commit acts which are sex crimes at home but not in the destination -- as another example).

    TLDR: international law is as fucked-up as US interstate law, only without the existence of a global constitution and supreme court.

    540:

    Greg

    You are just wrong!

    Sure London got fubarred, but all Local Govt services got mashed by Maggie. In order to pay for tax cuts, the funding of local govt was removed. If I recall correctly 65% of the funding of local government came from Central Government pre Thatcher that went (I worked for two London Local Authorities during this period). LAs were also not allowed to increase their taxation levels in line with the cuts so services crashed.

    As to Transport Systems, you cannot be unaware of how poor services are for us hicks in the sticks. Privatisation crippled Transport nationally. London still has far more money spent on transport per head than we get out here in Somerset.

    541:

    SLightly Foxed Please do not attempt to lecture me on transport matters? Also, I lived in Manchester for 3 years & I know how badly the Maggon's "reforms" ( Trans: tTotal fuck-over ) affected them. London & the big cities ( always excepting poor old Leeds ) all get more money for transport, because that's where the people are .....

    542:

    London still has far more money spent on transport per head than we get out here in Somerset.

    So, with the realization that this won't change many people's opinions - the politics of envy are a powerful force - perhaps a look at some data from the government

    One will note that the 3 regions of London/South East/East of England all paid more in to the government than they got out in spending.

    And what is amazing, is looking at the spending per person, is how little difference there is per person - which just shows population density matters.

    Also note the revenue per person - about 1.75x to around 2x higher in London than most of the rest of the UK.

    So, despite the prevailing narrative of those outside of London - that London is spoiled - we see that London does indeed subsidize the rest of the UK, and that the massive transit spending in London is based on the idea of keeping the gravy train rolling - which the rest of the UK counts on.

    https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8027/#:~:text=London%2C%20South%20East%20and%20East%20of%20England%20raised%20the%20most,per%20person%20in%202018%2F19.

    543:

    Actually I think Putin cares about Russia rather more than Trump cares about the US

    That is almost certainly true, but "more than Trump cares about the US" is a very low bar to clear

    544:

    Canada isn't quite a member of the EU yet, but it does have a law that makes a baby born abroad a Canadian citizen, as long as one of the two parents is a Canadian citizen.

    As always, check the fine print.

    Per the saying, we are all equal, just some are more equal than others.

    I was born outside of Canada, both my parents were Canadian (born in Canada). As such I automatically am a Canadian citizen (and have lived 90% of my life in Canada).

    But, thanks to the previous Conservative government, if I were to have kids born outside of Canada they would not be automatically Canadian (the law was changed).

    546:

    mdlve @ 545

    I was careful to avoid the word "automatic".

    547:

    They should be able to get a social security number if they need to provide one.

    Imagine if, back when you were busy working, you suddenly discovered that you were considered a Chinese citizen and you needed to sort out your Chinese taxes before you could get a bank account, loan, mortgage, etc.

    You don't know Mandarin (your parents left when you were a baby), and you are being required to file several decades of tax returns as well. With penalties if they are improperly filed.

    This would be an expensive and stressful event.

    548:

    So, despite the prevailing narrative of those outside of London - that London is spoiled - we see that London does indeed subsidize the rest of the UK

    This reminds me so much of Toronto and the rest of Ontario…

    549:

    Ah well... Lying slime-bag & con-man BoZo claims victory & we have a shit sandwich of a deal. I will not, now, be buying any Flour or Olive Oyl or Rice for 6 months ( I'd laid stocks in ) I'm not too bothered about fishing, since deliberately sold-off that valuable resource under the Maggon. I'm more concerned about the dual shafting of Scottish & N Irish potato growers. [ Though I suspect an "adjustment" will be made later ] Meanwhile, re-entering all the evil ECJ-controlled programmes that are really useful, like: Erasmus / Galileo / Europol / Euratom / EU Medicines Agency / EHIC, etc Ad nauseam will doubtless go on, slowly, over the years. However, those who shorted the Pound might be on to a loser, how sad. I've undoubtedly missed other things that we've been conned & cheated out of.

    550:

    I think the Brexit deal is something that will need time - time for all the details to be revealed, and time to see if both the UK Parliament and the 27 EU countries all ratify it. A lot can still go wrong.

    551:

    This reminds me so much of Toronto and the rest of Ontario…

    Yep, or Ontario/Alberta and much of the rest of Canada, in the US the Democrat States and the Republican States, and on and on - there is always some group/region that end up helping another region.

    552:

    Have you found a link to the actual deal? As I said to SWMBO, the politicians and press are no longer blithering, and are now blathering. But I put more trust in actual documents.

    553:

    And now we appear have a third new variant of Covid - from Nigeria

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/23/south-african-covid-19-variant-may-be-more-effective-at-spreading

    Unlikely to be the last, the next few months might be interesting.

    While prelinary the South Africans apparently think currently that their new variant, while severity of symptoms remains about the same, is more transmissible - hits younger people - and may be slightly more resistant to vaccines.

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/23/south-african-covid-19-variant-may-be-more-effective-at-spreading

    But what this does demonstrate is it won't be enough for the western world to vaccinate themselves, we need to get as much of the world as possible vaccinated even if we end up paying for it.

    554:

    Well .... I guess my prediction in another thread was at least 50% correct (we get a deal). The other half - bozo walks out of discussions next year - we'll have to wait and see.

    It is intresting to see in the press here in the uk; the over-optimism almost as if this deal is a good thing. It is not - it is a hard brexit. The UK press seem to have forgotten this!

    From what I've already read bozo is making this all sound like a) a victory and b) it's all because of himself (trumponian!) but I'm very skeptical of that. We'll likely find out in time however if bozo was crawling on his knees for a deal, or not.

    For now even the brexit ultras might be satisfied, but I don't think that is going to carry on for very long. Brexit - unlike all the media websites - is not over on Jan 1st, discussions remain to take place - brexit is just the beginning; there's still lots to discuss. And I can still see bozo walking out at somepoint, possibly maybe early on. And that would make it no deal.

    Remember then that this is still a hard brexit!

    Now what would be intresting to read is a prediction of what will happen for the next year under this hard brexit deal. Answers on a postcard please ...

    Random thought: Surely it isn't over just yet? Don't the UK/EU parliaments have to vote on this, and if one of the member states in the EU say "No"....well, no deal then?

    ljones

    555:

    Re: Nationality - 'As always, check the fine print.'

    Indeed - also a good idea when making a Will to specifically exclude any possible relatives living in some countries. Former USSR/Russia was that country in my family's case.

    Back when our first child was born we went to our lawyer to do the grown-up, responsible parent thing: draw up Wills. The lawyer commented on my middle name and asked its origin, whether I still had any relatives former SSR countries there (yes) and whether I was intending to leave them anything (no). He then inserted a couple of sentences in several different paragraphs/sections specifically -- a few even required initialing, i.e., 'And I really mean it!'.

    The reason for this per the lawyer is that Russia (and the former USSR) had a history of checking obits for any ex-nationals and their immediate families, swooping in to say that those people were still considered USSR/Russian citizens and that there were (estate) tax questions/consequences. I told my family about this. They checked with their own lawyers about adding these clauses: yes, good idea.

    So, different citizenship can also mean different estate tax laws.

    556:

    YOU WROTE (Germany: nope, if you want German citizenship you must renounce any previous...). ...

    RESPONSE It's a bit more complicated. I am not a lawyer, but I do have some first-hand experience.

    First there is an exception for first-generation immigrants from another EU country. Here, someone naturalising as a German citizen can keep their original citizenship by simply stating that they wish to do so. This may help to explain the very large increase in UK citizens becoming naturalised Germans in the run-up to Brexit.

    Second, children born in Germany to German/non-German couples (e.g. mother German, father non-German) get dual citizenship. It is my understanding that the child used to have to 'pick a side' upon attaining legal adulthood, but it is my undestanding that the requirement to choose has now been done away with and that the child keeps both. Not everyone is happy with this rule. (I don't know the situation for children born in Germany to, say, Turkish/Turkish parents.)

    Third, exceptions to the rule. If you naturalise as a German citizen, you are expected to give up your other (non-EU) nationality. However, you can apply for an exception to that rule which would allow you to retain your original citizenship. It therefore depends on your argument, on the specific authority (it's a devolved matter, not decided centrally), and probably on who you are. But the option exists. In Germany, there are rules for everything. But exceptions to the rules are (almost) always possible.

    557:

    Your random thought is correct. I believe that any country in the EU can veto it, but the political pressures are such that it is unlikely. It is a reserved matter in the UK, so Bozo doesn't need Parliament's permission, but Parliament could produce a Humble Address to the Queen to override her Prime Minister. We would then have a constitutional crisis of a magnitude that we haven't had for a few centuries :-)

    558:

    ijones I expect BoZo to lie & to wriggle & to cheat - & quite possibly, go for a General Election late next Spring on the basis of his "victory" Shudder.

    559:

    It is a reserved matter in the UK, so Bozo doesn't need Parliament's permission,

    Actually, he does, and Downing Street has already said that they will recall Parliament to get it passed by December 31st - and the ERG has already indicated they will be taking a close look at it.

    In addition, the remaining 27 EU countries all need to approve it, and the EU Parliament needs to approve - apparently a complicated process that means they won't get it done by the end of this year but as long as the UK and the other 27 are okay that won't matter on January 1st.

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-trade-deal-uk-eu-transition-timeline-b1766498.html

    560:

    And of course in addition to watching to see what the ECG and others within (and outside of) the Conservative Party think - queue Nigel - it will also be interesting to see what Labour decide to do about the legislation.

    561:

    I think there are 2 or 3 EU countries who may look at the Brexit deal as an opportunity to apply pressure to get what they want in unconnected negotiations.

    562:

    Brain bleach warning - but Nugent Farrago claims it's "OK" - oh dear - so I assume the ERG headbangers will whine & quibble, but go for it. Labour are in a very tight spot - do they abstain, or vote for it, on the grounds that it's better than "No deal at all" ??

    563:

    From my ignorant point of view from across the pig waste lagoon, this Brexit deal seems to be the equivalent of:

    "Good news kids! After four years of fights, taking pets to the shelter, endless marital counseling, bankrupting the family with lawyers' fees, and trundling you off to any relative who will take you while we try to work out our relationship, your dad and I are getting finally getting divorced starting Christmas eve! That's your present. Merry Christmas!"

    Is this even in the same multiverse as correct? Is it (quavering voice) better than this, I hope?

    564:

    Heteromeles Unfortunately, very close to the truth ....

    Quote from the Grauniad: Nevertheless, none of this guarantees that Johnson is now home and dry on the EU trade deal. For one thing, Brexit will never cease to divide Britain. The issue will never be settled. Wrong - though whether the resolution will come in three years, as it did 1685-88 or longer, as in 1640-60 is anyone's guess.

    { Oh, apparently Euratom & other scientific programmes are continuing, but not "Erasmus" }

    565:

    Parliament is being recalled for a non-binding debate, and may not even vote on it. If they DO vote, and it goes against the deal, he can simply ignore them.

    566:

    Brain bleach warning - but Nugent Farrago claims it's "OK" - oh dear - so I assume the ERG headbangers will whine & quibble, but go for it.

    Maybe.

    If nothing else it initially appears Nigel is selling out the fishermen he used as a prop several times.

    But Nigel appears to have sold out to people willing to pay him, and it is possible the border adventures this week scared more than a few of them, and so they decided the deal was better than the no-deal they wanted.

    But the ECG is more ideological than Nigel I think, and it won't surprise me if they don't like it - though the real question is if the no-deal fanatics have enough to force Boris to rely on another party in Parliament.

    Labour are in a very tight spot - do they abstain, or vote for it, on the grounds that it's better than "No deal at all" ??

    Labour may be in a tight spot - it depends on whether Boris can pass it on his own or not.

    If Boris can convince enough Conservatives to vote for it then Labour becomes (yet again) irrelevant to the whole Brexit issue.

    But if Boris can't get a majority, then Starmer has a problem - because as I said before politically the best thing to do is abstain and let the Conservative own it.

    In the end though it all depends on what the deal says - and we simply don't know that yet (and sadly may not even fully know/understand it prior to the vote).

    567:

    In the present day, power arises from import-replacing cities.

    In the Anglosphere, the political structures by and large reflect a time when power arose from dirt. And the folks whose power base arises from an expanse of dirt have mostly managed to prevent meaningful change to the structure. So it doesn't reflect reality, people's concept of politics doesn't reflect reality, and legitimacy is diminished as injustice increases.

    I suspect this is going to be a worse problem than it has been, by and by. (2030 at the outside if Pliocene and Eocene provide best analogs for near-future climates is at all correct.)

    568:

    Unfortunately, dirt soil (dirt is soil in the wrong place, per soil scientists, and I did minor in the subject) is the biggest carbon sink that we can readily manipulate. And most land is owned by a comparatively few wealthy "persons" (natural and corporate). Therefore I think that any concept that power doesn't come from land control and ownership is missing both the present reality of global Big Ag, and the vital role it plays in the future.

    Democratizing land ownership is probably one of the best things we could do. This isn't just small farm romanticism, it's things like looking at the various inefficiencies of scale that are popping up in Big Ag (see pollution, bee kills, etc.), the critical role dachas played in averting mass famine with the fall of the Soviet Union, the critical role of subsidies in propping up big ag, and the unsustainability of many of those subsidies. Bluntly put, we need more local management of land. Yes, that puts people in the peasant role, and that's unpleasant. Unfortunately, land care is something that really can't be left to a few experts and project-based labor.

    569:

    Parliament is being recalled for a non-binding debate, and may not even vote on it. If they DO vote, and it goes against the deal, he can simply ignore them.

    All of the reporting is that Parliament must vote to approve the deal and to make it law. If that doesn't happen then the UK leaves with no-deal at the end of 2020 - because if it isn't law then the deal fails.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-32810887

    This is why there has been much speculation for the last several months about how Labour will vote - because of the outside possibility of Boris not have enough Conservative votes to pass the deal - in which case he would need the support of other parties to get his deal passed into law.

    But that speculation is now all moot as Starmer has said today that Labour will vote for the deal, thus making the ECG irrelevant.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-eu-labour-vote/uk-opposition-labour-party-will-back-brexit-trade-deal-idUKKBN28Y1R5

    570:

    And for added intrigue, Scottish potato farmers have apparently been sold out in the deal, dealing a £112m hit to the Scottish economy

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/dec/24/scottish-seed-potato-farmers-sold-out-in-brexit-deal-says-snp

    571:

    Charlie Stross @ 539: TLDR: international law is as fucked-up as US interstate law, only without the existence of a global constitution and supreme court.

    Yeah. It just struck me as strange that as fucked up as the U.S. is on so many things (especially with Trumpolini) that our citizenship laws appear to be somewhat more humane than other "advanced" countries.

    572:

    "Peasant" is the product of a power structure, not of being engaged in food production.

    We do need much more local land management; I think some of the indigenous models are worth several looks and likely implementing.

    But we also need to recognise in our politics that a presumption that the virtuous dirt should control the unclean cities is actively failing to help anyone who isn't an oligarch. ("dirt" because "soil" has political connotations I don't want.)

    573:

    I am fully aware of what the media says, but the situation is as I said. Treaties and trade agreements are not legislation, and are reserved matters. I agree that, if Parliament objects, Bozo will be unable to get the consequential legistlation though, and will be unable to deliver on the terms of the agreement, but that's a secondary matter.

    574:

    New quote via the Beer: Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said: "Brexit is happening against Scotland's will - and there is no deal that will ever make up for what Brexit takes away from us. "It's time to chart our own future as an independent, European nation."

    575:

    mdlve @ 544:

    Canada isn't quite a member of the EU yet, but it does have a law that makes a baby born abroad a Canadian citizen, as long as one of the two parents is a Canadian citizen.

    As always, check the fine print.

    Per the saying, we are all equal, just some are more equal than others.

    I was born outside of Canada, both my parents were Canadian (born in Canada). As such I automatically am a Canadian citizen (and have lived 90% of my life in Canada).

    But, thanks to the previous Conservative government, if I were to have kids born outside of Canada they would not be automatically Canadian (the law was changed).

    I think U.S. law may be somewhat familiar (it's been a while since I looked it up for a previous argument on the internet).

    If your parents are/were U.S. Citizens and you were born "on foreign shores", you are automatically a U.S. Citizen ... EXCEPT, you do have to come to the U.S. to claim that citizenship.

    If you never live in the U.S. any children you have who are also born "on foreign shores" are NOT automatically U.S. Citizens, but do have a preferential "right" to immigration and naturalization.

    If OTOH, you have established your residence in the U.S. in order to exercise your citizenship rights and then for whatever reason are temporarily outside of the U.S. when you have children, they are automatically citizens.

    576:

    Me @574: Sorry, that should be “Beeb”, not “Beer”. Stupid iPad autocorrect

    577:

    Robert Prior @ 547:

    They should be able to get a social security number if they need to provide one.

    Imagine if, back when you were busy working, you suddenly discovered that you were considered a Chinese citizen and you needed to sort out your Chinese taxes before you could get a bank account, loan, mortgage, etc.

    You don't know Mandarin (your parents left when you were a baby), and you are being required to file several decades of tax returns as well. With penalties if they are improperly filed.

    This would be an expensive and stressful event.

    Yes it would. But if the shoe is on the other foot; if you were born in the USA, the U.S. State Department is required by law to assist you sorting it out.

    578:

    The guardian summing up what is "in" the brexit deal;

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/dec/24/from-tariffs-to-visas-heres-whats-in-the-brexit-deal

    I read it and it already reads like a landmine. I forsee a lot of arguments coming forth. Not good and definately a hard brexit!

    ljones

    579:

    mdlve @ 566:

    Brain bleach warning
    - but Nugent Farrago claims it's "OK" - oh dear - so I assume the ERG headbangers will whine & quibble, but go for it.
    But the ECG is more ideological than Nigel I think, and it won't surprise me if they don't like it - though the real question is if the no-deal fanatics have enough to force Boris to rely on another party in Parliament.

    Ok, ERG, ECG ... which is what? Are they both the same? ... or different?

    580:

    Heteromeles @ 568 : "the critical role dachas played in averting mass famine with the fall of the Soviet Union,"

    Dachas are second homes in the countryside. Only the very affluent or a special elite (like scientists) could own them under the Soviet Union. After the fall of the Soviets the simply affluent people in the city started to build small dachas on very small plots of land, stuck close together with no room for gardens.

    Some of the scientists and other members of the former elites might have survived through post-Soviet famines thanks to the gardens on their bigger plots of land near their dachas, but I'm having a hard time finding traces of an impact of dacha plots (when they existed) on the large majority of the Russian population.

    Farming knowledge doesn't seem widespread in Russia, after so many efforts to pauperize or control the peasants.

    On the other hand, when I go to the Wikipedia article on family farms and read the section for the United States I see that the majority of farms are owned directly or indirectly by families. They're owned by people who know the land, having lived on it for generations.

    581:

    I suspect we're saying largely the same thing, and arguing about whose terminology and conceptual structure to use.

    If you haven't read Scott's Seeing Like A State, you might find it interesting, even if you don't agree with it. He gives a plausible reason why it's so hard to get rid of the big landowners in any state system we've currently devised.

    582:

    But if the shoe is on the other foot; if you were born in the USA, the U.S. State Department is required by law to assist you sorting it out.

    From what I've read, their assistance to many of these people hasn't been very much use.

    583:

    Yes, and I'm foiled by the incomplete nature of relevant Wikipedia articles, who miss out on many recent decades of US farming history and Russian peasantry history.

    There's no way I can adopt a precise terminology and a conceptual structure with all those holes.

    584:

    They're owned by people who know the land, having lived on it for generations.

    Now look at the percentage with a second job to support their farming habit, or the trend in real income from farming among family farmers.

    Then look at the degree monopsonies constrain through seed supply, credit supply, markets, and regulatory capture of markets (e.g., unpasteurised cheese in Ontario). The rural narrative of oppression rests on facts; not always the attributed facts, but facts.

    Oh, and the degree to which it's literally impossible to make money seriously constrains how long-term anybody can be in their practices. One of the reasons the mammonites really hate the milk marketing board is that it makes it clear you get a better result with something other than a free market. (E.g., Ontario dairy production vs what recently happened in Upstate New York.)

    Then throw in the lag in the credit practices -- using "good year/bad year" ratios from the Holocene -- and it gets really messy.

    585:

    Heteromeles @ 568: Democratizing land ownership is probably one of the best things we could do. This isn't just small farm romanticism ...

    Sorry, but I think that's exactly what it is. Small farmers have the same imperatives to extract maximum value from the land that big agribusinesses do, except they generally have less spare capacity to fall back on. So if you expect a small farmer to be any less eager to use neonicotinoids, or to take more care to avoid polluting water-courses, or anything else, well, why would they?

    Big businesses are also easier to police than small ones, because you can reasonably demand that they have regular policies, auditable inspection reports etc, and their employees are a lot less likely to take legal risks for someone else's bottom line. (Yes, improper pressure, but that is still easy to police if you are bothered.)

    Of course they still need someone in government to keep tabs on them, but its a lot easier than tracking the same things on lots of small farms run by individuals with a strong personal profit motive for breaking the law.

    I recently heard an example of this from another domain. Big grocery stores like Asda, Sainsburys etc pay taxes and VAT as they are meant to. But small independent grocery stores generally don't; evasion is easy because so much business is in cash, and its hard to make them keep proper records because they don't have the time. And of course they don't have the economies of scale that the big boys enjoy so shaving the VAT is the only way they can stay in business.

    I've no doubt that small farmers are the same.

    586:

    Graydon @ 584 "One of the reasons the mammonites really hate the milk marketing board is that it makes it clear you get a better result with something other than a free market."

    Put an "s" to board so that it can form the plural. The mammonites hate the Ontario board and the Québec one (Les producteurs de lait du Québec) too!

    I knew a farmer's son who was raised on a farm. He told me that sometimes he thought of taking up farming. He was doing a Master's degree in Library Science. Eventually he ended up as an archivist for the catholic church.

    There's a limited amount of room for professional farmers.

    588:

    Backwards. There is evidence that small farmers are more productive per acre of land, while big farmers are better at attracting subsidies and advertising how great they are through things like production boards.

    The tl;dr version is that if you need to sort through the data from the hype. We live in systems that are geared to favor big agriculture, just as we live in systems that are geared to favor cisgender white males. That doesn't mean that they're the most resilient or even the most productive systems. It does mean that it's worth questioning the party line, and seeing if there are better options.

    589:

    US farming: horse hockey. Overwhelmingly, the US crops are agribusiness.

    Datum, not anectdote: as of the 1990 Census, "family farm" was NO LONGER A RECOGNIZED OCCUPATION, because it was under 1.5% of the population.

    I have some friends who have a small farm in se Indiana. Right. She's a chemist for a large company, and he takes care of the farm. Oh, and was the stay-at-home parent. Oh, yes, and did computer consulting.

    Small farms were driven under by the huge processing companies, who didn't want to deal with buy x from X, and y from Y, they wanted LARGE AMOUNT from LARGE.

    590:

    If you haven't read Scott's Seeing Like A State, you might find it interesting, even if you don't agree with it. He gives a plausible reason why it's so hard to get rid of the big landowners in any state system we've currently devised.

    At this point, I'm not sure if I read that or a lot of the reviews.

    My take is that Scott's analysis has a problem due to axioms. By analogy with ecological services, a state exists to provide services to those in its social environment; can't call them "social services" without serious ambiguity, but the state has legitimacy in part based on how well it does this. So it's there to produce an illusion of security for its citizens and it's there to produce an illusion of control for its elites.

    So questions of "local control" or freedom or similar to me seem like getting the systems theory either wrong or not-at-all; the illusion of control and the insufficiently regulated capitalism (which creates monopolies) combine to produce an expectation of control, in the "you do this exact thing at this time" sense. That doesn't and can't work, but it is highly valued by those who think they are exercising it.

    The "set the bounds" value of control -- the "we don't care what you do, so long as you stay in the defined volume" approach -- can work, and it can look like local control (because there isn't a central demand for a particular thing at a particular time) but it actively removes that illusion of control from people who have enough power to impose it. (Which they generally do, because that sense of control is more important than the results.)

    So it looks like the problem is the long-standing one of how you have a humane system of laws -- the "stay in the bounds", minimum necessary, without building machinery of oppression -- AND win fights with the oppressive systems that are wretched to live in but effective at looting.

    591:

    Ok, ERG, ECG ... which is what? Are they both the same? ... or different?

    Sorry, typo - ERG - European Research Group, known for Jacob Rees Mogg

    592:

    Still struggle to understand why he's not universally called re-smog

    593:

    WARNING: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/21/books/publishing-manuscripts-phishing-scam.html

    Never mind if you've already heard, but in summary: Why on Earth Is Someone Stealing Unpublished Book Manuscripts?

    A phishing scam with unclear motive or payoff is targeting authors, agents and editors big and small, baffling the publishing industry.

    594:

    Heteromeles @ 587

    Boy, those were really small letters. Fortunately it was easy to copy and paste the lot and read it in Times New Roman 14.

    The small gardens you describe have nothing to do with dachas and everything to do with the small plots of land the collectivized peasants (in kolkhozes or sovkhozes) had in the back of their small homes and were allowed to farm (along with a few animals) as they pleased, in their spare time.

    Those small plots of land were tended by people who knew the land and the seasons and shunned the centralized planning that came out of Moscow. The collectivized peasants sold the surplus of those small backyard plots in the nearest market towns. It was thanks to the plots that a total food collapse was avoided in some of the bad years under Khrushchev and later under Brejnev in the 50s, 60s and 70s.

    The above comes from my Russian History classes and East European History classes at McGill in the 1980s.

    What I don't know (apart from the little I get through Wikipedia and other like sources) is what happened to all those small plots during the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.

    595:

    FWIW, my grandfather was a farmer. Ask him. But every few years he shut up the farm, leased out the fields, and moved to a city where he earned enough money as an electrician to go back and be a farmer for another few years. This was happening during the 1950's. I don't know just when it started. He stopped when his second wife needed to move into a nursing home, probably during the 1960's, but it could have been the 1970's. Towards the end was when battery chicken farms started opening up.

    596:

    Moz Grease-Smaug, please!

    597:

    Interesting technology announcement from China -- it's a freight-carrying version of an existing high-speed EMU trainset, capable of moving rail cargo at 350km/h.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVcaZHBx_qE

    It looks to be based around air cargo freight modules and may be interchangeable with them. The freight cars have powered roller floors meaning the modules can be loaded and unloaded under computer control for better routing and forwarding.

    598:

    Pity it's not distributed power. I suppose that wasn't in the plan for the network and they want to see if it works before upgrading the power supply.

    It's unworthy but I can't help but feel that if the cargo modules are interchangeable with aircraft this becomes a way to really lose your luggage.

    599:

    Yeah, I've tried to fix the letters on the blog, and it turns out it's under user control, so hit ctrl+.

    I'll bow to your terminological expertise. The papers I referenced in that post called them dachas, so not knowing any better, I followed their lead. The linked papers were about what happened to them in the 1990s, so that may answer your question. Long story short, they seem to have fed a lot of people through the informal economy.

    And I think we agree on the fundamental point, which is that people who really know the land and have some flexibility that markets generally don't provide can do a lot better, for various values of "better."

    This remark is going to blend into my response to Graydon, because it gets into the same issues...

    600:

    I think we may be referencing two different books, because Seeing Like a State wasn't really about what you're talking about. He was referencing the problem of command and control with limited information. Am I misunderstanding.

    The basic point is that rule depends in some (large) part on knowledge. Where are your boundaries, and who and what is within them? That's why you need maps and censuses. However, to make the map useful, you've got to simplify and abstract, and that means you don't have perfect data.

    Indeed, as a human, you've got to simplify just to get your brain around it. Knowing where every bee is at every moment is too much. Knowing how many bushels of rice a property produces in an average year is about right. So maps simplify the complex reality of what's on the ground. This is one way the state sees things, through this simplification. Simplification can get forced onto the landscape too, if the state grids off the land and force property boundaries onto the grids, rather than following ridges and streams.

    Another simplification is the census. That fourth generation smith in the village, is he Smith Smithson, Bob Smithson, Robert Smithson, Daddy, Revered Elder Brother, the Village Blacksmith or the village coppersmith, or is he doing both jobs because the old coppersmith got mauled by an angry sow? If you're doing a census, what you want is name, gender (pick one of two), age, and family. Name? Smith Smithson is kind of a stupid name (every smith had a smith father not long ago) and everybody's got an older brother, so from now on his personal name is Robert, his surname is Smith, and he lives in the small village of Nowheresville, said name being chosen at the end of a long day by a grumpy surveyor, when he couldn't get the locals to agree on what to call it. The idea of personal names and family names is often a state invention, for use in censuses. There's no human rule that people are limited to three names. Age? If you're Korean, your census birthday a few decades ago was New Years, just in case your mom didn't remember (or want to say) what day you were born. The old Korean tradition of parents abandoning their names and naming themselves as their children's mother or father fouls up censuses and research too, more than all those Kims.

    Anyway, a lot of knowledge gets thrown out when a state does a census. The way states see their land and people is simplified, just because there's so much information, and not all of it is useful to the state.

    But all that filtering and discarding of data comes at a huge price in sophistication. It also means that often, a state might prefer to work with a few huge firms than millions of independent contractors. They've only got so much time, energy, and bureaucracy to spend. If everybody want things their way, why not just work with the big boys and assume everyone else is going to go along or else? Especially if you don't have electronic communication or even moveable type?

    Now, let's get to farmers. Sustainable farming is horrible for a state. One year the farm produces a surplus of potatoes, the next year is a bumper apple crop, then there's a drought and it's all barley. How the heck is a market-based state with cities to be kept in beer (they don't like cider or vodka) supposed to supply enough barley to the brewers on time if the farmers are just selling what's in surplus that year? That way lies madness. Here are some solutions: --Reward the big landowners who do what you want, which is normally to provide a lot of cheap food to the cities to keep food rioters from overthrowing the government. --Regulate what can be grown, where, and when, again to make the supply chains run smoothly. --Standardize farmland into acre lots, sections, and so forth, so that it's easy to find, buy, sell, or tax.

    Note that all of this plays well for politically connected big farmers, and not well at all for subsistence farmers who keep their land healthy and only sell what they've got too much of in a given season.

    Problem is, when we're dealing with an increasingly unpredictable world, it's not clear that a big farmer can handle the complexity of producing food to contract and a reasonable cost in a sustainable way. There's something to be said for putting more intelligence on the land. Rather than asking big farmers to micromanage polycultures that can't be machine harvested, it might work better to have smaller farms with more people doing more different things on the land, maintaining the soil as they do. This is what I called "dacha farming" in post-Soviet Russia, although Niala tells me that's the wrong term.

    Problem is, that kind of small farming is a nightmare for long, slow supply chains that depend on having predictable goods contracted for the pipeline months before it's even ripe. It's conceivable that with AI-intermediated logistics, we might be able to match up a highly diverse and rapidly fluctuating supply with people who are willing to eat what's coming at them. More likely, people will riot when they don't get enough hamburgers and fries, and that will incentivize governments to go back to big farms that supply wheat, cattle, and potatoes, even if they destroy the soil doing so.

    Hope this helps.

    601:

    Taking advantage of > 300, I'll note this.

    There are several places I visit in Google Earth every now and then to see if anything interesting has been going on.

    One of these is the SVR (Former KGB First Directorate) HQ at Yasenevo, just south of the Moscow Ring Road. And, yes, there's an interesting development since last summer, namely the construction of ten antenna stations. Four big (12-meter dish), three medium, three smaller. I suppose they're for satellite communications/ hacking, but maybe something else.

    55.5765 N, 37.5211 E

    Speculations as to purpose invited.

    602:

    Given the rather grim Christmas, here's a genuine tale of Essex wide-boys grifting the Chinese government for a few hundred million:

    The Essex Boys: How Nine Traders Hit a Gusher With Negative Oil

    Over the course of a few hours on April 20, a guy called Cuddles and eight of his pals from the freewheeling world of London’s commodities markets rode oil’s crash to a $660 million profit.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-12-10/stock-market-when-oil-when-negative-these-essex-traders-pounced

    Things that should raise your eyebrows:

    1) The leader of the Pack (there is indeed a young trader called "dog" and not in the US Gangsta way) is called, well: read it, see his name. His first name means: "Best". His second name literally means "Of the nature Goddess".

    2) They took ~$660 million. (Hmm. And Shell lost... $660 million?)

    3) There were nine of them (good luck after that haul with angry CCCP agents looking for come-back)

    4) In the sordid tale of Brexit, at least some of the wide-boys are doing their actual Patriotic duty and shorting the fuck out of some of the nastier side of trades (South Korea: launched an entire investigation into those selling oil futures to civilians, China has reimbursed the individual investors, there are doubts about forgiveness further up the monetary chain).

    5) You read it all here first.

    That's a real Master of the Markets[tm] at work, btw. Poor kids, they thought they get a couple of million each, now they're sitting on serious cash... Guy Richie's star has faded these last few years, but there's a film waiting to happen.

    The real ask is why it didn't all come out to $666 mil and so on. That... that is a far more involved question. Call it a snub / calling card.

    ~

    Predictions: you all missed the most important bit, which was the Ozone layer opening up and then closing after Hex- flows in your atmosphere. That's serious.

    Oh and Jupiter and Saturn etc etc, all the Guardians are dead. For real.

    ~

    2021.

    Hey, remember that "Great Reset" stuff some mad person was talking about? That's gonna be big.

    603:

    I think we may be referencing two different books, because Seeing Like a State wasn't really about what you're talking about. He was referencing the problem of command and control with limited information. Am I misunderstanding.

    Well, or I'm skipping steps.

    Information causes change; this is a simple heuristic (algorithmic minimum-representation information definitions are much mathier and impractical to use for anything) for what's information and what's data.

    Any control system needs to separate information -- do something! -- from data -- yeah, that always happens. Doesn't matter if it's turbine revs, engine temperature, or DHCP registrations in the server logs, if you want to control the thing, you have to identify the information and you have to respond to it.

    There are three general ways you can manage this; you can forcibly simplify the system into comprehensibility. You can provide "matching variety", one person to respond to some other single person's ability to generate information. (and you wind up like the East German Stasi.) Or you can build an amplifier, so your control system can generate responses and a smaller/simpler-in-principle system can control a larger/more-complex-in-principle system.

    The traditional response of forcible simplification is both a function of incapacity -- you've got quill pens and ledgers -- and a function of general social constraints (those food riots).

    That approach has serious problems, as you note (and Seeing Like A State notes) but this historical incapacity is not compulsory today; it's a function of tech level (and a need for armies). And even at tech level you can get different abstractions than the centralised nation-state; the centralised nation-state is the response to selective pressure to wage war effectively. If you don't have to do that, or much, you can have much more distributed structures of authority with less need for simplification (because the person exercising control has a smaller span to be concerned with); English monasteries and their relatively distinct economy come to mind.

    So, anyway; from the viewpoint of "we need a control system", the quill-pen-and-ledger version is not compulsory today. Multi-level filter-and-feedback systems are entirely technically practical and can (in principle) operate in near-real-time, so everybody knows that there's going to be a lot of barley this year and to maybe arrange for more whiskey barrels. This doesn't happen in large part because the folks currently in control of the oversimplification like the illusion of control -- they can't actually comprehend or control this thing, the information they get is frequently smeared over a long period of time so official responses are out of phase, etc. -- so they tend to insist on having it rather than admitting that a functioning system isn't comprehensible as an entire whole.

    But some different thing allowing more local decision-making can work as a system, and it doesn't even need AI though it would need categories of collective endeavour that aren't "corporation".

    604:

    Heteromeles @ 600: " This is what I called "dacha farming" in post-Soviet Russia, although Niala tells me that's the wrong term."

    It's not so much wrong as slippery. Personaly I would call your dacha gardens "Very small expandable Russian hobby farms." But that's too bulky.

    I found this interesting bilingual (English-Russian) article which explores the term well, especially in the context of post-collapse Russia.

    https://geohistory.today/dacha-modern-russian-history-legislation/

    605:

    Nojay Rail Operations Group class 769 And https://www.railfreight.com/business/2020/09/04/around-europe-premium-logistics-return-to-rail/?gdpr=accept

    Heteromeles when he couldn't get the locals to agree on what to call it. "Your finger, you fool" See also Eaglescliffe & Egglescliffe

    Negative Oil .... Hmmm - I'm familiar with Theydon Bois. Good pub there - Google Street View Highly amusing.

    606:

    On the other hand, when I go to the Wikipedia article on family farms and read the section for the United States I see that the majority of farms are owned directly or indirectly by families. They're owned by people who know the land, having lived on it for generations.

    If you're talking by count, I can see that. But by acreage I seriously doubt it. Even if you exclude the vast range lands out west.

    Also does the article go into how many of those family owned farms are leased out to someone or something else? I know multiple versions of this personally. We even did it for a while in a bizarre way. We rented out a tobacco allotment that came with some land my father and a friend bought to develop. And to make it more strange the tobacco wasn't even grown on "our" land. (Don't even think that US laws on tobacco farming do now or have ever make any rational sense except to restrict the acreage grown to keep the price up.)

    And how many of those family farms are really family partnerships or LLCs or similar. Inheiratence laws in the US make it hard to keep things in the family without lawyers involved.

    Says he descended from a family farm started in 1824 at a 1000 acres or more and mostly sold off when my grandfather died in 1982. But one uncle kept a chunk of what was left and I have second cousins who still live on some of it. But non of them farm it.

    607:

    Downgrading teleportation to mean transfer of information rather than mass is like changing virtual reality to mean sound and visual instead of complete sensory experience.

    I think there's another term which also went from wish-fulfillment to feasibility, but I don't remember what it is.

    608:

    becomes a way to really lose your luggage.

    Hey. My wife worked for 19 years on how to re-unite lost luggage with owners. She really didn't need another option in the transportation chain to help more bags go lost.

    609:

    David L @ 607 : "does the article go into how many of those family owned farms are leased out to someone or something else?"

    The article doesn't cover leasing out but it does cover forms of ownership and income:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_farm#United_States

    610:

    In the urban (but not NYC urban) environments I move in these days I continually bump into people who "own" a family farm by themselves or with other family members. Sometimes it might be nearby. But most times it is miles or even 100s of miles away. Once their parents stopped farming they leased it out. Many times to a neighbor. But a non trivial number to a large corp. And then they rent out the house to someone who likes the idea of country living. With a local person handling maintenance if the renter has an issue.

    Anyway, my point is the counts of types of ownership of farms in the US can be very misleading.

    As a side note when I was around 15 I asked my father why he didn't keep farming given his ancestors and his upbringing. We were literally on a tractor at the time turning under an overgrown garden. His answer was telling in so many ways in our modern world with so many non farm opportunities.

    "I liked farming. Until I had to get off the tractor."

    The family farm he grew up on wasn't the one that appears in Norman Rockwell type paintings. They had a small saw mill and slaughter house. And his father kept selling rights to the county to dig up gravel pits for road work. The legacy was a bit of a mess. Now toss in the habit of most small farmer to throw their trash in the local gully / creek.

    611:

    Not a Submarine ... Caspian Sea Monster revival - or not.

    612:

    to Heteromeles @531: And probably the last four years saved Russia from the real nightmare of being surrounded by neo-liberal American-style democracies and finding fewer customers for its oil exports.

    Well, not exactly. Not exactly nightmare of not-surrounded by not-liberal, not-democracies who have nothing to do with American style. That is what happening right now. And the US is fighting to secure gas exports to Europe. Still, 4 years is a breather to do more sensitive stuff since it limited (but not reduced) amount of sabotage, terrorism and corruption to the rest of the the world, and things like ISIL and rioting activists have vanished into invisibility once again as progressive media have been focused on more immediate targets.

    Not to pursue this topic too much, but here's interesting observation, last two weeks have been notable for a couple very promising news about industrial development in the country. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/12/15/russias-mc-21-passenger-aircraft-completes-first-flight-with-domestic-made-engine-a72364 https://simpleflying.com/russia-il-114-300-first-flight/ https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2020/12/russia-resumes-angara-test-third/ https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Russian_Space_Agency_confirms_plans_to_launch_nuclear_powered_space_tug_by_2030_999.html (sorry if I'm bloating this post with too many links)

    And then there's a funniest thing I've heard as of recent (being an engineer). This is an example of innonce worthy of such financial organization. https://www.oreanda.ru/en/v_mire/the-world-bank-gave-russia-recommendations-on-accelerating-economic-growth/article1350388/ Namely: revise the policy of import substitution, support the service sector, create a national institution to attract investment in order to achieve economic growth and integrate into global value chains

    613:

    A combination of prediction and wish....

    This is a reply to something way upthread.

    Anyway, the question was what big social changes might happen in the medium future-- changes as big as from a mostly agricultural economy to an industrial economy, or from a mostly industrial economy to a mostly information and managerial economy?

    Here's one-- most businesses and the like become co-ops. I've wondered for a long time why top-down authority (which has a lot of risks) is much more common than a more collaborative approach.

    But what would that take? Possibly people generally having better social skills, including a better ability to evaluate and respond to information as well as being able to deal with each other more efficiently.

    This led to another thought. What if there were a cure for PTSD-- a quick way (transcranial magnetic induction, perhaps) to move traumatic memories into ordinary memory instead of traumatic memories getting people stuck in moments of extremely high stress?

    Trauma is really common, and the side effects of PTSD are high both on the people who suffer from it and the people around them.

    614:

    I haven't looked at subsidy per head in years so I accept your figures. As I said, transport nationally got screwed by privatisation. For many people outside London, subsidy per head is a meaningless figure if you have no services.

    The politics of envy is quite an interesting statement - are you getting your retaliation in first? ;¬).

    I worked for (and lived in) the London Borough of Lewisham, so I am not coming from a position of envy or lack of knowledge. London has many advantages that rural communities don't have (and many disadvantages). And claiming you pay more is a poor excuse, if you have far more. How much richer is the average person in the SE than in the SW noting that averages are poor measures?

    615:

    to Niala @605: It's not so much wrong as slippery. Personaly I would call your dacha gardens "Very small expandable Russian hobby farms." But that's too bulky. It is slippery because it is evolving, if only slowly. Back in the times of USSR it was what is called "personal property" - it was like private property except you were not allowed to exploit it, resell it or otherwise extract profit from it. During the 90s a lot of those has gone through transformation into private purpose, but as far as I know a lot of the lands are still not privatized or even used whatsoever.

    I found this interesting bilingual (English-Russian) article which explores the term well, especially in the context of post-collapse Russia. That is much better description of the phenomenon than the previous one. Although it does not go deeper into explanation of economic reasoning behind such development and all that.

    That said, I myself can't imagine my grandparents without having a dacha out in the country. Anybody who is basically not lowest class worker in USSR could have such house, even if a small one like the one we still own. It is very small patch, barely 20 meters on side (classic 3 hundreds, perhaps), it is carved in the slope near the lake, but it is something. Before 90s it belonged to local village concil but later got privatized, although it is still on the territory of village cooperative and there are some primitive services like electricity and trash disposal and maybe even some road repairs.

    to Niala @580:

    Dachas are second homes in the countryside. Only the very affluent or a special elite (like scientists) could own them under the Soviet Union. After the fall of the Soviets the simply affluent people in the city started to build small dachas on very small plots of land, stuck close together with no room for gardens.

    That, again, is very inaccurate representation of what happened. After the government in the USSR abolished the ownership of the land, all private property on land was outlawed, completely and irreversibly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_on_Land What the elite members got and what they kept as their estates did not belong to them - it belonged to the state, and they've had limited influence on the property usage. Some of these residencies are still in government property and they are still used as great many assets of the state. They do not belong to families nor to the individuals. Personal property in USSR is pretty much the same story, as noted above - no retail or enterprise, only exchange or management under supervision.

    Owners obviously also wouldn't be able to hire the workers directly to tend and handle multiple estates as personal property - they've had to do it by themselves even if they were very influential people. Although it does not include connections, relatives or simple corruption cases which were carefully observed by state security. All in all, when it comes to property in USSR, I have an anvil here with me that needs to be dropped, but I will hold it back for now.

    Heteromeles @ 568 : "the critical role dachas played in averting mass famine with the fall of the Soviet Union," It was not really that critical, although it was very convenient for many purposes. The agriculture was almost universally subsidized by heavy industry in USSR as a measure to mitigate the impact a rapid industrialization made on village communities. It has never fully recovered until the complete collapse. Right now it is being led by the government into better managed condition with rather notable success, and I could see it with my own eyes when traveling. But it is merely exploiting resources extensively and, as engineer, I suspect there will be a hard limit to this growth at some point in the future.

    616:

    About PTSD - there has been some studies that have (at least somewhat)successfully treated PTSD with the help of MDMA/ecstacy.

    Due to current lawmaking I assume research in that area/direction is a bit complicated though...

    617:

    As I said, transport nationally got screwed by privatisation.

    To be clear, despite what follows I think instead giving all the money to British Rail would have achieved better results with more done per £ than what happened.

    But in the real world that wouldn't have happened - the Conservatives wanted to stop funding the railway and one of the goals of privatization was to end government funding.

    That, of course, didn't happen and instead the government ended up pouring amounts of money into the railway that British Rail likely never even dreamed of getting.

    Because while the cost was Railtrack, the government couldn't say no to the rich/powerful owners of the private operators and thus opened the proverbial cheque book.

    So blanket statements like the privatized railway is bad are wrong - with privatization that amount of new stock, new services, and infrastructure work is unlikely to have ever happened.

    Which isn't to say that it is in any way perfect, or that external factors also contributed. Rather, as always, it's complicated.

    For many people outside London, subsidy per head is a meaningless figure if you have no services.

    But it explains why they have limited services - the low population density makes providing many of those services more expensive.

    In particular, rail gets much more expensive to provide as the population density decreases.

    The politics of envy is quite an interesting statement - are you getting your retaliation in first? ;¬).

    No, just noting that it exists, and politicians manipulate it to gain power.

    Doug Ford (Premier of Ontario) got into power in part by doing so - appealing to the ignored/left behind smaller towns while hating the big city (Toronto).

    618:

    most businesses and the like become co-ops

    That would also (in Canada at least) take changing the laws. Speaking as a (former) member of Mountain Equipment Coop that was recently bought by an American private equity company without any kind of membership vote, sale arrange by a board that cancelled this years elections because of Covid… and this was apparently legal under Canadian law. (At least the lawsuit members launched got nowhere.)

    619:

    Graydon @ 603: ...from the viewpoint of "we need a control system", the quill-pen-and-ledger version is not compulsory today. Multi-level filter-and-feedback systems are entirely technically practical and can (in principle) operate in near-real-time...

    Have you ever heard of Stafford Beer? He tried to build exactly that. It had this really cool control room, but behind that was a model of a hierarchical command-and-control system in which orders were sent top-down, and deviations were reported up for corrective action.

    Actually the control room was kind-of fake. There was a computer involved, but the cool monitors on the walls were actually back-projection screens where humans would read teleprinters and put up OHP slides summarising the state of the economy. Presumably Beer envisaged dialogue along the lines of "Factory 37 is running short of 3.5mm ball bearings. Divert shipment charlie-delta-4". But it never happened like that, and then Salvadore Allende got deposed.

    Its interesting to speculate on what we could do today. The USSR tried to do centrally planned economics, but it couldn't handle the sheer number of variables involved. Reportedly it had to aggregate commodities into broad categories like "nails". So it would order a factory to produce X million nails, and get crates of cheap tin-tacks. So then they would order the factory to produce X tons of nails, and get crates of railway spikes. They didn't have the bandwidth to manage the economy at a resolution of 3cm nails vs 4cm nails.

    For most of the USSR history they tried to do all this with pen and paper. Late in the Brezhnev era Gosplan got some computers, but they weren't up to the task, and everything else was still being done on paper because there was no computer network. So on top of the lack of resolution the system also suffered from major delays; by the time a shortage was reported to the centre, plugged in to the model and updates issued it was way too late.

    Today, in theory, we could do this. Big computers and modern algorithms are easily capable of getting approximately optimum solutions to matrices of millions of equations with millions of non-linear terms, fast enough to be a good approximation of real-time.

    (Just to give you an idea of the scale of the problem, RS Components offers something in excess of half a million different electronic products, most of which are not substitutable. I've also seen a supplier offering 20,000 variations on the theme of steel pipe, but I can't find it right now. So lets say 20 million distinct products, giving a sparse matrix of 4e14 terms to be solved, just assuming a straightforward linear programming model. And then you've got the logistics of moving those products around).

    The remaining problem is GIGO; in addition to low resolution and long latency, the Soviet planning system suffered from a severe lack of accurate information. Apparatchiks made fraudulent claims to have met their production quotas, often by shipping faulty or incomplete goods. Barter became a way of life for many factory managers because the system wasn't working, but in turn that further corrupted the information being sent to the centre. Add in a generous dose of actual graft and you had a serious problem. You would need an auditing and enforcement mechanism to keep all the apparatchiks honest, but that's one of the things that hierarchical command and control systems tend to be very bad at; the auditing function is subject to regulatory capture by the production function.

    However even if you managed to solve the GIGO problem, it still wouldn't beat capitalism, because (1) capitalism is actually pretty good at this stuff already and (2) capitalism also excels at innovation, which centrally planned hierarchies also can't manage.

    Happy Christmas everyone.

    620:

    Today, in theory, we could do this. Big computers and modern algorithms are easily capable of getting approximately optimum solutions to matrices of millions of equations with millions of non-linear terms, fast enough to be a good approximation of real-time.

    Alas, no. Cosma Shalizi provides a high-quality explanation of why not.

    The ways we do this sort of thing today -- the multi-level feedback systems Beer envisioned and couldn't generally implement -- are with things like fly-by-wire or just-in-time scheduling. No living person understands any fly-by-wire system as a whole; it's not possible. But they do work. (Same thing is true of any modern computer system, or how you actually get the ball bearings you ordered in quantity.)

    it still wouldn't beat capitalism, because (1) capitalism is actually pretty good at this stuff already and (2) capitalism also excels at innovation, which centrally planned hierarchies also can't manage.

    Capitalism is actively causing a mass extinction that's got non-zero odds of including us. No other virtue can be supposed to make up for that. (Never mind the two-generation drop in real standard of living, itself just grounds for complaint.)

    Capitalism -- despite years of propaganda to the contrary -- suppresses innovation. Incumbents hate innovation and will do everything they can to prevent it, and in a capitalist economy, nearly everything is incumbents. (Look at the response to solar power in the US, for example.) Innovation comes from public spending. This is really obvious in some recent histories of aircraft propulsion from the 20s forward, but is really general. (and explains why weapons development was central to the industrial revolution; that's where the public spending was.)

    If you've read Beer, I'd figure you've run into the notion of getting wedged on false dichotomies; "central or distributed?" is one he goes on about a fair bit. The point is that the system has to work, and that means finding and fixing your scale errors in the control system. (Aircraft example-by-analogy; you don't have to adjust trim, or at least not trim for pitch; you can keep flying your intended course with continuous control inputs. That's still not how you ought to do it.)

    The choice is not between "free markets" -- which never exist for long, and can't exist for important things like housing and healthcare -- and "central control". The choice is between "works" and "does not work" and that flat out requires "works for who?" and quantified measures, and, hopefully, the large public arguments that go along with not being some sort of autocratic dystopia. (All autocracies are dystopian.)

    The system we have now works really, really well for about five thousand people. I'd like to see that change.

    621:

    mdive London is now getting the Doug Ford treatment - especially as we voted "Remain" It doesn't show, much, but BoZo is a vicious little shit, actually. His treatment of Bercow is something of a give-away. And the spiteful, petty, mean playground fight between him & Khan, which is trashing London, right now - a total pox on both their houses.

    Graydon Capitalism -- despite years of propaganda to the contrary -- suppresses innovation. Incumbents hate innovation and will do everything they can to prevent it, and in a capitalist economy, nearly everything is incumbents. A problem noted as far back as 1928 by G B Shaw in his play "The Apple Cart" Where all innovation or improvement was stifled by the monopoly mender of items - "Breakages Limited" Of course it's SOME capitalism - if you can get funding & support ( from where? ) your innovation may succeed & become the new paradigm. However: and explains why weapons development was central to the industrial revolution; that's where the public spending was.) Excepting the very first mass-production machinery - No, not ever. The actual Industrial Revolution was private & capitalist: Arkwright, Crompton, Watt ( & Boulton the financier ) Stephenson, the Brunels & all the others - none of them ever went near military spending, excepting M I Brunel. However, your last sentence is spot on.

    622:

    Greg Tingey @ 622: "The actual Industrial Revolution was private & capitalist: Arkwright, Crompton, Watt ( & Boulton the financier ) Stephenson, the Brunels & all the others - none of them ever went near military spending, excepting M I Brunel."

    You're right for the first and second phases of the industrial revolution and he's right for the third phase of the industrial revolution. Jet engines, atom bombs and atom power, modern IC electronics, computers, space travel, they all started because of massive military investment in R and D.

    623:

    The actual Industrial Revolution was private & capitalist: Arkwright, Crompton, Watt ( & Boulton the financier ) Stephenson, the Brunels & all the others - none of them ever went near military spending, excepting M I Brunel.

    All fairly late to the party; the folks who got the iron smelting and ability to make a precise bore going were cannon foundries, and the lathes and the gauges and "how does a factory work?" were the Plymouth Docks, making an amazing number of pulley blocks for HM warships. Watt, etc. are the first wave of "what can we do with this?" coming off public development, much like Hall in the US got true interchangeable parts working for the Harper's Ferry armoury by 1820 and it took a couple-three generations to diffuse into general production.

    Rail and steamships were significantly publicly subsidised, too, and with justifications that wind back to an imperial need to wage war. (Things you probably haven't run into in popular history; during the Great War, the British empire retained control of its telegraph network throughout its territory. The German Empire did not. This mattered surprisingly much. Much of London's preeminence as a centre of finance developed from being a telegraph hub.)

    (There is an absolutely fascinating progression from Elizabethan cannon, very precisely bored, through less precisely bored because (we think) cheaper, to the Carron Company making the carronade as a precise and cheap alternative. Fascinating in part because we don't know all the reasoning involved and have to infer it.)

    624:

    Graydon @ 624

    You might as well start in the 14th century with the creation of the new arsenal in Venice, the Arsenale Nuovo, which was a state run entreprise. The Arsenal had an assembly line for war galleys, which used interchangeable parts.

    But, as in the examples you give of war-related innovation before the 20th century, there was no trace of a synergy between new types of power sources, new types of communication and other new technologies which are the signs of a true industrial revolution.

    625:

    I see - so, massively cut the number of trucks on the roads. I like that, a lot.

    626:
  • A NUCLEAR SPACE TUG!!! Yes, yes, yes! Finally, a true space ship.

  • The IMF: oh, yep, absolutely, you didn't let the western capitalists take over all of Russia, you should go further into debt, get cheap crap from China through the West, so we can profit, and you need more low-paying service sector jobs. Great plan....

  • 627:

    Where do I start?

    Ok, let's start with Salvadore Allende did not get "deposed". He was MURDERED in a coup paid for and coordinated by then-President Nixon, Henry fucking Kissinger, and the CIA, setting up a dictatorship at least as vile as Franco's.

    Second, oh, yeah, capitalist innovation. Like the link that Monty posted in #602, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-12-10/stock-market-when-oil-when-negative-these-essex-traders-pounced

    That kind of "innovation"? Or the small businesses and companies devoured by huge businesses, and then, often, killed? (e.g., google, facepalm, amazon)

    And "hypothetically" it could be done? You mean, say, if the government were to use Walmart's stocking system?

    Fuck capitalism. Tax all billionaires into single-digit millionaires. Have NO HUMAN BEING living in poverty, not homeless, or worried about bankruptcy due to medical bills, or lack of food or a roof.

    As they started noting back in the sixties, this being Xmas, Jesus was a socialist.

    628:

    No: 350km/h railfreight would trash the turboprop freight aircraft market and probably most of the jet airfreight market, but it wouldn't touch trucks. Trucks are an order of magnitude slower but can go point-to-point with local drop-off, while trains are station-to-station (and by "station" I mean "freight terminal" with specialized container handling).

    Meanwhile, high speed rail energy consumption scales as the square (or is it the cube?) of the speed, due to aerodynamic drag. It also needs overhead electrification, total grade-separation, and in-cab signaling: it's not feasible with American-style railroads with level crossings, external visual signals, and diesel traction.

    This isn't a cheap option, it's an extra application of the high speed passenger lines China is building out (also India, also upgrades to existing HSR in the EU). Costs are probably going to be somewhere between trucks and airfreight.

    629:

    Nancy,

    Thanks for responding to my question.

    I've wondered for a long time why top-down authority (which has a lot of risks) is much more common than a more collaborative approach.

    There are quite a lot of answers to this. In no particular order:

  • Dunbar's Number puts a practical upper limit on the size of a purely collaborative organisation. Once you get past that number (roughly 150, except you need to leave people some capacity for non-work relationships, so more like 100) you need management mechanisms, departments, HR, all the rest of the stuff that goes with big organisations. Hierarchy naturally follows. This isn't a matter of how collaborative people are, its a limit of their cognitive abilities. There is a small minority of people who can keep track of hundreds, or even thousands, but you can't build an organisation composed of them.

  • Ronald Coase was an economist who studied a closely related problem: why do firms exist? His answer was that the average size of firms in a market will expand due to economies of scale until they reach the point where dis-economies of scale equal the economies of scale. Dis-economies of scale are things like size preventing agility, waste due to poor communication, management in-fighting etc. In some cases the optimal size is very large (think: car factories).

  • Co-operatives do exist, but they don't seem able to expand much. If people prefer working in co-operatives then this should give co-ops a competitive advantage: they can hire labour more cheaply. So this needs explaining. Two possible explanations I've heard are: a) Above a certain size it doesn't make any practical difference to employees whether they work for a co-op or a conventional firm, and b) Unlike listed companies a co-op cannot sell shares to raise capital. If anyone has more data on this I'd be interested to see it.

  • Moving on to the PTSD editing:

    If you have the technology to adjust the brain at that level then you can edit an awful lot of other things. For instance, you could edit someone's sexuality. At last: a cure for paedophiles. And transexuals. And gays. And women who fall in love with muslims. There is a science fiction story in there somewhere, but I don't think its a very nice one.

    (Glasshouse of course, although that had rather more powerful editing technology).

    630:

    DavidL@527 writes: “If Russia drops back a bit but they all move forward, they are happy.”

    Sounds remarkably like our own oligarchs, not that they’re exclusive categories. Unclear to me if there’d be more Americans who own big chunks of Russian assets, or Russians controlling large parts of the U.S. economy. Probably a moot point anyway, when citizenship papers can be bought and sold like any other security. Does tend to clarify the issue of why they’re so interested in the first place, about influencing the nuts and bolts fine details of American internal policy. For all practical purposes, they may as well be thought of as one undifferentiated group, oligarchs are oligarchs, their nominal citizenship doesn’t matter a whole lot. Tax ‘em all, I say.

    631:

    Rail and steamships were significantly publicly subsidised, too Err ... no. Or not here, anyway. Steam power came to the RN after private companies had well-started it all off. And longer-range steam power by sea was also post Brunel, of course.

    Charlie The freight emu's being repurposed here are 160 kph, but they are not carrying large containers. But - with proper planning & thinking ( i.e. sack every single person at DfT ) - you could have rail-freight to much more local depots, with the individual large containers being taken by electric truck for the "last mile" - actually about 5-10 miles.

    632:

    Paul @ 630

    I used to belong to a credit union here in Canada, a from of banking co-operative. Like all members I had one share, so I could have voted at meetings. I also deposited money in a savings account. I could probably have gotten a mortgage there when I bought my first condo but I went to a normal bank instead.

    Once a year all members of the credit union received their share of the profits made by the union. It was never much, since one of the first goals of the union was to help out members with mortgages.

    The credit union was a member of a federation of credit unions, Groupe Desjardins, through which it offered a variety of financial services.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desjardins_Group

    And that's where most of the money comes from.

    633:

    Re: 'About PTSD'

    Also psilocybin. These particular compounds loosen the neuron-neuron connections (i.e., increase neural plasticity) thereby helping to break the chain in whatever particular memory is being examined. However, from what I've read/heard: you absolutely need a guide/therapist when using these compounds.

    https://maps.org/other-psychedelic-research/211-psilocybin-research/psilocybin-studies-in-progress/research/psilo/passiepsilocybin1.html%7D

    634:

    "Meanwhile, high speed rail energy consumption scales as the square (or is it the cube?) of the speed, due to aerodynamic drag."

    Energy is the square, power is the cube. Which means that (for electric traction), to go twice as fast, all your kit for delivering the juice to the train, and for dealing with the variability of the load, has to be eight times bigger.

    If you think in terms of overall capacity rather than individual trains, then since capacity goes as 1/speed, you get energy as the cube and power as the quart, or the tesser, or whatever you want to call it.

    So a far better solution involves something along the lines of an array of trip-hammers, each one positioned above a chair to which an accountant is pinioned, and a script something like "It" (bonk) "does" (bonk) "not" (bonk) "matter" (bonk) "if" (bonk) "things" (bonk) "are" (bonk) "a" (bonk) "bit" (bonk) "slower" (bonk, bonk, bonk, bonk, bonk).

    635:

    Saw this thread of Scottish tweets. https://www.boredpanda.com/funny-scottish-tweets/

    I think my favorite is Scientist cradles scotch egg A tin fist breaks through the crumbs, a Scotsman hatches. Jurassic Park theme swells on bagpipes.

    636:

    "If you think in terms of overall capacity rather than individual trains, then since capacity goes as 1/speed"

    It scaled that way up to around WWII, but since then safety regulations have made it a much more complex function with a global maximum and with a lot of variables which are expensive to change, such as signal block lengths etc.

    The main capacity limitation is that steel-on-steel is a very low-friction affair to begin with, and almost anything but freshly ground geology will lubricate it.

    Due to the Step-Child nature of railroads in Danish politics, the 50km rail immediately to the west of Copenhagen Central Station used to have the world record for actual capacity, until they finally built the new track out of Copenhagen some years ago.

    637:

    "Rail and steamships were significantly publicly subsidised, too, and with justifications that wind back to an imperial need to wage war."

    Depends what country you're talking about. In Germany you got regulation of every bit of railway construction and operation in great and fine detail, resulting in a rail system designed for doing war that you could also do civilian transport on at other times if you wanted. In Russia you got railway construction funded by France to pay for them adding on extra bits to do war with. In Britain the government was keen to keep out of it as far as possible, and it was entirely dictated by civilian considerations, with the obvious important routes built early on by private means, and a lot of the lesser filling in of gaps done by little rickety companies with no money who would build the line, run it really badly for a couple of years, go bust, and sell it to the nearest big outfit for a song, so the big outfit got the line without having to pay for building it. To begin with this was just what happened, but as time went on there were more and more instances where it was actually supposed to happen.

    638:

    "Depends what country you're talking about."

    More than most people imagine.

    Denmark has no native iron ore or steel production, so railroads where a hot political topic, even just the "swedish or german steel" delayed many railroad projects for years.

    Compared to countries with native steel production where steel consumption fuels the national economy, for Denmark steel was a pure outlay which made 1km of railroad cost about three times as much in Denmark as in Sweden/Germany. (This is also why you find so few iron fences and railings in Danish architecture.)

    A few railroads projects were started as private ventures, all failed and most got nationalized, and most of them were shut down in the 1960'ies.

    The routes we have all originate in military requirements dating from post 1864, and to this date the rail-connection between Germany and Denmark is still the carefully designed "deliberate bottleneck" designed back then.

    639:

    Co-ops could at least be standard for smallish businesses, but even that doesn't seem to happen much.

    One of my fantasy changes for humanity would be a great increase in Dunbar's number, though even a medium-sized increase would probably make a difference.

    I can believe that above a certain size, it doesn't make a difference to employee's whether they're working for a co-op or a more conventional corporation.

    It wouldn't surprise me if it's harder for co-ops to raise capital.

    Speaking of, it would be interesting if it were (more?) possible to use crowdfunding for investments. We could probably use less gatekeeping, though I realize there's also an interest in preventing fraud.

    As for PTSD cures, I don't think it requires precision brain-editing. It's just returning to a normal state.

    640:

    "It scaled that way up to around WWII, but since then safety regulations have made it a much more complex function with a global maximum and with a lot of variables which are expensive to change, such as signal block lengths etc."

    Actually it's more or less the other way round. Block signalling systems started off being configured for trains running at fairly low speeds but with utterly dogshit brakes (as in, placing dog turds on the rails for the train to squish would have dissipated energy at roughly the same rate) and consequently with immense stopping distances. As time went on, braking technology improved so that as trains got faster and faster their stopping distances still remained within what the standardised block systems could cope with. While this was the case, increasing speed actually could increase capacity, and we got away with that for a surprisingly long time. Nevertheless, we began hitting the limits many decades ago and are now in the position that any further increase in main line speeds demands a revision of the signalling, and in doing that 1/speed shows up as a final limit straight away.

    641:

    Sorry, that was meant to be a reply to Paul @630.

    CEO of Gravity who cut his own salary to $70K to be able to afford to have a salary floor of $70K for all his employees found that it worked out well for his company, until the pandemic hit, and his company was running out of money. One of the employees suggested that everyone make an anonymous offer to take a salary cut. The employees turned out to be generous/trusting enough that the company will be able to keep going.

    642:

    “ What the elite members got and what they kept as their estates did not belong to them - it belonged to the state, and they've had limited influence on the property usage.”

    I’m reminded of the stuff Heteromeles writes about how the ultra-rich don’t actually own anything on paper; the yacht belongs to some trust. But if you’re the only one who gets to use it, that’s pretty important..

    643:

    Graydon @ 621: Capitalism -- despite years of propaganda to the contrary -- suppresses innovation. Incumbents hate innovation and will do everything they can to prevent it, and in a capitalist economy, nearly everything is incumbents. (Look at the response to solar power in the US, for example.) Innovation comes from public spending.

    Why is it that every time I say "capitalism" people assume that I mean some Randian libertarian nightmare? No, I mean our current mixed economy with government spending in the tens of percent GDP, publicly supported universities, grants to private R&D, and plenty of laws regulating private industry. Its not a big reach: the same people look at our current mixed economy system and say "fuck capitalism". So presumably we are talking about the same thing.

    Now we've got the Randian straw man out of the way, on to the meat of the issue.

    Innovation is not the same as invention. There is a huge difference between inventing something in a lab and getting it into mass production. If you want to see the difference google "battery breakthrough" for a long list of lab prototypes that still haven't made it into production. Of course government-sponsored research is a key part of the ecosystem. Sometimes government grants or contracts (e.g. NASA with SpaceX) are also necessary. I never said anything else, and I don't think anyone except the lunatic fringe of libertarians would claim otherwise.

    Yes, incumbents like to squash innovation. But something that distinguishes capitalism from anything else I've seen or heard of is that you don't need the incumbent's permission to set up in competition with them. All you need to do is persuade someone with money that there is more money at the end of it. That's not a high bar. A classic example is the telephone. A.G. Bell invented the telephone. The incumbent Western Union wasn't interested, so Bell set up on his own, and went on to eat W.U.'s lunch. (OK, oversimplified summary).

    The classic work on this is "The Innovator's Dilemma" by Clayton Christensen. He gives a number of examples of what he terms "disruptive innovation" in a number of markets. In each case the incumbents either ignored or tried to squash the innovation (mostly they thought it was irrelevant). Then the new innovation hit a tipping point and rendered the incumbents obsolete.

    Without something more concrete to critique its a bit difficult to tell if whatever it is you are proposing to replace capitalism could do better. But in the meantime, assertions that our current mixed-economy version of capitalism can't do innovation don't seem to be supported by the facts; clearly it does it better than anything else that has been tried so far.

    Whenever I see people expressing sentiments along the lines of "fuck capitalism" I ask what they would like to replace it with. I rarely get any kind of coherent answer (BTW, whitwroth, "abolish billionaires" is not an answer. I don't care whether its got billionaires, I want to know how it works). Yeah, I get it about distributed vs centralised, but we already know that top-down command economies don't work, and the proposals I've seen for socialist economies with distributed decision making range from the plain impractical to Pollyanna. Capitalism is a weird hybrid of centralised government with some level of democratic oversight plus distributed economic incentives that just happens to work reasonably well most of the time.

    Part of the problem here is that the only example of something other than capitalism on a national scale that lasted long enough to be called a real experiment is the USSR and its satellites. Pointing out the flaws in the soviet economic system is trivial, but of course you don't want to institute the USSR here, you want ... something else. What?

    644:

    Nancy L We have various Co-Operative Societies, which trade as the "Coop" Used to be very big, shrunk very badly 1960-2010, approx, are now growing slowly again But "the John Lewis Partnership" is technically a Co-op ... um.

    645:

    Paul @ 644 : "you don't want to institute the USSR here, you want ... something else. What?"

    Nothing much, just two things the Liberal Party has been toying with (and do-gooders have been asking for) : Proportional Representation and Universal Basic Income.

    646:

    Why is it that every time I say "capitalism" people assume that I mean some Randian libertarian nightmare?

    Because everyone (in the North Atlantic Anglosphere) is living in a Randian nightmare -- well, mammonite nightmare -- where tens of millions of people are being made homeless during a pandemic? where the response to the pandemic is no-shit the absolute worst in the entire world, for purely policy-choice reasons? Where "if you don't work, you starve" is policy whether or not you can work, reduction in number of jobs is policy, wage reduction is policy, wage theft is de-facto legal, and mammonism is the defacto state religion?

    That all calls itself capitalism, I suppose out of a desire to avoid accurate labelling as much as anything, but a whole lot of the people calling it that believe they're using the correct word.

    Mixed economies don't work because money dissolves everything. It creates an incentive to do what benefits you, rather than the system as a whole. It can take a few generations to fail, but we're living through it failing.

    I think the core systemic problem is that, OK, we've got this tool to ration agency. (rationing agency is money's primary social function.) Once it exists, it gets used as a means of coercion; any non-money means of economic existence (e.g., grazing on the commons) get abolished, and if you want to live you must earn wages. (Then the oligarchs conspire to set wages, which is a big part of what the Reagan and Thatcher governments existed to enable.) Society gets organised as a keep-the-loot contest, because the only way to be safe is to be very, very rich.

    What I want is pretty simple; if you get rich, where rich is defined as assets in excess of five hundred times the lower of the mean or median annual income, you're put to death and everything you own is destroyed. (Nobody gets to keep it; certainly no one inherits it.) (There's absolutely no evidence any lesser penalty will work; what records we've got of egalitarian societies strongly suggest greedheads can't stop, and I'm not willing to suggest a society where poverty is a penalty at all and I'm severely uncomfortable with prisons, or forced labour of any kind.) (500 because the income cap is 10 times and presumably a truly extraordinary person can make that for all fifty years of their working life.)

    That's a systemic constraint; it's one of the "occupancy by more than 80 persons is dangerous and unlawful" constraints, rather than the "you can only get three working bartenders back of a bar that length" or "you can only pump beer so fast" constraints.

    But -- the point is that everybody in society should have about the same degree of agency; to within an order of magnitude.

    Beyond that? No more limited liability anything. Perpetually increasing environmental use fees. (Emit x tonnes of whatever, pay x times Y rate. Y rate never ever goes down.) Whatever it takes to remove any idea of keeping the loot from the legal code. Decarbonisation with the urgency appropriate to the sensation of the devil's teeth around your other kneecap.

    Guaranteed food, housing, and education; no alternatives to public education or public healthcare. (You want it nicer, you make it nicer for everyone.) A less sorrowfully upfucked construction of the franchise. Strong institutional biases for value over price. "Wages are too low" being a completely unobjectionable political statement, supportable by standardised measures.

    647:

    Unfortunately, that's been tried in the USSR, China, and Cambodia, among other places, and it hasn't worked.

    The bigger problem is that civilization, in the sense of a hierarchical state, is extractive, and this goes for both capitalist and communist (and mixed) states. Anyone who wants to talk about sustainable development hasn't figured out that continued growth is inimical to living in any sort of limited biosphere.

    The fairly precise metaphor I came up with a long time ago is living on a generation ship, where people start using screws as a form of money. The more screws you have, the more you can trade for. So people start pulling screws out of the walls to get powerful, because that's ultimately what this is about: not money, but power. This can go on for awhile, but sooner or later, the ship loses too many screws and falls apart, killing everyone. The solution isn't to ration the screws that everyone has so that everyone has a level playing field, it's to put the screws back into the ship and use other criteria, like differential various forms knowledge, to establish status. Then make sure no one knows it all, to flatten the hierarchy and mandate both interdependency and each person having some power.

    So-called primitive societies all over the world figured this out in a huge variety of ways: take care of the land or watch your kids slowly starve, and treat psychopaths and narcissists as the cannibal monsters they are. Sadly, we live in a system that exists because it looted all these systems and puts growth above survival.

    Now some dim bulb is going to try to show off their "knowledge" at this point by babbling on about how economic growth is decoupled from extraction, and they're going to be so very proud of what they say. The problem is, it's complete and utter bullshit. It's more useful to turn the economy around 180 degrees: penalize any extracted asset, and value only things that improve the biosphere, specifically: clean water, carbon and other greenhouse gases out of the air and water, habitat for species, conspicuous restoration instead of consumption, and so forth. This can be every bit as inequitable as a consumer-based society, which satisfies that perverse urge that power-addicts have to screw others and make themselves feel better. But that's what we need at the moment.

    And yes, of course this can't last forever. It's the necessary corrective to everyone trying to maximize entropy on this planet for the last few centuries. Eventually, a restoration civilization will become unsustainable, because there's too much wilderness and not enough land for crops. At that point, our species needs to go to a third stage, which is custodial. Humans are unique on this planet in that we're capable of producing fire in a wide variety of ways. Used properly, we provide a unique ecosystem service. Better, it can be the basis for our being a custodial species that uses complex and differential fire regimes across the planet, along with many other techniques, to foster systems that feed us and every other species that's survived the mess we've made.

    A complex of systems based on something like this, humans as a custodial species in the ecosystems of species in which they live, can demonstrably last for tens of thousands years. And I think that's what we should aim for.

    648:

    I appreciate the discussion of dachas, and it helps to hear from people who know more than I do. My bit of sadness is that it's difficult to establish analogous systems in much of the US, including where I live. Oh well.

    649:

    The bigger problem is that civilization, in the sense of a hierarchical state, is extractive... Anyone who wants ... sustainable development ... continued growth is inimical to living in any sort of limited biosphere.

    You've missed a key requirement: must be able to resist invasion by extractive societies. That's where the Aboriginal Australians fucked up, for example. The moat worked really for a long time, you never hear of Hannibal marching his elephants across the Torres Strait. But once the moat stopped working they had nothing.

    The problem today is the moat writ large: extractive civilisations cannot tolerate non-extractive societies, and will inevitably destroy them if they don't collapse first.

    650:

    I'd modify that to must be able to resist being taken over by parasites. The particular trick that the British Empire worked won't work again on Australia, because it depended on finite resources that have been mined out. That's one point of the global political situation right now, actually, where we've got a struggle on to define what a post-oil world looks like when military power still centers around control and use of oil. The future won't be a replay of the past, because our planet no longer has big, untapped resources* that can be used for military advantage, the way oil, iron, coal, and so forth could be.

    The whole phenomenon of an entity being taken over, then forced to work to death to produce benefits for the entity controlling it, isn't limited to human civilization. Viruses do it quite well, as do any number of parasites and pathogens. Extractive societies are just one kind of parasite, and they only endure if they can avoid killing their hosts.

    An abstract example of a parasitic society in action would be the super-national super-rich working the rest of us to death so that they can survive climate change by hogging the resources that would otherwise have kept us alive. This strategy will fail for them if they can't turn themselves into, well, aborigines caring for the land, and that's a profound transformation. Indeed, it might be simpler to spend all their wealth rebuilding the land, in such a way that they control these resources, if control is what they hunger for.

    *The biggest, poorly tapped warfare resource we have is the internet, with cyberwarfare. That's one reason why I won't be surprised if the internet disappears in a few decades. This is simply adapting Norman Angell's argument that the entrenched global economic links make large-scale war not impossible, but futile, with the costs greater than any gains.

    651:

    Which, of course, didn't stop anyone, it just calmed down a few people who were getting worried.

    652:

    The problem today is the moat writ large: extractive civilisations cannot tolerate non-extractive societies, and will inevitably destroy them if they don't collapse first.

    Meant to respond to this, but it's a good point. However, I'm not sure "inevitably destroy" is quite the verb. We will try and often succeed, but that's basically selective pressure to come up with a non-extractive society that's increasingly immune to such attacks. Right now, that's things like the Rainbow Family, but who knows what the future will bring? I don't think it's impossible for a non-extractive society to resist an extractive one. Indeed, that's a theme running through the dozen-odd stories I'm meaning to write when the environmental litigation dies down with the business cycle.

    653:

    "we already know that top-down command economies don't work"

    Well, no, we don't know that, although people who don't like the idea do like to point to the Soviet example and claim it shows otherwise. But we also have as examples the wartime economies of the major participants in WW2 and WW1, which both show us that it can work and show us how not to do it, depending which one you're looking at.

    "Part of the problem here is that the only example of something other than capitalism on a national scale that lasted long enough to be called a real experiment is the USSR and its satellites."

    And that the propagandistic interpretation of "the USSR collapsed therefore it doesn't work" has a regrettable superficial appeal that makes people think it's true.

    For the entirety of its existence the USSR had to struggle against the larger part of the world desperately wanting it not to work and doing all they could to try and make sure it didn't. It began its existence with the need to recover from the greatest devastation and depopulation of any of the participants in WW1, and succeeded well enough not only to be able to handle another even more devastating war and again absorb the largest amount of devastation, but also to win it. It also had the need to create its entire political and administrative class more or less from scratch, from people who had no experience of government or administration, who had known nothing but authoritarianism for centuries and no idea how to function without it (cf. Britain getting rid of the monarchy and replacing it with... still a monarchy but they don't call him "king", because they had no ability to imagine anything more different), and get some functioning result from this unpromising material. And being in the minority their ability to create their own rules appropriate to their ideas of play was strongly constrained; in any interaction with the rest of the world they had to play by the rest of the world's rules (which were loaded against them), and moreover were considerably restricted in how far they could differ in their internal rules, which had to remain similar enough to allow straightforward interoperation. Consequently they had to bash their nails in by whacking them with the handle of a screwdriver instead of using a hammer, as it were.

    That they managed to last so long despite all the disadvantages imposed on them suggests that far from "not working", it worked astoundingly well, and probably would work just fine if it didn't have to deal with the whole of the rest of the world trying to fuck it up.

    654:

    I mean our current mixed economy with government spending in the tens of percent GDP, publicly supported universities, grants to private R&D, and plenty of laws regulating private industry. Its not a big reach: the same people look at our current mixed economy system and say "fuck capitalism". So presumably we are talking about the same thing.

    You're making some assumptions, and I don't think they are good ones. I think you're doing the thing where we all tend to attribute quite a lot of analytical detail and nuance to people who agree with us, and much less to people who do not. This is partly because difference is a horizon and it can be harder to see beyond it than to see then things around us.

    Markets are not capitalism, trade is not capitalism, and the economic interdependence of people living in a community where there is specialisation of labour definitely has nothing to do with capitalism. Capitalism is about the use of capital to exploit markets, and sometimes to distort or even coerce markets. Real markets are things that happen in streets and railway station carparks. Abstract markets are like spherical cows of uniform density: useful thinking concepts but they don't refer to concrete things, they are a mental model for thinking about concrete things. They are not a fact of nature, they are a technological mechanism that are created and managed. There's a temptation to refer the managers as "government", but really the distinction is a modern one that doesn't relate to the power relations at the heart of that management. In short if you believe that "government" should be limited, you believe in the tyranny of the powerful, which is indistinguishable from an absolute monarchy where the king owns everything (and maybe everyone).

    So this is a long way to come around to the point that some people really do say "fuck capitalism" and mean "fuck re-organising our economic relations to suit the investor class". Your reading that is different to this is the one that lacks the nuance, and the people you're deriding may have a considerably more sophisticated understanding of the concepts you're handwaving over than you'll ever realise exists. I say "may", I've no idea whom you refer to, but this is my suspicion, take it with a grain of salt if you like.

    Thinking in binaries is a real trap. Do you think that advocating a minimum wage makes someone more like Stalin? It's a serious question, because that's what happens when we assign policy preferences to "sides".

    655:

    Graydon You are describing the USA - but not ( YET ) the UK - though there's not much doubt that that is the direction the ultra Brexshiteers want to travel in. But, at the moment a tory (!) guvmint is handing out furlough wage payments & suspension or reduction of rents & rates, all as a a damage-limitation exercise. Mixed economies don't work REALLY? Tell that to the Germans or the Danes or the Swedes or ...... And to alter two words of your statement elsewhere: "CommunistMixed economies don't work because POWERmoney dissolves everything. "

    So - we need something different - what? We've been around this one several times, with, as yet, no satisfactory answer.

    Now this is criminally STUPID: "And everything you own is destroyed. (Nobody gets to keep it; certainly no one inherits it." Oh, really, including priceless works of Art or books & other property than can be redistributed. Fucking grow up & stop behaving like Da'esh.

    We've also discussed the stupidity of abolishing Limited Liability - it does need extra regulation, though. no alternatives to public education or public healthcare Equally STUPID. Public education in this country includes mandatory, compulsory spurts for anyone between the ages of 11 & 16. Deliberate, imposed brutality & fascism, how clever.

    You have actually described a true Soviet state & we Know that doesn't work, either

    As an Engineer of some sort, I'm not going to support any system that has been tried & has failed utterly. Mammonism has also failed utterly, of course ... currently it's in the equivalent of Soviet communism between about 1970 & 1990 - a dead man walking.

    Ah yes, Heteromeles has it, exactly: that's been tried in the USSR, China, and Cambodia, among other places, and it hasn't worked. - plus the piles of skulls, of course. "Dachas" - surely the US has "Allotments"?? After all, most of the other European countries have them, they are not unique to the UK.

    656:

    I think you're doing the thing where we all tend to attribute quite a lot of analytical detail and nuance to people who agree with us, and much less to people who do not. This is partly because difference is a horizon and it can be harder to see beyond it than to see then things around us.

    Thats funny, because it feels like its what everyone is doing to me. I'm trying to explore some interesting ideas about the pathologies of big organisations, the deeply intertwingled relationship between public and private sectors, the principle-agent problem, alternative economic relations and how to manage innovation. But a lot of what I get is "let me explain again how unrestricted capitalism is evil and will kill us all". Yes, I get that.

    I also get that our current system doesn't work for everyone. To a very rough approximation it seems to work fantastically for 1%, pretty well for 74%, not terribly well for another 20%, and utterly fail the remaining 5%. That seems to be the pattern across "the West"; countries with regular free and fair elections, a broadly capitalist base to the economy and a stable law-based government that takes between 30% and 50% of GDP in taxes.

    Do you think that advocating a minimum wage makes someone more like Stalin?

    No I do not. Actually I think UBI looks like a really neat idea, though I'd like to see some really large scale tests (maybe 100,000 people selected from the entire population for 5 years) before it is made universal.

    Perhaps the problem is that my thinking on this doesn't fit on any kind of conventional left-right axis. Its much more about systems, feedback, and failure modes than it is about the movements of small green pieces of paper, although the small green pieces of paper are still important components. Graydon's comment @ 647 about money as an agency-rationing mechanism is an interesting perspective; I'll have to think about that one.

    [Markets] are not a fact of nature, they are a technological mechanism that are created and managed.

    Yes, absolutely. The first markets happened organically of course, but libertarian explanations of why we should return to those pre-lapsarian days belong in the same box of fairy tales as the idea that we should return to the "primitive socialism" of pre-industrial tribal peoples. Modern society is way too complicated, interdependent and just plain big for either of those to work.

    What I'm interested in is how we manage markets, where we apply them, where they are not applicable, and what we use instead. Traditionally the two options have been regulated markets and top-down government action. Both of those have some nasty failure modes, so I'm interested in how to improve them, and also in alternative options.

    Ultimately we need to sort out the system so that the bottom 5% I referred to earlier don't get such a shitty deal, and then start doing something about the next 20% too. And along the way we also need to make our economy sustainable over a timeline of centuries.

    There is a line in one of L.M. Bujold's novels where a character muses that "We don't have dregs. We seem to stop at the lower middle class". That sounds like a pretty good goal, at least to start with.

    657:

    Yeah, I get it about distributed vs centralised, but we already know that top-down command economies don't work, and the proposals I've seen for socialist economies with distributed decision making range from the plain impractical to Pollyanna. Capitalism is a weird hybrid of centralised government with some level of democratic oversight plus distributed economic incentives that just happens to work reasonably well most of the time.

    Except what we've got now does not fit your definition of capitalism.

    The billionaires are a symptom. The underlying disease condition, however, is a wave of corporate mergers and take-overs that have resulted in an economy where the productive and service side is dominated by a handful of gigantic enterprises (think in terms of: Ford, General Motors, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, WalMart, etc), and the financial side is similarly dominated by private equity, sovereign wealth funds, and other wealth-extraction corporations. All of whom are lobbying furiously for a less-level playing field that locks them into a position of dominance so that they can charge rent.

    Internally those large enterprises are command economies. So the US economy at this point looks a lot like several hundred much smaller totalitarian states parasitizing an increasingly weak host.

    658:

    No, nothing has changed. The situation has ALWAYS been more complex, even in the case of a flat, straight, windless, unobstructed route. And, as you say, route complexities, safety and regulations are more important than efficiency in many or most places. They always have been, because of bends in routes, junctions and stations.

    In the simplest realistic analysis, the energy needed to travel a given route (ignoring starting and stopping) is a.W+b.A.V^2, where a and b are constants, W is the weight (roughly), A is an area (depending on the streamlining), and V the speed. Wind adds a b2.A2.V term, but let's skip that. However, due to more subtle effects (e.g. vibrational road surface losses and engine efficiency), there is also an increase in energy needed for very low speeds. The end result is that there is an optimal speed for efficiency, and a wide range where the efficiency is as close to optimal as makes no practical difference.

    Anyway, for walking, it's something like 2-3 MPH; for mainstream bicycles, 8-12 MPH; for modern cars, something like 30-50 MPH; and, for trains, I would expect it to be higher (50-80 MPH?)

    Once you add in the requirement to start and stop, it becomes a lot more complicated, especially as the optimal speed will be different for every block on the route. The calculations are easy, but the complication is in the data.

    659:

    At least, in the USA, they're largely metastatic endoparasites; in most countries, they're bloodsucking ectoparasites.

    660:

    But it explains why they have limited services - the low population density makes providing many of those services more expensive

    The idea that subsidy should be based on a flat tax i.e. subsidy per head - automatically gives a bonus to those areas where cost effective services can exist. As you effectively imply, London should therefore need less subsidy for transport than rural areas, where the need is greater? But that's a political choice, not a position of envy.

    As I have been counting the number of angels dancing on a pin, I will admit that I favour public investment in services and have commuted in and around London for many years. One of the reasons I left was the stress levels of those travels whether by public transport or as an evil car driver.

    661:

    Your figures are far too rose-tinted. They probably were correct for the UK some decades back, but nowadays it's more like 0.1%, 30%, 50% and 20%. Yes, it is THAT bad. My guess is that the USA is similar. It's worse in much of the rest of the world, too.

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/food-banks-uk-how-many-people-adults-poverty-a8386811.html

    662:

    Greg Tingey @ 656: "surely the US has "Allotments"??"

    They're called Community Gardens in North America and they vary greatly in size of plot

    The U.S has them:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_gardening_in_the_United_States

    Canada has them too and I was a member in one, run by my "city", for one summer.

    My property is mostly made up of woods but I have enough free space to build a garden. The problem is that I have an overabundance of wild animals ready to walk or fly in to eat whatever I would plant. It seemed that the idea of joining a community garden was a good one, to get fresh produce.

    Half of what I planted never came out of the ground. The other half was good and the radishes in particular were unbelievably tasty. But on the whole it took just too much time out of my day. I had to rush there from work nearly every day and it really wasn't "fun" work.

    663:

    Other reasons for the lack of coops are risk aversion and experience. Few people are willing to undertake the possibility of loss, fewer still want the grind of setting up a business, few know how, and of those that do many wouldn't do it again if they have done it - Capitalists do it for power and wealth, non-capitalists do it for ???

    I was involved for a time in setting up a Housing Cooperative which intended to buy land and self-build social community housing. Great enthusiasm from lots of people - then the leaders asked for effort . The only sound was the door being slammed as the crowds left. There are very few volunteers for that kind of work sadly.

    664:

    I also get that our current system doesn't work for everyone. To a very rough approximation it seems to work fantastically for 1%, pretty well for 74%, not terribly well for another 20%, and utterly fail the remaining 5%. That seems to be the pattern across "the West"; countries with regular free and fair elections, a broadly capitalist base to the economy and a stable law-based government that takes between 30% and 50% of GDP in taxes.

    I suspect your wildly optimistic - Trump, Boris, Brexit, Ford, Tea Party, the US opioid deaths, the Five Star movement, the original Yellow Vests in France, and the rise of anti-immigrant /anti-Jew/populist/right wing parties across much of the west and rest of world is a clear indication that a lot more than 25% fall into the "not terribly well" or worse category.

    And that's without getting into the more now sadly normal rise in food banks and other things that are stepping in to support people as the government withdraws from it's post-war obligations.

    665:

    I was involved for a time in setting up a Housing Cooperative which intended to buy land and self-build social community housing. Great enthusiasm from lots of people - then the leaders asked for effort . The only sound was the door being slammed as the crowds left. There are very few volunteers for that kind of work sadly.

    Yep, anything that exists on volunteers sadly only exists on the backs of a very small handful of people who are willing to dedicate the hours - and often the people who benefit are ungrateful towards the volunteers and the sacrifice of their time (and often own money) that they have made.

    Growing up my entire family got heavily involved in volunteering in the running of our local town's minor hockey - and the burn out of that volunteer experience as a teenager means I still have no desire to ever volunteer again 30+ years later.

    666:

    The kind of co-op I had in mind is a business. People get paid for working there, and the administrative work they contribute gets folded into their pay.

    667:

    The idea that subsidy should be based on a flat tax i.e. subsidy per head - automatically gives a bonus to those areas where cost effective services can exist. As you effectively imply, London should therefore need less subsidy for transport than rural areas, where the need is greater?

    I'm not saying subsidy should be based on subsidy per head, but rather that you can't escape the cost premium of providing services in less dense areas.

    There is a limit to how much money you can take out of the revenue generating areas - to keep the "engine" running in you need to re-invest in that area - and so at some point difficult decisions need to be made as to what you can subsidize elsewhere, and at what level of service.

    So in the current UK that means things like Crossrail and other large, expensive London focused infrastructure projects are necessary because without them you risk losing the engine and its profits.

    But the flip side is despite what a noisy contingent of train spotters want there is no case for restoring a second rail line through Devon - there simply isn't enough population density in north Devon, and nowhere near enough Plymouth-Exeter traffic to justify a second line. The cost per head - in this case per passenger - is beyond anything that can be justified.

    The problem is that the people in these other areas often don't acknowledge the cost portion - they just see that London gets a fancy new rail line and every 5 or 10 minute service and wonder/demand that their village of 500 people should also get a 10 minute transit frequency.

    None of which is to necessarily say that everything is acceptable, and things can't be done better in the non-London/SE areas, but those areas are never going to have London levels of service.

    668:

    Paul: Why is it that every time I say "capitalism" people assume that I mean some Randian libertarian nightmare?

    Graydon: Because everyone (in the North Atlantic Anglosphere) is living in a Randian nightmare

    Further to that, is large swathes of our social discourse, suggesting something as simple as universal medicare leads to accusations of "socialism" and wanting to bring in the gulags.

    669:

    Charlie @ 658: Except what we've got now does not fit your definition of capitalism.

    OK, I concede pretty much everything you say. Regulatory capture is the big failure mode of regulated markets, and there are lots of examples to choose from, both historical and current.

    In "I Claudius" there is an account of how Emperor Claudius gets talked into granting a monopoly on salt, supposedly to ensure an orderly market, but in fact to grant huge profits to the salt merchant in question. I don't know if that was based on a historical incident, but I bet similar stuff happened.

    I recall reading somewhere (never been able to find it since) that at one point French shepherds actually paid lawyers to accompany them in order to maintain their complicated set of special rights. Trade guilds were both guarantors of quality and restrictive access to markets for many centuries.

    The one I'd pick right now is the US broadband market, which is dominated by a very small number of incumbents, who have successfully obtained legislation to stop local counties doing anything about it. But somehow this isn't a political issue apart from a few geeks.

    Stepping back further, this is just an example of something bigger. The Fundamental Problem of Political Economy is: how do you stop the resource allocators from allocating all the resources to themselves?

    Answers on a postcard please.

    670:

    Actually I think UBI looks like a really neat idea, though I'd like to see some really large scale tests

    We did that when I was a boy.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincome

    Ontario was going to do something similar, but Ford cancelled it to save money*.

    Saving money being the usual Conservative reason for cancelling things, even when cancelling costs more money than keeping it going*.

    **Eg the Experimental Lakes Area in Ontario, when the Conservatives were willing to spend 25 years of operating budget to close the operation down and destroy long-term research.

    671:

    Might be worth something to note here that FDR's New Deal that did little more than focus the US government on the well being of the majority annoyed the Mammonites enough to begin what we now know as "Conservatism". I shudder to imagine the malignity we'd see if FDR had lived to push through his economic bill of rights. Now think of the potential firestorm if there were signs of pushing through the kind of change required before the wheels come off the current system, no matter how prudent that would be.

    672:

    Stepping back further, this is just an example of something bigger. The Fundamental Problem of Political Economy is: how do you stop the resource allocators from allocating all the resources to themselves? Answers on a postcard please.

    Certainly: redistribution and/or revolution. Read Piketty.

