Just in time for the talks in Paris* and as the last hopes of our keeping temperature-increase under 2 degrees Celsius evaporate, here's a nice video from Sky News illustrating what, at this point, our most optimistic future might look like due to our greedy shortsighted stupidity.
This video, released in the last 24 hours or so, on our 2° future was accompanied by scarier videos illustrating 3° & 4° respectively. For some reason, Sky has since chosen to set the accompanying videos to 'Private' status on YouTube.
To be generous to Sky, maybe these videos were just released prematurely by accident, and will be re-released shortly. Maybe.**
The remaining video is instructive.**** But we're missing the progression that the video-makers clearly intended with just the one. Also, each video ended with an encouragement to share said content via social media. Kinda hard to do that Sky when you disappear the videos with no warning, and no explanation.
* Which due to our ever currently convenient obsession with 'The War on Terror'*** are to occur under a 'State of Emergency' with protests conveniently banned. ** That, or representatives of Murdoch's buddies in the fossil-fuel-industries got wind of what one of his media-outlets was putting out, and convinced Sky of the benefits of a little self-censorship ? *** Many of the roots of which can be directly tied back to our dependence upon fossil-fuels, and support of the backwards regimes who control much of the supply thereof. **** Myself, I think there's an argument that some of the millennials and younger may have an excuse (living under Western corporate media & the likes of GOP-compromised educational systems) for not understanding just how dire the threat is. But, really, if you're over thirty or so and need any further convincing, then at this point I can't put it down to any better than, at most generous, wilful ignorance. Update:This vid. on 5° change may be a replacement for the other two videos I mentioned.
I would not have believed even seven months ago that I would feel as strongly about this man as I do today. Now, I'm long past making any excuses for him. He is the face of all the evil his party has wrought and continues to wreak. May a likely non-existent God have mercy on his soul.
Oh, and a premature Happy Christmas* Ev'ryone !...
* Fuck political correctness now and forever. Fuck Starbucks, regardless of how they decorate their cups. And fuck 'Merry'...it's Happy dammit.
* Sorry, make that the overseas province of the PRC formerly known as America's Bitch. Sorry, The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Do androids dream of a three-day week? This week, Professor Stephen Hawking weighed in on the topic that’s obsessing technologists, economists and social scientists around the world: whether a dawning age of robotics is going to spell mass unemployment. “If machines produce everything we need,” Hawking wrote in an “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit, “everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared – or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution.”
As technology advances, the question is no longer whether or not robots are coming for your job. The question is whether or not you should let them take it.
...
We’ve seen this pattern before. In successive waves of technological innovation from the industrial revolution to the automative leaps of the 1950s, millions of working people found themselves replaced by machines that would never inconvenience their owners by getting sick or going on strike. This time, however, it’s not just working class jobs that are threatened. It seems that Robespierre was right – it’s the prospect of angry unemployed lawyers and doctors that really prompts the elite to panic, or at least to produce urgent hardbacks and suggest to major news outlets that wealth redistribution might not be such a bad idea after all.
There is little to argue with in Kaplan and Ford’s basic predictions. Whatever happens, it seems that by the time most of us reach retirement, machines will be doing far more of the jobs that nobody really wanted to do in the first place. In any sane economic system, this would be good news. No longer will millions of men and women be stuck doing boring, repetitive, often degrading work for the majority of their adult lives. That’s fantastic. Or it should be. Did you really want the job those thieving android scabs are about to take from you? Wouldn’t you rather be writing a symphony, or spending time with your kids, or plucking your nose-hair? All else being equal, don’t you have better things to do than spending most of your life marking time at work to afford the dignity of not starving?
All else, however, is very far from equal – and that’s the problem. Technology is not the problem. The only reason that the automation of routine, predictable jobs is not an unmitigated social good is that the majority of the human race depends on routine, predictable jobs, and the wages we get for them. The rioting textile workers who smashed their weaving machines in the eighteenth century did not do so because they simply loved working twelve-hour days in dangerous, dirty conditions. They did it because they had been given a stark choice between drudge work and starvation. Two hundred years after the Luddite rebellions, most of us, when you get down to it, would not work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for forty years if we had a choice – but the necessity of earning a wage gives us no other option. In fact, advanced automation should for some time have made it unnecessary for any of us to work more than a handful of hours a week, as originally foreseen generations ago by thinkers like John Maynard Keynes – but somehow, most of us are working longer hours for lower wages than our grandparents.
The problem is not technology. The problem is capitalism. The problem is that in order to sell seven billion people on the necessity of globalisation, we’ve created a moral universe where people who do not work to create profit are considered less than human, and used as surplus labour to drive down the cost of wages. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a single parent, an unemployed veteran or an unpaid intern – the logic of late capitalism grants you no right to live unless you are making money for someone else. If our economic system defines the basis of human worth as the capacity to do drudge work for someone else’s profit then the question that has troubled science fiction writers for a century is solved: not only are robots human, they may soon be more human than us. ...
