Europe's Problems Summed Up:

• Pythagorean theorem: .......... 24 words • Lord's prayer: .......... 66 words • Archimedes' Principle: .......... 67 words • Ten Commandments: .......... 179 words • Gettysburg address: .......... 286 words • US Declaration of Independence: .......... 1,300 words • US Constitution with 27 Amendments: .......... 7,818 words • EU regulations on the sale of cabbage: .......... 26,911 words

The Day of the opposites

When it comes to voting for the Speaker of the house, a kind of opposites Universe comes into being. Labor members nominate an LNP member, who has to then defect. Then an LNP member waxes lyrical about a string of Labor members who are then nominated by him to the position - all of whom refuse the nomination. All this, partly because of Andrew Wilkies insistence on pokie reform. Each person in the parliament has power, but that power cannot be taken for granted and does not guarantee a veto on even a single policy item.

What is it with pears?

Almost all fruit that I store in the fridge stays the same ripe as when I put it in until eventually it rots. Mangoes, avocadoes, bananas etc. can't be put in the fridge until they are ripe because they won't ripen there. With a bag of pears however, that were as hard as gibbers when I put them in several weeks ago and forgot about, had become beautifully soft and sweet - more edible and ripe than before. Perhaps 2 deg celcius is perfect ripening temperature for the fruit?

Solar power: My views are in line with Sobek, the crocodile God

Sobek while praising the capabilities of solar, has been scathing in the use of feed-in tariffs. Solar feed in tariffs reek of the sulphurous stench of Hades.

I'm Changing my Qld Government vote to LNP because the Industrial Relations minister is a Dick

By name and nature: See:article on clothing manufacturing There really is not a lot of jobs nor candidates for union membership anyway, within this industry, so beating up the issue of sweatshops *again* is really flogging a dead horse no matter which way you look at it.

Getting a return on NBN battery backup = Marconomic solar PV plan

This article has a bit on the bottom regarding the battery backup unit, which many commenters have also mentioned. The problem is that although it is great to have broadband as well as voice calls available during blackouts, because blackouts are rare, and many homes were already in a situation where their phone was dependent on grid power, return on the investment in money and space to have the battery there can be dubious.

Once you have a battery permanently in your house, a return can be garnered by making the battery useful regardless of blackouts. A very small cheap solar panel can keep the battery charged up independently of the grid. Enough power is generated and stored to use the battery as a device charger (ipods, nintendos, mobiles etc.) that will cut your power bill considerably with no inconvenience to the utility. In my house charging devices uses a lot of electricity - not because of the amount of power required to charge the device, but because the chargers leak power all day, and the power points are hard to reach to turn them off and on each time they are needed, and the power conversion ac to dc is very inefficient. The battery/solar PV will double as an emergency charging point for devices during blackouts as well.

Still water flowing down the Murray Darling and out the mouth

The perceived wisdom that drought and a closed Murray Darling system is the new normal continues to be challenged by reality. From my reckoning and the following graph of the Murray river flow rate at lock one, the closest proxy of what is flowing to the sea from the system, 15,000 GigaLitres (or 30 Sydney Harbours) of fresh water has flowed to the sea since September 2010.



This link to see more live river data flows if you are interested.

I had predicted at around January that more water would flow out of the mouth than the total official storage of the whole of the Murray Darling before it stopped again. The total official storage is around 22,000 GL so I could yet be right. I figure that one more year of this kind of thing and we will be wanting to redact our thinking and declare that (the 10 years from 2000 to 2010) was just a freak drought the likes of which we would never see again in our lifetime. It is plausible that we may want to keep strategic dams along the Murray at half capacity to hedge our bets with catastrophic lower Murray floods now possible if we get a repeat of the inflows of last year. Namely the Menindee lakes, Hume and Lake Victoria could moderate catastrophic inflows to just the major flood mark at Renmark and below if they are pre-emptively emptied.

Yuan for the money?

