Looking at the stars

opinions, opinions

[cidenas]

The biggest problem with a full-scale war in Europe

The governments of the NATO countries are talking endlessly about starting a war with the Russian Federation but they are not doing much about preparing for it and that is because they have a much bigger problem than persuading affluent european taxpayers to pay a lot more tax to fund an industrial-scale war.

The problem is that 57% of families in Germany that have children have just one child: no mother wants to risk their only child to die in war. The same statistic applies to the Russian Federation and to the Ukraine and to most other NATO states.

Note: In the 19th century the government of Germany introduced pensions for women only to reduce their opposition to drafting their sons into the industrial-war era prussian armies as they had seen what Napoleone Buonaparte's war had done to french mothers.

That is also why the NATO governments are so keen:

To escalate the combat in Ukraine to kill as many Russian Federation soldiers as possible at any cost to the ukrainians.

To send ukrainian only-children instead of NATO only-children to die in their war against the Russian Federation.

That is also why:

The ukrainian government however corrupt does not dare (yet?) to draft in the army people below the age of 25 and the typical age of ukrainian soldiers is 43, and it allows all women and men under 23 to freely leave the country (never to return usually).

The Russian Federation calls the counter-attack in Ukraine a "Special Military Operation" and does not use conscripts but only professional soldiers in that operation.

The same problem also exists in China-mainland and China-Taiwan and is perhaps one reason why the China-mainland PLA is particularly keen to recruit young women: many chinese mothers regard young daughters as much less profitable investments (or even as costs) than young sons and regardless many of those young women will want to remain childless so they are not that different from sons.

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The more things change

In the past in Europe poor people could not afford shoes so most people wore wooden clogs instead.

Nowadays they wear sneakers instead of shoes.

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Another aspect of electricity vs. fuel

Many car owners and other consumers of energy have been switching to electricity from fuels (petrol and diesel, previously coal or wood) as sources of energy.

Electricity and fuels have among other two important difference:

Except for trivial quantities (portable batteries) electricity consumption cannot be anonymous legally: the consumer needs a fixed cable supply and an account to which electricity use is charged, and electricity is not easy to transport or given to others. Fuels instead can be bought even in some bulk fairly anonymously and can be easily transported and given to others.

Electricity cannot be easily stored in significant amounts by consumers and its ongoing supply is usually provided by a few large businesses that are heavily regulated by governments. Fuels instead can be easily (if somewhat dangerously) stored and there can be many retail suppliers as they are easily transported and given to others.

From a government's point of view a large scale switch to electricity from fuels means that consumers of energy can be more widely monitored and more tightly regulated. It is also much easier to cut the electricity supply to some retail customers via a small number of regulated large suppliers.

This means that de-electrification is another tool for governments along with job blacklisting, de-platforming, de-banking to lawfully punish some targets without by purely discretionary administrative means without involvement of courts and juries, saving a lot of time and cost.

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The most important social relationship

Usually the most important social relationship is claimed to be marriage, but given how fragile and difficult marriage is that is overrated.

Then perhaps it is parenthood, because that is a fact that lasts beyond marriage by creating a bond between parents which is not based on pure will. But in many societies parenthood is also somewhat fragile, in part because children are not shared equally among parents in case of marriage dissolution, in part because of high rates of child death can leave parents without children.

My impression is that the most important social relationship is instead grandparenthood, because:

grandparents know that their line has continued beyond one fragile generation and are somewhat more assured of their genetic legacy than parents;

it brings together the interests of four families in their descendants, and therefore it is likely to be longer lasting and more widely binding even if some children of the grandparents do not end up giving them grandchildren.

Grandmotherhood is particularly important because only grandmothers can be sure of their genetic legacy in their descendants ("the mother is always certain, the father never" is an ancient and wise saying).

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Food and body shape and anhedonia

Thanks to an interesting book about the food industry I have come to what I think is a better understanding of food and eating, the summmary is simple:

There are two types of food, appetizing and boring.

Appetizing foods contain sugar or fat or salt, boring food contain bulk stuff like carbohydrates or protein or fibre.

When eating appetizing foods the desire to eat them increases (it not addiction in itself, but something worse), and we have an instinct to gorge on them once we start eating them. This is because they were precious, being highly valuable and very scarce, and on finding them it was best to take-in as much as possible.

