Dick Smith living up to his name

(re Dick Smith's opinion that Australians should be limited, Chinese style, to two children)

Dick smith has got a point. If we want to limit population to any amount at all, we may want to have a target no of children per family. However, putting an individual limit and fines analogously to what the Chinese (RMP) do, risks overshooting considerably and also sets a fuse for a deadly demographic time bomb, as well as relying heavily on abortion as a means of enforcement of these policies. What is required is a target for an average(say 2) children per family, and a way to trade fertility allocations with those that do not want any children, analogously to water trading. Personally, I would find it easy to trawl my FB friends to find enough who would be willing to sell theirs to me. At any rate, our average in Aus is already at about 2, so further limiting people's reproductive rights would dangerously undershoot, eventually, when it is too late to rectify. 


However, as good as this (fertility cap and trade) sounds, it is not quite ambitious enough. There is still the dual issues of many children being unwanted to the point of being aborted, while many that want to adopt a child are thwarted by a lack of children to adopt and a heap of red tape - which leads to most adoptions being "soft immigration" ie. from other countries.

I am not suggesting the prepurchase of babies from females pregnant with unwanted babies by couples desperate to adopt, mediated and encouraged by the government. That would be the barbaric purchase of children akin to the economics of slavery and other barbaric uses of people trade and smuggling.

What I am suggesting will be viewed as a legitimate alternative to abortion - At a family planning clinic, pregnant teenagers (or other age groups) would be given the option of the fetus being carried to be made a ward of the state while in utero. The medical costs, as well as the loss of employment opportunities, stress and a range of other emotional and actual "costs" current and future, would be reimbursed financially by the state (including the fertility right trade).

At birth a pre-arranged adoption would take place. Rather than a prospective Adopter being limbo (and the baby being in limbo in foster care), there have been at least 6 months to arrange the details and documentation for the adoption to take place.

For the prospective adopter it will be a legitimate alternative to overseas adoption. Of course they would have to reimburse the Government for costs associated with the transfer of care, but this would likely be less than the costs associated with overseas adoption.

A couple of questions remain. Would a prospective birth parent rather get a whole heap of money for letting their baby live, albeit with someone else than making it die and it costing her? Would a prospective adopter prefer to live in the same country as the birth parents rather than on the other side of the world?

I don't know - I guess only people in that position could answer surveys to get a feel for whether this whole idea is bunkim or not.

Quote of the week

"They think we should wait for some science fiction fantasy to jump out from behind a bush, (but) we've got an offer on the table, and we're going to take it."

Bob Katter criticising the opposition (essentially crossing the floor) regarding amendments to NBN legislation put forward by the opposition.

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/labor-claims-nbn-milestone-in-marathon-day/story-e6frfku0-1226029637347#ixzz1HtBKgPVh

No Flea Zone

It appears that the quickest way to enforce a no fly zone and to "protect civilians" in Lybia is to kill the leader and to destroy their front line troops.

Oh Yes - about the Arab thing

I have been meaning to say something about the Arab uprising thing - My spin was that it is exciting and unpredictable, and that the "dictators dillemma" is definitely in play in those Arab countries that have dictators (most of them?).

This article explains to me at any rate the relationship of modern technology with why the uprisings have gotten so much momentum.

My view is that at this point, international "judgement" is quite moot, especially as there is no such thing as international law, at least that can be enforced. All there is is a kind of multilateral pragmatism, with perhaps some belated justice being meted out by citizens on their former oppressors, and perhaps sanctioned in hindsight by various countries and groupings. There is absolutely no point in supporting a tyrant when they look like they are going to lose no matter what. It is in a sense "victor's justice"

Chris Fellows says:
(BTW Marco, if you mind me posting an off-topic diatribe, just delete it and tell me to get my own blog already!)

Too bad - Until you get a new blog I'll keep the conversation going here.

It leaves a sour taste in my mouth that the one time the UN can get together it is to kick a man when he's down...surely the time for sanctions against Qaddafi was when he invaded Chad, or blew up that passenger plane, or fomented Tuareg rebellions in neigbouring countries, or killed thousands of unarmed prisoners, or had Sadat assassinated for making peace with Israel (the last not proven, but as proven as some of the allegations being used as justification now)?

