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When I asked John Sununu about his part in this history — whether he considered himself personally responsible for killing the best chance at an effective global-warming treaty — his response echoed Meyer-Abich. “It couldn’t have happened,” he told me, “because, frankly, the leaders in the world at that time were at a stage where they were all looking how to seem like they were supporting the policy without having to make hard commitments that would cost their nations serious resources.” He added, “Frankly, that’s about where we are today.”

While nosing around, I came across this article by Bjorn Lomborg (a notable economist who has come out against most climate change mitigation):

Looking into the future, it’s likely that hurricanes will indeed become somewhat stronger by the end of the century. They will also likely become less frequent, and societies will definitely become more robust. A respected Nature review shows that hurricane damage currently costs 0.04% of global gross domestic product. Accounting for an increase in prosperity, this would drop fourfold to 0.01% by 2100. But the global warming factor making hurricanes fewer but stronger will mean total damage will end around 0.02%.

This shows that global warming is a problem, but it also shows us that even accounting for this, damages will decline.

[...]

Research shows that the Kyoto Protocol, the first major global deal to cut carbon and rein in temperatures (and, it would follow, help prevent hurricanes) failed to achieve a thing. The Paris climate treaty is on track to cost the globe about $1 trillion to $2 trillion per year for the rest of the century. The U.N. body responsible for the treaty estimates that the cuts promised until 2030 will achieve 1% of what would be needed to keep temperature rises under 2 Celsius, or 3.6 Fahrenheit.

What this suggests is that spending 1%-2% of GDP on climate policies could, at best, help avoid much, much less than 0.01% of GDP lost to hurricanes. That is an infuriatingly bad investment.

In other words, this sort of incredibly terrible economic trade-offs is why current climate change mitigation isn't going to happen on a large scale in the majority of the world that isn't wealthy and can't afford that sort of virtue signalling. There's obviously more harm to climate change than just a slight increase in sea level, but all of the costs of it have been exaggerated while the costs of mitigation have been ignored.

Finally, I think it's worth reinvestigating the key dynamic that kills climate change mitigation. Poverty is the leading cause of climate change and other environmental harm not wealth. Extremely poor people can't afford to care about climate change. Here's a 2013 story that illustrates that. A Willis Eschenbach talks about several examples of where poverty destroys the environment (such as the notable different in tree coverage between deforested and more impoverished Haiti and neighboring, better forested San Domingo), a key one was a story about some shenanigans in the Solomon Islands where local people sold out for pennies on the dollar to logging companies.

So that inexpensive purchase of the island councilors, I heard it was ten grand US$ per man, gave the logging company the right to negotiate a contract with the locals if they wanted to sign. One afternoon, some of the young Vella Lavella guys made the trip over to the island where I lived to ask if I would help them. I bought the beers, and we talked about the logging company. They said that they’d been agitating to convince the people to keep the company out and take care of their own forests. But the sentiment among the people was against them. They wanted the easy money, just sit back and let the company do the work.

So Mr. Eschenbach tries to help with predictable results.

So I went over the whole document and marked it up. Then I met up with the guys again, and we went over the whole thing, clause by clause. I’d re-written about two-thirds of the clauses, and I’d worked with my friend the Public Solicitor, and we’d put together a document that would be a good deal for the locals. The loggers would still make out, but like businessmen, not like highway robbers.

[...]

So the big night came for the meeting. Everyone showed up, loggers and islanders. I played the genial host, and left them to discuss the fate of the forest.

And in the morning? They all came out, shamefaced. I took one look, and my heart sank. I asked one of the old guys, one of the big men, what had happened. “Oh, the logger men were very nice! Can you imagine, they gave us a whole case of Black Label whiskey. They explained the contract, and it sounded wonderful, so we signed it” … oh, man, my blood was angrified mightily and I was in grave danger of waxing wroth … but I knew the old man, and he wasn’t a bad guy, just weak. So I curbed my tongue and shook my head, and I said that his sons might approve, but his grand children would wonder why he sold their birthright for pennies … then I went and talked to the young guys. They said they couldn’t stop it, once the big men were drunk they got combative and wouldn’t listen to anyone and they would have signed anything.

After some rhetorical soul-searching

And at the end of the day, I realized that I was on a fool’s errand. Oh, I’d fight the fight again, in a minute, but I’d lose again. It’s what happens when big money hits a poor country—the environment gets screwed, whether it’s logging, fishing, or mining. Until the country is wealthy enough to feed its citizens and to protect itself, its resources are always on sale to the lowest bidder … by which I mean the bidder with the lowest morals.