No comment needed here really. I had some shit written for another recent post from the New Statesman (regarding the absurd Tory policies on housing as it happens), but in this case, I don't disagree with enough of anything in this piece to even attempt a commentary. Just read it if you haven't already.*
Updated the last post to reflect Hillary's belated opposition to the TPP deal, but I think this quote from her interview with Judy Woodruff merits highlighting.
...We've learned a lot about trade agreements in the past years. Sometimes they look great on paper. I know when President Obama came into office, he inherited a trade-agreement with South Korea. I, along with other members of the cabinet, pushed hard to get a better agreement -- We think we made improvements -- Now, looking back on it, it doesn't have the results we thought it would have, in terms of access to the markets, more exports, et cetera.
And here I thought, listening to her at first, that she was just referring to the insane trade-deals her husband pushed through as president, but no, she's indicting her own competence & record as well.
She then goes on with some nonsense about how 'in order for us to have a competitive economy in the global marketplace', the US needs to 'raise wages' 'at home' (which the Republican meanies have blocked). So, in other words, she doesn't get the fundamental complaint ordinary workers in the West have against these deals, nor why they are so favoured by the corporate elites, at all. I sure am filled with confidence in Hill' as the Dem's candidate right now.
* Should really be QOYD for 'Quote of Yesterday', but I suppose that's not 'a thing.'** ** More and more, I feel like commas should be placed outside of quotation-marks, but it just doesn't feel right for the full stop/period. I'm 'evolving' on the issue.
Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson's special debate-strategy: Imagine the other candidates as cute babies. Man must have a hell of an imagination. Then again, he is a highly-educated neurosurgeon who believes the Earth to be six-thousand years old...
Oh yeah, and the evil TPP deal was finally agreed (look it up). The details may or may not be available to the public a few decades from now...when the damage is already done. Happy hump-day !
Update: Oh lookee, Hillary-come-lately finally voiced her bold opposition to the trade-deal she previously praised & helped promote whilst in office, now that the deal has been inked by all the nations involved, and Obama has the 'Fast Track' power to ram it through Congress without the possibility of debate or amendment.
What courage from the would-be future leader of the free world, she who so vehemently opposed the war in Iraq that she voted for its authorisation, and she who hemmed and hawed for months on the Keystone XL pipeline-deal she previously supported whilst in the administration, till prolonged low oil-prices made it politically and economically unviable ! Bold bold Hillary !
Just a small one. Only a small meteorite do I wish Manchester's way. One just large enough to take out a convention-centre, say. And perhaps a few smaller hotel-sized and taxi-sized buggers. Evil fuckers can't all be in one place at the same time, I suppose.
Ministers should waste no time to make unpopular cuts to pensioner benefits, a think tank director has said.
Many of those hit by a cut to the winter fuel allowance might "not be around" at the next election, said Alex Wild of the Taxpayers' Alliance.
And others would forget which party had done it, he added.
At the group's meeting at the Conservative conference in Manchester, former defence secretary Liam Fox said spending cuts must be "for keeps".
Mr Wild said the Tories could not wait until a year before the next election to make the necessary cuts to the winter fuel allowance, free bus passes, the Christmas bonus and other pensioner benefits.
Mr Wild, who is research director of the think tank which campaigns for lower taxes and highlights examples of Government waste, said the cuts should be made "as soon as possible after an election for two reasons".
"The first of which will sound a little bit morbid - some of the people... won't be around to vote against you in the next election. So that's just a practical point, and the other point is they might have forgotten by then."
He added: "If you did it now, chances are that in 2020 someone who has had their winter fuel cut might be thinking, 'Oh I can't remember, was it this government or was it the last one? I'm not quite sure.'
"So on a purely practical basis I would say do it immediately. That might be one of those things I regret saying in later life but that would be my practical advice to the government."
You might well regret it indeed, you fascist piece of shit. The few pensioners who manage to not freeze to death, not die at the hands of cuts to the NHS, and not lose their memory to Alzheimer's, should remember those words the next time the 'Conservative' Party comes knocking at the door with promises of 'Security.'
* References to meteorites hitting Manchester above are in the name of Hyperbole. References to fascism are in the name of Accuracy.
The changing nature of the British jobs market has broken the link between unemployment and crime, according to new research.
The phenomenon – which saw rising joblessness matched by increased burglaries, thefts and robberies during the Thatcher years – ended in 2005, according to an analysis of crime and employment statistics.
The latest research suggests that growing trend of employers to adopt part-time working and zero-hours contracts has meant that communities are less blighted by mass unemployment and less likely to resort to crime.
The findings explain in part why Britain was not hit by a crime epidemic following the 2007-8 financial crisis which led to unemployment rising above eight per cent for the first time in more than a decade but saw a continuing long-term decline in crime.
