Richard Dreyfuss discussing civics: a reminder

You have possibly been directed to this before (I made my Eco 1 students watch it in class, and I may do so again). A while back, now, Richard Dreyfuss was a guest on Real Time with Bill Maher.

you may not know it, but Richard Dreyfuss studied the teaching of civics at oxford, and was a senior advisor on the same there (I forget the precise title he had at Oxford).

What happened, after Bill Maher asked Dreyfuss “what is civics?” is a stark reminder of what we’ve lost: especially in the US, where the teaching of civics was held in higher regard, probably, than elsewhere in the industrialised world. I don’t think one can watch this clip too often, at all.

This – the full clip, rather than youtube’s two-parter – has a tendency to be taken down. If you lose it, email me. I have a .mp4 (an .mp4? I never can tell) of it.

Australia, and food prices again.

The blog the Big Picture is wondering aloud whether food prices are helping out the retail sales numbers for Wal-Mart. With very good reason, too. Wal-Mart will report ex-energy sales, but no ex-food. One cannot help but think their company-aggregated 2.4% increase in sales (ex-energy) for the year are bouyed more than somewhat by the price of foodstuffs.

That price, by the by, is up 4% for the latest quarter alone, and 8% for the year.

WASHINGTON, D.C., July 12, 2007 – Retail food prices at the supermarket increased slightly in the second quarter of 2007, according to the latest American Farm Bureau Federation Marketbasket Survey. The informal survey shows the total cost of 16 basic grocery items in the second quarter of 2007 was $42.95, up about 4 percent or $1.61 from the first quarter of 2007.

Of the 16 items surveyed, 14 increased, one decreased and one stayed the same in average price compared to the 2007 first-quarter survey. Compared to one year ago, the overall cost for the marketbasket items showed an increase of about 8 percent.

In particular, the necessities.

Regular whole milk showed the largest quarter-to-quarter price increase, up 34 cents to $3.46 per gallon. Sirloin tip roast increased 27 cents to $3.99 per pound; pork chops increased 22 cents to $3.63 per pound; ground chuck increased 20 cents per pound to $2.85.

I’d say it serves you right for drinking dairy-milk, but I doubt the cost of soy is going down while the value of everything else appreciates. There are a couple of other interesting pieces in that article, concerning the price differences for milk of different fat-quantities (is that right? I haven’t had dairy in a very long time), as well as the declining share of supermarket food revenues that get to farmers.

In Australia, meanwhile,

The Australian Food and Grocery Council is warning consumers of further food price rises due to drought, floods and rising production costs.

The council, which represents manufacturers and processors, says some fresh food prices will fluctuate with weather conditions.

But chief executive Dick Wells says production costs including the price of irrigation water, livestock feed, fuel and fertiliser are expected to keep rising.

Again, the necessities in particular:

Consumers could be paying up to 25 per cent more for a litre of milk and other dairy products within the next six months.

National Foods Limited, the country’s largest processor of drinking milk and dairy products, said wholesale prices for milk and dairy foods would likely rise between 20 to 25 per cent in the half-year period.

To return, then, to the Kevin Rudd/supermarkets story. Milk is hit quickly because drought, directly (to the cow) and indirectly (via the feed) have an impact, as well as feed, directly, transport, etc. It’s expensive, basically (I’ve an idea! Leave them the hell alone. Okay, I’m not completely serious about that).

Politically, the Prime Minister is stuck. He can’t call an election today – he’d have his ass handed to him (recent polling showed the Prime Minister losing his own seat of 30 years), but to wait longer means more of this information. Another quarter’s inflation figures should verify what ordinary households are experiencing already: their rent is up, or their mortgages are up (‘distressed’ households – who spend more than 30% of income on housing – are increasing in number); their petrol costs are up; and their ordinary grocery bills are up, probably most of all. Families can cut back to generic brands on most goods, but force a household with 2 teenagers to do that and see if their parents vote for you.

So Howard is running into an election with the trifecta: the cost of keeping your house is going up; the cost of working at your job is going up; and the cost of feeding yourself, your family and the cat, dog and budgie is going up. And this doesn’t even include the cost of revolving debt, which is (the debt) also increasing – and ought to increase still more as we try to hang on to the same standards of living with seriously diminished purchasing power.

As it stands, Team Howard/Costello cop a lot of political hits, just by being incumbent at a time like this. For Rudd to win, of course, he needs to convince the electoral that he and his party can do something about it. The very fact that he is talking about it, while Howard/Costello use inflation figures that go out of date each week, if the newspapers (which everybody else reads) can be believed. I still think discussing his supermarket plan in terms of price-gouging is just silly – that is what the ACCC does, for Heaven’s sake. There’s no reason why it won’t work well enough to win an election, though.

Zero-carbon Britain

A week or so ago I discussed an also-recent post by George Monbiot, who had reviewed a handful of research papers (etc.); they all had pointed to a great deal more that governments could do for cutting back on carbon emissions.