Now, I started this sad tale for a reason, to give substance to the damage that poverty does to the environment. When you can buy an island council for ten grand a man and there are literally millions of dollars at stake, that council will get bought no matter how hard I fight against it. Per capita GDP in the Solomons is about $600 annually, it’s classed as an “LDC”, a Least Developed Country … and in a country where ten thousand dollars is almost twenty years wages, you can buy many people for ten large …

And concludes:

So this is where I came in, explaining about how people fighting against CO2 hurt the environment. Let me repeat the links in the chain:

1. Led in part by the environmental NGOs, many people and governments have declared war on CO2.

2. Their preferred method of warfare is to raise energy prices, through subsidies, bans, taxes, renewable energy requirements, pipeline refusals, and the like.

3. The rise in energy prices both impoverishes the poor and prevents the development of poor countries.

4. As Obama pointed out, even wealthy people with economic worries tend to ignore the environment … so stomping on the development possibilities of poor countries by raising energy prices is a guarantee of years of environmental damage and destruction.

I'll note also that poor people tend to be fertile people.

In other words, the attempts to fix climate and environmental problems makes the conditions which created the problems even worse. This is self-defeating. One doesn't need to be blocked by Big Oil propaganda when doing more harm than good and people figure that out.

And that brings me back to the fundamental tragedy of the earlier journal article. There, the author repeatedly describes all the harms that supposedly will accrue from climate change (pathologically reproducing the behavior that discredited him in the first place) while completely ignoring the harm that comes from his destructive fixes for climate change. Why should we listen and agree with this one-sided argument?

Editor’s Note: This narrative by Nathaniel Rich is a work of history, addressing the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989: the decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate change. Complementing the text is a series of aerial photographs and videos, all shot over the past year by George Steinmetz. With support from the Pulitzer Center, this two-part article is based on 18 months of reporting and well over a hundred interviews. It tracks the efforts of a small group of American scientists, activists and politicians to raise the alarm and stave off catastrophe. It will come as a revelation to many readers — an agonizing revelation — to understand how thoroughly they grasped the problem and how close they came to solving it.

But one merely needs to read the preface to the article to see the very overt motive:

The world has warmed more than one degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. The Paris climate agreement — the nonbinding, unenforceable and already unheeded treaty signed on Earth Day in 2016 — hoped to restrict warming to two degrees. The odds of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in 20. If by miracle we are able to limit warming to two degrees, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world’s tropical reefs, sea-level rise of several meters and the abandonment of the Persian Gulf. The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming “a prescription for long-term disaster.” Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario. Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum. Four degrees: Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China, India and Bangladesh claimed by desert; Polynesia swallowed by the sea; the Colorado River thinned to a trickle; the American Southwest largely uninhabitable. The prospect of a five-degree warming has prompted some of the world’s leading climate scientists to warn of the end of human civilization.

What is remarkable about this is that it's completely pulled out of the author's ass without support from actual research (and no, I don't consider extrapolations from computer models that have little to do with reality as actual research). I get that a 5C increase in global temperature probably will result in significant problems for mankind. But there's no consideration here of what actually will happen or how adaptable humanity will be to it (protip: humanity turns out to be quite adaptable to such things). What could have been an interesting study of that period of climatology has turned into yet more preaching.

What I see here is one sad person's acknowledgement that the con is over. They will never again have a population as gullible as we were in 1989. Here's a telling two paragraphs:

The answer, as any economist could tell you, is very little. Economics, the science of assigning value to human behavior, prices the future at a discount; the farther out you project, the cheaper the consequences. This makes the climate problem the perfect economic disaster. The Yale economist William D. Nordhaus, a member of Jimmy Carter’s Council of Economic Advisers, argued in the 1970s that the most appropriate remedy was a global carbon tax. But that required an international agreement, which Nordhaus didn’t think was likely. Michael Glantz, a political scientist who was at the National Center for Atmospheric Research at the time, argued in 1979 that democratic societies are constitutionally incapable of dealing with the climate problem. The competition for resources means that no single crisis can ever command the public interest for long, yet climate change requires sustained, disciplined efforts over decades. And the German physicist-philosopher Klaus Meyer-Abich argued that any global agreement would inevitably favor the most minimal action. Adaptation, Meyer-Abich concluded, “seems to be the most rational political option.” It is the option that we have pursued, consciously or not, ever since.

These theories share a common principle: that human beings, whether in global organizations, democracies, industries, political parties or as individuals, are incapable of sacrificing present convenience to forestall a penalty imposed on future generations. When I asked John Sununu about his part in this history — whether he considered himself personally responsible for killing the best chance at an effective global-warming treaty — his response echoed Meyer-Abich. “It couldn’t have happened,” he told me, “because, frankly, the leaders in the world at that time were at a stage where they were all looking how to seem like they were supporting the policy without having to make hard commitments that would cost their nations serious resources.” He added, “Frankly, that’s about where we are today.”