My latest read of the Economist had a particularly disturbing but compelling argument that it is only a matter of time before the Yuan will be the Worlds reserve currency. The article describes it as an overdue change, although I get the impression that it is not desirable, but inevitable and the alternatives eventually being virtually disastrous. I don't like it, but I realize now that it will probably happen, maybe before 2020. My preference is of course the Aussie dollar, but the chances are quite remote.

Enough with the sneaker net already!

I don't really know where I was going with this link but I thought it about time that I mentioned where I felt communications were up to in Australia. I have this feeling that so much of our effort of day to day life is working an elaborate sneaker net of information. All too often it isn't enough to send a picture, sound or video, and one must bring the object to the person or vice versa, just as in the old days we needed to save something to disk to move it to another computer. The more everything gets connected, the less this has to happen, although I think that shirts that can be screen printed by remote are a long way away yet.

There appears to be a fierce level of competition between carriers in the mobile Internet arena, and a bit of a lack of service in the adsl+ department. The NBN seems to have progressed to a level where even a sudden change of Government would find it hard to reverse the general gist of the new structure being formed in the industry. I believe that not only the current wireless competitive environment, but the future fixed broadband environment will also be fiercely competitive. The main scope for future differentiation between brands will be overall service, how plans will combine with other related comms, and total monthly data plans as before. Speed will be even less of an issue than it is now. There is virtually no chance that either the NBN co. will struggle to make ends meet, nor that the investment made by taxpayers will cause Australia to approach European US or Japanese levels of public debt levels.

Nice Hung Parliament

It appears to me that rather than the country independents having the balance of power and being the most important block of votes, it seems that every single person in parliament has been elevated in importance to the point of being almost as important as the Prime Minister or Opposition leader. One strand of evidence is that no matter how egregious Wassisname's usage of a Union credit card was, he has been afforded a sort of cabinet protection from dismissal as strong as it would be for the PM.

Something similar is happening to the Liberals in that every sitting member has been more obliged than ever to take a disciplined part in the voting process to take advantage of any slip-ups by the government to try to force an early election or embarassing backflip on policy.

With the Boat people issue, I feel that the populist "tough" approach has shown itself to be completely dependent on context. When boat-people are imagined as a *group* the populist notion is that they are undeserving and cheating the system. As soon as they are individualised and humanised (for instance, unaccompanied children), the populist notion flips to an assumption of innocence ie. that they should be processed *TO* decide whether they are deserving of refugee status. These are contradicting views, and a large section of the population holds them simultaneously. No law can preemptively and correctly act under these expectations. Constantly changing the laws, or even talking seriously about changing the laws keeps people smugglers on their toes without necessarily prejudicing the individual cases - Therefore a series of backflips on policy is the perfect policy in itself - especially if the overall refugee intake is allowed to increase from our dismally low quotas.

As far as the Carbon Tax is concerned, I am glad it is going through in spite it being one of the least popular policies I could ever imagine making it through *ANY* parliament. I think once it is in there it will be shown to be no more distorting or painful than the GST, with a lot less red tape for the average individual or business.

I do think it unfortunate that the Carbon Tax will get the blame for electricity price increases, when the reality is that it is the fault of exorbitant feed-in tariffs combined with the uncertainty of infrastructure expenditure that will be incurred due to the revised architecture of energy transfers required.

Tennis dates

Can anyone tell me the last two times and cities an Australian has won a Grand slam singles title?

September 11th 2011, New York.
September 9th 2001, New York.


No-one in the news has mentioned the irony in this.