One of those was the report Zerocarbonbritain: an alternative energy strategy, by the Centre for Alternative Technology (aren’t they clever? You will notice I used proper English in my blog post. I mean, ‘blog post. Dammit!). At the time of my writing , it had not yet been released – Monbiot having gotten a sneak preview, because he’s smart and famous, the bastard – but, now, it has. The full report can be downloaded here.

Alternatively, if you just don’t know whether or not it is your bag, you can watch a trailer for the report (no, seriously. What? Stop laughing!):

As it is laid out, the report is excellent (and colourful). The contents:

The report details Britain’s becoming carbon-free – and the world with it:

This strategy explores a scenario that leads from the status quo to a zero-carbon Britain in a zero-carbon world. The pursuit of such a strategy will entail a challenging period in the country’s history. The necessary rate of change will require rapid decision making and an urgent sense of common purpose, more akin to that which pertained during World War 2 than in any period since.

According to the idea of contraction (when all of our emissions are decreasing) and convergence (some date and point to which those contracting emissions will converge, on an equitable foundation depending upon our economies), the report discusses: the measures our economies must put in place to secure this; the measures our governments must undertake when our market fail to act, or act quickly enough; measures we can/must undertake to ‘power down’ our energy-utilisation building, motoring, manufacturing, etc.; and how to ‘power-up’, i.e. how best to utilise renewable (including nuclear) energy to replace our super-charged carbon-burning fascination of today.

In terms of ‘powering down’, the report coins the marvellous term energy-obese, in describing current-day England. I love it. The thesis is that England shall, by 2027, need to require half the energy it currently does. The report actually simplifies the British energy economy to a closed one: it operates as a closed island economy, meaning it must learn to work with no imported energy (not at all a bad idea, in this day and age). Building, consumption/consumers, transport and industry are dealt with individually, with discussion of structural market and governmental strategies that can be employed to bring energy use down. The keys are internalising the costs – the costs of production and of externalities – to ‘force’, if you will, England’s component energy-users to respond to the need to power down.

One of the big changes in use by industry/economy is in what we call ‘tele-commuting’. So much energy is burned through just getting to and from work – not to mention keeping two sets of buildings heated or cooled. Utilising telecommunications technology to do more and more of our work from home, including from farther away from the city, will alter the intensity of energy needed in our current supply.

Another is agriculture, specifically carbon sequestration. This is brought up as an alternative way of considering agriculture, relative to the silliness of biofuels.

In terms of ‘powering up’, the assumption then is that energy needed has been halved through the pursuit of such policies. This simplifies the problem considerably (and is exactly why debate about new sources of energy that do not address the escalating energy demand of today are doomed to hopeless failure).

Of most pleasing nature is how down on nuclear power the report is (because I am, too). It contains a very great, all-encompassing quote about the politics of relying upon nuclear energy:

“If the UK cannot meet its climate change commitments without nuclear power, then under the terms of the Framework Convention on Climate Change, we cannot deny others the same technology.”

– UK Sustainable Development Commission

Exactly.

The report favours (obviously) renewables. Which is where my previous mention of the report comes in. Wind, Solar (photo-voltaic), Marine (wave, tidal) and Heat (geo-thermal, solar-thermal) are all mentioned. Key, though, is matching demand. Currently the big problem with electricity-production is being able to meet the insane spikes in demand (at, say 8.30 when the Big Game kicks off, or right at half-time when we all go to make our cup of tea. Sorry, Americans. That must sound incredibly un-Manly*).

This is where some more speculative technology comes in. A lot of our ability to ‘do’ this lies with being able to store much greater amounts of electricity, for longer periods, and with an ability still to get it to housholds/offices when demand spikes. The good news is, that too is eminently do-able. Switching between different sources is one of the keys, localising storage is another. It needs to be devloped, but the reports uses dates like 2014 and 2027, so. If we’re not belted to hell by an asteroid by then, what’s stopping us?

Check out the report. It isn’t long, and it isn’t technical. It is interesting.

* Australians: I just remembered a joke told to me by my Uncle: “I have a ‘Coogee Chest’: it’s a long way from Manly.” Still makes me laugh.

‘The’ Saturday Cartoons, as collected by Bob Geiger

Wee. Chertoff, Vitter and the Surgeon General feature heavily this week. Go check out Bob Geiger’s collection of editorial cartoons.

Also, while I don’t often watch them, this animation by Nick Anderson is bloody terrific:

(it is flash, so it will not embed in WordPress. Click here to watch it).

The downfall of Citizen Black

While I was busying myself being lazy, Conrad Black was indeed convicted, on four counts of fraud. Not on racketeering, unfortunately – seriously, if I was to go to gaol for fraud, at least send me in as a gangster. He still faces, in this story, up to 20 years. In the article(s) I saw yesterday, he was facing up to 20 to 30 years, so. The lack of the racketeering conviction, an anomaly of being tried in the US anyway, may not make a difference to him being in gaol for the remainder of his life.