    The problem you're looking at is perhaps on the wrong scale: humans are a tiny fraction of the systems that keep the generation ship we're stuck on capable of supporting human life. The moment you limit your analyses to optimizing reallocation of resources within the human population and handwave away keeping the ship capable of supporting human life, any answer you come up with is going to be too limited to be of much use. Although, I grant, it's a very attractive limitation, in part because it's a bit less scary than looking at what's going on with the starship.

    Now, absent real action, we're going to re-implement the primitive solution that's worked for the last 300,000-odd years. Over the next century, our systems will break down, human populations will decrease 99-99.999% from current levels, and the survivors will be stuck with a resource base that's vastly depleted compared with what their distant ancestors of 10,000 years ago faced.

    You may want to consider how to avoid this. And it's a bit more than UBI.

    This is another version of the "canned monkeys don't travel well" discussion of the problems with building a starship. I suspect one reason we have so much trouble with starship design is that our thinking gets bogged down on the supposed necessity of preserving some version of a known civilization within the ship, and that makes everything else seem (or be) impossible.

    To rephrase this in a way that might be more thought-provoking for you, sustainability is about resilience, not productivity. Sustaining productive growth is an oxymoron, so it's worth ignoring. If you want an example of a resilient system, it's one that's lasted for centuries to thousands of years, not a theoretical construct. There are many "primitive" examples of long-term resilience, so it's eminently doable. But there are no civilized ones. Every single civilized example has a huge crash every few centuries.

    It's worth very seriously considering this. Because again, we're looking at massive decreases in human populations coming up later this century if we don't get our act together. And getting our at together means maintaining the life support systems on our starship, acting like canned monkeys, and shipping ourselves far better than we have in the last few centuries.

    673:

    They're called Community Gardens in North America and they vary greatly in size of plot

    The U.S has them:

    Even Texas.

    https://www.google.com/maps/@29.5350407,-98.5581395,3a,37.5y,152.3h,79.44t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sASYHEfLJ7I78ZYuOe1P4sQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192

    674:

    For those who like batshit politics, there's this notion popping up that VP Pence could/should invoke the Constitution's 25th Amendment tomorrow. The reason is in Section 4 of the Amendment:

    "Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

    "Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office."

    After December 27, Trump will have less than 25 days in office. So theoretically, the VP could conspire with a bunch of cabinet secretaries to invoke the 25th Amendment, replace Trump with Acting President Pence, and send his letter to both houses four days later. Presumably at that point Trump will reject the notion, saying he's the sanest person in the US. Then the Congress will not bother to consider the matter for 21 days, and Trump will no longer be President. That's the argument anyway.

    Why do this? Oh, I don't know, Covid19, that little Russian hack, the economy about to go over a cliff, a government shutdown, the January 5th election...

    On the other hand, when you look at who's currently on the cabinet, you realize that this is a little like asking the Ringwraiths to vote Sauron out of Mordor. Plus the politics would make for interesting times.

    So this isn't probability zero, but I'd put it out in the "win the lottery" back pasture of unlikely possibilities. Still, if it pops up over the next week, you heard it here first.

    Now back to distracting ourselves from the banshee wail of the oncoming Brexit shoggoth/train. Shall we go back to our doomscroll of doom?

    675:

    On the other hand, when you look at who's currently on the cabinet, you realize that this is a little like asking the Ringwraiths to vote Sauron out of Mordor. This is by design. Trump does not fully trust Pence, and never has. (In part because he can't fire Pence; the POTUS has no such power.) D.J. Trump has been getting rid of anyone who is not clearly a ring-kissing subordinate, and replacing them with ring-kissers.

    Paul Campos at lawyersgunsmoneyblog snarked on did a writeup of this a few days ago: Terminate with extreme bureaucratic prejudice (Paul Campos, December 23, 2020) And then I realized like I was shot with a diamond — a diamond right through my forehead . . . And I thought: My God, the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. He was describing his own writeup at NYMag.com: Pence Should Remove Trump From Office on Sunday (Paul Campos, Dec. 23, 2020)

    676:

    Heteromeles @ 673: "Every single civilized example has a huge crash every few centuries."

    We had the Scientific Revolution in the 17th century. Since then we've had a continuing Industrial Revolution in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, and it shows no sign of stopping (aside from a little blip in the power section) or even slowing down. We don't need car-congested cities for scientific growth to happen, and with it, eventually, technological growth.

    There's no reason for all our current civilisations to crash, unless we are very foolish and stop Science from going on and growing, and growing. (sez one whose alma mater has "Grandescunt Aucta Labore" as its motto)

    677:

    There are also rumbles that IQ45 is going to roll up on 6th January & try to overturn the election ...

    I also think that between now & 20th Jan is going to make the Brexitshambles look sane & normal

    678:

    You need to talk with the Chinese, the Russians, and the Irish, among others, about those little blips you're talking about.

    I'm going to try to not put this in a patronizing way, so my apologies for what's about to come next. "Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well" is Charlie's shorthand for how difficult it is to build a starship of any sort using physics as we know it. This is something we've batted around at great length on this blog for over a decade. I'm not sure how long you've been reading it, but that "canned monkeys" phrase was a hint to the longer-term readers that we've had this discussion before. All I'm doing is pointing out that arguments over how to make a starship that can fly for centuries or millennia also apply to keeping a planet habitable. Obviously, this goes back to the whole Spaceship Earth meme of the 1970s, but it doesn't make it any less relevant.

    As for science, grow, and progress, those are also strange attractors that have had a lot of adherents over the entire time this blog has been going on. I've been here for, um, well over a decade (two? I've lost track), and a lot of us started out with the notion that the important advances were in science, that politics would take care of itself, and that economic growth would power things indefinitely. This seems to be what you're espousing?

    Unfortunately many of us (me especially, but not exclusively) have had a really thorough education in how wrong those notions are. One example is the topic of this post. What we've realized, through direct confrontation with reality, is that political problems are often far more intractable and more important than scientific ones, and growth is not a panacea, no matter how its parsed. That's why we're grousing about politics and not proposing scientific cures for Brexit or Trumpism right now. A nastier example is that the science on climate change and what to do about it is quite settled. The remaining problems are social, political, and far harder to solve, because they center things like growth.

    As for my background, my day job is that I'm an environmental activist, working to conserve native plants. I've got a PhD in botany (many of us have advanced degrees here), but I spend a lot of time dealing with things like climate change, wildfires, transportation, housing, recreation, and water issues. The reason is that if I just go presenting the science behind this little biodiversity crisis we're going into, most politicians stop listening after about 10 seconds, and mosst planners stop listening after about 20 seconds. The looming extinction crisis may be vital to life on Earth, but most of these people literally don't know how to process this in their human-centered worlds. Nor do most of them care to try. And there are real problems in southern California involving affordable housing, water supplies, wildfires, and adapting our car-centered cities to climate change. If I only speak on plant issues, I get ignored. Therefore, to protect the plants, I've got to get active in all these other issues and help find solutions to them that also protect the plants, or I fail. The science part of these answers is the easy stuff, but throwing more science into the mix won't solve any of these problems, and growth is making the problems worse.

    Hope this helps.

    679:

    Incidentally, here's the url for a summary of the Canned Monkeys issues. Was it really two years ago? Sheesh. https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/07/canned-monkeys-dont-ship-well-.html

    680:

    Heteromeles @ 679

    The "little" blip I was alluding to was the use of a new power source to power the third phase of the industrial revolution.

    Each preceding phase has enjoyed its own, new, power source. With the first phase it was steam engines powered (largely) by coal. With the second phase it was internal combustion engines, powered by oil.

    The third phase was supposed to be powered by nuclear energy. As things turned out though nuclear energy was a poisonous dud (except in France) and there is still some groping about rigth now as nuclear plants are shut down all around the world.

    On the other hand the third phase has been going along well with the synergical use of its new technologies in all the other sectors.

    The thing to remember here is that a solution to the power problem cannot be solved by politics alone. There has to be solid science and technology work going on. We don't know everything.

    681:

    The Big Carrot in Toronto is a collective, quite successful.

    Note that they're smack in the middle of an affluent market, price for it, and had significant PR and legal expertise in the founding group. Many locals think they're great but can't afford to shop there.

    Also note that they're not especially distinguishable from a union supermarket in 1970; not the same mix of stuff for sale, less dependent on volume of food sales (because the Carrot sells a lot of cosmetics), but very similar in feel, staff salaries, and expectations.

    683:

    We don't know everything.

    In terms of fundamental science? for planning purposes?

    Yeah, we do.

    The folks looking along the edges of the weirdness might find something. But even if they do find something, it won't be technology quickly. (the last quantum device -- memristors -- were described in 1971 and there's still controversy over whether or not one has been built.)

    So far as "what to do?", we do know everything. I am pretty sure that's OK from a technological perspective; solar and batteries looks workable. (Especially since it's really efficiency, solar, and batteries.) Could be wrong; my take on the goal could be put as "keeping anaesthetised dentistry through the custodial transition", and there's likely more to that than I think.

    684:

    Yes, I'm rereading it now. For world-building, it's extremely useful. For understanding one aborigine's perspective, it's also extremely useful. For dealing with 7-10 billion people on this planet? It's a great lesson in the problems of scale, because that's one critical factor he leaves out. Also, he says right up front to not take it all at face value, and I echo that warning. He's not a new age bullshitter, but if you know a few things, you'll catch stuff he either got wrong or deliberately miswrote. Still, I highly recommend it.

    And I want to stress this: becoming ten billion aborigines will not save civilization. Becoming ten million aborigines globally a century from now will likely save our species if all else fails, but that's the solution we're trying to avoid if possible, due to the destruction involved.

    The critical thing we can learn from aborigines like Yunkaporta is the absolute necessity of being custodians for the planet, and not just consumers or progressives. Yunkaporta also has some really good ideas about what might be called lawful anarchy that they use, although I think the term of art is extreme heterarchy, due to the negative conotations of anarchy.

    Another thing that will make life easier when you read Yunkaporta is that the Dreaming he describes is in large part, their form of memory palaces (AFAIK). Some of the "woo" he mentions is also mentioned by other practitioners, like Lynn Kelly, who's an avowed atheist. Chalk it up to people trying to describe how the nonverbal parts of human consciousness and communication work, and don't get thrown by it if you're a rabid atheist and don't like reading about spirits and magic.

    685:

    Now this is criminally STUPID: "And everything you own is destroyed. (Nobody gets to keep it; certainly no one inherits it." Oh, really, including priceless works of Art or books & other property than can be redistributed.

    "Priceless" isn't a factual statement; it's (effectively) an "only an oligarch" loot quality label, and I'm describing a social system as hasn't got oligarchs and doesn't allow keeping the loot.

    Any other scheme produces some version of "keep the loot". (we will redistribute the loot! ok, that's a fight over who controls redistribution, and then who they can apply the mechanism to, just like US civil forfeiture, which was noted this past year for taking more money than burglary did; you die, but your kids share the loot (you want an aristocracy? that's how you get an aristocracy....), etc.)

    "Keep the loot" is most of the structural problem, including the planet having been classified as loot.

    Public education in this country includes mandatory, compulsory spurts for anyone between the ages of 11 & 16.

    So make it better.

    That's the whole point; no social partitioning by class. It has to work for everybody. No purchasing the illusion of control. No declaring your children better or special; you can think that all you like, but no making it policy or system or structure.

    As for the skulls; a great many people are going to die before their time. Sure as death; sure as fate, even in the extremely optimistic "Eocene climate regime by 2050" version. I'm expressing a preference for "fewer than the current plan" (which looks a lot like "everybody") and "mammonites", rather than (for example) the disabled killed by UK austerity policies.

    686:

    We don't need car-congested cities for scientific growth to happen, and with it, eventually, technological growth.

    In an abstract, artificial, perfect world perhaps not.

    But here in reality, yes car-congested cities are a necessity.

    Because one of the few things that unites voters across the political spectrum - Republican/Democrat/Conservative/Labour/Liberal/NDP/and every other party out there is their refusal to give up their car and either the possession of the house in the suburbs or the dream of the house in the suburbs.

    Which is why the politicians have done nothing about climate change - because they all want to get re-elected.

    There's no reason for all our current civilisations to crash, unless we are very foolish and stop Science from going on and growing, and growing.

    Congratulations, you have just described humans - foolish and frequently anti-science.

    687:

    The extractive societies - assuming that includes "extracting wealth and/or value from other people" - deliberately work to destroy non-extractive ones.

    Let's see, I can go from the Western armies - the US Expeditionary Force, the British Expeditionary Force, etc, in the USSR after WWI, back to things like Oneida, and other Christian idealistic societies in the US, and the latter were driven into bankruptcy.

    As a side note, I see that some of Europe and the UK recognized the USSR around '24, but others, well, the US not until FDR, and 1933. And of their entire history, as I've noted before, they were not either recovering from a war, or preparing for one, how long? 10? 15? years, and that when they're trying to improve life for everyone (and a homicidal sociopath in charge doesn't help things).

    688:

    You wrote:

    To a very rough approximation it seems to work fantastically for 1%, pretty well for 74%, not terribly well for another 20%, and utterly fail the remaining 5%.

    Are you joking? What country are you speaking of? The US, the 1% is doing great, the 4% below that aren't doing bad at all, from the 10% down to the top 5% are fine.

    And 80% of USans range from homeless to living from paycheck to paycheck, which means utterly terrible.

    And your quote from Bujold... ok, my soapbox is right here, let me get up on it, MIDDLE CLASS DOES NOT MEAN MIDDLE INCOME!!!!! The real/old definition of middle class would probably fit as "the top 15%-20%", not people within 30% of the median income.

    689:

    As things turned out though nuclear energy was a poisonous dud (except in France)

    No they weren't.

    What went wrong ...

    Nuclear power came in two stages: (a) military reactors for breeding plutonium for weapons programs (and powering submarines and aircraft carriers), and (b) civilian power reactors.

    As a vehicle prime mover, a reactor is crap: turns out that shielding makes them unfeasible for anything smaller than a ship except in rare circumstances (NERVA for space propulsion is feasible in principle, it's just nobody wanted to fly trans-Lunar crewed missions that needed to combine fast travel with big probes). You can use them to power trains, but it's safer and more efficient to park them in a power station and run power over overhead wires rather than putting one in a locomotive. Carriers and subs are special cases that both need prolonged high speed running (for their environment), possibly without refuelling.

    Civilian power reactors didn't really gain traction until the 1960s -- before that, they were a fig-leaf for plutonium breeders. And the standard designs were civilianized versions of military designs, with different requirements. Then they mostly got handed to the private sector who tried to run them at a profit in competition with existing coal/oil infrastructure.

    You can have safe civil nuclear power or cheap civil nuclear power: it's not obvious that you can have both. (See also: Chernobyl, Fukushima: the latter was a classic case of the safety side of the design brief not being quite extensive enough -- the reactors survived a very rare event with flying colours but subsequently succumbed to an unanticipated failure mode, i.e. fuel oil tanks being flooded with seawater from over a 20 metre concrete sea defense while the roads were blocked, barring resupply from land.)

    France rolled out civil nuclear power in the 1970s for strategic reasons -- France has just about no coal or oil reserves, and not much hydropower. It worked for them, but EDF is a state-owned monopoly and its remit was to provide strategically secure power supply for French industry and consumers, not to compete with the fluctuating prices of foreign-sourced commodities.

    But we're now into the disruptive phase of solar power -- which nobody really foresaw before the late 90s -- as PV cell prices crash. This has not only priced commercial nuclear out of the marketplace, it has priced new-build coal out, and soon existing coal burners and gas burners, except for niche requirements (providing base load during darkness). This makes the situation even worse for nuclear-as-capitalist-solution energy, but doesn't preclude other nations going for energy autarky after the French model.

    690:

    Let me note most people don't start businesses, and of those that do... I read, a long time ago, in the US that 67% of ALL NEW BUSINESSES fail in the first year.

    Just because you know x really well does not mean you know how to run a business. (For that matter, if you have an MBA, you don't know how to run a business.)

    I've never wanted to start one, for example, but even I know you have to have enough money UP FRONT, the day you open your doors, for an entire first year: salaries, bills, taxes, and oh, yes, a salary for you to live on.

    691:

    You shudder to see the malignity? You mean, what we in the US have been staring in the face the last four or six years? (I'm including Moscow Mitch's reign in the Senate, and his primary goal (nothing to do with his Oath of Office), killing anything Obama tried, and then anything any Democrat wanted that might help anyone but the 1%).

    692:

    Well, the first thing we should do, if we want to survive, is take out anyone who thinks and talks about "consumers" and is in a position to work towards resource extraction from consumers, is take them out and put them in front of a firing squad, and shoot them.

    I am not a giant mouth, connected to an inexhaustible wallet, sitting on a couch. I am not a "consumer".

    I adore how they talk about employees, and workers and separate that 100% from "consumers", who are some gigantic part of the population who fir the couch definition, above.

    693:

    Oh, one thing I thought of after I posted the above: as much as I dislike the original Henry Ford, unlike MBAs, he was not stupid. I've read his take on the price of his cars in the teens and 20s was that his employees who worked on the assembly line should be able to buy one of what they produced after a couple of years.

    MBAs don't care whether there's anyone to buy, and they're going to change jobs in several years anyway, so who cares about the company, or buyers two to three years from now.

    694:

    There is a frighteningly common disconnect here - Wages are demand, modulo some bells and whistles involving the state and its printing presses, but terrifying numbers of politicians and lobbyists work tirelessly to suppress wages, and those same politicians are none to fond of the aforementioned bells and whistles, either.

    Which means most countries are saddled with political factions that are actively working to destroy the economy. And those factions claim to be the pro-business party! The core problem with capitalism is, near as I can tell, that it is a way to coordinate people who have no goddess accursed idea what they are actually doing into a mostly productive whole.. and by doing so, it gives them the illusion that they do have a clue, which they then try to inflict on the system.

    I am personally extremely pessimistic on the solar / wind boom, because I just do not see storage working out, and to make things worse, both represent efforts to harvest power from the weather over a decadal time horizion.. which is not sensible investing if you expect the weather to change.

    This does not mean I expect the future to be without power, it means I expect the future to be.... highly flexible in their definition of what is a safe reactor design. You can build a power reactor very, very quickly and very, very cheaply, if you really want to, and I would really kind of prefer to build more staid designs now, when it is not an emergency.

    695:

    Charlie noted: "You can have safe civil nuclear power or cheap civil nuclear power: it's not obvious that you can have both."

    Honest question: There's been talk about thorium-fueled reactors for decades, with the nominal benefits being that thorium is more abundant, produces wastes with an orders-of-magnitude shorter half-life, and operates with potentially less dangerous failure modes. The largest objections seem to boil down to "but we can't use them to make weapons easily" and the breeder-reactor function is less efficient than with conventional nuclear reactors. Oh, and nobody's tested this on a production scale; doesn't seem to be any reason to think the research reactors won't scale up, but engineering sometimes turns up surprises.

    So why aren't we all powering our civilization with thorium? I assume it's not just the military industrial complex digging in its heels?

    696:

    Because one of the few things that unites voters across the political spectrum - Republican/Democrat/Conservative/Labour/Liberal/NDP/and every other party out there is their refusal to give up their car and either the possession of the house in the suburbs or the dream of the house in the suburbs.

    Not any more.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/driving-the-kids-are-so-over-it-11555732810

    https://qz.com/1574174/millennials-are-right-to-kill-the-american-car/

    https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/03/why-dont-young-americans-buy-cars/255001/

    My daughters are (almost) 29 and 25. The oldest one did not get her license until she was 22, and they both hate driving. So do their boyfriends. They would give up cars in an instant, if they could.

    697:

    Thorium is not fissionable, basically. The thorium boosters rarely if ever mention that in their 'give us money, we have Ph.D.s to feed!' PowerPoint presentations and TED talks.

    In reality a 'thorium' reactor is a breeder reactor, turning Th-222 into fissionable U-223 by neutron capture and then producing energy by fissioning the U-233. Breeder reactors have a bad engineering reputation, being very energy dense and very hot in terms of nucleonics (a very large number of fission and neutron capture events have to happen in a small volume because it takes two neutrons to breed a U-233 atom and then fission it and letting some neutrons escape in a larger volume would be wasteful) and thermal (a lot of energy from fission going on in said small volume).

    Since a 'thorium' reactor is in reality a U-233 fission reactor I fail to see how it would have less waste isotopes from fission than a regular PWR or similar reactor fuelled by U-235. I suspect there's a lot of Handwavium going on in the PowerPoint presentations which claim less waste than PWRs and the like.

    As for the Evull! military, conventional power reactors are crap at making Pu-239 because of contamination with Pu-240. It's easier and simpler to make pure Pu-239 in specialised reactors such as the ones at Hanford, Sellafield and elsewhere. However four of the Big Five nuclear weapons states have more Pu-239 than they know what to do with because everyone's stockpiles of deployed weapons have been vastly reduced since the heyday of the 1960s and making more Pu-239 is not a big issue. China doesn't seem interested in building up its nuclear weapons fleet beyond its existing limited holdings (about 300 weapons according to sources).

    The U-233 thorium reactors need to produce to work at all makes good enough nuclear weapons as well, by the way -- the US test-fired at least two such devices back in the day, both worked fine reportedly.

    698:

    Untested and speculative technologies are always superior to real ones because nobody has to actually make them work. You get to talk about all of the theoretical advantages without any of the messy real world issues intruding.

    Thorium reactors are very much in that bucket.

    They will probably work but you probably need to build a couple of generations of full scale test stations to work the bugs out first.

    Why spend that sort of money on a technology nobody will buy anyway?

    699:

    Thanks for the explanation Nojay. In response to one point: "Since a 'thorium' reactor is in reality a U-233 fission reactor I fail to see how it would have less waste isotopes from fission than a regular PWR or similar reactor fuelled by U-235"

    The Wikipedia article on the subject (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power#Possible_benefits) suggests as little as 1% of the wastes of a conventional reactor plus half lives of less than a couple hundred years for the wastes. That's highly significant, if correct.

    dpb suggested: "Untested and speculative technologies are always superior to real ones"

    But they have been tested (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power#Thorium-based_nuclear_power_projects). The question that remains is, as I noted in my original post, whether and how well they'll scale to practical outputs (e.g., to power a city as part of the grid). For example, the need for reprocessing of the fuel may be a significant problem.

    700:

    Credit unions work in the US because they are heavily regulated, which keeps them small and allows them to engage only in low-risk forms of finance. I think the lesson is not that capitalism is inherently bad, but that allowing any power to scale without constraints is not good.

    Tigers in the forest are not entirely safe, but the benefits to the ecosystem greatly outweigh the risks. Tigers in the cities eating people, not good at all. Giant tigers eating each other until there are only a few unstoppable monsters, this is not going to end well.

    701:

    Building tiny test reactors is relatively easy. Scaling up to a useful power plant is significantly more difficult.

    One reason the uk nuclear industry failed is constantly chasing the next big thing. Practically every plant in the country is a prototype.

    The only build i know of that actually went well is sizewell b, and that was an off the shelf pwr core.

    You end up with a prisoners dilemma situation where the rational thing to do is let someone else do the r&d and take the hit on the first 3 stations, then license the design.

    702:

    The thorium breeding cycle has less long lived waste, because it does not produce much in the way of transuranics - a very long chain of captures-but-not-fission events has to happen to get any, which means the only things in the mix are fission products, uranium and thorium.

    You can get similar results - that is, not much long lived waste - with plutonium if you run the molten-chloride salts reactor, because that has an incredibly hard neutron spectrum, which both keeps the number of captures-without fission events down, and also fissions the transuranics. The molten chlorides reactor kind of needs you to do isotope seperation on the chlorine, though, which means it was entirely goddamn impractical prior to laser isotope seperation, and would still require you to build a facility for that today.

    703:

    Untested and speculative technologies are always superior to real ones because nobody has to actually make them work. You get to talk about all of the theoretical advantages without any of the messy real world issues intruding.... Thorium reactors are very much in that bucket.

    I live down the road from the site where the only thorium-fueled commercial power reactor in the US used to sit. It was a high-temperature gas-cooled (helium) reactor. It demonstrated all of the advantages usually attributed to thorium-fueled reactors: in particular, high burn up and greatly reduced actinides in the waste stream. The big problem was moisture ingress due to a water-lubricated bearing in a pump -- a feature that would never be used today because there are much better solutions than existed in the 1970s. The plant's early retirement was a consequence of those moisture ingress problems.

    It's generally regarded as a technical, but not commercial, success.

    704:

    mdlve @ 687:

    "We don't need car-congested cities for scientific growth to happen, and with it, eventually, technological growth."

    "In an abstract, artificial, perfect world perhaps not. But here in reality, yes car-congested cities are a necessity."

    One of my favorite science fiction novels is the Pyramid Paperback edition of Clarke's Against the Fall of Night, with cover art by John Schoenherr.

    There are two cities in the novel, Diaspar and Lys.

    The cities have no cars in them, and they don't feel like abstract, artificial, perfect worlds when you read the novel. Of course, it helps that they're set several millions of years in the future.

    In our recent past it took us one and a half industrial revolutions (or one and a half phases of the single Industrial Revolution) to get rid of horses in the cities. It might take as much time to get rid of cars in the cities.

    We just don't need them and scientifc research doen't need them either.

    705:

    Whitroth #691. An important footnote to that is that most NEW businesses (in the small business sense) begin as side projects. Many fail without catastrophic impact, some are discontinued for various reasons, a few transition to becoming primary jobs.

    Examples: My parents opened a driver training school when I was young that was a runaway success. Dad was an excellent driver trainer, they had more business than they could handle or want. The end result was they shut it down because they wanted to keep their day jobs (school teachers) and still spend time with us kids.

    I've started or been involved in the early days of about 7 businesses. 6 of them are in the dustbin for a variety of reasons. Some were bad ideas, some had bad partners, some just didn't work out. None of them were financially catastrophic in the sense that I kept working all the while and the kids stayed fed. The 7th was the one that stuck.

    People who do not own or open businesses have no clear understanding of what is involved. I was one of them, grew up in a family with about 12 generations of civil servant (not exaggerating, my family is pretty much all teachers, administrators and soldiers going back to the 12th century). Opening/creating/starting/running a business was not part of our family DNA and few had even thought to try.

    706:

    The thorium breeding cycle has less long lived waste, because it does not produce much in the way of transuranics - a very long chain of captures-but-not-fission events has to happen to get any, which means the only things in the mix are fission products, uranium and thorium.

    The small amount of transuranics aren't really a problem product in a conventional reactor's spent fuel, it's the fission products that had everyone tearing their hair out in the Chernobyl and Fukushima incidents, especially the Big Four Problem Children of Sr-90, I-131, Cs-134 and Cs-137. Several kilograms of those isotopes made it out of the reactors at Fukushima into the surrounding countryside and the Pacific whereas the miniscule amounts of Pu-239, Pu-240 and Am-241 in the spent fuel stayed put where they had been created pretty much.

    The Russians have moved forward with their fast-spectrum reactors, the fabled Waste Eaters with the new(ish) BN-800. The Chinese have a small fast-spectrum reactor and are bending metal and pouring concrete on a 600MWe BN-800 lookalike with Russian technical assistance. If they pan out they can destroy spent fuel isotopic waste and close the fuel cycle meaning much-enhanced burnup and complete fuel recycling. We'll see if the technical problems of running a really hot reactor core in a sodium bath commercially can be overcome.

    707:

    Paul@670

    Primary text: Tacitus The Annals, 6.16 and 6.17

    [My editorials in brackets]

    The curse of usury was indeed of old standing in Rome and a most frequent cause of sedition and discord, and it was therefore repressed even in the early days of a less corrupt morality. First, the Twelve Tables prohibited any one from exacting more than 10 per cent., when, previously, the rate had depended on the caprice of the wealthy. Subsequently, by a bill brought in by the tribunes, interest was reduced to half that amount, and finally compound interest was wholly forbidden. A check too was put by several enactments of the people on evasions which, though continually put down, still, through strange artifices, reappeared. On this occasion, however, Gracchus, the prætor, to whose jurisdiction the inquiry had fallen, felt himself compelled by the number of persons endangered to refer the matter to the Senate. In their dismay the senators, not one of whom was free from similar guilt, threw themselves on the emperor's indulgence. He yielded, and a year and six months were granted, within which every one was to settle his private accounts conformably to the requirements of the law. - Tac. Ann. 6.16

    [So laws were made and then broken, so everyone was given time to clean up the mess. So more regulation:]

    Hence followed a scarcity of money, a great shock being given to all credit, the current coin too, in consequence of the conviction of so many persons and the sale of their property, being locked up in the imperial treasury or the public exchequer. To meet this, the Senate had directed that every creditor should have two-thirds of his capital secured on estates in Italy.

    [Increased regulation brought nothing but law suits:]

    Creditors however were suing for payment in full, and it was not respectable for persons when sued to break faith. So, at first, there were clamorous meetings and importunate entreaties; then noisy applications to the prætor's court.

    [Unintended consequences, so the smart money sat on the sidelines:]

    And the very device intended as a remedy, the sale and purchase of estates, proved the contrary, as the usurers had hoarded up all their money for buying land. The facilities for selling were followed by a fall of prices, and the deeper a man was in debt, the more reluctantly did he part with his property, and many were utterly ruined.

    [Seeing his friends go down in flames, Tiberius Julius Caesar Augustus then:]

    The destruction of private wealth precipitated the fall of rank and reputation, till at last the emperor interposed his aid by distributing throughout the banks a hundred million sesterces, and allowing freedom to borrow without interest for three years, provided the borrower gave security to the State in land to double the amount. Credit was thus restored, and gradually private lenders were found. The purchase too of estates was not carried out according to the letter of the Senate's decree, rigour at the outset, as usual with such matters, becoming negligence in the end. - Tac. Ann. 6.17

    [First century AD and 21st Century AD seem much the same.]

    [But the common thread between Rome and the discussion here is how to maintain a minimum standard of subsistence for all. Rome was 'panem et circenses' while today we want universal basic income and free broadband.]

    708:

    Hetereomeles The thing to remember here is that a solution to the power problem cannot be solved by politics alone. EXACTLY WRONG The solution to the power problem is entirely political - we already knoiw how to generate sufficient base-load power to keep the system ticking over, with renewables ( like Graydon's "Solar + Batteries" ) doing the rest - nuclear. The solution to which is political/educational. SEE ALSO: Charlie @ 690

    Graydon The artifacts & structures of Palmyra were destoyable "loot", as were the Bamiyan Bhuddas, and, & ..... Now then GROW UP!

    whitroth On MBA's - yes, precisely.

    Geoff Hart No. It's the fucking fake greenies who will do anything at all to stop "nuclear" now matter how safe it is ... Noticeable that they don't seem to have traction in France - see other posters on this. And Nojay ( thanks! )

    709:

    Those are not a waste problem. They are what you need to contain in the event of an accident, which is an entirely separate issue, and one which a salt-reactor handles by just not having them leave the salt on their own inside or outside the reactor- They are the waste stream, and a nasty waste stream it is.. However, it is not a waste stream that needs containing for very long as such things go: Halflives:

    Sr-90: 28.8 years. I-131: 8 days Cs-134: 2 years. Cs-137: 30 years.

    This means four centuries is 13 half-lives and change of the most stable of the lot, or in other words, a reduction of radioactivity by a factor of over 8000. A waste facility good for a thousand years is not much of an engineering challenge

    710:

    Greg Tingey @ 709

    Hey, I'm the one who said "The thing to remember here is that a solution to the power problem cannot be solved by politics alone" @ 681

    So I'm the one who's EXACTLY WRONG

    According to you, that is.

    I think I'm right because finding a way to get together solar and batteries on a continental scale is not a trivial problem.

    Of course I would prefer to be EXACTLY WRONG in this case because it would mean we would have finally found the missing link in the third phase of the industrial revolution, the elusive 3rd power source after steam and internal combustion.

    711:

    Niala @ 580: On the other hand, when I go to the Wikipedia article on family farms and read the section for the United States I see that the majority of farms are owned directly or indirectly by families. They're owned by people who know the land, having lived on it for generations.

    Many of the "corporate" farms in the U.S. are really family farms that had to adapt if they wanted to keep the land "in the family". Instead of dividing the land for the next generation, they divvy up shares in the family corporation.

    712:

    Robert Prior @ 582:

    But if the shoe is on the other foot; if you were born in the USA, the U.S. State Department is required by law to assist you sorting it out.

    From what I've read, their assistance to many of these people hasn't been very much use.

    There's some hope the incoming administration will do better obeying the law.

    713:

    Most of the forty-three radiation fatalities from the Chernobyl explosion were ascribed to ingestion of I-131 via milk and other food products resulting in untreated thyroid cancer. The hotter the waste the more dangerous it is ('Russian tea' aka Po-210 has a half-life of 138 days, enough time for a Russian wet-team to get it from a reactor fuel processing plant into their target's favourite beverage) but conversely the faster it goes away because of that short half-life.

    The Big Four I listed are the isotopes in spent fuel that are most worrying in biological terms. Due to the M-curve of isotope production proportions during fission there's a lot of them produced (anything around half the mass of a U-235 atom, statistically speaking). Note that Cs-134 is common in spent fuel but not truly a fission product.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission_products_(by_element)

    The Big Four have known uptake paths into human and animal tissue, bone etc. and they linger long enough and are radioactive enough to be worrying if there is an accidental release. Absent I-131 which concentrates in the thyroid, the other three of the Big Four have half-lives measured in years so they're hot for a longish time. Compare that to, say, U-238 which has a half-life of over 4 billion years meaning it's detectable but not biologically problematic in tissue, radiologically speaking.

    714:

    Geezer-with-a-hat @ 617: About PTSD - there has been some studies that have (at least somewhat)successfully treated PTSD with the help of MDMA/ecstacy.

    Due to current lawmaking I assume research in that area/direction is a bit complicated though...

    I wonder if there's any research that correlates duration & intensity of trauma to how the resulting PTSD manifests.

    715:

    I think I'm right because finding a way to get together solar and batteries on a continental scale is not a trivial problem.

    Speaking as someone who's peripherally involved in all this, and who's commenting again on our local County Climate Action Plan after the first two got thrown out for not decreasing greenhouse gas emissions in the County...

    ...No, it's mostly political. There are some interesting bits of engineering involved in remaking the grid, and there's probably some stuff that would make recycling solar panels and wind turbines more cost-effective.

    That said, there are two things that are really intractable problems. One is who generates and who consumes, and the other one is geometry in the most literal sense. And both of these are entirely political.

    Ideally, generation and consumption should happen on one lot, and that's what we're working towards on our home. However, I know a few things, so I very carefully pissed off my wife by insisting that I wasn't interested in any house that didn't have a big expanse of properly oriented roof for solar panels. That eliminated her first 20-odd choices, but she got the point and now happily drives an electric car.

    That was easy. But for a city-dweller in an apartment building? Where do the panels go? And who pays for them? And does the property owner have to learn how to run a microgrid for profit? What if that's snot something they're interested in doing? Or if it's run by an HOA who's multiply not interested in it, because Trump or IWantMoreRoses or whatever? That's all politics.

    So instead of putting solar farms on city roofs, because of local politics, we'll find a fallowed farm in some rural town somewhere, plop down a big industrial solar plant, and sell the power to the city, not the locals. The locals scream bloody murder about getting shafted for the urbanites, and they're quite right. These are political problems again. The engineering doesn't even require a college degree for most of it, just an apprenticeship.

    Then there's the politicians who have to make the decisions, and all the geometry they forgot after the final. Would you believe most of them don't know which direction north is? That's true around here. We've got a County Supervisor who thought he was scoring political points by insisting that his planning department come up with a detailed analysis of all the potential wildlife areas, showing what could be built there. The biggest one is the west edge of a freeway. Strip mall? Nope, it's an east-facing 45 degree slope. Only an idiot would build there, and Supervisor ProBuilder Supremo just demonstrated that he's not the expert he claims to be, just a good organizer with friends in the business. Shall we say.

    Explaining to such ignoramuses that you can't just put a one meter solar panel on a north-facing roof and run your car and house off it takes a lot of patience, especially when they'd rather believe the wealthy donor who assures them it will work fine. Explaining the same problem to a degreed and certified planner and getting that look of incomprehension makes me wonder whether they actually lobotomize the staff nowadays or whether it's just the culture to act that way. The retired planners I know are similarly irate.

    Anyway, I can rant at far greater length, but finding north, calculating the angle of the sun in different seasons, aligning properties to maximize solar gain, and so forth, is all stuff that's based on medieval celestial navigation and taught in undergraduate architecture courses. There's no need for scientific discovery in this, unless it's to figure out a better way to instruct thousands of militantly clueless politicians and bureaucrats how to pour pee out of their boots than printing the instructions on the soles.

    Personally, I wish it was just about science. That would be easy.

    716:

    You are conflating safety and waste management concerns. All reactors have to contain fission and decay products in the event of accident. This is not what anyone refers to when they speak of nuclear waste as a problem, that refers to materials produced in the normal course of operation that do not get burned by the reactor to produce energy.

    On safety molten salt reactors are better, because the salt fuel isolates fission product ect from the biosphere even in the event of accident, because they remain in solution - Getting this stuff out of the salt solution is a technical challenge, it does not happen on its own.

    When people say they produce less waste, they mean that the stream of products deliberately removed from the reactor to keep the salt fissioning - which is mostly these fission products - make up a modest mass flow that need only be confined on a time scale of centuries.

    717:

    here is a frighteningly common disconnect here - Wages are demand, modulo some bells and whistles involving the state and its printing presses, but terrifying numbers of politicians and lobbyists work tirelessly to suppress wages

    It's a mammonite core tenet that wages are a cost, and therefor to be minimised and ideally brought to zero.

    This really took off politically with Reagan and Thatcher; this is why people get really mad at MBAs, who have been taught "labour is a cost" as an axiom, and as a result make terrible decisions. (E.g., the slow and horrible fate of Eastman Kodak.)

    If you find really old Anglo business writing, pre-1970, you can find that view that profit is the proof you're doing it right and that your labour force is your primary capital asset.

    The current problem is mostly that trying to bring the idea that labour adds value into the foreground -- that work is what creates value -- runs into more mammonite axioms ("all value is measured in terms of my monetary wealth" and "do not dispute the fate of those whom god has accursed" (because they are poor; if God wanted them to have money, they would)) and the reflexive construction of "asset" and creates a drive for slavery, often distributed public-sector slavery. (Walmart employees on food stamps as much as for-profit prison labour.)

    The whole insistence that wages have to be reduced to zero before there can be true prosperity may combine with the political determination to totally ignore facts long enough to produce either bloody revolution or anarchic collapse. And everyone will be baffled because OF COURSE rich people are special and inherently correct.

    718:

    Niala @ 646:

    Paul @ 644 : "you don't want to institute the USSR here, you want ... something else. What?"

    Nothing much, just two things the Liberal Party has been toying with (and do-gooders have been asking for) : Proportional Representation and Universal Basic Income.

    Neither of those tells you anything about the underlying economic structure of the system that would provide them.

    719:

    SlightlyFoxed @ 664: I was involved for a time in setting up a Housing Cooperative which intended to buy land and self-build social community housing. Great enthusiasm from lots of people - then the leaders asked for effort . The only sound was the door being slammed as the crowds left. There are very few volunteers for that kind of work sadly.

    OTOH, Habitat for Humanity somehow manages to carry on & build a few houses every year using volunteers & wannabee home buyer's "sweat equity".

    720:

    wages are a cost

    Of course wages are a cost. It's obvious!

    Just as it's obvious that executive salaries and bonuses are essential to attract the right talent…

    (That was sarcasm, in case it's not obvious from context.)

    721:

    I was just about to draft something similarish.

    I'm not as into the idea that generation and consumption has to be on the same lot, but broadly I agree.

    I think nuclear is deeply stupid on so many levels, but it would work, at least for a while.

    Solar and powerlines would obviously work. They're both off the shelf items.

    The problems are purely political. There are no technical challenges at all. None.

    We spend at a conservative estimate 5 trillion dollars a year subsidising fossil fuels. Even at retail prices on alibaba that's 25 TW of solar. World energy consumption is about 22 TW. (obviously you wouldn't buy on alibaba, you'd buy the companies that make the machines that make solar panels and build thousands of factories that make solar panel making machines and then build trends of thousands of solar panel factories, and your costs would be a fraction of the alibaba price)

    https://m.alibaba.com/product/60787860799/450w-480w-500w-515w-sun-power.html?__detailProductImg=https%3A%2F%2Fs.alicdn.com%2F%40sc01%2Fkf%2FHc2d98969331a4795b05c00df08b4bd87M.png_200x200.png

    If the panels lasted 30 years that means a rolling 750 TW of panels, at least 75 TW of average power (175 TW in ideal locations) and free electricity at a wholesale level for everyone. With that much power, efficiency hardly matters. Globe spanning powerlines would be as easy as the globe spanning data lines we already have.

    The issue of locals being screwed over for power plants happens now, but instead of being annoyed by industrial animal farming giving way to industrial solar farming, industrial animal farming gives way to open cut coal which dumps toxic dust all over everything. You could charge peppercorns for the electricity and give it to the local communities and they'd love you. But again, politics.

    It's politics all the way down.

    722:

    Agreed. The reason I'm interested in having my own self-powered system is that I'm in a high fire area. Once I've got the battery, the cistern, the pump, and the roof sprinklers, I'm mostly set for providing the best protection I can for this effing expensive middle-class house, which is, in case of fire evacuation, turn on the pump (backed by battery and solar), crank the under eave and rooftop sprinklers, and run like hell. Hopefully I'll have it in this year or next.

    But otherwise, you're right.

    723:

    across much of the west and rest of world is a clear indication that a lot more than 25% fall into the "not terribly well" or worse category.

    There reality and feelings. My brother and others feel they are not doing very well at all. He has a decent job, 2 cars (one provided new by the job every year), owns his 2000sf house and a few acres, eats what he wants when he wants, pays his bills, has power and water, etc... And feels the liberals have cheated him out of what should be his better life.

    724:

    The kind of co-op I had in mind is a business. People get paid for working there, and the administrative work they contribute gets folded into their pay.

    Most people I know just can't see any difference between such and a for profit company. Just do not see it.

    I don't fully agree with them but as other have alluded to, after a while a successful cooperative or for profit business will grow to the point that most people involve don't see a difference.

    725:

    I'll try again, we got this as a reaction to FDR's New Deal, how much worse would it have been if he successfully enacted the Economic Bill of Rights? The complaint of the Mammonites seems to boil down to "The unworthy are receiving blessings!", which sounds little different to me than "Mommy, Mommy! Billy got a bigger piece of cake!".

    726:

    On the other hand, when you look at who's currently on the cabinet, you realize that this is a little like asking the Ringwraiths to vote Sauron out of Mordor. Plus the politics would make for interesting times.

    I donno. Given what Trump did to Mnuchin and most of the Rs in Congress this week loyalty to and fear of Sauron may be waning a bit.

    727:

    You've also got the issue of powerlines causing fires. Which again, is politics. The engineering for building powerlines that don't start fires is long solved. However there are some costs (taller poles, longer insulators, longer crossarms, better vegetation control, padmount transformers) and either providing public money or enforcing proper engineering is a political issue.

    It's politics all the way down.

    728:

    There was never any loyalty to him, but fear of his followers is not going away until they do.

    729:

    Magna International, a successful automotive parts manufacturer, was set up as a cluster of small companies because the founder, Frank Stronach, didn't believe he could manage more than about a hundred people and he didn't believe you could, either. Dunno how Magna's currently organised -- they're not especially forthcoming below the "group" level -- but the approach seems reasonably practical. Plausibly useful in maintaining collective identity. (Sort of an inverse franchise; you're a member of a company of specialists. There are other specialists in allied companies.)

    730:

    People who do not own or open businesses have no clear understanding of what is involved.

    Many involved in successful businesses don't either. They have a hit product with little possible competition for a while and make a gazillion $/£/¥/€/whatever and think they "know" how to run a business. When in reality what they know how to do is not destroy a money making machine. Or how to be lucking in their decisions based on totally wrong thinking. And that's not quite the same thing.

    731:

    "Prosperity gospel" comes out of christian justifications for slavery. So mammonism, which is sort of what happens when the christian dropcloth is pulled off the core principles, sincerely believes that if God wants you to be rich, you'll be rich. If you're poor, trying to make you not-poor cannot work AND it's contrary to the will of God. ("enslaved" can be neatly substituted for "poor".)

    Plus this is all unquestionable axioms absorbed in infancy. It's not subject to rational argument; it's even got far more ostensibly academic backing than something like a flat earth does.

    What you're seeing now is not so much a reaction to the Four Freedoms but a reaction to the idea that mammonism might stop being the state religion, and of course it's going to be a violent reaction. (Y'all do know that post-Reconstruction, various elected state governments were overthrown with cannon and replaced by strictly white government? Dunno if the supreme court judgement that states are free to do that is still considered good law or not, but the precedent's there. The calls to shoot the governor, etc. have at least an historical example of being accepted as sound legal theory.)

    732:

    Thomas Jørgensen @ 710: A waste facility good for a thousand years is not much of an engineering challenge

    As political challenges go OTOH ...

    733:

    Robert Prior @ 721:

    wages are a cost

    Of course wages are a cost. It's obvious!

    Just as it's obvious that executive salaries and bonuses are essential to attract the right talent…

    (That was sarcasm, in case it's not obvious from context.)

    The <tt>(teletype)</tt> tag seems to work here if you want the "sarcasm font".

    Wages are a cost, but so are executive salaries and bonuses. And there's something to be said for the idea that companies should have some purpose; some reason for existing beyond profit maximization. Profits are good, but they're not the only good and what is done with those profits matters.

    Profits should not just be used to increase the rents extracted by the owners of the companies, but to improve the lives of customers & employees and enrich the communities in which those companies operate.

    If they aren't, ownership needs to change.

    734:

    So, what you're suggesting is a international organization, set up under the auspices of the UN, for the US, UK, EU, Russia, China, and India (at least) develop a scalable working reliable design for nuclear reactors, and then build them, and no, private industry, you may NOT SUBSTITUTE ANYTHING WHATSOEVER, build it EXACTLY as the designs show you.

    And anyone not following exactly, or substitutes cheaper, gets shot.

    735:

    Against the Fall of Night/City and the Stars (two versions, one with revisions years later) are among the favorite books I have ever read.

    Um, no, not "millions of years", it's one billion years from now. The sun is slowly changing color.

    736:

    Um, about uranium: radiation, ok... but then there's this thing called heavy metal poisoning. As observed after massive use in war of depleted uranium shells.

    737:

    one of the few things that unites voters across the political spectrum - Republican/Democrat/Conservative/Labour/Liberal/NDP/and every other party out there is their refusal to give up their car

    One of the few things that unites every political party in The Netherlands is their blatant cowardice in the face of voter hostility to cars and car dependence. They might disagree, vehemently, on whether you're a human being or whether you deserve any rights, but they agree that making the Netherlands car dependent would be a suicidal policy platform.

    In The People's Republic of Moreland (Melbourne, Australia) and also in a few places in Sydney and Auckland (Aotearoa) there have been apartments constructed without car parking. These were both extremely popular, and extremely controversial. Someone with more money than sense even went so far as to buy one of those apartments in Auckland purely so they could then whine to all and sundry that it did not have a car park. Sadly the suggestion that they sell it at a profit was met with "but I want to live here, I just need my car". Sadly there's no option to do the opposite, buy an apartment then sue the council and developer because of the unwanted car parking space one was forced to purchase with it (it adds ~50k-$100k to the price but they're only worth ~$3000/year when rented out, in the unlikely event that the body corporate permits that).

    There's a whole lot of urban planners who have realised that at a local level almost no-one wants cars, especially giant car sewers, and if you give them the option they will shun them. Always, always, when face to face with a car cultist, ask them how close they live to the nearest motorway. Most will have done whatever it takes to live within easy driving distance of one but as far from the actual sewer as possible given that constraint. Apparently they don't need cars quite that much...

    738:

    Most of the property gospel is a lot more recent than slavery. I don't know how much of it is a mainstream belief, though there was some disquieting stuff in Barbara Ehrenreich's Brightsided about non-religious positive thinking (the belief that your imagination creates reality) among business leaders.

    739:

    "...a new power source to power the third phase of the industrial revolution.

    Each preceding phase has enjoyed its own, new, power source. With the first phase it was steam engines powered (largely) by coal. With the second phase it was internal combustion engines, powered by oil.

    The third phase was supposed to be powered by nuclear energy..."

    What "third phase"? Supposed by whom? Hari Seldon?

    Power sources change for reasons of convenience. With water power you were limited to fairly small fixed manufacturing installations in a very restricted choice of sites, and if the site was crap for every other requirement you just had to suck it up. The development of the steam engine made it possible to build larger installations in sites that were more generally convenient, and then to build powered transport systems, although they were still big and heavy and relatively inflexible. Then we got electricity which made it possible to have just one or two big buildings with huge steam engines in and send the power to the installations that used it, which could be pretty well anywhere and of any size from very small to very large. (We also did similar things with gas-powered internal combustion engines and high pressure water, but electricity turned out to do the same things more conveniently.)

    Oil was a kind of parallel development roughly contemporaneous with electricity, by coincidence in origin, but in results filling in the gaps where electricity was not convenient and nor was coal. Being a liquid with a high energy density, oil was very useful for fuelling warships and refuelling them at sea, and then for fuelling comparatively small and flexible land transport machines. But big fixed land installations didn't gain anything from oil and continued using coal. (Of course there were also a whole range of intermediate sizes from house fire to locomotive that changed, or didn't, according to other factors too numerous to list affecting the relative convenience of the different fuels.)

    It's not a matter of an ordered progression of "$fuel stages", it's a web of partly overlapping developments over different timescales at varying rates determined by developments in mining/extraction, machining, metallurgy and a whole bunch of other things. Much the same kind of technology would have been developed in the end if only one of coal or oil existed, but at different times and with different aspects being more feasible and so more useful.

    Nuclear power is even less of a transformative step with its own "phase" outside the very limited area of the technology for handling the fuel itself. It's simply a replacement for coal as a fuel for big fixed central power stations, but with less pollution, less transport hassle and longer time to exhaustion. The power generated in those stations just carries on being used for the same things; there is no "nth phase", since no industry beyond the power station notices the difference.

    The difficulty with moving away from oil is again not a matter of replacement or of a "new phase", it's a matter of parallel development again. Coal, nuclear, and renewables are all simply different flavours of the same thing: power sources for fixed land-based electricity generation facilities. None of them are much use for transport or mobile applications (with one or two exceptions like railways in the appropriate geography). The various bodges we have come up with to try and bridge that gap are all still a lot less convenient than oil itself, apart from one or two instances where the balance is altered by laws and regulations and which don't count because the alteration is purely artificial.

    It's similarly wrong to talk about "getting rid of" horses in cities, and even more about "getting rid of cars". The situation there is that there is a requirement for a means of getting yourself plus some reasonable allowance of encumbrance (goods, luggage, passengers) about the place, without requiring physical effort, and with some form of defence against the weather and other people. For a long time the best approximation was some kind of horse and cart, which didn't do it all that well and was beyond the reach of most people. Then we got the car, which displaced the horse-powered methods because it did it rather better and was available to more people. No doubt in due course something else will displace the car. But we aren't going to cease to have some means of performing those functions without abolishing the need, which would mean abolishing weather, people, distances, gravity and things.

    740:

    Oops, I meant prosperity gospel, not property gospel. Freudian slip or finger macro (sometimes I'm my own autocomplete)?

    Cars are mostly about transporting people and stuff with protection from the weather, but to some extent they're also about storing stuff, and they're also a resource for some homeless people.

    741:

    Perhaps Barbara Ehrenreich's Brightsided addresses it; D.J. Trump is a Norman Vincent Peale guy; he was introduced to it by his father. (perhaps a reader's digest condensed version of The Power Of Positive Thinking, if he read it at all.) The affinity with people like Paula White is because they align, excepting the identity of the deity involved. e.g. 2020 Crises Confront Trump With An Outage In The Power Of Positive Thinking (July 25, 2020, Ron Elving) Basically a crude form of chaos magic. (Including the people who follow Prosperity Gospels, which (appear to) supply theological excuses for such things.)

    742:

    Bright-sided came out in 2010, so probably little if anything about Trump.

    I don't remember whether it discusses Theranos (the astonishingly large blood test scam).

    743:

    Most of the property gospel is a lot more recent than slavery.

    Certainly the marketing is, but the continuity in American protestant thought is widely accepted. (e.g., "fred clark prosperity gospel slavery" produces this thesis)

    "fred clark" prosperity gospel slavery gets the posts at Slactivist I was looking for; this one in particular (and the article it references) lay out the continuity from justifications for slavery to modern evanglicism. This one gets into the identity between American evangelical Christianity and the prosperity gospel.

    744:

    Pigeon @ 740

    Just start by reading :

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution

    Then read:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Industrial_Revolution

    And tell me when you've finished.

    By the way, we can't use Hari Seldon's services yet (supposing we brought him here from the future) because his psychohistory was based on a statistical process which only worked when you had an entire galaxy chock full of human beings.

    745:

    Heteromeles @ 716: "Personally, I wish it was just about science. That would be easy."

    I never said it was "just" about Science. I said that the technological problem was not trivial, that you couldn't solve the full expansion of solar power with politics alone.

    I was counting on you (and other activists) to solve the political side.

    But, reading the cases you've written down I'm starting to think that this isn't as much a political problem or a technological problem as an education problem. Those people never had the occasion to get the basics of Science when they were in high school .

    I get the same feeling when I read the written stuff that's put out by the COVID-19 denialists. They weren't given the really basic fundamentals of cell biology when they were in high school.

    746:

    Corrosion issues are significant. Perhaps not fundamental material science level, but unsolved. There are also some probably interesting radioactive chemistry problems.

    @Paul

    Regarding solutions, I like accountability. One of the fundamental current problems with Western capitalism is that wealthy people are insulated from disaster and also have outsized jnfluence - to the point that disaster can be quite profitable. Or, at least, not a real issue.

    So, first off, have a fairly thorough wealth tax. And yes, you can pack up your property and leave. But, foreign companies should be expected to pay for market access.

    Second off, if some disaster, eg, pandemic, comes through, the wealth tax increases to the tune of 10s of trillions. The idea being that wealthy people should be quite adverse to the notion of reducing infrastructure and weathering the occasional disasters. Or, of profiteering off of unneeded wars.

    The same principal can be applied to, eg, Gini coefficients, with the UBI spiking if wealth disparities exceed some threshold.

    How to get there? I expect it involves pressing firearms to the foreheads of surviving upper class people and their children.

    OTOH, looking at income levels, a good 18% of households in the US appear to be over 150k, which if fairly livable in most places, albeit, less so in CA. In the mid-west, you can live well on much less. I'd like to see a breakdown according to local costs, but have not found it.

    747:

    I said that the technological problem was not trivial, that you couldn't solve the full expansion of solar power with politics alone.

    It appears that we are incrementally solving the technical problems, though. We are in the "world's biggest battery" phase of rolling out grid-scale storage, where every few months the WBB title changes hands and last year's winner seems pretty moderate, even while they're busy doubling its size.

    Where the real shitfight is happening seems to be pumped hydro. It's inherently a "big shovel-ready project" but most places stopped building hydro at least 30 years ago so there's not really a body of politically engaged hydro manufacturers bust lobbying, where there very much is a body of coal lobbyists, and even nuclear ones (and an ample helping of fruit loops associated with both camps). So most of the "Boris in a hard hat" talk of of shiny new coal and nuclear plants (you're welcome to call the Australian shiny new coal talk the work of fruit loops, we're required to call them the Right Honourable Prime Minister of Australia and similar titles).

    748:

    I was being too negative yesterday I think. My real ire is directed at the molten salt moonshine. I automatically assume people are referring to this when thorium comes up because the internet loves molten salt...

    More conventional designs aren't unreasonable but they still need someone to invest in trying to make them viable.

    749:

    In the mid-west, you can live well on much less. I'd like to see a breakdown according to local costs, but have not found it.

    Most definitely. I'm in the expensive area of NC and a family of 2 adults and 2 kids can get buy on 60K. They may not drive new cars and their house may be 40 years old but they can live. IF THEY WANT TO.

    That last bit is about the people I know here and in other places that make $70+K, are single, and complain about not having enough money to get to the end of the month. But last month they bought a $700 purse or took a sky trip to Vail a month earlier.

    750:

    They weren't given the really basic fundamentals of cell biology when they were in high school.

    You assume that they AND their parents cared. Or had the ability to understand it. I was on what is now called the STEM track in the early 70s. My graduation class had 235 students. There were 11 of us who took physics. 16 took Chemistry II. I took trig (my attitude kept me from getting into the track that would have allowed me to take calculus but whatever) my last year. There were maybe 15 of us in that class.

    I had a cousin 10 years older than me who got drafted and did a tour in Vietnam. After his service was over he basically said he had changed from an 99% nurture mind set to more like 50/50 nature vs. nurture. Maybe less. Being in the army exposed him to people who, I'm paraphrasing here, there are some real slugs in the world who look like people.

    751:

    Um, about uranium: radiation, ok... but then there's this thing called heavy metal poisoning.

    Most heavy metals are biologically inert or not very harmful. It's the light metals, in both density and atomic number that are really dangerous to you, like lithium, beryllium (brrr!), arsenic etc.

    In comparison silver and gold, uranium etc. are pretty much harmless. There are some heavy metal exceptions, like lead, thallium and mercury but they're quite rare and even they aren't as bad, milligram for milligram as arsenic.

    As observed after massive use in war of depleted uranium shells.

    The Great Depleted Uranium Scare was like Reds Under The Beds, not actually true but it got column inches and justified apparent grievances. Uranium is Scary!, a magic word to the less-well educated and it got blamed for a lot of stuff it just can't do. The biological effects of uranium were studied up the wazoo starting in the 1940s for reasons, the results were pretty much meh since it doesn't take up into animal tissue very easily in the common forms (mostly oxides).

    752:

    Niala The technical problems of power generation & distribution are, shall we say, "trivial" compared to the screwing-over given to this area by the politicians & special-interest groups. Can I half-apologise & downgrade it to "May be correct, but irrelevant" ( Given the political problems ) ?? - see also Heteromeles on political problems. - Later: Those people never had the occasion to get the basics of Science when they were in high school . And never will - they simply CANNOT - EVER get their heads around the concepts of science, & how it works. It seems to be particularly strong in politicians, everywhere.

    Would you believe most of them don't know which direction north is? That's true around here. Yeah - I have to tell this to supposed gardeners ........

    Graydon E.g., the slow and horrible fate of Eastman Kodak. Yeah - tell me about it. I used to work for them.

    gasdive You are doing it AGAIN ... You live approximately, what between 27° & 33° S? Your solutions DO NOT & WILL NOT WORK at 52°N How many times do we have to tell you this before it sinks in? Ask Charlie, if you don't believe me!

    Moz The Netherlands is compact, densely populated & has a very effective public transport system. People will give up ( Or use them a lot less ) their cars if & probably only if you have that system. I live on the NE edge of London - I have a car, which I actually need - but - I only do about 1500-2000 miles in a normal year. But - again - when I need it it really need it & hiring won't cut it.

    "Prosperity Gospel" I remember reading about the serfsCrofters on Arran & elsewhere in late C19th Scotland, complaining about their lot & how they were (basically) starving ... And how they were ranted at by the ultra-Prod evangelical preachers, telling them it was a result of their ( as well as the rest of humanity's ) "sins" - just put up with it & grovel to "Jesus" & it'll be better in the next world. Nothing new here, I'm afraid.

    753:

    Of course I'm doing it again.

    Powerlines work. I know you don't think they do, but I've actually seen powerlines work.

    Your only objection to powerlines that's in any way reasonable (and not very reasonable) is that there are POLITICAL issues to do with crossing borders. (undersea powerlines solve that as they have for data).

    Which was the point. There's no technical reason, it's purely political.

    I live in the low latitudes of the southern hemisphere, and just as the zeroes and ones I type can get to you by cable in an instant, so could electricity. You're "virtually" in the room here with me, seeing what I type. You are effectively here in the southern hemisphere.

    It's a small world. You could get your head around that and stop yelling at me. That would be nice.

    754:

    "Workers' cooperatives– there are about 18,000 across Spain, together employing 300,000 people" The Guardian 2012

    There is a strong cooperative movement in Spain, but note the generally small size which was warped further by Mondragon which at the time employed 85000 whilst claiming to be a proper co-operative (the claiming is only because I have no knowledge of the accuracy of the claim).

    The Co-operative movement might be strong in Spain because there was a strong Anarcho-Socialist movement. But there is obviously a host of examples and a support system to help organisations to start up (Coceta).

    UK cooperatives tended to be retail organisations brought together to reduce the cost of purchasing food -

    "The first documented consumer cooperative was founded in 1769,in a barely furnished cottage in Fenwick, East Ayrshire, when local weavers manhandled a sack of oatmeal into John Walker's whitewashed front room and began selling the contents at a discount, forming the Fenwick Weavers' Society." Wikipedia

    755:

    You used the term "politics of envy" - then you used the flat subsidy example. Your arguing now for a position of special terms because we got X you want the same and don't deserve it because !!!.

    Try https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/843487/Transport_and_inequality_report.pdf

    TLDR The poorer your transport options the worse your position

    Now that can be countered by the fact that inequality is worse in London than elsewhere on some measures. Somerset is the new Cotswolds so we are getting more people like me (incomers) so the level of inequality is probably increasing, but absolute poverty exists in London and it also exists out here.

    It was your use of a denigrating term that grates by the way. It's a specious argument that all criticism of London is part of politics of envy.

    756:

    No. It's the fucking fake greenies who will do anything at all to stop "nuclear" now matter how safe it is ... Noticeable that they don't seem to have traction in France - see other posters on this.

    Given the history of French politics around nuclear activities (see for example the Rainbow Warrior affair) I'd be entirely unsurprised to discover that DGSE had been conducting black ops against French environmentalist/anti-nuclear groups for decades, along the lines of COINTELPRO.

    757:

    Moving your thesis backwards three or four centuries, you could add the use of water power to drive the start of the textile revolution. Some historians note that the use of Fulling Mills changed the textile industry and lifted production possibilities which in turn started the generation of wealth in some parts of Europe. This was then lifted by Banking innovations that meant capital could be raised and more investment could be generated - this helped in both England, the Low Countries and Italy.

    758:

    gasdive Yes, so it's a political problem.... Given the omnishambles of Brexit .. yes we could buy our power from, ooh, Morocco or Algeria, maybe? Now then your/our country is utterly dependent upon the continuing political good will of thiose places & the intervening places & the trustworthiness of all the guvmints involved - including our own lying incompetent shower of course. Maybe not such a good idea?

    Charlie Yes, well, them as well - wouldn't surprise me in the least. Except that Rainbow Warrior was agin nuclear open testing - a very justifiable cause.

    759:

    You want governments to control rather a lot. Do you have ideas about how to keep it reasonably honest?

    https://www.politico.com/news/2020/12/27/marijuana-legalization-corruption-450529

    Yes, it would be good for people to have a basic understanding of science. Thoughts about how this can be taught? Countries where people are more apt to know the science and its applicability? How do they do it?

    I'm inclined to blame conventional schooling for a lot-- in particular a structure which keeps students in simulationland. They're supposed to learn things without a connection to desire, decisions, action, and consequences. We've had that for generations, and I think we're seeing some bad results.

    760:

    SlightlyFoxed @ 758

    It's not my thesis. There were already many books on the topic when I took professor Bayley's class on the History of Technology back in the late 70s at McGill. Also, the two main Wikipedia articles on the topic have suffficent online citations and suggest good references.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Industrial_Revolution

    There were also many books on the topic of the proto-industrial revolution of the 12th to early 14th centuries and the Wikipedia article on medieval technology is moderately good.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_technology

    This is the best known work on the topic.

    Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages, by Jean Gimpel

    Because of the plague and famines everything was cut short.

    761:

    it adds ~50k-$100k to the price but they're only worth ~$3000/year when rented out, in the unlikely event that the body corporate permits that

    You're joking, right?

    A return of 3% to 6% per year is utterly bonkers compared to current global interest rates, and it's a capital asset that's only going to appreciate (as long as the kleptocrats at the top keep encouraging a real estate price bubble).

    You should totally buy car parking slots if you plan to retire in the next 10-20 years (the event horizon for self-parking vehicles to show up and disrupt the close-to-home parking space rental market).

    762:

    Powerlines work. I know you don't think they do, but I've actually seen powerlines work.

    Your sense of scale is out of whack.

    Powerlines to the UK and similar latitudes from regions with decent insolation are on the same scale as powerlines from Sydney to Perth ... and longer: really, spanning the south of Spain/north of Africa to northern Scotland or the Scandinavian countries is a tough call, even before you factor in bad weather (we get winter storms with what Americans call "hurricane force" winds every year) and sea crossings.

    Also, you're not talking about the odd few hundred MW or a couple of GW for grid balancing purposes: you're talking about demand in the tens to hundreds of gigawatts (the UK needs something like 180GW to cover not only electricity consumption but transport and heating -- the latter two mostly run on petrol and methane at present).

    So not only do you have to scale up the distances by an order of magnitude, you have to scale up the capacity by 2-3 OOM. And that's the problem.

    763:

    He has a decent job, 2 cars (one provided new by the job every year), owns his 2000sf house and a few acres, eats what he wants when he wants, pays his bills, has power and water, etc... And feels the liberals have cheated him out of what should be his better life.

    Has he ever articulated exactly what he's been cheated out of? Or is it a nebulous "better"?

    764:

    The complaint of the Mammonites seems to boil down to "The unworthy are receiving blessings!", which sounds little different to me than "Mommy, Mommy! Billy got a bigger piece of cake!".

    To me, it sounds more like "Daddy, Daddy! Billy got cake!". Not even a pretense of fairness.

    765:

    Got it - my wife wrote a book on the textile history of the region.

    766:

    Not to mention that politics is an entirely sane and reasonable objection to putting your power production in another country you do not have an absolutely rock solid relationship with.

    RE: Uranium ammo: It is still in use because the workable alternatives for armor-killing are, in fact, vastly more toxic, and people should be lobbying the armies using tungsten penetrators to damn well switch over to DU, not the other way around.

    Iraq did have an enormous health crisis as a direct result of the second Iraq war, but.. you really do not need to go looking for exotic explanations for that - sewage in the streets, unreliable power, and the attendant constant use of poorly maintained generators in close proximity, waste burning in open pits, ect, ect.

    767:

    Yes, it would be good for people to have a basic understanding of science. Thoughts about how this can be taught?

    Pay for it.

    The USSR did it; the Finns do it. Everywhere in East Asia does it. They do it different ways, but the common element is that they pay for it.

    (Oh, and tangentially? you start teaching science when they're five. High school is too late.)

    The US in particular strangled public education after Brown vs. Board of Education. Quite something when, given the alternatives between collapse into irrelevance and a hale empire, the choice is collapse because "hale empire" means being less racist. (It is hard to shake the sense that Brexit's core motivation really is the xenophobia, and at root it's the same "racism is my reason for living" construction; the body politic will collectively give up everything else first.)

    768:

    It was your use of a denigrating term that grates by the way. It's a specious argument that all criticism of London is part of politics of envy.

    Which I never said.

    769:

    Besides, political issues tend to be less tractable than technical issues. If you wanted a non-CO2 solution in the UK, I predict that nuclear is faster than solar-beamed power satellites which are both faster than power lines.

    Now, question is - does it matter? No, probably not. Consider the fraction of the world's population covered by solar + power lines + hydro. Excepting, perhaps, Canada, that covers all of the American continents, Africa, and the major population centers in Asia and Europe, along with the Middle East.

    Maybe the UK should be fine with - we are a rounding error - and shall keep polluting until someone comes up with cheap solar-based fuels? Or, perhaps, rent out some fairly local sunlit sea.

    770:

    So not only do you have to scale up the distances by an order of magnitude, you have to scale up the capacity by 2-3 OOM. And that's the problem.

    The core problem with long-range transmission of power into Britain from sunnier climes is that the Med is seismically active; you can run reliable infrastructure from Britain to the mainland no problem, but you can't do it from the Sahara to anywhere outside of Africa because there's an active fault boundary somewhere on the way. Maybe there's a way to manage this, but on known art it's in the "bridge to Vancouver Island" category.

    On the other hand, the US improved-grid plan Trump killed pointed out that a big integrated grid (which the US does not presently have) would solve most of the domestic power problems; you're basically shifting sunlight and wind around. There's no obvious reason a European grid wouldn't do the same thing.

    Seventh and last it still comes down to food production that's not dependent on fossil carbon. There's a distressing lack of research focus on that set of problems.

    771:

    I was counting on you (and other activists) to solve the political side.

    Sadly, it doesn't work that way. I trained as a scientist, and I detest politics. The reason I do it is that I detest extinction even more, and rather too many scientists are all about only doing science and staying out of politics. By sheer chance I got into a position where I could deal with political issues without worrying about my reputation, so I did.

    But if you're in the sciences and counting on people like me to do your dirty work for you, the bad news is that there are a handful of us compared with whole companies and university departments full of scientists doing what they're paid to do.

    But, reading the cases you've written down I'm starting to think that this isn't as much a political problem or a technological problem as an education problem. Those people never had the occasion to get the basics of Science when they were in high school .

    Oh, they were given the education. They just forgot it after the tests. The legitimate problem with politicians is that their core skills are working with people and organizing them. Then they're confronted, routinely, with problems that they have no inherent clue how to solve. They're being asked to solve homelessness, pandemic response, climate change, wealth disparities, and growing pothole problems, all by people who, for the most part, don't want to pay to have the problems solved. This is why they have staffs, to provide subject matter expertise and work with them on different issues. But they still get stuck with fugly problems. For example, the intersection of climate change, wildfire, homelessness, and the extinction crisis? That's a fucking miserable hole to get stuck in (and a real problem around here).

    I actually respect many of the politicians I've met, including some of the republicans. They work way harder than I do, and their job is even more thankless. And some few of them (and their staff people) are frighteningly intelligent. The problem is, many of them get so overwhelmed by the complexity of the issues they have to deal with that they resort to simple heuristics: party line vote, following the money, counting noses to see who's willing to show up and make noise about an issue, finding the obvious compromise, that sort of thing.

    In this sort of environment, it's hard to explain that solar works better if there's a lot of room for solar panels on roofs and they're pointed the right way. Or that clearing around powerlines for fire safety can make them less safe from fires (because of regrowth--you've got to clear at least once per year to make this work, and often they clear every 3-5 years because of budget compromises). Or that you need parks to sequester the carbon your city's going to produce while you try to make state mandates for adding affordable housing, so you can't pave more of the parks to handle the expected influx of new people.

    This is what you're asking the activists to solve for you. If you want that solution to work, you really need to show up and do your part when the activists turn around and ask for your help.

    772:

    " I've read his take on the price of his cars in the teens and 20s was that his employees who worked on the assembly line should be able to buy one of what they produced after a couple of years."

    This is an urban legend. It doesn't work, for obvious reasons (Ford was a high volume producer, and the workforce was relatively small).

    The way that I heard it, the high salaries were due to a characteristic of assembly line work vs 'gang' work. Gang work scales with the number of workers; assembly line work has a rapid fall-off with absenteeism. By paying a lot, a job at Ford was a job which you just didn't quit.

    (an old Ford retiree told me in the 1990's that the old guys in his years said that Ford guys would wear their badges at the bars, to pick up women)

    773:

    "In our recent past it took us one and a half industrial revolutions (or one and a half phases of the single Industrial Revolution) to get rid of horses in the cities. It might take as much time to get rid of cars in the cities. "

    Somebody talking about electric cars/trucks started off with two street scenes in NYC: 1903, 1913. The first was a mass of horses; the second was none. They pointed out that this was done in a single decade.

    774:

    "The solution to the power problem is entirely political..."

    And an engineer thinks: 'how hard can it be to solve a political problem? It's not like it's a hard engineering problem!'

    775:

    Not to mention that politics is an entirely sane and reasonable objection to putting your power production in another country you do not have an absolutely rock solid relationship with.

    This. Very much this.

    Living next to America, Canadians are very much aware that international agreements are just "words on paper" and can be ignored at the drop of a hat. Aluminium, for example. Softwood lumber. PPE during a pandemic.

    776:

    Greg Tingey:678

    There are also rumbles that IQ45 is going to roll up on 6th January & try to overturn the election ...

    I also think that between now & 20th Jan is going to make the Brexitshambles look sane & normal

    I think there are a bunch in the media, having bought into the myth of Trump's power base and that his racist supporters would come to his rescue, who are extremely disappointed that the armed rebellion/revolution/rioting in the streets has failed to happen.

    And so they keep doubling down, predicting the next "exciting chapter" that they will get to cover creating themselves in glory while have some excitement in an otherwise dull career.

    Things like the idea Pence will finally oust Trump (why? It's a fair guess Pence was promised something in return for suffering 4 years as Trump's VP, 20+ days out he isn't going to jeopardize whatever it is). Or Trump will triumphantly march into Congress and stop Biden.

    None of it will happen beyond Trump ranting and raving like a spoiled baby and a dwindling number of true believers whispering what he wants to hear into his ears.

    ilya187:697 My daughters are (almost) 29 and 25. The oldest one did not get her license until she was 22, and they both hate driving. So do their boyfriends. They would give up cars in an instant, if they could.

    Yes, I am aware of the young generation and cars - it's why Ford is returning to downtown(ish) Detroit.

    But note I said voters, not people. Sadly young people (in general) don't vote, and the current US estimates are something like 52% of voters are 50+

    So the point remains that voters demand cars.

    Niala:705 One of my favorite science fiction novels is the Pyramid Paperback edition of Clarke's Against the Fall of Night, with cover art by John Schoenherr.

    The cities have no cars in them, and they don't feel like abstract, artificial, perfect worlds when you read the novel. Of course, it helps that they're set several millions of years in the future.

    No, it helps that they are a work of fiction, so the "residents" do exactly what the author wanted them to do.

    Fiction can be a wonderful thing, it can show us what can be and influence minds, but at the end of the day it is an artificial creation that can ignore inconveniences and force solutions.

    Moz_:738

    One of the few things that unites every political party in The Netherlands is their blatant cowardice in the face of voter hostility to cars and car dependence. They might disagree, vehemently, on whether you're a human being or whether you deserve any rights, but they agree that making the Netherlands car dependent would be a suicidal policy platform.

    The Netherlands has 8 million cars for 17 million people(*) - they already are car dependent.

    Yes, they may be doing better than most other countries in the world at providing alternatives (public transit, bikes), but they still have a population dependent on cars.

    In The People's Republic of Moreland (Melbourne, Australia) and also in a few places in Sydney and Auckland (Aotearoa) there have been apartments constructed without car parking. These were both extremely popular, and extremely controversial.

    It can work in some areas - very densely populated so most stuff either walkable or good public transit.

    But a city near me tried that (at the request of the developers, who didn't like the cost of building undergound parking) where they reduced the parking requirements - and the result was illegal street parking and illegal parking on nearby private property.

    So it doesn't work everywhere, and with a lot of places having suffered from a lack of investment in public transit that isn't going to change anytime soon.

    gasdive:754

    Your only objection to powerlines that's in any way reasonable (and not very reasonable) is that there are POLITICAL issues to do with crossing borders. (undersea powerlines solve that as they have for data).

    Which was the point. There's no technical reason, it's purely political.

    Except political is an extremely big point.

    Trump/Brexit/etc have all demonstrated that you cannot trust a partner country to behave in your best interests.

    Electricity is a national security issue, as the French realized decades ago when they went nuclear.

    If, for example, the UK went all solar with solar farms in some southern country it would put the UK entirely in the hands of that southern country - who could at any time decide to blackmail the UK into paying up to maintain the supply of electricity, or simple cut the power because some MP or private company "looked at us funny"

    Or those undersea cables would make a tempting target for someone wanting to make mischief (see- Russia).

    Yes, oil/coal/natural gas can have some of these same issues - but because the generating plants are on your own soil you typically will have more options as sourcing the fuel from somewhere different is a lot easier than attempting to move a plant (solar or otherwise) on foreign soil and the expensive dedicated power lines.

    777:

    And an engineer thinks: 'how hard can it be to solve a political problem? It's not like it's a hard engineering problem!'

    Yes, this is true. And until they attempt properly spec out the political problem, prototype their solution, and test it out, it will continue to be true.

    778:

    Somebody talking about electric cars/trucks started off with two street scenes in NYC: 1903, 1913. The first was a mass of horses; the second was none. They pointed out that this was done in a single decade.

    Horses to cars was easy - there was no massive infrastructure project required and the car provided obvious benefits over the horse.

    The are 2 problems with going to electric.

    First, it is in a way like returning to the horse - battery power has similar limitations in that there is a distance limit with no quick "2 minute recharge" option. So for many going electric is a step backwards (even if in practise they would rarely exceed the max range per charge).

    Second, it doesn't remove cars from the cities, just changes them.

    And removing cars from cities requires massive public transit investment (you aren't getting much done in a single decade), and for many "cities" it means a move to much higher densities given their current suburb design.

    Both the densification and public transit are primarily political issues, and they are very big political issues. Suburban home owners don't like high density developments "ruining" their neighbourhoods and fight any attempts at putting in high density housing.

    779:

    Probably, the notion of the prosperity gospel goes back to the neolithic, or whenever the first era of "god-kings" cropped up in a particular society. The idea that the otherworld (however parsed) favors certain people at the expense of others is an obvious and easy way to explain perceived inequalities. Sorting out the more and less-random influences that account for such inequalities is difficult, time consuming, and hard to generalize from.

    I doubt that there's a continuity line between the first god-kings and the prosperity gospelites. It's such a simple and obvious meme that it's definitely popped up, independently, all over the world. If one was trying to trace a continuity of this idea across generations and cultures, the trace would involve retention of pointless idiosyncrasies in the belief systems.

    That said, I think it's perfectly reasonable to harshly criticize any xtian gospel of prosperity, both because it's precisely the opposite of what Jesus taught (so far as I understand the prosperity gospel). A number of thoughtful people have made the argument that the Jesus of the gospels is far better classified as an anarchist than as supporting class divisions of any sort.

    780:

    There's a third problem, which is that electric cars average around 3-5 kWh/mile, depending on how crazy the driver is. Right now, that energy is supplied in the form of gasoline, but if you're going to do it with electricity, you've got to generate that electricity somewhere and move it to where the cars are charging. The grid we have isn't quite designed for that.

    To pick one excellent example: Death Valley National Park. Gorgeous place, lots of sun. The problem is that to get there from the nearest town is a 100 mile, one way drive, and you can drive a long way inside the park. How to visit it with an electric car? Either put up lots of solar panels and charging stations (in a national park!) or put up a huge transmission line and charging stations (in a national park!). And goddes help us when they start rolling up with electric RVs.

    Yellowstone is even worse, since it's a mile up and in northern Wyoming, where they're serious about their snowfall.

    I'm just picking on these two because it makes the problem so obvious. A place like Los Angeles or Mexico City has the same problem only far worse, but it's less obvious how bad the problem is inside a city, because of the existing power structure. Putting hundreds of charging stations out in the wilderness highlights the issue.

    781:

    And an engineer thinks: 'how hard can it be to solve a political problem? It's not like it's a hard engineering problem!'

    Both Koch brothers were MIT engineers. And when they saw what they perceived a problem -- rich people losing their power, -- they approached it as an engineering problem. And were remarkably successful.

    782:

    You want governments to control rather a lot. Do you have ideas about how to keep it reasonably honest?

    To whom were you responding?

    I'm inclined to blame conventional schooling for a lot-- in particular a structure which keeps students in simulationland. They're supposed to learn things without a connection to desire, decisions, action, and consequences. We've had that for generations, and I think we're seeing some bad results.

    How would schooling which "connects things to desire, decisions, action, and consequences" even look like? I suppose this describes how children learned from their parents and from the rest of the tribe for most of history, but how would you implement it nowadays? Especially in subjects like science, where most parents are woefully unprepared?

    783:

    electric cars average around 3-5 kWh/mile

    Actually, most electric cars manage about 5km per kWh (high-end Tesla, 80kWh battery pack, range ca. 400km on a single charge). Some minimalist EV cars do a bit better than that but not much more than double at best. The Citroen Ami, for example, has a 5.5kWh battery pack and can cover 60km or so on a charge but it's limited to 45 kph and can carry only two people.

    784:

    Heteromeles @ 772: " If you want that solution to work, you really need to show up and do your part when the activists turn around and ask for your help."

    The last time that happened was in the seventies when a Greenpeace activist wanted me to sign something about saving baby seals. I considered it impolite for me to tell her that I would rather save the poor fishermen of the Maritimes, who counted on the seal hunt to make just enough money to be eligible for Unemployment Benefits the rest of the year. Instead I said something obduscating and not really impolite.

    The reality of activism in Canada is that a lot of it is concentrated in Greenpeace (which was born in British Columbia)and that Greenpeace is concerned a lot with West Coast issues that don't go well with East Coast (The Maritimes) issues.

    785:

    Since we're on nuclear power again I wondeer if someone knowledgeable can tell me how correct or not the paper - Limits to growth: Can nuclear power supply the world’s needs? - is? It sounds plausible to me but then I'm a moron - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0096340212459124

    786:

    Re: ' ... removing cars from cities requires massive public transit investment '

    Haven't read all the comments since my last visit, so apologies if this was already answered.

    Okay ... except that I'd like to see some data on 2020 re:

    1- number of people (percent of population) who actually needed to go to a specific location in order to 'work'

    2- of these, how many (what percent) had to drive vs. had access to public transit

    3- what proportion of essential workers relied on public transit (and why)

    4- what's the monetary trade-off between expanding public transit and meeting climate goals?

    5- Average occupancy rates of downtown office buildings, utility and other overhead operating expenses

    I'm betting that, on average, these corps' utility* costs dropped, so what did they do with the savings? Meanwhile, their remote-working employees' utility incl. hi-speed internet connection, etc. costs escalated. So -- did their employers help out with these unanticipated added costs? (Basically: what are the commuting to office vs. working from home cost trade-off for each of the employer and employee.)

    • Other costs would include: rent, office furniture/equipment, lunchroom, coffee, snacks, office cleaning, and let's not forget toilet tissue!

    Tie-in to your comment:

    If corps insist on having employees commute to their 'work' location, then it's to these corps' benefit to share some of the cost of a reliable public transit system. Usually this cost-sharing is via municipal taxes but unfortunately some municipal pols prefer fame to sanity, i.e., they'd rather have a big name head-officed in their town -- BigRiver -- than have a sensible tax base and infrastructure program.

    General comment:

    It seems as though a lot of folks here think that we're going or should strive to return to a pre-DT, pre-BrExit life. Really don't understand why, nor why we shouldn't aspire to something better. It's been a crappy year, but that doesn't mean we should forget the hard lessons learned.

    787:

    Nuclear power cannot supply the world's needs.

    There are no working designs suitable for mass production; there is no established community of practice; there is massive political opposition. The minimum build-out time is too long, because we've got maybe ten years.

    Once we're widely into a Pliocene climate there's serious food supply issues. Power stops being the problem.

    The options we've got are do nothing (hello, Eocene climate), solar/wind/storage (which is where we're going, but not fast enough), and miracle.

    788:

    “There's a third problem, which is that electric cars average around 3-5 kWh/mile” err, no, off by an order of magnitude. There’s a local delivery company that use Tesla X (the one that is actually a big heavy lump of metal) plus trailers to deliver up and down the island. They tell me that they get pretty much the claimed range unless a long high-speed highway run with trailer is involved. So even for this ‘difficult case’ they still see about 300Wh per mile rather than your 3kWh figure.

    And as for the eng/pol thing - an engineering problem is hard until we bend reality to our will but a political problem is impossible until we can bend a bazillion morons to our will. I know which I see as harder.

    789:

    A postcard:

    We do have the tools to disrupt monopolistic capitalism, if we want to use them. For example, before WW1 John D Rockerfeller owned about 1% of the USA, personally, through ownership of Standard Oil - I don't mean he had 1% of US income, that would have been small beer; he owned 1% of the wealth, in other words everything. Another three or four people owned big pieces as well.

    However, Teddy Rosevelt, with a lot of his votes from what they called 'progressives' in those days used legislation, in particular Anti Trust legislation, which (eventually) broke Standard Oil into seven sucessors. They were still big, and were the ancestors of Exon and the like, but he broke Rockerfeller sufficiently that his descendents are merely a few amongst several tens of thousands of very rich Americans.

    There are other flurries of similar sucess, such as the 1970s break-up of the Bell empire.

    I don't think there have been enough of them, or that they have gone far enough, but these tools are real and effective.

    Other tools, which we (the world) have used include wealth taxes, re-distribution of land and high marginal income taxes. (I like the look of taxing realised capital gains as income, myself).

    We can do these things, if we get the democratic authority for it.

    Long postcard -sorry.

    790:

    You're right. It's 4 miles/kWh on my Bolt, ranging from 3-5, not 3-5 kWh/mile. Thanks for catching that.

    Same problem though: it's a hell of a lot of electricity when you add it up with millions of commuters. We're going to have to upgrade our grids, as well as put a lot more panels on roofs.

    791:

    Heteromeles: "There's a third problem, which is that electric cars average around 3-5 kWh/mile, depending on how crazy the driver is. "

    So that's sorted then. No shift to electric until everyone can go to Death Valley without inconvenience.

    Might I suggest there are more subtle things going on here? I have no plans to go to Death Valley (or anywhere in the US). Can I get an electric car to drive to work?

    In the vanishingly rare times that I need to travel somewhere like the Alaska Highway, maybe then I could rent a gas burner?

    We've all been round this coaster a few times now. Edge cases are not the norm. EVs can and are excellent for urban driving, which (SHOCK) is what most people do most of the time.

    Others may need other solutions, but the fact that a trip to Death Valley requires something else is not a reason to dismiss EVs in the vast, overwhelming majority of use cases.

    792:

    Eh. There is a laundry list of minor issues, all of which are solvable in the context of 'solar and CO2 don't exist.'

    That said, there would be occasional failures, which would total far less than current death tolls from coal.

    Re cars, I'm not sure that the geographic / population density in the US is compatible with non-car solutions. And car-sharing, eg, runs into the issue of bad neighbors. (Of which, I freely admit, I will be until our daughter passes the age of experimentally dumping various substances upon the car seats.)

    So, electric cars are probably the best path forwards in most of the US.

    793:

    "The reality of activism in Canada is that a lot of it is concentrated in Greenpeace (which was born in British Columbia)and that Greenpeace is concerned a lot with West Coast issues that don't go well with East Coast (The Maritimes) issues. "

    Strongly disagree. Greenpeace has long since decamped to Amsterdam. Enviro activism in the last decade has been focused on oil and forests.

    Counterpoint to what you said about the seal 'harvest' allowing struggling fishermen to qualify for Employment Insurance. The great unintended consequence of the 10:40 employment insurance game was that a lot of people kept fishing cod when there wasn't an economic case to do so (Because fishing for 10 weeks allowed you to collect 40 weeks of EI). As a partial result, the cod stocks were fished so heavily they collapsed.

    That wasn't the only impact nor the only cause, but it definitely contributed. Setting up an exctractive system that keeps a relatively fixed number people working in an industry that has advanced technologically is doomed to fail.

    The total catch comparison between a modern trawler and a Dory with hand nets and longlines is dramatic. You cannot have the same number of fishers working it and expect the stocks to last. The collapse of the stocks was the inevitable result of reality crashing into feelings.

    794:

    Others may need other solutions, but the fact that a trip to Death Valley requires something else is not a reason to dismiss EVs in the vast, overwhelming majority of use cases.

    It's exactly the sort of edge case people with city council votes get totally wedged on. (Politicians hate making people unhappy; it's one of the reasons for the whole "define them as not-human" thing, it makes the politics of refusal so much easier.)

    Thankfully, in this case it's a bogus concern. If you can drive there, there's a parking lot. The parking lot gets roofed in solar panels. If the parking lot isn't enough area, roadways in the park get roofed with solar panels. Freeway sign supports are off-the-shelf mass production items; figure out the spacing, order however many that is, and get installing.

    Have a plan for when birds start nesting behind the panels. Have a plan for dusting the panels. Have a plan for putting the street lights under the solar panels, and having them be LED and as diffuse, bug-friendly, and sparse as you can get away with. Make sure you've introduced these plans to one another.

    795:

    whitroth @ 735: So, what you're suggesting is a international organization, set up under the auspices of the UN, for the US, UK, EU, Russia, China, and India (at least) develop a scalable working reliable design for nuclear reactors, and then build them, and no, private industry, you may NOT SUBSTITUTE ANYTHING WHATSOEVER, build it EXACTLY as the designs show you.

    And anyone not following exactly, or substitutes cheaper, gets shot.

    Sounds good to me. I think it should include Iran, Brazil, any other emerging nations who need (or think they need) nuclear power to meet domestic energy requirements.

    Although I do think there might be a few problems.

    1. The right-wingnuts in the U.S. Congress (or U.K. Parliament or other national governments) won't sign on to anything where some UN bureaucRAT is gonna' be telling them what they can & cannot do.
    2. "Private industry" ain't gonna build them unless they're guaranteed a profit (and more likely OBSCENE profits)
    3. You still haven't got a plan for dealing with the spent fuel & other radioactive wastes.

    796:

    Both Koch brothers were MIT engineers. And when they saw what they perceived a problem -- rich people losing their power, -- they approached it as an engineering problem. And were remarkably successful.

    And at the end of the day their solutions can be summed up as throw lots of money at the "solution", a very large amount that conveniently still remained essentially a rounding error for them given how rich they are/were.

    For most other people, trying to save the planet or deal with local issues, the lack of a spare billion or so means it is actually a real problem.

    797:

    Absent nuclear, the longer-term solution for baseload power in Britain is: Tidal We have large tide range, surrounded entirely by water & lots of wide estuaries & bays. You do not need to build a barrage right across any of these ( Which you don't want to do because - wildlife / silting / shipping flow ) But a half-barrage will do very nicely, &/or giant tidal lagoons - all fitted up with reversible turbines ... build a series of these in every major estuary or bay & the amount of power available is quite remarkable. Why isn't it being done? Because mammonite politics demands that "private companies" ( big monopoly combines ) should build & operate these for a profit, rather than it being done, Dutch-style as a national survival programme. The technical problems, at today's state of knowledge are trivial.

    Barry I am ( or was ) an Engineer of sorts - the problem with a lot of politicians ( even given H's comments ) is that they are fucking STUPID. Look no further than Corbyn ( Hasn't learnt a thing since 1973 ) or BoZo - who though "intelligent" is actually just a good stage magician.

    Graydon ( & also Moz ) You have a point, which you did not emphasise enough: Storage IF - we can find / improve / develop electrical storage ( And I mean really big-time stuff here ) - THEN - the problem(s) are basically solved ELSE - we're fucked as a certain poster frequently says.

    798:

    Nancy Lebovitz @ 739: Most of the property gospel is a lot more recent than slavery. I don't know how much of it is a mainstream belief, though there was some disquieting stuff in Barbara Ehrenreich's Brightsided about non-religious positive thinking (the belief that your imagination creates reality) among business leaders.

    The prosperity gospel descends directly from John Calvin's teachings on predestination and the salvation of the elect.

    Calvin was working at about the time chattel slavery of kidnapped Africans was being introduced into Europe's "New World" colonies, but chattel slavery predates Calvinism by quite a bit (ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, classical Greece, and of course, Rome [republic & empire]).

    799:

    The last time that happened was in the seventies when a Greenpeace activist wanted me to sign something about saving baby seals. I considered it impolite for me to tell her that I would rather save the poor fishermen of the Maritimes, who counted on the seal hunt to make just enough money to be eligible for Unemployment Benefits the rest of the year.

    So, how many poor fishermen, surviving on the seal hunt and government subsidy, did you save?

    As noted by Rocketjps in terms of the cod fishery, those seal hunters were only existing because the government found a way to temporarily deny reality - that there was no viable commercial market for the product (and by viable commercial, I mean a market that paid wages that the workers could survive on without government help). Or for the cod fishery, that they no longer needed 100x the workers.

    The best thing, albeit politically suicidal, would have been for the government to have let those industries evolve naturally instead of attempting to prop them up, with the resulting natural decrease in people employed. And the only reason the government intervened was because doing so would have meant accepting that those communities were no longer viable and the people would need to move elsewhere.

    800:

    Concerning electric vehicles, a data point from Montreal (Quebec): My wife and I live in west suburban Montreal, about 20 km from the periurbs. We have a Prius Prime hybrid, which gets us a little better than 40 km on a charge in warm weather. (In winter, probably half that.) For all of our regular daily chores, such as shopping, we can easily complete the necessary travel and still have km to burn remaining in the battery. We can even drive into town to meet our friends and return without burning any gas. It took us more than 6 months (including several winter months) to burn our first tank of gas, and at that, we still had ca. 20% of a tank remaining. About the same for the second tank, allowing for differences in weather during the two periods. That's a good thing in my books.

    There are some particular contexts to consider. Quebec has some of the cheapest electricity in the world, so it costs us very little to recharge the battery. Haven't calculated details, but the monthly electrical bill doesn't differ noticeably from pre-Prius bills; monthly variations drown out any increase. Quebec is also aggressively increasing its network of charging stations, and plans to ban the sale of gas-only vehicles starting in 2035. Slower than desirable, but probably more feasible because of the gradual implementation.

    Our hydroelectric power is semi-green, since hydro has an incorrect reputation for being carbon neutral. In fact, most reservoirs emit a shit ton of methane, and often increase overall greenhouse gas emissions. But on the whole, the balance seems favorable: if you account for other problems such as NOx and sulfur compounds and miscellaneous other crap emitted by burning gas, eliminating those emissions using an electric vehicle might outweigh the negative greenhouse effects.

    801:

    There are a bunch of assholes, er, GOP who are talking about standing up in Congress on 5 Jan and demanding that they vote on whether to refuse to accept the election results.

    It's not media exaggeration.

    802:

    Nojay @ 784: "Some minimalist EV cars do a bit better than that but not much more than double at best. The Citroen Ami, for example"

    The Citroen Ami is a masterpiece in mimimalist design.