Stuff I may not have published about my experience of 11/9/01

- In August of that year I had suffered a nervous breakdown which became completely reset after 911.
- I was in complete denial and I tried to go back to bed to try to convince myself it was all a bad dream.
- I was jealous of those who slept through it and got many hours extra of the world being a nicer place. In hindsight, it was probably a moot point.
- I remember taking my two oldest children to swimming very early the next morning. They were 8 and 5 at the time and I would take them to the local pool where my brother would give them swimming lessons for an hour or so, while I dropped in to work. I asked him if he listened to the radio, which he didn't (who doesn't listen to the radio in the car???), so instead of telling him about 911 I thought my gift to him would be another couple of hours of not knowing. He has not forgiven me for it.
-Sandor was also angry at me for not ringing him when it happened.
-I made various predictions about the future of the world, none of which I wrote down. However, one of those was that the next megaterrorist attack would be timed for the 10th anniversary. I figured it wouldn't be in Washington nor in New York, and perhaps not even in the US at all, but I figured a multitude of sleeper cells and plots globally, where it would be virtually impossible to discover them all before they came to fruition.
- What I felt was the aim of the terrorist organization was to provoke an over-reaction by the US, which would in turn make the US look like the evil terrorists. I felt that the US should avoid this as best as possible, but I think in this sense, the terrorists won.

For *off-grid* PV solar, we have reached and exceeded fridge parity!

My father has a house at west point, and since the electricity grid (nor the water grid) does not reach there, a combination of power alternatives does the job for off grid. Just a few years ago, the most economical off grid fridge alternative was a gas fridge. A twelve volt power system with four Lead acid batteries for storage and one solar panel (80 W) was enough for a tiny (all 12V) bar fridge, lighting, tv and charging of phones. Now with just 2 80W solar panels and a few extra batteries for good measure, there is enough power for a full size 12V fridge freezer! Being that the house is not always occupied, the fridge can stay on and neither drain money nor waste food. Air conditioners are still most economical with diesel generators run as needed, and gas cannot really be beaten for cooking, but I believe this is a very important milestone for solar over fossil fuels for off-grid purposes. This has required *NO SUBSIDIES*. It is prohibitively expensive to convert a system optimised for greed feed-in to a system optimised for off-grid purposes. This is why greed feed-in is useless in power blackouts - no storage - no internal power regulation - inefficient upconversion from 12V to 240V.

All subsisidies reek of the sulfurous stench of Hades

All other things being equal, (food production, installed PV systems) doing well is a sign that policies are on a good path. The problem is, as soon as you start subsidizing same, things are no longer equal, and the rule no longer applies. To get a quantitative analysis on what I am saying is that the theoretical test that there is a net positive is to calculate the effects of removing the subsidy and seeing if future taxes on the industry can repay the sum cost of the subsidy over the period it operated over. To be fair, one can include taxes intrinsic to the industry during and after the subsidy period.
Quantitatively, to measure the net effect of the subsidy, consider it like an investment, the return on investment being how much extra tax can be extracted from industry for the amount of subsidy spent. It is clear that on this count, that virtually all subsidies ever devised are loss making black holes. It is highly unfair to assume illeffects of taxes on commerce, when the root cause is the black hole of subsidies.

Anthropogenic Global Warming

I have so much in my head at the moment, and a great desire to write it down, but it is completely incoherent.

For the global warming debate, I feel it is important to demonstrate my non-partisan take on it. One easy way to do this is to show an example of a policy belief of mine usually associated with the far left (Green party or left wing of the Labour Party) and a contrasting belief that is associated near the other extreme (National party or One Nation or Right wing of the Liberal Party).

This is not because I want to present myself in the middle ground, but that what I believe to be true takes up a point in idea space far away from the political left-right line that at the moment takes up all the discussion space in virtually every forum I visit.

For instance, I am vehemently against solar PV tarriffs above the wholesale market rate for electricity.

I am also very in favour of a Carbon Tax.

I steer away from arguments that question whether global warming is "real" or not. To me it is like a question of whether I believe in God or not. I perceive both these questions to be a device to flatten my beliefs and squeeze them down onto the political continuum line from their proper place in multiple dimensions - with an aim to push me with denial or acceptance of various assertions one way or another to the correlated viewpoints of (in this case) the left or right of politics.