The Guardian today is suggesting that prosecutors are asking for 15 to 20 years, but that he may get as few as 5. They are running quite a good show on the aftermath. This blog-post heading is theirs, and I suspect the Citizen Kane reference is, given the life and crimes of Lord Black, deliberate.

Good for Patrick Fitzgerald, anyway. At least it might take his mind of the circus-like Libby Pardon, etc. saga in Washington.

The sentencing will be the interesting part. That he embezzled piles of money from Hollinger International was a given, as far as I could tell. My previous posts about this have compared his crimes to the likes of Jeffrey Skilling at Enron, as well as mafia bosses specifically, and how differences in the crime, the motive and the victims could nevertheless land them with similar sentences.

The big question was, is the crime (i.e. the impact on victims) to be punished, or the intent? The explanation of his sentence will reveal the Judges’ views on that question. In the end, though, Black has been convicted of neither tax evasion nor racketeering – the big-penalty charges – and of embezzling only USD6.5m, rather than the USD60m claimed in the suit. Meaning Lord Black is to be punished for far fewer crimes than the rest of us probably think he committed (and isn’t that always the way?).

Sadly, sentencing is not until late November. The way we are these days, we’ll forget who Conrad Black even is by then.

London underground workers to strike; drivers to film everything.

Take that, Gertrude Stein: I love semi-colons!

I woke (late) this morning to discover a strange spike in activity on this blog (there are as yet relatively few readers, so). The spike consisted entirely of a pile of people reading this post about Metronet Rail vs. Transport for London in the Great GB1bn Cost Over-Run. With no explanation why. Nor was it linked from a source, to my knowledge. The searching appeared, in my blogstats, thus:

Very odd. It did remind me, however, that I had wanted to talk about a Tube-related story. As luck would have it, another came along a couple of days ago, also. That first: several days ago, now, a train on the Central Line of the Tube derailed. Two trains were stuck (it and the one behind) for a couple of hours (900 or so people), with 37 injured. So much for that. The story – at least in ‘headline’ form – placed the blame on “debris”. In fact,

The Rail Maritime and Transport Union, which represents drivers and station workers, said it warned London Underground in April about equipment left on the tracks by Metronet crews in the area of today’s derailment, according to an e-mailed statement.

Metronet maintains two-thirds of the London Underground, doing repairs at night when the railway is closed. The union opposed the private company taking over track maintenance.

…

It was the fourth incident of debris on the tracks in 18 months, and the city should fire Metronet “in the interests of public safety,” said Bob Crow, the union’s general secretary, in an e-mailed statement.

Metronet said “a bale of material became dislodged” from a storage area, and that it’s checking all storage sites on the nine London Underground lines it maintains.

Score! Take the Tube, you might smack right into stuff! This will surely not endear Metronet Rail to the referree, Chris Bolt, in their dispute with TfL.

Tube strike

So when I caught sight of news that Tube workers were calling for a strike over ’safety concerns’, I figured this was it. Nope.

Tube staff to strike over safety

Tube workers have voted for a 24-hour strike on the Bakerloo line next week over fears for workers’ safety.

The Rail Maritime and Transport Union said it is in response to plans to make staff remove passengers from trains north of Queen’s Park station unaided.

The union insists two station staff and the driver should empty trains but managers say one member of station staff and the driver can do it safely.

The strike will begin at 2200 BST on Thursday 19 July.

No wonder the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union bills itself as England’s fastest-growing. It is also involved with strikes over pay on the Silverlink service, which runs up from London to the Midlands.

Back with the original derailment, though, little enough seems to have arisen, besides the Rail Accident Investigation Board having a look at it. According a statement on their website, there was “no evidence” that the driver, the condition of the train or the signalling system were at fault – not a good sign for Metronet, because that means everyone but them has a chair, now that the music has stopped.

The other response to this derailment that I found, I found to be the best – that of the Socialist Party. As well as the article’s headline (“Kick out the dangerous profiteers!”, they cried), they also noted that Balfour Beatty, a sub-contracting unit of Metronet, has this job – not Metronet themselves. Ah, sub-contracting.

On, then, to the story I’d wanted to discuss.

YouTube shows Tube driver journey

You read correctly. Tube drivers are filming their journeys! I think it’s great. Check YouTube for “train drivers view” (no punctuation required – this is web 2.0, after all). Here are a couple to save you the time.

I think it’s fascinating, but, then, I’m not a passenger (that’s for Harold Ross). Passengers don’t seem all that pleased. Safety-wise, I can see their point, up to a point of its own. What if the drivers are using tripods? Surely if police cars can be operated safely with a pre-set camera facing out the windshield, so too can trains? Sure, if my Tube train passed into the station with an operator driving with one hand and filming with the other I’d worry – but then most of the motorists I see here in New York do the same with mobile phones, without punishment. I still have to cross the road.

So enjoy the Tube films while they’re there. They’re still enjoyable to watch.