But with the prospect of spending $100 billion on fast rail, it crosses my mind that maybe we should try and just think of ways to make air travel less of a hassle.

The question that comes to mind is: what’s the minimum amount of security that could be required to operate a domestic aviation industry?

I know in a rural airport it means: show your ticket at the desk, throw your bag on a trolley to get put in the hold, and walk out to the plane on the tarmac.

Couldn’t this be done across the board?

Check in at the gate, throw your bag on a conveyor belt, and get on the plane. Skip the double check-in and security process. Straight away, air travel sounds a lot better. You just have to be at the airport fifteen minutes before takeoff.

It would lead to some slightly traumatic job losses and business shutdowns in the security industry. But not exactly enormous ones.

Planes are a bit more fragile than your average terrorist target – a smallish bomb can cause big problems – but really, if you’ve gone to the effort of making a bomb, you can use it on a plane or a train and you’ve made your point.

You could mount the argument that a plane is a different target to a train because there’s the September 11 scenario of using the plane as a weapon, but the thing about that attack is that it will never work again. Indeed it stopped working within an hour of it being used – United 93 crashed in a field when passengers stormed the cockpit. A planefull of people are never going to let terrorists fly the thing again.

Also consider that aviation – even in terms of hours spent – is safer than riding a bicycle, which is in turn safer than sitting in a car – see http://www.ecovelo.info/2011/08/02/nothing-to-fear/ for some slightly ancient but still probably roughly correct statistics. The security is all theatre.

What am I missing here?

I think it would be fair to ensure that anyone putting luggage on the plane has to board it – if you’re going to bomb a plane you have to be at least willing to go down with it. So that just means the luggage loading part is after the boarding gate process.

Possibly a better argument in favour of high speed rail is the prospect of peak oil price scenarios – if the rail line is built in thirty years time when the price of oil is twenty times higher, the government is going to look pretty wise. But as far as the comparison goes today, it seems like scaling back some of the crazy security red tape on aviation would be a good start on improving transport efficiency in Australia.

Sam Roggeveen makes the same point over at the Interpreter.

I noticed that Louis has actually gone into deep cover inside the Australian Labor Party, creating a full alternate identity as former trade union head called ‘Greg Combet’ and managing to rise all the way to a senior portfolio as Minister for Climate Change in the Gillard cabinet.

Should be a great doco! What would you call it? Louis and the Focus Groups?

- Five emotions invented by the internet. You may be feeling one of them right now.

- Are you ridiculously good at darts? Unless you can hit a one-inch diameter circle about two thirds of the time, you’re probably aiming at the wrong spot.

- The game theory implications of shutting down internet access when your dictatorship is threatened by popular revolution. (Spoiler: not a great idea.)

- Letters of Note is great every time, but for some reason I really liked this one, this very one.

- Classic pub conversation: How long is a severed head conscious for?

- What were the Reagan years actually like? A scathing and hilarious contemporary account called ‘The Clothes Have No Emperor’ has been republished and the first chapter is free online.

- Watch a comet go by.

Life is a bit too hectic in Mongolia for much blog posting but I have a few drafts I will try and churn out some time soon.

- The winners of the 2010 IgNobel prizes for ‘improbable research’, including:

MEDICINE PRIZE: Simon Rietveld of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Ilja van Beest of Tilburg University, The Netherlands, for discovering that symptoms of asthma can be treated with a roller-coaster ride.

PEACE PRIZE: Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston of Keele University, UK, for confirming the widely held belief that swearing relieves pain.

- Hipster dinosaurs.

- A recent psychology study finds that while, as might be expected, selfishness is considered annoying, the same also applies to selflessness:

After the game was over, the participants were asked which of the other players they would be willing to have another round with. As the researchers expected, they were unwilling to play again with the selfish. Dr Parks and Dr Stone did not, however, expect the other result—that participants were equally unwilling to carry on with the selfless.

…people were valuing their own reputations in the eyes of the other players as much as the practical gain from the game, and felt that in comparison with the selfless individual they were being found wanting.

- Two rocks converse.

- Heartbreaking letter from a Japanese kamikaze pilot to his two children in May 1945.