There is no "references" I can point to in regards to this basic philosophical idea, but it should be simple enough for the casual reader to understand.

The question remains as to how I can convince someone to my same viewpoint. It is much easier to convince someone that solar PV tarriffs are bad because Global Warming is bunk than it is because it makes the energy market dysfunctional. It is also easier to convince people that we should have a Carbon Tax because AGW is real and a threat, than it is because it moves tax reform down a sensible direction (broad based, flat, easy to administer, can replace messier taxes or even carbon trading)

Another question may be why I think minor structural detail of the laws which underpin the energy market are more important than the global risks of catastrophe or conversely wasting our time, money and energy on a non-catastrophe.

The answer is to me, that the underpinning structural detail is absolutely vital both to succeed in whatever aims that voters think is important with regards to energy usage, and to not waste any time, money or energy in that achievement. Laws which make markets act in functional ways are a net profit to society, laws which don't, are a net loss - pure and simple.

They should have built fibre to the premises

I think that The US's experience of wireless broadband demonstrates the dangers in relying on private enterprise capital and regulation to deliver a functional long term backbone of infrastructure. The article I've linked to demonstrates the pernicious effects of selling responsibility of infrastructure onto the private sector. The value of a spectrum increases if more can be done with it, and therefore there is an perverse incentive for government regulators to relax spectrums and rules, independently of the original reasons to have the rule there in the first place. It isn't just a "fibre is better than wireless tradeoff". Wireless is always going to be chosen by private enterprise because a return can be made in a reasonable timeframe. The issue of fibre vs wireless is separate, and I would be just as happy with the NBN plan if it went something like 10% FTTP, 50% FTTN, and the remaining 40% the newer version of next G wireless, as long as the government could take control of the infrastructure.

However both for practicalities in taking over the infrastructure and being able to think long term, 93% FTTH is entirely reasonable in getting country areas onto the grid. The more important point to note is that Australia's transmission spectrum will remain functional and unencumbered by huge data loads and conflict of interest, while the US's will lose way more than the $1500 per household or whatever it is within a decade in its dysfunctional spectrum allocations and congestion.

US - Politics and Game theory. It doesn't get any simpler than this.

For anyone who has any doubts about the merits of considering politics in terms of game theory should look at the debt ceiling negotiations. If one or the other political side backs down on their demands, the opposite side gets a considerable "win". If neither side backs down in time, everybody loses.

Classic Game of chicken.

The most important thing to consider is why people play this silly game when the livelihoods of millions of people are at stake? The first question is why do people play chicken when their own life is at stake?

Obviously the perceived political rewards are so huge in having the opposition back down in humiliation.

My hope is that if one side or the other backs down, that they get rewarded at the ballot box rather than punished - Hopefully changing the political perceptions for next time. I don't hold out much hope.

Wow. "Unpopular" tax reform with a hung parliament

One thing that tends to characterise hung parliaments or even non-traditional coalitions in most countries is their ability to only pass popular spending sprees and not the unpopular new taxes (or more correctly, tax reform) that are possible with clear parliamentary majorities.

This is clearly not the case in Australia. Whether for or against a Carbon tax, one has to admit that it is bold, given the popular opinion of the moment.

The thing is, that the idea is to reduce CO2 at the *lowest* cost, which is still putatively an aspiration of a reduced majority. The Europeans have active policies that don't work, and the US has failed to pass legislation that wouldn't work anyway.

Arguments against my arguments against feed-in tarriffs

Since my goal is not really to try to convince people of my point of view as much as measure it against my own logic, I think it is time to look at it from the opposite angle for a little while.

Valid points made against me:

- Take up has been at a higher percentage in the country than the city - This does not mean that more actual generation capacity or instalments are in the country than the city, but it still is counter-intuitive and thus an important counterpoint against my arguments. It means more money disproportionately to the country than the city, which makes a nice change.