If I was part of a mob burning down a police station and calling for the violent overthrow of the government, I would consider that I had crossed some red line between being a 'civilian' and an 'insurgent' and that it would be pretty much justifiable self-defence if the government used deadly force against me. And if there were people all over the country burning down police stations, I would think the government was pretty much justified in imposing a curfew and shooting me if I broke it. And if my whole town was in the control of police-station-burning hooligans, I would think the government would have a pretty good case for sending the air force against us. The hypocrisy of the UN condemning Qaddafi for doing what almost every UN member state would do if they were in his shoe is kind of icky

Not many journalists have taken this line at all. "Groupthink" seems to have taken over and the new good guys can do what they need to do to extinguish the bad guys, who have been happily doing bad things for decades. The double standards argument makes no sense to the groupthink.

NBN vs alternatives, again

I don't really want to offer a counter anecdote at this stage, because there is something more fundamental about the NBN plan than the simple "Cost for Cost - speed for speed" rationalisations of the argument between the plans broadly outlined by the Government and opposition.

The fundamental thing for me is the experience Australia had with the privatisation of Telstra in the first place, and whether the mistakes made then can be made up with a new plan.
The rationalisation of privatisation at that point and generally was that investments formerly provided by the Government would be made by private enterprise, and that costs would be borne by the end consumers who were most willing to pay for the services provided.
The main unexpected downsides was that voters even in cities were not happy with the disparity between country and city services, so a regimen of regulation was built up so high, Government became a virtual "owner" of Telstra's minimum service, but in a much more inefficient way than *actually* owning the associated infrastructure.

A second downside was the inefficient duplication of things like mobile phone towers, which provided neither more coverage, nor extra reliability.

A third issue can be illustrated with an anecdote. When a *Telstra* Fibre cable was accidentally cut, all services *other* than Telstra, including mobile phones stopped working for huge swathes of regional areas, including many which ostensibly should not have even relied on that connection. Ironically many Telstra services continued working at a slightly lowered reliability.

The ownership structure of the NBN is the real key to why it will resolve the failures of privatisation without harming its successes.

4G and new technologies a serious threat to fibre broadband

If you are not already convinced that wireless is the new future and that FTTP broadband is a white elephant you MUST read this.

Not only will 4G kill NBN but as an added bonus will boost personal insect repellant sprays in this country :-O

Ok. I admit it . the Economist is privatisation biased

Having read the Economist Intelligence Unit's brief accessible summary on broadband plans compared among dozens of countries, it has become obvious to me. Australia's broadband plans have been scored low because of the high comparative cost and mediocre quoted speed.

The issue I have (as I had with their take on university privatisation) is how the length of term of investment is never even considered as an issue. Wireless (Next G as oposed to Wi-Fi) has excellent returns on investment in the short term, but is in no way future-proof.

The real crux of the issue - Who should pay for and/or own infrastructure as opposed to running costs and retail sale of bandwidth etc, is never mentioned. It wouldn't be an issue to me, if the alternative suggestion was the government owning and spending money on a much reduced infrastructure - That would be a reasonable alternative, but in the long run, it wouldn't actually be cheaper. To me it is like Mr Windsor said - "You do it once, and you do it with fibre".

The biggest returns will happen once Moore's law catches up with the capacity of the network. Memory capacity still doubles every 18 months, but data generation and traffic on the internet is doubling quicker than that, about every 12 months. Therefore, given that if you build it, the traffic will eventually fill it - it makes sense to optimise the cost of the end-point infrastructure, rather than requiring a shorter timeframe to gain a payoff with something that will need to be upgraded again, duplicating a lot of the initial work.