This last bit in a nutshell is why they lost. It wasn't that people didn't care about the climate or near future convenience (excuses which conveniently allowed these theorists to ignore that important things are done with the burning of fossil fuels). It's that climate change mitigation required huge sacrifices for little gain in the present and future. Thus, while politicians could afford the pretense of caring about climate change, they couldn't actually afford to plunge their countries into greater poverty for this green ideology.

I think we're seeing a glimpse of the end game for the current bout of climate change ideology, namely, that the Chicken Littles of the world spin grand and nostalgic tales of how we could have prevented global disaster, if only we had remained as gullible as we used to be.

I think however there is a more important lesson to learn for those who wish to. Credibility is important here. When one lies and hides evidence for the good of the world [edit: in particular, exaggerating both the harm expected and degree of confidence in the science, both which the author above does], they lose credibility and the public trust. That happened over the past two decades. They may still get what they want, but it becomes an uphill battle with every victory dearly won and defeat possible even at the hands of opponents with minuscule resources.

Sad to say, this author didn't learn that lesson and instead doubles-down, making all sorts of claims of impending disaster with that peculiar lack of evidence. This is why we're where we are now.

Okay, the subject isn't what the title line is going to make you think, LOL.

I've, for now, gotten out of the PC repair business and am instead pursuing two food jobs. The new one is mid-morning to mid-afternoon at a local bakery that just opened. I went in dressed to impress, thinking it was interview time--and instead was hired on the spot and spent 6 and a half hours (8 AM to 2:30 PM) baking and (wo)manning the front counter. They pay better than anything I've done before, too, and the clientele has enough money to plunk down $3.00 for a muffin without a second thought.

And you know what? I'm *good at this.* Never having made cinnamon rolls before, my first attempt came out, according to the manager, as almost the Platonic ideal. The cheese bread (this *is* Wisconsin, you know...) was likewise my first attempt, and it just flew off the shelves. Muffins came up huge and moist, full of blueberries. It's been all of one shift and the manager already wants me to tell her some whole-wheat recipes and maybe experiment with stevia for the health-conscious crowd.

My heart is singing. This might be a kind of happiness. I don't want to jinx it, and I'd still rather be doing pharmacology, but this is...nice, for now. Maybe it's a kind of last happiness before the country implodes on itself. Whatever it is I'm going to take it gratefully, even if it's short-lived. It feels so good to use these hands to create.

Leveraged trading, futures, and short selling all seem to cause market disruptions that unnaturally affect the price of their assets.

Cash settled futures are essentially gambling, as they don't involve buying the actual asset. Money goes in, semi-random amount comes back. Contributes nothing to the economy as you're just playing betting games against the bank.

Leveraged trading, likewise, allows people to manipulate markets in ways they really can't afford to. Leveraged trading gives traders incentives to place stop orders which can crash markets due to cascading effects.

Short sales allow manipulators to drive the price of assets down when there's really no selling pressure from legitimate holder.

These practices have driven market instability. Bitcoin's drop seems to be driven in part by short sellers who can pressure the price down without getting anyone to sell. This can in turn drive stop sell orders to trigger, pushing the price down further.

My conclusion: I think short sales, leveraged trading, and cash settled futures should be made illegal. Perhaps automatic stop orders as well. Wall street wouldn't be happy (these are tools they use to make profit), but its what the economy as a whole needs to protect itself in my opinion.

A man has been jailed for having sex with a horse he claimed had given him consent.

Daniel Raymond Webb-Jackson broke into the stables and was caught on CCTV abusing the animal.

However, when questioned, the 31-year-old claimed the filly had agreed to sex because she smelt his crotch and winked at him.

Man says horse gave him sexual consent by winking at him

Including Americans...

The G7 foreign ministers today issued the following statement in advance of the anniversary of the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17:

We, the G7 foreign ministers, of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and the High Representative of the European Union, are united in our condemnation, in the strongest possible terms, of the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, a civilian aircraft flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on July 17, 2014.

MH17 was carrying 298 crew and passengers, nationals of Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Malaysia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Philippines, Romania, South Africa, Vietnam, the United Kingdom and the United States of America.