    Intended for the ride-share market it is also sold to individuals. Legally it is a quadricycle and not a car, so they were able to skip a lot of things in the design.

    I consider it an urban vehicle and not a traditional car, so to me getting rid of cars in a city doesn't mean getting rid of the Citroen Amis. The only trouble is that it isn't easy to use it to haul manure to a community garden.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citro%C3%ABn_Ami_(electric)

    803:

    "High density" is not just a suburban issue. When we lived inside Chicago, in an older neighborhood (mostly build pre-1930), a developer paid off our Councilman, and took out what was there and put in two: one, with NO street side, and the exit for at least three houses was the end of the driveway behind the block, and then there was the old farmhouse, on a large lot, on the corner of Ridge Blvd and Touhy. Feel free to look that one up, facing east on Tough. Three houses. Garages facing the street. Major accidenst and traffic jams guaranteed.

    Just (like 25'-50') east of Ridge & Tough was where Rogers, coming in at about a 30 degree angle, ran into Touhy. Traffic coming west on Rogers, and Touhy, coming to a traffic light... and that's exactly where there were three houses' garages out onto.

    804:

    David L @ 750:

    In the mid-west, you can live well on much less. I'd like to see a breakdown according to local costs, but have not found it.

    Most definitely. I'm in the expensive area of NC and a family of 2 adults and 2 kids can get buy on 60K. They may not drive new cars and their house may be 40 years old but they can live. IF THEY WANT TO.

    That last bit is about the people I know here and in other places that make $70+K, are single, and complain about not having enough money to get to the end of the month. But last month they bought a $700 purse or took a sky trip to Vail a month earlier.

    With a little bit of luck, some advance planning (deferred gratification) & self sacrifice, a single person can live fairly comfortably here on $24K/year.

    The house is 80+ years old & not in great shape, but at least it's paid for and I ain't sleeping under a bridge somewhere (although I do already have my spot picked out for if things ever get that bad).

    805:

    Returning to pre-pandemic.

    So, you think a lot of folks should work from home. Great. Who's going to pay for people to rent an apt, or a house, or buy a house, with a minimum of one extra room for an office (two, if it's a couple)? We're talking $100k or so per.

    And I wanted to go in to work. It meant that when I was not at work, I WAS NOT WORKING.

    806:

    The breakup of the Bell empire...

  • The final decision was in 1984. When I was hired by Ameritech, one of the Baby Bells, in '95, I, personally, was required to sign on to a consent decree about that.
  • The upshot was we're back to monopolies, or semi-monopolies, that are vastly underregulated... and ask anyone how much theif phone bills have gone up over five years.
  • 807:

    Re Against the Fall of Night, you wrote: No, it helps that they are a work of fiction, so the "residents" do exactly what the author wanted them to do."

    That is insulting, arrogant, and ignorant. Or did you somehow miss the OP's' note that it was ->millions<- of years from now, or my correction, that it was one BILLION (US billion) years from now. You're suggesting that in that time, we cannot possibly come up with a better solution for getting people from one place to another?

    808:

    Re depleted uranium: sorry, but you sound like the folks who, literally, for decades denied there were any biological effects in humans who'd been heavily exposed to Agent Orange.

    Nope.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2819790/

    809:

    SFReader:787

    Okay ... except that I'd like to see some data on 2020 re:

    2020 data would be interesting, I don't think it is available in a way that would help (yet).

    But I think the key thing that tells the story is that despite the early "feel good" stories in April/May of pollution disappearing, the water settling in Venice, etc. the official word is despite everything in 2020 the decrease in CO2 emission is expected to be minimal, no more than a normal variation.

    1- number of people (percent of population) who actually needed to go to a specific location in order to 'work'

    It turns out to be a lot, though the percentage would be interesting. But food, manufacturing, health care, etc. all require a commute.

    But consider the current "lockdown" in Ontario - where most of the Covid spreader locations are remaining open as essential businesses.

    2- of these, how many (what percent) had to drive vs. had access to public transit

    That will change depending on the location - transit (generally) needs higher densities. But as anyone can tell you when you live in the cities surrounding Toronto transit will either work or it won't, as the buses either don't go where you need to or the frequency and transfers are such that a 25 minute drive takes 90 minutes by bus - so only those who can't afford the car take transit.

    3- what proportion of essential workers relied on public transit (and why)

    Experience in the GTA - a lot.

    And the answer - because much essential work pays poorly and frequently does not offer full time employement.

    So far example the Covid hot spots in the GTA (Brampton, parts of Toronto) ususally coincide with poor communities and transit usage.

    4- what's the monetary trade-off between expanding public transit and meeting climate goals?

    We aren't meeting climate goals, so no trade-off.

    5- Average occupancy rates of downtown office buildings, utility and other overhead operating expenses

    Low for now, but I suspect the utility costs haven't dropped much - for a variety of reasons (including the small number of essential personal who are either in the office, or occasionally visiting) the office spaces are being maintained at normal environmental levels anyway.

    I'm betting that, on average, these corps' utility* costs dropped, so what did they do with the savings?

    Executive bonuses, or other costs from the sudden shift to remote work.

    Meanwhile, their remote-working employees' utility incl. hi-speed internet connection, etc. costs escalated. So -- did their employers help out with these unanticipated added costs? (Basically: what are the commuting to office vs. working from home cost trade-off for each of the employer and employee.)

    Well, the employee is no longer paying to commute either.

    General comment:

    It seems as though a lot of folks here think that we're going or should strive to return to a pre-DT, pre-BrExit life. Really don't understand why, nor why we shouldn't aspire to something better. It's been a crappy year, but that doesn't mean we should forget the hard lessons learned.

    Part of it is the reflection that, despite the frequent complaints about commuting, there are real benefits to the "office"

    Separation of home/work, in person contact with others, the networking benefits of running into people around the water cooler, etc.

    For many, unless they get a significant pay increase (or have the flexibility to move), their current living arrangements don't have space for a home office (or 2). And even if you can move, access to reliable high speed internet can then be a blocker (at least in North America).

    I have no idea what happens in the second half of 2021 when the vaccine finally expands to enough of the population - but I view anyone who says things will return to pre-Covid with the same amount of skepticism as all the people proclaiming in the media that Covid has permanently changed everything.

    We simply don't yet know what will happen.

    810:

    Tidal is a no-go because it's a huge capital project and you need to answer "how high is the sea going to rise during the projected service life?" and you can't answer that question.

    We've got a paleo-record number for "given current atmospheric carbon load, what's the expected eventual rise?" (but no way to predict how long "eventual" is and some doubt we can trust the number due to the rapidity of forcing and it's not like it doesn't have metres of error bar anyway); we've got a "rise this century" number which is highly questionable because the error bars are larger than the estimate. Anybody trying to figure out how to do tidal is going to look at that and sigh sadly.

    811:

    Nojay @ 752: The Great Depleted Uranium Scare was like Reds Under The Beds, not actually true but it got column inches and justified apparent grievances. Uranium is Scary!, a magic word to the less-well educated and it got blamed for a lot of stuff it just can't do. The biological effects of uranium were studied up the wazoo starting in the 1940s for reasons, the results were pretty much meh since it doesn't take up into animal tissue very easily in the common forms (mostly oxides).

    The problems with depleted uranium munitions has nothing to do with radioactivity. It's a toxic heavy metal. You don't want to be ingesting DU oxides.

    In military conflicts involving DU munitions, the major concern is inhalation of DU particles in aerosols arising from the impacts of DU-enhanced projectiles with their targets. When depleted uranium munitions penetrate armor or burn, they create depleted uranium oxides in the form of dust that can be inhaled or contaminate wounds.
    The chemical toxicity of depleted uranium is identical to that of natural uranium and about a million times greater in vivo than DU's radiological hazard.

    I don't trust "studies" that claim there's "no measurable detrimental health effects" because they come from the same sources that denied the Atomic Veterans health problems, toxic exposure to Agent Orange and Gulf War Syndrome.

    The outcomes were preordained in order to shield corporations & governments from liability.

    812:

    IF - we can find / improve / develop electrical storage ( And I mean really big-time stuff here ) -

    Grid storage investment is a problem because picking a winner in a crowded field is fundamentally intractable.

    The magic number is 100 USD per kWh.

    Current Li-ion is about 140 USD, but it was over 1000 USD in 2010. So on the one hand, give it five years; no problem.

    On the other hand, Li-ion is completely not what you want for utility scale storage; it's optimised for mass and compactness, which are the last things grid storage wants to worry about. Grid storage wants to worry about price, which means things like installed lifetime. Paying for compactness is unattractive.

    (On the third hand, five years is a very long time if we need to decarbonize by 2030.)

    Old-school nickel-iron would likely work if someone scaled up manufacturing capacity; they need a factor of about three on current installed prices, but right now it's highly niche. Everyone is hoping for better rather than building that factory.

    That crowded field of potentially successful battery chemistry has organic flow batteries, sodium solid-state, Direct Methanol Fuel Cells (gotta do something with methane from the sewage plant...), all kinds of solid-state lithium, and molten salt.

    Every one of these should be getting a few tens of billions USD in parallel development funding.

    813:

    “ this isn't as much a political problem or a technological problem as an education problem” Dealing with ignorant people is a huge part of practical politics.

    814:

    There are a bunch of assholes, er, GOP who are talking about standing up in Congress on 5 Jan and demanding that they vote on whether to refuse to accept the election results.

    It's not media exaggeration.

    There are a minority of GOP who are making noise about standing up on January 6th.

    But the Democrats control the House, and even if the Republicans take at least one of the Georgia seats Mitch has already said Biden won and he will thus approve the election results, and he has instructed the Republican Senators to do as such.

    So yes, barring Trump getting a miracle, it is media exaggeration - they are drumming up every outside chance Trump and his followers dream up.

    And in the meantime, as stated, his militias remain missing in action.

    https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/america-votes/fact-check-is-the-choice-of-the-next-u-s-president-up-to-mike-pence-now-1.5233798

    815:

    I would rather save the poor fishermen of the Maritimes, who counted on the seal hunt to make just enough money to be eligible for Unemployment Benefits the rest of the year.

    Making it just another environmentally destructive and/or deliberately cruel work-for-the-dole scheme. Meanwhile the people pushing what is quite obviously the only way to "save" these "poor fisherman" - that is, train them enough to be employable in another fucking industry - don't get a platform and actually the very same governments cut back technical and trade education across the board. And people vote for that, sigh.

    The other great example is non-plantation logging where there's still an incentive (paper mills for instance). I remember discussions with forestry officials in the Eden-Monaro region in the early 90s describing the culture in the logging communities, that they needed to provide eduction about how you achieve more with a small chainsaw then with one you can barely lift. Of course, automation decimated jobs in logging, even though people will blame this job loss, and the lack of access to timbers that just don't exist in numbers anymore due to uncontrolled logging, on "greenies" (or "fake greenies", to use a term that turns up on this blog). It's as stupid and self defeating as it is possible to get in terms of supporting the small local communities, but there's a massive ideological investment in this stuff. At least it is a knot that will unravel itself due to the economic pressure and ageing, but lobbying for stopping support for it is a big important thing to do.

    Of course the same thing applies with coal mining, but more so.

    816:

    I'd add that the thing about Death Valley, or Yosemite, or Yellowstone is the political conflict between infrastructure to support the visitors versus the need to keep the place as natural(istic) as possible. It helps to realize that Death Valley gets 1.3 million visitors per year, Yosemite gets 5 million visitors/year, and Yellowstone gets about 4 million visitors per year. So if you have to provide 50-100 kWh per visitor to get them in and out, it adds up. And those parks really don't have much visible infrastructure at the moment.

    Fortunately, this little exercise made me run the numbers for LA County, which has 6.43 million cars, an average of a 17.6 mile/day commute round-trip, and which currently uses 66,118.67 million kWh. Turns out the problem of completely electrifying the car fleet adds less that 0.1 percent to the total electricity usage in LA County currently. Fortunately, that means that they don't have to rewire the county to make eCommutes a thing.

    Well, not exactly. However, the California grid is still stretched enough that everyone going home, turning on the AC, and cooking dinner and washing clothes between the hours of 4 and 9 pm can cause brownouts during heat waves. So while switching from gas guzzlers to EVs theoretically doesn't call for radical grid restructuring, in practice there's going to be a huge amount of politicking around getting chargers at worksites to avoid crashing the grid every year during peak evening hours, and figuring out who's going to pay for them and for their installation. Totally doable, but quite a chore, especially when people whine that they're unsightly and take up space that could be used to park real cars...

    817:

    So that's sorted then. No shift to electric until everyone can go to Death Valley without inconvenience.

    They did indicate that there chosen examples were a bit extreme.

    Might I suggest there are more subtle things going on here? I have no plans to go to Death Valley (or anywhere in the US). Can I get an electric car to drive to work?

    Drive to work, not a problem.

    But for a lot of people their vehicles are used for a lot more than just driving to work - and the 200-230 mile range of an electric SUV is an issue for many of them.

    So at least one vehicle (for now) needs to be non-battery.

    In the vanishingly rare times that I need to travel somewhere like the Alaska Highway, maybe then I could rent a gas burner?

    The problem is that frequently when people need the extended range of a gas burner, so do a lot of other people - which means nothing available to rent.

    Like say Thanksgiving, July 4th, Christmas, long weekends - or most summer weekends in a lot of places.

    We've all been round this coaster a few times now. Edge cases are not the norm. EVs can and are excellent for urban driving, which (SHOCK) is what most people do most of the time.

    And it's the same problem - that it works for 80%+ of the time is irrelevant, because that loss of 10% to 20% means lifestyle change - and people aren't (yet) willing to make lifestyle sacrifices to deal with climate change even if they are in the part of the population that agrees it's real.

    818:

    Re prosperity theologies, the wikipedia article is decent. (Please note, I am not a Christian.) They are not just theologies demanding that one accept one's lot in life, or theologies that teach that hard work and discipline is how one acquires prosperity. (And uhm mingling with other such people every Sunday to increase the probability of acquiring new potential business connections (aka "networking").) Prosperity theology (Wikipedia) In particular, see "Positive Confession": 5 Errors of the Prosperity Gospel (June 5, 2015, David W. Jones) or if you prefer, a master's thesis: Show me the money. The origins of the American prosperity gospel and its significance today (Preinerstorfer, Julia (2017, Masterarbeit, University of Vienna) In short, this doctrine says that believers can gain material possessions and good health via the technique of positive confession, which requires the verbal declaration or affirmation of a desired end. When you see videos of those bizarre prayers by Paula White and others, they are among other things (like extracting money from their followers and entertaining them), attempting to cast spells using words, because they believe as voluble extroverts with a continuous inner monologue that thoughts (and thus spells("/prayers")) are impossible without words. Some of it is cynical fakery (and for some of them, all of it), of course, but much of it is sincere. They do not consider it to be spell-casting (they have theological explanations), but it is functionally isomorphic with some other magic systems.

    Oh, and this Sumerian proverb might be relevant: UET 6/2 251 1-8. (cf. UET 6/2 252, 6.2.5: YBC 7344, 4.06.1: Seg. C ll. 3-16, 5.2.4: l. 9) A man without a personal god does not procure much food, does not procure even a little food. Going down to the river, he does not catch any fish. Going down to a field, he does not catch any gazelle. In important matters he is unsuccessful. When running, he does not reach his goal. Yet were his god favourable toward him, anything he might name would be provided for him.

    819:

    Damian @ 816 and also mdlve @ 800 and Rocketpjs @ 794

    We don't live in a command economy. The Capital can't decide to suddenly drop a new industry to get people working at something instead of killing seals and depleting fish stocks. The voters in the Maritimes got what they asked for. They were used to the sea and they didn't want to go too far from it.

    Sometimes the voters got more when local politicians were wooed by savvy entrepreneurs in opening strange new factories in the Maritimes.

    That's how New Brunswick ended up with a safety car-sports car factory and Nova Scotia got an advanced consumer electronics assembly plant. Both tries went belly up in a short time.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bricklin_SV-1

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clairtone

    820:

    Yes.

    Thing is any exchange system where winning this time means your chances of winning the next time go up, like capitalist exchange and most others, means wealth (or whatever else you are trading) tends to get concentrated. And that means you have to really use the tools. It is no good just breaking a monopoly and then sitting back. It only works if we do it hard and often. Your point about the Bell sucessors is right on the mark.

    In the US, from what I remember, you had a useful set of laws until Reagan (who I hope is burning in the Hell I don't believe in) deliberately broke them, along with all those other constraints on capitalism, dating from pre WW1 and from the depression.

    My point is you had them, at least partly, so you can re-enact them and enforce them.

    Does need the votes. Oh dear.

    821:

    And it's the same problem - that it works for 80%+ of the time is irrelevant, because that loss of 10% to 20% means lifestyle change - and people aren't (yet) willing to make lifestyle sacrifices to deal with climate change even if they are in the part of the population that agrees it's real.

    That's my situation. We've got an electric car that's lowered our gas consumption by around 75%. Unfortunately, I still need the gas car to visit my elderly mother (because she's...elderly, which means that sometimes rapid trips are exceedingly necessary). It is entirely possible to drive the EV to visit her. It needs to be recharged to make it back, and she doesn't have a charger.

    My suspicion is that this problem will largely go away as the technology improves. That's rather less concerning than the bottleneck of having enough batteries to go around, and more importantly, having everyone be able to buy an electric car. After all, for a few hundred dollars you can buy a 90s era Camry that still runs great. Electric cars are 50-100 times more expensive.

    822:

    The minimum build-out time is too long, because we've got maybe ten years. A lot of the discussion here is about things that don't fit into that near-term time window. We should probably discuss possibilities for major near-term political and social shifts/stir-ups, e.g. a genuine Great Reset mentioned by H R Monty #602.

    HRM: read and thought about that Essex Boys piece. Slightly depressing as a vivid illustration of how personal wealth is often/usually quite disconnected by layers of abstractions from reality, but interesting. I hope some was taken for Good. I mean, it reads like it was like a cloud of large-denomination notes bobbing gently in a gale, to be plucked from the air by anyone fast enough.

    823:

    So if I wanted to annoy a few people, I'd describe prosperity theology as cargo cults for white folks?

    824:

    A return of 3% to 6% per year ... You should totally buy car parking slots if you plan to retire in the next 10-20 years

    Note the "in the unlikely event" caveat. I know people who have done this, and it has always ended in tears. Most body corporates have a procedures for doing this officially, and it generally involves at least one vote of the body corporate membership... ie, everyone who owns an apartment or more usually the developer takes their proxy votes as part of the sale. And invariably the vote is either no, or some bullshit like the prospective renter must be approved by a meeting of the body corporate. Those meetings typically happen once a year.

    So people do it unofficially. Which means you can only rent to someone who already has access to the building. Or you can take your chances giving the renter a swipe card for the building ... and your apartment. Either way you have to notify building management of the rego plate. And just hope yours is not a building that uses facial recognition, or you could easily find yourself facing fines for having unauthorised residents (they're trying to stop AirB'nBas well as people hotboxing international students).

    Also, you can't buy carparks separately from apartments. It's bad enough trying to swap carparks with another resident. One friend in a smaller block of ~20 apartments spent years trying to persuade the people in the next apartment to swap garages. They assumed that because she wanted to do that she'd be willing to pay not just for the legal niceties, but also a nominal amount for the inconvenience. Say, $10,000. That was after 3 years of just refusing to even consider it. She wanted the garage directly under her apartment so she could run power to it, rather than having to run power tools off the lighting circuit or risk running an extension cord out the window (fine: $200 per complaint)

    All the fines and procedures are "as agreed in your strata contract" but amusingly in many apartments if you don't pay they can deny you access to common areas... like the hallway to your front door. And you have to litigate to get access back. It's cheaper to pay the fine than contest it.

    If you think I'm prejudiced against apartments you'd be 100% right. NSW strata laws are worse than many other places, but they inherently don't work because living next door to the people you're litigating against is rarely a good idea. Multiply that by even 10 people with big mortgages and "can I do this" ... "no, of course not".

    825:

    l nickel-iron would likely work ... but right now it's highly niche.

    Because the Coulombic efficiency is poor. Despite a few claims of 95%+ the actual manufacturers talk of future cells getting 80%-85% which is more like pumped hydro than lithium, and existing cells are typically lower than that (70% for NiMh and NiCd, for example).

    These experimental guys were thrilled to get as high as 30%...

    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263736995_Post-Hoc_Comparisons_Among_Iron_Electrode_Formulations_Based_on_Bismuth_Bismuth_Sulphide_Iron_Sulphide_and_Potassium_Sulphide_Under_Strong_Alkaline_Conditions

    Nickel-Iron works in low temperatures and for long periods as long as high self-discharge and low efficiency is acceptable. That's a niche, but sadly it's not a "bulk power storage" niche. There's hope for some of the research-stage batteries, but the reason bulk manufacturers are producing lithium cells is because they work better than anything else right now.

    826:

    , automation decimated jobs in logging, even though people will blame this job loss, and the lack of access to timbers that just don't exist in numbers anymore due to uncontrolled logging, on "greenies"

    Imagine you're a logging executive and you;'ve just brought online another automation system that means you only need half as many workers out getting logs. You can admit this to your workers as you kick them off site, or you can blame the boogey-man. Even the people in those communities who know the score have incentives to keep quiet - logging is a high-risk industry and it's not the smart people who're losing their jobs. It's the guys who get drunk, torch each others trucks, spike trees and get banned from every pub within 100km for starting fights.

    So, imagine you're a logging executive facing five guys like that. Are you going to say "you're fucking morons who struggle to put your boots on the in morning and I don't want anything to do with you. So long, losers"... or "that nast Bob Brown has fucked us both, that's why I have a new boat at my new beach house and you're out of work. Gee, sorry guys, there's nothing I can do".

    Better to fund astroturfers than retraining... cheaper too.

    Timber Communities Astralia for example.

    827:

    Lithium absolutely works better than anything else right now!

    If we absolutely needed X amount of amp-hours in batteries, every single one of the promising non-lithium battery tech avenues failed hard, AND there just wasn't enough lithium, we could build enough storage with NiFe batteries.

    Since the PRC isn't building specialized rolling mills for the plates, I am not too fussed about the scenario; just noting that, all else failing, the option exists. Sufficient battery storage is not inherently dependent on one or more of the new things working.

    828:

    FWIW one guy I went to school with was a logger. He was a moron, but not a complete moron. Grew dope when he was out pruning trees, used to get paid cash for the pruning at the end of a 3 month stint away and used those payments to launder his drug money. Didn't spend a lot of it, knew he was doing a young man's job. Last time I ran into him he 40-ish, breeding dogs... had about 15-20 staffys and similar, probably made at least $100 a week selling pups. I suggested he was retired and dog breeding was a hobby and he said "nah, man's gotta have a job, I'm a dog breeder". Sure you are, Pat, sure you are.

    829:

    Re: 'So, you think a lot of folks should work from home.'

    'Will' rather than 'should' depending on particular jobs and sectors/industries.

    While I can't tell you which jobs because I don't know, I think a likely next step in the evolution of business and careers and by extension, communities, is greater decentralization. If manufacturing and sales can be decentralized, why not other departments (HR, Marketing, Finance, etc). Okay, the down side is that decentralization usually includes more admin but let's face it, admin is going to keep going on regardless.

    https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/industry-trends/fastest-growing-industries/

    830:

    Niala @ 803: Nojay @ 784:

    "Some minimalist EV cars do a bit better than that but not much more than double at best. The Citroen Ami, for example"

    The Citroen Ami is a masterpiece in mimimalist design.

    Intended for the ride-share market it is also sold to individuals. Legally it is a quadricycle and not a car, so they were able to skip a lot of things in the design.

    I consider it an urban vehicle and not a traditional car, so to me getting rid of cars in a city doesn't mean getting rid of the Citroen Amis. The only trouble is that it isn't easy to use it to haul manure to a community garden.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citro%C3%ABn_Ami_(electric)

    The one I wanted (still want) is the Aixam Pro e-Truck van: https://www.aixam-pro.com/en/

    It would have been suitable for ALL of my around town transportation needs (room inside for cameras, tripods & lighting equipment OR guitars & amps for when I was going out to play. Might have been big enough to allow me to carry both (2.8m3) and I suppose that's room enough for a load of manure.

    Most of my pre-Covid life happened within a 10 mile (16 km) radius of my home & something with an 80 km range would do nicely. I figured that it would handle 98% of my transportation "needs", leaving the Jeep for when I wanted to go somewhere out of town. Not quite enough range to get me to the VA hospital in Durham & back home again (60 mi, 96 km), but it would do for most everything else I needed a car for.

    But it's not available here in the U.S. and I don't think anywhere else in North America. And I don't know of anything similar that is available here.

    831:

    At this point, no, we're back to UBI.

    The more joobs get automated, the fewer jobs there actually are. Back in the seventies and eighties, you'd hear about the "information economy", and how, though well-paying factory jobs were going away, they'd be replaced by better-paying information economy jobs.

    Right. Can you say "would you like fries with that?"

    Now, they're not even pointing to a source of new jobs, just there MAGIC will be.

    832:

    Damn, after I hit submit, I realized the rest of what I was going to say, which is that even if there are jobs, FUCKING HR PEOPLE WON'T EVEN LOOK AT YOU. What, you're 40 or 50 and just "retrained"? Hell, we can get younger people with experience WHO WON'T EXPECT THE SALARY YOU DO.

    They won't even pass their resume/application along for the hiring manager to look at.

    833:

    Or, perhaps, you're a mining exec, and the industry is going to mountaintop removal/pit mining. You can buy HUUUUGE trucks and shovels.

    And between 1972 and 2019, you can go, for the mining industry in the US, from 780,000 miners to 78,000 miners.

    The obviously thing to do: there's a War on Coal, it's all because of them environmentalists an' elites....

    834:

    Why isn't it being done?

    The technical problems, at today's state of knowledge are trivial.

    You mean all the issues with undersea machinery have been solved? No barnacles or such on currently available designs? I suspect power people want a 30 year design that doesn't require a turbine to be extracted from the seabed every 9 months for a 3 month retrofit.

    But then again, I'm not an undersea mechanical / chemical engineer.

    835:

    So if I wanted to annoy a few people, I'd describe prosperity theology as cargo cults for white folks?

    Personally, I would call it "sympathetic magic for white folks", but your description is accurate enough

    836:

    Re: 'Separation of home/work, in person contact with others, the networking benefits of running into people around the water cooler, etc.'

    Those can be benefits or not depending on personalities and corporate culture.

    Separation of home/work hasn't been a thing since corps started issuing mobiles and laptops. Actually a permanent 'home office' just might make it easier to enforce firm work hours. Based on personal experience - my hours at the office seemed to get longer and longer every year/promotion. Longer office hours mean that social needs can (only) be fulfilled at work which means that people have less time, energy and need to get involved within their communities. Corporate serfdom.

    837:

    a single person can live fairly comfortably here on $24K/year.

    Single is the key. And buying a house here where we are would be hard.

    Kids are EXPENSIVE.

    838:

    But consider the current "lockdown" in Ontario - where most of the Covid spreader locations are remaining open as essential businesses.

    Well, classed as essential businesses. There's a fair bit of debate about just how essential some of them are.

    Personally I'd be all for allowing small businesses to open with stringent limits. Like how I got a new pair of glasses in the spring: made an appointment and was the only person in the shop at the time.

    Would there be cheating? Yes, but I suspect not nearly as much as some claim. And frankly I'd rather not have one consequence of Covid being a retail landscape dominated by Walmart and Amazon.

    839:

    "Your sense of scale is out of whack."

    No, I don't think it is.

    Firstly, they're called a "network" for a reason. No network is designed to route all the traffic, (be it power or data) through a single cable. The UK might currently draw 61 GW at once, but there is no cable, line, switchyard or indeed any single bit of kit that has 61 GW flowing through it, or anything like it. Because if it failed, there's no conceivable backup that it could fail over to.

    So if your consumption is 180 GW, you need about 200 GW of supply divided up into chunks no larger than about 12 GW. 12GW is an off the shelf solution that you can ring up ABB tomorrow and order. Yes the cable is longer than anyone has built, but surely you can see that if you can build a 4000 km cable (which has been done), you can build a 20000 km cable. There are losses, but just build more links.

    It's important to also remember that like trade of food, you wouldn't trade only with one country. You'd trade with Australia, Canada, Morocco, the USA, South Africa and others. Yes, you'd be dependent on trade to survive, but that's already the case. Russian gas, European food, Middle Eastern oil, Australian Uranium. So though you might be using 180 GW, it need not all come from Australia. Indeed it couldn't unless you add storage.

    It would be expensive, but finding money is a political problem, not a technical one.

    840:

    So -- did their employers help out with these unanticipated added costs? (Basically: what are the commuting to office vs. working from home cost trade-off for each of the employer and employee.)

    Well, the employee is no longer paying to commute either.

    In the case of teachers, the answer is "no". Of course, teachers are used to subsidizing their employer so no one really expected to get anything. Administrators get supplied technology, teachers have to use their own.

    841:

    Heteromeles @ 822 That is, more or less, my situation ... Most of the time I can use ( In normal times, of course ) London's excellent Public transport, or walk or cycle. But, the remaining 10-15% of the time, I want to go somewhere where there is no public transport () &/or I want to lug something large - which is why I have a car - & one that can carry a lot, incidentally. () Only 10/15 miles away, but it's outside the M25 & I want to collect horse manure, or go foraging for mushrooms, or just take a true counryside walk & watch the buzzards & other wildlife ( Fallow deer/ hares / edible birdies etc ... ) @ 824 - exactly so.

    whitroth @ 833 Yup There's the OTHER REASON anyone over 40 won't be hired ... They have already seen all the con-tricks "employers" play & won't be conned (again) Hence the repeated lies from Politicians & Employer's orgs etc etc etc ... "We can't get the skilled/trained/educated staff" OF COURSE YOU CAN WANKERS, but you're not prepared to either PAY them & not try to cheat them. Why do you think I have had ZERO days employment from my Engineering MsC & why I'm bitter & twisted?

    842:

    Checked my math, and it turns out that I compared EV energy use per day to Annual electricity use. Oops. So multiplying the EV use by around 250 (for commuting, anyway), it comes out to about a 10 percent increase in total electricity going into LA County.

    That's actually a fair amount, but I'm not sure it requires drastic rewiring. Then again, I don't know what our grid is rated for or how to work out the problem spots, so there may be other issues that I'm not cognizant of.

    843:

    I should point out that public transit barely gets within five miles of me, and it's impossible to get to it without biking in bike lanes where the car speed limit is 50 mph. So yeah, this neighborhood was designed, in the 1980s, for car traffic. It's getting halfway decent infiltration of electric cars, too.

    844:

    "Yes, so it's a political problem...."

    I think you've got it!

    This could be the first time I've ever got my point across to anyone.

    845:

    Vapourised/molten uranium rapidly coverts in atmosphere to particulate uranium oxide which rapidly drops to the ground because it's a lot denser than air. Unless someone is in very close proximity to a DU projectile strike then they will not breathe in noticeable amounts of uranium oxide. If they do breathe in those particles then over a period of time they will exhale and expectorate them like any similar particulates people inhale in their daily lives. Asbestos fibres are a different matter due to their size and shape, continued exposure to some particulates like coal dust over a period of years or decades can result in blacklung disease etc. etc.

    DU was blamed for all sorts of sicknesses, generally labelled Gulf War Syndrome back in the early 1990s after Gulf War 1. The list of effects and symptoms bore no resemblance to the real, measured and scientifically tested effects of uranium compouunds and especially oxides on the human body or animals generally. DU projectiles weren't actually used in most battlefields -- they're a specialised can-opening tool and not fired against, say, think-skinned meatbags or buildings and the like where HE cannonshells and tank gun shells would normally be used. DU still got blamed for these illnesses even when the soldiers had never been exposed to any such projectile use.

    Frankly if someone's standing right next to a burned-out armoured vehicle that's still smoking they're going to be breathing in a witches brew of toxic combusion products, plastics, fuel, paint, burning explosives and propellants etc. Any DU particles resulting from a pyrophoric burn through the hull armour will be a very small part of that.

    Uranium, like radiation is Magic so it gets treated way differently to all the other poisons and killers out there, that's all.

    846:

    "If you wanted a non-CO2 solution in the UK, I predict that nuclear is faster than solar-beamed power satellites which are both faster than power lines."

    I'd agree that nuclear is quicker than satellite beamed power which has gone on and off the boil for at least 50 years that I've been following it without even getting to the technology demonstrator stage.

    But Nuclear faster than powerlines?

    Huh?

    https://www.nsenergybusiness.com/projects/changji-guquan-uhvdc-transmission-project/

    "Construction on the £4.7bn ($5.9bn) transmission project was started in January 2016 and completed in December 2018"

    Under 2 years. Not even the most absurdly optimistic projections include building the equivalent of 4 Hinkley Point C in under two years.

    847:

    A couple weeks ago Nicholas Moran (a military historian specializing in armored vehicles) remarked on the current status of the research in a Q&A (Relevant bit is part of the opening remarks in the first minute). Apparently the big concern these days is that it gets into the water table; however the alternative is a tungsten alloy that turns out to be about as bad when it leaches into the water table.

    The world would be a better place without either, but for that to happen we need to do away with the need for them and that seems like one of the more difficult problems.

    848:

    David L @ 835 You mean all the issues with undersea machinery have been solved? No barnacles or such on currently available designs?

    The moving parts in the Rance Tidal Power Station are all within a concrete dam.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rance_Tidal_Power_Station

    It's been running steady since 1966. It paid for itself in 20 years.

    The only negative aspect I could find was in the French version of the Wikipedia article: All the Rance t river beaches have become mud flats. At places the mud is 3 m. deep.

    The French version also has more pics and diagrams.

    https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usine_mar%C3%A9motrice_de_la_Rance

    The Annapolis Royal Generating Station in Nova Scotia seems to have no ecological problems , except for the lost humpback whale which found its way out eventually.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annapolis_Royal_Generating_Station

    849:

    In general I agree, and per Niala this is how it goes for the Maritimes (I guess*).

    But the regions I'm talking about have, or at least had before COVID, already-busy tourism industries with enormous unmet demand. Once you took away the direct (moratorium on logging royalties anyone?) and indirect (those roads where 90% of the traffic is logging trucks that currently need rebuilding every 18 months...) subsidies, the individual income potential after switching is huge. Although I guess the penalty for acting like an idiot is less income overall, rather than more income for more risk-taking till the day you lose a hand, then a generous, topped-up disability support pension for life.

    It's always worthwhile to compare with occupations in similar straits, but which lack the romantically masculinist bravado and chest-thumping. Shining shoes, for instance, or picking fruit.

    • The reason I say "I guess" above is that the Maritimes can't be totally uninteresting for tourism purposes. If I lived in the NE USA I'd certainly be at least a bit interested (and you'd think there'd have been an upturn after that Annie Proulx movie came out). It'd come down to infrastructure, whether the locals are generally friendly and whether there even exist local businesses that will help you get out on the ice, look at and photograph the baby seals.
    850:

    "Except political is an extremely big point."

    Urrr, which is exactly my point. It's not just a big point. It's the only point.

    "If, for example, the UK went all solar with solar farms in some southern country it would put the UK entirely in the hands of that southern country - who could at any time decide to blackmail the UK into paying up to maintain the supply of electricity, or simple cut the power because some MP or private company "looked at us funny"

    Or those undersea cables would make a tempting target for someone wanting to make mischief (see- Russia)."

    Well the obvious solution to that political problem, is to not put all your eggs in one basket.

    As for a "tempting target" if you think taking out 30 heavily armoured undersea cables under 2 km of sea water all at once increases the vulnerability of the UK's grid to attack, then you haven't spent even 2 seconds thinking about it. I generally don't explain on line how 100 people could easily knock a first world country back to the stone age, but I'm sure there are people who can figure it out and it doesn't involve a fleet of deep operations vessels doing suspicious things.

    851:

    That's because you're looking at the wrong answer. The right answer is... UNIONS.

    852:

    Perhaps, since you seem to have missed it, I should repost my post #809: Re depleted uranium: sorry, but you sound like the folks who, literally, for decades denied there were any biological effects in humans who'd been heavily exposed to Agent Orange.

    Nope.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2819790/

    853:

    I personally quite liked it when I lived on the other side of the river from my workplace, and my commute was by ferry. It made the separation of work and private life quite palpable and clear. However, that distinction is also, I suspect, something that is easier to maintain in relatively junior roles with less responsibility. And even in those days, I found myself in the machine room at 3am on a Sunday often enough to feel like I needed a change to break out of the relentless grind of it all.

    I should add that in general for 25-odd* years of working in it, IT has treated me reasonably well. Some specific employers, including one place I stuck with for 10 years and really put everything into, did not, but that's by and by. I'm back (at 50!) at full-time study now (which is different to a couple of years ago when I happened to be managing a full-time study load at the same time as working full time) and this leads to more blurring of "work" and private than I'd have considered tolerable previously. But also more "free" time than I could have dreamed of just a year ago.

    • Don't ask about the perfectly normal, or alternatively even, years...
    854:

    Greg What you sat about the over forties is not universal. I also did an MSc when I was forty two. It was in clinical chemistry and I was working in the NHS part of the University lab running the course. WhenI got the degree I carried on working in the same job. Then I was moved, against my will to a new section coordinating all the lab based clinical research. I’d already affected my children’s education by moving to Leeds so I didn’t immediately look for another job. But when the children had gone to university 13 years later I could look for at her jobs and got a new job in Norwich at the age of 56. I wouldn’t have got the job without the MSc. It may be that you were looking for jobs in private companies and I was in the NHS but I had earlier turned down two jobs in Belgium and France for private companies. And I have given NHS jobs to people over forty.

    855:

    The alternative to DU is tungsten. Tungsten has animal testing that shows it to be really quite astonishingly carcinogenic, in particular in the forms you would exposed to when it is used in ammo. As in "The researcher refused to scale the experiment beyond six rats, due to five of them coming down with cancer". DU has handwaving in the direction of people coming off battlefields littered with 9000 different toxins coming down sick a lot.

    856:

    The only thing I'd say is that the number I've been using is 22 TW not 15. I'd also say that energy consumption doubles about every 30 years. So that would mean that the estimates for how long resources would last are quite optimistic. By the time you had the nuclear fleet built, actual consumption would be at least 3 times higher than the figures they used.

    Additionally, they assumed a global electricity grid. If you scaled to cover peak demand rather than average, you could probably double the required reactors. That implies they were optimistic by about a factor of 6. At least.

    857:

    Re: 'The right answer is... UNIONS.'

    Not sure -- 'union' has a lot of 'us vs them' historical baggage. And it seems to have always been implied that you could belong to only one union at a time or (maybe) ever which makes career switching (or even moving to a different town) more difficult. Plus some trades have a history of skills protectionism, i.e., pay to access apprenticeship. (Not sure how true that last bit is - could just be sour grapes.)

    Anyways - in the past century we've had many new industries popping up that required new 'trades' complete with their own accreditation/certification processes -- not sure which did better: those calling themselves unions, trades or professional associations.

    858:

    NONE of the latter do what unions do. Unless you're stuck with one that's sold out (look up "co-managerialship", or the ones who think they're guilds, having chased out the socialists), we're talking about working hours, paid time off, benefits, and did I mention getting paid for overtime?

    860:

    We don't live in a command economy. The Capital can't decide to suddenly drop a new industry to get people working at something instead of killing seals and depleting fish stocks. The voters in the Maritimes got what they asked for. They were used to the sea and they didn't want to go too far from it.

    Except paying people to keep doing a dying/dead industry is a form of command economy - in essence, the Canadian Government said fish for cod, or seal hunt, regardless of the fact that the industry essentially wasn't there.

    Yes, they didn't artificially create the industry directly, but by creating special rules (that regular workers don't get) around unemployment benefits they achieved the same thing through the back door.

    The reality is that the Maritimes in Canada are facing the same issue that small towns and cities around the world are facing - the decline of local industry and the mass move of the population to bigger cities where the jobs are. But for political reasons the government attempted to stop the process in the Maritimes while ignoring it happening elsewhere in Canada - and then people act surprised when some of the richer provinces get upset.

    861:

    “, it comes out to about a 10 percent increase in total electricity going into LA County” When I hear people getting concerned about how much extra power will be needed to power all those nasty EVs I have to wonder what people think happens when new housing or businesses are built. It is almost as if some folk believe that The Grid (and you can often tell that they are capitalizing it) is some immutable Gift From (my)God. Personally I think the smart thing would be to cut the power lines to assorted red states and Tory strongholds, diverting it to locales more willing to at least pretend to be a part of a modern world. That would charge a few EVs nicely.

    862:

    Yes exactly.

    Most grids plan on load increasing by about 3% per year. (well the properly run ones anyway). So 10% is about the expected growth over 3 years anyway. China often has a growth rate over 10% per annum.

    A reasonable package of incentives for home owners to install solar (something limiting HOA ability to veto them for instance) would cut consumption growth a lot, or even reverse it (as has happened in Australia).

    863:

    Home solar only decreases grid requirements where air-con is a major - and peak - load. That is Australia sure enough, but a grid which has peak load now - like the one I am using - literally sees zero reduction in peak power requirements from any amount of solar, and peak power is what dictates how many wires you have to run.

    This in fact makes me a bit cranky in full generality: People from southern Cali and the Downunder going on about how solar is a cure all, while I am straining to remember the last time I saw the sun, full stop.

    Solar and wind are about harvesting energy flows from the weather - talking about them as if they are drop in solutions with no regard for local conditions means you are talking nonsense.

    864:

    Hetero says; "So multiplying the EV use by around 250 (for commuting, anyway), it comes out to about a 10 percent increase in total electricity going into LA County [emphasis added] ."

    I say, "solar...would cut consumption growth a lot"

    You say: "People from southern Cali and the Downunder going on about how solar"

    I've put up several long posts in this thread that specifically addressed the UK situation. I've put up dozens and dozens of long form posts, carefully researched with copious references for everything I've said, that specifically addressed the situation on Scotland. Everything right down to researching rules around heritage listing and how it pertains to Charlie's windows.

    Now you're annoyed by my making a quick comment on the situation in LA County, like that's all I've ever done...

    With all due respect, fuck off.

    865:

    Re: ' ... we're talking about working hours, paid time off, benefits, and did I mention getting paid for overtime?'

    Basic workers' rights in the US haven't kept up with the rest of the world.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-18/u-s-ranked-worst-for-workers-rights-among-major-economies

    In contrast, Denmark is considered one of the countries with the best workers rights. What surprises me about Denmark (and several other EU countries re: workers rights) is that unions still play an active part even though there's thorough government legislation. Okay, I can accept that maybe the unions ensure that workers maintain visibility but there's still the image/perception issue. I guess European unions never had a Jimmy Hoffa.

    Interesting - while searching for comparisons vs. other countries on economic and demographic data I found that there's a name for the approach described above.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_corporatism

    866:

    Home solar only decreases grid requirements where air-con is a major - and peak - load.

    I don't think anywhere in the world has peak load between 12pm and 3pm. It would definitely be a weird place. But that's when solar peaks. So the question becomes... what's the alternative to solar plus storage?

    For those living in capitalist or mammonite cultures the answer is obvious: suicide. Or killing off the peasants if you're someone who isn't a peasant. I suspect it's the same in the end.

    Meanwhile, all hands to the pumps. Literally in the case of pumped hydro, figuratively in the case of the lithium miners.

    I'm starting to think I want a 1970's style cottage... cinderblock walls, concrete slab and roof, then insulate the outside with aerated concrete. Simple, almost brutal, but very effective. Especially with steel shutters for the windows and a proper airlock-style front entrance. The disadvantage of solar panels is that it's hard to make them bushfire resilient. Not as bad as a wind turbine, but still not great.

    867:

    In contrast, Denmark is considered one of the countries with the best workers rights. What surprises me about Denmark (and several other EU countries re: workers rights) is that unions still play an active part even though there's thorough government legislation. Okay, I can accept that maybe the unions ensure that workers maintain visibility but there's still the image/perception issue. I guess European unions never had a Jimmy Hoffa.

    In Finland, the government mostly tries to let the employer unions (they have theirs, too) and the worker unions negotiate together. This has been mostly the thing since the 1940s, though lately some of the employer unions have said that they will not listen to the workers anymore.

    From my point of view, at least some workers' unions have been too much about stuff for their members and mostly people working, and not so much about the unemployed or people in "non-traditional jobs". The same problems with forced "self-employment" that's rife in many places are here, too. It's about whether your taxi driver or food delivery person is an employee or an enterpreneur (in other areas, too). Still, I'm a member of a union and probably will be in the future. I did change my union some years ago, though, as the one I was in seemed to make too many statements which sounded a bit too economically right to me.

    As for employment when older, I got fired in May, and it took about five weeks to get a new job. I'm over forty, but in a very employable business. I'm now a software engineer, having been a general IT security consultant for about ten years, and a software developer before that, so my skills are still quite useful. (I have a Masters of Science, but it's in space technology and not directly applicable to my work now. It however proves I can learn stuff. I'm not sure how useful it is in the future - it isn't a requirement in the private sector and for government positions which reqire degrees the ones I'd be interested in now mostly seem to require PhDs...)

    868:

    From my point of view, at least some workers' unions have been too much about stuff for their members and mostly people working, and not so much about the unemployed or people in "non-traditional jobs".

    Unions, at their best, are controlled by their members and represent their members interests. So of course they are all about ensuring that the people currently employed in an industry get increasingly good pay and conditions, and continue to be employed. They only care about other people to the extent that their members do, which as a rule is not very much.

    This is part of why I don't see unions as a good long-term solution to socio-economic problems. Here in the UK we never had a Jimmy Hoffa, but other structural issues with the union system rendered them essentially irrelevant during the 1980s.

    The basic problem was that unions and management sat on opposite sides of the table and negotiated. In negotiation there are two cardinal rules: 1) never give anything away and 2) the side in the biggest hurry will get the worst of the deal. In negotiations between unions and management these were a recipe for long strikes (because nobody could admit to being in a hurry to settle) and a total lack of innovation (because any change proposed by management had to be negotiated at great length regardless of its impact on workers). Ultimately this led to national economic decline, the Winter of Discontent in 1978-79, and the election of Margaret Thatcher on an anti-union platform.

    869:

    Heteromoles @ 673, on stopping the resource allocators from allocating all the resources to themselves:

    Redistribution and/or revolution. Read Piketty.

    I've never actually read Piketty, but I'm familiar with his general thesis. I also saw a lecture by Joseph Stiglitz some time ago in which he argued that the middle class are the engine of prosperity because they are the people who buy all the stuff being made by all the capitalists. So if you destroy the middle class you destroy capitalism. Yes, I agree. Nice, if you can do it.

    How do you tax a billionaire? Or, more or less equivalently, how do you tax a multinational corporation?

    The book to read here is Moneyland by Oliver Bullough. It explains how people with lots of money have lots of options to keep it safe from the prying eyes and fingers of the tax man. There is an entry fee to Moneyland, charged by the lawyers and accountants who run it, and the countries who provide it with legal cover, but once you are in you are pretty much free of taxation. This means that once you get beyond a certain level of wealth (probably a few tens of millions of pounds) it makes sense to pay the entrance fee, shift your assets into Moneyland, and never have to pay tax again.

    This isn't (for the most part) illegal; rather it depends on arbitrage between different national tax regimes. So if a country increases tax rates on the very wealthy, the wealthy people simply withdraw their money and put it somewhere else. The only solution, as far as I can see, is some kind of World Tax Authority who can force all countries to impose effective taxation their residents and sanctions on non-compliant countries.

    870:

    mdlve @ 861: Except paying people to keep doing a dying/dead industry is a form of command economy - in essence, the Canadian Government said fish for cod, or seal hunt, regardless of the fact that the industry essentially wasn't there."

    The industry was there but the fish resources were not. The Canadian government never told the fishermen to fish for cod in the Maritimes, even indirectly. Through repeated elections the fishermen told the federal government again, and again, and again, that they wanted to go on fishing and the government obeyed.

    In a command economy, a Planned Economy, the fisheries experts living in the capital city would have decided to move the human resources (soon-to-be ex-fishermen) to another part of the country where human resources were needed.

    In a democracy with no Planned Economy the capital cities (because this is a federation there are many of them) obey the voters through elections, and the human resources (fishermen) go where they wish to go or (as in the case here) stay put, as wished.

    I've studied the planned economies of the USSR and the planned economies of Eastern Europe for years and I can, I hope, bring some form of enlightenement to your kind person by telling you that the Wikipedia article on Planned Economy is a very good one and that you should read it.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_economy

    I hope you will be able to set some time aside to read it between Xmas and the new year.

    871:

    I'm starting to think I want a 1970's style cottage... cinderblock walls, concrete slab and roof, then insulate the outside with aerated concrete. Simple, almost brutal, but very effective. Especially with steel shutters for the windows and a proper airlock-style front entrance.

    This isn't terribly far off the more "extreme" of the hyper efficient eco-houses I saw as examples of the possible (again, back in that ecology major in the early 90s). Concrete-block (aka Besser brick) structure, though one done with some character with plain corrugated gal roof over a tonne of insulation. But also thick insulation between the concrete and the corrugated gal exterior cladding. I am told there had been a long running dispute with the local council about being allowed to use the plain zinc reflective surfaces like that, but the owner/builder prevailed and there it was. Their main living area had a north facing glass wall with a reasonably massive thermal mantle-shelf-thing inside coming up to chest height, painted black. They covered this with a heavy white sheepskin run in summer. Not steel shutters, but a combination of steel and timber slats angled to admit sun in winter but not summer. The place was in Canberra, the owner's enthusiastic claim was that the first couple of years they overdid "running the house", and made it too warm in winter, too cool in summer.

    I believed him: I saw the empirical figures. There were other eco houses we got to look at, most of them rather more conventional in layout and usage (less "working the house" required). One had a glass dining room within a glass sunroom, that particular family's special luxury for winter meals.

    872:

    Probably, the notion of the prosperity gospel goes back to the neolithic, or whenever the first era of "god-kings" cropped up in a particular society.

    Not sure about the neolithic, but we know that bronze-age greek cultures equated beauty with virtue -- the gods blessed the virtuous and made them beautiful (and vice versa: ugliness was bestowed as a curse or punishment). And that assumption is there under the surface of our classical philosophers: I note that philosophers don't tend to interrogate the axioms of their own culture too deeply, lest they end up going the way of Socrates.

    873:

    Mike Collins Yes - Studying effectively "inside" the NHS - & then they offered you a job. I took an engineering MSc & then had to try & find work - anywhere commutable from NE London - so a pool of 10-15 million people there ... nothing, at all.

    "DU" Yes, well, almost all propellants & explosives contain "interesting" Nitrates & nitrate-combustion products which are so good for you - not at all ....

    SFR In contrast, Denmark is considered one of the countries with the best workers rights. What surprises me about Denmark (and several other EU countries re: workers rights) is that unions still play an active part ... which explains SO WELL why one J Corbyn was & is against the EU as a Capitalist Exploiters ramp against working people .... yeah. I guess European unions never had a Jimmy Hoffa. Scargill? Hatton? - maybe, perhaps. Except Scargill was an idiot. [ See also comments about employing people in dead or dying industries - coal was already in steep decline, even then. ]

    Paul The one really disgraceful part of Unions' history in the UK was their treatment of women as employees - they didn't want them, or if they had to have them, their pay had to worse than the men's. They were considerably more reactionary & primitive than the employers. ( A factor still to be seen in the NE of England voting heavily for Brexit, of course )

    875:

    The modern ideology that houses the prosperity gospel is the same that Weber coined the term "protestant work ethic" to describe. You can sort of see a general shape that changes only slowly in form, if not in detail, from the themes in classical antiquity through to the Westphalian era. But definitely the PWE concept is there not just in what is explicitly called "prosperity gospel", but in any ideology that equates property with virtue, like Libertarianism and slavery.

    876:

    The US pumped thousands of tonnes of biological defoliants over thousands of square kilometres of random countries during the Vietnam war, a process requiring thousands of US service people to handle and dispense the stuff with 1970s levels of safety rules and protection. It's not suprising a lot of people got sick.

    The Gulf War Allied forces in 1991 fired off maybe twenty tonnes of DU ordnance during the armour-vs-armour fighting (an MBT gun's DU penetrator weighs about 4kg, say five thousand shots), creating maybe a tonne or so of DU dust, 98% of which remained inside or around the targetted armoured vehicles. This, somehow, caused lots of people, many of whom were never within a hundred kilometres of the DU-engagement battlefields, to suffer from a wide range of symptoms, few if any of which had any connection to the symptoms observed by human and animal exposure to uranium in the past. But uranium is Magic! and Scary! so it must be at fault.

    877:

    No you never said it directly -

    "So, with the realization that this won't change many people's opinions - the politics of envy are a powerful force - perhaps a look at some data from the government"

    From your own comment 542

    878:

    What you sat about the over forties is not universal.

    I suspect this is very strongly situation-dependent.

    I know that I advise young teachers to start teaching where they want to end up, because school boards prefer to hired younger inexperienced teachers. This is partly because they are cheaper (public teaching contracts have a ten-year experience grid for pay), and I strongly expect partly because younger teachers are less likely to argue with administration.

    At a conference a few years ago I met a colleague from a southern Ontario school board notorious for this. The oldest teacher at his school was 30. They were spending a lot of time and energy reinventing the wheel, and had a lot of problems that a more experienced school wouldn't have. (He said the conference was amazingly useful, and worth paying for from his own pocket and risking calling in sick to attend*. It was the hallway conversations with experienced teachers he found most useful — something that in a rationally-run system would have been a matter of course.)

    *School administration didn't approve of conferences for teachers. All training was conducted by sending administrators who then passed along what they thought was important, or by using 'specialists' who had even less experience than the teachers but who could convince an administrator they were experts. Think motivational speakers.

    879:

    Re: 'The Canadian government never told the fishermen to fish for cod in the Maritimes, even indirectly.'

    Quite the opposite in fact ... as per one of the Atlantic provinces' most famous sons:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Crosbie

    'Crosbie's final cabinet post in the Mulroney government was Minister of Fisheries and Oceans ... He famously yelled out, "I didn’t take the fish from the goddamn water, so don’t go abusing me."[4][15] He oversaw the decision to close the cod fishery industry in Atlantic Canada due to the collapse of cod stocks.'

    This decision put at least 10% of the total work force officially out of work. The 'officially' is key because it meant that these people could apply for gov't support. An example of what happens when local economies put too many eggs into one finite limited or non-self-renewing extraction based basket.

    Re: Planned economy article

    Thanks for the link! No offense intended, just a matter of different personal perspective/life experience, re: following:

    Is there any economic model that actually takes into account as its basis the fact that it's humans that participate in an economy? Sorry, but it seems that the only economic models deemed worthy of investigation/reporting somehow manage to completely overlook that humans are heterogeneous; they are constantly undergoing various developmental stages - including entrance and exit; they are squishy biologics with very sharply calibrated physiologic, psych-/sociological operating needs, etc.

    My knowledge of economics is limited to a handful of courses I took years ago but it seems that apart from Kahneman (Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, 2002) - who was a psychologist, not an economist - there's been zero effort to take the human condition into any economic equations/laws - and thus the GDP rules triumphant when discussing the relative strengths of socio(hah!)-economic models aka countries/nation states.

    Never thought I'd ever read another econ book again let alone willingly shell out any money for one, but there you go. I really enjoyed Piketty's 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century' and have also picked up a couple of books by Mariana Mazzucato. If you have any books/papers along this line, feel free to recommend.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/26/business/mariana-mazzucato.html

    880:

    Define success as "not costing much" and "nobody argues with me" and there you go.

    Kinda like how defining success as "I'm rich" doesn't produce much in the way of desirable economic outcomes.

    881:

    Charlie Ah yes "Teaching the young to ask questions" .... See also the PRC & "whisteleblowers" who question incompetent authority, as seen in today's news. ( Wuhan /C-19 / shit response )

    882:

    SFReader @880 . I don't remember the titles or the authors but I do remember that I was astounded that so many economic history authors wrote excellent scholarly books on the history of technology. I had this impression because I found so much good stuff in the "HC-economic history" section of the university libraries (instead of my usual "D" sections).

    As a rule they didn't use models and they spanned centuries instead of concentrating on one short economic event.

    I didn't take a single course in Economics. It was all History, except for two courses in Political Science and one in Old Norse. My readings in Economic History were all linked to my studies in the History of Technology.

    883:

    Not sure about the neolithic, but we know that bronze-age greek cultures equated beauty with virtue -- the gods blessed the virtuous and made them beautiful (and vice versa: ugliness was bestowed as a curse or punishment). And that assumption is there under the surface of our classical philosophers: I note that philosophers don't tend to interrogate the axioms of their own culture too deeply, lest they end up going the way of Socrates.

    Remember that Bronze Age Greek cultures were Mycenae and Crete, so we actually don't know that. Most of their writing was book-keeping. We know quite a bit about iron-age Greek cultures, though, and we also know quite a lot about the Bronze Age in the Fertile Crescent, from Mesopotamia to Egypt. And yep, God-kings.

    As for the neolithic, it's worth remembering that the best-documented example we have of primary state formation in a non-state society is from Hawai'i, and they certainly had god-kings of their own unique take, complete with royal incest.

    I also agree about the classical philosophers, but I'd point out that none of them produced a lasting religion. If you look at Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, or whoever Lao Tzu is (actually, let's just go with the author of the Chuang Tzu), they're definitely countercultural figures, out to establish radically different systems than what they grew up in.

    I separate out Lao Tzu because I don't think he existed. Lao Tzu is generally translated as "old master," but if you literally translate the characters in the name, they mean "ancient child." In the Celestial Masters tradition of Taoism, there are 24 "qis," basically symbolized by the eight hexagrams arranged across the three spheres of heaven, earth, and man. Lao Tzu is identified as the central, 25th qi-flow that animates the other 24, which in turn combine to create the entire world. Also historically, Lao Tzu was mentioned in the Chuang Tzu, of which the oldest copy is about 200 years older than the oldest known copy of the Tao Te Ching that Lao Tzu supposedly wrote. It's likely more useful to ponder what Lao Tzu is, rather more than who.

    Taoism's not the only system the ancient child's turned up in. He pops up in alchemy, and as the Marassa Jumeaux in Voudoun. It's possible that the Gemini played a similar role in Bronze Age Greek mythology, since much of the artwork seems to portray a sun goddess with twin male gods. And with that, we're back in Greece, wondering what the heck it was that the Bronze-Age Greeks actually did believe in. And that's a good place to stop.

    884:

    The high self-discharge is not catastrophic for bulk storage when used for buffering supply, but the efficiency is. The big problem with bulk storage in any high-density battery is safety - the UK uses something like 3 MTOE per week, and you really don't want even 1% of that burning off in our crowded island. Enclosing it isn't a great idea, as it would turn it into the equivalent of 25 megatonnes of TNT, and a 250 kilotonne explosion would be even worse news.

    The corollary is that bulk storage banks using lithium will take up fairly large areas compared to the minimum needed. Not an insuperable problem for that purpose, but a rather nasty one if our supply was based on north African solar, and shipped as batteries; no worse than oil, but potentially little better. OGH in #763 has described the power line issues - again, not insoluble, but not easy.

    I sincerely hope that he is wrong in #762, because of the other environmental and social costs of increasing the car dominance in the UK. No, the atmospheric pollution issue is NOT the only serious one, and I am seriously unconvinced by the greenwash for electric cars, because the manufacturing, maintenance and disposal costs are a major factor. The only data I have seen on overall lifetime environmental costs has been by people vigorously grinding axes.

    885:

    The cod fishery in the Maritimes was the victim of technology, population and policy (not necessarily in that order).

    Fishing technology improved dramatically, for the Canadians as well as the other countries that fish the Grand Banks. A trawler measures its catch in tonnes, while 100 years earlier it was pounds.

    At the same time, there were more people alive in places like Newfoundland. More people who came from fishing families, whose forefathers had been fishers for centuries.

    All well and good, but when you have more people harvesting more of a limited resource, it will run out. So then you have policies to limit the 'harvest', which means those people can only work a few weeks/year.

    At this point you need to either have policies to change the type of work people are doing (unpopular) or to support those people to keep doing the same thing. For better or worse, the policies kept too many people in the doomed job and it led to collapse.

    There is a very direct parallel to the current situation in Alberta as well. Individuals flocked to the province during the period of high oil prices. That era is past, but we have local and federal politicians demanding that policy keeps those people in the same place, and ideally doing the same work even though it is now uneconomic and will likely never reach the same heights as the most recent boom.

    The tragic part is that a significant number of the people being economically displaced in each instance are the same people. Plenty of displaced fishers ended up working in Alberta, and now they are being displaced again. They are justifiably angry, but at the same time their industry is killing the planet and needs to end...

    886:

    Of minor relevance to the electricity supply problem, y'all might want to check https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ now. It's currently evening and chilly in the UK, the sun's down and there doesn't appear to be a lot of wind.

    887:

    If you have any books/papers along this line, feel free to recommend.

    I really enjoyed "b"Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner? by Katrine Marçal. Don't know if it's what you're looking for, so check out this review first:

    https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/who-cooked-adam-smith-s-dinner-katrine-marcal-book-review-behind-every-great-man-his-mother-10168812.html

    On a more strictly economics line, I recommend two books by Ha-Joon Chang.

    Bad Samaritans (subtitled "The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism") takes aim at the usual simplified stories told about the benefits of free trade. The fact that it was banned by the South Korean military as a seditious book (because it might promote anti-government and anti-American* thinking) is probably a recommendation :-)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Samaritans:_The_Myth_of_Free_Trade_and_the_Secret_History_of_Capitalism

    Also recommended is 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism. This is more a collection of essays, so good reading for bus trips.

    https://etonomics.com/2020/05/19/23-things-they-dont-tell-you-about-capitalism-by-ha-joon-chang/

    If you'd rather watch/listen, he has a lecture here:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whVf5tuVbus

    *I was surprised to learn that was a factor in the decision. I guess South Korea is being extra-careful not to piss off the yanks who are a key part of their national security.

    888:

    Direct -- air-and-water -- methane synthesis is a thing; methanol-from-the-methane runs about fifty percent efficiency, so just methane is presumably better than that. Methane-air and methanol-air fuel cells are a thing, and there are current commercial offerings for methanol-air in the megawatt range. (They're looking at zero-emission maritime power sources. There are a lot of handling reasons to prefer methanol to methane if your use case is anything other than a rocket or a gas turbine.)

    So you could take the "sailing ships with shaft alternators to capture wind energy" approach; I wouldn't burn the methane (soot! black particulate carbon is a warming problem all of its own) but I'd think any politician with a lot of grumpy fisher-folk and a need to hark back to the fabled days of something or anything would be all over this. Local ship building jobs, lots of jobs as crew, new distributed robust infrastructure on land, a shot at being a community of practice for at least one kind of fuel cell; hard to see what's not to like in industrial policy terms.

    Makes a perfectly reasonable storage mechanism for land-based wind, too; that's where the existing research effort is going. Not as efficient as battery storage but much more pumpable, so desirable for powering trains, aircraft, and ships as well as grid storage.

    Still going to be lots of batteries; still likely to be several battery technologies. But so far as I can tell all the pieces of methanol-air with air-source carbon already exist, and the option of shipping energy around as methanol thereby also exists.

    889:

    Rocketpjs @ 886

    Yes, there is a limit to the number of people you can hire to give guided seal watching tours. In fact I know of only one such tour and that's in the Magdalen Islands archipelago in the middle of the Gulf of Saint-Lawrence.

    https://www.tourismeilesdelamadeleine.com/en/discover-the-islands/experiences/nature/seal-observation-tours/

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalen_Islands

    So, the others have to leave when there are bad fishing years.

    Fortunately for the local inhabitants their archipelago is part of the territory of the province of Québec. For several generations they had the habit of leaving (temporarily or permanently) for distant Verdun, a worker's suburb of Montreal. They didn't have to go to really, really far-away Alberta to find jobs.

    But not all Maritimers have left for Alberta (or Verdun or Toronto). Some of them ended up in Ottawa. There was a disproportionate amount of people from Newfoundland (doctors, software engineers...) where I used to work at the Public Health Agency of Canada. They all had in common a very good sense of humor.

    890:

    EC "greenwash"/people vigorously grinding axes - such as ignoring the very inconvenient recent-ish findings on atmospheric pollution from tyres .... ( Oh yes, have you got your kt & Mt mixed up? )

    AT @ 887 Exactly the conditions that Moz doesn't seem to be able to understand, you mean? Agreed with you & EC that IF we can get economic & safe storage of 'leccy, then most of the problems are solved, perhaps. ... "if"

    Graydon There are several companies trying with the direct synthesis of Methane route. How many of them are promoting vapourware or other impractical routes, I know not. Would be nice if it was economically viable on a large scale - again - "if" No soot though - it's very easy to get complete combustion of methane - like my kitchen gas cooker does ....

    891:

    Well...

    You're proposing a system that goes:

    CO2+energy to methane to energy used+CO2+methane lost

    The problem with this is that methane's a worse greenhouse gas than CO2, so the methane lost from storage and transfer, to the degree it stays in the atmosphere, actually makes climate change marginally worse, not better.

    The screaming need right now is to get the anthropogentic greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and oceans. While leaving them in the atmosphere is better than pulling them out of the ground, by itself that's insufficient right now.

    892:

    About the mass moves: 1. Consider the small towns created by industries. For example, for a century, tiny farming/ranching/plots of land were turned into towns where the trains could stop for water and wood/coal/oil. Then diesels and electic, and the stops aren't needed. 2. Modern MBA's into non-creative destruction. Around the mid-nineties, I think it was, I heard the story of a Walmart that moved into the outside of a small town out west (US). Except for the local drug store, they drove every single solitary business in town out of business. Then, five years later, they decided they weren't making "enough" profit, and shut the Walmart, telling the town to drive 30 mi away to the next one. 3. Consider that in much of the world, in small countries (and not-so-small) the majority of the population is in the metro area of the capital city (i.e. Mexico City).

    If people had, say, a BMI, they might not move. Oh, and if corporations didn't keep them from building their own infrastructure (broadband, anyone?)....

    893:

    Really? You don't think so? That's odd, I occasionally get fucking twits, and some robocalls, from my local power company about that.

    Consider that while the factories are running full, most of the time, you get, first, transit during lunch hour (11:30-13:30), and, esp in warmer weather, all of the buildings that people live and work in with those so "wonderful" sealed windows.

    894:
  • What do you see as a better than unions long term solution?
  • What a lot of you seem to not see is this: socialists were always a large part of the labor movement. Until the early/mid fifties, when they wealthy struck back with the Cold War and red scares (you say there's commies under my bed, Sen. McCarthy! I'll git em!)
  • After that, it went two ways: "co-managerialship", with the heads of the unions making the kind of salaries company presidents did, and the mob moving in, seeing it as nothing more than a protection racket.

    Without the socialists, there's no interest in the wider society in which we live. And the lobbyists pushed through laws preventing alliances and things like strikes for bigger issues, got to be only about the job....

    Also, trade unions are a terrible idea. You get the carpenters crossing the line (some of them, anyway) when the sheek metal workers, or the clerks, are on strike. And in many cases, you need to change if you go elsewhere. And, of course, the companies hiring non-union labor, because the wealthy's pushed-through laws made it easier. Never mind who got less pay....

    Now, an industrial union, where *EVERYONE at a job was a member (and I'd make it that contractors needed to join, as well, which would hit the outsourcing in the gut) would be a lot different, and more powerful.

    Oh, btw, I've been to the US federal NLRB, and there are rules explicitly making it next to impossible to form/join a union if you're IT.

    I also note that I'd wipe out laws and regulations, and add new ones, saying that unless a person has scheduling and budgetary authority over more then four people for over a year, they are NOT MANAGEMENT, and so eligible to join a union.

    • ObDisclosure: twice in my life, I've been a member of the Wobblies....
    895:

    Not just there. I've read of places - the British isles? maybe Gaul? where the about-to-be-king had to be examined naked, and any moles or such blemishes disqualified him.

    896:

    Yup. Not great, but not worse.

    Stopping fossil carbon extraction has to be step zero.

    Something has to power ships, trains (the best electrified system in the world still needs yard engines and track repair machinery), aircraft, and heavy equipment, notably tractors. Hypothetically graphene compressed electron tanks can do that; what we have today can't.

    If we can move a major military to methanol-air fuel cells and methane gas turbines with air-sourced carbon, that gets rid of the "army exception" for stopping fossil carbon extraction. (and give existing thalassocracy a reason to push something ship-dependent.)

    I'd rather do this with ammonia, but for whatever reason people are offering commercial turnkey methanol-air systems and not ammonia systems. (I figure we're going to need to get into ocean wind ammonia synthesis anyway, for fertiliser inputs.)

    Air-source-carbon methane seems an unlikely plastics feed stock, but if it is, that's a bit of sequestration.

    So, anyway, yeah, not great. But not worse.

    897:

    Same as it ever was.

    The town I grew up in was originally a train stop, but was able to grow by virtue of being ground zero for the Alberta oilfield.

    Around that town and across the prairies were sprinkled endless little 'towns' and settlements, all of which were not more than a couple of hours on horseback from all the surrounding farms. Each little cluster had a few houses, a general-ish store and maybe a school.

    The rise of the automobile put a stop to most of the commercial aspects of that, and then the schools (with busing). Many of the spots are still on the map but are really just a place where a few houses are a bit closer together.

    That centralization of services continues - the bustling prairie town my great grandfather had his farm near in the 20s and 30s now has little more than a diner, all other shopping and banking is done in 'nearby' (30km) Calgary. The other small towns and even smallish cities are similarly being gutted, as people prefer to drive to the bigger centres. The town of 500 my parents finished their teaching careers in could barely support a small grocery store and a bar, being about 100 km from Edmonton meaning that most residents would go there to buy groceries etc.

    Blind spots in our cognition mean that otherwise intelligent people will drive massive trucks and burn 50l of fuel to go to a distant big box store and save $30 on their groceries, not to mention the extra hour or two of driving.

    At no point I am aware of has anyone demanded that the government subsidize those little general stores because they were there before and 'should' continue. But for exactly that reason much of Alberta is in an uproar because the oil industry is in decline and people want their goodies.

    898:

    I think that my units are correct.

    899:

    You're determined.

    Sorry, but are you suggesting that all the vehicles and packs and uniforms, etc, were all hosed down before returning to base, and mechanics, for example, cleaned the outsides before doing maintenance, or refueling and otherwise resupplying?

    An ex of mine's second husband was in 'Nam. He was never within a hundred klicks of the forests where they used Agent Orange. He did, however, mention at least once to me that he remembered being up to his elbows in the crap, loading and transporting it. And they tried, three times, to have a kid, and miscarriage every time, reasonably presumably from Agent Orange.

    900:

    Are you suggesting that we don't get much at all... from the Illiad and the Odyssey? We don't know, for example, that Greek Gods appeared, usually in private situations, to humans (he asks, thinking of Odysseus chatting with gray-eyed Athena).

    901:

    "The screaming need right now is to get the anthropogentic greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and oceans."

    How?

    Putting them in has taken many decades of about the simplest chemistry imaginable on a sodding enormous scale. To get them out again usefully rapidly - say, a tenth of the time - means, then, operating some much more difficult chemistry on ten times the scale. And it needs all those decades-worth of energy as input, and doesn't produce any output you can use.

    I've not heard of any proposed method that could actually achieve this or anything vaguely close to it. Only things that would take geological time to have any effect and could only work if no land was needed to do anything else on, or similar, which are basically just piddling about.

    Moreover, even if we did have some useful proposals, I can't see how you get people to do them. Not even with some equivalent of guns to heads on a scale of billions. Especially given that we already have the equivalent of guns to children's and grandchildren's heads on the scale of billions, and it doesn't make any difference.

    902:

    And it's wobbling. Flickering lights and there's been at least one interruption severe enough to make the computer reboot.

    903:

    CO2+energy to methane to energy used+CO2+methane lost

    Whaddabout CO2+energy to methane to methanol to energy used+CO2+methane lost where the CO2 -> methane -> methanol part is done in centralized, regulated, inspected facilities, perhaps under a Fulleresque dome to mimimize methane lost? It might involve industrial facilities on the scale of current petroleum refineries, but so what, given what's at stake?

    904:

    And it's wobbling. Flickering lights and there's been at least one interruption severe enough to make the computer reboot.

    Please let us know how that goes and if there's any public reports on it.

    905:

    and any moles or such blemishes disqualified him

    Leviticus 21:17-21

    Say to Aaron: ‘For the generations to come none of your descendants who has a defect may come near to offer the food of his God. No man who has any defect may come near: no man who is blind or lame, disfigured or deformed; no man with a crippled foot or hand, or who is a hunchback or a dwarf, or who has any eye defect, or who has festering or running sores or damaged testicles. No descendant of Aaron the priest who has any defect is to come near to present the food offerings to the Lord. He has a defect; he must not come near to offer the food of his God.

    906:

    Leviticus 21:17-21 Yes, but note that many of those defects were acquired after birth, due to bad luck/life's circumstances.
    The ones who qualified made it from birth (with no defects when born) to adulthood without acquiring a disqualifying physical defect.

    907:

    This isn't terribly far off the more "extreme" of the hyper efficient eco-houses

    Oh, it's definitely not a new idea. Aerated concrete isn't even particularly new, it's just more widely available to the point where our local big box hardware shops sell aerated bricks (it's fragile so hard to move, and mildly annoying to cast in place).

    The thermal mass stuff is ancient, I vaguely recall that some of the oldest structures in the world Europe make use of the idea. But big sheets of glass facing the sun is obviously a recent thing, and triple glazing even more so :)

    908:

    EC You said .... "Enclosing it would turn it into the equivalent of 25Mt and a 250kt explosion would be even worse news" But the second ("worse news" ) is 2 orders of magnitude smaller - uh?

    Rocketjps Fort McMurray? Tar Sands? Or Calgary? Actual Oil? Oops - you actually say Calgary - sorry.

    Bill Arnold/Allen Thomson/whitroth Those "No Defects" rules are aimed at producing Healthy Children - given that the knowledge of disease & inheritance & contagion was vanishingly small & they were relying on belt-&-braces approaches, even when totally unnecessary. ( Lamarck or Lysenko vs. Darwin, in essence )

    909:

    Agent Orange is a biochemical defoliant, its toxicity is known now.

    Depleted Uranium (DU) which is what kicked this discussion off, before you mentioned AO, is supposed by many to have all sorts of after-battle bad effects. The evidence doesn't support this belief. I did finally find something vaguely authoritiative which addresses the scare stories about DU use in warfare.

    https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/properties.pdf

    It does give numbers on the use of such weapons in GW1 and the Balkans conflict, not GW2 because it was written in 2000 or so before that particular clusterfuck kicked off. The abstract of the IAEA report I link to ends:

    "Urine, feces, hair and nails record recent exposures to DU. With the exception of crews of military vehicles having been hit by DU penetrators, no body burdens above the range of values for natural uranium have been found. Therefore, observable health effects are not expected and residual cancer risk estimates have to be based on theoretical considerations. They appear to be very minor for all post-conflict situations, i.e. a fraction of those expected from natural radiation."

    910:

    Actually, there is a solution. You swap batteries instead of stopping to charge. This is a simple and obvious given cars and batteries built for doing this, and if it's done correctly the change shouldn't take any longer than filling your tank with gas. The "battery station" would have all the necessary equipment to charge multiple batteries, probably overnight, and sell snacks.

    Doing it like this is probably one of the necessities for getting gas companies on-board - they transition to supplying batteries for "battery stations" but they keep existing.

    912:

    Battery swapping works for fleet vehicles; it particularly works for things like city buses at shift change. (If you can get the bus back to the garage; at present, lots of bus driver shift changes are swapping the driver at a stop.)

    If you're talking personal vehicles, it doesn't work; risk of damage during swap, your brand new car now has a five year old battery with significantly diminished range, the discomfort with not owning an essential part of the car (the single most expensive component of an electric car), and the imperfect circumstances problem -- battery swapping works fine at 20 C under cover. Now do it at -15, in wind and blowing snow and Stygian darkness, with the battery holding frame cold enough to be too tight to release -- makes battery swapping something people will pay to avoid.

    A combination of most charging being home charging and fast and improving charge times to 80% (park, plug, go take a pee and stretch, stretch again, 82%, OK, onward...) is likely to make charging time a minor concern at best as electric cars become prevalent.

    913:

    Well, plants put 10-25% of the carbon they sequester into the soil in the form of root exudates and food for mycorrhizae, so I'd say that switching to more permanent agriculture that leaves the carbon in the soil as much as possible is a really good place to start. Then you're making two useful things: plant products and healthier soil.

    There are some huge problems with this. In no particular order: --It's easy to blow soil carbon, by heating soil or disturbing it. Adding carbon to soil basically means no till, which means other methods of weed control have to be used. Many places would also benefit from going to polycropping instead of rotational monocropping, but the downside is that it's hard to mechanize polycropping, so you need more human labor. Which drives up the price of the resulting products. Which means people have to be paid enough to afford food. Are you beginning to see why I advocate for wealth redistribution and small farming? --One easy place to get carbon is greenwaste. You simply collect it from the trash stream, compost it somewhere, and then spread it out on fields. Easy, right? I mean, you can just have a huge composting facility somewhere where there's vacant land cheap and near a highway, truck the greenwaste from surrounding counties to that site, mix it all together, compost it in windrows, and ship it throughout the nearby territory? What could go wrong.

    Two words: pathogen superhighway. In California, one-third of counties are under quarantine for pathogens and pests, some of which can survive being hot composted. Mixing the input and widely shipping the output from composting is about the best way to spread them we could devise short of deliberate biowarfare. To defeat them, you need to pay for crop epidemiologists and a lot of field workers. But plant pathology is nowhere near as profitable as biomedical research into lifestyle diseases of humans, so universities for the past two decades have been cutting these departments, and the remaining plant pathologists tend to be molecular biologists more than epidemiologists who can track and plan to stop a crop killer. So yes, getting our heads out of our profit-maximizing assholes and prioritizing the systems needed to continue civilization is really a thing we need to do, which is why we're talking about this on the website of a SFF writer, rather than in a school cafeteria with some napkins to plan on.

    If you want some other places to put carbon: building materials (wood and concrete replacements) and road surfaces are also useful places, although I agree, by themselves, they're tiny pools that won't solve the problem.

    914:

    Troutwaxer @ 911: "Actually, there is a solution. You swap batteries instead of stopping to charge"

    It's been tried rather recently and it failed miserably, after close to a billion dollars invested in the affair. The company was called "Better Place" and it went bankrupt in 2013.

    There's a full Wikipedia article that explains how it was supposed to work and why it didn't work:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company)

    They thought they had figured out everything.

    915:

    David L @ 838:

    a single person can live fairly comfortably here on $24K/year.

    Single is the key. And buying a house here where we are would be hard.

    Kids are EXPENSIVE.

    I know I'm an anomaly. Mainly because the old virtues - work hard, save and avoid debt as much as possible actually worked for me. I look around and see others who work just as hard, who live those same old virtues, and they don't have the success I've had. I know I got undeservedly lucky.

    There's no way I could afford to live here if I didn't already own the house. I certainly couldn't afford to buy one now; not even the kind of hovel this place has become. I don't see any way someone else could make it here on my income either.

    And lord help those with less than I have, 'cause for damn sure no one else is going to.

    As expensive as having kids is, they're worth it. I regret never having them.

    (tl;dr - narcissistic sociopath ex-wife ruined me financially before she ran off & by the time I eventually did recover it was too late for me to start another family, even if I had the social skills to find another partner.)

    916:

    Well, speaking of the EV Bolt, about 1/4 the car is battery, so you have to take it apart to replace the battery in the car. Given range anxiety, I agree with the engineers who decided to go with faster charging over battery replacement, since unless we get considerably better batteries, we're talking about swapping more than 400 kg of batteries. And that's just for a car.

    Now, it's tempting to speculate that it would be possible for a semi-trailer to pull a battery tender that could be swapped out. Maybe not impossible, but outside the Australian road trains, it might get a bit problematic.

    917:

    Nojay @ 846: Vapourised/molten uranium rapidly coverts in atmosphere to particulate uranium oxide which rapidly drops to the ground because it's a lot denser than air. Unless someone is in very close proximity to a DU projectile strike then they will not breathe in noticeable amounts of uranium oxide. If they do breathe in those particles then over a period of time they will exhale and expectorate them like any similar particulates people inhale in their daily lives. Asbestos fibres are a different matter due to their size and shape, continued exposure to some particulates like coal dust over a period of years or decades can result in blacklung disease etc. etc.

    So, that's the reason the U.S. Army doesn't require you to don protective overgarments and wear a protective mask with hood and undergo chemical decontamination whenever you have to work around DU contamination, even if it's no longer burning.

    Oh, wait ... They DO require that! I wonder why? Could it be because that shit is poisonous1

    DU was blamed for all sorts of sicknesses, generally labelled Gulf War Syndrome back in the early 1990s after Gulf War 1. The list of effects and symptoms bore no resemblance to the real, measured and scientifically tested effects of uranium compouunds and especially oxides on the human body or animals generally. DU projectiles weren't actually used in most battlefields -- they're a specialised can-opening tool and not fired against, say, think-skinned meatbags or buildings and the like where HE cannonshells and tank gun shells would normally be used. DU still got blamed for these illnesses even when the soldiers had never been exposed to any such projectile use.

    Ever been to war? If you've got troops in the open or unarmored vehicles or insurgents with barricaded positions in buildings and the only ammo you have loaded is DU (GAU-8/A), you shoot them with DU projectiles.

    Frankly if someone's standing right next to a burned-out armoured vehicle that's still smoking they're going to be breathing in a witches brew of toxic combusion products, plastics, fuel, paint, burning explosives and propellants etc. Any DU particles resulting from a pyrophoric burn through the hull armour will be a very small part of that.

    Uranium, like radiation is Magic so it gets treated way differently to all the other poisons and killers out there, that's all.

    I keep telling you, IT DOESN'T HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH RADIATION! It's a heavy metal toxin just like lead.

    1 Yes, that's exactly why you have to suit up. You don't want to get it on you, and you damn sure don't want to get it IN you.

    918:

    Research reconciling genetic knowledge about the black plague with historic knowledge. Covers the plague's spread into Asia, the Arabian peninsula, and Africa.

    https://www.metafilter.com/189868/The-Big-Bang

    Article which is only free till 12/31.

    https://academic.oup.com/ahr/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ahr/rhaa511/6040962

    919:

    They thought they had figured out everything.

    Apparently they didn't allow for "mismanagement, wasteful efforts to establish toeholds and run[ning] pilots in too many countries".

    920:

    Damian @ 876: The modern ideology that houses the prosperity gospel is the same that Weber coined the term "protestant work ethic" to describe. You can sort of see a general shape that changes only slowly in form, if not in detail, from the themes in classical antiquity through to the Westphalian era. But definitely the PWE concept is there not just in what is explicitly called "prosperity gospel", but in any ideology that equates property with virtue, like Libertarianism and slavery.

    The "Protestant Work Ethic" seems to me to be rooted more in the idea "The devil finds work for idle hands!" You should be employed in some good work to keep temptation at bay. You're not guaranteed to get rich, but it will keep you out of mischief.

    The work is its own reward.

    921:

    “ If you find really old Anglo business writing, pre-1970, you can find that view that profit is the proof you're doing it right...”

    “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

    922:

    JBS There's no way I could afford to live here if I didn't already own the house. I certainly couldn't afford to buy one now; not even the kind of hovel this place has become. I don't see any way someone else could make it here on my income either. You too?

    923:

    The GAU-8 would only be loaded out with 50% or 100% DU rounds if the mission profile said there are Main Battle Tanks in the indicated patrol area. DU rounds are overkill for buildings, light vehicles etc., a lot less effective than HE cannonshells since they do less damage per hit scored and they have little or no area effect other than when impacting heavy armour plate.

    The GAU-8 is a crappy piece of kit anyway, mated to the A-10 bayonet-charge aircraft. There are other vehicle-mounted weapons like the 25mm Bushmaster that can fire DU rounds but they, like the A-10, are usually loaded for their mission rather than being issued 100% DU.

    As for cleaning out wrecks, you'd be expected to suit up and wear respirators whether they were hit by something like a Hellfire or a Storm Shadow missile rather than a DU penetrator because of all the toxic combustion products from burning propellant, burning liners, burning fuel, burning crewmembers etc. The DU oxide residue from pyrophoric combustion is not nice stuff but the science says it's not what causes Gulf War/Balkans War Syndrome in the many many folks who have claimed it to be the cause of their illnesses.

    924:

    Honestly there is almost no way most people could afford to live anywhere nice without prior home ownership at this point. We live in a high cost of living area that is currently being flooded with money as people flee the COVID city nearby. There is no local economic reason for homes to be so highly values, just the proximity to the metropole and the shrinking need to commute to an office.

    Of course, much of the 'value' of those homes is similar to every other finance bubble - if everyone decides to sell at the same time they aren't worth anything. I find myself sometimes thinking about selling everything and going away with the money, but where would I go? I like it here, my work is here, the kids are happy and safe...

    That is mitigated a bit by the actual usefulness of a home (as opposed to a credit derivative). Even if it is worth nothing, it still keeps the rain off your head.

    925:

    A friend of mine built a ruined church in his backyard using aerated concrete blocks. Being able to shape it with woodworking tools, he did a few nicely aged gothic architecture features, and these days with the weeds growing up through it it looks more genuine than it did 10 years ago. I think he wanted to get moss and ivy growing over it, but at least 2 droughts have happened since. I believe he has other improvement plans in the works, and he found a way through his disagreement with council about his carport (a slight change to his design yielded a structure they did not insist needed engineering sign-off).

    But on topic: yes, a lot isn't that new. But this is also the golden age of ubiquitous computing, so the whole "working the house" concept is now more automatable than ever. Sure a lot of features can be entirely passive, but we can have virtually passive active features too for not much trouble.

    926:

    Re: '... so many economic history authors wrote excellent scholarly books on the history of technology'

    Guessing this is like a second intellectual home for you seeing as history of tech seems to be a recurring theme/strange attractor here. (Interesting discussions overall.)

    Thanks again!

    927:

    Heh, heh. Tell me all about "living in an expensive area". In '09, I relocated from Chicago, which I guarantee is not cheap, to the DC area, where I found rents and food 1.5 to 2 times more expensive.

    Managed to find a "cheap" place to rent (more black than white area), then found a house a couple years later.

    I retired last year, and we're living on social security - about $36k/yr. BUT: instead of 401k saving, I dumped half my paycheck, almost every single month, on principle on the house. I own it, so only taxes and insurance, not principle, interest and escrowed taxes and insurance.

    Oh and it's the most expensive house I've ever owned.. and, other than the immobile home my late wife had when I moved to Texas in the mid-eighties, the smallest place I ever owned.

    I am not, however, moving. I'm too old, and "not going to do that again" doesn't begin to cover it.

    928:

    this is also the golden age of ubiquitous computing, so the whole "working the house" concept is now more automatable than ever.

    That just switches the work from hardware to software. As someone with a little bit of knowledge of recent history I am aghast at the idea that my house would be reliant on "the cloud" for anything, let alone basic functions "Alexa open the fire escape"...

    Modelling is brilliant, computer-aided everything right up until I move in. At that point we're back to "the doorbell is some wires connecting battery, switch and buzzer" level of technology. Like my current house, the internet stuff is essentially decorative (I can watch my chickens over the internet! Also, there's a little bit of screening so the outside camera can't see the driveway or street). Stuff like curtains, thermostats and so on don't connect to the outside world. My solar power setup doesn't either - I have an entirely separate thing that puts my solar output online, based on a clamp meter around the feed wire. Hacking that from outside gets you read access to the clamp meter (oooh!), where hacking the solar inverter could shove 260V AC into the grid/house wiring or if they're particularly talented, set the thing on fire (it's on an external brick wall with asbestos eaves, so annoying rather than fatal). Just say no. The idea of coming home after a week away to discover that someone has turned off the freezer is not great, but discovering that they opened all the doors and windows and left them that way for a week could get ugly. Not least the insurance claim "oh, hackers, you say".

    929:

    Sure, but the point is it doesn't need to be internet connected. I do have thoughts about useful things to do that with, such as roller doors and gates, but I'm even lukewarm about biometric door locks (thumbprint readers, that sort of thing). Warm if it can be done on local hardware, but if it requires sending the data to google, Apple, Amazon or anyone else, that's more in the meh, luke territory.

    930:

    Re: Economics

    Thanks! - Read the first couple of articles and will watch the video. While Ha-Joon Chang does examine the reality vs. the myth, so far from what I've read he's not that particularly interested in looking at fundamentals of human motivation vis-a-vis economics/purchasing behavior.

    I'm interested in finding any academic treatment of this mostly to see whether economists are keeping up with the times, i.e., technology - specifically the prevalence of living one's life online esp. measurables like shopping and politics/voting behavior. Entities like Google and FB have probably amassed a ton of data on this which probably can be fairly easily parsed out into perception and behavior*. I'm guessing that these corps also probably have specially built AIs running their ad/programming/links scraper programs (with time stamps) which would really help to identify and even potentialy quantify possible causal relationships. Having recently read Kahnemann's Nobel Lecture (PDF is 41 pgs long), I find it more than just kinda scary that economic theory is still largely ignoring the main driver of our present economy - the influence of social media/advertising/background noise --- the Internet. What Kahnemann describes is pretty straightforward from a cognitive psych perspective but if you're not aware of these things, you can be led by the nose.

    https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/kahnemann-lecture.pdf

    • What would be really interesting is for Google and FB to donate their respective data to some trustworthy neutral third party for the purpose of testing every economic theory so that we can find out what works and what doesn't - at least for now - and how this varies across countries/socioeconomic domains, demos, etc. Leave a comment
    931:

    You're getting hit with the Vancouver bubble, which apparently can be at least partly linked to foreign money.

    https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-hidden-foreign-ownership-helps-explain-metro-vancouvers-decoupling-of-house-prices-incomes

    Toronto (and anywhere within a couple of hours drive) is seeing the same thing.

    Toronto is also seeing the effect of converting residential housing into unregulated hotels (ie. AirB&B). It's telling that rents are way down when there's no tourist travel and suddenly condos are available for long-term rent, even though a year ago they "weren't" being rented on the short-term market.

    Anecdotally, in some downtown Toronto buildings that officially don't have short-term rentals, not only are they a lot less crowded but the cleaning costs of public areas has gone down (even allowing for extra cleaning).

    932:

    "Well, plants put 10-25% of the carbon they sequester into the soil in the form of root exudates and food for mycorrhizae"

    Ah, I didn't realise it was as much as that. I'd have guesstimated a good order of magnitude less, at least for anything short of forests. But then, part of my thinking there was that only in forests (and a few other environments, also slow and non-agricultural, eg peat bogs) do the natural accumulative processes get to carry on accumulating undisturbed, and we don't have that much growing land to turn over to non-agricultural use. If it can be done through agriculture, then that does provide a means of getting the scale up large enough. The kind of things you describe as "huge problems" in doing agriculture in such a way as not to let it all straight back out again, I'd interpreted as "not gonna happen", at least on anything more than an experimental scale in rich countries... so I guess it still sticks on "how do you get people to actually do it".

    Composting I would have thought would release loads of methane, at least when you spread it even if you do capture and use what it gives off while you're making it. Your local pathogen situation sounds horrendous, but surely that could be at least mitigated by doing the collection and composting on a much more local scale... it sounds to me like that's one of the numerous problems that you get in excessive degree because of stuff like US notions of "how things are done" and the California version of those notions being even more awkward.

    933:

    "The work is its own reward."

    I think you've forgotten to use your "sarcasm font" tags...

    934:

    The modern ideology that houses the prosperity gospel is the same that Weber coined the term "protestant work ethic" to describe. The "Protestant work ethic" is incidental to prosperity gospels. They are about demanding (verbally) that (the Christian) God make the demander prosperous, with the demand typically structured as a verbal declaration of a desired state model[1] of their personal prosperity, but they've been branching out into politics, like recent demands that God overturn the US election. These demands are given (cherry-picked, then warped) theological/textual justifications. With a usual addition of how monetary giving to the church is repaid by God many fold in physical prosperity. (Again, with words/theology characterizing it differently.) There are other denominations that push the work ethic and prosperity gospel churches certain don't discourage it, and probably more importantly, one's probability of success as a local businessperson or tradesperson or employee might be increased by enforced weekly socializing/networking, particularly when one is surrounded by others actively seeking prosperity.

    Since these churches (in aggregate) are current quite powerful politically in the US (and elsewhere), they should not be mischaracterized. Please at least skim the wikipedia article. (And the other links at #819, and there are plenty of reasonably deep media articles.) Prosperity theology

    [1] when I use the term desired state model (e.g. Kubernetes clusters) professionally, the lurking never-verbalized joke is that desired state models are also used by prosperity gospels and related systems.

    935:

    Bill Arnold @ 935

    This hum, er, "Theology" reminds me of the scene near the end of the Ten Commandments (1956) when Moses comes down from the mountain with the stone tablets, to find that some of his Hebrews have made a golden calf and are going ape over it.

    "Gee Moses, we we're just having some prosperity theology while you were away."

    CRASH, BOOM, BANG!

    You can't fool around with Charlton Heston and expect to get away with it.

    936:

    "not owning an essential part of the car (the single most expensive component of an electric car)"

    That's half the point of it (rapid replenishment being the other half): it gets rid of the enormous problem that there is always one part that never costs less than a few grand, that will fail, and that consequently dictates the price of the car second hand. If you have an electric car according to the current pattern, sooner or later you will have to fork out several grand for a replacement battery, with the only alternative being to fork out even more money for a replacement car. There won't be any cheap second hand batteries except for ones that are already fucked.

    With an ordinary car you don't have this problem. Even for major components like the engine and transmission you can get replacements - even for quite expensive and exotic cars - for a few hundred pounds. Similarly you can get another car for a few hundred pounds. Consequently the problem is an order of magnitude smaller.

    Swappable batteries put electric cars in the same position as existing cars: you are not forced to cough up some bleeding horrendous wad of money multiple times during a lifetime of driving; you have the option of never having to spend more than a train fare from London to Scotland or thereabouts.