- It is development of "power stations" by stealth, avoiding the red tape, delays and NIMBYISM associated in building bigger more efficient (even renewable) ones. If we are looking at generation capacity added per day, with this surge it is quite reasonable amount but spread quite thinly accross the grid.

The biggest Marconomic counter-argument (so far unmentioned) is that this "subsidy" is more similar to the Brazilian ethanol subsidy, and even in some ways similar to the incentives that built the railways in the US and the Managed Investment Schemes (MIS) in Australia that enabled mass planting of a plethora of long term crops such as olives and timber.

The thing that works about these subsidies (whereas European agricultural ones don't) is that the subsidies have leaked a great deal to what would pass as infrastructure. Whereas if the government said they were going to spend $32 Billion over 10 years on solar electric base power stations around the country, it would be voted down, while if we spend the equivalent of $100 billion extra (compared to what we would have with the status quo) Neatly packaged and spread across various risk profiles, REC's and individual investments, people would go along with it.

The Brazilian ethanol subsidy money leaked through to private companies which built efficient ethanol generation and trading infrastructure. The Companies that funded the railway booms became bankrupt, but the railways are still there. The MIS funds are much maligned but they have generated a large "infrastructure" of trees closer to generating income. The German feed-in tarriffs have been incredibly expensive for what they have achieved, and completely distorted the market. However, the result appears to be a semblance of infrastructure. Australia is not repeating the mistakes of Germany, by having a honeymoon period of high tariffs rapidly reducing over a few years, the subsidy portion *may* be temporary, and the constant shifting of the goalposts mean that any tariff regime will not breed dependence on the tariffs from solar panel owners. They already know that they can't count on them being that generous for more than a couple of years.

With all these "infrastructures" built from subsidy money rather than directly, it still is somewhat controlled by the Government(indirectly through the actions of the subsidies), and can possibly fit into the rule of thumb that Governments should own infrastructure, but it usually is a very tenuous control.

Amartya Sen and all that

Amartya Sen did a lot of research on the causes of famine and the gist of the conclusions was that lack of food was not a factor at all, and that various market failures were evident (including hoarding, purchases by the British military, price gouging etc.) which explains most of it. This perhaps contradicts Adam Smiths conclusion about bakers, bread and "the hidden hand" that means we can all get fed without benevolent bakers.

I don't disagree with the gist of that, and my belief is that Destitution, not Dearth is what causes famines (there is an Economist article of a few years ago that I could look up but I don't need it to make my point)

India became democratic after about that point, and the Government of India has, ever since, had a program of purchasing and distributing food for the poor, including subsidising food in good times and in bad. I like to call this system a "brute force" way of solving the problem. The "hidden hand" of commerce gets replaced by a very visible hand of the Government. However, is this brute force method foolproof? How expensive is it? Why does Australia not embrace or need something similar?

My assertion is that the policy of the Government of India has got the credit for avoiding famines when in reality, a policy concentrating on social welfare rather than food purchases would have both avoided famine more cheaply, and would have resulted in far higher economic growth meaning it would have been considered "first world" well before the turn of the century.

I completely disagree with the policy conclusion that Governments becoming buyers and sellers in the market is a good way to avoid the market failures that cause famines. Certainly there must be enough storage capacity for store levels to increase when prices are low, and drawn upon when prices are high, if only to buy enough time for suppliers to ramp up/down production/imports (panic buyers are profitable, if supply can be ramped up) . Social welfare to avoid destitution should be done with money or food vouchers rather than the food itself, so that market signals still function at the farm level (small farms will not ramp up production if the Government doesn't offer a higher purchase price). Governments are just as capable as individuals of hoarding, price gouging etc. when it comes to/from other countries, so what may be of benefit for a country in isolation may still be a complete disaster to an inoccent other country which has become destitute.

This is to say there is still a dearth of situations where Governments should involve themselves in consumables. Nor any situations where private interests should own infrastructure. That is not necessarily about whether an outcome is an aim of a policy, but whether the policy is equipped to give the desired result.