- An oldie but a goodie: the classic PDQ Bach version of the first movement of Beethoven’s fifth symphony, with baseball commentary:

But since I am an open-minded (read: highly suggestible) chardonnay social democrat, the mention of all that Stalinism did slightly remind me of the fact that there are some super-earnest lefty believers standing around on King St in Newtown and outside Glebe markets every weekend. And sometimes you will talk to committed environmentalists who, if you press them for a while, will admit that their advocacy on climate change is slightly driven by that fact that it’s a chance to finally have a proper go at tearing down the military-industrial edifice that’s destroying the world. And I agree that saving the environment is good and sustainable living is great too, and getting out into nature is great, and we should preserve it, and all that is only more clear to me living (and travelling) in Mongolia, the only country more sparsely populated than Australia. But on the environment, and climate change in particular, I think nobody has said it better yet than UK comedian David Mitchell:

‘sorting it out is always presented as an opportunity or a pleasure… In fact, it’s just a thing, a really depressing thing, that’s happening… There’s also often slight undertones of disparagement of industrial pioneers… I want to see a global warming expert acknowledge that burning oil, and the various machines we’ve invented that burn oil, is brilliant, and it’s a real pisser we can’t do it anymore, but we can’t, because of facts… The alternative attitude is no more convincing than when Mum said “why don’t you kids have a race to see who can tidy their rooms fastest?”‘

Anyway that’s all beside the point. My original question was prompted by Gerard, and it was something like this: if Greens candidate Lee Rhiannon is now, or has ever been, a Communist, and keeping in mind that some of the various earnest characters on Sydney’s somewhat bohemian streets are probably Greens, are the Greens’ actual policies in any way Communist?

I am pretty sure not, but I felt like I should at least check. This was also because the final questioner, named Luke Brand, on Q&A last night at 50:15 (in what was otherwise one of the best Q&A episodes ever) was particularly and irritatingly ignorant. As he complained about the lack of ‘visionaries’ in Australian politics, he tried to sum up a common perspective on the Greens: “We’ve got the Greens saying no for the sake of saying no, just so they can save baby lizards and small tree frogs… Where is the forward thinking for this nation; the grand schemes to move forward, like high speed rail, like Snowy Mountains style schemes.” It then fell to Senator Christine Milne to exasperatedly explain that the Greens policy actually includes large scale public works schemes with a particular focus on high speed rail and a significant restructure of the tax take centred around renewable energy and carbon reduction.

In response to all this, the questioner, Luke Brand, said, “Show us some policy, Christine. Put it out there.” Luke Brand, the link to the Greens website is http://greens.org.au/, and their policies are at http://greens.org.au/policies. You should have a read! Instead of being an uninformed dick on live TV to a federal senator.

Anyway, I have now been to the website myself for some reassurance that the commies haven’t taken over. The results of my investigation into Greens policy are as follows:

1. The first policy they list is “we are anti-GMO” (genetically modified organisms). This is minus points from me. Concerns about GMOs fall under the plausible but paranoid anti-industrial complex. From my understanding, some unpredictable eco-impacts are likely, but humans have been doing genetic engineering in the form of breeding crop varieties for thousands of years. Genetically modified crops reduce the need for pesticides, reduce land use, and reduce food shortages. Organically grown crops are lovely n’all, but unfortunately there isn’t enough landmass on earth to grow enough food to feed everyone without modern industrial farming. But other aspects of their policy I support – bans on DNA patents for example – so at least there’s something here for me. Still. Bad start. (Late disclosure: I came into this thinking I was probably mostly a Green voter). Three out of five crazy stars.
2. Biodiversity preservation, rigorous environmental impact assessment processes, respect for traditional owners of the land, sustainable fisheries management, no logging of old growth forest. Tick tick tick. ‘No new coal mines’… well, if new coal mines are that bad, I figure the point of a carbon trading scheme or tax is to make them economically unviable. So I’d prefer that. But whatever. That’s one of those policies I can let slide as more or less symbolic. Slightly communist though. One star.
3. Sustainable agriculture. Sure it all sounds good, subject to my rant under 1. One star. At this point I have realised the Greens have hundreds of policies on their website, so switching to a highlights package.
   