    (People do like to belittle this advantage using arguments along the lines of "I've not had to change my battery" (because they haven't had it long enough to need it), or, worse, "I only had to pay [some sum with at least three zeroes on the end of it]" (yeah, well you're a jammy bastard, some of us don't have thousands of pounds down the back of the fucking sofa). Such arguments are not convincing and serve only to annoy.)

    "your brand new car now has a five year old battery with significantly diminished range"

    No, you have a battery whose age is unknown and irrelevant to you, that contains at least some specified minimum amount of charge. That gives you whatever range that amount of charge corresponds to in your particular car. When that runs out, you can swap it for another one which gives you the same again. You can carry on doing this until the car falls to pieces, and you always get the same range. Reduction in range with age is something you simply don't come across.

    "risk of damage during swap, and the imperfect circumstances problem - battery swapping works fine at 20 C under cover. Now do it at -15, in wind and blowing snow and Stygian darkness, with the battery holding frame cold enough to be too tight to release"

    That is assuming the swapping system is really badly designed (similarly for Heteromeles's objection that it weighs 400kg). Alternatively, you could imagine, say, a machine that you park on top of within the marked lines, which then aligns itself with the frame, releases the attachments, lowers the battery out and inserts the replacement; you don't even have to get out of the car. Maybe at little rural swapping stations you might find a simpler version with the machine resembling a powered pallet truck, but it's still comparable with hose in tank for effort and exposure. Of course, this sort of thing requires standardisation of frame sizes and attachments, but you would need that in any case.

    937:

    Some time ago someone else cited a similar failure in the southwestern US. It doesn't prove that the idea doesn't work. It just shows that you need to do it properly.

    At a minimum, you need to add a few paragraphs to the giant tomes that dictate what cars have to do to be approved for use on the road, specifying that they have to be made with replaceable batteries, and specifying the standards for dimensions, attachments and so on, so that you don't need a different battery for every different make of car and so that they can be changed mechanically without user guddling. It's obviously never going to work if you just let the car makers do what they feel like and they all make them non-replaceable.

    You also need to get the infrastructure in place before you expect people to start using it. Doing it back to front may have been OK when cars were a frivolous rarity only available to the very rich, but it's hopeless when they're an established mass necessity.

    Indeed, what we are doing at the moment is just a way of ignoring the infrastructure problem now by making it a bigger problem for someone else in the future. And the more fundamental problem is that we keep allowing or even encouraging governments to renege on their responsibilities as states, and just sit back snouting while leaving everything in the hands of private enterprise to come up with their usual inherently crap models that have making money as their real primary aim with the actual doing something useful part being accorded a poor second place and done badly because that makes more money than doing it well.

    938:

    battery swapping works fine at 20 C under cover. Now do it at -15, in wind and blowing snow and Stygian darkness, with the battery holding frame cold enough to be too tight to release

    Given the precision required I suspect the car wash style to be the only one that works. No-one is going to accept "give or take 10cm" when it comes to jamming a new battery into the car, there's going to have to be a whole lot of guidance and it'll almost certainly be cheaper and easier to do it via a drive-through that forces the car into a known position give or take a few centimetres, then the last mm is handled by wiggling the robot bits.

    Which means that if necessary a blast of hot air will clean and heat the battery bits... and they will likely have that hot air from the charging system. I would not be entirely surprised to see an actual car wash, at least of the underside, just to keep the robot clean. That way when your Pigeon types drive through half a metre of mud on their way to get a new battery they will not clog up the workings.

    But yeah, expect this for trucks first. Drive your big chassis-rail beat onto the machine, whirr whirr clunk, drive off and keep going. That's the minute you need to swap drivers taken care of, now off to the races again. The big problem in Australia is that the places where you want that don't have grid power... the Nullarbor, but also the outback more generally.

    939:

    Also, I need to emit generic whining noises. "Service NSW", the bit of our gummit that supply drivers licenses among other things, have updated their app to not work on my phone. Phone is ~5 years old, and since the update it now starts up and says "your phone is not supported".

    So I've been looking at the confusion of smartphones available and now I have a headache. I like the look of Android One (the no-bloatware version of Android), but $700 for the Nokia 8.3 which is apparently decent, or $200 for the Nokia 3.4... but that's apparently limited performance and the battery life is not great. OTOH... $700 so I can run the ServiceNSW app when I have a perfectly good except-for-that phone right here... I just can't make myself do it. I look at that and it feels like a big chink of money so I might as well buy the Cat S62 for $1100 and get a IR camera and something that's rugged with decent battery life. My use case is very "buy all-enclosing phone case, throw phone in handbag, go about life" so the whole pocket-filling fondle-slab part doesn't actually matter. The "bends if not treated with loving care matters, because handbag also holds multitools, bike pump, keys etc.

    940:

    While I don't chuck it in with multitools, and I did get the case for it, Ulefone ought to be a lot cheaper than that Cat. Upper midrange by current standards, vanilla Android, there are at least occasionally OS security updates, and it's got a pleasant heft; screwed together on an aluminium frame. Battery life decent -- I rarely get as low as 80% over the course of a day, but then I am not leaving the house, either -- and it does have an IR camera. (The optional endoscope accessory is visible only, alas.)

    There are a great many other robust phones from that particular manufacturer; this is the one I happen to have.

    Searching "android walkie talkie phone" seems to be a decent way to find the robust phone makers in general. Or at least a way to get into a different thicket.

    941:

    Aside from “no way are you swapping my damn batteries “, what is something that a lot of places in outback Australia have that might be of use wrt EVs... it’s on the tip of my tongue... something to do with heat and that wotsit that hangs in the sky... nah, not getting it. One of the Chinese EV companies does the battery swap thing. It apparently works in a mechanical sense, takes 90 seconds or so. Still not going near it.

    942:

    You're proposing something that might work if batteries were a commodity, but they're not. EV battery development is just starting to inflect up the logistics curve, and no one is really sure what's going to happen. Specifying a battery compartment a centimetre shorter than the minimum height of the cells in what turns out to be the $BEST_TECH is nothing anyone wants to risk.

    I mean, D through A, AA, AAA, etc. cells for the entire 20th century. And they're all just legacy formats now. It's not even 18650 vs 26650 vs 21700; those are iterations. They're not the only iterations. Battery tech is not going to be stable until both the chemistry and the manufacturing are stable which is at least ten years out even in the meadow-flowers-and-unicorns scenarios.

    The Hydro Quebec battery excellence org, an example of public funding of basic tech if ever there was one, has an explicit four-generations-of-chemistry plan for each of at least three battery technologies. I find this reassuring; they're not trying haruspicy to pick a winner now.

    943:

    Pigeon Yeah Your "arguments that you hate" are similar to the tosser who say, when I rant about having to sell my L-R ... "But then you can get a new(er) car" I DON'T WANT A NEWER CAR - I simply want to keep this one - I deliberately got it & have kept it for 17 years, because it does everything I want, idiots!

    944:

    whitroth @ 895:

    1. What do you see as a better than unions long term solution?

    A good question, to which I don't have a good answer. Unions did an awful lot of good work back in the Industrial Revolution. My perspective on this history is strongly UK-centric, whereas yours is clearly American. In the UK we always had trades unions, but in some places they became effectively industrial unions. You mention the difficulties with trades unions from the labour POV; from the company POV having several different unions able to hold you to ransom was equally bad, so there was a strong tendency for companies to recognise one or two unions, and for these to represent all the workers in a single set of negotiations. So pretty similar to industrial unions in practice.

    The role of ideology in unionism was also complex. In theory the Labour Party and the trades unions worked together for the benefit of working people, guided by a broad socialist ideology in which the end point would be a democratic government that owned the "commanding heights" of the economy. To this end Labour governments nationalised amongst other things the Bank of England, electricity, gas, telephones, railways, coal, steel and car manufacturing. All of these industries were heavily unionised, or rapidly became so. Since the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress saw themselves as two parts of the same struggle for socialism this seemed perfectly logical.

    However this immediately put the government (including Labour governments) and the unions on opposite sides of the negotiating table. The unionised workers in nationalised industry set about capturing as much of the excess value of production as they could. But because the industries were nationalised it was not at all clear what this "excess" was (e.g. nationalised coal was sold at a high price to the nationalised electricity generator, thus creating a hidden subsidy), and even when it was known it didn't act as any kind of limit. The unions discovered that they could simply demand higher and higher pay rises and cushier conditions, and the government was politically unable to resist even when it meant subsidising the nationalised industries.

    (Union organisers also seemed to get a lot of perks in these negotiations; see here for a satirical take on it from the time.)

    Meanwhile the other 80% of the working population, not having that kind of leverage or access to subsidies, got fed up with seeing their own wages taxed to provide subsidies to the nationalised industries, having to pay high prices for substandard cars (British Leyland became a national joke; the first Japanese imports were highly sought after because they just worked), having to wait 6 months after moving house to get your telephone connected, and similar persistent irritations. This came to a head in the Winter of Discontent, after which Maggie Thatcher got elected, and that was pretty much that for unions.

    Stepping back from this history to take a wider view: unions seem to be a short-term solution to abuse by capitalists, but once they win that struggle it becomes a case of "hail to the new resource allocators, same as the old resource allocators". Merely replacing management by unions doesn't solve any fundamental problems. The wealth might be spread a bit more widely, but it creates a class divide between the unionised workforce and the non-unionised workforce. It also prevents innovation and fosters inefficiency (see my previous post).

    So I don't have a good answer. I wish I did. Its why I keep asking people what they propose to replace mixed-economy capitalism with. In the UK we ran the unionisation experiment to its conclusion, and it didn't work, so scratch that solution.

    945:

    Paul There was the classic case of the Dockers' & Road Transport unions attempting to block/boycott/cut-off cash to competition: The then-new factor of freight containerisation on the railways & then ( by current standards ) small - "freightliner" depot at Stratford ( E London ). Needless to say, the tow big railway unions didn't like this & there was a very public bust-up. In the end, although the biggest union ( T&GWU ) backed the road workers, the railways won, There was much sarcastic comment at the time about "The solidarity of labour" - & I got a close-up view of this, since the then Stratford depot is quite close to here ....

    946:

    Greg,

    Thanks. I'd always supposed that containerisation was opposed by the unions because it meant that you no longer needed people to carry stuff between rail trucks, ships and lorries. But I hadn't known the actual history.

    947:

    In the previous sentence, I referred to 1% burning out, and was referring to enclosing THAT. It is obviously a stupid idea to have a single national stockpile of batteries for somewhere the size of the UK.

    948:

    Another union anecdote (which I may have told here before):

    My uncle worked as a draughtsman in a shipyard. At the time there was very much a class divide between the white-collar draughtsmen (and they were all men) and the blue collar workmen down on the shop floor.

    As an apprentice some time around 1950 my uncle was given something simple to draw up and then take down to the shop floor to be cut out of sheet metal. He showed the blue collar worker the plan, and then helpfully picked up a piece of chalk and sketched out the same thing on the metal to be cut.

    Instant pandemonium. The Shop Steward (local union organiser) was summoned, who then issued an order to everyone to down tools, and the senior management were called down to the shop floor to sort things out.

    What my uncle didn't know was that there was a strict "demarcation agreement" dividing work between the white collar and blue collar areas, and part of this agreement was that "marking up" the work was allocated to the blue collar side. By picking up the chalk my uncle had broken this agreement.

    In the end hackles were stroked, it was explained that this was an innocent mistake by an apprentice, and my uncle was firmly told to NEVER do that again.

    949:

    When you're ganging up thousands of cells in three dimensions it makes very little difference what the dimensions of the individual cells are. Lots and lots of little things in a great big box. All you need to do is specify a volume that gives you the required capacity at currently achievable energy storage densities plus a wee bit for luck, and then stack them in whatever layout and mixture of orientations it takes to fit them in. As the energy storage density is improved over time, that only gets easier. Also, when you're using any thing in thousands-per-car quantities, especially when nothing else uses anything like so many of that thing, you don't have to limit yourself to whatever standard sizes happen to exist elsewhere; you get to be the one who defines a standard size.

    950:

    Play School clock...

    951:

    re. unions: My one experience with being a union member was 7 years in the federal government, including several as co-chairman of the workplace safety committee at a research institute. My take was that the people who actually gave a damn about members worked to provide support at the member level, whereas sociopath politicians ended up running the union, and only cared about their own power. They loved long negotiations because they got to stay in high-class hotels, with all their expenses covered by working slobs like me, who got paid pennies during a strike.

    YMMV, of course, but this is broadly confirmed by a cousin who's been a labor/management arbitrator for decades. He's in so much demand that his backlog is typically 3 years. His take (paraphrased) is that if the rank and file union members actually saw how their leaders behaved, they'd kill them with their bare hands.

    That being said, unions offer essential protection against sociopathic management. But possibly union management should be a short-term elected role, with elections held far enough before negotiations for candidates to come up to speed on the issues, and the term of office ending when the new contracts are signed. Another would be to have an arbitrator who is consensually chosen by both labor and management (what my cousin does), and who can impose limits on the negotiation period, and can insist that the union and management agree in writing (a legally binding contract) to accept the arbitrator's verdict. If both sides agree on the arbitrator, it's harder to argue the arbitrator was biased.

    This won't even remotely solve all the problems with the inherently confrontational union vs. management system, but it will make leadership roles far less attractive to the sociopaths. A better solution might be to have an organization's management with a balance between labor- and management-appointed managers, sort of like a cooperative. Many problems with that too, such as the fact that this structure could also become adversarial, but at least it gives labor a voice in decisions.

    952:

    Unions don't -- and can't -- work because they don't -- and can't -- solve the problem, which is the existence of management.

    Organisation of large complex effort is inevitable; a class-structured group who have more authority than responsibility is not inevitable, and is in fact the problem. Only everything gets focused on how to solve the immediate specific injustice -- which unions have had some beneficial effects on -- rather than the structural injustice of the authority/responsibility mismatch.

    953:

    I've worked both union and non-union workplaces, and found unionized workplaces better in direct proportion to the strength of the union.

    I see where you're coming from about union leadership, but would make the semi-serious counterargument that it might be beneficial to have sociopaths on your side when dealing with management's sociopaths. :-)

    The term limits thing is superficially attractive, but leaves you with a problem of relatively inexperienced negotiators on one side vs. more experienced on the other. More to the point, our collective agreement is fairly continually tweaked (small modifications to deal with changing circumstances, clarifications, etc.) and you really want someone who knows the details involved in that.

    I find it interesting that in every contract negotiation I've been involved in for the last two decades (post-Harris), the union has been willing to sit down and negotiate well before the end of the current contact — it's our employer who wants to wait and play Trump-like dominance games, with the government stepping in to legislate cuts and strips and limit our legal rights. (Winning a court case that a law is illegal is nice, but fairly useless if it takes a decade to get the verdict.)

    It sounds like you think Germany's codetermination is worth looking at. Can any German readers enlighten us on how that works in practice?

    954:

    Unions not only can work they do work, which is why shitty managers spend so much effort on trying to get rid of them.

    955:

    If unions worked, a whole lot of folks who worked at GM would still have their pensions.

    Unions are a way to increase the cost of abusing the workforce; they don't in any way solve the problem of management-the-concept existing.

    956:

    Paul Containerisation was bitterly opposed by the dockers, because it meant you either could not ( Or, it was at least much more difficult ) to steal stuff. All sorts of lies were put about as to why they didn't like containers, as you said, but not being able to steal was the primary reason. Of course, dockers got like that because of the way a lot of the dock employers' behaved - good riddance to all of them, both sides.

    Re. Unions, generally ... Germany manages this much better - now.

    957:

    Organisation of large complex effort is inevitable; a class-structured group who have more authority than responsibility is not inevitable

    Do you have any examples? How well do their structures scale to organisations in the multiple thousands or tens of thousands?

    My experience of senior managers in organisations that size is that, sociopathic or not, they do generally know their business. The ones who don't tend not to last long, and nor do the companies they run. This means that they have to be a distinct professional class because they need the training and experience, just like any other job. "More authority than responsibility" tends to follow because these are the resource allocators, and they will naturally tend to award resources to themselves, including soft landings in case of failure.

    I was in GEC-Marconi when it was run by George Simpson. After selling the defence business to BAE he re-organised the rump as a growth-oriented telecom business. Unfortunately neither he nor the band of managers he bought in knew the first thing about telecoms because they had previously run Lucas, the car parts company. We were pitching ourselves to the industry and to investors as a technology company, but none of Simpson's first or second line could stand up at an industry conference without displaying embarrassing amounts of ignorance. My boss at the time was reporting to one of those ex-Lucas second-line managers, and he took to calling the guy "the PHB".

    (Actually the CTO was from the telecom industry, recruited from one of the American companies Simpson bought out. But Simpson and his cronies didn't know enough to spot that he wasn't any good at his job).

    Marconi went bust about 3 years later.

    958:

    Unions not only can work they do work

    They work in the short term. In the long term they have a nasty tendency to destroy the companies their members work for.

    959:

    Greg Tingey @ 956 "Re. Unions, generally ... Germany manages this much better - now."

    Yes, German unions are protected by the German constitution. When big managers in big companies try to undermine unions they get arrested and thrown in jail!

    Unions are strong in Japan and Scandinavian counties too, each in its own way. In all industrial countries unions work OK when they get to form federations of unions to fight big companies who step on the workers.

    960:

    "If unions worked, a whole lot of folks who worked at GM would still have their pensions."

    Non sequitor, unless 'working' is defined as 'cure the troubles of the world.

    961:

    "They work in the short term. In the long term they have a nasty tendency to destroy the companies their members work for."

    That's a big claim, and I'm sure that there's massive evidence in favor of it.

    962:

    Like anything, we hear about the minority of bad ones and never hear about the majority that (happily) co-exist with company management.

    This is further distorted when external factors are in play that get ignored in the media coverage - like years of bad management.

    963:

    It's difficult to find really large examples, because really large examples are subject to financialisation.

    Google was -- it not longer is, but it was -- an example of a geek collective that scaled. You're prompted from grade N to grade N+1 by convincing a board of grade N+2 folks you deserve to be, and you initiate the process. "Manager" was a resource allocation specialist, rather than someone who assigned work and blame. (You can't keep this up once you're publicly traded; the market won't tolerate an absence of the illusion of control.)

    You can find a small number of relatively small shops doing things that must work; GE's milspec jet engine assembly shop was a strong example through the 90s and at least into the oughts. (~300 people, 1 manager.)

    It's important to keep in mind that "knows the business" is in a context of oligarchs; does the business extract profits effectively? This requires systemically underpaying labour, which in turn requires that labour has no power, which in its turn means that the disjunction between authority and responsibility is necessary to the conduct of the business (if you're an oligarch).

    The core fight is that labour conditions only improve when there's a shortage of labour. It's a very consistent goal of policy to prevent any real shortages of labour; capitalists want a fake surplus (obtained by preventing anything from happening which does not directly profit them) and unions want a fake shortage (created by controlling supply), but neither situation is stable. The union position is unstable on shorter time frames.

    "Stable policy goal of labour shortages in business", well, for what businesses? Absolutely cannot do that with health care, and health care is a very large part of the economy, generally around 10% in a "North Atlantic" economy.

    Aggressively indexing minimum wage doesn't work; the corporation will develop a case of no actual employees. I'm pretty sure it's necessary to get rid of the oligarchs.

    964:

    Re: 'If unions worked, a whole lot of folks who worked at GM would still have their pensions.'

    Any employee can be scammed out of their pension plan. In fact, this became such a widespread problem that ...

    'In 2010, the Department of Labor's Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA) initiated the Contributory Plans Criminal Project (CPCP) to combat criminal abuse of contributory benefit plans.'

    https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/EBSA/about-ebsa/our-activities/resource-center/fact-sheets/cpcp.pdf

    Mergers and acquisitions which seem to go in and out of fashion regularly can also totally screw up pension plans for all --- except the handful of suits that were sitting at the negotiations table. How odd, that. Hmm.

    https://www.kiplinger.com/article/investing/t001-c032-s014-how-a-merger-or-acquisition-affects-your-401k.html

    965:

    There are answers to all of that. What you're talking about sounds, to me, exactly like "co-managerialship".

    How many of the folks in charge of the unions were/are socialists, rather than executive-types?

    Let me note that one answer is the one the Wobblies use: they have one, count 'em, paid employee, the General Secretary, and they earn the median of what all union members make, period.

    That would weed out a lot of the sociopaths.

    966:

    Was that one union, or two?

    I can see it, esp. if it was two: if the blue collar went on strike, mgmt bringing down the white collar to strikebreak.

    967:

    Inexperienced vs experienced negotiators: ah, but you're missing one vital thing. I dunno if it's the case in the UK, but in the US most managers will change jobs, maybe not even in the same field, every 3-5 years.

    I will note that as about four years ago, the head of Red Hat Linux was the former head of Delta Airlines.

    Now, imagine if RH tried to form a union. Or, going the other way, a CEO and others who have never dealt with a union, and think it'll just go away, and only know the propaganda their own cla$$$$$$$$ tells them about unions.

    968:

    Or maybe you should stop talking through your hat when you have no idea what you're talking about.

    GM went through bankruptcy, IIRC. The first thing any big company does when going through bankruptcy is cancel any union contracts, and set it so that they don't need any new ones.

    This, for example, is why the coal companies spun off - I think it was Patriot Energy, knowing that it would go bankrupt in < 6 years. Not only no union contract, but they got out of the federal requirement to pay money into the UMWA Health and Pension Funds. (Yes, I know about this personally from someone on the inside.)

    969:

    Oh, but don't you know, someone with an MBA can run any company, from a gas station convenience store to a software house to a steel mill.

    NOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    970:

    REPLY @Nancy Lebovitz 918

    Thank you so very much for the link to "The Four Black Deaths". It travels up many of the alleys I've been hiking in the last 10 years or so -- though entirely without the author's impressive expertise and credentials.

    Have shared the link with many others as well.

    971:

    Again, no, they don't.

    Counterexample: Eastern Airlines. The unions screamed bloody murder, telling the regulators that Lorenzo was willing to destroy the company to break the unions. Under Raygun, they said, nahh, he won't. The airline went under something like 2-3 years later, the parts being sold off.

    IT's ALL MANAGEMENT.

    972:

    GM's bankruptcy was huge and public.

    There was no, zero, nada, zilch political cost to public funds being used to recapitalise GM -- Treasury agreed to fully fund NewCo with equity -- while ending the pensions. One would not be too far wrong describing the view of the pensions as a consensus "too much", which is a whole 'nother leaking sack of extra-dimensional horrors.

    Any kind of effective union movement would have been able to attach some political cost to that decision; what happened was a sort of fearful silence in the hopes of maintaining existing jobs.

    Unions are an effective way to make worker abuse costly in the short term. As a means of maintaining or increasing the labour share of returns on productivity in the Anglosphere they've failed hard.

    973:

    Graydon noted: "It's difficult to find really large examples, because really large examples are subject to financialisation."

    Not really. The union I belonged to (PSAC, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Service_Alliance_of_Canada) had 200K members. Our sister union, PIPSC had ca. 60K members. Neither was "financialized", depending on your definition. Sweden's equivalent to PSAC is nearly 100K members, and I suspect similar statements can be made of many government unions. All of these large unions have done a decent job of protecting their members.

    If you're talking private sector only, UAW in the U.S. has nearly 400K members and the Teamsters have nearly 2.5 million members. That's just off the top of my head. Many of these large unions have done a decent job of protecting their members.

    Graydon: "does the business extract profits effectively? This requires systemically underpaying labour, which in turn requires that labour has no power"

    None of these points are true. Effective profit extraction only requires a product better than your competitors. "Efficient" extraction is a different point, and more defensible. For your second point, the edge case is a monopoly for an essential product, in which case the business can charge whatever it wants and still pay its employees a good wage. This used to be true of many computer companies, and may still be true to some extent. This is also true to a lesser extent in an oligopoly. Your third point's a non sequitur, since it assumes that all businesses are sociopathic and have no intention to treat their employees well. Although that's common, it's not a requirement nor is it universal.

    Graydon: "The core fight is that labour conditions only improve when there's a shortage of labour."

    Although that's common, it's neither universal nor essential. Government regulations can and usually do require (for example) safe working conditions and a (arguably too low) minimum wage in most modern democracies. And there's nothing to prevent a government from limiting a CEO's salary to (say) 1000 times the lowest salary. The threat of moving a business elsewhere happens even in the absence of such threats and with effective carte blanceh for CEOs et al. (see "offshoring").

    I get where you're coming from: the socialist notion of class struggle still remains broadly valid (mutatis mutandis) is all capitalist systems in which power gravitates to the top of the hierarchy. That doesn't mean such systems are unworkable or inevitably unfair to the workers.

    974:

    The core fight is that labour conditions only improve when there's a shortage of labour.

    Which the last decade or so have proven to be false - where the US and others regions had labour shortages yet wages and work conditions didn't improve.

    There is now a disconnect in the economy and thus the workers are not benefiting (pre-Covid turning the world upside down).

    975:

    Re: ' ... if there's any research that correlates duration & intensity of trauma to how the resulting PTSD manifests.'

    Had intended to comment on this days ago -

    Below is a full chapter on PTSD - quite lengthy - but may help answer some questions. Short answer: 'It depends'.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207191/

    'Chapter 3 - Understanding the Impact of Trauma

    Trauma-informed care (TIC) involves a broad understanding of traumatic stress reactions and common responses to trauma. Providers need to understand how trauma can affect treatment presentation, engagement, and the outcome of behavioral health services. This chapter examines common experiences survivors may encounter immediately following or long after a traumatic experience.

    Trauma, including one-time, multiple, or long-lasting repetitive events, affects everyone differently. ....'

    PTSD is a very active field of research including the below breakthrough research that identified biochem markers in the blood. (Yes - PTSD is real.)

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-019-0496-z

    The above study was done among male military vets only therefore came under some criticism. Hopefully they can re-run this study soon starting with male and female ER/ICU medical staff who - as a group - have been living a nightmare and are pretty close to burn-out.

    976:

    There's at least a take on that one that the population rate of economic participation is still low by the historical norms so the appearance of a labour shortage is false, the employers know it is false, and are reacting accordingly.

    The extent to which wages are set, rather than negotiated, and the degree to which HR aggregation tools like Linked In function to set all salaries to the average (and thus trend to decrease them over time) is so far as I can tell not studied. Which is a shame because it certainly looks important.

    977:

    Thank you for letting me know.

    In general, I have a not-great habit of evaluating what I share by the amount of conversation it generates, but in this case, I've shared the Black Death material a lot, and I've only gotten a few replies, but they're been enthusiastic.

    979:

    There's at least a take on that one that the population rate of economic participation is still low by the historical norms so the appearance of a labour shortage is false, the employers know it is false, and are reacting accordingly.

    As you say, doesn't appear to be properly studied.

    But the number of cases where employers go running to the government proclaiming labour shortage so they need special permission to bring in foreign workers(*), or the number of stories over the last decade about unfilled job vacancies, would seem to indicate that labour participation is only part of the problem.

    • during Alberta's most recent oil boom Tim Horton's was bringing in foreign workers because they weren't willing to pay the higher wages it would take to hire local people.

    Or currently in Ontario, where the restaurant industry is pleading with the government because they "are doomed to a lack of available labour" while conveniently ignoring their poor wages and work conditions.

    980:

    They don't pay their employees a good wage. Even more fun with "profit extraction" when employees are over in the third world.

    https://9to5mac.com/2020/12/14/iphone-assembly-suspended-india/

    981:

    Swappable batteries put electric cars in the same position as existing cars: you are not forced to cough up some bleeding horrendous wad of money multiple times

    The Tesla Model S was designed around a swappable battery. Tesla even had a model for "filling station" swaps -- for a fee, the station would swap out your existing battery and swap in a fully-charged one. Because Teslas are internet connected telemetry platforms they could factor in some arbitrage for relative battery life and condition. Idea was you'd drive cross-country swapping batteries on your way from A to B to C to D, then drive back the same way, swapping back, until you picked up your own fully charged battery at the first stop, essentially renting batteries as you went.

    Swapping was designed into the car: drive it onto a platform, unlock some bolts and unplug the battery, jack it up, slide old battery out and new battery in, done and dusted in ten minutes.

    Spoiler: it was cumbersome, customers hated it, after the first couple of trial stations they folded the scheme. Still makes it really easy to swap a tired Tesla battery for a wired one, though -- just like a very expensive tire change.

    982:

    Ulefone

    That looks cool. I will grind through a bit. But also... 120GB of ROM. (I assume you lot all remember when ROM meant Read Only Memory rather than apparently "read-write persistent storage").

    Sadly though those phones fall into the category of "no screen protection" so I'd still need to buy a protective case. Which kind of negates the point of buying a rugged phone (I don't shoot underwater video, my current non-waterproof phone has survived five years). I am on my second case for it, the first one rubbed against something hard long enough to grind through the case and make a scratch on the phone... luckily the back of the phone. Hasn't happened again but it makes me look at "rugged screens" and wonder whether the warranty covers a set of keys rubbing against the screen for a couple of hours while I ride my bike.

    983:

    Down here the labour unions have the problem that they are legally hamstrung but the employer unions have free rein. In Australia the process for going on strike is complex and legally fraught, but the process for locking workers out is trivial. Likewise "sympathy strikes" are effectively banned, but employers are free to blacklist workers and employ scabs*.

    It's less "not a level playing field" and more "any of that and you go to jail". The anti-union political party has effectively won, not least because the anti-union newspaper guy now owns a scary chunk of the English-language media.

    • the term is legally meaningless because unions are not protected against non-union workers but are prevented from retaliating against them.
    984:

    Yep. The GOP has packed the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board), but we're hoping that Biden will pull it the other way - I think he said he would.

    985:

    One thing I absolutely would include in any near future set novel is 2020 era electrics.. retrofitted with later batteries. Assume one of the players working on solid state lithium crack it. That results in cheaper, much longer lived.. and much denser batteries. If in 2032 you buy a used Tesla for a song, and just cram as many D.Bag 3000 solid state cells in as will fit in the battery pack, you have a car which can run at petal-to-the-metal speeds for a very, very long time

    986:

    I remember seeing a short video report on some people in Aotearoa who were drag racing a fairly boring 1970's sedan that had been retrofitted with electric drive. It made the local news for being disturbingly quick. I suspect a combination of instant-on electric motor and only carrying enough batteries for a couple of drag runs. Talk about range anxiety "range when fully charged: 1/4 mile, times two" 😋

    I wonder what effect all the stupid anti-repair technology is going to have. A combination of all the parts being designed to work precisely together and various laws making it illegal to repair stuff if it's protected, therefore everything is protected, might make some of the refitted more like replacing. Sure, it's a Telsa body, and maybe motor, but everything else has to be replaced because it's smart enough to sulk when not talking to a genuine whatever... headlight, door handle, charge socket.

    987:

    But the number of cases where employers go running to the government proclaiming labour shortage so they need special permission to bring in foreign workers(*) See also: Brexshit & all the lies about horrible EU workers stealing jobs, yes? Until they suddenly find that there is nobody there to hire ... oh how sad.

    Moz Yes "Proprietary" fitments rather than universal fitments - um.

    988:

    Funny, about 40 years ago, I suggested this to my twin brother, a labor (or is that labour?) lawyer. He scoffed. I kept my counsel (appropriate) but I've often re-visited the thought. Interesting it showed up here.

    989:

    Sorry, did not quote the subject. Was about containerization and theft.

    990:

    Thread of interest to UK people and others who might soon encounter (perhaps most people) the UK variant virus. But see the final tweet about secondary attack rate saying take that bit with a grain of salt.

    With data that has emerged in the last week, I'm now 80-90% convinced that infections by the UK variant virus (Pangolin lineage B.1.1.7, @nextstrain clade 20B/501Y.V1) result in, on average, more onward infections, ie are more transmissible. 1/10https://t.co/g8HKduGvqW

    — Trevor Bedford (@trvrb) December 29, 2020

    Sadly, not much SARS-CoV-2 sequencing is being done in many other parts of the world, e.g. the US. Anyway, mask-up when indoors and anywhere else where there might be significant sharing of unfiltered exhaled air, physically distance, improve/insist on indoor ventilation where possible, and avoid indoor gatherings where possible. (I've been wearing a N95 (from the before-times) recently, and feel(am) safer with it.)

    991:

    "Which the last decade or so have proven to be false - where the US and others regions had labour shortages yet wages and work conditions didn't improve."

    Another way to phrase it is that they don't want to raise salaries, and therefore they have a shortage.

    My major anecdote here is that almost every newspaper article about a labor shortage comes down (by the end of the article) to 'we want to pay minimum wage, no benefits, and have people move 500 miles at their own expense for a temp job'.

    992:

    Rocketpjs @ 924: Even if it is worth nothing, it still keeps the rain off your head.

    Yeah, mostly ... and I've been working on that.

    But that moved down my priority list all of a sudden. I went out to the grocery store for my bi-weekly shopping this evening. Got two blocks from the house and my Jeep just stopped working; total electrical shutdown. Right after I pulled out onto one of the busiest streets in town.

    Fortunately from where it happened it's only half a block downhill to the garage I usually take my vehicles to & I got a gap in oncoming traffic so I was able to drift around the raised median and into their parking area (only about 10' going the wrong way in the dark with no lights, no emergency flashers).

    The reason I take it there (besides them doing good work & having fair prices & never having tried to gouge me) is it's less than half a mile to my house. I can easily walk home while I wait & walk back when they're done.

    As it was, the guy who runs the place was still in the back doing paperwork, so I knocked on the door & left the key with him. They'll take a look it tomorrow and call me to let me know how much it's going to hurt.

    I stopped by the quickie mart across the street from there and got a loaf of bread, but they didn't have whole wheat. It's been 40+ years since the last time I bought white bread.

    993:

    Pigeon @ 933:

    "The work is its own reward."

    I think you've forgotten to use your "sarcasm font" tags...

    Wasn't meant to be sarcastic. That's my assessment of how the "Protestant Work Ethic" differs from the prosperity gospel. You've got the satisfaction of knowing you've done a good job even is no one else ever recognizes it, and even if it doesn't bring great financial rewards.

    It's like how the Boy Scouts are supposed to do a good deed every day and not expect any reward for it. In fact, if you do get a reward, it doesn't count as your good deed for the day ... though, you're really supposed to be doing lots of good deeds every day and not keep count.

    You're trying to become a better person by being a better person.

    994:

    "ten minutes"

    Ah, well, there you have it. Compare with the kind of thing Moz and I were proposing...

    995:

    "Sure, it's a Telsa body, and maybe motor, but everything else has to be replaced because it's smartshit enough to sulk when not talking to a genuine whatever... headlight, door handle, charge socket."

    And also because that's the easiest way to make sure it isn't spying on you, and can't be radio-commanded to stop working. (Compared to taking every single thing apart, disabling anything that looks like a radio or persistent storage, hacking the software so it doesn't complain about those things being gone, and never being sure if you haven't missed something.) Not to mention the way that any electrical item which these days has to be "talked to" but which for 80 years or so has worked fine with no more "talking to" than switching the power on and off invariably also has some additional behaviour which serves only to be bloody infuriating.

    Of course, the same problems are also pervading petrol cars these days; at least with electric cars there is the advantage that building a PWM controller is simpler than building an engine management computer and calibrating it to pass emissions tests.

    996:

    I am reminded of one night when the police discovered me stopped underneath a streetlight at a roundabout miles from anywhere with half the wiring loom hanging out of my motorbike. They offered to call a breakdown service for me; I replied "Oh no, it's all right, it's just a total electrical failure, I'll have it fixed in a few minutes". It wasn't until I had fixed it and was on my way again that I realised why they gave me such funny looks.

    997:

    Actual swap time, publicly demonstrated, was 1 minute and 33.4 seconds.

    Not one single customer used the swap station twice. Every use was "I wonder what it's like". The stats on usage fell week on week. After about two years of having it available the usage had effectively fallen to zero. I saw a video of the "open" swap station and it looked abandoned. No one wanted it.

    Eventually someone ran over a tow hitch that flicked up and punctured the pack. That caused a small fire. The car was still drivable and the driver drove off the freeway, parked and got out completely unharmed. The fire was put out with no trouble.

    However it got a lot of publicity, not that everyone was fine, no one was ever in any danger but rather "Tesla explodes on highway, family lucky to survive inferno"

    So Tesla was faced with putting a bash plate under the car that would preclude automated battery swapping or facing more "Tesla Inferno" headlines. They closed the battery swap stations. No one cared.

    998:

    "there is the advantage that building a PWM controller..."

    If you think that the motors in a modern EV can be driven by a PWM controller, you shouldn't really be commenting on how electric cars should be. This is as basic as there are two power cables coming out of the PWM and three going into the motor. It's about the same level of incompatibility as saying you're going to retro fit the turbines on a 747 with coal screws like on pre-first-world-war turbine ships. They're both turbines, so it will be fine.

    999:

    gasdive @ 997

    Didn't you also have Better Place (tm) automated battery swapping stations in Australia?

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/better-place-closes-up-shop-in-us-australia/

    1000:

    Pigeon @ 996: I am reminded of one night when the police discovered me stopped underneath a streetlight at a roundabout miles from anywhere with half the wiring loom hanging out of my motorbike. They offered to call a breakdown service for me; I replied "Oh no, it's all right, it's just a total electrical failure, I'll have it fixed in a few minutes". It wasn't until I had fixed it and was on my way again that I realised why they gave me such funny looks.

    The thing that gets me is the Jeep has absolutely no Lucas parts.

    1001:

    They closed the battery swap stations. No one cared.

    I think at this point "I have enough range" has conclusively beaten "but I might want to swap batteries and keep going". At least for people who actually own electric cars. We're very much in the "but I can drive my fossil car from Sydney to Perth if I want to" camp of range anxiety (hint: people still die doing that because they just keep driving until they are forced to stop. Often by a rock or tree some distance from the road. Stopping to recharge/refuel isn't optional).

    Swappable batteries seem like a fine engineering solution to a problem that hasn't really been identified yet. But it's such a simple solution that any muppet can imagine how it would work and the various bits needed to make it go. Whereas "build out a network of fast charging stations" is just boring, mostly political, and at this level of analysis, trivial. You really just have the old "two standards, plus a new third combined standard under development". Viz, Tesla/iCar the first mover, everyone else with the "14 levels of AC or DC with a standard plug and comms protocol". Soon with added "you can charge your non-Tesla at a Tesla station, for a fee".

    1002:

    As far as I'm aware better place had an office but no batteries. I think they were in talks over providing some fleet solution, but I don't think it ever came to anything. I'm happy to be proven wrong.

    1003:

    Apparently we did, but they were so unpopular that no-one noticed. I follow the electric car thing, somewhat reluctantly, because a lot of people I talk to are really, really committed to their car (like here, for example). But I never heard of those things until after they shut down.

    Part of it was the obvious "27 incompatible options", and partly Australia is a stupid place to start. We're bigger than the US with less than a tenth of the population, plus we have a long history of government support for stupid cars. Sorry "cars built for local conditions". Yep, your Holden is guaranteed to break down in a uniquely Australian way, not like those shitty Jap cars that don't break... no, wait, um, "Proudly Australian yadda yadda something something cobber mate cor blimey"

    1004:

    I just did a Google dive. My memory was mostly right. In 2011 BP (unfortunate acronym) were in talks with some fleets in the ACT area. (ie. National capital and surrounds, large country town with lots of government offices). The plan was to have things running by mid 2012. It all hinged on compatible cars, of which there was one. The Renault Fluence ZE. The ICE Fluence was a gigantic flop. Like utterly stupendously earth shatteringly un-noticed by literally everyone. People didn't not want the Fluence, they didn't even know it existed.

    Renault decided to "infinitely postpone" the launch of the only car that could swap batteries, and that was the end of that.

    1005:

    Another way to phrase it is that they don't want to raise salaries, and therefore they have a shortage. Or "The law of supply says that at higher prices, sellers will supply more of an economic good." Except for those selling their labor. The rule does not apply to them, because mumble mumble capitalism mumble.

    1006:

    It all hinged on compatible cars, of which there was one. The Renault Fluence ZE.

    Is that French for flatulence?

    1007:

    Swappable batteries seem like a fine engineering solution to a problem that hasn't really been identified yet.

    More accurately, I think they're a solution to "I won't buy an electric car. Because, um, ... range. Yes, yes, that's it, they don't have infinite range".

    Arguing with that is invariably either a Gish Gallop or "I reject your reality and substitute my own".

    1008:

    Got two blocks from the house and my Jeep just stopped working ... Fortunately from where it happened it's only half a block downhill to the garage I usually take my vehicles to ... The reason I take it there (besides them doing good work & having fair prices & never having tried to gouge me) is it's less than half a mile to my house. I can easily walk home while I wait & walk back when they're done.

    This is an excellent example of a wonderful solution that is a wonderful solution for the people for whom it works and irrelevant to those for whom it doesn't work.

    I've brought it up myself because I also take my car to a mechanic similarly located to me; it's easy to walk between the two. Indeed, the mechanic's shop is an unbroken downhill from my house and it's possible to roll there if I must; I've only had to do it once in twenty years but knowing I could is reassuring.

    I hope you can use the same example with others who bring up specific local solutions that can't be exported universally.

    1009:

    They're a solution to "I don't have infinite money". Of course, anyone who buys (a) a Tesla (b) a brand new car of any type, effectively does have infinite money. As I mentioned above, I do get thoroughly fed up with people who do have several grand just lying around the place doing nothing so they can just stroll into a garage and order a brand new battery without thinking about it - let alone a brand new car - assuming that it's a similarly trivial matter for everyone. I get even more fed up when they embed that false assumption into systems which once petrol is no longer an option will deny basic mobility to everyone who is not a rich cunt.

    1010:

    So what would you use then? A rotary converter? An adjustable brake?

    "This is as basic as there are two power cables coming out of the PWM and three going into the motor."

    No, there are two power cables going into the PWM unit and three connecting it to the motor.

    Was that just a slip, or are you displaying greater ignorance than that which you impute to me?

    1011:

    Realistically we're rapidly heading back to rural areas being occupied only by lords and peons. If you're outside the reach of public transport you're going to need to be rich enough to run a car or you're going to be walking/cycling.

    A lot of this stuff comes down to incompatible realities, and as we are seeing with the pandemic there are limits to the alternate realities. Tellingly even the most covid-denying public figures somehow seem to be priorities for the vaccine (that isn't needed and doesn't work but was personally invented by President Doctor Doctor Professor Lord Baron Trump). Which should give people pause to think about what will happen when it's not just two doses of a cheap vaccine but basic food, clothes and shelter that are needed for people to survive... the UK and US have both had serious cases of "just die, then" recently.

    1012:

    As I mentioned above, I do get thoroughly fed up with people who do have several grand just lying around the place doing nothing so they can just stroll into a garage and order a brand new battery without thinking about it - let alone a brand new car - assuming that it's a similarly trivial matter for everyone. I get even more fed up when they embed that false assumption into systems which once petrol is no longer an option will deny basic mobility to everyone who is not a rich cunt.

    Wow, you're the first person I've met who thinks I have infinite wealth and that I'm a rich cunt. What my wife and I have, instead, is a commitment to blow some of the money that we won't spend on our non-existent kids trying to be early adopters for non-GHG emitting tech. This is for the sake of the nieces and nephews we do have, who will live in the world we'd rather not screw up completely. We bit the bullet on the Bolt because it was the cheapest one we could get that did the minimum of everything my wife needed in a car. It was the first car we'd bought in well over a decade, and we're not planning on replacing the gas guzzler for at least another five years, unless it breaks beyond repair.

    Yes, the cost sucks, but the only way to get it down is for enough people to drive EVs so that we get economies of scale. There's even a chance this strategy will work. But it will work only if those rich cunts like me you're so fed up with get the market active enough that cheaper models and used cars become available.

    1013:

    Sydney seems to have a fair population of people who don't have the money for an electric car but are determined to have a motor vehicle of some sort regardless. There's a fearsome variety of "electric assist bicycles" and "powered mobility aids" ranging from legal through to not even pretending. As well as scooters and similar toys (which are more tightly regulated but much less policed than bicycles).

    It appears to my uninterested eye that the price point for 10km at 20+ km/hr has dropped below $AU500, possibly below $AU300. The price for a three or four wheel "powered wheelchair" is higher, but I'm not convinced it's much higher in which case those have plummeted - used to be that an ebike was $1000 and an echair was $5000.

    Apparently "mobility scooters" are limited to 10kph. Which means the thing that overtook me on the road the other day was presumably ... an unregistered car? No pedal power so it wasn't a bicycle, Hmm. I wonder.

    https://roadsafety.transport.nsw.gov.au/stayingsafe/pedestrians/motorisedwheelchairs/index.html

    1014:

    Holy bat, prices have indeed dropped. $Au500 gets you something that should work... or ~$3000 for one with lithium batteries. Not quite bicycle territory, but then they don't sell in the same numbers https://activescooters.com.au/compare-mobility-scooters/

    1015:

    https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/DC-10-55V-60A-PWM-Motor-Speed-Controller-CW-CCW-Reversible-Switch-12-24-g-C-Dh/233731434984?chn=ps&norover=1&mkevt=1&mkrid=705-139619-5960-0&mkcid=2&itemid=233731434984&targetid=919947033086&device=m&mktype=pla&googleloc=9072286&campaignid=10101785270&mkgroupid=102311925260&rlsatarget=pla-919947033086&abcId=9300368&merchantid=7364522&gclid=CjwKCAiAxKv_BRBdEiwAyd40NxSEUXKZcf_s7Kr_jdjITJ5HqGN3QE4Gncf9fCgExBPVX0--PMIOuBoCaVUQAvD_BwE&pageci=bf364e1f-1426-42ef-be7e-3b4fef561630

    Two. Count them yourself

    Because a PWM controller is for DC motors. It Modulates the Width of the Pulse of DC. Hence PWM. They're for DC motors and DC has two power cables, one positive, one negative. They're popular for model trains and old forklift trucks.

    I don't know what's in your head when you say PWM, but if it's got 3 power cables it's not the same thing that's in everyone else's head.

    Hooking one up to the three phase motor in a modern electric car would be quite a feat.

    1016:

    Scott Sanford @ 1008: This is an excellent example of a wonderful solution that is a wonderful solution for the people for whom it works and irrelevant to those for whom it doesn't work.

    [ ... ]

    I've brought it up myself because I also take my car to a mechanic similarly located to me; it's easy to walk between the two. Indeed, the mechanic's shop is an unbroken downhill from my house and it's possible to roll there if I must; I've only had to do it once in twenty years but knowing I could is reassuring.

    I hope you can use the same example with others who bring up specific local solutions that can't be exported universally.

    Why are you being such an asshole about it?

    1017:

    You can rent an Ami for 22p a minute. So you can drive for over an hour a day for less than the cost of the congestion charge you'd pay in your old diesel banger. Buy one outright for 6000 pounds. That's basic mobility.

    1018:

    Pigeon 'They're a solution to "I don't have infinite money".'

    They're not a solution to anything if you can't get them up and running, and herein lies a problem.

    Nobody is going to build the infrastructure to support swappable batteries unless and until there is a fair fleet of such to make use of them. Nobody is going to be interested in swappable batteries until there is enough infrastructure to make them usable. Chicken, meet egg.

    There are possible ways round this, of course, but they do get dicey. Vehicles that can either be recharged conventionally or swap batteries might be one path, but as various people have pointed out above, there needs to be a single standard for swappable batteries, and who's going set that up while everybody is still doing conventional charging.

    Then, once swapping becomes possible, but before it gets universal, you have the issue of swapping in an old, dying, battery, and then having problems when you have to resort to conventional recharging.

    So, I would think that swappable batteries would be a good idea if it could be got up and running, but getting there would be very difficult.

    JHomes.

    1019:

    People who depend on cheap cars today are depending on the second hand market. That is what makes most electric options look so very unaffordable - The tech is too new for there to be much of a second hand market full stop, but that will fix itself with time. Battery packs turn out to be way more durable than anyone expected, because the car babysits the cells in a way no laptop or phone battery ever is, so they will likely last a very long time with only minimal range degradation. - and the most likely future tech direction is going to be better still on this point. Though I must admit, I am mostly just amused by the idea of an old tesla S getting its battery pack ripped out and replaced with literally a megawatthour worth of iron fluroide/lithium cells.

    I also expect at least the more numerously produced models to wind up with quite thoroughly haxxored software - Right to repair laws are not going to get less aggressive, so the legal cover will be there.

    1020:

    Moz Actually, no. Especially since the Oxford/Zeneca vaccine has just been approved & is going to distributed as fast as they can do it - apparently.

    TJ People who depend on cheap cars today are depending on the second hand market Exactly - I will have to buy a "New" vehicle, if Khan wins & forces sale of my L-R ... but that "new" vehicle will be secondhand, same as my present one was, 17 years ago. If we are talking environmental friendliness is it ( Or is it not ? ) better simply NOT TO BUILD a new car & run the old one for as long as possible? I suspect it's horses for courses & the variable circumstances in different places.

    1021:

    Can you lay off the hate for people with MBAs? I have an MBA from AGSM. I also have an undergrad degree in Comp Sci from UNSW. Neither degree defines who I am nor what I believe. At work (a medium-sized IT consulting firm) I fill a couple of different technology management/leadership roles. My work varies from writing code to project management to building financial models for the business to working with our clients on their internal roadmaps and how we can assist them to leading a team of engineers, developers and sales people.

    My boss has an MBA. A number of my colleagues at work have MBAs or are studying for them. None of us believe that we know how to run any business we want to walk into. Nor are we driven by some perceived rapacious desire for the almighty dollar. We ARE interested in learning, in developing our skills and becoming better managers and leaders.

    There are definitely a cadre of people out there who fit what I believe your intended target is. But it isn't best defined by those who have MBAs versus those who don't. Maybe it is more about those who want to be 'managers' versus those who deliver useful outputs.

    1022:

    And now for something completely different.

    Do you love me? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn3KWM1kuAw

    SFW. Robots. General Dynamics.

    1023:

    Graydon @ 963:

    It's difficult to find really large examples, because really large examples are subject to financialisation.

    I'll take that as a "no" with special pleading.

    I also see a couple of replies along the lines of "the X Union has 100k members". Yes, but that's not the kind of organisation we're talking about. This is about organising a company, co-operative or other large organisation with thousands of people working in it full time, not just getting lots of people to pay dues.

    Google was -- it not longer is, but it was -- an example of a geek collective that scaled. [...] (You can't keep this up once you're publicly traded; the market won't tolerate an absence of the illusion of control.)

    I don't think you can really blame the stock market for this. Page & Brin are fundamentally Computer Scince geeks; they aren't the sort to just be told what to do by a bunch of ignorant suits. And Google was (and is) the darling of the stock market: the First Unicorn. So I think its a lot more likely that Page & Brin started off thinking along the same lines as you, but then found it didn't work and moved to a more traditional structure.

    You can find a small number of relatively small shops doing things that must work; GE's milspec jet engine assembly shop was a strong example through the 90s and at least into the oughts. (~300 people, 1 manager.)

    One person with the job title of "manager". Probably another dozen or so "team leads" doing managerial work at least part of the time.

    But I agree that smaller organisations need a lot less management than large ones, per head. Its one of those dis-economies of scale that Ronald Coase described. If we could do everything with small organisations then management would be a much smaller profession.

    It's important to keep in mind that "knows the business" is in a context of oligarchs; does the business extract profits effectively?

    Thats a side issue. The question here is whether its possible to have a large organisation (at least several thousand full-time workers) without a class of specialist managers. Economic relations between the organisation and the rest of the world are a separate issue.

    1024:

    More accurately, I think they're a solution to "I won't buy an electric car. Because, um, ... range. Yes, yes, that's it, they don't have infinite range"

    Yeah. Getting people to innovate when they don't want to innovate is really hard. You can see the cognitive dissonance wheels turning behind their eyes while they search for an excuse to rationalise their emotional resistance. Its no use dealing with their objections because they'll just hunt around till they find another one, ad infinitum.

    And I speak as someone with a long career in trying to do this (don't ask).

    1025:

    Widespread screening for PTSD biochem markers in blood might make for a more livable World, if a management person could claim lower than average PTSD markers in workers under her supervision, and hitting performance goals, it could look good on a resume. Might even encourage more leadership and less dominance.

    1026:

    Paul @ 1023: "Thats a side issue. The question here is whether its possible to have a large organisation (at least several thousand full-time workers) without a class of specialist managers."

    You can have a federation of co-ops made up of small units and of specialists working at each level, under the direction of elected co-op members.

    I was once a member of a credit union forming a big federation, the Desjardins Group, and it has 45,000 employees working under 6,000 elected managers or directors.

    Of course, there are little human and technical glitches in the system now and then. Last year a disgruntled IT employee stole the personal data of all the members of all the credit unions making up the group. This year, a few days ago, there was a glitch somewhere in their central computer system and everything came to a halt.

    1027:

    I am not holding my breath for the people who damned the Russians for going ahead with their vaccine after minimal testing and no publication of the data to do the same to the UK.

    For any doubters, it's the right decision, being vaccinated is much safer than not being, and I shall have it, but the hypocrisy is exactly what I expect.

    1028:

    Oh, yes, indeed - and I also speak from experience!

    But, in this case, you ALSO get opposition from people who have looked at the proposed innovations and concluded (rationally) that their claimed merits are at least half (and probably almost entirely) wool-pulling, they will mainly (and possibly merely) move the problems, and there are vastly better solutions. Yes, I am one of those.

    I won't divert with a description of better approaches, unless asked, but simply say that this is NOT a case of pro versus anti electric car tribes.

    Incidentally, the reasons that the battery swap failed were known in advance, but Tesla refused to learn from previous similar schemes. It could be made more popular, but would need a different car design and business model, and it's very unclear it's worth the effort.

    1029:

    Desjardins Group certainly sounds like the kind of example I was looking for. I'll go and read up on it, and I may be back with more questions. Thanks.

    1030:

    But, in this case, you ALSO get opposition from people who have [..] concluded that their claimed merits are at least half wool-pulling

    Yes. My experience was also not in electric cars, and it was in a field where EPNS bullets abound. So I can certainly forgive the genuine skeptics who knew what they were talking about (actually those conversations were really interesting). But it was rare that I got that far.

    1031:

    The hardest thing to do is not to introduce innovation, but to persuade people who have been taken in by a 'revolutionary new development' that it won't work as it stands but would need modification. I have also had the following sequence many times:

    Me: we should do this, but conditions ... are critical; it will not work without them.

    Them: we have adopted your scheme, with modifications (effectively dropping one of and sometimes all of the conditions).

    Me: that's not going to work, I am afraid.

    Them: your scheme was impractical (read: politically tricky) as it stood, and this will work.

    Later: it fails dismally.

    Them: your proposal didn't work, so we are going to rule out anything along the same lines.

    Later: their new, different scheme fails even more dismally.

    1032:

    whitroth noted: "They don't pay their employees a good wage. Even more fun with "profit extraction" when employees are over in the third world."

    Minor correction: the people who assemble Apple products aren't Apple employees; they're employees of a manufacturer that Apple contracted to assemble its products. That's deliberate, since hiring and offshoring slave labor is obviously cheaper than paying your workers American rates or good rates, but they're not employees.

    But your comment motivated me to reality-check my statement, though I don't have time to do a deep dive. A quick Web search suggests Google's average salary is ca. US$120K (vs. US$125K for Apple), with a median of US$246K for Google. For employees living in the Bay Area, those are probably only enough to bribe a landlord to let you live in a cardboard box in their alley. Apple's in the same ballpark, though their median (in Canada) is ca. C$32K (vs. C$20K flipping burgers). It's not a lavish salary, but you can live comfortably on that much in many Canadian cities.

    Anyway, on that basis, looks like I should revise my statement to "some high tech employees earn a decent wage; the support staff, not so much".

    1033:

    A couple of interesting things about Japanese quality control, they were taught it by Americans (How Americans lost it is another question.), in the American midwest, older Japanese cars are rare, they don't do well on salted highways, some examples rusted faster than (Insert worst Detroit rust bucket you can think of*). Right wingnuts tend to blame unions whenever quality control is discussed, but union folk don't make design decisions.

    *Thankfully, they got better, still too expensive for me though.

    1034:

    Apparently Facebook has decided that it's going to pay remote workers based on where they live.

    https://fortune.com/2020/05/21/facebook-permanent-work-from-home-salaries/

    So it looks like the cost savings of remotely working while living in a cheaper location will probably be captured by the employers, not the employees.

    Colour me unsurprised.

    1035:

    A couple of interesting things about Japanese quality control, they were taught it by Americans

    Same with just-in-time manufacturing. American car manufacturers used to do it, but plant managers started stockpiling parts because otherwise a delay in one place cascaded through the system.

    1036:

    jcandiloro @ 1021: Can you lay off the hate for people with MBAs

    For what it's worth, I read the complaint not so much as about MBAs per se as about those who think that because they have an MBA, they don't need any domain-specific knowledge to manage any business (and that they can freely ignore the people who do have domain-specific knowledge).

    And I think the criticism of that attitude is entirely warranted. It's certainly possible for to overstate the business value of subject-matter expertise, but ignoring it entirely is just stupid

    1037:

    For employees living in the Bay Area, those are probably only enough to bribe a landlord to let you live in a cardboard box in their alley.

    The interesting question here is: why are the rents in SF that astronomical? It sounds like Google isn't really paying employees; they are merely a conduit for money on the way to the landlord or previous owner of the place where they live.

    If you have space for N people and N+1 people need to live there then no amount of wages will generate a reasonable standard of living after housing. (Note: I know practically nothing about the SF property market; this is a general observation)

    1038:

    Tim H. @ 1033

    Japanese industrial companies got their industrial quality control traditions mainly from one US individual, W. Edwards Deming.

    What he taught them was a form of statistical process control which he had already applied with great success in the production of war materials in US automotive factories. The US auto factories threw out his statistical process control methods after the war because they hated being told by statisticians how to produce vehicles. Besides, there was a seemingly endless post-war market for cars, regardless of how you produced them.

    Deming found a better public in Japan!

    The Wikipedia article on him is deeply flawed because it spends so little time on statistical process controls and their basis: data.

    Deming: "In God we trust, all others must bring data."

    And by this, he meant that all the concerned persons in the factory should bring vast quantities of hard facts to the statisticians.

    1039:

    Can you lay off the hate for people with MBAs? I have an MBA from AGSM. I also have an undergrad degree in Comp Sci from UNSW.

    To which I would guess, based on your further comments, that the Australian MBA programs are far different (and apparently better) than the American MBA programs - for which the views exposed by whitroth are about.

    Simply put, the belief in North America is that the MBA is what is destroying American business.

    1040:

    Apple's in the same ballpark, though their median (in Canada) is ca. C$32K (vs. C$20K flipping burgers). It's not a lavish salary, but you can live comfortably on that much in many Canadian cities.

    Like any salary comparison, location matters.

    You aren't going to live comfortably on $32k in most of southern Ontario, and I assume the Vancouver area is similar.

    $32k in southern Ontario won't even get you a rental apartment without somebody providing a second income.

    Oh, and minimum wage in Ontario is $14.00/hour, so if you got a full time job flipping burgers you would earn just under $30k, which also helps put that Apple Canada wage into perspective.

    1041:

    Years ago I read an article about how unionized workplaced outperformed non-union ones. Took a while to find it. (Scroll to p.36) Dates from August 1998 (older than I remembered) so possibly outdated but possibly not.

    The average unionized establishment recorded productivity levels 16 percent higher than the baseline firm, whereas average nonunion ones scored 11 percent lower. One reason: most of the union shops had adopted so-called formal quality programs, in which up to half the workers meet regularly to discuss workplace issues. Moreover, production workers at these establishments shared in the firms’ profits, and more than a quarter did their jobs in self-managed teams. Productivity in such union shops was 20 percent above baseline. That small minority of unionized workplaces still following the adversarial line recorded productivity 15 percent lower than the baseline—even worse than the nonunion average.

    http://static1.squarespace.com/static/5821fcda579fb3ff43e5876c/5821fe275a655bd3e3a6c4bd/5821fe1e5a655bd3e3a6c466/1478622750193/Scientific_american_August_1998_1998en88s.pdf?format=original

    I read this when it came out. Wasn't able to find the original study then (and haven't since) but will try to track it down.

    Also of interest in this issue: an article about the dangers of space debris, and another about yellow fever warning of possible new viral threats. Plus ça change…

    1042:

    I don't believe the concept was his alone, but Deming isn't the core issue, that is "Does your management team value authority over the business?". This has some bearing on an earlier topic, unions, when a management team reacts to unions like characters in the first "Bodysnatchers" remake did to uninfected humans, they can value fighting the union more highly than producing a quality product.

    1043:

    Apparently Facebook has decided that it's going to pay remote workers based on where they live.

    So I dislike Facebook, but in fairness to them paying a wage based on where your employee is living is already fairly common among those companies who had a virtual workforce prior to Covid.

    But this is just one of many reasons why the assumption everyone is going to flee the cities and work remotely post-covid is false - and watch for surprises and sob stories of people who take their big city salary and spend it on big house/big property in rural area only to see their salary cut...

    Paul:1037 The interesting question here is: why are the rents in SF that astronomical? It sounds like Google isn't really paying employees;

    Too many people in a limited space, and desires/rules that forbid higher density housing.

    The stories of municipal workers who can't afford to live in the silicon valley area have been going on for decades - yet they all continue doing it.

    And it's worse, as the tech employees have taken the silicon valley problem to San Francisco, in part because Google etc all provide private bus services for their employee's commute.

    If you have space for N people and N+1 people need to live there then no amount of wages will generate a reasonable standard of living after housing.

    If you stay around to become senior (and valuable enough) you start to earn a "good" salary even in silicon valley (note the $246k median salary comment above for Google) - but even if you don't stay and you manage to get onto the property ladder in the bay area you can then sell, usually (for now) taking a healthy profit, and buy elsewhere cheaper.

    And then there are the stock options, and the dream of being part of a start-up that makes it big...

    1044:

    mdlve @ 1040

    The cost of living is even lower in the Maritimes, especially in the province of New Brunswick or the province of Prince Edward Island

    1045:

    Re:' ... if a management person could claim lower than average PTSD markers in workers '

    Until that day arrives, employee turn-over rate is a useful metric. Most people dislike change so for them to actively opt for and then work at finding a different work place says a lot.

    Early in my adult work life I took a job at a major high profile corp and within a week almost everyone I interacted with told me that the average tenure for that particular position/job was less than half a year. So if everyone expects you to be gone within a few months, how effective can you be? I stayed longer than the average but I've asked about employee turnover ever since.

    What gets ignored in such scenarios is: it takes time/$$$/corp resources to be constantly recruiting, interviewing, and training new employees. A manager who can't hang on to and develop his/her staff is a drain on corporate performance. This last bit is taken into account by some orgs using some version of a '360-degrees' employee performance assessment: what one employee/manager/department does eventually impacts other employees/managers/departments.

    One argument I've heard for maintaining a set level of employee turnover is that: if you let go the bottom 10%, you'll end up with even better employees overall - you'll always be improving your pool. Personally, I don't buy this: (1) some jobs/positions take longer to develop therefore you risk measuring too soon (prematurely); (2) individuals vary in their competitiveness - just because you're willing to overtly 'compete' doesn't mean that you're actually better at your task; (3) eventually the really talented but 'uncompetitive' potential future employees will avoid applying for jobs at your corp. (Same for hire/retain decisions based on other simplistic metrics, e.g., age, degrees, etc.)

    1046:

    mdlve @ 1039:

    Can you lay off the hate for people with MBAs? I have an MBA from AGSM. I also have an undergrad degree in Comp Sci from UNSW.

    To which I would guess, based on your further comments, that the Australian MBA programs are far different (and apparently better) than the American MBA programs - for which the views exposed by whitroth are about.

    Simply put, the belief in North America is that the MBA is what is destroying American business.

    There may be more too it than that. Used to be (around the time I entered the job market in my teens - mid/late 60s) you couldn't get a decent paying job without a High School Diploma. Then it became you couldn't get a decent paying job unless you had a Bachelors Degree. Lately it looks like an MBA is the minimum requirement for an ENTRY LEVEL POSITION.

    What are people going to do when credential inflation goes so far that even a PHD isn't enough?

    1047:

    The cost of living is even lower in the Maritimes, especially in the province of New Brunswick or the province of Prince Edward Island

    Which given Apple isn't in those provinces isn't very relevant - they only have 1 store in the Maritimes (Halifax).

    Apple's presence in Canada is limited to the more expensive places for the most part, which puts the Canadian wages on the low side and reflects that other than a office to run Canadian retail and their retail stores they don't have much in the way of Canadian employees - and at those wages they aren't a great employer though sadly typical for retail.

    1048:

    if you let go the bottom 10%, you'll end up with even better employees overall

    You'll also end up with a snakepit, because everyone knows that they are competing against each other for their jobs. Expect sabotage, stealing credit, information hoarding, and other productive behaviours :-/

    1049:

    Apple's in the same ballpark, though their median (in Canada) is ca. C$32K (vs. C$20K flipping burgers).

    That's Apple's retail arm. I doubt that American Apple Store employees are earning $125k either.

    Apple Store wages are typical retail. You get decent discounts, so if you're young and like Apple products it's a decent gig, but nothing to build a career on.

    1050:
    Oh, and minimum wage in Ontario is $14.00/hour, so if you got a full time job flipping burgers you would earn just under $30k, which also helps put that Apple Canada wage into perspective.

    If whoever wrote "iDrive" had only stuck to the flipping of burgers, then Humanity would have been much better served by their efforts!!

    The Internet remains forever baffled over why some files will sync, other files will not, and why the hell not? Nobody knows, not even Apple!

    Just ripping off rsync was too easy, doing better than rsync too hard!

    Aaaarghhh!!!

    1051:

    Rbt Prior Yes, well Zuckerberg really is a prime-grade shit, isn't he?

    Niala Kodak realised they had a problem ... looked at Deming's work ... thought they would re-introduce it. "Quality control applies to everything" - until we, the employees, noted that it should also, therefore, apply to management. It fell apart very rapidly at that point & the cynicism levels rose again. This was also about the time that the anti-union stuff really got going during & post Ray-Gun ... and the rot proceeded onwards, though by that time I'd gone elsewhere. - Tim H's remark: "Does your management team value authority over the business?" hits the nail square on.

    mdive The Brit MBA seems to be very similar to the US one, judging by the arrogant shits I met when I was doing my MSc

    1052:

    Lords & peons - well, no. What we're going to is lords, and dirt-poor almost no one else, except those working for an agribusiness (and that's not many people at all).

    Everyone else is moving to at least the edge of a metro area, where the jobs are.

    If there was an MBI, we might see people move back out, but not unless there is.

    1053:

    Model trains? Really? Then why does everyone from me, with my old power packs, to the latest reviews in Model Railroader, measure the voltage put out by the pack?

    1054:

    Lay off the hate? Well, no. Not only no, but HELL, NO.

    I've known folks with MBAs who had a real undergrad degree (like my late ex, with the BSc in materials science). But almost all companies are run by MBAs, and they are everything I say.

    Example: starting in the eighties, they decided that every division of a company should be a "profit center", and none a "profit sink". First, this mean that DP began to charge other divisions in the SAME COMPANY, and, of course, wanted to maximize their profits, to the point where other divisions started outsourcing, or doing the computation in-division, because it was cheaper.

    I am not making this up. I've BEEN THERE - for example, the Scummy Mortgage Co in Austin, TX (actual name available upon request).

    And, of course, outsourcing means you can prevent the workers who make the company go from forming a union (thereby maximizing your profits).

    Mostly, they have NO ETHICS (and I have seen articles in the last half-dozen or so years, urging MBA programs to teach ethics, so, no, they don't teach it now.)

    I gave another example earlier - how the fuck does the former CEO of Delta Airlines have any kind of background to run Red Hat Linux (the biggest, commercially, in the US)? He came in, and, sure enough, they started screwing the user base and the community that supported them.

    1055:

    I have real trouble believing some of the moves of the humanoid robots.

    And no, they weren't doing the twist. nyah

    Amazing, though.

    1056:

    And paying for outsourced slave labor and sweat shops also keeps them from unionizing.

    1057:

    Tense error: it's "destroyed", not "is destroying". What actually gets made here is a tiny fraction of what used to be made. It was so much better for ROI to have it made in China and India, and elsewhere in southeast Asia. I think the biggest sector in the US is the "service sector".

    1058:

    Applied to management? And here, I thought our 180 degree reviews did that....

    snicker

    1059:

    Really? What country are you in? In the US, except in specific niches, most people change jobs every 3-5 years.

    Yes, really. And that's based on having lived and worked in Philly, Austin, TX, Chicago, (the Space Coast of FL), and the DC area.

    I will note that folks working for the government, or government contractors, tend to stay much longer.

    1060:

    Question to US-ians Will This lunacy actually have any effect, or merely delay Biden's confirmation for a few hours?

    1061:

    Probably just delay Biden's confirmation for a few hours. My sense (and note I'm a very long way from DC) is that this is about as organized as the Trump administration's efforts to get Covid19 vaccines to people in the amounts and speed that they've said they would.

    That said, I think the longer play is to make this another effing Lost Cause like the American Civil War, to perpetuate a sense of grievance by providing an alternate reality wherein the bloody shambles of their ideology actually getting to govern is reinvented as a glorious but lost cause fighting against the overwhelming forces of Darkness those filthy transnational pedophile democrats Jews, or some such sludge dredged up from the Ninth Circle of Hell.

    1062:

    Apropos of nothing, but I'm rather taken by the ideas of Prof. Larry Gross, who's created the idea of "Postapocalyptic Stress Syndrome" (PASS)

    You can't tell from his name, but Prof. Gross is an Anishinabe man from the Minnesota Chippewa (in other words, he's an American Indian, not white). He's looking at this from the perspective of what's happened to American Indian tribes over the last 400 years. However, he sees evidence of PASS in Europe after the Black Death.

    And, I'd argue, that Trumpism may in part be an American response to what happens after the Vulture Capitalists leave towns and cities. There's something definitely worth thinking about here.

    Extended quote from the linked article:

    When a culture enters a postapocalypse period, it will usually undergo great stress. There are several considerations that need to be taken into account in this regard. First, the stress will pervade the society. The stress will not simply involve a small segment of the population, as might be the case with combat veterans experiencing posttraumatic stress disorder. Instead, everyone in the culture will be affected. Second, the stress will strike at both the personal and institutional level. Some features will be expressed in the lives of individual people, but an apocalypse will also see the collapse of societal institutions that normally circumvent and/or minimize stress in the wake of a shock to the culture, and that would assist in the recovery process. A number of features of the postapocalyptic environment can be enumerated.

    On the personal level, a postapocalyptic period includes:

    1. An abandonment of productive employment 2. An increase in substance abuse 3. An increase in violence, especially domestic violence 4. An increase in the suicide rate 5. An increase in the rate of mental illness 6. The abandonment of established religious practices 7. The adoption of fanatical forms of religion 8. A loss of hope 9. A sense of despair 10. A sense of survivor's guilt On the institutional level, a postapocalyptic period involves the collapse or weakening of the following: 1. Family structures 2. Government institutions 3. Educational institutions and processes 4. Established religious institutions 5. Health care delivery systems

    Together, these personal and institutional features constitute what I call postapocalypse stress syndrome, which can be thought of as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) raised to the level of an entire culture. However, since PASS involves institutional structures as well as personal concerns, the phenomenon should not be thought of as posttraumatic stress disorder becoming pandemic in a society. The affliction goes much further than that. This is what makes recovery so difficult, especially since PASS tends to be generational in nature. It is not simply the case that a shock wave will move through the society, after which time people will be able to continue as they had in the past. Instead, the effect is so profound, that the stress can ruin people for the rest of their lives, with the attendant despair and dysfunction being continued in subsequent generations. This is the situation that many Indian communities face today."

    1063:

    Will This lunacy actually have any effect, or merely delay Biden's confirmation for a few hours?

    Again, as previously noted the challenge (after a short consideration) must be passed by both the House and the Senate.

    The Democrats will still have a majority in the House, thus it is dead.

    It is getting full coverage by the media for eyeballs, not because it is a serious threat to the election.

    1064:

    I thought Deming's invention was using statistical methods of quality control, which apply to easily measured aspects of large numbers of the same thing.

    I don't have anything against applying quality control to management, at least if you can beat Goodhart's Law, but what methods did you have in mind?

    1065:

    H Yup - not only a "lost cause" - but to note down names of those who "Stay loyal to Dump" & those who actually recognise that the D's won, for filing for 2024 - assuming that IQ45 is not in jail, of course.

    "PASS" - hence the rise in power & viciousness of the RC church - twice - first time after about AD 450 & the second time 1348-1517

    I've also seen, as previously mentioned, a re-run of "the roaring twenties" following the passing of C-19 as a serious threat, say by May/June this coming year. If true, I intend to enjoy it!

    1066:

    On the institutional level, a postapocalyptic period involves the collapse or weakening of the following:

    I was just this morning reading a Central American newspaper that noted with distress that, with the collapse of many businesses, the "informal" (gig) economy there is now at over 50% of all employment. Whether and how long an employer-employee structure will be in returning is unclear. And if it doesn't, then what?

    1067:

    Question to US-ians

    Will This lunacy actually have any effect, or merely delay Biden's confirmation for a few hours?

    Like you think we know? The general opinion is that it won't change what happens on Jan 20, but the legal situation is obscure enough that there's room for unpleasant surprises.

    1068:

    Update on my car: (as if anyone cares)

    A bolt on the starter worked loose & shorted out the battery. Battery is dead now. Profoundly dead.

    I'm guessing the battery stayed shorted out over night, so it's never going to recover. I'm probably lucky it didn't catch on fire.

    The "damage" is around $600 (diagnostics, labor & parts, including a new 75 month battery), which is a lot less that I was expecting. I have enough in my "rainy day" fund to cover it, but I sure hope it doesn't "rain" again for several months.

    So ... to the thread about swapping batteries in electric vehicles. How many miles do manufacturers estimate you'll get out of a vehicle battery pack before you have to replace it? I know it will vary by brand, but what's the rough average?

    I'm guessing that if a common battery design was developed & infrastructure built to accommodate fast swaps there'd have to be some way to record the accumulated mileage accrued each time the battery went out in a vehicle. Or would you measure "wear & tear" with some other metric? Recharge cycles?

    How would you deal with the situation where someone comes in with a low mileage battery but the only batteries available at the swap station have high mileage? Would it matter?

    For comparison, I had to have the engine on a 72 Pinto rebuilt at slightly over 100K miles. I rebuilt the engine in my MGB and who knows how many miles it really has? I don't even know whether it's the original speedometer or not. It's almost certainly going to take another engine rebuild if I ever get the round tuit I'm going to need to restore it (although the engine was running fine when it was vandalized).

    My Ford Escort Wagon got a rebuilt engine at around 250K (the rebuilt engine lasted barely 36K; just enough to be out of warranty).

    1069:

    Re: 'NO ETHICS'

    Depends on the school - Yale, NYU and Stanford all have business ethics as a core course. It's also often wrapped into a 'Policy' or 'Organizational Behavior' core course.

    'Ethics' only became a required course in grad school for the life sciences not too long ago. No idea whether 'hard science' (eng/comp-sci) grads also have to take ethics but given society's increasing dependence on these fields, I'd say they should.

    For the sci/eng posters here: Did you ever take an ethics course? If not, why not?

    Way back in first year undergrad, for Humanities electives I took two Philosophy courses back-to-back: Ethics and Logic. My take-away: alone, neither discipline/point of view suffices.

    1070:

    [about Google losing the geek-collective nature]

    The span of my acquaintance across Google employees is certainly not statistically significant, but the timing -- who got on the board when -- is certainly suspicious.

    And yes, once Google becomes about maintaining the stock price -- once any tech company is up the logistics curve and now has to maintain a market position -- they're immensely vulnerable to the opinions of the oligarchy mood ring that is the stock market, and act like it.

    My take is that we've got the Magna example, where it is obviously possible to build a large company out of small companies, small enough to work readily as collectives; we've got the Google example, where it sure looks like you can build a big geek collective and run it off an internally-implemented system no one human understands or controls if you can defend your alternative from the folks with a vested interest in having control; and we've got a bunch of quite functional -- meaning the member votes mean something -- Canadian credit unions at various sizes.

    It is clearly possible to do the thing organisationally if you can defend it against the imposition of a fixed hierarchy.

    Which gets me to the point about "manager"; having a resource allocation -- that is, logistics -- specialist is indeed inevitable. Any large organisation has to contain that skillset. What is not inevitable or required is for that skillset to be in charge, that is, for there to be an immutable hierarchy which always applies irrespective of circumstances.

    The simplest way to put this that I can think of is that with a managerial culture -- that fixed hierarchy -- there's this person who says whether or not you did a good job. This is not required; it's entirely possible to set things up so that the statistical analysis says whether or not you did a good job. It's entirely possible to set things up so the team says whether or not you did a good job. Some combination works vastly better than the manager.

    The problem is getting rid of the expectation that there's a manager who says if you did a good job on the part of the managers, who like things set up like that; they get power and money out of it.

    1071:

    Allen Thomson @ 1067:

    Question to US-ians
    Will This lunacy actually have any effect, or merely delay Biden's confirmation for a few hours?

    ike you think we know? The general opinion is that it won't change what happens on Jan 20, but the legal situation is obscure enough that there's room for unpleasant surprises.

    My guess is that 6 Jan 2021 is going to be the longest, most aggravating day Congress has experienced since the founding. It may even spill over into the rest of the week because the idiots will be running off to the courts to file another lawsuit every time they lose a point in the debate.

    But, some time around noon on 20 Jan 2021, Joe Biden will become President of the United States and no GOP BULLSHIT is going to delay that. I do expect Trumpolini will make it a point to crow about Biden's inauguration crowd being smaller than his was in 2017 (lying about the pandemic once again).

    1072:

    How many miles do manufacturers estimate you'll get out of a vehicle battery pack before you have to replace it? I know it will vary by brand, but what's the rough average?

    Nobody has the least idea. They're shipping new battery chemistry in unique-to-their-produce control systems.

    The original expectation was that you'd have to swap the battery at around five years; the current expectation is "longer", but that gets very dicey from a PR perspective because while the machine part of an EV could easily be good for twenty years, the stack of chips in the control system isn't. VLSI has a definite lifetime, and it is not likely to be longer than five years or so. Ten would be a startlement. So one thing to look at with an EV you are considering to purchase is how readily you can swap out the control computer or computers and how modular things are.

    You're almost certainly ahead of an ICE engine car on total lifetime cost, but you will have to plan for maintenance.

    1073:

    The first year that you get rid of the bottom 10% does improve matters. The next year maybe it helps to get rid of the new bottom 10%. But after a few years, everyone left is competent. Plus the effect on morale.

    1074:

    SFReader @ 1069

    Back when I was thinking of becoming an engineer in the 1970s there were no ethics courses for engineers, but engineers were expected to learn on their own all of the ethical restrictions and the laws pertaining to their reserved profession in the civil code of the province.

    I learned from those of my friends who became engineers that the professional corporation for engineers spent more time fining its members for having disobeyed the laws and regulations than for protecting its members.

    This was in contrast to the corporations for lawyers or doctors, who spent more time protecting their members than protecting the public from ethics violations or worse.

    Things don't seem to have changed much:

    https://www.oiq.qc.ca/EN/IAM/PUBLIC/PROTECTIONPUBLIC/Pages/default.aspx

    1075:

    " How many miles do manufacturers estimate you'll get out of a vehicle battery pack before you have to replace it? " Current evidence - which is of course a bit limited because not so many packs exist at the > 10 y.o. range) - is that properly managerd packs last a long time. There are increasing numbers of Teslas with multi-hundred-thousand mile histories and that appear to indicate capacity still over 95% nominal. There are a few over 400k. Battery developers are claiming nominal million-mile lifetimes are practical.

    Pack prices are going down quite rapidly. Having to replace an 85kWh pack (perhaps $10k today) in maybe 15 years does not seem like a terrifying possibility - pack prices are likely to be rather lower. And you would have benefitted from rather cheaper running costs for that 15 years.

    And at that point the pack will still likely be useful for another 15 years as a domestic backup, and then recycleable.

    And we're assuming that humans will manage to still be around that long.

    1076:

    I notice that a US Republican congressman-elect has just died from Covid. I've also seen that the number of Republican office holders who have had Covid is three times the number of Democrats. Assuming this continues, in a few years there won't be enough Republicans to worry about :)

    1077:

    I would say that Professor is on to something, and more than just Native Americans. I think the english speaking World needs a return to government with the welfare of the little folk foremost in their consideration, the .01% is well equipped to look after theirselves.

    1078:

    The other thing about firing-the-bottom-10% schemes is that it's much easier to improve your hiring practices and HR practices generally. It's harder to put it on a slide deck or consult on that basis, though.

    1079:

    Or would you measure "wear & tear" with some other metric? Recharge cycles?

    Remember that everything is a computer. There's probably more processing power in a cordless tool battery than in the original IBM PC. Definitely more persistent storage. We're talking 10c microprocessors that sleep on nanoamps and use microamps when working. So each battery knows its use history, its current state of charge, its current capacity and so on. The charger uses that to decide how fast to charge, how hot to pre-heat the battery and so on.

    From an accounting point of view you won't own the battery, you'll rent it. So there's no "your battery is shit" question, but there could well be a "you have the elite package, you get the best battery we have in stock" option. Batteries here are more like hire cars or the "swap a gas cylinder" models (Australia has possibly more than one BBQ gas bottle swap setup - you take in an empty and get a full one. Initially you "buy" a bottle... but you don't really own any specific bottle, you always possess one but which one changes. Welding gas works similarly except you generally pay rental on the bottle rather than owning it, but that's changing).

    1080:

    firing-the-bottom-10% schemes is that it's much easier to improve your hiring practices and HR practices generally.

    The problem with firing the bottom 10% is that unless you have good HR practices already you're not going to fire the bottom 10%. You're going to fire the least-popular-with-their-managers 10%, and the potential for serious issues is high. Imagine a manager finds out that they're in the 10% before they have to submit their cull list...

    My experience of that process was that companies generally lost many of their best 10% and some of the worst 10%. In one case our boss came to us and said he had to make one of us redundant because the PTB thought it would be unfair/a bad look if we all stayed when 15% of everyone got kicked. We looked at each other and said yep, that's fine, you do what you have to do. He went away, we all said "fucking morons. I'm out" ... but we all carefully waited until after they announced the names to give notice. One lucky winner got a redundancy payment. The rest just got new jobs. They went from desperately searching for a really good programmer to even more desperately searching for five really good programmers and a new team leader. No idea what happened, I changed cities and there was no-one left in that company I cared to stay in touch with.

    1081:

    with the collapse of many businesses, the "informal" (gig) economy there is now at over 50% of all employment. Whether and how long an employer-employee structure will be in returning is unclear.

    Probably a long time, absent government intervention or serious collective action by gig workers.

    1082:

    There are a few ways to look at this.

    One is that swappable batteries really matter with long drives, not in town. Even if a home charger costs $2000, it eventually pays for itself. For commuter recharging, the system level challenges are either the need to charge at work (the ideal, because the sun's shining then), or to store charge system-wide and charge cars at home (less ideal, because you're losing electrons in storage and retransmission). Adding in a battery swap every week is just another layer of complexity, because you've got to move a ~400 kg battery around as well as move electrons to the charging stations, so it gets a bit silly.

    Conversely, for a trucker who wants to drive, say, 1000 km a day, being able to rapidly swap batteries is money. That's why I wasn't entirely joking about battery tenders on trucks. You pull into a truck stop, unhitch the tender, hitch in a fully charged tender, and go. The wheels make it easier to deal with the multiple tons of battery that need to be shifted. It would take some time, but if you combine it with a food and bathroom break, it would work. The challenge then is piping a lot of electrons to rural truck stops, rather than gas.

    While I agree that batteries in principle can keep track of their own status, if you're not careful, there will be a whole set of after-market battery hacks available, to either modify the range/output/increase lifespan, or alternately to lie to the car about the battery status. So battery software and firmware will regularly have to be upgraded. Who will be trusted to do that?

    This is non-trivial. Car computer hacks have been around for years, as have EV computer problems. The Bolts EVs have a recall on because the battery can overheat. Our car has definitely done that many times, to the point where I unplug it immediately on full charge, because I hear the cooling fan scream into high gear from the other end of the house. We've temporarily fixed it by decreasing the charging level, but we need to get it permanently fixed.

    Anyway, there's a whole complex set of logistics and maintenance issues. As noted above, none of these are showstoppers, but they are interesting. It's partly about how the electricity gets generated, how it gets moved, how it gets stored, how it gets put into cars and other equipment we currently use fossil fuels for, how to make it hack resistant, and how to get people to accept that this is good enough and better than frying with climate change.

    And if you want whimsy, you can imagine trains (road or rail) carrying charged battery tenders out to places they're needed where they can't charge on their own. You might also imagine that the vehicle battery of tomorrow becomes the equivalent of the proverbial tatami mat in Japanese architecture, where sizes can be standardized to the number of tatami mats needed to cover the floor. If standard sized, swappable batteries caught on, one might imagine car designs being specified by how many standard batteries they took. In this alt-future, pimply faced youths crave a four-battery muscle car, and sneer at the single battery burb-boxes their parents wanted them to drive.

    1083:

    For the sci/eng posters here: Did you ever take an ethics course? If not, why not?

    Professional responsibilities were part of the 'engineering as a profession' course I took when studying engineering in the 80s. So not a separate course for ethics, but part of mandatory first-year program. The idea that 'you are responsible for people's lives' was generally present in all design courses. And of course the iron ring, to remind you every day that you are responsible for design failures.

    1084:

    Battery life data points: The 11-year-old main battery on our 2008 Prius hybrid was still working at full or near-full potential when we sold it. That is, the battery had not yet begun to degrade sufficiently to affect the fuel economy. That's for a car parked outdoors through a Canadian winter, though supported by a block heater. The battery on my mother-in-law's older Prius lasted equally long, but was kept in a garage through a milder western Massachusetts winter. An online auto mechanic site that specialized in Prius repairs also claimed 10+ years of battery life.

    Whether our battery was about to suddenly and dramatically fail, I can't say. All I can say is that the buyer hasn't banged on our door to complain ca. 1 year later. I can only say that we had no problems for 11 years and close on 200K km of driving, about 50% under urban (non-highway) conditions.

    1085:

    The first year that you get rid of the bottom 10% does improve matters. The next year maybe it helps to get rid of the new bottom 10%. But after a few years, everyone left is competent.

    After a few years, everyone left is skilled at gaming the system to not be in the 10%.

    Help a new colleague get up to speed? Don't forget they're a competitor!

    Notice a potential problem with a colleague's work? Let it blow up on them so their 'score' takes a hit!

    And so on…

    Back when I was at university we had a class on contract and liability law (useful for engineers to know a bit about). We ended up on teams with law students who were astounded that engineering students worked together to solve problems, and helped each other. Apparently law students knew they were competing with each other for a limited number of prestigious internships (clerkships?) after graduation, and the best ones went to those with the highest marks, so they were hyper-competitive to do anything to get an edge. This would include things like removing pages from reference books & journals in the library so other students couldn't research the assigned cases*.

    *Pre-internet, so paper was the only way a lot of this information was available.

    1086:

    Just got an email from an American Republican congressman, which I thought I'd share. It's phrased as a poll question (yes/no/don't know) but it looks to be a lot like push-polling to me. Thoughts?

    As your representative in Washington, I have the privilege to make sure your voice is heard in the halls of Congress.

    That’s why I want to ask you an urgent question about congressional action being taken on January 6.

    Federal law requires the states to deliver certified electoral college results to the vice president, serving as president of the Senate, and other parties. Then a joint meeting of Congress is required by the 12th Amendment to count the electoral votes and declare the winners of the presidential election. The session on January 6, 2021, starts at 1 pm ET.

    If a member of the House and a member of the Senate together issue a joint objection to any state’s vote—for any reason—the House and Senate go into separate sessions to consider and vote to sustain the objection. The last time there was an objection was in 2005 when a House Democrat and Senate Democrat objected to Ohio’s electoral votes claiming voting irregularities.

    There is a question about the legality of some votes cast in the 2020 election. Article II, Section 1, clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution clearly states that Presidential Electors must be appointed according to rules established by each state’s legislature. But in the months before the 2020 election, those rules were deliberately changed in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, not by their legislatures, but by governors, secretaries of state, election officials, judges and/or private parties.

    The Supreme Court has not yet ruled on this important, constitutional question.

    Should the U.S. House of Representatives certify the electoral college vote in these four disputed states on January 6?

    1087:

    We ended up on teams with law students who were astounded that engineering students worked together to solve problems, and helped each other

    My engineering school spent much ethics instruction time on explaining that we weren't supposed to help each other "too much" while at school, but obviously we needed to develop our cooperative abilities because on the job that would be very important. There was also some blather about laws and guilds and whatnot, but the whole course was ~10 hours with one, hour-long test.

    We also got practical instruction, not least the two paths to dealing with a grossly unreasonable assignment. We had one such, IIRC the closest anyone came to completion was over 200 hours work (plus many more hours of computer time running simulations). Much sharing of simulation time was done, and so on down that path. meanwhile another group of students spent their time grinding through the bureaucrazy to establish that yes, they had discussed this issue with the lecturer and no, an acceptable outcome had not been reached... and so on until eventually the head of department decreed all work must stop, marks would be decided by HoD and lecturer working together. He requested that we clearly identify shared work in our assignments. I was really, really glad I had listened to the gossip and decided not to take that course.

    1088:

    The UK government will no longer be able to use the EU as a "whipping boy" for its problems, Germany's centre-right Die Welt says. "The public can no longer be appeased with the ritual lie that the EU is responsible for all of life's misfortunes." Except, of course the headbangers will try, at least, to do exactly that.

    Oh yes, something I said elsewhere has come back:
    Between C-19 & the insane politics of the last year, the wreckage is all around us, probably still containing unexploded ordnance. Any predictions for that "Unexploded Ordnance"? Any other predictions for 2021?

    Incidentally, I expect the full cost of Brexit to not show up until 2022 - after which we will se if BoZo & the Brexshiteers are going to mirror James II & VII - or not.

    1089:

    Heteromeles @ 1082

    The solution Better Place (TM) had for many problems with swappable batteries was to keep the ownership of the batteries and lease a "single" battery at a time to the car owners.

    The robotic swapping stations were supposed to cover the whole of Israel and cost $500,000 each. They built about 27 before going bankrupt. The robotic swapping stations eventually cost 2 million dollars each.

    Each station was constantly networked with the others so that the time they could all be charging depleted batteries would not coincide with real peak times on Israel's electricity grid. It was over-computerized, but what else would you expect with a founder who came from SAP.

    1090:

    Which reminds me: computing power is now so much more readily available. In that situation now I'd almost certainly have just paid a cloud provider to run the thing for me because it would have been under $100, and that's worth way less to me than spending 3-4 weeks fighting for lab time at university.

    When my ex was finishing her master's in architecture they had some simulation exercise that was a similar shitfight for computer time. Turned out you could get a trial version of the software that would only run for ~10 hours*. On my programmer desktop at home it ran at least 5x faster than on their shitty computer lab machines... she could afford to play with ideas at home, which made her submitted assignment much better. Helped by me being able to show her how the input files worked (you "exported" CAD files in a text-ish format, added a few lines of simulation parameters using a really awful GUI, then a command line program ran the actual simulation before you imported the results to a pretty GUI. Or just edit the text file once you have your CAD model).

    Also, with a bit of experimentation it was possible to run coarse simulations quickly (under a minute) until you had a sensible set of parameters, then re-run with fine detail to get a very pretty output (after an hour or two at home... so probably overnight at university).

    • and with proper system monitoring software you could see how it was "persisting" the run time and trial details. Can't recall what I did but 10 hours wasn't an effective restriction :)
    1091:

    Any predictions for that "Unexploded Ordnance"? Any other predictions for 2021?

    To at least a first approximation, every primary health care provider in Britain has become a PTSD case. Under idiosyncratic stress conditions, they'll behave erratically. Some of them will behave VERY erratically. (Look at how often in 1920s murder mysteries a doctor who served in the Great War has snapped. That's going to be a cultural trope again.)

    Which means you haven't got functioning health care, and it takes a blank cheque and a decade to fix that, given training times. Only you haven't got a reserved cadre of non-traumatised trainers, you haven't got the blank cheque and may, per Brexit, lose the capacity for the blank cheque. This is going to be one of those really challenging things, with a government that's fundamentally against having it at all.

    (Canada and the US are in similar boats, plus Brexit, plus global health care worker shortage, plus very limited movement, so importing health care workers isn't going to be practical.)

    A combination of slow rollout and functional-but-not-sterilising vaccines (watch this vary by individual for the mRNA vaccines!) means we're plausibly going to produce a much worse version of COVID. Everywhere with an effective social response is fine; everywhere that didn't have an effective social response is not. The Anglo thalassocracy ends in its two hundred and somethingth year. (Which means Taiwan does, too, and that comes with all the VLSI supply chains taking a major, major hit.)

    Some failure of something is going to take out a basal supply chain. Everything oscillates; hope for slow groans from the structure of commerce, rather than further ping noises.

    Increasing numbers of people will experience psychological failures under "hold what you got" stresses.

    There's going to be a lot of good news out of material science; there's likely to be a lot of good news out of fundamental biology, as the immune system research blank cheque approach stays active.

    Agriculture will continue to get wobblier, more doubtful, and more dire.

    And, Lord, but here and there, it's going to rain.

    1092:

    Isaac Asimov would approve!

    1093:

    (I have a Masters of Science, but it's in space technology and not directly applicable to my work now. It however proves I can learn stuff. I'm not sure how useful it is in the future - it isn't a requirement in the private sector and for government positions which reqire degrees the ones I'd be interested in now mostly seem to require PhDs...)

    So lie by omission, I did. My last resume failed to mention my early years in the software biz. No one asked my exact age.

