Shrinking jobs: A bug or a feature?

Less full-time employment sets off alarms but is this a bug or a feature?
It's a bug in the States where part-time is replacing full-time because of perverse incentives in Obamacare but why is there not greater outcry?
Only in modern times have most adults been employed in a public taxable sphere.
If folk have enough food and shelter and can look after their babies comfortably, how much work will they really need to perform?

If as a couple you have no kids instead of  2.1, that's $25000 (Canadian link) to $30,000 (American link) less money you need to earn yearly.
A hundred dollars a month will bring you all the sitcoms, movies, pop songs, world and sport news and Hollywood gossip you can handle on your wide screen TV and smartphone.
The car you are driving may go over 300,000 km before needing replacement. (Remember the Urban Legend in the 'sixties that GM was buying back any car that ran more than 100,000 miles to see what was wrong with it?  Remember when tires lasted one third of what they now last?)
If your lifetime medical has a default cost of zero bucks per annum because your income is low and government feels sorry for you, you are ahead one to ten thousand dollars each year.
When you see kids playing video games, texting, staring at LED screens, you know they can be kept happily distracted for a few dollars a day when they grow up.

In the background is the possibility of cheap fusion.  One year's work may earn you a cold fusion module that will supply a lifetime of electricity, buried in the back yard.    Those 3-D printers (link to print a bicycle) will mean that a large percentage of the little gadgets you must have to run a household can be printed out from a file stored on your phone. (Try this link:  "NASA will transport 3D printers to space so astronauts can print tools -- and potentially even food.")

Cheap energy is a disruptive technology.  It will also make unemployment numbers meaningless.

Microwave maize IN THE HUSK: Best corn on the cob.

Boiled and barbied doesn't cut it. Nor does de-husked, plastic-wrapped microwave corn on the cob rise to greatness.  Corn on the cob done au naturel is the ultimate fast food.

Leave the husk on.
Microwave on high for 2 to 3 minutes for one cob.
It stays burn-your-lips hot for a quarter hour.
Peel it like a farmer right at the table.
Use the stump of the husk for a handle and throw away those plastic cob skewers.
Discover what corn really tastes like, not water logged, not over-cooked.
Very sweet and needs just a smidgen of butter and salt.

One cob split with your spouse at the dinner table
looks cheery and yellow on the plate,
is piping hot, looks farm-fresh
and tastes divine.

Crime is down everywhere and your explanation is too simple: The Economist

Any one up for a little mischief?

Crime stats are down or different all over.  The Economist challenges knee-jerk analysts with a complex picture.  Read this to be intelligent.

Any one up for a little mischief?

Fewer babies means there are fewer high risk offenders in the 18-24 age group and their impulses are diluted by the growing seniors crowd.    There are fewer things in the typical house that will fetch a good price from a fence thanks to smartphone tech. More offenders have been put in prison but stats fell where fewer were jailed too.  Cars are harder to steal. DNA and cheap alarms with video make it hard to get away with crimes.  Car theft has plummeted to a tenth of what it was in the US. Bank robberies in the UK fell almost tenfold. Police technique has improved to focus on high risk neighbourhoods.  It's easier to let your fingers do the walking defrauding people from your home computer.   Young people that were hanging out are playing computer games and watching porn instead.  You don't see many kids playing outside and their parents are driving them everywhere.  Some of the drug crazes have passed and many current users pay for drugs from their pay instead of by stealing.

One simple secret to keep cool when it's too hot to sleep. Cheap too!

Turn your hot water bottle into a cold water bottle. Fill it at the cold tap and climb into bed. Tuck it somewhere like the back of your neck where there's good blood flow.  Even on the hottest of nights, in ten minutes your skin will be dry, you'll have cooled down and will probably be off counting sheep too.

Just remember to screw the plug tight,
dry the outside
and dry carefully the little space around the plug.

When this isn't an option.

Ignorance and bliss:

The study of ignorance is agnoiology.  "Agnosia" is an idea in philosophy and a medical condition.  As a condition, a subject who seems to have normal perception will look at or listen to something but will be clueless that it is actually there. The eye or ear responds but the brain takes no note.

Years ago I ran across a hip but obscure definition of "Agnosia" in the abstract.

"The unknowableness of the object answering to the unknowingness of the subject".  

Some things are indeterminate or mysterious because the limitations of the observor make them so.    Resonating with this is the idea that any measurement by an observor alters the state of the observed. With agnosia, it's as if the reality of the object is affected by the reality of the observor.

Donald Rumsfeld gave a modern twist to this referring to  "Known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns".  The fourth corner of this tetrad is "unknown knowns" - things we know but don't know that we do.