We fully support the work of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT), an independent criminal investigation led by the Netherlands, Australia, Belgium, Malaysia and Ukraine. The JIT’s findings on Russia’s role in the downing of MH17 are compelling, significant and deeply disturbing. The G7 recalls that UN Security Council Resolution 2166 demands that all states cooperate fully with efforts to establish accountability. We are united in our support of Australia and the Netherlands as they call on Russia to account for its role in this incident and to cooperate fully with the process to establish the truth and achieve justice for the victims of MH17 and their next of kin.
In a rules-based international order, those responsible for unacceptable actions, such as the firing or launching of the BUK missile of Russian origin, which intercepted and downed a civilian aircraft, must be held accountable. To this end, we call on Russia to immediately engage with Australia and the Netherlands in good faith to explain and to address all relevant questions regarding any potential breaches of international law.

We express once again our deepest condolences to the families of the victims of MH17. We stand together against the impunity of those who engage in aggressive actions that threaten the rules-based international order, anywhere, anytime, and under any circumstances.

Joint Statement From G7 Foreign Ministers on MH17

Ok Trump/Russia supporters, how do you rationalize this one?

Well, other than probably winning an argument with The MiBu,* I tried to convince khallow that it might be possible to replace someone's decision making power with a deterministic software simulation without them ever noticing any loss of freedom.

I think such a simulation could work but it couldn't just be a simple neural network. It would need to simulate the senses and the chemical neurotransmitters that the brain uses to represent things like emotions.

I think there's a fair chance that the person might never notice the exchange, unless of course you told them! In that case I suspect they would get extremely upset. You might think the decision-making software wouldn't allow them to decide to get upset about it, but I think it would. It just needs to be able to model what would happen if the person were to be told about the existence of such an experiment.

What you couldn't do is build a software simulation that could predict a human's actions many steps in advance. That's because you'd have to simulate not just the human but their external world as well. And if they discovered the prediction software, it would have to simulate itself as well, which would lead to it never being able to halt.

I suspect there are similar problems with attempts to predict economic events with algorithms. Once people learn the algorithms they can deliberately do the opposite of whatever the algorithm says people will do.

^{*This is satire. Ain't Poe's law a bitch? Of course I won it! ;)**
**Ah dammit -- just read he's gone outta town. He'll never take the bait now!}

A criminal complaint was unsealed today in the District of Columbia charging a Russian national with conspiracy to act as an agent of the Russian Federation within the United States without prior notification to the Attorney General.

The announcement was made by Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jessie K. Liu, and Nancy McNamara, Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office.

Maria Butina, 29, a Russian citizen residing in Washington D.C., was arrested on July 15, 2018, in Washington, D.C., and made her initial appearance this afternoon before Magistrate Judge Deborah A. Robinson in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. She was ordered held pending a hearing set for July 18, 2018.

According to the affidavit in support of the complaint, from as early as 2015 and continuing through at least February 2017, Butina worked at the direction of a high-level official in the Russian government who was previously a member of the legislature of the Russian Federation and later became a top official at the Russian Central Bank. This Russian official was sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control in April 2018.

The court filings detail the Russian official’s and Butina’s efforts for Butina to act as an agent of Russia inside the United States by developing relationships with U.S. persons and infiltrating organizations having influence in American politics, for the purpose of advancing the interests of the Russian Federation. The filings also describe certain actions taken by Butina to further this effort during multiple visits from Russia and, later, when she entered and resided in the United States on a student visa. The filings allege that she undertook her activities without officially disclosing the fact that she was acting as an agent of Russian government, as required by law.

Russian National Charged in Conspiracy to Act as an Agent of the Russian Federation Within the United States

I sometimes write small programs over Christmas. I published a rotating torus and a fractal animation. A previous effort was a sudoku puzzle solver. This type of puzzle involves completing a 9×9 numerical grid (or a 16×16 hexadecimal grid for the particularly ambitious) while meeting the constraints that a digit may not be repeated in a row, column or box. While some people find this type of puzzle to be fun, I find it rather tedious and contrived. I also like to solve the general case. People have used many techniques to solve sudoku puzzles and perhaps the most ambitious was a spread-sheet with multiple layers and a very large number of conditional operators. (This is more akin to a Kohonen network or a deeper neural network.)

My technique is rather blunt: 81 levels of recursion. Superficially, this would appear to require an infeasible maximum of 9^81 attempts. However, the constraints of the puzzle bound this to something more akin to 9×8×7×6×5×4×3×2×1 attempts and it often takes far less attempts. Indeed, solving an empty grid requires relatively little computation.