    1094:

    On a local reddit board someone just said:

    If 80% are in favour of lockdown, those 80% of people should be putting themselves into lockdown -- without being told. Why does everyone need a politician to tell them to wear a mask? There is literally nothing stopping people from wearing masks where people say they should be being worn, either.

    Don't get me wrong, I'm for both lockdown and masks, I'm just confused as to why I'm seeing so many people saying she should say what we should be doing when it's something people could already voluntarily be doing.

    The answer is that, as usual, what people think they should be doing is harder or less fun than what they are doing. "you have to make me" is literally the answer, whether that's paying tax, losing weight, or wearing a mask. Yes, it sounds stupid, but that's human nature.

    1095:

    Moz @ 1094

    Well yes, there's always "The great unwashed". But you have to think of this in terms of techology too. I was an "Early adopter", wearing a P100 mask (with magenta-pink double filters) when half the people in the food stores weren't wearing masks at all or wearing them under their noses.

    1096:

    Because it's not much use?

    Mask wearing helps, but as frontline healthcare workers show, it's not perfect.

    "not perfect" is ample if everyone does it. Say you have an R0 of 2 and it's infective for 3 days before symptoms put you in hospital. Say 10 people have it. After a month it's doubled 10 times and 10 000 people have it. Compare the not perfect situation. Say masking the infected cuts their chance of passing it on in half, and masking the uninfected cuts their chance of catching it with each exposure in half. 10 people have it. The "not perfect" measures mean they only pass it to 5 people. Within a month it's eliminated from the population.

    If 1 person only uses the not perfect solution and cuts their chance of catching it in half, but no one else does, then they'll have many many exposures. Each with less risk, but so many that they will inevitably catch it on one of the exposures.

    1097:

    RE: '... looks to be a lot like push-polling to me. Thoughts?'

    Yep - they're testing the waters.

    And I'm guessing that maybe the GOP are indirectly testing reaction to the GOP controlled Senate's nixing of the $2,000 stimulus checks. (Distract the populace by redirecting attention.)

    My impression is that the Electoral College voting thing is a no-go because too many judges/courts have already thrown out similar suits.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_United_States_elections

    1098:

    The answer is that, as usual, what people think they should be doing is harder or less fun than what they are doing. "you have to make me" is literally the answer, whether that's paying tax, losing weight, or wearing a mask. Yes, it sounds stupid, but that's human nature.

    Also a factor is that going into lockdown isn't always a personal choice - if you work retail and retail is open, you have to go to work. Repeat for any other business that isn't essential and work can't be done from home.

    So a government mandated lockdown, that forces unnecessary businesses to close, is necessary.

    1099:

    The point is that 80% wearing masks and staying at home is enough to limit the spread quite drastically. So why aren't the 80% doing that?

    I sincerely doubt it's out of genuine goodwill and an honest evaluation of the risks and benefits. You might be right, 80% compliance might be no better than 0%. I just don't think you are.

    1100:

    if you work retail and retail is open, you have to go to work

    yeah, the photos I'm seeing are not of retail workers diligently earning their pittance, it's crowds of people out and about as if everything is back to normal. They're the ones who mean that the retail workers have to be working, because without all those people getting manicures and buying lottery tickets the shops would have far fewer staff if they were even open.

    We're really back to Naila's point: I think voluntary lockdowns and mask use help, I can do them, so I am doing them.

    The evidence suggests that 80% of people agree with me right up to the point where they have to suffer inconvenince, so they are not doing that. They, however, complying with the social pressure to say they think they should be.

    1101:

    (Canada and the US are in similar boats, plus Brexit, plus global health care worker shortage, plus very limited movement, so importing health care workers isn't going to be practical.)

    I would go further and say most western countries in the northern hemisphere (sadly don't know the situation in Australia) are at the point where their health care systems are in some sort of trouble - hence the most common thing in the world today seems to be lockdown.

    This means everyone is going to have mental health problems in their health care workers, and thus everyone is going to be looking at training/importing new ones.

    But now you can add the obvious dangers of treating pandemic patients to the frequent low wages as a reason few locals are interesting in becoming a nurse for example.

    So this is going to cause a bunch of issues that few governments/private health care providers are prepared to deal with.

    And that is without getting into the long term care home issue that also seems to be a problem in multiple locations.

    1102:

    So why aren't the 80% doing that? In my local area in New York State, I sat outside a store a bit a day or two before the statewide mask mandate (April 17 2020) and then the day after the mandate took effect. Mask discipline was roughly 50 percent (or less) before the mandate, and in a day it switched to 100 percent (as observed). Similar observations have been reported by others, including with surveys. Surveillance video analysis would make a timeline of actual levels of mask usage (while entering stores) possible; I've been assuming/hoping that this is being done by some researchers. Can't say what motivated the 50 percent to not wear a mask because I did not ask. This was before the mainstreaming of the anti-masker propaganda. It was probably just a combination of "virus is a hoax/overblown/just like the flu/just a cold" (these ideas were being spread in the RW media) and "I don't have to", and realistically, mask availability was spotty at the time. Disinformation belittling deadly diseases and selfishness are a deadly combination for a society. The NY State governor also instituted various restrictions. We never had a full lockdown though; just closure of certain classes of business and schools and other gatherings, and a lot of work from home for those who had employers who allowed (or mandated) it.

    1103:

    Yep. We're hoping for a lot more to earn their Just Reward.

    Improve the government, clean the gene pool.

    1104:

    "I voted for Biden. If you try to raise questions about who won, you will be sorry."

    1105:

    Now you're just being bloody silly.

    That has 2 wires because it is a controller for a DC motor.

    If you want a controller for a 3 phase motor then it has 3 wires.

    Duurrrrrr.

    For a DC motor you have one output stage and a driver that translates a given control input into one PWM signal with a given steady ratio.

    For a 3 phase motor you have 3 output stages and a driver that translates a given control input into 3 PWM signals representing three sinusoidal(ish) phases of given amplitude and frequency.

    There are means of generating variable 3-phase AC which don't involve PWM, but no bugger uses them these days and hasn't for years. I remember programming the sinusoid sample tables into 27xx EPROMs for GEC's in-house attempt at developing a controller (custom chip in 40-pin DIP plus a bloody great rack of support stuff), and the impressive graveyard of charred transistors we accumulated from the gate driver units for the output MOSFETs blowing up repeatedly. And the MOSFETs themselves cost a packet, blew up if you looked at them funny and required a heatsink the size of a computer keyboard for each phase of a 5kW unit. Now you can get a fingernail-sized package for a quid which has an ARM32 core and MOSFET drivers built in, and the MOSFETs themselves are cheap, robust, and efficient. Outside of highly specialised niches, there hasn't been any reason for anyone to use anything other than PWM for yonks.

    1107:

    That's not what I said at all. But if you want to disagree with something I didn't say, have at it.

    1108:

    When I finally got to move to Unix, I started dropping the first couple of years, when I was on mainframes. By the time I was working again, after being out of work for almost five years (the early oughts), I dropped the first 9 years of work - the jobs I was applying for weren't interested in mainframes, anyway: they wanted C and Unix.

    At the bottom of the previous positions/major accomplishments, I just put "Further information upon request." No one was interested in going that far back.

    And ethics? My late ex regretted, right after getting her materials science BSc, not taking the exam for becoming a bonded engineer. 20+ years later, a massive difficulty.

    1109:

    The first year that you get rid of the bottom 10% does improve matters. The next year maybe it helps to get rid of the new bottom 10%. But after a few years, everyone left is competent. Plus the effect on morale.

    There were some managers at Cisco who kept spare people around, so they'd have someone to fire as needed.

    1110:

    Total Australian COVID-19 cases per million population are almost exactly the same as US and UK DEATHS per million. The disease caused some strain on parts of the Healthcare system at times, but nothing remotely comparable to what happened in New York or is currently happening in LA County or the UK NHS.

    1111:

    That's not what I said at all.

    Perhaps I misread. I thought you were disagreeing that 80% compliance would reduce transmission. Maybe you meant that 0% compliance plus one person would be the same as zero. That's probably true, but it's unrelated to my initial post.

    1112:

    Part of it is that there are intertwined populations.

    My wife and I are in the pretty paranoid category (haven't been to a store in about 6 months, avoid takeout, occasionally go on a walk while masked and crossing the street to avoid people. Even the parks are deserted in our area. We're also introverted and a little weird, so not a giant sacrifice. Honestly, aside from grocery trips, my main lifestyle change has been less time spent commuting.

    But, we drove by a recreation area (lake) and it was packed. Parking lots full, no prospect of effective social distancing.

    So, assume that 80% are perfect. (Which is BS, as many people don't have the luxury of working from home or quitting.). But, anyways, go with it. The 20% will tend to have a lot of interactions with people in the 20%. So, you get nearly the same exponential growth, followed by transmission to essential workers and their households.

    The mandates boost compliance in the sort of people who are lazy and just don't want trouble. So, they are probably quite effective.

    As an aside, I'd expect r0 to fall faster than you'd expect with a vaccine. The population is probably somewhat segmented into people cowering jn their homes and eager to be vaccinated and people who've been ignoring the virus and who have pretty high antibody incidence.

    1113:

    It's adequately true to say that the speed of a motor depends on the voltage applied to it, and the torque depends on the current. So to control a motor open-loop to run at a steady speed, you apply a steady voltage and let it take as much current as it wants; to make it develop a steady torque, you apply a constant current and let the voltage do what it wants.

    You would think, at least, that for a model railway application you want to regulate the speed, and so run it from a voltage source. Though I've tried both voltage and current sources, and it doesn't seem to make a fat lot of difference. What does make a difference, when using a voltage source, is whether you feed the track with a smooth DC voltage, or with a raw PWM signal. The raw PWM signal is better for fine slow speed control, for shunting and smooth starts etc, which I find is the most critical area.

    But any method of voltage or current regulation is miles better than the crappy old rheostats which used to be all there was. If they regulated anything it was the supply impedance, which is better than nothing but very strongly dependent on random external factors for whether it's much good.

    I've never looked at any reviews of commercial controllers because knocking up a PWM voltage regulator has been trivial for decades, and a car battery charger a much cheaper and more robust means of supplying the raw power than pretty well any alternative, railway-specific or not, for similarly long, so there has never been any point. So I'm not sure what they're trying to communicate by measuring the voltage (and if they're doing it off-load it's largely meaningless anyway). I thought that (apart from exotica like the Hornby live steam models, which come with their own special controller) all HO/OO or N stock was 12V, so the controllers would necessarily all be 12V also. Are they just checking the manufacturers aren't telling whoppers, or do they look at how it falls off under load etc?

    1114:

    Words mean something.

    Your words "PWM controller" means a DC motor controller. Which is why, if you type "PWM controller" into ebay, you'll get hundreds of DC controllers offered to you.

    The fact that you can build an AC controller that has three pulse width modulators as part of the design doesn't that it's a "PWM controller". Any more that the fact that there are places inside a gasturbine where liquid is converted to vapour makes it a steam turbine. The whole thing is called an AC controller, or an inverter or a BLDC controller (sensorless or sensor).

    As I said earlier: I don't know what's in your head when you say PWM, but if it's got 3 power cables it's not the same thing that's in everyone else's head.

    1115:

    But now you can add the obvious dangers of treating pandemic patients to the frequent low wages as a reason few locals are interesting in becoming a nurse for example.

    If you look at pay, it's obvious that the Ontario government values cops (with a high school diploma) more than nurses (with a university degree).

    You can add outright shitty working conditions, I suspect partly because nursing is seen as a female profession and so nurses are given less respect than (presumed male) doctors*.

    Harris (who has profited handsomely from privatized long-term care homes**) fired a bunch of nurses, on the publicly stated assumption that nurses cared about their patients and so wouldn't let patient care suffer even if their workload was increased. (All to save money for the 30% tax cut.) Nurses remember that, still.

    *I've heard lots of stories from female doctors of being 'taken for the nurse' while the male nurse is assumed to be the doctor. In scrubs apparently a lot of people still go by male/female stereotypes.

    **For those outside of Ontario, his government greatly increased privatization of long-term care facilities, which he personally profited from. For more details see the following article:

    https://www.ontariohealthcoalition.ca/index.php/former-ontario-premier-mike-harris-is-raking-in-profits-from-the-long-term-care-system-he-helped-create/

    1116:

    It's adequately true to say that the speed of a motor depends on the voltage applied to it, and the torque depends on the current

    Permanent magnet DC motor, yes. But those are one specific type of motor and are unlikely to be what's found in, say, a full size electric car. High end RC models are mostly complex motors to get better power density and/or more control. But it's not uncommon to see 3, 4 even 6 wires into an electric motor, and slightly weirder, to see only three wires into a stepper motor.

    So yes, you could rebuild an electric car to use a simple commutated DC motor(s). Might be unexpectedly fun to drive as the equally simple PWM interacted with the slowly discharging battery and the varying road surface, but I'm sure it could be done.

    What's done now, though, is mostly polyphase "brushless" designs, sometimes with cage rotors, and generally with way more sensors and computation than anyone could reasonably build from discrete components.

    1117:

    Kinda. Erwin covered most of what I was going to say in 1112.

    I was looking at it from the perspective of individual choice. Though I certainly assigned too much understanding to those making a choice.

    As in "I'm concerned, I think there should be a lockdown and mandatory mask wearing because I don't want to get covid. In the light of that concern, should I wear a mask?"

    The 80% aren't a block. For the concerned 80% to start mask wearing they each have to make a decision to start.

    Personally I wore a mask when out to get food that I couldn't have delivered (which was the only reason I went out) not because I thought it would directly help, but because I hoped that other people would see mask wearing and feel it was OK to get on board.

    Of course the other question is, "would 80% be enough on its own?" and the answer is "who knows?". We know that it's not enough to stop transmission in a highly infective situation, so it probably wouldn't prevent household transmission (even assuming people wore masks 24/7 which they don't). As Erwin pointed out, the 20% who don't care are probably the ones doing most of the spreading now anyway. They'd form a reservoir that would eventually infect everyone else.

    1118:

    Not going out is not an option for me; I have to get food and medicines and I have to get money to pay for the food. So I've been making regular trips for essential purposes all the time. (Using local shops that I know well it's usually possible to pick a time to go when there won't be anyone else in there, and if there's anyone else in the pharmacy I wait until they've come out (which I do anyway because the staff have no idea how well their voices carry).)

    What I have noticed over the year is that most of the time you'd never guess there was a plague on at all. The first lockdown seemed to have a large effect - suddenly everywhere was just empty, it was like Christmas every day out. That began to change even before the official end of it, and over the next month or two it got more or less back to normal and has stayed like that ever since.

    I reckon a lot of that is down to the shitty UK government not doing any proper lockdowns since the first one. Instead they've got this crappy notion of a patchwork of different degrees of lockdown which vary over quite small areas. And they keep changing. So nobody really has a clue what the fuck is going on and they just do what they reckon they can get away with without being hassled over it, which is basically everything apart from not wearing a mask because shopkeepers hassle them for that.

    I'm not entirely sure what the restrictions are because I've been doing "minimum necessary going out" for the whole time anyway. But I am pretty sure that whatever they are they're uselessly feeble in any case. The most recent one I received of the letters the NHS are sending out to "if you get this you're dead" people said, addressing such people in maximum risk areas, "we do not advise you to avoid work or school". So whatever they're laying on ordinary people and lesser risk areas, it can't be anything worth the trouble of saying it.

    1119:

    "So yes, you could rebuild an electric car to use a simple commutated DC motor(s). Might be unexpectedly fun to drive"

    Yeah. Very much so....

    Pulling out and throwing away the controllers that brilliant minds have spent the best part of a decade perfecting only to replace it with some home brewed concoction would also be unexpectedly fun, even if you kept the original motors.

    A couple of yearsago Tesla had the bright idea of adding a Dyno Mode. It let you put your car on a dynamometer without all the annoying traction control and power curves that they'd spent millions on perfecting. Just full power and don't spare the horses.

    To get into this mode required having the car stationary, accepting all sorts of warnings that it's only for dyno use, not to be used on the road etc.

    This is the result. (this isn't even the performance version)

    https://m.facebook.com/watch/?v=1293191017736047&_rdr

    1120:

    Tesla had the bright idea of adding a Dyno Mode. It let you put your car on a dynamometer without all the annoying traction control and power curves

    Hahaha. That makes me happy to see. The crash, that is.

    I really like that with modern RC aircraft you start with a basic supervisory autopilot and can build on that right up to the GPS waypoint level if you like. No real camera-based autoland yet, at least for fixed wing, but I'm sure it's coming. Quadcopters are now several generations into the autopilot, obstacle avoidance and general smartness and it's pretty fun what they can do, especially at the high end where they can afford to put a couple of watts into the thinking part of things.

    I've also seen a fucking terrifying misuse of a "brushless DC" (stupid name, but whatever) RC motor as a bicycle power assist. The rpm mismatch was the terrifying part, but the funny part was the power mismatch. Dumping 3kW into a bicycle drivetrain had the expected result. Not to the builder, but to me :) Little bits of bicycle over a wide area. Luckily it was a recumbent so the little bits bounced off the seat back rather than having to be recovered by medical personell.

    1121:

    "Your words "PWM controller" means a DC motor controller."

    No, it means a controller which depends on the principle of PWM. It doesn't imply "DC". It doesn't even imply "motor". It just means what it says.

    What kind of output the thing has and what it controls are matters to be inferred, if necessary, from the context. And when the context is electric car drive motors, it takes a pretty special kind of logic to infer anything other than "it controls an electric car drive motor, and produces whatever kind of output an electric car drive motor requires" - ie. almost certainly a 3 phase AC output to suit a "brushless DC" motor, but still allowing for the outside chance that some particular car might turn out to have a different kind of motor.

    The reason it produces a particular result on an ebay search is very likely that the phrase was used in some probably poorly translated Chinese advert which was then copied and relisted by hundreds of different Chinese usernames, and the search engine associated that phrase with that kind of item. That no more implies that the phrase means "brushed DC motor PWM controller" always and everywhere than that it means "low power PWM controller on a blue circuit board with no case".

    1122:

    Leaving all the systemic dysfunction aside, from an epidemiological perspective what you want is to extirpate the disease.

    Remember that the only thing we know the mRNA vaccines do is prevent severe symptomatic cases. We don't know they prevent you from getting it and we don't know they prevent you from transmitting it and we don't know they prevent it from damaging you. That's what's being rolled out in North America. The AstraZeneca vaccine hasn't been approved here yet.

    (The effectiveness status of the AstraZeneca vaccine is unclear; Derek Lowe lands on confusing mess.)

    Problem zero; COVID gets worse as it gets worse. Case severity is dose dependent; as the number of infected people rises, the (statistical expectation of the) severity of new infections rises. As the number of cases rises, the less effective hospital treatment becomes until with overload (no ICU, then no hospital treatment) the mortality increases. (Looks like it goes from about 1% mortality to about 10% mortality.) As the number of infections increase, the more mutations we can expect. (Pure numbers game; number of reproduction events times very small odds.)

    Problem one; the effective means of suppressing spread are all three of track-and-trace, enforced quarantine, and enforced universal mask wearing. If those aren't available, you're going to have problem zero.

    Problem two; the available vaccines are not known to be sterilising. The disease can still spread if they're functional vaccines. Functional vaccines are known (from studies in battery chickens, where a disease is prevented via functional vaccine) to make the circulating disease population more virulent. A big population inoculated with functional vaccines where the disease circulates is a "make disease worse" recipe. This is what is currently being done.

    Problem three; if all you've got are functional vaccines, you want to use them as little as possible. They're certainly not a route to social normalcy. You want, if anything, to institute stricter mask and quarantine rules while inoculating your medical personnel and ONLY your medical personnel. (Who are are least under continuous observation by other medical personnel aware of the danger of novel strains.) (and probably isolated-and-will-stay-isolated communities, though you'd better be extremely careful with the vaccine transfer into those communities.)

    Problem four; if you roll out functional vaccines over the course of a year to a prioritised list of targets, you now have no idea what your disease statistics mean WITHOUT really careful and extensive genomic testing on top of thorough track-and-trace. (Which we haven't got in Anglo NorAm.)

    All a slow vaccine rollout does is maximise the damage. It'll prevent most severe symptomatic cases but it doesn't solve the greenfield spread problem and so it doesn't protect your health care system even if it protects most of the workers. Which we don't know that it does; vaccine testing was in the general population in the summer, with generally low doses of pathogen. There could be a pathogen dose threshold at which the vaccine fails, and their could certainly be a circulates-in-the-hospital-staff variant that does the expected functional vaccine thing and evolves into a more virulent strain, potentially one for which the vaccine is not effective. We're going to find out.

    TL;DR the mRNA vaccines are not a solution; they're an experiment. It's more likely to help than not at individual scales but at a systemic scale it will, if non-sterilising, make the problem worse even if you somehow manage to inoculate everyone in the same sixty day period.

    1123:

    "Permanent magnet DC motor, yes."

    It's (ideally) true at the basic electromechanical level for any kind of motor, but the permanent magnet DC motor is the type which presents it at the power connections in the rawest and most obvious fashion. As you say, with things like brushless motors and complex closed-loop controllers, what it actually looks like may be very different.

    "But those are one specific type of motor and are unlikely to be what's found in, say, a full size electric car."

    This is true. But I was replying to whitworth's post about model railway controllers, and they're pretty much universal there.

    1124:

    "Apparently "mobility scooters" are limited to 10kph. Which means the thing that overtook me on the road the other day was presumably ... an unregistered car?"

    In the UK we have 3 classes, with maximum speeds of 4mph, 8mph and 15mph. Mine is a 4mph one, although I suspect it actually goes a bit faster than that on the flat. On a sufficiently steep downhill gradient, though, it goes like stink. All the braking on the move is dynamic, and if the motor is regenerating faster than the battery can accept charge it seems to just give up trying; it runs away at terrifying speed and stops responding to the throttle unless you let go of it almost completely, at which point it brakes hard enough to lock the back wheels and dissipates the energy in friction between the tyres and the surface.

    1125:

    It's (ideally) true at the basic electromechanical level for any kind of motor,

    Nope. Most obviously none of that applies to a synchronous AC motor, or for that matter an induction motor. For both of them speed depends on frequency, although the induction one varies with load as well. At least until the sync one stops being in sync, in which case you arguably don't have a synchronous motor any more.

    These days there are specific applications where electromagnet DC motors have multiple exciter windings and are to all intense porpoises a pair of AC motors working mostly against each other. That gives, IIRC, staggering torque at very low speed with excellent control. But the software to make those things happen is a bit hideous (there are currants in the windings and if you make too much hot water you get flavoured steam instead of tea. It's all very traumatic).

    1126:

    Maybe you should upgrade to a Cranky Chair and get disk brakes fitted?

    http://trisled.com.au/the-cranky-chair/

    1127:

    Much as I support Daily Kos, I always remember that they're activists, not an impartial news service.

    Here's the question: with 20 million of anything frozen, would you expect a shipment to be discarded due to adverse heat? Of course. That's not really news unless it happens too often.

    Pfizer, at least, is making money right now on the vaccine. I know because my wife's hospital bought shipments of the Pfizer vaccine for their employees, and they've got as much as they need for that population. Which is good, because their Covid units and ICU are just about full, so it's getting to an all hands on deck situation.* But yes, anyone who can keep it cold can order a pfizer vaccine through their doctor and pay for it themselves. I'd be shocked if the billionaires and millionaires haven't all done that already.

    AFAIK, the distribution screwup is at the White House, where they made no good plan for how to distribute the doses they ordered, apparently BSed that they had a plan rather than hiring a few people to do it for them. And IQ.45 failed to realize that he had the power to use the military and executive orders to ship all that vaccine where it needed to go, all he needed to do was order up the correct piece of paper and sign it like a big boy. Instead he's pouting and saying that the states have to do it themselves.

    The thing that pains me about this is that it's so dumb. IQ.45 wants the adulation for being a hero, the automatic hero makers are literally in his house with him, and not only is he not bright enough to use them, no one around him wants to help him out. What an absolute waste. The only thing he's good for is as an example of how good billionaires are at leading things (/sarcasm).

    *The grimly amusing situation is that the crypto-Trumpers in the hospital are being forced to break cover, because they're squirming around, trying to justify why they don't want to take the vaccine. Very little sympathy for them.

    1128:

    My experience of that process was that companies generally lost many of their best 10% and some of the worst 10%.

    In Finland, there's this process for larger-than-some-small-limit companies if they want to fire (or even temporarily lay off) people. I've followed a few, been part of one, and my impression, mostly shared with the workers, is that when ever you start the process for firing or even negotiating with possible need of firing, many of the best people you have will leave.

    I'm not sure why this isn't obvious to the management as it seems to inevitably happen. One theory I have is that it's the "people are exchangable resources" and it just matters how many leave instead of who does leave and who does stay. In my experience, in IT whenever people leave you lose some (or lots of) insitutional knowledge and have to build it up again in a hurry or just accept the losses.

    Of course, usually firing people is seen by the investors as a good thing, because, hey, the workers are just expense, right, and then share prices or whatever rise. One does wonder why any company on the public stock market ever hires anyone as the best point to be would be where there would be no employees and only income. </sarcasm>

    1129:

    One thing just occurred to me: when people find out they might lose their jobs many will start checking what other jobs are out there. Often this means they get told "we'd hire you in a second if we could. How much are you asking?" When those people say a number that's 50% more than I'm getting now and the prospective employer says "when can you start? Do you need us to pay moving expenses? Can we give you a signing bonus?" ... it doesn't really matter whether their current employer wants to get rid of them or not.

    I mean, in theory the best case is a 50% pay rise in their current role... a few of those and now you have 2/3 the staff and the same wages bill. Technically you've reduced head count and that's what matters, right?

    1130:

    One thing just occurred to me: it's all fine and dandy in a field where you can basically count on being re-employed and probably with better terms than in the previous place. Being able to call an employer and getting that is very much a privilege.

    However, there are quite many professions where that just plainly isn't possible, at least not easily, and the employers can have the attitude "if you leave and we want more workers, there are lines at the gates already". Often there's at least threats of "if you don't please us, we'll make you unemployable" which might or might not be true but is at least very stressing for many people.

    I got fired this year, and even though I was already looking for a new job, and got one in a few weeks, and wasn't in any financial dire straits, it was still a stressful and emotional time. I can only barely begin to imagine the stress and woe for people who would be in real trouble when getting fired, or even having the possibility of getting fired.

    Kind of tangential to that management problem there, though.

    1131:

    Very much so. I found Melbourne to be full of actively hostile employers in the language I was using, which may help explain the strength of the user group there. Finding a new job was hard, wages were low, and it turned out to be very much take that or leave. When I could, I left. It took days to find another job... in Sydney, once I started looking. They were very much "start when you can, move up here when you can, what can we do to help?". My experience of Melbourne employers was more "turn up promptly at 9am, in a suit, and do what you're told. Pay will be as low as we think we can get away with. And that's pretty damn low". My only ever group interview experience for a senior developer role was in Melbourne, as was the only time I've been contacted three months after an application to see if I was available for an interview (that was their first contact!).

    Being stuck in a career where you get treated like that would suck. A lot. Put it this way, in Melbourne when I got the opportunity to spend a year working as bike mechanic I jumped at the chance. Slightly lower wages, much nicer working environment.

    1132:

    Anti-C-19 measures I'm only wearing my ( Full-face, sheild-type ) mask inn shops or on trains ( Not that I'm using trains, now ) - but ... when I'm outdoors, I'm fairly well away from everybody, with the air blowing past, so I'm very unlikely to either get or pass on any infections, of any sort. Got a nasty fright in one shop, 13 days back - not going in there again until well after I've been vaccinated ...

    1133:

    You have your examples and I have mine. But simply grouping people by their qualifications and stating they are all the same and that sameness is "EEEVVVVIIIILLLL" is tiring, flat out wrong and not something you would say about any other arbitrary group of people.

    You don't need someone with an MBA to deliver the sorts of practices you describe (and which I can describe from my own experience too) - that's a function of management practice and theory. Which can be exercised by anyone.

    As for Ethics classes - I also didn't have any in my undergrad. I think that was mostly a result of time pressures - trying to cram A LOT into just a few years of study meant something needed to be skipped.

    1134:

    I suspect that in at least some cases IQ45 doesn't do anything is because he believes that if he's King Log then he can't be blamed when things break. IQ45 might actually be a bit generous.

    The games the GOP play on Jan 6 aren't nearly as important as how Georgia votes the day before. If the GOP keeps one or both of their Senate seats then the next four years, and possibly the next dozen, are going to be no fun at all.

    1135:

    Mike & everyone: Open this link incognito - it's from "The Atlantic" - worrying if IQ 45's last distraction will be to try to start a war with Iran, leaving Biden to sort it out. Ugggg ....

    1136:

    And just to show that arrogant fuckwits are not confined to BoZo's crowd this supposed left-winger comes along & tells us how wonderful Brexshit is - presumably another corbyista prat?

    1137:

    Greg Tingey @ 1135

    So that's why Iran has just suddenly decided to pay the families of the victims of the Ukraine International Airline crash.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-55488800

    1138:

    Brexit is the coming together of the hard right and the hard left. JC was supposedly on the Remain side in the campaign, but I could see his heart wasn't in it: a case of damning with faint praise. And once the vote was done and Teresa May disastrously decided to invoke Article 50 first and negotiate second, JC was her biggest ally.

    For that, I'll never forgive him.

    1139:

    Outdoors transmission risk is about 10% of the indoor risk but remains poorly characterised.

    Face shields by themselves are not known to be helpful. They are in fact specifically terrible indoors.

    (Medical types wear them to protect their eyes from droplets when someone coughs in their face. They're NOT a substitute for a mask.)

    1140:

    Unlikely. After the initial reflex denial, Iran admitted responsibility - and, unlike the case of Iran Air 655, all the evidence is that they genuinely thought they were acting in defence, whether they were grossly negligent or not.

    1141:

    Bellinghman Remember that JC has learnt nothing at all since about 1975 or earlier. And he was always of the ultra-Bennite opinion that the EU was "a giant employer's & corporate rip-off". In flat contradiction of the EU's employment laws etc. Quoting from Channel 4's fact check page:

    He voted against Britain’s membership of the trade bloc’s forerunner, the European Economic Community, when Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson put the question to a public ballot in 1975. In 1993, he described the “great danger to the cause of socialism in this country or any other country of the imposition of a bankers’ Europe on the people of this country”. Three years later, he railed against “a European bureaucracy totally unaccountable to anybody,” lamenting that “powers have gone from national parliaments”. Ahead of Ireland’s 2009 referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, Mr Corbyn said of the EU’s ties with NATO: “We are creating for ourselves here one massive great Frankenstein that will damage all of us in the long run.”

    Graydon I have "problems" with the conventional tight-fitting nose-&-mouth masks. Apart from my glasses steaming up almost instantly, I find myself fighting for breath & breathing harder & getting, if not a full-blown panic attack, certainly not being a happy bunny, at all. Hence the face-shield, I'm afraid In case it wasn't clear, when I say "outdoors" - I'm usually staying a good 1.5-2 metres away from others, when they are about.

    1142:

    Greg Tingey @ 1141

    Have you ever tried a P100 respirator? They are so tight (when you adjust them correctly) that your glasses would not steam up.

    https://www.arc-zone.com/3m-respirator-with-filters-6502ql-p100

    https://www.amazon.com/Safety-Works-SWX00320-Multi-Purpose-Respirator/dp/B01ND42P1Z

    1143:

    my glasses steaming up almost instantly

    Two things:

    1) Better-fitted mask. My cloth masks have a small pocket over the nose for a straightened paper clip, which I then bend so the top part closely fits my face. Makes a huge difference. My disposable surgical masks have a small metal strip that serves the same function. If your N95 is making your glasses fog then you need a mask with a different fit code.

    2) Slow down and take deeper, slower breathes. I usually walk very quickly, but when wearing a mask I have to slow down to what feels like an amble so I don't breathe faster. Again, makes a huge difference — it's the fast exhales that fog the glasses.

    1144:

    In case it wasn't clear, when I say "outdoors" - I'm usually staying a good 1.5-2 metres away from others, when they are about.

    Unfortunately, best current data is that 6 metres isn't far enough. (That Korean restaurant case can be exactly replicated by walking behind somebody.)

    Permit me to recommend the O2 Curve respirator -- https://o2canada.com/ -- and the "Max Air" filter option. It's got a much shorter lifespan ("today" vs "fortnight") than the regular filters, but it's intended for aerobic exercise and I can't tell the thing is there in breathing terms. (It's difficult to miss having a rigid shell with a gasket clamped to one's face.)

    The filters themselves are some sort of metamaterial charge gradient welcome-to-the-future stuff; they get extremely high ratings for filter effectiveness.

    1145:

    Er, no, sorry. They work well only on people with 'young skin' - just as scuba masks do - both leak badly for wrinklies like me and Greg (I assume). His beaver won't help, either ....

    To Robert Prior: such clips make a difference but not enough of one, and I have trouble at anything above a dead march, when speaking and even when moving my arms.

    1146:

    He was and is right about both the bankers and NATO, though I agree that he was deluded about where the pressure to make us subservient to them came from. It was and is far more from the UK than the EU.

    1147:

    That's because you are replaceable, in their opinion. Several years ago, I read an article in ... Slate? the Atlantic? called "Your HR Department Hates You", and they noted what I've been saying for a long time: back in the day, we had Personnel departments, who know what the organization did, and what they needed, and looked for retention.

    Now, it's "HR", "human resources", and everyone knows a "resource" is something you use up and throw away. They have no clue about the organization, and no interest in learning (most of the dept will hop to a new job somewhere else within 3-5 years). In some cases, they're outsourcing HR, so they REALLY don't know what the organization needs.

    1148:

    In the US, at least, you can't count on finding a new job quick. The last few times, it took me months.... And that's not counting that between the end of July, '01 and mid-Jan '06, I worked a TOTAL of six months... one of which I never got paid for.

    And I had a B.Sc. in CIS, decades of experience, and with big companies. After a few months, the assholes of HR (see previous post) look at you as non-viable. I literally had one idiot tell me "well, you're not fresh".

    One other thing - in the US, at least, it does matter: were you "fired", which means "for cause", or "laid off", which means no cause, RIF ("reduction in force"), etc, and you're eligible for unemployment insurance (state/fed).

    1149:

    I had some where I didn't get a response, after the first call with a recruiter for months. Esp. the one that took me back to Chicago in '06, and the last one, working for a US gov't federal contractor.

    1150:

    And the Idiot skipped the Mar-a-Lago superspreading NYE party, and came back to the WH, which is worrying.

    On the other hand, I strongly suspect that the Pentagon can easily stall for three weeks.

    1151:

    Masks: all mine are designer masks (my designer being my SO, in the other room). My solution to fogging is to move them a bit farther onto my nose, so that the weight of the nosepieces of my glasses weigh the cloth down, and the air goes out sideways, and/or through the fabric, as it's supposed to.

    1152:

    "Except for those selling their labor. The rule does not apply to them, because mumble mumble capitalism mumble."

    The rich must be paid more, so that they'll produce more.

    The rest of us must be paid less, so that we'll produce more.

    Simple.

    1153:

    "I notice that a US Republican congressman-elect has just died from Covid. I've also seen that the number of Republican office holders who have had Covid is three times the number of Democrats. Assuming this continues, in a few years there won't be enough Republicans to worry about :)"

    They'll run out of evil people only after the Sun burns out.

    1154:

    Nikon dSLR batteries can be checked for age in the menu system. The score is from 0 (worn out) to 4 (new). It is independent of the camera, so must have something to do with the battery. I could envision something similar for car batteries, maybe running the score from 0 to 10.

    1155:

    EC Thank you for those points! I'm doing what little I can to improve the odds in my favour. But ... "the boss" went round the corner for needed supplies ( like milk ) to find the local store ridiculously crammed .. a dog inside ( NOT in a food shop! ) & one especially stupid example where little mummy, little daddy & brat, all together inside, & brat with "pretend" shopping-trolley ... grrr. ONE breeder stays outside with the brat, while the other breeder goes in & does the shopping, yes? No wonder C-19 is spreading! At least the death rate now appears to be below 2%, not the 5%+ it was earlier ....

    1156:

    worrying if IQ 45's last distraction will be to try to start a war with Iran Thanks for the link. Nichols is a bit of a addled-warmonger (his history is spotty) trying to set himself straight(/reality based) intellectually. (Which is admirable, to be clear.) There's been a lot of discussion of these and similar scenarios, and close and constant attention needs to be on the US, and Israel/KSA/UAE/etc re Iran, especially for the next several weeks. (And on oil futures.) Frankly, if D.J. Trump seriously tries to start a war, normal rules re chain of command and other ... forms of pushback would not apply. He certainly would not benefit personally, and he needs to understand that the net effects to him personally would be negative. Since the military has clearly putting the pieces (for air strikes, at least) in place as ordered, this is a very dangerous situation. Also, FWIW, Netanyahu and Trump have ordered political assassinations of major Iranian figures, implicitly approving of politically assassination; they (and others) should be personally concerned about proportional responses, in the fullness of time. Starting a war would increase these risks for them.

    1157:

    Here is some sample current media buzz re Iran and USA/KSA/ISR Iran accuses Trump of 'plot to fabricate pretext for war' (Tal Axelrod - 12/31/20) Javad Zarif on twitter - "Intelligence from Iraq indicate plot to FABRICATE pretext for war."

    Israel, Saudi Arabia reportedly pressuring Trump to strike Iran in final days - According to Arab media's report, which is based on anonymous US sources, Riyadh and Jerusalem want to sabotage Biden's plan to re-enter negotiations with the ayatollah regime. (Daniel Siryoti, 12-31-2020) According to the report, which is based on anonymous US sources, Riyadh and Jerusalem have "exerted heavy pressure on the president to take out Iran's nuclear installations in a surgical strike" in order to sabotage Biden's plan to re-enter negotiations with the ayatollah regime on a long-term deal regarding its atomic project and other matters.

    1158:

    That's because you are replaceable, in their opinion. Several years ago, I read an article in ... Slate? the Atlantic? called "Your HR Department Hates You", and they noted what I've been saying for a long time: back in the day, we had Personnel departments, who know what the organization did, and what they needed, and looked for retention.

    Yeah - here some companies' managements realized that "Human Resources" sounds a bit bad, and did change the department name to "People Operations". You can probably guess how well that name change goes with already-cynical technical people.

    Also a good point about the terminology - I was laid off, so there was a reason, but it was not my fault, so I got a nice severance package.

    1159:

    We have very nearly survived the, Festive? Season 2020 WITH ONLY A FEW HOURS TO GO .. with added Viral Sauce ..but apparently? Now is not the time to lower our Immunisation,guard. ..." 75 infected with Covid after Santa Claus visits nursing home in Belgium .. "You'd better Watch Out!"

    ‘It is a very great mental strain to bear for the man that played Saint Nicholas,’ mayor says "

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/covid-belgium-care-home-santa-b1773673.html

    1160:

    >>I hope you can use the same example with others who bring up specific local solutions that can't be exported universally.

    >Why are you being such an asshole about it?

    I think you have misread my message. I was attempting to be helpful.

    1161:

    Graydon @ 1072:

    How many miles do manufacturers estimate you'll get out of a vehicle battery pack before you have to replace it? I know it will vary by brand, but what's the rough average?

    Nobody has the least idea. They're shipping new battery chemistry in unique-to-their-produce control systems.

    The original expectation was that you'd have to swap the battery at around five years; the current expectation is "longer", but that gets very dicey from a PR perspective because while the machine part of an EV could easily be good for twenty years, the stack of chips in the control system isn't. VLSI has a definite lifetime, and it is not likely to be longer than five years or so. Ten would be a startlement. So one thing to look at with an EV you are considering to purchase is how readily you can swap out the control computer or computers and how modular things are.

    You're almost certainly ahead of an ICE engine car on total lifetime cost, but you will have to plan for maintenance.

    Not really considering an EV at this time. I was just curious because batteries have been under discussion here & I had to get a new battery for the Jeep.

    The one EV I have lusted after is not available here in the U.S. And even if I could get it, it couldn't totally replace my Jeep. IIRC, it has a 40 mile range, and I have at least one trip I make semi-regularly that clocks in at 60 miles. ... and then there's the extended photo trips out west I still hope to make that were the reason I got the Jeep in the first place. But it would be good for 90% of my vehicle needs.

    I don't see having to plan for maintenance as a drawback for EVs. You have to do that for any vehicle. You should anyway.

    Seems to me the improved battery technology for EVs has begun filtering into NON-EV motoring as well. Before now, the best battery I could get for my vehicles was a "60-month" battery (prorated warranty), but the new one is a "75-month" battery, which I have never heard of before.

    1162:

    georgiana @ 1073: The first year that you get rid of the bottom 10% does improve matters. The next year maybe it helps to get rid of the new bottom 10%. But after a few years, everyone left is competent. Plus the effect on morale.

    The beatings will continue until morale improves!
    1163:

    Human Resources" sounds a bit bad, and did change the department name to "People Operations"

    Not better! I have been known to put my name as 24601 or Second Assistant on HR forms.

    Actually, one pleasure from my job-changing career was leaving one job where my team leader had foisted me off to HR when I had a problem, and conditions were generally wretched. I confirmed another offer just before the xmas break, and just after my team leader had gone on holiday for two weeks. Happily I only had to give two weeks notice... which I did on the last day before the mandatory week-ish off. I blocked my team leaders number after the first call, and unblocked once I started work again after the break. He went from peevish and useless* to actively hostile, which at least saved me the effort of documenting what I'd done. Not that it mattered, I was "not useful" and "couldn't learn how to do things properly"... from a team lead who used to "fix" my code, check it in, then leave me to fix any compile errors that resulted, and got shitty when I fixed business logic errors in his perfect code. Yeah, quitting was a pleasure.

    • not attributing to malice what can be explained by incompetance
    1164:

    georgiana @ 1076: I notice that a US Republican congressman-elect has just died from Covid. I've also seen that the number of Republican office holders who have had Covid is three times the number of Democrats. Assuming this continues, in a few years there won't be enough Republicans to worry about :)

    The Covid mortality rate among Republican politicians doesn't appear to be proportional to their exposure. One Republican politician out of how many MAGAts who ignore the health safety guidelines has died compared to how many others who died despite doing everything they could to follow the guidelines & avoid exposure?

    Plus I'm already seeing denial from right-wingnuts that he died from Covid because the proximate cause of death was a heart attack (which he had while he was in an ICU for Covid).

    1165:

    I see where Boris Johnson's father has applied for French Citizenship.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55499773

    1166:

    For the sci/eng posters here: Did you ever take an ethics course? If not, why not?

    Answering a bit late, yes. When I was doing my CS course for system administration - fascinating and educational, although professionally useless - there was a course on ethics. I remember that it was the only class at the collage that overlapped between the Computer Science and Philosophy departments. I don't remember anything particularly outrageous being discussed but we did at least recognize that the questions existed.

    Relevant to some other things, an engineer friend of mine once mentioned that he had an MBA basically for the hell of it. He'd been idling reading the documentation (as engineers and CS people tend to do) and noticed that the MBA degree requirements were about 95% stuff he already had or was going to get soon anyway - so the marginal cost of also getting an MBA was trivial. I don't know that he ever used it but it's nice resume candy.

    1167:

    ‘It is a very great mental strain to bear for the man that played Saint Nicholas,’ mayor says "

    Well, how much of a brain could he have to suffer mental strain if he though it was a good idea to play Santa in a seniors home in the middle of a pandemic?

    1168:

    Those types of motors do do a pretty good job of obscuring it behind a screen of frequency dependence, but the basic behaviour is fundamental, because current is flux and voltage is rate of change. It is much less obscured when you consider it in terms of power going into the shaft and coming out of the wires: want more current, you have to apply more torque; want more voltage, you have to increase the speed. And the frequency sorts itself out and stops confusing the matter. The motor case is necessarily just the same only with power flowing the opposite way, but the conventions around how those motors are used and how motors and power supplies tend to be thought of bugger the visualisation up.

    Scooter: the problem is not that it can't brake, just that it won't. It manages fine as long as the speed is low enough that it is generating little enough to still dump the energy back into the battery. But if the speed exceeds that limit (eg. steady speed but the gradient increases under it) then it doesn't know what to do with the surplus to get the speed down to where it becomes controllable again. It won't momentarily charge the battery at an excess rate to slow the thing down, and it won't keep the speed down by adjusting its speed limiter to any value lower than whatever the current throttle demand happens to be. It also doesn't seem to be capable of merely limiting the recharge current so you still get a bit of braking. So it just gives up entirely and rockets off down the slope. Only when you let the throttle off almost completely does it figure you're trying to do an emergency stop and allow itself to perform a non-ideal energy dump manoeuvre.

    It has other control deficiencies, too. When you open the throttle it does nothing at all for a second or two and then accelerates at an artificially limited rate, which is a pain in the arse when you're waiting for a gap in the traffic to nip across a road. It likes to limit its deceleration rate as well, which makes it unreasonably difficult to manoeuvre in a tight space without crashing into things. (The very first time I used it I drove it less than 2 metres before crashing into an engine because it didn't stop when I told it to.) From what I've been able to gather on the internet, it seems that all scooters and wheelchairs and things do that; it's an attempt to make them usable by even the most incapacitated user, in exchange for making them an arseache for people who do have decent motor control (biological).

    It also has the "be a total shit" feature which is standard on pretty much everything these days: the instant it detects any kind of fault it shuts down completely and sits there doing this really quiet beeping which is usually inaudible outdoors. So for instance if damp has got into the throttle pot and the contact is a bit dodgy, then instead of just getting an attack of the hiccups until you give it a thump, it will suddenly and unexpectedly slam to a halt for no apparent reason leaving you wondering what the fuck is going on, and refuse to move until you turn it off and on again. Fortunately it hasn't done this in the middle of the road yet.

    There is a programming interface connector on the controller board, so it might be possible to sort it out in a minimal-entropy fashion, if only I can find out what the protocol is. If I fail in that quest, then it's soldering iron time...

    1169:

    Robert Prior @ 1143:

    my glasses steaming up almost instantly

    Two things:

    1) Better-fitted mask. My cloth masks have a small pocket over the nose for a straightened paper clip, which I then bend so the top part closely fits my face. Makes a huge difference. My disposable surgical masks have a small metal strip that serves the same function. If your N95 is making your glasses fog then you need a mask with a different fit code.

    2) Slow down and take deeper, slower breathes. I usually walk very quickly, but when wearing a mask I have to slow down to what feels like an amble so I don't breathe faster. Again, makes a huge difference — it's the fast exhales that fog the glasses.

    Another thing you can do - and I believe in it because it's what I do - is to put a drop of liquid dish soap on the inside of your glasses lens & polish it dry with a handkerchief or other clean soft cloth. Don't wet the lens, just a little bit of soap & polish it dry.

    Do the same for the outside of the lens & it will help with the problem of lenses fogging up when you come into a warm building after being outside in the cold.

    1170:

    this supposed left-winger comes along & tells us how wonderful Brexshit is - presumably another corbyista prat?

    Certainly missing from reality a bit - blaming the EU for the loss of British manufacturing in one paragraph, and then a couple of paragraphs later stating the Germany (in that same EU) kept their manufacturing...

    Much other nonsense as well.

    1171:

    Re: '(as engineers and CS people tend to do) and noticed that the MBA degree requirements were about 95% stuff he already had or was going to get soon anyway - so the marginal cost of also getting an MBA was trivial.'

    Yeah - explains the over-representation. Marginal cost was 'trivial'? Must have been some time ago because the per annum tuition at most US MBA schools is $50-$60K. (Or his employer picked up the tab like some of the Fortune 100 corps.)

    Re: Ethics course

    Thanks for the reply!

    IMO, a program-specific ethics course would be more useful and relevant to undergrads than some generic overview of the history of a topic outside their speciality. Also primes them to be aware that they will share responsibility.

    1172:

    Somewhat interesting story on The Atlantic website about The Simpsons - how when the show launched 30 years ago they closely resembled a mid-west working class family, and now the fictional family is something most people would need to aspire to given the the increases in everything over the last 30 years with wages not keeping up.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/life-simpsons-no-longer-attainable/617499/

    1173:

    Well, there you go now. The UK is now out of the EU as of about 37 mins ago. I still say that there's probably a ~50% chance that bozo will break his own deal so he can say he got a deal but then have no deal to suit his ultras who while they are quiet now will I'm guessing will pipe up and complain soon.

    Not quite time I know in the UK but happy new year to you all!

    SP

    1174:

    Less than 5 minutes to go before it's the New Year in Glasgow.

    Happy New Year, Charlie and fellow blog visitors!

    1175:

    Stanley did not share his son's views on leaving, in fact Boris seems to be the black sheep of the family in that respect.

    1176:

    The Guardian has an updated story from today on the St. Nick visit to the retirement home in Belgium in early December:

    26 residents dead, 85 more residents tested Covid positive with 40 staff Covid positive

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/31/covid-outbreak-hits-belgian-care-home-after-santa-visit

    1177:

    My favourite job change was actually done by a colleague. After the TV-AM strike and Thatcher trying (and failing) every method of disrupting the TV unions until she had to resort to blatant legislation, the ITV companies (remember when there were more than two?) issued everyone with new contracts that removed any mentions of the White Book (Union Agreement). Employment law meant it took about 6 months, 90 day consultation and then 90 days to sign our new contracts. On the last day said colleague was called into HR where it was explained that if he didn't sign there and then he wouldn't have a job on Monday. His reply, "Yes I will. I start at Channel 4 at 9am".

    I think we were expected to be upset at the extra workload caused by his abrupt departure, but they hadn't replaced the White Book, just taken it out of the contract so KaChing Overtime!

    1178:

    Let's all take a moment to remember Flash that passed away at midnight.

    1179:

    A vehicle I'd like to lust after is a UK or EU hybrid minivan, at least 2-4 years old.

    However, it would cost a ton to import.

    1180:

    Well, turns out some of you think ahead and we have a short selection of relevant links:

    MF DOOM (hip hop legend) died, Covid related:

    Madvillain - The Illest Villains - Madvillainy (Full Album)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ0yXh_ADlQ&list=PL9dk_xtWpAkKs1-EKcvq-nKwdaaS-3czd

    This means nothing to most reading this, but he really did do Black America Hip-hop Xgenre Nerd stuff waaay before anyone else. In 2008.

    Internet Archive back doing what it should be doing, so fear not: those 100,000,000 hours of Newsground stuff is relatively safe, for now:

    http://blog.archive.org/2020/11/19/flash-animations-live-forever-at-the-internet-archive/

    Book all UK people should read in the upcoming months, since Ye Guds you need to hear some positivity about 'ethnic' issues to prep you for the garbage of 2021:

    https://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/publication/under-fire/9780750994354/

    Since 'Terf Island' is going big, with totally unearned OBEs and so forth being issued, remind yourself of just how ahistorical this all is:

    The first sex-change operation in a transsexual patient, i.e. the construction of a penis (so-called phalloplasty), took place in the Netherlands in Arnhem in 1959-1960. The operative technique had already been described in 1938 and was perfected after World War II.

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17373398/

    You can also then go down the rabbit-hole of how Soviet medical science really went above and beyond on this matter way before Thailand and why it was Classified Information for years.

    Lots more. But won't flood.

    Congrats, you all survived. Given that your opposition finds 'nuking balls' (not a joke) an acceptable weapon (weird thing about DNA damage: white hairs... are permanent, aren't they? Work out when they're not and if that's a Human ability) I've some bad news for you about upcoming events...

    @818

    Try these for size: To be wealthy and demand more is an abomination to a god.

    In the city with no dogs, the fox is boss.

    And this one: 1-5. A mouse fell down from the roof beams. A mongoose approached it: "Is any part of you hurt?" The mouse replied: "You needn't come near me. I am equal to any part of you." (note: you're going to have to know that Mongoose were imported back then - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongoose - and a few other things to understand it)

    • Oh, and this one: When …… answers ……, it is a good omen from heaven.. Wild you don't know what either ..... is.

    ~

    The Balls comment, by the way, is factual. I mean, if the TERF-ISLAND folks were actually serious, they'd be into micro-plastics, infertility driven by PCBs (etc) and actual DNA damage being done both as a by-product and deliberately. But they ain't.

    Oh.

    Here's one that you can grep: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/03/coho-salmon-pollution-car-tires-die-off

    When was that discussed? Years ago now.

    1181:

    My experience as an undergrad in the early 10s was a mandatory ethics course for every engineering major plus computer science. Very much driving home "The rules are written in blood; try not to be the reason for a new rule."

    1182:

    Ah, for Greg etc.

    Massive Mumsnet shit-storm + AdSpace in papers + US cash stuff you won't know about. Real life OBEs to these people as well. While... well: cheer yourself up, look up a Scottish Actor 'firing back' on Twitter about returning the OBE.

    But: if you're going full-in for 2021 with "Great Replacement" ideology (which is like, basically always racist) and doing the nasty with Bronze Age Perverts (it's a twitter account: it's 100% nasty business / COINTEL stuff from the USA) and so on: if you don't have the actual environmental / biological causations in your Cultural Critique, you're one of the evil ones.

    "Turning the Frogs Gay"

    Yeah, Chekhov's gun, you won't believe how easy it is to nuke $500,000,000 PR spend.

    But that's 2021...

    Anyhow, mass banned, got caught proving that certain Reddit / Computer Game companies and PR are all doing the nasty and fixing stuff. Nintendo: pretending it's not run like a zaibatsu while employing the worst USA PR companies in 2020. Lol, Tencent are acceptable to critique, can't hint Nintendo?

    And Russia , again.

    ~

    Whatever. Some point in Time (hello April) you're going to work out why Rowling's Mudbloods / Magic users via MumsNet gets so bloody and nasty. Hint: Special Secret Club and trans people kinda revert them back to ... MudBloods.

    For real. It's that simple: it's also used by Brazil, America, UK etc as an in-out grouping wink / nudge.

    Image having some disaster Furry / trans identity actually being the Magic when ... See how it works?

    1183:

    The UK vehicle I would most lust after is James Bond's Aston-Martin from "Goldfinger".

    Who would not want twin barrel machine guns, oil slick, bullet proof shield and ejector seat?

    Sweet, sweet ejector seat.

    1184:

    Greg et al with the fogging: Just put a strip of surgical tape across the top and stick it to tour face, it not only stops the fogging but for me it also stops the mask riding up into my eyes.

    I have a beard as well, which doesn't help, and after cataract surgery in November (left eye) and December (right eye, der!), which means sunglasses are mandatory if I go outside while the sun is out, I have rolls of surgical tape with all my mask stashes!

    And as Robert P said, if you find yourself getting breathless, slow down your breathing.

    Surgeons wear these masks for hours while operating, every study ever undertaken shows that they reduce your air intake by less than the provebial one percent, so it's all in your head :-)

    1185:

    Moz_ @1131:

    Very much so. I found Melbourne to be full of actively hostile employers

    I haven't looked at a job in Sin City since the 1990's - well, unless you count Google calling me up every now and then to keep their, "Yes, we do interview over 40's, and 50's," bull intact - and found the reverse.

    But I am an ancient UNIX[1] and C[2] hacker, and when some monkey low-balls an offer at me, they don't expect a reply like, "Well, just to live there in a similar suburb, and buy food of equivalent quality, you'll have to at least double that offer, call me back when you find a clue."

    Although I sort of regret not moving to Bris-vegas during the 1980s boom, I would have ended on a different path, which might have been more profitable. Oh well.

    Still, if I can live long enough to retire, I'll be happy. ;-)

    1 - And VMS, and AOS/VS, and pSOS, and RSX, and RSTS, and a heap of Operating Systems none of you have heard of. :-)

    2 - Well, kre taught me C programming, and there have been a lot of other languages since then, assemblers of various kinds, shells, DCL, DIBOL, SPL, SPAN, PFX, and so on. Heck, I was using SGML before the web started.

    1186:

    James Bond's Aston-Martin from "Goldfinger". Who would not want twin barrel machine guns

    Even in the US you might have trouble with those at traffic stops. And even a genuine James Bond ID card wouldn't impress the US cops.

    1187:

    >>MBA degree requirements were about 95% stuff he already had or was going to get soon anyway - so the marginal cost of also getting an MBA was trivial.

    >Marginal cost was 'trivial'? Must have been some time ago because the per annum tuition at most US MBA schools is $50-$60K

    It was a few decades back, yes. But he was already at university anyway, so it was mostly an opportunity cost of taking things like Contract Law rather than stuff like Geology of the Everglades, Napoleonic French Literature, or other broadening courses.

    I doubt anyone could get away with this now, if only because administrators must have noticed the hack and disallowed it.

    1188:

    "Surgeons wear these masks for hours while operating"

    https://www.kirbymorgan.com/products/helmets/superlite-27

    I used to wear one of these for hours while breathing air at up to 4 times normal atmospheric (so 4 times thicker) while doing heavy manual labour. Digging ditches etc. I find the "I can't breathe with a paper mask over my face" less than convincing.

    If your glasses fog up, spit on them.

    1189:

    Let's all take a moment to remember Flash that passed away at midnight.

    And it took xkcd's Great Gatsby adaption with it!

    1190:

    Maybe people who can't breathe through a surgical mask should also get air supplied at 4 bar? That would solve the problem...

    1191:

    On a different tangent, I heard this tonight and thought it sounded rather neat:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byS6wVgoRs0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6enartBTuc

    Taiwanese indigenous music, I think, combined with modern electronica.

    1192:

    Still an hour & some to go here. Idiots are periodically setting off fireworks, LOUD FIREWORKS, which are not legal in North Carolina. I don't really give a shit, but they've got my little dog so scared he won't even take a treat.

    He does not like them!.

    I've got him bundled up in a towel here in my lap trying to comfort him, but he's trembling like a leaf in a high wind.

    1193:

    gasdive @1188:

    https://www.kirbymorgan.com/products/helmets/superlite-27

    I haven't used a Kirby-Morgan since the 1980's - bloody nose-lever thing always hit me just wrong - I had some ideas about becoming a professional diver, did some courses here and there, but decided that high-pressure work was too bloody dangerous!

    Although I find spitting in my mask works, it doesn't seem to work on my glasses :-(

    1194:

    Who would not want twin barrel machine guns, oil slick, bullet proof shield and ejector seat?

    I had one of those when I was a boy. No oil slick, but the machine guns sparked, the shield popped up, and the ejector seat tossed the miniature driver a good foot in the air. :-)

    (It was a Matchbox car, IIRC. Present from grandparents in England.)

    1195:

    And on a totally different tack, I finished watching the Soviet epic Liberation. WWII from Kursk to the Battle of Berlin. Epic battle scenes with 100,000 soldiers and lots of tanks fighting across vast vistas, stirring socialist heroism, vile Nazis, what's not to love? :-)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZlzMhfx2hQ&list=PLwsbuswnI-71MiiY1lUK9njH4gHm-VQkH&index=6

    Rather interesting hearing English (Churchill et al) with Russian translation, and then English subtitles of the Russian translation.

    Good cinematography. Well-paced. Battle scenes looked better than most Hollywood ones (proper spacing between units, for one thing).

    At over eight hours (in five parts) it's more like binging a TV series than a conventional movie.

    1196:

    I got so I could clear my ears without the nose thing, so I always left it pulled as far out as possible.

    I had a couple of near misses, and I got a job because the guy before me died, so you probably made a wise choice giving it a miss. I only did it for about 3 years, but they were the most fun and most satisfying 3 years of my working life by far.

    Spitting on your glasses only works if they stay wet. Probably your suggestion is better.

    1197:

    Robert Prior @ 1194

    I didn't know that Matchbox made one. I had the golden Corgi Toys version:

    https://www.ebay.ca/b/Corgi-James-Bond-Aston-Martin-Diecast-Toy-Vehicles/222/bn_1936219

    1198:

    mdive One thing about the EU does not seem to have changed - the groups that hate it. Back in the 1970's when we had the "Do we want to be in the EEC?" ( As it was then ) referendum, you could guarantee that on alternate days the Communists or the BNP ( Fascists ) were outside the tube station, promoting the exact same message. I used to wind the arseholes up, by telling each lot that "their friends" were here yesterday - it produced a lot of amusing foaming & shouting.

    Ijones Well BoZo is as trustworthy as Charles I or James II & VII....

    Rabidchaos Ah yes, like the Railway Operating Rule Book, exactly.

    Oh fuck the mad troll is back.

    "Slow down your breathing" I DO breathe slowly - but deeply. I've been dancing for over 40 years & that does things to your lung-function! I know it's almost all in my head, but it doesn't help, unfortunately. Simply avoiding getting close to other people is the best preventative, 95% of the time. See also below ....

    How are we all managing with the ongoing pandemic & restrictions? I'm very fortunate. It's almost exactly a kilometre from my front door to my allotment plot, so every 2 days, usually, I'm walking 2k + what I'm doing whilst there & my house is at 117 ft up, the plot is at 58 feet up & the highest point in the middle is 147 ft - so I'm getting plenty of healthy outdoor exercise. What it must be like for people in apartments & flats ... like Charlie, for that matter. Um. After our experiences in the past fortnight, we are going to be ultra-careful about going into shops - the mass stupidity is truly scary. So how y'all doing?

    1199:

    A real life car with an ejector seat was made by the Mythbusters:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJt-VicUVOs

    1200:

    This made for intresting reading;

    https://www.politics.co.uk/comment/2020/12/29/never-ending-story-deal-unveils-next-decade-of-brexit-arguments/

    Essentially then - never ending brexit. AAaaaaaaargh!

    ljones

    1201:

    The primary job of HR is to stop the company from being sued. To this end they ensure that the company has the proper processes and can prove that they were followed. Its why you have an HR witness there for anything on the road to leaving the company.

    1202:

    On dumb stuff from HR:

    Many years ago I was working for a large company writing software. I wanted to go to a conference on this new Object Oriented hotness everyone was talking about. In company terms this was considered "training", so I had to fill in a form to apply for permission to attend this "training course".

    Most of it was pretty straightforward; who, what, where, how much etc. But the company had recently jumped on the "Investors In People" (IIP) bandwagon, which mostly meant that they got a nice logo to put at the bottom of your stationary. (It was a part of the ISO-9000 "measure the quality of everything" fashion).

    So I reached the bottom of the form, where the IIP bits had been tacked on. IIP required the company to measure the effectiveness of its training, so there was a question on the form:

    "How will the effectiveness of the training be measured?"

    This was a bit of a poser. I could imagine how the effectiveness of a typing course might be measured by the improvement of typing speed. I could see how an end-of-course test might be administered for rote knowledge. But this conference was intended to broaden my knowledge of software construction. There ought to be a positive impact, but measuring it would be lost in the noise. So I wrote:

    "I will weigh my head before and after."

    A few days later I got a phone call from a woman in HR (all HR departments were 100% female in those days :-/ ). In between bursts of laughter she explained that this was not an acceptable answer, and we agreed that it would be replaced by a presentation I would give to the rest of the department on what I had learned.

    The next time I had to fill in that form I found that the question had been changed, with useful suggestions about appropriate answers.

    1203:

    "Essentially then - never ending brexit. AAaaaaaaargh!"

    The UK is a large (by EU standards) country 20 miles from the EU, with longstanding major trading relationships. This means that neither party can get away with ignoring the other (without consequences).

    This might decline over the next 20 years, if Scotland rejoins the EU and a large amount of UK-EU business shifts over to the EU.

    1204:

    Barry And of course the Remoaners, of whom I am one, will point out & prod the headbangers & Gammons at every opportunity, when another of their lies & evasions is shown up. And keep on doing it, too.

    The larger Financial Services firms have already set up offices in a suitable EU country, or even two, so that they can carry on, as before, with the bulk of the work being done in London, as previously - or so I am told .....

    1205:

    That looks like the toy I remember. I'd forgotten about the Corgi brand.

    1206:

    I have worked in union and non-union jobs of many descriptions.

    My worst experience with a union was at Safeway as a teenage bag packer/cart pusher. We had a lovely contract chock full of benefits, balanced against a flat rate union due paid every week. I paid ~$7/week, made about $7/hr, and worked between 5 and 15 hours per week (being in school). So my dues amounted to a large percentage of my income. And then anyone who ever considered taking advantage of any aspect of our pretty contract found their hours reduced to near zero (but not the dues).

    My best experience with a union is in my current job. The union closely protects the workers, the managers work hard to keep workers happy. Wages are good, benefits are good. I strongly suspect that is in large part because the work is NOT easy, nor is it easy to find people to do the work. I also strongly suspect (without evidence) that a lot of the positive management style has to do with the fact that almost all of the management (lower, middle and upper) are female and/or transgender. This is an organization with ~500 staff, 300 of which are full time.

    1207:

    No, no, no. I've said before, and I'll keep saying: my son and I, 20+ years ago, decided that the better weapon was a rocket with a wedge-shaped charge. Now, a bazooka has a shaped charge to go through armor; the point of a wedge shaped charge would be to split the car in front of you in half, left and right. That way, the pieces are thrown sideways, clearing the lane in front of you, rather than blowing up in place, forcing you to stop.

    In addition, assuming you're in the left (US) lane), the piece blown to the right takes out the idiot on your right who, seeing this, wants to cut in front of you.

    1208:

    Ah, RSTS! Had the time-sharing version one term in college, very nice. As opposed to what I was stuck with the term after, the noxious operating system (NOS) on a Cyber 6000. DCL... AS 400? No MVS or DOS/VSE/SPF/whatever they added after '95)?

    And yes, I learned my favorite language, C, from K&R and Turbo-C.

    1209:

    I also strongly suspect (without evidence) that a lot of the positive management style has to do with the fact that almost all of the management (lower, middle and upper) are female and/or transgender.

    That was not been my experience in the three decades I worked as a teacher.

    1210:

    THANK YOU!!!!!

    You have no idea what you did by posting those links to the Taiwanese music.

    Back in the nineties, my late wife and I, working on a story she was writing in an APA (which I hope to edit and get published, one of these days) have characters go to a bar in a rough part of town to listen to this odd music (which I've also brought into my own universe, in my current novel), which we called "sfarrasta blues". Esp. that first link - make the singer's voice a bit more nasal, and add in a heavy reggae backbeat, and that's pretty much what we described.

    Never thought I'd actually know what it sounded like... but I do, now.

    Again, thank you.

    1211:

    About the breathing - something that's hit me a bunch of times over the last month or two is, mostly when I'm about to go out shopping, or even to work on the front or back yard, is this almost-pain in my upper chest.

    I can't tell if there's a cause, or if I'm getting paranoid about going out.

    So don't feel alone.

    1212:

    Rather interesting hearing English (Churchill et al) with Russian translation, and then English subtitles of the Russian translation.

    The Weta "Lord of the Rings" movies were dubbed into a number of languages. Russian-Gandalf was exceptionally effective, because it's not so much that you stop seeing or hearing Ian McKellan's Gandalf at all, it's that the character is suddenly entirely different.

    Imagine a senior prelate, who is not merely displeased with you, but who is so entirely holy that they can see, somehow hovering over your head, the precise coordinates of the specific location in Hell which the devil has been preparing for you. Now imagine that they are not only so grim with holiness that anything infernal just straight up flees the vicinity, that they decided many years ago that mercy was God's job; they're here to beat the sin until it flees the sinner.

    I have never quite dared to try to find the being-compassionate-with-Frodo scenes to see how those come across.

    (I speak not a word of Russian; I'm reporting my impression of the emotional tenor of the thing.)

    1213:

    I can't tell if there's a cause, or if I'm getting paranoid about going out.

    Any time you have to wear PPE, something's wrong. Maybe you've made a mistake, maybe the situation has gone, or always was, highly sub-optimal, but PPE is the very last thing on the list of safety steps and should generally be understood as some mix of failure and inherently dangerous.

    I think that awareness just plain leaks back out of people's bones, and there's only so capacity for either in people.

    1214:

    Duffy @ 1183: The UK vehicle I would most lust after is James Bond's Aston-Martin from "Goldfinger".

    Who would not want twin barrel machine guns, oil slick, bullet proof shield and ejector seat?

    Sweet, sweet ejector seat.

    There are a lot of vehicles I'd lust after if I could afford to own a collection like Jay Leno's. I've wanted one of these since I assembled a plastic model kit of one when I was 12 or 13:

    https://rmsothebys.com/en/auctions/sj15/motor-city/lots/r170-1935-duesenberg-model-sj-dual-cowl-phaeton-in-the-style-of-lagrande/180464

    But my dreams are a lot bigger than my wallet.

    1215:

    Robert Prior @ 1195: And on a totally different tack, I finished watching the Soviet epic Liberation. WWII from Kursk to the Battle of Berlin. Epic battle scenes with 100,000 soldiers and lots of tanks fighting across vast vistas, stirring socialist heroism, vile Nazis, what's not to love? :-)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZlzMhfx2hQ&list=PLwsbuswnI-71MiiY1lUK9njH4gHm-VQkH&index=6

    Rather interesting hearing English (Churchill et al) with Russian translation, and then English subtitles of the Russian translation.

    Good cinematography. Well-paced. Battle scenes looked better than most Hollywood ones (proper spacing between units, for one thing).

    At over eight hours (in five parts) it's more like binging a TV series than a conventional movie.

    Yeah, I don't think I'm quite that interested in Russian history.

    OTOH, there IS some pretty cool stuff on YouTube if you can manage to dig through all of the garbage and find it.

    Another Soviet era gem well presented with love & dedication & great cinematography:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8HEZ-x4-_w

    1216:

    Robert Prior #1211 "That was not been my experience in the three decades I worked as a teacher."

    Fair enough, my all time worst boss ever was also a woman. I suspect any attempt at gender essentialism deserves to be condemned.

    I also suspect that my current workplace is run by people, mostly female and transgender persons, who are in this line of work due to an excess of empathy. People don't just 'fall into' this job.

    I come from a family of teachers. Many people become teachers because after finishing their degree in (x) they discover that they must also get some additional certification and so become teachers - regardless of actual affinity for the job. Some become wonderful teachers, others hate the work and fail upwards or out. Additionally, most of the people who are actually GOOD at being a teacher are less interested in becoming the boss of teaching (and thus teaching less or not at all).

    There are some cases such as my father, who was an excellent teacher, who becomes so exasperated with administrative incompetence that he moved up as a self defense strategy (only to discover that said incompetence does not end at the school office level).

    1217:

    whitroth @ 1209: No, no, no. I've said before, and I'll keep saying: my son and I, 20+ years ago, decided that the better weapon was a rocket with a wedge-shaped charge. Now, a bazooka has a shaped charge to go through armor; the point of a wedge shaped charge would be to split the car in front of you in half, left and right. That way, the pieces are thrown sideways, clearing the lane in front of you, rather than blowing up in place, forcing you to stop.

    In addition, assuming you're in the left (US) lane), the piece blown to the right takes out the idiot on your right who, seeing this, wants to cut in front of you.

    You're going to have trouble with the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. The machine guns in 007's Aston-Martin were manufactured before the law took effect, so they're "grandfathered" in. Maybe if you could find Fiona Volpe's rocket firing BSA Lightning A65L from Thunderball ...

    1218:

    JBS @ 1217 : "Restauration d'une vieille moto soviétique"

    This is an excellent example of Google's very own brand of multilingualism.

    The Web page title is bilingual in Russian and English.

    The video's title is in French: "Restauration d'une vieille moto soviétique"

    The name of the YouTube channel is in English»: "Great Idea"

    The paragraph-and-list description of the video is in French

    The comments are in Russian, English, Spanish, Korean and Japanese and who knows what else...

    1219:

    Weta LotR? What's that? All I see when I try to search for it is something apparently related to Peter Jackson.

    1220:

    Been watching the BBC Channel 4 series "Utopia" on Amazon Prime (looks like an inferior American version will be coming out in September).

    Some scenes are extremely hard to watch, but I find it hard to stop watching.

    Any thoughts on whether this is a reasonably accurate portrayal of our near future?

    If the rich and powerful find their power is slipping (ironically as a result of their pursuit of wealth and power destroying the demographic, economic and environmental basis of the civilization that gives them power in the first place), I can see them acting just a vicious and dirty as they are shown in the series.

    1221:

    I usually don't watch thins like that, but I just spent half an hour watching that loving restoration of that beautiful Soviet-era motorcycle.

    Thanks.

    1222:

    Something to enjoy - The History of English podcast:

    https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/

    Some of y'all may have already discovered this, but it's new to me.

    1223:

    The production company/special effects/thingy is Weta Workshop, so "the Weta Lord of the Rings", as distinct from the Bakshi/animated Lord of the Rings.

    Peter Jackson was the director for those, but I think of Jackson as primarily a negative influence on the production.

    1224:

    whitroth @ 1221: Weta LotR? What's that? All I see when I try to search for it is something apparently related to Peter Jackson.

    I believe "Weta" refers to the special effects company who made most of the props for Peter Jackson's Tolkien film adaptations.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weta_Workshop

    ... distinguishing the Jackson films from earlier attempts to bring the works to the screen.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle-earth_in_film

    1225:

    Duffy @ 1222: Been watching the BBC Channel 4 series "Utopia" on Amazon Prime (looks like an inferior American version will be coming out in September).

    Some scenes are extremely hard to watch, but I find it hard to stop watching.

    Any thoughts on whether this is a reasonably accurate portrayal of our near future?

    If the rich and powerful find their power is slipping (ironically as a result of their pursuit of wealth and power destroying the demographic, economic and environmental basis of the civilization that gives them power in the first place), I can see them acting just a vicious and dirty as they are shown in the series.

    I haven't watched it, but what I know of it it's a pretty standard secret master-race corporate conspiracy to wipe out all the NON-master-race sub-humans, but well made & clever. Do you think the secret master-race corporate conspirators are likely to win in the end?

    1226:

    Re: 'I DO breathe slowly - but deeply. I've been dancing for over 40 years & that does things to your lung-function!'

    Some questions/comments that may be of use to you:

    1- Have you tried wearing the mask in the house? This could sorta help figure out whether it's the mask, apprehension about what's out there, or maybe even something else entirely.

    2- Do you have more than one mask? Are they all constructed in exactly the same way with you arbitrarily switching between/among them when running errands? And do you feel the same way regardless of the mask? - Depending on construction, one mask might feel more restrictive than another or channel your breath differently.

    3- Your breathing pattern might change v-a-v local environment or anticipated activity without your being aware of how, when or why - mask or no mask. (Sorta related to how people forget the most trivial things the moment they step out of one room and into another.)

    BTW - fabric masks have finite usage lives, plus they can not only start falling apart but can also 'compactify' depending on what they're made as well as cleaning/laundering process and products. (Never use fabric softener on any PPE masks - ever. Air/hang dry only.)

    While dancing is great for helping expand your lung capacity, breath control is equally important. (There are many yoga, voice/singing and pulmonary rehab/physio videos online - the good ones have verifiable certificates/degrees.)

    Lastly, my glasses fog up much faster and more regularly during colder humid weather especially since I've been wearing a mask - warm humid exhale meets cold humid ambient air smack on ambient temp (cold) lenses. Not sure about the specific critical temp/humidity levels, just that it happens. So, lets see ... you live in London where it's cold and humid about 80%-85% of the year?

    1227:

    Let's see, so the plot line is like "we, the 1%, hate all this social safety net, we'll destroy it, and make them believe it's making things better for them"?

    1228:

    SFReader @ 1228

    Forget the masks, he's got a big beard. What he needs is a real helmet like the ones from VYZR Technologies or Covidisor:

    https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1822537795640

    https://sprudge.com/meet-covidisor-a-practical-covid-helmet-that-lets-you-drink-coffee-171507.html

    1229:

    So, 2021 brings some entertainment (and possibly doom) for those in London as Piers Corbyn - brother of Jeremey - Covid denier and anti-vaxxer - announced he is running for Mayor of London

    https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/piers-corbyn-announces-he-is-running-for-london-mayor/01/01/

    1230:

    To stop glasses misting up when wearing a mask rub a little washing up liquid on both size of the lenses and then polish them with a dry cloth or tissue. This worked perfectly on my reading glasses. I tried it on my driving glasses which had been stored in my car for two days, mostly at freezing temperature. It was less successful but reduced the misting a lot. So I expect it would work most times unless the glasses have been stored in the cold.

    1231:

    2021 starts with a strong 2020 clown circus feeling :

    "Microsoft Word/ Google Docs issue compatibility issue causes Gohmert lawsuit to miss submission deadline"

    https://mspoweruser.com/microsoft-word-google-docs-issue-gohmert-lawsuit/

    Incompetence at this level is an art form.

    1232:

    Piers Corbyn

    Well, London does have form on electing nutcases. But going on that the UK might end up with a Prime Minister Corbyn after all...

    1233:

    2021 starts with a strong 2020 clown circus feeling ...

    And it doesn't stop there! You may have that a Texas Republican is suing to promote the vice president to election dictator despite Pence, um, not inciting insurrection and suggesting he will obey the law. This has annoyed the Department of Justice, which is not allowed to use phrases like "bat-shit crazy" in legal papers. The admittedly partisan website points out that when your own Justice Department wants a lawsuit tossed out that's a good sign it's a waste of time.

    1234:

    Re: '... causes Gohmert lawsuit to miss submission deadline"'

    I'm guessing the office staff that would normally prep & send docs were AFK/unreachable leaving these guys to figure this out for themselves. So we get ... VIP Pols who are convinced they know exactly how to run the most powerful country in the world stymied by everyday office/ELEM-HI school tech. Sheesh! So, yeah, sure - blame it on MSFT & GOOGL. (Anyone check to see if these guys hold AAPL shares?)

    Hadn't been aware of this lawsuit but based on the below - the level of fabrication/outright lying is escalating.

    https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/532289-that-louie-gohmert-lawsuit

    1235:

    Apparently Tesla batteries are getting safer all the time... from a baseline of not great. The interesting thing is to me is that while they catch fire less often than fossil vehicles, they're harder to extinguish and at least one "spontaneously reignited" more than once. I don't think fossil cars just get left to burn themselves out, or at least not often, but that seems to be what Tesla suggests.

    https://www.chron.com/business/article/A-Tesla-Model-S-erupted-like-a-flamethrower-It-15831399.php

    1236:

    (I speak not a word of Russian; I'm reporting my impression of the emotional tenor of the thing.)

    Decades ago, chatting with someone who spoke Ukrainian*, they said one of the nice things was that they could recite old family recipes at an English-speaker and have it assumed that they were cursing them. Made it simple to fake being angry while keeping control.

    *Not Russian, but related.

    1237:

    Liz Dye at wonkette has been doing funny law-'splainers on Trump's autocoup legal team attempting to install DJT as God Emperor Trump. Congress's Dumbest Man Files Election Lawsuit That Would Make A Krakenhead Blush (Liz Dye, December 28, 2020 04:15 PM) Haven't looked to see what happened with Gohmert and team today though.

    1180 It's 2021 and ... In the city with no dogs, the fox is boss. Human cultural contexts can change a lot over a couple hundred generations. You'd previously mentioned the (relevant to prosperity gospels) "To be wealthy and demand more is an abomination to a god." Anyway, hi, read, the trans material is (as always) interesting.

    1238:

    My Russian is far from native, but I can and have gotten along on the street in Moscow. While you can certainly get emotional and/or abusive in that language, I'd not have said that it ordinarily sounds particularly emphatic/harsh to an ear used to listening to English.

    1239:

    This has annoyed the Department of Justice, which is not allowed to use phrases like "bat-shit crazy" in legal papers.

    "Your Honour, we ask that you dismiss this lawsuit on the grounds that it is vespertilio obscaenum insanis."

    1240:

    Haven't looked to see what happened with Gohmert and team today though.

    Tossed for lack of standing.

    1241:

    This has annoyed the Department of Justice, which is not allowed to use phrases like "bat-shit crazy" in legal papers.

    "Your Honour, we ask that you dismiss this lawsuit on the grounds that it is vespertilio obscaenum insanis."

    1242:

    Russian and Ukrainian sound rather different. Ukrainian is much harsher.

    1243:

    EVs in general and Tesla in particular have never had an actual fire issue. It’s just the usual ‘new thing does same thing as old thing and we make headline payday from thing’. To the best of my knowledge there haven’t been any model 3 fires at all, even in fairly dramatic crash situations. Whereas every single day there is bunch of ICE vehicle fires. About 500 in fact. When did you last see shrieking headlines about that? BMW caused a rash of terrible fires due to a fault in some gibbons used to maintain something - the cars would catch fire after days simply parked. Also an EV won’t generally explode, nor do floods of electrons spread across the road and then catch fire and ignite other vehicles or peo.

    1244:

    EVs in general and Tesla in particular have never had an actual fire issue.

    Are you really saying that the one in the article was displaying normal and expected behaviour?

    I thought, and could have sworn I said, that EV's burn less often than fossil cars do. But the article appears to say that in the unlikely event one does have a battery pack on fire you just have to sit and wait.

    OTOH, my experience is much more with the definitely-doesn't-catch-fire end of the market (cases of spontaneous human combustion are rare and have never AFAIK involved someone riding a bicycle at the time)

    1245:

    I agree that driving around with 15-odd gallons of molotov cocktail mix is asking for flammability problems. I also tend to think that driving around with a few hundred kilograms of lithium is asking for flammability problems. I also tend to think that fire departments have had more experience dealing with petroleum-based fires than, lithium-based fires, so that may have something to do with how they're dealt with.

    Finally, I can't think of a technology that can be harnessed to do, say, 100 kWh worth of work in a few hours that doesn't have problems if it catches fire, and I think that includes enriched uranium or plutonium.

    Well, I take that back. I suppose we could set up large bucket brigades of people along highways to pass passengers and cargo along at at least 30 mph (hard to get a cargo bike to go that fast, at least for a slug like me). That would be relatively fireproof, although I suspect a lot of people would go to the hospital for other reasons if we handled public transportation this way.

    1246:

    The issue you seem to be having is that it just isn't the same as you're used to and you're finding it disturbing.

    You can put out a Tesla fire. You just pour water on it. But you may need to pour water on it for 24 hours straight to be sure that everything that's shorted out is completely discharged before you can load it on a tow truck and take it away.

    Alternatively you can let it burn if it's somewhere safe. It's a total loss the moment it caught fire (or probably before that, when it crashed). Putting it out won't "save" the car. In an hour it's done, you can clean up and everyone goes home.

    1247:

    You could use twelve hundred grammes of Po 210 as the heat source for a 30% efficient Stirling engine and get 50 kW through an electric drive car.

    Presuming the usual ceramic encapsulation of the radioactive source, it'd get hot enough to light flammable substances, but there wouldn't be anything in the power train that could actually burn.

    1248:

    "also tend to think that driving around with a few hundred kilograms of lithium is asking for flammability problems"

    12 kg

    https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environment-impact

    1249:

    it just isn't the same as you're used to and you're finding it disturbing.

    Well, yeah. I've seen a car with far too many magnesium bits burn and that was kind of like the Tesla... we just stood there and watched, putting out anything nearby that caught fire. It is indeed different from (most) fossil cars, because you just hose those down then pick up the bits and go home.

    I just wonder... will electric cars burning for a day on the side of the road become normal rather than man-bites-dog? With 500 fires/day in fossil cars (I presume in the USA?) having "hardly any" EV fires by comparison could be anything from one a day to one a decade, once there are comparable numbers. Coz right now there's hardly any electric cars, and 10 year old ones are even rarer, so even one fire is remarkable.

    1250:

    It's not so much that lithium batteries will be transitory (though I think they mostly will as sodium beats them on price), it's that several solid electrolyte chemistries are already in the pipeline because they work better. These chemistries coincidentally don't catch fire.

    As soon as there's a non-flammable option a whole lot of twitchy aviation regulators are going to insist on it very hard. Letting people fly with 10 Ah lithium-ion device batteries makes them very unhappy.

    1251:

    "will electric cars burning for a day on the side of the road become normal"

    No. Because that's not what they do.

    If you don't want it to burn, you pour water on it for a day.

    If it's somewhere you don't care, it's all done and dusted in an hour or so. Which is why that's the suggested option.

    1252:

    In Finland, some fire departments have these containers which can be filled with water and a burning electric car, just to extinguish them. They're meant to be used for a couple of days to make sure the fire has died down.

    1254:

    I'm just trying to imagine a passive heatsink that can dissipate 50kW without any external parts getting too hot to touch. Not my area of engineering, but it sounds like its going to be larger than the car. And of course you can't keep it in a garage.

    Any kind of active cooling is going to be failure-prone, and I'm not sanguine about passive cooling in contact with a muddy road.

    1255:

    Electric cars like Teslas have liquid cooling for the motors and control circuitry as do most "performance" EVs that can sustain 100km/h for an hour or two on a motorway. It's all energy and it all ends up as heat-death-of-the-Universe eventually. With cars and most other transport options there's stored energy that gets converted to heat energy while doing useful work and the heat has to go somewhere otherwise things will cook or even melt.

    1256:

    mdive Arrrrggggh! P Corbyn is certifiably utterly bonkers - I had the misfortune to ( V briefly ) meet him in about 1980 - & he was clearly borderline-loopy, even then. - Moz - unfortunately true. Actually, I'm hoping Shaun the Sheep wins, simply for the laughs. We need those laughs.

    Michel2Bec Incompetence at this level is an art form. Ask Grayling? Or Gove?

    SFR the level of fabrication/outright lying is escalating Well, they could always come over here, so that BoZo could give them advanced training, couldn't they?

    1257:

    Flammability problems:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_542CVy9YE

    One car caught fire in a multi-storey car park. The heat was enough to melt the petrol tanks in neighbouring cars, which then spread the fire to their neighbours, and so on.

    On the other hand, with EVs:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug-in_electric_vehicle_fire_incidents

    (Article has multiple issues; take with a big pinch of salt. But I can't find anything more authoritative).

    1258:

    On cooling:

    Yes, but this was in the context of a radioactive heat source, so it generates 50kW continuously; if the cooling on a conventional EV fails you just turn it off. You can't do that with an RTG: its going to put out 50kW whether you use it or not. If you don't have a big heat sink the thing its in will simply melt or catch fire. (I'm assuming the source itself is engineered from materials that won't melt down no matter what, but that's probably unrealistic).

    Not that it was ever a serious suggestion of course.

    1259:

    At present, all electric vehicle batteries are made by companies who are taking great trouble to make them as safe as possible, and almost all electric vehicles are well-maintained. One question is what happens when that is not true; my guess is 'not much different from at present'.

    The second problem, which is fundamental in basic physics but denied by the EV fanatics, is that of energy density. There is 300+ joules/gram in a lithum-ion battery, so there is ample potential for an explosion. Hence, unlike with petrol etc., enclosing the fuel and excluding air will not stop a fire but turn it into a worse explosion.

    That is not insoluble, using good engineering and a sane risk-assessment, but is why I am so opposed to 'simply' replacing modern cars by electric versions - what it will mean is that cars increase by 50% in weight and (say) 25% in volume, with all the problems that introduces.

    1260:

    The serious problems are going to be (a) when cars crash into houses and start to burn and (b) multi-vehicle crashes, with several HGVs involved, and people trapped in cars. No change from at present, but the difficulties are different. The problem with complete fuels (like batteries) is that all you can do is to prevent the fire from spreading - merely excluding air does not extinguish them, and flooding them with water may not do so.

    1261:

    At present, all electric vehicle batteries are made by companies who are taking great trouble to make them as safe as possible, and almost all electric vehicles are well-maintained. One question is what happens when that is not true; my guess is 'not much different from at present'.

    I would go in a different direction, and ask at what happens when we reach a point when there are sufficient electric cars old enough to need new batteries that 3rd party battery suppliers come into existence, providing "cheap" questionable quality replacement from whatever the low cost country at that time is.

    1262:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1260

    Simple, you declare a two alarm fire (or 2 company fire) and let them get their how-to books out and avoid cutting batteries with their big pincers.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG0Vvv16mV4

    Another part of the solution is to plant a lot of trees between your house and the road. Writing this I feel safe, looking out the window at the lovely trees I had planted when I moved in sixteen years ago.

    But I do have to go out to fetch some food some time, so it isn't a perfect solution.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKDbFi1v7ig

    1263:

    Er, I don't think that you understand how most of the world lives. Neither of those solutions will work in most of Europe (definitely including the UK), for example.

    1265:

    Taxing the billionaires just got a little bit easier:

    US passes ‘historic’ anti-corruption law that effectively bans anonymous shell companies

    Still lots of other places for them to hide the loot, but the US had a unique combination of strong laws to protect the money and lax laws to track it.

    Now we just need to see how effective enforcement is.

    1266:

    Energy density isn't how you get explosions; those are dependent on the energy density and the rate of reaction.

    Same way an oak plank just isn't going to explode, though if you ground it to dust and distributed it in air (or some other oxidizer) it could. (Or soaked it in LOX.) Or how powdered aluminium gets added to explosives for brisance but no one worries about an airliner's structure going boom. Or how TNT melts when heated, without going boom. The clever solid state chemists insist that the solid electrolyte batteries are a no-boom situation and I don't see any reason not to believe them.

    So I think we're going to see two things; one is the safer chemistries, and two is such enormous battery production scale that counterfeiting as such won't be practical, because the minimum capital cost of entry to the market to get competitive prices won't be distinguishable from legitimate entry. (Kinda like with CPU chips. The production facility is too expensive for counterfeiting to be practical.)

    Three is what we already see; current-tech batteries, 18650s and the like you can get for flashlights now that they're not current for large battery packs, have internal controllers. The terminals connect to an onboard controller, and you can't change them without an equivalently smart controller able to negotiate. (Or sometimes through use of the built-in USB socket, and just feeding power to the onboard controller.) Flashlights might not care but I'd expect cars are going to be checking every single cell in the battery pack for the correct crypto signature, making third-party battery manufacturing a high-barriers-to-entry endeavour.

    1267:

    I am now afraid that we will be looking back on 2020 as the last good year.

    The Mutated Virus Is a Ticking Time Bomb There is much we don’t know about the new COVID-19 variant—but everything we know so far suggests a huge danger.

    https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/12/virus-mutation-catastrophe/617531/?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits&fbclid=IwAR1ro1T39VYAAkh3KXYypoaopv6QlOiEMukmt9Nq-b-k7Ww15RSsquMmWcc

    "Take a virus reproduction rate of about 1.1 and an infection fatality risk of 0.8 percent and imagine 10,000 active infections—a plausible scenario for many European cities, as Kucharski notes. As things stand, with those numbers, we’d expect 129 deaths in a month. If the fatality rate increased by 50 percent, that would lead to 193 deaths. In contrast, a 50 percent increase in transmissibility would lead to a whopping 978 deaths in just one month—assuming, in both scenarios, a six-day infection-generation time."

    The Americans who have been infected with the new, more infectious strain of COVID-19 have no history of travel. Is it possible for a virus to have identical mutations occur simultaneously on the other side of the globe? And how many COVID-19 mutations are there now awaiting discovery?

    1268:

    Is it possible for a virus to have identical mutations occur simultaneously on the other side of the globe?

    Sure.

    People tend to think of mutations as due to some strange outside cause; almost all mutations are errors in the copying process, and the main functional difference between DNA and RNA is that DNA has better error checking. SARS-CoV-2 is an RNA virus; it has lots of copying errors. It's also (as these things go) a small virus; the ratio of codes-for-something-functional to noise is high. So mutations has a fairly high chance (which is still not large in absolute terms!) of being functional.

    We're looking at a very young disease that's getting greenfield expansion; that means many instances of the virus, and many copying events. (This is why it is so important to prevent spread in the first place.) We can reasonably expect that copying errors and selection will produce similar functional mutations as SARS-CoV-2 expands in different human populations. These won't be identical, the folks sequencing the virus can tell them apart, but they're quite plausibly functional equivalent.

    (It looks like SoCal has a really fast spreading variant, and isn't doing the sequencing to detect it. It could just be a couple doublings didn't get caught before the surge became obvious, though.)

    1269:

    " Ask Grayling? Or Gove?"

    All great artists, we are just unappreciative peons.

    1270:

    And another music recommendation for the new year:

    https://cmccanada.org/shop/cmccd-28320/

    Orchestral music with Inuit throat singing. Reminds me a bit of Stravinsky's Rites of Spring.

    1271:

    Eastern Airlines... Lorenzo

    Eastern Airlines (and Pan Am) were designed to operate with no real competition. And as the universe changed they (management, unions, politicians) all refused to believe they needed to change.

    Lorenzo showed up when the corpse was brain dead. He was just the one who pulled the plug before all the assets vanished into the life support systems. But like it or not, the body was brain dead and never going to survive intact.

    Oh, yeah, toss in TWA.

    My wife worked for a major airline for 30 years. Yes management and unions at her employer and other airlines have both done stupid / crass / selfish / evil things over the years. But those 3 airlines were trying to pretend it was 1965 forever and guess what. It didn't work.

    1272:

    Graydon: It is clearly possible to do the thing organisationally if you can defend it against the imposition of a fixed hierarchy.

    There are other examples: in the UK, the John Lewis Partnership is one of the biggest department store chains (with a medium-sized supermarket/grocery subsidiary, Waitrose): structured as an employee-owned trust (full-time employees are shareholders, receive a profit-related annual bonus pay-out) it had revenue in 2020 -- a horrible time to be in retail -- over £10Bn; it's neck and neck with Marks and Spencer, formerly the largest department store chain in the UK, and the only larger retailers are the big supermarket chains (e.g. Tesco/Asda/Morrisons).

    Oh yes: John Lewis had a pay cap on management -- the highest pay permissible is capped at 75 times the lowest employee wage. (Not as low as Graydon has proposed, but it has kept JLP from being overrun by sociopathic MBAs; most of their management is promoted from within the workforce.)

    The most interesting aspect is that JLP is an old firm (not far off 200 years at this point) and they've grown massively in the past 3 decades. Their model appears to be thriving, and other companies have chosen to copy it (e.g. the hifi chain Richer Sounds went to that model in 2019 when Julian Richer retired and handed his shares over to an employee trust).

    1273:

    Re: 'We can reasonably expect that copying errors and selection will produce similar functional mutations as SARS-CoV-2 expands in different human populations.'

    There's also: length of time a virus is able to live (reproduction cycles) in a host.