The converse seems sometimes true.
In the charming song, "How much is that doggy in the window, the one with the waggly tail?" the quality of the observed (the waggly tail) is actually a reflection of the affectionate character of the observor.  The dog wouldn't have the defining quality of a waggly tail if the observed dog didn't like the subject.

Falling in love seems a special case of knowing.  Of all the people we half notice, one becomes an overwhelmingly interesting object to know more about.  With this attitude, you suddenly DO learn a lot more about the object of your desire.  A newly met couple will sit talking for hours about every tiny interesting thing in their life.  This despite having been content to be ignorant for years before and even determined to keep the other person uninformed about yourself.

From an old collection of Punch cartoons.

Remind me again: Is earth getting hotter or colder? Persuade me with a chart.

There's the last half million years.  The little box in the upper right is the last ten thousand years.  If you take a hand lens to the chart, you might make out the last hundred years which gave birth to climate alarmism.

If you are a betting person, would you be saying colder or hotter is the trend?  Would you call everything since the invention of writing a baseline for climate or the upper limit for climate?

The chart is reproduced in Hoskins review of climate change at Watts Up With That.
(We're talking a ten degree Celsius swing here.  The horizontal time line is compressed, making it look more dramatic than perhaps it is.)

Downs syndrome - possible fix.

The BBC reports there may be a way to turn off the third copy of human chromosome 21 which produces Downs Syndrome.  In a lab setting, Dr. Jeanne Lawrence's team at the University of Massachusetts Medical School inserted the XIST gene into stem cells grown from a Downs Syndrome person and were successful in shutting down the entire effects of the third copy of chromosome 21.

Picture from BBC story

The write up leans to "more research required" rather than "exciting breakthrough" but the proof of concept is there.

Dash cam compilation needed for crashes of civil society in the States

We've seen the Russian cam compilations of crazy driving and crash scenes.  Their citizens learned the hard way to be vigilant observors.  The same is needed in the States as civil society and the rule of law go crashing daily in the headlines.  Blogging Tories had eight back-to-back stories yesterday on the Trayvon-Zimmerman train wreck.

 The Zimmerman tale includes DOJ interference, a police chief fired for using common sense, a whistleblower fired for obeying the law about releasing evidence, a judge who suppressed evidence and changes charges midstream to help her side win.   A mixed race hispanic/white/black man who votes democrat called "a cracker" and a possible gay predator by a young black girl who can't read a letter she claims to have handwritten.  The only explanations making sense to me: Democrats needed to get out the vote for November 2012.  The black community knows it is in big trouble and isn't ready to deal with it.  Low information voters are the norm everywhere at all times.

When I see a reference to Benghazi, or the IRS, or Fast and Furious, or the Department of Justice, or the EPA or the NRLB or the White House executive staff, or California anything, I grimace and wonder if I have the energy to keep reading forward another day.  Remember the wards in Philadelphia with 100% democrat only votes last November?  Can you read about their president Obama musing how to do end runs past congress and the senate without losing your appetite for all things American?  I can't.  Remember support for the Honduran dictator?  Remember the no show for Thatcher's funeral and the crowd sent for Chavez?

You don't have to love America to appreciate the Pax Americana is keeping us safe.  The re-set button has been hit and we don't yet know what is slouching towards us.  I keep hoping China will prosper and mellow because the Pax Sinica is next in line when the US falters.  It won't be a jolly old multilateral sing-a-long.

Peak Oil tease: Peaks but never comes

Six times bigger than Bakken, a challenge to all the oil in Arabia, here`s the latest find from Coober Pedy, Australia.  A couple hundred billion barrels identified so far, one of the `greatest unconventional oil discoveries any of us will see in our lifetimes`.  "Unconventional" of course means, "Will cost a lot of bucks".

You want some of that
peak oil, don't you?

I'm tired of being told to be surprised when the conventional wisdom about energy is so often wrong anyway.  Canada, nicely endowed in oil, has lots of company around the world now.  The OPEC cartel and all those folks who blame wars on oil haven't been around even half as long as the electric light bulb.  They're a blip of history. Meanwhile we are walking about in pure fields of energy that haven't been tapped cheaply yet.  Remember E=mc2?   Unpack the energy in one blueberry and you could run the city of Toronto's power grid for a couple weeks.

History on the left, speculation on the right.

All your life you've been seeing these charts.  They show increasing supply on the left (history) and a decreasing supply of affordable energy on the right (speculation) and the peak is today.  I'm betting on history over speculation.


Grumblers could re-think oil and gas:  It's green energy, bio-converted from solar energy in it's original environment and stored successfully for millions of years without degrading the environment.  What's not to like?