Input (via stdin) is nine lines of text with any non-numerical string as a separator between digits. Use digit zero for unknown inputs. Output (via stdout) is nine lines of text followed by a count of the recursion calls:-

begin 644 sudoku-solver.pl.gz
M'XL(`/4*0EL"`YV3SV^;,!3'[_XKW(:F$+<!$DT-(IXF=9===DFE'9(<\L-I
MK+F`;-,13?SO>S8.(5%6:;L`[_F]S_=];=.["4LEPS7/PH))@1]_(-3#LW*;
M_RSQ+!?O3$+L/P>C*!X_3O#+GN'G/%.YU+Q\&Z(>K)JE>#3ZA)5>2=TD)M%3
M%&.U>F<([7+I>X)&J2>FDQB>A"8!_HTP]C1[*^AT]O+UV_?/*22^")XQJ@K!
MM1_.%]E"+C1^6)+PP98&IL;B*H.KI@D\"&E@@'N5?#L'OE<MJ6=0<_@R/36J
M$5+E&F^Y*FRUI1P,Y6"'.K1#?:2`<2%YIO$]OA\ZM0-Q&D;E5'&[R&[/E"7;
ME%(Q"Q+Y9B5\;\L*O0^HVO.=3D]I$70"F?_JAIO\;'6=5S:$?)EI0LPWWSDR
MI9/X.'C?&/>#M#MATX0!)-30C8LQJ[AN!F]0C4L+7-[0J`4Z/TZ+Q)9=8R:<
M1Q@*9J>@Y$K"Q,D;$[3)W24N!4::4N@)Q\%@]$1L"*4F'*<M<4!=C[M6YD)-
M(0?'WCDF;R=6K[#FPH].U-H\^@0!<Y[&:+]_D:1PIX)NWU$F2MM4?0T*)J!_
MD%Q@V_1_@V'7"/BZ&P?-;E5FKRYE_E+T+Z+'M[D/MH;&W<ZS.P+8$^#Z+;G6
7U:K6[:]D?YV6$$$K0G\`U/.'`+`$````
`
end

(Usual instructions for uudecode process.)

I may finish writing a web interface for this script so that I can spoil more enjoyment save more tedium among non-technical people. I planned to implement a stateful script which uses an HTML form. However, if anyone wants to extract digits from an image, that would be greatly appreciated. This would allow a sudoku puzzle to be solved by selecting an app on a smartphone and pointing the smartphone's camera at the puzzle. Or uploading an image via an HTML form. I like to solve the general case.

A friend suggested a solitaire card game solver. I give this serious consideration.

If there was any doubt about processing HTML (from stdin to stdout) into rainbow text, an example implementation is provided. It works best on long paragraphs of text and many find the result too irritating to read:-

begin 644 rainbow-text.pl.gz
M'XL(`$P&0EL"`X5376O;,!1]]Z]0$C>58SN2G&84;'F%P-C#^K(%-HA=<!)G
M\>9:0;)IH4E_^R3Y*QD9PQ:Z.N?HWJ.OT0!5@J-U5J!#RG/@?C>,$?B\?/P"
MOB99L68O8)F^EA*#"\O#9.[>@^4^!0M6",;+K'J>&B/)2NH>WWD?0)G\3@NP
MX^P9+!Z_&<8#K]-@"CU\Y[0-RT_VEM\)"(78(=C3-)D31_[XC/<47W^*K2<;
MHEJ#1@#>#`!RMDER:&:%1<4^VY5^C[&JM/KA@SBDF_/Q3YYL]=C<L)P*B24<
M=NXMERA.SZ+BD&<E1#`8N.YT\M%UPV.P>@KC27B$T7CU%(31V(]M_ZA"$)51
M$?'8>B/.[&2A3#C*GJXD+=4VZ\0:JRLTY;5)-%/$H1+[6N;<WM:_UBO?%*MP
MQS@T<QF;>:#3R,"V+;TO`&0[J,&5F4]F\>`=K8(P1BW;)))D3'5DV[XF3D;=
M7%?#"E29=%6*V^EJ)5/ZBV4%E,[ZO06`IV7%"RWPFU3_]3G8IKNL2+>P\V2=
M^=2ESI8R[6/;BQO7(,U%VL\Y,(&I.MA)EQ)UZ]&*A&J1FQ4EU)'546M*7#/Q
M+W)=D<D1J9/8I`755BD\5+7[-71JB;;2T\7ZQ('+$CLX##ZQHI3/+6><1L/1
M#?9^M"T:AC?B1@1(2<*A8[:7=:5=Q!-S;5]B1&*)C:?S3DNN:,D_M-X5K?>W
MMC\7Y^)<K,OK='$M3H;QLL_R%';GGLN.!F%S[/7P7:"5?DFVB1`3^DVH30+C
4QDL]S7*&43'42?\`&U52+MT$````
`
end

(Usual instructions for uudecode process.)