Eating boring foods (boiled oats, white rice, most vegetables) is a chore, and we have an instinct to eat a little as possible only to dispel hunger. This is because they are usually relatively abundant and yet can be stocked for a long while and eating as little as possible when they are abundant means saving them for later when they may be less abundant.

As a minor but still important factor, the delay in preparing food often makes it less appetizing, and it being already prepared and ready to eat makes it more appetizing.

The epidemic of obesity is largely due to the cheap and wide availability of ready-made food made with appetizing ingredients. Obesity is rarest in rich countries where food has a balance between boring and appetizing components, and is usually not ready-made. The food industry quite understandably works hard to market ready-made higher appetizing food.

There is another strong component that I think is important: eating appetizing food is a pleasure, and the lives of many people in developed economies are "anhedonic", that is rather scarce of pleasures (too little sex, too little leisure, too much stress, ...) and pleasuring oneself with appetizing food is one way to compensate, too bad that eating some increases the appetite to eat more. The anhedonic life of many people may also create psychological addiction to appetizing foods.

The implications are also simple: if you want to be slim, prepare and eat boring food and have sources of pleasure other than food, so that eating it is chore you want to minimize to have more time for the other sources of pleasure, such as a hobby, friends, entertainment, sport.

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Still fond of “Accidentally in love”, and some new ones

I have re-watched a few times the chinese-mainland TV serier "Accidentally in love" for being both lightheartedly funny and romantic, without exaggerating with the stereotypes.

I have also recently liked "The heart of genius" and "Andante" and also "Sh**ting stars" and "Science and sensibility".

I am a bit disappointed that the k-drama industry is creating many k-drama themed series, where the protagonists work in the k-drame industry, are famous actors, or script writers, or agents (but very few movie directors), but this is often done in a fairly fun, lighthearted way, as in "Sh**oting stars" (the male protagonist character is a k-drama actor, the female protagonist is a k-drama agent, the important detail is that he has been pursuing her since they were students, and completely outside the k-drame industry).

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Another nice chinese series

I have kept watching several east asian TV series in large part because they give an impression of living styles and thinking in those countries that are quite important to the world economy. Among these there are many excellent works.

I have been recently delighted by the chinese-mainland series Brilliant class 8 which is the story of a rock star with popularity issues who goes back to teaching music in a high school like he did before becoming famous. The story of course involves his romance with another teacher, but it is also very much about the students in the special music class he teaches.

As usual for a primary chinese-mainland TV series the production values are very good, but the quality of this series goes beyond that: even if a star and other stars who are his friends are involved this is not a fantasy about a girl marrying a star, it is almost entirely a story about two teachers and their class. Like most chinese-mainland series the story develops slowly, but that allows for nuance and subtlety and some slow but good comical effects. The schools, houses, scenery are also well chosen and presented. Characters have some flaws, and try to overcome them.

So it is both very good and informative, but it has defects as well, the usual: the story and the characters are too nice, the teachers are too keen on the happiness of their students, even the bad people are not that bad, and the characters are a bit too good at overcoming their flaws, and their living standards a bit too high (except for the stars of course).

But overall it is very good, the actors, especially the protagonists, represents their characters with skill and subtlety, and the plot is somewhat realistic even if a bit too sweet.

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People of Global Majority and neoliberalism

There is a relatively recent expression that is meant to replace the acronym "BIPOC" (non-white) and it is "Person of Global Majority". Indeed around 85% of people globally are non-white. Now consider two broad statements:

People of Global Majority are 85% of the global population and usually earn wages of around $1-$2 per hour, and mostly live outside the USA and Europe in backward places with low capital development (not that many aqueducts, sewers, paved roads, railways, hospitals, universities, etc.).

White people are 15% of global population and usually earn wages of $10-$20 per hour, and mostly live in the USA and Europe in advanced places with high capital development (plenty of acqueducts, sewers, paved roads, railways, hospitals, universities, etc.)

To a neoliberal that looks like racism: the world looks to them just like South Africa in the "apartheid" era, where a small minority of "white supremacist" workers live in pleasant neighbourhoods forcing employers to pay them wages way above global market rates, while many more People of Global Majority are kept outside in backward "stans" with low capital development where they have to accept market wages and struggle for jobs.

To a neoliberal it also looks like exploitation: in the USA and Europe employers are forced to pay "white supremacist" workers 10 times more than the worldwide market rate and are forbidden by "white supremacists" from hiring immigrants from People of Global Majority, and import restriction discourage offshoring jobs to places where People of Global Majority live. Such "racist" discrimination results in massive exploitation of employers and other investors by USA and european "white supremacists" workers. The neoliberal conclusion is that:

There should be no "apartheid" and there should be no import or immigration restrictions into the USA or Europe until 85% of jobs in the USA and Europe go to People of Global Majority and until 85% of the population of the USA and Europe is People of Global Majority.

