Stories of Interest

The Little Village that Could: Fascinating story about a village in Andalucía called Marinaleda which has managed to create a communist-style utopia over the last 50 years is told in a recent book, The Village Against the World, by Don Hancox.

Spain is more corrupt: A recent report by Transparency International has Spain sliding way down the list of corrupt countries, to 40th spot, between Poland and Cap Verde (out of 177 countries ranked). New Zealand and Denmark came joint first. The US ranked 19th and Canada 9th. Comments in The Guardian emphasize the PP's scandals and also the royal troubles of Iñaki Urdangarin, the king's son-in-law. Apparently Spain will now draw up its first Freedom of Information Act, though it has already been criticized as not going far enough.

US Government Cheating on Pensions: An astonishingly hard-hitting essay on Newsweek shows how governments and companies are cheating workers out of their pensions, and being supported by the courts. This is very chilling reading.

Employment rates

The employment rate of a country is in many ways a better indicator of the state of employment than the unemployment rate. For example, in 2010, the US had an unemployment rate of almost 10%, while the employment rate (for those between 15 and 64) was about 67%, according to the OECD. 

Some other figures (latest unemployment rate - employment rate in 2010):

Switzerland       3.1% and 78.6%

Canada             7.2% and 71.5%

Germany           5.3% and 71.1%

U.K.                 7.7% and 69.5%

U.S                  7.4% and 66.7%

France              11%  and 64%

Mexico              5.1% and 60%

Spain              27.2% and 58.6%

Turkey              8.1% and 46.6%

Unemployment rates are notoriously unreliable because states define them in different ways.

People who choose not to work, or have retired early, or live off their investments, or have just dropped out of the workforce and no longer seek employment, make up most of the difference between the two rates. In the US in 2010, that difference was (100 - (67+10)) = 23%. In Turkey, I wonder how the 45% difference is made up?

Favourite Quotes

I'm going to put some quotes I like here, updating the page from time to time like the "Headlines" post.

"The US is a state designed by geniuses so it could be run by idiots." (quoted by Friedman)

"It's like farting in a cheese shop: it's not the main problem." Sean Locke.

Utilities doomed by solar panels!

Fascinating post by David Roberts on Grist about how the utilities business model, in use for a hundred years or so, might be destroyed by creeping use of home solar panels.

Based on a report by the industry itself, it suggests that the electric grid might go the way of the fixed phone, Kodak, RIM and the US Postal Service. Even limited penetration of solar panels, the report says, will begin a vicious cycle in which the utilities will have to increase costs to compensate for declining revenues, thus driving more people to install solar, and so on.

Let's hope this is prescient.

Floods

The June 2013 floods in Southern Alberta, where we live, have probably been the worst since records have been kept, destroying homes and leaving people with unimaginable cleanups, in High River, Calgary, Bragg Creek, Canmore, and many other municipalities.

River flows, in the Bow, Elbow, and Highwood Rivers, were four to five times the levels of the previous flood in 2005 and around ten times normal.

Normal flow in June for the Bow in Calgary is around 200+ cubic metres per second. At its peak this year, it reached 2400.

Normal flow in June for the Elbow below the Glenmore reservoir in Calgary is about 40+ cubic metres per second. This year it reached 700.

See more statistics about the flood here.

Our house sits just above the 100-year flood plain, as shown on standard city maps. The two bottom levels of the yard, by the river, are in the flood plain and were flooded, up to exactly the top of the stairs from the second level to the main yard. There are now three or four inches of silt on top of the grass on the bottom two levels. Our house escaped, with just half an inch of water in the basement from sewer backup, which we managed to vacuum up almost immediately. We were evacuated Thursday evening and managed to return home on Friday to check for possible damage, which is when we found the water and cleaned it up. At this point there was still power. We then returned home definitively on Saturday, though the power by then was turned off until Monday.

The rest of our street, both east and west of us, was under a metre or more of water. At least one house was lifted from its foundations, just a few blocks away.

Apart from the record high water levels and unprecedented number of evacuees, there was no shortage of curious incidents like the following:

• When it seemed the zoo would be flooded, the first plans called for the big cats, tigers and lions, to be moved to holding cells in the court building in downtown Calgary.
• Then, when the zoo was flooded, the hippos got out of their enclosure and were very close to escaping into the Bow River. Hippos are apparently very aggressive and dangerous. What they might have done if swept downstream is anyone's guess.
• A neighbour's daughter came back to her father's house in a canoe to rescue the Van Gogh and Group of Seven originals and, she said, get the food from the  fridge.
• A CP train derailed when a bridge collapsed, apparently because the gravel it was built on had been eroded. Six cars carrying a diesel-like substance were in danger of falling into the Bow River, being carried downstream and posing a danger to anything in their way, including, one imagines, other bridges.
• A week after the flooding, we were surprised to learn that some of Daniel's friends had just been evacuated again. It turned out this was not because of the flooding, but because a gunfight broke out in their neighbourhood and a police bullet hit a gas meter, giving rise to fears of a serious gas leak.

Offers you can't refuse

I used to get offers in my inbox almost every day, to purchase little blue pills at low, low prices, or to lengthen my penis, or to find a nice milf in my neighbourhood.  Nowadays, this no longer happens. Since I retired, the algorithms that determine what offers I receive seem to have deleted sex and now target desires presumably deemed more appropriate for my age group:

"Full Set of Authentic Mink Eyelash Extensions by a Master Technician" (from WebPiggy)

I kid you not.

Understanding the Economist

I've been reading The Economist assiduously every week for a dozen years or so now. It is a wonderful magazine, full of reliable information, expert opinions and analysis; and it is beautifully written, clear, witty and unrelentingly clever. Although it is impeccably edited and can almost never be faulted for bad style or typos, ever so often I would come across a sentence that I had to read over two or three, or several, times, before I could make sense of it. This happens with most densely written prose and I thought nothing of it, apart from enjoying later the satisfaction one feels when a difficult puzzle has been solved.

Recently though, either because something has changed at The Economist, or because I am in some sort of linguistic decline, I seem to be finding sentences whose meaning eludes me pretty much completely, even after several rereadings. The other day I came across this, for example:

Very few of HMV's customers only ever purchase music from HMV.

"Very few only ever do it"? What does this mean? For some reason, I can understand the very similar "Most of HMV's customers only ever purchase music from HMV", which I think means they never buy music from anywhere else. So I imagine the original sentence means that few customers never buy music anywhere else. But now that sounds strange. I guess the majority do buy music elsewhere. Maybe it means "Most of HMV's customers also buy music elsewhere."