The story does mention the likely role in preventitive technology in reducing crime, though that only addresses the question of means.
Here's a hint from the other side of the Atlantic at a more likely causative factor:
But no-one seems to want to take that line of enquiry seriously, and we're going to be still debating this shit for decades to come, and still pushing Dirty Harry-style get-tough rhetoric on crime even as London sinks into the Thames and DC & NYC into the Atlantic.
Banning lead in petrol is responsible for declining crime rates in Britain, the United States and other countries, startling new research suggests.
The astonishing conclusion threatens to overturn current thinking on crime and punishment....
Published in the peer-reviewed journal, Environmental Research, the study reports a "very strong association" over more than 50 years between the exposure of young children to the toxic metal and crime rates 20 years later when they are young adults.
And it says the association holds true for a wide variety of countries with differing social conditions, law and order policies...
Britain – one of the last to get rid of the toxic metal – is one of the latest to enjoy a decline in crime.
But, someone seems to want to tell a very different story today, and link falling crime-rates to zero-hours contracts of all things. Ladies & Gentleman, your Independent newspaper.
And to think, they told Tom Tomorrow that people would be put off by all the words in his cartoons. This must come across as utter gibberish to first time readers.
Hmm, wonder if Invisible-Tentacle-of-the-Unhindered-Exchange Glox will ever show up in TMW in his its own right...The mind boggles.
There is an economic and demographic backdrop to the differential policies towards asylum-seekers of Germany and the UK - to Germany's relatively open door, that compares with the UK's heavily fortified portal (which will be opened just a bit by David Cameron later today).
The two relevant points (leaving aside moral ones) are that:
the UK's population is rising fast, whereas Germany's is falling fast;
the dependency ratio (the proportion of expensive older people in the population relative to able-bodied, tax-generating workers) is rising much quicker in Germany than in the UK.
So to put it another way, it is arguably particularly useful to Germany to have an influx of young grateful families from Syria or elsewhere, who may well be keen to toil and strive to rebuild their lives and prove to their hosts that they are not a burden - in the way that successive immigrant waves have done all over the world (including Jews like my family in London's East End).
Here are the European Commission's projections from its Ageing Report that was published earlier this year.
It projects that Germany's population will shrink from 81.3 million in 2013 to 70.8 million in 2060, whereas the UK's will rise from 64.1 million to 80.1 million.
As you can see, what is striking is that the UK is set to become the EU's most populous country, ahead of Germany and France, as a result of a relatively high fertility rate and greater projected rates of net migration.
It is probably relevant that the Commission forecasts that the proportion of the German population in 2060 represented by migrants arriving after 2013 would be 9%, compared with 14% in the UK. So Germany would be a lot less multicultural than the UK.
As for the dependency ratio, the percentage of those 65 and over compared with those aged between 15 and 64, that is forecast to rise from 32% to a very high 59% in Germany by 2060.
Or to put it another way, by 2060 there will be fewer than two Germans under 65 to work and generate taxes to support each German over 65.
...
Here is the thing. Wherever you stand in the debate on whether immigration is a good or bad thing - and most economists would argue that immigration promotes growth - right now immigration looks much more economically useful to Germany than to the UK.
That is perhaps one of the unspoken reasons why Germany is being much more welcoming to asylum seekers from Syria and elsewhere right now.
That said, some business leaders and a couple of Tory ministers gave me what can only be described as an off-message critique of David Cameron's approach to the migrant crisis over the weekend.
They said that Angela Merkel is creaming off the most economically useful of the asylum seekers, by taking those that have shown the gumption and initiative to risk life and limb by fleeing to Europe.
Precedent suggests they will be the ones that find work fastest and impose the least economic burden on Germany or any other host country.
By contrast, David Cameron appears to be doing what many would see as the more morally admirable thing - which is to go to the Syrian camps and invite children and the most vulnerable of refugees to Britain....
Ah, the politics of population-replacement...
Here we are in the age of the robot, and yet still we talk of too few workers. One might think our policies...and our politics might reflect the same...As if ! What they do reflect, as always, are the interests of capital.
The Beeb has a poll out on public attitudes in the UK towards taking in more refugees. They note that those of a working-class background are much less supportive (24% to 54%) than the middle-classes. Wonder why that might be ?*
* No, not that they are simply uneducated and/or racist.
David Cameron, whose family surely wouldn't have any of their millions hidden away in tax-havens, will be addressing this any day now.
And yes, the actual map is interactive and searchable (sadly only by address), if you want to see properties down to the level of individual flats & parking-spaces, and which shell-companies based in which countries or territories, which as the Eye points out may or may not be tax-havens, own them.
Better a screenshot of this address perhaps, than some random flat owned improbably by a company in Liberia.
Though the Channel Islands, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Hong Kong, Seychelles, and the like sure do seem to own a remarkable amount of property in London, for what are surely, entirely normal legitimate reasons.