4. Childcare centres: to be made non-profit by law, and wages to be raised. This is pretty communist stuff. I rather doubt if public or NPO childcare would be necessarily any better or cheaper than the current private providers. But their suggested progressive reforms to family tax benefit stuff are fine by me. Not something I know much about anyway. Two stars.
5. Giving the vote to 16 year olds. Hmmm. I think this is a plain old error in judgment. In a theory of politics which I just invented (perhaps with some credit to Churchill), 18 to 25 year olds vote left-of-centre in higher numbers because they study at uni and live in the city and because they fall under the influence of their leftist friends who are (to make a vast and unfair generalisation) statistically more charming, interesting, sociable, clever and popular. Eventually the hard-working conservative voters we ignored in our 20s become rich in their late 30s and opinions swing around again because we all want to be invited to good dinner parties and yachts etc with people who actually own houses. But 16 year olds still live at home and just vote the same way as their parents. No stars for communism, just slightly whatever.
6. Drugs: ‘harm minimisation’, and elimination of jail sentences for drug use offences. But no legalisation of marijuana? Sellouts. -3 stars for being old conservative fogeys.
7. Climate change: the whole nine yards. I will defer to the judgment of Queensland economist John Quiggin on this one. While also saying that I generally agree anyway. Go geothermal! Go large tax take increases! Although I’m not that against compensation to power plants. The incentives are still there just the same, just with a bit less bankruptcy.
8. Nuclear: no nuclear anythings. I am not particularly worried by this. I suppose there might be some cold fusion technology that is the bizness – I could get behind research aimed at nuclear power generation with no waste, and people sometimes say that’s possible. But generally nuclear plants seem to lead to the kind of awful irreversible permanent stuff that I don’t like, a bit like tattoos. Which is funny because Greens voters often have tattoos, according to my insightful use of stereotypes. Two crazy stars.
9. Environment: I like the environment. I also like awesome toys, but sure, go for it Greens, protect the environment.
10. Human rights: as a law graduate I generally am in favour of all kinds of abstruse deference to immutable rights etc and, based on my working career so far, pretty tough regulation of privacy. I am not sure about a human rights charter though, since I rather like Bob Carr. Still, given that democracy is going to the shitter with Rupert and 24 hour news, we probably need a human rights act. Tick.

Okay I am over this exercise now, I may continue it with more detail later. But in summary, I feel informed enough to say that the Greens are roughly as communist as I expected, ie about 27% communist. This is a level I can vote for. So far.

I want to do music for the subway– I want to make music so that when you go through the turnstile it doesn’t just go “eeeh!”. Make them all separate tones that are in key. So like during rush hour in big subway stations it would make this kind of harmonic music. Just bad ideas. The only reason to get semi-successful is so you can do that shit.

- Star Wars characters wear haute couture (see right).

- Dutch council is trying to save €400,000 on welfare payments by encouraging unemployed women to find rich husbands. (via chris blattman)

- XKCD surveyed people to get them to give names to colours. Stephen von Worley made a pretty sweet graphic of the results.

- The Orwell Diaries continue. In George Orwell’s liveblog of WWII it is June 22nd, 1940, and France has just surrendered. Earlier in the month, during the Dunkirk evacuation, he was in a rather dark mood, considering he was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War himself:

Always, as I walk through the Underground stations, sickened by the advertisements, the silly staring faces and strident colours, the general frantic struggle to induce people to waste labour and material by consuming useless luxuries or harmful drugs. How much rubbish this war will sweep away, if only we can hang on throughout the summer. War is simply a reversal of civilised life, its motto is “Evil be thou my good”, and so much of the good of modern life is actually evil that it is questionable whether on balance war does harm.

- Finally, are you in the mood to get happy weepy? Check out this video of a baby who was born deaf, and has just had his cochlear implant turned on so that he can hear his mother’s voice for the first time:

an ultra-Orthodox population that is increasing dramatically, a settler movement that is growing more radical and more entrenched in the Israeli bureaucracy and army, and a Russian immigrant community that is particularly prone to anti-Arab racism. In 2009, a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 53 percent of Jewish Israelis (and 77 percent of recent immigrants from the former USSR) support encouraging Arabs to leave the country. Attitudes are worst among Israel’s young….This March, a poll found that 56 percent of Jewish Israeli high school students — and more than 80 percent of religious Jewish high school students — would deny Israeli Arabs the right to be elected to the Knesset.