    'But the new variant, along with research by Gupta and others, has also drawn attention to the potential role in COVID-19 of people with weakened immune systems. If they provide the virus with an opportunity to evolve lineages that spread faster, are more pathogenic, or elude vaccines, these chronic infections are not just dangerous for the patients, but might have the potential to alter the course of the pandemic.'

    https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/uk-variant-puts-spotlight-immunocompromised-patients-role-covid-19-pandemic

    There are a lot of 'immune compromised' people out there and not all are seniors: cancer therapy and transplants include extended courses of immune suppressants, pregnancy (self-limiting but prolonged), asthma therapy (intermittent), and probably others.

    1274:

    THANK YOU for that.

    Jeez, the US right behind the Caymans....

    1275:

    Bullshit.

    Eastern could have made it... but for fucking Lorenzo.

    And TWA? You mean the airline started by the Pennsylvania RR?

    1276:

    Doesn't take immune compromised.

    It's a (clade of) new disease(s); immune effectiveness varies from "corpse" through "lasting damage" to "shrug". Somewhere in the range from "lasting damage" to "shrug" there's "nearly a draw"; it can't kill you, it can't reproduce unconstrained, but your immune system can't quite kill all of it, either. We don't know what proportion of cases that is; we can be reasonably confident from detected "still has it after sixty days" cases that it's not zero, but that's about the present state of knowledge.

    This is why preventing any spread is so very, very important, because a greenfield disease will do this, absent really reliable prompt lethality. (E.g., greenfield measles in the Americas.)

    1277:

    Oh, for chrissake! Please act your intelligence. The reason that it is not just relevant but critical is that a substance can explode only if it can release enough energy to cause an expansion on a change of state INTERNALLY, and EITHER is enclosed in some impervious surround OR is large enough for the rate of expansion to exceed the rate of escape. Yes, I am ignoring oddities like water freezing.

    Furthermore, I said the POTENTIAL for explosion.

    The rate of reaction affects the type of explosion considerably, as well as whether an UNENCLOSED substance will explode (which will also depend on the amount). But it makes damn-all difference as to whether one will occur at all in an ENCLOSED substance.

    The point of what I said, and I said it explicitly, is that enclosing a lithium-ion battery in (for example) a steel shell is NOT a good idea. It works excellently for incomplete fuels like petrol, methane etc., but it is NOT a solution for a lithium-ion battery that is in breakdown.

    Therefore some other solution has to be found, and just letting it burn out is NOT a good one for large power sources in road vehicles in densely populated areas.

    1278:

    Robert Prior @ 1270

    I'm not sure. I think I prefer it when it's a competition:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krg7ySLipAA

    1279:

    No idea what happened, I changed cities and there was no-one left in that company I cared to stay in touch with.

    That was a totally normal outcome of downsizing in the 90s.

    Turns out if the MBAs in the boardroom swing the axe and fire 10% of workers, firstly, employee morale tanks -- "survivor guilt" is a thing and nobody gets much done for the next month or two (for one thing, they're reassigning the workload that the laid-off used to do and learning how to do it, and for another, they're depressed), and secondly, a bunch of good employees will take the opportunity to leave and get jobs somewhere more quality- rather than quantity- oriented.

    It's even worse with voluntary redundancy, which is a "humane" alternative: the seat-warmers won't leave a cushy job unless they're able to claim a pension, but the effective/valuable employees will take their pay-out and walk into a new job elsewhere.

    About the only way I've seen to make downsizing work even remotely effectively is by way of a hiring freeze. With average employee tenure of 3-5 years it doesn't take long -- even with a recession on -- to reduce numbers, and the hiring freeze is a stochastic process: there's no bias towards retaining/losing good/bad employees. Trouble is, sometimes you lose that one individual who it turns out has been quietly supporting a dozen drones ...

    1280:

    For the sci/eng posters here: Did you ever take an ethics course? If not, why not?

    UK Pharmacy degree (1983-86): compulsory Law and Ethics component. Second year exam. If you didn't pass, you didn't graduate -- period. (You could re-take the entire year, once.)

    Note that while compliance with the letter of the law was mandatory, you could also be sanctioned by the pharmaceutical society inspectors for skirting the ethical limits: most severe penalty would mean being struck off the register, i.e. professional qualification cancelled (meaning, you don't get to work in that job any more). Very much a Caesar's Wife approach in those days: you had to not only be pure, but seen to be pure.

    1281:

    The point of what I said, and I said it explicitly, is that enclosing a lithium-ion battery in (for example) a steel shell is NOT a good idea.

    Depends on the engineering tradeoff, doesn't it? Does the enclosure reduce punctures (and those consequences) more than it makes internal battery failures worse?

    These guys certainly think a steel enclosure can be preferable to aluminium, for example. And their description emphasises that EV design uses the whole car as armour for the battery pack.

    All the manufacturers consider pack protection proprietary; it looks like they all currently use relatively thin (< 10mm) aluminium for obvious weight reasons, but public details are scant.

    There's general advice not to spray water on lithium battery fires because of hydrogen production from the water. (Same basic reason you can't carry water bottles into an aluminium smelter.)

    I don't see any reason you couldn't spray a lithium fire down with CO2, and CO2 extinguishers are an established technology. Getting enough CO2 to the accident site immediately is going to be the same challenge it would be for a petrol fire; it's not like ICE car fires never burn out at the side of the road today.

    Because all the EV battery packs have active thermal management and have to move some working fluid around, none of them are sealed in a "this is a high pressure pressure vessel" sense; even if the enclosure is pressure-tight and has no burst discs, the radiator is going to fail before the enclosure, and the radiator has to be outside the enclosure in at least airflow terms.

    So I am not seeing much fire risk, relative to petrol, and pretty much zero explosion risk; it's going to vent long before it can go boom. Which is the kind of thing we've seen; you get fires, but no boom.

    1282:

    “ Larger companies that employ more than 20 people, have revenues above $5 million and a physical presence in the US, are exempt from the act. Churches, charities and other non-profits are also exempt.

    That last loophole should inspire some interesting workarounds.

    1283:

    Re:'... but your immune system can't quite kill all of it, either.'

    And so you continue to infect others.

    1284:

    Nope. The idea of a car burning by the side of the road for hours just is NOT going to happen. The fire truck that shows up will have extinguishers for electrical fires, and I say that with 100% confidence.

    If nothing else, a car burning by the roadside will create a traffic jam on both sides of the road (fucking "gaper delay", as they say in Chicago).

    1285:

    Eastern Airlines (and Pan Am) were designed to operate with no real competition. And as the universe changed they (management, unions, politicians) all refused to believe they needed to change.

    A quick round of research on the web doesn't agree with this - the unions at Eastern had agreed to pay cuts prior to Lorenzo arriving to help the airline deal with deregulation - and Eastern was apparently making a small profit prior to Lorenzo starting his war with the unions.

    Lorenzo showed up when the corpse was brain dead. He was just the one who pulled the plug before all the assets vanished into the life support systems. But like it or not, the body was brain dead and never going to survive intact.

    Again, doesn't appear the case.

    Rather, he showed up with the intent to break the unions and damn the consequences, while selling off Eastern assets at below market prices to his existing airlines - he was so bad that when Eastern eventually went into bankruptcy the judge removed Lorenzo from Eastern and appointed a new CEO.

    But despite his attempts at breaking the unions he did nothing about solving the real problems - poor routes and high aircraft lease costs (previous management made a bad bet/decision to buy a lot of new planes just before deregulation happened, crippling the company financially compared to competitors).

    https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1291&dat=19900420&id=eRdUAAAAIBAJ&pg=5814,1592666

    https://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1255&context=jaaer

    1286:

    Part of the procedure for putting out an electrical fire is turning off the electricity. That’s hard to do when the source of the electricity is in the middle of the fire.

    1287:

    Paul @ 1257: Flammability problems:

    [...]

    Couple of thoughts here:
    1. Somebody's liability insurance premiums are definitely going up - if he doesn't get canceled completely.
    2. If you drive an electric vehicle, don't leave it parked where a hurricane is going to submerge it in seawater.

    1288:

    There is a good explanation of the SARS-CoV-2 mutation rate in "SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) by the numbers."

    SARS-CoV-2 is actually unusually stable for an RNA virus, because it generates a proofreading enzyme. Also, because the spike protein is essential to the virus getting into cells where it can reproduce, it tends to be highly conserved. This is why it was possible to create effective vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 almost immediately, while there still isn't an effective vaccine against HIV.

    There have been multiple mutations of SARS-CoV-2 that increased the transmission rate. But the biggest problem has been the lack of effective leadership in some countries such as the US and the UK. I suspect the latest mutation scare is actually the UK government evolving into a form that will hopefully be better able to resist the virus.

    1289:

    Re: 'UK Pharmacy degree (1983-86): compulsory Law and Ethics component. Second year exam. If you didn't pass, you didn't graduate -- period.'

    So ---'professions' which happen to usually enjoy higher social status than plain careers/jobs also happen to have compulsory ethics components/courses.

    Seems this connection could be leveraged to make ethics courses more attractive to undergrads in other fields. At the very least a workplace ethics course would introduce students to issues they might face in the workplace as well as some knowledge of what they would be able to do about it.

    1290:

    Weta are mostly a digital vFX company. The company I worked for at the time, BlueArc, supplied most/much/all of their NAS storage. (And indeed many of the rest of the digital vFX companies at that time.)

    1291:

    "There's general advice not to spray water on lithium battery fires because of hydrogen production from the water. (Same basic reason you can't carry water bottles into an aluminium smelter.)"

    They're may be such general advice, that I've never seen, but the specific advice for dealing with battery fires in cars is to either let it burn if it's safe (EC, please stop providing examples of when it's not safe, the instructions cater for that) and dousing with copious water for hours of its not. (the idea of just dropping it in a tank is brilliant.

    From the Tesla first responders guide [their emohasis] "USE WATER TO FIGHT A HIGH VOLTAGE BATTERY FIRE."

    https://www.tesla.com/en_AU/firstresponders

    1292:

    You hayseeds from the backwoods just don't have a clue about what it is like in the urban rabbit-warrens of much of the world. Yes, the burning car often causes a traffic jam - which then means the damn fire engines can't reach it!

    Note that there is no difference in that respect between petrol and lithium-ion - the main distinction is that, as Robert van der Heide says, the latter needs to be flooded with water until it has 'burnt out' and the usual compact suppressant (foam) doesn't do anything useful.

    1293:

    Wētā Digital is mosley digital.

    Wētā Workshop is mostly physical props.

    Wētā Workshop came first.

    1294:

    As a weekly or more flyer of Eastern, TWA, and USAir from 80 to 87, Eastern and TWA had problems. They were just not operating in the modern world. It was obvious to those of us who flew on them on a regular basis. Then my wife joined a different major airline in 89 for 31 years. And we got to interact with former employees from Eastern, TWA, and PanAm as they fell apart. They were just not going to make it. And many of the better employees figured it out and jumped before they collapsed and they had to fight for a job in a flooded market.

    You comments about poor routes and bad airplane buying decisions was a part of it. Operating as if it was a cost plus market was another. And many employees just felt entitled.

    There was no single thing. It was everything. They world changed and they got caught. American, Delta, etc... figured out how to get through the change. Painfully but they did it.

    I remember flying on 707s on TWA in the early 80s on flights where we were in the air less than an hour. It seemed inefficient at the time. Now it seems insane. Especially with those NOT high bypass engines. To your point TWA didn't buy new planes, Eastern did. Neither made it.

    PanAm had it's own share of issues. The common one being the airline industry changed and they didn't.

    1295:

    I suspect the latest mutation scare is actually the UK government evolving into a form that will hopefully be better able to resist the virus.

    While this is an outcome devoutly to be wished, I very much doubt it shall prove so.

    It seems inescapable that there's a sharp split -- many orders of magnitude in per-capita deaths -- between effective and ineffective responses to COVID-19; it seems equally inescapable that the split rests on whether or not an effective mandatory quarantine got implemented. (And has stayed implemented for travellers.)

    To implement an effective mandatory quarantine, you must feed and house people with public funds. It's inescapable.

    I am stricken with a conviction that this is why most of the Anglosphere has had an abject failure of a COVID-19 response; given a choice between feeding and housing people or letting the plague rage, complete with major recession and vastening heap of corpses, the mammonites in control of the Anglosphere did not perceive a question. Under no circumstances shall public funds ever be used to feed or house people; that is a sin.

    Cannot convince myself it's any more complicated than that; the well-understood simple thing to do is impossible for religious reasons, and it happens to be the only effective thing to do under the circumstances.

    1296:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1292

    I can understand that a burning car would cause a jam that would stop first responders from getting through in England. There are no shoulders for emergency vehicles to roll on, on those precious, tiny, narrow roads!

    At least there were none on the roads, and even on the highways I used, between London, Cambridge, Oxford, Milton Keynes and Sandringham.

    By searching the Web I've just discovered that there are now some shoulders, on some roads in England, and broad ones at that. First responders would have no trouble in getting to a burning car on those.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M42_motorway

    1297:

    I don't see any reason you couldn't spray a lithium fire down with CO2, and CO2 extinguishers are an established technology.

    That generates an unknown volume which cannot sustain life. And constantly changes. And is invisible.

    This isn't BOFH flooding the server room, but in some ways it's worse. Some area around the fire can only safely be visited wearing breathing gear... but you don't know what that area is. What you hope, and try to acheive, is that no-one in the car is alive. People downwind can take their chances...

    Unlike water a litre of liquid CO2 turns into 500-ish litres of gas Whioch is great for "lump a couple of litres from a cylinder into a car" but not really good for "pour a stream into the area"

    1298:

    British drivers are very disciplined where emergency vehicles are concerned. When they see the flashing blue lights and hear the two tone signal they pull to the side of the road the let the emergency vehicle pass.

    1299:

    whitroth @ 1275: Bullshit.

    Eastern could have made it... but for fucking Lorenzo.

    And TWA? You mean the airline started by the Pennsylvania RR?

    Lorenzo wasn't the white knight Eastern hoped he would be, but the airline was already in deep financial trouble before he came along. If they hadn't been, he'd have never got a foot in the door.

    Pennsylvania RR didn't start TWA or even it's predecessor Transcontinental Air Transport.

    The Pennsylvania RR, along with the Santa Fe RR, did have what would today be called a codeshare with TAT that allowed passengers to take the overnight train from New York City to Columbus, Ohio where they boarded a flight to Waynoka, Oklahoma where they again boarded an overnight train (Santa Fe RR) to Clovis, New Mexico and once again enplaned for the final leg to Los Angeles, California.

    More accurately, TAT had a codeshare with Pennsylvania RR & Santa Fe RR.

    In July 1930 TAT merged with Western Air Express and several other small carriers becoming Transcontinental & Western Air (T&WA) on October 1st. That same month T&WA offered their first all-plane coast to coast service.

    T&WA is partially responsible for the development of one of America's iconic aircraft designs; the Douglas DC-1, DC-2 and DC-3 (aka Dakota, aka C-47).

    A 1931 crash of a Fokker F-10 tri-motor due to the failure of its wooden wing forced T&WA to replace its entire fleet. The only suitable all metal design available at the time was the Boeing 247, but Boeing was owned by the same parent company as United Airlines and all of their production (the first 60 to be built) was guaranteed to United.

    T&WA signed a development contract with Douglas for an all metal, twin engine airliner that could carry 12 passengers a thousand miles (1080) and take off on one engine from Albuquerque, NM (and operate on one engine at altitude between Albuquerque, NM and Winslow, AZ).

    The one (and only) DC-1 was delivered to TWA in December 1933, followed by 32 DC-2 aircraft in May 1934. By 1937 most of the DC-2 aircraft were phased out in favor of DC-3s ... and the rest is an effin legend!

    1300:

    the mammonites in control of the Anglosphere did not perceive a question. Under no circumstances shall public funds ever be used to feed or house people; that is a sin.

    Anglonesia waves byebye as it exits the anglosphere. Straya and kiwiland both increased benefits and (to a larger extent for the kiwis) swept the homeless off the streets and couches and into motels. Tellingly, when a homeless person was claimed to have sneaked into quarantine the kiwi government looked for them, couldn't find them, and treated it as games in the political class rather than an excuse to purge the quarantine system.

    Sadly once the worst subsided they've been kicking the homeless back onto the streets and slashing benefits, while appearing in public to wring their hands and wish there was something, anything they could do about this crisis. So they still adhere to the correct religion, just not to the point of immediate suicide. "if everyone else jumped off a cliff".... Boris would set his clown car on fire before driving it off the cliff so as to create a greater spectacle. See, he really is better!

    https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/covid-19-coronavirus-bloomfield-dismisses-claim-homeless-man-sneaked-into-5-star-quarantine-hotel/XU34M5U376E7I46W5AUA2NMFC4/

    1301:

    They'll use whatever the second generation replacements for halon are for suppressing electrical fires.

    This is an existing technology....

    1302:

    mdlve @ 1285:

    Eastern Airlines (and Pan Am) were designed to operate with no real competition. And as the universe changed they (management, unions, politicians) all refused to believe they needed to change.

    A quick round of research on the web doesn't agree with this - the unions at Eastern had agreed to pay cuts prior to Lorenzo arriving to help the airline deal with deregulation - and Eastern was apparently making a small profit prior to Lorenzo starting his war with the unions.

    Eastern was already in deep, deep trouble before Lorenzo came along. Things Eastern management did to alleviate those troubles bore some fruit after Lorenzo took over, but they weren't enough to save the airline. Maybe if some of them had helped Eastern turn a corner before Lorenzo came along, the company might have recovered enough they wouldn't have had to go looking for a white knight (which Lorenzo for damn sure was NOT).

    Lorenzo didn't have any interest in saving Eastern, which is what Eastern management was hoping for when they sold the company to him. But I don't think Eastern's prior management knew he was no more than an asset stripper.

    1303:

    Idiots in the US will sometimes block the emergency lanes. And then there are places like bridges, etc, where there's no emergency lane for a quarter or half a klick, and too many Amurkans are too dimwitted to move. It often takes a while.

    1304:

    Why would anyone in their right mind use halonesque gas which doesn't work when their entire firefighting infrastructure is already in place, uses water which is cheap and actually works?

    That's insane.

    1305:

    gasdive @ 1304

    Why do you say Halo dosn't work?

    Halon based systems have been installed in museum vaults, archives vaults and the vaults of rare book departments of big library systems.

    Halon leaves no residues.

    Water destroys museum collections, rare manuscripts and rare books. To be precise, water causes damages that are too costly to repair or in some cases beyond any form of repair.

    1306:

    "I don't see any reason you couldn't spray a lithium fire down with CO2"

    It reacts.

    1307:

    "Why do you say Halo dosn't work?"

    That reacts, too.

    Nothing actually puts it out because it burns without external inputs; most things react with it. So it's a problem.

    Water reacts to produce hydrogen fluoride, both as gas and in solution, which is horribly dangerous stuff, except this is special magic hydrogen fluoride which is perfectly safe and you can breathe it in and dance around in showers of it or even go for a swim in it and it doesn't eat your lungs at all nor dissolve your bones even a little bit; the proof is that Tesla issue instructions that say "pour water on it", so it must be all right. In fact it isn't really a problem at all and it isn't the least bit difficult to deal with any of the aspects or consequences, because Tesla issue instructions that say "pour water on it", the existence of which solves everything.

    "M42 motorway"

    That is one of the places where it can be the most difficult for an emergency vehicle to get to the scene.

    It has a vicious variable speed limit system with frequent gantries carrying variable signs and number-plate-reading average speed cameras. The limits can change over very short distances and can be different in each lane. This system can result in all lanes of the motorway packed nose to tail at the kind of spacing you expect when creeping up to roadworks, but still moving at 50mph. And when the traffic gets heavy enough it says "sod allowing for emergencies, we'll use the hard shoulder for traffic as well", so "all lanes" means "all possible lanes". There is no spare lane where an emergency vehicle can drive up the side of everyone else. There is no space for anyone to pull over and let one past because all lanes are so densely packed that it's nearly impossible for one car to change lane, let alone a whole string of them. There isn't even anywhere for the poor sod whose car is catching fire to get it off the road. It's a horrible bodge and extremely unpleasant to drive on when it gets crowded.

    1308:

    And some Brits are so dimwitted that when everyone else starts pulling over they go "hey wow, look at all this space" and drive down it themselves. Until they get to the point where people don't have so much room to pull over so the clear space is a bit narrower, and sit there like lemons making the ambulance get stuck behind them until it gets the bazooka out.

    1309:

    It's on several lists of what to use, along with ABC or BC dry chemical.

    (E.g. https://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/safety_concerns_with_li_ion or the rather alarming https://thehazmatguys.com/thmg095-extinguishing-agents-3/ )

    My understanding is that water carries off heat to prevent further thermal decay of not-currently-ignited cells, rather than putting out the existing fire as such. And it's surely more environmentally friendly than almost any other choice except possibly liquid nitrogen.

    1310:

    Firstly, museums full of rare books are indoors where the halons don't just blow away in the gentlest of breezes.

    Secondly, burning cars have no value. Spraying water on them doesn't devalue them. No one repairs a burnt out car.

    Thirdly, halons work by reducing the percentage of oxygen, which makes the fire go out. For a battery fire the actual fire is immaterial. The heat is coming from the reaction inside the cells. The fire is a symptom, not a cause. If you put it out with halons the first puff of breeze will bring the oxygen back and the flames will restart.

    Fourthly, when you smother the fire, the cells still spit out electrolyte, which will contaminate everything anyway and need to be washed away with water. So you're going to put water on everything anyway.

    Fifthly, halons are good insulators, so the cells will have a harder time losing heat, so they'll be more likely to thermal runaway. Halon makes the situation worse.

    Sixthly, no fire truck carries anything like the quantity of halons required. You'd need multiple semi trailers full of it. It would cost millions of dollars for each fire.

    Seventhly, you put a battery fire out by cooling the batteries. Once a battery gets hot the normal internal reactions speed up and produce heat. If that heat can't be dissipated faster than its produced, the battery heats up more, the reactions go faster, more heat is produced and you get thermal runaway that makes the cell vent. Water cools the cells enough that the reaction slows down, the heat production slows down, that cools the cell more, that causes the reactions to slow down and the cell returns to normal. Halons do the exact opposite.

    But apart from not being available in the required quantities, not working and making the situation worse, halons are a great solution.

    1311:

    Gasdive @ 1310

    Sorry, I misunderstood you. I thought you were speaking of Halon and water generally, in all possible fire-extinguishing circumstances, instead of strictly for putting out fires in electric vehicles.

    1312:

    Halons work well in confined spaces, is my understanding: they decrease the oxygen concentration. Not so good on a freeway where passing traffic is causing turbulence.

    I had fun reading up about fighting lithium fires. If it's a large amount of lithium metal burning, then it's class D. But cars (as noted above, thanks) are rather smaller amounts of lithium compounds, so the batteries themselves, if they're burning, are Class B, like gasoline. Except that electronics are Class C, and act like a Class B when you remove the source of electricity. Except that they are the source of electricity, so...massive amounts of sodium bicarbonate?

    1313:

    Is it too much to just RTFM that I've linked to half a dozen times on this blog?

    Tesla do not say "this is special magic hydrogen fluoride which is perfectly safe and you can breathe it in and dance around in showers of it or even go for a swim in it and it doesn't eat your lungs at all nor dissolve your bones even a little bit"

    They actually say:

    "HIGH VOLTAGE BATTERY - FIRE DAMAGE A burning or heated battery releases toxic vapors. These vapors may include volatile organic compounds, hydrogen gas, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, soot, particulates containing oxides of nickel, aluminum, lithium, copper, cobalt, and hydrogen fluoride. Responders should always protect themselves with full PPE, including a SCBA, and take appropriate measures to protect civilians downwind from the incident. Use fog streams or positive-pressure ventilation fans (PPV) to direct smoke and vapors."

    Which amazingly, is exactly what the MSDS says to do in the case of an accidental release of HF.

    " SECTION 6: Accidental release measures 6.1. Personal precautions, protective equipment and emergency procedures General measures : DANGER: Toxic. Corrosive. Wear a self-contained breathing apparatus and appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE). (gas tight, chemical-protective) Evacuate personnel to a safe area. Approach suspected leak area with caution. Remove all sources of ignition. Toxic, corrosive vapor can spread from spill. Ventilate area or move container to a well-ventilated area. Before entering the area, especially a confined area, check the atmosphere with an appropriate device. 6.2. Methods and materials for containment and cleaning up Methods for cleaning up : Try to stop release. Reduce vapour with fog or fine water spray. Prevent waste from contaminating the surrounding environment. Prevent soil and water pollution. Dispose of contents/container in accordance with local/regional/national/international regulations. Contact supplier for any special requirements."

    1314:

    You can grep this, but here it is repeated:

    "Hi"

    "KILL ZEERRR"

    "The Mind is a Garden, never do that"

    "Your world is a shit - storm, how bad would it bee..."

    The added bonus round of Six Years of this crap fore-running the plays of some evil nasties... is.

    A) A lot of them hate us

    B) We can fore-run your basic bitch level crud before they even go live with it

    C) There's a reason we're doing it

    Now; if you're too dumb to note "Nintendo" then just slot that right into them using (IL / UK) heavy messing COINTPRO level users (now in the free market[tm]) then, whatever.

    ~

    But the bottom line is:

    "Hi"

    "KILL ZER"

    ~~~

    Seven Years Later

    You know, you've all been utter Cunts. So, have you seen this scene from a film called "Scanners"?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI3NoBeNwfk

    Because, well. After Eight Years of this.

    Why the fuck do you not deserve this?

    1315:

    Heteromeles @ 1312 : "so...massive amounts of sodium bicarbonate?"

    I think I would try to starve off the oxgen with a giant blanket instead:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7YhsxbR7Ys

    1316:

    And, to be honest.

    We're rather insulted by how easily we're shitting down $660 million and so on, and getting "dunked on" by failures of your systems.

    Abrahamic Religions - go look up the Vista.

    Dead.

    For Real.

    "Ze's the Anti-Christ"... Well then. Do not expect us to not kill your shitty Gods, then. Sorry (((JEWS))) -- same fucking model.

    You're worshipping ASH and DEAD SPACE now. ~

    For real. No, really. All Abrahamic Religions are now ... dust and trash and nonsense. The Divine Spark there... no longer exists.

    Why?

    Because you were uppity narcissistic evil cunts.

    Took us 20 mins.

    For real.

    "Zeds Dead, Baby, Zeds Dead"

    ~

    And yeah.

    We know it's true: "KILL ZER"

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ukmjBSQY-c

    Killed your fucking God. Why? Look at his followers..

    1317:

    I suspect the latest mutation scare is actually the UK government evolving into a form that will hopefully be better able to resist the virus.

    So a UK government, that has demonstrated spectacular world leading incompetence for the last 4 years in trying to negotiate the easiest trade deal ever - otherwise known as Brexit - as has so far demonstrated little in the way of competence in dealing with Covid - is suddenly found a way to evolve to deal with Covid.

    Unlikely I would think.

    1318:

    So, new year, new turmoil likely in the Conservative Party in the UK.

    Obviously opinion polls can have issues, but new poll reported in Guardian/Observer indicates election held (based on polling up to just before the Brexit deal announcement) indicates a minority government with Labour and the Conservatives essentially tied in seats.

    To no suprise the SNP is forecast to take all but 2 Scottish seats, but the Liberal Democrats would be effectively wiped out dropping down to 2 seats.

    Oh, and Boris would lose his seat.

    https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jan/02/poll-predicts-a-uk-general-election-now-would-wipe-out-tory-majority

    1319:

    I wouldn't put a lot of weight on polls just now; there is time for the vaccine rollout to be a startling success or for the NHS to fail and the ~10% mortality rate to chew on the Isle of the Mighty until those who will die are dead. (Or for there to be continued ghastly muddle, though I don't have the impression that the systemic resiliency holding up the muddle has much functionality left to it.)

    COVID is oddly different from historical plagues; those tended to be seen as divine judgement of one sort or another. This one, we know with considerable confidence how it came to be and what you should do about it; there are examples of places that are now free of the plague, having done those things as they ought to have done. Presumptively there's a point at which the blame attaches for not doing the thing.

    That's likely to affect the UK political landscape.

    1320:

    am stricken with a conviction that this is why most of the Anglosphere has had an abject failure of a COVID-19 response; given a choice between feeding and housing people or letting the plague rage, complete with major recession and vastening heap of corpses, the mammonites in control of the Anglosphere did not perceive a question. Under no circumstances shall public funds ever be used to feed or house people; that is a sin.

    Except it is not confined to the Anglosphere - Germany (where half their total Covid deaths apparently happened last month), France, Japan, etc, etc, are all struggling with Covid as they face many of the same issues - trying to protect the economy, mixed messaging from governments, governments saying one thing and then members of the government being documented ignoring the rules, etc.

    France and Spain both had multi-day new year raves that had to be broken up by police despite Covid restrictions.

    And Japan, despite (possibly) having the Olympics in 6 months or so has no plan to start vaccinating for months yet apparently with Covid increasing in Tokyo.

    Really, it is easier to talk about/list the countries that have handled Covid well than to list those struggling with Covid.

    1321:

    Any place where mammonites have a voice in government is doing badly. The English-language reports are the ones I can read, and the ones I'm more interested in.

    Any place where they don't did fine. (Which includes the arch-capitalists in Singapore, which anyone with a fondness for market systems might find heartening.)

    It's like a leaky roof or a broken well pump when you have livestock; you spend what it takes to fix the problem right now. This is the least-expensive possible response. Only you get this refusal to spend because mammonism; money isn't allowed to move in that direction. It's not a cost-benefit analysis, it's an axiom in a moral system. It makes an effective political or public response impossible.

    So, lessee...

    From the nice folks at Our World In Data, here's a selection of countries with cumulative confirmed deaths per million people.

    We can be pretty sure the US, UK, and Canadian confirmed deaths are undercounts, and at least in the Canadian case the excess death stats aren't publicly available. But I think the shape of the graph makes it really clear that there's effective public health response and ineffective public health responses.

    This scatter-plot makes it painfully clear that, if anything, effectiveness of response is negatively correlated with affluence.

    1322:

    UK government evolving

    You mean the least fit parts dying off before reproducing? I'm not even sure I could identify all the parts, let alone the mechanism of reproduction (elections, perhaps?)

    1323:

    Any place where mammonites have a voice in government is doing badly.

    You keep saying that, but you keep posting proof that it's not true. I'm kind of confused by that. Your "doing badly" metric might be calibrated to China? Which leaves about 8 countries doing ok... meaning that your mammonites include countries like Nepal, Cuba and Norway.

    The evidence might suggest that island nations do better, but then Fiji is an outlier even in the Pacific (it's a mercenary state ruled by a military dictator... sorry, elected former dictator). PNG seems to have more or less got lucky - as have the remote northern parts of Australia, the Torres Strait in particular. "lucky" but locking the fuck down, in Australia, and I fear by not tracking or reporting it in PNG.

    https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-28/torres-strait-mayor-fears-coronavirus-transmission-from-png/12498124

    1324:

    Let's say 10 per million is about the upper limit of an effective COVID-19 response; the line Malawi and Sri Lanka are right on.

    (Mercenary states ruled by dictators are practically DEFINED by not being mammonites, because a religion of greed is not compatible with the dictator's authority being absolute. Same with the PRC; if they think you're trying to use money as an alternate power structure, they kill you. About half their billionaires so far.)

    Look at Africa vs Europe; look at which nations in Africa are doing relatively badly, and which nations in Europe are doing relatively well. Europe's best responses are small Scandinavian countries with relatively flat economies (Gini coefficient under 30) but they still haven't done well.

    Norway is a really polite petro state with profit sharing, but it's still a petro state; of course it's got mammonistic influences. (Oil industry is about trading planetary habitability for immediate profit; nearly perfect "money is the most important thing".)

    Cuba's listed at 12.89 per million; not good, but a close miss.

    Nepal, dunno, but they're not especially egalitarian and they're not any kind of despotism, so hard to see how not.

    1325:

    Let's say 10 per million is about the upper limit of an effective COVID-19

    I assume you're willing to allow that the good folk of Aotearoa are part of the anglosphere, by virtue of having the English Queen and being part of Five Eyes and all that?

    So... they're not mammonites, by your measure? I'm sure Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson would just fucking love to hear how they were insufficiently worshipful at the house of mammon, or maybe their followers in the current parliament have lost the faith? FFS, we only just got rid of a merchant banker as PM. Even Boris Johnson never stooped to merchant banking. And Jacinda Ardern is doing as little as possible to move the country in a progressive direction for fear of losing votes back to the hard monetarist parties, to the point where she risks losing the left of her own party out of disgust... the last election saw a lot of soft right voters support Labour out of fear that the soft left voters were going to The Greens. So poverty and climate catastrophe are off the agenda, the housing crisis has vanished in a puff of rising prices and she can't tax wealth because mumble mumble something about house prices.

    1326:

    mdive Curiously, the UK misguvmint's previous incomptence seems to have stopped - where it comes to vaccine acquisition & hopefully, distribution. Probably because they have actually left it to the professional experts for a change! We will see, soon, won't we? Like, if I have not been vaccinated by 01/02/2021, someone has screwed up ..... badly.

    I note your comment on how Germany got it right, first time, but are now equally in the shit with everyone else

    Meanwhile Veepence has apparently joined the nutters for the 6th Jan shitshow in the US Congress?

    Graydon TWO percent mortality rate, actually, now.

    But here, the mammonites have suffered a (temporary?) loss, with handouts/furlough/emergency payments all over the place - we will see how that plays out, between now & (approx) May or June, by which time a large proportion of the population will have been given a jab.

    Moz HOW are you going to make a wealth tax actually work? It's been tried, multiple times & always seems to catch the wrong people, whilst the "obscenely rich" get away, every time. Do tell.

    1327:

    Oops, looks like I spoke too soon. Guvmint bureaucracy fucks over qualified people trying to help with the mass vaccination programme.

    Graydon I will be interested to see what that "Our World in Data" plot looks like in 6 or 12 months, once the vaccines have been rolled out, but not in the USA .... ( Unless the new Biden administration really gets a grip, of course )

    1328:

    Sounds like a prime example of too much efficiency leading to a loss of flexibility.

    1329:

    Meanwhile Veepence has apparently joined the nutters for the 6th Jan shitshow in the US Congress?

    While Pence seems to have given verbal support he has no authority to actually do anything except read the results. And while he can slow down things a bit I suspect he will let the tail holes do their thing and just run the gavel. But each challenge on the 6th can tie things up for about 3 hours. So if you extrapolate it out the tail holes can make the process take 150 or so hours. Say 4 to 5 states per day. Pee, eat, and sleep will factor in if things run past the first day. Which means this can drag on for 10 to 15 days or so. Which will be bad for all kinds of reasons.

    1330:

    "And some Brits are so dimwitted that when everyone else starts pulling over they go "hey wow, look at all this space" and drive down it themselves." This happens on motorways. They're not (necessarily) dimwitted. They're selfish. They know somebody near the obstruction will let them in. But I've never seen this when emergency vehicles were involved. Most of my car journeys involve driving on. the most dangerous B-road in Norfolk, often also involving the most dangerous A-road in Norfolk. These are also the roads used to reach the main hospital in Norfolk (where I used to work). On average there's on emergency vehicle stopping traffic every trip I make on these roads. Nobody ever tries to jump the queue in these circumstances.

    1331:

    David L 6+15 = 21 Or something really nasty, like that - do you mean? Except - if there is no "president" officially available to be sworn in, doesn't Pelosi automatically become the president? Oh & isn't Veepence supposedly "off elsewhere" immediately after the 6th?

    1332:

    As a Labour supporter I'd like to believe the conclusion of this poll. But the next election will be in 2024. Remember Harold Wilson's saying. "A week is a long time in politics."

    1333:

    Graydon @ 1321:

    Any place where mammonites have a voice in government is doing badly.

    How do you distinguish those places? Or are you simply blaming any failures on "mammonites" and then finding that, surprise surprise, the places you find mammonites are the places that fail on C19 (clue: replace "mammonites" with "Jews" and see how it sounds then).

    This scatter-plot makes it painfully clear that, if anything, effectiveness of response is negatively correlated with affluence.

    Or it might be correlated with ineffective governments in poor countries being unable to track C19 deaths.

    Later, in 1324:

    Mercenary states ruled by dictators are practically DEFINED by not being mammonites, because a religion of greed is not compatible with the dictator's authority being absolute.

    Actually its more the other way around. Dictators only stay in power for as long as their feudal elite see it as being to their advantage. El Presidente has to ensure that his lieutenants get a share of the spoils, lest they decide to replace him with someone more generous. They in turn need to ensure that their placemen down the hierarchy also benefit, and so on down. The policeman who stops you and demands a bribe isn't just lining his own pocket: he has to pay a portion of his income to his boss in order to keep his position, and so on upwards. This is why kleptocracy is such a stable form of government: honesty is prohibited, and this prohibition is ruthlessly enforced. The division of spoils in a kleptocracy is a matter of politics and occasionally murder. Competent governance is secondary to maintaining the cash flow.

    1334:

    Is this the result of the new more infectious strain of Covid-19?

    Results of infection rates per age in Basildon, Essex. (Darker is higher rates, age in left, date on bottom)

    https://i.imgur.com/ipmeB0q.jpg

    1335:

    Yes. The problem occurs when all lanes are relatively narrow and solid with traffic, and there is nothing like a verge. This is common in cities, and can happen in some rural areas (e.g. the West Country). I have been stuck in such a queue with an emergency vehicle flashing (there was no point in a siren) for half an hour.

    A Tesla battery will boil away c. 900 Kg of water at NTP, and a typical fire engine carries only about double that, so a second engine or finding a hydrant would be needed (because of losses). Petrol and diesel is much worse, in theory, but their fires can be and are suppressed by foam.

    None of this is a show-stopper, but is why (a) I believe that it is critical to reduce car sizes rather than increase them and (b) why serious planning and expenditure needs to go into infrastructure. Neither is being done in the UK or, as far as I can see, the USA.

    1336:

    It's a combination of that, and the various relaxations of lockdown over the past month or few. It's why the gummint has panicked, and is proposing to use vaccines in completely untested ways. We haven't been told how the Oxford vaccine will be administered, though it's almost certainly in a way that hasn't been tested for efficacy, and don't have any evidence of whether the 12 week separation will have the same efficacy even for the Pfizer vaccine. And using a different vaccine for the second dose hasn't even been tested for safety!

    But, to repeat, it's still safer to be vaccinated than not, and I shall be getting it. But I shan't trust that it will protect me, or prevent its spread.

    1337:

    EC It will protect you ( And me ) somewhat, for certain. But, if the gummint screw with the distribution-rates & timings, I suspect something will go 'orribly worng. If my memory serves me right I'm in group 3 & you in 4? I do hope the medical professionals are very, really, absolutely careful about making sure that if anything does go badly wrong the politico-idiots get the justifiable blame & not the educated medicos

    1338:

    Re: '... here's a selection of countries with cumulative confirmed deaths per million people.'

    Suggest you add Switzerland to your display: very steep climb in case numbers, the gov't is sitting on its hands and it's a preferred holiday travel destination this time of year. So we have: out of control virus spread, a do-nothing gov't mind set, tourists from (and returning to) all over the planet some of whom may be in early/non-detectable stages of infection (but transmissible). New tourism slogan: Switzerland, C-19 Petri dish for the affluent!

    Yeah - that's real good public policy.

    What's even scarier/dumber is that Switzerland is home base to several pharma giants that have research centers there. Underscores the size of the disconnect between 'access to' vs. 'usage of' good science. That's like saying no worries about my VitD levels because I've got a some pills in some desk drawer. Sure, I haven't taken any yet, but I've got plenty.

    1339:

    EC, what struck me was the increase in infections for those under age 65 - especially children - compared to the first wave last spring.

    1340:

    That's been noted by the people whose job it is to note such things, but I haven't seen a convincing explanation of why, though there are several plausible hypotheses.

    There's little point in comparing anything except hospital admissions and deaths with the first wave, because the measurement of cases in it is best described as statistically useless verging on utterly bogus. It's not good now, but it's usable.

    1341:

    This is about the TERF/white supremacist "feminist" nexus and the folks bankrolling it, right?

    1342:

    That's been noted by the people whose job it is to note such things, but I haven't seen a convincing explanation of why, though there are several plausible hypotheses.

    I suspect that quite a bit of these differences and variations in the statistics are due to differing and varying testing policies. One example I was looking at recently is Mexico's case fatality rate, which is 9% vs 2-4% for most other countries. Apparently their policy has been to test only the very ill, meaning people who were already at much incleased risk of death.

    1343:

    In the first wave in the UK, it was essentially just people admitted to hospital who were diagnosed with and tested for COVID. We had the same effect, and is why I was so rude about the case data for that period. That's one explanation.

    Another is the policy of pushing elderly COVID patients back into care homes (yes, seriously), which is why there were so many deaths there.

    A third is that the lockdown no longer applies to schools, or not in full.

    And yet another is that the variant affects the young more.

    Take your pick - any or all of those, plus any others you care to invent.

    1344:

    EC Most likely a combination of parts of the above. Someone in guvmint needs to make their tiny dithering incompetent minds up: Are schools staying open more important that older people's lives - because of the "damage to education" ( Which will be real, but is it worth it? ) OR Do we want to keep the death-&hospital-overload toll as low as possible, even if it temporarily slows education down? Pick one & bloody stick to it?

    I know where my sympathies lie: The disease is the enemy - nothing else matters. WE can sort the "other messes" out afterwards. YMMV

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Oh yes - Charlie At the risk of being given a card ... there is the assumption that anyone is "bankrolling" anything. Rather than two opposing sets of idiots having a screaming match? ( ?? )

    Or, even more relevantly, & likely, that you have just been trolled & made the exact same mistake I have done in the past & risen to the bait. [ Because there wasn't an actual message in there to start with ] ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ [ Or delete the latter section! ]

    1345:

    the good folk of Aotearoa are part of the anglosphere

    Kinda not by first principles; the Anglosphere entity is New Zealand. Anybody who is using Aotearoa un-ironically is making a political statement about that.

    And as you yourself have noted (or at least as I recall you noting), New Zealand got extremely lucky; the other party would have done the same terrible things the UK or Canada are doing, they just happened to not be in power, on the one hand, and on the other hand the current NZ PM is a truly gifted communicator and (apparently) both numerate and stubborn. Plus island plus small, so there's only one level of government you have to get lucky about.

    1346:

    what struck me was the increase in infections for those under age 65 - especially children - compared to the first wave last spring.

    Many countries closed schools last spring, which means children were sheltered more than adults. In the fall there was a great emphasis on getting them back into school, which means they were exposed as much as adults. (Possibly more than adults, depending on the school and how well it could enforce social distancing.)

    If your testing is rationed by symptoms and/or known contacts (as ours was/is in Ontario) then it's likely children are more undercounted than adults in published rates.

    Back when I did my teacher training (last century) we were warned that as a profession teachers had the highest rate of infectious disease in Canada* (higher than medical workers even). Every teacher expects to get sick several times a year from their students. No reason to expect that Covid changes the pattern of spread at schools.

    https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/children-often-carry-more-coronavirus-than-adults-study-67785

    *It was a caution that those of us with immunocompromised housemates might want to consider another job.

    1347:

    UK / US

    Speaking of those places, I just got the latest data from https://covid.ourworldindata.org/data/owid-covid-data.csv and did a quick spreadsheet exercise.

    The case doubling rate for the UK is currently a smidgen over 30 days and diminishing. For the US it's 70-ish days and the trend isn't obvious because of the holiday effect on the stats.

    If those doubling rates were just to stay the same, the UK would have ~2.5M new cases this month and the US ~7M.

    1348:

    Are schools staying open more important that older people's lives

    Evidently, judging by government actions.

    1349:

    How do you distinguish those places? Or are you simply blaming any failures on "mammonites" and then finding that, surprise surprise, the places you find mammonites are the places that fail on C19

    "How much does this cost?" (the basic mammonite reaction, quickly followed by an axiomatic refusal) versus "How do we pay for this?" (the non-mammonite, public emergency response; we know what we need to do, we have to figure out how we can do it.)

    The successful political systems are diverse; Singapore is about as capitalist as it is possible to be. Vietnam are communists. New Zealand is a Westminster democracy. Taiwain is a republic. The PRC is an authoritarian panopticon something. There's a big range of GDP per capita involved across the successful responses, so it's not a question of resources.

    The thing the success have got in common is not -- tempting as the idea is -- numeracy in public life, because there were people giving correct advice in all the places which have failed. (There are standard texts on the subject!) It looks an awful lot like it's an axiomatic refusal to spend driving an inability to enforce a quarantine, and that the refusal to spend comes down to mammonite axioms about the nature of money and the appropriate ways for money to travel in society. (With a sideline in the illegitimacy of common-good restrictions on personal conduct heavily promoted by keep-the-loot mammonites who have been working to delegitimise taxes for generations; this is much of where the liberty! anti-maskers come from.)

    Since we haven't got a technical solution, and for something that is infectious while it's asymptomatic nothing but an enforced quarantine of those exposed is going to work absent the technical solutions (sterilising vaccines to the whole population OR universal application of extremely effective treatment), here we are.

    1350:

    Schools being closed in the summer of 2020, the disruption to exams and the knock-on effects of that kerfuffle almost cost the governments their place in power. Governments can only provide political solutions to people problems and schools cannot close because people won't accept them being closed. They will vote for and support governments that keep the schools open hence the schools will open.

    1351:

    But here, the mammonites have suffered a (temporary?) loss, with handouts/furlough/emergency payments all over the place - we will see how that plays out, between now & (approx) May or June, by which time a large proportion of the population will have been given a jab.

    It comes down to coherency of policy; if the folks noting that BoJo is not long for the job are correct in supposing February, which means you're going to get either Gove or Patel in the middle of that time frame. Which means there probably won't be coherency of policy; it's a skill set the Tories haven't got and something of an interest they're lacking.

    The other part of this is that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine has poorly characterised effectiveness, on the one hand, and there's a new COVID variant in the UK with a higher R, on the other.

    Vaccine effectiveness is of interest because the higher the R, the more effective the vaccine has to be to get R under 1 in the population. (That is, to have the disease go away once the population has been vaccinated.) Wild-type SARS-CoV-2 has an Rₜ around 5, which gives (by 1 - 1/Rₜ) a minimum vaccine effectiveness of 80%. The new stuff? not currently well understood, but it's not difficult to suppose it's more infectious than the Oxford vaccine can suppress.

    Still a good idea to get vaccinated; sensible, prudent personal damage limiting step to take. But not obviously sufficient to suppress the disease.

    1352:

    Schools being closed in the summer of 2020, the disruption to exams and the knock-on effects of that kerfuffle almost cost the governments their place in power.

    I think part of the problem is that "schools", while accurate, really covers 2 or 3 different communities and the pros/cons for those communities is very different.

    The needs vs ability to deal with home schooling changes by age group - the primary school aged kids (say 4 to 11) tend to be hurt the most by the absence of school (they are in the prime learning years for their brains, they need the most hand holding and help, can't do school themselves without the structure of in person (hence the parents driven to distraction in the spring) - and perhaps most importantly they are also the most at risk when not having external adults observe them as they don't yet have the ability to reach out for help themselves (which isn't the same as saying all teenagers will/would).

    The other side is the teenagers, who (in theory) should be able to home school with minimal parental direct supervision/involvement (yes, it won't apply to all), and thus in school can in theory be considered less of a necessity. They can also be more tolerant to simply skipping a year and restarting schooling a year later if necessary (like, for example, if they are poor enough/live in the wrong place and thus don't have access to the necessities of home schooling - computers and reliable high speed Internet).

    And of course there is also the age difference in the need to interrupt working-at-home parents for things like snacks/boredom, or the simple reality of being able to stay home alone for those parents who are privileged to have jobs that allow work from home.

    1353:

    Biden, coming in, will. The Monday after the final results for Pennsyblvania, Georgia, and Nevada came in, the very first thing he did was to introduce his pandemic team, ready to go on day 1 (that is, 21 Jan., more-or-less, depending on how fast the Trumplodytes can be forced out the door).

    1354:

    Not quite - they're only going to try to challenge about half a dozen states: PA, WI, MI, GA, maybe AZ and NV.

    1355:

    Bankrolling - there are, that's not even a question. Just like mammon-winger US billionaires, like Adelson, helped bankroll the Brexit vote, they want this - they're funding their own brownshirts, to aggressively encourage them to fight us, rather than see who's working at starting the fires.

    1356:

    That is, of course, on top of the largest, most well-equipped hospitals in the large cities in the US running at, or close to, 100% usage, and about to collapse.

    If/when they do, watch the US death rate shoot up.

    1357:

    Graydon The fundamental mistake of mammonites is that they never. ever ask the extremely relevant question: "What does NOT DOING THIS cost?" - which will often turn out to be much larger, oops. Especially in public-health situations.

    ..... which means you're going to get either Gove or Patel in the middle of that time frame. EUUWW! A choice between an even smarmier, less-competent-than the present liar, or a bullying fascist liar. ..... I note,incidentally, that many of the older, more moderate, sensible ex-members of what used to be the "Conservative Party" are urging Starmer to rescue the country - are they our equivalent of The Lincoln Project, I wonder? If so, then the next election in 2024 (?) is going to be "interesting"

    mdive the primary school aged kids (say 4 to 11) tend to be hurt the most by the absence of school Excuse me, but utter fucking bollocks. Almost all of the "teachers" in that group are merely licensed child-minders - or so my personal experience of 71-64 years ago tells me. ( Most of what I learnt in that period - which got me passed the 11+ & into a "Grammar" school - where I really did have to work & learnt things ... ) Was in spite of the supposed "teachers" I had .....

    whitroth Erm ... Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia ( The US one! ), Arizona & Nevada?

    "bankrolling" - yes, maybe, but - why? What's in it for them? If there was to be a potential profit out of it, I could instantly see why they would want to, but ( to me ) it makes no sense. What am I maybe missing?

    1358:

    gasdive @ 1310: Secondly, burning cars have no value. Spraying water on them doesn't devalue them. No one repairs a burnt out car.

    That's not entirely true.

    1359:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1335: None of this is a show-stopper, but is why (a) I believe that it is critical to reduce car sizes rather than increase them and (b) why serious planning and expenditure needs to go into infrastructure. Neither is being done in the UK or, as far as I can see, the USA.

    We get lots & lots of planning over here. Expenditures may never materialize, but we got planning.

    1360:

    Allen Thomson @ 1347:

    > UK / US

    The case doubling rate for the UK is currently a smidgen over 30 days and diminishing. For the US it's 70-ish days and the trend isn't obvious because of the holiday effect on the stats.

    If those doubling rates were just to stay the same, the UK would have ~2.5M new cases this month and the US ~7M.

    Meaningless comparison & I don't see how you can get that from your "statistic". In "70-ish days" the number of new cases in the UK would have doubled twice, while the number of new cases in the US would have only doubled once, and you don't define the starting point.

    1361:

    "But I've never seen this when emergency vehicles were involved."

    I have. Prebend Street bridge in Bedford, for instance, which is the main connection between the hospital and most of the northern half of the town. The bridge itself is wide and has very wide pavements which make it easy for people to put their left wheels up the kerb and get out of the way. The street leading to the north end of it is narrow and has thin pavements with lamp posts and things growing on them, so it requires traffic in both directions to pull over and leave a gap down the middle. This combination creates a divvy trap in the northbound direction at the north end of the bridge, where the narrowing of the road overcomes the cranial imperviosity barrier and the vehicle comes to a halt, and then the approach of the ambulance from behind causes the few remaining brain cells to shut down altogether.

    The selfishness at motorway obstructions is mostly exhibited by lorry drivers, who have the attitude of "I can't be arsed to negotiate this efficiently, so I'll make sure nobody else can either", and have the width to enforce it; when the traffic starts to slow for the obstruction they sit half way between two lanes and block anyone else from coming past, so now the obstruction effectively begins not at the actual blockage but a couple of miles or so further back where the wanker in the lorry is. Nothing to do with the approach of emergency vehicles; they're simply reacting to the presence of a hold-up up ahead.

    1362:

    Hang on hang on hang on. What the fuck is "de-radicalisation" doing in that list of training requirements? People have to accept political re-education before they can get vaccinated?

    1363:

    HOW are you going to make a wealth tax actually work?

    Me? By voting for smart money-focussed people.

    It might be useful for you to know that Aotearoa has an optional capital gains tax on shares etc (there are rules, but they are easily gamed for most people. Basically the capital gains tax catches day traders and that's about it), and local councils levy rates. That's it for wealth taxes.

    So by comparison to tax-happy socialist states like... the USA or UK, NZ doesn't even try to tax wealth. If they wanted to, and the current PM hadn't ruled it out, they could simply copy the US and impose a CGT, or inheritance tax, or the various other little nibbles at wealth that other countries do.

    1364:

    The thing the success have got in common is not -- tempting as the idea is -- numeracy in public life, because there were people giving correct advice in all the places which have failed.

    Is what they have in common leaders/decision-makers who are numerate (or who seriously take the advice of those who are)?

    1365:

    Also, tax is an iterated game and no fixed rule can ever work. It's a kind of mirror of Goodhart's Law: any measure used for taxation is gamed and becomes almost useless as a measure, and often for tax.

    So by necessity tax law, and what is taxed, is always changing.

    Which means that "what I would do" is just say "I want to tax wealth" and have some sort of bureaucracy, maybe a whole government department, dedicated to the cause of turning things I want to see taxed into the subjects of effective tax laws. We could call it.. the tax office.

    1366:

    almost-pain in my upper chest

    Psychosomatic chest pains are A Thing among anyone in or past middle age: stress and anxiety cause tension in shoulders, neck, and thoracic muscles which manifests as mild pain either directly or due to bad posture. I get it, my wife gets it, I think right now if I had a dog, the dog would have it too (the cat doesn't care).

    1367:

    I started to feel depressed and then got really depressed

    From 1996 - Show of Hands Cutthroats Crooks and Con-Men

    https://youtu.be/QWtBLNSoQWM

    1368:

    Is what they have in common leaders/decision-makers who are numerate (or who seriously take the advice of those who are)?

    I'm pretty sure that what the states with successful public health responses to COVID-19 have in common are leaders who care if people die.

    1369:

    1 Mammonites: everything except "how much money do I have/control right now" are what, according to Krugman, are called "externalities."

  • The states (and commonwealth) I mentioned are the ones that give Biden the win, and which the Hairball has been fighting all along.

  • Bankrolling: brownshirts. They're the very lumpy proletariat who has been blinded by brainwashing, and will attack the rest of us who can see what's going on.

  • 1370:

    Really? Mostly, if they're really burned out (like my dearly departed beloved Toyota Tercel wagon), they literally are nothing but scrap metal. All insurance companies would consider them totaled.

    1371:

    Thanks, Charlie. I was assuming it's that, given when it happens.

    1372:

    Almost all of the "teachers" in that group are merely licensed child-minders - or so my personal experience of 71-64 years ago tells me.

    And Britain hasn't changed since the 50s?

    1373:

    No, not entirely true, as you say.

    Close enough to true for all practical and planning purposes.

    Add to that, the value to the fire fighters is definitely zero. So they're going to do whatever is most convenient to them. This car is being repaired, but observe the fire fighters (sarcasm) desperate rush (/sarcasm) to save as much as possible.

    https://youtu.be/QtdDOeAlzrQ

    Their care for this valuable car includes belting the front of the car with an axe to set off the air bags, in a classic car that doesn't have airbags.

    Also worth noting is that they put on SCBA before doing anything with the car. The procedure is the same as a battery fire. Keep bystanders away. Put on PPE. Pour water on it.

    1374:

    "bankrolling" - yes, maybe, but - why? Wealthy religious people often spent some (a tiny fraction) of their money to promote bigotry demanded by their personal religious doctrine, and will often spend their money where it has/can have a larger effect because the countering forces are weak. The anti-homosexual legislative push in Uganda was an example. What they get out of it is dehumanization (and even death) of classes of people that they dislike. They don't need a profit motive if the money involved is small relative to their (often obscene) fortunes.

    1375:

    The procedure is the same as a battery fire. Keep bystanders away. Put on PPE. Pour water on it.

    You make it sound so simple.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-53726197

    "pour some water on it" 😂

    I know that was a very simplified explanation, and I do have some vague recollection of playing with the big boys toys back in the day, it's just that "pour some water on it" has always amused me as a description of what firefighters do. It brings to mind a cooking recipe way more than a fire engine. "add 1 1/2 cups of warm water, then wait until the mixture has subsided".

    1376:

    Wild-type SARS-CoV-2 has an Rₜ around 5, which gives (by 1 - 1/Rₜ) a minimum vaccine effectiveness of 80%. This is an R0 in a context of no NPIs and probably with urban population densities. (It's what we saw in e.g. Northern Italy and New York City, early in the western world part of the pandemic; seemed to be about 5) (I know some people say R0 is supposed to be context-free, but this is not true. E.g. a country with a dominant culture where the ancient and preferred form of greeting is to pick the left nostril of the other party then insert the finger deep into in one's own right nostril might have have a higher R0.)

    Making distancing a habit unless physical closeness is required, making mask usage much more ubiquitous, etc, will/may persistently reduce the effective R enough to keep it well below 1 in a vaccinated population, probably, IMO. (Assuming a sterilizing vaccine.) These measures do not need to be pulsed like shutdowns; they have very low freedom cost. Early on in the US, such measures were being treated as plausible or good ideas in the US RW media, then there was an influence push to block them.

    1377:

    I'm just trying to imagine a passive heatsink that can dissipate 50kW without any external parts getting too hot to touch.

    Water's actually a pretty good heat sink; it's one of the reasons why they store spent reactor fuel rods in swimming pools for a few months before reprocessing/transferring to a waste repository.

    (IIRC during the Fukushima crisis my BOTE calculation was that it'd take a 1MW heat source about a day to boil a ton of water. Assuming I'm not off by orders of magnitude, that ton of water would totally handle a biggest-battery Tesla, at least until their trucks hit the road.)

    So: tow truck with a "fish tank" on the back, have a fire tender stand by while moving the smouldering wreck into the tank, then pump water until the wreckage is submerged. Drive back to the pound and park up for 24 hours or until it cools off. Assuming runaway battery fires are rarer than gas tank fires, this should be an adequate solution.

    1378:

    "The Mind is a Garden, never do that" ... Zen garden sand Omega swirl images Did you mean something analogous to this? I never [worked out] the precise images for sure.

    This stone is Un-no-ishi (the stone of omega) of the Koda-tei (the Koda River garden) of Ryugen-in. (or "Un-no-ishi" stone in Koda-tei. (https site has a bad cert))

    1379:

    Energy density isn't how you get explosions; those are dependent on the energy density and the rate of reaction.

    Yep.

    Highly counter-intuitive factoid (for non-chemists): the pat of butter in your fridge has a higher energy density than the same weight of TNT or C4. It just doesn't let it out fast enough to be a problem.

    Similarly: a 20 kiloton nuke (Nagasaki bomb sized bang) releases about as much energy as a boring 1GW pressurized water reactor puts out in a few days (10 days or so by electricity output, rather less time as raw heat). It's just that the nuke releases its energy in something on the order of fractional microseconds (thereby creating a plasma fireball which then leaks it at progressively longer wavelengths over a much longer time, all the way down to fractional seconds).

    1380:

    Charlie Stross @ 1377 "So: tow truck with a "fish tank" on the back, have a fire tender stand by while moving the smouldering wreck into the tank, then pump water until the wreckage is submerged."

    Don't you also need a truck with a huge fireproof hydraulic arm on it to pick up the car and dip it into the tank?

    It seems much simpler to me to keep a big folded fire blanket in a single truck and take it out manually and unfold it and have two fire persons slip it over a burning car to choke the fire.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlLVtBnxgD0

    1381:

    The blanket works for an oxygen-dependent fire. So it would work for an air-something fuel cell EV where the something is burning, but not for a battery fire, since both halves of the reaction are in the battery.

    (Fire triangle is heat, fuel, and oxidiser; the blanket is blocking the oxygen in the air from getting to the fuel, which cuts of production of heat.)

    I try to remind myself that some of the taken-seriously battery chemistries include lithium-iodine, lithium-sulfur, zinc-bromine, aluminium-chlorine, lithium-chlorine, and magnesium-sodium. Lithium-ion is far from the most exciting possibility in a fire-fighting context.

    1382:

    I liked your previous link about fire-fighting chemicals where NaCl was one of the suggestions. A truckload of salt is something that many snowy places would have, and expect to have it washed off their roads.

    Sadly pouring some sugar on it didn't make the list.

    1383:

    Graydon @ 1381

    But where is the oxidiser in a lithium ion battery?

    It's all in the electrolyte?

    So, LiC6 + CoO2 ↽ ⇀ C6 + LiCoO 2 ?

    1384:

    The oxidiser accepts the electrons.

    So presumably that's the anode, and the LiC6. But I would want to find a battery chemist before I had any confidence in that answer!

    1385:

    Salt, plan NaCl salt, melts around 800 C. Calcium chloride, much more likely as road salt hereabouts, melts at about 770 C. Both are rated as "does not burn", same flammability as water.

    So neither's going to ignite or melt in a 500 C battery fire, so it does make sense.

    Can't help but think it's going to smell truly appalling somehow. (Salt works as a casting medium for some metals, but your nose knows when the pour starts.)

    1386:

    Graydon @ 1385

    In that case all you need to do is to slightly modify (with a screw device?) the back of a big highway salt-spreader truck, so that the salt spreads about two meters above the usual position for the impeller.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_service_vehicle#/media/File:Schneepflug_Strasse_hinten.jpg

    1387:

    You do know that a Tesla model 3 weighs about the same as a BMW 3 series, right? They’re not made by taking a nice normal pollution spewing ICE and adding two tons of AAA size mercury-alkaline cells and a giant rheostat operated via Mr Bean style strings.

    EVs are not notably heavier than old fashioned air killers. They do not require impossible changes to anything. If you don’t want one don’t buy one. Simple.

    1388:

    The amusing part about Japanese rock gardens is that, per a history of the Japanese civil war ("The World Turned Upside Down: Medieval Japanese Society), Japanese rock/gravel gardens were invented by a kawaramono. The kawaramono people were hinin (lowest caste "nonhumans") who lived on the riverbanks, especially those of the Kamo River in Kyoto. Since Japan has relatively short, steep rivers, they tend to flood and then recede, leaving behind large banks of sand and cobbles. These areas were not claimed by any landlord, so they were rent free, and the riverbank people (kawaramono) settled there: people who worked with dead animals, lepers, outcasts, and increasingly artists and monks. Apparently, as in the modern day US (where undocumented immigrants work as gardeners, landscapers, and farmers), the kawaramono worked on the landscapes of Kyoto. Zen'ami, credited with developing the rock garden style, was the son of a kawaramono renderer who grew up on the riverbanks, and dreamed up the landscapes as a form of escape. "Just as nothing grew on the riverbanks except, stunted bushes, the dry gardens, or kare sansui, contained no plants."

    And people have projected stuff onto them ever since, assuming this story is true. I'll note that this book cites Japanese sources, while the Wikipedia entry on rock gardens cites a French book on gardening.

    Anyway, I wonder what would happen if you asked a norteno to create a garden that represented her experience of the US/Mexico Border, what she would come up with, and what it would symbolize to those who saw it?

    1389:

    These measures do not need to be pulsed like shutdowns; they have very low freedom cost.

    Except that apparently a significant number of people believe that wearing a mask is a serious infringement of their fundamental freedoms. Given the ephemeral (and international) nature of the internet I'm not certain we'll ever know how that meme* started and propagated.

    For reference, the recent anti-mask protest in Vancouver was at least partly organized and led by people wearing "Trump 2020" clothing. In Canada. It's like there's a whole belief cluster that people get infected with, even if parts are totally irrelevant.

    *In the original meaning of the word, rather than a cat picture with misspelled words on it.

    1390:

    Highly counter-intuitive factoid (for non-chemists): the pat of butter in your fridge has a higher energy density than the same weight of TNT or C4. It just doesn't let it out fast enough to be a problem.

    Hence the lovely scene in Tony Robinson's The Wonderful World of Dung… :-)

    1391:

    I'm not certain we'll ever know how that meme* started and propagated. FWIW, for those twitter accounts involved in early anti-mask activity that have not been deleted (there are some), twitter is a graph where every node has an account, a timestamp[1] and can reference other nodes. And it's open, with APIs. [1] for a parser, see https://oduwsdl.github.io/tweetedat/ (See the link at the page about twitter snowflake)

    1392:

    So: tow truck with a "fish tank" on the back, have a fire tender stand by while moving the smouldering wreck into the tank, then pump water until the wreckage is submerged.

    Yeah, here's an article (sadly only in Finnish, but with video and pictures) about those Finnish electric car fire containers.

    This is how you extinguish a burning electric car.

    1393:

    Reportedly there was an analogous anti-masking movement in the US during the Spanish Flu Pandemic. While it's interesting and potentially useful to figure out who sparked this go-round, one could also ask whether this endemic American CRIS* that caught fire with Trumping and anti-maskery has any adaptive value in less dangerous times.

    My thought for the day, not incidentally, is that those who say "they're not sheep"** are being guided by crooks, herded by dogs, and regularly milked and fleeced.

    Cranio-rectal insertion syndrome. I don't know how to say scheisskopfery properly in German, but I suspect that would sound better. *This was in reference to a video of someone getting ejected from a Costco for refusing to wear a mask because he's not a sheep. Baa.

    1394:

    http://smbc-comics.com/comic/captcha-3

    Comic reminding us that recaptcha is specifically designed to be trivial for self-driving cars to solve. After all, recognising motorbikes, stop signs and traffic lights is the very basic start to driving safely...

    1395:

    Or the original version:

    https://xkcd.com/1897/

    1396:

    So ---'professions' which happen to usually enjoy higher social status than plain careers/jobs also happen to have compulsory ethics components/courses.

    NO.

    A "profession" (in the sense the pharmacist is a profession, or medical doctor is a profession, or solicitor is a profession) is regulated by statute. It's a criminal offense to misrepresent yourself as a practitioner: meanwhile, practitioners are bound by special laws and a code of conduct enforced by a regulatory body with investigatory powers, a disciplinary process, and the ability to withdraw a practitioner's license for infractions (and even recommend prosecution to the police). In return, the licensed practitioners have special legal powers.

    Example: while I was registered with the Royal Pharmaceutical Society (I dropped off the register in 1990), I was legally allowed to be in possession of controlled substances such as heroin, cocaine, and other narcotics in the course of my professional business. (Not to consume them! But unlawful possession is a criminal offense under the Misuse of Drugs Act, and obviously pharmacists have to have be conditionally exempt, as do police in custody of seized evidence, lawyers and clerks in the court system ditto, and patients who have been lawfully prescribed controlled drugs (a CD is not automatically the same as a CS, but they overlap). So yes, I was occasionally in possession of heroin, amphetamines, and cocaine.)

    The reason regulated professions exist is that there is a strong risk of harm -- not just moral hazard, but risk of injury, loss of liberty, or death -- if people practice these trades without due diligence.

    ... And every time I hear the word "professional" being misapplied to a generic workplace or occupation ("professional attire", "professional salesman", etc) it's fingernails-on-blackboard time because it's weakening the public understanding of a very important safety mechanism.

    1397:

    Mikko Parviainen @ 1392

    Google translate did a good job of translating the article, except for the presence of the word "acoustic", which made no sense. They probably meanr "electric". The video was perfect.

    1398:

    ABSOLUTELY COMPULSORY listening HERE - BBC R4 programme on "How to Vaccinate the World" & - without directly saying so, how the political "leadership" has gone completely missing in action. ( Lasts half an hour )

    1399:

    "is regulated by statute. "

    Let me just add, that the general regulatory principle is the following:

  • You have to meet the following qualifications and/or take an exam to become a _

  • You cannot contractually or otherwise disclaim responsibility.

  • You have to have liability insurance worth at least _

  • You have to subject yourself to the following intrusions, into what is normally something a company get to decide for themselves: (record keeping, audits, background-checks, helping law-enforcement, dispose of medicine people return without cost, etc.)

  • In return we grant (your profession) monopoly on doing __ so that everybody you compete with are on the same level playing field.

  • This style of regulation is used for such diverse professions as medical doctors, electricians, divers, gold-smiths, nuclear engineers, staticians (people who calculate if a building will stay standing), farmacists, legal translators etc. etc.

    In may European languages the phrase "liberal occupation" denotes professions not subject to such regulations.

    1400:

    The way that energy density is calculated, and the consequent way that the logically challenged confuse themselves, is something that annoys me. There is a massive and fundamental difference between complete fuels (*) and explosives on the one hand, and things that burn in air on the other. Butter has a negligible energy density in the absence of oxygen, and petrol's is essentially zero.

    As I would have thought was obvious, but some people here can't seem to grasp, a complete fuel fire cannot be put out by excluding air from it! So blankets, foam, halon, etc. are at best pointless and quite probably harmful.

    Furthermore, if a complete fuel has enough energy density to cause it to expand considerably (e.g. vaporise its volatiles), then it has the POTENTIAL to cause an explosion. The consequence is that it cannot easily be made safe by enclosing it in a strong, largely impervious shell.

    Sometimes, a complete fuel fire can be suppressed by cooling it enough that the reaction stops, but that often needs a LOT of cooling.

    (*) A complete fuel is one that does not need an external supplier of (usually) oxidiser to burn.

    1401:

    c.f. 'Engineer', which is a licensed title in some jurisdictions (Germany among them), but which in the UK has little more standing than 'manager'

    1402:

    Oh, really? If you compare functional equivalence and remember that most cars in places like the UK are MUCH smaller than a Tesla, things don't look so rosy. I challenge you to suggest a functionally equivalent EV alternative to my Skoda Fabia 'estate', at a comparable weight. I'll even be generous, and let you drop its nominal range from 550 miles to 400.

    The issue isn't whether penis extensions like the Tesla 3 are any heavier than their equivalents, it's whether the bog-standard cars owned by Joe Bloggs are. As I have said before, the inflation of car sizes over the past half century has been very harmful in itself, and a further increase is NOT what we want.

    1403:

    The "acoustic" comes from "akusto" which is a quite rare word, meaning a set of batteries. One rechargeable battery is "akku".

    Now that I think of it, these words for electric storage devices are fun. In Finnish we have

    • Akku - A rechargeable battery (probably via Swedish 'Ackumulator')
    • Paristo (colloquial: Patteri) - A Non-rechargeable battery. Grammatically 'a set of multiple "pari"'
    • Pari - rarely used, usually means 'a pair' but here is 'an electrochemical cell'

    And that "patteri" can come both from "battery" and "paristo", I'm not sure which. I'd lean to "battery" if pressed.

    In English I understand it's usually "a battery" and chargeability is then specified if necessary? "An accumulator" is a word, but not very common AIUI. Wikipedia says it's most likely a lead-acid battery.

    1404:

    How much good do folks here think ethics courses do?

    1405:

    Mikko Parviainen @ 1403

    In France "un accumulateur" (or "un accu") is a single cell battery while "une batterie" is an assembly of many cells of "accumulateurs".

    But don't use those terms in a garage in Montréal, where everything and anything that takes an electrical charge is "une batterie".

    1406:

    Nancy Quite a bit. The Boss' firm have someone who looks after this & who is called in if there are any dodgy conflicts-of-interest/legal-&-regulatory problems etc. He's ex-HMRC, knows where to look for buried bodies & knows how to contact the regulatory authorities really quickly, if something looks like it's going pear-shaped. Also, if he says: "We are not touching that one with somebody else's" - then the client/customer is politely told to go elsewhere ( And the firm will quite possibly tell the regulators & cops, anyway. )

    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

    Biden & co now have a problem: It's obvious they were going to let "The States" deal with IQ45's state crimes & keep him in the courts & probably jail - which is NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH "Federal" crimes. The released recorded conversations shows him committing (IIRC) "Seditious Conspiracy" - & they may/will have to do something about that.

    1407:

    But don't use those terms in a garage in Montréal, where everything and anything that takes an electrical charge is "une batterie".

    I suspect that a capacitor would not be "une batterie" but rather "un condensateur" ("kondensaattori" in Finnish), but I'm getting perhaps a bit too pedantic here, and I know you probably meant an electrochemical device for storing electrical charge, for longer periods of time than a capacitor is usually used.

    1408:

    In English, the older terms were accumulator for rechargeable cells and (galvanic) cell for others, and battery was used as in French, but battery has been used in normal speech for a single cell since 1812 and is now the normal word. There are occasional perverse pedants who object to that.

    1409:

    Another heads-up re: DT

    For these individuals - from both parties - to write and publicly post such a letter says a helluva lot about the present situation.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/extraordinary-warning-to-trump-by-10-former-pentagon-chiefs/2021/01/03/b1d3f070-4e38-11eb-a1f5-fdaf28cfca90_story.html

    'In an extraordinary rebuke of President Donald Trump, all 10 living former secretaries of defense cautioned Sunday against any move to involve the military in pursuing claims of election fraud, arguing that it would take the country into “dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory.”'

    1410:

    Mikko Parviainen @ 1407

    You're right! I had forgotten all about "les condensateurs". I have never done any kind of work on my cars or on any car, and in my Physics classes we never did electrical lab work. It was all theoretical and I forgot a lot of it. Fortunately we had actual labs for chemistry.

    Meanwhile, in that hypothetical garage in Montréal they would have called it "Un capaciteur" instead of using the correct term which is, as you know, "un condensateur".

    Back in the 60s there was a single tech school for garage mechanics/electricians for all of Montréal. So, most garage mechanics were self-taught, reading up on things in English-language auto company manuals. They would francise the terms by doing things like giving a gender and changing the ending. Hence the term "un capaciteur" instead of the correct "un condensateur".

    1411:

    "In English I understand it's usually "a battery" and chargeability is then specified if necessary?"

    Yes.

    A rechargeable battery is technically an accumulator but nobody calls it that. It did have some sense of being a lead-acid car battery at one time because they managed to become familiar to the general public while the word was still in use, but I'm not sure how much it does any more. It's possible that the word would now be more widely taken as a Hawkwind reference.

    On the other hand "akku" or something very similar is one of those words that shows up like a familiar friend in a technical document in some foreign language that you're trying to puzzle out. Seems that English is something of an exception among languages that use the Roman alphabet in not calling it that.

    Irrelevantly, I think one of my favourite foreign technical words has got to be German auspuff for exhaust.

    1412:

    What, no clignotants or vilebrequins? They were missing out.

    1413:

    ... And every time I hear the word "professional" being misapplied to a generic workplace or occupation ("professional attire", "professional salesman", etc) it's fingernails-on-blackboard time because it's weakening the public understanding of a very important safety mechanism.

    Back in the 80s, when I was studying engineering at university, there was a fad for calling everything "engineered". So a housewife was a "domestic engineer", the binman was a "sanitation engineer", and so on.

    The professional societies objected, but apparently all they could regulate was the term "professional engineer".

    1414:

    SFReader 1409. 'In an extraordinary rebuke of President Donald Trump, all 10 living former secretaries of defense cautioned Sunday against any move to involve the military in pursuing claims of election fraud, arguing that it would take the country into “dangerous, unlawful and unconstitutional territory.”'

    I could not believe my eyes. Dick Cheney had signed this?

    I got paywalled by the post so I went to NPR. Cheney had signed it and he was also the one who started it all!

    1415:

    Concerning the "Malefactors of great wealth", I believe they're in part punishing the Roosevelts, even though TR & FDR are long dead, for suggesting there were concerns more important than money*.

    *They may also revile Paul Henning for his invention of "Milburn Drysdale" in "The Beverly Hillbillies", who was distinctly "Mammonite".

    1416:

    How much good do folks here think ethics courses do?

    In terms of increasing ethical behaviour?

    Like any course, it probably depends a lot of the content, the teacher, and the student.

    Will an ethics course change the behaviour of a Wall Street trader? I'd be extremely surprised.

    Might an ethics course encourage a Walmart pharmacist to file reports on lax sales of opiates? Possibly.

    I suspect that ethics courses are like the annual compliance training an Ontario teacher has to do. The training doesn't teach that we must report suspected child abuse (we already know that), it reinforces that we are legally liable if we don't. (It also means the government can claim to be doing something positive without having to spend any money.)

    I suspect the real ethics problem is that people tend to judge 'ethical' in context of normal behaviour. If everyone is doing it, it isn't unethical. For example, see this study on banking culture:

    https://www.nature.com/news/banking-culture-primes-people-to-cheat-1.16380

    So what an ethics course needs to do is armour an individual against a group whose behaviour runs counter to what society deems ethical. And a course can't do that by itself, there also needs to be things like strong whistleblower protections, serious and enforced penalties for unethical behaviour, etc.

    Compliance with lockdown restrictions is sort of like that. Most people know what should be done, and will go along with it if other people are also doing it. Throw in visible amounts of non-compliance, including by leadership figures, and more of the general public decide 'why bother' and start doing what seems best for themselves. All the explaining in the world about why the restrictions are important falls before "if they can do it, why can't I?".

    But the message from the government about adherence also changed after the revelations about the actions of Dominic Cummings, which were followed by a decrease in compliance. Returning to a single event might seem like bearing a grudge, but it was pivotal for many reasons. During lockdown the message on compliance was clear: social restrictions were vital to stop the spread of the virus, so everyone had to play their part; no excuses, no exemptions. But Cummings changed the tone: if you could find a loophole in the rules, it somehow became acceptable (and defensible) to break them. The enemy changed from being the virus itself to being the measures designed to curb the virus.

    This shift in tone did not go unnoticed, as our research at UCL showed. The same sacrifices people had willingly made in the spring as part of a collective social responsibility suddenly seemed less necessary. Goodwill turned to anger and upset, largely targeted towards the government that defended Cummings’ actions. Trust in the government to handle the pandemic took a sharp downward turn in England, from which it has not recovered since. Trust is crucial, as research has shown that it is one of the largest behavioural predictors of compliance during this pandemic: larger than mental health, belief in the health service or numerous other factors. As humans, we need to trust our authorities if we are to follow what they tell us to do.

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/02/follow-covid-restrictions-break-rules-compliance

    1417:

    Did you mean "Tesla S"? The 3 isn't that much larger than a Golf. But vehicle sizes are getting out of hand in the U.S., especially trucks & SUVs.

    1418:

    The NYT provided this link. VERY interesting. The protection from a single doze of the Oxford/Astrazeneca is very poor, but the efficacy of the second dose appears to increase with the dose interval (though it's indirect). You may well ask why the UK gummint did not stress that advantage of the 12 week interval.

    https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/948334/Information_for_UK_healthcare_professionals_on_COVID-19_Vaccine_AstraZeneca.pdf

    1419:

    I meant the Tesla 3. That's my point. It is functionally no larger than a Golf, but takes significantly more space and is significantly heavier.

    Tesla 3: 4.694 x 1.847 metres, 1.61 tons, 425 litres luggage capacity.

    Golf: 4.284 x 1.789 metres, 1.39 tons, 466 litres luggage capacity.

    My Fabia 'estate' is under a ton, a damn sight smaller, takes the same number of passengers and has a much larger luggage capacity (even without the back seat down). Most people buy cars for actual use, not pretension.

    1420:

    How much good do folks here think ethics courses do?

    Quite a lot, even if they're surveys of different ethical systems as I got in the conservation ethics class I took as an undergrad. It wasn't a prerequisite to graduating in environmental science, but I'm glad I took it. The thing I've noticed is that people who came up through biology courses and do wildlife or botanical consulting have much less of an ethical standard, for the most part. They have no qualms stepping off a trail in a heavily used park to pick a rare flower to look at it. After all, they know what they're doing, why should the rules apply to them? The problem is, when thousands (or millions) of people use the same park, if even a tiny percentage of users do that, the park gets trashed. That's a non-trivial example of what lack of conservation ethics in a science curriculum can do.

    I've been peripherally involved in attempts to promote professional standards in the environmental consulting industry. After all, these are the people who theoretically are trying to keep species from going extinct. You think they'd want to be regulated, right? It's been a struggle to get anywhere: many consultants don't want to bind themselves to any code of ethics above a non-disclosure agreement, for fear of making less money.

    In unrelated news, attempts to license recreational marijuana dispensaries seem to be running into the same trouble, that unregulated pot is more profitable. For that matter, I'd love to know if there are any attempts at creating ethical standards in the computer coding and social media industries, and how well they're going.

    The thing to realize is that regulations, licensing, and organized Professions, all started out as attempts to corner markets, using the "we've got standards, you don't" rubric. Think Guilds 2.0. You'd think they'd guarantee quality, but often they don't.

    Getting back to professional environmental consulting, there have also been attempts by Registered Professional Foresters (RPFs) to corner the consulting market, because they at least are registered, even if they know jack shit about anything they would be doing as consulting botanists (they're not required to take any courses in plant taxonomy for an RPF, for example). But their profession is getting downsized thanks to GIS, so they're looking to shift their market.

    Recently, the California legislature gave the RPFs a big bone by making them responsible for doing a lot of the fire clearance plans under CalFire, which used to be the Board of Forestry, which used to only regulate forestry before fighting wildfires got to be more profitable than forestry (and so they dumped the career scientists and now employ fire marshals who have masters in Fire Science). And yes, RPFs know jack shit about wildfires, and the Timber Harvest Plans they still produce for CalFire are sick jokes that get automatically rubber stamped, even though they're sometimes hand written and illegible. But they are licensed Professionals, just like y'all engineers, pharmacists, doctors, and landscape architects. Meanwhile, the people trying to stop the sixth mass extinction are mere unprofessional practitioners.

    Perhaps you can tell, but my sympathies to people who feel their professional stature impugned by the way us peon practitioners use the word "professional" are rather minimal.

    1421:

    Batteries are a lot heavier than gasoline. On the other hand, we're ignoring the fundamental insanity of using a couple tons of stuff to move a single human at high speed so that they can meet a culturally mandated schedule. Once you accept that fundamental insanity, then having a heavier battery package to move a single human around makes a lot more sense, because of the notional avoidance of greenhouse gas production while the car is in motion.

    This is an unnecessarily rude way of saying that most cars only move the driver and occasionally some groceries, so interior volume is not the best measure of functionality.

    I'd even go so far as to say that going by "mine is bigger than yours is," (e.g. quality of vehicle is related to internal volume plus notional threatening stance plus notional survivability in a crash) is the reason so many Americans invest in huge trucks and SUVs as commuter vehicles, even though they're massively counterproductive for the job. And since I really dislike this whole American style of driving, I tend to campaign for people to use smaller electric cars and worry a bit more about how well they drive.

    1422:

    The thing to realize is that regulations, licensing, and organized Professions, all started out as attempts to corner markets, using the "we've got standards, you don't" rubric. Think Guilds 2.0. You'd think they'd guarantee quality, but often they don't.

    Eh, no.

    Sometimes that happens -- think "realtors" (who don't exist in the UK) -- but then consider airline pilots, brain surgeons, and structural engineers. If the latter occupations get it wrong, people die: sometimes lots of people. Standards and enforcement got dropped on them from a great height in reaction to the aforementioned piles of skulls, and mostly it works.

    This has gradually trickled down to other areas, formerly unskilled/semi-skilled trades: electricians or gas fitters or plumbers need to be certified these days. But they can cause serious damage (or deaths) if they get it wrong, so ...

    There are grey areas, of course. If my chartered accountant fucks up, it can cost me a lot of money but I probably won't die. I still pay him, rather than an amateur (or doing the books myself), because it gives me some assurance that he knows what he's doing. Same goes for solicitors with the conveyancing paperwork involved in buying property, or with making a will: you can cut corners but there'll probably be a price.

    Nonsensical regulations reminiscent of your "guilds 2.0" quip seem to me to be more common in various US states, e.g. licenses being required for beauticians and hairdressers? I mean, what?!? That actually looks more like rent-seeking by state assemblies than anything else.

    But in the sectors where lives are at risk, professionalization generally gets imposed from the top down (and has teeth).

    1423:

    You've got it backwards, I think. It's worth digging into the history of MDs for example. Or pilots, for that matter, or bridge builders. The work came first, then the professional organizations, then the licensing. In this regard, I think pilots are an extreme example in that it only took them 10-20 years or so to start pushing for systematized training and licensing, and the first licenses were (IIRC) memberships in the pilot club.

    There's nothing logical about who gets to do a profession in terms of safety. The biggest example right now is that you don't need a license to become President of the United States, or any political office for that matter. Competency is not required. Nor is competency required for dealing with things like climate change, even though these affect the life of everybody on the planet.

    1424:

    "In English I understand it's usually "a battery" and chargeability is then specified if necessary? "An accumulator" is a word, but not very common AIUI. Wikipedia says it's most likely a lead-acid battery."

    "Battery" came about because you needed so many "elements" in your volta "pile" to get usable amounts of electricity for the crude experiments of the time.

    In H.C.Ørsteds famous experiment 200 years ago the current was probably about 5 ampere, and one of the critiques at the time was that it might just be a thermal effect from the hot wire.

    Pendantic purists still insist on calling a single electrochemical cell "an element" and multiple cells "a battery".

    "Battery" is of course inspired/derived from the military term.

    "Accumulator" is of german-french origin and never really caught on in english.

    The fact that the germans decided to name the worlds second best storage battery "OPzS" (Ortsfest PanZerplatte Flüssig) didn't help sell their vocabulary.

    The worlds best storage battery is still the "Telecom Round Cell" which was an abject commercial failure, because most of the original production run is still in service 50 years later. (See BSTJ Vol 49, September 1970, number 7)

    1425:

    I could not believe my eyes. Dick Cheney had signed this?

    In AD&D terms, this can be seen as the difference between lawful evil and chaotic evil. Lawful evil sees the utility of systems and laws. Chaotic evil does not.

    In the real world, I'd take this as an indicator of competence on Cheney's part, that he thinks a functioning US government is more useful than a non-functioning one. Also, Trump has literally wasted over 300,000 American lives due to his catastrophic handling of the Covid19 crisis. Getting him out of power is becoming a pressing issue.

    1426:

    That leads to me consider that the old, CORRECT definition of "middle class" were professionals and small-to-medium business owners.

    Most of whom are regulated these days.

    It is NOT MEDIAN INCOME. In the US, certainly, most median-income people are living paycheck-to-paycheck, and a big hospital will bankrupt them.

    Side note: my late ex, when she was a NASA engineer, did a presentation at a high school on jobs and careers, with a number of others. She was perturbed to find that a plumber made more than she did as a federal employee and professional.

    1427:

    Teo House Democrats are already calling on the FBI to open a criminal probe about that phone call.

    Hell, no, he won't be at the Inauguration....

    1428:

    As I sincerely hope that you have noted by now, I am very much NOT ignoring that insanity and am even less prepared to accept it! Yes, I am a prophet crying in the wilderness, but that is the story of my life :-(

    Until and unless I see some realistic whole-cycle efficiency estimates (i.e. from burning natural gas to actual propulsion, INCLUDING manufacturing and disposal fuel use) OR a good indication that we are going to increase our (UK) electricity generation by a factor of three without burning more fossil fuels, I shall remain deeply suspicious of your claims.

    The benefit that electric vehicles will reduce the urban atmospheric pollution is clear, but all other claimed benefits are essentially pure polemic. I agree that the potential reduction in fossil fuel use in some countries is considerable, but the relevant figure is for the whole life-cycle and not just the on-road use. And I haven't seen any figures that weren't by people vigorously grinding axes (and not just by the electric proponents).

    1429:

    In the US, that "title inflation" was what companies started doing, as they were destroying unions, partly to inflate the titles when they weren't giving raises, and partly... actually, a lot, to call people "management", so that they couldn't be in unions. My #1 example is, of course, "administrative assistant", who's in management, rather than "secretary", who could join unions.

    Oh, and then you can give the former secretary a few bucks more a year, and call her "salaried", and have her work "as much as it takes", instead of letting her go home at the end of 8 hours....

    1430:

    "There's nothing logical about who gets to do a profession in terms of safety."

    The biggest deficiency right now is software where there are neither requirements nor liability for the consequences.

    It takes more paperwork to certify the power-cable to a medical device, than it does to certify the software in it.

    1431:

    Please - what do you mean "getting" out of hand?

    I knew a dentist, back in '04, who told me that her lawyer wanted her to get an SUV, which was classified in FL as "a truck", and then she could deduct it on taxes as a corporate expense.

    There needs to be an additional driving test for vehnicles over 5000 vehicle weight. And esp if they're fucking jacked up, and longer than, say, 18'.

    I won't get started on whether there should be national laws against tinting any window so dark I can't see oncoming traffic through it when pulling out of a parking space.

    1432:

    Agreed. I'd point out still further that, if EVs continue to exceed expectations in terms of useful lifespan, it's going to be awhile before we see what full lifecycle looks like for these things. And, we're likely going to have to switch to EVs without necessarily knowing what the full life cycle is, just on the chance that it will work out.

    I will note that we switched to gas-powered cars in an era when there were long and contentious arguments about how long the petroleum supply would last, and well after the first paper on the potential for climate change had been written and ignored. By that standard, we're being considerably more thoughtful, perhaps to a level of overcautious, in switching away from gas to electricity. Given what the idiots in charge thought they knew a century ago about how long the gas would last, we're doing pretty well.

    1433:

    P H-K "Round Cells" Abstract: In the late 1960's Bell Laboratories developed a novel cylindrical design for a stationary reserve lead acid battery to provide back-up power in the Bell Telephone System's central offices. The extensive laboratory test and evaluation data suggested that this design should significantly extend the expected life and reduce maintenance in telephone float service vs. conventional designs available at that time. Limited commercial production of this design was initiated in 1972, with full-scale production at two manufacturers underway by 1974. To date more than 1.5 million cells have been made, installed and used by the divested telecom heirs to their Bell System forefathers, as well as nonBell companies. Actual discharge test, field inspection and overall performance evaluation results are presented on more than 14,000 individual round cells, ranging from less than one to more than 24 years in service. Round cell string capacity tests show a level trend with no string failures for the full 24-year period. Individual round cell tests of the 14,568 round cell population indicate a worst case failure rate of 19 round cells in the 14,568 cell population, or 0.1% failure. Eliminating cells of questionable suitability (not recharged, etc.) results in a failure rate of only 2 cells of the 14,551 remaining round cell population, or 0.01% failure. The 1970's accelerated tests had projected plate growth to reach only 2% in 70 years. Plate growth data from round cells removed from field service for 7, 15 and 23 years appear to confirm that projection. The data also indicates zero post seal or jar cover seal leakage in any of the more than 14,000 round cells tested, in stark contrast to the traditional field expectations of post seal and jar/cover seal leakage in either rectangular flooded or valve regulated lead acid (VRLA) cell designs. An actual post seal leakage rate of 4 to 10 percent was found on the more than 28,000 rectangular flooded cell population tested. Capacity test results on the >14,000 VRLA cell test population follow results of other recent publications. VRLA average string capacities trend linearly downward with age, reaching 80% in only 5 years. This study lends further credence to what appeared at the time to be exorbitant promises of the 1970's with regard to both reduced capacity aging and grid growth rates. This study also reports a zero rate of post seal and jar/cover seal leakage, unique in the industry.

    whitroth In the US, certainly, most median-income people are living paycheck-to-paycheck, and a big hospital will bankrupt them. The people responsible for this should be hung - slowly.

    1434:

    I think in general they do good, as I can't help but think otherwise a lot more bad/evil would happen in the world.

    Though as the opioid crisis shows they aren't perfect with far to many "professionals" choosing profit over ethics.

    Or sadly, look at many members of government who often seem to have a background in law (like Ted Cruz), and who frequently seem to forget any ethics stuff they may have been taught/sworn to.

    So in general, good as it makes it clear to the many what exactly it means, but imperfect as it doesn't stop those inclined to behave badly anyway.

    1435:

    Heteromeles @ 1421 "And since I really dislike this whole American style of driving, I tend to campaign for people to use smaller electric cars and worry a bit more about how well they drive."

    I wish everybody could use the size of car they need at the time they need it. For Greg Tingey it's using a car/truck at that portion in time when it's a used vehicle. For me it was using in a more or less regular fashion a portion of the smallest Toyota in a car share company.

    But when I left Montreal I left the vast network of parking spaces/pick-up points of that car share company and went to a city where car sharing was nearly nonexistant. The Montreal car share company was a private enterprise and it saw no profit in operating elsewhere.

    So to me the big problem is not so much with hi tech or the size of a car but in the legal structure that makes car operations profitable and in the lack of entrepreneurs in "green" fields.

    Fortunately there is at least a vast infrastructure for used cars//trucks.

    1436:

    That aspect is a hell of a lot better in the USA than the UK! The insurance cartel makes it prohibitively expensive to hire cars when needed, unless you need them for only a day or so. It would be (technically) trivial to sort out, but our government is one of by the people by the cartels and for the cartels.

    1437:

    Ok, it may be up to you, Charlie. I was expecting the traitorous Orange Hairball to head for his dacha on the Black Sea... but his first stop may be... Scotland.

    https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/1/4/2005829/-Airport-near-Trump-s-golf-resort-in-Scotland-is-alerted-to-a-US-military-plane-arriving-1-19-21

    1438:

    Most people buy cars for actual use, not pretension.

    Maybe in England. Not so much in North America.

    1439:

    This could be interesting. Scotland going into lockdown, and Trump possibly making plans to head there January 19…

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/jan/04/scotland-to-go-into-full-lockdown-at-midnight-sturgeon-announces

    https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/donald-trump-could-fly-scotland-23254563

    Prestwick Airport has been told to expect the arrival of a US military Boeing 757 aircraft, which is occasionally used by Trump, on January 19 - the day before his Democratic rival takes charge at the White House.

    Speculation surrounding Trump's plans has been fuelled by the activity of US Army aircraft, which were based at Prestwick airport for a week and said to be carrying out 3D reconnaissance of the president's Turnberry resort.

    Sources at Prestwick said two US military surveillance aircraft were circling Turnberry in November, using the Ayrshire aviation hub as a base.

    US media has reported that Trump will break with tradition and snub the inauguration of President Joe Biden on January 20, instead announcing a re-election bid on Air Force One.

