Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

what is going on in the UK?

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The energy and inflation situation sounds pretty bad in Europe and particularly in the UK. Now, these are definitely political opinion articles so I would take them with somewhat of a grain of salt. But if the facts and figures quoted here are even roughly correct (which I haven’t independently verified), if sounds like the UK is losing its middle class.

Let me back all that up with…well…the statistics coming out of Britain are mind-boggling, and I mean that. Consider just a few. Inflation’s projected to hit 18%. 18%. Meanwhile, in the rest of the rich world, it’s peaking — at least for now. I quoted you the one about 70% of households living in fuel poverty already, but consider it again. What would you say if 70% of people in your country had to choose between food and energy? But it hardly ends there. There are more food banks than McDonalds in Britain. Raw sewage is washing up on beaches. Entire villages are running out of water, and soon enough the country will be water poor, yet there’s no plan or agenda to fix any of this.

eand.co

HM Revenue & Customs, on the other hand, suggests that average earnings were £26,000 before tax and £23,500 after tax in 2019-20, but it forgets national insurance, which might reduce this by £2,000, and almost compulsory pension contributions that might deduct another £800 after tax relief, leaving £20,700 to really spend. What that means is that the average household requires two working adults to make it work. It also suggests that having average earnings in the UK means earning less than £15 an hour.

Can such a household now have a decent lifestyle on this level of income? Given that this household is very unlikely to be able to afford a mortgage, rents matter here – and average rents in the UK are now over £1,100 a month, or over £13,000 a year…

What is obvious in all this is that a person on the average income in the UK is already struggling to make ends meet. Frankly, every person and household in this situation is likely to be in financial difficulty. They will already have to make difficult choices. Anything that tips the balance against them now literally leaves them beyond their limits.

Independent

Some of this is certainly due to the pandemic, the Ukraine war, etc. But maybe food, energy, and water prices are also sounding warnings that our unsustainable treatment of the natural environment is finally having consequences. While the underlying trends of pollution, degradation, and resource overuse accumulate slowly and gradually, our society may be able to make small adjustments to adapt to them as long as conditions are relatively stable and predictable. But then random shocks happen to the system, and we are not able to recover back to the trend, and our quality of life can suddenly erode and never quite get back to where it was.

Don’t forget to worry about volcanoes!

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Amid all the many choices of things to worry about, we sometimes forget volcanoes! But actually, they can be quite dangerous and are not as uncommon or far away as one might think. This article from Cambridge has some numbers on how common and damaging they actually are, and how we seem to pay them less attention than some other types of disasters that are actually less disastrous.

“Data gathered from ice cores on the frequency of eruptions over deep time suggests there is a one-in-six chance of a magnitude seven explosion in the next one hundred years…

Mani compares the risk of a giant eruption to that of a 1km-wide asteroid crashing into Earth. Such events would have similar climatic consequences, but the likelihood of a volcanic catastrophe is hundreds of times higher than the combined chances of an asteroid or comet collision…

“The last magnitude seven eruption was in 1815 in Indonesia,” said co-author Dr Mike Cassidy, a volcano expert and visiting CSER researcher, now based at the University of Birmingham.

“An estimated 100,000 people died locally, and global temperatures dropped by a degree on average, causing mass crop failures that led to famine, violent uprisings and epidemics in what was known as the year without summer,” he said.

Cambridge University

So we are not necessarily matching our money and effort to the greatest risks. Then again, I’ve heard it suggested that a small-ish nuclear winter would not be as damaging in the future as it could have been because the cooling effect would be partially offset by climate change.

extinction debt

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Paleontologist Henry Gee says humans have an extinction debt because we have very low genetic variety caused by past bottlenecks, our fertility is declining, and we have overexploited our habitat.