Post Yasi De-brief

Quite a few interesting points to make on the wash-up with regards to this monster cyclone. It is quite amazing how many people went into such a panic that they flew or drove out of Townsville at great personal expense, on Wednesday (3/2/11) at which point we were ruled out of both very destructive winds and the worst of the tidal surges. Fear is contagious, and most of my time on Wednesday was spent calming friends and family down and busting the various rumours circling around - like these Some of the major problem was that uncertainty of where the cyclone was going to land as of Monday and early Tuesday was passed on by word of mouth, and gave the wholly wrong impression to a lot of people that Armageddon in Townsville was still possible when they were making decisions early Wednesday. This was contradicted by the facts, and it is a tribute to Anna Bligh and her team that each press conference had the utmost up to date facts and correct specific instructions to everyone concerned. It appears several important lessons were learned from each recent cyclone to the effect that I couldn't fault the "official" response in any way whatsoever.

The aftermath response is a little bit the other way. The same sort of people that had their families unnecessarily huddled inside wardrobes overnight, were out there the next day thinking it had been way overblown. Bitter disappointment and resentment about power being out for so long gave way to surprise about how much monetary assistance would come their way. So much money has been doled out by Centrelink that Townsville is under a stimulus induced spending spree. One-offs like disaster relief have little of the economic ill-effects of other kinds of government spending, as the money filters back as taxes from those companies that did well servicing peoples needs in this area. The net result might even be more growth for Australia.

(EX) Tropical cyclone Anthony

The lack of a three day forecast track map for this system from the BOM seems to have confused everybody, especially since it is likely to cross the NQ coast within the next three days! There is method to this madness and this system is more chaotic than normal, so they don't want to send even more mixed messages than that.
This link shows the best guess of what rainfall and barometric pressure will ensue in the following few days, so I suggest it is the more useful "warning".

Lessons from flooding

I fear that lessons from the Brisbane catchment flooding may not be heeded for the Murray Darling basin at the moment.

The main thing I have seen is that, for the Brisbane River at least, it is enough to refine procedures (or the rule book, as I have heard it called in the media) to have made the catastrophic major flood of the lower Brisbane river a moderate flood (albeit a longer lived moderate flood). The rule book seems to have been written at the time the Wivenhoe was built, and it essentially awaits for upstream data of inflows to enable releases in advance to allow room for incoming floods. This was fine when weather predictions days in advance were highly unreliable (as they were in the eighties) or for inflows of a volume that is not several times the capacity of the dam, nor when "La Nina" conditions point to aggressive early releases being more "conservative", than a wait and see what runoffs eventuate policy.

This lesson, which I am sure will be heeded for the Brisbane River catchment because catastrophic floods make it obvious, seems to be being ignored for the Murray-Darling. At the moment, the calculations are quite similar - with the Menindee lakes at over 100% and three major floods on their way in the next few months.

In 1956, another La Nina year, catastrophic floods hit the lower Murray when floods of the Darling and Upper Murray converged at the same time - Similarly a reaction was to build flood mitigation storages (in that case the Menindee lakes). They really should be emptied at a much faster rate right now, not just to absorb the peaks coming down already, but to have enough capacity to hold back the flood such that it doesn't coincide with possible autumn upper murray floods. The analogy with the Brisbane catchment is that the Wivenhoe may have been able to actually slow down the outflow as the Bremer and Lockyer floods peaked through, mitigating them rather than exacerbating them (If enough pre-emptive releases were made).

Of course, the bigger the flood, the less dams can feasibly hold them back, regardless of strategy.

Two non-rhetorical questions

Given the current flood on the Mary River I have two serious questions:

1: Would the Traveston Dam have been ableto mitigate this flood in a meaningful way?

2: Is a major flood any LESS a threat than a dam is to the lungfish or any other endangered species of the river?

I suspect the answer to the first is possibly yes, even though the premise of it needing to be built was predicated on mitigating drought, the shallow nature of the valley it would have flooded would tend to at the absolute least flatten the peak of floods, and with a bit of luck and timing could have absorbed most of it.

With the second question, I suspect the flood would have done the lung fish little damage, but I am not aware of how it copes with floods. Most fish use it as an opportunity to spread. Endangered land animals already marginalised by drought and the encroaching humanity might have been better off with a mitigated flood, however.