    If Trump does fly to Scotland he could be in breach of coronavirus restrictions. Trump Turnberry is effectively closed until February 5 due to Tier 4 rules, according to the resort's website.

    The US Department of State - America's equivalent of the Foreign Office - said it was for the White House to comment. The White House did not respond.

    The Scottish Government said the UK Government's Foreign Office is responsible for planning Presidential visits. Transport Scotland said: "This is an operational matter for the airport itself".

    1440:

    Re: ' ... there are neither requirements nor liability for the consequences.'

    Agree.

    IMO 'ethics' implies 'responsibility'. The why of how one should act is usually tied to potential outcomes usu. harms done to self and/or others.

    Haven't conducted a survey on this but my impression is that any group calling itself a 'profession' has a code of ethics/standards. Typically such codes are a collective and individual promise to self-regulate/police not just as a form of power-grab but because they possess specialized knowledge which the general public (client) does not possess. Professional groups basically enter a contract with society: because they choose to lever such specialized knowledge for their own benefit (revenue), they therefore also recognize and accept that they have an obligation to warn/keep from harm.

    I consider this just one more layer or stab at recognizing social and interpersonal responsibility. (Religions and legal systems are the primary two.)

    1441:

    Robert Prior @ 1439

    Dang! I'm going to lose my bet. I was sure he'd head to Zurich.

    1442:

    It takes more paperwork to certify the power-cable to a medical device, than it does to certify the software in it.

    Although some statutory regulators are investigating ways to regulate medical software as though it were itself a medical device. That's a work in progress, it seems that COVID has slowed it down a bit. There are some other angles to address the risks that such software brings. For instance most places have an infrastructure around managing safety and quality in healthcare processes and practices. Cybersecurity, for instance, has a significant behavioural component and it is useful to cast it as an organisational ethics problem, and this is quite amenable to treatment under safety and quality. But I think the overview picture is that there are many silos, while certain problems don't fit into the purview of any one of them neatly, so this aggregate is still being worked out.

    1443:

    Niala There were also the considerations of: "Never, ever have to buy another one" & "be able to do all routine & some other maintenance" You can see why I picked the machine I have!

    IQ45 inside the Wee Fiswife's jurisdiction & breaking lockdown! Ah weel, laddie, Alba has some really authentic auld prisons ye ken. A special cell could always be provided inside Hermitage Castle

    1444:

    "Cybersecurity, for instance, has a significant behavioural component"

    That is a very poor substitute for product liability.

    The only two things you can sell without any product liability in EU are software and religion.

    1445:

    There's nothing logical about who gets to do a profession in terms of safety.

    I think the truth of the situation is in between yours and Charlie's comments, that it is not uniform or even consistent across different domains of expertise or different geographical areas, and often where there are genuine problems caused by incompetent practitioners, the licensing scheme justified on that basis can be implemented in ways that end up being orthogonal to the problem. From what I see in health, and more generally in Queensland and Australia in general, which are both places that lean toward more regulation rather than less, it's a far from homogenous situation, where there is a certain amount of shared responsibility between government entities and industry groups (in some cases legislation directly transfers responsibility to such groups).

    I totally agree with your perspective that even where it can be seen as an unproblematic good, it is often used for mercurial purposes in grossly hucksterish, shameless way. But we also only have a limited view of the scale of issues with unlicensed practitioners and competence, to an extent that selection bias is almost certainly going to lead to erroneous impressions without some sort of systematic review and a structured collection of data that is representative of the situation.

    There are good arguments for licensing beauticians (potential for serious injury) and realtors (building safety requirements at the time of sale), but there's a question about what practices need to have the force of law versus simply promoting businesses which have independent accreditations and so on. It's a big continuum, and it's not a linear one.

    1446:

    whitroth @ 1370: Really? Mostly, if they're really burned out (like my dearly departed beloved Toyota Tercel wagon), they literally are nothing but scrap metal. All insurance companies would consider them totaled.

    Never done a classic car restoration?

    1447:

    When they're burned out, the frame, etc, is usually twisted.

    And restoring a car is waaaaay more fun than I want, nor, now, do I have the garage, tools, or energy to do that.

    Now, a kit car... maybe 25 years ago, if I could have afforded one... here's one: https://carscoms.com/1932-replica-kit-makes-rolls-royce-cabriolet-oldtimer-baron-imperial-164539.html

    1448:

    Niala @ 1380: Charlie Stross @ 1377

    "So: tow truck with a "fish tank" on the back, have a fire tender stand by while moving the smouldering wreck into the tank, then pump water until the wreckage is submerged."

    Don't you also need a truck with a huge fireproof hydraulic arm on it to pick up the car and dip it into the tank?

    It seems much simpler to me to keep a big folded fire blanket in a single truck and take it out manually and unfold it and have two fire persons slip it over a burning car to choke the fire.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlLVtBnxgD0

    That's cool and all, but don't the batteries in EVs generate their own oxidiser when burning?

    And it would be better if the company's web site had easy to find information about the product ...
    How big is it?
    How much does it weigh?
    How many times can you use it before it has to be replaced? Can you hose it off & pack it up to use again?
    How effective is it for multi-vehicle accidents
    How much does it cost?

    1449:

    That is a very poor substitute for product liability.

    Resisting the urge to look again, I don't think I was offering as one. Rather it was an example where the situation is complicated by multiple interested organisational entities in most real-world organisations, and parts of an issue might be best seen from a perspective that isn't obvious the first time you encounter it.

    AIUI European jurisdictions are currently working on mandatory usability standards in health software, as an example of legislative mechanisms. The assignment of responsibility along the chain from purchaser to manufacturer to implementer to operator to internal standards entities to trainers and change managers to end-users is complex, safety being one of the areas where it's especially complex. If it wasn't, healthcare-associated infection wouldn't still be a major issue in most hospitals worldwide.

    1450:

    Nancy Lebovitz @ 1404: How much good do folks here think ethics courses do?

    Probably depends on how ethical a person is before they sign up for the course.

    1451:

    It takes more paperwork to certify the power-cable to a medical device, than it does to certify the software in it.

    No, it does not. EN62304 comes with significant requirements on "the paperwork" for software running on a medical device, in particular if the device through some mishap could feasibly cause damage to the patient. This includes a requirement specification, test specification for each requirement, design, patient risk analysis and infrastructure to handle incidents and defects. And there must be full traceability. Manufacturers of medical devices will be audited at regular intervals to ensure that they actually do the paperwork.

    There is a new directive that came into effect in 2020 where the paperwork needed for new or substantially changed products (IIRC) has been increased, and the auditors are also expected to be specialists in the field that they are auditing. So, if the software documentation is being audited, at least one of the auditors must be a software specialist. (I am surprised that it was not a requirement earlier, but at least it is now.)

    It is true that the individual software developer at a medical device company is not liable for any damage caused by his or her software, but the company is. And rightly so, because if someone did get hurt by the software, it was also a failure of everyone involved in validating the code, e.g. through review, testing, risk assessment and mitigation and so on.

    1452:

    JBS @ 1448

    "That's cool and all, but don't the batteries in EVs generate their own oxidiser when burning?"

    They do, even underwater in some cases. But the time varies. That's what has me stumped. The time varies too much. The Finnish fire brigades (Mikko @ 1392) (who don't use blankets)leave the car for two days in the "pool" they carry around

    The immediate goal of the blankets (there's more than one maker) is to isolate the fire in a multi car accident or in a parking lot or underground garage. Some of the blankets can be reused and they're costlier.

    One of the vendor sites asks $2,422 for a reusable one:

    https://www.edarley.com/car-fire-blanket/

    1453:

    Re: 'Scotland going into lockdown, and Trump possibly making plans to head there January 19…'

    Maybe someone told DT how the Brits will not send Assange back and is hoping he too can evade extradition/his day in court (jail). (How would Scots react I wonder?)

    1454:

    "The Finnish fire brigades (Mikko @ 1392) (who don't use blankets)leave the car for two days in the "pool" they carry around"

    How can they do that during the winter ?

    I would expect the water freezing to burst the container ?

    Here is a semi-technical article about the same kind of container in Denmark:

    https://ing.dk/artikel/slukningscontainer-her-kan-brandvaesenet-isolere-braendende-elbiler-231520

    (Google translate will probably manage)

    The overall idea is to be able to drag the burning car into the container and haul it out of the way until it stops burning, the main concern seems to be that leaving it to burn out in-situ might disrupt traffic for hours.

    I can find no mention anywhere that it has been used "in anger" yet.

    1455:

    SFR & RP Joking aside! And see my previous comment ( #1443 ) - this is a foreign-policy/international issue & is therefore "reserved" to "Westminster" .... who probably wouldn't want to touch it with someone else's! If it was on the 19th, then IQ45 is still US president, with security ... but coming here WITHOUT AN INVITE OR PERMISSION (?) What passport is he carrying: Diplomatic or Ordinary/ Will his security detail be armed - if so & without permission they will go: "Directly to Jail, do not pass go, do not collect £500" - and then be quietly escorted on to a US-bound plane as shortly after 13.00hrs GMT Wednesday as physically possible. Thus leaving IQ45, in Britain, without a valid passport, permission, breaking the C19 regulations ( Even stiffer, now ) - and thoroughly loathed by about 85-90% of the populace. Slinging him into "preventive detention" in some suitable hole ( Barlinnie? ) might be amusing - see my suggestion above - but frankly we will want rid of him a.s.a.p.

    Charlie - want to add to the laughs on this one? Oh, & I agree with a previous poster about 2021 shaping up as a clown-car show, you really could not make this shit up.

    1456:

    Biden & co now have a problem: It's obvious they were going to let "The States" deal with IQ45's state crimes & keep him in the courts & probably jail - which is NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH "Federal" crimes. The released recorded conversations shows him committing (IIRC) "Seditious Conspiracy" - & they may/will have to do something about that.

    On the contrary, long before this week there have been plenty of federal charges that could in theory be prosecuted. This one doesn't change the federal playing field much.

    Although as far as I know he was not in legal trouble in the state of Georgia before now. The only lawyer I know who's looked at the actual laws of Georgia (disclaimers: I know him personally and he doesn't practice in Georgia) says that yes, this looks like a prosecutable offense - but Georgia might not find it worthwhile to do anything.

    Biden might find it politically expedient as well as satisfying to let the state of New York haul him in first. A state prosecution is operationally distant from the presidency and New York is known to want to ask him questions about his taxes. This is fine with me; I would be delighted if he were sent upstate to Dannemora, New York's Little Siberia.

    1457:

    Self @ 1455 There is the suggestion that it isn't for IQ 45 in person, but for Melanoma, oops, "Melania" Thoughts on that?

    1458:

    whitroth @ 1437: Ok, it may be up to you, Charlie. I was expecting the traitorous Orange Hairball to head for his dacha on the Black Sea... but his first stop may be... Scotland.

    https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/1/4/2005829/-Airport-near-Trump-s-golf-resort-in-Scotland-is-alerted-to-a-US-military-plane-arriving-1-19-21

    If he does, what are the chances the UK will extradite him to the US?

    1459:

    "What passport is he carrying: Diplomatic or Ordinary"

    Former US presidents have diplomatic passports.

    I think I read somewhere that Carter insisted on also having a "normal" passport, for when he was not travelling in any official capacity.

    1460:

    whitroth @ 1447: When they're burned out, the frame, etc, is usually twisted.

    Sometimes. Older cars were built a bit sturdier.

    1461:

    Poul-Henning Kamp @ 1454 : "How can they do that during the winter ?" "I would expect the water freezing to burst the container ?"

    I don't know. I would expect them to use something like a battery-fed dock bubbler. You know, the kind of bubble-making machine used to prevent your dock from being crushed by the winter ice on a lake. Assuming you have a house or winterized vacation home by a lake, and a dock too elaborate to be just pulled out of the water during winter.

    Do a google search under "dock bubbler"

    They also have smaller systems for ponds.

    Google had no problems translating the first paragraph of that article but the rest was blocked by a paywall.

    1462:

    "There is the suggestion that it isn't for IQ 45 in person, but for Melanoma, oops, "Melania" Thoughts on that?"

    Very unlikely the USAF would consent to that. The last ride out of town is merely a courtesy gesture.

    My bet is that he is going to evacuate the entire clan, in order to not leave any potential hostages behind.

    The stop in Scotland is as far as USAF are willing to take him, and they can defend that decision on him having property there, and because it will not require a fighter escort to fly there.

    My second bet is that they will transit without ever clearing customs in Scotland, and leave on a private jet for one of many possible odious destinations.

    Ivanka and Jared mat elope to Israel before then, I'm sure moving the embassy to Jerusalem has bought them de-facto political asylum and immunity from extradiction attempts.

    1463:

    Another possibility is that he gets hauled in front of multiple state and local courts, on tax evasion, reckless endangerment, and the like. The interesting and unlikely situation is if the Republican Party either regenerates a notochord of basic principles, or alternately splits and decides to sic the laws on each other. In that latter case, we've got a lot of potential federal sedition charges floating around. Possibly. It's more possible that IQ.45 will pardon all the US representatives who committed sedition on his behalf.

    The interesting question will be if Agent Orange is out of the country by January 20, and what his secret service detail does, if anything, when he gets brought up on charges. My suspicion is that they will unseal charges at noon on January 20, or (possibly) right after Biden's inaugural speech. It will make for messy new coverage, what with Trump supposedly announcing a run for office in 2024 to interrupt Biden's inauguration, with that preempted by a long list of charges that Trump is being indicted for in New York and possibly elsewhere, along with a flurry of "preserve evidence" writs from various AGs and DAs.

    January 20 is going to be an interesting day. If we're really (un)lucky, A certain US government 757 will head for either a notional Black Sea dacha or Saudi Arabia and get shot down by Iran. By accident, of course. I'd give this a probability around 0.0, but stupider things have happened.

    1464:

    'Do a google search under "dock bubbler"'

    If you had asked me three minutes ago what a "dock bubbler" were, I would have had no idea :-)

    1465:

    Scott Sanford @ 1456: Biden might find it politically expedient as well as satisfying to let the state of New York haul him in first. A state prosecution is operationally distant from the presidency and New York is known to want to ask him questions about his taxes. This is fine with me; I would be delighted if he were sent upstate to Dannemora, New York's Little Siberia.

    You left out the best part.

    The prison in Dannemora is named the Clinton Correctional Facility.

    1466:

    How can they do that during the winter ?

    I would expect the water freezing to burst the container ?

    It will have a burning vehicle inside it? Should keep the water warm enough while the battery pack is still hazardous, once you can see ice forming it's probably safe to drain it and lift the wreck out. Looking at the image it appears the box can be removed so I'd expect each truck to come with several spares and there being an isolated area somewhere for the ones in use to sit while they wait for things to cool down.

    Though the dock bubbler mentioned would probably work too...

    1467:

    Poul-Henning Kamp @ 1462:

    "There is the suggestion that it isn't for IQ 45 in person, but for Melanoma, oops, "Melania"
    Thoughts on that?"

    Very unlikely the USAF would consent to that. The last ride out of town is merely a courtesy gesture.

    My bet is that he is going to evacuate the entire clan, in order to not leave any potential hostages behind.

    The stop in Scotland is as far as USAF are willing to take him, and they can defend that decision on him having property there, and because it will not require a fighter escort to fly there.

    My second bet is that they will transit without ever clearing customs in Scotland, and leave on a private jet for one of many possible odious destinations.

    Ivanka and Jared mat elope to Israel before then, I'm sure moving the embassy to Jerusalem has bought them de-facto political asylum and immunity from extradiction attempts.

    The Trump Organization "OWNS" a Boeing 757. Last I know about it, it's stuck at Stewart International Airport in Newburgh, NY missing an engine. They've been looking for an engine that could be used for a single flight down to Louisiana for maintenance. Apparently it's due for a major inspection/maintenance overhaul before it will be deemed airworthy and the Trump Organization dropped the ball because they didn't anticipate he wouldn't be flying Air Force One any more.

    If N757AF is not in Scotland when Trumpolini & Co. get there, they ain't going any farther on the Air Force's dime. And it don't look like it is going to be there.

    1468:

    licenses being required for beauticians and hairdressers?

    Both of whom common buy chemicals like acetone by the gallon. And store it on the premises. The "apply coating to live human" business involves a whole lot of exciting things, many of which "cause cancer in the state of california" and some of which cause chemists to run very fast. It's an ongoing problem for customs because a lot of what comes out of cheap asian suppliers comes with MSDS that are at best misleading. Generally misleadingly optimistic statements like "contains no formaldehyde".

    I can see why you'd want to at least require someone in the shop to have hazardous materials training, and if that's not possible at least require that someone in the company has passed a 20 question multichoice test on material safety at least once.

    Mind you, in some parts of the USA at least, they should also have a "slavery is not ok" section to the qualification because IIRC New York at least has regular problems with human trafficking in the beautiology industry.

    1469:

    Maybe Scotland is just a refueling stop on the way to the UAE?

    1470:

    JBS @ 1467: "If N757AF is not in Scotland when Trumpolini & Co. get there, they ain't going any farther on the Air Force's dime. And it don't look like it is going to be there."

    Yes, but in the following weeks he might be able to sell his still-unrepaired N757AF registry 757 to a friendly billionaire. With that money he would have enough to buy a smaller business jet and still have pocket change left.

    1471:

    You left out the best part. The prison in Dannemora is named the Clinton Correctional Facility.

    I buried the lede, yes. Given that it exists, isn't it delightful to think of The Donald being locked up there?

    For those who don't know New York trivia, the prison is named after the county, which is in turn named after George Clinton the first governor of New York state, later the fourth vice president, and no relation to Bill or Hillary. But there's a lot to be said for The Donald having to hear the name Clinton every day for the rest of his life.

    1472:

    Re: "Melania" Thoughts on that?'

    Two possibilities:

    1- Probably exercising that pre-nup she insisted DT sign before moving into the WH: just as soon as she lands in Scotland, she's gonna disappear.

    2- Or, given the report that DT threw a hissy fit with her re-decorating of Mar-a-Lago, i.e., he didn't like it and immediately ordered some parts of it to be torn down, she may be looking for some particular objets d'art. Are any of the museums open during this lock-down? When's the last time they did a complete inventory, esp. of the really shiny, gold stuff?

    1473:

    The Trump Organization "OWNS" a Boeing 757. Last I know about it, it's stuck at Stewart International Airport in Newburgh, NY missing an engine. They've been looking for an engine that could be used for a single flight down to Louisiana for maintenance. Apparently it's due for a major inspection/maintenance overhaul before it will be deemed airworthy and the Trump Organization dropped the ball because they didn't anticipate he wouldn't be flying Air Force One any more.

    On one hand the single engined 757 was parked back in July and any competent organization would be able to sort things out in half a year, particularly when there was a well known deadline for when the hardware would be needed again. On the other hand, Trump and competence have never gone together; as you point out as of early December it was still there.

    1474:

    "I challenge you to suggest a functionally equivalent EV alternative to my Skoda Fabia 'estate', at a comparable weight. I'll even be generous, and let you drop its nominal range from 550 miles to 400."

    Skoda Fabia Estate (SFE) Mass 1256 kg Mid range Aptera Mass 800 kg

    SFE in two seat configuration cargo 1370 litres Aptera cargo 707 litres bed lid closed. Bed lid open not specified.

    SFE range (per EC) 550 miles Mid range Aptera (per Aptera) 400 miles.

    Not exactly equal. The SFE carries nearly twice much without anything protruding, but it's 50% heavier. The SFE has longer range if it happens to be full when you start, but given that the tank isn't full when you start, but some lesser amount, that's less every trip, in the real world its sometimes much shorter range.

    Overall pretty equal I think, though the Aptera does have a camper van mode that the SFE lacks.

    1475:

    Re: DT's flight from ...

    DT also owns a Cessna Citation X according to a celeb-mag. Another article mentioned a helicopter that he'd put up for sale late 2020. Looks like he's got more than one exit option.

    1476:

    Ivanka and Jared mat elope to Israel before then, I'm sure moving the embassy to Jerusalem has bought them de-facto political asylum and immunity from extradiction attempts.

    My (admittedly superficial) understanding of Israel is they still require the friendship/support of the US, so I wouldn't be so sure that Ivanka/Jared would be so safe in Israel.

    What's that, you want to buy new arms? Well, hand over the Kushners...

    The interesting question will be if Agent Orange is out of the country by January 20, and what his secret service detail does, if anything, when he gets brought up on charges.

    Nothing? If he is outside of the US then the Secret Service detail would at a guess be reduced to very qualified body guards from a legal perspective, and wouldn't have legal standing to say arrest him (and if they do have that ability he will simply have dismissed them the moment he is an ex-President, further removing their legal power over him).

    Re: "Melania" Thoughts on that?'

    A lot depends on how much she knows.

    Spousal privilege ends with divorce...

    1477:

    Given some discussions over the last several months some may find this podcast episode interesting.

    They discuss (in plain english) an overview of Covid and the vaccine development, and then move on to discuss several things including the state of SpaceX, electric cars, developments in nuclear power (both fission and fusion), growth in solar and wind (and how low they are as a percentage.

    https://dotnetrocks.com/?show=1720

    1478:

    SFReader @ 1475: "DT also owns a Cessna Citation X according to a celeb-mag."

    I missed that one completely. Wikipedia also missed it in its "Trump Force One" article.

    And it's not only in a celeb-mag, it's also on jalopnik and the NY Times:

    https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/donald-trumps-other-jet-is-this-heavily-badged-but-seld-1766617173

    https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/27/nyregion/after-a-legal-maneuver-donald-trumps-jet-is-cleared-to-fly.html

    It's a business jet with 8 seats and a 6,410 km range according to its Wikipedia article, if you can still trust Wikipedia.

    1479:

    Thanks. Saw that plane (NF757AF) parked there in Aug 2019 at an air show, but starboard was facing not port so I didn't spot the missing engine if it was missing at the time.[1] Been keeping an eye out for it; might have a look this week with a spotting scope or binoculars. Google translate deserves a hat tip for the translation of this: https://www.laquotidienne.fr/les-voyages-de-donald-trump-egalement-a-larret/ Proof that the best will, the most vehement assertions are not always enough to retain power. ... Donald Trump's entire technical team is actively looking for solutions to be able to quickly find a Rolls Royce RB211 reactor to restore the T-bird.

    [1] cropped phone image: N757AF20190824 [2],[3] [2] For UK people: redarrows_20190824 performing at the same air show in the USA. [3] 1:400 model of NF757AF.

    1480:

    There is no rational explanation for licensing of occupations. In many cases, it does seem like rent-seeking and/or market capture by training institutions.

    [i]Hairdressers and barbers[/i] Here in Ontario, barbers and hairdressers require a common license. Even though the skills are quite different ... barbers study chemical use and hairdressers practice just enough with razors for the exam, and then promptly forget.

    There is a basic public health and safety rationale for competence and knowledge requirements. In addition to chemical use, these occupations use sharp tools in contact with or in close proximity to human anatomy. And, they need to recognize ectoparasites and transmissible skin and scalp infections that require infection control beyond the basic precautions.

    [i]Beauticians, manicurists, etc.[/i] On the other hand, these people perform very similar work on different parts of the body. Sharp tools, skin contact, possible skin infections, hazardous chemical use. But they don't need a license or training. Their shops usually show no evidence of infection control, control of solvent vapors or ultraviolet radiation. And, as you write, often the staff have limited or no proficiency in either official language. Which does raise the potential of "less than free" labour or outright slavery.

    There is a reason why I get my gnarly, weird toenails trimmed by a licensed health professional (chiropodist or podiatrist, depending on where they went to school).

    1481:

    "The Trump Organization "OWNS" a Boeing 757. Last I know about it, it's stuck at Stewart International Airport in Newburgh, NY missing an engine. They've been looking for an engine that could be used for a single flight down to Louisiana for maintenance. "

    Knowing what we know about Trump and his finances: No, they almost certainly do not own a 757.

    They may have leased it, and very likely defaulted on payments when it stopped working, and the owner, having nobody else to lease it to is not in rush to pour money into it.

    As for it being stuck like that: You can get almost anything in the air transport repair business, except credit. That industry knows far too well about customers "just taking off", so almost anything is COD or even prepaid transactions.

    1482:

    P H-K PROBLEMS - Only works if he is still IQ45 & not merely "Mr Drumpf", i.e. before 13.00hrs Washington DC time on Wednesday. ( 18.00 GMT ) After that he's a US citizen on British territory, & probably breaking C-19 lockdown rules. "Clearing Customs" - irrelevant: The moment he sets foot on Scottish "soil" he's subject to our laws, at which point Secure, comfortable preventive detention seems the most likely outcome. How nice. This could be really amusing - you could sell popcorn! ( Ivanka / Jared --> Israel. That is plausible ) Could that jet make Washington - Tel Aviv in one hop - what's its fuel capacity? See also thoughts on the smaller plane, lower down.

    This is looking less & less likely - unless BoZo has secretly given them permission to land. If he has the shitstorm will be immense. And a certain elderly, but very important lady will definitely be "Not amused" as the saying goes. Like I said we have some very old, extremely impressive fortified & secure places to put people like him.

    H @ 1463 Much more likely - which is why he's trying to flee, of course. Yup 2021 for clown-car year

    RvdH REMINDER Even if it is "Only" a refuelling stop - it's on the ground in the UK on a civilian airport. Our patch, our rules. See also H on "one hop only" on leaving office? The same applies to SFR's comment ... The moment Melanoma lands in Scotland, she's on our patch. She only gets to leave when we let her. RANGE of a Cessna Citation X ???? - ah yes, thanks 6410 km. And using google-maps measure distance function, Great Circle Wash DC - Israel = 9500km Whereas Wash DC - Prestwick = 5510 + Prestwick Tel Aviv = 4024 So do-able, provide he's got the moolah to pay for the fuel & isn't "taken into protective custody" the moment he lands.

    1483:

    Whitroth: That leads to me consider that the old, CORRECT definition of "middle class" were professionals and small-to-medium business owners.

    Not in the UK!

    In the 19th century there were about 13-14 classes, although only three "official" ones.

  • Upper class: the thousand families -- peers of the realm and their families. Your male head of the household could sit in the House of Lords (exception: Baronets couldn't). Membership was hereditary and patrilineal. You could be poor, but it usually tracked land ownership (for values of land on the sale of "Northumberland") with enough territory locked up via entailments that an idiot who gambled away his inheritance could be followed by a frugal son and then re-accumulation of money via rents.
  • (Baronets were a special case: a 17th century bolt-on ersatz title of nobility invented to raise money for the King, the title was hereditary but sold (for a small fortune), and didn't confer legislative powers or a bunch of the rights other titled aristocrats would expect.)

  • Middle class: the clergy and lawyers. Doctors were a late addition. Typically about 1,000-10,000 male householders and their families. Note that at the high end, Bishops and Judges got to sit in the Lords: status overlapped with the upper class in that respect.

  • Lower class: everybody else, from destitute vagrants, widows, and orphans up to wealthy factory owners and captains of industry. There were roughly 10 graduations within lower class, from "destitute" up to respectable working lower class, to business owners (for example farmers, publicans) and at the high end a level of wealth overlapping with the upper class.

  • In general the wealthy would aspire to a knighthood for public service, or marry their daughters into the more impoverished bits of the aristocracy: they got the association with a title of nobility by proxy ("Sir Jumped-Up Businessman here is actually the father-in-law of Baron Bankrupt"). Then they'd pretend to have been upper class/aristocracy all along, hence the appearance of social immobility: in practice, the Victorians had more fluid social mobility than present day Americans.

    Note that for a businessman, getting the respectable family association opened doors to investment capital: with a lot of money controlled by the aristocracy (because rent, because landowners) being able to be introduced as baron somebody-or-other's in-law got you in the door, whereas being just another jumped-up tradeseman didn't.

    But anyway: 13-15 social classes, fluid (but unacknowledged) class mobility, emphasis on family lineage. And the relics of this system are with us today: it's not dissimilar in the US, you just rebranded "lower class" as "middle class" and "nobility" as "billionaire".

    1484:

    Charlie There was also the "new" class the Engineers & Technocrats of the period 1800 - 1900 Some of whom accepted peerages, some didn't. But - they were listened to & consulted - the Victorians were sensible enough to realise that these people were actually important. ( Armstrong / Arrol / Fowler / Baker / Cubitt etc -it's a long list )

    1485:

    Greg Tingey @ 1482: "This is looking less & less likely - unless BoZo has secretly given them permission to land. If he has the shitstorm will be immense."

    I'm betting that Bozo has given Trump a secret permission to land and then quarantine himself on his big, empty golf course in Scotland.

    1486:

    Some corrections: my car weighs only 1090 Kg, according to the book; and I said 'nominal' for the range, because I used the official fuel figures.

    However, the Aptera Mass sounded interesting, so I did a Web search, but found nothing on that model. What I did find indicates that the Aptera 2 and 3 are not even remotely functionally equivalent, and the 5-seat version is (at best) only just being designed. The Aptera Web site has nothing but idiot-bait videos, which always makes me suspicious.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptera_Motors#The_4_Wheeled,_5_or_6_Passenger_Aptera

    Perhaps I should stress that I am talking about cars for actual use, today. I would accept forthcoming cars if there were strong evidence of exactly what they will do, when they will appear, that they will be legal on UK roads, and that they will be maintainable for 10 years. But the Aptera fails on ALL of those.

    1487:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1486

    By doing a Google search with "Aptera camper" I think I found the Aptera camper gasdive was talking about. Unfortunately the founder of Aptera gave no hint as to its cost or availability.

    https://wefunder.com/updates/132009-solar-powered-camping-with-aptera

    By doing a Google search with "skoda fabia camper" I discovered that you didn't need a flexible extension in the back to sleep in a Skoda Fabia. It was long enough to stretch out, as is. In fact this couple slept in the back of theirs on a 16,000 km trip on the Silk Roads.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=QqyZg-imUls

    1488:

    Thanks very much. It was probably an experimental model - anyway, it fails dismally as a practical alternative, not least because it is only a 2-seater.

    My old Austin Cambridge estate was big enough for two people of over 6' to sleep in comfortably, but that was a much larger car. From the video, they had removed the rear seats of that Skoda Fabia estate entirely and were fairly short people, anyway - I couldn't even remotely stretch out in it, and it's normally only just big enough to get my folded recumbent trike in.

    It's a real pain that is a requirement, anyway - I would MUCH rather take it by train, but that's no longer possible in the UK.

    1489:

    Niala If that is the case, the shitstorm really will be immense - & - much as I loathe BoZo we simply don't want it. People will ignore the lockdown & simply riot if that happens & a lot of people will be asking very awkward questions. It would be an act of monumental stupidity & arrogance that would make even Brexit look sane & normal. [ Turnberry - Prestwick is 26km in a straight line. ]

    1490:

    Charlie - want to add to the laughs on this one?

    Only to say that, if he arrives on a 757, Prestwick -- which is used to refueling US military transports -- would be a perfect midpoint refueling stop on his way to Jeddah or Moscow. (A 757 could probably do either from the east coast US on a single tank, but it'd be a bit tight, and that's a long flight for a narrow-body.)

    Trump's expressed opinions on Scottish independence and Brexit mean that he'd be politically about as welcome to the Scottish government as Nigel Farage (who after his last attempt to do a walkaboutcampaign in Edinburgh had to be escorted out of the country by the police, for his own safety).

    1491:

    Just been out to mine with a tape measure and it looks like I could just fit if the front seats will tilt forward far enough. It would need a platform rigging as the back seats don't fold flat, although there is a lip inside the boot hatch and supports for a cross-bar just behind the back seats for a flat floor shelf which would work for half of it.

    Might see what I can do when the weather warms up a bit and we're allowed out.

    1492:

    Greg Tingey @ 1489: "If that is the case, the shitstorm really will be immense"

    I think that NATO would much prefer for Trump to stay within NATO than go to Russia.

    Trump has managed to make both the developer of Trump Towers Istanbul and president Erdogan of Turkey hopping mad. So that leaves the United Kingdom and that means the big, empty golf course in Scotland.

    Bozo can always present Trump's occupancy of that big empty golf course as a temporary measure while he looks for another suitable home within NATO.

    1493:

    I took the numbers for the current model. I did see that the earlier ones were lighter, but if we are talking about cars that can be bought new today, the weight I gave was correct. Either way, the Aptera is hundreds of kg lighter, which you claimed was impossible, and put out the challenge to name a vehicle that was functionally equivalent.

    You can order an Aptera now, but not yet in RHD.

    https://www.aptera.us/shop

    The camping kit is a 600 dollar option.

    If you're going to exclude cars that aren't guaranteed to be maintainable (absent fabrication or aftermarket) then you've excluded all cars. There's nothing to say any particular manufacturer will exist in 10 years or that they'll still support your car in ten years if they do exist.

    You didn't specify that they had to be on sale in a particular market. You were maintaining that they're physically impossible.

    The mass I got from the Aptera 3 wiki page. The larger vehicles aren't really relevant to this discussion, so where they are in the design phase means nothing.

    I don't know how or why you can simply proclaim that the 3 "isn't remotely functionally equivalent" 2 people plus lots of luggage at 100+ mph down the motorway for 400 miles sounds pretty equivalent to 2 people plus lots of gear down the motorway at 70 mph for 550 miles.

    I'm not saying they're exactly identical. No two different vehicles are. The Skoda can be configured for more people with less luggage, which the Aptera can't. But the Aptera can go 0-60 in well under 4 seconds, while the Skoda takes over 10. (can it even reach 70 mph on the flat with a bit of a head wind?)

    Swings and roundabouts. But functionally, for a single person or a couple, they're equivalent. For the function of a couple going places with stuff, they both perform that function. 2 people and their dog can go visit relatives hundreds of miles away and take lots of stuff in either vehicle. Or do an IKEA run... Whatever, they're functionally equivalent without being identical.

    1494:

    Sigh. The Skoda Fabia estate can carry up to 5 adults and some luggage - and most people who buy that sort of thing often need to carry 4 people - even I, with no children at home, fairly often used it for that before lockdown (guests, you know, and trips to a restaurant/pub with only one person needing to stay sober).

    Willy-waving top speeds are irrelevant, but stability in strong, gusting side-winds is (this is the UK, you know) - my car is poor, but 3-wheelers are notoriously sensitive to them.

    I could go on. I sometimes use the Skoda's full load limit, and I doubt very much that the Aptera's is as large. And .... No, it is not is not even remotely functionally equivalent.

    And don't be more childish than you can help. I never said that they were physically impossible. What I said is that is not the path we are taking - and, if you would stop trying to score points, you might remember that I have been hammering on for ages on this blog alone about why that is wrong and the need for smaller and lighter cars.

    Also, I said "strong evidence" for forthcoming cars, not absolute proof, and most mass-production cars meet that. Given that Aptera has been liquidated once and doesn't even have a production vehicle yet, it's a speculative venture, at best.

    1495:

    One interesting detail is that the date mentioned is the 19th of jan.

    That sounds like he want to get out of Dodge while he is still Commander In Chief.

    Theoretically, if he boarded AF2 on the 20th, after inarguration, Biden would be in control of where it would land, including putting Trumpolino under arrest on touchdown.

    1496:

    Actually, it might be highly amusing if he took up residence in Scotland:

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-51666413

    Given his record, he might find that the planning and enforcement is a little more hostile to him than it has been in the past. Didn't I read about some attempt to convert a club house to a residence without applying for change of use?

    And it would be quite accidental if there were severe problems with connectivity where he happened to be ....

    1497:

    Breaking News (via a Channel 4 news journalist on Twitter): Nicola Sturgeon has explicitly stated, in public, that Dontald Trump is not allowed to come to Scotland this month to escape the Biden inauguration, due to lockdown rules.

    First Minister speaks:

    "I've no idea what Donald Trump's travel plans are. I hope and expect that the travel plan he has is to immediately exit the White House, but beyond that I don't know: but we are not allowing people to come into Scotland without an essential purpose right now, and that would apply to him just as it would apply to anybody else. Coming to play golf is not what I would consider to be an essential purpose."

    1498:

    Yes, though she has no power to prevent him coming, or require him to return, even after he is no longer president. She could probably lock him down in the airport, though, or even have him slung in jail :-) I doubt that we shall have such fun, but (like you, I assume) I expect there will be yet another row between her and Bozo about the latter's behaviour.

    1499:

    Nicola Sturgeon has explicitly stated, in public, that Donald Trump is not allowed to come to Scotland this month to escape the Biden inauguration, due to lockdown rules.

    I am guessing, despite her statements, she legally cannot prevent the visit of a foreign head of state as I be surprised if Westminster ceded that amount of authority.

    What she is doing is playing good politics - letting the public know in no uncertain terms that if Trump does arrive it is against the wishes/desires of the SNP government in Scotland and thus entirely on Boris - and by speaking first preventing Boris from trying to saddle her with some of the fallout.

    1500:

    Re the Trump's destination on 19th January, I still cannot see what the Russian government would gain by letting him stay. (Pass through, perhaps, but where to?)

    1501:

    Immigration is a reserved matter; she cannot prevent him entering, whether he is head of state or a wanted criminal. Yes, she is playing effective politics.

    To waldo: yes, I agree. Despite the claims of the conspiracy theorists, there is NO evidence that Trump has been anything more than a useful idiot to Russia (or, indeed, Israel, the UAE or Saudi Arabia).

    1502:

    Re: DT's flight from ...

    No idea how to calculate this and search hasn't provided any hints whether this might be feasible.

    [A] DT travels to Nome, refuels and heads to Russia's easternmost city.

    [B] Travels directly from Seattle (or Nome) over the North Pole to Moscow.

    What's the minimum size runway that the Cessna needs for a landing? (Could ISS track him?)

    Because DT in theory will have access to a slew of 'State' secrets right up to the moment Biden is sworn in, any travel to a hostile state/territory would be problematic for him.

    1503:

    Trump won't be head of state after noon on the 20th.

    Even if he shows up as head of state before then, he won't be head of state after that time -- so he'd be subject to Tier 4 lockdown in Scotland. Entering and leaving Scotland without a good reason is illegal, whether by road, rail, sea, or air: moving outside your local area (a radius of about 10 miles) is illegal, non-essential businesses are closed, visiting other households is forbidden, meeting up with people outside your bubble is forbidden, meeting people outdoors is forbidden, the only reasons for leaving your residence are essential trips (eg. food shopping), emergencies (eg. medical treatment) and up to an hour's outdoor exercise per day (taken in solitary or accompanied by one other person from the same bubble). Masks to be worn in business premises at all times, contact tracing app running on phones, if you test positive or have a COVID19 contact you're to isolate indoors for up to two weeks.

    I'm pretty sure the hotel at Turnberry is closed; if it isn't, Trump would arrive and then be required to self-isolate in his room (okay, his owner's suite) for two weeks. Food delivered to the door, access for room service only while he's distanced (in another part of the suite).

    If he's really lucky he'll fly in and promptly be locked down in the Gateshead Travelodge, 5.8 miles from the airport (which is in the middle of nowhere). Yes, it's a hotel: the rooms are comparable to Anders Breivik's jail cell in Norway.

    1504:

    Re: 'Trump has been anything more than a useful idiot to Russia ...'

    I'm using Russia for convenience to point out alternate routes he could take if he decided to go on the lam.

    1505:

    Despite the claims of the conspiracy theorists, there is NO evidence that Trump has been anything more than a useful idiot to Russia (or, indeed, Israel, the UAE or Saudi Arabia).

    Does he know that? Or does he think he's a valuable ally and friend who they owe favours to?

    1506:

    And ... Just for once Sturgeon is exactly correct. I would reckon that well over 90% of the entire British population do not want this mobile orange turd on our land. Most importantly, I suspect our Commander in Chief doesn't ever want him near her ( Like less-than 1000km ) again. In a perverse way, I hope BoZo is that stupid - like I said, it will immediately backfire, very badly, how sad.

    Cessna citation X: It says here: length for take-off @ sea level: 5140 feet = 1.75 km & landing 2 730 ft = 930 metres Because there's a private airstrip @ Turnberry Map Link but it's only 960 metres long.

    OTOH, there are useful places other than jails in Scotland, some of which are not too far away, he could be put on one of those, without a mobile phone ... Ailsa Craig; Sanda Island; Pladda; there's a Tibetan Retreat on Holy Island, by Arran; Little Cumbrae. And thereafter a very, very long list of isolated rocks, shoals & bare pieces of sea-girt land

    1507:

    That is a damn good question (irrespective of which country you are referring to).

    1509:

    Re: DT's flight from ...

    Just realized that all DT might have to do is change planes* at any (international) airport. My understanding is that as soon as someone sets foot on a plane registered to some other country, they are considered to be on foreign soil.

    https://www.britannica.com/topic/international-law/Jurisdiction

    • Also applies to boats/ships. Don't think he'd pull an Assange and show up at some foreign embassy.
    1510:

    Trump won't be head of state after noon on the 20th.

    Which is likely the point of arriving (if this is true) on the 19th - it gets him into the UK and to his preferred place to sit this out prior to becoming a regular person, and thus subject to the laws of Scotland.

    so he'd be subject to Tier 4 lockdown in Scotland.

    He is essentially going to be subject to lockdown wherever he ends up - his days of just walking around with a bodyguard(s) are over for a bit given how unpopular he has become.

    Entering and leaving Scotland without a good reason is illegal, whether by road, rail, sea, or air:

    Hence the arriving while still POTUS.

    moving outside your local area (a radius of about 10 miles) is illegal, non-essential businesses are closed, visiting other households is forbidden, meeting up with people outside your bubble is forbidden, meeting people outdoors is forbidden, the only reasons for leaving your residence are essential trips (eg. food shopping), emergencies (eg. medical treatment) and up to an hour's outdoor exercise per day (taken in solitary or accompanied by one other person from the same bubble). Masks to be worn in business premises at all times, contact tracing app running on phones, if you test positive or have a COVID19 contact you're to isolate indoors for up to two weeks.

    Most of which won't matter to him - even staying in Florida won't be the same as once he is no longer POTUS the appeal of being seen with him, or to try and cozy up for favours, will be gone. The membership of his club will be taking a hit soon.

    Besides, he likely won't want to have people doing selfies around him with "loser ex-President" as the tagline after the 20th.

    I'm pretty sure the hotel at Turnberry is closed; if it isn't, Trump would arrive and then be required to self-isolate in his room (okay, his owner's suite) for two weeks. Food delivered to the door, access for room service only while he's distanced (in another part of the suite).

    Not exactly a problem when one is rich and presumably fleeing the law.

    1511:

    If the idea is to get from DC to Moscow in the Citation X on Jan 19 while he's still POTUS, staging through Thule Air Base would seem to be a convenient way to do it. Weather permitting.

    1512:

    "Weather permitting."

    Thule airport, in January, in a Citation X ?

    It does not.

    1513:

    Didn't I read about some attempt to convert a club house to a residence without applying for change of use?

    Mar A Largo - The big club he has been using as a get a way from the White House for the last 3+ years.

    It is located in a very tony (snooty) rich area / town near Miami. When he bought the estate and applied to make it a rich folks hang out he had to sign legal documents with the local government that it would never be used as a residence. In fact there are real restrictions on how many nights per year someone can stay there. That has somewhat been treated with a wink and smile for the last few years as he IS the President, but the local officials and residents are adamant that they do NOT want him to "live" there after January 20, 2021.

    1514:

    Right, you had/have actual legal classes. I was, of course, speaking of the econo-political terms, used by, say, socialists and other such rable.

    Your definition, at the end, is of course spot on.

    (signed) the rabble (who are also revolting)

    1515:

    The aircraft Trump will be using on January 19th is a very modified Boeing 757 called a C-32. It has a maximum range of 11,000 km, which is twice what is needed to go from Washington DC to Scotland.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_C-32

    The C-32 also has aerial refuelling equipment, which makes it possible for it to reach any point on the globe, including Moscow.

    But I don't think there is much of a chance that Trump would want to go to Russia instead of Scotland. At the slightest hint of possibly going to Russia the Secret Service would tell him very politely that they could not guarantee his safety there. In other words they would drop him like a hot potato. The secret service offers more than a security detail following ex-presidents. They also do serious intelligence work to keep track of long term threats of all kinds to the president's life. No ex-president would want to lose that.

    Besides, Putin is happier with Trump sowing discord in the UK than being useless in Moscow.

    1516:

    His dacha on the Black Sea, of course.

    Oh, my, yes. The perfect place for him, his dacha on the Black Sea. In a sector claimed by the pro-Russian Ukrainian separatists. Russia has deniability, so does the Ukraine....

    ROTFLMAO!!!!!!!!!!!

    1517:

    Ah, but there's one critical question that everyone here is forgetting: ->what time<- on the 19th? If he arrives, say, right before midnight on the 19th, or, as we say, 05:00 20 Jan, GMT....

    1518:

    I doubt that Trump could sow any more discord in the UK than we are creating ourselves. The blitherati are currently asking "Whither Farage?", because even he cannot think of any way to sow more discord at present.

    1519:

    "Weather permitting."

    Thule airport, in January, in a Citation X ?

    It does not.

    Why? The temperatures forecast for the next two weeks are running around -25 C and the winds under 15 km/hr.

    1520:

    They also do serious intelligence work to keep track of long term threats of all kinds to the president's life. No ex-president would want to lose that.

    There has never been an ex-pres like Trump before. While I think a lot of his persona is personal bluster, I suspect he really does think he knows best about everything and does not believe the SS can tell him anything better than he can figure out for himself.

    1521:

    mdive Let's just suppose he does trun up here before the local 18.00GMT deadline on Wednesday ... The moment it is 18.01, what Sturgeon does have the authority to do is ..... Direct Police Scotland to arrest him & put him in the slammer, pending various C-19 breaches & anything else we can think of.

    AFAIK, no ex-president of the USA has ever lived outside the USA after retirement. I wonder what their rules are for "SS" men in those circumstances, as they would be subject to both the laws of & the approval of whichever country it was. Um.

    EC QUOTE: €6bn of City trading jumps ship to the EU - from the Torygraph Brexit was such a good idea, wasn't it?

    1522:

    GAHHHH

    -&GTwhat time&lt-? He could show up there at 23:59 on the 19th, or, as we say, 04:59 20 Jan GMT, eight hours from private citizenhood.

    1523:

    Hmmm... thinking about this further. He could also either order the SS people he doesn't trust, or say "I resign as President, go away" to them, and have his personal security.

    1524:

    Scott Sanford @ 1473:

    The Trump Organization "OWNS" a Boeing 757. Last I know about it, it's stuck at Stewart International Airport in Newburgh, NY missing an engine. They've been looking for an engine that could be used for a single flight down to Louisiana for maintenance. Apparently it's due for a major inspection/maintenance overhaul before it will be deemed airworthy and the Trump Organization dropped the ball because they didn't anticipate he wouldn't be flying Air Force One any more.

    On one hand the single engined 757 was parked back in July and any competent organization would be able to sort things out in half a year, particularly when there was a well known deadline for when the hardware would be needed again. On the other hand, Trump and competence have never gone together; as you point out as of early December it was still there.

    I think the key is no one in the "Trump Organization" had the nerve to suggest preparing for the possibility that Trumpolini could lose the election and might have to revert to gallivanting around at his own expense.

    1525:

    Greg Tingey @ 1521: "The moment it is 18.01, what Sturgeon does have the authority to do is ..... Direct Police Scotland to arrest him & put him in the slammer, pending various C-19 breaches & anything else we can think of."

    She has the authority to arrest him then?

    I thought that devolution did not include foreign policy. In fact that's why (I suppose) Nicola Sturgeon must be so angry now.

    And that's why Putin must be so happy, because having Scotland eventually separate from the UK would cause problems within NATO.

    In Canada all of this would be enough to call an emergency federal-provincial conference!

    1526:

    Niala @ 1487: Elderly Cynic @ 1486

    By doing a Google search with "Aptera camper" I think I found the Aptera camper gasdive was talking about. Unfortunately the founder of Aptera gave no hint as to its cost or availability.

    https://wefunder.com/updates/132009-solar-powered-camping-with-aptera

    By doing a Google search with "skoda fabia camper" I discovered that you didn't need a flexible extension in the back to sleep in a Skoda Fabia. It was long enough to stretch out, as is. In fact this couple slept in the back of theirs on a 16,000 km trip on the Silk Roads.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=QqyZg-imUls

    Doesn't look like you can do that without taking out the rear seats. Like most of the small [estate] wagons I've looked at lately (last 20 years or so) it doesn't have true fold flat rear seats.

    My Focus wagon had them, and the Jeep almost has them, although it's not long enough to sleep in the back even with the seats folded down. So I'm now thinking about a DIY Teardrop Camper. Just gotta' get a whole bunch of round tuits together.

    1527:

    Niala Correct - devolution does not include foreign policy. BUT - after 18.00 hrs GMT 20/01/2021, DJT is a private person on Scottish soil & therefore subject to Scottish law. Game over.

    1528:

    "Doesn't look like you can do that without taking out the rear seats."

    You can't. It's really just a small hatchback that has been stretched by 8" - nothing much, but it means that it is a LOT more useful for my modest requirements. That's why I put 'estate' in quotes.

    1529:

    Correct - devolution does not include foreign policy. BUT - after 18.00 hrs GMT 20/01/2021, DJT is a private person on Scottish soil & therefore subject to Scottish law. Game over.

    But only if he breaks the law after that point. Anything done prior to that point, when he was POTUS, would fall under Westminster authority.

    So Scotland couldn't rush in an arrest him for breaking the travel restrictions on the 19th.

    Which isn't to say he wouldn't be stupid enough to ignore some rule/law after the 20th, but until then he would be okay.

    But it is also a two way street - the lockdowns also make it impossible for the public to go and protest him, thus giving him quiet alone time to make chaos on Twitter while thumbing his nose (as least temporarily) at the assumed legal actions waiting in the US.

    (and also worth considering that even with ignoring Boris he will have friends high up in the British Government, given that a number of influential Conservatives are part of that cross-Atlantic mutual admiration society)

    1530:

    Does anyone know who won the auction Atlantic City NJ was holding to determine who gets to push the button to blow up the Trump Plaza casino?

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55357512

    https://www.dw.com/en/us-atlantic-city-auctions-off-demolition-of-trump-plaza-hotel-and-casino/a-55980927

    1531:

    Correct - devolution does not include foreign policy. BUT - after 18.00 hrs GMT 20/01/2021, DJT is a private person on Scottish soil & therefore subject to Scottish law. Game over.

    I thought American ex-presidents travelled under a diplomatic passport? I suspect that would force foreign office involvement.

    1532:

    "I thought that devolution did not include foreign policy"

    It's probably a LOT more complicated than anybody here imagines.

    For instance, a so-called "diplomatic passport" is not a magic "go anywhere, anytime" membership card, quite the contrary actually, you're not supposed to just show up with one, you're supposed to ask permission before you travel, and present your credentials to the head of state when you arrive etc.

    ... unless the two countries are part of one of the many treaties that stream-line that 19th-century nonsense.

    Of course USA and UK have a treaty like that, so normally a US holder of a diplomatic passport will just wade in.

    However, on the 19th of January Trumpolino is still head of state, and those don't just drop in for tea, unannounced, uninvited and in particular not undesired because that is what diplomats, using a technical term, call "an invasion".

    (By default all General Officers must ask permission to set foot in other countries, in order to not de-facto start a war, unless a treaty has waived that requirement. Most such treaties only wave the requirement if they are on vacation "with their household" and unarmed. Danes have run afoul of that by going hunting with their buddies in Sweden.)

    I'm sure Trumpolino has sent a telegram, but unless QEII sent one back saying "Sure, come on in!" he will technically be starting a war by setting foot on Scotland.

    If QEII wants to go out with a bang, she could send troops to disarm and detain him, call an emergency session of the UN Security Council and claim the former british colonies in America back before Biden is sworn in, then after Biden is sworn in, give USA independence, but only after removing the second amendment from "their proposed constitution."

    In practice, doing anything to Trumolino while he is POTUS would be a diplomatic insult to USA, in all likelyhood, nothing much is going to happen.

    In terms of "practical chicanery", you cannot prevent a plane from landing at "a suitable surface" if the plane has declared an emergency, but you can of course freely decide to use any surface under your control to store snow-ploughs or tractor-trailers.

    If Nicola wants to play dirty, she has the means.

    If I were her, I would go for it: Let him land, "decertify" the runway with the airports snow-ploughs before his wheels stop, use the quarantine rules in the convention on air-transport to bottle him up in the airport, then send Biden a telegram the minute he has been sworn in, saying "Cleanup runway 30, please."

    There would be a hell of a racket, but apart from Trumpolino, nobody would mind, and she would be guaranteed to sweep the election and the referendum.

    1533:

    I thought American ex-presidents travelled under a diplomatic passport?

    That was my understanding. It certainly makes more sense than mdive's claim that

    he wouldn't be stupid enough

    Because Trump has proved hard to underestimate.

    1534:

    I find it difficult to believe Trump is considering leaving the US for any length of time - he will still wield a lot of influence (and money) on the back of his faithful supporters. After all he now has the cash to pay for the best lawyers to tie up legal actions for years, and the level of his support seems to be proof against the kind of evidence that would end any normal politician's career. Unless he is planning something really bad for the US (but good for him) for his last few days...

    1535:

    Oooooh...

    Does the Duke of Atholl stil have a private army?

    1536:

    By the 19th, we will be seeing things like a device to detect the instant Trump's presidenton field collapses, and switch on a virus-proof quarantine force field in the form of a sphere centred on Trump's person, which then begins to gradually contract. Charlie will have had to upgrade his server to deal with all the predictions.

    On the 21st, all that new server capacity will have only to deal with a few people commenting that that was dull, then, we didn't even get to see the woman with the "Trump is a cunt" placard making an appearance.

    1537:

    On diplomatic passport => diplomatic immunity, it appears as if the answer is "sometimes, not always."

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB90883356896791000 While many government officials and politicians travel on diplomatic passports, the legal protections of diplomatic immunity actually apply to only a very small set of foreign diplomats posted abroad. According to the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, a foreign diplomat must be formally accredited to a host country to be granted immunity from prosecution under the host state's laws. Even then the immunity only applies in the one country where the diplomat serves and not when he or she visits other states. In the U.S., diplomats posted both to foreign embassies in Washington and the United Nations are covered. Beyond that, there are many other customary immunities that countries respect -- or ignore -- according to their own laws, beliefs or negotiated agreements.
    1539:

    “ use the quarantine rules in the convention on air-transport to bottle him up in the airport” Do you have to even let him off the plane? Don’t bring the stairs, let’s see if the crew will let him deploy an emergency slide.

    1540:

    The Duke of Atholl takes our Asshole prisoner?

    1541:

    Vehicle sizes and weights have been creeping upward for years, for reasons which have nothing to do with any of the drivetrain components. Indeed, if anything engines have become lighter and more compact, for reasons like the use of aluminium instead of iron for the main castings, or increasing output by increasing charge density rather than charge volume.

    This thread has sort of established that an electric car battery is 400kg. That is more than the entire drivetrain of pretty much anything that can still reasonably call itself a car these days, let alone any single component of it.

    There is no reason to suppose that electric cars will follow any path other than the obvious, ie. continuing to follow the trend of increasing bloat but also with a step increase in total weight due to a battery and motor being a lot heavier than a fuel tank and engine. Sure, there may be one or two exceptions, just as there are already with ordinary cars, but they will continue to be exceptions, just as the existing ones do.

    1542:

    Ah, good to see that top speed isn't relevant. So, then, the citroen Ami. Already in full production from a large manufacturer, so it's a likely as any other car to be supported in 10 years. For sale in the UK. 485 kg. Has 4 wheels which you think makes a difference for crosswind stability. (is actually having the centre of pressure behind the centre of gravity, which the Aptera does)

    Or the Nissan E-NV200. 7 seats. 4200 litres of cargo space 1600 kg (only slightly more than the current version of your car, but 50% more passengers and 3 times more luggage). Its almost the same length (a bit more than a foot longer) and width as the Skoda.

    The light electric cars are there if you want them. The idea that electric cars are heavy isn't the case. If people are buying heavier cars, that's because that's what people want. The trend is there in petrol cars. Note that your favoured ride has gained 200 kg since you bought it.

    1543:

    This thread has sort of established that an electric car battery is 400kg.

    The EV batteries run to about 200Wh per kilogram after support structures and anti-fire barriers are taken into account. the 400kg battery is for a high-end pure EV with a single-charge range of ca. 500km under optimal conditions, and that capacity costs a lot. There are other EVs with much smaller battieres and less range and generally lower pricetags (frex the BMW i3, 270kg battery, range ca. 300km, cost about half that of the top-of-the-range 500km-capable Tesla).

    1544:

    In terms of "practical chicanery", you cannot prevent a plane from landing at "a suitable surface" if the plane has declared an emergency

    Sure you can. America did it in 2001.

    1545:

    Anent Trump on Scottish soil after 1800GMT on January 20th:

    a) He will almost certainly be caught doing something that violates Tier 4 Lockdown -- after all, rules are for Little People, right?

    b) Failing that, Iran have issued a Red Note via Interpol calling for the arrest of 48 US officials including Trump. Yes, they're blowing smoke (same when the USA attempts to do the same wrt. Iranian officials, as opposed to assassinating them with drones -- I think they're currently limiting it to just pissing on Iranian financial institutions, hence the recent seizure of a South Korean tanker). However, once Trump is no longer POTUS it would put him in a rather bad position if Police Scotland chose to wake up and pay attention to the Interpol Red Note, which amounts to an arrest warrant.

    There's no way that the Scottish courts would extradite Trump to Iran (inhumane conditions/risk of suicide/risk of execution are all valid objections that work in UK courts as long as the Tories don't abolish the Human Rights Act) burt they could detain him without bail (he's a billionaire, after all: money has no conceivable hold on him!) until the process worked its way through the courts.

    (Won't happen, but I can dream.)

    1546:

    Apropos of nothing, but I enjoyed this media puff piece on a Harvard Professor's new science fiction speculative fiction book titled Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth about 'oumuamua: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjpwzp/harvards-top-astronomer-believes-aliens-tried-to-contact-us-in-2017

    Kudos to the Harvard PR department for getting this advertised. It reflects well on the school.

    1547:

    I think that impounding the plane and shipping him back in coach is about the best we might hope for. I'll bet that doesn't happen either.

    Sad part is that I've got a Zoom meeting during the inauguration on the 20th. I suspect a bunch of us will have the sound off so that we can listen to the inauguration and news flashes, whilst waiting our turns to drone on appropriately.

    1548:

    Nojay @ 1543: " There are other EVs with much smaller batteries and less range and generally lower pricetags "

    There sure are. The Citroen Ami has a 56 kg. battery and a range of 75 km. They sell it for 6,000 Euros in France.

    1549:

    This thread has sort of established that an electric car battery is 400kg

    Nah, that's just the Bolt, and it's approximate. The more interesting measurement is the 3-5 miles/kWh which seemed to hold over a variety of electric cars. Getting that to, say, 8 miles/kWh for a functional sedan would be extremely nice.

    1550:

    There's no way that the Scottish courts would extradite Trump to Iran (inhumane conditions/risk of suicide/risk of execution are all valid objections that work in UK courts as long as the Tories don't abolish the Human Rights Act) burt they could detain him without bail (he's a billionaire, after all: money has no conceivable hold on him!) until the process worked its way through the courts.

    (Won't happen, but I can dream.)

    I suspect there would be a lot of support from Canada for such action, on the basis of turnabout is fair play given the games his administration played with China and Meng Wanhzho and leaving Canada with the mess.

    1551:

    Speaking of electric cars, being reported today that for the first time they outsold traditional cars in Norway for the year - battery electric cars accounted for 54% of sales in 2020 in Norway (and 2/3 of sales in December).

    And Tesla wasn't #1 - the Audi e-Tron was.

    https://www.caranddriver.com/audi/e-tron

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/05/electric-cars-record-market-share-norway

    1552:

    Just been out to mine with a tape measure and it looks like I could just fit if the front seats will tilt forward far enough. It would need a platform rigging as the back seats don't fold flat, although there is a lip inside the boot hatch and supports for a cross-bar just behind the back seats for a flat floor shelf which would work for half of it.

    That's a nuisance but it's also a solved problem. Turning a hatchback with fold-almost-but-not-quite-flat rear seats into a comfortable sleeping space is addressed in this article by someone who did just that. The floor situation was addressed with a wooden frame (constructed out of an old pallet), which once in place gave a flat surface for a memory foam mattress topper. Also very useful in a British winter were Thermawrap insulation panels to cover the windows.

    Good luck. I've slept in my car; while a Crown Victoria is a ludicrously huge car by European standards, the back seat isn't so wide that a 190cm man can lay down straight. I wouldn't want to do it every night.

    1553:

    Clearly a great vehicle for transporting a recumbent trike and 100 litres of panniers from Cambridge to Lairg, which I have done in my Fabia and intend to do again (if I survive lockdown)!

    If I got electrical assistance for my recumbent trike and a spare battery, I could get that range with a vehicle that would weigh something like 30 Kg in total.

    Pigeon (#1541) has it right - there's no technical difficulty in making lighter vehicles, but things are going in the other direction :-(

    1554:

    You DO need enough distance between the rear of the front seats in their fully-forward position and the rear sill - which there isn't for tall people in small hatchbacks.

    1555:

    Waldo Yes - all 25 (?) of them.

    1556:

    Elderly Cynic @ 1553: "Clearly a great vehicle for transporting a recumbent trike and 100 litres of panniers from Cambridge to Lairg"

    Ah! The Ami doesn't even have a boot/trunk!

    But seriously, if I had serious network of car-sharing pick-up points like I used to have in Montreal all I would need would be something like the Ami once a week to do my groceries (putting the bags on the single passenger seat)and a van once every two or three months.

    Since there is no car-sharing network here I own a van and I drive it once a week to do my groceries.

    1557:

    Yes, precisely. Actually, I knew that :-) You can probably guess which post that remark was really aimed at!

    And I have the car I do for exactly the same reason as you, though I may have to buy a van next time, because none of the smaller cars meet my requirements and I really DON'T want a bloody great penis extension!

    1558:

    Bring in a radio or TV. Zoom tells you, up front, that they do NOT play well with anything else on the same system trying to use sound.

    I'm on Linux, and last Sat? I was in a zoom, accidentally found a link to a tv show, shut it off asap... but 10 sec later, my whole system rebooted.

    Really not happy with zoom.....

    1559:

    Going in the other direction... US carmakers refused to make smaller cars in the late seventies. Then the Japanese came in with small cars, and they went out of the stores like hotcakces. It took years for the US to make some smaller... and then they introduced SUVs, and went larger.

    Let's also note that Toyota had 10 years of the Prius flying out of the stores, until the US carmakers admitted that yeah, maybe there was some small market for them.

    THEY ARE OWNED by the petrochemical industry. They want to burn more gas.

    Also see previous posts of mine, screaming that I can't buy/afford a hybrid minivan.

    1560:

    whitroth @ 1558

    Can't you avoid that kind of aggravation by not downloading and installing Zoom at all and instead joining a Zoom conference directly through your Web browser?

    1561:

    You DO need enough distance between the rear of the front seats in their fully-forward position and the rear sill - which there isn't for tall people in small hatchbacks.

    Oof, yes. My first car was a Honda Civic hatchback (a hand-me-down from my mother), and the rear seats and cargo area were very cozy. It wasn't exactly spacious up front either. In retrospect I do appreciate the five-speed manual transmission and tachometer.

    1562:

    Haven't succeeded in doing that, though. I am on Linux - see if they've got a firefox add-on.

    1563:

    Just tried to join my own meeting, doesn't work.

    1564:

    But what to do about spent li-ion batteries?

    Suppose we replace every American car with a Tesla (or equivalent).

    280,000,000 each no. of American cars (2018)

    2.32 tons average weight of a Tesla (4,323 to 4,960 lbs)

    0.60 tons weight of Tesla battery pack

    168,000,000 tons total weight of Tesla batteries on the road

    56,000,000 tons average annual of battery disposal (3 year battery lifetime)

    By comparison:

    267,800,000 tons average annual amount of non-hazardous waste (2017)

    24,700,000 tons average annual amount of hazardous waste (2017)

    Hazwaste or not, spent EV batteries will result in a massive waste management/disposal headache.

    1565:

    Old lead batteries are valuable scrap. I don’t see why lithium batteries would be any different.

    1566:

    There are several non-ferrous scrap specialists who will pick up even a single 20kg+ battery from me. You can drop off any lead battery you like, in any condition other than "currently on fire" and they may even pay you for it. I also collect wheel-balancing weights reasonably often and they will take those too.

    Right now the whole "a lithium battery contains 5% lithium" works against recycling because squillions of tiny batteries in different form factors with different packaging and contents is just a nightmare. But even so there are battery recycling bins in some supermarkets.

    Once you get into bigger batteries they are easier to recycle, and the obstacle is that no-one wants to recycle them. The local RC shop has one of the supermarket bins, and a sign saying "please don't put hot batteries in, wait until they are safe" which makes me think that a: someone has done that; and b: someone is emptying that bin from time to time. I suspect that if I put a 10kg, 200AH LiFePO4 battery in there whoever recycles them would be delighted.

    But there's not, as far as I can tell, "a man with a van" business offering to recycle big lithium packs... yet.

    1567:

    Clarification: "the obstacle is that no-one wants to recycle them"

    Meaning that the current owners of those batteries want to keep them.

    1568:

    Fuck. Not this again.

    "56,000,000 tons average annual of battery disposal (3 year battery lifetime)"

    They're warranted for 8 years. The smart money is on 15 year life and lots of people are saying that the current generation is going to last 20 years with normal use. 3 years is beyond stupid. They're obviously lasting longer than that. Mine isn't tesla, it's optimised for capacity not life, being a motorcycle, and it's 7 years old now with no identifiable range reduction in a hot climate, in a hot garage, which is the worst possible situation.

    Secondly, the Tesla pack is designed from the outset to be recycled, and designed to be taken apart by automated lines. Tesla say 100% recycled. They say the materials they need for making batteries occur at 2-100 times the concentration in old batteries than in the best available ores, and that's no need to dig it up. It would cost them money to throw them away. Their numbers make sense.

    1569:

    The reason no-one is recycling those bigger lithium batteries is because they're too valuable to people who want to reuse them. I sold my defunct lawnmower battery (10S2P, 2.5AH 18650's) for $50, or $2.50/cell to a buyer who knew that at least one cell was dead. He was not going to recycle it, he was going to repurpose the cells.

    There is a vigorous market for second hand Tesla batteries and they attract a price premium in that market largely because they are easier to work with than their competition. Insofar as it makes sense to talk about competition in the market for crashed or damaged batteries... it's not as though the suppliers are designing them to be reused after being damaged.

    "wah wah what about old batteries"... that second hand value makes a nonsense of the claim that they're going to end up in the waste stream.

    But yes, I'm sure the problem with ewaste is electric cars rather than slave-made phones or single-use electric toys.

    1570:

    Oh, do stop with the foolishness. You’ll make yourself look very silly. Does anyone with more a handful of brain cells really think that nobody has plans to deal with these issues? Really?

    1571:

    Bring in a radio or TV. Zoom tells you, up front, that they do NOT play well with anything else on the same system trying to use sound.

    Oh, I know all about that, and I was planning on having a TV on. With Zoom, or Microsoft Teams especially, if it's really important, I close firefox and restart my computer to clear out the memory before starting the call. The Multiple Sclerosis Team has issues when playing with others which must be why it's the preferred option for local government dealing with irate community members in public meetings.

    Whining aside, it beats the heck out of driving an hour to a 30 minute meeting and missing the event entirely.

    1572:

    "Sure you can. America did it in 2001."

    No, they did not.

    They shut down all of their airspace with the largest NOTAM in the world, making it illegal for the planes to be there in the first place.

    But if a non-hostile plane had come limbering across the atlantic asking for emergency landing, they had no choice but to let it land, and this did in fact happen a couple of times from either side during the closure.

    1573:

    Moz Here almost all major stores & quite a lot of smaller ones have battery-recycling bins.

    Meanwhile ONE Senate seat has gon to "Rev" Warnock & the other one is very tight, but, perversely the city/town areas are the last to count, so it looks probable that Ossoff will/may win. If that is the case then the very first thing the US Dems need to do is to enact laws that stamp on voter suppression - though how one does that, I know not. Suggestions from USA-ians, please?

    1574:

    Acting for the Scottish Government.

    1575:

    [...] the very first thing the US Dems need to do is to enact laws that stamp on voter suppression - though how one does that, I know not.

    This came up previously here @104. I mentioned the Shelby decision, which struck down federal restrictions on state voting law. JBS commented:

    Not quite. The Shelby decision hinged on the law only being applicable to SOME states. Congress could pass a law applicable to ALL of the states that should pass Constitutional muster.

    So if the Democrats control Senate and House then its just a matter of writing the law and voting it through. Biden signs it, job done. If the Democrats don't control both then it won't happen.

    Of course if the law does get passed the Republicans will challenge its constitutionality, so back to the Supreme Court it probably goes. But as JBS says, the Shelby decision was generally in favour of federal authority on this matter, so a reversal on that issue seems unlikely.

    1576:
    Bring in a radio or TV. Zoom tells you, up front, that they do *NOT* play well with anything else on the same system trying to use sound. I'm on Linux, and last Sat? I was in a zoom, accidentally found a link to a tv show, shut it off asap... but 10 sec later, my whole system rebooted.

    That sounds odd. On my linux system (Debian sid) Zoom is a normal pulseaudio using program, I can set it up to use any of the sound devices I have and it shares ok with any other programs using the same device, or I can have it use a dedicated device (e.g. headset) while other programs use the built in speakers, or the speakers in the monitor.

    As for your reboot -- something must be broken (and I don't mean zoom), there is no way a user program running as non-root should be able to reboot your system.

    1577:

    Poul-Henning Kamp @ 1572: "They shut down all of their airspace with the largest NOTAM in the world,"

    I went hunting for that monster NOTAM on the Web to see what it looked like. I did not find a monster NOTAM. Instead, I found that on the day of September 11th all the instructions were given verbally and nothing was written down.

    https://www.law.virginia.edu/news/2001_02/faa.htm

    Sure, they did come up with a giant NOTAM and lesser ones in its wake, to close down U.S. airspace. But that was in the days after September 11th.

    The only written thing that they used on the day itself that I could find was SCATANA, the already written plan for the Security Control of Air Traffic and Air Navigation Aids.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_Control_of_Air_Traffic_and_Air_Navigation_Aids

    I found that the FAA did everything by radio or phone. They called up their counterparts in Ottawa by phone and NavCanada implemented Operation Yellow Ribbon. The circumpolar flights and the North Atlantic tracks flights all passed or were about to pass over Canada.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Yellow_Ribbon

    1578:

    but, perversely the city/town areas are the last to count, so it looks probable that Ossoff will/may win.

    That's where the mail in ballots are concentrated. And by Georgia law they can't be processed till after the polls close. Plus the bigger the population the more "provisional" ballots you get which means more hand processing. And to be official they have to be fed into a ballot counting machine after being unfolded, unspindled, etc...

    And somewhere in the state there were "technical" issues with a memory card so they are feeding 11K or so ballots through counting machines again.

    NOTE: I will NOT defend how Georgia does voting in terms of generating paper ballots. But at least they do have paper.

    But yes, based on where the remaining ballots are to be counted and the numbers involved it is most likely that Ossoff will win.

    Everyone is focused on this run off in Georgia as the big election. To me the big one is in 2022 when Georgia will elect its next slate of state wide offices. That fight will get tough with knives out. And nationwide Biden needs to walk a tight rope for the next year or so. Too progressive or too conservative and he'll loose the Congress. Everyone who doesn't want the R's to win has to understand they will just not get everything or even most things they want.

    1579:

    It's YOU who are being foolish. There are people who have (viable) plans to deal with these issues, and there are people who have the power to put such plans into action, but there is strong evidence that there is little to no overlap between the two groups, in at least the UK (and, I believe, the USA).

    1580:

    Someone in charge issued an ATC0 which translates to no planes in the air over the US. So unless you were headed in at 500mph and about to cross the boundary you were told to go away. Saw a recent show about Gander on 9/11 and some of the radio talk when the pilots were told to land there was along the lines of

    "No, we're going to Chicago." "Ah, no you're not. You can land here or no where". "We are going to Chicago" "Land here or you will be intercepted" "Ah, OK"

    1581:

    Used Tesla batteries.

    Once they are down to something like 70% or 80% of original possible charge some are repurposed as Power Wall (or whatever they call it) batteries for home and small building use. With capacities appropriately noted. If paired with solar on the home and a grid connection they will last a long time. Or to some degree maybe you can pick how long they last.

    1582:

    Many years back I was involved in a project automating a lead refinery. It was built on top of an old (as in originally Roman) lead mine, but the mine had been exhausted decades earlier.

    So what was the refinery consuming? Well, old lead pipes and the like, but primarily defunct lead-acid batteries. And the lead ingots (each about the size of a bathtub) shipped out were mostly destined for new batteries.

    When you make batteries, one of the feedstocks is old batteries that can no longer be used even for domestic storage. This is certainly true of Tesla's Gigafactories and, given the cost of mining Lithium, I expect it's true for other manufacturers.

    (This assumes the current battery chemistry continues - were we to end up using, oh, I dunno, seaweed, circumstances may change)

    This household has two electric cars (Kia and Nissan) and a Tesla Powerwall. We've not seen any sign of any dropoff on any of those. The warranty on mine is 7 years or 100K miles (same as the rest of the car).

    1583:

    the very first thing the US Dems need to do

    Actually they first thing will be to decide on what changes to make to the filibuster rules.

    Things like voting rights laws can be held up without 60 votes to proceed. Even if the final vote is 51-50.

    In the more civil past, 60+ votes could be had to release bills for final votes even if the final vote was only 51-49. That was a distant time of unicorns and flowers.

    1584:

    Tesla Powerwall. The newer version is the Powerwall 2 which includes nice features like the ability to run the house during a grid power outage — the original version wasn't certified for that, with there being a risk of it feeding power outbound and potentially electrocuting workers working on what would otherwise be a dead line.

    (This being the UK, that's actually kicked in for a total of 96 seconds since we had it installed the year before last, and I suspect those were brownouts.)

    1585:

    Recycling lithium from batteries is MUCH trickier than recycling lead from them (the latter can be done, inefficiently, at home), but almost certainly makes sense. The problem with the UK and USA is the dogma that such things are best left to the Holy Market, where a good government would regard it as its responibility to ensure that it happens.

    Reusing batteries is good, because it amortises their production and disposal costs over a longer period, but merely delays the latter.

    I find it amazing how many people here who clearly think that they are on the socialist and environmentally conscious end of the spectrum hold to the same sort of belief as our governments. Infrastructure and conventions (like recycling) don't just happen.

    1586:

    That you didn't like American subcompacts doesn't mean they didn't exist.

    1587:

    that's actually kicked in for a total of 96 seconds since we had it installed the year before last, and I suspect those were brownouts.

    After we started getting hurricanes or the remnants of them 30 years ago I looked into getting a generator. But I noticed my power was restored way faster than that of my neighbors. So I asked a crew why. It turns out when my house was built in 61 (one of the first in the area) the transformer was tied directly to the substation feed wire, not a fused sub feed wire. And my pole is the first point of a dozen or so coming out of the substation where they can open or close the loop. So when things go bad my house gets energized before 5000 or so nearby. I figured that was good enough. I still might get a power wall plus solar or similar if I build a new house. My current house will NOT support solar on the roof.

    1588:

    Lighter weight cars are technicably possible, but getting them certified for use on public roads is liable to be more challenging. For example, a European based auto firm eyeing the U.S. market must consider whether a given model will sell enough to justify U.S. certification, so our choices are constrained. Do consider that much of that weight increases your chances of surviving a collision.

    1589:

    I think that impounding the plane and shipping him back in coach is about the best we might hope for. I'll bet that doesn't happen either.

    Impounding a US Air Force plane would be a distinctly unfriendly to treat a NATO ally. Shipping Trump home in economy class with manacles is, alas, something the Home Office could do, but Priti Patel's more likely to ask for his autograph and a signed photo.

    1590:

    The Vega and Pinto?

    Egads. What lousy cars.

    We had a 62 (I think) Falcon station wagon and a 64 Ranchero truck. Both were Ford's answer to compacts in the early to mid 60s. The Ranchero went through a lot of changes during it's time in our family. Engine and transmission swap. Sheet metal screwed to the floor to cover the rust holes.

    Both were based on the same body frame and were the basis of the Ford Mustang. Which was why Iaccoca was able to develop it so quickly.

    1591:

    Anyone want to gather up tail numbers of various planes that the Pres might use in the last few days of office plus one he personally controls? Plus maybe a few of his really dedicated fans? We could start tracking them around the 27th via flightradar24.com or similar and see where they wind up.

    1592:

    But not much worse than contemporary imports, some of which generated a market for aftermarket replacement of ill-considered OEM parts choices. And perhaps, we should not mention the appallingly under powered Chevette.

    1593:

    Good luck. I've slept in my car; while a Crown Victoria is a ludicrously huge car by European standards, the back seat isn't so wide that a 190cm man can lay down straight. I wouldn't want to do it every night.

    The Crown Vic makes ludicrously poor use of its interior volume: just consider the maximum thickness of the doors, for example, between the outer skin and the interior surface! When I first got in one I wondered if the doors were meant to be bulletproof armour, but no: they're just bulked out for no obvious reason. Same goes for relatives like the Lincoln Town Car: the suspension is soggy and designed to make it feel like a bed on wheels, the trunk is voluminous but not usefully so for holding rectangular objects, the engine and transmission are ghastly beyond belief.

    1594:

    "Impounding a US Air Force plane would be a distinctly unfriendly to treat a NATO ally. "

    Impounding AF2 would be an act of war.

    1595:

    But what to do about spent li-ion batteries?

    Suppose we replace every American car with a Tesla (or equivalent). ...

    56,000,000 tons average annual of battery disposal (3 year battery lifetime)

    Three points:

    Firstly, Teslas are like high-end BMWs or the equivalent: big, powerful sports saloons. There is no sane reason to imagine the economy/compact side of the market is going to vanish.

    Secondly, based on current longevity 3 years looks like a ridiculously short lifespan -- plenty of them are still holding a good charge in day to day use after over years: early predictions of triennial battery changes are now looking thoroughly pessimistic.

    Thirdly and finally, there's a grid level market for battery farms to do load balancing against renewable inputs, and it turns out that battery packs reclaimed from EVs when they drop below 70% of as-new capacity work fine if you line 'em up in rows on a concrete slab and hook them up to a substation, where they can serve for many more years, until they drop so low that it makes sense to remove them for recycling and replace them with another fresh-from-the-automobile pack.

    TLDR is many of them will be smaller than you think, they last longer than you might expect in cars, and even after they've aged out of moving lumps of steel around they're still useful for other purposes.

    1596:

    The Pinto front suspension has had an afterlife in kit cars because of it's compactness*, but if you recognize one, it should be referred to as a "Mustang II" part, lest one give offense. *Also didn't prematurely wear out tires like the MacPherson strut suspensions of the day.

    1597:

    There's also the used market, if older EVs get into a price range I could afford*, a range degraded to 100 km would mean I might need to charge it twice weekly, less expensive than even American gasoline. *Working class.

    1598:

    Which is likely to drop the 56 million tons to closer to 10 million. It still needs someone to organise the regulations to ensure that they ARE practicably recyclable and recycled, and to ensure that the recycling mechanisms are in place. It's no different in kind from organising the increased generation, distribution and charging facilities, but none of them will 'just happen'.

    1599:

    There's also the used market, if older EVs get into a price range I could afford*,

    The battery keeps the price of a usable second-hand EV high. If the car's really cheap the battery is toast. It costs thousands to replace it with even a second-hand battey pack with restricted range compared to new.

    Right now I could buy an petrol or diesel car with an inspection (ObUK: MOT) for less than a thousand quid and expect to get a year's service and more out of it. I don't expect to ever see a 300km-range EV for less than five thousand quid second-hand.

    1600:

    But if a non-hostile plane had come limbering across the atlantic asking for emergency landing, they had no choice but to let it land, and this did in fact happen a couple of times from either side during the closure.

    I remember Canadian airports getting slammed by diverted flights. I also remember Canadian security worrying about what would happen if one of those flights also had attackers on board — because it's not like Toronto or Vancouver is empty of targets. At the time we were told that if we didn't accept the planes they would crash because they didn't have the fuel to turn around.

    Directed from the Air Traffic Control System Command Center (ATCSCC) at Washington Dulles, the FAA’s 17,500 controllers directed the landing of some 4,300 tracked airborne targets and ordered the diversion to Canada of 120 inbound overseas flights, while the remaining inbound airplanes returned to the countries of origin. Nav Canada landed the diverted traffic and its domestic airborne traffic before unplugging its service.

    https://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/aerospace/2007-10-08/shutdown-national-airspace-system-was-organized-mayhem

    At least we got a good musical out of it: https://comefromaway.com

    Our thanks was to be publicly blamed by American security officials for years, because apparently lax Canadian security allowed the hijackers to fly directly to America from Germany, UAE, and Saudi Arabia. :-/

    1601:

    But not much worse than contemporary imports,

    A friend bought a new Toyota Corolla around 78. It was not much more than a big tin can on wheels. But it help up much better than the Pintos and Vegas I knew about.

    1602:

    P H-K OTOH Temporarily impounding AF2 for purely technical safety & constructional reasons, to ensure that any potential passengers were not endangered? < Grin >

    Update: Ossoff is now claiming victory as well as Warnock. Time to make sure voter suppression never happens again The next 2 years are critical - as noted above: Far too many Merkins are convinced that Social Democracy is "commonism". If Biden/Harris can keep control until 2024 & DJT is in jail by then, things might actually improve.

    1603:

    Impounding AF2 would be an act of war.

    To pick a bit of a nit, AF2 is the call sign of any aircraft if the VP is on board and the Pres isn't.

    But I get your point.

    1604:

    The other practical problem is that lithium mining, as currently done, isn't exactly sustainable. There are issues like, well, evaporating a lot of water in deserts to crystallize high-lithium salts and all the other mining problems you'd expect (limited deposits, interesting co-occurring elements, like rubidium and cesium, that have to go somewhere, etc).

    That said, it's almost certainly easier and more environmentally viable to cycle the lithium between batteries than out of decreasingly good deposits, so I'd kind of expect industry to get their act together and scale up accordingly. It's really little different than recycling lead rather than dumping it.

    One problem we are having is that, with car batteries performing so well, the push to next gen house batteries is stalled. See, back in 2017, we were all assuming that the next gen house batteries would be decommissioned car batteries running at 70% charge. These are more than good enough to power a house or recharge a car that's less than drained. Alas, that market has not yet materialized, so we're stuck with Tesla Wall Warts that aren't sufficient to powering a home and car off the roof. Sad problems to have, I know.

    1605:

    Assuming Ossoff has won, one hopes that the gun-rich conservative movement all stand in a big circle and attempt to hold hands and sing kumbaya before chambering a round and opening up on each other. Or, in the less metaphorical version: it's loyalty test time! Who will sacrifice what's left of their humanity to become a Trumpian Dignity Wraith, who will buckle and crack, who well turn away, and who will get indicted?

    Honestly, at this point, I don't care beyond schadenfreude, but for those who like grimdark, grab your white and greasy popcorn and chow down. I'm more hoping that some of the awe inspiring black and latinx women who are rising to power in the US can actually do some good in the world.

    1606:

    AFAIK,the Vega existed to make Pinto & Gremlin owners feel better about their choices. Routine maintenance on the contemporary imports was a more expensive proposition, as I don't believe they'd yet implemented hydraulic lash adjustment in their engines, higher priced parts, all of which might be of little concern to someone who could afford professional service, but a big deal to a DIY, by financial necessity. Almost bought a 2nd hand Corolla once, but neither I, nor the owner could persuade it to start.

    1607:

    AFAIK,the Vega existed to make Pinto & Gremlin owners feel better about their choices.

    My brother had a Vega he got used but as I was 4 years ahead of him I was off at college when he got it. I don't remember much talk about it but I do remember clouds of blue not too long before it went away.

    1608:

    Almost bought a 2nd hand Corolla once, but neither I, nor the owner could persuade it to start.

    I sold my 95 Ford Explorer a few years ago. Had around 250K miles (odometer and speedometer had stopped a few years earlier). Misc things not working. Drivers window didn't want to go up without hand assist. When guy showed up to look at it radiator was about a gallon low. Surprised me.

    Anyway, I was asking $800. He offered $400. I took it. I think we both got a good deal.

    I got about 16 years out of it.

    1609:

    Ossoff is now claiming victory as well as Warnock. Time to make sure voter suppression never happens again The next 2 years are critical - as noted above: Far too many Merkins are convinced that Social Democracy is "commonism". If Biden/Harris can keep control until 2024 & DJT is in jail by then, things might actually improve.

    And time for the periodic reminder - Senators don't always vote based on party lines - and so Biden is still limited as to what he can accomplish.

    In particular 1 Democrat Senator (Joe Manchin, West Virginia - a very pro-Trump area) has already publicly said he will not support all of Biden's campaign ideas.

    So yes, if the Georgia results hold up and give us a 50/50 Senate that is good for Biden as it means he can get some things done, maybe (not sure how the Senate's 60% rule comes in to play).

    But there are some things that even the 50/50 Senate will not pass.

    1610:

    Actually they first thing will be to decide on what changes to make to the filibuster rules.

    They don't have the votes do change that unless some Republicans support them.

    Joe Manchin, D West Virginia, has publicly said he will not support any attempts to change that, which makes it 49 for 51 against at a guess.

    https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/10/politics/joe-manchin-supreme-court-packing-cnntv/index.html

    1611:

    Exactly. Or in other words, they will always be an order of magnitude too expensive for me to ever have one. Or anyone else like me, and there are a lot of such. Which is why I get so mad at people who can buy them new making out that it's all sunshine and flowers. When they become the only permitted/feasible option, there will be a vast amount that non-rich people simply can't do. A map of the country that shows only places where public transport is a possibility would be nearly all blank spaces marked "here be dragons", and a great deal of what it would show would itself disappear under the additional and quite reasonable requirement that the public transport not be mindbendingly shit. (Not to mention that under current circumstances it is completely blank all over...)

    1612:

    They don't have the votes do change that unless some Republicans support them.

    A few years ago after the big tax change of 2017 someone asked McConnell if they were going to change the filibuster rules get rid of the 60. His answer was interesting. Something like "there's no where if we can't get to 60 we can get to 50 at this time".

    1613:

    MS team? Please tell me more - I understand 1 in 1000 Americans have it, so please understand how PISSED I am that none of the GOP has it, yet three (or is it four now?) of my dear friends has it.

    1614:

    Restore the Voting Rights Act of '65, with coverage to all states (and commonwealths)

    1615:

    My system is not broken (CentOS 7.9.2009. Updated. This has only happened with the Zoom application running, and not anything else.

    In fact, with the first 5.4 release of zoom, it happened several times. I was speaking with another linux hand at a virtual con, and he'd run into it as well, and recommended I downgrade to 5.3, which seemed to work.

    I believe the recent time was with a newer 5.4 of zoom.

    1616:

    Why are you bothering to respond to me, if you didn't actually read what I said?

    "However, prior to the downsizing of the United States car industry in the 1970s and 1980s, larger vehicles with wheelbases up to 110 in (2.79 m) were considered "compact cars" in the United States."

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_car

    The first compact car I can ever remember riding in - note that we're excluding the VW bug - was a ladyfriend's Pinto in '74.

    The US auto manufacturers keep enlarging everything. See, for example, the T-bird....

    1617:

    As I said, compacts, as we know them, didn't come in in the US until the seventies, and then only grudgingly, and crappily, by the US Big Three.

    1618:

    Yes, let's mention the SHOVE-IT.

    An ex and I bought an '80, used, in '81. By the time we'd split, and she drove it off to the Tidewater area of VA from Philly...

    I replaced the starter motor. I replaced the generator I replaced a broken coil spring. And, oh, yes, TWO FUCKING TRANSMISSION REBUILDS, ONE PAID FOR BY A CLASS-ACTION LAWSUIT.

    When the CEO of GM knocks on my door, and offers me a car with good gas milage, and a 10-yr warranty on EVERYTHING (ok, not tires or oil changes), I'll buy a GM vehicle.

    Otherwise, NEVER.

    1619:

    Grimdark? Why would the Trumpistas starting to assassinate each other be "grimdark"? Sounds more like "hopepunk" to me.

    1620:

    And, the latest news is that Biden seems to be prepared to stick the knife in and twist it.

    For those out of the US, four years ago, President Obama had nominated Merrick Garland for Supreme Court Justice. McConnell refused to even bring the nomination to committee for 8 months, claiming there was a "Biden Rule" in the Senate against doing that at the end of a President's term (there was no such thing). Then, McConnell rammed through as a Supreme Court Justice a woman the Bar Assn said was "unqualified" just a few months ago, right before the election.

    The headline is that Biden's looking at Merrick Garland as Attorney General.

    1621:

    Meanwhile HERE is an evil, grasping, corrupt tory shit A leading Tory credited with inspiring Brexit has urged Boris Johnson to cull a raft of EU consumer and worker protections, now the UK has the freedom to act. Safeguards for the use of data, pay and conditions, GM foods, hedge funds, dangerous chemicals and the disposal of environmentally-damaging vehicles should all be binned, Daniel Hannan said. “Change is coming. To succeed outside the EU, we need to be fitter, leaner and more globally engaged,” said the former MEP, who has just been made a Conservative peer.

    whitroth @ 1614 Yes - hadn't thought of that, because I'm not hat familiar with US norms. I think it needs more than that, though.

    1622:

    Paul @ 1575:

    [...] the very first thing the US Dems need to do is to enact laws that stamp on voter suppression - though how one does that, I know not.

    This came up previously here @104. I mentioned the Shelby decision, which struck down federal restrictions on state voting law. JBS commented:

    Not quite. The Shelby decision hinged on the law only being applicable to SOME states. Congress could pass a law applicable to ALL of the states that should pass Constitutional muster.

    So if the Democrats control Senate and House then its just a matter of writing the law and voting it through. Biden signs it, job done. If the Democrats don't control both then it won't happen.

    Of course if the law does get passed the Republicans will challenge its constitutionality, so back to the Supreme Court it probably goes. But as JBS says, the Shelby decision was generally in favour of federal authority on this matter, so a reversal on that issue seems unlikely.

    Well, again ... not quite ...

    1. The Shelby decision was generally NOT in favor of Federal authority.

    2. Don't confuse should pass Constitutional muster with WILL pass ...

    My interpretation of "Shelby" is the Roberts Court was determined to strike down provisions in the law intended to prevent disenfranchisement of minority voters. The "argument" that it was UN-Constitutional because it was not applicable to all states came after ... post hoc justification.

    Plus, the decision in "Shelby" predates Trumpolini & Moscow Mitch (Putin's Bitch) packing the Supreme Court with EXTREME REICH-WING IDEOLOGUES. So even if the Democrats can pass voting rights legislation equally applicable to all of the states, it still might not get past the Supreme Court. They'll just find some other specious argument on which to base striking it down.

    1623:

    JBS But - they have got to do something to prevent voter suppression. minimum numbers & distribution of polling station / ballot boxes / drop-offs + restrictive fake "ID" laws etc.

    1624:

    David L @ @ 1578:

    but, perversely the city/town areas are the last to count, so it looks probable that Ossoff will/may win.

    That's where the mail in ballots are concentrated. And by Georgia law they can't be processed till after the polls close. Plus the bigger the population the more "provisional" ballots you get which means more hand processing. And to be official they have to be fed into a ballot counting machine after being unfolded, unspindled, etc...

    And somewhere in the state there were "technical" issues with a memory card so they are feeding 11K or so ballots through counting machines again.

    Ossoff/Perdue is so close they're probably gonna' have to have a runoff election.**

    Georgia's system isn't that bad. They have touch screen voting machines & once the voter has made his/her selections and commits it, it prints out a ballot the voter can look over and verify it has his/her choices recorded correctly (I don't know how they handle a case where the voter discovers a problem, but by law they have to have a way).

    Those paper ballots are then fed into a scanner which records the actual count. The ballots are retained so they can do hand counting if they need to.

    **I'm just being silly, but it occurs to me it is entirely possible for one candidate to get 49.9% of the votes while the other gets 49.8% (0.3% spoilage) and I'm not sure how Georgia would decide such a race in which neither candidate has a majority of votes cast.

    1625:

    Re: ' ... a distinctly unfriendly to treat a NATO ally. "'

    DT campaigned in 2016 on getting the US out of NATO. In a rare show of actual cooperation and putting their country first, both parties voted to keep the US in NATO:

    'On December 11, 2019, the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee passed a bill to be put in front of Congress which would require Congressional approval for American withdrawal from NATO.[51][52]'

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_from_NATO

    DT is no friend/ally of NATO despite his campaigning for NATO membership for his bestie (Putin).

    1626:

    So while the first silly objection to the Electoral College votes has been made and in in the 2 hour debate period (Arizona), apparently VP Pence has released a letter stating he will not block the certification of Biden's win, stating that the VP does not have such authority.

    1627:

    But - they have got to do something to prevent voter suppression. minimum numbers & distribution of polling station / ballot boxes / drop-offs + restrictive fake "ID" laws etc.

    Maybe.

    Biden and his administration has 2 years (assuming Georgia does end up both for the Democrats).

    Historically the party holding the White House does poorly at mid-terms - losing the Senate in 2022 seems a given, and apparently it doesn't (at this point) look good for the House either.

    So 2 years, combined with some Democrat Senators who won't support everything you want to do, means Biden & team need to carefully look at what they would like to achieve, the time available, and the odds of getting it through the Senate and choose carefully.

    Dealing with voter suppression is noble - but if the odds are in favour of the Supreme Court throwing it out then that is wasted time/effort - good if you have healthy majorities in both chambers and 4 years, no so great now.

    (ultimately the solution is to deal with it at the State level, via activism through propositions on the ballots where available - things like taking redistricting away from the politicians like done in Michigan(?)).