This combination of factors might indeed doom other species. I would like to believe our species’ intelligence and technology gives us the ability to adapt our way out of the mess we have created orders of magnitude faster than other species would. Of course, the possibility that we can does not guarantee we will.

the walking climate dead

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Parag Khanna has an all you can eat buffet of ideas he calls climate anarchy. Some combination of extreme weather, food crisis, and poor sperm quality is going to lead us to a sort of Walking Dead without the zombies scenario involving prepping and RV parks. This seems like one plausible future to me, let’s hope not the one that comes to pass.

Progressive policies are popular, goddamnit!

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You see this in the media fairly often, and it is occasionally brought up by (losing) courageous politicians like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Large majorities of voters support benefits programs, particularly Medicare and Social Security. These politicians can’t get elected though because of the anti-tax narrative that is convenient for the wealthy and powerful interests that buy and own our successful politicians. So around and around we go.

Sensible policies are obvious. Incrementally lower eligibility ages, or at least allow younger citizens to opt in at cost. The latter would be win-win for everyone except the finance and insurance industries.

Political strategies are less obvious, and nothing that has been tried has worked lately. Politicians need to reach the same working class and professional crowd that is susceptible to the anti-tax message. A somewhat disingenuous approach would be to exaggerate the reach of those who are actually trying to dismantle the popular programs. Use their words against them, even out of context,and make their political and private associates guilty by association. Give the race and gender rhetoric a rest, because it is dividing the majority of voters you need to support sensible policies that are going to benefit disadvantaged groups the most. It’s a dirty game, but it’s a game the other side is going to play like it or not. Expand the benefits first, let people see and understand what they are getting for their taxes, and the benefits will be hard for future politicians to take away.

August 2022 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: The fossil fuel industry intentionally used immoral, evil propaganda techniques for decades to cast doubt on climate science and make short-term profits, probably dooming us, our children, and our children’s children. Also, and because that is apparently not enough, nuclear proliferation.

Most hopeful story: “Effective altruism” may give us some new metrics to benchmark the performance of non-profit organizations and give us some insights on dealing with existential risks (like the ones I mention above).

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: Japanese raccoon dogs are cute despite their unusually large scrota, which are traditionally thought to bring good luck.

metformin and longevity

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This article says billionaires are “racing” to invest in longevity treatments. Top candidates attracting funding include various gene therapies, drugs, stem cells, and old people consuming the blood of children (seriously, this is real but presumably the children are fine). This article argues a known drug called metformin deserves more attention.

effective altruism and existential risk

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In my recent “effective altruism” post, I promised to follow up on the idea of existential risk. Basically, there is a debate, bogus in my opinion, between whether an altruist should try to reduce suffering today or make sure humanity has a long term future. The argument goes that the 8 billion or so human souls alive now are only a tiny fraction of the potential trillions that could ultimately exist, so making sure we don’t wipe ourselves out should be top priority. I call this bogus because we have the intelligence, ingenuity, and energy to work on all these problems. Just divide and conquer as they say.

Anyway, here is another existential risk article. Nuclear weapons have been and probably still are the largest existential threat. But biological weapons and mishaps may now or soon will present an equal or greater threat (which doesn’t make nuclear weapons better, it doubles the threat). Artificial intelligence is an unknown unknown, potentially catastrophic medium term threat, and opinions vary from years to decades to never. Nanotechnology is a theoretical long-term threat.

My take is that we need to get on top of the biological threat fast with some kind of treaty and inspection regime we can all live with. In the US, we need a damn health care system. And at least get the nuclear threat back to where it was. Courageous political leadership could make these a priority.

effective altruism

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Here’s a very long article on “effective altruism”. The idea of benchmarking charities based on how much they spend to achieve their stated objectives makes sense to me. However, some objectives are harder to quantify than others and it doesn’t make sense to assume everyone has the same values, or that they should prioritize objectives that are easiest to quantify.

I can see another use for these types of benchmarks. If you are running a charity trying to achieve a particular objective, you can compare your cost-effectiveness to the best charities in your class. If you can’t at least approach their level of performance, you might be better off just donating your money or effort to them rather than running your own charity.

The article morphs into another article talking about existential risk. I’ll talk about that another time.