It’s also shockingly unprofessional work by the IDF, as discussed over at the Interpreter.

I will solemnly say that at least these nine people killed won’t have died in vain, unlike so many thousands of others – mostly Palestinians – in the last ten years of this conflict. Their deaths may in fact bring about serious change in international opinion and real change on the ground for the 1.5 million people of Gaza.

I have read a few other interesting things that I can’t help but re-post here. From the Independent, an excellent article worth reading in full, with a strikingly good but totally not-going-to-happen idea:

Ideally Israel would now rethink a policy which there is every reason for thinking is not only catastrophic for Gaza’s people, but also not in its own long-term interests. But if not, there may be ways in which the international community can shake off its passivity in the face of this unfolding tragedy. For if broadly friendly governments – preferably within the Quartet but if not outside it – were to confront Israel with the prospect of mounting their own, much more official and internationally sanctioned official maritime relief operation, it would be exponentially more difficult for the Netanyhau government to see it off than it has, however messily and lethally, this week’s flotilla.

Implausible as it may seem at first sight, the idea has been discussed at a high level in international diplomatic circles. The only senior UN figure brave enough to float the idea publicly, however, is Unrwa’s Gaza director of operations, John Ging, who mentioned sea access when he argued in an interview more than a month before Monday’s fiasco, that it was time for the international community “physically” to do something about “rescuing” Gaza. While the Israeli claim that an unchecked activist flotilla entering Gaza compromises its security may be understandable, it could hardly say the same about allied or UN ships.

Israel has made the claim that the action was legal because of the well established law of the sea permitting attacks on neutral vessels that are running a maritime blockade. One commentator suggests that might be legally wrong because that rule only applies to ‘international armed conflict’, and this is not an international conflict. But that’s a bit of a technicality. With a more substantive point, albeit one that won’t get much of a hearing in Israeli courts, Ben Saul at the Drum points out the argument relies on the far shakier grounds that the blockade itself is legal:

the San Remo Manual also contains rules governing the lawfulness of the blockade itself, and there can be no authority under international law to enforce a blockade which is unlawful. Paragraph 102 of the Manual prohibits a blockade if “the damage to the civilian population is, or may be expected to be, excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated from the blockade”.

Finally, the most succinct point made so far is by military insurgency commentator Abu Muqawama:

]]> http://vierboom.wordpress.com/2010/06/03/the-gaza-thing/feed/ 0 Francis Fast roping 101 http://vierboom.wordpress.com/2010/04/23/fwdworthy-on-friday-2/ http://vierboom.wordpress.com/2010/04/23/fwdworthy-on-friday-2/#comments Fri, 23 Apr 2010 02:49:52 +0000 Francis http://vierboom.wordpress.com/?p=251 ]]> - Does it annoy you when people write the imaginary word ‘alot’? This will definitely help. Funniest thing I have read in ages. The rest of the blog is pretty funny too.

- Once upon a time, this guy was considered fat enough that people were willing to pay to see him at the circus.

- Jon Stewart takes down Fox News and Bernie Goldberg. Related: Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo, the dirtiest phrase ever written in Latin.

- This is how fast the speed of light looks.

- Apparently, if you’re a happier person, you’re likely having more deep and meaningful conversations rather than pleasant small talk.

- Fixed gear bikes have caught on everywhere… except China? According to this article it has something to do with how they just aren’t into irony over there:

“There is a saying in Chinese: ‘Laugh at the poor, not the prostitutes,’ ” Juanjuan Wu, a professor at the University of Minnesota and author of Chinese Fashion From Mao to Now, told me. “Hipster fashion only really works by communicating your irony—in other words, someone needs to ‘get it.’ Hipster irony in dress would most likely be misinterpreted in Chinese society as simple poverty or weirdness.”