What we need is more "lakes" in the not so wild west

There is quite an eerie duality between the lakes of the "wild" west-flowing rivers (in general they flow to wards Lake Eyre) and the "tamed" west flowing rivers. A series of lakes in the "wild rivers" (eg Lake Yamma Yamma, Diamantina lakes, Coongie lakes, etc.) Considerably slows the flow to the treeless salty pit in the end point (Lake Eyre). On the way, these storages are the lifeblood of both wilderness in these catchments(waterholes, trees, wildlife), and for human resources in those same catchments (mainly sheep/cattle grazing).

If you compare this with the Murray/Darling basin, all the human endeavour that has toiled to tame it has merely expanded on this natural system of floods being trapped. Both for the environment and human uses, it is an amazing extension, as the facts remain that floods and drought are as damaging to the natural environment's inhabitants as they are to human habitation. The remaining floods and droughts in the system are still primarily in the gaps where there is no suitable "lake" to absorb floods and make the water available through some of the following drought. I am estimating that by the end of this La Nina year, as much as all the water capacity of all of the Murray Darling water storages will have flowed out through the barrages of Lake Alexandrina. It is an open question as to whether the floods have nicely "reversed" the whole of the environmental damage done through the 10 or so years of it being a closed system (in drought, as it were). Although climate scientists have deemed the last 10 or 20 years as the new normal - I would suggest that it is a very brave call to BET that there will be similar droughts within our lifetime, as opposed to the usual contrived predictions.

If we could have harnessed even half of that water flowing away to the sea, the floods would have been even more controlled. At least we should have generated some osmotic energy from it at Lake Alexandrina, instead of just talking desalination. In the next few years of relatively plentiful water (even if we have a drought immediately after this La Nina) It makes no economic sense to buy (at a high price) water allocations from farmers who would use it to make a profit, for the environment which doesn't need it at that moment because of the soil storage from this recent series of flood events. Just feel grateful that we have got so much flexibility due to large natural and artificial storages, and perhaps plan some more future bountiful lakes that can be huge long term environmental assets for a relatively small environmental and human adjustment upfront price in drowned valleys.

Disaster for International Diplomacy?

The ability for high level diplomats to say one thing *on the record* to each other, and say completely different things in public or to their citizens has been completely compromised - To put it another way, our governments ability to lie to us has been hampered considerably. Oh, what a terrible world it is where the people who's job it is to lie to us can't do that convincingly anymore. If you look at it closely, it is the same with lawyers as it is with politicians. How can lawyers (and prosecutors) successfully lie anymore if forensics and bugging of their priveleged conversations keep getting better and more common?

After all there is a grain of truth in the saying that a politician (and lawyer) is lying if their lips are moving. It is their job to do that, and the job of the "free" press to believe them (otherwise come election campaign they lose all their advertising revenue)

It really appears to be the unfortunate result of better technologies - and scientific systems that seem to find truth and rule out lies.

country qld

From article

''I grew up in a Queensland country town, where people spoke their minds bluntly,'' he wrote. ''They distrusted big government as something that could be corrupted if not watched carefully. The dark days of corruption in the Queensland government before the Fitzgerald Inquiry are testimony to what happens when the politicians gag the media from reporting the truth.''

''These things have stayed with me through the years. WikiLeaks was created around these core values.''

Cyberwarfare Begins

It appears WWI of cyberwars has begun. It seems to be a fair fight, with weapons of choice being Distributed Denial of service attacks. The main casualties will be financial in nature, but will deeply affect how the world will operate in the future. The expectation of "complete" privacy has been eroding considerably, and can only be considered a transient phenomena (this conversation is secure for now - if I don't record it, it loses usefulness. If I do record it, there is an unknown probability that it may be leaked somewhere in the future - hopefully it won't bite us too hard, and will fall in the hands of our friends and not get exclusively sold to our enemies without our knowledge)

This is also the dillemma I (or anyone) has with their own private and intimate emails to friends. I have got into the habit of self-censorship just as much with my private emails as I do with FB or this Blog. There are still a few things I say and talk about verbally that I would not put into writing.

Julian Assange - Hero or villain?

