Solving the problem by, well, solving the problem

Want to end poverty? Brazil’s answer: Give people money



I said many years ago that if you want to end airplane crashes it's actually very easy. Take the wings and the wheels off of them. No crashes.



It will be interesting to see if this is done correctly: the government can put money in circulation this way, but it has to remove enough money in taxes to prevent inflation. I'm betting that they'll fall down on that part. If they do, it will cripple any effort to fix problems here, since the press is too dumb to understand what they will have done wrong.



On the other hand, if the program is done right and actually succeeds, we can watch the pseudo-libertarian lackeys of the 0.01% make excuses about why it won't work here.

Science press gets it wrong again.

In other news, water is wet.



Stephen Hawking: 'There are no black holes' : Nature News & Comment



When the headlines, "There are no black holes," simply contradict what the very story under it says, it's time to fire the editors.

A good idea is quickly abandoned...

... while a bad idea lasts forever.



Popular Flood Insurance Law Is Target of Both Political Parties - NYTimes.com



One of the first things I realized about the consequences of climate change is that one of the most immediate dangers is foolishly trying to fight the sea. Beach communities already pay huge amounts of money to fight the littoral current that moves sand up and down the shore. (Remember your parables, folks? Foolish man, houses, and sand?) How do you suppose they'll react when their coastal property is below sea level? And who do you suppose they'll expect to pay for it?



So now sea level is rising, and people are crying. Look, I'm not unsympathetic to people whose homes are being lost. But come on, one of the risks of living close to the water is that the water may get a bit too close. Who should pay for that? Gee, lets see. You get to live near the beach. You get to go fishing and swimming, bird watching in the marshes, enjoy the laid-back atmosphere of coastal living. So of course the people who should pay for that are.... everyone else, right?



The Biggert-Waters flood insurance reform act put more of the burden of insuring flood-prone coastal properties where it belongs-- on the people who choose to build in a flood zone. So naturally the people who now have to pay the true cost of their foolishly located buildings are crying.



It's really not complicated. Don't build on a flood plain. That includes the coastal property likely to flood in severe storms. It would have cost much, much less after Katrina to give displaced homeowners a check for the equity they lost and tell them to build above sea level. Sea level in the Miocene, that is. (See figure 2, page 3) And not on a river flood plain either.

Both sides of their mouths?

Inequality: Why aren’t the poor storming the barricades? | The Economist



So the Cato Institute says that the reason there's no widespread revolt is that the gap in actual consumption isn't all that much.



But wait! Every time someone says that the rich don't consume much as a percent of their income, conservatives call foul.

Can't have it both ways, dudes.

Whose ox is being gored, Administration in power edition

What voters actually care about, in one chart



The whole article is interesting, but look particularly at the graph of who (by party) worries about deficits. It's the party not in the White House. (Admittedly only going back to Clinton in these data)



First, I'm inclined to think that anybody who is worried about budget deficits in a categorical sense doesn't really know what they're talking about.



Second, since budget deficits are a part of life almost all the time, it becomes the convenient whipping boy when you haven't got much else to complain about, or to distract people from your real agenda, or when yo want to distract them from the things you are actively doing wrong.

Of transporters, nostalgia, and the "good old days."

This column will change your life: consistency bias | Life and style | The Guardian



The Star Trek transporter presumably works by scanning a body down to the level of the subatomic, destroying the body at one location, and recreating it elsewhere. One metaphysical question that arises is whether the person stepping out of the transporter is really the same person, or a copy. When I step into the transporter do I just die, and does another body that "thinks it's me" emerge on the other end?

And does that question actually have any meaning? Science fiction is full of stories where a character's personality gets fed into a computer, and they are supposed to achieve some kind of immortality that way. But isn't it "really" just a computer that acts as if it's the person? Didn't the "real" person actually die? Absent any actual contact with the soul of the departed (or the person who stepped into the transporter) how could we tell?

Since I am more than skeptical of the existence of souls in the first place, I see this as a meaningless question. The linked article points to why.

When I remember my childhood, I place myself in those memories.

"Well of course you do. You were there" you say.

But was "I" really there? The "me" that I place in those scenes is not a 57 year old grouchy old home brewer with a decent understanding of a few things, and a superficial understanding of a lot of things. He isn't a person who has been through the joys of being a grandfather; the pain and loss of seeing loved ones slip into entropy; the irritation of loss of visual acuity, muscle strength, effortless recall of words, and fair endurance.

In fact, the "me" that wakes up in the morning isn't really the "me" that went to bed last night. But I have this illusion of consistency, because when I place myself in my own memories of the past (as the saying goes) I'm not much, but I'm all I've got to work with.

When we are nostalgic for the "good old days" we imagine that, because we lived a sheltered, protected, simple life, the world was that way. We see the world as getting more dangerous when it is in fact much, much safer, because in our memories we were safe. Or at least we survived. Witness all those "I grew up without bicycle helmets and I survived" libertarian screeds on Facebook. We hear about all the bad things today, but don't realize that much, much more of the bad stuff happened in the past, we just didn't hear about it. Leave it to Beaver only showed the town on one side of the tracks.

More than Calcium | The Scientist Magazine®

More than Calcium | The Scientist Magazine®



So let me get this right. Serious scientists think that paleolithic humans drank milk to get vitamin D?



Really?

 There is very little vitamin D in milk and in fact only trace amounts and in the UK milk is not fortified with vitamin D.

People think there is vitamin D in milk because it is added artificially. I can understand that misconception from most people, but this article is from a science publication.