• the M4 east extension, connecting the M4 to the City Westlink, bypassing the Parramatta Rd bottleneck (getting trucks and western Sydney traffic off the route) (see below).
• re-establishment of light rail along Parramatta Rd from Central to Strathfield, slowing down traffic, encouraging cycling and walking, and making restaurants and shopping accessible
• high density housing along the whole thing to replace the ugly crappy wasteland that’s there at the moment

However I can now delete this draft, since my exact whole plan was basically laid out by Andrew West in the Herald on the weekend. The Planning Institute of Australia and the Urban Development Institute of Australia have called on the government to have another look at Parramatta Road. Everything in the article is basically what I think too.

For some more info on the options for the M4 east, the RTA has the options paper from 2003 that examined a few possibilities. The short tunnel option exiting at Lilyfield (the yellow line below) seems to be vaguely favoured in the report.

M4 route options, from the RTA options paper

Actually it looks rather nice here. CC from Sam Ilic on Flickr

Canberra. It’s not that bad. I was there a few weeks ago. For me there are two obvious things to like about it: it’s a cycling paradise, and it’s home to the two of the safest ALP seats in the country. In other words, it’s home to the kind of lefty public servant/intellecturazzi I one day aspire to eat Saturday morning eggs benedict with.

Of course, this is also one of Canberra’s big problems. To outsiders, it seems like the place is mostly just a bunch of itinerant public servants, perhaps just there for a year or two starting out their career in a government agency. Moreover, there’s a vague sense that it’s somehow ‘artificial’. Because, of course, it is. As we all learned in primary school, Canberra was only conceived because back at the start of the 20th century Sydney and Melbourne couldn’t settle the pissing contest  over which would become the national capital. A design competition was held for a new city, Lake Burley Griffin was excavated, and today the city is one of the world’s great monuments to the traffic roundabout.

The other problem I have with Canberra is that it just isn’t really in a nice spot. All of Australia’s other capital cities are on rivers or harbours. They are all on or near the coast. But Canberra is not on the coast because the design competition specified that the city had to be at least 50 miles from the coast in order to be out of range of battleships and safe from naval artillery. This requirement would have almost been obsolete by the time the parliament opened in 1927, but it had the unfortunate result of removing the capital from the beautiful ocean of the east coast.

Of course maybe I’m just spoiled by Sydney. It really is a stunning city. Of all the cities I’ve been to in the world, only Stockholm seems to me to come close for natural beauty. I perked up a few years ago when Paul Keating suggested that we should just move the capital to Sydney – ‘he wouldn’t care if the capital was in Melbourne, “but if you want to impress the visitors, of course, you come to Sydney”‘ - and put the Parliament on the current naval base at Garden Island looking over the harbour.

This would be nice, and I’m all for it. But seeing as we’re all talking about population these days, and there are multiple calls for new cities to be established in Australia, why not throw in the towel on Canberra, and use the inherent value of the national capital to establish a real nice city, with both something to do (work for the government) and a good reason to live there (a few nice beaches, maybe some lakes, and warm weather).

Sunrise over Forster, from bass8888 on Flickr

Based on that criteria, and having a quick look at the map, I have picked out Forster-Tuncurry, 4 hours north of Sydney. It’s a nice holiday location, it’s already got some decent road infrastructure, and it’s along a corridor of population where more cities would help make the business case for everyone’s favourite big government project, very fast trains. A Sydney – Newcastle – Forster – Port Mac – Brisbane fast railway line would really liven the place up.

I think it would be a good thing for Australia to create a new city, and an easy way to really get a good one going would be moving the capital there. Of course, Forster being a nice holiday spot already, I’m open to other ideas. Serious studies of where to start a city suggest it should be in the Pilbara or the Kimberleys along the northwest coast of the country in WA, based on rainfall and such, but it’s not going to be practical to have the capital move that far away. Go down the South Coast somewhere towards Melbourne – say just move Canberra east to Jervis Bay – I say it’s too cold. Which is why I am thinking somewhere on the mid-north coast of NSW. But I’m easy. Just move it out of the middle of nowhere.

UPDATE: I know it’s a valuable thing to have some big inland centres, and in some ways it’s good that one of them is the capital. A lot of people like the climate and lifestyle of the inland cities. But probably not most people. Apparently 50% of Australia’s population lives within 7km of the coast. 7km inland still leaves more than half of Sydney.