It seems most reputable sites and countries are trying to cut the information off but,
It's not realistic that the information is going to be stopped

Note from the following linked site that he was born in Townsville and spent a lot of his childhood on Magnetic Island.

The "knowledge" that he has uncovered and disseminated is raw, extensive and does not "take sides" in terms of censorship - It's all there and available for anyone to read and make their own judgement.

He has been successfully demonised, especially by the USA, but I am unwilling to make any judgement at all except for that which I check on specifically.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange

http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/wikileaks-goes-underground--in-a-bunker-deep-in-sweden-20101206-18mii.html

Murray River - Not enough water.... or is that too much?

Is it just me, or does anyone else see the contradictions in the news articles in regards to the Murray River? If you google "Murray" in the news you get articles on the one hand about the grandiose plans to reduce water usage by reducing water allocations, and how State leaders and farmers are grandstanding about the disaster this would cause in communities where water buy backs take place.

On the other hand you get articles about this massive flood (the latest in a series of floods to hit the Murray-Darling System over the last year), how storages are starting to reach capacity and overflow and how even with high tech dam gates and good advance warning of floods, this still is a big potential headache and potential whole of system flood once they all actually fill.

Three books I read in 1978

These were - The population bomb - in English, it might have been a 1977 Christmas present from my parents who were in Australia at the time. Then there was Space - a book in italian about space - the solar system, Earth Moon and a quick rundown on Stellar evolution and the Big Bang theory. Then there was a Bible - In Italian, that was given to me by my "Nonna Dafne" (my father's mother) whom I stayed with by myself for a couple of weeks during some school holidays. I remember that I had these books in my hand luggage so that I could read them on the plane, travelling with my brother to Australia from Italy to be reunited with our parents (Arriving 1st April). I also had some tobacco? or something like that for my father.

Now my parents were quite horrified to hear that I had spent time with my very religious catholic grandmother, and that I was reading the scriptures that she had given me and taking it as the Gospel truth as it were. They lectured me about believing things just because someone in authority had written them down. The gist of it was that people write things down for other reasons than to promote the truth, and that you should be equally skeptical of any book (fiction OR non-fiction).

I agreed then and I agree now. I applied this to the other two books I was reading at the time, and ever since, I have had a skeptical view about doomsday predictions in regards to the Earth's population, I am equally skeptical about the Big Bang theory, and I am skeptical about practically all historical detail about the old testament (see, I hadn't even got to the new testament as yet).

How can one live a life not being certain of anything that is written? Should I have even trusted my parents when they lectured me about it in the first place? This explains a lot about my agnosticism and my current attitudes to population debate, and debates that surround theoretical physics.

I do Believe in a Big Australia

I don't necessarily believe in a big China, Europe, America etc. On balance, them shrinking would leave a nice vacuum for us to fill. I have absolutely no doubts about "sustainability" in an Australia specific sense. If there is an upper limit on our population, it would be near the population density of Europe or the US, which means I believe we can sustain a population of 200 Million as easily (or as difficultly) as Europe or The US sustains its current population. Within a couple of decades, there may well be several developed countries with a fairly rapid decline in population. They will not, on average be doing particularly well and citizens of those countries with ambition, will very likely try to move somewhere like Australia.

FTTH Broadband was the key after all!

It appears that Fibre To The Home was what sold the Labor party plan to the New England independent representative Tony Windsor. I don't know if my blog made any difference to that decision, but I do feel vindicated nonetheless. There are two striking things that I've noticed about similarly balanced (hung) parliaments in other countries - There is a tendency for

1) Policy sclerosis - it is often easier to get a majority opposing a new policy than a majority to be in favour.

2) More deficits than otherwise - It is way easier to push policies through that *spend* more money than ones which *save* or *tax* more money.

3) Balance of power bias - The independents (and greens in the senate) will have a policy say disproportionate to the number of electorates/seats they hold. This will be especially good for environmental programs which also benefit rural Australia, reasonably good for rural policies which don't particularly rile the Greens and policy inertia (unchanged policies) will tend to be the way with practically everything else.