    There are a lot of other things (hi Covid!) that Biden needs to deal with that may in the end be a higher priority, both based on impact but also on the odds of getting passed.

    There have been lots of stories since Biden's win on how "he owes group A this for voting for him". Most of those demanding things are going to be disappointed when what they want collides with reality.

    1628:

    David L @ 1591: Anyone want to gather up tail numbers of various planes that the Pres might use in the last few days of office plus one he personally controls? Plus maybe a few of his really dedicated fans? We could start tracking them around the 27th via flightradar24.com or similar and see where they wind up.

    The Trump Organization 757, aka "Trump Force One" is not currently airworthy - missing an engine. Doesn't look like it's going to be airworthy in time for him to use it on the 19th.

    There's also a Cessna Citation X, but I don't know if it has the range to reach Scotland (maybe with a refueling stop at Gander).

    He might get a courtesy flight on one of the Government's 757s on the 20th, but only to somewhere in the U.S. He won't be taking Air Force One and flying off to Moscow ... or Saudi Arabia.

    1629:

    JBS I already noted that the Cessna has the range to reach Prestwick - just not Israel REPEATING RANGE of a Cessna Citation X ???? - ah yes, thanks 6410 km. And using google-maps measure distance function, Great Circle Wash DC - Israel = 9500km Whereas Wash DC - Prestwick = 5510 + Prestwick Tel Aviv = 4024

    1630:

    Poul-Henning Kamp @ 1594:

    "Impounding a US Air Force plane would be a distinctly unfriendly to treat a NATO ally. "

    Impounding AF2 would be an act of war.

    Not if someone was absconding with it & a legitimate US Government requested local authorities to stop & hold it for retrieval.

    My guess is that a request to use government aircraft on his last day in office to any destination other than New York (Trump Tower), New Jersey (Bedminster) or Florida (Mar-a-lago) is likely to be met with delays due to insurmountable logistical obstacles.

    What is he going to do, have his Secret Service detail hijack the damn plane to Cuba?

    If he did manage somehow to take a government aircraft to Scotland on the 19th, the U.S. would most certainly request Her Majesty's Government to stop any onward movement & provide the necessary support to return the aircraft to its rightful owners.

    And any premature action the UK might take in anticipation of ~18:00 GMT could probably be smoothed over as "inaction" while awaiting clarification from above.

    1631:

    Breaking Fascists invade US Capitol Members evacuated. how different to the treatment of the "BLM" protesters earlier, eh?

    1632:

    Re: '... did manage somehow to take a government aircraft to Scotland on the 19th, '

    Could the pilot not travel at a lower speed or be asked to circle round because of traffic and all tarmacs happen to be 'busy'?

    Who(m)* exactly does the AFO pilot report to anyway?

    • for grammarians

    Greg (1631):

    This is insane ...

    All bets are now off on DT going quietly and I'm not sure even our most absurd notions on an SF/F blog will reach the insanity bar set by his supporters.

    1633:

    JBS @ 1630

    For several days now there has been a rumor that "that a Scottish airport has been told to prepare for the arrival of a US military Boeing 757 one day before Joe Biden is sworn in."

    I got that by putting into Google: "rumors are that someone will be using the president's 757 on the 19th". I got even more hits a few days ago, but I don't remember the search terms I used then.

    So, if the rumors are correct a very long range (modified 757 a.k.a. Boeing C-32) plane has already been reserved for the trip, on a day where he will still be president.

    If Trump wants to go elsewhere after that he has probably pre-positioned his Cessna Citation X in Scotland.

    1634:

    Just got a news alert that Trump supporters have stormed the Capitol Building in Washington, DC forcing evacuation and suspension of the Electoral Vote count.

    1635:

    The vote counting in the US Capitol building has been stopped; the police are evacuating people. A large Trump MAGA mob have taken over at least part of the building.

    It might have been faked, but there was a photo of a protester sitting in the empty US Senate chamber, in the (Speaker's?) chair.

    1636:

    I never in my wildest dreams imagined I would get to experience "Rise and Fall of the American Empire" live, but I guess that's what I have been doing for the last 50 years.

    USA is never going to recover, this is the start of a civil war.

    1637:

    I was using definitions of compact & subcompact that the Department of Transportation uses, by those, compact cars have been a U.S. thing since the autumn of '59 and the Pinto was too short to be a compact by definition. Peak T-bird was in 1976 when it was a full size "Thar she blows!", succeeding models were smaller, some in thee mid eighties had a souped up Pinto motor, the most recent comparable to the first in size. Be wary of generalizations.

    1638:

    I wonder if the "Trumplodytes" remember what became of the brown shirts?

    1639:

    USA is never going to recover, this is the start of a civil war.

    Dubious at best.

    They have so few people at the Capitol that they can't even entirely surround the building. LOOK AT IT! They're a bunch of fucking superspreading terrorists, and hopefully they will be dealt with that way. Legally, and possibly with insufficient medical care in a few weeks.

    Now go be scared about something else.

    1640:

    The coup attempt, as incoherent as it is, is still running. The DC Nat'l Guard will be coming in the evening, and the VA National Guard is on its way.

    Just to cheer you all up... an "explosive device" has been found and safely exploded... at the RNC headquarters.

    Listening to the Traitor's speech to incite the insurrection on C-SPAN.

    Biden's spoken. Trump had one, count them, tweet.

    1641:

    Oh, the the GOP are getting a little nervous, now that they are under threat.

    1642:

    Sorry, but that is not the way history works.

    The fact that Capitol was overrun by a clown-car's worth of mental patients is precisely the point.

    The fact that they didn't get brutalized, because they're white, just reinforces that point.

    1643:

    @ Everybody (mainly Americans): NBC projects Jon Ossoff (D) as winner in GA for the Senate. The Democrats will now have 50 seats + Kamala Harris as VP breaking ties.

    1644:

    SFReader @ 1632:

    Re: '... did manage somehow to take a government aircraft to Scotland on the 19th, '

    Could the pilot not travel at a lower speed or be asked to circle round because of traffic and all tarmacs happen to be 'busy'?

    Who(m)* exactly does the AFO pilot report to anyway?

    Depends on how much fuel reserves he/she has on board. If he/she declared a low fuel emergency, the authorities in the UK would NOT refuse permission to land.

    But they could leave the aircraft sitting out on a remote taxiway & refuse permission for anyone to disembark.

    The pilots (and the whole crew) are assigned to the Presidential Airlift Squadron of the Presidential Airlift Group, part of the 89th Operations Group. Chain of Command runs up through the 89th Airlift Wing to Air Mobility Command to US Transportation Command to the Department of Defense and ultimately through SecDef to the "CIC".

    1645:

    "The Democrats will now have 50 seats + Kamala Harris as VP breaking ties."

    Count down to some Libermanesque presumably "D" senator beginning to detail any attempted progess ... 9 ... 8 ... 7 ... 6 ...

    1646:

    Niala @ 1633: JBS @ 1630

    "For several days now there has been a rumor that "that a Scottish airport has been told to prepare for the arrival of a US military Boeing 757 one day before Joe Biden is sworn in."

    I got that by putting into Google: "rumors are that someone will be using the president's 757 on the 19th". I got even more hits a few days ago, but I don't remember the search terms I used then.

    So, if the rumors are correct a very long range (modified 757 a.k.a. Boeing C-32) plane has already been reserved for the trip, on a day where he will still be president.

    If Trump wants to go elsewhere after that he has probably pre-positioned his Cessna Citation X in Scotland.

    IF the rumors are correct ... I've not seen any confirmation that they are.

    Where is Trump's Citation X at this time? Has it been pre-positioned?

    1647:

    What the fuck, America?!?

    (Going to bed shortly, will put up a discussion thread tomorrow -- by which time the immediate drama will hopefully be over and we can chew over the consequences.)

    1648:

    Barry Photos of fascist protesters in Pelosi's office, too ....

    P H-K Correction: It could, all too easily, be the start of a civil war. But not like 1861, more like Ireland 1922-3 between the Pro-Treaty & Anti-treaty "forces" Hwever, you too noticed: The fact that they didn't get brutalized, because they're white, just reinforces that point. see me @ 1631.

    JBS @ 1644 It would be DIRECTED to Stanstead, where it would be parked at the far end & surrounded by "Gentlemen from Hereford"

    Charlie Precisely ... w.t.f. indeed.

    1649:

    JBS @ 1646: "Where is Trump's Citation X at this time? Has it been pre-positioned?"

    Good question.

    Its registration "tail number" is N725DT, if I can believe the two different pictures I saw. I checked on an FAA Web database and the Cessna Citation X still seems to belong to one of his companies.

    A day or two ago (or more?) somebody commented here that they could find out (from another database) where the Cessna was if they had its "tail number". I'm hoping they'll do so.

    1650:

    Location seems to be not public by request of owner/operator unless whoever it was has access to non-public sources.

    1651:

    Reddit's "Leopards ate my face" board is struggling to deal with the volume of submissions.

    Now Trump's deranged MAGA terrorists hate the cops and call them Antifa. Funny how Trump's fascist mob calls anyone who opposes them antifascists. https://www.reddit.com/r/LeopardsAteMyFace/comments/krr03p/when_your_visage_gets_masticated/

    What I love are the various calls for the police (and military!) to get involved and "do the right thing"... which normally means beating and even killing anyone who resists. But in this case seems to mean "surrender to the rioters"?

    1652:

    Sorry, but that is not the way history works.

    Actually, it is.

    History evolves the way history evolves, and just because we claim something doesn't make it so.

    A handful of people out of a country of 350 million misbehave and break the law in the capital does not make a civil war.

    If anything it might in the long run be beneficial if it provides a wake up call to enough people in the Republican Party that their little project is running away from them.

    The fact that Capitol was overrun by a clown-car's worth of mental patients is precisely the point.

    Not really.

    They get to have fun for a couple of hours, and become a footnote in history.

    They don't change anything, Congress will still certify the Electoral College and Biden still will become President on January 20th.

    To an extent if anything this shows that the US is still a democracy and open society, that the government isn't operating behind a cordon of military personnel shooting down citizens.

    The fact that they didn't get brutalized, because they're white, just reinforces that point.

    A key point yes, but it still doesn't make it a coup or a civil war.

    1653:

    The coup attempt, as incoherent as it is, is still running. The DC Nat'l Guard will be coming in the evening, and the VA National Guard is on its way.

    Pentagon saying Pence involved in decision to call in National Guard, not Trump.

    1654:

    They will fail to take power, and they will fail to stop Biden taking the presidency. But make no mistake. This is a major team-building moment for the US fascists, hardening their core. They are spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt. The small worms feel like a powerful dragon.

    I also doubt that this is the start of a US civil war. But it could be the next infamous step towards a fascist dictatorship, similar to the Reichtag fire in Berlin, or towards a civil war.

    1655:

    "Or in other words, they will always be an order of magnitude too expensive for me to ever have one."

    You can lease an Ami for €19.99 a month, (approximately one day's congestion charge on your diesel banger) but whatever.

    1656:

    "Biden still will become President on January 20th."

    ... and everybody lived happily ever after ?

    No, sorry, I'm not seeing that at all.

    In one single day, We have seen that a few ten thousands of votes being all that stood between a palace-coup and what goes for democracy in USA, we have seen a clown-car full of white facists, who had pre-announced their violent intentions, overrun the legislative chambers, almost aided and abetted the police force which a few months ago treated a a nonviolent multi-ethnic demonstration like an invasion, we have seen the president cheer this on, without the 25th amendment being invoked, and with only 13 arrests and stern nudge-nudge-wink-wink talk that they "possibly could face prosecution".

    And this "the emperor is naked" moment comes by, not because the emperor is a bat-shit crazy hitler-wannabe, but because close enough to half the electorate, for a Georgia photo-finish to be necessary, voted for the naked emperor and the deeply-corrupt&racist-and-not-even-hiding-it republican party.

    Dont forget: The most right wing democratic senators, some of which are every bit as racist and corrupt as the republicans, are already calculating what they can bargain for, now that they have veto power over the entire democratic party's agenda.

    As many, me included, have pointed out: Trump viewed this as a hostile corporate takeover, where he didn't get his cut, so he's torching the place on the way out, and the kindling have been stacked up for four years,so it's going to burn just fine.

    I'm sure a lot of "polite USA" will try to pretend all of this never happened, but that's Iraqi Minister of Information territory right there: Everybody saw it happen.

    So no, Hallmark-style glossy pictures of nice grandpa Biden in front of a perfectly manicured southern mansion's lawn is not going to be enough to make everybody happy ever after.

    Either you get a revolution, which is unlikely, or you get a civil war, with the possible outside option that the democrats, as is their fashion, end up getting nothing done in the next four years, when the Republicans field a /competent/ facist dictator-wannabe.

    1657:

    Without a regulatory overhaul, something like the Ami is not a transportation solution in much of the world.

    1658:

    Those paper ballots are then fed into a scanner which records the actual count. The ballots are retained so they can do hand counting if they need to.

    My problem with the Georgia method is they generate BAR CODES on the paper which is what is actually read. So you are verify text that matches what you picked but you have no idea if the bar code (maybe a QR code) is doing what you asked and is implied by the wet wear readable text.

    1659:

    Tim H @ 1657

    The Citroen Ami was designed from the start to meet all the European Union regulations for a quadricycle. It has all national regulations on its side in Europe.

    In other countries like Egypt, Thailand, etc. it's not so much a matter of regulation but marketing and political influence by Citroen. They already have all kinds of tiny quadricycle-like vehicles like the "Tuk-tuks" or others.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_rickshaw

    In North America we can forget about the Ami until the day when the definition for enclosed "mobility aids" is widened a bit more.

    https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/daymak-launches-new-boomerbuggy-x-the-first-solar-mobility-enclosed-scooter-with-air-conditioning-300848439.html

    1660:

    My father bought a 4th gen model for some crazy reason. Maybe he got a deal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Thunderbird_(fourth_generation)

    It was a definite land barge. I think he bought it as he couldn't justify buying a 57 model which is what he had wanted when younger.

    1661:

    I liked the '84, built on the fox body, light enough to be fast with an unnaturally aspirated 2.3L.

    1662:

    A day or two ago (or more?) somebody commented here that they could find out (from another database) where the Cessna was if they had its "tail number". I'm hoping they'll do so.

    Well a few hours ago. There are web sites and phone apps that allow you to track such. I used (and subscribed to) flight radar 24. There are others. When my wife and I were flying 60-70 times a year you could track your plane back and make sure it was on time on the way in to make sure you'd be on your flight when you needed to be.

    Anyway when I put in N725DT I get no active or recent flights for a Cessna 750 Citation X. Serial number 750-0023, 24 years old.

    1663:

    You ever try to site and permit a hazwaste disposal facility?

    1664:

    My problem with the Georgia method is they generate BAR CODES on the paper which is what is actually read. So you are verify text that matches what you picked but you have no idea if the bar code (maybe a QR code) is doing what you asked and is implied by the wet wear readable text.

    Why is that a problem?

    You have 2 choices:

    1) machine A generates the ballot in both human readable form (so the voter can verify) and in machine readable (bar code/QR code/doesn't matter). This bar code is read by machine B which actually counts the votes. Because it is a bar code, which having been around successfully for decades is a solved problem, and can have some sort of verification/check sum protocol, the risk of a read error is very low.

    2) machine A generates the ballot in human readable form, and machine B reads the human readable ballot. This isn't a solved technology, which means there are more opportunities for bugs and user input errors (paper not quite aligned correctly, etc.).

    In either case you are relying on the machines being secure and accurate - if you don't believe that then it doesn't matter which system you use. Because if you are worried about fraud that can simply be done on machine B regardless of which system is used.

    In either case you can manually audit the vote, either by manually counting ever ballot or just random subgroups of votes.

    1665:

    Ok, almost time to go eat dinner - about to be 19:30 EST.

    The National Assoc of Manufacturers called for the 25th Amendment. 90%-95% of everyone on the news is calling it an insurrection. The Kansas City Star (?!) is saying it's the jr. Sen. from MS for trying to object to certifying. Trump seems to be being kept out of the loop about restoring order. Twitter's doing things to his feed.

    One Congresswoman, Omar, is drafting Articles of Impeachment, and a LOT OF PEOPLE are going "if starting a coup isn't grounds for impeachment, what is?"

    It's going to be really interesting what happens tonight.

    1666:

    Re: 'Either you get a revolution, which is unlikely, or you get a civil war, with the possible outside option that the democrats, ...'

    And then you get another lethal virus this one happens tp spread hate and mistrust of legal government/constitutional procedures. Small groups of people with banners saying 'Canadians for Trump' have shown up outside the gov't buildings in Toronto, Vancouver, and Calgary.

    https://globalnews.ca/news/7559368/canada-pro-trump-rallies-us-capitol-lockdown/

    Any sign of something similar happening in other countries - pro-DT groups in the streets?

    Security's gonna have to be really, really tight on January 20/21.

    1667:

    David L @ 1662: "when I put in N725DT I get no active or recent flights for a Cessna 750 Citation X. "

    That's Trump's Cessna all right.

    So, that database doesn't say where it is right now, if I understand well.

    1668:

    I believe what's been happening has been degrading the soft power of the U.S., chipping away at our respectability... is it too paranoid to suggest that the goal of contemporary conservatism is to insure that no government can push around the .001%?

    1669:

    Not so much a data base as access to real time transponder data. For commercial flights they merge this together with schedules so you can see where a plane has been for a week or few and where it is supposed to go for a bit of time into the future. And look things up by flight number and airline code.

    If there is no flight underway or flight plan then there is nothing to see.

    1671:

    Twitter has locked Trump's account for 12 hours and is threatening a ban.

    Congress has resumed the process of certifying the Electoral College votes.

    1672:

    Small groups of people with banners saying 'Canadians for Trump' have shown up outside the gov't buildings in Toronto, Vancouver, and Calgary.

    These idiots have been around for a while in Canada, most often seen around anti-mask protests or lockdown protests.

    But they never amount to much in terms of numbers, never reach triple digits.

    1673:

    Small groups of people with banners saying 'Canadians for Trump' have shown up outside the gov't buildings in Toronto, Vancouver, and Calgary.

    And in Vancouver anti-mask protesters wear "Trump 2020" clothing while leading anti-mask rallies, apparently.

    1674:

    is it too paranoid to suggest that the goal of contemporary conservatism is to insure that no government can push around the .001%?

    I suspect the goal is to ensure that governments follow orders and do what the 0.001% want, rather than simply being unable to push them around.

    1675:

    "Biden still will become President on January 20th."

    ... and everybody lived happily ever after ?

    Not what I said.

    I said today's event will not overturn the results of the election in November, that Trump will not remain in office.

    In one single day, We have seen that a few ten thousands of votes being all that stood between a palace-coup and what goes for democracy in USA,

    It's always sad when in the name of protecting democracy valid votes for the side you disagree with are dismissed as being "a palace-coup"

    Democracy is imperfect and often messy, and voters are allowed (hey, it's freedom of choice) to vote against their interests, or to vote for idiots, or vote for whatever you want to call the Republican Party today.

    we have seen a clown-car full of white facists, who had pre-announced their violent intentions, overrun the legislative chambers, almost aided and abetted the police force which a few months ago treated a a nonviolent multi-ethnic demonstration like an invasion, we have seen the president cheer this on, without the 25th amendment being invoked, and with only 13 arrests and stern nudge-nudge-wink-wink talk that they "possibly could face prosecution".

    Ah yes, the great tradition of armchair quarterbacking.

    Events like this rarely see mass arrests - the authorities are too outnumbered to achieve this.

    What does happen though is photographs and video from the event area and surrounding areas are archived and gone through, and with time the perpetrators are identified and charged.

    So judging consequences for the offenders by results in the first 12, 24 hours will be misleading.

    As for the 25th Amendment, that's problematic. A majority of Trump's cabinet have to vote to remove him - unlikely to happen (and note that the Cabinet != the Republican Party)

    And this "the emperor is naked" moment comes by, not because the emperor is a bat-shit crazy hitler-wannabe, but because close enough to half the electorate, for a Georgia photo-finish to be necessary, voted for the naked emperor and the deeply-corrupt&racist-and-not-even-hiding-it republican party.

    And the point?

    Again, people are free to vote however they want - and if they want the Republican Party and everything it stands for, that is their choice - the fact that you, I, perhaps everyone on this forum, all disagree is irrelevant.

    Dont forget: The most right wing democratic senators, some of which are every bit as racist and corrupt as the republicans, are already calculating what they can bargain for, now that they have veto power over the entire democratic party's agenda.

    Again, your point?

    The system is what the system is, and both the Republicans and Democrats have to work within that system - and they both twist and manipulate the system to their advantage, both on a party level and on a representative level.

    If you want to be angry, be angry at the Democratic Party for peforming so badly in the election that the Senate is merely 50/50.

    I'm sure a lot of "polite USA" will try to pretend all of this never happened, but that's Iraqi Minister of Information territory right there: Everybody saw it happen.

    Nope.

    "polite USA" is well aware (for the most part) of what is happening - hence the record voter turnout in November.

    So no, Hallmark-style glossy pictures of nice grandpa Biden in front of a perfectly manicured southern mansion's lawn is not going to be enough to make everybody happy ever after.

    Never was.

    The US, like a lot of countries, has serious issues both within it's political parties and within the electorate, and no one election was going to solve this 50+ year in the making problem.

    And it will probably get worse before it gets better.

    Either you get a revolution, which is unlikely, or you get a civil war, with the possible outside option that the democrats, as is their fashion, end up getting nothing done in the next four years, when the Republicans field a /competent/ facist dictator-wannabe.

    Revolution - nope

    Civil War - nope

    Let's get real - despite 4 years of pandering to them Trump has been unable to get them to overturn the election.

    If Trump's followers were really into violence there would have been millions of them in Washington today - the low numbers shows that this is a fringe movement of people who can't organize an effective birthday party because it involves to much effort.

    Which isn't to day that large number of people who currently believe Trump will suddenly change their minds - most of them won't. Be they also aren't going to rise up with guns.

    And yes, there is a good chance that the Republicans will take the White House in 2024, and one or both parts of Congress in 2022.

    But that is because the Democrats have a problem - the US population (or, more precisely, given the quirks of the US electoral system, the voters that matter) are more right wing than many Democrats want to admit - and they have no plan to deal with it, nor do their billionaire supporters.

    1676:

    9, 8, 7, ... I seem to recall there was a countdown to crazy, and yet some... Lost count.

    1677:

    The core of the capitol invaders are being 'forged in fire'. No doubt some of them will go to prison (maybe), but there is a core that is building.

    This feels more like the 'Beer Hall Putsch' than any kind of successful attempt at a coup. They will go away for awhile, but probably come back more dangerous. No doubt Trump will be a martyr for the cause within a few years, and when they find an actual competent, charismatic fascist we'll all be in trouble.

    1678:

    As for the 25th Amendment, that's problematic. A majority of Trump's cabinet have to vote to remove him - unlikely to happen

    Doesn't matter. At a MINIMUM the 25th takes 5 or more days if the President doesn't go along. And that's if every group involved is fast tracking things. The cabinet, Congress, the VP, etc...

    Impeachment AND removal, on the other hand, can be done in a few hours. IF IF IF both sides of Congress want it to happen that fast. House writes up some articles of impeachment, (KISS applies), vote, send it across the building, Senate accepts it and put it to a discussion on the floor ignoring conventions and just decides to have a vote.

    While we are closer to that than ever before there is still that requirement of 2/3s of the Senate to go along. I seriously doubt we're there yet. But if Trump doesn't settle down the Senate may get there before the 20th.

    1679:

    A ban is good news.

    FWIW we've had pro-Trump protests in Sydney and Auckland recently, it's not just Canada. I think there are people everywhere who buy the whole nutbag from US media and just go to town. Literally, with protests in the middle of cities in random places around the world.

    1680:

    His name is Joe Manchin and he has already announced his intentions to anyone who will give him an interview. I had been predicting he would be the most powerful person in Washington and then I rolled it back because it looked like the Democrats would not prevail in Congress. So here we are after all.

    America needs 3 or 4 major political parties to accurately represent its most important constituencies, but that's structurally un-workable; so chaos it is.

    1681:

    Only one of these articles is satire:

    https://www.betootaadvocate.com/uncategorized/fiji-laughs-at-pathetic-american-attempt-at-a-coup-deta/

    Speaking to The Advocate today, the Prime Minister of Fiji Commodore Frank Bainimarama condemned the actions of the ‘insurgents’ that raided the US Capitol Building. “It wasn’t even a bloodless coup,” said Mr Bainimarama.

    https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2021/01/turkey-statement-protests-storming-us-capitol-congress-dc.html

    “Turkey invites all parties in US to use moderation, common sense to overcome this domestic political crisis,” read a brief statement reported by the Turkish state-run Anadolu Agency.

    1682:

    You wrote: And yes, there is a good chance that the Republicans will take the White House in 2024, and one or both parts of Congress in 2022.

    But that is because the Democrats have a problem - the US population (or, more precisely, given the quirks of the US electoral system, the voters that matter) are more right wing than many Democrats want to admit - and they have no plan to deal with it, nor do their billionaire supporters.

    Thanks for outing yourself, right winger.

    "Billionaire supporters"... you mean, as opposed to all the WHITE WING BILLIONAIRES, from Murdoch to the Waltons to Koch to Adelson?

    How much have most of candidates since 16 gotten from the median donor? Oh, that's right, $27.

    And no, they're not more right wing. They want real change, and if they can't get what they want, they'll do anything.

    Or did you miss that over 80 million voted for Joe? That the election this year was the LARGEST TURNOUT IN MY LIFETIME?

    1683:

    I don't think so. They think they know how strong they are... but the real thing is look and listen to some of them. They're snowflakes.

    And when they get home, some of them will go to jail. And they're going to see the overwhelming majority of Americans genuinely horrified - that CAN'T HAPPEN here! That's somewhere else....

    1684:

    And don't forget all those joyous superspreaders in that maskless crowd. At a rough guess, 2-3% of the previously uninfected will die due to this spasm of stupidity. Along with a rather larger number of their friends and friends of friends who get exposed by these assholes.

    Anyway, based on the hundred-odd Republican Congresscritters who voted to uphold the Arizona electoral protest after the insurrection, my guess is that rapid impeachment is going to have a very tough row-to-hoe. Sorry Rep. Omar. I think it should be started just in case, but the chambers have too many MAGATs infesting them right now.

    As for the 25th Amendment, something very interesting happened today that's only now getting the attention it deserved. Mike Pence acted with the Acting Secretary of Defense to call out the National Guard. That's Trump's job, but Trump had apparently checked out in some fashion, and Pence issued the (illegal???) order that put the National Guard onto the DC streets to protect property, with the concurrence of the acting SecDef.

    The thing about the 25th Amendment is that it's for situations when the President can't do his duties. Acting as Commander In Chief during an insurrection is arguably a duty, so if the POTUS isn't doing his job and the VPOTUS is forced to step in or else...That looks a bit like time for Pence to start being Acting President.

    Personally, I hope to wake to find the 25th Amendment has been invoked, and Trump's given a nice extended vacation in Bethesda for a full psych and physical workup. He will of course scream bloody murder, but Congress can run out the clock on him once Pence and company files an appeal, and there's nothing he, or his supporters, can do legally. Whether they can successfully do something illegally is another question.

    1685:

    It's entirely possible that VP Pence and sundry Cabinet members and other officials have already, as with the National Guard deployment, simply started acting as if Pence were Acting President, that involving a great deal less commotion than would be involved with an Amendment 25, Section 4 declaration. Basically just let the President-Eject keep imagining himself President for 15 more days, in the middle of his usual cloud of fawning courtiers, but substantively ignore him. It doesn't even require a conspiracy for them to do this, just a spontaneous outbreak of common sense.

    After all, back in pre-Amendment 25 days, that was pretty much how Edith Wilson got elevated to de-facto Acting President for 17 months, after Woodrow was disabled by stroke in October 2019.

    1686:

    I sometimes read conservative reddits (mostly to figure out if they are really that nuts) and...the commentors are a lot less ..conservative...than I'd expected.

    There does seem to be a strong anti-corporatist streak. Oddly, there was also more support than I'd expected for AOC. (As in, they tended to disagree with her politics, but felt she has pro-people.)

    Sadly, I kind of suspect that a truly successful left wing party would also need to be xenophobic in the US. There are a bunch of different interest blocs and it just seems like the strongest voting majority. With the current alignment though, the US is effectively quite far right.

    1687:

    Charlie This is the USA Beer-Hall Putsch - now DJT won't be around next time round - but his successor will be, someone who has learnt from this ... A competent & actually ruthless fascist, who could very easily take over in 2025 or 2029. We need to worry about whom that might be. ( Rocketjps @ 1677 ) You too? and when they find an actual competent, charismatic fascist we'll all be in trouble.

    P H-K CORRECTION If anything it might in the long run be beneficialreally bad if it provides a wake up call to enough people in the Republican Party that their little project is running away from them, so they need to get a competent fascist to run the show, next time eh? - oh your # 1656 is much nearer the mark & disturbing it is, too.

    zumbs (#1654) is correct, which is why we should be even more concerned

    1688:

    A comment from "Esquire" of all papers! QUOTE: He is responsible for all of it. This country has a serious fascism problem now. It has a fascism problem that is fed and encouraged by what is at best a fascist-adjacent media ecosystem and, at worst, a communications network that would embarrass Goebbels.

    1689:

    Apologies but ... long quote from "The Atlantic, below.

    All I can say is that: "This is History" & like the evening of 22/11/1963 or the afternoon of 11/9/2001, I deeply wish it wasn't. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

    This is a moment of shame and grief.

    If we are not very careful, it will also be a terrible moment of opportunity for President Donald Trump. The violence Trump incited could be his pretext for further abuses of presidential power.

    As so often with Trump, he has indicated the plan in advance: Use the Insurrection Act to somehow interfere with the transition of power. He could try it this very day.

    In institutional self-defense, Trump must be impeached again and this time removed. That needs to happen immediately, before he can declare martial law, so that Vice President Mike Pence can oversee the constitutional transition of power, the first time since the Civil War that such a transition can no longer be described as “peaceful.”

    Yoni Appelbaum: Impeach Trump again

    What’s needed, this time, is for a saving remnant of Republican senators to emulate the integrity that was embodied last time around only by Senator Mitt Romney. The leaders of Trump’s own party have to do the job of protecting the country from Trump’s violent lawlessness. Last time, the other senators refused. Now they need to feel real pressure.

    All through this day, Republican pundits have expressed shock and puzzlement that it could come to this. “We don’t know who these people are,” the radio host Mark Levin tweeted. That’s the same Mark Levin who wrote an article urging Congress to challenge the results of the 2020 election, an article approvingly tweeted by Trump on December 30. In fact, we know “who these people are.” They are the monsters incubated, birthed, nurtured, fed, trained, and now loosed by Trump and by his enablers in politics and the media.

    “This is not who we are,” Donald Trump Jr. tweeted this afternoon, although earlier today he had been doing plenty of incitement of his own. As the whole world now sees, this is exactly who the Trumps are and who his most loyal supporters are. But it does not have to be the enduring legacy of all Republicans and all conservatives.

    Everybody connected in any way to Trumpism must instantly put as many miles of distance as possible between themselves and this president and the mob that he raised and unleashed. There is still hope that the word Republican can be wrenched back from the thugs and insurrectionists. And the new majority in the House and Senate should act fast to offer Republicans the chance to return to faith in the Constitution they have attacked.

    Schedule an impeachment vote for this very night. Stay ’til dawn. Do whatever is necessary. Avert any potential for martial law. Deny Trump command of the military; withdraw the nuclear codes. Don’t wait until the next crossed red line, until the next smashed barrier, until the next putsch attempt. Install Mike Pence right away as the 46th president and work with him to manage the transition on January 20 to Joe Biden as the 47th. Bar Trump from ever again holding office—and get ready to prosecute him for his crimes on January 21.

    Act now. And everyone who acts now—even those who were most in the wrong until now—can share the credit and recognition as a protector of the Constitution. There is no time for delay.

    Remove this treasonous president. Invite his own party to join the effort to remove him now, or to share now and forever Trump’s guilt.

    1690:

    No doubt Trump will be a martyr for the cause within a few years, and when they find an actual competent, charismatic fascist we'll all be in trouble.

    I have thought of Trump as a sort of Hindenburg figure, with the glaring inconsistency being that Hindenburg was successful as a general. With that in mind, this election and its outcomes are something like the "stab in the back" (that is Germany's surrender on the Western Front, despite prevailing on the Eastern Front). What 100 years ago was tragedy, today is farce? Maybe someone arrested in the present unpleasantness is the really dangerous individual looking forward to the 2032 elections. Neat parallels are misleading, but as much as a clumsy paraphrase makes an analogy, and as much as the "100 years later" pattern doesn't really have legs, it's a diverting thought experiment.

    1691:

    Eh, not Hindenburg. Billy the K.

    1692:

    Yesterday was the high water mark of Trumpism. As Pickett's Charge was for the Confederacy, Trump supporters assaulting Congress was the high point of the movement.

    From here on out their numbers dwindle and their decline in numbers accelerates. Obesity, old age, Covid-19 (easily prevented if the idiots would just wear a mask), "deaths of despair", continued brain drain to the cities, the slow death of their resource extraction economies, etc., will leave fewer and fewer Trump supports with each passing year.

    Georgia an Arizona both turned Blue this year. North Carolina is almost there. Texas and Florida will soon follow. Then its "game over" for the GOP at the national level.

    1693:

    "I have thought of Trump as a sort of Hindenburg figure"

    Not really.

    Trump is more like the village-drunk who leans on the wall of the emperors new palace, making it fall over to reveal it as just a potemkin village, held together with spit and baling string.

    Read any observant ex-presidents memoir, and you will find they are all painfully aware how fragile the government of USA actually is.

    The only reason it has not collapsed until now, is that they have largely managed to keep blundering idiots away from the controls.

    As a European, one would tend think that now, finally, USAnians will get their shit together, but that's not how it works.

    Things will only get worse, because now the road has been cleared for the competent facists, and since there can only ever be "Us vs. Them", the republican party will close ranks around "the best man for the job".

    And remember: Half the population is suffering from Stockholm-syndrome after being indoctrinated by Fox News for three decades: Trumps approval rating has never gone below 40%.

    Ten years or so, and we'll see the second inning of WWII, this time with England and USA playing on the facist side of the field.

    1694:

    Forgot to say:

    Hack of the Decade award obviously goes to Putin.

    1695:

    All through the worst of the mob "visit" there was remarkable restraint by the ladies and gentlemen of the press in not revealing the restricted location where the members of Congress were spirited away, within the Capitol complex.

    Even this morning the press is silent about this.

    1696:

    If that meant the blimp, possibly. However, all this reminds me of the ending of the Dunciad (last 30 lines or so) - for those that don't know it, look it up, because it is a wonderful bit of poetry.

    I am horribly afraid you are right in your last paragraph.

    1697:

    My system is not broken
    By definition if a non-root user mode program causes a Unix like OS to crash or reboot then the system is broken.

    1698:

    Yes, I heard that one, too, back in the 1970s, with regard to IBM MVS. It's mathematically provable to be nonsense. It is possible to build systems that are secure, in the sense that no entity can escale privilege without appropriate authorisation. It is NOT possible to build systems that are secure against deprivation of service, unless you constrain the user programs to a level that is unacceptable.

    I am a very rusty about the minutiae of modern Unices, but I used to be able to crash any of them with a simple program, usually within half an hour of starting to code.

    1699:

    Something positive to remember: http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0908/3stooges.php3

    Comparisons to NAZIs has the problem of making "Drumph!" look competent, but I am still amused that the Howard brothers & Larry Fine mocked Hitler so effectively.

    1700:

    @ Niala # 1695: "All through the worst of the mob "visit" there was remarkable restraint by the ladies and gentlemen of the press in not revealing the restricted location where the members of Congress were spirited away, within the Capitol complex."

    I can't detect whether this is meant ironically or not. Is the American press really so bad that they can seriously be lauded for not actively partaking in an act of sedition/insurgence/terrorism (whatever you want to call it)? I am aware that the level of journalistic quality (and of public discourse) in the US is painfully low compared to anything I am used to here in Germany, but is it really that bad?

    @ Greg # 1688: "from "Esquire" of all papers!"

    Charles Pierce is a very left-wing columnist by US-standards. I've read him a lot during the Obama years alongside Charlie's blog. I only stopped when Esquire put him behind a paywall. He was very outspoken in criticizing Obama from the liberal left at the time, and he's been firing broadsides against Trump and the Republicans continuously for the last four years. You'll notice that he always amends the word 'president' with a '*' when he's referring to Trump, to denote that he doesn't accept him as president. Unfortunately for all his efforts he's not been successful at sinking the GOP-ship.

    <sigh> The lot of the liberal left…

    1701:

    "Is the American press really so bad that they can seriously be lauded for not actively partaking in an act of sedition/insurgence/terrorism (whatever you want to call it)?"

    I would say they're being lauded for a temporary pause in the sedition.

    1702:

    P H-K The only reason it has not collapsed until now, is that they have largely managed to keep blundering idiots away from the controls. Boris Johnson? Hopefully, though, by 2032 Brexit will either be reversed or more-or-less collapsed, so no we won't be playing fascist - I hope. There's the alternative Germany/Britain analogue, though - with us playing Austria-Hungary to the US' Zweite Reich, one I really don't like.

    1703:

    gasdive @ 1701: "I would say they're being lauded for a temporary pause in the sedition."

    You bet! And I wasn't only praising the U.S. members of the press. I was also praising the members of the press who were there, inside the capitol complex, from all over the globe.

    They all kept silent about the "secure location" where the members of Congress were temporarily (4 hours) hidden away, because they knew that if they revealed it on the air or on the Internet some members of the mob would immediately hear it.

    1704:

    Tim H: is it too paranoid to suggest that the goal of contemporary conservatism is to insure that no government can push around the .001%?

    No, I think that's an entirely correct analysis.

    1705:

    "Boris Johnson?"

    Just you wait: He'll make the trains run on time.

    1706:

    'They all kept silent about the "secure location"'

    Yet, it only took a not-so-random-dude on the interwebs 20 minutes to geolocate it from the picture of the electoral college votes one senator posted on twitter...

    1707:

    Opsec is hard, and not all people realize that many photos have the location it was taken in, for example. (I don't know what happened in this case, but one guess is the picture metadata.)

    1708:

    Elderly Cynic @1698:

    Yes, I heard that one, too, back in the 1970s

    It is a lot harder than it was, but not impossible.

    I first crashed a real OS programmatically running BSD 4.1 on a VAX, but it's easy when you're studying the architecture preparatory to fiddling with device drivers, poor munnari took a lot of beating back in the day.

    Most Linux systems crash because some luser thinks that "portable" means, "It builds on Ubuntu and Fedora Core", or that because they can type "c++" they are a C++ designer. Sadly, they aren't.

    And Zoom and it's siblings are what Windows peecees and read-only SMB shares on Solaris are for, crash-and-reboot without breaking anything that matters. :-)

    1709:

    @1707: He didn't reveal what the clue was, but his primary job involves geolocating Northkoreas nuclear facility from their propaganda photos. ie: not-so-random dude.

    1710:

    Georgia an Arizona both turned Blue this year. North Carolina is almost there.

    I moved to Raleigh, NC 31 years ago. It has been almost blue since I got here. The D's keep getting more liberal and thus move the "center line" and so those who don't like either tend to hang tight and vote more R than they used to.

    Go back and look at the wikipedia entries for the presidential elections for the last 30 years. We are consistently in the middle. Even swung to Obama in 2008 then back to R in 2012.

    We are the perfect example of pushing people too hard to one side or the other.

    1711:

    The D's keep getting more liberal

    Really? From north of the border, it looks like the Democrats are moving right, just less fast than the Republicans.

    1712:

    I am not in the US, but I do remember once reading a very spirited argument about Senator Manchin on a left-wing blog there. The Senator's defenders made a couple of very cogent points.

    Firstly; he has won a Senate seat as a Democrat in West Virginia, and somehow retained it in 2018 two years after President Trump outpolled Hillary Clinton by forty-two percent.

    Secondly; despite voting with the Republicans slightly more than half the time, he has voted with the Democrats when it really mattered such as every vote associated with the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare").

    Their overall conclusion was that Senator Manchin was about as good as could be expected, and massively better for the Democratic party than any West Virginian Republican.

    1713:

    North Carolina politics are very mixed. Very. Wake county has a 150K students in our school district. Within an hour or so drive from here are counties that have less than 10K people total.

    People who are family farmers on a 100 acres or less and some of the largest hog, chicken, and turkey growing barns in the country.

    3 very large military bases.

    Very progressive towns with world class universities all within 30 miles of my house. But just try and find a church nearby that doesn't have YEC as a stake in the ground.

    We re-elected a D governor who the Trump followers totally despise. Yet we also voted to re-elect Trump. (The gov is mostly following science and not $$ in terms of Covid-19. Go figure.)

    Wake and Mecklenburg counties have about 1 million people and tech/stem nerds are moving here and nearby in ever increasing numbers. Which has the rural legislators scared silly as THOSE folks are just not like THEM. Except they want the money and jobs.

    Anyway, unlike Wyoming, western Oregon or similar we are not a very unified group of people.

    1715:

    Re: 'And remember: Half the population is suffering from Stockholm-syndrome after being indoctrinated by Fox News for three decades:'

    Now that social media has begun to act responsibly, maybe it's time to re-visit the libel/defamation laws across all media.

    This would include appropriate/honest (verifiable) branding of shows/commenters/'reporters': if they're not telling the truth, they should be sued/tossed in jail for lying and cannot call themselves or their shows/broadcasts/correspondences 'News'.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_defamation_law

    'Journalists' are supposed to abide by a code of conduct/professional ethics. Too many haven't and I can't think of any that have been challenged/brought up on the carpet by their peers. 'The Press' is a cornerstone of (most) democratic systems - they have power, they know it - but they also need to accept responsibility for not keeping their own house in order.

    1716:

    "'Journalists' are supposed to abide by a code of conduct/professional ethics."

    That was a lot easier back when you had to be a really big idiot, to not make good money publishing a newspaper.

    That is not even close to being the case any longer, and as a result most media, including social media, is being turned into propaganda outlets.

    More fundamentally, it is close to impossible to tell what "a journalist" is any more, much less who would get to decide who qualifies for the title ?

    Am I a journalist ?

    Is Trevor Noah a journalist ?

    Is Assange a journalist ?

    Is Limbaugh a journalist ?

    Newspeople love to call themselves "The fourth estate", and we may need to buy that concept: A new fourth independent branch of government, with the right and duty to investigate and truthfully report what the other three branches are up to.

    1717:

    A poll - only 20% of Americans support the actions yesterday.

    https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/01/06/US-capitol-trump-poll?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=website_article&utm_campaign=snap_US_capitol_poll

    Yes, 20% is too high, and yes the number of Republicans (45%) who support it is too high, but it shows a strong break from Trump with only half of his core group supporting this.

    But it does show there is a limit to how far they will follow him.

    1718:

    And Trump is now (for the moment at least) saying while he doesn't accept the election results he will do a peaceful transition of power

    https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/07/trump-says-there-will-be-an-orderly-transition-of-power.html

    1719:

    if [reporters are] not telling the truth, they should be sued/tossed in jail for lying and cannot call themselves or their shows/broadcasts/correspondences 'News'.

    Much as I sympathise, I think this would be a cure worse than the disease. I can think of several countries where reporters are authorised by the government and/or required to tell the truth as defined by the government. They are not be be very nice places to live and lack democratic freedoms.

    We already have verifiable "branding" for reporters; they appear under the banner of a news organisation, and anyone pretending to be a CNN or Fox News reporter when they aren't will be sued for trademark infringement.

    News organisations and reporters are already liable under defamation/libel laws.

    Despite all of the abuses, the 1st Amendment was a good idea; I wouldn't want to see it repealed. (And your proposal would require that).

    1720:

    I think SFReader is Canadian. And they think some of the US laws are, uh, "quaint". :)

    Along with a few others from countries around the world. In what I'll call both directions.

    1721:

    And remember: Half the population is suffering from Stockholm-syndrome after being indoctrinated by Fox News for three decades: Trumps approval rating has never gone below 40%.

    Stockholm-syndrome was about the unwilling being taken hostage. That is NOT what Fox News did. Their audience was/is totally willing. And a non trivial number are now jumping ship as Fox isn't Trumpish enough anymore.

    1722:

    David L @ 1720: " And they think some of the US laws are, uh, "quaint". :)"

    Exactly! We were told in school that our constitution (and the laws that are attached to it) was better than the US one because it was made much later, when political thinkers had gained a better knowledge of political systems.

    1723:

    Aaand Facebook have extended Trump's suspension until after the inauguration. Wonder how long it'll take Twitter?

    Hey, maybe there's a silver lining here: if right-wing crazies get off Facebook in a huff that reduces FB's network effect power. The alternate platforms will also have a less favourable advertising environment.

    1724:

    Thanks for outing yourself, right winger.

    Ah, good to know - anyone who disagrees with you is a raving looney right winger.

    Sorry to disappoint you, but while I am centrist to left on the world scale, by your American standards I am a raving socialist likely bordering on communist.

    But more importantly I believe in observing and acknowledging the world as it is, not as I believe it is.

    "Billionaire supporters"... you mean, as opposed to all the WHITE WING BILLIONAIRES, from Murdoch to the Waltons to Koch to Adelson?

    So George Soros is apparently a figment of my imagination? That must make Hungary a very strange place then.

    But to make it clear, yes there are rich and billionaire supporters of the Democrats - and they need to step up their game not in funding the Democrats but in the creation of effective think tanks that can change public opinion - and reverse the rightward trend of the US over the last 50 years.

    Because that is what has made your list of billionaires so successful - not their direct support/buying of candidates but their ability to con the voting public with slogans/beliefs like trick down economics, taxes are theft, the Laffer curve, and the branding of anything sensible as evil.

    The US isn't going to change for the better until nonsense like that is reversed, and that will take lots of money outside of the Democrat Party.

    How much have most of candidates since 16 gotten from the median donor? Oh, that's right, $27.

    So typically American, where you measure everything in direct $ support. Again, see above.

    And no, they're not more right wing. They want real change, and if they can't get what they want, they'll do anything.

    The November results say otherwise, and anyone who pretends otherwise is going to have a rough decade to come.

    Or did you miss that over 80 million voted for Joe?

    Yep, good for him - but worrying was that Trump took just over 74 million votes, more votes than any other President in history except for Biden. And a substantial increase from his just under 63 million in 2016.

    That the election this year was the LARGEST TURNOUT IN MY LIFETIME?

    Yep, and likely won't repeat anytime soon.

    Or did you miss the massive anti-Trump protests in his first year, and how they all fizzled out by year 2.5 and year 3?

    The problem for the Democrats and their true believers is that support wasn't for the Democrats - a lot of it was anti-Trump votes.

    The November results show this - the failure of the Democrats down ticket. Going into election day there was talk of not just getting over 50 Democrat Senators, but maybe even getting 60. Oops.

    The Republican wins elsewhere - Senate, House, State level, etc. all clearly show that a lot of people voted for Biden/Harris and then voted Republican for the rest of their choices - ie. they weren't voting for a Democrat President, they were voting for the proverbial "anyone but Trump".

    So add in those "anyone but Trump" votes being able to return to their preferred Republican option in future votes, combined with the lack of Trump to run against (at least for 2022, maybe even 2024) and the Democrats have the dual problem of convincing record numbers of voters to turn out again, as well as convincing those Republican voters to vote Democrat again.

    Which is why the Democrats have trouble in the future.

    (and that's without getting into the problem of non-white communities shifting their votes to Republicans).

    1725:

    North Carolina politics are very mixed. Very.

    Not arguing that. Was surprised that you think the Democrats are moving left, because from news I see up here they seem to be moving right.

    1726:

    Every time I look at the American white wing, my brain starts playing Eric Bogle's "Keeper of the Flame" as a soundtrack.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJESiYEDO8E

    Wonder why?

    1727:

    Was surprised that you think the Democrats are moving left, because from news I see up here they seem to be moving right.

    It is getting broader in NC. Less middle and more at the ends. More of a 2 humped camel with the ends holding more than the middle sides of the humps. The middle is still bigger but it swings back and forth. More to the right than left for the 3 decades I've been here. Most of the middle wants to go more left but the extreme left looks scarier than the extreme right to most people.

    And then you throw in the high growth (look it up for NC) and the major metro areas are trying to be 1950s suburbia while 20 story buildings are going up a 1/2 mile away. We recently had a 8000 unit development go up 20 miles away from most anything. All of them commuting "in". Via car. The need is here. The developers want to build almost anything people want. But the suburbs from the 60s/70s is full of people in their 70s/80s want to pretend it is still 1965 or 1975 so they fight anything other than more suburbs.

    I hope we don't become a mini Atlanta.

    Oh, and 2 hours away we have entire counties with less than 5000 people. Who are Trump all the way.

    As you might infer I'm not all that popular at community planning meetings. Well until they shutdown in March.

    1728:

    Was surprised that you think the Democrats are moving left, because from news I see up here they seem to be moving right.

    2010 was a disaster around here for the D's. They just went nuts and most sane people backed away. They have become a bit more muted/nuanced since then. But 2010 cost them the legislature and they haven't gotten it back. And that year got them tagged as "nuts" to many middle of the road people.

    1729:

    538 had a pretty good analysis of why Georgia turning purple may take more than North Carolina's supposed turn leftward. NC-23% African American/Georgia-32%; Charlotte and the Triangle-44% of NC's population; Atlanta-55% of GA. Bizarrely, NC rural/exurb areas are turning right while GA's have always been there; so the right has already had its high-water mark in Georgia while NC has had two competing waves of political change in the last dozen years.

    I concur with Roger Prior (and maybe others), the mainstream news outlets still never miss a chance to remind us of how Biden supposedly brought all these former Trump moderates back to sanity while the "deluded leftists" would have destroyed us all, despite having zero evidence for this and a moderate amount of evidence to the contrary.

    In case people care, I am a deluded Social Democrat, probably(?) right of Corbyn and way left of Blair in your native frames of reference.

    1730:

    I realize the first sentence might be ambiguous: in case it was not clear, GA's turn might be more permanent and reliable than NC's supposed turn starting in 2008.

    1731:

    Reply to self @ 1702 I note that Patel (!) has condemned DJT, but BoZo has not .... DJT's Arsebook account suspended until at least 21st January

    P H-K @ 1705 NO His aim, along with many tories is to have no trains at all - even now.

    David L @ 1710 Utter lying bollocks Teh Overton Window has been moving consitently to the right for the past 30 years, if not longer, so that someone like myself, who thought that Harold Macmillan only ever made two mistakes, am now regarded as a left-winger. ( Actually, some of my views have also trended left, but ... ) By European, including Brit standards, the "D's" are a centre-right party, fuckwit.

    ... Apparently, Pence has been "Formally written to" asking him to invoke the US 25th Amendment. That does, IIRC offer a way out: 25th is invoked, Pence "takes charge" & they simply run the clock down until its 21st January. ( ??? )

    PrivateIron Corbyn was not, is not & never has been a Social Democrat. That is why he's unelectable, apart from being incapable of learning anything. One hates to admit it, but a return of "The War Criminal Blair" would be welcome, right now - yes, it's got that bad.

    1732:

    For optimism, I will guess that Trump is a symptom of cracking in the beige dictatorship.

    It isn't that Democratic Party is necessarily focused on being worker-hostile, but the equilibrium they've reached with the interest groups aligned with particular parties - is.
    (Better than the Republicans, and really just less inclined towards scumsucking, but...most civilized nations wouldn't consider them left wing.)

    It seems likely that Trump signals some sort of realignment. Probably with Republicans becoming more xenophobic and labor friendly. And with Democrats trending more to the elite.

    Albeit, I really have no clue.

    But, imagine an explicitly anti-immigration and anti-corporatist presidential candidate who ran on a platform of supporting lower classes and rural areas, along with mild transphobia. I suspect, and fear, that they would win. This resembles Trump, but assume without the manifest incompetence.

    Eh, maybe that ends up with a net leftward shift. Meh, interesting times. Or maybe, Texas turns blue and there is more of an orderly shift leftwards.

    Oh look, attempted insurrection and new COVID strain with spike protein mutation strain from South Africa. Coming pretty close to 2/3rds. I was hoping for 0/3.

    1733:

    ... Apparently, Pence has been "Formally written to" asking him to invoke the US 25th Amendment. That does, IIRC offer a way out: 25th is invoked, Pence "takes charge" & they simply run the clock down until its 21st January. ( ??? )

    Pence can't arbitrarily invoke the 25th, a majority of Trump's cabinet need to support it.

    There is no support among the cabinet for invoking the 25th.

    1734:

    than NC's supposed turn starting in 2008.

    NC didn't really turn in 2008. The D's were walking on air with O as a candidate. They beat the bushes, drove folks to early voting, recruited eligible college students, and in general did a great get out the vote operation. Especially during early voting. So most R's were going to vote on the actual voting day. The entire state was weather in the high 30s into the 40s (F) and raining. Guess what. D's carried the day. At least for Pres.

    4 years later the D's expected everyone to just show up again and didn't hustle like they had in 2008. Guess what? O lost the state.

    Then in early 2010 the D's just went absolutely nuts. Why not have a gay couple's fight about an affair between D state leaders in public during their state convention? In a state were the dominant religion is "evangelical". And other things. The D ex governor had apparently though he was royalty and didn't have to deal with the "little people". And then his replacement was worse. They lost control of the state legislature and most of the council of state in a spectacular debacle. And haven't come close to getting it back.

    Well our governor is a D after the R did his own version of self immolation a few years back. And in the election a few months ago the D won re-election by appearing sane next to the R who wanted everyone to pretend Covid-19 didn't exist. But it wasn't a blowout by any standard.

    Anyway, NC is NOT trending left. Except at a snails pace. Anytime much progress is being made the D's figure out a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And thus keep the middle on the "right" side of things.

    1735:

    From my viewpoint, the Dems actually stopped the rightward movement during the time they ran Obama. They slowly seem to be moving back towards liberal.

    And I'll note that in a pre-election speech, Biden said he was going to be the most "pro-union president anyone had seen".

    1736:

    I don't know about this left and right stuff. I just vote for the party of the guy with a turban.

    1737:

    But a lot of people have been pretending that NC is turning left; so it will be "interesting" to see if GA is fools gold from the same vein.

    Both parties used to pretend to care about various surface flavors of policy while concentrating on preserving America's military and looking out for different types of millionaire/billionaire. That balance has completely broken on the Republican side. The surface narratives have replaced the core of self interest. The Democrats have bravely soldiered on, hoping the Republicans get control of their people while continuing to stamp down on their own base. They are using Trump populism to damn all populism along the way.

    Here's the problem: reality. The material conditions of most Americans are worsening and there is only so much spin can accomplish in the face of that.

    So the status on the ground: America needs a party that actually addresses the material needs of most Americans. What it has is a party that says it's doing that, but won't because that would be contrary to the interest of its constituents: wealthy people. And another party that says those material needs are for losers and everything would work itself out naturally if "those people" were not against us. So a populist party that hates itself and a party that is running away from populism while insisting populism is bad for people.

    What we need is a racist/religious party; a libertarian party; a neoliberal party and a social democratic party. Then people would have choices based on policy and we could find out where the American people actually ARE. Instead our elections are the equivalent of using a Rorshach Test to determine how to diagnose and treat a patient's cancer.

    1738:

    Ok, let's assume I take you at your word, as to being on the left.

  • In the US, which is, of course, what I'm most familiar with, a minimum of 90% of the time that ANYONE talks about the billionaires supporting the Democrats, they are of the GOP or further right. Really. Go look through US infotainment media.
  • Overwhelmingly, you're wrong - most billionaires that support political parties, in the US, give most if not all of their money to the GOP. You mentioned Soros. Sure. And probably Bill the Gates. On the other side, Rupert Murdoch not only gives, but his entire media empire is an undeclared (and so illegal) contribution to the GOP, and that is worth billions or tens of billions in advertising alone). Then there are the Walton family - what, six or eight of them? And Adelson (who also dabbles in the UK - I believe he sent a lot of money to the Brexit campaign, one way or another -and Israel)
  • The Dem-donators are far outnumbered. 3. The massive anti-Trump protests. As someone who went to them, no. "Fizzled", because by year three, we actually saw the beginnings of the impeachment... and we had major victories in '18, and the control of the Congress had started, finally, to begin to rein him in.

    Finally, the turnouts will be larger. I keep seeing a lot of millenials, Gen-X,Y and Z, saying "shit, it does matter", and turning out.

    Heh - the DSA went from 12k? 16k? members in '16 to over 60k last year, and they seem to be on track for 100k direct, dues-paying members, along with "socialism" being a good word to them...and actual, self-declared socialists are, in fact, getting elected to office (like, say, the one in District 5 in the VA House, and, oh, yes, the last couple of years, my County Council President.

    1739:

    That's an extremely odd statement. I see no sign whatsoever of the GOP becoming more "labor-friendly" (actually, the Dems seem to be moving back that way", and "elite"? When it's the GOP that is owned by the elite, but accuse the Dems of being?

    1740:

    Here's the problem: reality. The material conditions of most Americans are worsening and there is only so much spin can accomplish in the face of that.

    Oddly the relatives I have and people I know that are Trumpers through and through are much better off than 20 years ago. They seem to feel they should be much better off.

    In the back of my mind I'm thinking they can't stand people who shouldn't be as well off as them being even or nearby.

    1741:

    Let us remember that even now, over 45% of those voting ... voted for IQ45 That, even after treasonous rioters ( Carrying a Confederate flag into the Capitol is surely treason? ) broke in, & were then ejected, numerous Congresscritters STILL VOTED to not accept the election result. The message is clear ... NEXT TIME, they will select a smiling, smooth, plausible out-&-out fascist, who will only strike once he's got all his ducks in a row.

    Oh yes, I note several brutal autocratic states have used this incident to "show up" how useless & hopeless Democracy is. Putin, of course has hit the jackpot, here.

    1742:

    "NEXT TIME, they will select a smiling, smooth, plausible out-&-out fascist, who will only strike once he's got all his ducks in a row."

    Of course they will!

    What else can they do ?

    "There goes my voters, I'd better follow them, I'm their leader"

    1743:

    mdlve @ 1664:

    My problem with the Georgia method is they generate BAR CODES on the paper which is what is actually read. So you are verify text that matches what you picked but you have no idea if the bar code (maybe a QR code) is doing what you asked and is implied by the wet wear readable text.

    Why is that a problem?

    You have 2 choices:

    1) machine A generates the ballot in both human readable form (so the voter can verify) and in machine readable (bar code/QR code/doesn't matter). This bar code is read by machine B which actually counts the votes. Because it is a bar code, which having been around successfully for decades is a solved problem, and can have some sort of verification/check sum protocol, the risk of a read error is very low.

    2) machine A generates the ballot in human readable form, and machine B reads the human readable ballot. This isn't a solved technology, which means there are more opportunities for bugs and user input errors (paper not quite aligned correctly, etc.).

    In either case you are relying on the machines being secure and accurate - if you don't believe that then it doesn't matter which system you use. Because if you are worried about fraud that can simply be done on machine B regardless of which system is used.

    In either case you can manually audit the vote, either by manually counting ever ballot or just random subgroups of votes.

    For years & years I used to get another guy's bank statements. We had similar addresses - mine is 100 Smith St and his is 100 Smithfield Ave. We live about 4 blocks apart within the same Zipcode.

    When his bank implemented the USPS machine readable barcode (encodes ZIP+Four), they used his address, but the printed BARCODE was for my address (the +Four).

    Fortunately, you don't need a machine to decipher the USPS barcode and I was finally able to figure it out (he still had to notify his bank to get it corrected).

    You shouldn't need a barcode reader to find out if there's a mistake on a machine printed ballot. Here in Wake County we use Scantron ballots. Machine readable, but no barcode.

    I still don't know how they deal with spoiled ballots, i.e. when the voter verifies their choices on the printed ballot & finds there's a mistake that needs to be corrected before the ballot is submitted.

    1744:

    I just vote for the party of the guy with a turban.

    I vote for the chap with socks, because we have first-past-the-post and I don't want to split the anti-antipeople vote. :-/

    Given the brother of our coked-up drunken mess has just preserved democracy by overriding voters and ending all municipal experiments with FFP, I suspect I'll be voting that way for a long time.

    1745:

    Re: '... where reporters are authorised by the government and/or required to tell the truth as defined by the government.'

    I was thinking more along the lines of some level of gov't (federal or state) requiring reporters/journalists to act like real 'professional' group*: have a code of conduct, enforce it, otherwise we'll sue/fine/toss in jail you on the public's behalf.

    I repeat: it's about responsibility/accountability.

    My take on some of the EU rulings re: social media is that they're increasingly and explicitly putting the onus/responsibility on the media/channel/reporter wrt to harms their service can do to people. IMO, this is no different than having car manufacturers taking responsibility for auto safety - brakes that work, low emissions, etc.)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_professional_designations_in_the_United_States

    FYI - A bunch of these professions are in fact regulated/licensed by gov't and this hasn't done their business any harm.

    1746:

    David L @ 1678:

    As for the 25th Amendment, that's problematic. A majority of Trump's cabinet have to vote to remove him - unlikely to happen

    Doesn't matter. At a MINIMUM the 25th takes 5 or more days if the President doesn't go along. And that's if every group involved is fast tracking things. The cabinet, Congress, the VP, etc...

    <

    Section 4.
    Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

    Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

    There are strong indications that Pence and the Cabinet ARE seriously considering invoking Section 4 of the 25th Amendment. Under the procedure defined, Pence COULD displace Trump and remain ACTING PRESIDENT for the remainder of this administration's term in office.

    I think he should. This is a watershed moment in American democracy. The precedent set by yesterday's riot CANNOT be allowed to stand unchallenged. Because next time, and there will be a next time if if this is allowed to stand, if Trump's abuse of power to directly attack Congress, the rioters may be able to overthrow Congress. ... and certainly, by the time after that ...

    Impeachment AND removal, on the other hand, can be done in a few hours. IF IF IF both sides of Congress want it to happen that fast. House writes up some articles of impeachment, (KISS applies), vote, send it across the building, Senate accepts it and put it to a discussion on the floor ignoring conventions and just decides to have a vote.

    While we are closer to that than ever before there is still that requirement of 2/3s of the Senate to go along. I seriously doubt we're there yet. But if Trump doesn't settle down the Senate may get there before the 20th.

    Impeachment, trial, conviction & removal are separate steps in holding a President accountable. The House can (and I think there's a good chance will) go into session as a Committee of the Whole and vote Articles of Impeachment (Abuse of Power, Incitement to Riot, Seditious Conspiracy) in just a few hours.

    Whether Moscow Mitch (Putin's Bitch) would convene the trial in the Senate is questionable.

    I think there's a good chance that both will happen. Pence & the Cabinet invoking Section 4 of the 25th Amendment and the House voting Articles of Impeachment.

    There is nothing in the Constitution making them mutually exclusive.

    1747:

    PS: If Pence does invoke Section 4 & Congress follows the procedures therein, Trump would not be able to exercise ANY of the powers of his office until Congress acts, including granting pardons to himself and/or his co-conspirators.

    1748:

    Rick Moen @ 1685: It's entirely possible that VP Pence and sundry Cabinet members and other officials have already, as with the National Guard deployment, simply started acting as if Pence were Acting President, that involving a great deal less commotion than would be involved with an Amendment 25, Section 4 declaration. Basically just let the President-Eject keep imagining himself President for 15 more days, in the middle of his usual cloud of fawning courtiers, but substantively ignore him. It doesn't even require a conspiracy for them to do this, just a spontaneous outbreak of common sense.

    After all, back in pre-Amendment 25 days, that was pretty much how Edith Wilson got elevated to de-facto Acting President for 17 months, after Woodrow was disabled by stroke in October 2019.

    Ain't gonna happen that way. The whole point of the 25th Amendment is to formalize the succession. It is specifically designed to prevent another Edith Wilson.

    Sections 1 & 2 are meant to deal with the situation that obtained after the assassination of JFK where there was no Vice President. It was a gap in the Constitution that hadn't been corrected before.

    Sections 3 & 4 are meant to deal with an incapacitated President - Eisenhower's heart attacks (Section 3) or Wilson's stroke (Section 4).

    Pence may become the Acting President, but it will not be "de-facto". It will have to be formally done following the Constitution as amended.

    1749:

    In breaking news, various officials are resigning from the Trump Administration for reasons. Notably, Elaine Chao, Secretary of Transportation and wife of Mitch McConnell, currently Senate Majority Leader.

    1750:

    13 days to go & counting down ..... I note, amongst therats leaving the sinking shipprincipled resignations ... one has said that some are staying because they are frightened ( now! finally! ) of what IQ45 might do in these final days with newly-appointed "acting" servants/officials. Thoughts on that?

    1751:

    MSB @ 1700: @ Niala # 1695:

    "All through the worst of the mob "visit" there was remarkable restraint by the ladies and gentlemen of the press in not revealing the restricted location where the members of Congress were spirited away, within the Capitol complex."

    I can't detect whether this is meant ironically or not. Is the American press really so bad that they can seriously be lauded for not actively partaking in an act of sedition/insurgence/terrorism (whatever you want to call it)? I am aware that the level of journalistic quality (and of public discourse) in the US is painfully low compared to anything I am used to here in Germany, but is it really that bad?

    I think there's a certain amount of amazement that they didn't manage to fuck it up.

    1752:

    Mick Mulvaney, President Donald Trump’s former chief of staff, told CNBC on Thursday he has resigned as special U.S. envoy to Northern Ireland.

    “Those who choose to stay, and I have talked with some of them, are choosing to stay because they’re worried the president might put someone worse in,” Mulvaney said.

    1753:

    I read that both Pelosi (House) and Schumer (Senate) have asked Pence to use the 25th Amendment. If he does not, Pelosi says the house will move forward with impeachment.

    And the Articles of Impeachment have already been circulating... written by three House members... including mine.

    And I read that most NATO intel agencies are confirming to their own governments that this was an attempted coup, AND that there was police assistance.

    1754:

    Robert Prior @ 1711:

    The D's keep getting more liberal

    Really? From north of the border, it looks like the Democrats are moving right, just less fast than the Republicans.

    "The center cannot hold."

    I've been in Raleigh for 50+ years (and in NC for 70+; born & raised in Durham, NC). I'd say the Democrats in NC are about the same as they've been since Nixon's Southern Strategy managed to strip out the racists & the right-wingnuts.

    We still have racists & right-wingnuts in North Carolina, but they're all mostly Republicans now.

    Democrats are not-quite left of center, but the center is a moving target, so sometimes we appear to be on the left, and sometimes we appear to be on the right depending on where the Overton Window is at any particular time.

    1755:

    Whitroth And I read that most NATO intel agencies are confirming to their own governments that this was an attempted coup, AND that there was police assistance. What price Five Eyes, now? I would not be in the least bit surprised to find out that IQ45 has compromised us all - the Manchurian Candidate.

    Oh yes, I also note that Biden has publicly contrasted this with the treatment of BLM people, earlier on.

    1756:

    Robert Prior @ 1725:

    North Carolina politics are very mixed. Very.

    Not arguing that. Was surprised that you think the Democrats are moving left, because from news I see up here they seem to be moving right.

    Yeah, but what biases does the news up there have? Where is your Overton Window right now?

    1757:

    what IQ45 might do in these final days

    That's the question many worry about. Certainly he can issue a ton of pardons to cover any misdeeds his lackeys commit in the next two weeks. The real question, IMO, is what the deranged Commander in Chief can tell the US military to do and whether they'd do it. Other misdeeds would probably be fixable, but military ones might not be.

    1758:

    JBS @ 1756: "Yeah, but what biases does the news up there have?"

    Depends if you're talking about the English language media or the French language media.

    1759:

    The real question, IMO, is what the deranged Commander in Chief can tell the US military to do and whether they'd do it. Other misdeeds would probably be fixable, but military ones might not be.

    Based on every indication that the uniforms have said lately, I suspect anything odd will be slow walked with every "i" to be dotted and "t" to be crossed and triple checked 3 separate times. With a leak or few to the appropriate people.

    1760:

    Re: 'The real question, IMO, is what the deranged Commander in Chief can tell the US military to do and whether they'd do it.'

    I think that the military and everyone else have been duly and publicly forewarned by former insiders. (The military can also probably stall for time. Hope they've changed his access codes to red buttons.)

    https://www.businessinsider.com/trumps-former-defense-secretaries-slam-appalling-assault-on-capitol-2021-1

    1761:

    Hope they've changed his access codes to red buttons.

    You really think he actually paid attention to such things?

    1762:

    @ Everybody (mainly USAnians, Mergans, and Americans): Well folks, we've had our first coup attempt, at least the first I'm aware of. When do you think we'll have the next?

    As I've said before, 74 Million Americans voted for a would-be dictator who has now encouraged sedition. How many of those 74 million STILL support him? If the 139/211 Republican Representative who supported the electoral challenge ARE representative of their constituents, then ~50 Million Americans support overturning the results of the election and STILL support Trump. (This is consistent with the poll that says 20% of Americans support their actions, quoted above.) As Rachel Maddow said (to the best of my quoting): "The GOP is a violent, insurrectionist party, with fascist markers."

    How I disagree with our President-Elect: This (yesterday's *terrorist coup attempt) may not be what we aspire to be, but this IS who we are now. We can not go back to normal and assume this was an aberration; it was EXPECTED.

    *Initially, I thought the word "terrorist" was inappropriate and too extreme. Then I learned there were two pipe bombs discovered. That's terrorism.

    1763:

    I could be completely wrong. But...look at the voting blocks. Then look at the voters that the soon-to-be-not-president (STBNP) pulled in.

    The college-educated tend to vote Democratic. The non-college-educated tend to vote Republican. I'm not talking about the 1%.

    High immigration and free trade are not intrinsically labor-friendly and are supported by both parties, but not by STBNP. That pulled in a fair number of MAGATS.

    While I see some Democrats (AOC yay!!) moving in labor-friendly directions, and see the Republican's under Trump as largely labor-hostile, popular rhetoric may predict future actions. The trick is that, in addition to social conservative/liberal, democratic/facist, economic conservative/liberal axes, there is a BS axis, wherein Republicans seem appreciably more likely to say whatever BS is currently politically expedient, so the weight of rhetoric is hard to gauge.

    That said, the MAGA fraction of the Republicans - which is likely the dominant plurality - is racist but not economically conservative, at least from anecdotal observation. And, actually, anti-corporation. I'd bet that someone telling rural people they deserved more free money and blaming Chinese people could go pretty far, appropriately dressed up.

    So, if you looked at motivating their base, I'd guess that an opportunistic politician could win a primary and probably the presidency with fairly left-wing economics (okay, by American standards) and significant racism - probably focused on xenophobia. And maybe the first time it'd be a simple swindle by the 1%. But, eventually, there'd be a transition towards fulfilling whatever rhetoric was being spouted.

    I sort of dread the resulting transition in the Democratic Party, as I'm not sure I'd end up comfortable voting for either.

    Albeit, I tend to model US politics as some interest groups allying with the racists and dominating politics for a while.

    20 years from now, maybe this falls apart, as racism maybe becomes a negative electoral factor, but, for now, that doesn't seem to be true nationally.

    1764:

    Niala @ 1758: JBS @ 1756:

    "Yeah, but what biases does the news up there have?"

    Depends if you're talking about the English language media or the French language media.

    Either way, you have to be cognizant that there are biases.

    1765:

    Keith @ 1762: @ Everybody (mainly USAnians, Mergans, and Americans):
    Well folks, we've had our first coup attempt, at least the first I'm aware of. When do you think we'll have the next?

    A lot depends on how effectively Congress responds to the first one.

    1766:

    JBS @ 1764 Most of the English media consider freedom of speech to be an absolute good. Most of the French media consider the freedom to speak in French to be an absolute good.

    And that's just two biases among many.

    1767:

    I'd say the Democrats in NC

    Ah. I was thinking of the national party (as we were discussing national politics).

    In Canada provincial and federal parties are distinct entities, and our news (or at least the news sources I use) distinguish between them.

    1768:

    AT @ 1757 Right back at comment #4 I asked: Even worse, will DJT & his paid minions try something really, terminally stupid between now & 20th Jan 2021? That still applies, does it not?

    Keith @ 1762 Never mind sedition - AIUI "Conspiring to wage war against the US" is defined as treason, yes? Carrying a Confederate battle flag into the Capitol falls under that, I would have thought?

    1769:

    Where is your Overton Window right now?

    Good question. Do you mean Canada's, or my personal one?

    The country's has certainly moved right since my youth. (With the exception of LGBT matters.) Preston Manning, who was regarded as a crazy right-wing kook, is now a paragon of moderation and tolerance, for example.

    Mine has moved left since my 20s and 30s, as I learned more about the world. (With the exception of unlimited free speech — I'm much more conscious of hate speech and crying fire in crowded theatres.)

    1770:

    Something I read on another blog:

    There were a hundred on duty Capitol Police Officers yesterday, facing against 10,000 off duty police officers.

    1772:

    @ JBS, Greg Tingey: Thanks. I'm no pre-cog or expert. However, I expect there will be another attempt and/or a successful rightwing demagogue as president (or at least a powerful, influential figure) between now and the "*Roaring 40's" when climate change may start to make things really nasty and there will likely be 10's of millions of angry young/middle-aged people out of work and with little prospect for new work due to automation. (A major well-paid & benefitted infrastructure & sustainability program throughout the Western World could deal with this latter, but I doubt it will be done.)

    I very much hope to be WRONG.

    *Yes I know that's a nautical reference

    1773:

    The Confederate battle flag is almost ubiquitous in the US. It was basically a school flag where I was when in my teens. (We had a debate about it and things changed a bit.)

    Anyway.

    Carrying about such a thing comes under free speech. Constitutional rights. Etc... Same if the flag of Iran or back in the 50s of the CCCP. Doesn't mean you might get the snot beat out of you and not much done about it but carrying the flag in general is not against the law.

    Now telling people to rally around "Bob" with the flag and start shooting isn't free speech but just carrying the flag is allowed. Although in this case it might be against house rules to carry such a pole around.

    1774:

    That is surely treason?

    Doubtful.

    §2381. Treason

    Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

    Is carrying a flag with a pattern on it levying war?

    No.

    Is carrying a flag with a pattern on it giving aid and comfort to an enemy?

    No.

    Because the Confederacy no longer exists (as a legal entity), and the flags of the confederacy, while they certainly have meaning, are in a legal perspective just a flag with a pattern - it does not represent anything official.

    1775:

    But, imagine an explicitly anti-immigration and anti-corporatist presidential candidate who ran on a platform of supporting lower classes and rural areas, along with mild transphobia. I suspect, and fear, that they would win.

    I think you just described a typical European right-wing party.

    1776:

    Robert Prior @ 1767:

    I'd say the Democrats in NC

    Ah. I was thinking of the national party (as we were discussing national politics).

    In Canada provincial and federal parties are distinct entities, and our news (or at least the news sources I use) distinguish between them.

    You were responding to David's comment specifically about North Carolina and North Carolina Democrats.

    1777:

    The nice part is that I prefer European politics to USain politics, at least from a distance, so maybe that sort of realignment might actually help? What do the other parties end up looking like? I mean, one of the US issues is our two party system, which may result in oddities.

    1778:

    First Federal charges filed for yesterday's riot:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD9Zaxyq3q0

    1779:

    1. In the US, which is, of course, what I'm most familiar with, a minimum of 90% of the time that ANYONE talks about the billionaires supporting the Democrats, they are of the GOP or further right. Really. Go look through US infotainment media.

    Sorry, but this has me confused.

    Talk of billionaires supporting the Democrats means they are supporting the GOP????

    2. Overwhelmingly, you're wrong - most billionaires that support political parties, in the US, give most if not all of their money to the GOP.

    I'm not wrong, because I never said/claimed that - you brought it into the conversation.

    And again, you are the one obsessing with direct donations to a political party, not me.

    My point is that the billionaires on the right have gotten their way NOT because of donations to the Republicans (though it certainly helps), but because they have funded various forms of PR - think tanks, quack economists, etc. - who have all come up with "theories" and other things to be sold to the public - very effectively - that appear to be good for the voter while actually harming the voter and benefiting the rich.

    Politicians and political parties alone cannot set the narrative - more often than not the successful politician isn't leading the voters but rather pitching their platform to where the voters have already been placed by outside forces, with maybe a gentle nudge.

    The Democrats, if they want to succeed (and by that I mean more than just occasionally getting elected but also improving the lives of Americans), need an equivalent outside force creating a narrative that gets successfully sold to the public instead of the right wing narrative.

    And that takes time & money, hence my comment about left wing/Democrat supporting billionaires - not that they are many, or that they funnel lots of money to the Democrats, but that they need to fund a selling of a new vision to the American public.

    And so far they aren't doing that, they seem to be more interested in helping people in 3rd world countries - noble goals, but when the US/western world is in crisis it may be a luxury they can't afford.

    3. The massive anti-Trump protests. As someone who went to them, no. "Fizzled", because by year three, we actually saw the beginnings of the impeachment...

    Impeachment didn't matter, and was irrelevant as anyone paying attention to the Republicans could have predicted - they weren't going to impeach Trump. Yes, the media hyped it up, but the Republicans just ignored it.

    Finally, the turnouts will be larger. I keep seeing a lot of millenials, Gen-X,Y and Z, saying "shit, it does matter", and turning out.

    Irrelevant.

    Yes, millennials and Gen Z turned out in greater numbers in 2020 - up from around 40% of them to 50% of them from 2016.

    But in the total voters count (which is what matters) that took them from 16% of the voters to 17% of the voters - so not enough to matter.

    And the problem is, a lot of that was anti-Trump voting - and while I hope they continue to vote it seems more often than not anti-something votes don't lead to sustained voters turnouts.

    Heh - the DSA went from 12k? 16k? members in '16 to over 60k last year, and they seem to be on track for 100k direct, dues-paying members, along with "socialism" being a good word to them

    I think it's great that a small number of people feel that way, but it in no way reflects the majority of Americans, particularly in the swing states.

    1780:

    Robert @ 1769:

    Where is your Overton Window right now?

    Good question. Do you mean Canada's, or my personal one?

    The country's has certainly moved right since my youth. (With the exception of LGBT matters.) Preston Manning, who was regarded as a crazy right-wing kook, is now a paragon of moderation and tolerance, for example.

    Mine has moved left since my 20s and 30s, as I learned more about the world. (With the exception of unlimited free speech — I'm much more conscious of hate speech and crying fire in crowded theatres.)

    Either one or both. My point is that your perception of whether the (North Carolina) Democratic Party is moving right or left is influenced by where you percieve the center to be located. Consider parallax.

    It is just as applicable to political viewpoints as it is to observing our actual surroundings.

    From my point of view the (North Carolina) Democratic Party has hardly moved at all, while the national Democratic Party has barely shifted to the left. The local (North Carolina) Overton Window has shifted right, but may be gradually drifting back towards the center. The national Overton Window has shifted even further to the right & doesn't appear to be correcting to the center at all.

    But that's how it appears to me, a self identified slightly left of center, politically moderate, old fashion, Liberal Democrat looking outward from here in North Carolina.

    1781:

    The GOP is going to seriously start moving away. One of the injured was a Capitol Police officer... who just died of his injuries.

    This is after the chief of the Capitol Police resigned.

    No, this is not going to go down well, and the Dems and the left have the complete high moral ground.

    1782:

    Re: 'You really think he actually paid attention to such things?'

    Yes.

    Probably one of only a handful of things DT would have paid attention to because DT's into power and that big red button represents ultimate power. (He kept on and on about it back when he was 'negotiating' with Kim Jong-un*.)

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/03/donald-trump-boasts-nuclear-button-bigger-kim-jong-un

    • Randy Rainbow even did a parody on this - Jan 8 2018.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDB5b5aYef4

    1783:

    mdlve @ 1779:

    1. In the US, which is, of course, what I'm most familiar with, a minimum of 90% of the time that ANYONE talks about the billionaires supporting the Democrats, they are of the GOP or further right. Really. Go look through US infotainment media.

    Sorry, but this has me confused.

    Talk of billionaires supporting the Democrats means they are supporting the GOP????

    I believe he meant it's right wing-nuts talking about "billionaires supporting Democrats"; GOP supporters doing the talking.

    Whenever billionaires & Democrats are mentioned in the same news article, it's highly likely it means George Soros, a political dog-whistle meaning "the JEWS!"; anti-Semitism at work.

    With a few exceptions, most actual billionaires tend to lean to the right.

    1784:

    A Capitol Police Officer has died from injuries sustained in yesterday's riot:

    https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/07/politics/capitol-police-officer-dead-after-riot/index.html

    1785:

    Trump just gave a speech that sounded like it was written by Mitch McConnel and delivered with a gun to his head. I think the republicans are coming down hard hard on him , basically “do what we say or we go along with the Dems on impeachment “

    1786:

    Ten years or so, and we'll see the second inning of WWII, this time with England and USA playing on the facist side of the field.

    It's football where you change ends at half time. In cricket, you change ends at the start of every over. Which is probably just another way of expressing how broken the world is going to get in the next 20 years.

    1788:

    Meh, no-one wants to play. If Trump is Hindenburg, Giuliana is Ludendorff...

    1789:

    And in what shouldn't be a surprise, some of those involved in the event yesterday are today finding they have been fired by their employers.

    https://www.fox4news.com/news/north-texas-lawyer-fired-after-videoing-himself-taking-part-in-capitol-riot

    Or this shining example of a quality mob who kept his company badge on his clothing: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/maryland/articles/2021-01-07/company-fires-employee-who-stormed-capitol-with-badge-on

    1790:

    Which will affect the state (and commonwealth) legislatures... esp, for example, PA, where losing a GOP Commonwealth Senator would not be good for the GOP... I mean, given the governor is a Democrat.

    1791:

    Capitol mob - pix

    I'm guessing that all of the Capitol building is fully monitored. If yes, then by now there are several different law enforcement agencies (incl. those with shiny interesting tech) reviewing videos* to identify every rioter.

    More consequences ...

    Some of the airlines have already said that for passenger and crew safety they will not be serving any alcohol. The flight attendants just plain don't want any rioting 'protestors' onboard.

    https://thehill.com/homenews/533098-airlines-taking-extra-safety-precautions-following-capitol-riots

    • Not to mention all the selfies these rioters posted on their Twitter and FB accounts.
    1792:

    You were responding to David's comment specifically about North Carolina and North Carolina Democrats.

    I assumed he was talking about national politics, given Obama was mentioned.

    1793:

    Trump just gave a speech that sounded like it was written by Mitch McConnel and delivered with a gun to his head. I think the republicans are coming down hard hard on him , basically “do what we say or we go along with the Dems on impeachment “

    Might be better for them to convince him to resign because they will be going along on the impeachment. That way they don't have to look like they're protecting him.

    1794:

    I saw something saying that Pelosi had given Pence, who wouldn't answer the phone, until the morning, if he wasn't willing by then, she was going ahead with impeachment.

    1795:

    Is that accurate? For total political donations, the first report indicated that total contributions were split pretty evenly, with Democratic donations in the lead for 2020, albeit there were some peaks where Republican donations were a fair bit higher. Now, this isn't exactly the right measure...

    I suspect Republican billionaires are more successful at shaping political discourse simply because a lot of USains want an excuse for bigotry.

    1796:

    I suspect Republican billionaires are more successful at shaping political discourse simply because a lot of USains want an excuse for bigotry.

    Or you can simply look at who owns the newspapers and other media.

    It would be interesting, for example, to ask why there isn't more diversity in movies, TV, or video games, or novels*, given the success of things like Black Panther and the first Wonder Woman. The answer is generally that "people don't want it," but I think people in this case means conservative investors who are being asked to pony up hundreds of millions in production costs, rather than any audience.

    The reason I bring this up is that the strong, violent, white male, possibly with beautiful white female attached as side kick (or damsel in distress) is the default mode for far too much we see and read. And it shows through: the Capitol Police took selfies with the demonstrators yesterday, and nonviolently escorted some of the vandals out of the building. In July, against a nonviolent Black Lives Matter, those same cops stomped heads and didn't let people in the building. Why the different treatment? Could it be that violent white people are portrayed as heroes a disproportionate amount of the time, while uppity black people (or Indians, or anyone with brown skin) are almost always threat, at best an anti-hero or the ruler of a mythical civilization like Wakanda?

    These portrayals matter. Who's helping drive the culture of what writers write, editors purchase, and producers pay to create?

    *And before you insert your foot in a random orifice, diversity in this case means fiction matching world population proportions, not tokenism like "Lara Croft and T'Challa mean you're wrong." Violent whites are massively over-represented, even in manga and anime.

    1797:

    Nadler supports bypassing the usual process and bringing it directly to the House floor. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-congress/us-house-judiciary-chairman-nadler-supports-immediate-impeachment-of-trump-idUSKBN29C36K If the House does this, they could get it done pretty quickly, and put McConnell in a bind. Meanwhile people in Trump's cabinet are resigning rather than have to deal with the 25th amendment, or so it appears. (Or to block it, but my reading of the text is that acting heads ("principal officers of the executive departments") would take their place. Anyone know of a treatment of this by a proper legal scholar?) Messy. And the sabre-rattling re Iran (a lot of it Israel-driven) is making matters more urgent. ISR/KSA are whisper-singing "Onward Christian Soldiers"/war in Trumps ears (in a few press reports), with people (agents, some of them) piling on in inflammatory opinion pieces in multiple venues. Evil warmongers.(Iran would be wise to publicly ask its proxies to totally stand down, IMO. They've been playing their responses to the escalations by the opponents quite competently mostly.) (I saw Bolton's statement against the 25th amendment and in a fraction of a second thought that he was probably trying to maximize chances of war with Iran. Ugh, that guy cannot be trusted.)

    1798:

    this is not going to go down well, and the Dems and the left have the complete high moral ground.

    Uh, so, about that...

    https://thehill.com/homenews/news/533171-poll-majority-of-republicans-blame-biden-for-mob-storming-the-capitol

    1799:

    Erwin @ 1795: Is that accurate? For total political donations, the first report indicated that total contributions were split pretty evenly, with Democratic donations in the lead for 2020, albeit there were some peaks where Republican donations were a fair bit higher. Now, this isn't exactly the right measure...

    I suspect Republican billionaires are more successful at shaping political discourse simply because a lot of USains want an excuse for bigotry.

    I don't know what you mean by "Is that accurate?" The part I wrote is as accurate as I know how to make it.

    Whenever you hear "talk" in the USA about billionaires & Democrats it usually comes from right-wingnut sources and it's almost invariably dog-whistle anti-Semitism.

    I suspect that just as many "USains" want an excuse for bigotry as do UKains, OZains, EUains ...

    And I suspect your own Anti-American bigotry is seeping through.

    1800:

    It's going to be an interesting two weeks.

    Right now, a bunch of Republicans are trying to pretend nothing happened, 147 Congresscritters and Senataints went along with the mob last night (NY Times ref), and cabinet officials are jumping ship left and right. Oh and the Senate Sergeant at Arms offered his head on a platter, quite rightly in my opinion.

    Will Agent Orange try it again? I suspect he might if there's another impeachment hearing that gathers everyone in one place, but the problem is that absent such a hearing, Congress is in recess until the 20th, so he has no target.

    There's still a lot of denial, deflection, and disinformation (it was all antifa! and similar BS). So I suspect a lot of Republicans just want to bury this as deeply as possible. It looks like Pence doesn't want to do the 25, even though it's seems a good route to his future in politics.

    And apparently IQ.45 is contemplating pardoning himself, just like we expected. Lawyers reportedly are split about whether this is allowable, but someone needs to point out, after Biden is sworn in but before El Cheeto's case is heard, that Biden could declare himself dictator for life using the same power unless it's shot down with extreme prejudice and immediately.

    1801:

    Scalzi had some things to say today. Sample:

    "The GOP always meant for us to be here. The thing is, there’s somewhere beyond here the GOP still wants us to go. We shouldn’t pretend that the GOP won’t get us back to here as soon as practically possible. And then past it, to the ruin of us all."

    https://whatever.scalzi.com/2021/01/07/but-what-if-we-didnt/

    1802:

    Well that's totally expected. I mean come one, you go win an election like you have a mandate to govern or something, people are gonna get upset about that. And upset people are gonna storm the legislature and hurt innocent people, that's their god-given right after all.

    1803:

    David L Time you & the whole USA fucking grew up "Free Speech" does not include destroying freedom - the Germans learned that the very hard way. Displaying an Haukenkreuz anywhere inside the GDR will get you arrested so fast ... ( Unless you have a special permit, say for filming ) We've had this discussion before here ... the US first amendment needs very careful re-examination, to say the least.

    mdive ... levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States ... Well, that's it, right there! The Confederacy levied war on the USA, didn't it? See also my comments about swastikas in Germany, above.

    Moz Yes. I heard someone on the radio news ranting on about how the riot was infiltrated by left-wingers antifa & commies & it was all a sham - yes, really.

    aldonius @ 1787 And ... will those "R" congresscritters who joined the rioters face any consequences - if not, why not?

    BEWARE As noted ( Unholyguy @ 1785 ) IQ45 read an autoprompter speech: DJT has said there will be a peaceful transition to a new administration ... Did he mention Biden or the Democrats, at all? No. Be very careful.

    12 days & counting.

    1804:

    Probably one of only a handful of things DT would have paid attention to because DT's into power and that big red button represents ultimate power.

    Paid attention to? Sure. Touch and fondle. Yep. Take some selfies with his hand over it? Of course.

    But learning how to actually use it? No way. That's what minions are for.

    1805:

    JBS @ 1748: Yes, of course I'm aware that the entire point of the 25th Amendment was to formalise the succession, and provide an orderly alternative to what happened with President Wilson in '17. My point was merely that interested parties may find expedient just ignoring and working around the President-Eject for 12 more days: It'd be a whole lot less fuss than 25ing or impeach & convicting his worthless ass, with less blowback, and there would be a certain finesse to it.

    It might not be too difficult to distract him with the Grand Panjandrum aspect of the Presidency and signing fatwas. All he ever engaged with was the reality-TV-role bits, anyway, and he might never notice nobody really implementing his orders for another fortnight -- though a little fancy footwork might be required here or there to prevent him realising he's being nothinged to death, e.g., advise any civil servant he purported to fire to take a little time off and come back later.

    1806:

    but someone needs to point out, after Biden is sworn in but before El Cheeto's case is heard, that Biden could declare himself dictator for life using the same power unless it's shot down with extreme prejudice and immediately.

    Trump doesn't give a rat's ass about what Biden might do unless it impacts him (Trump).

    1807:

    There's a very big high horse over there you can get on to preach it out how the UK and GB speech laws are perfect compared to the rest of the world. Let me know when the chairs are set up so I can come sit and attend the lecture.

    1808:

    Oh shit Finger problems @ 1803 I MEANT: BRD of course. "Bundesrepublik Deutschland" Sorry about that.

    1809:

    I mean come one, you go win an election like you have a mandate to govern or something, people are gonna get upset about tha

    I think it's more like: Trump is extremely popular with everyone I know, all the media say he won but somehow Biden claims to be president elect. Trump says there's fraud and the election was stolen, so that must be the explanation.

    We also know that the left are violent thugs who will stop at nothing, while Trump supporters are loyal, law-abiding folk. If an entirely legitimate protest against the stolen election turns violent, clearly it was attacked by left-wing thugs. If some of the "Trump supporters" seem to be acting violent they must be aunty-fah provocateurs in disguise.

    And so on. It's no harder to believe than any of the other nonsense they've been spouting for the last ... decades. It gets funny when they accuse people like the furry of being antifa, and the various comments that law enforcement were antifa quite honestly make me laugh... you know when someone gets so twisted up that they end up speaking the truth despite their intentions? This is one of those times. People, even cops, who are opposing anti-democratic thugs who claim to be carrying out a coup in favour of a corrupt businessman... yeah, actually, that's literally what antifascists do.

    1810:

    Will Trump issue a blanket pardon to those involved, even though police officers were injured and one has died ? It seems the easiest way to avoid details coming out in court cases and so maintain the "left wing agitators" story, which in turn would probably be enough to stop the blue flag movement being affected. I'm assuming that Trump supporters would just ignore their man pardoning police killer(s).

    1811:

    I'm assuming that Trump supporters would just ignore their man pardoning police killer(s).

    But would they support him pardoning ANTIFA and BLM cop-killers?

    There's possibly also technical problems issuing pardons to unknown people, even if he can do it for "any and all offenses". It might also backfire if it turns out there were crimes other than the already-known stealing of mail and hacking computers... what if it turns out that someone stole a whole bunch of stuff from a Trump-supporting Republican and that ends up in the media (because the rioters were not all smart, forward thinking sorts of people and might not go through every page thinking about the contents before giving it to a reporter/scanning and uploading it)

    If nothing else there might be a conflict between "publish government secrets and die" and "pardon all the traitors".

    1812:

    "the US first amendment needs very careful re-examination, to say the least."

    It's more than speech.

    We need to encode in law, that if you want to retain your own human rights, including the right to speech, privacy and ultimately liberty, you have to respect, in speech and deed, that /everybody/ else has them too.

    1813:

    It seems the easiest way to avoid details coming out in court cases

    There is a huge downside to a pardon. The SCOTUS has said that if you have a pardon you can't use the 5th or in general not talk when asked questions in a trial, deposition, or similar situation about whatever the pardon covers. So while you get immunity from whatever the pardon covers you must then talk if asked and go to jail if you don't talk.

    1814:

    New topic: What happens now?

    Please move the discussion there, thanks.

    1815:

    Doesn't this follow naturally from a the act of accepting a pardon being effectively an admission of guilt? It's the ultimate form of leniency for pleading guilty...

    1816:

    Let me know when the chairs are set up so I can come sit and attend the lecture.

    Let me know so I can come and sell popcorn: the UK's speech laws are mostly terrible.

    1817:

    I'd vote for that.

    And on that note, I'm closing the comments on this thread as it's way too cumbersome. Continue here.

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    This page contains a single entry by Charlie Stross published on December 18, 2020 8:20 PM.

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