There should be no exploitation of employers and investors and wages in USA and Europe should converge to the global market rate.

Therefore the inevitable neoliberal conclusion is that the class enemies of 85% the world's workers, those People of Global Majority, are "white supremacist" usian and european workers, while usian and european employers are the champions of social justice, because they want to stop the discrimination against People of Global Majority and bring to them the jobs currently restricted to be in the USA and Europe, and give them unrestricted access to jobs and living in the USA and Europe, which the "white supremacist" workers have so far denied to them.

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Another “Jar-Jar” story

So I went through some episodes of the korean series "Tomorrow" and I could not continue watching it because the primary main character is a "Jar-Jar" style character, that is implausibly infantile and ridiculous. That is lazy scriptwriting, that happens sometimes in TV series. At least in the original "Jar-Jar" it was later revealed to be a ruthless character acting infantile and ridiculous with skill only to deceive others.

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Why employers ask for gaps in CVs

Many employers ask candidates for jobs to explain gaps in the timeline of their CVs, and this is a way to work around some common laws:

In many countries there are laws for the rehabilitation of offenders stating that job candidates are not required to declare having been sentenced for old or minor crimes, and these do not appear in police reports.

Requiring candidates to explain gaps in their CVs effectively works around that, as they must then say that they spent time in jail, or else lie and then become liable to lose their job for it.

Those laws for the rehabilitation of offeders are among the many laws that have been designed to have no effect, purely for virtue signaling.

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Narrow web UI problem

I have previously described that fro some web sites the right hand column (in the developer jargon, the "right rail", which often contains vital parts of the site, disappears (1, 2) on relatively narrow displays.

That seems to happen on several other sites, so I suspect that it is a problem with soem web UI framework, and looking at the source of those web pages it looks like it is related to Bootstrap responsive layout and perhaps also Semantic UI. I would not be surprised if multiple web frameworks had the same logic flaw.

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German cities and civilization

Travelling through german cities I notice how affluent most of them look like, and how 20th-century they still look like, with plenty of small shops in residential areas and other amenities, and the good quality of buildings.

But for something that is missing: public benches, toilets and water fountains in newly built residential area are very rare. The explanation can only be the same as in thatcherite countries: they are public amenities that smug, young or middle aged affluent baby boomers who travel by car don't need, cost tax money, and are also generally opposed by local shopkeepers, in particular bar and restaurant owners, who would rather that people passing by had to pay toll to their businesses to rest, drink or relieve themselves. Older town areas, where they have survived the WW2 bombings, tend to have rather more in terms of public benches, but not much more as to water fountains and public toilets.

Note: there are sometimes newly built benches, but as in England they tend to have gratuitous armrests in the middle purely to ensure that a vagrant cannot sleep across their length, not that I have seen any trying to (vagrants tend to sleep on stacks of cardboard boxes under road bridges, not exposed to the sky on a bench).

That is quite disappointing because civilization is also something about civility, providing small cheap amenties because it is the civilized thing to do, even it they may deprive local shop owners of some small amount of revenue they feel entitled to. I am not surprised that extreme meanness is common in thatcherite England (never mind even worse in the reaganista USA), but that some of it happens in Germany too is sad.

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Hartz reforms and immigration

The central fact of the german economy for decades has been the low fertility rate and the shrinking of the working population, in particular of the male working population, as men live shorter lives than women, and this has unbalanced the ratio between working men and retired women.

Wikipedia reports that even if young german men outnumber young german women in a 105 to 100 proportion (something that gives much greater power to german women in the marriage market), there are only 75 men per 100 german women over 65 (something that gives greater power to german women as to voting, as the percentage of the population over 65 increases).

The more obvious fact of the german economy has been the Hartz "reforms", which have involved a substantial cut in welfare benefits for the unemployed, and a strong encouragement of low paid casual work as a replacement for unemployment benefit, in order to create higher competition for existing jobs and keep down wage growth.

One commont claim is that the Hartz reforms were designed to cut unemployment statistics if not unemployment (low paid casual work is not quite employment but it is classified as such), but the their timing and subsequent developmnts suggest a rather different explanation:

The shrinking german population would create upward pressure on wages, and a shift in national income from business and land owners to workers, and a tendency for the valuation of businesses and land to fall due to shrinking number of customers and buyers/tenants.

At the time the Hartz reforms were designed negotiations were well under way to let the low-wage countries of eastern Europe join the European Union, and a flood of immigrants was expected from them into Germany and other rich EU countries, to the point that full freedom of movement was delayed.

Most german voters would continue to have well paid secure jobs and live in their good quality low rent flats and houses with long term secure leases.

The german political and business class wanted to ensure that the immigrants would have a much less favourable treatment than german citizens, and would be channeled into casual low wage and would have to compete hard for housing at higher rents and with less security than incumbent german voters.

As to this the Hartz "reforms" have been highly successful: there are in effect two tiers in the german economy:

One reserved mostly to incumbent german older middle class voters with better jobs, wages, job security, lower rents and greater security of housing tenure.

An inferior tier of casual low paid jobs and insecure low quality housing for immigrants from a massive inflow from eastern Europe in the 2005-2015 period, and then with a massive inflow of middle eastern refugees in the 2015-2020 period.

Both inflows added to the first increase in decades to the total german population, which had been declining until 2011, and around 25% of residents of Germany are now of foreign origin, many of them young male workers.

While most native incumbent middle class workers in the first tier have maintained their vested advantages, and have enjoyed cheaper services thanks to wider availability of cheaper immigrants in casual jobs, and lower tax growth thanks to welfare cuts, there have also been some disadvantage:

The much expanded labour supply has flatlined wage growth for most german workers, which would have instead improved if population had continued to fall.

The minority of incumbents in the first tier who lose their stable jobs and secure housing end up having to compete with the immigrant workers for low paid jobs and insecure housing in the second tier economy.

So far most german voters have remained in the first tier economy, so the main political effect of the Hartz reform has been a collapse in the votes for the SocialDemocratic Party that introduced them, as many of their previous voters were in the lower rungs of the first tier econmy and have fallen or risk falling into the second tier economy. Most Christian Democract voters are solidly middle and upper class, and their risk of falling into the second tier created by the Hartz reforms is small, so there has not been as big a fall in the votes for the Christian Democrats, but overall there has been a shift to an anti-immigrant party.

In all this the Hartz reforms have not been in nature too different from the "neoliberal revolution" of the Thatcher and Blair and successor governments, but in the intensity; in particular so far even the Christian Democrats have refrained from the english strategy (etc.) strategy of pumping up residential property and share prices to buy the loyalty of the affluent middle classes despite the worsening of salaries and job security.

That may not be going to last: given that most german voters have long term secure low-cost housing leases, the latest immigrants inflows have started to impact severely the availability and price of the small proportion of housing stock that is available on the market, and once there is momentum for higher residential property valuations most middle class voters take notice and start putting their savings into it expecting ever bigger capital gains (as in China currently or in Japan before 1992), and the political demand for high housing cost inflation becomes hard to resist, which eventually leads to big problems in the real economy.

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Lists and ending periods

There is a long standing debate about whether when writing a list each items should be terminated with a period or not.

There is a clear answer to that: they should not as such, but if the item is made of one or ore sentence then each, including the last, should be terminated with a period as usual.

That is because lists are just sequences of items, and periods terminate sentences, not words. So for example items do not need to end with a period in a list of things like this:

a beautiful flower

the starry sky

donuts

But in this list of sentences each sentence should end with a period (and each item containing the sentence is not ended with a period):

That is a beatiful flower.

We looked at the starry sky.

He said "eat the donuts".

A first check is whether there is a verb (even implicitly). In the doubt, put in a period: it is much less clear to leave a sentence unterminated than to terminate a list item which is not a sentence, as sentences need a terminating period, while non-sentences just don't need one, but they could have it.

Note: what confuses the issue is that list items have a starting marker, for example a dot, but no ending marker, yet some people think that each list item should have a period as ending marker like sentences, which would require a list items containing one (or more) a sentence to end with two periods.

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The two different BusinessWeek UIs

I have discovered that similarly to Tumblr the BusinessWeek site has two different UIs depending on the width of the browser window.

When the it is wide it has a right hand column with links to previous full issues, and to podcasts and columnists.

When the browser window is narrower the right hand column disappears and there is no way to get access to the online version of the print issues.

I suspect that a lot of web UI designers assume that on desktops the viewers always have their brower window full screen. But what about cellphones? They usually have narrow and tall displays, and my cellphone the right hand column of the BusinessWeek web site never appears.

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The two different Tumblr web UIs

I have been struggling for a while to find a way to use the MarkDown editor for Tumblr posts, which seemed to be quite difficult, because it seems accessible only from the "dashboard" and the dashboard itself would not appear even if I selected it from the top left menu.

Well, I figured it out: Tumblr has two quite different web user interfaces:

When the web window is narrow: it has a simplified interface that does not allow access to the "dashboard" or to the MarkDown editor, even if I selected it as the default in my account settings.

When the web window is wide: it has a full interface with the "dashboard" and access to the MarkDown editor.

Note: It is not clear to me whether the switch happens when the ratio between height and width changes, or when the width passes a certain threshold, either absolute or as a percentage of the screen width.

What surprised me is that there seem to me two rather different web UIs with different features depending on the size of the window. It may be just bad coding: when selecting the “dashboard” item in the top left corner menu in “narrow” mode the “dashboard” actually briefly appears and then disappears.

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Impression of “Angels of death”

Japan is quite famous or notorious for cartoon movies called "anime", of which there are some popular types, usually there is some kind of sword and sorcery magic, and the male otaku and not rich or notable protagonist ends up with a large number of very horny girls trying to be with him, or there are slice of life cartoons where some girl has a romantic connection to a good man, and sometimes there is a little bit of magic.

There are also exceptionsm, for example "Angels of death" where the plot involves two deeply traumatized protagonists involves in a nightmarish adventure and finding a way to matter to each despite everything. Many spoilers follow.

The story is that a traumatized pretty smart 13 year old girl (Rachel Gardner, "Ray") and a traumatized disfigured strong 20 year old boy (Isaac Foster "Zack"), who both have committed hideous crimes, find themselves in a building setup by an insane priest and some mad accomplices as a house of murder to see how the inmates cope with the idea of God in their extremity. The girl is also unable to feel emotions, and the boy feels almost only rage and cynicism.

The plot is driven by the desire of the girl to be killed because her life has been so horrible, but she cannot kill herself because she believes in God, and asks the murderous boy to kill her, at which he take the opportunity to extract a promise from her, that she will use her smartness to help them both escape the mad experiment in which they have been imprisoned.

During their escape they form an understanding, the find in each other a reason to forget a part of their trauma and to start feeling normal emotions , of enjoyment the present, developing friendship, despite the nightmarish envrionment they are in. Eventually the insane priest sees this and realizes that his experiment has succeded but in a more optimistic way than he thought, and allows them to leave, as the exit is behind an illuminated window in a chapel, which the boy smashes and take the girl over. But the police is waiting for them and they are separated, he is put on death row and she is put in an asylum.

The final scene happens after he manages to escape from death row and comes to see her in the asylum, because she had asked him to kill her if she helped him escape, and he wants to keep the promise. She says that she wants so much to keep that promise, and then he pulls her over and what happens next is not shown, just a report that neither of them have been found again.

It is an ambiguous scene not just because it does not show what happens to them, but because there is an element of magic: he enters her room by smashing the window, which is on a high floor, her seems to float outside the windows, and has huge full moon at high back, and he carries with him his favoruite weapon, a massive scythe, which is not clear how he got after escaping from death row, or how he could climb or fly up to the window with it, and when he pulls her out after she asks him again to kill her, they both seem to be flying in the air in the light of the moon. The very last scene shows how the police find the room: nobody present, the boy's old killing knife abandone on the floor, and some blood on the shards of the broken winwo even if the previous scene did not show any wound on either of them.

It could be interpreted as her hallucination, or that after being killed fter death row he has become a ghost, but it is shown that police cars surround the asylum to capture him after his escape, so it cannot be either.

My guess is that the scene is meant to mimic the scene where in the last level of the nightmare building they are in the chapel and escape by breaking the stained glass window behind which there are the stairs to the exit, and that the finale hints that there is a supernatural element, and somewhat they both manage to exit this world which has brought them so much pain and horror (and to which they have also brought madness and crime).

This is consistent with the final message that is essentially one of recovery and hope (but not redemption) in mutual support and friendship, and that even deeply damaged people in nightmarish situations can improve (that happens to the mad priest too, but not to his accomplices) thanks to that.

This anime is unusually nightmarish and even disturbing, and the execution is sometimes a bit clumsy and over the top even for nightmarish, but overall it is quite good and interesting.